Glenn Greenwald and Wired’s Threat Level explain why. Klein crosses over into territory sometimes described as “not even wrong.”

Feinstein may face censure from her Democratic colleagues over her pro-Bush votes.

Secrecy Plus Immunity Eliminates Accountability.

We have another torture AG, it appears, and it totally didn’t have to happen: the vote to confirm was 53 to 40, which means a cloture vote was a real possibility. Add to this that the campaigning Dems didn’t show to vote. We reckon there’s some angle to allowing another yesman to get confirmed to show everyone how bankrupt the GOP is, but it really IS time to play hardball. The GOP have fucked up everything in sight, and have no reason to stop now. The Democrats really need to tighten up and play hard to show America they’re just as pissed off as everyone else.

Rolling over on “waterboarding may not be torture” Mukasey ain’t gonna do it.

His most recent special comment concerns fired U.S. Acting Assistant AG Daniel Levin, who lost his job for speaking out against torture generally and waterboarding specifically — after he had the technique used on himself to better evaluate it. Olbermann begins:

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the meaning of the story of former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed:

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

Go read the whole thing.

Over at Huffington Post: “Biden: Rudy’s Sentences Consist of ‘A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11’.”

Keith Olbermann, national hero, on Fox and Bush’s incessant fear-mongering.

We find ourselves here, looking at someone the Family Security Matters organization thinks is dangerous. The pic is funny, but the list — FSM’s top 10 most dangerous organizations in America — is hilarious. Their site is slow, so here’s the rundown:

1. Media Matters, because reprinting what the Right says is somehow wrong;
2. Universities and colleges, apparently because booklearnin’ is dangerous;
3. MoveOn.org, a clear communist cabal;
4. The League of the South; actually, this one makes sense — LoS is pretty freakin’ scary;
5. Center for American Progress, whom they decry as “smearing and misleading;”
6. Shockingly, Dobson’s Family Research Council, a group Heathen also oppose;
7. The ACLU, natch, on account of their dangerous promotion of liberty;
8. CodePINK, a grassroots peace-and-justice outfit;
9. The Muslim Student Association, ’cause all them ragheads is DANGEROUS;
10. ThinkProgress, smeared here along with MediaMatters, MoveOn, CodePink, the ACLU, etc., for consistently pointing out just how naked the right is.

Enjoy.

Reid, in violation of Senate rules, is saying he won’t honor Dodd’s hold on the telecom immunity bill.

WTF?

The link above is getting ongoing updates, so use it to stay on top of the story.

This whole thing is important because the bill amounts to a short-circuit of the judicial process. ATT has been sued over this, and is losing badly despite their army of lawyers. Their solution is to use a bought-and-paid-for congressional delegation to buy a retroactive immunity and render the judicial proceedings moot. That dog won’t hunt, or shouldn’t.

Turns out, Chris Dodd’s got enough. He plans to a Senate hold on the telecom immunity bill.

(Via Atrios, who rightly says good behavior ought be rewarded.)

From the House debate on the SCHIP override:

First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where ya gonna get that money? You going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care.

[…]

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

(Kos, Atrios)

The GOP are, of course, apoplectic at this statement. Largely because it’s true.

Bush has appointed an avowed opponent of birth control to head the family planning office inside DHS. Again.

The appointee, Susan Orr, comes from the far-right Family Research Council, which favors abstinence-only education and opposes using any tax dollars for contraception.

In 2001, she was quoted in the Washington Post favoring a Bush administration plan to drop a requirement that health insurance plans for federal employees cover a broad range of birth control.

“We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease,” she said at the time. “It’s not a medical necessity that you have it.”

(Washington Wire @ WaPo)

They’ve caved on the bill that issues blanket and retroactive immunity to the telcos who’ve been illegally eavesdropping on us since before 9/11.

At least Chris Dodd is still fighting.

See here.

On Sunday, Maureen Dowd let Stephen Colbert have a run at being an Op-Ed columnist, to great comedic effect. A bit:

So why I am writing Miss Dowd’s column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

[…]

Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.

