Intro and Thoughts
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I should probably introduce myself before spouting off my thoughts about some slice of the world, probably involving politics. My name is BHGlitter. I posted here once before, but dropped off quickly due to the messy end of the semester.
Ok, things about me that pertain to my posting here.
- I am senior politics major at Ithaca College
- I am also the News and Views editor of Buzzsaw Haircut, IC's fully student-run alternative magazine.
- I spent a summer interning at The Nuclear Policy Reasearch Institute. I have thought about nuclear winter for many hours.
- My perspective is usually shaped by a combination of the news I've been reading, the ideologies and philosophies I've found myself thinking about, and random x factors like the songs I've been listening to or the stupid things I may have done the night before.
- I have a vague sense of what I believe, but I don't have anything pegged down. If you ask me what my sincerely held belief about something is, it would be hard for me to say as I'm really just in the process of figuring that out.
- I'm somewhat onorganized, but I'm seriously thinking about working on that.
OK, as for content, I'm going to talk about Bush (surprise surprise) and the recent revelations about domestic spying.
I just finished finals week, so my mind wasn't too focused on "what's going on in the news," but even so, it feels as if this is pretty huge. Now, to be honest, I haven't read theTimes Article nor any of the follow ups and add-ons in other media outlets. To be truthful, the majority of Americans probably haven't and aren't going to. But even so, I think this is a story that most people will find out about. Kind of like the blowing of Valerie Plame's cover, the real world legal potential, i.e. a member(s) of the Bush administration goes to jail for this. Bush has already acknowledged that it is true, thus guaranteeing another day or two into the news cycle. I really do have a feeling this thing has legs.
Just as the Bush administration has ben forced to respond as has the conservative media (and by that I mean the noise machine, not the journalistic media). Unsurprisingly they are blaming it on a combination of hatred for the administration, lack of patriotism,and softness on the war on terror. To me, it seems interesting that they are ignoring the real underlying debate here, which is presidential authority in a democracy. Apparently Bush's war on legality is really just the war on information.
I'll post more on this after I head home for the holidays and get a chance to catch up on all the new news.
In the mean time, Digby has some interesting thoughts on this aspect of domestic spying debacle here
(Via Atrios)
Ok, things about me that pertain to my posting here.
- I am senior politics major at Ithaca College
- I am also the News and Views editor of Buzzsaw Haircut, IC's fully student-run alternative magazine.
- I spent a summer interning at The Nuclear Policy Reasearch Institute. I have thought about nuclear winter for many hours.
- My perspective is usually shaped by a combination of the news I've been reading, the ideologies and philosophies I've found myself thinking about, and random x factors like the songs I've been listening to or the stupid things I may have done the night before.
- I have a vague sense of what I believe, but I don't have anything pegged down. If you ask me what my sincerely held belief about something is, it would be hard for me to say as I'm really just in the process of figuring that out.
- I'm somewhat onorganized, but I'm seriously thinking about working on that.
OK, as for content, I'm going to talk about Bush (surprise surprise) and the recent revelations about domestic spying.
I just finished finals week, so my mind wasn't too focused on "what's going on in the news," but even so, it feels as if this is pretty huge. Now, to be honest, I haven't read theTimes Article nor any of the follow ups and add-ons in other media outlets. To be truthful, the majority of Americans probably haven't and aren't going to. But even so, I think this is a story that most people will find out about. Kind of like the blowing of Valerie Plame's cover, the real world legal potential, i.e. a member(s) of the Bush administration goes to jail for this. Bush has already acknowledged that it is true, thus guaranteeing another day or two into the news cycle. I really do have a feeling this thing has legs.
Just as the Bush administration has ben forced to respond as has the conservative media (and by that I mean the noise machine, not the journalistic media). Unsurprisingly they are blaming it on a combination of hatred for the administration, lack of patriotism,and softness on the war on terror. To me, it seems interesting that they are ignoring the real underlying debate here, which is presidential authority in a democracy. Apparently Bush's war on legality is really just the war on information.
I'll post more on this after I head home for the holidays and get a chance to catch up on all the new news.
In the mean time, Digby has some interesting thoughts on this aspect of domestic spying debacle here
(Via Atrios)
!
He got a legal opinion first (as tendentious as that is), which gives him enough cover that it won't be a major issue.
Also, the FICA court which grants the warrants normally used for domestic spying (the only difference here is that they didn't use the FICA court) is notoriously compliant; if they wanted a warrant to do what they did, they could easily have gotten one. The most likely conclusion is that these several dozen cases were done where they thought the timing was imminent.
As an American citizen concerned about civil liberties, this is not the best news I've heard all week, and the Bush Administration has a pattern of overreaching on this sort of thing in general.
But the revalation doesn't amount to any sort of smoking gun.
Far from it - Many Democratic legislators were briefed on it and knew it was going on. Were it something really serious, they would not have hesitated to raise a ruckus about it.
Welcome to the website. :) We'll be sure to make it worth your while.