Lemme Tell Ya Bout Bad Votes

It was early July of an election year when a bona fide liberal, a staunch defender of the progressive cause was facing a contentious election against an entrenched conservative Senator who would pull out all the stops; painting his less experienced challenger as weak on the tough-guy stuff of national security, a pussy when it came to fighting and killing the evil-doing muslamonazi terror.

Despite being nearly incomprehensible on the stump and surrounded by corrupt and incompetent cronies, the Conservative Senator knew he could count on his legion of lobbyists to fund his campaign of fear and lies. The insurgent challenger correctly judged the temperament of an electorate that was sick to death of GOP rule, but leery as always of something unfamiliar. But he also knew that the only hope for his cause was to beat the Conservative. That was job one.

And politics being what it is, the liberal challenger was put in a box with few good options. He was in the House of Representatives at the time and the day came when the abomination known as the Military Commissions Act came up for a vote, complete with the despicable abolition of habeas corpus clauses and hideous codification of torture. A law so egregiously contrary to what this nation stands for, not even a Supreme Court more to the right than the day it selected Bush as the 43rd Resident could find a way to make it Constitutional, and has knocked it down at every turn.

Sherrod Brown (D-OH) turned his back on his principles and voted for the MCA, a decision he lived to regret but pledged to make up for that mistake. His vote against FISA is one step in that direction.

Barack Obama made just as profound a mistake by not doing all in his power to stop the legislative pardon just handed to the telecom giants and the criminal cover-up by the White House for committing over 30 consecutive felonies by reauthorizing their illegal surveillance. Obama was in a similar box, with bigger stakes and fewer options than Brown in July of 2006.

There were only four sides to the box
.
1. Don't show like McCain.

2. Vote for FISA like he did, reluctantly while on record endorsing the defeated amendments that would have stripped the bill of the telecom immunity clauses.

Or . . . Fight the bill which leaves two possible results.

3. This junior Senator cashes in his political capital before even accepting the nomination of his party for President, leading his slim majority from the back bench and convincing enough Republican Senators to honor his filibuster, thus handing the Presumptive Democratic Party Nominee the legislative coup of the millennium, confirming that he is indeed the second coming.

4. Obama leads a doomed filibuster attempt, a futile gesture that confirms the next month's Fox News talking points that the Democrats are in disarray, will not support Obama, and that he is a feckless and naive politician who has a lot to learn about leadership and the realities of Washington D.C.

He picked number 2. It was clearly the best of bad choices from his perspective. Your mileage may vary, and your Quixotic instincts are noble indeed if you believe he should have gone for 3 or 4. Would that it were true that following through on all good intentions were rewarded or even possible in Versailles on the Potomac.

It would have been the right move, but not a winning move, and America rewards winners, not philosophers. Ask George McGovern, John Kerry and Al Gore, or even Ted Kennedy about how hard it is running for President when you're a liberal, despite knowing in your heart of hearts that you are on the right side of history and have a vision of what this nation can truly become if it listens to its better angels.

Sherrod Brown has to live with stories like this, as he washes the blood from his hands:

. . . Huzaifa Parhat, a member of China's Uighur ethnic group, a Muslim people who are subject to continued oppression by the Chinese government. Parhat had fled China to Afghanistan, which he in turn left when his refugee camps was bombed by the Americans, fleeing this time to Pakistan, where he was turned over to U.S. forces for a bounty payment.

He has been held as an enemy combatant for over six years without charges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has now ruled that absent some proof of his enemy combatant status he must be released. Interestingly, the government while continuing to press his enemy combatant status, has evidently cleared him for release -- unfortunately there is no country to which to return him. Such is the state of justice in this country seven years into the term of a president who has shamed us in so many ways that they are hard to enumerate.

I don't relish the thought of being an Obama apologist. He has more than enough of those, and chief amongst those should be the Senator himself -- with an act of atonement by President Obama, fixing this miserable FISA law and punishing those who abused their powers these last seven years again and again and again under cover of executive fiat.

However, at least Obama doesn't have detainees like Huzaifa Parhat on his conscience, or record. In fact, his extraordinary speech against the MCA was probably the highlight of his first year in the Senate.

When you are sitting in the Oval Office, or don't have to face reelection for another six years in the Senate, you can afford to be a statesman. When the election day is quickly arriving, however, it's all about politics, not principle. That's just the way it is, and Barack Obama always knew that.

One of the reasons I believe the FISA bill got rammed through now is because Obama and Harry Reid didn't want this to hang over the election like the MCA did in September of '06, when the Senate finally got around to approving what the House had done in July. He didn't want to make another speech like this, 9/28/06:

"I may have only been in this body for a short while, but I am not naive to the political considerations that go along with many of the decisions we make here.

I realize that soon, we will adjourn for the fall, and the campaigning will begin in earnest. And there will be 30-second attack ads and negative mail pieces, and we will be criticized as caring more about the rights of terrorists than the protection of Americans. And I know that the vote before us was specifically designed and timed to add more fuel to that fire.

[snip]

Politics Won Today

But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on the terrorists.

And yet, we have a bill that gives the terrorist mastermind of 9/11 his day in court, but not the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists - people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.

So folks, all I have left to say is that you better put on your big boy or girl panties and suck it up. This ain't bean-ball we're playing and we've got people dying out there from war and poverty and sickness, people that will keep dying if the GOP can keep a hold of the White house and keep a strangle-hold on Congress. We've got innocent folks being tortured, kid being blown up for no damn reason on the streets of who knows where, and a corporate kleptocracy raping our resources and stealing our future -- and you're all pissy about Bush bugging your phone.

Get over it. The conservatives have been fighting us liberals as if we were the real enemy in a real war. It's about time to wake up and realize we're in a war and fight back, which included tactical retreats like we witnessed this week. We got bigger fish to fry right now. We can fix FISA the same day we close down Gitmo and indict Cheney and Rove.

So, I Got This Bumper Sticker

From MoveOn.Org, that is a nice pretty shade of blue that even matches my car.

It says "Obama '08," and it was free!

Dartboard or car? Dartboard or car?

Quandary.

(BTW, nice move Hillary.)

My less than heartfelt answer is continued support for Barack Obama, and I'll slap the dart-hole free sticker on the car.

Why?

Step one, rid the bureaucracy of the neo-cons.

Step two . . . (something about underwear gnomes, I forget)

Step Three, profit? Happiness? Utopia? I dunno, but we gotta do Step One.

I just keep going back to the saying, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

That was Voltaire, who also said, "Love truth, but pardon error."

We can make bumper stickers out of Voltaire's best sayings and be even prouder of our bumper-bling. He would still be considered a progressive today, and recognize that many of society's ills he abhorred are in full force despite a couple of centuries of revolution and "democratic" institutions.

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force useful only as a counterbalance since its "religious tax" or the tithe helped to create a strong backing for revolutionaries.

