Repub states "A free press undermines our country"

[DREDIOCK]

If this were about military operations being held where men might die in combat I would agree.
but this is about the unconsitutional invasion of privacy of the American people. Therefore I very strongly dissagree.

and I dont buy into this "if your not doing anythign wrong you have nothing to worry about" line of pure BS.

You want info on me. Show just cause and Get a warrant. otherwise my information is none of your )(#)(@*@ Damn buisness. Legal or otherwise.

[Holden McGroin]

Not only is the direct quote in the thread title (AFAICT) false,

From December 19, 1941, until August 15, 1945, the Office of Censorship had the power to censor international communications at its "absolute discretion." With a staff of more than 10,000 censors, the office routinely examined mail, cables, newspapers, magazines, films, and radio broadcasts. Its operations constituted the most extensive government censorship of the media in U. S. history and one of the most vivid examples of the use of executive emergency powers.  (Demos FDR and HST)

[Nash]

Originally posted by Yeager
Its the larger picture that needs refreshing and I just dont see the same level or intensity of dimished rights as many liberal minded people express here.  I suspect its more a matter of partisan posturing than anything to do with genuine concern.

I'll put you down for guns.

I got lazs down for guns, seatbelts and helmets.

And as long as these things aren't messed with, the government can eavesdrop on you, mine your telephone records, mine your banking records, break into your house, detain you, cut off any aces to a lawyer or your family - all without a warrant.... and indefinitely.

They can fabricate evidence and lie to you in order to send you off into a fiasco of a war. They can leak classified information to the press, and then assault the press for reporting leaked information unfavorable to them.

They can out CIA agents and destroy careers in order to secure public approval for said fiasco of a war.

They can violate the law by actually purchasing favorable news coverage of their policies...

They can give a wink to the legislative branch, whilst killing the record for signing statements; in effect putting itself well above the law.

They can block every attempt to investigate their relationship to big business and the no-bid contracts, which have wound up in hundreds of millions of dollars in missing tax payer money.

If they don't like what Congress has come up with, they just sign executive orders to step around it.

If they don't like the scrutiny of their nominees by the legislative branch, they simply wait until congress is on recess and go ahead and appoint them.

They've reclassified thousands of previously declassified materials, and then turn around at whim to suddenly declassify selective portions of the CIA National Intelligence Estimate so that they can leak it to the press.

They blow off existing law and the courts meant to oversee those laws by simply ignoring them.


But...... hey...... so long as seatbelts and helmets and anti-gun rhetoric are what really matters.

[Flit]

Originally posted by DREDIOCK
If this were about military operations being held where men might die in combat I would agree.
but this is about the unconsitutional invasion of privacy of the American people. Therefore I very strongly dissagree.

and I dont buy into this "if your not doing anythign wrong you have nothing to worry about" line of pure BS.

You want info on me. Show just cause and Get a warrant. otherwise my information is none of your )(#)(@*@ Damn buisness. Legal or otherwise.

 It is about miltary operations being held where men might die in combat.

[bj229r]

Originally posted by DREDIOCK
If this were about military operations being held where men might die in combat I would agree.
but this is about the unconsitutional invasion of privacy of the American people. Therefore I very strongly dissagree.

and I dont buy into this "if your not doing anythign wrong you have nothing to worry about" line of pure BS.

You want info on me. Show just cause and Get a warrant. otherwise my information is none of your )(#)(@*@ Damn buisness. Legal or otherwise.

It's most decidedly NOT unconstitutional, despite what Keith Olberman and his 37 listensers say-- the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 (yes..the LIBERAL Warren court that gave us Roe Vs. Wade)..that there IS no right to privacy in financial matters:

But the program's constitutionality is incontrovertible. In U.S. v. Miller (1976), the Supreme Court held in no uncertain terms that the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures did not protect bank customers' financial records. Customers have "no legitimate 'expectation of privacy' in their [records]," because all such financial information is "voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business." In short, "[t]he depositor takes the risk, in revealing his affairs to another, that the information will be conveyed by that person to the Government." No reasonable expectation of privacy means no Fourth Amendment violation.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/388ygtdv.asp

The fact that there are a bunch a avowed leftists in the CIA and NSA who hate Bush more than Al-Queda shouldn't be a surprise by now. Let's see.... the thing about the Koran in the toilet (false)..the 'secret prisons'...the overseas wire-tapping.... the phone number data mining...now this...

