But I am saying that the normal democratic methods seem to fail us here -- this is a real "don't blame me, I voted for kodos" situation. If Obama, who was the most strident advocate against this stuff out of both parties in the 2008 primaries (except for maybe Kucinich), doesn't follow through on this stuff, what are the democratic options?
The electorate is uninformed and easily manipulated. Bias in the news media is generally to support the status quo and not rock the boat. Lively debate occurs mostly for easily understood and emotional issues. Covering complex issues with complex answers is not a winning strategy for aggressive ad revenue goals.
With an uninformed and easily manipulated electorate, elections are largely influenced by money. Corporations and wealthy people contribute the most money to election campaigns, and therefore have a significant amount of influence over policy decisions and positions. Gerrymandering is also a huge problem and further reduces the amount of debate and competition during elections.
Lawrence Lessig (through rootstrikers.org) is a pioneer in raising awareness on how damaging the above situation is to a healthy functioning democracy. Awareness is the best thing we can do to improve the situation. If you're interested, check out this TED Talk that Lessig did: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
America wouldn't have lasted very long if a minority group set the cities on fire each and every single time an unpopular decision was made public.
P.S. the democratic options involve letting your representatives and elected officials know that you are pissed, whether that's through letters, complaining to the media, peaceful protests, or all of the above.
Sometimes the people don't naturally do what jbooth personally feels is right for the entire nation. Welcome to Democracy.
I've knocked on probably 1,000 doors and made probably 5,000 phone calls for democrats over the last 10 years. I'm not some slacktivist, and I'm not saying that the whole world needs to agree with me, although the accusation of arrogance is well taken.
We've seen no evidence that Obama changed anything about NSA wiretapping and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that he probably didn't (how those drone strikes coming, and the medicinal marijuana crackdown)?
When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush", it'd be nice if he actually did something different.
The FISA was changed to require warrants in 2008 (though Obama was a Senator then, not sure what part he played in that as I don't remember the discussion from the time it occurred). The "watch list" the NSA was using was gigantic when Obama took office and was shrunk down to focus on those who might actually impact national security.
> how those drone strikes coming
Better than what we used to do, invade entire countries and drop 1000kg JDAMs everywhere, which involved far more "collateral damage".
That is, of course, unless you're saying that we should simply wait until a group blows up something in America and then go destroy whatever state the operational cell was working out of. I personally prefer disrupting the cell and leaving the state intact (as do the states that we surreptitiously work with...) as it involves less human sacrifice on both sides, but that might just be me.
> the medicinal marijuana crackdown
Yeah, I got nothing. The sooner we move away from giving a shit about marijuana the better, as far as I'm concerned.
> When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush"
They were both "opposite of Bush" so I hope you had more in mind than that when you voted. As it stands though, if you think Obama is just like Bush then you might want to re-evaluate history, as time has a habit of helping us forget the bad and remember the good. There was a reason that as far back as 2004 that Bush was already well down the road toward becoming the most unpopular President in decades, and that's because there was much worse things going on than drones...
No, it wasn't. FISA always required warrants for certain surveillance, and the 2008 FISA Amendment Act increased the time period for warrantless surveillance, and added new exceptions to the warrant requirements, and it explicitly blocked investigations of illegal wiretapping that had occurred before the Act.
And then go read the damn law for myself. (Perhaps it's a good thing I mentioned Obama wasn't President at that time. :O)