Let's stop Bush's warrantless wiretapping

While I have my outrage on this morning:

I am one of the 73% of Americans who oppose George Bush's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

I am outraged that George Bush admits he broke the FISA law at least 30 times by authorizing activities that were illegal -- and I am outraged Congress has not impeached Bush for doing so.

I am outraged that the Bush Administration has lied about its illegal activities for years, especially former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' perjury before Congress -- and I am outraged Gonzales has not been prosecuted for doing so.

I am outraged that George Bush used a false terrorist threat in August to terrorize Congress into legalizing his illegal wiretapping -- and I am outraged Congress has not impeached Bush for doing so.

I am outraged that nearly every Republican and a few dozen Democrats voted for Bush's wiretapping bill.

I therefore demand the following:

(1) Immediate repeal of the "Protect America Act of 2007" enacted in August, or at bare minimum allowing it to expire in January.

(2) Defeat of any further legislation to legalize warrantless wiretapping or give immunity to telephone companies or Bush Administration officials who participated in the illegal wiretapping of American citizens

(3) Prosecution of Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress when he testified that there was no "serious disagreement" inside the Justice Department over the illegal program, even though then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his top aides dramatically threatened to resign over the program.

(4) Impeachment of George Bush for violating the Fourth Amendment and FISA over 30 times and for falsely terrorizing Congress into passing the Protect America Act.

(5) Criminal prosecution of Bush, Gonzales, and everyone else who committed these crimes.

Care to join me?

The terrorists on the Right

Easter Lemming has compiled the data, so I don't have to. Read all of it. One of the excerpts and links there is from Hunter at DKos, who also has the outrage:

It's long past time for people to stop treating Fox-style, Malkin-style, Limbaugh-style conservatism as merely a "political" phenomenon. It may once have been, but it isn't now. As of this millennium, it's nothing but a hate movement with neckties. Protofascism with bright, patriotic logos. Stop treating it with anything but revulsion and disdain. Stop pretending for even a bare moment that they are anything more than thugs.

The bile generally accepted as conservative discourse from people like these, and Coulter, and Hannity, and O'Reilly, isn't something that we can continue to ignore.

The BS over the MoveOn advertisement, the "phony soldiers" remark by Limbaugh, the obsession over contrivances like this will not be allowed to dominate the framing of the debate over who is best qualified to lead this nation out of the moral quagmire that Bush led us into, and from which someone will have to extricate us.

We are going to have a debate over how best to end this war, and not over flag lapel pins. We are going to have a debate over how best to address the concerns of climate change, not whether or not it exists or who's responsible for it.

We will progress on the challenges we face, not refuse to acknowledge them or allow ourselves to be preoccupied by inanities.

As citizens we simply no longer have the luxury of being distracted by Cavemen or American Idol; we are now compelled to look at the circumstances created by the unethical leadership which derived from our earlier apathy and begin making improvements to our republican democracy.

Before it collapses on our heads.

Of, By, and For the Corporations

The Federal Communications Commission is doing a swell job communicating with lobbyists, but with the public? Not so good, according to a government report.

The Government Accountability Office says the agency tips off some people with business before the commission in advance about what items are coming up for a vote, usually before the public is notified.

"Situations where some, but not all, stakeholders know what FCC is considering for an upcoming vote undermine the fairness and transparency of the process and constitute a violation of FCC's rules," the GAO said.

Just SOP for an administration run on cronyism.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

Slightly more over the line toward actual recklessness. On par with the outing of Valerie Plame. Of course, when the extent of one's foreign policy expertise is dependent on leaking sensitive, classified information to Fox News sometimes one has to blow valuable intelligence cover in order to do it.

Those who recall the indignity of President Richard Nixon having to declare, in response to a question from the press, “I am not a crook,” must have winced yesterday when President George W. Bush, also talking to the press, was forced to avow, “This government does not torture people.”

That the questions had to be asked speaks volumes in itself. That the answers from both presidents were thoroughly unconvincing says just as much.

Or perhaps Bush was only suggesting that our military and our private contractors may torture people but "this government" does not.

We already knew about the "few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib. But are we still performing extraordinary rendition to countries like Turkey or is "this government" outsourcing torture to firms like Blackwater?

Is this the real reason for having 130,000 soldiers and 180,000 mercenaries? And what is the point of extracting intelligence data by waterboarding if you're going to leak it to the media? To keep the low-grade fear factor going among the general (sheeple) population?

Andrew Sullivan, formerly one of Bush's buddies:

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

Fascism? I think I've heard that mentioned before. Mussolini: "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power."

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

What, indeed.

The Weekly Wrangle

Time once again for the Texas Progressive Alliance Weekly Blog Round Up. This week's round-up is compiled by Vince from Capitol Annex.

TXsharon says, "YOU SUCK AT&T" and she can only say that because she doesn't use AT&T. Over at Bluedaze she tells why, if you use AT&T for your Internets, you can't say they suck.

Stace at Dos Centavos reports on racism and bigotry committed by a corporation and a UT fraternity.

What's really going on in Irving? Xanthippas at Three Wise Men notes there's more going on in the immigration crackdown than possible profiling and arrests.

CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme notes that NOW wants to know why U.S. District Judge Judge Samuel Kent was 'punished' with a 4-month vacation after the investigation into sexual harassment charges.

