I was wondering about the feasibility of attempting to arrange a protest outside of the Senate on July 8th where everyone recites the Fourth Amendment while the updates to FISA are being debated. Does anyone think this is a good idea? -- Silash

I do, Silash. I think one of the main hurdles to being heard is that Senators never see Americans protesting their actions face to face. Of course, having the idea, and finding a way to feasibly implement it, are two very different things. I've long thought that protestors (not decked out in pink crowns, etc., but wearing their normal attire) in Congressional offices, in the House and Senate galleries, and walking the halls, carrying protest signs and video cameras (if possible) is the way to put pressure they'll notice on Members of Congress. But, realistically, how many Americans can afford to travel to D.C. to do that?

As for the current "District Work Period," when theoretically members are in their home districts closer to their constituents... Ben Masel's diary Monday - that was on the recommended list at DailyKos for more than 12 hours - asked commenters to list public appearances this week by their Senators. 250-some-odd comments later, I spotted one allusion to a possible appearance by Senator Salazar in Colorado this Thursday. The first order of business in this effort may be to call the offices of the 20 Democrats (who last voted for cloture on the bill itself, including immunity, in February) and ask them to list scheduled public appearances, if any, by their Senators during this self-described "District Work Period."

Again, these are the Democratic Senators who voted in February, post-amendments, to invoke cloture on the FISA-shrinking, American-data-funneling bill containing immunity:

Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Tom Carper, Bob Casey, Kent Conrad, Dianne Feinstein, Daniel Inouye, Tim Johnson, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Blanche

Lincoln, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Ken Salazar, Jim Webb, Sheldon Whitehouse

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2008_record&page=S891&position=all

The thirteen I think we should focus on pressuring (because we need just 11 of them to join the 29 Democrats who opposed final cloture in February, in order to block final cloture July 8th):

California's Dianne Feinstein

Colorado's Ken Salazar

Delaware's Tom Carper

Florida's Bill Nelson

Hawaii's Daniel Inouye

Indiana's Evan Bayh

Missouri's Claire McCaskill

Montana's Max Baucus

North Dakota's Kent Conrad

Pennsylvania's Bob Casey

Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse

Virginia's Jim Webb

Wisconsin's Herb Kohl

Jesselyn Radack made a valiant effort to call many of these offices on Monday [I don't think she was asking specifically about July 8's critical cloture vote, post-amendments, though; the less we focus on cloture, the more that vote will be blown off as irrelevant by Senators, though it's our best shot at stopping immunity]. But getting a staffer's vague account of what a Senator will do, is not the same as getting it in the Senator's own words in response to a reporter or a constituent question. The problem is finding the Senators so that they can be publicly asked and pinned down as to why they hold the position they do.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/30/82056/9464/70/544027

For the record, since Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to pretend that the House somehow amended the bill that the Senate passed in February so as to make it meaningfully better (Pelosi still calls the Senate bill "unacceptable"), here's how the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (who, along with the White House and Rockefeller, originally wrote the Senate bill in the first place), describes the changes that were made to the Senate bill by Hoyer's frenetic backroom dealing:

"We sat down together on the Senate Intelligence Committee and began, on a bipartisan basis, to work out a permanent solution to FISA. I am very thankful we could do it. We put in a great deal of work. We spent a lot of time with the DNI, with the lawyers and the operatives for the program, and Senator Rockefeller and I worked, in a bipartisan fashion, to come up with a strong committee bill that we passed out of the Senate later on a 68-to-29 vote.

.

I thank my colleagues on the committee, their staff, and all the Members of Congress who supported us, particularly the 68 who came and voted aye to pass the FISA amendments in February.

That started the process that led us to where we are today. There is a strong bipartisan product before us. There were changes, cosmetic changes largely, made that the House believed were important and the intelligence community assured us would not interfere with their ability to collect information under the structure we had set forth in the FISA amendments that were passed by the Senate.

That is where we are today." - Kit Bond of Missouri, 6/26/08

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2008_record&page=S6214&position=all

[Jfitzgerald, I think you've come to the right place to discuss that topic. You are absolutely right about the glorification of the presidency in modern America, in my opinion. The national (corporate-censored) media effectively covers only the presidency today, to the exclusion of Congress, and many Americans now think that their future is entirely in the hands of the man who will be our next benevolent Constitutional dictator. Partly, of course, because our own power as vested in the Article I branch of our government has effectively been ceded - with or without our approval - to the corporations who now fund the seats of cooperative Congressional incumbents. Yet no president - Obama included - can force the Congress to re-exert its own powers to check the Executive Branch. Idling those abusive presidential powers until the next faithless Republican president takes office to re-assert them is absolutely not equivalent to a Congress forcing back those encroachments upon its authority whether the incumbent president likes it or not.]

P.S. Many thanks, selise.

You acknowledge (I think) that there is a difference between attacking a candidate's qualifications to hold office and attacking his ideas about what the holder of that office should do, ie. his policy positions.

Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. If my experience is in efficiently running death camps, I should be attacked for that, regardless of whether I say that we should not have death camps. I shouldn't be allowed to use that to fill in the blank for "government experience."

The problem here is that you and Obama have accepted the media's and McCain's framing of the conversation. There's no reason to do so. This is truthiness over truth. It's corrosive.

Your complaint is that in his attack on Clark, Obama is playing only by his own rules, while Clark has not agreed to those rules.

Nope.

Clark, by the way, no doubt understands this, takes no offense at Obama's attack, and imagines he is still being useful to Obama's campaign, even when in this case being useful requires, paradoxically, being condemned.

I agree.