[Yeager]

nash, your a smart cookie.  What are you doing posting on this board.  You should be making up laws or something.

[bj229r]

Hehe..this stuff isn't new...heard about this item today...interesting stuff:

The classic blunder of inadvertence making the case for censorship occurred in 1942 when the Chicago Tribune reported the Battle of Midway in a way that could have prolonged the war with Japan. The story has been much garbled over 50 years, so it is worth setting the record right, with acknowledgements to the interviews by Richard Norton Smith for his 1997 biography of Tribune publisher Robert McCormick ("The Colonel"). One of the closest kept secrets of World War II was that the U.S. Navy had broken much of the Japanese naval code. It was foreknowledge of the Japanese fleet movements that enabled Adm. Chester Nimitz to ignore a feint and concentrate his carriers near Midway to win a decisive victory.

No American correspondents were at Midway, but a colorful Tribune reporter, Stanley Johnston, was with the carrier Lexington when it was sunk in the preceding Battle of the Coral Sea. Johnston was a giant Australian, a champion sculler and a World War I hero. He had been recommended for a Victoria Cross for his valor at Gallipoli and in France. When the Lexington was hit, he made heroic efforts to rescue badly burned sailors from the ship's hold. He was very popular when transferred to another ship for transport back to the United States, and spent much of the time in the quarters occupied by the Lexington's executive officer, Cmdr. Mort Seligman.

Johnston, writing his account of Coral Sea while in Seligman's cabin, noticed a blue-lined paper that had the names of Japanese warships in an order of battle. He copied the list and later took this "dope" with him into the Tribune offices. His editor, Pat Maloney, was interested mainly in the Coral Sea account, but he accepted a sidebar on the Japanese order of battle at Midway, which Johnston hurriedly wrote. Johnston wouldn't reveal his source, but assured Maloney he had checked the list against the authoritative reference, "Jane's Fighting Ships." Maloney rewrote the first two "muddy" paragraphs, then wrote a headline that was not justified by Johnston's text:

NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA

Maloney did not clear the story with censors, convincing himself that there was nothing in the guidelines to suppress news about the movement of hostile ships. And then, to protect Johnston's real source, Maloney attributed the story to "reliable sources in naval intelligence" and put on it a fake Washington, D.C., dateline.

The Navy was appalled. The Japanese had only to read the Tribune to realize that such knowledge could only mean that their codes had been compromised. President Franklin D. Roosevelt — a bitter enemy of McCormick — initially was disposed toward sending Marines in to shut down Tribune Tower. He was talked out of that, then considered trying McCormick for treason, which carried a death penalty in wartime. It ended up with the attorney general taking the Tribune men to a grand jury. But there was no cooperation from the Navy, which rightly was concerned that a trial would mean disclosing the code-breaking. The grand jury refused to indict. The Japanese missed the Tribune blunder — as they also missed the false charge by columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell that the Tribune knowingly had based its story on a decoded Japanese message.

[Hangtime]

Whelp, soon as industry gets it's prices capped, the forigen intrests and ownership of our transportation, defense and port industries are re-nationalized, the draft re-established, the borders closed and guarded and the moth ball air and sea fleets are mobilized, the standing army boosted to 2 million and the shipyards and armories get thier full swing marching orders..

THEN YOU CAN TELL ME WE ARE AT WAR.

Right now, we're just pissing in the wind, and the Times or any other paper can print 'all the news thats fit to print'.. and that includes informing us of how, what when and why the government is diggin and fishing around in my personal papers, effects documents and just how the hell that makes me safer from some rag headed dipwick living in a cave 1,000 miles up country from peshwar.

