I have it on excellent authority that Senator Reid has put off the FISA immunity bill until the New Year.
Congratulations (for now) to Senator Dodd, and to Russ Feingold and the many Senators who made it clear they were going to assist him in his filibuster.
Update: More at Crooks and Liars.
Crooks and Liars » Dodd To Filibuster FISA Bill.
It's pretty sad that the nominally Democratic Senate leadership has
I would have hoped that some other Senators would share Dodd's conviction that this issue is worth going to the mat on — one Senator can't keep up a filibuster forever. Three can. Where are the others on this issue?
Thank you Senator Dodd for picking this issue and taking it seriously. (This is Dodd's first filibuster in a 27-year career).
I used to say that I could see Romney as the least bad of the Republican candidates. Surely no principles was better than bad ones?
I may have to reconsider. On the one matter where one has to assume he is least likely to lie to us, the place of religion in public life, former Gov. Romney has some very strange views, such as: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”
The clearest statement I've seen of the problem may be slacktivist, Mitt vs. atheists, martyrs,
Let's deal with the latter assertion first: “religion requires freedom.” There are far too many counter-examples for this to be true. Think of China, where the government denies religious freedom to millions of Christians and Falun Gong adherents and Tibetan Buddhists. Yet despite this lack of freedom, despite this active oppression — and, in a way, in response to this oppression — these faiths are all thriving. ….
“Freedom requires religion,” Romney said. Had he said, “Freedom requires religious freedom,” then I would agree, absolutely. Try to imagine if you can a society in which people were denied this most intimate of freedoms, the freedom of conscience, yet remained in all other respects free. Such a thing is impossible. This is part of the genius of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Take away any one of those freedoms and you take away the others as well. Each of those freedoms requires the others.
But Romney did not say that freedom requires religious freedom. He said, “Freedom requires religion.” And that's a contradictory statement — a very different, and very frightening, thing.
If freedom requires religion, then the a-religious and irreligious, the non-religious and un-religious are the enemies of freedom. Romney believes, in other words, that atheism is incompatible with freedom. Whatever it is he means by “religious liberty,” he does not believe it can safely be applied to atheists.
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem at all with devout candidates. I respect people who want to actualize their faith — just as long as in their public life they put the First Amendment first, and don't try any back-door establishment of religion. Thus, I respect, but disagree with, people who say abortion is murder and wish to change the law to protect what they see as unborn people. I also disagree pretty strongly with people who want use state power to enforce their versions of morality, but I often do understand where they are coming from — even though I think that many of these efforts have serious constitutional difficulties and wish they were much more sensitive to these issues.
I don't respect people who want to create special programs whose real purpose is to funnel money to churches (although I don't mind at all having churches compete on a level playing field for federal funds so long as they observe the rules that apply to all recipients of federal money).
But I also respect (and would rather vote for) people whose faith — be it religious or secular — leaves more scope for individual choice and autonomy on most questions of morality.
Mitt Romney's position that atheists are or should be second-class citizens hearkens back to an old American idea, mostly abandoned in the Enlightenment period, that the irreligious were fundamentally untrustworthy because without a fear of Hell they could not be trusted to keep their oaths.
It's deeply depressing to consider that a major GOP candidate who is 200 years behind the times may still seem modern when part of a field that seems anxious to compete on who is more for torture of more detainees, and who has the cruelest plan for deporting and deterring undocumented workers.
Oh, wait. He's campaigning as just as much a troglodyte as most of the others. Romney thinks we should double the size of the Guantanamo prison camp. I suppose that since Romney thinks Muslims are unfit for top government jobs this shouldn't be totally surprising.
Race to the bottom. Dragging us down with it.
More dumb police work: Man angry with son-in-law fingers him as terrorist to FBI
A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter's husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.
The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities would stupid enough to believe him.
The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the United States for business.
The wife didn't want him to travel since she was sick and wanted him to help care for their children, regional daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet said without disclosing the couple's names.
When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.
He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.
The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.
