There are some days when I wonder if it wouldn’t be more satisfying to throw my computer at a brick wall than continue to inform myself of the Bush administration’s march away from democracy, the legislature’s commitment to doing nothing to stymie these activities, and the media’s refusal to treat any of this as worthy of national attention.
After reading Glenn Greenwald’s recap of Attorney General Mukasey’s testimony before the Senate, I’m leaning towards the computer-at-wall option.
Via Joel Johnson, what may well be an early draft of the MacBook Air ad…
Roy at alicublog has a review of There Will Be Blood that really captures what makes this such a powerful and disturbing movie. I saw it a couple weeks ago and had trouble fully circumscribing the film in a way that allowed me to adequately respond to it. I recommend giving Roy’s review a read, though there are some mild spoilers in it, so you may want to hold off if you haven’t seen the film yet.
Memo to Al Wynn: desperation is not an attractive cologne. Voters can smell it from a mile away. And when the traditional press runs stories that come this close to calling you a liar and a moron, you know you’ve gone too far.
Matt Stoller provides the background:
I’m reading through this complaint the Al Wynn campaign just filed against Donna Edwards with the FEC. He literally accuses SEIU, the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, Anna Burger, EMILY’s List, the Arca Foundation, ACORN, and the Tides Foundation of campaign finance violations, though as you can see it’s kind of hilarious what independent experts think. I hope you’re proud of your endorsee, Speaker Pelosi. And I hope the rest of these groups come out forcefully against Wynn, mocking him mercilessly for his nonsensical claims.
What’s remarkable is that after reprinting wins vinegar-soaked bluster, the Baltimore Sun actually provides space for an independent analysis of Wynn’s charges. What follows is one of the most hilarious takedowns you’ll ever see aimed at long-time incumbents by the press.
An attorney with the independent Campaign Legal Center in Washington who was asked by The Sun to review the complaint said it didn’t appear to contain any facts that would constitute illegal collaboration.
“Interestingly, and unlike most complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission, there’s not a single provision of federal campaign finance law directly cited in the complaint,” attorney Paul Ryan said. “Several of the allegations, in my view, make clear the complainant doesn’t really have a clear understanding of what constitutes coordination under federal law.”
Talking to some people that know, Paul Ryan is a top elections law attorney and he wouldn’t be lining up on the side of “no violation” if it wasn’t air tight. He’s calling bullshit on Wynn’s charges: the complaint has no argument in it and Wynn’s campaign doesn’t know what the law says.
This FEC complaint is an effort to create the appearance of impropriety in Donna Edwards relationships with a wide range of progressive, grassroots organizations. The reality is that this sorry tactic is only necessary because Al Wynn is facing possible defeat at the hands of Donna Edwards and her people-powered movement.
Donate to Donna Edwards through ActBlue.
Via Open Left, Senator Russ Feingold gives a very tight encapsulation of the fundamental problem with the Protect America Act and current efforts by Republicans in the Senate to keep there from being judicial and congressional oversight of domestic surveillance activities. “Trust us” is not adequate when we’re dealing with the powers a government has over the rights and privacy of our citizenry.
Senator Feingold notes that as the law stands now, Americans surrender to the government tremendous powers to eavesdrop on their phone calls and read their emails. Glenn Greenwald summarizes it in slightly greater detail:
With all the focus on the travesty of telecom amnesty, it has been easy to forget just how Draconian the Protect America Act really is, how radical are the warrantless eavesdropping powers it vested in the President. In essence, that bill allowed the Government to eavesdrop on every single international telephone call made or received by an American with no restrictions or judicial oversight whatsoever, and further empowered the Government to read every international email sent or received by an American with no restrictions or judicial oversight.
I know something about what it feels like to be an American whose communications would fall into the categories listed above by Feingold and Greenwald. Prior to joining the Dodd campaign, I worked at a non-profit organization called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT). SFT is an international campaigning organization that works towards Tibetan independence. Though SFT is headquartered in New York, it has offices in Canada and India. On a daily basis, I was making and receiving phone calls to India, Canada, England, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and countless other countries around the world. Emails, faxes, text messages, and VOIP calls came in and went out from around the world too. Yet as Senator Feingold notes in the video, my colleagues and I had to trust that every single one of these communications between students and young people and nonviolent organizers around the world was something worthy of respectful privacy from the Bush administration. Trust was the extent of our safety net.
