Hey Jack. Suck on this.

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Fox and the neocons want to spin the truth, but the fact is, Obama's the real deal.

scamming the nation is his game.

The spawn of a mixed marriage ( is Kenya really in Africa, I know that the Congo is part of darkest Africa.) Obama parlayed his color in racist black Chicago to a seat in the US Senate,

Backed by Mysterious Big Money ( how big is that Obama Big Money? Bigger than DNC and Union Big Money, brother)

Obama promises a chicken in every pot, pie in the sky and $4000/yr for every college student, free health care to Mexico: just for starters.

Cheers

Linking a NYT editorial that catalogs ways Obama has reversed himself on several positions -- and we're not talking minor adjustments in, say, proposed capital gains tax rates or mpg standards, but rather betraying an earlier promise to defend the Constitution and Rule of Law against the FISA "compromise" (nothing of the sort) abomination -- doesn't get any more fundamental than that -- as supporting an argument that "Obama's the real deal".

Weird (guess I'm suggesting you might need to define "real deal")!

P.S. You can join mybarackobama.com supporters' group "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right" here.

Hard to imagine a more relevant and fundamental test of "real deal"ness than following through on -- instead of reversing -- a prior commitment (while wooing primary voters) to defend the Constitution and Rule of Law.

If you want to fight every issue like Rove or Hillary and take extreme positions at either spectrum, than yes, this post is bizarre. If you want to solve problems instead of fight them, than this post and Barack Obama's positions make perfect sense.

Telecom immunity is not the issue. Balancing the need for government accountability and oversight while we effectively keep the country safe is.

Guns or no guns is not the issue. Appropriately balancing the individual's rights with societies need for safety is.

Leaving Iraq is not the issue. Resolving the fiasco there as carefully as Bush was careless going in is. And "carefully" doesn't necessarily mean abandoning everything there, but the realities are that we can't maintain the current troops levels there anyway because Bush has totally tapped out our military resources. So now as we watch Afghanistan's insurgency flare up while Iraq's fragile progress is getting picked off by seasoned assassins in Anbar, all anybody, no matter how brillant a leader they may be, can do is redeploy, regroup, and prepare for the rising tide of chaos caused by the irresponsible exhaustion of our national defense.

Telecom immunity is not the issue. Upholding the Constitution (including 4th Amendment) and Rule of Law is. Telecom immunity is simply the means of guttting them (i.e., it guarantees that current civil suits -- the only likely means of shining a light under the rock of the Bush admin's illegal spying on Americans -- will be dismissed, hence ensuring the perps' freedom from accountability).

Obama was right when he took a stand on these issues (specifically, to oppose and support a filibuster of any bill with telecom immunity) and wrong to go back on it. It's just that simple. It's also an utterly non-partisan matter, and about as far from "extreme" as it's possible to get, impinging as it does our most core, fundamental Constitutional values and principles, i.e., precisely what make this country worth defending.

Some

recommended

reading.

but as someone who works in intelligence and national defense, and knows this issue at its core level because I've reviewed many of the references and reports, both classified and unclassified, I think I understand the issue better. I believe Senator Obama has probably been briefed more thoroughly at the classified level now and may have a better sense of the issue than the rank and file of his party.

After 9/11, a significant seam was discovered between the intelligence held by CIA, and the evidence held by FBI. The two were not allowed to communicate, because the CIA couldn't spy (receive evidence) on U.S. citizens, and the FBI never had enough resources to pursue international criminals, and the CIA never like to share secrets anyway. In general, the CIA wasn't collaborating, and FBI was effectively kept in the dark because of the seam or gap between information regarding international activities and domestice activities surrounding suspicious groups under investigation or the targets of intelligence collection plans. This gap was tremendously compounded by an arrogant administration that dismissed experts like Dick Clark who were privy to both sides of the gap.

That said, the key reason the issue isn't more understood is because the general public, who does not get to see the classified references and reports, cannot trust the current administration, for some very good reasons. I have consistently disagreed with the way Bush has violated the FISA act, but he did, and he entangled the Telecoms along the way. I don't think giving them immunity lets the government officials who did violate the law off the hook.

All that said, I don't think all the government officials acted with malice. I think they genuinely thought they were aggressively persuing threats to the public, but I think that time of urgency that might allow for some clumsy incompetence has passed. Actually I think it passed around 2003. I think it's time for some constructive accountability, but I don't think prosecuting the Telecoms is constructive. I think the government officials are the ones who owe the public for their incompetence. Then the government may regain the trust of the American people that it needs to more effectively pursue threats without violating their privacy.

Immediately after 9/11, the administration stumbled around and haphazardly tried to fix the problems, but rather than read and learn and understand how the system should've and would've worked if they were doing their jobs, they took short cuts and broke laws. Rather than updating FISA with reasonable adjustments and accomodations that preserved oversite while expanding its effectiveness, they just ignored it so they could blame it for their incompetence.

The Telecoms aren't the villians here. The members of the Bush Administration are.