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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSenate Votes (73-23)to Extend Sweeping Bush Era Surveillance Power (for Five Years?) WTF!
Last edited Sat Dec 29, 2012, 12:57 PM - Edit history (1)
Senate Votes to Extend Sweeping Bush Era Surveillance Powers
Even modest attempts to reign in domestic spying law fail as Senators defend sweeping powers for NSA
- Jon Queally, staff writer
Update:
Sen. Jeff Merkeley (D-OR) offered an amendment to the surveillance bill that would have forced the government to declassify the rulings or at least summaries of them. It was among four amendments defeated. (Image: Screen grab via C-SPAN) The US Senate on Friday voted to reauthorize the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a spying bill that critics say violates the Fourth Amendment and gives vast, unchecked surveillance authority to the government.
The move extends powers of the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance of Americans international emails and phone calls.
The FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act (H.R. 5949), passed on a 73-23 vote.
Its a tragic irony that FISA, once passed to protect Americans from warrantless government surveillance, has mutated into its polar opposite due to the FISA Amendments Act, said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel at the ACLU. The Bush administrations program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/28
daa
(2,621 posts)The US government has more information on its citizens than Stalin, Hilter, Stasi. Can't vote to raise axes on the rich to protect the middle class though. That would be doing the will of the people nd election results.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)graham4anything
(11,464 posts)Now if we can reclassify guns as WMDs in the war on terror, we can get somewhere, utilizing any and all means possible
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)Bobby wiretapped MLK pre-FISA.
Now, the Fourth Amendment is ignored, and FISA is rewritten to be the opposite of what it was intended.
But, hey. If you've got nothing to hide...
kenny blankenship
(15,689 posts)to justify the Bush-Obama Police State. Rather telling, too, about the kind of person you are. If anything the example of MLK should stand AS A BLAZING WARNING AGAINST MEN LIKE BUSH AND OBAMA. As Atty General, Robert F. Kennedy played along with FBI direcor Herbert Hoover's attempts to paint Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Communist and drive him to suicide, just as he was privy to his brother's many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is a SHAMEFUL BLOT on the Kennedy name, and will stand forever, whether you think he tried to make up for things like that after his brother was murdered. Political opportunists who seek sweeping powers like Obama and Bush have, always abuse them the way RFK and Hoover abused Cold War era counter-espionage powers, and they create an atmosphere in which their underlings and successors will abuse them more and more routinely and flagrantly.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)I find it disgusting that people use code words like police state or Bush/soand so are the same
Ralph Nader ites continue their bullshit
Nader caused the Bush's to win in 2000. Everything else was trivial
If you voted 3rd party and for Nader one has NO moral ground to protest now
And it is NOT abuse-being that it is legal and CONGRESS authorized it.
Anything a president does that congress authorizes is LEGAL
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)Rahm and Obama were top recipients of AT&T campaign contributions in 2008.
What did Nader have to do with the 2008 FISA amendments? That's right, nothing.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)No wars
No 9-11
No corrupt supreme court ruling
all because Nader sided with the Bush admin. to throw him the election either on purpose or because he was an idiot
either way, it is his fault
He singlehandedly stifled the vote, and it was one of the lowest turnouts ever in 2000
and in NH his votes could have given Gore 270
so, yes, it has everything to do with Nader and the Naderites.
It would be simliar to a car filled with 4 people go to a gas station
3 get out and rob the station and kill the people inside
The driver had no knowledge and would be no part of it
except all 4 are arrested and guilt is equal.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)retroactive immunity for illegally wiretapping US citizens during the Bush administration and it's Nader's fault.
That's utter bullshit. What a fucking joke you are.
Edit to add: Nader should be President. He's the most powerful being in the universe, apparently. He would be better than our milquetoast Capitulator-in-Chief who hasn't met a corporate interest he couldn't sell out to.
a11ig8r
(40 posts)Dodge much? Dodgey.
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)I don't believe in attributing what somebody in years past would have done today to exempt our politicians from acting lie we live in a Democracy.
