Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping 260
Spamicles writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to subpoena documents from the Bush Administration related to the government's admitted eavesdropping on Americans' overseas emails and phone calls without getting court approval. In a 13-3 vote, the Committee decided to authorize its chairman to issue subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Nearly any request is going to be met with tough resistance from the White House, and the confrontation over the documents 'could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.'"
Re:A request you can't ignore... (Score:2, Interesting)
Good luck america.
Re:At the end of the day... (Score:3, Interesting)
The
It's this simple... (Score:4, Interesting)
While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.
We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.
While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.
We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.
Re:At the end of the day... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it's about time, then, that we did like the founding fathers and started fighting for ourselves.
13 to 3 vote. Should tell you something. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Write committee, wrong body. (Score:5, Interesting)
So start with Cheney. Move on to Gonzales. Repeat as necessary.
Heck, leave Bush alone for all I care. He's not driving this bus, he's just the guy with the hat.
Impeachment: It's not just for presidents.
Re:At the end of the day... (Score:2, Interesting)
For those not familiar with Amendment 3, it states "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Hell, I'd bet $5 that not more than a dozen Congressmen/Senators have even read the constitution (We know the President hasn't read it), but they outlawed internet gambling, and I have no desire to go to jail.
Re:Write committee, wrong body. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A request you can't ignore... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the movies, he almost always plays a good guy. His characters are usually the take charge or I'm not standing for fucking up type people and this will have more sway then a voting record or connection to former presidents. You can expect television stations to play his movies when he runs, not because they support him but because they will get ratings and can charge more for advertising.
Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh wait! I look at what wikipedia has to say about the factual innacuracies in _Lies..._:
In fact, it was not a Viet Cong grenade; instead the grenade had fallen from a fellow American soldier's flak jacket during a non-combat mission and accidentally detonated.
American officials say they have "convincing evidence" that bin Laden, who has been given shelter by Afghanistan's Islamic rulers, was involved in the bombings of the east African embassies.
At the time I wondered if this was wag the dog, to distract the American people from his troubles with the congress. Now I understand that the Republicans are more interested in using our terrorist enemies as a political tool, to win elections and gain power, rather than actually protecting us against them.
Re:At the end of the day... (Score:3, Interesting)
Democrat or republican, it doesn't matter, they don't want the president to ever think they have more power then congress is willing to let them have and the democrats specifically don't want the supreme court declaring what the president has done to be legal at all. Especially if it involves a funny reading into the constitution like we have seen in the past.
Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No surprise here (Score:3, Interesting)
This was modded Funny because my posts are generally laden with humor or heavy sarcasm (meaning no one ever takes me seriously). You should worry when posters like myself are rated Insightful because it's at that point that the real thinkers (aka 'Da Brains') on this sight have fled.
Reasons the Da Brains might flee:
* NSA is wiretapping Da Brains' posts
* Da Brains are wiretapping the Senate Judiciary Committee's phones and learned of their own subpoenas
* Da Brains have stumbled upon some of my poorer posts (such as this one)
* Best two out of three options
* All of the above
* Da Brains' restraining orders against Cowboy Neal have expired and they have been forced to move to locations without intertubes access
* In Soviet Russia, subpoenas wiretap you!
* Profit!
If I'm ever rated as Interesting then you know it's a slow day on
correction (Score:3, Interesting)
The current Pres Bush had used the signing statement 800 times as of last Feb and interestingly, his pappy used it 232 times. In fact ALL of the presidents before GW Bush used signing statements only 600 times.
The interesting thing about this extraordinary measure is that usually these signing statements are used when the Congress passes a law that the President finds so unconstitutional that he feels he must weigh in. Most Presidents just go ahead and veto the bill instead. But remember, the first six years of the Bush Admin, when he used the signing statement 33 percent more than all the previous presidents combined, he had a Republican Congress.
So what was up? It was all about enhancing the power of the "Unitary" Executive. Think for a moment about one of the most inadequate and incompetent presidents in history grabbing such power for himself.