VoteVets has a new ad featuring Brandon Woods, an Iraq War veteran from New York.

In the ad, Brandon says, "What did we fight for in Iraq? I have some idea. I fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And "freedom" means when the Iraqi people and their Prime Minister ask us to make a plan to leave, we do. But, Senator McCain would occupy Iraq indefinitely, against their wishes. That's not what freedom means. That's not what we fought for. Senator, I thought you would know better."

Here's VoteVets' statement releasing the ad:

Senator McCain once said that if the Iraqis asked us to leave, we would have to leave. Those of us who served agree with that. Senator McCain now either has to back off his refusal to set a plan to leave Iraq, as Prime Minister Maliki requested a number of times in the past week, or tell the American and Iraqi people why he would overrule Iraq's government and turn our troops into an indefinite occupying force. Those are his only two options. Our new ad makes that clear.

The American people, the Iraqi people, the Iraqi government all think it's time for us to leave. So what does "winning" mean now, Mr. McCain? Stubbornly staying put when you're the only one who wants us to stay?

Netroots Nation 2008 has done something invaluable for me. It brought the senselessness and the travesty of the Iraq War back to the forefront. It was a potent reminder of why we're even here--the single most significant factor behind the rise of the netroots.

From the IGNT/Mojo Friday care packages for the troops, Pastor Dan's moving service this morning, and the remarks of every key note speaker, Iraq is bubbling up again to become the first issue we will expect our new President to address. Donna Edwards was particularly strong in her keynote Saturday night, running through the litany of challenges we face in our failing economy, and the salient fact that not a single one of them can be solved until we are our to Iraq.

The withdrawal from Iraq also featured largely in the panel that I participated in Saturday, "War Pundits," along with Mark Danner, Samantha Power, Greg Mitchell, and moderated by Ari Melber.
Spencer Ackerman attended the panel, and has a great live blog of the panel. I've got a lot of thoughts still emanating from the discussion that I'll be drawing upon in the coming months as the discussion about how we approach the withdrawal. But for now, my remarks from yesterday are below the fold.

So what's Congress going to do about this one? (subscription req.)

The Bush administration is refusing to comply with an unusual resolution adopted by the House Natural Resources Committee seeking to halt uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.

An Interior Department official said this week that the administration could not act on the resolution because a quorum was not present for the committee vote....

Democrats cited a rarely invoked provision in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (PL 94-579) that allows the panel to seek immediate withdrawal of lands under "emergency" situations.

The Democrats on the committee used this provision for the incredibly controversial protection of one of the nation's greatest treasures. Republicans boycotted the vote in committee. Because of course we have to have uranium mining at the Grand Canyon. And what could possibly be the problem with that? It's not like there aren't other national parks, right?

Committee chair Nick Rahall has written to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, explaining that, by committee rules, a sufficient quorum was present and the resolution stands. Another sternly worded letter to the Bush administration. Yeah, that'll work.

Jonathon Singer, Chris Bowers, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Governor Dean for about 20 minutes following his Register for Change rally here in Austin. As luck would have it, my digital recorder malfunctioned, so I don't have the complete transcript, but Jonathon also recorded it, and he'll provide a more detailed transcript or perhaps a podcast at MyDD soon.

The conversation focused largely on the DNC's registration program, which will rally voters and new voters in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in teh next week before traveling on. As a follow up to this registration effort, I asked if the DNC would also be focusing on voter protection, ensuring that the new voters registered in the program will actually be able to cast their vote, and that that vote will count. Dean said that the DNC is building a robust voter protection program. It's included compiling voting regulations from every secretary of state in the country to allow the folks on the ground in each state to know their state's regulations. They will also focus on training staff and voters in absentee voting, a loophole that's been left open in recently passed laws in various states.

We talked a great deal about the 50 state strategy, and Chris's summation is spot on:

Dean said that his main goal as chair has been to build a permanent political operation for Democrats in all fifty states, and that this goal is on the brink of being accomplished. He also said that he thinks there is no going back from the fifty-state strategy, and that this sort of broadly based political operation is here to stay for Democrats even after he is no longer chair. He was clearly very proud of this accomplishment. I was clearly in love with him.

I asked him whether he saw any unintended consequences of his 50 state strategy, and I was surprised by his response. To him, the most unexpected thing has been the number of former Republicans and conservatives that have been recruited in the program. He touched a bit on the issue that we've come to realize is so critical for the netroots--not just more Democrats, but better Democrats and that as we work to broaden the party base, it will be important to persuade on progressive issues, as well.

We talked about my region of interest, the west, a region that Dean obviously loves. He's bullish on our downticket chances in Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, and on Obama's chances in Montana, Nevada, Colorado, and potentially even Arizona. As the race heats up, Dean thinks it makes sense for Obama to consider campaign stops not only in these states, but in Nebraska, Alaska and even northern Idaho.

He put to rest the rumor perpetuated by an ad campaign, that Hillary Clinton would not be on the ballot at the DNCC in Denver. Clinton will be on the ballot and will speak at the convention--the DNC rules are clear on this. In relation to this, he talked about the importance of fighting back against these rumors, of answering the inflammatory e-mails with the truth.

