It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.
Glenn Greenwald

6.25.08 Sam Stein: Serenity Lost: Obama and The Netroots

6.22.08 Glenn Greenwald on the "Compromise" (Here)

6.20.08 Pandering To Big Oil

McCain declared drilling is so "safe" that "not even Hurricane Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston." This is patently false. Hurricane Katrina caused 44 oil spills, resulting in more than seven million gallons of oil spilled, according to the Coast Guard., nearing the nine million gallons spilled in the 1989 Exxon-Valdez disaster.
The Progress Report

"The Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," McCain said.
...
The presumptive GOP nominee then read from Chief Justice John Roberts' dissent, and predicted the courts would now be "flooded" with habeas corpus lawsuits.
HuffPo

In his predictable dissent today, Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts unwittingly provides a fitting epitaph for the president's disastrous legal adventures: "One cannot help but think … that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants." Exactly
Ken Gude:guardian.co.uk,

Which refers to "A Preliminary Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Tax Plans" Urban Institute and Brookings Institute

6.15.08 Bush Pledges on Iraq Bases Pact Were a Ruse

As Iraqi sources have now revealed to Western reporters, however, the U.S. has proposed access to dozens of military bases without a time limit that would be technically Iraqi bases but which would actually be fully under U.S. control.
...
It now appears that the Bush administration's ambitions to establish a legal framework to legitimise the occupation before the end of Bush's term will be frustrated by strong opposition to the pact from pro-Iranian Shiite political parties on whose support the al-Maliki regime depends. The government is under strong pressure from legislators belonging to al-Maliki's own Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq to scuttle the pact, and wait for the next U.S. administration before negotiating on the status and role of U.S. forces in Iraq.
POLITICS-US

The Bush administration is currently trying to push Iraqis into accepting a indefinite long-term security agreement, with demands including nearly 60 permanent bases, immunity for foreign contractors, control over air space, and authorization for war with Iran.

Michael Ware: What we’re also hearing from the Iraqi government is they may go it alone, using a hangover snippet of law left over from the original American occupation authority of Paul Bremer.

Think Progress

Scalia's rant starts at page 110.

At page 112: At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.
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These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified.

Judging by the tone of Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, however, you'd think that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues in the majority not only released Hamdan and his buddies from their imprisonment at Guantanamo, but also armed them with a rocket launcher and paid their collective train fare to Philadelphia.
Salon

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.
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In a second ruling on habeas, the Court decided unanimously that U.S. citizens held by U.S. military forces in Iraq have a right to file habeas cases, because it does extend to them, but it went on to rule that federal judges do not have any authority to bar the transfer of those individuals to Iraqi authorites to face prosecution or punishment for crimes committed in that country in violation of Iraqi laws.
Lyle Denniston, Scotus Blog

Comcast has no legal obligation, at least that I'm aware of, to broadcast particular ads. But the danger of allowing corporations like Comcast to control the content of vital political debates by refusing to broadcast ads that are critical of them or their Congressmen is manifest, and that's particularly true where -- as is the case for Rep. Carney's district -- one company controls the bulk of the important television outlets. In an age where corporate consolidation of our most influential media outlets is increasing rapidly, companies such as Comcast can suppress the expression of political views it dislikes -- or conceal their own illegal behavior -- by censoring any political viewpoints that are contrary to their interests or to the interests of the political figures who receive substantial contributions from them and then serve them. Obviously, that is precisely what Comcast is doing here.
Glenn Greenwald

6.5.08 Seth Colter Walls:

More than five years after the initial invasion of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally gone on the record: the Bush administration misused, and in some cases disregarded, intelligence which led the nation into war. The two final sections of a long-delayed and much anticipated "Phase II" report on the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence, released on Thursday morning, accuse senior White House officials of repeatedly misrepresenting the threat posed by Iraq.

In addition, the report on Iraq war intelligence harshly criticizes a Pentagon office for executing "inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities" without the proper knowledge of the State Department and other agencies.
Huffington Post

With petroleum prices reaching record levels, the Oil and Gas Mining Policy Division of the World Bank has initiated a study on the state of government-owned or national oil companies (NOCs) to ascertain their efficiency and competitiveness vis-à-vis private ones.

The study will cover the corporate governance and value creation efficiency of leading state-owned oil companies, which are estimated to control approximately 90 per cent of the world's oil reserves and 75 per cent of production. In the light of increased global oil prices, the World Bank has already advised all governments to open up their petroleum sectors for foreign and private investment.
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"NOCs [especially in developing countries] are often the instruments for achieving a broad range of national, social and political objectives that go well beyond their original purpose of maximising revenues for their governments. Some industry observers have suggested that the pursuit of these non-core non-commercial objectives imposes additional costs on NOCs, reduces their incentive to maximise profits, and hinders the NOCs' ability to raise capital in the financial market, leaving their state treasuries to bear the burden of inefficient capital allocation," the World Bank said in its report.
by: V.M. Sathish, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly via Truthout.org

The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.
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"The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues," the document is quoted as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler.
MICHAEL MELIA

As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation's telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.

But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

Wired via NewsTrust.net

6.1.08 Memo to Scott McClellan: Here's what happened

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.
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Article proceeds with full documentation. Must read history. Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay:McClatchy

A controversial plan to study and profile domestic terrorism was scrapped after popular push back, however, the spirit of the legislation lives on in Senator Joe Lieberman's office.
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On May 19, Lieberman sent a letter to Google Inc.'s CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that Google "immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube."

"By taking action to curtail the use of YouTube to disseminate the goals and methods of those who wish to kill innocent civilians, Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote.

Google fired back, refusing to take off material that did not violate its community guidelines. "While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view," Schmidt said in response, adding, "we believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate, we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds."
Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t

The Pentagon has developed a taste for unrivaled power and unequaled access to the treasury that won't be easily undone by future administrations.
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As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has pointed out, if a stack of bills roughly six inches high is worth $1 million; then, a $1 billion stack would be as tall as the Washington Monument, and a $1 trillion stack would be 95 miles high. And note that none of these war-fighting funds are even counted as part of the annual military budget, but are raised from Congress in the form of "emergency supplementals" a few times a year.
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Great at selling weapons, the Pentagon is slow to report its sales. Arms sales notifications issued by the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) do, however, offer one crude way to the take the Department of Defense's pulse; and, while not all reported deals are finalized, that pulse is clearly racing. Through May of 2008, DSCA had already issued more than $9.1 billion in arms sales notifications including smart bomb kits for Saudi Arabia, TOW missiles for Kuwait, F-16 combat aircraft for Romania, and Chinook helicopters for Canada.

To maintain market advantage, the Pentagon never stops its high-pressure campaigns to peddle weapons abroad. That's why, despite a broken shoulder, Secretary of Defense Gates took to the skies in February, to push weapons systems on countries like India and Indonesia, key growing markets for Pentagon arms dealers.
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Tracing the Pentagon's take-over of intelligence is no easy task. For one thing, there are dozens of Pentagon agencies and offices that now collect and analyze information using everything from "humint" (human intelligence) to wiretaps and satellites. The task is only made tougher by the secrecy that surrounds U.S. intelligence operations and the "black budgets" into which so much intelligence money disappears.

And, I'm only on page 3 Alternet: Frida Berrigan, Tomdispatch.com