Under the Federal Election Committee’s guidelines re-written in 1993, unions and corporations are forbidden from funneling unlimited contributions to political parties.
So last week when Congress provided immunity for telecom giants, such as AT&T, who are collaborators in the biggest spy bill passed in history, perhaps they weren’t looking for anything in return.
Except the fact that [...]

Read Manufacturing con-(vention)-sent »

The NY Times buried the story this afternoon. Maybe they were busy getting wiretapped on the phone.
After close to a year of in-house cock fighting, the House passed a bill today that will listen into your cavernous soul. Or something similar.
The outdated and now unfabulously updated FISA bill, passing 293 to 129, with near-unanimous support [...]

Read Don’t tap me, bro! »

Above is an artifact that should go into the Library of Congress/National Archives. It is evidence that in 2008 there remains at least one human in Congress who understands what is at stake in the conniving disingenuous warrantless spying and telecommunications immunity bill that the President and his cronies are salivating over and that the [...]

Read Rush Holt as Sarah Connor? »

What’s happening with the FISA electronic surveillance bill is The Story of Washington politics in general and of Bush-era politics in particular. It’s what has been going on for eight long years—the idiot doublespeak, the pretend threats, the corporate cronyism, the shrinking enabling Democrats and the muddled craven press corps. For a more full explanation, [...]

Read FISA: it ain’t just for terrorists and wonks »

There was a man from Texas who apparently gave a speech in Washington yesterday in which he said absolutely nothing new but all the papers covered it as if it were something. One major story that didn’t make it onto the front page, though, the kind of story that should be front and center all [...]

Read State of the union bait and switch! »

The Obama South Carolina victory was the first really decisive contest yet of the Democratic primary race. His victory speech seemed a powerful tour of his thinking over the past couple weeks, a combination finger wag and group hug. This kind of emotion-getting natural-born speechifying is something we as a nation have been sorely missing [...]

Read South Carolina shouts »

Time Magazine selected Vladimir Putin as its Person of the Year and yet managed in its fawning interview with him to get his birth year wrong by six years. Inspired by Time’s crack staff and more generally by the spirit of silly end-of-the-year lists and meaningless nominations, I propose semi-presidential candidate Chris Dodd as [...]

Read Hollywood Dodd »

Time magazine columnist Joe Klein appears to be the latest Judith Miller— ie, a careerist journalist and damned shoddy reporter who has been manipulated by the “well-placed sources” he depends on for advancement and whom he will protect at all cost. A column he wrote last week has been dissected by Glen Greenwald at Salon [...]

Read Time’s patsy Klein »