Thus far this convention looks just like '04, just more lavish. As Carville said he had not heard either of the words war,gas(there was plenty from the podium),mortage, bankruptcy, etc. Just change change and more change. Change what and change it to what. Does the average American living hand to mouth care that the bigwigs sit in massage chairs? Who pays for this extravagance? Who is the gaudiness supposed to impress? Michell looked kind of foolish trying to explain how they were just ordinary folk running for president. I guess DKos is impressed since most nouns are preceeded by at least five meaningful adjectives such as wow and absolute most,  and a sentance not ending in !!! is considered meaningless.

cross-posted from Street Prophets

Yesterday in Denver, Matt Stoller caught an ad for a party given by AT&T for Blue Dog Congresspeople.

Recognizing a golden opportunity, a bunch of progressive bloggers led by Glenn Greenwald, with press credentials all, tried to attend the party to do interviews.  But the press was excluded, they were told, and they could not enter.  This was not exactly acceptable to a group of people who have all spoken up for Constitutional freedoms in the recent FISA controversies and who consider warrantless wiretapping to be a very serious issue.  Here was a wiretapping telecom courting Congresspeople with no press coverage whatsoever.  Interview they must.

So they stood outside and did the best they could to see who was attending and to speak with them as they entered the party.

From Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Party Crashing AT&T and the Blue Dogs: The Best Government Money Can Buy:

After The Dark Knight was released, a lot of ink was spilled over the morality of Batman's cellphone survelliance system.  Wing-nuts and Bush apologists loved it because it "proved" Dems are weak on anti-terror methods and that all our concerns about "phantoms of lost liberty" will fly out the window as soon as we see what real evil is.

The counter argument is that The Dark Knight is a tacit admission that the current administration's anti-terror tactics only work in a comic book world.  Only someone as ridgidly principled as Batman should have the power to watch everyone is society.  And even he can't be trusted to directly weild that power.  Instead, he had to turn it over to his conscience, in the form of Lucius Fox.

Fortunately, Batman's cell phone is just science fiction.  But this article in Newsweek shows that it might not be SciFi for much longer.

Remember all the consternation and angst on this board surrounding Obama's recent "yes" vote on the FISA bill?  Remember all the people sayin' they were going to ditch Obama, that he was a sellout, that they weren't going to contribute another dime to his campaign? Remember that?

Obama will announce that Chris Dodd will be his VP. Chris Dodd should not be a total surprise, as Obama's VP search requested info from him just last month. And Dodd fits very well with all of Obama's stated and unstated requirements of a VP candidate. But I'm not totally happy with a VP Dodd...

Update: if you don't like "VP guess" diaries, don't read them. Don't hassle me for expressing myself in public just because you're not interested in my reasons why. Diaries that come late in the process, but before the choice is truly known, shouldn't have to suffer just because they waited for more info. If you didn't slam the early diaries, don't waste our time with slams now just because you can't change the channel to watch something else. Constructive discussion is always welcome, even (and especially) if it does "push against my preconceived notions".

The SF Chronicle reports on corporate lobbyists taking advantage of a loophole in rules preventing them from throwing lavish parties to "honor"House lawmakers, which exempts parties for groups of Members.

Prominent, a Sunday evening bash thrown by ATT for the "Blue Dogs" to thank them for the FISA amnesty.

Lobbyist parties for lawmakers bend rules

Congress, pledging to clean up Washington's culture of corruption, approved a rule last year to end the practice of lobbyists or their clients throwing lavish events honoring lawmakers at the parties' national conventions.

But the House ethics committee opened a huge loophole in the rule by issuing guidelines in December saying it was fine for lobbyists or their employers to throw parties for a group of House members - just not for a single lawmaker...

...AT&T is among the sponsors of a party celebrating the conservative House Blue Dog Democrats on Sunday night.

Perfect spot for the first appearance of my "STOP GOVERNMENT SPYING" banner.

It is safe to assume the current Democrats and incoming Democrats will not do much to undo Bush's damage to the constitution without some serious poking and prodding. Hopefully the Ron Paul Republicans, our friends on this issue, will help them along a bit.

But I think we need to do everything we can to strategize and keep people informed about abuses to our civil liberties and about attempts to roll back the damage done to them during the last 8 years.

To help this effort along I started a Civil Liberties Google Group. Our brief agenda and link is below. Please join.

Whodda thunk that Pakistan has a more vibrant democracy than the good ol' USA?  Perhaps there's a slight angle to this argument, but consider the roles of Bush 'the Guardian of Democracy' & Musharraf 'The Generalismo'.  Now, consider the following:

1.  Pakistan actually sees demonstrations that aren't composed of vapid demonstrators simply wanting personal attention.  In Pakistan the attention often comes from suicide bombers or zealot policemen, yet the heroic lawyers protest on!  When's the last time you saw a group of 1000 climbing fences and sucking tear gas in America - other than spoiled brat (F)anarchists?

2.  The protests actually mean something, as witnessed by the resignation of Musharraf on charges that he violated the constitution.  Charges?  Back in the good ol' USA the we have legislation (FISA again) which officially acknowledges wrongdoing, but there's nary a twitch on the protest line.  

Combine the above with news about the dismal state of American electorate involvement and ability and it suggests that we need a kick in the pants.  Hmmm...Musharraf '08?

