I guess the aggressive progressives got to some of the Democrats in the United States Senate.

The vote on retroactive immunity for the telecom giants has been delayed until July 7, according to a hurried and brief statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon.

This is how the potential victory, at least in the short term, was reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group that has fought as hard as any other for our Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches…

THE SENATE DELIVERED AN UNEXPECTED REPRIEVE ON TELECOM IMMUNITY THURSDAY NIGHT, deciding to delay the vote on the FISA Amendments Act until after the July 4th recess!

Earlier in the week, the mainstream press was reporting that the immunity bill would see swift and uncontested approval. Senate leaders emphasized that passing an immunity bill this week was one of their highest priorities. And yet, in the end, the bill simply wasn’t as uncontested and noncontroversial as the pundits and politicians thought it was. Overwhelming grassroots action and the efforts of Senators Dodd, Feingold, and Bingaman were critical in giving allies a broader window of opportunity to make an impact on telecom immunity legislation.

For more, click here…

I guess we won’t have to serve them those Florida tomatoes with the salmonella sauce after all : )

Guest Editorial: Cheers and Jeers
From DailyKos.com
by Bill in Portland Maine

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Dear President Bush,

It’s been awhile since we talked. Just busy, I guess.

Anyway, I want to Congratulate you. You win. In fact, you win big-time. It’s time for me to admit it: you came, you saw, you kicked ass.

Over the course of the past seven and a half years, you and your wingman Dick Cheney have gotten virtually everything you demanded, much if it without a fight.

You used a national tragedy to clamp down on Americans’ civil liberties and launch a war against a country that neither caused that tragedy nor threatened us at all.

You pretty much halted government-supported scientific research and environmental protection in their tracks. You did nothing to solve the health care crisis.

You politicized the Justice Department. You worked hard to breach the church-state levee in the government, and then played patty-cake while the real levees collapsed into countless people’s back yards. You gave big business (especially big oil, big finance and big military-industrial complex) free reign to “self-police.” You made your elite base very, very rich, while using your shiny lapel pin to awe-strike your poorer, more ignorant base.

I mean, you are so talented that you even managed to break the Census Bureau. My gosh, even Reagan couldn’t figure out how to do that.

And through it all you avoided repercussions. Even losing GOP House and Senate majorities hasn’t slowed you down much.

There’s so much raw evidence to impeach your ass that it would be as easy as Dick Cheney shooting a lawyer in the face. The rap sheet is a mile long. Yet you remain 100 percent unscathed, threatened by nothing more than a pretzel getting stuck in your craw. That’s amazing. My peasant hat is off to you.

Seriously, all you’ve “suffered” (if you can call it that) is low approval ratings. Big deal. As long as you have your 25 percent “base” that thinks you walk on water, you can do anything you want. Smirk. Dance. Ride your bike. Wave. Swagger. Intimidate the Democratic leadership with the word “Boo!”, beat the traditional media so senseless that when you say “jump” they put on rocket shoes and blast off for the stratosphere. Smirk some more. Clear some more brush. Hell, you can do pretty much anything you damn well please.

So, sincerely: congratulations. You may have wrecked the country and your party, but so what? You got everything that you, George W. Bush, wanted out of your time in office. You should have no regrets, since you telescoped your intentions to everyone well in advance (yes, even back in school).

And in seven months you’ll retire and open up a Texas-size think tank disguised as a presidential library that will perpetuate your propaganda and your policies. (”Oh look, Heritage Foundation … you have a baby brother!”)

Many will say your administration was a failure, but that only works if they’re thinking about the welfare of the country and its 300 million citizens. Your presidency was never about them (just ask the Supreme Court) - it was about you taking care of your circle of rich, power-hungry, war-mad cronies while simultaneously setting out to prove how much the federal government can suck. On that score, you may indeed be the best president ever.

Love,
Billy

P.S. Hugs to Laura and the twins.

Will the real Democrats please stand up … and filibuster?

Ad 2: The Senate just adjourned for the night and will take up the FISA legislation Thursday morning. Obviously, there are some important people who have some thinking to do.

