Uh, we think not…

We have been reporting on this for more than four years now all the way back to the launch of this independent news site. But I guess it takes a New York Times story and an MSNBC story to hit the airwaves for people to finally realize it’s true.

U.S. E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

Rep. Steny Hoyer is leading a “compromise” on the FISA reauthorization bill that would ultimately let the Bush administration and their friends at AT&T and Verizon off the hook for illegally spying on innocent Americans.

Last night, this so-called compromise was voted out of committee and as early as this morning the bill may be brought to the House floor for a full vote.

Speaker Pelosi can still stop this bill.

As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can pull the bill from the floor and refuse to call a vote.

Call Speaker Pelosi right now and demand she stand up to President Bush and stop telecom immunity.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
(202) 225-0100

Suggested Script:
“I’m calling to tell Speaker Pelosi I am depending on her to pull any bill from the floor that will ultimately grant immunity to telecommunications companies who illegally spied on Americans. Can I count on Speaker Pelosi to stand up to President Bush?”

Speaker Pelosi has stood up to the President’s fear mongering on illegal spying before, she can do it again. But she needs to hear from you to know where you stand.

Here is what Senator Russ Fiengold said about this bill last night:

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation. The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home.”

Senator Leahy also made his position clear:

“I will oppose this new FISA bill when the Senate votes on it next week. We must do everything we can to protect Americans from the Bush-Cheney Administration’s erosion of our civil liberties and callous disregard for the rule of law — and this new FISA bill fails that test.”

You and I remember that the Senate has passed retroactive immunity before. But working together, we can make sure that the Senate never has a chance to pass this bill by stopping it in the House today. Call Speaker Pelosi right now.

Thank you for taking action.

Charles Chamberlain, Political Director
Democracy for America

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., June 5 – Global warming gave us a break this spring in Alabamaland with plenty of rain and way cooler temps than last year. But the global pendulum is now swinging hard toward summer, and it’s hot as hades in T-Town.

On the national political front, in spite of some hand-wringing over the past few weeks, now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a new poll shows that he holds a six point lead over Republican nominee John McCain. Obama leads McCain 48 percent to 42 percent among registered voters, according to a CBS poll.

Obama Leads McCain

I’m still betting the Yuengling 12-pack that those numbers will grow after the parties hold their conventions this summer and that Obama will win in a landslide in November, especially if Karl Rove is kept on the sidelines.

And it looks like he is being kept on the defensive by the House Judiciary Committee.

Facing pressure from the committee, the Bush Justice Department is now admitting that its Office of Professional Responsibility has launched investigations into accusations of ethics lapses and potentially illegal conduct on the part of the U.S. attorneys offices in Alabama behind the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy.

Read the letter in PDF format here

Then, the pendulum is also swinging down in Montgomery.

Federal prosecutors are no longer seeking stiffer prison sentences for Siegelman or Scrushy, and they are not even bothering to explain why, according to Associated Press reporter Bob Johnson. It makes one curious to know what happened to the cozy relationship between Johnson and U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin, since Franklin has changed his tune and now says he will deal with the appeals case in court, rather than in the press.

Maybe the gag order is still in force that was issued by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who took over the Justice Department after Alberto Gonzales had to resign last August at about the same time Rove was forced to depart the White House.

Siegelman must be happy with how the pendulum is swinging, now that his prosecutors have filed a motion with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking that their appeals for a longer prison terms be dropped.

“The government has elected not to proceed with its cross-appeal as to either defendant,” the filing says, with no explanation.

Prosecutors End Siegelman, Scrushy Sentence Appeal

Hmmm. I guess all that talking to the press last year just didn’t do as much good as they thought, especially in the face of Chief U.S. Judge Mark Fuller’s oversized hammer that pounded Siegelman on the head for doing some talking of his own. And that is in part the basis of why a bipartisan group of 54 former state attorneys general from across the country have filed a brief with a federal appeals court asking that Siegelman’s conviction be reversed. He was sentenced to extra time for discussing the ethics of the court in public with the press.

Their friend of the court filing on Siegelman’s behalf says the prosecution and sentencing of Siegelman “raised serious First Amendment concerns” and asks the appeals court to overturn Siegelman’s conviction, a ruling legal experts say could come by the end of the year.