Dean always inspires with his commitment to the long term project of party building. His short conversation with us today--as well as the fact that he's launching the registration drive from Netroots Nation and giving tonight's keynote address at the convention--demonstrates that we remain a critical part of that long-term effort. It's a mantra that never gets old: we have the power to take back our country.

How much did it kill the Wall Street Journal to have to publish this headline: "Idaho is No Longer a Lock for Republicans"?

Savor that for a few moments.

Ok, now on to the article.

SANDPOINT, Idaho -- Bill Sali is defying the political odds by making Idaho's first-district congressional race competitive. That isn't good for Mr. Sali: He is the incumbent.

A 54-year-old Republican from Kuna, 18 miles from Boise, Mr. Sali represents one of the most heavily Republican electorates in the U.S. The district hasn't elected a Democrat to the House since 1992; in the 2004 presidential race, 69% of its votes went to George W. Bush.

But through slow fund raising and a combative reputation, Mr. Sali has become vulnerable to his Democratic challenger, Walt Minnick, a businessman with little political experience.

Actually, Minnick has quite a bit of political experience, but from the outside, as an activist on environmental issues. And this is what having an "experienced" politician in the seat has meant for Idaho, some of the greatest hits folks might remember from his race in 2006:

When Mr. Sali was in the Idaho statehouse, he tried to amend a bill that would extend a law against domestic violence to minors because he wanted it to apply only to heterosexual couples. He supported efforts to make divorces more difficult to obtain. He upset some colleagues by insisting on legislation to require parental consent for minors to get abortions after courts frowned on such laws.

After an abortion debate in 2006, then speaker Bruce Newcomb, a Republican, told a group of reporters in the statehouse hallway that Mr. Sali was "an absolute idiot" after Mr. Sali insisted on the statehouse floor that abortions cause breast cancer. "I've not withdrawn my statement," said Mr. Newcomb, who now teaches at Boise State University...

He objected to putting a Mexican consulate in Boise. (He says it might encourage illegal immigration.) Last year, responding to a Hindu prayer recited in Congress, he said "multiculturalism is the antithesis" of the U.S. motto, E pluribus unum, Latin for "out of many, one."...

Mr. Sali also announced a draft bill to "propose that the force of gravity, by the force of Congress, be reduced by 10%" to combat obesity. Mr. Sali said it was meant to parody a bill to raise the minimum wage, which he felt ran counter to the laws of economics.

Sali has been a core mover in an attempt by an extremely conservative faction of Idaho Republicans (as opposed to the run of the mill very conservative Idaho Republicans) to take over the party, which they succeeded in doing at last month's state convention when they teamed up with Ron Paul supporters to oust the long-serving and relatively moderate party chair.

There's also the spectacle in the Senate race of an Independent candidate teaming up with Dem Larry LaRocco to make the point that Republican Jim Risch doesn't really give a damn about Idaho voters, since he's not running much of a campaign and thus far has refused even to debate. Risch has never been one of the most popular of Idaho figures, even among Republicans, and Rammell's continuing pounding on him (which has been getting serious press across the state) will hurt Risch to some degree.

Given all these factors, there's likely to be a lot of ticket splitting all across the ballot in Idaho this year. A fractured Republican vote is the only hope for Idaho Dems, and it's looking more and more likely that it can happen.

Race tracker wiki: ID-01 ID-Sen

Nation author and netroots activist Ari Melber will moderate a panel at Netroots Nation next Saturday morning at 10:30, entitled "War Pundits,":

Many people helped lead the U.S. into war in Iraq, but few were as wrong, uninformed and unaccountable as the television pundits. How do war pundits influence and distort our foreign policy debates? Why are they the most influential voice in the public discourse of foreign policy? This panel will convene journalists and actual foreign policy experts to dissect the broken punditocracy, Pentagon propaganda and the marginalization of voices critical of war or the government. From Iraq to Iran, panelists will discuss what activists can do to improve the accuracy and accountability of America's foreign policy punditry.

The panel will include Mark Danner, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, award-winning columnist at the E&P web site, author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq and Kossack, and me, less impressively credentialed than the remainder of the panel, but nonetheless holder of two degrees in international studies and one of the vast legion of bloggers who got it right on Iraq before we even invaded—though at the time I was still limited to yelling at the television set, not yet broadcasting my opposition on the Internet.

In approaching this discussion, Ari e-mailed these thoughts.

I hope we can use the war pundits panel for two aims: pinpoint media failures in refereeing foreign policy debates; and brainstorm organizing campaigns to improve democratic discourse. That should be easy, in theory. For Iraq coverage, the netroots' critique actually overlaps with the traditional media's stated goals of accuracy and balance. By relying too heavily on government sources from one party, most pre-war coverage misstated the threat and drastically underplayed opposition to the war among experts, political elites and the general public. According to a recent academic study, network TV stories in the eight months before the war quoted Bush administration officials for 29 percent of sources, while quoting Democratic officials for three percent of sources. The war pundits were shockingly unrepresentative of political reality. And grassroots antiwar groups, the study noted, "comprised just 1% of all quotes, making such dissent a drop in the bucket." So even when activists build large movements—some of the Iraq war protest broke world records—media malpractice can limit their impact. And the virtual media blackout of Democratic opposition to the war, even as most Democratic congresspersons voted against it, exacerbated tensions between the progressive base and incumbents with a misleading narrative. How can activists make the media live up to its own mission and report reality in foreign policy debates? How can the public influence who is anointed to shape our nation's war punditry? And will the general public's antipathy towards the media ever translate into greater media accountability?

