Senate Approves Telecom Amnesty, Expands Domestic Spying Powers
July 10th, 2008The Obama cultists find the Kool-Aid to have a bitter aftertaste. McCain still doesn’t know which planet he’s on. The U.S. Ship of Fools sails on.
Via: Wired:
The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush’s five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government’s authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.
The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.
The 68 to 29 vote puts an end to more than a year of debate over whether the government should be able to collect millions of e-mails and phone calls daily from U.S.-based communication switches without any probable cause. It also answers whether Congress believes the nation’s telecoms and president had a duty to follow the rules set out in 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed after the abuses of the 1950s and 60s.
If the FISA Amendments Act survives constitutional challenge, it dooms the dozens of anti-wiretapping lawsuits filed against the nation’s telecoms, by ordering the judge in charge of the cases to dismiss them if the telecoms can prove the government asked them to help out.
The Obama cultists find the Kool-Aid to have a bitter aftertaste. McCain still doesn’t know which planet he’s on. The U.S. Ship of Fools sails on.
Well said, Kevin, well said. 🙁
This is a tempest in a teapot. In almost every other country the government does whatever it damn well pleases, law or no law, and day-to-day life in Mexico, say, or France, is not much different than day-to-day life in the U.S.: a typical grind of trying to infer meaning and morality and gain some semblance of reward from an indifferent natural world. If you are stupid enough to want to crowd into the kitchen of human money and power, then you deserve the heat of being wire-tapped, assassinated, or whatever other consequences those freaks use to jerk each other off. The fact is the vast majority of the world’s population goes about its daily life with little or no fear of interference from government or any other power freaks because they are involved in nothing the government or other power freaks are interested in. When you “graduate” to the middle class, even then all you have to do is consume enough of the right things to keep the middle class economy going and the power freaks that run it happy, and pay the minimum taxes to the government to keep it off your back. Surveillance, legal or illegal, is nothing more than the usual cops and robbers bullshit that doesn’t involve ordinary people. You might say, well, what about Nazis and Communists and their secret police and family members denouncing family members? I say, that’s no worse than having to pollute the air with auto exhaust just to live or having to listen to people talk seriously about American Idol or Star Wars movies. Mutual paranoia might even be kind of fun–at least people are engaging–compared to the brain-dead American life of freeway commuting and getting butt-fucked by the TV every night and loving it. Yes, I do agree, that the ordinary people who get wiped out when the power freaks go on a war rampage or when one of their nuclear power plants melts down is tragic. But the Creator, in all His glory and wisdom, never promised us a rose garden.
My kool-aid drinking, Obama-cultist brother sent me this, from the NYTimes, because it made him feel better about the fact that Obama never really promised much (except “change”, whatever the f*** that means): http://tinyurl.com/5tct34
Regarding the FISA “compromise”, the columnist says, “Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.” Gosh, when you put it that way, how can anyone have a problem with it? I mean, keeping alive a few cells from the body of the 4th Amendment is better than killing every last cell, isn’t it? If someone were to threaten you with death, wouldn’t you feel a lot better if they promised to keep a few of your cells alive? LOL! And, lest we forget, Obama “would rather have gone farther”. What a hero!
The MIC keeps marching us relentlessly to the Right, and the Left keeps finding reasons why it’s ok. Relax, take some nice SSRI’s, and turn on the home shopping network. It’s all good!
The only ones really affected by this are the honest and loyal Americans who have totally lost their sense of trust in their government and each other. The Republic will suffer in the long run because the open debate and expression of differing ideas will either stop or go totally undergroud (not through telecom media). Frankly, I hope Obama gets elected. This country deserves him.
More and more, I beginning to think that Obama is the Rockefeller’s (s)elected one. But hidey-ho, there were alot of other traitors to what once was our right to privacy, else this bill never would have passed. I want to know who is dry humping who in this Senate? Sheesh? Did they all see and spend time with the Washington madam?
Sheesh.
I’m one of those card carrying freaks from the ACLU. And gosh dang it, they are going to file against this joke of a “law”. This law would never stand the test against a non-partisan Supreme Court – by the by. But that ain’t what’s growing in the garden. We got Freaking Freaky genetically modified “weeds” (that are probably growing their own) instead.
