House passes FISA bill..without Telco immunity.

Bush has of course threatened to veto it, and the vote total is below the amount needed to override a veto..but the House did send BushCo a hearty ‘kiss off’ before they left town for a two-week hiatus. The Rethug members of Congress, as usual, screamed the Democrats were undermining national security.

The Democrats, as usual, said the President and his boot-lickers were using fear-mongering as an election year tool. But the Democrats did cave in on an important issue, as usual. From the Reuters writeup:

While the House-passed bill would not grant immunity, it would allow phone companies to present their cases in a closed-door court, with the judge given access to confidential documents about the surveillance and the authorization for it.

The writeup is full of verbal bitchslaps of each other from both sides of the aisle. Slog through it if you must, but we are still in a holding pattern on this one folks..

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On Surveillance Bill, Debate Postponed Till Monday

A few turncoat Democrats sided with the Republicans today to force the Surveillance Bill onto the Senate floor.

Isn’t that special? I didn’t think so either.  From TPMmuckraker:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) moved for a vote on cloture — that would force an end to debate and trigger a simple majority vote on the underlying Senate intelligence committee version of the bill (which has retroactive immunity). To do that, he’ll need 60 votes.

Reid objected to this, said that he would vote against it, and then postponed the vote until Monday.

Reid is a pimp, plain and simple. The Democrats are so damn afraid of being called ’soft on terrah’ they will pretty much pass anything BushCo wants at this point.  If you don’t believe me, read the letter Reid’s dumbass sent up to the Pres this afternoon. I refuse to post it here, so click the link at the top of the post.

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Liberty is Dead

That’s it. We’re done kids. The greatest experiment in democracy can’t survive long term. Our addiction to drama, turmoil, and petty bickering will kill it. Our passion for ridiculous drama is so ingrained, we invent them and call it news. Then, we quote this to each other like it’s from God’s mouth to our ears. Americans can no longer be happy except when quivering with indignation. We’re beyond caring whether our positions are supportable, as long as they make it possible for us to point at people, Jerry Springer style, and hold forth on their differences.

This county was founded on an argument; our governing precepts grew from a thousand arguments, and for two hundred years we have argued in order to grow. This was a good thing. Nowadays, we no longer argue with any sort of fact based premise. Nope, not us. We bicker. Our passions are rooted in contrived shallow positions on topics shaped by people who have a stake in the outcome, not a sincere ideological imperative. We disregard facts that don’t suit us and squabble with the carefree obstinacy of three year olds.

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Why does Harry Reid heart the Telecom’s?

Money of course..lots and lots of it. From Glen Greenwald’s column at Salon:

Then again, AT&T is the second largest contributor overall to officials in Congress, having poured into the Beltway a total of $38 million in campaign contributions for the election cycles for which these records are available. Verizon is in 33rd place with over $15 million; BellSouth in 39th place with with over $14 million; Time Warner in 28th place with $17 million; and MCI in 83rd place with $8 million. The Communications Workers of America, which lobbies for all sorts of pro-telecom legislation, is in 13th place with close to $25 million. That’s $118 million of telecom money poured into the coffers of members of Congress, and the real total is much higher since this is only from the top 100. And now Congress, on a more or less bipartisan basis, is passing a law declaring that this industry shall be completely immune from any consequences even if they are found to have broken multiple federal laws in allowing illegal spying on all of their customers.

Now, it all makes sense doesn’t it? Methinks the majority of elected Dem’s are really just Rethugs in sheeple’s clothing.

Tags: Telecoms, Harry Reid, lobbying money

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Mukasey is a fan of the “Unitary Executive Theory”

After watching the confirmation hearing for Michael Mukasey the last couple of days, I have come to the conclusion that he is a Bushie of the highest order…just more intelligent than the others in that select group. Watch the exchange between Mukasey and Russ Feingold below regarding Bush and his ability to disobey laws he doesn’t like or impede his power.

[youtube]1gxqLiUTWho[/youtube]

Mukasey tries to backtrack on the second day by saying its not a black and white issue..its a grey area. I call bullshit on that one right here and now. Its either the constitution or the president that holds sway. If BushCo believes in the Unitary Executive Theory and that it applies to all things Presidential, and there is no doubt about it my dear reader, they do…then they also believe they have the right to ignore parts of the constitution.

