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    • Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
      “You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked. “We can’t say that,” Torrance answered. “Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked. “That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said. Advertisement “Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked. “We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered. “What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.” “We have not come to a position on that,” he said. “So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said. “I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”
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      "(Judge) Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. [...] We now have it from the U.S. government lawyers’ own mouths: This law may put journalists at risk, or at least the lawyers explicitly refused to rule out that option for their client – and, as Forrest put it, they have “one very big client.”"
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      Voting isn't everything. "I think Emma Goldman had a point in saying that if voting changed anything they would ban it. I think Howard Zinn had a point in saying that it doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House so much as who is doing the sitting in. The relentless ubiquitous question of how you can change the world if you refuse to engage in electoral politics strikes me as crazy. Women didn't vote themselves the right to vote. Workers didn't elect the eight hour day. India didn't vote the British out."
    • Part II Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States (Zeese, Occupy Washington, DC)
      "When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy. "
    • Critiques Of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ (Huben)
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    • UPDATED: Limbaugh's Misogynistic Attack On Georgetown Law Student Continues With Increased Vitriol (Media Matters for America)
      Always good to have a reference, this is it. "Rush Limbaugh is not backing down after widespread condemnation over his misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student who testified before Congress recently about the problems caused when women lack access to contraception. " Multiple clips for future show and tells.
    • America's Death Squads (Davies, PDA Community/ZCommunications)
      "Barack Obama has halted the macabre parade of hooded, shackled suspects in orange jumpsuits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine at Guantanamo, but he has not done so by restoring the rule of law. Instead, to a great extent, he has replaced Bush’s policy with a global campaign to simply kill a wide range of people in cold blood: terrorism suspects, resistance fighters, and anyone else added to secret lists for secret reasons. From a uniquely American “exceptionalist” point of view, killing suspects instead of capturing them is a convenient way to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping up hundreds of mostly innocent people in an indiscriminate global dragnet and then not knowing what to do with them. The dead tell no tales. Public outrage is contained within the faraway countries where the killings take place and does not cause domestic political problems."
    • Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay' (Abdul-Ahad, Guardian)
      Iraq ten years after: instead of one Saddam, many little ones. "Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison. "We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else.""

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Ideas for change: Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act

Posted by Thomas Nephew on January 5th, 2009

Change.org’s “Ideas for Change in America” competition is trying to get the Obama administration’s attention — and is likely to succeed:

“The Ideas for Change in America competition was created in response to Barack Obama’s call for increased citizen involvement in government. The final round of voting began on January 5 and is comprised of the top 3 rated ideas from each of the 30 issues in the first round of the competition, which collectively received more than 250,000 votes.

The top 10 rated ideas from the final round will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, co-hosted by the Case Foundation. At the event we will also announce the launch of a national advocacy campaign behind each idea in collaboration with our nonprofit partners to turn each idea into actual policy.

The idea “Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties” is among the ideas competing for the final ten slots, with the following introduction:

FISA and the PATRIOT Act strike at the core of our Fourth and First Amendment Rights and institutionalize a surveillance society — and  FISA’s telecom immunity clause mocks the rule of law by not holding telecom companies accountable for any illegal actions.  Beginning the new Administration and Congress by focusing on these issues sends one of the clearest signals possible that that the new government is committed to ending the abuses of the last eight years and restoring our civil liberties.

For some specific ideas on rolling back the FISA Amendment Act and “Protect America Act,” see:

You can vote for “Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act” using the embedded widget below (most readers will need to register with a username and password first).  Voting ends January 15, and you get 10 votes to spread around to this and other good ideas.


As Jon Pincus writes in an associated blog post Turning the page on FISA:

The coming year will present a unique opportunity for a broad-based activism campaign to restore our civil liberties and begin rolling back key pillars of the national surveillance state institutionalized by the Bush Administration and Congress over the last eight years. By first pressuring President Obama to follow through in the first 100 days on his campaign promises to uphold the rule of law and protect Americans’ rights and privacy, and then gearing up for a 50-state strategy to pressure the House and Senate to repeal the PATRIOT Act and reform FISA, we can turn the page on this shameful chapter in our country’s history.

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UPDATE, 1/7: The “Ideas for Change” voting process can be confusing; here are step by step instructions.
EDIT, UPDATE, 1/9: “Specific ideas” bullet list added.  Other worthy ideas to vote for:

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One Response to “Ideas for change: Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act”

  1. Outreach to bloggers « Get FISA Right Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 9:53 pm

    [...] clear that other groups are doing a more effective job of outreach than we have so far.  newsrackblog.com and Beyond the Matrix have blogged about us, Moon in Cancer has our widget up, Michael Connery [...]

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