Krugman explains Gore Derangement Syndrome.

The SCOTUS has refused to hear the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who was kidnapped by the US and imprisoned secretly in Afghanistan for four months in a case of mistaken identity. In refusing to hear the case, the Supremes have accepted the Administration’s exercise of the state secrets privilege, which essentially means they can do whatever they want and quash the resulting courtroom challenges on the grounds that “hey, we gotta keep secrets.”

At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said.

Thirteen CIA agents have arrest warrants in Germany as a result of the case.

It’s wonderful what bad publicity can do.

By timing the deployment length of a National Guard unit so as to just barely fail to qualify the soldiers for the GI Bill. Nice.

The Big Con, over at NYT. Precis: How DID the GOP manage to shift to the hard right, and convince much of America that was a good idea?

DHS wants to lock up domestic travel such that we’d need their permission to fly. Seriously.

“I didn’t watch Bush’s speech last night, much for the same reason I don’t bathe my eyes in lye.”

(Pointed out by RB)

Reason and Radley Balko explore why a Texas prosecutor is refusing to preserve evidence that may show the state executed an innocent man in 2000.

Frankly, the inherent lack of a death penalty mulligan should be enough to convince anybody that the state ought not be in the business of killing people.

MeFi points out Mercer for President, the best site by an insane candidate we’ve seen yet.

From the AP:

NEW YORK — A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible “far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

More:

The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of an Internet service provider, complaining that the law allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court supervision required for other government searches. Under the law, investigators can issue so-called national security letters to entities like Internet service providers and phone companies and demand customers’ phone and Internet records.

In his ruling, [U. S. District Judge Victor] Marrero said much more was at stake than questions about the national security letters.

He said Congress, in the original USA Patriot Act and less so in a 2005 revision, had essentially tried to legislate how the judiciary must review challenges to the law. If done to other bills, they ultimately could all “be styled to make the validation of the law foolproof.”

Noting that the courthouse where he resides is several blocks from the fallen World Trade Center, the judge said the Constitution was designed so that the dangers of any given moment could never justify discarding fundamental individual liberties.

He said when “the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution, it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

Regarding the national security letters, he said, Congress crossed its boundaries so dramatically that to let the law stand might turn an innocent legislative step into “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

Thank GOD someone is paying attention. Perhaps the best part of the article, despite the awkward phrase in re: the role of the judiciary, which we’re pretty sure the judge didn’t botch:

Marrero’s lengthy judicial opinion, akin to an eighth-grade civics lesson, described why the framers of the Constitution created three separate but equal branches of government and delegated to the judiciary to say what the law is and to protect the Constitution and the rights it gives citizens.

Marrero said the constitutional barriers against governmental abuse “may eventually collapse, with consequential diminution of the judiciary’s function, and hence potential dire effects to individual freedoms.”

In that event, he said, the judiciary could become “a mere mouthpiece of the legislature.”

Doonesbury examines the myth of the fiscally responsible Republican Party.

It’s long, but go read it anyway; here’s the final graf:

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that “90 percent of the information was unreliable” and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model [designed to produce confessions, not information], we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”

The goal of terrorism is typically to disrupt and frighten the target society, subverting their calm state, so that more attention is paid to the terrorist’s cause. It almost never works at creating change the terrorist would like, but it frequently succeeds at least in damaging the society targetted, not in the least because political leaders in these societies often play directly into the terrorist’s hands by capitalizing on the fear for political gain, or to increase their own fiefdoms.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is one such functionary; Bruce Schneier notes the following dialog from an oft-linked interview McConnell gave with the El Paso Times:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Wow. “If we talk about security policy, people will die.” Um, bullshit. Democracy cannot thrive in an environment of secrecy. Certainly some intelligence should be secret, and some planning, but a hard line must be drawn between legitimate operational security and shadowy surveillance practices turned on regular citizens.

McConnell’s interview is interesting for a number of reasons, as pointed out at BoingBoing; perhaps most interesting is that he explicitly confirmed what the government has been refusing to comment on, even in court: that commercial telcos have been helping them spy on Americans. Also worthwhile are the links at the end of Schneier’s post, especially those to Salon.

