Dems sell out the Constitution again..

The friggin’ ratbastards have agreed to provide immunity to the Telco’s and institute sweeping changes as to how our government can spy upon us. They are calling it..cough..choke..a compromise. From the WSJ via The Carpetbagger Report:

After more than a year of partisan acrimony over government surveillance powers, Democratic and Republican leaders have agreed to a bipartisan deal that would be the most sweeping rewrite of spy powers in three decades. The House is likely to vote on the measure Friday, House aides said. [...]

The new agreement broadens the authority to spy on people in the U.S. and provides conditional legal immunity to companies that helped the government eavesdrop after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to congressional aides in both parties.

The deal, if adopted, would bring the spy activities of a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program permanently under the law. That would allow the government, in certain circumstances, to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a specific warrant. It would also expand government spy powers to monitor communications between the U.S. and overseas to collect intelligence on topics beyond terrorism.

As Steve notes, Glen Greenwald’s pov on this is spot on. The fucking Blue Dogs were the ones championing this bullshittery to enable our government a free rein on spying without a warrant and providing the fucking Telco’s with retroactive immunity. They played the fear factor card just like the Rethugs do..and evidently it has worked..even Obama has jumped on this fucking bandwagon. From Greenwald:

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.(emphasis Greenwalds)

With Democrats such as these in office..who is really our enemy? Seriously folks..who? The Rethugs only need to enlist the help of the fucking Blue Dogs and snap..it gets done.

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If you weren’t paranoid before..this should do it.

Oh yeah..this will do it..from RawStory:

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a “walk in the park,” according to an interview published in the New Yorker’s print edition today. Read the PDF here.

Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

Read all our emails? As if they haven’t done that already.

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.

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The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, Part 7

We present another in the series The 14 Characteristics of Fascism and how BushCo uses them.This is updated from the original series that ran on the Coalition for a Republican-Free America -Dusty

PART VII: OBSESSION WITH NATIONAL SECURITY
Essay I: Librarian Takes on Patriot Act: And Wins
By PraetorOne and BibleBelted
Editors’ Notes by Daniel and BibleBelted

This particular post was originally written on April 12, 2005. At the time we wrote it, we had no idea that it might actually qualify as an essay in a series about the Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism. Indeed, in April 2005, there was some doubt as to whether or not the Patriot Act would be renewed. As it turns out, President Bush, despite promises that he made in 2001 that such Draconian measures would be temporary, has now decided that they should be permanent, and the Patriot Act, with only minor amendments has been tragically approved.

Why does that not surprise us? The Neocon agenda has never been all that sympathetic to civil liberties. Indeed, it seems as if only one Senator, our own Russ Feingold from right here in the State of Wisconsin, was the only Senator who even bothered to read this right wing abomination. Had the other 99 Senators bothered to have done so they would have realized that the Patriot Act was nothing more than a wish list for just abut every repressive measure that the GOP has been hoping for since the Nixon Administration.

When you think about it, the legislation was produced rather quickly–too quickly– which tells me that it had been sitting on a back shelf somewhere waiting for the right opportunity to exploit.

In many ways this reminds me of what happened on 28 February 1933–the day after the Reichstadt Fire in Nazi Germany. Never one to let a good opportunity slip by, then Chancellor Hitler went to President Hindenburg, asking that the aged president sign a decree for the “Protection of the People and the State. To quote William L. Shirer’s masterpiece, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY (1959-1960, Simon and Schuster), the decree stipulated that:

“… restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

“In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence on a number of crimes, including ’serious disturbances of the peace’ by armed persons.”

Now where have we seen this before? A national tragedy being used as an excuse to limit civil liberties. Oh, Jeez. I don’t know. You think maybe it might be in the Bush administration and their Orwellian named Patriot Act?

Could be.

On the other hand, not all of the news is bad news. As a result of efforts liberty-loving librarians and a concerned American public, our elected officials may well drop the library related provisions in the Patriot Act–even if they haven’t quite risen to the level of true patriotism and decided to scrub the entire act and its misbegotten spawn, Patriot Act Part II. Here, fellow readers, is an example of a plucky little lady and how she defied actions which could have easily led to an invocation intellectual repression. Here is Brandon’s Post from 12 April 2005. It is called ….

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