Commentary: "Didn't your mother teach you eavesdropping is not polite?"

              I found this article very interesting and agreed with it. Yosef says he fears we are going to war alone and broke. "What are we doing spying on our own ally’s?" He asks. Yosef states "An unhealthy obsession with our public safety has lead this nation to paranoia, which will leave as with no ally’s; unless we stop spying on our friends." I couldn't agree more. No matter how good a friend someone could be to you, if they eavesdropped on one of your conversations, just to make sure you weren't talking about them, you would definitely not be happy. I agree with Yosef and think we need to work on mutual trust.
                The article states that the NSA collected 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data in the span of a month. The questing is why? Why do we always have to feel in danger? Even by our ally's?  If you show a friend that you don’t trust them they start to not trust you as well, which will cause you and your friend to drift apart. Finally they will walk away singing “we are never, ever getting back together”. The same situation goes for spying on Brazil, and Germany.
               According to this article the United State is currently $17,116,590,825,120.15 in debt right now. The estimated population of the United States is 316,981,640, so each citizen’s share of this debt is $53,998.68. The National Debt has continued to increase and average of $2.63 billion per day, and yet we spend billions on spying on countries that are irrelevant. This is completely ridiculous and unnecessary. If there was a war to break out; we would not have any money to fund our military operations and we would not have any ally’s to relay on. I mean we're basically hurting ourselves because we're scared and non-trusting.  So stop the spying and keep the NSA under control.

Federal Workers Sue Government For Withholding Pay During Shutdown

    An article on Huffington Post states how a group of federal workers who had their pay delayed due to the shutdown are suing the federal government, saying it violated its own labor laws by giving them abbreviated paychecks in October. 
    In a suit that was filed October 24th, five federal employees who were required to work through the shutdown accuse the government of failing to pay them minimum wage and overtime during one pay period. By withholding several days' worth of pay, the government ran afoul of the Fair Labor Standards Act, they claim. "These are by no means highly paid federal employees," said the lawyer, Heidi Burakiewicz, of Mehri & Skalet in Washington. "They didn't know how they would support their children during the shutdown. They had to defer payments for bills." Even if these workers were fully compensated later, they were still paid less than the minimum wage on their scheduled payday, the suit claims. According to Burakiewicz, many employees who worked overtime during the shutdown had their additional hours recorded but couldn't be paid for them in their next paycheck. "Its violation was willful, and in conscious or reckless disregard of the requirements [of the law]," the suit says of the government.
   That is sad, no doubt. But what about the 200,000 people and small businesses all over America who live off a much smaller paycheck who had to go without a job and will not receive back-pay of any kind? Honestly, the fact that the government shutdown cost our economy $24 billion just because our leaders, who we've put in charge, couldn't come to an agreement shows we have much more to worry about.