He’s the American citizen arrested 6 years ago on charges he was working to build and detonate a “dirty bomb” on behalf of Al Qaeda. His case got interesting quickly, since the government maintained that he wasn’t entitled to any legal protections because he was held as an “enemy combatant”.

The courts eventually intervened, and the government was forced to try him in the regular courts, finally according him the same rights that ANY of us should have. Remember, this is a CITIZEN that the government simply declared to be beyond the reach of the rule of law. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, we don’t know what will.

He may well have been a bad guy, but we’ll never really know, now, because our own government basically destroyed Padilla over the course of his 6-year incarceration (much of it in solitary confinement, and subject to CIA “interrogation techniques” designed to dismantle Padilla’s mental health) and only then tried him in public. He was found unfit to stand trial by a forensic psychiatrist, but they overuled her and tried him anyway. He was found guilty on all counts yesterday. From Lindsey Beyerstein:

Over Dr. Hagerty’s objections, Padilla was deemed fit to stand trial for conspiracy to murder people abroad and providing material support to terrorists operating in Bosnia, Chechnya and other foreign countries. A Florida court found Padilla guilty on all counts, Thursday.

By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted while he was still of sound mind. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and thereby undercut the legitimacy their prosecution.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an “enemy combatant,” with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations.

The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power — a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King — because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today’s verdict — along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England — gives the lie to that claim.

All along, the Bush administration could have, should have, and was constitutionally obligated to charge Padilla with crimes if it wanted to imprison him. There is no more defining American liberty than the right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment, and like so many other basic liberties, the Bush administration violated and assaulted this right for no reason whatsoever.

[…]

Worse still, the notion that Padilla received a “fair trial” is dubious, to put it mildly, and will undoubtedly be vigorously contested on appeal. Last year, the New York Times obtained a copy of a video from Padilla’s imprisonment which showed techniques that can only be described as torture — systematic sensory depravation and gratuitous humiliations which clearly broke Padilla as a human being in every sense that matters, all before he had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything.

Another Republican has announced he won’t seek re-election in 2008; this time it’s our cousin Chip. Let’s hope his district hasn’t been gerrymandered into permanent Republicanism, and that the good people of it realize what voting for Bushites gets them.

First, Bush and his cronies blatantly and repeatedly violate FISA, each example of which is a felony. Bush admits that this is happening on national television. Nothing happens.

Then the fucking laptop majority rolls over and allows him to completely gut FISA, so that he can’t be troubled with such issues anymore. This law, which supposedly sunsets in six months, effectively gives the administration carte blanche to eavesdrop on any person, at any time, and in any place, for any reason. Period.

But oh, it gets better: now they’re claiming the Constitutionality of eavesdropping undertaken prior to the FISA-gutting cannot be challenged, on account of “national security grounds.”

Look, if you’re not pissed off by this, if you’re not mad enough to spit nails, you just aren’t paying attention. This president HATES the rule of law. He HATES that he can’t just do whatever he wants, and laws be damned. This is awful close to the Nixonian “it’s not illegal if the President does it” argument — but then again, at least Nixon had the decency to resign. Bush and his ilk show no such fiber.

Check it out; the Dark Lord still has a hard-on for Iran. Of course, why wouldn’t he? It puts money in his pocket, and the issues of our government, our military, and our nation are about to be somebody else’s problem.

What Bush means by “accountability,” via Balko.

So, you know how it usually turns out that the aggressively righteous and homophobic are the ones that get caught committing exactly those sins that they rail against? Didja notice these goons are almost always Republicans? Yeah, us too.

Well, it happened again: Florida state rep Bob Allen was just arrested for soliciting sex in a public bathroom from an undercover cop.

But it gets better, and stupider, as Scalzi points out.

specifically it’s alleged that he offered an undercover cop a Jackson if he’d let the legislator blow him. This was not a smart thing to do. But having been caught doing something stupid, Allen, who is a pudgy white fellow, has decided to double down on his stupidity by offering what is a truly, spectacularly — indeed, magnificently — dumb reason for soliciting another man for sex: Fear of a Black Planet!

