And #2 in the rankings? What did Carnegie-Mellon use to process the results? A Commodore 64? Sweet Jesus on a bicycle…

Well, yeah. Except for those Intel agencies that are full of biased leftists who send their husbands off on junkets to drink mint tea, and make GWB look bad. Those they want to execute for treason, even when they don’t break any laws.

I’m afraid he must have been spnaked last night.

Just wait’ll you see the beating the Unitary Executive Theory takes.

This assumes, of course, that the Democrats completely fail in their campaign ambitions and win the election.

[Files away under "Excuses"]

Do they genuinely NOT understand that without some legal controls, these agencies can, and ultimately WILL, act to harm THEM too?

Simple answers to stunned-incredulous questions: Yes.

*That’s* how Surber’s work achieved the label “Second most informative blog in the world”. Most people who reach Thumbpuppet’s level of stupidity, paranoia, and surliness are no longer capable of holding a sentence in their plaque-riddled brains long enough to type up their ‘thoughts’ and hit the post button. Surber gives researchers the chance to probe and dissect the tiny, wormy mind of a true Twenty-Eight-Percenter from a safe, reasonably hygenic distance. Surber may be the virtual fruit fly that enables saner individuals to unravel the knotted and broken genetic code of the hardcore Reichtard personality; his very primitiveness allows researchers glimpses of the core DNA of wingnut talking-points psychology which are hopelessly tangled in the writings of his more sophisticated fellow travellers.

That is precisely the sort of foolishness up with which I will not put.

Yes, except for the functioning brains part.

But seriously – I think they really believe that their sucking-up to people in power will be rewarded, and that they won’t be spied on or disappeared when the police state gets really rolling. So it’s like they accept that the Holocaust happened, but not the Night of the Long Knives.

Ah, but the servant waits, while the master baits.

COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action defined to “disrupt” and “neutralize” target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader’s Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).

That’s why we have FISA: because J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI as a political weapon under the aegis of “national security”. FISA never has and never would stop the Feds and spies from doing their real job, it only tries to ensure that we don’t return to the bad old days when they thought their job was destroying the lives of their bosses’ domestic political opponents.

Sorry of the shocking lack of snark in this comment, but the fact that everyone seems to have forgotten why we have FISA in the first place really cheeses me off.

1) Let America get attacked.
2)
3) Profit.

Which is interesting, 9/11 and the Iraq War considered. Heh indoodly.

You know, Don, the terrorists win if they spread terror. Their efforts have been aided by the rightwing pants-pissers since 2001.