With the new year and the change of administration in Washington there has been a tendency lately for retrospective looks at the outgoing Bush administration which has reminded us of all that has gone wrong in the last eight years and all that the Bush administration and its collaborators have to answer for. This tendency has in turn provoked the apologists for the Bush regime who are now using the unitary executive theory as a shield rather than a spear. The result is conversations like the one on the Diane Rehm show this morning where lawyers acting as apologists for the nefarious acts of Bush policy sound like panicky weasels trying to slip out of anyone having to take responsibility for the wrongs they have done. These pundits try to appear to be centrists, but the way they use arguments regarding pragmatic politics to evade moral accusations that there has been wrongdoing on the part of the Bush administration paints these men as the worst caricature of the sleazy lawyer.
Sen. Feingold, in the video below reminds us why it is that people participate in the democratic process. It's a long lecture, but it's the most authoritative denunciation on the the government's program possible given today's classification restrictions. We can only hope that the ACLU's lawsuit, timed with Bush's signature, forces the judicial branch to step in and hold those responsible for abrogating the rights of American citizens to be held accountable in the way the law proscribes. After all, how strong is the rule of law when the government itself is known to disregard provisions and limitations on its behavior? Why should anyone be allowed to be immune from allegations of rape, for instance? Maybe I'm deranged. But someone really deranged would wonder why anyone votes at all. By the way, that's not a scream you're hearing, it's the utter silence of a society looking on in horror as an elected body completely contravenes their desires.
That is the sound of Obama voting to set your freedom, privacy, and security back to the days before Nixon. Again a major piece of legislation is pushed through with no real discussion and no in depth understanding of what the law does. Instead the Bush administration and the power hungry, do-nothing senators push their message of fear that has inexplicably continued to work for them for seven years. It helps that there isn't any press coverage.
Remember these are the same people who had sufficient intelligence to prevent 9/11 but failed to. Yet they continue to say they need to listen in on to all of our calls. They continue to say that we need to give protection to the phone companies that may have broken the law in their rush to give all of our information, calls, Internet traffic, and emails to the government. They also continue to say that if you aren't doing anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about. Ahh the old standby of the people who want a police state and the conformists who support them. In case you weren't paying attention in elementary school that is the kind of shit we don't stand for in America. The fourth amendment was the founding fathers declaration that Americans should not have to be subject to such a weak red herring. I have also explained in previous posts why law abiding persons have every reason to have lawful secrets and to fear a government with too much power or information. For example, what if the Democrats decide to create a political smear machine and hunt out every gay conservative through the massive amount of information this will create? Then the law abiding, republicans will see what they have to fear from the fruits of their own fear mongering and lust for power.
What I really came here to do is rail against Obama for voting for fear and against freedom. I was really excited by Obama after his first speech regarding the racist conspiracies circulating in his church. That speech showed real leadership and had the potential of elevating the national dialogue regarding race. I was particularly excited because after months of hearing nothing but the words "hope" and "change" I finally knew something of substance about Obama. I was beginning to understand the rock star level of excitement that surrounded him. The last week has completely eliminated any enthusiasm I once had. Despite the "embarrassing pejorative" Jessie Jackson leveled at Obama, it is true that he has been giving up his convictions to appear more mainstream. Obama has been a crusader against gun rights, and even though I disagree with him, I was disappointed to hear his quiet measured reaction to the decision by the supreme court that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a handgun. Then later it was announced that Obama was in favor of the death penalty. I don't particularly have an opinion on the issue but I do know that if you want to get elected in this country, especially at the national level, you better be in favor of the death penalty. Combined with his taking the side of the freedom haters in congress this all spells out that Obama is another political robot just to act as a face. He is the dickless face of a party with no balls. Hows that for a pejorative?
Dennis Kucinich(D-Ohio), the elfin-looking, vegan, UFO-seeing, hot-wife-having Representative from Cleveland has introduced articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush.
I have mixed feelings about many things in that first sentence.
First, Kucinich is a profoundly inefectual represenative. None of the bills he has proposed has ever been passed. Which statistically boads ill for the prospects of these articles of Impeachment. Kucinich will propose any legislation that will get headlines. Kucinich's legislative strategy seems less directed at serving the people of his district but rather intended to provoke headlines that get him enough free attention for his reelection.
The things Kucinich champions with his doomed legislative action are the kinds of things that are the cause of the people, or crafted to promote peace and justice in simple language. So when these things are defeated it makes Kucinich look like he is a champion of the conserns of the common man. However, even if this is genuine and Kucinich really is a champion of the people he is rather Quixotic. Personally, I think the persona of a crusader for justice that tilts at windmills has been crafted by him to keep him in politics. That being said I am willing to live with an inefectual elfin-jester of a representative that loudly champions justice and freedom and peace rather than the typical congressman who is a shill to big industry and lobbying groups and justifies his corruption by dragging home as much pork as he or she can suck out of the public coffers. So even if the virtue Kucinich parades in front of the cameras is fake, Ill take fake virtue over unashamed corruption every day.
