…find myself largely in agreement with Atrios:
The surveillance state is obviously out of hand, super expensive, and quite likely totally pointless (for its expressed purpose) and incompetent. I don’t even consider this to be a comment on Obama, except to the extent that he is dishonest/supports dishonesty on this issue.
Hat tip: Kevin Drum
Ideology isn’t everything. Not everything is about partisan politics. Not everything that is done is effective. Not everything that is effective is constitutional. Not everything that is constitutional is right.
Do you have something in mind, in the Constitution, that’s not right?
I’d say moderate agreement but it would depend on how one defines “the surveillance state.”
I think when politics is driven by too much dishonesty, or too much unabated zeal for party power, it disables a country’s ability to create or even maintain fair-minded policies. Consequently, truth and pragmatic, unbiased applications, addressing economic/foreign policy ills, become secondary to brazen goals of stacking the deck (like what is being done via Colorado’s partisan passing of the “Voter Access and Modernized Elections Actâ€), or persuading a populace, by any means possible, to support a candidacy, flawed legislation, and/or lopsided POV.
Nonetheless, unilateral, partisan governance seems to be the popular path chosen for legislating these days. And, it’s always passed on a presumption of ‘good’ for the people, when usually it only assuages targeted segments of society. How one can then expect a country, absent honest diplomacy or good will to all, to be indefinitely perpetuated in good faith by it’s citizens, is simply a fool’s gold kind of rationale, IMO.
Would you apply that limpid analysis to North Carolina?
I’m so glad you asked that question, Sam! N. Carolina’s bill had two fold goals. The first was to tighten up beyond ridiculous early voting margins, and balance that with longer hours and more locations on election day. It also did away with same day registration which makes voter irregularities less likely to happen, as does presenting some kind of valid voter ID. Something like 70 percent agree with these changes. This is very different from Colorado, where a rift is building between rural and the metropolitan regions, having some districts exploring splitting the state into two states because many feel at odds with the liberal leadership in the state house.
Groklaw closed down yesterday because of this issue. A lot of people are closing up shop because they simply can’t operate in an environment of pervasive surveillance.