kirth

Person #4254: 58 Posts

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  1. Remember when cops were arresting people for videotaping them? (0 Replies)

    Remember what Coakley had to say about that? You don’t, because she had nothing to say about it. The closest thing I could find was this:

    The cases are the courts’ concern, said Coakley spokesman Harry Pierre. “At this time, this office has not issued any advisory or opinion on this issue.’’

    So – people were being harassed, arrested, and prosecuted for exercising a right that a federal court ruled was theirs*. The harassment and prosecutions were fine with Coakley.

    She does not display any commitment to the rights of citizens in the hands of police. So many of her efforts have been aimed at making prosecutions easier while ignoring the impact those changes would have on the public. Too much politics; far too little justice.

    * Note: if you’re going to record cops, do not conceal that you’re doing it.

    kirth   @   Jun 19, 2013 at 08:04 EST

  2. What is not organized? (0 Replies)

    What are “the traditional hallmarks of organized crime,” beyond being organized and committing crimes? Does organized crime require having lawyers, or wearing suits, or what? Nice shoes? Do the Hell’s Angels qualify?

    kirth   @   Jun 19, 2013 at 07:41 EST

  3. They must have slipped badly (0 Replies)

    Last time I was unemployed, maybe 10 years ago, they handed out a three-page list of job-finding sources on the Web. It went way beyond monster.com.

    kirth   @   Jun 18, 2013 at 13:19 EST

  4. Have you not been paying attention? (0 Replies)

    The Obama Administration has been very active in using State Secrets Privilege and national security as reasons to keep so many things secret, and the courts have mostly been cooperative with their efforts.

    Here he is doing it in 2009, to defend the Bush Administration.

    “The Obama administration has essentially adopted the position of the Bush administration in these cases,” said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “even though candidate Obama was incredibly critical of both the warrantless wiretapping program and the Bush administration’s abuse of the state secrets privilege.”

    Here he is doing it in 2010, to quash a lawsuit that challenged his efforts to assassinate an American overseas.

    Here he is doing it in 2011, to preemptively quash a lawsuit by LA Muslims seeking to stop religious-based surveillance.

    Obama started doing this less than a month after his inauguration, and he has not wavered one bit.

    There HAVE been lawsuits, LOTS of them. The President says they cannot go forward because the information required would compromise security.

    What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration’s version of the States Secret privilege — just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out — was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security. That is the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ — because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny — and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday [2/09/2009] expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).

    This has been going on through the entire span of the Obama Administration. and has been widely reported. Tell me, how would your hypothetical lawsuit or FOIA proceed if the government flat-out refused to allow it? I’ll say it again – they’re doing all this stuff in as complete secrecy as they can manage, and anyone who attempts to tell us anything about it is very unpopular with the Obama Administration, the NSA, and the CIA.

    kirth   @   Jun 18, 2013 at 05:58 EST

  5. But he did that very thing (1 Reply)

    Eric Holder acknowledges previously classified details of drone program and says US deliberately targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in Yemen in 2011 Mentioning due process is not anything like implementing it. Obviously it didn’t come before that penalty was carried out,

    kirth   @   Jun 17, 2013 at 18:13 EST

  6. Maybe you haven't noticed (1 Reply)

    There have been cases where ICE has detained – without counsel – American citizens, then deported them. No-one has been, or will be disciplined for these outrages. ICE has the authority to do this, under the Patriot Act. They also have the power to detain anyone they think might be an undocumented alien, within 200 miles of the US border. Did you know that the coast of Massachusetts is part of the US border?

    The point is that once you hand over that kind of authority, especially when it’s to be exercised in secret, it is inevitably going to be abused. You say you want transparency, but there isn’t any WRT this telephone record-keeping, or with many of the other things built into the Patriot Act. You do not know what they are doing. and the people who do know are not going to tell you about it.

    kirth   @   Jun 17, 2013 at 18:06 EST

  7. Something's missing (1 Reply)

    Something major is missing from the President’s statement. When, in his righteous smiting, does the due process guaranteed by the Constitution take place? Do you know? Do you care?

    kirth   @   Jun 17, 2013 at 06:22 EST

  8. Paid denier (1 Reply)

    Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer. His website is parodied and debunked at the website wottsupwiththat.com Watts is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, which itself is funded by polluting industries.

    kirth   @   Jun 16, 2013 at 19:16 EST

  9. It is amazing (0 Replies)

    Smogboy must have loaned them his coal-powered time machine.

    kirth   @   Jun 14, 2013 at 07:01 EST

  10. Because (1 Reply)

    Because nobody is saying “those things weren’t so bad.” They’re saying “this is being done to everyone,” with the implied point that your examples were not done to everyone. You may not believe that “most pervasive” is the same as “worst,” but the implication in your comment is that people are only calling it worst because it’s happening to them. It’s also false to say, as you do, that “no one else here is interested in attempting to put this in historical context of other civil liberties violations,” when the statement you object to does that very thing.