As for impeaching president Bush, thats a whole different ball of fishooks. I think President Bush should be impeached. He has been accused of exactly what Nixon did, and Republican party officials have been found guilty of manipulating the vote in Ohio in 2004. There is also the intelligence failure leading up to the 9/11 attack, extrordinary rendition, torture, the lies in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and so forth. However, much of that is just a deriliction of duty and does not amount to a crime. Furthermore, the stuff that he could be charged for is going to provoke a long hard legal battle.
This president has proven that he is beligerant in the extreme to any type of criticism or legal attack on his power. This is bolstered by the neo-con adgenda to make the office of the president extremely powerful. This adgenda is backed up by jmore than greed and evil but by long hours of thought and legal scholarship. This goal at inflating the power of the president is backed up by legal philosophy that argues that these cruel and wicked things that have been done by and on behalf of this administration are actually legal. The simplest way to explain this is that they believe anything the president says is ok, is legal. The insand and frustrating thing to know is that they have the knowledge and scholarship to back this madness up in court if that is what it comes to. The three attornys general that this administration has gone through are proof that there are many in high places already that subscribe to this philosophy of presidential preeminence. All this promises to produce a long and hard legal fight if the congress actually has the stones to follow through.
That is the other problem. The Democratic party hasn't had the testicular fortitude to stand for anything other than giving themselves a pay raise for as long as I have been old enough to read. They cant cut off the funds for the war and they are afraid of a long fight with the Bush administration. But they arent afraid because they will loose, these chicken-shit legislators are afraid of the fight itself. They arent afraid of the possibility that they will losse and this insane legal reasoning that the president's will is law will become the law of America. They are afraid of having to stand up for something other than giving themselves a pay raise. Sen. Feingold (D-Wisconsin) the only one in the senate chamber with cajones enough to still be called a man explained it best. He wrote to me that he believes that any attenpt to impeach Bush would be a waist of time. All impeachment proceedings would do is, distract the congress from repairing the damage he has done over his tenure in office. The long fight would be a circuis and all that would be accomplished would be sound bites and grandstanding. I can only assume that House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) believes something similar when she says that impeachment is off the table.
Much has been said of this kind of pragmatism and cowardice and is being played out in many editorials of this kind. I think the fight must be fought or these legal philosophies will slowly slime their way into the American legal system. Unless resisted this belief that power is greater than justice will destroy freedom.
This is what I was talking about in a previous post. This is what a law abiding person has to fear from a government that has too much information and no respect for boundries, rights, or freedom, in obtaining that information.
Jack Thompson is a lawyer in Florida who spends his time acting as an attention whore screaming about the gaming or pornography industries interchangably. Its easy to hate him, but I am compelled to feel sorry for someone who is obviously an extreme result of the psychological pathology of our society. Where we childishly glorify violence and adress sex with a bizarre characture, Thompson lashes out at attempts to profit from this communal tendancy. This man is a symptom of our collective social mental illness. Fortunately for the legal profession, he faces sanctions for his outlandish behavior. http://www.abajournal.com/news/lawyer_threatened_with_sanctions_after_putting_images_of_kangaroos_swastika/#When:08:10:00Z
The FBI abused its power under the Patriot Act? I'm schocked, schocked! Well maybe not that schocked.
Lastly, for anyone who is somehow so unaware that they may be compared to a cave dwelling hermit and in keeping with our mockery of hypocratical politicians; Elliot Spitzer.
If those who are being held in contempt of Congress are above the law because they were ordered not to cooperate by Bush himself, then why not hold W in contempt? There is no article or provision that puts the President above the laws of the land. For offenses up to and including the most heinous crime against a state, treason, the President should expect, as any other citizen, the combined weight of our laws, codes, and regulations when he chooses to violate them. Otherwise, why should any other citizen expect that there will equitable enforcement of the laws? Tin foil hats aside, with just a sparse review of his conduct, there are very simple cases that can be made. For starts, how about the NSA wiretapping program that is widely acknowledged to have been illegal? Then, in the light of Grand Jury discovery, or perhaps even the threat of it, we can finally untangle the web of lies, spin, and contempt which has so characterized the way the Bush administration has treated its adoring public.
First, in answer to the "Case for Telecom Immunity," specifically: "2. Beyond the theoretical case for the warrantless program’s legality, the telecoms here specifically relied on written representations from the administration that the program had been reviewed by the president and determined to be legal." The question of the legality of this program is anything but theoretical, and the argument so often so cleverly invoked to defend this insidious assault on the very freedoms that Bush notionally seeks to defend.
Addressing the National Association of Attorney Generals, the debate surrounding the FISA renewal and telecom immunity was Bush's primary topic. In a case of misrepresentation, W says the target of the whole program of the big bad jihadis sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan, dialing their favorite operatives in Anywhere, Homeland. I would imagine being so far away from home, in a land where no one can speak their language, they would be pretty homesick.