“To permit a conviction to stand in the absence of such an explicit quid pro quo” (for Siegelman’s appointment of Scrushy to the hospital board in exchange for a donation to the lottery campaign), the brief states, “would mean that a prosecutor has the power to indict and convict any politician and any donor whenever a donation was made and the politician took an action consistent with the donor’s desire, while aware of said desire.”

Ex-Attorneys General File Brief Suppporting Siegelman

Former New York Attorney General Robert Abrams, one of the authors of the brief, said the conviction of Siegleman, a Democrat, could have “a chilling effect” on democracy and make people afraid to make donations to political campaigns. He said: “The U.S. government cannot punish people for questioning or criticizing the actions of federal officials.”

Now we need to get that message about the pendulum swinging over to King George W. and the boys over at the Homeland Security Department, especially here in Alabama at the state version of same, where the Google Earth-Virtual Alabama system is scanning critics of Bush and the GOP as we write.

It’s hard to find the time and personal space to keep up with the criticism on a daily or weekly basis, especially when it becomes clear that these bastards have now managed to get to the programmer who has helped us keep this site up for the past three years. But no worries. We’re moving to a new server soon where politics and religion don’t matter and the hackers and spammers can’t shut us down again.

With your help, we will endure.

The United States House of Representatives, led by the Democratic majority, defied President George W. Bush on Friday and passed a surveillance bill that permits civil lawsuits against the telecom giants to go forward.

The 213-197 vote was short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a threatened veto by the president, however, so the bill now goes back to the Senate. Bush has demanded that any telecommunication company that participated in his warrantless domestic spying program, that secretly began after the September 11 attacks, receive retroactive immunity.

The battle over whether to shield companies has been a key reason why the House and Senate have been unable to agree on a bill to replace a law that expired last month that expanded U.S. authority to track alleged enemy targets without a court order.

It has also prompted Republicans to accuse Democrats of undermining national security while Democrats have accused Bush and his fellow Republicans of election-year fear mongering.

“It is time to reject the scare tactics of the Bush administration and enact this carefully crafted legislation,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said.

About 40 lawsuits have accused AT and T, Verizon Communications and Sprint Nextel of violating the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans, including lawyers, peace activists, environmentalists, journalists and liberal bloggers, all who have been illegally swept up in the electronic surveillance and data mining of phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing patterns.

Eyewitnesses to the illegal nature of the program have testified before Congress, yet the Bush administration and the Republicans in the House and Senate continue to lie to the American people and try to use the fear of terrorism to obliterate the nation’s Sixth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures in a crass attempt to win elections in 2008.

You can read the Reuters version of the breaking news story here. It is incomplete and balanced, but that is the mainstream news media for you.

House Passes Spy Bill, Rejects Phone Immunity

Meanwhile, if you’ve never watched a big, important debate on C-SPAN, you will be able to watch the replay tonight and over the weekend as Congress leaves on a two week recess. Rarely have more lies been told by Republicans in the name of taking away your Constitutional rights. Some Democrats stood up for you, but now the bill returns to the Senate for a final compromise. In the last Senate version of the bill, retroactive immunity was granted to the telecom companies.

If you have an interest in protecting your rights, get in touch with your Senators over the next two weeks and urge them to fight the Bush administration on this important issue. The issue is not the millions of dollars the phone companies may have to pay out in claims to those who were illegally spied on, including yours truly.

The issue is that the only way we are ever going to find out what the Bush administration and the phone companies did to violate all of our rights is the discovery phase in the civil lawsuits. That is what Bush is trying to avoid.

He broke the law and he knows it. The phone companies broke the law and they know it. They don’t even deny it! They just want Congress to pass a law making their law braking legal.

If that happens, the United States of America is no longer a democracy ruled by the laws of man. It becomes a monarchy and a dictatorship where the president becomes a king who derives his power from God, not the law.

Meanwhile, on the issue of the secret session by the House last night, read the Washington Post’s account. Hint! Hint!

The Secret Is Out: There Was No Big Secret

The United States House of Representatives went into closed session Thursday night to debate a version of the latest a surveillance bill without retroactive immunity for the telecom giants. The debate will continue in open session on Friday.

House Closes Doors for Secret Session on Spy Bill

A Brief History of the “Secret Session” in the House

Preparations are being made for the U.S. House of Representatives to go into a “Secret Session” of Congress. The House has convened such a session only five times over the past 196 years.

