I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between those telecommunication companies that try to buy political favors and those that offer federal law enforcement favors in return.

Today is the 154th birthday of SCOTUS Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the Court’s most forceful voices for freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Today, as AG Eric Holder deals with cases involving torture, wiretapping, state secrets, GQ paints a picture of an AG filled with angst, as Marcy Wheeler summed it up yesterday. But maybe it’s not angst, but that Holder is being haunted by SCOTUS Justices past, like Brandeis, Holmes, Robert Jackson, and Potter Stewart.

Happy birthday, Justice Brandeis, and keep up the good work.

While you work within the constraints put on any Speaker, to implement the agenda of the president who’s in your own party, please let San Francisco have real representation again. San Francisco values really matter to America. The City needs a Congressperson again. Let San Franciscans elect someone who needn’t compromise on their every viewpoint for the sake of the Speakership. You can do this, Madame Speaker. Please make it so. Finally, as I always close my letters and emails to you, more and more futile though they seem because of your dual role nowadays: Thank you for your service to San Francisco, to California, and to the United States of America.

Jeffrey S. White, judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, has entered a new order denying the government’s request for a stay pending appeal in the telecommunications companies’ documents FOIA case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its efforts to investigate the government’s warrantless wiretapping. And Judge White did it before the government ever really asked for a stay!

Almost three years ago, way before Barack Obama was even the Democratic nominee, Michael Tomasky wrote a column titled “Obama the anti-Bush,” presciently predicting that Obama’s bipartisany oppositeness to The Worst President Ever would be a huge asset should he run for president. A year later, Paul Krugman even more presciently referenced that same column while exhorting Democrats to be more like Bush.

Davin Hutchins at the American News Project follows the money trail to find out how telecom dollars influence Congressmen to say what they say and vote the way they do.

Michael Mukasey and Michael McConnell don’t want citizens to know about what the telecoms did to us before we grant them immunity. Does that make you rather suspicious?

So next year, when we get this vaunted IG report on the illegal wiretapping, it’ll include a passage that says: However, because the five-year statute of limitations has passed and because former President Bush, former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Chief of Staff Andy Card, and former Vice President Cheney are no longer in office, the culprits are no longer subject to legal consequences for their actions. Nevertheless, we recommend the American people consider the findings in this report should George Bush ever try to run for President again.

I am going to vote for Barack Obama in November. There is not even an iota of doubt in my ex-military mind about that, but it does not mean that I am going happily into the voting booth; it does not mean that I endorse, or even like all his policies and the stands he has taken on issues.

As Congress prepares to make the Bush administration’s dream of retroactive telecom immunity come true, I can’t help but think of the vast legal gulf between the telecoms who will never need to defend themselves, and the Gitmo detainees who may never get the chance to.