Whatever happened to the outrage?

Thank goodness for the ACLU. They are one of the few honest defenders of freedom out there.

To be fair, those warnings were right...if hypocritical.

Then surely citizens can demand to see transcripts, records, ect of their wire-tapped conversations even if no warrant is needed. If the authorities are going to rake them over the coals, at least let them know what for.

But communism doesn't work that way.

Just go to Drudge. Seems almost half of Americans don't mind drones who can actually pick up who they are by cell phone, or any electronic device. Including recording calls, or imaging people in their own homes.
It seems only Republicans deserve rage for intruding in your life. The left likes it because they have no fears they will be singled out. Wrong but, hey if your a liberal life is just a round of hugs for each other, but jail for mean Conservatives. Pam Geller knows this.
Just never mention Islam or Mohamed.

The Pat Caddell thread kind of fits here. The press thinks it is fine if the left carries out warrantless wiretapping. Reminds me of another state at another time, but they probably still keep a close eye and ears on their citizens.

But then why is ANYONE at all concerned about this? After all, "Law Enforcement" is your friend! This "warrantless wiretapping" is surely only being done by Nappy or Holder or Mueller or the Chimp in Chief. No "Law Enforcement" officer would ever stoop to this level and spit on their very oath of office...

Honest? ACLU? LAS, is the "S" for Shirley?

Press Secretary Jay(opie)Carney,

(of the famous Barnum & Bailey Carneys,
knows that suckers are bred every minute)

He tells us that it just didn't happen,
and his administration knows that it didn't happen,
and it should be just fine with we stupid peons of the lower regions that it didn't happen.

I and others are getting sick and tired of these traitorous shits.

Anyone ever hear of the Silent Majority?

Did your mom and dad ever mention those words.

Well the 'Silent Majority' here in America are so mad we are willing to piss on a spark plug to get rid of these traitorous turds.

37 more days baby!

OMG. Are you snooping on us,EBD.

If you think that was bad for Bush just wait until Mitt gets in. then the biased, lunatic media will really start to scream about every little thing like he dosen't use a kleenex correctly!!

Yeah but tyranny and police state expansion are OK cause it's our guy doing it now.

Zombies!

The Repubs shot themselves in the foot by choosing a Neo con to run against the Demos dud now in the White house. The John Birch society was 'drummed out ' just as Ron Paul was 'drummed out' and for the same reasons: freedom and liberty for American Patriots is not on the One World Gument agenda. This is worth a listen for other insights, including the computer fraud in U.S.elections:

http://www.jbs.org/news/ron-paul-drummed-out-of-republican-party

Oh Snap!
I did not expect this graphic.

Well.... Fascism is as fascism does.

"The Pat Caddell thread kind of fits here." - Ken (Kulak)

Very much so, Ken. Caddell's metaphor about the media as referees "sacking the quarterback of one team, tripping up their runners, throwing their bodies in front of the blockers" was in reference to the current presidential campaigns but it fully applies here. I mean (and not to repeat my post) do the legacy media and the Democrats not remember being in constant high dudgeon over the warrantless wiretaps when Bush was in office? There was a constant drumbeat of coverage about what was, Americans were told, a very, very serious issue, a threat to America and its constitution. The word "impeachment" was constantly in the air(waves), so serious was the violation of these wiretaps.

Al Gore gave speeches raising the alarm that Bush was "breaking the law repeatedly and consistently" with these warrantless intrusions. What's he saying now?

The legacy media was constantly ringing the alarm, warning of the dire threat, saying, in effect, night after night, "THIS should be of concern to all Americans…" Now, under the Obama/Holder administration these wiretaps and warrantless surveillance have *quadrupled* and it's pretty much crickets all around, from both the media and the Democrats.

How can this degree of egregious, in-your-face, flapping-on-the-poles hypocrisy be ignored?

...under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," (Obama) said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It's hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.

Okay, now he's the President, and the number has *quadrupled.* Is he being called on it by the legacy media? What happened to all that outrage, the calls for impeachments, the dire warnings, the constantly-broadcasted legacy-news coverage about this critical threat to the Constitution,etc., etc., etc.?

The Democrats and their proxy-media propagandists are sick jokes, and absolute, blatant hypocrites of the highest order.

Did you here about this. I know I didn't. This is how far down the pit of oblivion. OBama with his trained seals in the Media have become. This is out right Treason not to even mention it.
No misdirection, no lies even. Just the silence of those waiting to be slaughtered.
Those who think hiding this will ensure the monstrous behavior of the originator.

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote that, in striking contrast to the official line, the Benghazi slaughter was not a spontaneous movie review that got a little out of hand but a catastrophic security breach and humiliating fiasco for the United States. Even more extraordinary, on Sept. 14, fewer than two dozen inbred, illiterate goatherds pulled off the biggest single destruction of U.S. airpower since the Tet Offensive in 1968, breaking into Camp Bastion (an unfortunate choice of name) in Afghanistan, killing Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Raible, and blowing up a squadron's worth of Harriers. And, even though it was the third international humiliation for the United States in as many days, it didn't even make the papers. Because the court eunuchs at the media are too busy drooling over Obama's appearance as what he calls "eye candy" on the couch between Barbara and Whoopi.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/future-373028-belong-obama.html

Outrage is emotionally hard to sustain, on all sides of an argument -- by definition, it's got to be the exception, not the rule.

In a normal situation, where there is general consensus, however grudging a consensus it is, about what the rules of play are, calling out bad behaviour assumes that the offending party can be brought back into line by criticism.

When the offending party, however, is unreformable, the offending party gets voted off the island (i.e. excluded from the thinking of the consensus-minded).

