List.

[mangosteen]

I have a strong opponent in my district.
We got the domestic spending amendments passed.
It really does limit domestic surveillance meaningfully.
Suing the telcos would serve no real purpose.
We can't be seen as "soft on terror."
The dirt this would dig up would help no one.
This is an election year!
We need these tools to protect against terrorists.
You don't have the whole picture.
You can't handle the truth.
Don't be so naïve.


I was only following orders.

Comments

[arimathea.livejournal.com]

There is going to be a reckoning one day and I swear to all that is holy I will be in the front lines.

[sethg]

Reckon here. Now.

[cos]

In just a couple of years...

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, some of the people proposing themselves as alternatives are just as anti-following-rules as the folks we have now. Or rather, they're all for other people followingrules, but those rules don't apply to them, you understand...

[cos]

The point is to recruit some good primary challengers for some of the targets, and beat a few of them. You only have to beat very few of them to change the behavior of a lot more, as long as it's clear a) that it was part of an organized movement, and b) why that movement targeted the ones who lost (and therefore, what others can do to avoid being targeted).

P.S. That's how we won gay marriage in Massachusetts, flipping more than 60 votes in about three years. We only beat a few of them, but they never beat any of ours, and it was clear both that this was an organized movement, and the main reason they were vulnerable.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Don't worry, we'll repeal it when Bush isn't in office."

[mangosteen]

Good one, although for extra irony points, presuming that Obama becomes President, he'll be attacked on day 1 for invading peoples' privacy with domestic warantless wiretaps.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Day 1 of his presidency? He's been getting attacked for it for weeks now, and rightly so.

I understand quite well that he's willing to compromise when circumstances call for it, and I consider that one of his features. I don't understand why this is considered a compromise and not a total sell-out.

[cos]

This one, he's completely wrong about. I like the ways he has compromised on a number of things, and generally he seems good at keeping to what he thinks is important and finding creative ways to work with opponents. But on this, he's just entirely wrong, and it's not a compromise.

I don't think he thinks he was "compromising", and he still intends to try to get telco immunity stripped in conference committee. What he thinks he was doing, based on his responses to open letters, is... basically giving in to a twilight zone style game of chicken from Bush, that goes like this:
- Protect America Act expired at the beginning of this year
- PAA included a legitimate "bug fix" to FISA: it allowed surveillance of foreign communications that happen to pass through the USA, without warrants
- Surveillance begun under the PAA was allowed to continue for 6 months, so those "wiretaps" are expiring.
- Bush says if Congress passes a FISA bug fix without telco amnesty, he'll veto it
- What if Bush is crazy enough to actually do it, even though he claims the FISA bug fix is needed "to save American lives"? Then he can blame Congress because they didn't legalize the surveillance that needs to be done!

Now, Obama isn't falling for the whole crazy game of chicken the way some Senators are. He'd prefer to pass a FISA bugfix without telco amnesty. But he is falling for the idea that if no FISA bugfix legislation is passed now, it will do serious damage and telco amnesty, while undesirable, is a price worth paying.

He's wrong about that, of course: the Bush administration was breaking the law and doing whatever surveillance they felt like, before it all got made public and the PAA legalized most of it for a while starting in 2006. If Bush wants to play chicken on this, Congress can just not send him a FISA update. He'll continue breaking the law if he feels like it, or he won't in order to score political points.