Or, maybe Dodd...

Certainly my hero of the day, if ever there was one.

Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
Dodd's Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill
December 17, 2007 07:56 PM

Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.

The measure was part of a greater bill to reorganize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Earlier on Monday, the Senate, agreed to address a bill that would have overhauled FISA, authorized the monitoring of people outside the United States, given secret courts the power to approve aspects of surveillance, and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for past cooperation.

But the threat of Dodd's filibuster, aimed primarily at the latter measure, persuaded Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, to table the act until January. A compromise on the immunity will ostensibly be worked out in the interim period.

I have been watching CNN for 4-5 hours today and didn’t hear this story mentioned ONCE. Gee, Time Warner. Issue with warrantless wire tapping? Reid tried to be too clever with a trick to send both competing bills to the floor, but rules dictate that the first bill out of committee goes first on the floor, and the version without the immunity was considered a fall back, if you will.

Reid was inundated with calls and emails (all of which were, ironically, scooped up and sorted for future actions). Doesn’t that idea just work against the “If you have nothing to hide” or “We are only watching the bad guys” arguments? The act of sorting is spying. And if they are data mining, seems I write an awful lot of words that would be interesting to a data mining program. Just clearing me means I have been spied on.

See why they are so afraid? Beyond the lies and timeline problems, the financial risk is too much OF COURSE.

Not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist here after the TW comment, but Hillary could be running against GWB (and showing her experience at the same time, thus trumping Obama) by speaking out against the things he has done that she is going to change – like torture, wiretapping, Justice Dept, any of the 1100 signing statements (compared to the first Clinton dynasty’s 200 in 8 years) instead of taking their money and staying mum.

It’s called leadership, statesmanship, public service - not politics.

UPDATE

I had a thought.

Why would 76 senators support retro-active immunity for the telecoms?

First, the right.
Wired reported that there seems to be a correlation between the telecom company Qwest, the one company that did not give in to government requests, and federal contracts as far back as Feb 2001 (also reported by Stace). The admin wants to protect itself from whatever carrots and sticks were used, up to and including the Department of ‘Justice’ to get its way PRIOR to 9/11.

The White House doesn’t want to protect the telecoms, it needs it to protect itself.


The Left
Duplicity
Too many of the members of the congressional leadership were in fact briefed on many of these issues and didn’t raise concerns because, the tide was not in that direction at the time, what with terror plots in every mosque and and a couple wars to manufacture. They didn’t ask, protest or do enough at the time and its coming back to haunt them. Picture Sen Clinton’s Iraq vote fallout spread across both parties on issues that go beyond privacy and reflect the corruption.

and Power
The scandals cut right across every govt department and branch, the intelligence community, military, political fields – even the media companies that would act as a watch dog (see why they are rushing the new ownership rules? Once you’re invested in gov’t, you work to protect it).

We over-reacted and once we did, all the political weak-knees in Congress gave in, believing they wanted to be on the winning team.

I love my country. Can I have it back, please?

Alexis de Tocqueville
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.”