When your “journalism” rule book contains only one line – “Republicans Bad, Democrats Good”, you end up tying youself in knots.
While doing field testing hunting for wabbits, I briefly caught NPR discussing today’s expected climax of Rand Paul blocking any reauthorization of the NSA powers to do bulk data collection of every american’s phone calls.
NPR couldn’t figure out who blocked cloture, whether Republicans want to continue the program or are opposed to it and whether ending the data collection is a bad thing. All they “know” is President Obama wants the power, so NPR is in the preposterous position of scaring America that without the Patriot Act and the NSA collecting every fragment of minutia about our lives that some ISIS terrorist will sneak in through Mexico and detonate a suitcase nuke in New York City.
This is all Kabuki theater no matter what. If the Senate says no, President Obama will issue an executive order authorizing himself to have the power, classify the order and tell the NSA to do whatever it wants. They have his college transcripts and foreign travel history as a young man, after all. They might even have a collection of all his social security numbers.
WNYC, the Public Radio station in New York City has anounced they are moving two programs they create to self- syndication
Rand Paul explained the same thing on Glenn Beck’s radio show. The power given to the NSA has an escape clause so that in the event the authority is withdrawn, existing investigations would be allowed to continue. Since the NSA position is that all Americans are potential terrorists, that means they can continue their 310 million “investigations”