The last Secret Session was called in 1983 – with the House exchanging sensitive information regarding America’s support for the Contras in Latin America. Twenty-five years later, the House is preparing to go into Secret Session once again – this time to engage in a critical debate over the need to update and modernize the current terrorist surveillance laws.

Secret sessions were called on December 27, 1825, to receive a confidential message from the President regarding relations with Indian tribes; On May 27, 1830, to receive a confidential message from the President on a bill regulating trade between the U.S. and Great Britain; On June 20, 1979, to implement legislation on the Panama Canal Act of 1979; On February 25, 1980, to discuss Cuban and other Communist-bloc countries involvement in Nicaragua; and on July 19, 1983, to discuss U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua.

Over the course 1-2 hours, Capitol Police will escort members from the House floor, secure the chamber, and sweep the premises for listening devices and other possible breaches of security. Once the House is fully cleared, members who have signed the oath of confidentiality will be recalled to the chamber, select staff with appropriate clearances will be administered an oath of secrecy, and an hour of debate will ensue. At the conclusion of that hour, the Secret Session will dissolve.

The Clerk of the House maintains a list of members who have signed such an oath, and all but a handful have.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to the President Bush’s remarks Thursday morning that the House bill will “undermine America’s security”:

QUESTION: Don’t you think the president is lying?

PELOSI: Am I saying the president is lying?

QUESTION: Yes.

PELOSI: That’s the same question I got in 2001 when they asked me — when I said the intelligence on Iraq does not support the threat of — an imminent threat to our country that the administration is contending.

That’s what they said to me then. They said, “Are you saying the president is lying?” I said then and I say now, “I am stating a fact.”

The president is wrong and he knows it.

For more, see TPMMuckraker

Also, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) released the following statement after review of the Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) use of National Security Letters (NSL) and 215 orders in 2006, as well as subsequent corrective actions taken last year.

“At the same time the Administration is trying to intimidate the Congress into giving it additional spying power, we find out yet again that it has abused its authority to pry into the lives of law abiding Americans. Although the FBI has taken important steps to repair the abuses identified in earlier reports, I remain disappointed. We will continue to hold the Administration accountable for its actions and look forward to exploring the issues raised in this report at the Committee’s oversight hearing with the FBI next month.”

No Wonder They’ve Been Trying To Shut Us Down…

We should have known with all the Internet connectivity problems and spam and bandwidth filtering that the negotiations over telecom immunity and the surveillance bill are underway behind closed doors in Washington between the United States House of Representatives, the White House, the telecommunications companies and the intelligence community.

According to the TPMMuckraker:

Bush has been beating the drum for weeks (danger! terrorists! attack!). And finally the Dems seem to be marching in time.

…there are clear signs that whatever surveillance bill emerges from the House-Senate negotiations, it will more than likely contain immunity for the telecoms for their participation in the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. But Bush is not a man to settle. He wants more. Here he is speaking yesterday before a gathering of the state’s attorneys general:

“Now the question is, should these lawsuits be allowed to proceed, or should any company that may have helped save American lives be thanked for performing a patriotic service; should those who stepped forward to say we’re going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the President say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you.”

Now, as The Washington Post reports this morning, the bill negotiations are ongoing. So it’s not entirely clear what will emerge.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the Post reports, has been polling the Dem caucus on the immunity issue, with “the liberal camp” content with doing nothing (keeping the old FISA law) and “the moderate wing” pushing for retroactive immunity.

But it’s not clear if Hoyer has yet gauged support for this new telecom thanking provision. Perhaps it would come as a completely separate bill (the Thanks for Protecting America Act?), or perhaps all the lawmakers could just go down onto the steps of the Capitol and blow kisses. You never know what novel arrangement could emerge from the bill negotiations.

If they pass this bill, y’all, we can kiss our FREE free Internet goodbye. If you have any regard for your individual liberty, hammer your Congressman TODAY!

King wannabe George W. Bush went live on cable news this morning to take one more swipe at pushing retroactive immunity for the telecom giants, oddly also pushing his “faith-based initiative” to the governors visiting the White House.

He looked like he was back on the blow and Jim Beam last night while watching the CBS News’ “60 Mintues” show, seeing his disgraced former political adviser go down in flames in the heat of national reporting. His eyes were runny and he looked dehydrated and hung over and he was babbling worse than usual.

