Even you liberals if you just want eye candy. 

https://www.facebook.com/TomiLahren/videos/1328701090556408/

Appreciate it, getting old ain't no fun.

No, it sucks. Also sucks to deal with your own age related problems while still dealing with your even older parents.  Seeing your own future. 

The desire to defensively hold on to your beliefs in the face of contrary facts is a common human fault. It's not specific to Liberals, nor is it specific to politics. It takes maturity, humility, and a number of other things to admit you've been wrong or an element of your belief system is wrong. It sounds like your daughter isn't there yet.  Some folks never get there, some folks partially get there, and we're all guilty of it.

Actually, it's not.  The desire be a part of the tribe and to comply with how the tribe does things is a common human trait.  People don't fail to change their beliefs because in the face of contrary facts, they fail to do it because the facts are not trustworthy and fly in the face of how their tribe behaves.  There is an important difference.

You're both wrong.  Or actually both equally correct.  Underlying both your statements is that people are loyal to their own ego. Therefore asechrest, you're right it takes humility to change, and bflynn you are correct that people endeavor to belong to their "tribe". But either way at core it boils down to protecting your own ego in the face of how you appear to others. That most people deny this so vehemently convinces me all the more that it's true.

Totally agree.  The War on Drugs, and the War on terror ahs been used by both Republicans, and Democrats alike to grow agency budget5s, expand "law enforcement", and deny freedoms to law abiding citizens.  I no longer trust law enforcement.  I don't blame them for everything either, but I don't trust the motives of police at any level anymore.  I think they want numbers to justify larger, and larger budgets, and agencies just like most other government entities.  However, unlike other agencies, they can and do put people in jail for all the wrong reasons.

It seems like this thread has diverged into two separate topics, but it hasn't really.  The War on Drugs has become a de facto War on American citizens and it's theoretically possible the NSA can be recruited to that purpose.

The purpose of the NSA is to defend against FOREIGN enemies.  But as I keep repeating, when the foreign enemy Islamic terrorism now has American citizens as its soldiers, then we must allow the NSA access to their communications, 4th Amendment be damned.

On the other hand, if the NSA, or any government entity, uses its powers to gather information on American citizens OTHER than those associated with foreign enemies, this becomes a problem.  The FBI is supposed to address domestic crime but the NSA becomes involved when the lines are grey, such as the child of a Muslim refugee contacting ISIS overseas.

If however the War on Drugs makes criminals out of ordinary American citizens, then the FBI and local police and a host of other law enforcement agencies now become oppressors of ordinary American citizens, and these agencies now use every tool available to justify their mission, including invading our privacy. For example, local sheriffs are petitioning to be allowed access to the medical data collected by various States prescription drug monitoring programs, even though those databases are only supposed to be accessible by your doctor to see if you are getting multiple prescriptions, and by the State's monitoring personnel themselves to look for patterns of illegal substance acquisition. But if local sheriffs are given access to these databases, they can use them to unfairly target people without proper oversight. For example, anyone picking up a prescription must display a driver's license. So if you pick up your Dad's pills for him because he's in a wheelchair, then you get your Mom's pills for her, then you have a toothache and get a bottle for yourself, the monitoring database will show you getting three pill prescriptions in one week from three different doctors.  This could raise a flag with your local sheriff, who may not have been trained in how to look for addict patterns and how to discern addicts from innocent people, and lead to him parking a deputy vehicle in front of your house watching your comings and goings.  Yes, this is happening.

What does this have to do with the NSA?  The NSA functions as a service with "clients" if you will. Their clients are anyone with authorized need, for example, the CIA, the FBI, foreign governments requesting cooperation to track terrorists, and anyone really, who could use the kind of data analysis the NSA knows how to do, for a purpose related to national security involving communication with foreign parties.  So for any law enforcement agency to access and use the kind of spying the NSA does, all they have to do is demonstrate a need related to national security involving a foreign party. The War on Drugs is well connected to foreign parties, so I of course don't know what kind of classified work is going on, but I can well imagine the possibility of the NSA being asked to collect data on American citizens suspected of being involved in drug transport across the borders. This might easily apply to say, people who are private pilots who own a plane. (Nevermind the ZOMG you could fly that thing into a building - terrorist!! - factor) And:  Drug money is used to fund terrorism.  There's your connection right there.

So yes, the overall militarization of local law enforcement, their increasingly authoritative stance on personal substance use, and their increasing sense of entitlement to any existing information in any database, makes it plausible that the NSA could be asked to provide information on American citizens for increasingly intrusive made up reasons involving drugs. And just the fact these databases EXIST at all opens up massive abuse potential.  I've worked with databases enough to know, the collected information is accessible, they can mask it and they can say they're deleting it, but it's there, and once it exists, you are never safe.

