FISA Vote Postponed Until Tomorrow (Representatives, Congress, Iraq, interview)

[GigiBowman]

FISA Vote Postponed Until Tomorrow (broken link)

July 8th, 2008 by Michael Nystrom

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th on Vimeo


Above is an amazing interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 (Video & blog post found here (broken link)).
The FISA vote, originally scheduled for today, has been postponed until tomorrow so that Senators can attend the funeral of Jesse Helms. For more background on what is at stake, read (or listen to) an interview with Mark Klein, an AT&T Technician who in 2006 came forward with internal AT&T documents that revealed the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the National Security Agency access to its fiber optic internet cables.

continued on the campaign for liberty page under FISA http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

[AksarbeN]

This is some very good information and the links helped! Thanks for the thread. I did make the calls and also emailed my representatives.

[GigiBowman]

lol, notice how the important stuff goes unnoticed in here? No one reading or helping...just *** *** *** all day about nonsense as our rights get taken away...

[Blue Grass Fever]

Originally Posted by GigiBowman

... notice how the important stuff goes unnoticed in here?

That's everywhere, besides here!

Did it!.....(email..offices are closed..)

Keep threads like this going...fun to do! (and extremely easy...)

[GigiBowman]

Subject: The Worst of All Worlds

Why did nearly half the Democrats in the House vote for the "FISA Amendments Act" that's now pending in the Senate, when most of them had opposed warrantless spying and telecom immunity before? The answer is that they were bribed, using your tax dollars.

The Washington Post claims a deal was cut: the Democratic Leadership would support the FISA bill if the President would agree to add $95 billion in DOMESTIC spending to the latest Iraq appropriation.

In other words, House Democrats voted to continue the war and sold the Fourth Amendment for $95 billion.

Republicans say they want less spending. Democrats say they want less war. What's their compromise? More spending and more war.

Indeed, House Democrats supported the Iraq bill at a higher rate than Republicans did.

So much for the "anti-war message" sent by the American people in the 2006 elections!

This sort of "compromise" brings us the worst of all worlds. It's the kind of world expressed in the views of Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton above. Politicians of both parties get annoyed when gadflies start talking about the Constitution and America's proud traditions of individual rights, liberty, and the rule of law. To them, "laws" and "rights" are just bargaining chips to use in passing their spending bills.

The current course they're plotting will lead to economic collapse, fiscal bankruptcy, an Orwellian Big Brother police state, and a faltering, over-extended military empire. Who knows what kind of chaos or despotism will follow.

But the people don't have to wait for things to fall apart. Instead, we can put massive, persistent, resistance-numbing pressure on Congress. Apply the pressure, and members of Congress will bend, and then they will flip-flop. They will have to, if they want to keep their jobs.

So let's tell Congress that the American people do not tolerate their cavalier attitude toward Constitutional rights and the rule of law.

Tell them to pass the "One Subject at a Time Act," which would have forced them to separate the Iraq bill from domestic bills. Tell them you're aware the Democrats in the House sold out in return for increased domestic spending. Tell them you don't like having your tax dollars used as bribes.

Tell them to pass the "Read the Bills Act," which would have forced them to actually read the 116 pages of H.R. 6304, the "FISA Amendments Act."

And keep telling the Senate to oppose the "FISA Amendments Act." (broken link)

In your comments on all of these messages tell them you're proud we're a nation of laws, not men. Tell them OSTA and RTBA will help restore liberty by making it more difficult to sweep aside Constitutional rights in legislative horse trading.

Also, please consider joining the "Read the Bills Act Coalition." When you add "Read the Bills Act Coalition" button, banner, or tower ad on your website, we'll link to it from our blog and announce it in a Downsizer-Dispatch like this one, reaching almost 23,500 subscribers. To learn more, click here.

This week we welcome two new members to the Coalition:

Reinke Faces Life
The Virginian Rebel

Finally, in the last two weeks of June the House passed 44 bills totaling 969 pages, while the Senate passed 34 bills and 269 pages of legislation. A list of bills is available below the signature in the blog version of this Dispatch.

Thank you for being part of the growing Downsize DC Army.

James Wilson
Assistant to the President
DownsizeDC.org

[GigiBowman]

Fizzling on FISA
Posted: 09 Jul 2008 06:59 AM CDT
The Nation | July 1, 2008
A political culture capable of considering fundamental questions on the fate of the Republic would have focused on the dire threat to civil liberties posed by Bush's attempt to gain retroactive immunity for himself and the telecom companies that aided his warrantless wire- tapping schemes. Instead, the talking heads chattered endlessly about the anger of liberal bloggers at Barack Obama's support for the bill, the right wing's derision at his flip-flopping and other ancillary tempests.
But the FISA Amendments Act debate--which finished in the House with a 293-to-129 victory for the White House and is coming to a head in the Senate as we go to press--is about a lot more than Obama and the 2008 campaign. And it is about a lot more than granting immunity to telecoms that violated the privacy rights and trust of their customers. "I don't believe this will be remembered as the 'immunity' bill," says Russ Feingold. Feingold, who with Chris Dodd has led the Senate opposition that Obama once promised to be a part of, is right when he says the bill "is going to be remembered as the legislation in which Congress granted the executive branch the power to sweep up all of our international communications with very few controls or oversight."
It is troubling that Obama fails to recognize that, as Dodd told the Senate, passage of the measure will sanction lawlessness by an Administration that has engaged in "a pattern of abuse against civil liberties and the rule of law [and] against the Constitution."

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