Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

En lieu of the recent posts on the main blog about the FISA ordeal, I thought I should share this little story I came across when I logged on to Yahoor today.

(Link)

Senate delays eavesdropping vote
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 39 minutes ago

The Senate on Thursday signaled support for granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government conduct warrantless eavesdropping, a sign that the contentious provision may be headed for approval next week.

On a strong 60-36 vote, senators rejected an amendment that would have killed the immunity provision and strengthened the powers of a secret court to oversee the surveillance of phone calls and e-mails that involve people inside the United States.

Further action on the legislation was delayed until Monday, pushing Congress closer to a Feb. 1 deadline for enacting a new law. If a new law is not signed by the president by then, some eavesdropping practices that are now legal would be prohibited.

The Bush administration is insisting that any new law also protect from potentially crippling civil lawsuits those telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., blamed Republicans for the delay, saying they were trying to block a series of amendments majority Democrats sought to offer.

“It appears the president and Republicans want failure. They don’t want a bill,” Reid said.

The draft bill, written by the Senate Intelligence Committee, would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law, first enacted in 1978, dictates when federal agents must obtain court permission before tapping phone and computer lines inside the United States to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Agents may tap lines outside the country without court oversight.

It was the second time in six weeks the Senate had taken up the FISA modernization bill, only to see action stymied. Reid abruptly closed down debate in December when it became clear the Senate couldn’t finish work before the holiday break.

Most vexing to the intelligence agencies, without an extension of the law the government would return to needing individual court orders to listen in on any communication that passes through U.S. telecommunications switches and computer servers — even those that are between people who are outside the country. This is not required by FISA, according to legal experts, but became the practice over time to provide firms with legal protections.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on Thursday proposed extending the existing law for 30 days to buy the Senate additional time to produce a bill. The House completed its version of the bill last fall.

In a move to resolve the immunity issue, the key impasse on the legislation, the White House ended months of resistance Thursday and agreed to give House members access to secret documents about its warrantless wiretapping program.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade the House to agree to retroactively shield from liability those companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans without the approval of the FISA court. About 40 such civil lawsuits are pending against telecommunications firms, and the administration says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. It also contends that the companies could be bankrupted if the lawsuits are successful.

The companies were helping the administration carry out the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, a still-classified effort that intercepted communications on U.S. soil without oversight from the FISA court from Sept. 11, 2001, to Jan. 17, 2007.

Reyes and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence panel, requested access to the White House documents in May. House Democrats say they will not support telecom immunity without seeing them first. Some senators were given access to the documents last fall.

The documents include the president’s authorization of warrantless wiretapping, Justice Department legal opinions going back to 2001, and the requests sent to the telecommunications companies asking for their assistance.

I’m trying really hard to be surprised these days…really hard…

I’ve got a theory about Bill Clinton’s obnoxious behavior, coming up with inaccurate and crude slurs against Barack Obama. I think he knows that he looks like a jerk, and I think he knows that it disgusts voters, and I think that’s exactly what he wants.

The Hillary Clinton for President campaign has never sought to build a real network of grassroots support – not of the kind we saw developing in 2004. They know too that Barack Obama is attracting new voters to the presidential primaries, and that new voters are those who are the most likely to lose their resolve and not show up to vote when they become discouraged.

Hillary Clinton’s support, on the other hand, tends to come from the institutional Democratic Party and its extensions at the state and local level. Longtime Democrats who have been regular voters are more likely to support a candidate who reminds them of Democrats in the past, rather than someone who challenges Democrats to break with the past.

If voters are getting turned off by Bill Clinton’s smarmy attacks against Barack Obama, and want to stop participating in the 2008 presidential primary elections, it’s more likely that those who walk away in disgust will be Barack Obama’s supporters. I think that Bill Clinton knows that, and is purposefully trying to create low voter turnout in the Super Tuesday primaries, so that Hillary Clinton can win.

Consider how, every time that one of Bill Clinton’s stupid comments gets publicity in the news, he doesn’t apologize and back off. He comes out the next day and says something even more outrageous. Bill Clinton knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to drive everyone out of the Democratic primaries except for the people who are supporters of the establishment Clinton machine, and will put up with anything that Bill Clinton does.

At the American Museum of Natural History, a group of people calling itself Virgin Galactic has revealed its development of a spaceship that will take people off the Earth and into outer space for “Galactic” travel. There’s a catch, though. You have to be rich in order to get on board. Reservations for tickets begin at $200,000 each.

The question that discerning minds now must ask is this: Why are rich people willing to pay $200,000 to get into outer space away from the Earth’s surface? Rich people have the money to get information about things that the rest of us will never know about… until it’s too late.

Here’s what’s telling to me: These rich refugees from planet Earth are not content to merely get off the ground, even miles high up in an airplane. A standard airplane can get miles and miles above the surface of the Earth, but that’s enough for these skittish fat cats. Why?

It seems that it’s not so much the ground that the refugees desperate to board the Virgin Galactic spaceship are eager to escape. It’s the Earth’s atmosphere. It seems that our own planet’s atmosphere is on the verge of becoming deadly to human life. But how?

A “man” living in the United Kingdom who enigmatically calls himself “Bob the Alien” offers a possible explanation as he reflects on his oddly personal eyewitness experience on the planet Venus: “The cloud that covers Venus is not like the cloud that we have in our skies. It is full of deadly sulphuric acids droplets, not water droplets as on Earth. Nearly all of Venus’ atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide, a poisonous, suffocating gas which would kill any living creature if it was breathed in.”

It seems that “Bob the Alien” believes that Earth’s atmosphere will soon change to become more like the atmosphere of Venus. That’s why he is offering to take some Earthlings with him on his space ship the next time he lifts off. “Join me and my dog, Bobsdog,” he says urgently, “for an exciting journey around your Solar System and beyond. We will visit peculiar planets, mysterious moons, amazing asteroids, crazy comets and, if we have time, we can look at some stars too!”

I don’t know this “Bob the Alien” character, but he seems quite a bit more compassionate than Virgin Galactic.