Back on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown,” for the second night with Russell Tice, former National Security Agency analyst:
Not a whole lot new and it seems Tice is bound legally from naming names. Olbermann asks about specific journalists and specific publications, which Tice apologetically dodges.
Olbermann then chats with James Risen, New York Times investigative reporter, about the implications of government wiretapping. Risen, author of State of War (about the CIA), notes the “chilling effect” of government monitoring not just on reporters but on their sources. But the real issue here is that any program of routine monitoring, if tolerated, can produce data that can be twisted, manipulated or outright doctored to incriminate journalists the government finds inconvenient or unacceptable. It simply isn’t true that if you haven’t done anything illegal or wrong, you’re home safe.
Tice’s and Risen’s revelations raise many questions, but I can’t figure out why this isn’t a bigger story in MSM (the blogosphere is another story; Jonathan Golub has a post at Slog. Also Rachel Maddow to her credit is picking up on Olbermann’s report with Shadow Factory author James Bamford, who says PBS is doing a special on February 3). Have we forgotten completely the lessons of the McCarthy era? Isn’t government monitoring targeting journalists a direct flout of the First Amendment?
One hope is that Tice’s revelations will encourage others to step forward, helping President Obama to end the program (to help make amends for his FISA vote) and stop government hounding of news sources on the illegal wiretapping.
Nice story Paul. The problem is that the facts are not yet out on the entire lawless spying that went on. Also, that is why the republicans are trying to hold up Holder – they know he will go after the law breakers – unlike the sycophantic Gonzalez and the corrupt Mukasey.
yeah, let the israeli controlled company amdocs do all the wire tapping they want, blackmail poiticians with the information, and corrupt the american political system. you have to be stupid to think that bush and cheney, all by themselves just wire tap. you guys are morons. you cant see whats happening right before your eyes.
I don’t think anything will burst the inauguration bubble. Maybe they’ll pick it up next week.
Yes, MOT, its the Jews, the Jews control everything!
You’re correct (for once, though unintentionally). We fear Holder will go after those law breakers like he did the last time he was # 2 back under the Clinton AG. Sending jackboots to apprehend this dangerous fugitive should send chills down the spine of all those hardened 8 year old criminals on the streets of Miami….there’s a new sheriff in town, his name? Pres-uh-dent B-uh-rack Obam-uh…and he wants YOU to turn in these dangrous individuals to his hand picked 4th reich commander Herr Holder.
“Tice’s and Risen’s revelations raise many questions”
They also answer one simple question: Did Bush violate the Constitution, and his oath of office, and therefore commit one or more impeachable offenses?
The answer to that is yes.
I’m watching a Dr. Phil show with Ann Coulter, Scott McClellan, and Alan Colmes as his guests. Coulter is indulging in the usual rightwing victimology — complaining about how badly wingnuts get treated by liberals.
Yeah, uh-huh … payback is a bitch, isn’t it, Bitch?
Now Coulter’s pretending to know something about economics. This is funny. Unlike Darcy Burner, she doesn’t have a degree in economics. Coulter’s in over her head. She’s against spending taxpayer money on public infrastructure. Hitch up the donkey carts, folks, because we ain’t gonna have highways or bridges no more! God forbid we should tax ourselves to build public transportation systems to move commerce! We don’t need no commerce!
P.S., Did I mention that Dr. Phil is a wingnut and an ass?
Now Coulter is mouthing the standard-issue rightwing meme that people victimized by predatory lenders are the perpetrators of the mortgage meltdown. Yeah, it’s all their fault, because they were supposed to understand fine print that was deliberately written by shifty lawyers to be incomprehensible to anyone, including themselves! It’s all the fault of the poor people for being poor! The fact that mult-millionaires like Coulter can pay their bills proves that poor people are morally inferior! We don’t need no bankruptcy reform! We don’t need no restructuring of predatory mortgages! We don’t need no regulation of predatory lenders!
