Open Thread

3 Comments

1. 

   Real History Lisa on July 31, 2006 at 2:57 pm

   I wish it were something hopeful.

   THIS is on my mind:

   With one piece of legislation, Sen. Arlen Specter seeks to expand the Bush administration’s radical theory of executive power beyond the wildest dreams of Dick Cheney or even John Yoo. Just when it looked as though some semblance of checks and balances was being restored, Specter — the Pennsylvania Republican who masqueraded for months as a tenacious opponent of the White House — offers a bill that would strike an immeasurable blow for the Bush vision of an imperial presidency.

   Specter’s bill (S. 2543) is titled the National Security Surveillance Act, and it is framed as a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The Senate approved FISA in 1978 in the wake of decades of eavesdropping abuses by the executive branch under both parties. FISA allowed aggressive eavesdropping by the president against terrorists and other enemies of the United States, but required that it be conducted with judicial oversight to ensure this awesome power would no longer be abused.

   In reality, Specter does not want to amend the mandates of FISA so much as abolish them. His bill makes it optional, rather than mandatory, for the president to subject himself to judicial oversight when eavesdropping on Americans, in effect returning the nation to the pre-FISA era. Essentially, the president would be allowed to eavesdrop at will, precisely the situation that led to the surveillance abuses of the Nixon White House and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

   Specter’s bill will have three troubling consequences if it becomes law. First, it makes lawbreaking legal. When the New York Times revealed last December that the Bush administration has been eavesdropping without judicial approval for the past four years, it meant that the president has been systematically violating a law that makes such eavesdropping a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. If laws are to have any meaning, then elected officials cannot simply violate them with impunity. Specter’s bill not only virtually guarantees there would be no consequences for this deliberate, ongoing criminality, but rewards and endorses the president’s lawbreaking by changing the law to conform to the president’s conduct.

   This is what came of not challenging Arlen Specter’s lies re the Kennedy assassination. Dictatorship is lurking just under the covers of this legislation.

2. 

   Oui on July 31, 2006 at 3:15 pm

   .

   Military to airlift penguins back home

   RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (The Scotsman) July 31 — Brazil’s air force and navy will transport more than 100 penguins to Antarctica next month after the flightless birds were stranded on Rio de Janeiro beaches.

   Penguins arrive from the Antarctic Circle on ice floes that melt in the vicinity of Brazil’s shore and the birds wash up on Rio beaches every winter. Typically many of the birds are sent to local zoos.

   

   A plane carrying equipment for an Antarctic naval base will take the penguins to Brazil’s southernmost region next month, an air force spokesman said on Monday. They will continue their journey on a naval ship, which will release them into the ocean in their Antarctic habitat.

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

   ▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

3. 

   blksista on July 31, 2006 at 3:47 pm

   There’s a comparative link between O.J.’s pre-murder chumminess with the LAPD, and that of the LA County Sheriff’s Department with Gibson.

   Gibson’s given lots of money to the department and even participated in a PSA with Scott Baio wearing a deputy’s uniform.

   The anti-Semitism is one thing.  But they’ve let Gibson slide on two other occasions when he was driving drunk on the PCH.

   Any other time, any other individual who wasn’t a celeb would be busted big time for going 87 mph in 45 mph zone.

   I’m getting sick and tired of drunk assh*les like Cheney and Gibson getting away with antics like this.

   TMZ.com has everything.