This amendment will require 60 votes to pass, and all votes I have heard have been straight party line with D's voting for the four year (instead of 6) sunset. Obama just showed up and voted. That made my day even though the amendment won't pass. I hope this means he will stay for all FISA votes.

You were right on this one RMP. Ring up a victory for the pessimistic optimist.

But there is at least one more important step. Once there are enough destroyed countries under control, the imperial power pays their people a minimal amount to fight the next war. No need to hide the body bags because they go elsewhere, and also the cost decreases.

On my lunch break I caught the last ten minutes or so of Rockefeller defending telecom amnesty. It was nothing we hadn't heard before, of course. But to actually hear him say it, on the record, on TV, in the well of the Senate, it was breathtaking.

His defense of telecom amnesty was:

-if we don't give telcos amnesty now, they won't cooperate with the government in the future;

-if they don't cooperate with the government, we'll be vulnerable to The Terrorists because the government can't get The Intelligence It Needs any other way, and he knows this because the Intelligence Community told him so;

-why should the telcos be penalized for doing something the Attorney General assures them is legal;

-why should the telcos be punished for accepting on faith that what the Attorney General told them was legal was, in fact, legal;

-suing the telcos will not result in the bringing to light of any possibly illegal actions on the part of the Bush Administration, because the information needed to argue those lawsuits is (and will remain) classified ("properly, annoyingly, but properly");

-it will take many years to litigate those telco lawsuits, some of which are individual, some of which are class action; while those lawsuits are pending, telcos will be reluctant to cooperate with any requests the administration might make of them, and that will make us vulnerable to The Terrorists;

-allowing the telcos to be sued for cooperating with the administration will cause all corporations who are asked to cooperate with the administration to look askance at the government, which is not an attitude we should encourage in our patriotic corporate sector; we should instead grant proactive amnesty to any corporation which is acting pursuant to an administration request for information, because the presumption should be that the administration is asking for that cooperation in good faith and under the law.

That's of course my paraphrasing from memory, but that's the gist of what he just told the nation. It was, again, breathtaking. This is a Democratic Senator, of long experience, advocating granting this unsupervised and unsupervisable surveillance power to the Executive Branch. After 7 years of BushCo, after all those years in the minority, he has NO sense that the administration might try to abuse its authority?

Thanks. I listened to all of that and I even started to post about it right afterwards. But my post was basically that I was agape at what I had heard a Senator say, sentence after sentence, one sentence after the other. The lies of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It was that evolved.

Thanks for accurately quoting much of what Rockefeller said and for summarizing it quite well.

In an interview with David Frost this past December, Bhutto, may she rest in peace, said that Osama Bin Laden was murdered in 2002. Google David Frost and Bhutto interview, and click on the youtube link and hear it for yourself.

I don't believe this has been debunked, so my question is this:

Why has the blogging community let this slide without raising awareness of it?

This may or may not be relevant, but people I know used to complain that several generations of Americans had accustomed themselves to canned peas, Wonder bread and Coors beer. Then along came craft bakeries, craft breweries, and the locally-grown, organic markets. An elitist (i.e. wealthy people's) revolution to be sure, but a revolution nonetheless.

As digital photos improve, and we have the bandwidth to transmit higher-quality recordings, who's to say that the digital trade-offs we now accept won't go the way of Wonder bread as well.

Never underestimate the power of the antithesis; even while the architects of our totalitarian future are putting away their hammers and welding torches, and reaching for their gold leaf and paint cans, other forces are at work.

I don't quarrel with your analysis of our corporate masters' intent, only with your assessment of its inevitability index.

Dear ,

Some Articles excerpted from the U.N. Conventions Against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, to which the U.S is a signatory, having signed, ratified and implemented this treaty. I thought these might be helpful to you, since you have a duty as a member of Congress to prosecute as promptly as possible the tortures committed by the Executive branch, that were admitted to and even flaunted yesterday and today. If you don't prosecute, then according to Article 12 below, you are in violation of the law. If you don't punish, then according to Article 4 below, you are in violation of the law. Please proceed against the Administration with all due haste. You were not elected with a mandate to ignore the law.

Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 4

1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.

Article 12

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committee in any territory under its jurisdiction.

Article 13

Each State Party shall ensure that any individual who alleges he has been subjected to torture in any territory under its jurisdiction has the right to complain to and to have his case promptly and impartially examined its competent authorities. Steps shall be taken to ensure that the complainant and witnesses are protected against all ill-treatment or intimidation as a consequence of his complaint or any evidence given.

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.