While it’s a given now in blog discourse that the media failed miserably in the run-up to and the continuation of the Iraq War, it’s worth reflecting a bit on what Danner has called "the vaguely depressing spectacle of a great many very intelligent people struggling very hard to make themselves stupid." (And that quote is from three years ago, when we had been subjected to just a few years of the stupid.) I have my own theories as to what led to the mass inability to exercise critical thought demonstrated by the war pundits, a group which extends in my estimation to The Villagers—the reliable repeaters of conventional wisdom straight out of the White House briefing room.

First and foremost, I think the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the twin epicenters of their universe—New York and Washington—heightened their sense of their responsibility to the nation, including fully supporting their government in rising to its defense. The shared sense of tragedy, of responsibility, was probably a factor in the degree to which they just went along with, and eventually amplified, the Bush administration’s response.

That’s the charitable part of my assessment. Less admirable among The Villagers and the war pundits who so faithfully pushed the administration’s line is the factor that we’ve been discussing at length for the past several years in the blogosphere—the all important cocktail party circuit of insiders. For The Villagers, the Bush administration brought the return of "their people," the long-known faces who had dominated the establishment—and particularly foreign policy—since the Nixon administration, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

There was a familiarity to this team, and with the familiarity of the team, the familiarity of ways of thinking about and reporting about foreign policy and about war. As the cold warriors morphed into the neocons, they brought with them the bipolar, good and evil, east vs. west paradigms that had shaped (often disastrously) five decades of American foreign policy thinking. As "islamofascism" slipped into the place that "communism" had occupied in the thinking of these policy-shapers, it provided an easy narrative for the war pundits and Villagers to adapt without having to take too much into consideration the vast complexities of our newly and highly globalized world.

These were people they trusted, if for no other reason than they had known them for so long, and they were presenting a narrative that could be trusted, or at least easily understood. The other edge to that long relationship was the importance of staying on the inside of it—not endangering the all important access to the halls of power by asking too many questions or challenging too many assumptions. Staying on the inside seems to have gained even more importance for the crowd in this notoriously secretive and vindictive administration.

So when the few dissident voices that were heard on a national stage rose up, they were easily dismissed. After all, who in the punditocracy could believe that the Bush administration, their old friends, would lie to them about something as important as a war? And when it became increasingly clear that they, along with our Congress and the rest of the nation who lived inside the Beltway or voted Republican, was duped into going into war, it became increasingly important to not admit that.

Which, I believe, is one of the reasons that the bombshell New York Times expose on the military/media propaganda machine was greeted by the rest of the media (and The Villagers) with nothing more than a resounding yawn. What should have been a game-changing revelation:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

was little more than another blip of inconvenient information confirming the degree to which the media has been utterly played by this administration. It’s also inconvenient proof of the complicity of the media in perpetuating the administration’s lies, and in the continuation of this war, one Friedman Unit at a time.

The problems of the war punditry and the media are easy to lay out; the solutions, the other part of Ari’s challenge to us, much more difficult. We saw a bit of positive movement in the 2006 elections, when Ned Lamont and the netroots changed the narrative politically on Democrats and the war. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority in the 110th Congress has lost much of the edge it gained in that election by failing to substantially change anything on Iraq.

We have shown an ability to influence the narrative, but what can grassroots and netroots activists do to, in Ari’s words, "make the media live up to its own mission and report reality in foreign policy debates? How can the public influence who is anointed to shape our nation's war punditry? And will the general public's antipathy towards the media ever translate into greater media accountability?"

In this regard, the growth of organizations like VoteVets, which provides important and credible push back on the war, is key. But what else can we do to crash this gate?

The ACLU and the EFF, the public interest advocacy groups who have done the lion's share of the work against the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program--including bringing the civil cases against AT&T and other telcos (and who, btw, are not greedy trial lawyers), have both announced they will bring legal challenges against the new FISA law, passed yesterday by the Senate and gleefully signed today by Bush. The groups will challenge both the immunity provisions and the unprecedented expansion of warrantless wiretapping allowed in the new law.

From EFF's blog, Deeplinks:

Since then, the phone companies and their allies in Washington have spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity. They ran ridiculous fear-mongering attack ads against any politician who dared to oppose them. President Bush threatened to veto any bill that allowed EFF's lawsuit to continue.

Yesterday, Congress completely capitulated to the President's threats and voted to let the telecoms off the hook. If the telecoms are not held accountable, the administration will remain unchecked in its warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans. This must stop!

We need your help to take the fight to the next level. We're going to challenge Congress's unconstitutional grant of immunity in our case against AT&T. We're going to fight for a congressional repeal of immunity in the next Congress. And we're going to file a new lawsuit against the government, challenging its warrantless surveillance practices, past, present and future.

