Don't care what Rahm thinks. :) But IMHO, Trump will run Ivanka for president

[Anatos]

299. I understand

what you wanted to say, and I chose to ignore it. It's nothing but ad hom paranoid undermining, the kind our political opponents are fond of using. So I thought maybe we could paper over that mistake. But since you brought it back up...

I don't care what Bush said or did. Bush is not President any longer. The harm he caused is still with us. The current President is still trying to mitigate some of that harm. But the leftists who believed he was coming into office to overturn the PATRIOT ACT were misinforming themselves on purpose. Despite the outrage and the legal reproaches of the ACLU, much of the authority that the government provided itself is, in fact, reasonably necessary to secure a democratic free state in the modern technological world.

It is vitally important that we always view with suspicion any action the government takes "under the guise" of combating terrorism. That's a different thing than what you're doing, which is viewing with paranoia any action the government takes in order to actually combat terrorism.

As far as at least a sizable (and powerful) minority of the country goes, it is the OWS movement which is a coordinated attack on constitutional rights. I know they're wrong, but that doesn't mean everyone else does. I plan to win this fight, not die nobly trying, so forgive me if I point out that your conflation of the over-the-top reaction to civil disobedience with the serious work of national policy does you no good and every else even less. You seem to be laboring under the mistaken belief that whether or not something is legal is what prevents police from abusing their authority, as if writing a law against something means it can no longer happen.

Working yourself up into an anti-authoritarian lather is not a position an intellectually serious self-enlightened progressive should allow themselves to embrace. Responding to someone who calls out your paranoia with accusations of naivete is also a losing proposition. The real world will always let you down once the future comes and there aren't any bogeymen.

And just to drop back into serious discussion mode (and away from 'replying to someone's lame insults' mode), it occurred to me that another reason the White House might not like this amendment is because exempting only US citizens from this process (you did notice this isn't an amendment giving the President this authority, but merely revoking it only in the case the terrorist is a US citizen, didn't you?) is not only contrary to reason but also to foreign policy and to any true patriot's fundamental sense of decency.