Sen. Leahy: No More Secret Orders, Secret Courts, Secret Torture
Many legal experts have accused the President of breaking the law by ordering the wiretappings without a court warrant as required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT): "This warrant-less eavesdropping program is not authorized by the patriot act, it's not authorized by any act of congress, and it's not overseen by any court. And according to reports it has been conducted under a secret presidential order, based on secret legal opinions by the same justice department, lawyers who argued secretly, that the president could order the use of torture. Mr. President, it is time to have some checks and balances in this country, we are a democracy. We are a democracy. Let's have checks and balances, not secret orders and secret courts and secret torture, and on and on."
That's from Democracy Now! yesterday.
Mike noted it yesterday:
"I broke the law." That's what he's saying. That and "Piss on all of you, I do what I want." He's been appeased and coddled by the press (and the New York Times sat on this story for a year) and you get idiots saying things like, "The dialogue from the left is just getting so rude tsk, tsk."No, you've been living in the Bully Boy bubble while the rest of us have been speaking truth. You're the joke for sitting there whining about what people are saying or lying about it (like Nicky K did when he was proved he was so quick to slam the left that he didn't even need to read Molly Ivins because calling her a "Bush hater"). You're the joke for thinking a Bully Boy can be coddled.
Mike calls Bush "the Bully Boy electronic peeping tom."
So did Rebecca:
bully boy's spying on us. he thinks that's okay. he's spent today and yesterday and saturday full of himself and how he's protecting the nation ... by destroying what we stand for.
maybe you caught the war lust the bully boy had when he was raving after 9/11 (several days after) and you thought, 'well this is what we have to do.'why did you think that?
to save the country?
so how do you justify what's going on now?
how is the country being saved when everything we stand for is being twisted and perverted?the nsa has been spying on american citizens. bully boy could have tried for a fisa warrent which rarely refuse to grant a warrent. that wasn't the route he wanted to take.
So did Elaine:
King Bully Boy and his court of fools. They aren't working for America. They're working for King Bully Boy. They're loyalties aren't with the public, aren't with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or any belief, written or not, that speaks to the higher nature of what our nation is supposed to aspire to.
[. . .]
What's going on in the oval office needs to be called out by people in their own voices, in their own way of speaking. Not to call it out is far more dangerous and destructive than to use what someone feels are the "wrong words." We need to be discussing this, all of us, because if we don't, if we stay silent, we're saying it's okay and we're turning our backs on what we are supposed to believe in.When you do that, you destroy your own character as well as the nation's character.
At The Third Estate Sunday Review, we did an editorial that opened with this:
"We are all the outlaws in the eyes of America."
That's the opening line to Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together." That's also what the Bully Boy appears to see when he looks out on the nation.
And C.I.'s been all over this topic.
This is serious and so for today's Jot, this is what I want people to focus on. I'll be posting this week but it may not be every day due to the holidays.
