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. 

The Pitfalls Of Rape Prevention Critique

  
    So I recently read this article  The Pitfalls Of Rape Prevention on "The Dish" about rape. Emily Yoffe informs women "The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. … If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men." She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.”
    Katie McDonough accuses Yoffe of writing “rape apologia”: Yoffe has plenty of good data to support her argument that binge drinking on college campuses isn’t healthy. The over-consumption of alcohol can literally kill people. What it can’t do, however, is make a woman responsible for a crime committed against her.
     Emily Matchar comes to Yoffe’s defense saying "The fact that Yoffe didn’t discuss men in her story is troubling. It frames rape as a women’s issue rather than an everybody issue, which I assume was not her intent. But this doesn’t make her points about women and drinking any less true. Educating women on the factors that make them vulnerable to assault is not victim-blaming. It is simply practical advice backed up by data. We tell travelers to be aware of their surroundings in unfamiliar cities to reduce the risk of mugging. We teach new drivers defensive strategies to avoid being hit by drunks and speeders. This should not be any different."
    I agree that women should be aware, and should not put themselves in a position that could lead to being taken advantage of in anyway, and if they find themselves in a compromising situation or at a party where they don't trust or know the men, it wouldn't be smart to drink or get drunk, especially without a sober friend to keep an eye on you. Woman should be smarter and not give anyone the chance to take advantage of her... but I also do not agree that women are always responsible for the crime. It takes a sick person to take advantage of an unconscious or unwilling person, and not always does the blame fall on the stupidity of the victim for getting drunk in an unsafe environment without a friend watching them. In fact there are many people who get raped by friends who they have trusted for a while and it's not solely the woman's fault for being in that situation. I do think women should be careful and think things through and know the situation they're going to be in before they get drunk. But I also think if they're going to get drunk they need a friend to watch over them, because not many people can be trusted, especially when alcohol is involved.

Woman Says Strip Search After DUI Arrest Went Too Far

 I read an interesting article Woman Says Strip Search After DUI Arrest Went Too Far on abc news where a woman was arrested for drunk driving then was strip searched and treated harshly and it went too far. On May 18th in Illinois Holmes was pulled over by LaSalle county deputies. She had been at a wedding with her boyfriend and he was too drunk to drive. In this article, the police dash cam video shows her calmly taking a field sobriety test. The police say her blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit. She was arrested and taken to the police station for a dui, and that's where things go awry. The video shows Holmes standing against a wall while a female officer pats her down and male officers are standing by. Then all of a sudden the female officer puts her down to the ground in a rough manner, they say because she allegedly tried to kick them. "I was terrified," Holmes said, "I felt helpless. Within moments, deputies carry her into a padded room and shoved her face-down on the floor. Then, three male officers and one female remove all of her clothing, leaving her naked for two minutes, until an officer tosses in some blankets. "I was scared. And I lay there crying," Holmes said. Illinois law says officers can only conduct a strip search when there is a reasonable belief that a suspect has a weapon or drugs, and that they can only be searched by deputies of the same sex. And that it cannot be observed by anyone not physically conducting the search. They were on-duty deputies humiliating and groping a female inmate. It makes you wonder, were these guys ever even trained? This morning, Dana Holmes says her civil rights were violated, and she wants justice. She says she hopes they lose their jobs.
   I agree with Dana Holmes, as to her rights were violated. A strip search is a practice of searching a person for weapons or other contraband suspected of being hidden on their body or inside their clothing, and not found by performing a frisk search, by requiring the person to remove some or all of his or her clothing. None of that applies to Dana Holmes situation. All she was accused of was allegedly trying to kick the officer which you can't even prove from the video. And even if that was the case, she'd been calm the entire time up until then, why not even try another method first before using force? Why thrown her to the ground without a warning? And if she was drunk, she doesn't know exactly what she's doing, and she seriously cannot be a threat, why embarrass her and violate her rights by unlawfully strip searching her for no reason? And even then, strip search her illegally with officers not rendering the search in the room and on top of that, they being of the opposite sex. I agree with Dana Holmes and do believe her rights were violated and that it was wrong.

The Vote to Defund Obamacare to Avoid Government Shutdown

     Yesterday the Washington Post published an article: The Vote to Defund Obamacare to Avoid Government Shutdown. Basically it tells how with the deadline for government shut down growing near, John Boehner has a difficult choice to make: either embrace a compromise with the democrats, agonizing conservatives in his party, or give into their demands and have a showdown with the president and senate. On Wednesday Boehner decided to choose none of the above and come up with his own solution which is to set a vote for Friday which will both provide funding to keep the government open, while stripping away money to implement portions of Obama’s health-care law.
     Boehner also said that it demanded a one-year delay of all aspects of Obamacare when it comes time to consider granting expanded borrowing authority to the Treasury in the coming weeks. Without the authority the government will experience, for the first time, delinquency on the nations almost $17million debt. The democrats didn't like either of those options and are setting up yet another game of political brinksmanship that could threaten the nation’s recovery.
     After an hour-long House Republican conference, Boehner told reporters “We’re going to continue to do everything we can to repeal the president’s failed health-care law.” After hearing that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid called Boehner a Republican "anarchists" saying that he was trying to tie up the upper chamber by insisting on votes on ending or delaying Obamacare.
     But if nothing is done by September 30st almost every government will be partly shuttered, while the deadline to increase the federal debt limit is only a few weeks later in October. Both Democrats and Republicans are worried that the republicans won’t come to an agreement which would leave the nations fiscal well-being at risk.