Drones and spying and President Obama

A while back someone asked me how I felt about the president, and at the time I said I was very disappointed with the renewal of the Patriot Act. That was something that I had been against in the previous administration, and here it was continuing with the new administration that was supposed to be so ideologically different.

Based on that, it would be reasonable to wonder if I am thoroughly disillusioned, or blinding myself and deciding that everything is okay, and it is neither of those things.

For the drone program, if my Sunday post was not clear enough, we should have grave concerns when killing is easy. Taking a life is a big deal, and we need to remember that. And of course, drones are used for many things, but the targeted drone strikes are a concern, and the spying is a concern, as is PRISM. I don't really have anything to hide, but it's a bad principle.

Actually, the thing that strikes me the most is that the programs don't seem necessary to me. We had plenty of information leading up to the September 11th attacks; the problem is a lack of follow-up, and lack of will to prioritize the most pressing matters over the existing agenda. Having PRISM did not stop the Boston bombings.

It's like the waterboarding that was justified as being necessary for finding Bin Laden, but it was other techniques, that were not torture, that produced the valuable information. We don't need to stoop to these levels. There are other things that we need to do better, and that we can feel good about.

My other old complaint about the president was that he was not being bold enough; he was still trying to build consensus from people who were just not going to come through. That may be related to the other complaints, but I want to point out that I still President Obama has presided well, and been fairly effective. The economic is doing better, there are advances in healthcare that should be able to proceed, environmental protections have been strengthened, and the Ledbetter act is no small achievement. Anything accomplished with Boehner and McConnell around has to be seen as pretty impressive.

There are two trains of thought from this. One, and I think about this a lot, is how do you effect change. For example, with the Ledbetter act, that improves some options for legal action, but women are still traditionally paid less, offered less opportunity for advancement, more subject to sexual harassment, and discriminated against in hiring, and people will ascribe it to actual qualifications, but there's more there:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2013/07/12/kim-ogrady-resume-gender-discrimination/?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl3|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D343912

The Affordable Care Act still faces obstacles to implementation, but even without that there are states that are turning down Medicaid expansion, which would save lives, just to prove a point.

Going outside of that, look at the Arab Spring and how exciting that seemed, and yet here is another coup, and there is still conflict. Things were so exciting when the Soviet Union broke up, and it is still broken up, but how different is life in Russia? Did gangsters just replace the old party members?

This seems to happen over and over again, and that leads to my other train of thought, which has been on my mind a lot. We will go over that tomorrow.