That being said the US government is probably spying on everything you do.
Do you approve of that? Are we all criminals?
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)anything goes and it's fine by me
spying?
I use a c/c for everything but the lottery
I use an ez pass which is attached and on my cars 24/7/365
I use a supermarket scanner card which instantly can tell you what I bought the last 10 years
I use a cell phone
I am on the net which instantly has tracking
and you are worried about spying?
I don't mind the TSA. Nobody has infiltrated a plane since.
I go to concerts in Madison Square Garden 10 times a year and am frisked each time, as has been the norm for 30-40 years now
no
I am not worried.
If they find someone plotting to do another CT the day before and drop a drone on that person and it saves 20 kids lives, please, do it.
the guy who kept slaves, yet wrote the thingy that says "All men are created equal" while abusing the women slaves he kept, Thomas Jefferson did not count on the coup'd'etat going on by the south in 2012.
we are at war. anything goes.
If you don't like the president Bush who made the patriot act(though the War Powers Act is really the same thing anyhow), make sure not to vote for Jeb or a bad president in 16 or 20 or 24 or 28 or 32 or 36 or 40 or 44, etc.
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)That's what they Bushinistas said after 9/11 and I remember most here being against it.
How times have changed.
How eager will you be to keep these laws in place once the US leaves both Iraq and Afghanistan?
And incidentally, we are not in any declared war.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)What one did when a bad President(Bush ) was in office has NO relation to what one does when a good one is in office(Obama).
Lincoln was a great President.
FDR was a great President
LBJ was a great President
Carter was a great President
Obama is a great President
the constitution is not constant, neither is life
we live, we learn
and we are at war, right here like in the Civil Wars days
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)graham4anything
(11,464 posts)AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-Ben Franklin
Would this guy be considered a troll on DU?
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)and what about the massacre of the citizens of the USA by the settlers?(the Native Americans?)
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)I don't own a firearm, and I believe that there needs to be more common sense regulation.
The tragedy of what has happened to the First Nations will always be a scar on the fabric of American history.
Strangely enough you had written in this thread that "anything goes (in war) and it's fine by me." The Americans were at war with the First Nations. It was a belligerent war of expansion and conquest. I'm sure that there were many that said during that time that "anything goes and it's fine by me."
And the First Nations were slaughtered.
graham4anything
(11,464 posts)Puglover
(16,380 posts)Freedom isn't free.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)from the "blue line specialists" to defend this.
All the hopes over Leahy, Feinstein, Wyden, etc. Amendments and yet the Senate vote wasn't even close. They had to know the vote wouldn't be close, so it was all just for SHOW. And that's what we now expect will happen...which seems why there's not much news here on DU, about this Five Year Extension to an Act that is a continuation and even strengthening of the Bush/Cheney policies.
progressoid
(49,992 posts)JVS
(61,935 posts)LisaLynne
(14,554 posts)Are they really just evil? I don't actually think so. Not all of them. The government is made up of people and I don't think they are ALL bad people. So, do they think they need to do this to protect us? Do they really think they will find the bad guys this way? Are they thinking that they can ultimately use it to squash dissent (which I would classify as evil)? What?
I don't think I'm making a lot of sense here, but I wonder if we could really understand their motivations (short of them actually being hardcore power grabs), maybe we could find a way to counteract this. Or is it just that power corrupts and when you have some you just want more and more, no matter who you are?
KoKo
(84,711 posts)Don't have time to get the links to post here right now. But, its been reported on recently how much the MIC funds our "elected representatives."
Octafish
(55,745 posts)...and find other enemies of the state, like those dangerous Occupy people.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/28/fbi-ignored-deadly-threat-to-occupiers/
Rex
(65,616 posts)are worried we have nothing to be afraid of anymore, so they are bringing back...COMMUNISM! We MUST have an enemy, yet how ironic the goto enemy is always WE THE PEOPLE.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)His pen and ink social network diagrams tied people, events, and time together in a very understandable way. That was in 2000. Then, just as his career was really taking off, he died from suicide cough murder. The FBI visited his gallery and took pictures of this in 2000.
