June 20th, 2008
It has recently come to my attention that people actually listen to this program. What, are you crazy? All this time I thought that we were just talking into microphones for the hell of it. Now I find out that we’re actually being broadcast to a potential audience of millions?
Wild.
I guess that while I have you all listening, I’d like to mention the family’s new dog. She relates to today’s news, seriously.
Brought into my family homestead to replace an aged, and now passed-on, hound, little Darcy is a German Shorthair, fast, obscenely muscular, and only slightly more courageous than a platoon of French soldiers on the German border circa 1939.
While the household cats are treated little better than Algerian separatists by the new dog, I may as well be marching at the front of a blitzkrieg. She’s been a presence in the home for several months now, and although my visits have been quite frequent in that time, her reaction remains the same every time.
Stepping in the door sets her barking, tail tucked between her legs, cowering behind the safety of my stepdad, her apparent protector and undoubted favorite person. A few minutes of coaxing and offering treats will bring her within a body’s length, but any sudden movement will throw her into full retreat.
And while there are moments where she’ll forget to be terrified of me, they only last until the next change of setting. I’m not all that surprised when she doesn’t recognize me after two weeks, but it’s a little disappointing when she forgets who I am when I’ve only just walked back inside the door.
It’s not as if I’m trying to project any sense of menace towards the poor animal. Even though she has the long-term memory of a trout, I’m not going to hold it against her.
What does get me is how her courage manifests. The three household cats, one of whom has lived in the house for over a decade, are mercilessly pursued by the dog. She has ample vigor to chase, cats, birds, deer, and shows no apparent fear of thousand-pound holstein heifers more than ten feet away.
I, however, represent a horror so terrifying that she will choke herself on a leash, eyes rolling to the whites, if I so much as run within ten yards.
She’s paralyzed with fear by the most inappropriate things, and for the life of me all I could think this morning as I watched the roll calls come in from Congress was that the Democratic leadership in the House had turned into my Mom’s dog.
I really want to like them, but unless they grow some backbone and figure out when to hold their ground, and when to leave well enough alone, it’s going to be hard to show them any respect.
The chickenhawks struck back today, on this 20th of June, 2008, and you’re listening to the Timothy Jordan Show News.
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Among the final orders of business for House of Representatives this week was a vote on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It represents a capitulation by the Democratic leadership in the face of pressure from the White House to provide immunity to the nation’s major telecommunications companies for their help in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program.
At stake this morning were nearly 40 cases brought against the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and by extension the U.S. government for 4th Amendment violations from the ongoing wiretapping of American citizens without any judicial oversight.
After barely over an hour of debate, our Representatives in the House voted 293-129 in favor of the bill. The Senate will take up the bill early next week.
Locally, both Representatives Anna Eshoo and Sam Farr were in the minority who voted against granting expanded powers to the President and immunity for the telecoms.
Already members of the Republican party are celebrating a victory, because despite what’s being said by Speaker of the House Pelosi, this was no compromise. This was a capitulation, a yellow-bellied and capricious betrayal of all the Americans who voted the Democratic majority into office two years ago.
Under the terms of the proposed law, the telecommunications companies currently being sued in dozens of class-action lawsuits will be granted immunity from prosecution if they are able to present to the court a document from the Department of Justice saying that the President requested and authorized their participation.
This was framed by the bill’s supporters as falling short of total immunity because of the need for Federal certification of the telecom’s participation.
There’s only one problem with that statement: These documents are already known to exist. They were part of the original requests made in the early days of the Bush administration to expand wiretapping of Americans. The bill was specifically written to make these existing certifications a “get out of jail free” card for the telecoms.
What they represent is something unprecedented in the history of the country. Up until this Presidency it was assumed that the rule of law applied to just about everyone. At least that was the often unrealized ideal. If there was a crime committed, then the person accused could be brought before a court and the evidence against them heard.
That same process applied to individuals, corporations, and the government. But if the FISA Amendments Act becomes law, it creates a gaping hole in the U.S. legal code, a hole that lets the President say, “I’ve authorized this company to break the law.”
The precedent created by the FISA Amendments Act is more than just troubling. It’s a direct assault on the principles that this country was founded upon. Shame on Speaker Pelosi and the House leadership. The Democrats who voted in favor of this bill did so not because of some immediate need for wiretapping, no immediate threat to our nation’s security, but because of fears that they’d be portrayed as soft on defense in the fall elections.
It’s the same old story, the same shallow ploy that’s been used to cow Democrats for the last forty years. There’s nothing in the history of our country that Republicans are endowed with some higher wisdom that enables them to better defend our nation from its enemies.