Repeal of immunity is frankly pretty unlikely, unless the federal court which has been directed by this law to dismiss the cases against the telcos delays deciding on these cases until there's a new Congress. But, particularly in light of the recent Al Haramain opinion issued by Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California, there is some possibility that the new law could be deemed unconstitutional.

The ACLU has filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York today, challenging the overreaching surveillance powers it confers on the executive. From the ACLU's blog:

Three of our main points:

• The FAA violates the Fourth Amendment because it allows the government to gobble up the constitutionally protected communications of American citizens and residents without getting individualized warrants, and without specifying the time, place or length of the surveillance, and not specifying how the info gathered will be disseminated, or how long it’ll be kept. (You know, the who/what/where/when/why.)
• The FAA also violates the First Amendment by chilling lawful expressive speech without adequate justification by authorizing the government to intercept constitutionally protected communications without judicial oversight.
• The challenged law violates the principle of separation of powers by allowing the government to continue surveillance activities even if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has deemed those activities illegal. (Good idea, right? Asking the government to obey the law?)

The ACLU is joined in this suit by plaintiffs The Nation magazine, journalists Naomi Wolf Klein and Chris Hedges, attorneys David Nevin, Scott McKay, Dan Arshack and Sylvia Royce, as well as a number of organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Global Fund for Women, among many. Wolf and Hedges, as well as representatives from some of the NGOs in the suit participated in a conference call for reporters and bloggers the ACLU held Thursday. All of the representatives spoke about the chilling effect this law will have on their efforts to conduct their regular business.

Many of them work with groups, particularly in the human rights arena, who have been labeled by their own governments as terrorist organizations. There is now a very real fear on the part of these groups that this communication will cease as foreign partners face the possibility that their communications will be gathered and turned over to their governments by the U.S. Statements by some of these plaintiffs can be found on here.

Additionally, the ACLU has petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the FAA be open to the public to the extent possible and that the ACLU be allowed to make arguments about the constitutionality of the new law."

Harry Reid laid it out on the Senate floor:

"[T]his legislation needs more work. That is why I oppose it, and why I am committed to working with a new President to improve it.

"Congress should not wait until the 2012 expiration to improve this bill. I will work to ensure that Congress revisits FISA well before 2012, informed by the oversight that will be conducted in the coming months by the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees and by the reports of the Inspectors General.

"Next year, for example, Congress will be required to revisit a number of provisions of the Patriot Act. That may provide a suitable occasion to review the related issues in this FISA bill.

He'll be joined by Russ Feingold:

This administration, despite its weakness, somehow is able to raise the spectre of being as they say "soft on terrorism" and unfortunately Democrats who can be so strong on domestic issues somehow collapse, and that's exactly what happened. This is a terrible piece of legislation. It's one of the greatest assaults on the Constitution, I think, in the history of our country. We are going to have to fix it but it is a dark hour for the Constitution....

[T]he telephone company immunity is a terrible thing, and Senator Dodd and I and others fought hard to get rid of it. It's bad on the merits because it undercuts the rule of law and it also potentially blocks our ability to find out in court what we believe, which is that the President's warrantless wiretapping program was illegal and a terrible violation of the law. But even more serious is the Title I of the bill, and that's the part where the government is given the ability to potentially to suck up all bulk communications, all international calls, all e-mails, all text messages that any American might make to their daughter who's on her junior year abroad, a daughter or son who's in Iraq, a reporter, a business associate. This is a frightening intrusion and it has no court supervision whatsoever.... It simply allows this amazing expansion of federal power into an area that really has never been allowed before. And that is the most shocking part of the bill, but either one of them is a sufficient reason to say this legislation is a catastrophe and needs to be fixed at some point....

Having a Democratic president, and particularly Barack Obama, should allow us to greatly change this mistake. Barack Obama believes in the Constitution, he's a constitutional scholar. I believe he will have a better chance to look at these powers that have been given to the executive branch, and even though he'll be running the executive branch I think he will understand and help take the lead in fixing some of the worst provisions. So this is a huge setback, and it would have been much better for Democrats to stand together and not let it happen in the first place because it's much harder to change it after the fact, but I do believe that Barack Obama is well-positioned, both in terms of his knowledge and his background and his beliefs to correct this. So I do think that people have a right to be disappointed, but they also have a right to hope for change....

Hopefully they'll be joined a large cadre of new members of Congress committed to fixing this. We can help with that part right now, by working to elect these folks.

But primarily, echoing Reid's and Feingold's thoughts, they need to be joined by President Barack Obama. There are a number of things he can do as president to mitigate the worst aspects of this new law.

Primarily, he can require that his intelligence agencies operate under the old FISA law and obtain warrants for all surveillance of U.S. persons and require that that surveillance be targeted rather than blanket. He can ensure that the IG report that this law requires is carried out and carried out completely and effectively. He can go even further in mitigating the damage done by the immunization of the telcos and the resulting cover-up of the scope of the illegal program by the Bush administration by ordering the declassification of all the documents relating to this--and other--secret programs.

