The House Passed It
CNN reports: House approves overhaul of wiretap laws
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The House on Friday approved a bipartisan plan to overhaul the nation’s wiretapping laws.
The House vote was 293-129, with more Republicans than Democrats voting for it. The bill now moves to the Senate.
Here’s the House votes page, so you see the names of the Stalinists, including Nancy Pelosi, who approved violating your rights under the Fourth Amendment and allowing criminals to walk free.
Nice leadership on this issue from the “presumptive” Democratic nominee for President. I guess the supporting the Constitution would have interfered with his “bi-partisanship”.
10 comments
Barack Obama is a Senator, and as such he is not responsible for the actions of the House of Representatives. Now that they have passed this execrable garbage, which is an ex post facto law in violation of the Constitution, I expect and insist that Barack Obama will do everything in his power to stop it in the Senate.
Michael, you’re out of luck; you can no longer claim that Obama is not responsible: Obama just announced his support for the bill. He is on board with the telecoms. And Harry Reid has already announced that any attempt to remove telecom amnesty from the bill will fail, which allows Obama to say he tried to remove it, but… you understand the politics. Obama is now on board with them.
Accordingly, I have removed my banner endorsement of Obama from my blog. Whether or not I end up voting for him, I cannot condone a candidate’s explicit abnegation of the Fourth Amendment.
As an outsider now, I would note that the convention is off a ways, and as it depends on the superdelegates, they can always go with another candidate. I believe there is a credible choice in the wings, depending on the pending vote on the Constitution.
It would be disruptive, but the Constitution is sort of important.
People need to learn not to project their hopes and dreams onto politicians.
This is weak language to be sure:
“It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward.”
However he has not yet failed to remove the retroactive immunity provision.
I’d like to be clear that Barack Obama is facing a real test of effectiveness here, if he is against the immunity provision and will work against it, then we should expect him to work effectively against it and strip it from the final bill. If he cannot do that and will simply vote for that abnegation of the Constitution, he will lose my support.
*shug*
I don’t understand why anyone would be remotely surprised.
Kryten, you can tell people what experience has taught you, like stoves are hot, but they don’t accept it until after they get “burned”.
I mentioned when the two “Democrats” won special elections in the South recently, that they weren’t anything more than conservative Republicans with a “D” after their name, but no one listened. The House of Representatives is in the control of conservative [blue dog] Democrats and they are going to act just like Republicans.
Oh, I know. 🙂
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that you and I (and a minority of others) have experienced *the real world* out there, and seen the worst possible side of human nature in many situations. We have both had to deal with many forms of corruption, and most people would never believe us if we told them just how much corruption in all it’s forms there really is. We have been trained to look at things from all angles, and to assume there is more than the superficial surface which is all most people see. We were trained to look for the threads binding things together, the patterns in everything humans do. It all comes down to patterns in the end. So, it’s no surprise to us. The rest have such insular lives. I used to envy them sometimes, I’m sure you did occasionally also. 🙂 Now, I no longer envy the insulated, ignorant (in it’s literal sense) multitudes. Now I just want to grab them all by the scruff od the neck and scream WAKE UP YOU MORONS!
But I can’t, so I just continue to watch the inevitable unfolding and spend a lot of time sighing sadly and being grateful that I was lucky enough to have had some great times to remember. I suspect I am going to need those memories, because great times may well be a thing of the past.
Someone once said to me that I have a very sad and negative perspective. I simply said “No. I have a sadly honest and true perspective.” I survive, they rarely do. The sharks leave me alone, they know. 🙂
I know who my friends are, and who I can trust. I have friends I’ve known for most of my life and have been with me and stuck by me through some very hard times. I count myself lucky.
If you expect the best, you will be disappointed most of the time, and simply relieved when something good happens. If you expect the worst, you won’t be disappointed often and you may, occasionally, be very pleasantly surprised!
I like my occasional pleasant surprises! 😉 😀
“However he has not yet failed to remove the retroactive immunity provision.” Michael
Michael, give it up: Obama screwed up big-time here. He bills himself as the candidate of change, as the candidate who believes America is tough enough to talk directly to its enemies, etc. etc. But he is afraid to face down… the telecoms? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
FWIW, I’ve noticed that some people say Obama must be the source of the cave-in, and a lot of others who say it must have been done at least with his assent as the alleged leader of the Democratic Party. I am prepared to believe at least the second conjecture. And I am not very happy about it.
Pattern is the key that ties together intelligence analysis, criminal investigations, and computers programming – they all involve finding and exploiting patterns.
It requires training and concentration to eliminate the normal “filters” that people develop over their lives and see what is there, rather than what “should be” or ” we want to be” there.
Interview five witnesses to an event and you will get five versions of what happened because the human mind has a bad habit of “filling in the background”. That’s why there are so many bad “eye-witness identifications”. Physical evidence is real, human memories are often dreams.
After the abysmal record of supporting so-called “progressives” who turn out to be regressives, you would thing people might understand that a record is better than a promise. For some reason, people continue to project their hopes and dreams onto politicians, only to be disappointed. I don’t care what they say or how well they say it – what have they actually done?
As they say in the financial brochures “past performance does not guarantee future results”. but it’s a damn sight better than promises.