Spying on us is a big concern. My beef with the article is that it's got practically nothing to do with Obama.  NSA employees and subcontractors have a job they want to keep. It's their lifelong chosen field. The President is elected every four years. They are NOT going to risk their job doing some illegal search on the whim of a current President because he wants to use their searches for personal reasons, and they are very conscious of where that line of legality is drawn, and they do their best to stay on the legal side, despite occasional forays over it. If the Obama administration "abused" the NSA information collecting abilities, it was likely properly documented for national security reasons.  My beef is not with Obama, my beef is with these national security reasons being drawn up against American citizens for reasons connected to the failed, persecutory War on Drugs.

I truly believe most people within the NSA sincerely wish to defend America against terrorism. And their chain of command contains a lot of cross-accountability and oversight. The danger is not that the NSA has nefarious purposes, or can even be used by a President with nefarious purposes. The danger is that the War on Drugs (and other over the top things) will allow the NSA to be used as a tool in ways increasingly eroding our 4th Amendment rights. And the other big danger is that the NSA will fail to protect us from Islamic terror due to them being TOO careful not to overstep the legal line. They have to walk a tightrope. We criticize them for spying too much but when there is another 9/11 they will be criticized for not spying enough to have prevented it.

No, the danger to our rights isn't the NSA per se, is the paradigm of increasing Federal control over every aspect of our lives.  And that's where we need to focus our efforts to change. But leave the NSA alone to root out the Islamofascists among us, please.

Not seeing a lot of discussion about what happened here so I assume you're all good with the Obama administration spying on citizens?

No I didn't say I am good with the Obama administration spying on citizens.  First of all, it's the NSA doing the spying, and it conducts searches of internet data according to a series of protocols, this has always been the case, (and before the internet was the case with respect to other forms of communication) which are constantly being re-evaluated. That is nothing new.  It pre-dates Obama. This article doesn't give any specifics about exactly who the targets were, nor why Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.  Unless I missed it somewhere.  The rules are re-evaluated and changed to keep up with a constantly evolving internet landscape, and the challenge, as I've been trying to illustrate in this thread, is how to protect our 4th Amendment rights while also discovering needed information to prevent terror attacks which might be carried out by our own citizens.  Quite frankly, the NSA wants to protect Americans, and is trying to find the bad guys, and if it is hampered by rules, it will go all the way up to the line of legality to do its job. Yes, that means sometimes it steps over that line. Again this is nothing new and has always been an ongoing challenge for the NSA. How to protect Americans by gathering as much information as possible but without breaking the rules designed to ensure 4th Amendment rights are not violated.

But not knowing exactly what Obama was trying to do, I'm reserving judgement.  If Obama was trying to spy on Trump campaigners or otherwise gain knowledge for the purpose of undermining a fair election, that would be a very serious offense.  I doubt most NSA personnel would want to be part of that. But if Obama loosened to rules as a result of classified information given to him by the CIA or other Intel advisors, who thought there was good reason to do this in the interest of protecting the country against terror attacks, that would be another matter entirely and actually "business as usual" for the IC.  And as I keep trying to say, that sort of thing is becoming much more of a problem now that we seem to have Islamofascist U.S. citizens.

When it comes to the NSA and their intel gathering, I put very little stock in anything I read in the media, including this article, because there is too much we do not know going on behind the scenes. Only in retrospect can I judge whether NSA spying is right or wrong, justified or not, Constitutional or not.

So, no, I'm not good with Obama spying on me as a citizen, especially for reasons unrelated to terrorism.  I am good with the NSA spying on citizens suspected of having ties with terrorists.

Did you think I was serious?

No not really. But I took it and ran anyway. Just to add posts to the forum.

This right here is the reason we need to NOT take in refugees:

The Manchester suicide bomber:

Abedi was born in Manchester in 1994 and is of Libyan descent.

The second youngest of four children, his parents Samia Tabbal, 50, and father, Ramadan Abedi, a security officer, were Libyan refugees who came to the UK to escape the Gaddafi regime, although they are believed to have returned.

If the U.S. accepts refugees, their children born here are citizens, but we can't spy on them because of the 4th amendment.  Even with extreme vetting, we would not be able to stop someone like this. The only way to defend against it is to either give up our 4th Amendment rights, or stop letting people of this ideology into our country.

Steingar I agree with you, freedom is more important than security. But at the same time we need to defend ourselves. Multiculturalism is a failure. Letting people into our communities who do not assimilate, but who instead nurture a microcosm of their culture of origin, is a sure way to destroy our culture. No, they do NOT want to live peacefully side by side. Human nature has never allowed that.  And this particular culture (fundamentalist Islam) is particularly hostile to our own culture. Yes we need to discriminate against this monstrous sub-religion if we want freedom and acceptable levels of security.

The quote is from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/manchester-terror-attack-everything-know-far/