Just ’cause, although he couldn’t stop the FISA fiasco single-handedly, he at least did get the thing delayed.
The whole article’s helpful, but the money quote’s in the bottom graf here:
brief overview: we learned after September 11, 2001 that giant telecom companies worked with this administration to compile Americans’ private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope. The Bush administration appears to have convinced those corporations to spy on Americans for five years, in secret and without a warrant.

“Trust me” — a message that comes straight from the mouth of President Bush. I would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even in the best of times. Not even from a president on Mount Rushmore.

I wouldn’t take “Trust Me” from Dr. Henry Jones Junior (aka Indiana), let alone a President. And Bush?  Read more 

FISA: A Time To Sit In At Obama’s Campaign Offices?

Many activists involved with the struggle to preserve our 4th Amendment rights and oppose the latest revisions to FISA were deeply disappointed by the substance of Obama’s response, which contained a whole series of misleading arguments, as Glenn Greenwald documented here.

While some were ecstatic that Obama listened at all, others had a higher standard, and found the disingenuous arguments to be insulting to their intelligence, particularly given how fundamental the issues are, and how clearly Senator Obama had previously stated his intention to filibuster if telco immunity was part of the deal.  Read more 

Withering.

There’s a lot to say about this, including the theme that will make our Paul happy — questioning the notion that we must support Obama no matter what, and also the beyond-dubious premise (by way of Greg Sargent) that “Obama’s ’candidacy has long seemed to embody a conviction that Democrats can win arguments with Republicans about national security — that if Dems stick to a set of core principles, and forcefully argue for them without blinking, they can and will persuade people that, simply put, they are right and Republicans are wrong.’”

However, I must sign off, but I wanted to share this link with you ASAP and to see what y’all make of it.

Greetings, Class of June, 2008!

One of the ironist’s bitter pleasures during these past several years has been watching the rats jump from Bush’s stinking ship at precisely the most expedient times (that is, after some great and irrevocable damage has been wrought upon our nation).

With the shocking news (brace yourselves, folks) that Barack Obama is not at all a New-Politics Progressive Savior, we’re seeing some fellow Dems in the throes of buyer’s remorse.

Reading this DailyKos thread, I don’t know precisely how to feel.  Read more 

Yet another attempt is being made to pass a FISA revision bill that will provide immunity for the telecoms against lawsuits for their part in illegal spying on American citizens. The cabal planning this maneuver expects to take their plot to both the House and Senate next week, where coalitions of Republicans and BlueDog Democrats could provide enough votes for passage.

********

Update 3: NYT article and a blogger talks to Hoyer’s office

Update: More on the new FISA deal from The Hill and Glenn Greenwald. Text is down at the bottom.

Update 2: Congressional contact information list  Read more 

Spy Bill ’Compromise’ Still Gives Amnesty to Telcoms, But Adds Trappings of Justice

House and Senate leaders are still bargaining over how far to expand the government’s domestic spying powers and whether to grant retroactive legal amnesty to companies that violated federal privacy laws by helping the government spy on Americans.

But if a proposal from the top Republican from the Senate Intelligence committee is any indicator, telecom amnesty would be all but assured in any final bill.  Read more 

I was thinking about that article in The Hill, Dems hedge on healthcare:

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member and an Obama supporter, referring to the presidential candidates’ healthcare plans. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.” …  Read more 

Congress Daily:

House and Senate leaders will attempt to negotiate a final deal to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week, but their success is far from guaranteed.

For weeks, House Majority Leader Hoyer has said he hoped to strike a compromise on FISA legislation before the recess. But he has faced major obstacles in bridging a divide in his Caucus.

Liberal lawmakers want greater controls on how the government conducts electronic surveillance and they do not support giving blanket retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the Bush administration conduct electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without warrants.  Read more 

ACLU of WV at West VA Blue

After boldly standing up to The Bush administrations’ fear mongering in February, word comes that House leadership may now be working with Senator Jay Rockefeller to possibly rush a pro-telecom amnesty bill through Congress in the next few days.

Civil libertarians in the Mountain State, say no to back room deals.

The FireDogLake community is trying to do something about this.

I don’t like Steny Hoyer. There’s just no way around it. Now he’s conspiring with Jay Rockefeller to force retroactive telecom immunity through Congress, so George Bush and his criminal conspiracy won’t have to answer any questions about violating the Constitution by spying on American citizens without warrants.

Again.

Did I mention I don’t like Steny Hoyer?  Read more 

The House, to its great credit, passed a FISA reform bill that doesn’t eviscerate the rule of law by granting the telcos retroactive immunity, and doesn’t completely gut the Fourth Amendment*. That’s good news, and if we get lucky, the whole abomination might just get deep-sixed, at which point we would return to the status quo ante legally, while much strengthened politically. Kudos, I freely grant, to Nancy Pelosi** and the rest of the House leadership, including — lambert blushes modestly for calling this one, against all odds — Steny Hoyer. That said, let’s do the classic blogospheric media critique thing on WaPo’s not totally fucked coverage. Jonathan Weisman reports:  Read more 

Via TPM, this from the Online WSJ:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

What could go wrong?  Read more 

So what do local bloggers think of the FISA sellouts?  Read more 

Excellent work by Stoller, getting this statement from the Foster campaign:

[FOSTER] Nobody is above the law and telecom companies who engaged in illegal surveillance should be held accountable, not given retroactive immunity. I flatly oppose giving these companies an out for cooperating with Alberto Gonzalez on short-circuiting the FISA courts and the rule of law.”

