A quick note about how ridiculously biased the Washington Post's coverage of the Democratic majority is.
See the underlined passages from the first four paragraphs of tomorrow's front-page WaPo article below:
===
Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill
Some Telecom Companies Would Receive Immunity
By Jonathan Weisman and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 18, 2007; Page A01
Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.
Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.
The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote.
It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill,
and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.
The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.
...and now see the vividly emphasized lines below from the sixth paragraph of the article:
(snip)
Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government's procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance. They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.
More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702438.html?hpid=topnewsOK.
1. YES, the fact that the complicit TelComs get a walk sucks. But, in my opinion, this bitter pill is more than worth swallowing as the price paid to re-establish FISA oversight of the wildly anti-Constitutional domestic surveillance activities by the Bush administration. These bastards must be constrained on this matter, because they cannot be trusted to refrain from using NSA's vast capabilities to spy on political enemies.
The FISA oversight court has recieved 19,000+ warrant requests from Federal officials since it's inception, and rejected less than 10 of them (I think they rejected only three, but cannot recall for certain). Also, FISA allows Federal officials to spy first and seek a warrant later; they can tap phones and perform other surveillance activities without a FISA-granted warrant, and don't have to face the FISA court until weeks later.
In short, this is 'oversight' in its most gossamer iteration...but almost certainly, that court won't give them warrants to spy on political enemies, and that is more than enough for the moment. This is especially pressing during an election year; imagine the NSA surveilling the Democratic candidates and eventual nominee, so as to feed tactical to the GOP candidates, media allies, and the congressional minority...
...and yeah, I think they'd do just that, if they haven't already. Consider: a lot of people are wondering why the majority has time and again folded its cards under minority GOP pressure. Some have theorized that the GOP must have some serious dirt on some heavy Dems, blackmail material they threaten to reveal unless they get their way. But where would such dirt have been found? One possible answer is that said theoretical dirt was revealed through NSA surveillance of Democratic officeholders...hm.
But beyond such theories is the simple truth: this bill, for the first time since January of 2001, sets actual limitations upon White House activities, sets an actual legal boundary around the limitless authority they have professed to hold. It isn't much, but it is a really really REALLY big deal nonetheless.
Which leads to...
2. The article abover totally skates over the fundamental pro-Constitution requirement for oversight of the Executive, and paints this as some absolutely humiliating calamity for the Democrats instead.
This is the second one of these in as many weeks. The first was that NYT debacle about the House version of the FISA bill, which was on the whole a solid effort to create said oversight and was the genesis of the oversight achieed by dumping the TelCom thing...but was smeared by the Times as yet another Dem retreat.
That article was very effective in riling up the activist base against the Dems...even though they were finally doing the right thing working on the best piece of repair-our-rights legislation we've seen to date. This one will likely do the same.
What would hurt the Dems more than anything right now? On the eve of an election year that could easily see the Dems win both the Oval Office as well as a veto-proof Senate majority, it would hurt quite a bit if the activist base bailed on them out of frustation...which is already at needle-in-the-red levels, and further exacerbated by the alleged certainty of a Clinton nomination, who is the base's least-favored candidate by orders of magnitude.
Maybe I'm wrong, at it really is bad enough to warrant such an excoriation...but all I know is that I'm going to sleep better knowing there is at least some bit of a check on Bush & Co.'s surveillance powers, and don't see the TelCom thing as being important enough to scuttle that oversight.
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