Reading Voltaire reaffirms my commitment to refer to the "Inside-the-Beltway" crowd as more than simply, "The Village" but "Versailles on the Potomac Villagers." We've come so far to fight the same battles. Fortunately, we're better armed for having men like Voltaire, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Hamilton gone before us -- leaving us a framework to fight these battles against a foe too full of itself or too ignorant to even know or care who Voltaire is, and why these are words to live by:

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

As for FISA, Like his contemporary, the "conservative" Edmund Burke who said that "Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny." Voltaire tells us that, "If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones."

We have the technology. We can make our laws better than they are.

That will never happen with John McCain in the White House.

GPS Cells and Jumping the FISA/Telecom Shark.

I gotta agree with Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus. This is a dumb battle.

Kevin Drum picks up the story from TChris at the Big Tent of Perpetual Outrage that the ACLU and the EFF folks have filed a FOIA suit to find out if and when and how often the government has used the GPS tracking information in your cell phone to monitor our locations.

(Okay, if that's too many abbreviations for you, then don't worry, you don't need to care.)

It's like this. Every modern cell phone has a little GPS transmitter (or something) and they can triangulate your position between cell towers (I guess). The ACLU and EFF and Kevin Drum want them to get warrants to find out -- where you are.

Drum must be a bit punchy from all the FISA/TeleGiant fighting lately, because frankly, he's better than this.

That cell phone tracking should indeed require a warrant hardly seems disputable. That the Department of Justice refuses to explain its policies hardly seems defensible. Good luck to the ACLU and the EFF.

Uhhm, nope.

It's not only disputable, it's dismissible and defensible.

Now just calm down and think for a minute.

• They could follow you without a warrant.
• They could ring your doorbell to see if you answer without a warrant.
• They can set up a stake out across your street and monitor your coming and going without a warrant.
• They can check your garbage and find out where you picked up the take out you had for dinner without a warrant.

If you leave your home, you are by definition "out in public." Where's the expectation of privacy when you are in public? If you're not out in public, you must be at home or where-ever you went when you left home and went out in public to get there.

Location is a status, not a thing to be seized or a conversation that can be intercepted. You don't need a warrant to find out someone's status: alive or dead, male or female, felon or clean record, physical description, valid or suspended license -- home or roaming the public streets.

If you do have an expectation of privacy when you are traveling around, in public, then you must be sneaking around -- so ditch the phone with the fancy chip in it that is probably eating your brain anyway.

Democrats Cannot Filibuster Their Way Out Of A Paper Bag

Since there's been nothing on the news save for some of us libs praising Senator Dodd's fantastic speech I linked to earlier, I never would have realized that the FISA bill has not been put on the back burner until January as I was led to believe based on what Dodd said on the floor. Fortunately, DDay at Digby's blog disabused my of my irrational exuberance and pointed me to Ian Welsh's rundown at FDL of the vote tally in favor of closing debate on the issue, defeating Feingold and Dodd's threatened filibuster and opening the way for amnesty for both the Telecoms and Bush administration to get away with their illegal surveillance of Americans since before 9/11.

Disgusting. The GOP successfully orchestrated more filibusters of any and all Democratic initiatives in one year than any previous two-year session of Congress dating back to Philadelphia in 1776 -- keeping wholly intact the poisonous neoconservative strangle-hold on our nation. The Democrats can't even mount one when they have the majority and are simply fighting to respect the constitution and the basic privacy of the citizens they supposedly represent.

Privacy, the basic liberty to be left the F#$%k alone, is officially a joke. There is none in AmeriKa and probably never will be again. With this and the provisions in Dodd's own Housing Bill requiring everything you purchase be reported to Big Brother, the police state will have all the tools it needs to control everything you do. Not just suspicious transactions will be monitored, but every damn thing.

Information is power, and they will now have it all. Or at least the ideologically pure automatons they hire to keep the rest of us in line. If they know everything you're doing, they know everything they need to know to pull your strings -- and make you a part of the machine too.

The Editors Nails The Zeitgeist

At least he/she/it/they at Poor Man know what lurks in my head.

I know I sound like a broken record, but it would be nice if someone would at least acknowledge that the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is kaput, and so the whole national security justification for secret FISA courts and NSA wiretaps actually no longer exists. I’m open to arguments that current technologies, etc., means that the government needs expanded surveillance powers - it’s not my preference, but I don’t think I’m qualified to propose policy here. But it would be so nice if someone could relate it to the real world of the present day, rather than trying to make me believe that bearded religious nutters living in caves are more cunning and sophisticated than the Soviet Union. (Yes, the 9/11 hijackers did manage to escape the detection of the Bush administration. So did a class 5 hurricane.)

Of course there's more, all of it spot on.

A Saner Head On FISA

I'm not sure I agree with Neil the "Werewolf" on this one, but it's nice that he's trying to console us. I do feel a bit better, but I'm not buying into this statement:

This bill is basically the same kind of garden-variety corruption one expects from Congress -- protecting wealthy interests at the expense of ordinary folk. That's why it's a bad piece of legislation. But Congress passes junk like that all the time (the farm bill, lots of defense appropriations, not bargaining hard with Big Pharma, etc) and it's not the end of the world. And that's why I'm writing this post -- I don't want people to lose perspective and think that this is too much more than just another garden-variety bit of corporate corruption. It's a lot closer to the tax breaks for ceiling fan importers that it is to torture.

It's a bit more troubling than all that Neil, a few more basic principles and American freedoms are at stake here, don't you think?

And the problem is broader than Neil paints with his singular focus on the imperative that we must replace George Bush and his entire criminal enterprise from the executive branch -- and of course than requires that anyone with an "R" after their name is no longer welcome at any White House Bar-B-Q's. (No, seriously. Forget about the post-partisan crap about retaining someone like Gates at DoD or any similar "enlightened" nonsense. They ALL have to go.)

Neil begins with the simple premis that , "This is a legislative precedent that emerged because Steny Hoyer decided that it would be good business to sell the telcos the immunity they wanted in exchange for campaign contributions." But that doesn't reveal the whole picture. Hoyer would never have been placed in such an untenable position, knowing he would be labeled as a bought and paid for hack by even well-meaning analysts like Neil if the Democrats in the House weren't hamstrung by the turncoat Blue-Dogs who vote with the GOP on damn near everything that matters, and thus as loyal to Bush as John McCain.

Now I don't know if these DINO's will have an epiphany when Barack Obama takes the oath of office, or will have some enlightenment shoved down their throats. But I do know that haveing the equivalent of 40 or so Joe Liebermans filling space in the Democratic Caucus and marching in lock-step with the remnants of Tom DeLay's outfit is THE principle reason Congress as an institution is despised more than anything, ever.

So thanks Neil, I do feel a bit better, but I'm looking for more than merely an inauguration ushering a new era. I'm looking for a purge.

Sadly, I'll probably be disappointed on both counts. But in the true spirit of a Cleveland sports fan and apostle of St. Wiley E. Coyote and the Church of Never Say Die, that certainly doesn't mean I'll accept the notion that the Perfect is the enemy of the Good.

