It's not just Obama.

It's going to be important in 2014 -- in terms of manpower; donations; Green, Peace & Freedom and independent challenges; etc. -- to remember who is responsible for what.

Apparently, House Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi influenced Democratic members of whom we can usually expect better, such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX), Luis Gutierrez (IL), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Steve Israel (NY), Ami Bera (CA), Joaquin Castro (TX), Joe Kennedy (MA), Annie Kuster (NH), Nita Lowey (NY) and Louise Slaughter (NY), to vote to protect NSA's power. If only 12 of them had opposed the program, some spying would have been stopped.

That the vote was close is good news, however: it offers hope that opponents will be encouraged to keep fighting.

How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program: "The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash's amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday's shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment's defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It's an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic...."

The rest of the story: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/25/how_nancy_pelosi_saved_the_nsa_surveillance_program

More on possible congressional resistance to domestic spying: Six Ways Congress May Reform NSA Snooping

1) Raise the standard for what records are considered “relevant.”
2) Require NSA analysts to obtain court approval before searching metadata.
3) Declassify Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions.
4) Change the way Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges are appointed.
5) Appoint a public advocate to argue before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
6) End phone metadata collection on constitutional grounds.

Must Read: How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around the World

In a recent speech, Glenn Greenwald discussed how the government and media treatment of WikiLeaks is symptomatic of a total lack of respect for the law and government transparency by the secret consortium of government and corporate power that runs the United States.

[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the  transcript of a speech delivered by Constitutional lawyer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald at the Lannan Foundation on March 8. The speech was transcribed by the blog Contumacious. Please visit AlterNet to read the entire speech.]

by Glenn Greenwald

...[P]olitical controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They're always part of some broader framework, that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn't really matter which specific topic, or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss, the reality is, you can't really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture, and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So, in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes, that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.

This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administration eavesdropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this very naïve idea that this was going to be very straightforward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eavesdropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing, is a felony in the U.S., just like robbing a bank, or extortion or murder, and that it's punishable by a prison term of five years or a $10,000 fine for each offense.

The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So, I thought that this was going to be a fairly straightforward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that and everybody's talking about that, that that's actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I'm actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really is was I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do....that thing that the law said for 30 years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. And, as it turned out (and I realized this fairly quickly) none of that actually happened. It wasn't a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.

And, not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So, what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it, and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime, that it was a felony under the statute and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became why. Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?

So, then I needed to delve into that dynamic, that I began by referencing that determines political outcomes. I had to examine the fact that we have a political faction inside the U.S. [the American Right] that is drowning in concepts of nationalism, and exceptionalism, in tribalism that leads them to believe that whatever they and their leaders do is justifiable inherently because they do it, and in a complete lack of principle...this is the same faction that impeached a democratically elected president not more than 10 years earlier on the grounds that the rule of law is paramount and we can't allow our presidents to break the law. And, yet, here they were defending it.

Please read the entire address at How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around the World by Glenn Greenwald (AlterNet 2011-03-21).


Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by Working Assets Publishing next month.

Saturday Catchup: Must-reads (and sees) from the recent past

Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’? by Chris Hedges (TruthDig 2010-03-29). "The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die."

On this week's 42nd anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, two talented lawyers who've dedicated their careers to fighting inequality join Bill Moyers to examine justice and injustice in America after 42 years of struggle. Watch Bill Moyers interview with Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander. A transcript of the interview. Bill Moyers essay on economic justice (Bill Moyers Journal 2010-04-02). Also: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Economic Dream Still Unfulfilled, 42 Years Later by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship (Salon 2010-04-02)and We Still Don’t Hear Him by Bob Herbert (New York Times 2010-04-02).

The Inhumanity of War by Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute (Huntington Post 2010-04-03). Constant warfare is good for America and boon to the world. Not.

Nearly six months ago, in a must-read piece in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer pondered the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program (The Predator War 2009-10-26), Obama's ramping up of the terror bombing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The situation has only become more dire in the months since; as with the torture of prisoners, the debate over the indiscriminately murderous drones has devolved into an argument over how far we can go without committing acts that are actually indictable: see, Drone Attacks Are Legit Self-Defense, Says State Dept. Lawyer by Nathan Hodge (Danger Room 2010-03-26) and The Legal And Moral Issues Of Drone Use (NPR 2010-03-30) with Peter Bergen, Amitai Etzioni and Philip Alston.