    You don’t agree that it’s the worst. OK, we get that. There’s no need to impugn the motives of good people in their assertion that it is.

    kirth   @   Jun 12, 2013 at 09:21 EST

  11. Very uncharitable (1 Reply)

    You’re attempting to turn somervilletom’s (and Rep. Capuano’s) concern that this is happening to everyone now into “but it’s happening to me! Now!” That is at the least uncharitable, and I think it is reprehensibly dishonest. If you were addressing apologists for previous rights abuses, that comment would be warranted. You aren’t and it’s not.

    kirth   @   Jun 12, 2013 at 06:40 EST

  12. No preference (1 Reply)

    Left-wing religious dogma is also inappropriate as a basis for these kinds of decisions.

    kirth   @   Jun 11, 2013 at 07:03 EST

  13. No, it's not (0 Replies)

    Not on my end. I tried at work, and it’s just as slow there. It takes much, much longer than it did six months ago, at both places. I never see six-second loads. Also Comcast/wifi at home; wired ethernet at work. I have Facebook and Twitter blocked, so what I see is google taking a while to load, but I don’t see that until I’ve already waited a while.

    Too much flair; it blocks the functional stuff.

    kirth   @   Jun 8, 2013 at 17:25 EST

  14. You mean... (0 Replies)

    “The meetings will continue until morale improves”?

    kirth   @   Jun 7, 2013 at 13:35 EST

  15. I look forward to my retirement (0 Replies)

    Unfortunately, all the fresh young blog commenters don’t seem to know shinola from a hole in the ground, so I have to stick around a while.

    kirth   @   Jun 5, 2013 at 21:12 EST

  16. And so it was (0 Replies)

    It has been investigated. No crime was committed or is imminent, or even likely. Why is the kid being punished? Because he had a fight with his sister “recently?” If there’s something criminal there, bring charges for that. The Facebook entry shows a possible lack of good judgement, but no actual threat is in it. They’ve got nothing, so they’re using this Patriot-act BS to persecute him. We’re losing the Land of the Free and becoming the Home of the Cowardly.

    kirth   @   Jun 5, 2013 at 18:39 EST

  17. It's the usual lesser-of-two-evils thing (1 Reply)

    Given a choice between a crappy majority leader and crappier majority leader, you’re going to choose crappy. Just like all the Presidential finals I can remember. We in MA are truly blessed to have two Senate elections in a row where we don’t have to make that kind of choice, because one of the candidates is not crappy.

    kirth   @   Jun 5, 2013 at 09:33 EST

  18. Similar experience (0 Replies)

    Just about all the threads load slowly now; some of them load VERY slowly. Two computers on different ISPs, same experience. To use technical terms, there’s too much crap on the site. Throw some of it out.

    kirth   @   Jun 5, 2013 at 07:42 EST

  19. Rights when you feel like it (1 Reply)

    This thread is a terrific illustration of the flexible rights phenomenon. Persons who espouse Constitutional rights as inviolable suddenly use their personal feelings about the circumstances or person in a particular case to justify prosecution, even when presented with a Supreme Court decision that clearly applies. The language of that decision is clear and specific. To ignore it because something “strikes you as threatening,” or advocate imposing probation while in the same breath admitting “no crime was committed” indicates a truly profound misunderstanding of the nature of Constitutional rights.

    It does nothing useful to uphold rights only in cases where everyone agrees the subject is protected. It’s the cases that make us uncomfortable that are where the rights come alive and actually perform their function. Those are the ones that separate the real defenders of the Constitution from the fair-weather friends.

    kirth   @   Jun 5, 2013 at 07:28 EST

  20. No, you wouldn't (0 Replies)

    You wouldn’t see a lot more automation in the landscape business, regardless of wages. There’s no place left to mechanize. If you’ve ever seen a big landscape company attack a condo complex, you’d see that they have machines to do everything. Not just mowing and leaf-collection, but transferring debris into trucks, distributing mulch from trucks into gardens, all manner of pruning, road and sidewalk cleaning – everything has a machine. What you would see if landscape wages were high would be an increase in owner-maintained properties, and an increase in the skill level of landscape workers. There’s definitely room for that.

    kirth   @   Jun 4, 2013 at 09:19 EST