Thank You Democrats

At least the 105 128 of you (thanks Larry), including my representative Marcy Kaptur, who stood firm against the lawless imperialism of the Bush administration and voted no on giving the Telecoms immunity in the FISA bill. (The yeas and nays are here, HT Hilzoy.)

Thanks as well to the sole republican brave enough to buck his party and vote against this travesty as well, Timothy V. Johnson (R-Illinios-15).

This vote effectively split the Democrats in half, 105 128 patriots who stood up for the rule of law against 128 105 capitulators, including the leadership, Pelosi, Hoyer, Emannuel. Those 105 128 are going to need all the help they can get. I'm not sure the Act Blue idea of punishing those who followed the leadership's cue is as important as supporting those who did the right thing -- cuz they're going to need it.

Or maybe they're just in safe enough seats they can afford to hold the liberal line. I know that the core Northern Ohio progressives, (Kaptur, Kucinich, Tubbs-Jones) are in no real danger of losing their seats, and Blue Dogs like Zack Space, a Democrat in a very conservative district, was never going to go along with anything that even hinted he was "soft" on terrists. None of this should be a surprise.

The reason is simple. other than the bumper-sticker mentality that has been mastered by the fear-mongering GOP, this issue simply doesn't resonate with the public at large. They don't know, like you should, why FISA matters so much.

Since all signs still point towards another wave election, and possibly a '32 type realignment, funding the liberal wing of the party may not be all that productive right now, but it's advance thinking (as the blogosphere always seems to do), putting in place a new framework to push for new leadership, or at least a new direction for 2010, and remaking the very sole of this nation by 2012.

Maybe that's even too short-sighted. The GOP spent 40 years institutionalizing the politics of fear and loathing.

I probably am conditioned by the loathing to loath sending up challengers against every Democrat who won't toe our progressive line as Glenzilla and the Kossacks advocate. My reflexes are even more attuned against dis'ing the party's nominee for his silence -- since just six months ago my rallying cry was Silence Is Betrayal.

John Edwards, recalling MLK's message of resistance to war:

As he put it then, there comes a time when silence is a betrayal -- not only of one's personal convictions, or even of one's country alone, but also of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.

That's the thing I find the most important about the sermon Dr. King delivered here that day. He did not direct his demands to the government of the United States, which was escalating the war. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence, and to take responsibility for bringing about what he called a revolution of values.

A revolution whose starting point is personal responsibility, of course, but whose animating force is the belief that we cannot stand idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world.

And this, in my view, is at the heart of what we should remember and celebrate on this day. This is the dream we must commit ourselves to realizing.

To quote words even more familiar, while the Democrats struggle to gain a true majority, one both filibuster and veto proof, before they can solidify their gains, while they are still vulnerable enough not to take the progressives for granted . . .

If not us, who? If not now, when? ~RFK

Support the 105 128, and fight the capitulators. You want to send a message? This is how.

Thank Goodness For Bloggers

Otherwise this democracy thingy would be really hard to understand.

Fortunately, we have rather insightful people like Mark Schmitt at Tapped who sorts out the "why" of the ongoing Florida re-vote controversy.

Clinton's only ally is uncertainty. The minute it becomes clear what will happen with Michigan and Florida -- re-vote them, refuse to seat them, or split them 50-50 or with half-votes, as some have proposed -- is the minute that Clinton's last "path to the nomination" closes. The only way to keep spin alive is to keep uncertainty alive -- maybe there will be a revote, maybe they'll seat the illegal Michigan/Florida delegations, maybe, maybe, maybe. In the fog of uncertainty, Penn can claim that there is a path to the nomination, but under any possible actual resolution of the uncertainty, there is not.

Schmitt points out that as soon as you reset Florida and Michigan, the race doesn't look close at all: Obama up by a million in the popular vote count and will undoubtedly do better in Florida than the 32% he originally got, cutting into The Math of her near parity in pledged delegates.

Perception being reality in politics, her perceived competitiveness vanishes, which is what she is counting on to sway superdelegates. Mind you, I'm of the opinion that seating superdelegates from Florida, where MSNBC's Chuck Todd informs us that she holds a decent advantage, is what the game's all about, but it was another blog by MikeVotes that ties Todd's suspicions with the tidbit that

Florida law prohibits election officials from authenticating votes cast in the Democratic Party's proposed do-over primary by mail, state officials said Thursday, a potentially fatal blow to the increasingly embattled plan.

Mike usefully provides the link to the Miami Herald article that explains what you won't see on the TeeVee, that Florida election officials take their responsibilities very (cough) seriously -- especially the Republican ones when they see an opportunity to screw a Democrat with an arbitrary and capricious whim, again.

Thanks Mike. And thanks as well to other bloggers who explain the inexplicable ... like Kagro X who makes sense out of the arcane parliamentary games that are possible when you have even the slightest congressional majority and need to fight and win the FISA battle. And make George Bush sing that old song about saving the "patriotic" telecoms so he can save his own hide.

The blogosphere will tell you everything you wanted to know, and even the stuff you didn't need to know.

It represents the collective wisdom, idiocy, and research facilities of humanity at large, which is why Avedon's admonition that Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur is so very apropos when translating the tattoos on Eliot Spitzer's call girl, "Kristin" a.k.a. Ashley Dupre.

You are so right Avedon. Everything does sound more impressive in Latin. And we'd never know how impressive this bimbo's belly was if it weren't for the IntertubeZ. (Hat Tip: Wonkette)

Oh, the tummy tatoo translation? The best my one semester of Latin combined with the collective wisdom of the blogosphere can tell is that her tatooist didn't speak Latin too well, but who does.

Best guess: "I was safely protected?" or something like that. The Post's "fair value" is fun, and that might be what Ashley thought tutela valui meant, but knowing she insisted that her performances be "safe" or You Don't Get The Sex, Dude, seems all too fitting.

Resume Debunkifying Function

Honestly, some things you just can't let go unanswered.

The one question, really the only question on the current state of FISA, why didn't the GOP agree to extend the Protect America Act another 21 days to sort out what is to be done on Telecom immunity. Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Mike McConnell, was asked that up front on CNN's Late Edition. It's the one question he would not answer. (Update: Turns out, the whole gang was full of it.)

Via Andy McCarthy at The Corner, we are linked to the even more wingnutty Weekly Standard up to their usual nonsense complete with spin, half-truths, bullshit, lies and a complete rewriting of recent history on the FISA/Telecom Amnesty bill.

Let's dive right in, shall we.

Hear No Evil
Are House Democrats serious about national security?
by Matthew Continetti

How much ya wanna bet that his answer is, "No?"

On February 16, last year's bipartisan legislation governing the collection of foreign intelligence and protecting from liability all persons who comply with federal directives to assist in such collection--the law otherwise known as the "Protect America Act of 2007"--expired, having exhausted its six-month, 15-day statutory lifespan. At which time the federal government's ability to pursue suspected terrorists and emerging threats was dealt a serious blow. You can thank House Democrats for the whole sorry mess.

