Can progressives demand “retro-active immunity” for someone?

Disgusting. Even though both of my parents worshiped the original authoritarian JEHoover, they brought me up to believe in an America that no longer exists.

OT: The depression is here in full force. After my job literally going to China before Christmas I have applied to over 40 job and been on 6 interviews last month alone. My (personal injury law firm owning) Landlord has had enough of my paying half the rent and has started eviction (the day after I paid him every cent of my Unemployment). NOBODY is hiring (no one has been hired for the jobs I interviewed for either)! I guess all those tax cuts the wealthy got didn’t help us. Next week my SO and her kids (one Down Syndrome) goes to a shelter and I go???? Florida is lovely, as long as you don’t have to work for a living.

How about government writing bots like ad ware that downloads into the computer and records ’shopping preferences’ and other demographic data of the sort private enterprise utilizes legally then sells to political campaign datamining third party vendors which consultancies that hire the likes of Sara Taylor then can massage into precinctwise profiles of which voters to cage. Congress has a predilection for nurturing business, the healthy mercantilist western economic way for the past few postAdamSmith centuries. Now all this is somewhat of a different concept precisely from bold wiretapping, or intercepting your webcam, or monitoring your Skype callback features, or devising a way to disassemble that tunneled virtual private network the company has you use for proprietary data. But these things are related in that they are cyberdecipherable, if you will. Further, silicon fab technology and digital signal array offloading algorithms to free cpu crunch cycles have improved vastly in these past forty years as the telcos became incrementally more proficient in first voice recognition, then speech recognition. I work on a speech rec platform for my company and love its efficiencies, though I can type as quickly as most rhetoricians speak; it has saved the carpals and freed the mind to exert yet more control over my work product while simultaneously being faster than human keyboarding, although replete with computer errors. Aside from such technical observations is the interesting retrospective toward what ira effected in its social strife affronts toward main British society, essentially driving that noble old system of government toward the forefront of surveillance as a norm in public life. What I am saying here is there is a knot of technologic problems and privacy is the connecting link among them, worth reinforcing in a US progressive way; but there are commercial arguments congressmembers from both parties will use to divert and disperse real dialog over what shape we want our freedoms to retain. The burden of a surfeit of leisure had distracted a lot of voters and elected officials about these matters, in my view; but the rare moment Obama is providing to his party and the nation now in primary season constitutes an opportunity to energize people toward protecting some unique values in our system of government and society. Other than that, the bmaz and ew comments this past fortnight on the fisa renegade retroactive shield for whatever BushCo had done with the siloed calls for the past seven years, is material with which I agree; and, besides, it is clearly written by our two hosts.

I know that they say that voters have short memories. Let’s make sure that we don’t ever forget this vote.

BTW, where can we find a list of who voted which way?

UGH?

THANK YOU SENATOR DODD! I salute you sir.

Separation of powers does NOT exist today…

I would hit up my congresscritter (Duncan Hunter) on this but I am afraid it is hopeless.
I tried once and I got a very bad headache from talking to his office boy (That you Tony Snesko?)
And Hunter is working very hard to make sure nobody he thinks has done something ILLEGAL ever gets retroactive immunity for it- like for crossing a geopolitical boundary so their families doesn’t starve to death.
‘Cause you know in this country if you do something illegal, for chrissakes, you should be punished.
Ain’t that right Duncan?

at areln specter’s office they told me he’s not for sale.
that’s bullshit on its face:

We could see Specter getting worked up over the CIA’s decision to destroy tapes of terror suspects getting tortured. Instead, he’s carrying on about football as if it’s a matter of national security.

Surely, Specter’s outrage has nothing to do with his backing of the cable industry, and his big donors at Comcast, who are in a fight with the football league concerning the NFL Network.

Or perhaps the NFL didn’t get Specter’s chief of staff good enough seats to the Super Bowl. Specter says he wasn’t aware of the request and that the staffer would pay for the seats, which cost $700 each.

$312K from computer and internet companies.

More:
$153K from Comcast; $70K from Verizon.

you do the math.

Between the voting difficulties and basic differences regarding upholding the Constitution and rule of law, maybe it is time for a real third party.

EW, you will be pleased that Leahey just worked in a reference to Scooter Libby about how the administration protects its own. He’s getting lots of nice understated digs in. It’s a much better speech than I expected.

IMHO it’s time to let the Majority Leader know he needs to step aside and nominate Dodd as Leader in his place.

“And I doubt there ever has been [a better public servant than Jay Rockefeller]”, Mata Harry officially disembarks from Planet Reality.

BTW, who is the president of the senate?

Feinstein voted no. Her first acceptable vote on the matter, though from McConnel’s smug grin alone I’d expect it’s the foregone conclusion we dread.

I suppose there is some faint consolation in the fact that even if this bad bill becomes law, as seems likely, it won’t get any more Constitutional than it is now. So some distant day after all this nastiness is finally over — and by the way I think that everything we have seen of this so far is only the beginning of the beginning — and all these crazy authoritarians’ long moment has finally passed, and America has at long last finally regained its senses, it will be repealed.

Very, very faint, though. I’ll be quite a bit older than I am now…