http://www.creators.com/...

(This is actually a repost from some months ago, but I put so much time into hunting down the appropriate photos, I decided to repost it; besides, I'm depressed about not being able to make it to NN this year, so I wanted to post something light to cheer myself--and perhaps others--up a bit)

Several months back, Canadian Noise posted an Oscar-themed diary which speculated on the casting for a filmed version of the 2008 Presidential race.

Unfortunately, the diary didn’t get much notice, but I thought it was such a fun idea that I ran with it, and came up with the following. The only rule I made for myself is to take it seriously—no cartoon characters, no dead actors; all of the choices have to be current, professional film or TV actors. Feel free to toss your own ideas into the ring; I know that I’m way off on at least some of my choices, but what the hell...

Santa Barbara Oil Spill

President Bush is lifting the executive order limiting offshore drilling to areas presently approved. Although the Caribbean has lost half of its corals since 2005 the administration wants to open more areas for potential damage. The administration claims it will help fight high gas prices but oil companies haven't drilled 75% of the existing lease areas. Bush's plans are a give away to big oil that won't change gas prices at all.

Let's cut to the chase, I think Chris Dodd should be Barack Obama's Vice Presidential pick. Dodd is the perfect yin to Obama's yang. Where Obama is perceived as inexperienced by some, Dodd is recognized for his impressive foreign affairs resume. Where Dodd could be seen as too "inside the beltway", Obama heralds a new era in the story of our nation. Let's take a look at just why this unlikely Senator from Connecticut could become America's next Vice President.

Cross Posted at Political Newsline

I've seen quite a few comments and diaries and blog entries and columns and talking heads say that Hillary Clinton deserves to be the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee because 8 million people voted for her in the primary.  I've seen the same argument made, though much less frequently, about John Edwards and his third place finish.

Well, I'm hear to tell you as an Edwards delegate candidate who endorsed Hillary after Edwards dropped out, bullshit.

When I put my name on the ballot to be a delegate for John Edwards it was so he could be President, making the big decisions and leading our country to a new era of progressivism.  It was not so he could be the Vice President, live in the Naval Observatory and attend a lot of funerals.

A corrupt $300 billion bill passes the Senate and no one cares.

Last night I posted this diary about how Chris Dodd is Being Vetted for VP, based on an AP article.  It also mentioned that Joe Biden and Ken Salazar are not being considered, and that Kathleen Sebelius and Claire McCaskill avoid answering.

Over at The Field, Al Giordano has a more detailed article on some of the other potential candidates.

The AP is reporting (i know, i know...) that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn) is being vetted for the position of Vice President by the Obama campaign.

The former White House hopeful and Connecticut lawmaker indicated Wednesday that he has been approached by the campaign. "There's been some inquiries, yeah," Dodd said. "They ask for a lot of stuff. I'll leave it there."

Would this help the netroots to forgive Obama for FISA?  I can't speak for everyone, but it would go quite a way in making me feel better.

More

Talking Points Memo has an article up (via the AP) confirming that Chris Dodd has been asked to submit paperwork to Obama's VP search committee.

When I woke up this morning, I turned on C-Span to watch the inevitable. A handful of courageous Senators like Feingold and Dodd standing up for what's right while other Senators folded to political pressure. I remember when I first read the constitution of the United States. I was just a kid in public school, maybe 13 years old. We reviewed every amendment and why each amendment was an important part of our democracy. Never in my life did I believe that one day, not too many years later, the U.S. government would completely disregard that sacred document.

