Virtually no daylight between Democrats and Republicans

booman expresses his serious frustration with democratic inaction on phase II of the pre-war intelligence investigation... remember that...? i had quite honestly forgotten...

Remember when Harry Reid was Minority Leader and he used some procedural move to shut-down the Senate until the Republicans would agree to move forward with Phase II investigation over pre-war intelligence? How's that Phase II investigation going now that Harry Reid controls the Senate?

Still, another Intelligence panel Democrat, Dianne Feinstein of California, said the status of the Phase II investigation was a “good question.” Feinstein said she has not “been at a meeting where it’s come up. But I can’t make every meeting.”

[Intelligence Chairman Jay] Rockefeller said last week that the investigation is “chugging along very nicely,” but quietly, “without pyrotechnics,” a reference to the fights of recent years.

Not so, said Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the top Republican on the Intelligence panel. “They haven’t scheduled any time on it,” he said.

The Phase II investigation is supposed to focus on two things: "examining the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and...contrasting the statements of public officials with what the intelligence community was saying at the time."

The Democrats' excuse is that they are working on more pressing matters, like the FISA bill...which they passed out of committee last week with retroactive immunity for the telecommunications corporations.

The FISA bill is important, but not nearly as important as holding the criminals that got us into this catastrophic war accountable. The Dems are more concerned with covering the ass of the Establishment than they are with getting us out of this war.

i got chewed out royally last january by a woman friend of mine who does serious legwork for the dems in a rural county... i was expressing dismay that the new democratic congress wasn't picking up the ball in nearly the way i had hoped... she hit the ceiling and told me i was being unreasonable, that i needed to give them some time, that they had a strong "first 100 days" agenda and that they were getting things in place to make sure it all happened...

my expectation, which i now see to have been pure fantasy, was that a dem congress would take serious, forceful steps to remedy a downhill luge run to an authoritarian state... i was heartened when the investigations under waxman, conyers and leahy got rolling, although i still couldn't understand why, with clearly impeachable offenses just sitting out there beckoning, we weren't taking that step... then came the white house and doj stonewalling of congressional committee requests, followed by the subpoenas, followed by more stonewalling... and now...? crickets chirping...

the inaction on phase II is part and parcel of the whole pattern that's emerged, the truly horrifying part of which is that there's virtually no daylight between the dems and the r's... is the 2008 election, a democratic president and a stronger democratic presence in congress going to remedy this...? color me highly dubious...

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Robert Parry notices a hidden element of the Protect America Act: spying on Americans overseas

as a testament to the depth of my cynicism, i've basically assumed that i'm being monitored no matter where i am, inside or outside the country... although i'm certainly not a computer technology geek, i'm sure that, even when i'm in argentina and using an argentina isp and ip address, there are enough identifying bits and bytes coming from my laptop that, should anyone care, would make it easy to pinpoint both my whereabouts and my activities... simply monitoring my web-based email accounts, for instance, would easily reveal from where those emails were sent... and, of course, there's also tracking atm withdrawals, credit card transactions, and the local provider that my u.s. cell phone is registered with... about the only way i WOULDN'T be traceable is if i went completely off the grid, which would mean no laptop, no phone, no credit cards, no atm's, no web-based email... i could possibly make occasional use of a ciber (as internet cafes are known in argentina), but only rarely and very carefully...

Bush's Spying Hits Americans Abroad

By Robert Parry
October 19, 2007

In August after the Democratic-controlled Congress caved in to George W. Bush’s demands for broader surveillance powers, I noted that the new authority went far beyond what was advertised and that the President could obtain year-long spying orders on Americans who ventured outside the United States.

My , which was based on a reading of the law’s language, wasn’t shared by commentators in the major U.S. news media and even drew some reader criticism as alarmist for failing to take into account secret “minimization” provisions that supposedly would protect American citizens.

some recent developments have further served to convince parry that his analysis is correct...

[T]he Bush administration’s hostile reaction to a seemingly innocuous amendment added to a new surveillance bill by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, suggests that targeting Americans who travel abroad was a key goal of Bush’s “Protect America Act of 2007.”

Wyden told the New York Times that his amendment would require the government to get a warrant whenever it wants to wiretap an American outside the country, such as a U.S. soldier serving overseas or an American on a business trip.

“The individual freedom of an American shouldn’t depend on their physical geography,” Wyden told the Times. He said his amendment passed on a 9-6 vote in a closed Senate Intelligence Committee meeting on Oct. 18. [NYT, Oct. 19, 2007]

After the committee vote, the Bush administration and a key Senate Republican took direct aim at Wyden’s provision.

“We have strong concerns about that amendment,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “We certainly could not accept it.”

Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, the ranking committee Republican, said Wyden’s amendment was “problematic” and could scuttle the entire bill if not changed.

In other words, the seemingly loose phrasing of the Protect America Act wasn’t just an oversight or something that would be cleaned up with some internal technical adjustments. Rather, it was an important feature of the legislation that was slipped past the Democratic leadership and most of the Washington press corps in August.

like i've said repeatedly, you can only assume that EVERY transaction you make that takes place on a network of any type not totally under your control is potentially monitored...

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Schlozman: disdainful and vitriolic

TPMmuckraker has the lowdown on brad schlozman...

"He was universally despised by career people. He was the most disdainful and vitriolic guy I've ever dealt with, and he had it in for everybody."

looks like there's no longer any doubt, the justice department was merely a branch office for the white house, which, in turn, was merely a wholly-owned subsidiary of karl rove inc. and the republican national committee...

Schlozman was appointed to be the interim U.S. attorney in western Missouri on March 23, 2006 -- just two weeks after the president had signed the USA Patriot Act into law; the bill contained a provision that allowed interim U.S. attorneys to serve indefinitely.

Schlozman, who had zero prosecutorial experience, was installed as the U.S. attorney in western Missouri -- where Jim Talent was battling Claire McCaskill in one of the closest Senate races in the country. The administration appointed him suddenly and without consulting the senior Republican senator in the state, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO). A spokeswoman for Bond said that "Senator Bond was informed of Mr. Schlozman's appointment when he was named as interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri."

"most disdainful and vitriolic" is quite a statement... i've observed folks like that in action in the private sector and it isn't pretty... sure, you take a lot of shit from them that you should never have to take out of fear of losing your job, but, what it amounts to, without beating around the bush (pardon the pun, please), is nothing more or less than verbal and emotional abuse... what's usually worse is that THEIR bosses are often aware of such behavior and do nothing... needless to say, that kind of boss NEVER behaves that way in front of HIS boss, so HIS boss just writes it off to whining employees...

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