Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has threatened to sue a publication after it revealed details of his tax returns, which he had sent to them by mistake.
According to Lagniappe Daily, which broke the original story, “In a cease-and-desist letter emailed Saturday afternoon, the former Auburn coach’s attorneys demanded the article be removed, accused Lagniappe of ‘unlawfully accessing’ the information.” The letter further “claimed it was illegally published without Tuberville’s consent, and … it was not protected speech under the First Amendment.”
No, that’s fucking stupid. People, even politicians should be allowed a level of privacy. It doesn’t matter to you at all if they have netflix, and if it does, go see a therapist.
Tax statements and any trade information should absolutely be public knowledge. Monitoring someone’s cash and credit card statements is some predator level shit.
You’re acting like becoming a politician isn’t an active choice.
Just because it’s a choice doesn’t mean every single detail of their lives needs to be public. Why should you or the public care at all if an elected official has Netflix? Why does it matter if they have $500 cash in their wallet? Do you need to know every time they take a shit and what time they go to sleep? No. None of that is information that matters at all.
There absolutely needs to be more transparency, but asking for literally everything is fucking dumb.
No, not politicians. They should have to sacrifice their privacy in return for power. Because the risk of corruption is too high. Leave nowhere for it to hide, nowhere at all.
Yes, corruption via their Netflix subscription. Dumb take.
You also want cameras in their bathrooms so they aren’t making secret deals while they shit? Gotta cover all your creepy bases.
Why collect taxes either? Before you know it they’ll just take 100% of your paycheck!
You see how stupid the slippery slope fallacy is as a rhetorical device?
What does this have to do at all with what I said? There are things that should be transparent, and others that don’t matter. If someone has Netflix, that doesn’t matter. This isn’t about slippery slopes, it’s about common sense privacy that every person is entitled to.
Just in case, because you keep referencing it, the listing that we should be able to peek in their wallet and whether they have Netflix are likely illustrative of the granularity of inspection rather than actual, strict metrics for checking a politician’s financial transparency.
As an actually metric, I would say that politicians should not be able to move funds larger than a $1000 without reporting on it.
That’s fair. I have stated and agree that there needs transparency. The original comment I responded to was very specific about Netflix and cash in wallets. After I said no, they followed up and clarified that that’s exactly what they meant.
I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m directly responding to those statements, because that sort of monitoring is insane.