BRAZENLY LIBERAL — a fact-based initiative

This week, the House Democrats capitulated to Bush and the telecommunications companies. (Senator and Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama says he will fight to strip telecom immunity from the bill when it gets to the Senate.) And you just know this kicked up a storm in the liberal blogosphere, as [...]

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Every once in a while, the inadvertent placement of ads with news stories can make a pithier comment on a story than any blogger. Screen cap from abcnews.com:

The Bush administration has been quietly tracking people suspected of bankrolling terrorism through a secret program that gives the government access to a massive data base [...]

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Sometimes patriotism means supporting the government. Sometimes it means defending the country against those who would destroy it during their brief tenure.
In refusing to be bullied into silence, Wired has shown true patriotism.
A file detailing aspects of AT&T’s alleged participation in the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic wiretap operation is sitting in a San [...]

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Most people have a guilty pleasure, a nonedifying though essentially harmless activity that brings some relaxation and diversion. Soap operas, comic books, fashion magazines - all have their fans among some seemingly uber serious people.
For me, it’s Cold War era spy novels. Love ‘em. I haunt used bookstores looking for any I [...]

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I’m not an international superspy. I’m not an agent provocateur. I’m not a private detective, a supergeek hacker, a sophisticated electronics whizz, or a telecommunications expert. I’m a middle-aged woman living on a farm in America’s heartland.
Just to establish my complete lack of any arcane expertise in the area of how to [...]

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Really!  Says so right here.   Last week, a Washington Post/ABC poll showed Americans think having the NSA keep track of all their phone calls is a fine thing. No problem. Go ahead. Be our guest. We can see how tracking our phone calls to Mom will be a critical tool in [...]

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Click on through to read The Carpetbagger Report’s take on the latest NSA revelations. You’ll be glad you did.
A little taste:
Bush wants us to know that he’s not “trolling” through our personal lives; he’s just allowing a secretive government agency to covertly log every American phone call for secret reasons, without oversight, and with [...]

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Back in December, Bush acknowledged the NSA was conducting surveillance on American citizens’ phone calls, but hastened to assure us it was only international calls and the only people being spied upon were those people with “a clear link to these terrorist networks.”
Those of us who found this less than 100% believable were subject to [...]

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I never thought I’d live to see the day that loathsome tool of the Far Right, Fox “News,” would be linked on this blog. But I imagine it’s being gleefully linked on just about every left-leaning site in the blogosphere this morning. I’m sure the rightwingnutjob blogs are linking it, too, though with [...]

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SCARE US: On the TV screen, a senior citizen falls to the floor, frightened and helpless. The voiceover tells us they aren’t likely to fall where they can reach a phone to call for help.
SAVE US: Get a handy-dandy button to push that will alert the emergency service to her location and need [...]

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These guys are playing it so close and so coy that even a reliable GOP toady like James Sensenbrenner calls it “stonewalling.”
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales suggested on Thursday for the first time that the president might have the legal authority to order wiretapping without a warrant on communications between Americans that occur exclusively within [...]

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When a privacy-rights group requested records to show how many times a secretive presidential oversight board had asked the Justice Department to investigate possible violations of intelligence-gathering laws since 2001, the answer that came back last month was as simple as it was startling.
Zero.
One possible reason: For more than half of President Bush’s first term, [...]

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As of this writing, you can still go into a closet, close the door, turn off the light, and pick your nose in private. Don’t count on that lasting much longer.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Security Agency could have legally monitored ordinarily confidential communications between doctors and patients or attorneys and their clients, the [...]

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