All week I've read your emails, seen your comments online, and heard your phone calls.  You don't want the flawed FISA bill to become law.  I hear you and I wanted to let you know that I'm going to do everything in my power to stop this bill.
Much as I would like to I can't respond to each one of you individually so I've decided to respond online via video. I'd appreciate if you would take a moment to watch and pass it along to your friends and family or anyone you know that cares about preserving our right to privacy.

 

Thank you all for standing with me and speaking out about stopping the FISA bill.  It's going to be an uphill battle but your words of support are a constant reminder of why this particular battle is worth waging.

Sincerely,

Russ Feingold
United States Senator

contact your senator...again if you already have, and harry reid as well as obama's senate office and express your feelings regarding the importance of this issue.

he and dodd need all the support they can get.

today the RATpublican'ts in the senate killed a bill that would have placed a windfall profits tax on the profits of the largest oil companies...the legislation was turned back by a 51-43 vote.

more below the fold

house passes fisa without retroactive immunity, 213-197. 11 dems crossed over and voted nay. via tpm keep the pressure on until the senate gets onboard.

the chimperor keeps lying and threatening to veto the bill unless he gets everything he wants, and what he wants is carte blanche to continue his illegal spying and the RATpublican faithful blindly follow along behind by refusing to participate in the process until the 11th hour, where they have pulled a procedural ploy and requested a rare closed [secret] session to debate the fisa legislation. the same opportunity that they derided back in february when it was proposed by a group of liberal democrats led by Intelligence Comm. member Rush Holt (D-NJ):

Boehner's spokesman, Kevin Smith, derided the secret session proposal as a stalling tactic.

"There are clear rules and procedures for how Congress handles classified information," Smith said. "This nonsense is nothing more than another stalling tactic from a bunch of liberals who don't want to give our intelligence officials all the tools they need to keep America safe."

the request was granted by speaker pelosi, and a 1 hour debate will be held in secret session tonight, with the vote scheduled for tomorrow morning. this closed session is something that happens very rarely in the house:

Secret sessions are fairly rare, according to the House Historian's Office. Since 1830, the House has met behind doors only three times; 1979, 1980 and 1983.

so far, the democratic leadership has continued to offer the RATs one opportunity after another to participate in an open and bipartisan <gag> manner, and have received nothing in return.

more below...

long story short, the supremes have refused to hear the ACLU's challenge to the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, without comment.

the importance of this decision, which puts an end to the legal challenge, in relation to the FISA statute, especially the teleCON immunity provision, is smartly summed up by Glenn Greenwald:

... This decision does mean, however, that EFF's pending lawsuits in San Francisco against AT&T, Verizon and the other telecoms are now the sole remaining vehicle for finding out what the Bush administration actually did when spying on Americans for years without warrants, and as importantly, is the last hope for obtaining a judicial ruling as to whether the President broke the law and violated the Constitution when doing so. If Jay Rockefeller and Dick Cheney have their way and retroactive amnesty is granted to these telecoms, those lawsuits will be forever dismissed and Americans will remain indefinitely in the dark about how our own Government spied on us, and will forever lose the opportunity to have a court rule whether the Government broke the law and violated our Constitutional rights...

the house will be back in session next week, and the full court media onslaught is already underway.

chimpy, from his saturday radio address, leading the way:

"At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning a new attack on America."

contact your Representative... Senator...Speaker Pelosi...and Majority Leader Reid    

Update [2008-2-12 13:23:36 by dada]: the FISA Betrayal in the senate is complete and now it's up to the people's house to uphold the rule of law.

contact your representative, speaker pelosi, and sign the FDL Petition to Tell House Members to Stand Firm Behind the RESTORE Act!

yeah, yeah...l know...l've become a one trick pony...but it'll be a great trick if we can pull it off, and it wouldn't have even come to this juncture without a loud and consistent outcry

the senate will vote on the amendments to the fisa bill tomorrow, tuesday, and it doesn't look promising at the moment.

as Glenn Greenwald put it today:

The telecom amnesty debate is controversial but it is not complicated. The Government asked telecoms to break numerous federal laws in exchange for profit. Some telecoms refused to do so and others -- such as AT&T and Verizon -- agreed to break the law for years. Which behavior do we want to encourage and reward -- (a) telecoms which turned down the substantial government contracts to enable warrantless spying on Americans because doing so was illegal, or (b) the telecoms which purposely broke our laws by allowing illegal government spying on Americans? How can that even be a debatable question?

As the Senate votes on amnesty tomorrow, the only real question is whether telecoms which broke our laws should be accountable in a court of law for their illegal behavior (the way things are supposed to work in a country that lives under the rule of law) or whether Congress, lavishly funded by this industry, will pass a law that has no purpose other than to give them the retroactive license to break our country's laws with impunity.

more below...
   