In doing that as president, Obama can actually provide the most fundamental of changes that he's been promising--a government and an executive that doesn't put itself above the rule of law.

There was good news, very good news, out of the Senate today courtesy Sen. Ted Kennedy, who returned just in time to cast the deciding, veto-proofing vote on the Medicare bill. He fittingly received a standing ovation on his return.

(Click on the picture to launch video.)

Here's his statement:

I return to the Senate today to keep a promise to our senior citizens and that’s to protect Medicare.

Win, lose or draw, I wanted to be here. I wasn’t going to take the chance that my vote could make the difference.

This is a critical bill that among other things, blocked a 10.6 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors. Those cuts would very likely have driven more doctors and hospitals to refuse Medicare patients. The Senate attempted to vote prior to the July 4 recess, and came within one vote of cloture.

The administration has been lobbying the Republican caucus hard on this bill, including, rumor has it, sending Cheney up to the Hill today to the Republican luncheon to whip them. Kennedy's vote today helped break the Republican opposition to the bill, and the WINOs flipped their votes.

Sen. Reid issued the following statement calling on Bush to sign the bill:

The House strongly passed this bill in bipartisan, veto-proof fashion by nearly 300 votes, and the Senate has now passed it by a veto-proof margin as well. It is now up to the President to sign it into law. I call on him to join Congress in making sure Medicare works better for every American senior and TRICARE works better for our troops.

Thank you, Senator Kennedy, for making a bad day in the Senate better, and for keeping your commitment to the nation's seniors.

And guess who didn't show up to vote today? Yeah, that's right. John McCain.

There's incredible potential for 2008, and it starts right here, on our Orange to Blue list. Not only is it a group committed to solidly progressive values, but they're already a team.

You need no more proof of that than the fact that as soon as our candidate in Wyoming, Gary Trauner, heard about the fire that destroyed Darcy Burner's home, he donated to her campaign. He wanted to join our effort to give her time away from dialing for dollars in order to take care of her family and recover from the fire.

Last week Markos set a $400,000 goal to give Darcy the breathing room she needs. The community responded like crazy, and we're only about $32,000 from that goal. That means that the netroots raised nearly $120,000. Because Darcy is family.

She's family to Gary, too. As he said in his e-mail to me, "we definitely need to take care of our own... Hopefully, my contribution can help inspire others (including candidates) to step up as well..."

It's a great concept, a team. Imagine what that team will be able to do when they get to Congress.

(Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)

Update by kos: Here's another nice story. We can "tag" links to the ActBlue page, so we can track the success of various campaigns. This campaign is tagged "refcode=burnerfire".

Well, when we first started the campaign, I opened up my email and had two seemingly panicked emails from Orange to Blue candidate Eric Massa. I'm talking emails with ALL-CAPS in the subject line, urging me to call him ASAP. A bit worried (I don't generally get these kinds of emails), I rang up Massa and asked him what was up.

"I think something is wrong with ActBlue," he explained, worried. "I think donations that were supposed to go to Darcy Burner are ending up in my account."

What Massa's finance person had seen was that "refcode=burnerfire" tag show up on a couple of contributions to his boss, not realizing that people had given to Burner first, and then added a few bucks to a few more candidates. Massa could've kept his mouth shut. Like all candidates, he desperately needs the cash. But thinking something was wrong, his first instinct was to call me and try to fix the "problem" of him getting money.

These candidates look out for each other, whether it's Burner or Trauner or Massa or any of the others. We've got a great class of candidates this cycle, who will do us proud for many years.

Race tracker wiki: WA-08 WY-AL

Salon has a fascinating and disturbing story today from Jon Eisenberg, one of the Al Haramain lawyers:

On July 3, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in California made a ruling particularly worthy of the nation's attention. In Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc. v. Bush, a key case in the epic battle over warrantless spying inside the United States, Judge Walker ruled, effectively, that President George W. Bush is a felon.

Judge Walker held that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA -- which means Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program was illegal. Whether Bush will ultimately be held accountable for violating federal law with the program remains unclear. Bush administration lawyers have fought vigorously -- at times using brazen, logic-defying tactics -- to prevent that from happening. The court battle will continue to play out as Congress continues to battle over recasting FISA and possibly granting immunity to telecom companies involved in the illegal surveillance.

The story of how Al-Haramain's lawyers negotiated the journey thus far to Judge Walker's ruling -- a team of seven lawyers that includes me -- sheds light on how much is at stake for the Bush administration and the country. It is a surreal saga, involving a top-secret document accidentally released by the government, a showdown between Bush lawyers and a federal judge, the violent destruction of a laptop computer by government agents, and possibly even the top-secret shredding of a banana peel.

Call me Alice -- because this is a tale directly from Government Secrecy Wonderland, the bizarre and unnerving adventures of suing President Bush for apparently violating a federal law. I'll swear under penalty of perjury that what follows is true and correct. Otherwise, you might not even believe it.

Read it instead of watching the Senate in essence provide a pardon to Bush for this felony. Which is happening on the Senate floor now, first with the procedural cloture vote, and then with final passage.