“This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park,” said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a “statistic.”

[…]

[L]et’s think Allen’s rationale through:

Allen, during the middle of the work day, was at the park, just minding his own business, enjoying the Florida sunshine or whatever, like you do, when he suddenly noticed that the park was full of black men. Fearing for his own personal safety, he decided that the best course of action was to go into the public restroom, peer over a stall — twice — to locate a black man, and offer that black man $20 and a blow job if he’d just leave him alone.

Go read the whole thing. Scalzi’s on fire with this one.

A bill gutting the already lax restrictions on warrantless domestic spying passed the House yesterday, just as Bush wanted.

WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE? As one Kos diarist says, enough with the excuses. Stop rolling over. Fuck the GOP, and fuck their contempt for due process and the Constitution. Stand the hell up and fight.

We hope someone in the Magnolia Office can tell us that the asshole described here is, somehow, going to be kept from helping to convict more people on bogus science. Please?

One of the Right’s favorite rants is that to fail to support this president is to be unpatriotic. To them, there is apparently no room for dissent, no possible honorable path besides blind obedience and trust in the state, which is of course an idea with no merit at all. In fact, to call it “intellectually bankrupt” would be an insult to bankruptcy.

And yet, they still do it, which means some idiots are actually buying it. We outlien for you now a distinction:

It is the Right that insists its opponents are unpatriotic; that they hope the enemy wins; that they are in Osama’s camp; that they support Al Qaeda; and that they hate the troops because they want to bring them home. They do this because, we assume, it is the best they can do. They cannot admit their failure and their folly because they equate apology and course-changing to weakness. Instead, they want to run out the clock (and troops and country be damned) and slink away in 18 months.

It is the Left that insists none of these ideas have any merit on their face, and that it is in fact supremely patriotic to insist a President be answerable to those who elected them, to the Constitution, to the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution (once held so dear by the GOP when Clinton lived at 1600 Pennsylvania). No one on the Left ascribes treasonous motives to their opponents — well, unless clearly wishing to establish an Imperial presidency is treasonous (and it may be).

Rove’s refusing to honor his subpoena as well. Time for Congress to cowboy up and take the next step; Bush has already made clear he thinks nobody in the executive is answerable to Congress. This is incorrect, and Congress needs to make an object lesson of every last one of them.

Texas governor Rick Perry has joined George in his anti-science crusade and appointed a nutbird looney creationist to CHAIR the State Board of Education. We shit you not.

The appointee, Dr. Don McLeroy, has repeatedly voted to stifle scientific information in textbooks covering evolution. From an Austin American-Statesman editorial:

In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn’t comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn’t factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation’s largest Baptist college.

You can find out even more “proud to be ignorant” information on McLeroy’s web site, which is chock full of anti-intellectual — he’s a big fan of Conservative anti-Enlightenment author and discredited moralist Paul Johnson — anti-evolution, abstinence-only claptrap. He is, of course, an Aggie, and lives in Bryan.

And now, via a series of tubes, a summary of the scandal that led the FBI to raid Ted Stevens’ home.

John Scalzi on something that even Bush won’t do. (Thanks, RB!)

The DOJ has stated formally that they will not enforce House contempt charges against Administration officials.

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald takes note of Yoo’s WSJ editorial insisting Bush’s exercise of Executive Privilege is justified, normal, and Constitutional.

First, n.b. who Yoo is:

Yoo is not only willing — but intensely eager — to defend literally anything George W. Bush does or would want to do, including — literally — torturing people and crushing the testicles of children if the Leader decreed that doing so was necessary to fight Terrorists. Yoo, of course, is a principal author of most of the radical executive power theories which have eroded our constitutional framework over the last six years.

So, clearly, he’s a guy with a lot of credibility, right? Well, it gets better. Turns out, this isn’t the first time he’s written publicly on Executive Privilege. Back in 1998, when Clinton attempted to use it during the Lewinsky matter, Yoo wrote another editorial with the exact opposite thesis.

