Hold Fast

The Drum Major Institute has put out their annual score card on how Congress rates on middle class issues. You can go see how your state’s congressional delegation stacks up and what issues are included in their metric.
One thing that is particularly impressive is that this year, the vote on the Civil Justice part of […]

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Tim Stark at CQ has new information about what House Democrats are doing on FISA. The short version is that they’re circumventing the intra-congressional negotiations for compromise legislation and taking another shot at a bill in the House. That was not entirely clear in this morning’s NY Times piece by Eric Lichtblau.
House Democrats plan to […]

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Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reports a new possible deal on FISA coming out of the House:
The tentative proposal worked out by House Democratic leaders, officials said, has three main elements.
In continued defiance of the White House, House Democratic leaders are readying a proposal that would reject giving legal protection to the phone […]

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Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing interviews AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn. In the interview, Klein mentions that only Chris Dodd has presented his story before Congress, and according to Klein, “[Dodd] got run over by his own party leadership who seems determined to do the work of the NSA […]

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Another day, another major article documenting unprecedented domestic surveillance operations by an organization that has no mandate for operating on US soil. Today’s Wall Street Journal article by Siobhan Gorman goes into great detail on what the NSA has been doing under the Bush administration and how it has partnered with other federal agencies to […]

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Democrat Bill Foster won a special election in the 14th congressional  district of Illinois, Dennis Hastert’s old district. One of the key aspects of Foster’s campaign against Republican Jim Oberweis that was encouraging was that Foster took a very strong stance in favor of the Constitution and against retroactive immunity. In a statement to Matt […]

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Matthew Yglesias:
Basically, Bush wants a ton of torture, McCain prefers a moderate level of torture. This is one of several reasons why I, unlike Hillary Clinton, don’t think McCain passes the “commander in chief” threshold in a particularly impressive way. I’d like a commander-in-chief who’s prepared to govern the country in a manner consistent with […]

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We will likely know next week whether or not Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on Democrats caving on FISA is substantively correct or not. He has said it comes from unimpeachable sources and while some in the House are denying it, it seems others are corroborating it.
The entire process on this legislation since the Senate passed the […]

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Glenn Greenwald breaks word of the House “compromise” legislation that will effectively give the Bush administration everything they want, closely in line to the bad Senate legislation. It seems that the House will pass a Title I bill that has some minor changes from the Senate bill and set up a separate vote for retroactive […]

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