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How on earth do we know that unemployment is in double digits today? Heck. I'm not even sure employment status is measured in the census, and if it is, that's pretty useless for any sort of planning. I would hope and expect that local municipalities would track such things via more obvious methods (like records at unemployment offices, business reporting forms, etc).



Again. Local officials can do this (and do!) much more efficiently than a once every 10 years census.



Yet you took the time and still cant think of any legitimate reason why ethnicity, religion, or gender, much less employment status, income level, and god knows what else is on the long form need to be asked of everyone in a national census.


The *only* reason for the census is to determine how many people are living in each geographical area, so that the correct number of representatives can be assigned based on population. That's it. Any other information gathered is done pretty exclusively to more easily tailor political messages to different regions of the country and is used to shape domestic policy to those numbers. Silly me for hoping for a world in which one person is just as important as another in the eyes of our government. The very fact that we collect additional information leads one to assume that is not the case.



Again. I'm quite sure that local officials have a much better handle on the make up and needs of the people in their own communities than could possibly be obtained by a census. It's not like they don't operate local government offices continually the other 9 years of the decade and have the ability to figure out how many people need forms in which languages, how many children attend their schools, birth records, employment records, number of homes, how many are filled, etc...


There are a thousand different things that a local municipality does every year which gives them information necessary to effectively run their own geographic area. The only difference is that the federal government doesn't have direct access to said information. One could make a reasonable argument that this is the only reason why the fed wants that information taken during a census. Which leads to the final question: Why?



You only need raw population numbers for this. And this is the only legitimate use of the census data.




This is all BS. All of this is collected regularly through normal local venues on a continuous basis. Again. The only difference is that the Federal government doesn't have direct access to all of that data in one convenient location.



I don't think it's a stupid question at all. The federal government doesn't need to know this stuff. Only the local governments do, and they get it automatically as a result of actually working in the area day in and day out. The school system in a given area has a really really good idea of exactly how many kids live in a given area within a given age range. They know this with a granularity that is vastly better than anything you'll get with a census taken once every ten years. Same with all the other services. It's absurd to even suggest that those services rely on those numbers.

Well, no. That's the most basic reason for a census but it's hardly the only reason.

Too bad you don't give a shit that your precious conservatives do this just as much as anyone.

Keep cryin' the crocodile tears.

Illegally? Who's? Stop playing the "change one word each time" game. You said that the Bush administration was engaged in tapping domestic phone lines. Stop moving the goal posts here.



That's not a "domestic wire tap". For it to be "domestic", the call has to take place between two points both located inside the US. Do you know what "domestic" means? A "domestic phone line" is a line between two phones which is wholly contained within a single country. If that line extends outside the country, it's no longer a domestic line. It's international and no longer protected by FISA. This is nothing new.




FISA has never prohibited wiretaps on "domestically originating" phone calls. You're just playing with words again. These are international phone calls. Ergo, they do not require warrants. They never have (except for some specific conditions having nothing at all to do with whether one end point is in the US).


You keep putting the word "domestic" in there as though if you just keep repeating it enough, people will assume this means that a call from one person to another in the US was/is being tapped. That is not the case. An international call has *never* been protected from wiretapping. The NSA has *never* required a FISA warrant to do this.

There were some minor changes to FISA along the way, but they were more of a structural and technological nature (what kind of taps, and where they can be located within a network). The reality is that before the Bush administration took power, a phone conversation between two people in the US could not be tapped without a warrant, and during the entire Bush presidency a phone conversation between two people in the US could not be tapped without a warrant, and now that the Bush presidency is over, a phone conversation between two peole in the US still cannot be tapped without a warrant.


You lost zero protections of your rights there. The entire thing is a stupid word association game. Repeat "domestic" and "wiretaps" in the same sentence over and over and people will think that the government is tapping their phone conversations.

You're smarter than this Joph.


EDIT: I missed one bit.

They did not tap the domestic originating phones to "see where they called". They tapped the foreign phones to see who called them. And yes, if the person calling was in the US, they tapped that call (which was and is perfectly legal). If the call was sufficiently alarming, they would then get a FISA warrant for the US phone and put a tap on it (also legal of course).

That's how the program worked. So yes. Technically "hundreds" of people in the US may have had their conversations tapped. If they called a number outside the US which the NSA had on a terrorist phone list. Um... That's completely legal.

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 7:20pm by gbaji

Do you? The phone lines being tapped were phone lines in the United States. Regardless of where the calls were going to, the US government was tapping phones in the United States without a warrant.

If you need to spin and spin and spin some more to say "No big deal!" then power to ya. Cry some more about the census


Only if they're retarded since I bolded the section that said they were international calls.

Keep saying "But it's all legal!" over and over as your defense though. Hey Brightbulb -- the census is completely legal as well. Hell, it didn't even require Congressional hearings and lawsuits and the attorney general looking like a dipshit on TV.

