Thanks for your web page

Maybe like me under a Kerry presidency – he makes me drive a useless hybrid while he takes a fuel-busting private jet on all his personal travels. Maybe how he expects me to pay more in taxes while he only pays 12% of his.

Those are the only second-class situations I can see myself in. I live a happy and modestly successful life without the legal marriage. My seven year monogomous relationship is the envy of many a hetero and almost every homo.

It is very easy not to vote for the traitors in charge of the party of asses.

I am a dem – but would prefer a 3rd party at this point. ..you seem to think we should just be lucky they don’t string us up…so no need for further Equality- right? Lets be lucky for what we have? No thank u – I’d still trust Dems before Repugs who hang onto the religious right (those who we’d dissappear or change) NO THANKS! The dems are far from perfect – but Id take my chances with them….before Id ever stoop so low as to buddy up to the very people who want to make me a 2nd class citizen. We don’t need Equality – as long as the rethugs keep terorist away…right? Pleeez! I see thier “Scare Tactics” wrk well on you. …did they scare you into believing you are less then deserving of Equality too?

“I am still trying to figure out how any reasonable gay person could honestly belive the Rethugs have thier interest at heart….unless its thier own SELF interest!”

Do you mean self-interests like my self-interest in:

- not getting blown up in a terrorist attack?
- not having an Islamo-fascist Caliphate string me up like an Iranian teenager?
- being able to live in a free country under rule of law, including a dynamic economy along with other, moral and spiritual benefits?

Then please count me GUILTY AS CHARGED.

Now let’s look at the self-interests of the Democrats, which you appear to support:

- Legislating everything to the Nth degree, to control and undermine everything and everyone, excepting only abortion and extreme sex;
- Rule of politicians and bureaucrats (vs. freedom under rule of law)
- Lip service to individualism, but absolutely none in reality – “The enslavement of all to all”

Those are the Democrats’ self-interests, which you would appear to support. Wild guess: Might you be a public employee? or tied / related to one?

Anyone?

Crickets

“I guess when the Commander in Chief, in definance of the Fourth Amendment, becomes the sole law of the land, such as spying on fellow Americans without prior court order,”

About 25 years ago I was a lowly airman working with the NSA. Although I’ve been out for so long and evidently it is now ok to casually tell secrets in today’s intelligence community, I’ll just say that nothing in this revelation about the NSA is surprising. And I was in it during the Carter administration. Somebody ask Carter why he allowed it.

The black helicopters are monitoring what you type via the fillings in your teeth! Time to ratchet the foil hats a few notches.

So I guess my beef now is with the FISA and the Congress that passed it. The president should probably have exercised better judgment than to utilize powers, though legislatively granted, of dubious constitutionality. But I think it is more proper to redirect criticism to a Congress that so carelessly passed this law without serious consideration of its constitutionality.

“I review my own actions every 45 days, and I determine that I am not violating the law.” That’s hardly the way the Founders envisioned the checks and balances. Simply consulting the other two branches isn’t the same as obtaining the constitutionally required permission of the other two branches. Saying “What do you think?” and then pressing on is hardling a form of checks and balances. The wiretapping was done only a couple hundred times over the span of four years. That maybe averages out to a search warrant every two days. How hard would it have been to visit a judge every two days? Don’t we already have a secret national security court established for things like that? This judicial oversight established by a legislative act ensures that the executive branch has the proper constitutional authority to conduct the wiretaps.

I understand that we are fighting a war, and I accept that we must curtail some civil liberties in order to be victorious. But the Constitution provides legal means to curtail those liberties in wartime. It’s not like the president would have risked liberal obstructionism in Congress by asking for the search power in question — the court had already been established, and the necessary laws already in place. All they had to do was visit a judge.

No, the president did not violate the 4th Amendment. Not only did the president repeatedly notify congressional leadership, “the program has been heavily lawyered by multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice and NSA and White House, and is regularly reviewed.” Just because you hate the president doesn’t make what he does illegal. It’s clear that he made every effort to follow the law.

He did respect our constitutional form of government and, in this instance, he, representing the executive branch, consulted the two remaining branches before taking action. The more information that comes out on this, the clearer it becomes that not only did president do the right thing, but he also did the legal thing. And this project was particularly warranted in light of national security concerns in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (when such eavesdropping took place).