Now Coulter is outraged because some people in the inauguration crowd booed Bush. Yeah, that’s just awful, booing a warmonger and torturer who screwed workers and consumers and wrecked the economy. The nerve of those people!
Now she’s denouncing “the culture of single motherhood.” Yeah, it’s just awful that women leave men who beat the shit out of them! The nerve of those people!
I think she/he/it is jealous because she/he/it doesn’t have any children of her own. We should give Coulter a medal for not procreating. One of her is enough.
Well this is easy. simply set up a privacy market, and those who want to spy on you have to negotiate a contract and pay you for the privilige of snooping. retail chains do this all the time with their stupid “club cards”. studies show that costs drive the price but not so much the quantity of snooping engaged in, since the demand curve is highly inelastic (not price sensitive). current tax subsidies to the NSA have lowered the cost of snooping, and now there is way too much of it, just like there was too much corn in the 1950’s. to couteract this we need a snoopee’s union to raise the wages for those who are deemed worthy or being snooped upon.
you know. if you want my ssn#, send me $5,000,000 and it yours. one big union. one big strike.
go snoopies!
Has anyone besides me noticed that teen pregnancies soared on Bush’s watch? Hey wingnuts, how’s that abstinence thingy working for you idiots?
with a little creativity, we could set up a private free market for ‘coulters’. the only problem is the insatiable social desire to thin the herd, a powerful exogenous force, may overwhelm the fragile ineffable beauty of the untrammeld free market as it seeks to optimize the supply of this scarce resource to maximize social utility via the sacred price mechanism.
@12 “pay you for the privilige of snooping. retail chains do this all the time with their stupid “club cards”.”
Not really. Here’s how it actually works. They mark up a $3.00 item to $8.00 and give you $5.00 off if you agree to let them spy on you. If you don’t, you have to pay $8.00 for a $3.00 item. Smells like extortion to me.
I can already see how this would work at the government level. Let’s say you’re entitled to a tax refund of $1,500 but you have to pay $10,000 unless you let the CIA eavesdrop on you. See how that works?
I don’t think this approach changes the fact that it violates your constitutional rights. As for the supermarkets, it’s hard to avoid because they’re all doing it, so the only effective way to deal with it is through government regulation that outlaws the practice.
@14 I’ll buy her/him/it if I can do whatever I want with her/him/it. Does anyone have a cargo container they’re willing to donate for a worthy cause? I may be shipping something to Tierra del Fuego.
@ 7 Roger Regurgitated roadkill’s exciting Thursday night revealed:
@8 Roadkill keeps us abreast of his Soap opera TV viewership:
@9 Roadkill continues his best imitation of Cindi Reinhart:
Some advice for our furry friend:
It takes a real jackass to have the hare-brained idea that anyone gives two shits about your soap opera watching life, roadkill. Keep your worthless posts to yourself or do us a favor and condense them into one long idiot rant so the normal people can just scroll past it.
@13: easy. the religious free marketeers have subsidized the cost of stupidity, lowering its price, increasing its supply, cp. this outcome should have been foreseen by any rational observer with an ounce of common sense and a 15 year old daughter steeped in the musings of aynnie rand.
it may take decades and bold government market intervention to mop up the excess supply of stupidity, but who (besides larry kudlow) ever said pareto optimums were easy?
Can you imagine what could happen if Coulter and Palin got married? Their kids might have Coulter’s looks and Palin’s brains.
Ricky Dipshit @17 — Did you squeak something, mouse? I can’t hear you.
@15: there is always shoplifting or widespread social disorder. do not give up hope, a product whose supply is also governed by sacred free market principles, although deriving marginal cost tends to be tricky.
@18 Yeah, a lot of enterprises have inventory they can’t get rid of. It seems to be systemic.
@5: Poor Ricky D. – if you want some info on Holders background – maybe you should look up who first nominated him to the Federal bench – a guy named Reagan.
Maybe you should look up the Democrats he prosecuted (Rostenkowski).
Maybe you should do a little more research than just listening to the idiot rightwingnut pundits that brainwash you.