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Waiting On Our World To Change

I have lost faith in this country’s leaders.

I’m a registered Libertarian, but, because I wanted to see major changes, last November, I dipped my pen on the Democratic side of my ballot (I voted absentee).

I hoped against all reason I have come to understand (that when shown the full light of day, Democrats are no better for our country than Republicans: there is no lesser of two evils when it comes to the “ruling” political parties) that our world would change for the better.

Like everyone else, I’m still waiting.

The Democrats poll numbers are in the crapper, yet, they continue to side with the Bush administration (despite his own low poll numbers) to take away our rights.

It’s like they forgot all about how last November we voted for them to change the status quo and rid of us the scourge that is Bush/Cheney.

In the meantime, Pelosi and Reid and the rest, continue to pat the voters on the head saying “There, there, little voter. We’re the professionals. Let us handle your country the way we think is best. Even if we betray your vote, TRUST US, it’s for a very, very good reason.”

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Day after day, we are watching our rights being compromised by people we elected to help stem the tide and reverse the erosion started by the Bush Administration.

Sadly, things are coming to light now, that if we knew them a year ago, we may not have been so hasty as to support “our good friends,” the Democrats.

For instance, Bush has been spying on Americans since BEFORE 9/11/2001! Our “good friend,” Nancy Pelosi has apparently known about the spying for years, yet, she did nothing and said nothing about it. Now, bully for her, she’s the Speaker of the House! Ya’ll think she would be Speaker if the American people had heard how she may have sat by and helped sell our rights down the river (and that she may have known BEFORE 9/11/2001! Funny: those wire taps did not aid in the halting of the biggest terrorist attack this country has ever seen…)?

Maybe now we have a whiff of why Pelosi took “impeachment off the table”. Maybe she is, in one way or another, as complicit in the loss of our constitutional rights, as Herr Bush and Darth Cheney?

Honestly, I don’t presume to know anything. I’m just tired. I’m tired of politicians selling out my future and my children’s future. I’m sick of crazy people running this country into the ground.

I’m sick of saying “good-bye” to my husband every other year. And what for? Our leaders have been stabbing us in the back since BEFORE 9/11, yet, we are still fighting the “war on terra”. After 7 years, they should have figured out how to get the “bad guys” by now. Yet, we hear that “Nope, we aren’t any safer since starting the war on terra!”

Our long National Nightmare is getting scarier and scarier and despite the best efforts of some of our loudest voices and busiest activists, we are no better off today than we were a year ago. In fact, we are worse off, as the Democrats continue to cow to the Bush Administration and give him exactly what he wants when they should be standing up to him and the rest of Republicans and demanding (and returning) our country back to the people who came out in droves and elected them.

15 months is too long to wait…

At least it appears that some Democrats (like Sen. Chris Dodd) are fighting Bush’s (and the telecoms) attempts to roll back our Fourth Amendment rights (and get immunity/amnesty for breaking the law…since BEFORE 9/11!).

(Gracefully crossposted at Dizzy Dayz and The Katrinacrat blog and The Sirens Chronicles)

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The Fog of Fear…

The NYT has a good Editorial read up this morning. It addresses the Bush administration’s propensity to find something, anything…to drum up their fear factoring in order to gain more power to spy on Americans. The title is: Spies,Lies and FISA. From the second paragraph of the editorial:

There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires a warrant to intercept international communications involving anyone in the United States. A secret court has granted these warrants quickly nearly every time it has been asked. After 9/11, the Patriot Act made it even easier to conduct surveillance, especially in hot pursuit of terrorists.

I am sick of this President’s bs. I am sick of the lies and half-truths in order to toss the constitution out the window. It’s about power and control. What it isn’t about is making American safer. Its not about finding the terrorists either my dear reader. This is a country that follows the rule of law, or it was prior to this administration taking office. From the NYT editorial:

Mr. Bush and his team say they have safeguards to protect civil liberties, meaning surveillance will be reviewed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the inspectors general of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two enormous flaws in that. The Constitution is based on the rule of law, not individuals; giving such power to any president would be un-American. And this one long ago showed he cannot be trusted.

