Bush’s FISA Bill Passes Senate

The Democratic capitulation is complete.  Telecom immunity will shortly be a real disaster instead of an imagined disaster.  The telecom’s millions of lobbying dollars was money well spent.  I hope you enjoy paying your cell phone bill every month – that’s where your money is going.  Not to service or functionality, but to ensuring their illegal acts are swept under the rug.

To those who are expressing amazement that the President with the lowest approval rating in American history keeps getting exactly what he wants, I want you to read the following very carefully.  If you keep voting for candidates simply because they have a (D) behind their name, these capitulations are exactly what you deserve.  If the criteria you employ to vote for a person is that a Democrat just has to be better than a Republican simply because they’re running as one, this kind of thing will keep happening.  Stop whining when you sell yourself and the rest of us short.  It’s pathetic.  Either a candidate subscribes to tenets set forth by members of the party or they don’t.  If they don’t, they shouldn’t hold office representing that party.  Which leads us to the obvious: stop voting for them!

If Democrats are complicit in the illegal activities of telecoms, that’s their problem.  I didn’t ask them to approve illegal wiretapping.  Here is where I think true Democrats break from Republicans: no elected official of my party should hold office if they’re corrupt.  And I’m going to work to get the corrupt ones replaced by better Democrats.

Random Hits 7/9/08

Science matters to voters when choosing who to vote into office.

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Science Debate 2008 has released 14 questions the presidential candidates should answer. Actually, I’d like to ask Senator McCain if he bases his decisions on scientific underpinnings or not and what examples can he provide if he does. What he says today and what he would do as president to prove to the science-hating crowd he’s one of them are likely to be two very different things.

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Interesting take on the FISA capitulation by thereisnospoon, whose writings I search for. Obama tacked toward the center of the Overton window. It’s up to activists to move the window. More evidence that we activists are the leaders and elected officials are by design the rearguard.

Random News Pieces 6/27/08

Sen. Salazar (D-CO) offered a decent turn around on renewable energy regulation. It comes after Sen. Allard (R-CO) and other Republicans unveiled part of their proposal to increase production of domestic energy, including oil shale development. One of Sen. Allard’s talking points is the lack of a regulatory structure is holding back development and somehow hurting our energy portfolio. Sen. Salazar wants to maintain the moratorium on lease development. Citing the need for renewable energy development, Salazar pointed out that renewables also face an uncertain regulatory environment. What’s good for the goose…. A small framing victory. I wish Dems would apply it to more issues.

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All three candidates running for the CO-02 seat (Jared Polis, Will Shafroth, and Joan Fitz-Gerald) said they disagreed with Rep. Udall’s vote on the FISA bill, which is a good thing. I disagree with the premise on which Rep. udall’s statement is based: there is currently no impediment to collecting intelligence on potential activities by “terrorists”. There is a current version of FISA in effect and it has done its job since its inception. Giving the Bush administration more than they wanted isn’t being an opposition party.

To: House Dems Who Voted for Telecom Immunity

The modern Republican: defender of the 2nd amendment, with no thought to its conditionality and destroyer of the remainder of Rights, including the 4th amendment. I guess I can see why they’ve spent so much time and energy on the 2nd now. With searches no longer hinging upon probable cause, maybe we all should have guns to defend our property, physical and electronic. The government, purposefully wrecked by Republicans, obviously has no interest in doing so any longer.

Is the House vote the end of the world? Obviously not. I’m angry the vote happened the way it did. Just as Pelosi and Hoyer learned that they needed to quickly schedule this vote to avoid hearing from constituents, activists will learn from this event as well. There are other things need attention too. FISA is definitely important, but only one facet of a larger war going on. Longer-term goals need to be established, fought for, monitored, and “audited”. I’m going to transform my emotions on this vote into continued action to make a difference. It’s what got me started as an activist and maintaining that drive to improve my country will be fed by this capitulation. As part of this, I’m no longer going to use an AT&T/Cingular cell phone. They charge too much and now I know where all that extra money is going. Instead, I’m going to do business with CREDO mobile. They didn’t lobby Congress to absolve telecoms of admitted lawbreaking. It’s an easy choice.

The fact that FISA isn’t the only story we should are about doesn’t mean we should be quiet and simply accept blatant political maneuvering. I think back to my participation in a Politics West roundtable: when Dems do something I consider wrong, I will not hold back my criticism of those actions. As a Dem, I expect more from other Dems than I do of Republicans. I’ve written before about the role of elected officials: they are our employees. Any time an employer gives an employee a task or project and the employee doesn’t perform to the employer’s standard, it is the responsibility of the employer to do something about it. And do something we must. Displeasure left uncommunicated festers and destroys relationships. We have the opportunity to let those officials know how we feel about their performance. Take it.

A Look at Telecom Donations to Democrats

When I think something is shady or unethical about the way in which a Democrat votes, I don’t hesitate to call it as I see it. The House’s approval of retroactive immunity for telecommunication corporations last week is a prime example. I have zero love for corporatist Democrats. My interests (and yours) aren’t taken seriously when companies like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint can spend millions of dollars to ensure they get their way.

MapLight.org examines how two votes this year produced Democrats that voted against immunity before they voted for it. Not surprisingly, a large number of Democrats that switched their votes also received money from the afore-mentioned corporations.

Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:

$8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for Telcos (94 Dems)
$4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity for Telcos (116 Dems)

88 percent of the Dems who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008).

Click on the link above to see the list of these 94 Dems.

Of note to Coloradans:

John Salazar (CO-03): $6,000

Ed Perlmutter (CO-07): $1,000

Mark Udall (CO-02): $0

Here’s the way I read this: John Salazar is a Corporatist Democrat. He’s willing to vote based on pressure applied from big-money interests (note: you and I don’t make that list). I don’t think Ed Perlmutter is a Corporatist Democrat, but I’m not sure how else to describe him. Why would he vote to grant retroactive immunity to corporations that knowingly broke federal wiretapping laws? Especially with Qwest’s presence in the state: they didn’t hand control over to the Bushies. Why should the other telecoms get off scott free?

Mark Udall is running hard for the center of the political spectrum and it’s disgusting, quite frankly. Republican politicians will stab his “bipartisanship” in the back the first chance they get (see Sen. Ken Salazar’s ridiculous contortions for proof). I don’t think Republican voters want immunity that much more than Democrats do, which is to say not at all. I would be very interested in seeing any kind of quantitative rationale for switching his vote. Does his campaign think it will secure Undeclared or Republican votes this November? He might need them if he continues to stick it to his base.

Here’s what it means to Democrats at the national level: folks like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi need to be replaced with better Democrats. This capitulation based on campaign donations is sickening.

Good framing example

I read an excellent example of framing today: a Newsweek reporter talking to Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) about the importance of external oversight to the FISA program.

“In the modern political climate you’re more likely to hear about amnesty with respect to undocumented workers than you are about the amnesty for the phone and Internet companies who helped the government break the law before the act was passed.“

Yeah, that “liberal media” has just been going to town on the brown invasion from Mexico, hasn’t it? And since we know how much Democrats hate business, that same “liberal media” has totally been using the same language to talk about telecommunication corporations doing Bush’s bidding. Wait, they haven’t? Well gee, what’s wrong with those two assumptions?

This is one of the better examples of how to correctly frame an issue, and quite frankly one I wish I had thought of before reading it. That being said, I don’t mind incorporating it into my lexicon.

h/t mcjoan