FISA Fight: Attack of the Epic....

[emilyg]

Today is going to go down as a dark day in our nation's history, as the Senate completes its total capitulation to the Bush administration and its corporate masters, through passing legislation that dramatically expands the government's surveillance powers and immunizes the companies responsible for illegally spying on us from any form of legal redress for the victims.

It's unbelievable that nearly three years of campaigning, legislating, debating, and shouting from the rooftops on this issue, one of the most important of the time, has had almost no effect. Worse yet, the new law that is about to be passed is the worst possible permutation imaginable--not only does it perform all the aforementioned perfidious tasks of justifying lawbreaking and expanding our surveillance state, it practically removes all oversight from the process and allows the surveillance system to be easily tailored to pick on purely domestic issues, ranging from illegal online gambling to P2P file sharing. All the Attorney General and the DNI have to do now is say, "Hey, the President authorized this. Here's his signature," and the FISA judge has to essentially sign off on a rubber-stamp for surveillance of potentially dozens--hundreds--of people, all without individual warrants. Because, of course, no sitting President or Attorney General would ever abuse such a system for their own ends. No sir.

This was a battle the Democrats absolutely could have won. They could have stood their ground and fought the new laws every step of the way, and gotten good press, more donations, and the respect of their constitutents. Instead, they knuckled under to protect their corrupt leadership from being hit by lawsuits for their part in the surveillance, and in so doing, granted one of the most corrupt and authoritarian American presidents in our history one of his greatest victories--the unchecked expansion of "Total Information Awareness," a vast data dragnet where your every move is catalogued, cross-referenced, and analyzed for "suspicious behavior." It's the stated
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-bosworth/fisa-fight-attack-of-the_b_111699.html

[NattPang]

1. This was a battle the Democrats absolutely could have won?

Sounds like someone's theory.

Does this writer understand
the times we live in?
Where a Corporate media
decides who wins elections,
which General must be shut down,
and which terror alarm becomes
big news.

Tim Russerts funeral should have
given this writer a clue.
I didn't see him stopping that.