Bill Foster, Democratic Candidate in IL-14 March 8th Special Election

So, when you make your calls to the Blue Dog traitors on FISA, be sure you stress that point.  Read more 

South Texas Chisme cries shame. PrairiePundit says that Reyes Sivestro Reyes insults our intelligence on intelligence.

Check out the local bloggers in your area.

If you are unhappy with the Democrats, you can email your concerns to info@dccc.org
note - it is necessary to be polite - no flames

Remember how Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program was originally about wiretaps? And then morphed into being about foreign-to-foreign communication? Well, that was all disinformation. Turns out it’s all about email. Your “papers,” as the Fourth Amendment has it. WaPo:

At the breakfast yesterday [Kenneth Weinstein, assistant attorney general for national security] highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA’s current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because “essentially you don’t know where the recipient is going to be” and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Just as we said from the very beginning.

10-to-1, 100-to-1, these fascist weasels decided to suck up all email, just to get some of it right away. And the odds are that they archived it all, on the chance that some of it would be useful later (especially if privatized).  Read more 

From Congressional Daily (subscription only, no link, sorry)

To break an impasse over legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, House Democratic leaders are considering the option of taking up a Senate-passed FISA bill in stages, congressional sources said today. Under the plan, the House would vote separately on the first title of the bill, which authorizes surveillance activities, and then on the bill’s second title, which grants retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s warrantless electronic surveillance activities. The two would be recombined, assuming passage of both titles. In this way, Democratic leaders believe they can give an out to lawmakers opposed to the retroactive immunity provision. Republican leadership sources said their caucus would back such a plan because not only would it give Democratic leaders the out they need, it would provide a political win for the GOP. It remains to be seen if such a move will placate liberal Democrats who adamantly oppose giving in to the Bush administration on the immunity issue.  Read more 

Where’s Jack Bauer?

They have no shame.

Glenn speaks for me:

There is some (understandable) confusion around about what is going to happen tomorrow with the FISA vote and Dodd’s promised filibuster… I shared this confusion until earlier today when these matters were clarified.

Contrary to the emphatic promise Dodd repeatedly made during his presidential campaign to lead a filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop any bill that has telecom immunity in it (a promise which, incidentally, led to hundreds of thousands of dollars being donated to his campaign), there isn’t going to be any actual filibuster tomorrow. Under the Unanimous Consent framework agreed to by all Senators (including Dodd), there will be a 60-vote requirement to invoke cloture on the FISA bill and for ultimate passage, followed by an allotted 4 hours of post-cloture “debate,” but there will not be any real filibuster to prevent cloture. When Leahy says that he will “join” Dodd’s filibuster, what he means is that he will merely cast a vote against cloture.

Dodd’s efforts against this bill have been quite commendable, and the UC Agreement isn’t completely worthless. It means that Democrats do not need 60 votes, or even 50 votes, to stop this bill. Rather, they only need 41 Senators willing to oppose cloture (which everyone knows they’re not going to get).

Still, Dodd is not, after all, going to lead an actual filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop the bill. Worse, the Republicans are going to be permitted to impose 60-vote requirements on key Democratic amendments without actually having to filibuster at all — exactly the situation which Harry Reid vowed just two weeks ago he would not permit.  Read more 

Scum. Primary challenges needed:

Some House Democrats were prepared to support immunity, regardless. In a Jan. 28 letter, 21 Democrats in the conservative Blue Dog Coalition sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., supporting [retroactive] immunity and listing other provisions that they believed were needed in a FISA bill.

They wrote that the Senate bill “contains satisfactory language addressing all these issues, and we would fully support that measure should it reach the House floor without substantial change.”

Meanwhile, Steny Hoyer says:  Read more 

I’ve got to run, so forgive the C&P post direct out of my email box. From CQ:

Legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act remained stalled in the Senate Tuesday, held hostage by a partisan clash over procedures for consideration of an unrelated economic stimulus package.

A frustrated Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complained that Republicans were blocking his efforts to schedule votes on proposed amendments to the bill (S 2248). He questioned Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s commitment to the legislation, saying Republicans have declined to allow FISA to move forward.

“The Orwellian Bush administration has now slopped over into the Senate, and now the Republican leader is now becoming Orwellian himself,” Reid said.  Read more 

Slate magazine runs a podcast called Gabfest, featuring Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz. This week’s episode also aired on the POTUS election channel on XM Radio.

At about 22:14 into the program, the discussion turns to FISA and telecom immunity. And the “point” was repeatedly made that the topic is unbearably dull, even to listeners of a quasi-alternative political show.

I couldn’t always be sure which was John and which was David, so I’m supplying my best guesses.  Read more 

Typical toll tower on Rhine in Bingen

Finally—we’re nothing if not open-minded here at The Mighty Corrente Buiding—a solid reason to vote for Obama—a dogwhistle I can hear.

Via Ezra, this from XKCD:

Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.

Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one.

The Mighty Corrente Building, and the blogosphere in general, could not run and would not even exist without open standards, so Obama’s embrace of them is good news. For example:  Read more 

The plot thickens, as seen in Glenn’s latest update:

There was some significant, and apparently unexpected, obstructionism on the part of Republicans this afternoon, whereby they blocked votes on any of the pending amendments and then filed a Motion for Cloture (i.e., to force a vote on the Senate Intelligence Committee bill as is), the vote on which will occur on Monday at 4:30 p.m. Supposedly, the obstructionism angered Reid and other Democrats and now Reid will not only support Dodd’s filibuster but urge his caucus to do so as well.  Read more