Neither the FBI nor the TSA can afford to ignore emails with specific accusations. Stopping someone directly accused of being a terrorist is entirely reasonable — although you have to wonder whether the Swedish authorities were consulted at any point between receipt of the email and the passenger's arrival.
Still, if the FBI and the TSA can't do a better job of distinguishing a terrorist from an innocent visitor after 11 hours in which they have him to interrogate and during which they can presumably contact the Swedes to go talk to the sender (if they haven't already), then TSA really is not much use, since all air travel will be subject to a trivial denial of service attack. This is worse than “security theater” — it's security Grand Guignol.
Apparently the FBI did eventually get around to contacting the Swedes.
FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered that the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law's computer.
What's unclear from the story is when the request was made, and why they deported the traveler pending this report.
Bonus 'security' horror story, brought to you by those dangerous Episcopalians.
What's amazing is not that Senator Chris Dodd gave a really good speech drawing a line against further Administration depredations against the Constitution.
No, what's amazing is that it took so long before he did it.
And what's disheartening is that speeches like this are rare and wonderful things in this (supine) Democratic-in-name-only (“DINO”) Congress. Because contempt for law (and for Congress) are hallmarks of this Administration.
Since they are aggressively not talking about the war, the two most important domestic policy issues before Congress at present are the FISA re-authorization and the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey, a man who is an intelligent prevaricator about torture and a straight-forward authoritarian about Presidential power to be our next Attorney General.
The Senate's capitulation on FISA includes retrospective amnesty, without even a need for truth and reconciliation, for all the telecom companies that violated the law, knowingly, and allowed illegal eavesdropping of telecoms traffic just because someone in government asked them to do so. There is now some evidence, arising from the Nacchio fraud trial, that the illegal spying program started well before 9/11 — the smoking gun that this amnesty plan may be designed to hide.
The whole idea of these companies going along with oral requests that they had to know were illegal is positively Soviet. So too are the all-too-credible allegations that when Qwest failed to play ball with these illegal requests, it got punished by being denied government contract work for which it was best qualified.
That the Senate would agree to an amnesty with no disclosure in these conditions is one of the best arguments for term limits that I have ever heard.
Senator Chris Dodd, emerging as the conscience of the Presidential field, has placed a hold on the FISA bill. I hope his colleagues are grateful to him for saving them from their own folly.
Even so, no hold seems likely for the Mukasey nomination, further cementing the irrelevance of the Senate and its quiet complicity in torture and other outrages. Yes, there's a tradition of allowing most nominees to go through, but torture ought to be exceptional. And if that won't do it, why on earth is the Senate going to confirm a man who testifies that he believes the President can violate statutes on national security grounds more or less whenever he wants to?
Asked, for instance, if the president was free to violate a law enacted by Congress, Mr. Mukasey said, “That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.”
…
Mr. Mukasey also said that Congress might be powerless to bar the president from conducting some surveillance without warrants.
“The statute, regardless of its clarity, can’t change the Constitution,” Mr. Mukasey said. “That’s been true since the Prize cases.”
But the Prize cases concerned whether President Lincoln had the power to impose a blockade of Confederate ports without Congressional authorization — not in the face of a Congressional ban. (Indeed, Congress later retroactively authorized Lincoln’s actions.)
The distinction between Congressional silence, as in the Prize cases, and Congressional limitation, as in the 1978 law that required warrants for some intelligence surveillance, is an important one.
…
“So you are telling the committee, Judge, that anytime the president is acting to safeguard the national security against a terrorist threat, he does not have to comply with statute?” asked Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, referring to the 1978 law.
Mr. Mukasey did not answer directly…
I think this means that confirmation would be a grave error — even if failure to confirm keeps Peter Keisler, the perhaps equally absolutist temporary AG, in office for a long time. (I happen to have known Keisler reasonably well a long time ago, back in college and law school. He always seemed a deeply decent person on a human level. He was also one of the most right-wing people I knew and his political viewpoints were extreme even then. But then he might well say the same about me for all I know.)
As for the Senators, if they don't care about the Constitution, is there at least no jealousy left for the legislative prerogative? Primaries for them all, I say.
Jotwell Blenderlaw