But not before taking a test vote:

Senate Nears End of Surveillance Bill Debate

One of the most important votes in the history of the United States Congress will take place perhaps tonight. Since you will not see coverage of this on CNN, you better watch the blogs and C-SPAN 2.

As we reported last Friday, the cowardly Democrats who control the House of Representatives voted with the Republicans in favor the new domestic surveillance bill, granting a back door form of legal immunity for the telecom giants. They made it where a judge can grant the companies immunity - based solely on a piece of paper showing President George W. Bush authorized the illegal spying on Americans in the wake of 9/11 himself.

Scott Horton writes today at Harpers.org: Will the National Surveillance State Prevail Again?

His buddy Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, owned by the Washington Post, carried this detailed account: FISA A Significant Victory for the Democratic Party? Not…

One blog commenter says:

Victory is still possible in the fight against warrantless spying and immunity for the telecom companies that collaborated in previous illegal spying. There are signs of significant divisions in the Senate that we may yet be able to exploit to defeat the Senate version of HR 6304.

The divisions are deep enough that there still isn’t a Senate version of the House bill, or a bill number, and there are still multiple ways we could win this fight.

One strategy is to find a Senator willing to filibuster, and thereby block a vote. The aggressive progressives found one:

Senator Feingold Will Filibuster FISA

Then, the Washington Independent has now verified that House members may have been swayed by donations from the telephone companies such as ATandT and Verizon. Surprise! Surprise!

Telecom Donations Tied to FISA Vote

According to the Daily Kos, the Senate may vote tonight or there may be a filibuster.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., took to the Senate floor this afternoon to talk about the FISA bill and to detail, point by point, the failure of the Hoyer/Rockefeller capitulation. Here’s the statement he and Sen. Dodd released yesterday announcing their intent to filibuster:

“This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

“If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans’ civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation.”

Another good place for good blog journalism on this issue is the TPM Mukraker.

In a related story, the Washington Post this morning carried a story about the ISP Charter Communications’ plan to spy on customers and sell the information to advertisers.

Charter Halts Plan to Track Surfing Data

Are newspaper editors just not paying attention to this battle? They are either AWOL or just on the wrong side of this fight. The telephone and cable companies are as much of a threat to newspapers as bloggers and craigslist.org. Why won’t they fight back?

But the big question for the day is:

Will Senator Barack Obama, who promised we are “not a country where wiretapping is done without warrants,” before we made him the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, stand up and join the filibuster? Will Senator Hillary Clinton stand with us?

If not, we may just have to crash the convention in Colorado in August and put someone else in there. Hey Al Gore? Hey John Edwards? Want to be president?

by Glynn Wilson

Maybe this will convince the Alabama press corps that politics was paramount to the exclusion of impartial justice in the Bush Justice Department.

The United States Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, which is charged by law with the conducting “independent investigations, audits, inspections, and special reviews” of DOJ personnel and programs “to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct, and to promote integrity, economy (and) efficiency,” released a report on Tuesday concluding that politics and ideology were indeed used unethically and illegally by the department in the hiring process between 2002 and 2007.

Hundreds of highly qualified lawyers who applied for internships and jobs were rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups - especially ANY environmental group - or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, the report concluded, while preferential treatment was given to those with Republican ties and conservative affiliations on their resumes.

After digesting the report, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to implement Inspector General Glenn Fine’s recommendations.

“Yet again, the Department has been putting politics where it doesn’t belong,” Conyers said in a statement. “The report concludes that under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ tenure in 2006, several Department officials including Michael Elston violated federal law and Justice Department policy. We already know from the Committee testimony of Monica Goodling that she ‘crossed a line’ in hiring career attorneys as well.

“When it comes to the hiring of nonpartisan career attorneys, our system of justice should not be corrupted by partisan politics,” Conyers said. “It appears the politicization at Justice was so pervasive that even interns had to pass a partisan litmus test.”

The report’s recommendations include a statement making clear that in future hiring and firing decisions, all decisions should be based on merit.