Fair enough. We are now forewarned that as patriotic citizens, we must analyze the curiously named Protect America Act's failure to become law with any eye towards blaming Democrats for putting us all in horrible danger, and completely ignore the issue of retroactive and prospective immunity for the telecommunication companies who facilitated warrantless wiretapping when they didn't think they needed such a law to make their actions legal, and the role of George Bush in all this.

It gets better worse.

The Democratic leadership denies this, of course, having adopted an Alfred E. Neuman "What, Me Worry?" approach to national security.

Ah yes, foreign policy advice from someone who reads Mad Magazine. This should be good. Of course what's really telling about the whole piece is that the word immunity -- the reason for the impasse -- isn't mentioned until half-way through, once he's done spinning the facts to suit their version of history.

By the time one gets through page one of this two-page propaganda tool, we find out that "probable cause" is some kind of freakish liberal scheme deserving of scare quotes as it imposes some kind of "stringent FISA procedures" before a search warrant may issue -- which we all know is a lie since FISA allows initiation of surveillance three full days before any warrant might issue.

But any new wiretaps the government seeks will have to go through stringent FISA procedures, which require the government to show "probable cause" that a "U.S. person" is a "foreign power" or an "agent of a foreign power" before a search warrant targeting him can be issued.<

We also find out, simply by dropping the name Richard Clarke, the old 1978 FISA law doesn't work -- even though the Patriot Act, as well as Patriot II modified it already. Shocking, that in order to spy on you or me or any other American citizen, the Bill of Rights might apply. Jesus, I'll bet if it was the Second and not the Fourth Amendment they were pissing on there'd be hell to pay.

Another piece of Constitutional Tom-foolery was this tidbit:

It turns out, further, that the NSA wasn't spying on Americans willy-nilly. Most of the warrantless surveillance targets were foreign nationals located overseas, though the program also surveilled[sic] the 500-odd people in the United States with whom those overseas targets were communicating. Nor was it at all clear whether or not FISA superseded the president's plenary, constitutional authority to "protect and defend" the United States from attack. No court has ever said so. And no administration, including Carter's and Clinton's, has ever accepted FISA as determinative of its constitutional power.

Where does one start? How about the low-lying fruit first. The President of the United States swears an oath specifically laid out in Article II of the Constitution, to wit:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Not to split hairs, but if it were Bush's sworn duty to protect us from attack, they should have started impeachment proceedings on September 12th, 2001.

Now it's very comforting to know that the concerned folks at Weekly Standard have guaranteed all of out civil liberties, and that "most" of people our government spied on were nasty foreigners or people here talking to nasty foreigners -- all of which kept us safer. Too bad that's a lie. Not to mention the fact that we don't require any kind of warrants or other permission to spy on foreign nationals, only Americans -- never did.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

Equally comforting is that previous Democratic Administrations, including the one that originally signed FISA into law, might not have felt bound by it's perfectly reasonable requirements. I suppose by not mentioning how Reagan or Bush(41) felt about FISA made the argument more persuasive. Also absent from consideration is the current POTUS's obviously disingenuous pronouncement that we get warrants whenever we need to.

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.

This fight was never about protecting us, except to the point where people's fears can be exploited and Democrats be made to look bad. It's about power, control, information and keeping everyone involved out of prison.

There really are so many freakishly outlandish wingnut memes floating through Continetti's article it's almost remarkable he didn't land a job on Dick Cheney's staff. He drops the bombshell that the FISA court system degraded due to an overload of cases because the "Bush administration was weak" after the Democrats reclaimed Congress -- but neglect to mention that now, unlike the situation last summer, the court has no backlog whatsoever.

Now one can talk about burying the lede, or just come out and accuse young Continetti of obscuration, but he doesn't get to the point, "retroactive immunity," until 1000 words into a 1600 word column. Mind you, this is a guy who thinks himself clever comparing Democrats to a cartoon character, Alfred E. Newman, but thinks Ted Kennedy is "disgusting" for saying Bush is "willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies."

And then the sophistry begins in earnest.

But the crux of the anti-immunity Democrats' argument seems to be that because the original Terrorist Surveillance Program was "illegal" and the phone companies were complicit in its "illegality," they therefore should be liable for damages resulting from such "illegal" invasions of privacy.

This is wrong on all counts. The Terrorist Surveillance Program was not illegal. And the telecoms were engaged in a good-faith effort to help the federal government protect the United States from attack. Isn't that how we should want corporations to behave in a time of war?

Hold on Sparky, not so fast.

It's simple logic, if you can follow along. If the program were "legal" as you say, and that journalism degree from Columbia is all the credentials we need to bow down to your authority on this, then there is no need to worry whether the Telecom's get immunity or not, yes? Shouldn't we at least let a court of law be able to make that determination is it is in question? Isn't that what they are for?

Oh Noes! You don't say? According to our junior editor at the Weekly Standard, we never should submit "national security decisions to an unelected and unaccountable judiciary."

Courts are thus, irrelevant, unnecessary, a quaint vestigial institution of a bygone era. We're at WAR don't you know. (I'm not sure which war he's talking about. Iraq, Afghanistan, George's war on Terra, or the wingnut war on liberals -- it all plays the same.)

Forget the fact that we've been at war before, this one's different I guess because the "enemy" isn't a superpower with enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the planet 10 times over, or a genocidal maniac with legions of storm-troopers blitzing through Europe. No, this time it's some dudes in a cave in Pakistan who might highjack a bus and call ahead for reservations in Atlanta -- which is all the warning we'll need to push to color-coded duct-tape threat light to orange -- just before the next election, and between the conventions of course to dull any Democratic advance in the polls.

But I digress, and there's a wee bit more insanity to debunk.

The fight over retroactive immunity should be seen for what it is: a backdoor attempt to shut down the president's post-9/11 intelligence gathering efforts and return the intelligence community to a pre-9/11 footing, when the FISA court governed almost all counterterrorist surveillance and the standards of traditional law enforcement applied more often than not to investigations of suspected terrorists.

Yeah, that horrible "law-enforcement" approach that Scotland Yard used to nail the liquid bomb plotters, or the FBI used to disrupt a planned attack on JFK airport. I used to think that the folks who mocked the "law enforcement approach" just wanted to kill anyone who remotely looked like a terrorist (whatever that means). I didn't know they just wanted to do away with laws altogether. Live and learn.

Perhaps the most egregious lie in the entire article resides in the penultimate paragraph:

It was fear of the FISA court, after all, that prevented Minnesota FBI field agents from searching the laptop of al Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui--the suspicious student at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota--even though they knew about Moussaoui's jihadist beliefs and connection to a Chechen terrorist.

This theme, The Moussaoui Myth, of course is lifted almost directly from another "Standard" publication, completing the circle as it were. The only problem is that nobody presented the evidence of Moussaoui's suspicious flight training or terrorist ties to anyone at the Justice Department to make any decision on whether they should get a FISA warrant. The ball was dropped, period. The red flags weren't bright enough. Neither FISA nor "fear" of FISA kept anyone from doing their job. They just didn't.