However, evidence has emerged that the real target of this program may really be the e-mails. Which, makes me want to breath a sigh of relief, given the Bush Administration's track record of handling e-mail. It's not that the NSA, by means of this warrantless wiretapping program, invaded your privacy and cracked open a Pandora's box where probable cause and the very slim margin of institutional procedure that keep Americans from having to fear what goes bump in the night, but they probably wouldn't know how to manage it.
And if you were wondering how probable cause died, and if it will make a sound? I would say probably not. Our newest candidate for the vaunted 'Republicrat' status, Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes said that he hopes to bring the matter to a vote within a week. Also of interest, is the point that the House has seen and reviewed documents in relation to this matter, and they're "pretty much finished." So, what was in those documents? Or, were they mostly redacted? Some of the potential deals that are in discussion would continue to leave this entire matter beneath the lock and key of classification, away from the prying eyes of the interested or not public. The Senate version of the bill that has already been passed allows the Attorney General to wave his magic pen and pronounce everything legal and dismiss any and all related lawsuits.
For extra flavoring, try the aforementioned NPR coverage, now with audible delight. Or Senator Feingold issuing a public service warning about the already-passed Senate version.
Some editorialization from the Young Turks. Yes, the Democrats do suck.
And if you haven't seen Bush enough today, here he is addressing the National Association of Attorney Generals. And no matter how many times Bush said that his government told these telecommunications companies that the program that they were requested to participate in was legal, it clearly wasn't and every instance of him saying that the government said this program was legal before it saw the light of day could be used as evidence against him.
Kenneth Wainstein was on NPR today discussing the warrentless wiretapping bill currently stalled in the legislature. The man must be an excelent litigator, he never became distressed even when faced with difficult questions or confrontational or callers. The part of the interview that sent me into a patriotic rage was his explination as to why FISA is insufficient to aquire necessary intelligence on terrorists. Unfortunately no transcript of the interview is available currently but audio file of the show should be on NPR's website tonite. So I will be forced to paraphraze.
Mr. Wainstein explained that FISA is insufficient because it requires them to show probable cause. Showing probable cause to a judge requires expendature of manpower and time. Those intelligence analysts and lawyers could be doing other things.
So basically the justice department finds it inconvenient and cumbersome to deal with our justice system designed to protect innocent people from abuse of police power. Or in other words, the warrentless wiretapping bill, in its avoidance of probable cause, is designed to circumvent our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Or to put it another way the government wants the ability to spy on anyone with or without probable cause.
In discussions of this nature the question is often raised, "Why do you care?" or, "You should not have anything to worry about if you are not a criminal." These kinds of statements being based in a naive trust not just in the institution of government but in the individuals acting as agents of the government.
Honest, law abiding people have reason to fear not only of being wrongly accused by mistaken identity, beureucratic error, mistake from lazyness or stupidity, intentional framing by the real perpetrator of the terrorism, but we also have reason to fear simple corruption in the hourly employees of the various agencies handeling the information. For example, if you purchase anything over the internet, use internet banking, or speak about your financial information on the phone, you put your account numbers and pin numbers at risk of simple opportunistic theft by the employee handling your info.
For a real world example of things "going missing" after being handled by agents responsible for national security. boingboing
More pertinent article outlining other reasons to be conserned.
The old media continues to refer to this story in the terms most favorible to the Bush administration. I (and some former intellegence experts) want to point out some misconceptions that seem to be floating around. First, FISA already gives the president authority to listen to the phone conversations of any terrorism suspect. Its a legal, judge approved warrant, and the backlog is a myth. Second, if the warrentless wiretapping provision expires tomorrow, the wiretapps that are already in place under that law, get to stay in place for up to a year.
If President Bush already has everything he says he needs to protect us then what is in this bill he isn't talking about, and why would he want it passed? At the very least what Bush, the cowards in the Senate, and the business community want is a policy statement that it OK for a company to break the law and violate the rights of innocent American citizens as long as someone in the government asks. I may have misunderstood but I thought the reason Fred Thompson wanted Nixon impeached was because Nixon thought the President was above the law.
As some of you might have heard, the amendments to the FISA regulations, which also includes telecom immunity, has passed through the Senate. As the article mentions, there were 19 Democratic Senators who voted in favor of the legislation, along the lines of security before freedom or something like that.
Here is a list of the Senators who have voted to uphold the Bush administration's priorities, to twist the truth, to become Republicrats.
There is no curse loud or profane enough to hurl at the senators who voted to give immunity to the telecom industry. All this does is encourage companies to break the law whenever the government asks them to. It makes the rule of law waivable at the whim of the president. If the alagations against the telecom companies are true, then we all have been harmed. Even law abiding people have secrets that should be kept and respected. Even criminals deserve privacy. Privacy is a human right that is not granted by governments or agencys, we are imbued with that right by our creator and the purpose of government is to protect our rights.
The Democrats roll over, fail to understand why they won last election, and approval ratings continue to fall.
