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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.'"
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)
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.
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
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.