John Yoo, you’d be today’s Official Heathen Douchebag if it weren’t for Gonzales. Maybe Abu will share his prize with you.

Don’t take our word for it. Just go look here, where he quite simply refuses to answer questions. His utter contempt for Congressional oversight is absurd and borderline criminal. Josh lays it out:

It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don’t remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it’s simply not permitted to refuse to answer the question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress. (Emph. added)

It doesn’t stop there. See more here.

There exist, apparently, buildings you are prohibited from photographing.

The list itself, knowledge of which is a necessary precondition to following the (bullshit) law, is also secret.

We are not making this up.

The bottom line is that McCammon was caught in a classic logical trap. If he had only known the building was off-limits to photographers, he would have avoided it. But he was not allowed to know that fact. “Reasonable, law-abiding people tend to avoid these types of things when it can be helped,” McCammon wrote. “Thus, my request for a list of locations within Arlington County that are unmarked, but at which photography is either prohibited or discouraged according to some (public or private) policy. Of course, such a list does not exist. Catch-22.”

The only antidote to this security mania is sunshine. Only when more and more Americans do as McCammon has done and take the time and effort to chronicle these excesses and insist on answers from authorities will we stand a chance of restoring balance and sanity to the blend of liberty and security that we are madly remixing in these confused times.

Look, people: any time there are secret laws, or secret evidence, or secret trials, you’re fucked. The whole idea of any of those things is blatantly anti-American, anti-freedom, and anti-democracy. Governments MUST exist in an inspect-able, transparent state.

(Via BB.)

From WaPo, as reported in TPM:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

In other words, he’s asserting that he can short-circuit any such investigation on his own say-so, and that, essentially, he and his branch are not answerable to Congress. More:

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

Somebody needs to smack this crap down with a quickness. That just won’t do. Harry Reid, we’re looking at you.

Check out this Executive Order, and note how the words “5th Amendment” and “due process” do not occur despite the fact that the order purports to give the Secretary of the Treasury authority to freeze the assets of anyone who “undermines” efforts in Iraq. This determination may be made secretly, and need not happen before the freeze. (Really. See Section 6.)

N.B. that “undermines” is not defined.

More coverage at The Guardian; that it’s nowhere in the American press is, of course, due to our “liberal” media.

So, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that there’s been some fun in the Senate in the last 24 hours. Basically, the GOP signaled its intent to prevent a vote on a measure calling for troop withdrawal with a filibuster. In modern times, the filibuster is usually not carried through a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; the intent is usually enough, the outcome assumed, and the next move made by the non-filibustering party.

Well, this time it’s different. Reid stated he’d hold the Senate open all night, forcing Republicans to actually DO the filibuster in order to prevent a vote on the troop measure. This is well within the playbook, and is in no way an underhanded move. However, the press is utterly failing to report this accurately, and has on more than one occasion suggested it was the Democrats who were filibustering. Diane Sawyer even claimed that it was Reid who “vowed to filibuster.” Reid can’t filibuster, since he’s in the majority here. Let’s set the record straight.

From MediaMatters:

On July 11, Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jack Reed (D-RI) proposed an amendment to the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2008 (H.R. 1585) calling for troop redeployment from Iraq to begin within 120 days. On July 16, Senate Republicans blocked the Democratic leadership’s effort to schedule an up-or-down vote on the amendment. In response, Reid scheduled a July 18 cloture vote on the amendment, which would require a 60-vote supermajority to cut off debate on the measure. On the Senate floor, Reid criticized the Republicans for “using a filibuster to block us from even voting on” the amendment and announced his intention to extend the debate on the measure through the night on July 17 in order to “highlight Republican obstruction.” From his statement:

REID: But now, Republicans are using a filibuster to block us from even voting on an amendment that could bring the war to a responsible end. They are protecting the President rather than protecting our troops. They are denying us an up or down — yes or no — vote on the most important issue our country faces.