Interesting comment on NPR re this bill passing. I did not know that the Inspector General is to do a review on just went down in this illegal program, and well, huh. Dya think we ought to see what the findings are before we give immunity?
NAH. GET YOUR FREE OUT OF JAIL CARD NOW. We’ll catch you on the flip-flop.
What a bunch of MORONS.
And ey, @ Peregrino, In almost every other country the government does whatever it damn well pleases.” Shucks, I think it is now IN EVERY COUNTRY THE GOVERMENT DOES WHATEVER IT DAMN WELL PLEASES.
Kindly please, just freakin bend over.
and the Left keeps finding reasons why it’s ok.
Not all of us. Not all of us by any stretch of the imagination.
The thing I’ve been forced to realize in the past five years is that the USA is a plutocratic oligarchy very thinly disguised as a civil libertarian constitutional republic. So is the UK, truth be told, but their oligarchy is a tad more enlightened then ours, IMHO.
I don’t know if I’ve ever discussed this here, but US history since the start of our current “constitutional” era seems to follow a weird numerological pattern. The first era was initiated by the elections of the year 1788, and this was the era when the country was a federation of sovereign states during which “liberty” was thought of as being a condition of very limited government, as opposed to the condition of rights of individual citizens regardless of status in society being guaranteed by the government.
The elections in 1860 72 years later resulted in what is misnamed “The Civil War” (“War Between the American States” is better), and this turned the country into a much more unitary state characterized by industrialization and effective rule by a plutocratic class.
72 years later came the elections of 1932 in the wake of the start of The Great Depression, which ushered in The New Deal and the USA’s very limited and parsimonious welfare-state. This new condition helped to nurture a fairly large middle-class who in turns eagerly or passively supported America’s growing economic imperial hegemony.
72 years later came the elections of 2004, which ushered in the final phase one could label “decadent late plutocratic empire”. Of course, this was well underway before November 2004, but this final 72-year phase will pound the final nails into the coffin of constitutional government.
Another thing I observe is that the beginning of the end of each of the three previous phases seems to have begun during the last third, or twenty-four years, of the 72-year phase. As a concrete example, the election that brought Ronald Reagan into the White House and spelled the piecemeal beginning of the end of New Deal era occured in 1980.
It’s The End of the World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine. 🙂
Sorry, Loveandlight, I’ll try and be more clear next time. On the other hand, I never said ALL of us; but then, it doesn’t have to be ALL of us, does it? ENOUGH of us are drinking the koolaid to allow the country to move farther to the Right, year after year.
I thought it was obvious that by “the Left” I didn’t mean people who come to this site, for instance, but rather most of the US Congressional “democrats”, most of the corporate “liberal” media — and the millions who buy the crap they’re selling — and a whole hell of a lot people who think the DailyKos is worth reading.
Oh, yeah, and the current Presidential candidate on the “Left”.
Glad you feel fine.
@ anothernut:
Obama certainly lost my vote. The fact that he is not in favor of a single-payer national health-care system meant that my willingness to vote for him was very tenuous in the first place. I’m an old-school liberal in the late 60’s/ early 70’s fashion, and in the age of the “blisters-on-the-fingers-from-going-{bleeblbleeblbleebl}-Ann-Coulter” right wing, that pretty much makes me a radical leftist. My big things are: 1) Ending the Iraq War and no more belligerent posturing towards Iran (the implication being that Israel can take care of itself and its interests from now on); 2) Rolling back the police-state, and 3) a single-payer national health-care sytem along Canadian lines.
The Democratic Party as a whole has been moving away from even this very modest and reasonable liberal agenda. Even though I won’t refuse to vote for Democrats, that “D” after the name of a candidate or incumbent is no longer a a guarantee that I will fill in the arrow next to their name on the ballot. I have noticed that a lot of “Left Blogistanians” seem to have a doormat-codependent-high-school-boyfriend mindset towards Obama and the tepidly more progressive Dems. I find that…unbecoming.