Note To GOP Frightmongers

When playing the fear card, save the grandstanding and political stunts for a slow news day.

Hullabaloo:

So the latest on the FISA bill is this: the House and Senate were supposed to meet today to begin the compromise of the RESTORE Act, which has no telecom amnesty, and the Senate Intelligence Committee version of the bill, which does. But the Republicans took a walk and refused to negotiate.

There's three obvious problems with this. 1.) These sessions are behind closed doors. 2.) Despite this being the 19th time they met, more and more people are watching Hillary and Obama square off in their debates. 3.) The McCain hit the fan.

See, if a political hack shouts, "Boo!" and nobody is there to hear him, it doesn't count. Lord knows nobody is listening to Mr. 19% phoning in messages from Africa. Well, we're listening -- but we just can't help but laugh when says things like the Telecom Companies should have immunity not only retroactively, but also for crimes Bush wants them to commit in the future. At least that's how I read this...

"If we do not give liability protection to those who are helping us, they won't help us. And if they don't help us, there will be no program. And if there's no program, America is more vulnerable."

Folks, Bush has even lost the ever reactionary John Birch Society on this ploy. What's also fun is that it was the GOP who walked out on this, again, and are saying the Democrats are blocking progress on the bill. It. Is. To. Laugh.

I mean, the man is just silly, why should we listen to him any more than the people of Pakistan when he pleads with them to retain Musharraf? Who's he kidding? Why on earth does he think he's relevant anymore? Better question, why would anyone, even here, think any suggestion he might have is a good idea?

Bush is spreading something, but it isn't democracy.

DC Puppet Theater

Better hall monitors than I have been weighing in on sudden switch in Washington yesterday.

From time-wasting hearings for druged-up ball-players on Wednesday, to presidential fantasies of existential threats from abroad and all out rhetorical warfare on Constitutional principles in the House -- complete with a GOP staged walkout in the name of rejecting any such grandstanding by the Dems -- all coming to a head on Thursday.

Something changed yesterday. The wind is now blowing from a different direction. There's still fear in the air, but it's coming more from the right than the left now.

I will duly note Olbermann coming right out and calling Bush a fascist last night on national television had to be some kind of first. It's also no surprise that Glenn Greenwald has one of the best takes on all of this:

This is the kind of pure, unadulterated idiocy -- childish, cartoonish and creepy -- that Democrats for years have been allowing to bully them into submission, govern our country, and dismantle our Constitution. Outside of Andy McCarthy, Mark Steyn and their roving band of paranoid right-wing bloggers who can't sleep at night because they think (and hope) that there are dark, primitive "jihadi" super-villains hiding under their beds -- along with the Very Serious pundit class which proves their Seriousness by placing blind faith in the fear-mongering pronouncements and demands of our military and intelligence officials for more unchecked power -- nobody cares about adolescent Terrorist game-playing like this any longer. In the real world, it doesn't work, and it hasn't worked for some time.

Americans are worried and even angry about many things. Whether Osama bin Laden is throwing a party because AT&T and Verizon might have to defend themselves in court isn't one of them. Outside of National Review, K Street, and the fear-paralyzed imagination of our shrinking faux-warrior class, there is no constituency in America demanding warrantless eavesdropping or amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms.

Ah, the Drama. Bravo! Author! Author! Coming as it did after deliberate disruption of a memorial for one of their fallen colleagues, Shakespeare would have set the whole scene at a graveyard. "Alas poor Lantos, I knew him Horatio..."

The conservative noise machine's Regurgitators are playing their appointed role, but without the usual enthusiasm the zeitgeist demanded just a few months ago. Noting John Boehner's stunt was indeed "staged," but all in the name of principle, that any disrespect to the dead was the fault of those damn Democrats for mourning too long and interfearing with their scheduled snit-fit, all over serious stuff of course -- like their dad is bigger than ours or something like that -- they just seem preoccupied, depressed.

Serious?! You want me to be serious? Fine, I will when they stop using fear for fear's sake and recognize the facts. The games and demagoguery are old.

Now, the president asserts that the expiration of the protect America act will pose a danger to our country.

• The former National Security Council advisor on terrorism says that's not true.
  
• Former assistant attorney general says that's not true. Numerous others, and the chairman, has asserted that's not true.
  

Why is that not true?

• Because FISA will remain in effect.
  
• The authority given under the protect America act remains in effect.
  
• And if there are new targets, the FISA court has full authority to give every authority to the administration to act.

So I tell my friends, we are pursuing the politics of fear. Unfounded fear. 435 members of this house and every one of us, every one of us wants to keep America and Americans safe. Not one of us -- not one of us wants to subject America or Americans to danger.

• The president's assertion is wrong. I say it categorically.
  
  
• The president's assertion is wrong.

Honestly, it's nearly impossible to keep track of all the wingnut temper tantrums that hit the fan all at once. While duly reciting the party line on FISA and the contempt citations for Harriet Meirs and the rest of the goon squad who purged all but "loyal Bushy"

US Attorneys, the spontaneous eruptions of shock, somber resignation and real outrage over Mitt Romney's endorsement of John McCain (or anything else to do with McCain) contrasted sharply with the dull, paint-by-numbers faux indignation being spoon-fed to the remaining dead-enders of the right's true believers, all 16% of them.

[Interesting side note: the rabble at Wizbang's comment section are speculating that McCain would do better asking John Kerry to be his running mate instead of the usual suspects like Huckabee or Lieberman. They are an amusing bunch, and starved for anything that will distract from their depressing future.]

Fran Townsend Resignation and the Unconnected Dots

Surprised? Steve Clemons was unprepared for the news that Fran Townsend, Bush's Counterterrorism and Homeland Security Adviser, no longer has an office in the White House. I don't think she left to take the job as Karl Rove's ghost writer at Newsweek.

We remember the edict from Chief of Staff Josh Bolton that anyone in the White House past Labor Day was in for the duration. Townsend didn't make it from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Something's up. She serves at the pleasure of POTUS, and evidently, he was no longer pleased. With Karen Hughes leaving, this is the second unexpected resignation in as many months.

Here's your Speculation Points Memo:

Townsend has been on several "short lists" to replace high profile Administration staffers, including consideration as Homeland Security Director when Bernie Kerik discovered he had "nanny problems," and more recently as someone who could step into the Attorney General slot left vacant by Gonzales.

Her star has been on the rise right along, just having been put in charge of the Continuity of Government program last May. Her job did not even exist before "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20."

The document designates a National Continuity Coordinator, who would be the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

That would be Fran, until this morning anyway.

When/if the shit hits the fan, Townsend's replacement will be the most powerful person on the planet -- cuz the PrezNitWit will be looking to the Continuity Coordinator to tell him how to "legally" declare himself President in Perpetuity.

