Letters to the Editor
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@omooex...on Obama (the liar?)
I think it would be interesting...
To barage Obama with phone calls rather than your own representative. I must admit I don't know how to do that, but I do think that it would be more effective.
He needs a bit more than a suggestion to vote properly in the Senate. Posted at ThinkProgress is:
One of Obama’s advisers on intelligence and foreign policy advisers, however, is someone who “strongly” supports telecomm immunity. John Brennan is a former CIA official and the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. In a new National Journal interview, Brennan makes it clear that he agrees with the Bush administration on the issue of immunity.
Obama MUST repudiate Brennan and he must go even further: fire Brennan...or is this another of those deals like with NAFTA? Say one thing (renegotiate labor and environmental rules for NAFTA, against immunity for FISA) but secretly mean something else (we're just kidding on NAFTA, just political nonsense to feed the base and we're just kidding on immunity, just political nonsense to feed the base)?
Obama cannot be allowed to go both ways on this. He either openly and clearly repudiates Brennan (and fires his criminal ass) or he admits to being a pandering liar who hates the 4th Amendment.
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omooex 2:18
I do see constituent-led change occuring on the local level and even on a state level. I'm not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But it does seem that when corporate interests are involved, change, if it is even possible, is never what its cracked up to be.
It's gratifying to see this from you because there is also the real possibility that bottom-up change will extend to the federal level eventually. This possibility was a major component (along with judiciary stacking, among other things) of the RW power grab of the last half century, and we will not likely be able to undo their gains in any less time. Further, as you allude, we cannot know what the outcome will be (law of unintended consequences, serendipity, etc). Contrary to the overly-simplistic stylings of both triumphalist RW interpreters (and some naively idealistic LW-ers, too), history is not a linear narrative, neither in its unfolding, nor in its retelling.
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Condatis
...any finite probability divided by 0 is equal to infinity.
No! Division by zero is undefined. Period.
You can take a limit of your function and see what happens as the denominator approaches zero. It may converge and approach infinity or it may diverge and you get nothing.
Sorry for being a math nazi.
Your analogy is correct in that doing nothing guarantees nothing will change. I still call, locally or toll-free nationally, and simply ask if my favorite politician supports the rule of law. I always get a "yes, of course" answer and then I ask about immunity for lawbreakers in the telecom industry and then the tone changes. Sen. Reid stated he was strongly "opposed to sweeping telecom immunity". Oh good.
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If Glenn Greenwald and his supporters keep fighting the good fight for truthjusticeandtheamericanway...
...and my side keeps winning votes, I'm good with that.
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Tempus, Gordon
Tempus: Don't look at me; I've been saying Obama's full o' crap since the get-go. I just thought that if I was going to waste my call on somebody, it might as well be somebody who has the capacity (but as you note, not the desire) to lead on the issue.
Gordon: I agree about history not being a linear narrative. It does seem to rarely deviate from the course of our worst expectations however.
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winning votes?
Your side huh. Our side believes in the constitution.
Which side are you on,
Brownshirts or Blackshirts?
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Craven no matter how you cut it.
Clearly the house dems are more afraid Republican accusations of being soft on terrorism in the upcoming election than they are of the voters in the election.
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staying with the dog metaphor
red rocket! red rocket!
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Note to Glenn
To get the postcount up you have to time your articles so they don't coincide with Salon's regular antisemitic raving column of stupidity. Or, just combine that and this and save the mental cases the trouble of flicking back and forth. 87 letters, you call that column? Pshaw.
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Elephantman
Please, don't misinterpret this, but seriously -
why don't you fuck off and die?
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Life imitates Perelman!
She is a literary detective, and in the first of the series, The Eyre Affaire is assigned the task of saving the integrity of that novel. (She first had to learn to jump both into and out of fiction."
S.J. Pereleman, "The Kugelmass Affair" (?) A maritally frustrated Col. lit. prof. has himself projected into "Madame Bovary" for a little lunch-time fun. Treat turns to trouble when Emma Bovary insists on coming to New York for the shopping and shows, staying at the Plaza and running up huge bills. Can Kugelmass get her back into the novel before his wife finds out? In the meantime, lit. students all over are finding strange characters in Flaubert's classic tale of infidelity. Hilarity ensues, and you will too.
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Elephantman is already dead.
Please, don't misinterpret this, but seriously - why don't you fuck off and die?
That's being unkind. He's simply a dumb animal that doesn't realize what's really at stake, able to act only on instinct and herd mentality.
But I agree. The world would be a cleaner place if he joined his ancestors in the ground.
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My pleasure, ondelette
The parts I've posted I transcribed myself (as part of my struggle to 'crack the code' of the discussion about email, to try to better understand the meaning of the 'foreign to foreign in the U.S.' "modernization" or "intelligence gap" argument). C-SPAN has only the video in their archives, which is my source for the recording (I was pleasantly surprised that they covered the event; my thanks to Mary at emptywheel's for alerting us to that). I checked the ABA site [abanet.org], but didn't see a transcript there; a full transcript would indeed be a good thing for the ABA to make available in this case, because Monday's discussion really added significantly to the content of the FISA debate. [Thanks and kudos go to Suzanne Spaulding for that and for a great job as moderator, and for the timely organization of this event. Especially as James Baker's extensive FISA knowledge is presumably about to 'go dark' publicly - as he takes up a new job as Deputy General Counsel for national security at Verizon Communications in about a month.]
I'm assuming for the moment that the 'pen register' and 'trap and trace' references Kate made are to call detail record (as opposed to actual message content) surveillance - data that's collected to enable the link or pattern analysis that the House Judiciary Committee's RESTORE report pretty explicitly references as being authorized by the House bill.
Your elaboration last thread about the roving-around-a-fixed-center email scenario is an illuminating example of what I think is the cause of the FISC warrant 'backlog' that PAA has since removed. Presumably just about a year ago, various FISC judges were struggling with this very issue in an effort to interpret the Fourth Amendment and FISA in the age of email.