A pertinent detail...
Obssesive-Generous
Thank you for seeing the Big Picture and standing up to these warmongering traitors, Rex.
Rex
(65,616 posts)Stand right along side you unwavering, til the very end if need be.
These BFEE bastards think we just forget and forgive. Some people (better people) do, I DON'T. I never will. If these shitheads would have taken five seconds to be adults and listen to the CIA in 2000...well you know...personally I think they wanted this autocratic power grab from the moment I read about PNAC.
RIP to all the unknown heroes.
This vet salutes you.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
c. 1979-90, 5th Version
1999
"ObsessiveGenerous"
Toward a Diagram of Mark Lombardi
by Frances Richard
wburg.com
Who is James R. Bath?
A nodal point in Mark Lombardi's drawing George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, 5th Version, 1999, James R. Bath appears in the upper lefthand corner of the 16 1/2" x 41" piece of paper. The spatial syntax of Lombardi's drawingswhich map in elegantly visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers, politicians, corporations, and governmentsdictates that the more densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. Thirteen lines originate with or point to James R. Bath, more than any other name presented. Among those linked to this obscure yet central character are George W. Bush, Jr., George H.W. Bush, Sr., Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Governor John B. Connally of Texas, Sheik Salim bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, and Sheik Salim's younger brother, Osama bin Laden.
The drawing is done on pale beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume of George W. Bush's career in the oil business. In other words, the drawing, like all Lombardi's work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of history painting, a document of factually verifiable yet extremely pared-down relationships limned in a double light of international fame and cryptic realpolitik. Or rather, the light is triple. For, though he possessed the instincts of a private eye and the acumen of a systems-analyst, Lombardi was of course an artist, and from the raw material of wire-service reports and books by political correspondents, he drew not only chronicles of covert, high-stakes trade, but technically pristine and sensually compelling visual forms. His project's sources are profoundly art-historical, even as they are obviously journalistic, and the creative tension between abstracted, self-propelling image and direct verbal communication propels his work. Delicately balanced and gracefully enlaced, these lines and circles read from across the room as purely retinal explorations of two-dimensional space. Their stylized complexity, however, lures the eye in, to a point where language registers as legible and referentiality asserts itself through the scrim of form. A narrative emerges. Looking shifts toward reading, and Lombardi's one-two punch lands.
James R. Bath, it turns out, is a Texas businessman, a sometime aeronautics broker whose firm, Skyway Aircraft Leasing, LTD., was a Cayman Islands front amassing money for use by Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. Bath also served as an agent minding American interests for a quartet of Saudi Arabian billionaires, one of whom was Sheik Salim bin Laden, the oldest son and heir of Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, father of fifty-four children including Osama. According to reports by the Houston Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and others, Bath did business in his own name but with the Saudis' money; tax records indicate that he collected a fee of 5% on their multimillion dollar American investments. In 1979, Bath contributed $50,000 to Arbusto Energy, a limited-partnership controlled by George W. Bush. As Bath had little capital of his own, oil insiders trace the funds to his silent partners, specifically Salim bin Laden. Such cash infusions from Bath's client sheiks and George H.W. Bush's cartel cronies could not, however, prop Arbusto up. The venture collapsed in 1981 and merged into the Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. Spectrumstill with W. at the helmevolved through more near-failures and mergers into Harken Energy, which, in 1990, embarked upon a sweetheart deal to drill oil wells in Bahrainthis regardless of the fact that Harken had never drilled an overseas well, nor a marine well of any kind. Oil industry cognoscenti again assume that the Bahrain contract was orchestrated as a favor from the Saudis to the American chief executive and his family. The favor paid. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock at $4 per share. Eight days later, Harken finished the second quarter with losses of $23 million; the stock promptly lost 75% of its value, finishing at just over $1 per share. Two months later, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the Gulf War began. All these events are cited in Lombardi's drawing.