Holder will go after ANY bad guys. He made a mistake on Rich – didn’t do his homework and said he was neutral. Big deal. Look at his entire record – he goes after anyone who breaks the law, period.
um sure, I provided a picture back @ 5 before this thread became
Cindi Reinhart’sRoger Rabbits own personal second by second recount of him viewing the Dr. Phil Soap Opera show. I’m sure Holder’s decison to send jackboots to capture an 8 year old from his Miami family will just be a standard practice in the coming Obama years of the 4th reich. Afterall, he’s promising to have 250 thousand “national security forces” in America (Goldstein’s ass should even pucker over that prospect- if he wasn’t a self hater that is).Got Brownshirts?! You too can join and say “yes, we can”
All I can say is it was a great day. We got a glimpse of how afraid the right is of Holder. We celebrated Roe v. Wade day. We saw MADAME SECRETARY CLINTON get a standing ovation from her employees on her first day at State. PRESIDENT OBAMA outlawed torture, Gitmo and secret CIA prisons.
And that was just TODAY. Must really suck to be a right wing traitor these days. But don’t worry you little cunts. We’ll be here to rub it in your chest and to remind you just how fucking miserable your lives are and how we’re about to make them worse – all the while laughing at you!
How these authoritarian whackos love to order people around.
No one’s paid attention to you in the past. Except maybe to laugh at you when dragged silly-assed garbage like Larry Sinclair in here.
And no one is going to pay attention to you in the future. And it will stay that way.
Little Ricky Dumbass.
@ 26 the pervert eye peeking into the bathroom stall:
And no one is going to pay attention to you in the future. And it will stay that way.
Promise?! I’ll hold you to that pervy boy.
You kiddies here seem to really get bent out of shape when you can’t refute facts in posts counter to your
liberal cult programmingpolitical ideology so please, feel free to ignore them and not simply reply with some meaningless gibberish (like you’re capable of anything else,right?…hmpf) like the methane you spewed @ 26.I see that RickyD is trying to activate his two remaining brain cells. Try more voltage, you perv.
I can’t wait until the flood gates open. With the Bush regime relegated to Crawford, TX where it belongs, more and more people will be willing to come out and tell the truth about these right wing crooks. I suspect we have only scratched the surface of their unConstitutional, illegal, crooked and evil deeds. I look forward to these thugs being locked up.
29 – Crawford was just a pose so fools like little Ricky Dumbass could touch themselves to pictures of Dumbya cutting brush.
The monkey now resides in a more citified place in Dallas next door to the billionaire who writes Limbaugh’s paycheck.
Stemcells, Family Planning – another bad day for little RickyD. You’d better get used to it RickyD. You’re going to have bad days, every day, for the rest of your miserable, pathetic existence.
@30 Worse for little RickyD, his dream of becoming a jackbooted, Republican Brownshirt has turned to shit. It’s obviously breaking his heart. The bitterness of his posts reveals all. Apparently, and give thanks to the application of sufficient voltage, he’s finally capable of realizing that he’s one of life’s biggest losers.
@24: Little ricky D. – your little mind is so set on humping anything that Rush Limppaw says that you have absolutely NO credibility.
Wow – you really are a pathetic fool.
After Gonzalez (lying, crooked, sycophantic foll) and Mukasey (lying asshat who could not even call waterboarding torture) these wingnuts try to criticize Holder?
Someone who actually understands and respects the constitution?
How pathetic! The right wingnuts are really so out of touch with reality.
[Deleted by author]
You gotta hand it to little Ricky Dumbass. He’s really committed to defending the barely warmed-over Limbaugh he brings here.
An obese, cowardly, drug-abusing sex tourist is the perfect role model for him.
His commitment to know-nothingness and dumbassery is equaled by few.
Well, I guess this explains how Bush won reelection. Is anybody stupid enough to believe that Bush/Rove/Cheney did not have access to this program, and used it to their political advantage?