The Kerik/Giuliani Connection? She knew Bernie Kerik best when he was up for the Homeland security gig, but wasn't consulted since she was up for the same job. She was a Brooklyn prosecutor and then moved to the US Attorney's office to put mobsters in jail and busting international crime syndicates under (who else) Rudy Giuliani. Guess which indicted former NYC Police Commissioner was assigned to the US Justice Department's New York Drug Enforcement Task Force during that time-period -- after he was fired as a security investigator for the Saudi Royals. Yeah, that Bernie Kerik.

They've met.

It seems, that she's been fighting the FISA battles since her friend Janet Reno was Attorney General, leaving the Justice Department in 2000 when she was thwarted in her effort to let the counterterrorist folks share the info they got from wiretapping with the criminal divisions -- willing to follow procedures that set up "the wall" but pushing it to its limits. At this point, I could only guess which side she is on in the current FISA debate, but nobody knows the ins-and-outs better. Reno put her in charge of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review in 1998 -- the only gatekeeper the FBI and other agencies had before applying to the secret FISA Court to obtain warrants.

There are skeletons buried out there, and Fran Townsend knows where they are.

I'm most intrigued about her current position as Catastrophe Czarina. She had 90 days after her appointment on May 9th to come up with the Continuity of Government plan, which pretty much ignores the fact that a legislative or judicial branch exist, making the President alone responsible for "lead[ing] the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."

Presumably, that document is now complete and is making the rounds inside the Administration along with the National Intelligence Estimate that the Vice President couldn't cook.

Got your tin-foil Freak-Out hat firmly in place? Check this out.

"This directive [for the Continuity of Government plan] shall be implanted in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 USC 19), with the consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved."

The document also contains "classified Continuity Annexes."

I don't think it was Bush who is no longer pleased with this lady who seems to have a firm grasp of what is and is not appropriate executive prerogatives as well as knowing all too much about surveillance of foreign terrorists.

She pissed off Dick.

It's that, or Hughes and Townsend said something nice about Hillary Clinton, which would have the same effect.

A Spine Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

Thursday: 64 Iraqis Killed, 28 Wounded

I'll believe it when I see it.

Dems will block Mukasey nomination unless they get an answer from the AG nominee on whether waterboarding is torture.

In a completely unrelated episode, in another wing of the Capitol Building, in what must be an alternate universe...

In a little-noticed speech Tuesday at the Georgetown Law Center, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said telecom immunity would be "grossly irresponsible" until Congress knows what conduct is being immunized.

Clearly a disease has infested some of the Democratic Congressional Leadership. I'm hoping it turns into a fever, but I fear it's just a cold. This will be the way they save face for passing more funding for the damn war.

Gee, Jay, How's That Intel Report Coming?

Monday Update: 69 82 Iraqis Killed, 73 75 Wounded

Are there no honest men (or women) in Washington?

Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.

The surge in contributions came from a Who's Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.

So, I guess that means that the administration gets exactly what it wants in the FISA capitulation bipartisan compromise bill, including immunity for the telecos. Chalk another one up for Cheney. His pet Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee has come through for him again, with a little help in the spare change department. For a Rockefeller, this guy comes cheap.

More on Jello Jay under the fold.


I mean, didn't you think that it was all too convenient that Jay Rockefeller (D-Verizon) always seemed to cave when it looked like standing up to the dodges, lies and secrecy of the administration was the right prescription. Now the excuse is that they're too busy looking the other way on domestic spying to stand up to President 24%.

Well, now we know. don't we. They never were going to seriously look into the manipulation of intel leading up to the war and release the so-called Phase II report. You did hear that they were "shelving" that, didn't you?

The Phase II investigation is supposed to focus on two things: "examining the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and...contrasting the statements of public officials with what the intelligence community was saying at the time."

Oh, that's right. I forgot it was just supposed to quietly go away and only live on in myth, like the Kennedy assassination investigation into that magic bullet thingy. But come on. I don't need Jay Rockefeller to tell me they fixed the intelligence around the policy -- that they were going to trump up some reason to go to war against Iraq even before 9/11. They didn't need Curveball to con them into invading. He was just conveniently available to add to their house of cards.

Of course in a nation where 33% of the people STILL believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11, and 41% are pretty sure there was some kind of direct connection between the hijackers and Iraq, people like me will always believe that Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams cooked up enough smoke and mirrors at Cheney's direction to make Bush believe what HE will always believe -- that there was some sort of rational explanation why we went into Iraq in the first place.

No doubt in some twisted corners, twisting the intelligence was seen as a patriotic duty.

Allowing this administration and their buddies to get off -- again -- scott free, is beyond the usualy spinelessness of the Democratic Leadership, something we've grown accustomed to ever since Pelosi's "Off the Table" moment. But hey, I've always wondered what a guy named Rockefeller was doing in the Democratic Party anyway. True, his clan were never really considered true conservatives, and 42 Grand is chump change to the Rockefeller family.

But a populist? Someone who was going to "take it to the man," he is not. BooMan is livid about the Intel Committee finding better things to do . . . than their job . . .

I call bullshit. Where is the urgency? You call this 'absolute committment'? I call it a total whitewash. At this point we should be moving onto Phase III: How the Intelligence Community is using psychological operations to maintain support for a failed war. And Phase IV: How the intelligence is being fixed around the policy of obliterating Iran.

We've seen this before...it was called Iran-Contra, and it was far less serious that what we are facing now. I saw Fred Thompson, on a post-debate show last night, tell Alan Colmes that Iran is trying to take over the entire Middle East and that we are therefore justified in spending hundreds of billions on discretionary defense spending. He told Colmes 'to read something' and then he might understand that our budget problems are all about entitlements and have nothing to do with preventing the 1000-year Persian empire.

The Republicans are out there in some alternate reality...a reality that has no connection to reality. Their ideology is dangerous. And the Democrats are covering their ass.

This has to stop.

Thanks to Avedon, you can read a little bit more on Rockefellers new BFF's at Democracy Now.

A Distinction Without a Difference

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.



I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.


[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Step Outta Line, The Man Come...

(Sorry, but I'll explode if I don't get this song out of my system.)

...And he take you away.

Very little information on the NSA Program's successes, failures, and abuses has come out thusfar; and indeed it may be less likely that more comes out in the future: Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports tonight that the administration has raided the home of a former DOJ lawyer, Thomas Tamm, seizing his and his kids' computers, on suspicion that he was involved in leaking the program's existence to the media. Now that Congress is out of the oversight picture, I suppose it's time to kill the messengers and thereby get the media out of it too.

What, you may ask led to Tamm being led off the the most convenient gulag? Fresh off their latest finger-pointing circle-jerk and pointless demagoguery, Wingnuttystan speculates that crazed lefty blogging is to blame:

What this Newsweek story by Michael Isikoff doesn't mention is what might have caused the FBI to be suspicious of the alleged leaker---BDS blog postings by Thomas Tamm. One such BDS posting was made by a reader identifying himself as Thomas Mann in the New York Times The Caucus political blog.

Shocking, just shocking that an American might want to express his outrage against something that until yesterday was indefensibly illegal action by the government. Even more frightening is that Bill O'Reilly isn't the only one scouring the comment sections on liberal blogs to find anti-American subversives.

