The NSA is doing oversite, that tells you all you need to know.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 6 2006 16:14 utc | 4

Did you all enjoy the Oath Or No Oath exchange between Gonzales and Specter?
After assuring himself and the AG in the back rooms that he had the votes to prevent Gonzales being put under Oath, Specter came out to grandstand for the cameras, saying no need for the Oath, while Gonzales said hey no problem with the Oath here, knowing it wasn’t gonna happen.
To quote Dr. Lector, “That was good.”
Anyway, this whole Congressional oversight issue is completely misunderstood. Over means over, right? Sight means view, observe, see, look. Look says it very well.
Over sight is the same as over look. That’s the ticket. You’ve never pulled off the highway at a scenic oversight, have you? No, you stop at the overlook.
Same with Congress. Their true role is to overlook the Executive and Judical branches.
Glad we cleared that up . . .

Posted by: Antifa | Feb 6 2006 18:28 utc | 6

Yep, all for show.

Posted by: ben | Feb 6 2006 20:04 utc | 8

Digby thinks it is all about pure domestic spying for political gain. No foreigners or international calls involved in those cases.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they’ve done.
Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style.

I find that very likely.

Posted by: b | Feb 6 2006 21:48 utc | 10

@mr avid
I expect the Republicans who count (not the ones in the street, mind you) have already made their peace with it. The DNC is only a titular opposition party as it is, and Hillary is currently demonstrating to the hands that hold the Diebold levers that she is someone who will play ball with them while maintaining the facade of being “the opposition”.
Amongst the Republicans who don’t count, there are already some rumblings as the dim realization hits them that Bush is not really a “conservative” at all. The hands that hold the levers are neither conservatives, liberals, Democrats nor Republicans (even if they carry one or another expedient banner). They are nothing more than Imperialists and plutocrats… and Hillary Clinton is already every bit as much a member of their ranks as George Bush (Younger or Elder).

Posted by: Monolycus | Feb 6 2006 23:40 utc | 12

Ask a simple question: if its really a question of spying on arabs, or Middle Easterners or AQ wannabees, wouldn’t they first want to hire some competent translators to interpret their zillions of “intercepts”? In fact they remain woefully short in that department.
Probably still haven’t refilled a lot of Chinese translator positions since the purges of the McCarthy days.
Skipping around the FISA act has nothing whatsoever to do with the War on Terrorism, in which operation the Bush guys have not a single tactical – much less strategical – win to point to.

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Feb 7 2006 3:12 utc | 14

btw. anything more on the John Loftus iraq-had-wmds bs? just curious.

Posted by: slothrop | Feb 7 2006 3:32 utc | 16

mr avid suggested Start asking every Republican you know how they feel about Hillary having this same power in about three years.
the smart one will probably laugh inside, feign some kind of disgust, & then resume laughing. sam smith, over at the progressive review, recently posted another good reason why the clinton’s are not an alternative

GREG PIERCE, WASHINGTON TIMES – President Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father that the Democratic former president is like a member of the family. Former President George Bush has worked with Mr. Clinton to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami and the hurricane disaster along the Gulf Coast. Asked about his father and Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush quipped, “My new brother.” “That’s a good relationship. It’s a fun relationship to watch,” Mr. Bush said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
. . .
Mr. Bush said he has checked in with Mr. Clinton occasionally. “And you know, he says things that makes it obvious — that makes it obvious to me that we’re kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. Makes sense, after all, there’s this kind of commonality,” he said. Mr. Bush jokingly referred to speculation that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former president’s wife, will seek the Democratic nomination for president. He had earlier referred to the former first lady as “formidable.” “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton,” he said, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

also see smith’s clinton archives here & here.
and i’ll close w/ this observation, which i’ve brought up before – but it’s so relevant, from jonathan schwarz over at a tiny revolution

As I like to say, the Democrats and Republicans have generally represented the sane evil people and the insane evil people, respectively. Their long-running argument goes like this:
REPUBLICANS: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!
DEMOCRATS: I like the way you’re thinking. I really do. But if we keep at least SOME of them alive and working for us, we can make even MORE money in the long run!
REPUBLICANS: You commie!

Posted by: b real | Feb 7 2006 15:40 utc | 18

Don’t worry, be happy! In 2007, President Cheney will reassure you that “our long American nightmare is over”.

Posted by: gylangirl | Feb 7 2006 16:19 utc | 20

What is the result of a finding by a majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the President broke both the FISA law and the 4th Amendment of the US Consitution, not to mention his oath of office? Nothing.
The Senate doesn’t get to decide if the impeachment process proceeds. Only the House of Representatives does. Which is why this hearing is occurring in the Senate rather than the House.

