I submit that this FISA abomination is not a democratic "end run" around Articles 24 and 25 of the recently-filed Articles of Impeachment. This FISA abomination is, instead, only happening because Bush is rubbing the Democrats' faces directly in Nancy Pelosi's refusal to allow impeachment to be "on the table."

The FISA amendment going around today is specifically premised upon granting immunity to telecoms who were told by the Administration that it was legal to do the wiretapping without a warrant, and it is specifically and intentionally premised upon nobody having to demonstrate that this representation was in fact true. In other words, the liar's culpability is irrelevant for purposes of this new retroactive immunity, it is just not an issue. Only the lie-ee is entitled to immunity.

Today's FISA amendment does not legislatively "decree" that the President's representations were "true", nor could it because those representations included supposedly assuring that wiretapping without warrants violated neither a statute that said it is proscribed nor a Constitutional Amendment that proscribes it. It just is silent about that, decreeing only that those who the President assured won't be held liable.

Now, Articles 24 and 25 of Rep. Kucinich's recent submission would both address exactly this issue: did the President lie to these telecoms in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States in order to facilitate illegal wiretaps. The answer, of course, is undeniably yes. These are impeachable offenses, it isn't a question of "civil liability" in a lawsuit.

So why is this being done like this? There is only one reason: this is being done right, directly in Congress' face by a President who is so fK*ng confident that he is above the law and not subject to the Constituion's impeachment provisions that he just does not fK*ng care that his own actions are left out of the FISA revisions. And Pelosi et al know this, and they are too cowardly to do anything about it.

Would somebody ask Pelosi in tomorrow's abbreviated "debate" whether she will agree to schedule prompt hearings on at least Articles 24 and 25 of the Kucinich impeachment bill as a condition of allowing this FISA whitewash to proceed?

Talk about your Rope-A-Dope. Pelosi just lured the Prez into impeachment, big time. Yep.

This FISA bill effectively presumes that the President broke the FISA law and violated the Fourth Amendment when he falsely assured the telecoms they should participate in warrantless wiretapping. And, while this FISA bill allows the telecoms immunity, retroactively, for what they did, the bill does not purport to grant any such immunity to the President. If I read it correctly (and it may be there's something buried in there that everyone is missing), the "illegality" of the President's instructions is not questioned at all by this legislative grant of immunity to those who, when told by the President that this was legal, accepted the President's lie and acted on it as if the President of the United States had some kind of integrity or something.

So now, the civil suits against the telecoms will go away; the government already has been dismissed from those civil suits based upon strained, but accepted, claims of national security. The only place left to air the question of the propriety and legality of the President's spying program and the "assurances" that were given to the telecoms is, therefore, by proceeding to congressional consideration of Articles 24 and 25 of the pending Impeachment Resolution presented by Representative Kucinich.

So, while everyone is assuming that Pelosi and the Democrats have miserably capitulated in yet another round of embarassingly misguided fear of George Bush, maybe what's really been going on is that Pelosi has lured Bush out into the open by her past "impeachment off the table" remarks (which, of course, were and could only ever have been based on what she knew about when she said it, and are obviously fair game for reconsideration and revision upon further reflection, right?). Now, the course of the FISA negotiations has resulted in the President's own handlers demanding and receiving an immunity provision that not only excludes the President's causal acts, but in fact presumes the illegality of those acts as a predicate for immunity to those who acted in response to the lies.

So, I guess we'll be impeaching Bush right away now, since Articles 24 and 25 have just been essentially conceded by the Republicans, the Administration ... and our Democratic leaders, too.

I'll be waiting for the announcement.