Hopefully, Mr. Tamm can expect better treatment than some others who undoubtedly entertain the Malkinites on the right nearly as much as they would have enjoyed lions shredding Christians and Jews in the Arena in another era:

"The Red Cross went in and got to interview these people for the first time," said Mayer on the CBS Evening News. "What these people described was hanging from the ceilings by their arms and being water-boarded, partially drowned, put on leashes and knocked into walls and basically deprived of all kinds of sensory imagery for years." [my emphasis]

They don't "hate us for our freedoms." They hate us because barbarisms have been undertaken in our names. As the conclusion of Mayer's extraordinary New Yorker article points out, my earlier lament that a government that acts outside of the law, cannot legally put the bad guys away. What made these neocons believe that they were smarter than over 200 years of constitutional tradition and centuries of democratic jurisprudence is beyond me.

NOT being an arbitrary and capricious despotic tyrany was supposedly what separated us from the likes of the Taliban and Hussein in the first place.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Show of hands.

After the last election, after the celebrations was over and you were smelling the Thanksgiving turkey, who really thought that with the Democrats taking over Congress the war would be over by now?

Anyone ... anybody ... Beuler...?

How about a rollback of Bush's NSA wiretapping program? Closing Gitmo? Seriously, weren't you pleasantly surprised that Rumsfeld was actually fired, finally, especially since the timing was backwards and could have helped the GOP more if it came before the election?

The absolute best we could have hoped for is that there would now be an honest check on the White House, that things wouldn't get worse...

...that the war wouldn't escalate...

...that the Administration wouldn't be able to finagle a way to get even more power to abuse our civil liberties because any new expansion of Patriot Act and NSA wiretapping would be DOA with the new Congress...

...that hard won seats in red districts that now have a Democratic representative could no longer be counted on to rubber-stamp George Bush's misguided policies.

Zack Space, Charlie Wilson, thank you so much for living up to expectations ... the expectations of all the people in your respective districts who don't think there's a hair's difference between a donkey and a 'phant, that all politicians are pathetic stooges who put their own self-interest above all else and worship at the alter of the highest bidder.

Space, Wilson of Ohio Vote for Bush Eavesdropping Amendment: "Two of Ohio's 18 Congressmen, Zachary Space and Charlie Wilson, both new and both Democrats, were sent to Washington last year as Ohioans turned out one political party for another. The duo, Space from Dover and Wilson from St. Clairesville, both representing fiscally and socially conservative rural districts, cast their votes for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which critics opposed to President Bush's anti-terrorism tactics said should be defeated because it would give much-needed legality to his administration's unrivaled and unchecked power to perform surveillance on persons overseas and within the United States."

This is the third strike for Space, and I'm done with Charlie too. If even Hillary Clinton knew it was not in her self-interest to support this measure, the same Hillary who has spoken about having wanted her husband to have had more power similar to that confiscated by the current administration, wimps like Space and Wilson are irredeemable.

This broad statement by Meteor Blades applies directly to you Messieurs Space and Wilson:

Because, frankly, you epitomize weak. Your every pore exudes feebleness. You are surrender monkeys. And you’ve just casually tossed away a basic protection as if it were a banana peel.

When it comes to votes that mattered, votes that highlighted a respect for principle instead of continuation of power, high profile votes that would have exemplified the courage of your convictions -- you both have proved you have none.

The Big Tent Democrat formerly known as Armando sums it up nicely:

The entire purpose of this provisions is to enhance the power of the executive and to free it from any checks and balances. It is clear that the Bush Administration, an Administration that has no basis for asking for any trust, has played the fear card to attack our Constitutional balance and overset the vision of the Framers of our Constitution.

For what it's worth, while I noted that as long as there are safeguards mindful of basic privacy expectations of ordinary citizens, I had no real problem with amending the FISA legislation per se. However, because of the very nature of this sensitive law, we really don't know all the nuts and bolts that went into it. (Unless, you know ... you actually read it (pdf) -- unlike most of our Congress Critters).

What we do know is that the circumstances surrounding its approval are highly suspects and ring of the same old notions that if you stand in the way of the President's demand for more power, you will be branded as a coward to your electorate come next fall. What we do know is that the deal Congress worked out with the National Intelligence Director was overruled by Bush himself (or more likely his alter ego in the Vice-President's office). That alone tells me that the current law goes beyond that which was necessary and proper. Any Democrat who voted for this ought to be ashamed.

Whereas the law previous insisted that the administration get FISA Court-approved search warrants to eavesdrop on communications involving Americans citizens on U.S. soil, this new law changes the landscape. If the federal government wants to spy on someone, and the target is "reasonably believed" to be overseas, a warrant is no longer necessary. [And the belief is not "clearly erroneous" - Mark]

This is just another bill, like the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, and the "emergency" supplemental authorization for funding the "surge," this law was yet another example of something pushed down our throats with no real time to deliberate or consider the full ramifications. Enough Democratic Congressmen and women capitulated to the White House scare tactics to give the Administration exactly what it wanted -- and unbelievably expanded the prerogatives of Alberto Gonzales -- one of the most (if not the most) reprehensible political tools ever to run the Justice Department.

Consider this statement by Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post (via Glen Greenwald):

To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

***

The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants -- unless the subject is the "primary target" of the surveillance.

Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court's role is reduced to that of rubber stamp. . . .

Not convinced that this "fix" went far beyond what was necessary to simply allow us to intercept communications that were between terrorists whose network happened to cross through the United States. Not convinced that the rights of US citizens are going to be abused by design?

Maybe this report by James Risen of the NY Times, who's been on the NSA wiretapping story from the beginning (again, HT Glenn):

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

I don't for one minute believe that Congressmen like Space and Wilson were elected with the expectation that they would support expansion of the Unitary Executive with full Congressional approval.

And if you think that this really doesn't have any consequences to you or me, put yourself in the place of a father whose home was raided, and the computers of his children as well as his own were confiscated, merely for letting the world know that the administration was violating the law all this time. Illegal acts that now are legal.

Six month's sunset provision? Kabuki ass covering, nothing more. If you really though it mattered which party was in charge of our National Security State, you're living in a dream world where memories of a representative republic protected basic liberty are simply quaint.

Mellisa has more reactions. Does it really need to be said that if Powerline thinks Congress did the right thing, it's ghastly wrong.

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear...

Steve Benen reports at Carpetbagger there's another reason to strip Junket John Boehner's of his Ohio citizenship and deport him as far as possible from the Buckeye State he so regularly embarrasses -- preferably somewhere that has no decent golf courses.

If you've been paying attention through these lazy summer daze, you caught wind of a flurry of activity to (once again) change the FISA law (the one that's got Gonzo in so much hot water) so the President's spying program can be expanded. Something the White House has blocked for the last two years.

