re: #310 piratedan

sorry man, you’re not swaying me, you appear to be confusing the head of the executive with some omnipotent despot that controls all programs and has responsibility for all things. He’s following the letter of the law as it currently stands on the books, not how he would like it to be. Obama has been on the record as stating that he’s not comfortable with the power that the Patriot Act allows him, but he’s bond by the law to do what he can to deter what he can from threats abroad. He’s asked the Congress to review this, instead, they rubber stamped it when it came up for review. He’s the one who initiated what changes have been made to the law at the behest of allies in Congress to add oversight to it, is it perfect, no. It’s also not the carte blanche that existed with the Bush Administration.

You’re busy looking for the perfect, and completely disregarding the good in front of you. Part of the same poniless brigade regarding ACA, yeah, it’s not single payer, but guess what, there weren’t votes for single payer available, so he got the best deal that he could make. You wanted reform of the Patriot Act, for fucks sake, he couldn’t even get credit for tracking down Bin Laden.

He is just following the law of the land huh? How’d that work for DOMA?

The law doesn’t require him to do anything. It gives him the tools to do what he thinks best. The Congress gives the US Nuclear Missiles and he is the Commander and Cheif so why doens’t he use them?

The only diffence between the law now and Bush is that a kangaroo court run by Roberts rubber stamps everything that they want to do. It is widely reprted that the warrantless wiretapping by Bush is simply warrated now. nothing chnaged.

And he has not said that he is uncomfortable with what the NSA is currently doing. In fact, on the Charley Rose show he famously defended the current law and how it is executed by saying that “it is a good trade off between security and our civil rights”.

In a post above someone gave a link to a Today show piece where he said that he wants to be transparent but not at the cost of any current programs.

He also had his administration lobby against the amendments to defund the phone metadata programs. If he was uncomfortable with them he could have simply let the Congress defund them.

I am most certainly not looking for the perfect. From all the facts that I ahve seen I agree with Wyden that the prgrams simply don’t work and want them ended. If they don’t work then there is no increased risk and we don’t have to govt Spying on us.