Congress needs to rent a huge set of balls and fix this mess. There is other way around it. The changes made during the summer recess expire in Feb of next year. We can not wait that long for Congress to fix their fuckup with regard to spying on Americans.

BushCo has made fear mongering its modus operandi in order to get what it wants. The republicans are responsible for the original damage done to our Constitution..but this time around the Democrats handed BushCo what it wanted. Those simple-minded mutha fuckas need to fix it. They need to fix it NOW. Nothing less will be acceptable.

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Senators Leahy and Dodd reintroduce Habeas Corpus Restoration Act

From Leahy’s government website, an excerpt of his remarks:

Last year, Congress committed an historic mistake by suspending the Great Writ of habeas corpus — not just for those confined at Guantanamo Bay but for millions of legal residents in the United States. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing in May on this bill illustrated the broad agreement among representatives from diverse political beliefs and backgrounds that the mistake committed in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 must be corrected. The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, S.186, the bill on which this amendment is based, has 30 cosponsors. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported it on a bipartisan basis. I hope Senators will review the Committee report on this measure.

Habeas corpus was recklessly undermined in last year’s Military Commissions Act. Like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the elimination of habeas rights was an action driven by fear, and it was a stain on America’s reputation in the world. This is a time of testing. Future generations will look back to examine the choices we made during a time when security was too often invoked as a watchword to convince us to slacken our defense of liberty and the rule of law.

Congress must come together to restore Habeas Corpus. The NYT has an editorial on the subject here, entitled “Restoring American Justice”. A short blurb after the jump:

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Terror Database catches few terrorists but does catch Anti-war Activists very well.

Almost 20,000 people ended up, for whatever reason, in the govt’s terrorist database. That..is a lot of people wouldn’t you say?

Get this…the govt wants to ‘open up’ the list to private entities. You know, we contract so fucking much of our needs out these days, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the fuckwits wish to make all sorts of lists, like the airline passenger list, available to people outside the govt. From the WaPo article:

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a “substantial bearing on homeland security,” though officials would not be more specific.

Of course they wouldn’t be specific..please..its all a big freaking secret don’t you know? Over half of the folks ‘detained’ were collared by the folks at Customs and Border Patrol. Another snippet of the WaPo article here:

Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said. FBI and other officials said that they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated that the number of arrests was small.

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The problem with fuck-ups in power is…

 

…fuck-ups with power.

Blink.

How the fuck is a bitch supposed to trust the same government that has fucked up just about everything to do anything right?

My nerves are fried…the simplest of news item now inspires terror as a bitch contemplates the minions in charge actually trying to be in charge!

Example – the Pentagon will power down the infamous TALON database on September 17, 2007. The database was supposed to track threats to military bases and such…but somehow it went retro all on its own (blink, blink followed by blink) and got its Nixon on by tracking peaceful anti-war protest and participants.

Oh, I’d like to be glad that another arm of our government that was being used as a weapon against political enemies of the current Nightmare in Charge and his war is being shut down.

But the same fuck-ups who lost a shit load of guns in Iraq…the same fuck-ups who used the system to violate the rights of Americans because they had the audacity to utilize their right to peaceful protest…and the same fuck-ups who contracted with a wanted criminal who supplied arms to al Qaeda and paid him a fabillion trillion dollars to fly arms for America (oh, for the love of…SHIT!)…those same assholes are now being trusted to power down a database containing sensitive information about average folks.

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Bush and his whores continue to sink the Country while Congress just watches.

Once upon a time, there was a Place called the Department of Justice. It was a noble institution, one we could always be sure would do the right thing and that politicization of the Department would never occur to taint their decisions or prosecutions….

Those days of old are gone sportfans..seriously..they have been for over six years now. Our DoJ is headed by a man who has sold his soul to the devil…aka George W. Bush. The Department has been a haven for liars, carpetbaggers and charlatans that care more about the Asshat in the Oval Office and covering his lily-white, privileged ass than doing the “People’s” business. We also have the whores working out of the White House..you know..Rover,Bolton, Jennings, a myriad of other whores and former whore-in-waiting Harriet Mier’s to thank for our downward spiral into the abyss.