Update I: Cloture invoked, 72-26.

Update II: The FISA Amendments Act passes, 69-28.

It's the final FISA fight of this Congress.

The Senate just rejected Dodd's amendment to strip Title II--the immunity provisions--from the bill, 32-66. Now up is Sen. Specter's amendment that requires the cases be dismissed if the court determines that the warrantless wiretapping programming was legal.

Update I: Specter amendment fails, 37-61. Next up is Bingaman's amendment, the last hope that the Senate regains it's sanity. Given how the votes are going, I'm not holding my breath.

Update II: Bingaman fails 42-56. The Senate is in recess until 2:15, so that the Republicans can go have their weekly lunch and toast the capitulating Dems in celebration. Then they'll come back and finish it off.

The roll call vote on the Dodd amendment is now available, with a link and list of the good guys below the fold.

For the scope of the damage that our Congress is about to do, consider this by Jonathan Turley.

The votes start in a few minutes. This should be the order of votes.

• Dodd Amendment #5064 (strike immunity)
• Specter Amendment #5059 (allows broader court review) (60-vote threshold)
• Bingaman Amendment #5066 (delays immunity until completion of IG report) (60-vote threshold)
• Motion to Invoke Cloture on H.R. 6304
• Passage of H.R. 6304, the FISA amendments act of 2008.

These are the people with perhaps the most important voices of all on the issue. They put their professional lives and reputations on the line, one more than thirty years ago, two during this administration. They were and are in a position unique in this debate--they saw up close what the government is capable of doing in secret and against the will of the Congress and the people.

Perhaps the most famous whistleblower of all, former intelligence officer Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who in the early 1970s released the Pentagon Papers, has come out strongly against this FISA bill. He spoke with Tim Ferris of BoingBoing Gadgets about this legislation, the danger it poses, and what we should do about it.

On Tuesday [ed. note, the votes will be Wednesday], a bill will come up that changes, basically really rips apart without admitting it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by expanding the president's ability to overhear, without a warrant, without any judgment outside the executive branch being exercised, American citizens in the United State, thus gutting the Fourth Amendment, essentially. And also granting retroactive immunity to the telephone companies who obeyed the illegal presidential request to carry on an illegal program these last seven years....

Now the real importance of that last point, which is clearly unconstitutional and which many people, Senator Dodd and Senator Feingold and over the last year, until fairly recently Senator Barack Obama had promised to filibuster any bill that gave that immunity. And the reason for that was not a desire to punish anybody, actually, but because the civil suit possibility for people whose rights had been violated by this illegal overhearing gave the only real chance of finding out what it was that  NSA was hearing, and the FBI or CIA or whoever else was involved. Congress doesn't yet know that. In fact, if they vote for that immunity, they'll be voting immunity for acts they really don't even know what their giving. Like President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon after he resigned which was for any crimes he may have committed which Ford, in the absence of a prosecution of Nixon, didn't really know what he was pardoning.

So the same would be true here, meaning we would be giving away the only chance we have of discovering how much the government is spying on us illegally and finding out about law-abiding citizens. The people who leaked that I think did it because they knew what was happening and they felt it was wrong, it shouldn't be happening. They haven't told us yet, they haven't risked their jobs to that extent, to tell us either who exactly has been order, how many, for what purposes, and what exactly they've been overhearing and what use is made of it....

This information would enable the government to intimidate or blackmail or manipulate every member of congress, every official who might be tempted to reveal criminality, people like the ones in the NSA who knew that criminal action was--and is--going on. This law is intended to legalize it, basically, and to continue the cover up, conceal it.

You can't have a democracy with the state--the executive branch--having that kind of information, total information about every communication, every credit card, every transaction, every fax, e-mail, telephone conversation of everyone. And as far as we know, that's what's being collected now. We do need to know whether that's yet true or not, but I think it's a pretty good assumption.... You can't keep a republic, a constitutional republic with that degree of knowledge by the president, by the executive branch of all of our private affairs. You can't have it. You have something else, you have you can call it an autocracy, a dictatorship. It's the basis for tyranny, and that's what the Constitution was meant to prevent and that's what this bill would confer--unlimited power....

I have to say that no senator, Republican or Democrat, should be voting for this Senate bill. Not one. Everyone who does so is in fact, I would say, violating his or her oath to defend the Constitution. But they can do better than that.

Ellsberg, one of the more than 21,500 members of the myBarackObama group that has urged the Senator to oppose this bill, is pushing for us to do the same, to call our Senators.

Two of the Bush-era whistleblowers join in his call. Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, and Babak Pasdar, who leaked information that a major telecommunications carrier provided the government with access to its entire mobile network, weigh in today.

President Bush, despite receiving all the changes he demanded, proceeded that very same month to begin eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the retooled and updated FISA law. Once caught, he tried to excuse his conduct by claiming that FISA was somehow inadequate, and he has been aggressively pushing for amnesty for the phone companies who were co-conspirators in his illegal program. This newest proposed change to FISA will provide telecom amnesty, which will ultimately protect not only the phone companies, but the president himself, by dismissing the lawsuits against the companies.

