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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dear Congress: Do you really think your 11% approval rating is because you're not kissing Bush's ass ENOUGH??
Posted by Jill | 6:03 AM
With more than three out of four Americans disapproving of George W. Bush, you'd think Congress would finally realize it's safe to start blocking his relentless march towards a police state. You'd think that a 24% approval rating would be low enough that Congress would stop running scared. After all, not even the media are calling him a "popular president" anymore -- a moniker they gave him until his descent towards the Mendoza line made it impossible.

But you'd be wrong. The dimwits in Congress must think their own 11% approval rating means they aren't kissing President Twenty-Four Percent's behind enough, because they're about to cave on FISA, giving their corporate masters in Big Telecom partial immunity for breaking the law and providing the government with your phone records:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.


It's getting depressingly familiar, isn't it, this refrain of "We don't have the votes"? If the end result is going to be the same, why not at least go down fighting for what you believe in, rather than be active participants in the president's lawlessness?

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government's procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance. They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.

The domestic surveillance issue has been awkward for Democrats since the administration's secret program of warrantless counterterrorism surveillance became public in late 2005. In August, a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats passed a measure backed by the White House that put that program on firm legal ground by expressly permitting the government to wiretap foreign targets without a court order, including, under certain circumstances, when those targets are communicating with people in the United States.

But Democratic leaders insisted that the law expire in February, so they could try again to impose more restrictions on the administration's ability to spy domestically. Most Democratic lawmakers and party members -- backed by civil libertarians and even some conservatives -- wanted the new legislation to ensure for example that future domestic surveillance in foreign-intelligence-related investigations would be overseen by the foreign surveillance court. The court was created in response to CIA and FBI domestic spying abuses unmasked in the mid-1970s.

But conservative Democrats worried about Republicans' charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists. "There is absolutely no reason our intelligence officials should have to consult government lawyers before listening in to terrorist communications with the likes of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other foreign terror groups," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).


Is anyone still buying this notion that millions of Americans are on the phone with Osama bin Laden every day? And besides, the existing FISA law allows the government to obtain warrants within 72 hours AFTER listening in on such communications. It just doesn't allow sweeping, dragnet-type surveillance of the type we're seeing from this Administration.

Note the Democrat named in the above-cited Washington Post article: John D. Rockefeller IV. Aren't you glad that Rockefeller repays his corporate donors so handsomely, by supporting legislation that allows them to break the law as long as the president says it's OK? As Glenn Greenwald notes,

AT&T was the fifth largest contributor to Rockefeller's last campaign, followed by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association in Sixth place, Bell South in Ninth Place, and Verizon was in the top 20.


Just in case you thought the Democrats weren't just as bought and paid for by corporations as the Republicans.

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