Full disclosure, I am the netroots director for OR-Sen candidate Jeff Merkley

Update: FISA abomination passed the US senate. The rollcall can be found here.
~~~~~

Original diary follows:

In a few hours from now, at about 11:30 ET today, the US Senate will start voting on the FISA amendments bill H.R. 6304.

Let's make one last effort to stop this bill from passing.

This morning I spoke to a reporter for the Savannah Morning News, the biggest newspaper in John Barrow's district. He mentioned to me, and he seemed surprised, that Regina Thomas has been making warrantless wiretaps an issue in a race where Regina's own best issues, employment and high gas prices have been front and center. But Regina remembers when the government wiretapped Martin Luther King and she finds it deplorable that the congressman from GA-12 should support Bush doing the same thing to untold millions of American citizens without legal warrants. The same reporter asked Barrow, who has been one of Bush's most dependable allies on this, and Regina about warrantless wiretaps and retroactive immunity in their Savannah debate last night. It was obvious that Barrow-- for all his touting of his Harvard education-- has no understanding of the Constitution, separation of powers or the oath of office he took. Although Regina is just a state Senator, her intuitive understanding of Justice and the respect with which Americans hold the Rule of Law, puts her light years ahead of Mr. Smarty Pants. But Georgia's 12th CD isn't the only race where a progressive facing a reactionary has seen the FISA issue come to the fore.

I was down at the Huffingtonpost when I saw a recent piece that Senator Chris Dodd wrote on the FISA bill currently being considered in the Senate.

After reading that, I immediately thanked Senator Dodd (again) for his tough stance against Telecomm Amnesty.

I'm about to write Senator Feingold, who has also been a fighter on this issue.

We've asked our congressmen and congresswomen to stand up for the rule of law, and while not enough congressmen and women have stood up for what's right, we need to take time to thank the men and women who have been fighting the good fight for us up in D.C.

The President and the right-wing machine has asked us to trust them with warrentless wiretapping and domestic spying.

Senator Obama has said that he will vote for the pending FISA bill. Some of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, however, have pledged to vote against that piece of legislation and have offered their reasons for choosing to do so. Let us look at comments by some of those who stand in opposition to Senator Obama's position and why they stand in oppostion. This may better help us to assess where Senator Obama stands on the left/right political continuum.

Gene McCarthy used to say that the function of liberal Republicans was that, when they saw a drowning man, they would throw him a rope exactly halfway too short to reach him. Under the ironclad economic rule that there are no progressive multimillion dollar corporations, the New York Times is now, and always has been, a liberal Republican paper. In the editorial today, "New and Not Improved," the Times is letting its desire to appear loftily superior outrun the facts. Just as it did when it permitted the discredited Judith Miller to shill for the Iraq war, the Times is now flacking for the Republicans with today's arguments. As usual, it does so just to create the appearance of being evenhanded while proclaiming a nonexistent equivalence of disreputability between the candidates.

The Blue America community - FireDogLake, Crooks & Liars, Down With Tyranny, Digby & Glenn Greenwald - launched this internet calling tool to get constituents whipping their Senators to support the Dodd-Feingold Amendment which will strip retroactive immunity from the FISA bill.

No president should have the power to monitor the phones and emails of Americans without a warrant, and telecommunications companies should not be let off the hook. The laws apply to presidents and cronies alike, just like they do to the rest of us.

Instructions: Highlight the code. Press Ctrl + C to copy it. To publish this somewhere, press Ctrl + V to paste the code. Sharing this image will spread the word.

<textarea rows="6" cols="40" wrap="virtual"><a href="http://tools.advomatic.com/7/fisa"><img src="http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/6087/raiseyourvoiceblueamerimq3.png" class="imgLeft" alt="raise-your-voice-blue-america.png" /></a></textarea>

Back in March, I wrote a story laying out the rationale for drawing out a FISA fight that everyone expected us eventually to lose. ("We don't have the votes!") The basic premise:

Every time Congressional Dems actually slow down and take stock of the situation -- from Senator Chris Dodd's brave (and lonely and seemingly futile) stand, to the cautious maneuvering of House Dems today -- new revelations arise that should make all Americans who value our freedoms glad they did.

Well, the House stopped slowing down recently, and have handed an all-too-willing Senate (which has all along been more willing than the House, it must be noted) a bill that puts retroactive immunity for the pay-for-play telecom spies back on the table. Now it's back in the Senate's lap, with a few brave souls preparing to do what they can to keep the train wreck in slow motion.

Is that worth doing? Sure. And for all the same reasons, which perhaps deserve mention again as Senators prepare to vote on this mess when they come back to work next week. And it couldn't hurt for you to be armed with this list if you see your Senators or Representatives at your local Fourth of July festivities.

So, over the years since we first learned of the Bush domestic spying scheme, and in the six month reprieve that the extended FISA fight has given us, what have we learned about the security and surveillance practices of the "administration" that we supposedly should trust with these new powers?

• We learned that:

  A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance

• We learned that they resurrected and hid Total Information Awareness:

  Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

  But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

• We learned that all the lines are being erased, with the national security apparatus monitoring domestic data traffic and the FBI becoming a foreign intelligence outfit.

• We've learned that the FBI has committed massive abuses of its powers::

  The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.