Posted by: gylangirl | Feb 7 2006 18:01 utc | 22

I called Specter’s DC office this afternoon and was told by the woman who answered the phone that the senator does not believe it is necessary to swear in a Cabinet officer, that the oath of office already obliges him to tell the truth to Congress.
Oh, Arlen…..!

Posted by: jawbone | Feb 7 2006 21:53 utc | 24

mmmmm – links works
here?
or there
….

Posted by: hanshan | Feb 8 2006 17:53 utc | 26

just a guess: the power behind the dem party was already online w/ the program – for instance, not disputing the last two presidential elections – and on this tangent, the domestic spy program is a mop-up to make sure that everyone else will either come on board or stfu. i don’t believe that the thrust of the program is necessarily aimed at the other party though. there are still some journalists out there who can do some damage & those pesky leakers who seek them out. there are still other factions amongst the elite classes who favor neo-liberalism over the new fascism. iow, the opposition has never truly been the other party.

Posted by: b real | Feb 8 2006 19:12 utc | 28

@b real
That was essentially what I was trying to say with my Feb 6, 2006 6:40:01 PM post. You said it a lot more clearly.

Posted by: Monolycus | Feb 8 2006 20:46 utc | 30

Speaking of loyalty oaths, some are now worried about fifth columns.

And the administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue fifth column movements.
. . .
So my friends on the other side, I stand by this president’s ability, inherent to being commander in chief, to find out about fifth column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that.”

Chilling.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Feb 8 2006 21:38 utc | 32

Were these guys commissioned officers? Or blogger-Joes who did a brief stint and are not professional military…
i had one pinned down long enough to elicit that he was only a single-tour weekend warrior & he was definately living in a world of denial. i doubt that the actual oath has officially changed, but i do believe that these guys were sincere about their belief that the emphasis was that they obey & support the president. and given that this is a president who allegedly refered to the u.s. constitution as that “goddamned piece of paper” and has undeniably demonstrated outright contempt for it in his very actions, even if they do know something of it other than that they may have read it once in elementary school, the oath itself is a sham. we can see that it’s not at all held up as a binding document.
along a similar tangent, re another similar system predicated on strict authoritarianism, i was recently doing some research on police corruption & came across a good talk by an ex chief of police who now works to expose how the “war on drugs” creates corrupt copt – “gangster cops” is what he calls them. during the talk he’s giving, he mentioned something that obviously catches your attention

…when our sergeant taught us about the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the police from making searches generally, without a warrant, although there are some exceptions, he went through the lesson plan as it was written. However, a couple of days later when he was teaching a course on police procedures from another lesson plan, he taught us how to search people.
And there was a certain contradiction there, and being a kind of maverick even back in those days, and he being a reasonable man, unlike some of the other instructors, I asked the question, “Well, but what about the Fourth Amendment?” I thought we weren’t supposed to search people unless we had a warrant. And he said, “Well, that’s just a civil matter. Someone can sue you for violating their civil rights, but you go ahead and search them, and no jury is going to find against a cop who comes up with a handful of dope outside the schoolyard. And if the courts didn’t want us to do this, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
Now this was a good instructor, so that’s the indoctrination that comes in. The Constitution is not seen as a glorious document that established unique Civil Rights in the history of civilization, but it’s seen by the police as an obstacle that they have to get around to do their job.

again on the topic of loyalty oaths, i also recall reading that there is an increase in such things in the academic world. might make for an interesting investigative report to cover how widespread loyalty oaths are in the current climate w/i the u.s.

Posted by: b real | Feb 9 2006 3:50 utc | 34

Of Wiretaps, Google Searches and Handguns by John Allen Paulos

“Even if the probability that the purported terrorist profile is accurate were an astonishing 99 percent (if someone has terrorist ties, the profile will pick him or her out 99 percent of the time, and, for ease of computation, if someone does not have such ties, the profile will pick him or her out only 1 percent of the time), most of the hits would be false positives.
For illustration, let’s further assume that one out of a million American residents has terrorist ties — that’s approximately 300 people — and the profile will pick out 99 percent, or 297 of them. Great. But what of the approximately 300 million innocent Americans? The profile will also pick out 1 percent of them, “only” 3 million false positives, innocent people who will be caught up in a Kafkaesque dragnet.”

Posted by: beq | Feb 9 2006 20:17 utc | 36