Yeah, at this point Rand Paul is pretty much running as Hillary Clinton-lite. You see, through various intelligence programs, the US government is able to identify foreign terrorist organizations. When those terrorists then contact folks in the United States, we have legitimate reason to know who they’re talking to, so NSA has developed means of sifting that information.

And yet here we are, 13 and change years after 9/11, a “Republican” Rand Paul cheering with Democrat Barack Obama that they tag-teamed to kill the program.

USA PATRIOT was a huge bill with a lot going on. Some of it was possibly not a great idea. But applying modern big-data tools to find patterns in terrorist behavior was a great idea. Instead of fighting the last war, and trying to find the same pattern we saw last time, we were trying to find the next threat. Thanks Rand Paul, for fighting to give privacy for Russia, China, Iran, and the other Islamic State.

It is such a shame. In an era when actual creation of profiles of actual people is happening every day as firms like Google gather data and sell it to the highest bidder (as well as have it open to searches), the anti-American Ron Paulite fringe teamed up with Democrats to push scare stories.

See, what these technical ignoramuses aren’t telling you is that your data isn’t safe, your data isn’t protected one iota. All they did with this push was to stop the US government from tracking terrorists. Google’s going to keep gathering it. Governments are going to keep searching it, as well as private attackers.

Yeah, that’s right. Rand Paul and the Surrendercrat caucus are telling you one specific program fighting the new Axis of Evil has to be shut down, while instead we should be creating more tools to help the private sector fend off ongoing attacks America is enduring against new threats. Our data is under attack, and government should be collaborating with the private sector to share data on attacks. But no, we’re trying to stick our heads in the sand and gather less data.

It’s okay. It’s not like, while we’re playing ideological games as Presidential year politics, America’s enemies are still plotting against us or anything. It’ll never happen. Nobody would crash a plane into a building. Nobody would invade an embassy and kill the ambassador. Nobody would bomb a US warship. We’re fine. We’re totally safe. The War on Terror is over. Obama said so.

Why is a United States Senator targeting an industry? Let the market decide. People need information. Let them take their own risks. You take away options and people just will face less competition, and save less money. It’s shocking a Republican is talking like this.

We normally see winners and losers picking from Democrats, in matters like Net Neturality. Fortunately that may lose in court soon, because one of the worst parts of that bad deal is a war on poor people.

Don’t forget. Ever-increasing regulation of the type Obama and Grassley want costs us more in direct government spending, in addition to the greater economic burden we all face from it.