Since it appears no other news organization or blogger is rushing to get a story online about this, here’s the White House transcript.

Ad 1: Finally, the Washington Post gets something up…

Bush Pushes House to Renew Surveillance Law

Lock Yourselves In, Folks

The Newhouse press is putting out the press releases for the Alabama Department of Public Safety again, this time reporting that this non-holiday weekend will be another “Take Back the Highways” weekend.

Chris Murphy, director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, tells the corporate, chain press motorists can expect more frequent, unannounced state trooper highway blitzes this year, even on non-holiday weekends.

There will be at least one statewide blitz using 400 troopers, and “regional blitzes” using 50 troopers over four days.

“We are trying to get more creative,” Murphy said. “We are trying to not just write tickets. If we wanted to do that, we could target I-459 to give speeding tickets, which is like fishing in a barrel. We want strategic enforcement.”

Wooh! Strategic enforcement to take more money out of your pocket with a recession looming, and more money out of the state coffers from sales taxes on meals out at the state’s restaurants. But it seems Bill Canary at the Business Council of Alabama has no problem with that. Maybe business is better at the churches?

The department plans to put more unmarked patrol cars on highways, including 30 new Dodge Chargers, although the unmarked cars will have DPS emblems on the passenger doors and officers will be in uniform, the News reports in Alabama, the nation’s number one police state.

Murphy also plans to put more marked vehicles on the highways, and this year he plans to use DPS’ 18 motorcycles as part of the traffic blitzes, like the seven that sometimes run a speed trap on John Rogers Drive by the Birmingham Race Course and new Guiding Light Church.

Topping the list is a blitz jointly planned for Mobile and Baldwin counties, where 90 people were killed in highway crashes last year. Other counties targeted are Chilton County, with 24 people killed in crashes last year, Tuscaloosa with 31 and Cullman with 39.

But remember, if you have to get out of the house and on the highways, and a small town Barney Fife pulls you over on the Interstate, that is against the law. You can challenge the ticket in court – and win! Call a lawyer…

To read more of the press release, click here and weep…

For once, the Congress of the United States has taken a stand against king wannabe George W. Bush. Only this time, it was the House, not the Senate, that did the right thing.

Members of the House smartly departed Washington on a 12-day recess today – without passing a new surveillance law giving the telephone and Internet providers a free pass for taking part in the Bush administration’s illegal scheme of intercepting the private telephone conversations, e-mail messages and Web surfing patterns of innocent American citizens, including peace groups, environmentalists, journalists and bloggers.

Of course the lame-duck president woke up this morning in a tiff and started lying to the American people again, this time saying without an extension of the so-called Protect America Act, the intelligence community will not have the tools it needs to protect the homeland against a potential terrorist attack. But that’s not true, of course, and Democrats rightly accused the president of “fear-mongering” and say he has the authority he needs to intercept communications of suspected terrorists, even if the law expires.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the congressional majority is simply trying to balance civil liberties concerns against the executive branch’s concern for security.

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires a special court’s permission to monitor the communications of suspects inside the United States. Changes in technology since then mean much of the world’s computer and phone traffic passes through the United States, much of it over fiber-optic cable lines.

Precedent dictates that court orders are needed to listen in on any of them, but the new law, passed last August, would allow the federal government to initiate wiretaps for up to one year against a wide range of targets. The version updated and passed this week by the Senate explicitly compels telecommunications companies to comply with the orders and protects them from civil lawsuits for doing so.

Unable to muster the votes to extend the current law, House leaders say they’d rather let it lapse and operate under the old FISA rules than be pressured by the White House into accepting the flawed Senate bill. And good for them.

Any member of Congress who voted for this law in the first place should be replaced by the voters.

And to prove it, here’s a gut check for all those so-called conservatives and libertarians out there who might still be supporting the president on this issue. How would you feel if this invasive law were in effect and Hillary Clinton were president? Would you still want the federal government to have this power to spy on you?

Of course, Ms. Clinton was absent in the debate in the Senate this week and did not stand up against this assault on our civil liberties. She was out on the campaign trail trying to make up lost ground against Senator Barack Obama, who was there and voted against the version of the law granting unlimited amnesty to the telecom giants.

For that, he just got my vote – and the endorsement of this news organization for president. It is time to take sides.

We’ll have more to say about this later, but first we have a little trip to take down to the state capital city. Look for more updates late this afternoon…