or click sig for linky

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/20/bipartisanship/permalink/1f75d8b6455b032e229230d2b3e4b7b9.html

If you think this FISA thing is NOT a done deal, w/ every last one of the $%^&ing mother*&&^%ers OK with it, think again.

David Brooks said

"If you're a phone company executive, the government comes to you and asks you to do stuff, I think you should be protected if you refuse."

Fixed it for him.

A Pre-Emptive Attack on an October Surprise?

Just thinking out loud here, but I am reminded of how the Dem leadership caved on the Protect America Act, with rumors that from behind the scenes the Administration was warning of an imminent 9/11 scale attack. And that if happened, the Dems would be blamed

What if Obama did make a statement against the FISA bill and it lost then sometime before the election we experience a Terrorist attack ( I would'nt put it past the Right Wing-nuts) the media /McCain/Republicans would blast Obama and the Democrats which would cause dire consequences to the Election.

In that perspective the Dems were between a rock and hard place.

I will continue to support Act Blue going forward but will vote Obama come November.

Kudos

They're directing members to call

(866) 675-2008 (campaign main number)

and place opinion on FISA there.

I did so, by using option 6 on voice menu. Call went straight through, polite handling of call by campaign.

*******

GG et al.-- if you are still around, my understanding is that since this is a new bill for the senate, any senator can place a hold? Or have Reid's actions Friday precluded that. While Reid dishonored Dodd's hold, could he do so if both Dodd and Feingold placed hold? How about Obama?

It takes a huge leap of unearned faith to believe that Obama will make a "principled" choice for Supreme Court rather than a triangulated pig in a "bi-partisan" poke.

Chief Justice Lieberman? I think (really audacious hope!) I am being facetious here but I'd love to see the comments after his first Court justice, whoever it will be, is nominated. Start holding your breath now.

Face it. America is screwed, blued, and tattooed when this is our best hope!

Glenn, why not run these ads in Rep. John Barrow's district, the guy Obama did a support ad for, the guy who has a credible progressive opponent in a primary election the next few weeks?

Barrow predictably voted Yes on the FISA bill. His primary opponent, Regina Thomas, has publicly stated she would have voted No.Helping her get elected, even if our support significantly narrowed her margin of loss, would send a message to Obama that people who care about the Constitution will fight back.

Barrow is one of the three named targets of our campaign, for all the reasons you said. We’re trying to figure out how viable it is to make our efforts there worthwhile, but assuming we can, a big bulk of our resources are going to go into defeating Barrow on July 15.

One aspect being overlooked in this debate is this legislation legitimizes the technological infrastructure that makes sweeping warrantless surveillance possible.

Given that the apparatus is apparently here to stay, one would be foolish to presume that its use will be limited to to international communications. It will take just one act of home-grown terrorism for the government the expand the use of warrantless wiretapping to domestic communications.

Slippery slope, indeed.

One might argue that the threat of domestic terrorism isn't what it once was given our collective focus on the foreign threat. One would be mistaken. Consider the conditions that motivated Timothy McVeigh (Joel Dyer wrote an excellent book called Harvest of Rage in 1997 examining the motivations of the Militia Movement). If anything, the economic and social conditions for those people in McVeigh's demographic group have worsened in the intervening 10 years.

Consider also the fact that under an Obama administration (assuming he keeps his campaign promise--I know, a large assumption) we will soon have several tens of thousands of combat veterans returning from the Global War on Terror. A small but significant percentage of whom, like McVeigh, will be psychologically scarred, have legitimate grievances against their government (that will likely be under-addressed due to the budget constrictions left behind by Bush) and possess the necessary skills for wreaking serious havoc here at home.

It is a stone cold certainty that within the next eight years this column will be vigorously fighting the expansion of the domestic surveillance state.

I'm a big Obama supporter, but am under no illusions. I think he's head and shoulders above McCain, but he has flaws, like any politician. This latest move on his part underscores one of them. It also underscores an amazing tone-deafness that runs rampant in Washington. On both sides of the aisle.

There is nothing to be gained politically by Obama when he supports the capitulation. Nothing. There is no constituency of voters crying out for illegal surveillance and retroactive immunity. It doesn't exist. If anything, the opposite is the case. As in, voting against this garbage has the general support of Americans. Among those of us who have been paying attention, there is actually heated opposition to this trashing of the Constitution.

On legal, moral and ethical grounds, Obama would be right to filibuster. But the amazing thing about that is that he would also fire up the base like nothing in the last 40 years. He would energize, electrify, and galvanize that base unlike anything since the days of RFK.

Filibuster this bill and watch his popularity go through the roof. I'm positive about that. He would gain enormous political dividends by "doing the right thing."

That he won't is a mystery of a sort, with roots in cynical politics of the worst kind. If he really wants "change we can believe in," he must filibuster. It's not quite the makings of a Waterloo, but it's within a league or two.

But what really kills me is that in the last 48 hours, Glenn finally called on Obama to act like a leader, Obama failed to act like a leader, Glenn finally realizes that there is no Obamessiah and that our candidates have to be "vetted".... but still insists that McCain absolutely MUST be defeated.

Many of us who HAVE done the 'vetting' of Obama that Glenn now realizes should be done are convinced otherwise -- Glenn, of course, hasn't bothered to do that vetting, despite talking about how important it is, and demands that everyone else be just as much of a lemming as he is.

This is the last time I'm going to tell you this.

You just continue to lie about what I wrote in service of your deranged bitterness that your candidate lost. I didn’t support Obama or anyone else in the primary. I frequently criticized him. I defended Hillary Clinton numerous times from unfair press attacks. I never, as you claimed yesterday, said that Hillary should get out of the race. And I specifically and on several occasions criticized Obama for his lack of leadership on this issue.

Every time I point out that you are lying about what you are writing that I said, you run away to some other blog to show off your extreme derangement and then come back here and repeat your lies the next day as if it never happened.

I’m not going to bother to keep spending time correcting your lies. I’m just going to delete them and then you can add this venue to the long list that have done the same with you as you run around saying what a martyr you are because people have banned you and won’t allow you to use their sites to spew outright lies about them and then run away and refuse to answer.