Can someone fill me in: is there anything new in this spying report we didn't know in 2006?
I'm missing what's "new" here, but then again I've been in airports or airplanes for most of the last 48 hours and my brain still isn't working fully.
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...millions of jobs, trillions of dollars of budget.
He/she takes the blame for everything but has really only a small amount of power.
Unless he's a part of the system, like Bush, and has a VP like Cheney who is total insider and all they do together is collectively strengthen the chock hold they have on us.
Nobody who understands US government thinks that a president can effect all that much change.
It's a group effort: the executive, judicial, and Congress, and us, and the Media, and now corporations.
The president has very limited power and he's certainly not able to bring about new governance.
That being said, Obama has done a pretty good job by comparison to his predecessors.
Did so many people at DU really not know this was going on? My reaction to this story was one of "meh, ssdd". Its been a loooong time since I thought email & phone call records were private.
Truth is... if the gov't wants to know all about someone its as easy as checking facebook. Seems like 90% of its users are willing to share everything on their own. Their friends, political leanings, where they are, where theyve been, what they had for breakfast, etc, etc., etc. 
Its a hell of a lot more informative than telephone meta-data. Imagine if the government were tracking people the way facebook does? Heads would explode. 
about Obama's exercise routine than . . . well, you get it.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Your Creditscore.com all are part of the NSA database. We all have a series of numbers associated with us that, together, as run through the NSA's own algorithms and those used by its customer agencies within the IC, altogether this creates a real-time profile and predictive score of our intentions and potentials in a dozen different scales. It determines the jobs we're eligible for, what areas we can access, how we can travel . . . none of this should be a surprise to any conscious person in America. But, most choose to be ruled by distraction and to cope by avoidance behaviors, like staring at their phones large parts of the day. 
Greetings e-citizen #. Feels good to rant.
I couldnt agree more with everything you said. Technology was sure to (eventually) bite us in the ass. And theres no way to put that genie back in the bottle now. Its all completely entrenched in every single thing we do. And as technology advances the government will simply get better at hiding it. Thats partly why I cant bring myself to be outraged over it. I really dont think theres a damn thing anyone can do about it. Maybe its pessimism, but I feel its also truth. Too many people are too busy watching snooki & ranting on facebook to even begin to contemplate the big picture. Too busy, too stupid, too lazy, whatever. The end result will always be the same.
They might as well just microchip us all and get it over with. We pretty much are already anyway.
By that logic, what was new about slavery during Lincoln's term? Why have a big hissy fit about it then?
I find these threads fascinating, because they expose the utter hypocrisy of the Third Way and the moral bankruptcy underlying its shifting positions on fundamental issues like Constitutional protections, depending on which party is in power.
I think we are witnessing something really important here. The escalating assaults on the fundamental rights of American citizens, and the increasingly absurd and vicious defense of them, are showing Americans at long last how truly ruthless and malignant the usurpers of our government, the Third Way and their corporate Republican counterparts, really are.