Criticism of Hillary Clinton's laugh is no laughing matter, so says PDiddie at Brains and Eggs in HRC:LOL.

Might be time for a bit of horsetrading on the floor of the Senate, and one of Texas Kaos' regular diarists, Fake Consultant, has a bit of advice on the subject for Majority Leader Harry Reid in On Larry Craig and Filibusters, or Wanna Make a Trade?

Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war. The Republican-Media coalition must have declared war on Social Security, and Blue 19th exposes their lies.

Human rights advocates cheered the Williamson County commissioners' vote to sever ties with the operator of the T. Don Hutto holding facility for undocumented immigrants, but Eye On Williamson's wcnews wonders if a battle within the Republican party over the county's share of the profits may have driven their decision.

McBlogger at McBlogger speculates as to the reasons Sharon Keller (chief justice of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals) needed to get out of work at 5 on Sept. 25th.

Vince at Capitol Annex tells us about the Texas Conservative Coalition's new Election Integrity Task Force, its new Chairwoman and its likely recommendations.

Peter at B and B writes about the quixotic attempts by a group of environmentally conscious Republicans to get their chosen political party to care about conservation and stewardship: Republicans for Environmental Protection, all 70 of them, meet in San Antonio.

Off the Kuff looks at the ongoing dispute between the Harris County Appraisal District and the state comptroller over how commercial properties are taxed.

In a Texas Kaos dairy, Dallas and Denton drinking water at risk by TxDOT's route selection choice for FM299, Faith Chatham's shares a letter from Highland Village parents group activist/homeowner Susie Venable to mayor Tom Leppert of Dallas regarding the city water department's failure to monitor possible MTBE contamination issues. Despite cries of running out of money, TxDOT selected the only route (of 8) which would double project costs by requiring bridges to be built across three tributaries to Lake Lewisville (the drinking water source for Denton and Dallas Counties) in the area of the lake already contaminated by MTBE.

Gary at Easter Lemming updates the Pasadena mayor Manlove resignation and his running for Lampson's seat. There are a lot of happy faces at city hall. Easter Lemming broke the story back on September 22nd.

Trinity Trickey strikes again at The Texas Cloverleaf. This time pro-toll road literature features the war on trees and the fight against Angela Hunt by the powers that be. Only in Dallas.

This week's installment of GLBTube at the Houston GLBT Political Caucus Blog is a double feature: first, a sampling of clips related to ENDA; secondly, gay Republicans are running ads in order to sabotage hypocritical presidential candidates!

WhosPlayin hammers away on GOP Congressman Michael Burgess for dissing Muslims and being one of 30 boneheads to vote for giving mercenary firms like Blackwater a license to kill.

The Texas Blue looks at how the evangelical social movement isn't playing nice-nice with the Republican Party any longer, and why that is good for America.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson -- author, syndicated columnist, political analyst and commentator -- is making a virtual book tour stop at Para Justicia y Libertad on Oct 11 to discuss his new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation Between African-Americans and Hispanics.

Hal at Half Empty counts a Lucky Seven of candidates that want to run against Nick Lampson in CD-22. He ROFLs and LMAOs.

Sunday Funnies (Really Late Edition)

RNC logo's "wide stance"

So much snark, so little time.

A prison-striped, starry-eyed pachyderm, on his hind legs (they only go two-legged when they're engaging in coitus), gathering behind next year.

Or perhaps ...

(I)t really does look like an elephant that just got ran over by a truck and is now splattered and dazed on the ground, covered in skid marks.

All the good ones have already been taken. But there's plenty of bad ones left, and they're all pretty funny.

TexBlogs on SCHIP

President Bush yesterday vetoed an important and widely supported bi-partisan expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) (H.R. 976). WhosPlayin takes a look at what the blogs of the Texas Progressive Alliance are saying about this terrible move:

Adam at Three Wise Men writes: Bush uses veto pen to strike health care for kids



Blue 19th takes Randy Neugebauer to task for being willing to send billions to Iraq, but not to help children at home.



Blue 19th also uncovered a transcript of a secret press conference featuring the President, the Governor, and Rep. Randy Neugebauer. Put your sensibilities on hold and enjoy.




In examining Bush's veto of the SCHIP reauthorization and expansion, Vince at Capitol Annex notes that this is one of the President's worst actions in office and also points to statements on the veto from a pair of Texas legislators, Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio) and Ellen Cohen (D-Houston).



Muse interrupts her outrage at the veto to send Bush a Bible verse, and remind him that his approval numbers are half of the percentage of Americans who approve of the legislation. She wonder if what's next is clubbing baby seals and drowning kittens.



Eye On Williamson calls Bush and Rep. John Carter on their votes against children, for private insurance corporations and urges the people to get involved: Bush Vetoes Childrens Health Care & John Carter Is Right By His Side.



Matt Glazer of Burnt Orange Report notes that the non-partisan Center for Public Policy Priorities urges Texans to encourage Senator Cornyn and the 18 Texas Congressmen who voted against it to change their votes to override the veto. Matt also suggests that Bush, Perry, Cornyn, and McCaul hate children and encourages us to show our outrage at a rally for kids health.



Charles Kuffner of Off the Kuff notes that Bush is acting ashamed of this veto and explores the numbers needed for an override.