We can testify firsthand to the blatant violations, because we were the whistle blowers who exposed the egregious wrongdoing that has occurred. Our disclosures included how AT&T cooperated with the NSA to install monitoring hardware to spy on the entire Internet, and how a major telecommunications carrier allowed for federal government access to its entire mobile network - without security controls or record keeping. These security breaches represented an unprecedented expansion of government surveillance of the population....

The Senate is set to give the final approval for amnesty and expanded spying tomorrow, so this is the last chance to turn it back. We urge that amnesty be denied. What information did the telecoms share with the administration? How was this information shared? Is it continuing today? We need answers to these questions.

To this day, the American people do not know the full extent of the telecom actions in warrantless wiretapping, and if amnesty passes, we may never know. Allowing this administration and these corporations to get away with this illegal and unconstitutional behavior sets the worst type of precedent for future American generations.

They will pass this terrible legislation, but not it cannot happen with our complicity. We'll lose, but we'll lose by putting them all on notice that we expect them to use a greater majority in Congress next year, and a Democratic presidency, to repeal this travesty and to finally reveal all that information they are working so hard now to cover up. The vote might be over tomorrow, but this issue will not go away.

Call your Senators and remind them that we'll be watching and that we'll remember. Additionally, call the 29 Senators who voted against the Senate bill the last time it came up--along with Obama and Clinton who did not vote--and tell them to vote for the Bingaman amendment, but if it does not pass to vote against final passage.

These are the 30 Senators and the potential president who can hold firm now and lead the charge to fix this next year. Holding them to their previous vote now is critical to making those improvements in the next Congress. The list is below the fold.

You're going to hear a lot today about how much the FISA Amendments Act have been improved from the last iteration coming from the Senate. That will be the cover for those who vote for this bill, even with Title II--the immunity provision--included.

But, about those "improvements," here's Kit Bond:

We believe that this new bill that we're considering, H.R. 6304, which passed the house with a strong majority vote of 293-129 last friday, should be passed here. As with the senate's original FISA bill passed several months ago, the compromise that is before us required a little give-and-take from all sides. But in essence what we have before us today is basically the Senate bill all over again.

I am aware of those that some on the far left want to paint this as some radical new legislation. But if you read the language, it's not different. the press picked up on this trait last week and kept asking me to help them find the purported big changes that no one could find. There really is not much that is significantly different, save some cosmetic fixes that were requested by the majority party in the house.

There's a potential fix to this bill, Bingaman's amendment that would delay the immunity until an IG's report is completed. That's the amendment that Mike and Mike say is poison pill that will result in a Bush veto. Because this amendment is subjected to a 60 vote rule, the chance that it will be passed is slim.

Thus, the final bill that Senate votes on tomorrow will probably be "basically the Senate bill all over again." The 29 Senators who voted against that Senate bill that has only received "cosmetic" fixes should vote against it again, and be joined by their colleagues Clinton and Obama, who didn't vote on it, in voting "no" on the final bill if that Bingaman amendment doesn't pass.

Does anyone really want a President McCain to have the expanded surveillance powers this bill confers? Or even a President Obama? Do these Democrats want to be responsible for dramatically weakening both their and the courts' power vis-a-vis the executive? That's what they're about to do.

Call them and tell them to vote for the Bingaman amendment and vote against final passage of the bill if Bingaman doesn't pass.

DNI McConnell and AG Mukasey have penned yet another missive to Harry Reid, this time to warn him that the most promising of amendments to be considered to the FISA Amendments Act, Bingaman's provision that would delay immunity until after an IG report, is utterly unacceptable. There's a surprise.

Emptywheel at FDL covers the salient points:

And I gotta say--the fact that DNI Mike McConnell and AG Michael Mukasey claim they'd advise Bush to veto the bill if it included Jeff Bingaman's amendment--holding off on giving the telecoms immunity until after the IG study mandated by the bill was completed--makes me rather suspicious that Bush intends to spike the IG investigation....

As we have previously noted, any FISA modernization bill must contain effective legal protections for those companies sued because they are believed to have helped the Government prevent terrorist attacks in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

   [snip]

H.R. 6304 contains such protection, but the amendment would reportedly foreclose an electronic communication service provider from receiving retroactive [immunity] until 90 days after the Inspectors General of various departments, as required by section 301 of H.R. 6304, complete a comprehensive review of, and submit a final report on, communications intelligence activities authorized by the President between September 11, 2001, and January 17, 2007. The final report is not due for a year after the enactment of the bill. Any amendment that would delay implementation of [immunity] in this manner is unacceptable. Providing prompt liability protection is critical to the national security. Accordingly, we, as well as the President's other advisors, will recommend that the President veto any bill that includes such an amendment.

Now, I'd be charitable and buy Mike amd Mike's claim that they're just worried about a delay. Except that they make this completely cynical bid to suggest that the SSCI's review of the program was adequate to expose what really happened with this program....

So we know that--at the very least--the IG investigation will have reviewed John Yoo's role in this process, whereas SSCI has not done so. You think maybe there's something that OPR found but is hiding (and on that note, here's the LAT's recent discovery of something I covered last year--that OPR never has to reveal the results of its investigations)? Mike and Mike don't want you and I to find out what that is until after McConnell's former buddies in the privatized spying racket get their immunity.