The only way to break the back of this horrible beast is for our Congress to do its job. Their job, which our founding fathers put in writing, was among other things… to protect our country from an evil dynasty of men who would rather lie to us, spy on us, squander human lives, drain our federal budget, take care of their friends, cronies and business partners AND sacrifice what’s left of our Constitution….for personal gain.

Why did this happen now when Congress is planning a month long vacation which is thinly disguised as time to go home and ‘talk to their constituents’ you might ask yourself..I know I did. There are many different scenarios and they all stink to high heaven.

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Here’s To Mr. Audacity

 Ill: Micah Wright/Progaganda Remix, With Permission

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html

We have to give this to Mr. Bush ~ no law, & no tired meme, will he allow to stand in the way of his quest for all-encompassing executive power. In today’s news, courtesy of The Hill, we learn that Bush used his Saturday radio address to try press forward with his overwrought claims that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established in the aftermath of Nixon’s excesses to prevent an executive who wishes to style himself King from spying, is outdated. It doesn’t address modern technologies like cell phones & e-mails, he says, & we need to update it.

Of course he casts it in patriotic terms:

“‘Every day that Congress puts off these reforms increases the danger to our nation’ Bush said in his weekly radio address. ‘Our intelligence community warns that under the current statute, we are missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.’

“The administration’s updates to FISA focus heavily on modern technologies not around when the bill was passed almost 30 years ago, such as cellular phones and e-mail. Bush argues that the extended powers his proposal grants are essential to national security.

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Speedy Gonzales Zips Around Congress

With Permission: Micah Wright/Propaganda Remix

Update: The psychedelic, kaleidoscopic, ever-changing world of ‘Berto’s DOJ:

Since ‘Berto’s Tuesday testimony, all the news agencies have set about trying to confirm his surprise testimony that the spying program he tripped himself up testifying about once before was, really a program not heretofore disclosed, so, er ~ he wasn’t technically lying to Congress the 1st time.

Everybody finds that, um, he was. At least the Congresspeople he claims were briefed about it say it was the Terrorist Surveillance Program 1st reported by the New York Times that they were briefed upon, not the unnamed “other program” he said he couldn’t talk about.

Still, through a spokesman, ‘Berto, like his boss, stays the course when confronted by evidence of reality. And, we dare speculate, will be able to rely on the boss’s exertion of executive privilege if Congress has the chuztpah to try to get to the bottom of it.

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Schumer, Gonzo and the gang of 8

Chuck was the last man to question Alberto today. He asked direct yes or no questions of the man who heads our country’s Justice Department. He asked about the meetings with the gang of 8. Schumer asked him direct yes or no questions regarding the clandestine meeting with a barely lucid John Ashcroft at the hospital.

Uncle Al side-stepped each and every friggin one of those direct questions. That’s a surprise I know..For those of you that missed this event..Leahy and Specter take swings at Alberto:

[youtube]DWIxG-ww2Ms[/youtube]

Al tried to discredit Comey’s previous testimony before the committee regarding the warrentless spying on Americans.

Simply put, Alberto Gonzales is a Shit-stain on the Department of Justice in these here United States.

Tags: Gang of 8, Alberto Gonzales, Ashcroft, Perjury

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Inspector General Confirms Probe of Rogue FBI Anti-Terror Office

Nothing in the MSM about this, but Wired has it:

The Justice Department’s Inspector General and the FBI are investigating an office that sent fake, emergency letters to telecoms requesting phone records, according to the Inspector General’s office. That office lacked the authority to request the records and did not apply for the subpoenas promised in the letters.

That information largely confirms a a Wired News story from last week, which revealed that top FBI officials told privacy groups that a criminal investigation of the office was underway and that individuals had been granted immunity.

If the investigation looks into possible criminal violations of fraud statutes or a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, it would mark the first known investigation of government employees for violations of the Patriot Act.

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