I really didn’t have to apply too much exaggeration or hyperbole here. If you were unaware, not a month ago, DeDiFei resolutely defended the NSA’s spying tactics publicly. After all, and I quote:
“What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States. And I see enough of the threat stream to know that is possible,” Feinstein said at a Pacific Council on International Policy dinner in Century City.
So yeah, just basic hard Democrat bullshittery, go back to sleep America, you are free to do as we tell you, etc.
And then, this week, shit got very real for the Senator.
Turns out the CIA had accessed Senate computers. Spied on them, even. And we can’t have that, nooooooooooooo.
It’s been a while since I vented some Feinstein hatred. It wouldn’t be necessary, if she wasn’t such a goddamned evil piece of hypocritical, royalty-minded shit.
It’s not healthy to keep your emotions in. Tell us how you really feel. 😀
Not to piss in your anti-Feinstein/anti-Democrat Cheerios, but that was the same rationale–VERBATIM–that was used by the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress (both houses, mind) to justify the horribly misnamed PATRIOT Act.
Cliffs Notes version: names and political parties don’t matter. It’s power that’s corrupt.
Moral equivalency smells bad.
Bush being an ass in no way excuses Feinstein being an ass. And Bush is not a threat any longer, so get off that horse – We’ve got *current* threats to deal with.
The problem here, in particular, isn’t the old “protect us from terrorism” line. The problem is the “rights violations are ok except when applied to me” part. As I recall, Hynes and Grant didn’t make a comic addressing the original statement, only the hypocritical one.
Compare, Feinstein’s reaction, by the way, to Ted Kennedy getting put on the No Fly List in 2004. Rather than “I’m special and this shouldn’t apply to me,” he said, “most people don’t have the recourses that I have in case of a false positive, and that’s not right–everybody should have the same ability to get removed from the list”. (Quotes are paraphrased, not verbatim.)
Also, just as a reminder, jlgrant has repeatedly slammed both parties in here. Your CliffsNotes version is stating the position that jlgrant has frequently demonstrated that he holds; his anti-Democrat Cheerios sit right next to his anti-Republican Frosted Flakes on the shelf.
You have to have your head up your ass, blindfolded, to think that bush was any kind of republican except for the (R) next to his name.
LOL anti-Democrat? JL is more ANTI-INVASION-OF-PRIVACY. Pretty sure if you went back to him during the USAPATRIOT Act and W administration, he’d be just as opposed to it.
By the way, much like Obamacare has some good in it, the USAPATRIOT Act also has some good in it as well. It improved communication between departments, and intelligence gathering communities. Spying on US citizens was not actually allowed during the W admin, that was expanded later during the Obama admin. But at any rate, Neither party has our best interest at heart anymore(if they ever did). They want to give themselves more money and power, and to heck with us. The only thing they do is give lip service to the ones who will put them back in office, while working in their own self interest.
It was horseshit then and it’s horseshit now.
I’m not sure what your point is here, if you think agreeing with me is “pissing in my cheerios”.
To ask a question, for one moment put aside the finger pointing and who authorized what under who… as MaskMan obliquely suggests, focus on the here and now…
I have to ask, is ANYONE calling out Feinstein on her hippocracy, her blatant, bald faced, subtle as a kick in the crotch, flashing red sign I’m not a servant of the people that aught to have her recalled to her home state hippocracy?
I do, every time at the ballot box. Not many agree with me, as the only good thing that DiFei does for us is fights for our water rights.
Hippocracy? After all her other miscellaneous bullshittery, she’s trying to promote the rule of HORSES!?!
My god, her evil know no bounds… 😀
Bad Horse, obviously.
Just another Elite pissing on the peasants.
“‘Tis a foolish man who looks for consistency in the human heart.”
Doubly so, in the case of soul-less power-grubbing politicos.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/tony-benn-1925-2014-ten-his-greatest-quotes
This chap passed on today in the UK, but his words seem appropriate here.
I’m a registered Democrat and I’m pretty sick of Feinstein as well. I think there should be some general test created for politicians; if you don’t pass the test on health care knowledge, you can’t pass laws on health care. If you have no knowledge of gun control and crime problems, you can’t pass laws relating to those areas. I think we’d get a lot less bullshit laws that way.
http://www.guns.com/2014/03/13/ares-armor-halts-atf-raid-refuses-turn-customer-names-video/
Remember, plebeians, a receiver IS a gun, Uncle Sugar tells you so.
Yeah, that was a solid bit of bureaucratic judo, and Bravo Zulu to them.
Too bad it was necessary.
Hobbes: “You were in my way. Now you’re not. The ends justify the means.”
