Nobel Prize Aside…

OK, the NPP is terrific, but we’re still getting nowhere fast on stopping the excesses of the prior administration’s privacy intrusions:

As a Senator, Obama favored raising the standard for issuing an NSL to require a link between the records sought and a terrorist, spy, or other agent of a foreign power. Yet the Obama Administration opposed an even weaker standard – one that would require that the government draft an internal statement of “specific and articulable facts” showing that the information sought was somehow relevant to an investigation. Instead, according to the deliberations of the Judiciary Committee, the Administration favored a mere relevance standard…As Senator, Obama supported an amendment to raise the standard for issuing a Section 215 order to require a link between the records sought and a terrorist, spy, or other agent of a foreign power. The Obama Administration opposed this very change to the PATRIOT Act, dooming its prospects in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The piece is from Leslie Harris, over at HuffPost; please read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

As always, you can follow GetFISARight for more.

Hey! We Were On The Frikkin BBC!

Not only was the Obama Letdown Watch blog featured on the BBC’s “World Have Your Say” program on Monday, but our very own JJB was a guest!

You can download the program on their web page, and here’s a direct link to the MP3.

Our blog is mentioned (and quoted at length) upfront, and John is on at just past 40 minutes.

Enjoy!

How the PATRIOT Act Came To Be

This blog was started because of a concern for our civil liberties, and as a reaction to Barack Obama’s backtracking on wireless wiretaps.

So it’s of particular interest that today, via The Washington Independent, we found out exactly how the PATRIOT was enacted:

“Then Chairman Dreier” — referring to Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), then chairman of the House Rules Committee — “under lord knows whose instructions, substituted that bill for another bill, that we at Judiciary had never seen. So we come here today now to consider what we do with those parts that are expiring.” Conyers proceeded to say that many of the problems being discussed at the hearing with the current law would have been addressed by the original bipartisan one, such as offering an opportunity for people harmed by the Patriot Act’s abuses to seek redress. The original law also “may have eliminated, or simplified, litigation about Patriot Act abuses that continue today,” said Conyers.

Rep. Nadler added:

“We held in this committee five days of markup and achieved unanimity on the Patriot Act. Then the bill just disappeared. And we had a new several-hundred-page bill revealed from the Rules Committee” that had to be voted on the next day, before most members of Congress even had a chance to read it, said Nadler.

This came out in today’s hearings on the JUSTICE Act, which you can find more about at the GetFISARight wiki.

Obama and gay rights

Here is the state of things with the Obama administration on gay rights:

Good: Obama extends federal benefits to same-sex partners

Bad: Obama has yet to follow through with his campaign promise to overturn Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Ugly: Obama administration supports the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits

Obama and the public option

Here are a couple articles talking about Obama’s relationship with the Blue Dogs, and if he’s really trying for the public option at all.

Greenwald: Even The New Republic now calls for a party purge of corporate-owned “centrists”

Rahm Emanuel, Tom Delay, and the Bush/Cheney White House have left no doubt that where there’s a will to influence the actions of Senators and House members in one’s own party, there’s a way. But the Obama White House has done nothing in the way of attempting to change the behavior of the supposedly obstructionist Blue Dogs and centrists whom Obama-defenders are eager to blame for the health care standstill. In fact, they’ve done the opposite: Emanuel has repeatedly leapt to their defense and attacked progressives who sought to influence or otherwise put pressure on them to change behavior

Marcy Wheeler: Obama Doesn’t Want You To Know He Knows Public Option Is Popular

The White House is circulating happy poll numbers in favor of health care reform.

But the White House is not circulating the happy poll numbers–from the very same polls!!–in favor of the public option.

Obama Got Rolled

From today’s Paul Krugman column:

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Has Obama completely lost the trust of progressives?

Speaking for myself, he never fully had it in the first place. The health care mess within which the President has gotten himself seems par for the course, the logical conclusion of what happens when a politician is happy to compromise on whatever principles he or she might have, in the name of this theoretical “bipartisanship” we always hear about.

If you take good ideas, and combine them with bad ideas, you’re not going to end up with good ideas anymore. This is simple logic.

But it does seem true that Obama has finally lost many progressives because of his less-than-convincing approach to health care reform. A good indicator of that might be FDL’s ActBlue page — already over $300,000 has been raised as a thank you to Congresspeople who’ve vowed to keep the public option in any health care legislation.

So while the fight is still playing out, it does seem clear that Obama got rolled. Maybe he’ll have the last laugh here, but if so, losing the faith of many of the people that helped elect him is a large price to pay.

Political capital is the currency of our democracy, and he’s used a lot of it up.

False

Finally. Someone has said it.

Worthless Wiretaps

Not only is the government’s warrantless wiretapping program an invasion of privacy, but apparently it doesn’t work:

The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information.

Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

And here’s the kicker:

In 2008, Congress restructured the federal surveillance law, the broadest such overhaul in three decades. The inspector generals’ report said the new law “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than did the original program. That same measure also gave legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program.

Progressive Block Emerges

Just a quick note, if you aren’t a regular reader of OpenLeft (and you should be…) — this is an important development:

At the behest of a determined bloc of progressive Democrats, the Senate leadership is dropping futile attempts to appease Republicans by weakening major legislation. It is difficult to even count all of the times Open Left and other blogs have urged the Democratic leadership to do just that.

This has happened because the Progressive Block strategy is starting to manifest itself. Rather than Democratic leaders voluntarily turning legislation into a warm pile of corporate mush in order to appeal to a center-right business, media and political status quo, and then having those leaders browbeating the left into supporting said warm pile of corporate mush because that is just “political reality,” now progressives are determining the limits of political reality themselves. Progressives are offering the leadership a simple choice: pass a strong public option, or you don’t get a health care bill.

Saying “it’s about time” just isn’t strong enough.

It’s puzzling why progressives/liberals/whatevers couldn’t be just as strong a congressional force as the Blue Dogs. Perhaps now it’s the “elections matter” mentality that has pushed them into being more in the game.

Whatever the cause, it’s really good news.

Maddow on Obama and DADT

Last night, Rachel Maddow took President Obama to task for his backtracking on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And rightly so.

Video clip here.