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Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping
Spamicles writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to subpoena documents from the Bush Administration related to the government's admitted eavesdropping on Americans' overseas emails and phone calls without getting court approval. In a 13-3 vote, the Committee decided to authorize its chairman to issue subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Nearly any request is going to be met with tough resistance from the White House, and the confrontation over the documents 'could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.'"
Fight it in court and let the clock run until January, 2009. The next president, Hillary most likely, will use this precedent to run an even more secretive and authoritarian white house.
Good luck america.
My money is on a non-binding resolution.
/. poll seems especially relevant. The US government is like Windows: it almost seems designed to work better with a reinstall every so often. However, this will not happen, so we'll just get more bogged down with spyware from the NSA and faulty antivirus from Congress.
The
despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.
While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.
We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.
While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.
We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Perhaps it's about time, then, that we did like the founding fathers and started fighting for ourselves.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Even the Republicans are getting tired of the President's contempt for their branch of government.
So start with Cheney. Move on to Gonzales. Repeat as necessary.
Heck, leave Bush alone for all I care. He's not driving this bus, he's just the guy with the hat.
Impeachment: It's not just for presidents.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
For those not familiar with Amendment 3, it states "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Hell, I'd bet $5 that not more than a dozen Congressmen/Senators have even read the constitution (We know the President hasn't read it), but they outlawed internet gambling, and I have no desire to go to jail.
I'm not from the US either but as I understand it the "third guy" happens to be a woman.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The precedent was actually started by her husbands when he was in office. Adn no, I don't think Hillary will be president. The senate has lower rating then the president and the president is pretty low. The American people aren't clambering for a democrat in office rather someone who isn't more of the same. And you don't really see this separation with any of the candidate on the record for running so far. I think Former Senator Thompson will come in late and seeing how his acting roles of late are going to have more impressions on the American people then mudslinging and dirty campaigning, he will likely be the next president.
In the movies, he almost always plays a good guy. His characters are usually the take charge or I'm not standing for fucking up type people and this will have more sway then a voting record or connection to former presidents. You can expect television stations to play his movies when he runs, not because they support him but because they will get ratings and can charge more for advertising.
Oh wait! I look at what wikipedia has to say about the factual innacuracies in _Lies..._: Franken wrote that former U.S. Senator Max Cleland (D-GA), while serving in the U.S. Army, "...left three of his limbs in Vietnam. A VC grenade blew them off."
In fact, it was not a Viet Cong grenade; instead the grenade had fallen from a fellow American soldier's flak jacket during a non-combat mission and accidentally detonated. Woah, that really blow his credibility!</scarcasm> The inaccuracy was corrected in the book's paperback edition. Oh, nevermind. You may disagree with a lot that Bush has done in office, but to say he has done nothing is wrong. He did nothing, *absolutely* nothing, about Middle East terrorists, Jihadists, or Islamic fundamentalists before 9/11. What was the Bush administration doing during their first several months in office? Trying to build a missile defense shield and back out the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia. Clinton pursued and convicted Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the first WTC bombing. Yousef is now in a maximum security prison. ( Where is Bin Laden now? Probably hiding out in Pakistan, our military dictatorship friends in the middle east). Clinton launched cruise missile attacks against terrorist training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan while the Republican congress was investigating things like his Christmas card mailing list and his travel agent's activities. CNN said at the time that U.S. officials say the six sites attacked in Afghanistan were part of a network of terrorist compounds near the Pakistani border that housed supporters of Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.
American officials say they have "convincing evidence" that bin Laden, who has been given shelter by Afghanistan's Islamic rulers, was involved in the bombings of the east African embassies. So he was attacking Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida.
At the time I wondered if this was wag the dog, to distract the American people from his troubles with the congress. Now I understand that the Republicans are more interested in using our terrorist enemies as a political tool, to win elections and gain power, rather than actually protecting us against them.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Well, they will do nothing meaningful because they don't want to lose the impression of power. If this goes to court, it will go to the supreme court and it will be ruled probably in the presidents favor. And if it isn't, they can refuse to comply, and have the supreme court issue another ruling that enables it to happen like the one supporting the interstate commerce act that gave the government sweeping new powers.
Democrat or republican, it doesn't matter, they don't want the president to ever think they have more power then congress is willing to let them have and the democrats specifically don't want the supreme court declaring what the president has done to be legal at all. Especially if it involves a funny reading into the constitution like we have seen in the past.
Hey, that was a good post. I see you're currently modded 3 for 'informative'. That seems fair to me (informative links deserve high mods). There's an odd trend I've noticed that I can't explain, so I'll just state it. I predict that your post will be modded up for a while, and then over a couple of days, it will get modded all the way down to 0. For some reason, after a few days, moderators keep modding down any posts that seem at all anti-Bush, but they don't do it right away. The delay is what bothers me. Why doesn't it happen right away when we're all reading the article and responses? I also predict that this post will be modded down, in similar fashion, but only after a couple of days.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
This was modded Funny because my posts are generally laden with humor or heavy sarcasm (meaning no one ever takes me seriously). You should worry when posters like myself are rated Insightful because it's at that point that the real thinkers (aka 'Da Brains') on this sight have fled.
Reasons the Da Brains might flee:
* NSA is wiretapping Da Brains' posts
* Da Brains are wiretapping the Senate Judiciary Committee's phones and learned of their own subpoenas
* Da Brains have stumbled upon some of my poorer posts (such as this one)
* Best two out of three options
* All of the above
* Da Brains' restraining orders against Cowboy Neal have expired and they have been forced to move to locations without intertubes access
* In Soviet Russia, subpoenas wiretap you!
* Profit!
If I'm ever rated as Interesting then you know it's a slow day on
I'm sorry, my numbers above were a little off. Then number of presidential signing statements by Clinton and Reagan together come to 150 not 50 as I wrote.
The current Pres Bush had used the signing statement 800 times as of last Feb and interestingly, his pappy used it 232 times. In fact ALL of the presidents before GW Bush used signing statements only 600 times.
The interesting thing about this extraordinary measure is that usually these signing statements are used when the Congress passes a law that the President finds so unconstitutional that he feels he must weigh in. Most Presidents just go ahead and veto the bill instead. But remember, the first six years of the Bush Admin, when he used the signing statement 33 percent more than all the previous presidents combined, he had a Republican Congress.
So what was up? It was all about enhancing the power of the "Unitary" Executive. Think for a moment about one of the most inadequate and incompetent presidents in history grabbing such power for himself.
You are welcome on my lawn.