Will the Pentagon send surveillance drones and other military support to the Somali government for its offensive against al-Qaida-linked insurgents, as the Associated Press reports? Perhaps you should ask your members of Congress.

Newsweek calls Afghanistan’s police force a ”$6 billion fiasco” that could cost us the war. Nation building is a risky business; no wonder presidential candidates promise not to do it.

"A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush." By Charlie Savage and James Risen (New York Times 2010-03-31).

The event itself was insignificant, of course, especially by comparison to, say, decades of priestly diddling of deaf children, but the media coverage was characteristically abysmal:

But then, as so often before, Jon Stewart put it all in perspective for you:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
2 Girls 1 GOP
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

And speaking of the important role of late night comedians in our national dialog,  David Letterman's interview of Tea Party member Pam Stout on the Late Show was a "quietly remarkable piece of television," according to Entertainment Weekly's tv critic Ken Tucker.

Catch Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner's Fun for the Whole Family episode on BloggingHeads -- will health care reform give Obama a foreign policy boost?; Obama and Netanyahu, less than the best of pals; The Frumble in the Jungle; can conservative intellectuals ride the Tea Party tiger?; the Catholic Church’s systemic failure; is the Greek financial crisis just the tip of the iceberg?:


Speaking of the Frumble in the Jungle, Carl Bloice takes on The Myth of the Sensible Center (Black Commentator 2010-04-01). Left, Right and Center become meaningless anyway when the central ideologies controlling our politics, corporatism and militarism, are forbidden subjects.

The Fed in Hot Water by Robert Reich (TalkingPointsMemo 2010-0402). Tim Geithner made secret, unregulated, probably illegal payouts of Bear Stearns and AIG worth tens of billions in public dollars months before Congress authorized taxpayer bailout of the financial community. Also, watch Robert Reich on ABC's This Week: The Obama Administration's Approach To Financial Reform Will Do 'Nothing' To Change Wall Street (Huntington Post 010-04-04).

To battle Wall Street, Obama should channel Teddy Roosevelt by Simon Johnson and James Kwak (The Washington Post 2010-04-04). Like that's going to happen.

And Tepid Reforms Demand that Progressives Mobilize by Katrina vanden Heuvel (Washington Post 2010-03-30).

US GAO releases 2010 Assessments of Selected Weapons Programs (2010-03-30), one- or two-page assessments of 70 weapon programs, most found wanting against "best practices" criteria.

Music video of the week is from a tribute to Skip Spence's legendary Oar (full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for the second Moby Grape album), with a wild guitar solo by Wilco's Nels Cline:


Women in Their 90'S Who Make A Difference Today by Joan Wile (AfterDowningStreet 2010-04-03). My 94-year-old mother, having lent a hand in the battle to permit wind farms in New England, now wants take on the war in Afghanistan. "I think you should leave the world a little better than you found it," she says.

It took a while for the corporations to lay their cold dead hands fully on the the switches of mass media access after the terrifying (to them) social, intellectual and artistic cacophony of the 60s. Throughout the 70s and 80s, though, brief flashes of anarchy and creativity could still sneak past the cultural police lines, as in this energetic Black Leather Monster by punk rockers Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics on “Solid Gold,“ the pop hits countdown that usually featured lipsyncing bubblegum bands and eroto-aerobic dance routines.


A Critic's Place, Thumb and All is a thoughtful meditation on the future of arts criticism by Times film critic A.O.Scott (New York Times 2010-03-30).

Finally, a song much abused by karaoke singers is given its most disturbing reading ever:

Accountability: Senators’ Patriot Act ‘fix’ would eliminate telecom immunity

"A group of US Senators unveiled legislation Thursday aiming to strip telecommunications firms that took part in a hugely controversial Bush-era spying program of immunity from lawsuits.

