Sounds like Hatch just called anyone who supports individual Constitutional rights stupid, irrational, and a traitor who supports the terrists.

And yet he would use the freedom of speech guaranteed to a US Senator to say such stupid irrational traitorous things. Amazing!

Punishing the Telecoms isnt what important to me. Finding the truth and bringing the criminals to justice is.

I agree. Truth and Justice all the way.

One problem is politics gets in the way and Truth or Justice aren’t always easy to get even without politics.

At least in this instance they’ve stepped back from the original work and they’ve taken a bit more time to consider this complicated situation. When even DiFi mentions that the administration broke the law with their spying, then you know they’re at least well informed.

I’m very curious to see what kind of legislative solution they come up with. I doubt any of them wants to hurt the telcoms, but they would want some kind of finding of fact, so the role of the administration can be clearly outlined and so the purpose and extent of the spying can be discovered.

It seems likely they’ll have to let court cases go forward, but there will probably also be some kind of (perhaps limited) immunity for the telcoms. They were, after all responding to the government’s request as a FISA request is usually done. Where they may have stepped over the line (and a court will decide) is in opening their doors completely to any and all kinds of spying without a warrant.

The separate issue of telcom spying for their own purposes might come into these cases, but maybe not.

In the end we should know precisely what BushCo has done and over what time frame and we should know how long the telcoms assisted/enabled it without warrants.

If you want to assist a fascist dictator, then you should beware that the courts might not accept a defense of “We were only taking orders.”

A must read for everyone interested in the FISA bill (lol as opposed to everyone disinterested) is Glenn Greenwald always, and yesterday and today in particular:

Harry Reid — compare and contrast
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Also we all know that everytime one of the Repubilicans invokes going to the FISA court for a warrant–they fail to state the obvious. The FISA court in its years of entire history has denied warrants in 5/20,000 cases.

“I find the threatening ad hominem argument of my good friend from Utah complete bullshit.”

Talk about terrorists holding Americans hostage! “Senator, why do you support a terrorist who is threatening to kill innocent Americans?”

If people don’t get that one, I don’t know what they will.

(Also having lots of database errors here, slow loading pages when they do work.)

the confusion (for me) was the uc you heard this morning.

But at the elapse of 30 hours, such objection ceases to have force. Rule XXII supersedes, and calls for conducting a vote on the underlying matter – in this case, a motion to proceed to consider S.2248.

Yeah, me too. Database “connection” errors.

Bob in HI