Doggett will vote against, I asked him via staff to speak out on the floor as well, but staff didn't know if he would do that. Given the self-satisfied look and expressions of Smith, Boehner, et al., it appears the fix is truly in.

Very well, retribution it is.

I wonder how many have politicians etc., have been part time carpenters.

I wonder if they would know how to plug in a toaster without an electrician?

They are shocking.

At least Walt Whitman tended the DC's wounded soldiers before he had a stroke.

I visited the Walt Whitman archive to try and find the short poem about Democratic.

I failed to find it but,

'Um are HYPOCRITES.

Show 'um the right hammer end?

Show Pelosi etc., how to swing a mallet!

'Um ETC., bang a mallard duck on a table.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the following statement after negotiators reached an agreement on FISA legislation. The House is scheduled to take up this legislation on Friday. Emanuel’s statement is below:

“The FISA legislation we will consider gives our intelligence community the tools it needs and the public the civil liberty protections it deserves. In addition, it rejects calls for automatic immunity for private sector companies. While this bill isn’t perfect, the perfect should never be the enemy of the good. I applaud the Democrats and Republicans who reached this compromise and produced legislation that deserves support from both sides of the aisle.”

Looks like my congressman is going to be getting a nasty letter from one of his constituents...

This is not why we fought so hard in 2006. So that arrogant cowards like Hoyer could bargain away our civil liberties. Since he seems to have neither a conscience nor intelligent political instincts, he is a detriment to the party. It's too late to get rid of him this year. But it's not too late to shape party leadership after the 2008 election. Let's blast him, and make him persona non grata among the new members who will be swept into office by the rising tide of progressivism. Once he has been marginalized, he will be much easier to excise from the body politic in 2010. I'm in. Fear seems to be the only language these moral midgets understand.

These sniveling cowards and crooks should no longer be called "Blue Dog" Democrats. They should be called WHITE FLAG Democrats.

People like Fred Hiatt are the scum of the earth. Their definition of "bipartisan" is giving the Republitard Fascists everything they want and groveling while doing so.

We need to primary these crooked, gutless wankers -the sooner the better.

I am still baffled on one question: How do I differentiate between a free society and a tyranny? Even if I accept that only labels are different, I need to know who hands out those labels. Who is the one I have to trust/believe in labelling?

Until recently I thought a tyranny is at its core defined by , 'the tyrant can aks anything from any citizen, and the citizen has to comply'. That can obviously not be right since there seems to be a difference if one is asked by the good King George [of England], President George [of the USA] or Ali Khamenei. In case of the King I throw tea in the ocean, start a revolution and come up with the best constitution in the world. In the case of Khamenei I tell him to bugger off and wave a big stick ...

as The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt are patting the Democrats on the head:

CONGRESSIONAL leaders of both parties should be commended for drafting legislation that brings the country's surveillance laws into the 21st century . .

This just in...the 21st century has just been declared a Fascist free-for all.

Pelosi, Hoyer, et al, should be swinging from a balcony, their corporate johns by their sides.

How anyone can continue to support the Democratic party en masse is beyond me.

I am genuinely concerned that many Democrats are in the same bed as the Republicans. The American people are indeed in trouble. Peripheral issues and political correctness will no longer trump the foundations of our Constitution.

This still has to go the Senate, doesn't it? Can't Dodd still save the day again?

I'll be waiting for the announcement.

Don't hold your breath. I have a better chance of getting a threesome with Jessica Biel and Madeline Zima.

There is no mention of the current disaster, however, which makes the letter somewhat weird. I hope that he will indeed be part of a filibuster. But, once again, where is he in public?

What you got is an old email, written after the House in March passed its own bill. It hasn't been updated yet to say what Obama thinks about the new bill. Maybe they'll get around to saying something before the vote.

The Dems have caved, and GOP Rep. Wilson has just clobbered them ANYWAY, from the floor.

This was so predictable. Unless you're a Democratic member of Congress.

All of the sadness and disappointment here is heartening in a bitter way--it shows some thread of common interests between us. While the institutions, intended to protect us, turn on us in selfish betrayal, I am left to turn a few pages. This is one of my favorites:

When blackguards and murderers under cover of their offices

accuse the world of those villanies

which they themselves invent to torture it--

we have no choice but to bend to their designs,

buck them or be trampled while our thoughts gnaw,

snap and bite within us helplessly--

unless we learn from that to avoid being as they are,

how love will rise out of its ashes if we water it,

tie up the slender stem and keep the image of its lively flower chisled upon our minds.

A poem by William Carlos Williams, The Wedge, 1944, the Cummington Press

I just called my congressman's office and told the rep answering the phone that Rahm Emanuel must think his constituents are pretty stupid - in his odious statement on the FISA "Agreement", he "applaud(s) the Democrats and Republicans who reached this compromise and produced legislation that deserves support from both sides of the aisle."

I said that if Rahm is so supportive of this measure then he must be getting a lot of calls from constituents who are also in favor of it. "No!" said the rep, "most people are strongly against it".

I asked why Rahm was pro-"compromise" if the people that elected him were not.

"I couldn't tell you that, sir, but I can tell you that he'll hear about it as soon as he gets back here."

Right . . .

I hope he shows his sorry face next Sunday at our Gay Pride Parade. The fifth congressional district of Illinois is not going to forget this!!