"The bill aims to 'fix problems with surveillance laws that threaten the rights and liberties of American citizens' without crippling the government’s ability to track suspected terrorists, the lawmakers said in a joint statement.

"The legislation would affect the way the US government can search Americans’ personal records, conduct wiretapping, and otherwise collect and use information on US citizens....

"Democratic Senator Russell Feingold, long a critic of government spy powers on Americans, was a chief author of the legislation presented Thursday.

"The others included the number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, as well as Democratic Senators Jon Tester, Tom Udall, Jeff Bingaman, Daniel Akaka, Ron Wyden, and Robert Menendez, as well as Independent Senator Bernie Sanders."

Go. Read. Senators’ Patriot Act ‘fix’ would eliminate telecom immunity by Raw Story (2009-09-17)

Update -- Reality intrudes: "The Senate Judiciary Committee narrowly passed a bill Thursday to extend several controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the counterterrorism law hastily drafted in the aftermath of 9/11...The bill - the USA Patriot Act Sunset Extension Act - was co-sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and committee member Dianne Feinstein, who also chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and passed was passed by a vote of 11 to 8." - Senate Panel Extends Controversial Patriot Act Provisions by Jason Leopold (truthout 2009-10-09)

The Senate Caves In Again to Bush on FISA

But the House shows a little moxie

The FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), an "updating" of the 30-year-old law that authorized a secret court to oversee intelligence operations by federal agencies, sailed through the "Democratically-controlled" Senate on Feb 12.

Intended to "modernize and streamline" provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, "and for other purposes" (italics added), the act includes a section authorizing warrantless wiretaps of foreign-to-foreign communications and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the administration to spy on Americans. The bill also states that the government will not need a warrant for foreign-to-American communications, with no privacy protections on the American end, and will allow the government to install monitoring stations in telephone and internet facilities inside the U.S., also without judicial review.

In effect, the statute provides retroactive immunity to government officials as completely as to the telecoms.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Democrat's narrow majority was diminished by the defections of a few conservatives like Lieberman and Salazar, but you'd be wrong. The vote wasn't even close.

Sixty-eight senators voted for the bill; only 29 said nay. To put it another way, 19 Democrats -- 40% of the Democratic delegation -- joined Lieberman and the Republicans in voting to gut the Constitution.

Three senators couldn't be bothered to vote at all. One was Lindsey Graham. No loss there. But the others were the two liberal champions who seek to be the leader of their party: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

It's no wonder that millions of American feel disenfranchised by the current system. In the absence of party discipline, there is no downside to lying about who you are or what you'll do once you're in office. Voters pull the lever for a Democrat and wind up with a senator or a representative allied with the GOP and supporting a corrupt, incompetent and fascistic president. Why wouldn't they vote for Ralph Nader the next time, or just stay home? It shouldn't be a shock that more people vote for American Idol than for president; at least you can count on the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, Carrie Underwood and Taylor Hicks to deliver as promised.

The problem with Washington is not that it is narrowly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Nor is Federalism the problem. The problem is that the government -- all branches -- is firmly and utterly in the hands of conservatives. Nothing is changed by dispatching someone to the District for no more compelling reason than that s/he labels self a Democrat. We have to start choosing people who actually will take on the military-industrial complex, engage in the fight against poverty, expand democratic government, protect the environment, and rebuild the country's tattered infrastructure, regardless of party. We have to stop letting conservatives use the Democratic Party to camouflage their dominance of policy. There are no liberals in the Republican congressional delegation; why should conservatives be allowed to hide out among the Democrats? Party labels are just another way of keeping us from figuring out what's really going on.

Instead of sucking up to right wingers in order to cop the choice corner suites in the Senate office buildings, the Democrats should toss traitors like Joe Lieberman out on their Dumbo-sized ears. What has been gained by taking "control" of the Senate, beyond winning for the Democrats a share of the responsibility for the failures of George W. Bush and of the conservative majority that truly controls the legislative agenda? We would have a far more responsive, effective and democratic government if our elected officials were organized along ideological instead of partisan political lines.