I would like to inform the Republican leadership and all my colleagues that we have no intention of backing down. If Republicans do not allow a vote on Levin-Reed today or tomorrow, we will work straight through the night on Tuesday. The American people deserve an open and honest debate on this war, and they deserve an up-or-down vote on this amendment to end it.

Given the Republican leadership’s decision to block the amendment, we have no choice but to do everything we can in the coming days to highlight Republican obstruction. We do this in hopes of ultimately getting a simple up-or-down vote on this and other important amendments that could change the direction of the war.

A 2003 Congressional Research Service report on “Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate” defined filibustering as “any use of dilatory or obstructive tactics to block a measure by preventing it from coming to a vote.” While senators once routinely mounted filibusters by holding extended debates on the Senate floor, it is more common now for the Senate to recognize filibusters merely through cloture votes. If a cloture motion fails to get 60 votes, debate continues and the measure does not move to the floor for an up-or-down vote. By calling an all-night session, Reid is forcing opponents of the withdrawal plan to sustain the filibuster by actually speaking on the floor.

So, bottom line: The Democrats want to vote on a troop withdrawal measure favored by wide margins, if poll after poll is to be believed, and the GOP minority are hell-bent on keeping this measure from reaching a vote, because it will PASS. They planned to filibuster, and Reid made them actually execute on it rather than just threaten.

Wil has a great post on the bullshit “be vewy vewy afwaid” warnings from Homeland Security head Chertoff; he quotes extensively from Radley Balko’s piece in Reason. Go read both. Here’s a taste:

Wil:

Yesterday, Michael Chertoff, the director of Homeland Security, told the nation that they should be scared out of their minds, because he has a “gut feeling” that Al-Qaeda will launch a terrorist attack within the United States sometime this summer, and a bunch of anonymous government sources are breathlessly leaking truly scary things to Mass Media.

Bull. Fucking. Shit. This is the same recycled crap that we’ve heard over and over again from this administration, and I’m really fed up with my government doing its best to terrify me and my fellow Americans.

Radley:

By definition, the aim of “terrorism” is not to topple the U.S. government, or even to rack up a massive body count […]. The aim of terrorism is to cause terror. It’s to scare us. Frighten us. Alter our way of life, and get our government to change its policies.

In this sense, the very people who are supposed to be protecting us from terrorists are playing right into the terrorists’ hands.

Wil brings it home:

This is part of a long-established pattern from this administration: when the public begins to see them for what they are, they scramble to issue a bunch of terrorist attack warnings, so we’ll be afraid and give them whatever they want, so they can “protect” us.

[…]

What’s going on right now? Ah, yes, Bush and Cheney have the highest disapproval ratings since Nixon, and Bush’s approval among Americans is in freefall. The opposition to Bush’s complete failure in Iraq is at an all-time high. The outrageous commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail conviction — well within federal guidelines — because Bush thought it was “excessive” has infuriated Americans across the political spectrum. The Attorney General is quite clearly a liar, acting not to uphold the Constitution, but in fealty to Bush and Bush alone. Cheney brazenly claimed to be his own branch of government. The US Attorney Firing scandal shows no sign of going away, as Congress finally brings some investigation and oversight to a criminal administration which has acted as if the laws don’t apply to it since the day the Supreme Court put them into power. Americans are waking up to all of this, and the reality is difficult to deny: Bush, Cheney, Rove, and everyone in their rotten administration are crooks.

So, in a transparent effort to distract us from the damage they’ve done to our country, all they have is fear. All they can do is terrify people into submission, and it’s disgusting. We’re better than this. We’re stronger than this. We’re smarter than this.

So, please, don’t be afraid this summer. Don’t be part of Bush and Cheney’s Culture of Fear. Don’t let the terrorists win.

True dat.

The President admitted yesterday that the leak of Plame’s name came from his administration, but said that his commutation of Libby was “fair and balanced,” and that he was now “moving on.”

It would be difficult for this to be more clear. Bush’s message is simple: commit a felony breach of national security in the pursuit of political retribution against his enemies, and you can expect to spend zero time in jail. Yet again, we point out that we have never had a president so hostile to the concept of “rule of law.”