Bush defends wiretapping Americans in federal court today

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

"I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "It's very troubling."

Since Bush will likely evade prosecution for his Iraq war crimes, it would certainly be an acceptable consolation prize to see this particular piece of legislation unwound. Let the courts do what the Congress didn't have the stones to.

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, announced late Monday he wanted to discuss 11 questions (.pdf) at Tuesday's hearing, one of which goes directly to the heart of the immunity legislation.

Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision?

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says the immunity legislation, if upheld, "makes it possible to extend immunity to other areas of the law." ...

The EFF is now challenging the immunity legislation on the grounds that it seeks to circumvent the Constitution's separation of powers clause, as well as Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights," the EFF's Cohn says. "You can't do that."

God damn right. I'll bet the judge agrees. The SCOTUS, however ...

30 miles of Ike debris in Chambers County

Two and a half months after Hurricane Ike blasted the shoreline, alligators and snakes crawl over vast piles of shattered building materials, lawn furniture, trees, boats, tanks of butane and other hazardous substances, thousands of animal carcasses, perhaps even the corpses of people killed by the storm.

State and local officials complain that the removal of the filth has gone almost nowhere because FEMA red tape has held up both the cleanup work and the release of the millions of dollars that Chambers County says it needs to pay for the project.

Elsewhere along the coast, similar complaints are heard: the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been slow to reimburse local governments for what they have already spent, putting the rural counties on the brink of financial collapse.

"I don't know all the internal workings of FEMA. But if they've had a lot of experience in hurricanes and disaster, it looks like they could come up with some kind of process that would work," said Chambers County Judge Jimmy Sylvia, the county's chief administrator.

I met Judge Sylvia in 2006, in Anahuac with David Van Os on the Texas county courthouse tour he made as part of his run for state attorney general. And of course it's not just Chambers County; everybody knows Galveston is still wrecked but in Bridge City -- where they had to rescue people off the roofs of their houses when the 12-ft. storm surge came up -- many of the Orange County residents are still living in tents, waiting for FEMA trailers to arrive.

Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough tells the story of receiving word on Sept. 12, as Ike closed in on Galveston, that FEMA was sending him $1.8 million of his $3 million request for storm cleanup — from Hurricane Rita, three years ago.

"Good Lord! The red tape and rules you have to go through to get anything done," Yarbrough said. "On Hurricane Ike, when we're putting out tens of millions, we can't afford a three-year reimbursement program. It would bankrupt most entities in this area if it takes that long.

It's not just Ike that Texans are still suffering from, either:

Near the Mexican border, thousands of families remain in homes damaged by Dolly, the storm that blew ashore on South Padre Island on July 23. FEMA was helpful at first, but bureaucracy and the distraction of the other hurricanes have slowed the recovery, local officials said.

A farmworker rights organization and 14 poor South Texas residents sued FEMA last month, accusing the agency of refusing to help thousands of poor families repair their homes.

"I understand they have Hurricane Ike, but we had a Category 2 come through the Valley, too," Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said.

Whoever gets to be the next FEMA director inherits this clusterfuck.

Spectacular sky scene tonight

Be sure and look up at the moon this evening:

Every once in a while, something will appear in the night sky that will attract the attention of even those who normally don't bother looking up. It's likely to be that way on Monday evening, Dec. 1.

A slender crescent moon, just 15-percent illuminated, will appear in very close proximity to the two brightest planets in our sky, Venus and Jupiter.

People who are unaware or have no advance notice will almost certainly wonder, as they cast a casual glance toward the moon on that night, what those two "large silvery stars" happen to be? Sometimes, such an occasion brings with it a sudden spike of phone calls to local planetariums, weather offices and even police precincts. Not a few of these calls excitedly inquire about "the UFOs" that are hovering in the vicinity of our natural satellite.

More.

Monday Funnies: The Clintons are back

I think Hillary as SoS is an inspired selection, but that won't keep me from having some fun with her (and her husband) ...