Meanwhile, another Bath associate, Sheik Khalid bin Mafouz, was involved in the collapse (in July, 1991) of the Bank of Credit and Commerce, International, better known as BCCI. Among the sins of the Pakistani-owned BCCI were money-laundering on behalf of Colombian druglords, arms brokering, bribery, and aid to terrorists; when this cabal came unglued, millions of investors in seventy-three countries lost their life-savings. Although Bath was not personally implicated in the BCCI fiasco, an estranged business partner claims that that he, Bath, had been recruited to the CIA in 1976-77 by George Bush, Sr., after serving in the Texas Air National Guard as the buddy of George Bush, Jr. (in 1972, the two young men narrowly escaped arrest for cocaine possession). Bath's putative CIA connections, the Agency's operations in the Middle East, and the adventures of BCCI thus compose a kind of symmetry. The byzantine saga of BCCI's demise is plotted in the drawing that is perhaps Lombardi's masterwork, BCCI-ICIC-FAB, c. 1972-1991, (4th Version), 1996-2000. Unveiled in the landmark P.S. 1 exhibition "Greater New York" in 2000, this piece signaled Lombardi's arrival at the cusp of art world fame; it is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. A wall-size panel schematizing twenty years of suspect alliances amongst scores of players, BCCI-ICIC-FAB was the last major work the artist made before his death.
For those who followed the BCCI scandalor the Harken Energy/insider trading scandal, or the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro scandal, or the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal, or any of Lombardi's pet juggernautsthese diagrams summarize rather than amend available knowledge. He was always careful to explain that he did not conduct primary investigations, but culled his information exclusively from the public record; a basic Internet search yields multiple references to the Bath/Bush/bin Laden connection. However, ferreting out and adding up in one's own head the myriad fragments scattered across the infotainment megascape is a very different experience from standing before Lombardi's rhythmic plots. In the strangely contemplative and yet galvanizing presence of these images, the graphic equilibrium with which he invests his subjects is transformative. To track these events in the context of the drawings is to experience their import freshly, to undergo a shock of mixed recognition and surprise.
CONTINUED...
http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html
Infinite thanks to you, Rex. I am honored to return your salute, Sir. I am privileged to stand with you.
Rex
(65,616 posts)Makes you wonder how many have truly taken a short walk off the top of Foggy Bottom.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2987035&mesg_id=2991082
Stay strong my friend, we have facts and history on our side.
EDIT - notice who else is in that thread...spewing the RWing disinformation?
KoKo
(84,711 posts)Thanks...for reposting this. Had computer crash awhile ago and had that bookmarked and couldn't get it back again.
Younger DU'ers might never have known about him, his artistic diagramatical drawings tying the "web of influence" together before his unfortunate demise.
Rex
(65,616 posts).
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)with its own.
Sad.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)The KGB never could have dreamed to have access to info on it's own people that the US gov't has now, from logging internet and phone communication, credit card receipts, library records, etc.
the electronic age has made it so easy.
I'm afraid the stage is perfectly set for a much scarier police state.
CanonRay
(14,108 posts)Our country is really fucked up.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)We can count on him to protect us from the tyranny of the state...can't we?
Logical
(22,457 posts)great white snark
(2,646 posts)If you get material from a website they really need updating.
BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)Evidently that includes Rand Paul and Al Franken. Can anybody come up with the complete list of the Senators voting against?
BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)Only 3 Republicans voted against: Murkowski, Paul, Lee
19 Dems voted against: Begich, Udall, Coons, Akaka, Schatz, Harkin, Durbin, Franken, Baucus, Tester, Menendez, Bingaman, Udall, Brown, Merkley, Wyden, Leahy, Cantwell, Murray
Sanders voted against.
Boxer and Lautenburg did not vote.
It strikes me that these 20 (including Sanders) are the people we need to fight hardest for in each election cycle. And we know they are being joined by a few new Senators that should be progressive. So that's where we are in reality. 20-25 halfway progressive Dems and another 30 who might as well be Republicans. While that may sound bleak, it actually is significant progress.