More hmmms...HS civics students graded on protest involvement?  Civil disobedience arrests as pre-req for Polisci degrees?

Just what we needed:

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

Hmm. Where have I seen this dynamic before?

A spying technique that's currently illegal or otherwise prohibited, but which we're actually engaged in anyway, which the "administration" now proposes we legalize before somebody who takes the rule of law seriously gets elected to the White House.

But don't worry! The FOX Nutwork will have no problem finding Democrats to go on the air and endorse the plan, along with the usual useless caveats:

Former Justice Department official Jamie S. Gorelick said the new FBI guidelines on their own do not raise alarms. But she cited the recent disclosure that undercover Maryland State Police agents spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar groups in 2005 and 2006 to emphasize that the policies would require close oversight.

Oh, OK. All we need is some close oversight. Gotcha. No prob.

Seriously, is now any time to really be so glib about needing close oversight of, well, anything? Saying something requires close oversight to be done right is, these days, tantamount to saying it can't be done.

To borrow a phrase often heard in these parts not so long ago, "Shut up about FISA warrantless surveillance domestic spying already! It's over!"

What do you know? There might have been something fundamentally wrong there, after all.

No one could have foreseen...

Over the past few weeks, various members of the online liberal/progressive community, that included quite a few Kossaks, worked together in a democratic fashion to create the Netroots Platform  

For those of you who have just joined us, check out DemocracyLover in NYC mothership diary http://www.dailykos.com/... , to get the whole picture.  For the Civil and Human Rights Plank, we had a whopping 67 Contributors.  Join me over the fold to read the final version

I was driving home from work last night when I heard an advertisement for the Barracuda Message Archiver.

Now, I wasn't dumb enough to believe that the e-mails I send and receive at work don't ultimately end up in a grand archive - in fact, the warning that precedes every workday letting me know that anything created or submitted by this computer is their property (good thing none of this gets published :-) disabused me of the notion that I could delete an e-mail a long time ago.

But it's the sales line of this product that spooked me.

The Barracuda Message Archiver provides everything an organization needs to comply with government regulations in an easy to install and administer plug-and-play hardware solution.

For all you scared, greedy, stupid, or cynical Representatives and Senators who voted for the FISA revisions last month, here’s a little something that got lost in the Friday Olympics-vs.-sex-scandal news dump. . . .

Can you believe that congressional primaries are still happening across the country?  They are.  And wouldn’t it help to know a primary candidate’s position on FISA and other Constitutional issues prior to voting?

The Get FISA Right group is finding out the answers, using a questionnaire developed on our wiki.   The survey includes a section on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 followed by a section on Constitutional Rights.  Challengers are scored on a curve with a grading method discussed in our web forum.  Incumbents are graded on the vote they made in the House and Senate when the flawed bill was passed.  Those who voted Nay get an A, while those who voted Aye get an F.

More after the fold.

After reading Spencer Ackerman's short piece today entitled "No More Voices Behind My Back" a few things came to mind that I would like to discuss.  Emails and phone calls with people in Middle Eastern or Southern Asian nations could cause the government to secretly and negatively focus attention on innocent parties.  Ackerman writes, makes and receives such emails and phone calls because of his work in journalism.  The scrutiny of his communications would undoubtedly take place at a higher level, and from more directions, than the scrutiny of domestic communications.  Having said that, and keeping in mind that I still consider all such spying illegal under the Constitution of the United States, political and rights activists here in the United States have plenty of reasons to worry about Bush's Big Brother policies.

More After The Flip

This would be Rep. Silvestre Reyes.

And to recap why I'm furious with him, it's best to read the diary I posted after our first conversation about the vile FISA rewrite.

Since Reyes pulled the stunt he said he was against back then, I've been fuming and stewing.

Today, I had the chance to let him know how upset I was.

CBS News recently spoke with Mr. Joel Brenner, who they described as "the nation’s top cyber-security official" about the security risks facing U.S. travelers planning on attending the Beijing Olympics.

The travel advisory was blunt: "All information you send electronically-by fax machine, personal digital assistant (PDA), computer or telephone-can be intercepted." It was of course non-news.

Then came an exchange between Mr. Brenner and reporter Bob Orr that must have come as a surprise to at least a few viewers:

Brenner: "The public security services in China can turn your telephone on and activate its microphone when you think it's off."

Sorry to interrupt the puritanical Ken Starr-like scolding going on, but something more important than John Edwards’ sex life happened today.

Or to be exact, 34 years ago today: Richard Nixon resigned the presidency over the threat of certain impeachment for violating the 4th Amendment, among other crimes.

Today, August 8, is the day Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency of the United States in 1974 to avoid impeachment and conviction for high crimes and misdemeanors.  Today is the day that Holy Joe Lieberman was driven from the Democratic Party.

Today is also the day the Strangebedfellows Moneybomb is set to go off.  Back in June-July when the FISA fight was roiling, pissed-off civil libertarians raised over $300,000 to run ads targeting Democrats such as Steny Hoyer who colluded with Congressional Republicans, the White House, and the telecoms to pass the corrupt and dangerous 2008 "FISA Amendments Act."  The Strangebedfellows aim to continue and broaden that campaign, and they need our help.