If recent history, and this current administration are any indication, then Republicans are the last people that we’d want defending our nation. And yet the Democratic party continues to fight the battles of 2008 as if it’s 1994.
This is not the time to run scared from the same old Republican attacks. The Grand Old Party’s claim to represent the best interests of the American people is at its weakest since the fall of Nixon. Kick them when they’re down, because they certainly didn’t show any mercy when they had a grip on the levers of government.
There was no compromise out of Tom Delay when he ran the House, so why did Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer curl their quivering tails between their legs and capitulate to the most egregious demands of the President and telecommunications companies earlier today?
It’s awfully hard to respect someone when all their bluster is reduced to whimpering under the table.
The Senate will meet early next week to vote on their version of the bill.
Just how will Senator Obama, the presumptive leader of the Democratic party in the years to come, handle himself next week? In a statement released earlier today the Senator said that, “After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act.”
He went on to offer that while he supports the bill, he’ll be working to remove the immunity provision from the Senate’s version.
How the other members of his party respond will be a topic for next week’s News segment, without a doubt.
A similar law passed in the Swedish Parliament earlier this week, despite the protests of thousands of Swedish citizens who now face nearly unregulated wiretapping of their private communications.
Back at the Fortified Mountain Compound we’re already anticipating the need to hurl some bile upon the office door of Senator Feinstein, who’s shown herself to be deeply in the pocket of the telecoms in the past. On the off chance that listeners would like to persuade her otherwise, and keep my bile off of her door, there’s a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s contact page for U.S. Senators provided in the post of this evening’s News segment at www.timothyjordanshow.com.
• via EFF, H.R. 6304 PDF (216KB)
• via The Local, Swedish opposition to similar wiretap law
• via Talking Points Memo, Obama statement on FISA Amendments Act
• EFF Senate contact page to oppose telecom immunity
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I’ll be saving up some extra bile just in case.
Oh wait, I may need it sooner than expected, because there was another victory in the Global War on Terror announced this week.
The terrorist policies of the Saddam Hussien government, which terrorized U.S. oil companies into leaving Iraq, have been defeated.
According to the New York Times, the Iraqi government is set to approve a series of no-bid service contracts with Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum, Schell, and several other smaller oil companies. The companies would take over operations from the Iraqi national oil company, which had licensed large contracts to Russian and Chinese firms before the U.S. invasion.
The contracts would go into effect despite the failure of the Iraqi Parliament to pass a critical law to fairly distribute the proceeds from oil sales among the country’s ethnically divided provinces.
Formal announcement of the contracts, which were in no way influenced by the presence of 160,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq *cough*, is expected by the end of this month.
• NYT, Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back (free subscription required)
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Was that okay? I think that I threw up a little in my throat back there. What happened to the good old days when the U.S. government had to sneak around and collude with major companies in the inky shadows? Come on, they’re not even making an effort to spin this anymore. They may as well sew those oil company logos underneath the mission patches our soldiers wear.
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In news of that which is far less likely to make me hurl, yesterday NASA announced that they had discovered definitive evidence of water ice at the North pole of Mars.
A trench dug into the polar soil earlier in the week by NASA’s Phoenix Lander revealed a hard surface under a thin layer of dust, in addition to some dice-sized chunks broken off from that surface. The chunks could have been rock, until a camera on the Lander recorded them melting away.
Rocks don’t melt away, but ice does.
The discovery of water ice on Mars is a major step forward for exploration of our closest planetary neighbor. It means that future missions have a source of water, freeing critical payload space for equipment and astronauts.
• NASA, Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander’s Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
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I need to free some space for this evening’s post-show beer, but can’t leave without a little taste of excellence.
I’ve said for a long time that bacon goes with everything. An old friend recently gave me a box of bacon mints that nearly proved me wrong, but I’m convinced that the failure of the bacon mints was simply in the execution, not the concept.
The concept is, of course, that bacon goes with everything.
Whatever you’re eating, a little bacon will make it better. A lot of bacon will make it a lot better.
All that bacon tends to leave tasty bits between your teeth, and if you’re like me you want to get that tasty bacon out of there while it’s still tasty.
But how to do that while keeping as much bacon flavor going as possible? The answer to that question was supplied by the fine folks down at Archie McPhee.
Producers of fine toys and novelty goods, they’ve recently added something excellent to their product lineup: bacon floss.
They actually feature an entire lineup of bacon-related products. Sadly, they don’t sell actual bacon, so Archie McPhee won’t be winning this week’s Award of Excellence, but their bacon floss will.
What better way to remove that tasty bacon from between your teeth than with bacon-flavored floss? There isn’t a better way, because removing bacon with bacon floss is pure excellence.
And that’s been the News for the 20th of June, Ought-Eight.