But that census thing... wooo-wee! Sure is a scary potential abuse of government power. I know if I had to chose between taking a census or having my phone tapped without a warrant, my calling patterns recorded into a NSA database, my library records opened by the FBI, e-mail and internet records pulled, etc... Well, fuck. I better not take that census -- no telling what abuses the government will do with it.

Yeah... I've stopped thinking that about you. I think you really are this much of a blind tool to the GOP that you'd slavishly defend any potentially abusive expansions of power they'd ask you for while barking at any shadows they point you towards. It's sad and pathetic but that's pretty obviously just the kind of person you are. You're not "smarter" than anything... you're just a parrot.

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 10:59pm by Jophiel

Lick my taint.

If you can't see the value in the data that is generated by the census, it's because you don't want to. Fact is, the census is the only data set that is consistent across the states and counties, not too mention the decades - for much of the criteria. Planners, law-makers, accountants/budgeters, policy wonks, and more utilize the census data to best identify and solve todays problems - private and public.

You make a good point though; much of the information gathered by the census is already public information in some other form - so it's not hardly treading on liberties by asking the questions.

Clearly not city, since a great many small municipalities would lack the resources.

Wouldn't it be redundant for them to gather all that data...again?

A "phone line" represents the entire length of switched wires from one end of a phone call to the other end. The tap can exist at any point between those two.

Do you have magical information that shows that the actual physical taps for the NSA program in question (not the later proposed call-data collector thingie) were located inside the United States? Because you're correct. If the point at which the tap occurs is inside the US, it would require a FISA warrant. However, no one has *ever* shown that this is true. And it honestly makes little sense. If I'm tracking a list of phone numbers for people in the Middle East, I'll want to put my taps near where they are, not speculate as to where in the world someone might call them from and place the taps there.


The numbers being tracked were terrorists in the middle east. The NSA would have to go massively out of their way to use tap points in the US to track their calls. And there's no evidence that this is the case. You're playing on word association. Taps in the middle east can pick up a US person's call to a number on a list in the middle east. This constitutes "listening in on US phone calls", is then labeled as a "domestic wiretap", and the spin just keeps on going...


Unless you can prove that the NSA used taps located inside the US to do this, you're just spouting garbage. Can you?



I'm not spinning, and I'm not saying "no big deal". I'm saying that what was done did not violate FISA. Period. No amount of playing word associate games changes that.




Because the tapping program in question was legal. What's so hard about that? Do you complain this much that someone watched TV in his own home? Cause I'd point out that that is legal too. And I'd be just as right.


You want to get all indignant about this invented invasion of privacy, but apparently the government actually coming to your home and obtaining information about you isn't anything to be concerned about at all. Strange set of priorities you have there Joph.




I never said it wasn't. See. Unlike you, I don't have to invent some argument that something is illegal in order to say that it's a bad idea. There are a whole lot of things which are completely legal, but I don't think we should be doing. It does speak volumes that folks on the left have this need to label stuff they don't agree with as illegal in some way. It almost makes me think that you don't believe you can persuade people to your position on the merits of the issue itself, so you have to create some kind of legality angle and argue it on that basis.


I suppose it makes your position seem stronger to declare that what Bush was doing was illegal. Um... But when the claim of illegality is false, then the whole argument kinda falls apart.


I'll ask again: What evidence do you have that the NSA wiretapping program in question involved taps located inside the US? Cause that would be news to everyone...

Yes. That's the law. Now you need to show evidence that it was broken. Knock yourself out trying...

The FISA warrant was not required. That's what makes it "not illegal".



Stop changing language. It's not about the "line". It's about the location where the line is tapped. The phone line extends from one end of the call to the other. Simply saying that the "phone line is tapped" is an irrelevant statement.

If the tap is physically located on US soil, they need a FISA warrant. If that case is true and they do a tap anyway, then what they are doing is illegal.

You have not shown an iota of evidence that the taps were located on US soil. Thus, any claims that a warrant was required, or that Bush did anything wrong because he didn't get warrants for these taps is pure speculation on your part.


Find evidence that the taps were on US soil Joph.

Edited, Oct 2nd 2009 7:10pm by gbaji

[quote]Stop changing language. It's not about the "line". It's about the location where the line is tapped. The phone line extends from one end of the call to the other. Simply saying that the "phone line is tapped" is an irrelevant statement.

If the tap is physically located on US soil, they need a FISA warrant. If that case is true and they do a tap anyway, then what they are doing is illegal.

You have not shown an iota of evidence that the taps were located on US soil. Thus, any claims that a warrant was required, or that Bush did anything wrong because he didn't get warrants for these taps is pure speculation on your part.


Find evidence that the taps were on US soil Joph.
[quote]

So every time I call my aunt in Germany, you think it's ok for the government to listen into my phone call so long as they tap it from the base in Germany and not from the Qwest hub here in Denver?