And, too, though Mike and Mike don't want to say it, they also don't want us to have any leverage over both the telecoms and the Administration(s) to make sure we get our IG review. Telecom immunity, after all, is a pretty fucking big carrot. We're way more likely to get what we want out of them--timely cooperation and security clearances--if we withhold that carrot until we get what we want.

But Mike and Mike, for some reason, are dead set against that happening.

It's hard to imagine that the Bush crew ever really considered the possibility of in IG investigation of this program, and now that's pretty much confirmed. They've engineered the OPR investigation to be a dead end and were able to show the SSCI into writing this ridiculous bill without even having the benefit of knowing what they are immunizing the telcos for. Here's one more investigation that is utterly unacceptable.

Should this perfectly reasonable and bipartisan amendment pass, the bill will be vetoed. Because this president is above the law. The DNI and the AG say so, and Congress is about ready to ratify that assertion, so there you go.

Following last week's federal court decision in Al Haramain v. Bush, now we know both that the federal courts would rule the program illegal AND that FISA was always "exclusive." Now we also know that there will likely never be any IG report, no matter what Congress does.

So what's left among the rationales for passing this, again?

Update: The debate on this bill will occur today. Because of Jesse Helms funeral, also today, all votes will be held tomorrow.

The Democratic establishment is out in full force now, providing justification for the crappy FISA Amendments Act that's about to become law. While they haven't learned how to fight like Republicans (who have redefined "compromise" to mean "capitulation") they've learned how to lie like them.

Case in point, Nancy Soderburg, who was Clinton's deputy national security advisor and an ambassador to the UN. She pens a truly deplorable op-ed in today's LA Times, in which she tries to rewrite not only the history of the Bush administration's lawlessness, but also this law.

I can't write a better take down of this nonsense than Glenn, so be sure to read his whole piece. But here's this part that's particularly salient:

It's notable because the political establishment is not only about to pass a patently corrupt bill, but worse, are spouting -- on a very bipartisan basis -- completely deceitful claims to obscure what they're really doing. This is what Soderberg says is what happened:

The Senate is dragging its feet because the compromise bill's opponents -- mostly Democrats -- want also to punish the telecommunications companies that answered President Bush's order for help with his illegal, warrantless wiretapping program. That is the wrong target.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance -- the administration's effort to do a better job of "connecting the dots" to prevent terrorist attacks. In its review of the effort, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the administration's written requests and directives indicated that such assistance "had been authorized by the president" and that the "activities had been determined to be lawful."

We now know that they were not lawful. But the companies that followed those directives are not the ones to blame for that abuse of presidential power.

I would really like to know where people like Soderberg get the idea that the U.S. President has the power to "order" private citizens to do anything, let alone to break the law, as even she admits happened here. I'm asking this literally: how did this warped and distinctly un-American mentality get implanted into our public discourse -- that the President can give "orders" to private citizens that must be complied with? Soderberg views the President as a monarch -- someone who can issue "orders" that must be obeyed, even when, as she acknowledges, the "orders" are illegal.

That just isn't how our country works and it never was. We don't have a King who can order people to break the law. I have no doubt that people like Nancy Soderberg are spending the July 4 weekend paying shallow homage to the Founding, all the while being completely ignorant of or indifferent to the principles they pretend to celebrate.

This line of thinking is not only patently false, it's absolutely dangerous. Political expediency has been put ahead of principle, which happens all the time in politics. Politicians are always going to be politicians and they are always going to be basing their actions on the next election.

In this case, it wasn't even smart strategy. There are basically three groups who care about this legislation--us, The Villagers, and the Bush/Cheney cabal. Voters aren't clamoring for the Democrats to cave--Bill Foster's win proves that. So in a valiant effort to appease The Villagers, they piss off the activist base. As usual.

But this time is different. This time it's the Constitution we're talking about, the core principles of our founding--separation of powers, rule of law, all those "quaint" phrases that have kept this country going for 218 years.

Now the phrase we get is "it's good enough." Literally, Nancy Soderburg says this bill is "good enough." Sorry, but some of us have slightly higher standards. One of the reasons the Republican establishment is about to be thrown out by the American people is because we're sick of being lied to. Dems should take that as a cautionary tale, and realize that we're just not that stupid.

That goes for our soon to be President, as well. We have a much better chance of continuing this battle, repealing this legislation, and having the information related to this program declassified with a President Obama than we do a President McCain, and I relish the opportunity to do just that.

That's why I'm supporting Obama fully in this election. He's got my vote. But truthy talking points are not going to fool us--we will not sit by while Dem leaders lie to us about what this bill does and and watch them confer the king-like powers on the office we hope he takes.

This holiday isn't this holiday without Dave Alvin:

His friends and sometimes Knitters bandmates in X have a great version of it, too, but it's Dave's song, so he gets the honors of the video.

That song and mcmom's potato salad are pretty much my only requirements for this holiday, since I don't get all that much out of explosions.

What makes your 4th?