With the White House already lost to the center-right, liberals, progressives, peace advocates, environmentalists, labor activists and such can more effectively deploy their time, talent and legal tender to reorienting the Congress than worrying over who's going to be president. Not that there aren't reasons to choose among them, but McCain, Clinton and Obama are more alike than they are different: none of them is going to tackle the radical adjustment in priorities needed if this is to become a just and democratic country. There should be no rush to choose one over another without getting concrete policy commitments in return.

In the matter at hand, for example, here is the list of nominal Democrats who voted with the Republicans to give the president the added power he craves: Baucus (MT), Bayh (IN), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lincoln (AR), McCaskill (MO), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Rockefeller (WV) -- the bill's sponsor, Salazar (CO), Pryor (AR), Webb (VA) and Whitehouse (D-RI). I'm not saying protecting your rights as citizens should be the only thing on your mind when you vote, but at least it ought to be a consideration.

Besides, many of these names -- Baucus, Casey, Conrad, Johnson, Kohl, Landrieu, the Nelson boys, Lincoln, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar -- come up over and over again as stalwart defenders of corporate interests and opponents of economic reform. Put a hand on your wallet and look around for a progressive alternative the next time they come conning for support in your precinct.

The list should give us pause in other ways. It turns out that a candidate's opposition to the war du jour may be an insufficient reason to endorse him if his objection to the conflict is that it has been mismanaged, the position of many corporatist Democrats, Jim Webb apparently among them. By the same token, it is hard to see what was gained by replacing the last liberal Republican, Lincoln Chafee, with the conservative Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (another possible warning flag to keep in mind this particular election season: the Rhode Island Democrat's campaign slogan was "Change the Senate").

In 2006, the Democratic Senate and House election committees systematically supported conservatives against candidates who ran on such issues as peace and economic justice. With many more progressives in primary races this time than last, activists need to be on the alert for a reappearance of similar tactics in upcoming contests.

The news isn't all bad.

Although the president was at his fearmongering worst last week, in a rare demonstration of backbone, the leadership in the House, balking at shielding phone carriers from privacy lawsuits and at warrantless and unwarranted surveillance of American citizens by their government -- took a two-week Presidents' Day vacation without reauthorizing last summer's temporary domestic wiretapping law.

"By blocking this piece of legislation, our country is more in danger of an attack," Bush said of the House's presumption. "By not giving the professionals the tools they need, it's going to be a lot harder to do the job we need to be able to defend America."

The temporary provisions are set to expire at midnight tonight, but Democrats argued that the basic law will remain in effect and that the president wittingly manufactured the confrontation by threatening to veto a short-term extension that was intended to permit the Senate and House time to deliberate responsibly on revising FISA permanently. "He knows that the underlying 'intelligence' law and the power given to him in the Protect America Act give him sufficient authority to do all of the surveillance and collecting that he needs to do in order to protect the American people," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The New York Times on Thursday.

In response to Bush's accusation that Democrats are imperiling the nation's security, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer accused the president of "fear mongering."

"After refusing to extend current law, the president repeated today his untenable and irresponsible claim that our national security will be jeopardized unless the House immediately rubber-stamps a Senate bill," Hoyer said. "In fact, a wide range of national security experts has made clear that the president and the intelligence community have all the tools they need to protect our nation."

"This is not about protecting Americans," added Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus, on Friday. "The president just wants to protect American telephone companies."

If the bill is so vital, some Democrats wondered, why not sign the measure without the telecoms' "Get Out of Jail Free" card and let the phone companies off the hook with separate legislation?

Whether the rare display of gumption by House leaders is evidence that the Democrats are ready at last to take on the worst excesses of the president remains to be seen. But so low are our expectations by now that it was gratifying to see them display even the faintest profile of courage, notwithstanding that to do it they had to get out of town.

Countdown Special Comment on FISA: President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist by Keith Olberman (CrooksAndLiars.com, 2008-02-14)
Putting the president above the law (International Herald Tribune, 2008-02-10)
Bush Says Congress Putting US in Danger (AP/NYTimes, 2008-02-15)

Update: House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance

The House approved a new FISA bill that denies retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms and which refuses to grant most of the new powers for the President to spy on Americans without warrants. It passed comfortably, by a 213-197 margin. (Salon.com, 2008-03-14)