Rand Paul blathering for hours on Senate floor

the marriage of capability and justification breeds opportunity.

If there's an American citizen who is about to murder hundreds of people, fuck yeah.

And you would too, you towering hypocrite.

Or should Bush not shoot down the plane on 911 if it's about to smash into the WTC?

You know what? If a bad guy had a bomb I'd support the sniper blowing his brains out without due process.

Anybody who says otherwise is trolling or a complete and utter dumbass.

I'm not going to defend a statement I never made.

What this is about is your side expecting a laundry list of "I will not..." from this President as you never did from any prior President. If he spends all his time issuing statements about what he's not going to do, the thinking is, he'll never get anything done, which is the sole and entire goal of Republicans, Tea Partiers, and the Pauls.

Now, back to the original question: How would you recommend the U.S. pursue terrorists?

Forty years? I'd say you're being generous. This country has been about meddling in foreign affairs since at least 1803.

From today

http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/07/did-rand-paul-win-white-house-says-no-au#.UTjisvfc8aA.facebook

from yesterday

http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/05/eric-holder-yes-your-government-can-dron

Links to other commentary at the site.

So Paul got the answer he wanted. Not that it was ever NOT the answer, but still. He gets to look like a conservative hero, and nothing has changed.

Also, I love that Holder's response was basically "tl;dr."

Yeah, except Holder didn't say what you think he said.

Indeed. It was the equivalent of filibustering over black helicopters and Agenda 21. It was nominally about the evils of drone policy and Brennan's support for them, but it was about completely imagined evils rather than evils that exist in the real world.

Paul offered a long paranoid conspiratorial rant that will only get in the way of fixing the problems that actually exist with drone use.

No, it wouldn't have been appropriate.

Neither of you has read any of the quotes from the filibuster, have you.

His response looked to me more like,

And that's the problem -- the guy thinks he doesn't have to listen, doesn't have to answer, doesn't have to be accountable. That is the problem.

Nope.

Even if we knew the target?

Don't you know we deprive terrorists of their right to due process when we stop them from killing people? Why do you hate freedom so much???

I fail to see how Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is relevant, since those were attacks carried out by foreign nationals on US soil. Yes, bringing those planes down would have made collateral deaths of US citizens, but that's a far cry from gunning down a citizen suspected of terrorism.

Some of the humanitarians on this board don't seem to care when the police kill innocents during a wrong door raid, so it's really no surprise that they see no harm in drone action on "terrorists".

He did answer. The letter was the answer to Paul's question. The fact that it wasn't satisfying to you is entirely your problem.

You're right, rather than kill a few terrorists in the act, let's instead invade a few countries and bomb the shit out of them, it's the only just solution.

No one here seems able to offer an alternative.

Even if we knew the target. What do you think is going to happen to a 747 if it gets shot down over a city? Do you think it's just going to disappear, 1980s arcade game style? Whether it gets shot down or not, it's still going to kill a shitload of people. Giving our government permission to pull the trigger on us, even once, is idiotic.

I'm not talking about shooting it above the Empire State Building in order to save the WTC. The point is, Rand Paul and some of the rest of you are feigning to freak out over something the President has long had authority to do. Where were you when the Bush admin nearly shot down civilian aircraft on more than one occasion? Does the Secret Service have authority to shoot a Presidential assailant? Sometimes circumstance dictates action. We have always given police authority some leeway in this regard, because they can't do the job otherwise. Rand Paul wasted 12 hours to complain that the sky is blue.

How do you think the U.S. should deal with terrorism?

Foreign or domestic?

In at least one case, impeachment. On a more serious note (not that I'm not serious that Obama should be impeached, but we all know it's not going to happen) strict immigration law enforcement. Contrary to liberal consensus, our immigration system is not broken -- it's turned off.

The 9/11 hijackers committed their attack while holding expired visas. Border security to mitigate their odds of getting here through Mexico or Canada. It's time to stop indulging in political correctness and actually keep an eye on those who are most likely to pose a credible threat, rather than diverting effort and resources in order to mollify liberals by appearing to be "fair" rather than just being smart.

A guy spending about 13 hours asking for a straight answer to the question says that Holder's answer wasn't satisfactory to anybody except those who didn't have the balls to ask the question at all.

And the shooter would likely be lauded as a hero by the NRA.

It looks more like you lack the intellectual honesty to even admit to yourself what this is about, which is to say the execution of American citizens without due process. Hell, I'm against the death penalty, and that's with due process, so of course I'm going to be against these drone strikes. And the prospect of it happening within our own borders should be enough to give anyone pause, and if it doesn't, frankly either that person is being willfully ignorant, or they're all for the idea that the government should just be able to kill whoever it wants, whenever it wants, simply because it's the government.

I've been talking about how I was disturbed by what I see as the "militarization" of law enforcement in the United States for years.

I guess it goes back to the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in the late 1990s that was later called "the Battle of Seattle" when protestors clashed with police.

Now, heaven knows I'm a supporter of law enforcement and take a dim view of violent protests and such.

But.

Until Seattle, I never dreamed that American law enforcement would be firing rubber bullets into crowds of protestors. I thought that was something that was only done on the West Bank, Belfast, or somewhere like that.

Some tear gas of course. Maybe even water hoses, officers on horseback and some yapping German Shepherds.

But not firing bullets (and even though they were made of rubber they're still bullets) into crowds.

Without due process, all you have is the Feds' word that the hypothetical "bad guy" had a bomb at all. You may be comfortable believing every word the Feds tell you, but not everyone is so credulous.

You idiot. There's a post event review and investigation. Police who kill somebody without proper circumstance get tried for their crime. It's amazing to me that people are willing to support things like stand your ground, but refuse to accept the necessity of similar policies for people whose job requires that they place themselves in harms way, not for their own purposes, but to protect others.

What a selfish piece of shit you are, to think that a cop who can make a split second decision to save somebody's life needs to stop what he's doing and find a judge. This is how society breaks down, when fools like you get the idea that everybody is a selfish ass in it only for himself. Kindly fuck off until you are ready to live in the real world.

Do they? In what percentage of cases where the cops clearly acted improperly does that lead to conviction and incarceration? How much time did Lon Horiuchi, for example, spend behind bars?

Cops are vested with the powers of arrest and detainment. That also imposes on them responsibility that civilians aren't under -- or it should. In practical terms, it rarely if ever does.

That's not selfish, you blind bootlicking pansy dumbass. That's insistence on accountability on the part of public servants.

Yeah, the news has that effect on people.

Bite me, you credulous, naive fucking child.