- Ira Winkler, a former NSA analyst, nails the real concerns about the NSA’s lawless activities:
Fundamentally, this is an issue of law. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was established in 1978 to address a wide variety of issues revolving around Watergate, during which a president used foreign intelligence agencies to collect data on U.S. citizens. As part of FISA, the NSA has to get warrants to analyze and maintain collections of data involving U.S. citizens… The president claims that the process of getting those warrants—of complying with the law—is too time-consuming. Normally, that would sound like simple laziness, but the reality is that the program is so large that they would need an army of lawyers to get all the warrants they’d need to be in compliance with FISA. But the law is the law. No president has the right to pick and choose which laws they find convenient to follow.
“No president has the right to pick and choose which laws they find convenient to follow.” What a concept. Why, one wonders, does the ultra-right in this country find this so hard to understand?
- Michelle Goldberg, author of the recently released Kingdom Coming, describes the dangers of Christian nationalism and offers ways to combat its spreading influence on the American polity:
One way for progressives to build a movement and fight Christian nationalism at the same time is to focus on local politics. For guidance, they need only look to the Christian Coalition: It wasn’t until after Bill Clinton’s election exiled the evangelical right from power in Washington that the Christian Coalition really developed its nationwide electoral apparatus… In conjunction with local initiatives, opponents of Christian nationalism need a new media strategy… Much of what media strategists need to do simply involves public education. Americans need to learn what Christian Reconstructionism means so that they can decide whether they approve of their congressmen consorting with theocrats.
- Amnesty International has launched irrepressible, a campaign for information freedom. Among other tactics, the campaign provides a simple way for webmasters to undermine net censorship by publishing censored material directly on a web site.
- From TPMmuckraker we learn that Amir Taheri, the liar who invented the fairy take that Iran would force Jews to wear yellow badges, was invited to the White House as an ‘expert’ on Iraq:
Q Can you give us a readout on the President’s meeting this morning with the Iraq experts?
Ye gods and little fishies… is it any wonder that this administration is destined to go down in history as one of the most incompetent ever in the history of America?
MR. SNOW: Yes. Oh, my goodness, I forgot to bring the list. But actually—do you have the list, Fred? Yes, it was an interesting meeting. What you ended up having was—I’ve got all the names but one written down here. We had Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey, Michael Vickers, Amir Taheri, Fouad Ajami and Raad Alkadiri.
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