Comments on: Mixed Telecom Signals

By: Nell

Nell — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:22:29 +0000

As interesting as I found this, it was impossible to make it past the first two sentences. Just as so often before.

Paragraph breaks and white space are used for a reason. What’s the aversion to using the Enter key?

Please, John. Please.

By: agentofgoldstein

agentofgoldstein — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:54:47 +0000

“We are talking to the representatives from the communications companies because if we’re going to give them blanket immunity, we want to know and we want to understand what it is that we’re giving immunity for,” he said. “I have an open mind about that.”

I read that as, Cheney has been nice enough to show me the transcripts of some embarrassing phone calls I’ve made, an I am opening up to a deal as they show me more of my (for now) private conversations.

I have often heard from Bushies that I should have no problem having my communications recorded if I have done nothing wrong. If thats their argument, then the same should go for the telecoms. What are they afraid of? We are now learning “they” is the admin, not MaBell.

And since these companies have been kind enough to copy all thats bouncing around for 7 years+, I’ll trade them immunity for turning over the copies of all those missing RNC emails.

By: JohnLopresti

JohnLopresti — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:04:43 +0000

my@42 correction Hepting is related but the aCLU proper case was the one that was remanded and squelched from the appeal to scotus to limbo eventually in aclu v nsa.

By: JohnLopresti

JohnLopresti — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:54:51 +0000

In a computer upgrade recently some spring cleaning on the electronic desktop resulted in my rearranging the chronicles of the current presidency. Several relationships among the historical documents were apparent, renewing once again the sense that this president under color of emergency authority has attempted to skip many of the checks and balances laws on the books. I had the impression it was Chuck Shumer’s interchange with Jim Comey in the famous hearing about the hospital visit which elicited first in a public arena the revelation that ‘the program’ puttered along with only whitehouse counsel approval during the time following Comey’s refusal to reauthorize it, though the specificity of this observation is obscured by Comey’s own reluctance to talk about it in public, instead having me draw substantially from the available online analyses of his vague allusions, after he seemingly had blurted out more than he had intended regarding the rudderlessness of the legal status of the wiretapping program; most of what people took to be his forthcomingness I thought guarded and prescreened divulgations accompanied by feigned political outrage on the part of committeemembers at that hearing; Comey certainly clammed up by the time the House had occasion to ask followup questions at the lower chamber’s own hearing with him as a reluctant ‘witness’. I agree with the original comment by ew in the post above that the ‘after’ could be AP syntax, maybe authored by a journalism school graduate who momentarily lapsed into imprecise terms; but also, touring Reyes’ colorful website with much historical and demographic rambling prose about the 2 million population area which is his district 16 in TX around El Paso, and reading of his background careers from which he retired to run for congress somewhat more than a decade ago, it seems also feasible that his asynchronous ‘after’ remark has more bilingual syntax than it appears to have, because the usage is also viable in English, albeit differently nuanced. His region has nearly 3/4 population of Hispanic descent. Spanish syntaxes for addressing chronologic relationships in constructs depicting events past carries a great burden of the speaker and reader’s needing to have a grasp of archaic grammar and highly inflected forms of verb tenses not available in English, and, indeed, commonly avoided by ordinary speakers of that language. In sum, I think his remarks were politicized, but rendered in a hybrid syntax which muddied even further his purposeful obfuscation regarding his plans, which he is coordinating under the direction of Pelosi, and with parallel effort linked to Reid’s roadmap for extracting maximum advantage from the process of preserving the rights which innure to private citizens and businesses under tort claims with respect to first and fourth amendement matters, and extending to the other areas the ACLU addresses in its courtbrief in the Hepting matter now in Vaughn Walker’s court. Like the penalty phase relief Exxon just last week continued to seek in Scotus in the Valdez oilspill matter these many years after the event, telcos want to avoid fines for which they are liable; Nacchio seems to have been the only one to try to argue in support that obligation, though certainly his company, too, had to cooperate in order to stay on the vendor list for government contracts and stay out of jail; but Seidenberg at Verizon made initial complaints, at least in media, when the wiretap story was published, though much of his rhetoric later seemed proven vacuous, as all the telcos were onboard with only minor gradations of reluctance to participate. I hope Pelosi stays firm; she can take the heat; and Reid can remain adequately aloof from the atavistic resoluteness which is a principal trait of laws manufactured in the House of Representatives. There was one idea last week spoken to the media by a member of the house who was not privvy to the documents the committee Reyes leads had reviewed, nor were the proceedings of the secret meetings on the wiretap programs divulged to the plenary membership of the House; the member, whose article I am not finding at the moment, regrettably, had suggested the entire lower chamber meet in executive session excluding the public, a rare process, solely for the purpose of discussing on the floor what has been confidential information held private in committee, concerning the several months when the telcos skipped their legal obligations and simply tapped phones as the president demanded. I think the House’s attempt to nullify the Senate’s overly compliant initiative to cancel law retroactively in the form of ‘immunity’, promises to serve as one of the few counterbalances the public has in matters such as this, which border on security issues, but which also serve as political ploys by an administration whose short shrift given to mere legality is legion in many initiatives. The House should stand firm, and override Reyes’ wishes if he decides to err on the side of favoritism for the telcos. This comment is wending toward the other thread about the now debilitated foreign intell advisory board, about which I located an interesting membership roster, there.
For a succinct summary of the drift of TX politics in the past ten years written by the Supreme Court in the gerrymander case which partly reversed the DeLay countergerrymander see the first few pages of the LULAC v Perry opinion published in 2006, syllabus edition there; AJ Anthony Kennedy wrote the first section.

By: phred

phred — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:45:11 +0000

I agree it’s easy to understand Republican Congresscritters putting party first, and in the end they invariably do so. It is interesting to note however, that individual Republican Congressmen did object to the broad powers asserted by the executive branch, but in the end, they did not stand up to the WH. It is maddening to read about the various incidents where people saw where things were headed, they would object, but in the end, they would back down.

Thanks for the comment about the Spanish Civil War. Nothing like a little “cutting off your nose to spite your face”, eh?

By: Ishmael

Ishmael — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:24:06 +0000

So, why cave then? Cui bono?

By: brendanx

brendanx — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:18:16 +0000

It’s easy to understand why Republicans would fight for their party over something abstract and relatively abstruse like the “prerogatives” of the legislative branch as an “institution”. What’s difficult to understand is why the Democrats won’t fight for the institution in the interest of preserving their own party.

I’m reading about the Spanish Civil War these days. The Republicans lost in the early days because the bourgeois government wouldn’t unlock the armories to the leftist masses who were willing to fight for that government.

By: JohnForde

JohnForde — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:15:39 +0000

Hey MNChuck, wanna meet up anyway?

You can send me an email thru my website.
www.mentalengineering.com

Hope to hear from you. - JF

By: Sedgequill

Sedgequill — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:08:40 +0000

Hey bmaz—

Despite my light footprint here and in the greater blogosphere, Tom Maguire has called me your acolyte. Let me be clear: I would not follow anyone who would have me as an acolyte.

By: phred

phred — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:53:31 +0000

If you haven’t read it, I really do urge you to read Savage’s book Takeover. You will find that in some cases Congress simply couldn’t be bothered to defend it’s prerogatives (in one instance because they were heading out of town for recess). I really don’t think you need to invoke blackmail or Stockholm syndrome or anything else. Perhaps it is a case of herding cats, too many people in Congress with diverse interests to get them to pay attention long enough to the imminent threat to their institution.