CREDO action, part of the Working Assets, is making it easy to contact your senators and urging them to support the Dodd-Feingold amendment stripping the retroactive amensty from the bill under consideration. click the link above to send this message, or one of your own:

I'm writing you today to urge you to vote for the Dodd-Feingold amendment to pull retroactive amnesty for the telecom companies out of the wiretapping legislation currently under consideration.  If that amendment is not approved, I ask that you vote against the entire bill.

The rule of law is important to me, and I hope it is to you as well.  Both the Bush Administration and the big telecom companies knew that FISA was the law of the land when they started eavesdropping without the warrants required under FISA.  Retroactively granting amnesty for these violations would make a mockery of the principle that no one is above the law...

additional contact information for the other senators, such as reid, feinstein, HERE, that includes phone, fax and web contact info.

free fax services, if you so choose are available at FreeFax, eFax, and faxzero.

for more options and details see Christy Hardin Smith's (fdl)
article at alternet, and BooMan's excellent FISA: What to Ask of Your Senators.

let's light those phone lines and fill up the inboxes, shall we.

lTMF'sA

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".
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"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."...

say what! "first use to prevent the use"...mindnumbing orwellian doublespeak; and there's more...

US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search

click screen for message

more below...

mosaic by Azael @ Hellblazer 2007

Bush's efforts to negotiate a long-term U.S-Iraq pact may remove troops as an '08 election issue...

Camp Arifjan in the desert kingdom of Kuwait... he indicated that he was setting in motion policies that could dramatically affect the presidential race--and any decisions the next president makes in 2009.

In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries...

more below...

in a move, not unexpected, that has been opposed by both demoRATs and Ratpublicans

Christmas for Big Media

...Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin plans to hold a vote on rules that will let the largest media companies swallow up more local newspapers and TV stations.

...Martin is forging on with the vote, which he knows he will win, despite bipartisan Congressional requests to delay the vote and the adamant opposition of two of the five FCC commissioners...

[...]

Just last week, senators from both parties berated FCC Chairman Kevin Martin about his big giveaway to Big Media. He didn't flinch. He's now thumbing his nose at both Congress and the public.

The Nation

so it now appears as though, regardless of concern expressed from both sides of the aisle, that once again, big media, gets what they want...not that there ever was much doubt of the outcome.

more below

© don wright

the latest squabbling between the house and senate demoRATs reached another nadir yesterday, with majority leader reid refusing to bring the competing bills to the floor for debate.

it looks like the demoRATs are preparing yet another capitulation, led by reid, with probably no more than a whimper of disapproval from pelosi. once again giving carte blanche in the name of security and compromise, to whatever BushCo™ wants; the constitution and rule of law be damned.

more below...

Senate Blocks Energy Bill

...Environmental groups, consumer advocates and alternative-energy companies have hailed the bill, but a broad array of opponents, including cattlemen, coal producers and multinational oil companies, are lining up to block it.

[...]

The largest source of these alternative fuels remains corn, and food producers argue that diversion of corn to fuel production is driving up feed prices for cattle, pigs and poultry. They oppose the bill because it raises their production costs and, ultimately, the price of food on the table.

"The ethanol number is definitely too high. It burns more feed and food than we would like," said Jesse Sevcik, vice president for legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute. "The hog diet is 80 percent corn, and when corn prices double, those producers' input costs go up pretty substantially."

The oil industry hopes to eliminate a provision that rescinds more than $13 billion in tax breaks granted in 2004 and 2005, when Congress was in Republican hands. Democratic supporters of the bill said the oil companies could easily afford the new taxes because they were earning record profits on oil selling for more than $90 a barrel. But the oil companies said the money would come from revenue needed to develop new sources of oil and would lead to higher prices at the gasoline pump.

[...]

In the Senate, the prospects for the renewable electricity standard and the oil industry tax package are highly uncertain. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the Senate could pass an energy bill without those two "millstones."

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, declined to predict passage, with or without the renewable energy or tax provisions.

"We're going to try very hard," he had said Thursday afternoon.

nyt

l'll bet you will, harry...

it seems the prospect of increased taxes on oil companies massive profits; in reality a 'roll-back' of $13b in tax breaks granted in 2004 - 05 by the RATbublican rubber stamp congress, plus another $8b that would have funded R&D and implementation of alternative energy technologies; was too much of a burden. not to mention the requirement that electric utilities generate 15% of their power from wind, solar, or geothermal sources.

while far from perfect, an understatement of gargantuan proportions, the measure would have placed the country on the path to a more sustainable energy future as well as cutting emissions that contribute to global warming.

more below...