Next.. the data protection act got axed. Why? i want these miserable database systems and corporations that 'legally' fish out my particulars and sell 'em to the government or chevron curbed, AND RIGHT NOW.

The real THREAT to Americans is a government selling our security up the damn river to corporate intrersts. The govenment is OUR monkey.. not big businesses.

Stop the BS "republican" v "democrat" crap. Start saving your damn country!

[Nash]

Originally posted by Yeager
nash, your a smart cookie.  What are you doing posting on this board.  You should be making up laws or something.

But I make up laws all the time!

Like this one:

From now on, you shall address me as "your Royal Highness."

...or if you prefer, "your Royal Heinous."

I'm not picky.

[Debonair]

According to Marine General John F. Kinney the navy knew Pearl Harbor was OTW also...at least the tribune was albe to keep the lid on sammy sosas steroid use, lol

[Thud]

Originally posted by storch
...if his sons should join up to do a tour of service the answer is usually an emphatic NO.  it's ok if someone else's sons and daughters go in harm's way but not MINE!!!! what pathetic pampered suburbanites we have collectively become.

That is a timeless response, you cannot seriously claim that reluctance to send off loved ones into battle is a sign of these times. Fourty years ago, 55, and 65 years ago people were at least as reluctant.

[Nash]

Quite right, Thud.

And when he says: "what pathetic pampered suburbanites we have collectively become," he is talking about himself.

"Collective" my arse.

What you are starting to witness is the internal rumble that's beginning to materialize in the minds of the people who got so thoroughly duped.

They thought they were smarter than that.

They cannot believe that it happend to them!

So they sit here and try to say that: "OMG - It's the fault of soccer moms!"

or.... "All government is bad! Screw them all!".... when it was the Republicans alone who screwed them.

It's a temper tantrum, and ya gotta kind of let it play out. Once they've brushed the sleep out of their eyes, kicked the walls in a few times, then maybe they'll start talking sense.

[Holden McGroin]

Originally posted by Nash
.... when it was the Republicans alone who screwed them.

[scratches head]Could'a sworn dems voted in favor of allowing the President the power to attack too...
let's Google......
hmm Senate Dems 29 for 21 against....
House,  296-133 betcha some of those 296 were demos.  Maybe all those demo reps and sens were just victims.[/scratches head]

[scratches head some more]I think that the British, with independant intel, decided to do it too...  I wonder, since they are not Republican, they must have been just duped by Repubs... no they had MI6...they would have been self duped.[/scratches head some more]

[Nash]

Holden? Do you mean to imply that the fumble of this government rests solely on its inexplicable decision to attack Iraq?

If so, it was a tragic mistake of a decision. It was based purely on the "facts" as they selectively sought them out. It was undermanned. It was mismanaged. It was one of those instances where you could war-game it and throw everything wrong into the pile, and then come out and execute precisely every single thing that went wrong.

And you can scratch your head over the Dems' voting for this war all you want, but the Dems only received as much information as the Republicans decided to tell them, and nothing more. And sure as heck, they would have had no idea that someobody could screw it up this badly.

And the fiasco that is the Iraq war isn't the entire equation.

Tell me how the supposedly fiscally responsible Republicans walked themselves into such crippling debt?

Tell me why health care is in such shambles.

Tell me why Homeland Security is such a joke - cutting New York's security funding in half, while giving places like Louisville whopping increases?

You bring up British intel while conveniently ignoring what the British intel was actually telling the Brits.

While you're at it, explain to my why - while boys and girls are getting IED'd to smithereens over there - anyone should give a rat's bellybutton about god and gays.

The fact is... I could turn this three paragraph rant into a book.

... and I don't know where to stop.

The more this happens, the more I feel like it's more of the same crushing of paper clips with paper weights.

Go ahead - exhaust yourself with this nonsense - the truth backs me up and baby, that well never runs dry.

[Holden McGroin]

That's what I thought you were off about...  I didn't realize you were blaming absolutely everthing from deficits to the war to the Columbia shuttle failure on "solely Republicans".  

I guess that makes it more logical somehow.