• We've learned that the FBI still gets it wrong pretty often, too:

  A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

• And of course, we've not forgotten the good, old "No-Fly List"

  The Transportation Security Administration's secret no-fly list includes some very unlikely terror suspects -- Bolivian President Evo Morales, 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers, and every single person named "Robert Johnson."

• We learned that the argument still frequently made that foreign-to-foreign phone calls that pass through the U.S. can't be monitored without the PAA and the new FISA changes, and which are constantly pointed to as the proximate cause of the deaths of American soldiers was... a lie:

  The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

• We learned that the "administration" believes the AUMF rendered the fourth amendment a nullity:

  ... our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations. See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, from John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Robert J. Delahunty, Special Counsel, Re: Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States at 25 (Oct 23, 2001).

• We learned that that might not even matter, since the head of the NSA is dead certain there's no probable cause standard in the fourth amendment, anyway:

• We learned that the DOJ may be using your cell phone to track your physical movements without a warrant, or any court oversight.

• We learned that the "administration" says it can read your mail without a warrant:

  President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

  Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

  A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.

• We learned that racial profiling is back at the FBI, and this time, it's a-ok:

  Nearly 40 years ago, the FBI was roundly criticized for investigating Americans without evidence they had broken any laws. Now, critics fear the FBI may be gearing up to do it again.

  Tentative Justice Department guidelines, to be released later this summer, would let agents investigate people whose backgrounds — and potentially their race or ethnicity — match the traits of terrorists.

  Such profiling faintly echoes the FBI's now-defunct COINTELPRO, an operation under Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s and 1960s to monitor and disrupt groups with communist and socialist ties.

  Before it was shut down in 1971, the domestic spying operation — formally known as Counterintelligence Programs — had expanded to include civil rights groups, anti-war activists, the Ku Klux Klan, state legislators and journalists.

  Among the FBI's targets were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lennon, along with members of black extremist groups, Fidel Castro sympathizers and student protesters.

And of course, all of these unchecked expansions of executive spying power are occurring in a context in which the Congress has found itself almost completely without power to compel any compliance at all with its most serious oversight responsibilities. Despite the assurances they're scrambling to give that all will be well and closely-watched, the reality is that this Congress has been unwilling and/or unable to exercise any serious control over the executive in the way it interprets or implements these powers, even when such implementation is clearly outside the law. In fact, it is precisely because the implementation was outside the law that we're even having this debate, and incredibly, it's a debate about retroactively legalizing it.

In the face of all of these absurdities, rely on the Washington Post to tell us that opposition to this bill at this time -- in the hands of this president, too -- is inherently unreasonable:

Reasonable people can differ on the issue of immunity, but the FISA debate hasn't been overpopulated by reasonable people. As a result, the immunity issue has assumed a significance in the legislative process that far exceeds its underlying importance. We understand the heartfelt arguments of those who believe that closing the courthouse door to Americans who claim the warrantless wiretapping invaded their privacy rights represents "an abandonment of the rule of law," as Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said last month.

The editorial actually has passages in it that are considerably worse, and some which are outright false. For example, the assertion that "no one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored." Untrue, as the parties in the Al-Haramain case (as well as that class of people in possession of eyeballs used for reading) well know, but the Washington Post apparently does not.

But if it's true, as the editorial whines, that immunity "is the least -- not the most -- important aspect of the complex FISA debate," you couldn't tell from the traditional media coverage of that debate. Crocodile tears from the Post editorial board are no substitute for the media's missed opportunity to discuss those "most important" aspects of the complex FISA debate. But they've been AWOL on those issues, and it took bloggers latching onto the most politically explosive of the issues to even slow the runaway train long enough for the more important issues -- and I agree there are plenty of them -- to even get a second look.

The Post, of course, would have you flush that opportunity down the toilet in the mad rush to inscribe the mistakes being made on those more important issues on the books. How "reasonable," indeed.

Unchecked expansion of spying powers. A complete lack of enforceability of Congressional oversight. A lapdog press that actually can't wait to cheerlead for the collapse of all controls.

Has there been any point in our history when it's made less sense for the Congress to cede even broader powers to the executive?

In one last, great irony, you and your representatives in Congress are given one last chance to think this over: the Independence Day holiday. I urge you to think more deeply and seriously about it than the Washington Post has.

Sign on as a citizen co-sponsor.

Stand With Me Again on Retroactive Immunity
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
From: "Chris Dodd"

For the last nine months, when retroactive immunity has surfaced, we have been able to delay its passage.

We were able to stop it in December because I had an army behind me.

Two months later, it stalled again -- this time in the House.

And last week, we managed to delay action one last time.