8/9/10/11 Roger, I don’t know whether this is an indication that:
(1.) Dr. Phil is getting desperate for guests
(2.) Coulter’s getting desperate for opportunities to peddle her drivel
(3.) you’re getting desperate for some way to amuse yourself in the evening…or
(4.) all of the above.
YLB @ 34: Speaking of Limbaugh, did anyone catch what he said yesterday? He rather forcefully stated that ” I DO hope that Obama fails”. He went on to say that by Obama failing, it would be a repudiation of his “socialist” policies and tendencies.
Aside from the fact that Obama is not a socialist, never has been, and the American people soundly rejected all wingnut attempts to label him as such in the last election….
Let’s keep in mind that Limbaugh and those like him WANT the American economy to crash (even further than it already has), for tens of millions of Americans to be out of work and homeless, and lacking in basic health care, just so Limbaugh and those like him can say…”See, I told you so!”
Their utter lack of patriotism is thus displayed for all to see. Why does the right-wing hate America?
38 It’s not only about being able to holler “Neener-neener”. Limbaugh and the other right-wing screech monkeys, and the “captains of industry” who back them, want to have an America full of desperate people hovering near starvation, who’ll be willing to work for pennies. That they thread their chant with the claim that this is still “the land of opportunity where anyone can somehow strike it rich” does manage to fool some “Joe Six-Packs” into thinking that this will be to their benefit any day now when they win big in their state-run lottery, or its more fraudulent privately operated equivalent aka the stock market.
The irony of all this is that the fat cats are sowing the seeds of their own doom by impoverishing their own potential customers.
Here is how the current Gitmo, military tribunals has worked:
Bush released this guy:
So the idiot republicans used torture, illegal wiretapping, illegal detentions and prisons, illegal avoidance of the justice system (military tribunals) – and they just release the dangerous guys anyways? Wow, what total incompetence. so much for the pathetic wingnuts arguing that somehow these things kept us safe and Obama is dangerous.
Wrong again, dittobrains.
Obama can’t do worse!
Just close the stupid gitmo camp – it is not even keeping us safe now.
“Just close the stupid gitmo camp – it is not even keeping us safe now.”
Nor was it ever.
Hmmm….this guy was a Saudi, huh? Maybe he got a pass because he had….>Cough! Cough!<…friends.
Yanno….kind of like a certain other Saudi who’s hiding somewhere in Afghanistan…or is it Pakistan? Or…..somewhere.
rhp –
Jon Stewart did an excellent takedown on the Limbaugh/Faux News mentality:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo.....419/688084
@42 “I want him to fail.”
Why does Rush hate America?
@39
fool some “Joe Six-Packs
hey art, would that be anything like “ira new york shyster”?
just wondering what class its ok to make fun of.
Ahhhh yes re-run@42, still drinking the warm man-made sticky daily kook-aid.
Lookie here incorrectnottobright@40 who claims plants create CO2 and that’s what caused 4 previous non-man made CO2 gas upheavals. What a ‘tard.
Oh yes back to his “argument” in #40…
The fool, Al-Shihri, said he traveled to Iran to buy carpets for his store in Riyadh. He said he felt Osama bin Laden had no business representing Islam, denied any links to terrorism and expressed interest in rejoining his family in Saudi Arabia.
Since he wasn’t tortured and played nice (ain’t these the new rules) he was let go.
Moral of the story… can’t trust these guys.
Whenever Pelletizer writes something out of the blue like link#13, it’s fact checking time…
“The increase was greatest among black teens, whose birth rate rose 5 percent between 2005 and 2006, reaching 63.7 per 1,000 teens.”
Somehow Pelletizer, I’m sure black teen girls are not listening to GW Bush for guidance.
What a fool #13!
#47 cont”’
Now with a Donkey congress in 2007 the birth rate went even higher…
Of Course Pelletizer blames this on Bush, even though the data is showing it’s happening in bluuuuuuuuuuue country. I guess Planned Parenthood is in trouble? Lacking clients now?
Olbergoebbels is Obamas propaganda minister.