That is the liberal claim whenever the liberals are clearly at fault.

I still would place slightly more blame on the bad law than on the individuals involved.

But blamed or not, those individuals are all protected from the consequences of their actions. If enough fuss were made, the tax payers would be punished for the actions of the officials. But the officials are protected. If you can't understand that one political party is responsible for that ...

I agree.

Ok then.. Clearly.. (facepalm)

What is that law exactly and who is responsible for it being implemented?

Here I agree.. You see, here's the problem that needs to be fixed..

And off you go again..

Wire tapping laws that allow only the government (with judicial warrant) to make secret recordings.

I think third party secret recordings, under most conditions, should be limited to government action with warrant. But a second party secret recording should usually be permitted: A person intended by the speaker to hear the speech should be permitted to secretly record it, with many limitations on the use, but not on the act of recording. When the speech is a threat by a bully or criminal, the victim should be free to bring that to the appropriate authority to support a demand for protection from the criminal.

When the speech is extortion by a government official acting under "color of authority", virtually all limits on the use of the recording should be removed. The victim should be free to choose the media he trusts to expose the corruption, and should not be required to trust the government to police itself. But in most states in the USA, the special laws regarding officials acting under color of authority, gives such officials more protection from secret recording compared to ordinary citizens, not less.


I don't think you can be convinced of anything within that side of the topic.

Yes, the general lack of accountability of public officials for their actions is a problem that deserves remedy.

But in this instance, I think you are looking for public officials to ignore the law and substitute common sense and good judgment. That sounds right in any individual case (certainly this one) but fails terribly as a general policy.

This country is increasing ruled by bad laws with selective enforcement. That is the path to tyranny. Because it means we are not ruled by laws at all, but by the arbitrary choices of our rulers. We have immigration laws (maybe you think they are good, maybe bad, but the current administration's decision to not enforce them is bad either way). Obamacare was a horrid law, and every choice the President made to selectively not enforce it looks like a mitigation of the disaster. But behind the scenes, many of those were the result of extortion forcing monetary support for the Democrat party in return for selectively exempting groups and companies from the worst harm done by a Democrat law. The new EPA water regulations, if strictly enforced, would make almost all farming in this country illegal. Obviously, the EPA does not intend to enforce such regulation even as much as 1% of the time. Instead the selective non enforcement is an unlimited weapon to use to force compliance with whatever else the EPA might want from any specific farmer, and that already includes extorted campaign contributions.

I'm American and I live overseas trust me the press is not the same everywhere Americas news has become infotainment not news. The problem then becomes people begin to live in an echo chamber, that leads to the infotainment industry shaping public discourse. There is no news outlet here that I've been in contact with that has reached the level that we have in the states. When Johnsfine says things like "the liberal media" he's repeating things he's heard on from the non-liberal media i.e. conservative media. I first heard that term used by a tak show host 15 odd years ago and it stuck and show's the general sad state of discourse. Here the news tends to be the news without the associated commentary and moral judgement by the commentator. Fox vs MSNBC, Breitbart vs Maddow etc. these things tend to define you. You simply don't understand how much propaganda comes from the "news" in the states until you step away from it for a while. This tends to lead us to an US vs Them and shuns a great number of people in the process what is a supporter of labor and gun rights supposed to do for example to side with one you have to give up or severely weaken the other the other of your convictions. Our dichotomous two party system needs to disappear and it will as the older generations become less politically active we'll then be able to shed the built up and built in rancor until then we will have a nonfunctional government. There are two few gentlemen and ladies in politics and too many ideologues there are other things that play into that other than the news media but it's one of the larger reasons.

That is absolutely false.

I make my own observations and come to my own conclusions from what I read and hear from the "main stream media". The exact term "main stream media" I am repeating from the conservative media. On my own, I would have just said "most of the media". But the term "liberal media" (referring to most of the media) is obvious on its face to any honest intelligent person who observes it. I used that term before I every saw any conservative media at all.

Gentlemen, I really think that it's to be assumed that all of us actually have very well-balanced opinions ... except, of course, for "Fox News" and other such businesses, which as we know simply exist to sell newspapers and advertisements, and which have chosen to whack-a-mole on very narrow points of view in order to generate polarization and "notoriety." Even though I do not agree with this as a media marketing-strategy, "a media marketing-strategy" is the totality of what it actually is. Nothing in the real world of life is nearly so simplified, or polarized, as what they choose to scream at us from their bully pulpits.

So, in venues such as this one, "we really don't need to fall for that sort of thing." We know that our respective opinions, strongly held though they might or might not be, are actually complex and well-balanced. The stereotypes that are put forth by media-marketing are precisely that: straw-men and stick-figures, engineered to polarize. Not real life, and, not real opinions.

In some way, I think that this particular school administrator's reaction did reflect that "Fox News influence." He or she did perceive that a kid who was being bullied, and who had the presence of mind to collect proof of it, was somehow "wire-tapping equals felony(!)" simply because the kid used an iPad as a tape-recorder. And the police officer, who was likewise caught on-the-spot and pressured to come up with something, reacted in a similarly extreme way. "Acting out," if you will, the "Fox News polarized" position. And in so doing, heaping burning coals upon the head of a young boy who was already trying to deal with hostile bullies. This is the consequences of a media that loves to paint everything as terrorism (or something equally extreme == sensationalistic), and of people's perhaps-unconscious tendencies to act-out what they are constantly being exposed to instead of making appropriate judgment calls on their own.