I don’t know if anything we said or wrote was ever opened and analyzed by the Bush administration. But I know the thought that doing work that I believed in guaranteed that my communications were not private, that I could only trust my government to honor my privacy, makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Trust is not the basis of law. Laws are past to ensure that there is something deeper, stronger than men. Throughout the Bush administration, those in power have consistently sought to expand their power in contravention of existing laws. Sometimes, when caught, they tried to change the laws themselves. But that was never their first inclination, as we saw illegal, warrantless surveillance practices begin shortly after President Bush took office and long before the September 11th attacks.
The PAA was a law passed under duress, a law that replaced the structure of oversight with the discretion of men. The Intelligence Committee’s revision is equally bad. As Marcy Wheeler notes, “the SSCI has inadequate protection for the privacy of Americans, particularly when they communicate with people in other countries.” Retroactive immunity may be getting much of the attention in the FISA fight, but it is by no means the only concern in front of the Senate. We have to continue to recognize the scope of the issue in front of us and work diligently to pressure the Senate to do the right thing by ending warrantless wiretapping and stopping retroactive immunity.
Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.
Glenn Greenwald explains that the word does not mean what you think it means.
John Edwards is dropping out this afternoon.
Prepare for thousands of diaries on DailyKos and MyDD with this as their general theme:
Seriously though, this is a shame that was going to happen for a long time. Edwards was the last progressive voice in the race and a lot of liberal Democrats will be left with hard choices between two candidates that don’t really share their political values.
Update:
I think it’s worth nothing that other than Chris Dodd, John Edwards was the candidate whose political views I found most similar to my own. Edwards brought progressivism and populism to the presidential race unlike any other candidate. As such, he was able to validate a political analysis about corporate power and economic disparities on the national stage. The Democratic field is less ideologically diverse with Edwards’ exit and that is a bad thing at this stage in the primary in this blogger’s view.
The NY Times pretty much nails Giuliani’s precipitous fall from national frontrunner to punchline for jokes by Ron Paul and Fred Thompson supporters.
In interviews Tuesday, even before he gave a concession speech in which he spoke of his campaign in the past tense, Mr. Giuliani described his strategic mistakes, suggesting that his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand; he in fact competed hard in New Hampshire, to remarkably poor effect.
Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.
Giuliani was a bad mayor with fascist tendencies and an egotistical side that would make George W. Bush blush. He took advantage of a national tragedy, first for personal economic gain, then for personal political gain. His campaign’s reliance on 9/11 demeaned the victims of the attack and the nation that moved on from it. The victims’ families asked him to stop. The fire fighters asked him to stop. But perhaps only devastating humiliation in his losses to joke candidates like Ron Paul and Fred Thompson will dissuade him from continuing to profiteer from the attacks of September 11th. After all, it’s all about Rudy in his mind.
I can hardly think of a politician that deserved this public and national a humiliation more than Rudy Giuliani.
The Senate also passed a 15 day extension to the Protect America Act late last night. It will head to President Bush’s desk to be signed into law, presumably.
While this will give the Senate more time to negotiate a better solution for FISA reform legislation, it also gives us more time put pressure on them to ensure they end warrantless wiretapping and hold fast against retroactive immunity.
Continue the pressure today by writing your Senators through CREDO Action’s email tool.
I’ll have more updates as the day goes on about what we can expect from the next two weeks of debate, negotiations, and voting.
The Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank, has posted their response to Bush’s State of the Union address (Full disclosure: I’m a member in DMI’s Netroots Advisory Council). Here’s a clip from their section on FISA and retroactive immunity.
“Establishing after-the-fact that it was acceptable for telecommunications companies to break the law and spy on American citizens has nothing to do with protection from terrorism, but everything to do with shielding powerful corporations from accountability for their actions. Granting retroactive immunity in this case would set a dangerous precedent for corporations to trample the rights of middle-class Americans.”
There’s much more on immunity at the link above. To read the full report, which touches on the economy, education, health care, and other issues from Bush’s speech last night, click here.
Hold Fast 