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.

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think about those attributes for a moment. are they characteristics that you would categorize as a positive contribution to the psychological makeup of an individual, or even a group  of people...let alone actions that were taken with that as the underlying principle?

what if they were the primary doctrine, vis-a-vis foreign relations, of your government?

as a rational person you would, l presume, see those actions as the mark of a country awash in the profligate pursuit of it's own hubristic goals.  their actions, unmoored from the foundations of the underlying philosophy of their own founding, awash in the an aggressive pursuit to control the actions of those over which it has no claim to sovereignty,

what happens when arrogant omnipotence is blatantly, with extreme prejudice, exerted over a sovereign nation that has long been an ally? canada and great britain for example?  

welcome to the ussa, where we're the biggest, baddest asses on the planet.

 "whatta ya gonna do about it?"

more below the belt...

from ww l, and ww ll:

you thought bill-o was nauseating?  HA! HA! HA!....or is that HO! HO! HO!

more below...

As they say … Breaking News from the Senate.

Forgive me if some of this is in the weeds, I’ll try and make the parliamentary process as painless as possible.

1. Within the last hour, the Senate Judiciary Committee just reported out a FISA bill that DOES NOT include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans.

2. This means the Judiciary bill moves to the full Senate WITHOUT the dangerous language included.

3. Retroactive immunity will, however, surely be introduced as an amendment to the FISA bill.

4. If needed Senator Dodd will filibuster any amendment seeking to add retroactive immunity to the underlying bill. By filibustering, he will force the opposition to find 60 votes to pass the provision. It will be a lot more difficult for those who would enable the erosion of our Constitution to find the 60 votes necessary to stop immunity on its own than it would be for us to find the 40 needed to sustain a filibuster of the bill as a whole if it included immunity.

Today is a great victory for all of us — and another example of Chris Dodd’s leadership.

If it wasn’t for our efforts, together, retroactive immunity would be well on its way to sailing through the Senate … largely unnoticed.

The fight continues, for sure, but this was a big victory today.

Visit www.ChrisDodd.com for more updates as they happen.

We’ll be in touch.

Tim Tagaris

Chris Dodd for President

props are in order, well done!

and telecon immunity is still on the table.

According to the ACLU, it will be 'marked-up' by the judiciary committee tomorrow morning. according to an email from the ACLU:

The Democratic Judiciary Committee staff is floating substitution language that would make the government responsible for illegal activity committed by the telecom companies.

Congress must reject any attempts to provide immunity to those that broke the law. If the government assumes legal responsibility for lawbreaking for the telecoms, the companies will be let-off the hook for their illegal actions. It also means the taxpayers will be responsible for any damages. The ACLU strongly and firmly opposes the substitution, which is, in essence, telecom immunity.

If this substitution language gets enacted, we know that the government will stop the lawsuits by arguing: states secrets, executive privilege, and sovereign immunity in order to stop the people from having their day in court against the telecom giants.
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h/t C&L

So, it would appear that the demoRATs are about to make it possible for the government to not only direct the telecoms to do their bidding without oversight, but to place the onus of any financial losses, via lawsuits...in the unlikely event they ever get to trial...on you as well.

By the way, this lovely piece of legislation, if approved, won't sunset for six years: 31 December 2013...two presidential elections out, not to mention the mid-terms.

Christy at FDL has compiled a contact information list, and Chris Dodd has a whip count posted on his Dodd for Pres. site as well, that shows the current positions of the members of the committee.

A detailed, section by section analysis is availabe at the ACLU site HERE as well as a one-page synopsis HERE.

Additional contact information, including web contact addresses, may be found for the senate HERE.

Another day, another outrage.

lTMF'sA