Real life – and, real opinions – are not "polarized." They can't be described in simple paragraphs let alone sound-bites. Or even two-way exchanges in a forum.

Then you make the conclusions you are supposed to make.

Somewhat similar case from 2006:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/05/1...harges-dropped

This definitely started under Bush. Does Obama deserve to be criticized for continuing it? Oh, definitely. But it started during the Bush administration, and I was following the news about it on Slashdot at the time.

From 2007: http://news.slashdot.org/story/07/06...olice-a-felony

Furthermore, while I agree that it's a bad law (and who wouldn't), I would question whether it's a "liberal" law, as it was used to protect abuses of power during the busting of the Occupy protests. Yes, this happened under Obama. Notice that no-one who's disagreed with you has defended him:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...is-not-guilty/

It looks to me like the student did not violate the wiretapping law, which only applies to telephone and private conversations:

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/penn...-recording-law

Conversations in a classroom would be considered public.

I almost put in there that you'd say exactly that.

Emphasizing the word "definitely" is a great substitute for facts (sarcasm).

Do you know of any state in which it STARTED during the Bush administration?

I recall some stories about those laws being passed in the Carter administration, but mostly I think it was earlier.

You read some stories about questionable enforcement of such laws during the Bush administration. But not BY the Bush administration. Pay attention to who was actually doing it.

There are plenty of new and unique abuses perpetrated by the Obama administration. But the evil alliance of labor unions (in these cases police and teachers) with the Democrat party flowered under FDR and have plagued us ever since.

I missed that story among the thousands of stories of criminal activity committed by the Occupy movement and ignored by the authorities.

Meanwhile the Tea Party movement organized peaceful legal protests that were blocked and busted, sometimes violently, by liberal authorities.

Both kinds of protest occurred almost exclusively in locations controlled by Democrats. Tea Party protests were harassed and restricted by government from the start because they represented dissent. Occupy protests were coddled and encouraged by government as long as they stayed on the anti-capitalist message. But when Occupy protests devolved into the disgusting lawlessness one would expect from the freeloaders participating, some Democrat jurisdictions decided they were an embarrassment to liberalism, rather than the intended indictment of of capitalism. Democrats oppose free speech and want to silence those on their own side who embarrass them, every bit as much as those on the other side who contradict them.

That's fine.

You read some stories about questionable enforcement of such laws during the Obama administration. But not BY the Obama administration. Pay attention to who was actually doing it, since (correct me if I'm wrong) you appear to have taken the position that the current administration is responsible for the case being discussed.

The point that it started during the Bush administration stands, btw. That's when the cases that clearly served as a precedent to this one were. The Bush administration was as much responsible for those as the Obama administration is for the current one.

How do you deal with the parts of the law simplified in that explanation to "common sense tells you is private". The recorded threats by bullies in this case were clearly intended as a private communication from the bully to the victim and not intended to be heard by third parties.

The whole topic of second party secret recording, is restricted almost implicitly to situations in which the speaker is saying something he wants heard but not provable.

So as soon as the law starts parsing details of expected privacy, it is really parsing details of the competence of the evil. Did you shout the threat so you didn't know who might hear it (you can be secretly recorded), or did you take some care that only your victim heard you, so the law protects you. That law is stupid.

Thank you Smokey. You cleared that up almost as well as the Fox nut did for himself The term "liberal media" always makes me chuckle. Do people suppose they are not owned by huge corporations? and fewer and fewer but larger and larger ones all the time? Do they also suppose that any political party can afford to ignore corporate interests (historically conservative)? It should be obvious that it is rare that any party is able to push through any large changes that don't benefit Big Business directly, at least in the US, and I would imagine almost everywhere, since wealth == power.

There was a terrific series on HBO called The Wire written by an ex-cop and an ex-writer for The Baltimore Sun and I think it was episode 2 that dealt a great deal with what has happened to public schools and how they can't stop gangs, let alone bullies, especially in poorer neighborhoods. That too, is largely about money. In order to get State and Federal funds they have to meet certain "standards" on certain tests. There simply isn't time nor money to support much more than "teaching" how to answer those test questions. This has been about mostly by the ridiculous (but great sounding spin job) No Child Left Behind, which, if memory serves, was a Bush initiative but passed with complete bi-partisan support. Then the States added to it and established the "standards" within each State. Some are worse than others. None of them great.

"Meet the new Boss. Same as the old Boss" - The Who

There are some differences when one political party wins an election, but they have become very slight. The Real Life Golden Rule prevails. "He who has the gold makes the rules" and in addition, has heavy influence on media to keep the rabble arguing amongst themselves about trivia that has little effect on Big Biz. Bullies in school, especially in public schools from areas where the kids are not likely to reach Management, are just collateral damage and of little concern to the wealthy and powerful.... whose kids go to private schools where bullying is minimized and is less about lashing out than establishing "pecking order".

I didn't want to mention this, as I'm in another country and I don't have a first hand-perspective, but I've been wondering about the extent to which No Child Left Behind was responsible for the conditions that Johnsfine described in his son's school.