The obverse is also true: just look at Bob Rae, who killed his own chances to be Liberal leader by being all outrage all the time. Not everything that Stephen Harper does is all bad, and not everything he does is all good (although, as you know, I believe he thinks about, and has a view, as to what the best interests of the country are). Liberals tuned Bob Rae out long ago...

Which is a long-winded (as usual) way of saying that the American media has been voted off the island...

Eye Candy-

Licorice Stick.

Its not "media" anymore. Its the DemocRat party propaganda arm. We've known this for years.

I'm pretty sure these days that if you put anything on-line or say it on a phone, it ends up in a database in the USA someplace.

Big Sis says hi.

Which is a long-winded (as usual) way of saying that the American media has been voted off the island...

Nope. They still control the island. Legacy media is on top and calling it.

Most pigs are unionized.

Careful, red gunlop, or you'll be labeled as my troll brother...

It's not just the convenient amnesia of the Left about its bleeding-from-the-eyes outrage about how Bushitler was supposedly turning the nation into a police state with all those Big Brother wiretaps. It's the Left's truly stunning hypocrisy about First Amendment freedoms across the board

The post-modern liberals, call them "progressives", got their start in Berkeley in 1962 in the Free Speech Movement, which was the beginning of the Democrat Party that is today. Throughout the 60's and 70's liberals shrieked about the primacy of First Amendment, not just among Constitutional Amendments, but in our essential liberties. Free Speech/press was the font of every blessing, and the Democrats/liberals/left were fierce in their insistence that absolutely no limits be placed on speech/expression.

What is most repulsive is that so many of the Baby Boomers and pre-Boomers who were activists 35-50 years ago don't just sit silent today in the face of their movement's turnabout, but are among the noisiest peasants marching with their pitchforks on the castle, demanding that the blasphemers against the social religion be sent out to be lynched. Their capacity for non-embarrassment at their own foibles is apparently limitless.

The left has always shamelessly preened in its self-description as the principled ones. But it is the Tea Party which is clearly moved and constrained by principles, ideas and ideals. The Left is moved only by and for power.

The fact that the left doesn't blink an eye in calling for the quasi-legal lynching of a filmmaker they wish to scapegoat says volumes. Today's left, which includes the vast majority of the msm, otherwise known as the Ministry of Propaganda, is beneath contempt

Bambam has done things that would have caused apoplexy if they had been done under Bush. From the massive increase in drone attacks, and the subsequent death of hundreds of innocents in 'collateral damage' to the TSA's new 'freeze' drills, where even after you've proved who you are, stripped off half your clothes, had all your belongings and your person scanned, they still want the right to yell 'freeze' and have every one turn into a statue, to the completely odious NDAA, which gives the American government the right to execute foreign nationals they believe are engaged in terrorism, and the right to detain Americans in America indefinitely without the right to see a judge, these are all far worse than warrantless wire taps. But where are the chants of "Obamao"?

Double standard indeed. One standard for Bush, no standard for Bambam.

You've misread the story (as the ACLU intended).

The increase is not in wiretaps or other monitoring of the content of communications, it's in collection of "pen registers" - the records of calls made from number X to number Y, and of sender and receiver addresses on e-mails.

This information is, obviously, provided freely by the communicating person to the communication carrier (a third party) and U.S. courts have ruled many times that there is no right of privacy in this information.

The recent increases in such collections are not because the Obama Administration is the New Gestapo, but because such collections (not even possible a few years ago) are now cheap and easy.

The ease of such collections does mean more effective government surveillance - which the ACLU seems to oppose on principle (regardless of its utility for public safety or its harmlessness to actual privacy). But it's an inevitable consequence of the new communication technologies.

harmlessness to actual privacy

You should go read Spycatcher by Peter Wright. A member of British intelligence, he hit on the idea of using pen registers to identify Russian spies in London in the 1950's and 60's. When Russian spooks would leave their embassy, they would make sure four or five other attaches did so as well, so MI5 couldn't follow them all. But since these were the days before cheap cell phones, the cars were equipped with radio telephones. Even though 5 couldn't interpret the coded conversations, Wright realized that the decoys weren't going to be making many calls - they were simply going to go shopping or just drive around. But the spook would be using his radiophone, and simply by noting the frequency and length of calls, they quickly identified the real spies. Not "harmless" to the Russians at all.

And to think that it would be harmless today is just as naive. Let's say you're a male politician, married to a woman you still care for, but her interest in sex has diminished considerably after three kids. You don't want to cheat on her, or visit escorts, so you resort to calling the thriving phone sex numbers. Then, in the middle of your next campaign, rumours start surfacing about that activity, and some enterprising reporter uses freedom of information to obtain and publish the data. You lose.

Now, you've done nothing illegal - seamy, perhaps, but not illegal. But this 'harmless' data the government has collected was used against you to humiliate and shame you, and help you lose the election.

You have to think a little deeper about these things, because there is always some power hungry maggot in government looking to bring down others to satisfy their own peculiar lust.

LAS, 8:39p.m. --

I know it's Pew, but have a look anyway at:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/cnn-newspapers-hammered-as-americans-turn-to-mobile-news/article/2509299

According to this research Drudge gets as much traffic as WAPO, which used to be considered, along with NYT and LAT, the "newspapers of record" of the United States. CNN has lost a third of its viewership share and newspapers have lost fifty percent of their readers since 2000.

Why is that? Technology? Maybe. People in the States too busy working, or something? Or have those who have left simply excluded these media sources from their thinking because they are emotionally tired of being serially outraged?