Calvin: “I didn’t mean for everyone, you dolt! Just me!”
Diane Feinstein’s a corporate whore who’s been masquerading as a Democrat for decades. She’s been the token feminist Democrat (but secretly a closet Conservative on everything while in office). Don’t let the title of D in front of her name fool anyone.
SHe is just the latest to do it, since she is a Dem the noise machine is louder, and the outrage is bigger (justifiably)
The Hon. Mrs. Feinstein may have divided her supporters, and her popularity may have hit deservedly historic lows, but that will not prevent her re-election. California will not elect a Republican senator in the forseeable future, or an independent or third party senator ever without a complete repeal of all campaign finance laws … which also strongly favor incumbents in primaries.
tl, dr: she will get re-elected anyway.
And her dudgeon in the second article? All for the CIA, which is legally prohibited from domestic intelligence activities. Nota bene, she’s careful to never address how she would have reacted had the NSA done it, and the writer barely touches on that at the very end of the article. I can’t really believe she would actually tolerate it; she just expects us to do so.
I dunno about JL, but I think he is tending towards the point of view that both parties are corrupt power hungry statist whores, ready to go down on anyone who will help justify their power grabs, made at the expense of our liberty. I am almost entirely certain that he (like me) had no tolerance for the USA PATRIOT act. In fact, I think the biggest difference between his politics and mine (small-l libertarian) is that he believes it is possible for the government to enact wealth-transfer programs (welfare) without doing harm, and I do not.
“It’s just meta-data”
Possibly coincidentally, this turned up in my inbox today. Synopsis: A couple researchers got a few hundred volunteers to install an app on their phone that tracked the same level of meta-data the NSA has. The amount of information they could piece together with that, Google, and Yelp should be considered alarming by anyone.
With the info on who you called, what time of day, for how long, add in your job, age, and the job and age of the recipient, and a scarily close guess on the subject of conversation can be generated.
Not that I’m endorsing them in their invasiveness, but they must be really bored with my records–my last six phone calls were to/from my mother. (Most others I know communicate differently, and we’re going more and more to facetime for anything important.) Discussing sun exposure for the garden this year, the weather (ditto) and last frost dates must be stultifying to any NSA listeners out there.
Truth be told, the vast majority of conversations are utterly banal. Doesn’t make it right that the govt is collecting that info, though.
I’m not certain I’m following the conclusions here. The New Yorker article linked to above isn’t so much bitching about Feinstein et al being spied upon on a personal level (or even on a “business” level) as it is protesting the clandestine removal of a variety of documents previously given to the committee that made the CIA look bad, and then having the CIA accuse the committee of having obtained those now-missing documents in an illegal act. At least, that’s what I came away with as an interpretation.
Yeah, there’s a little whinging about how the committee is being “threatened” in a manner that does seem to cause a little eye-rolling – but that’s the smallest part of the article, I thought.
The most interesting part of it, if I understand what it seemed to say, was that the computers containing those files were, essentially, sequestered. Contained on them, a 6.2 million page data dump that contained a great deal of rubbish, along with a fairly damning look at some of the CIA’s less-than-stellar behavior of the last decade. Which apparently included some things they never intended to see the light of day – so now the CIA is saying the committee must have acquired them illegally.
If the original data dump didn’t have a Table of Contents (it didn’t) or any kind of organization (it didn’t) I see no way for anyone to prove anything much here. But I have to say that, regardless of anyone’s low opinion of Feinstein, this isn’t ABOUT her – not really. This looks like another cover-up attempt in the making.
I get tired of watching a government agency try to “investigate” some other government agency – I find it impossible to believe any more in any kind of impartial results.
Sorry to have to derail your lovely screed, but it should be noted that it is the CIA, not the NSA, that is being accused of “spying” on Congress. You should at least get the details right. That’s not to say the the NSA hasn’t gone after members of Congress. FISA was established in the wake of Nixon using the NSA to wiretap rivals in and outside of government. And we shouldn’t forget the absolute glee with which Republicans supported the expansion of domestic spying under the PATRIOT Act, and the retroactive immunity for telephone companies involved in warrantless wiretapping, demanded by Bush and Cheney, and passed by Republicans in Congress.
Well shit howdy, bro! You’re right!
Ehn. I’ll leave it. The point is not who passed what, and I love that the second I target repubs OR crats, that particular side always has nitpicky defenders pointing at the other team.
You want a 100% accurate statement, down to the nitty gritty level? Neither the GOP or DNC are on your side, unless you make over $1 million annually. They just want you rooting for one or the other so they can continue fucking you into the ground while you’re distracted.
Yeah, when i heard of this i spent a good ten minutes laughing my ass off.