Bush talked about it last week, and much laughter ensued over the very idea that we could give give the Bush-Bots even more lighter fluid to douse the Constitution with. Laura Rosen posted the plea from Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, to Congress for a bill to "modernize" FISA. On it's face, the request seemed reasonable if not a bit vague. He spoke strictly about surveillance of foreign operatives on foreign soil -- something that shouldn't need court review whatsoever.

But now, thanks to House Minority Leader Boehner, and Fixed Noise, we learn that the classified FISA Court issued a secret ruling that we couldn't listen in on foreign operatives' conversations (where both subjects were overseas) when it was relayed through part of the network within the U.S. Just so we're clear, that fact was classified. Undoubtedly, there's more we don't and shouldn't know.

IF that's all there is to it, then by all means Congress should fix this problem. As far as I'm concerned, it shouldn't even be a problem. Boehner's revelations fit within both Bush and McConnell's requests. What is sad is that I would not be supportive of removing any checks on this particular administration's use of surveillance whatsoever without the disclosure of this classified information because of their unreasonable secrecy, previous power grabs, contempt of civil liberties and consistent stonewalling. And now it turns out, that the way the Administration was using (or abusing) FISA was indeed unconstitutional right along.

Neither I, nor any foreign operatives should have reason to suspect that the U.S. has the ability to easily monitor communications between two points in other countries, even if a terrorist from Canada is speaking on the phone to another conspirator in Mexico and we tap the line as it runs through Michigan. Of course we can, and should. But Boehner spelled it out in such plain language that even one of the 25 per-centers who just get their news from Fox, and still believe that Saddam Hussein ordered 9/11 can understand it. They were all to eager to smear the judge than question the integrity of Dear Leader, they didn't need to hear this tidbit.

Did they really need a skeptic like me to be okay with this? Or was Boehner really trying to get the support of the islamophobes who already are willing to bomb Mecca, as if ...

All I require is that any new changes to FISA be very carefully weighed consistent with the principles that the privacy of U.S. citizens be protected, always, and that before my communications are tapped, there be some reasonable suspicion that I may be involved in criminal activity -- that's the probable cause determination that I am entitled to based upon my inalienable rights to due process. That's what it means to live in a free society.

Data Mining - Just So We're Clear

The phrase you're looking for is "probable cause."

The source of the conflict is the Bill of Rights.

That's what keeps gnawing at the back of your brain when reading the Sunday Times piece on Data Mining and hearing the Resident's plea to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The idea is simple. Simple so long as you understand the basic principles of what it means to live in a supposedly "free society." For the same reasons that you cannot arrest someone just because they "look guilty," the government cannot order someone's privacy be violated -- searched, wiretapped, etc. -- unless there is a reason to believe the suspect is connected to criminal activity.

You cannot "search" (enter into an area or monitor someone's communications where they have some expectation of privacy) to "discover" probable cause -- it must exist prior to the search.

"So what!" say the Neo-anderthals who surely consider such notions even more quaint than the Geneva Conventions, or habeas corpus. "National Security is at stake! They want to KILL us!!!"

Leaving aside that we survived Nazi Germany and the Soviets without rejecting this cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the scheme cannot and will not make us more safe. Not from terrorists, not from drug dealers, rapists, thugs or most certainly, not from the government. But Oh MY! Some nutjob with internet access and a disposable phone really, really hates us. THEY HATE OUR FREEDOMS, so we better eliminate the threat -- by eliminating our freedom.

Feh!

Follow me on this. What happens when someone is prosecuted and in the course of the trial the court learns that the evidence collected was tainted, obtained illegally -- without probable cause? They must throw the evidence out. If that tainted evidence, or other evidence collected as a result of learning the of existence of the original improperly obtained evidence (fruit of the poisoned tree) is the only thing the government has on the suspect -- the suspect goes free. He walks, with the added knowledge that he is being watched, and how he's being watched. Such means become more than useless, worse than counterproductive -- they are dangerous because they create smarter bad guys.

Such doctrines that insist on probable cause were put in place for a reason. It's how we define being free -- free from unreasonable government intrusion into our daily lives. They should not be allowed to harass you because you are somehow different, the wrong color, sexual or political persuasion, the wrong religion or look like you belong to the wrong ethnic heritage.

Nobody is "wrong" in this nation. People do wrong things, true. But here, we correct/punish/prevent wrong behaviors, not eliminate people's freedoms due to their status.

We don't do that here, not in America. At least we're not supposed to. And the only way to insure that our liberties are protected from the government who derives its authority from us, is to prevent it from using evidence it never should have acquired in the first place against us.

State police power is an awesome thing, subject to a whole host of abuses and unjust applications if not checked by reasonable limits. The government has the power to end your life, take away your freedom and throw away the key, and confiscate all you own. It is hardly too much to insist that it only does so within reason -- and that means having a legitimate, reasonable suspicion that you are involved in a criminal enterprise before they start listening to your every conversation and put a tail on you and everyone you associate with, especially those that attend the same mosque.

And that's the hat trick all in one fell swoop, ignoring our first liberties as Americans embodied in the First Amendment. Speech, assembly and religious freedoms assaulted by one program gathering all the information it can find on all of us, looking for smoke where there is no fire, and trampling on our 4th, 5th and even 6th Amendment rights for good measure.

Indeed, when you take a look at the Bill of Rights, it becomes clear that the neo-cons only honor the Second and Third, (and only to a point). The rest of it are quaint 18th century notions they refuse to accept even though they reflect the balance of power between the government and the governed that had evolved since the 13th century. This tried and true system just hasn't been sufficient to these fools who prefer a society, culture and economic system more akin to feudal times than a 21st century civilization.

Much of our Bill of Rights was taken directly from a document one hundred years older, the British Bill of Rights, which also influenced the drafting of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. And, much like our Bill of Rights came about as a reaction to a despot's abuse, so did the British Bill of Rights.

This accumulated judicial wisdom must triumph, and I'm confident it will -- because I truly believe in the genius of our system. The Seventh Amendment incorporated that historical wisdom by referring directly to the "Common Law." The Common Law is awash with means for protecting us from would-be tyrants, some scoundrel with power who used fear and prejudice as a weapon against his enemies.

That is the quaint tale, abuse of power by the sovereign and the public, through their elected representatives, stomping out such transgressions against our liberties. It's the reason the Eight Amendment talks of prohibiting excessive bail and the Sixth Amendment speaks of speedy trials -- to thwart the government from making it easy to dispose of inconvenient people and political enemies who otherwise are law abiding.

I've a strong suspicion that the current throwbacks to Jacobinism (in both senses) which spawned the British version of liberty guarantees will create a backlash of similar proportions -- which is not a bad thing. That may be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, that his policy of unfettered executive power is rejected so strongly that we never permit such disasters as epitomized by his reign be tolerated again, and that our institutions are transformed to prevent its recurrence.

One can only hope. But keep in mind that this struggle has been a backdrop of democracy for centuries -- and in the end, democracy has proven superior to despotism every time.

These are the bedrock principles of our civilization, unlike the relatively new notion called executive privilege (a limited doctrine first recognized in 1974 and not -- as Tony Snow would have us believe -- since George Washington).