“Political affiliations may not be used as criteria in evaluating candidates and that ideological affiliations cannot be used as a proxy to discriminate on the basis of political affiliation,” the report says. Department leaders should be “vigilant to ensure that political or ideological affiliations are not used to select candidates.”

According to Birmingham attorney Doug Jones, who represented former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman early on in his travails with the politicized Bush Justice Department and still represents some of the legislators now under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham, the details of the report are no surprise to anyone who has followed this story over the past year.

“This report is nothing new to those who have been involved with or closely followed the Justice Department,” Jones said. “What is not included though is that the practice is much broader than the Honors program and extends to U.S. attorney’s offices across the country.”

Two things happened that has allowed the Bush administration to stack the Justice Department with young Federalist Society lawyers, Jones said.

“First, after 9/11, DOJ was able to bring on a whole slew of new assistant U.S. attorneys. Then, in a move to stack the deck, Ashcroft’s DOJ began offering early retirement benefits to senior lawyers, resulting in career prosecutors leaving the department and being replaced by young Republican/Federalist Society lawyers,” he said. “Just like with the Judiciary, the influence will be left for years to come.”

In the heart of the report, investigators focused on the DOJ honors program, which places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in jobs there. While historically the program had operated under the control of senior career officials, under Bush’s first Attorney General John Ashcroft the control of the program changed.

In what could have been a worthy attempt to reach out to a range of students outside the so-called Ivy League, hundreds of qualified applicants were rejected because of their ties to liberal or progressive nonprofit groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, or who had clerked for judges or legislators with ties to the Democratic Party.

Concerned Justice employees had raised alarms about the politics of the department last year when they sent a letter to Congressmen who had been examining whether political considerations led to the dismissal of at least nine U.S. attorneys. That investigation now includes the probe into whether Siegelman was prosecuted for political reasons, to remove him as a political threat from future elections in Alabama.

The report is the first in a series of studies investigating the role and reach of political appointees in hiring and enforcement at Justice during the Bush years. The studies cover the prosecutor firings, problems in the civil rights division and problematic statements by former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, who took over after Ashcroft resigned - and then resigned himself last August the same week Bush political adviser Karl Rove resigned from the White House.

You can read the full final report here.

Now will the press in Alabama tell the people the truth? Or will they bury or ignore the report? Stay tuned…

Birmingham News staff writer Brett Blackledge, who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating mostly Black Democrats who work in Alabama’s two-year college system and also happen to be into public service by serving in the state legislature, is taking my advice and leaving the paper to take a job in Washington, D.C. with the Associated Press.

While I broke the story on an e-mail list on Friday that his days were numbered, here is the first mention of the departure in the paper, in Executive Editor Tom Scarrett’s little column that normally deserves scant notice since it usually says nothing about nothing.

We face a special challenge at The Birmingham News because we are losing a special reporter. Brett Blackledge, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, is leaving our staff to become an enterprise reporter in The Associated Press’ Washington bureau, doing investigative work on national security and intelligence issues. It’s a great opportunity for him, but a great loss for us in Alabama.

Watchdog Reporting Biggest Job?

And like I’ve said on the blog and the radio before, the Birmingham News’s idea of watchdog journalism is sort of the like the Bush Justice Department’s idea of justice: All the time and money goes into investigating mostly poor Black Democrats, while the big time corruption of rich White Republicans is completely ignored.

When Blackledge did his first hit job on Jill Simpson, I told him he should use the clout of that Pulitzer to get the heck out of here and go to work for a real news organization somewhere else.

Good luck Brett. And good riddance. Alabama’s political system has been screwed up bad enough by bad reporting from the “Bug Mule” papers before. Now perhaps we can begin the real job of media reform in this state.

For those of you interested in following the news on media reform, there are a number of stories today on the Poynter Institute’s site that talk about the problems of the traditional newspaper industry, including an analysis from the New York Times saying this year could be the worst ever for newspapers, and another from Ad Age saying “the sky is falling! It’s totally falling, for real!”