Another craven capitulation

As I told the office of one of the good guys, John Kerry, "The Congress needs new leadership."

He knows if you've been bad or good

Another quaint Constitutional right that the Bushists are shitting on:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Let me get this straight: Telecom amnesty is required because one or two phone companies declined an illegal Bushist surveillance program at some point? Telecom amnesty furthers the government's goal of spying on all of us in violation of the Fourth Amendment? And that's the reason I should support telecom amnesty?

They obviously think we're idiots.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, who is brilliant as always. A sample quote:

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values.

Telecom amnesty is about one thing only

Litigation it ain't. Security? Nope.

Amnesty is about hiding the truth from us little people, the truth about how thoroughly the phone company despises privacy and law (see The President's Analyst) but even more important the truth about how thoroughly the Bushist regime keeps us all under surveillance.

End of law

American Leona Helmsley politicians of both parties have proven and are proving that the rule of law is too much trouble - if you're rich and powerful enough to have a lobbyist and to make campaign contributions. Only the little people obey the law.

Britney Spears and Michael Vick really missed out. If they had made campaign contributions while they still had resources, they could have bought their way out of the celebrity fixes they're in.

At least the long-suffering Fourth Amendment is out of its misery. Now the authority of Congress to pass laws that anyone with the slightest bit of pull has to obey looks really weak. Duhbya doesn't obey, and now the telecoms, not to mention Halliburton, Enron, and Blackwater.

The telecoms, by the way, employ lawyers. There is no way the plain meaning of their statutory responsibility to maintain confidentiality could have been difficult for them to interpret. They chose to violate them under the extortion and transparently bogus legal rationales of the Bushists.

Congress, if you're listening to anyone who has this perspective, prove me wrong. Go ahead, punks, make my day.

Note: My own Congressman, Jim McGovern, is most heartily excepted from this screed. Ted Kennedy, too.