Tag: TMC Politics

The Patriot act Extension has FAILED to pass in the House!

House rejects measure that would extend key Patriot Act provisions through December

A measure to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act counterterrorism surveillance law through December failed the House Tuesday night, with more than two-dozen Republicans bucking their party to oppose the measure.

The House measure, which was sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and required a two-thirds majority for passage, failed on a 277-to-148 vote. Twenty-six Republicans voted with 122 Democrats to oppose the measure, while 67 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans to back it. Ten members did not vote.

The measure would have extended three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire on Monday, Feb. 28, unless Congress moves to reauthorize them. One of the provisions authorizes the FBI to continue using roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access “any tangible items,” such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third is a “lone wolf” provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act that allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

The vote came as several tea party-aligned members of the new freshman class had been expressing doubts about the measure.

Primary those Democrats that voted for “Yes”. This is the second issue that I have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul and the Tea Party Republicans. The second issue: cutting defense spending not Social Security or Medicare. Paul has said that he would vote against extension next month when the bill comes before the Senate.

Up Date: This is the statement from Rep. Dennis Kucinich:

“The defeat of the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, under the suspension of the rules, signals the potential for a new coalition. Twenty-six Republicans joined one hundred and twenty-two Democrats to block passage, forcing a new debate on these critical questions of privacy and civil liberties. It was thought that reauthorization would be non-controversial, which is why it was placed under a suspension of the rules, but the fact that it failed to get the two-thirds vote required indicates that it is controversial. This is a surprising development and it will lead to more debate about the PATRIOT Act. I credit Conservative Republicans, Libertarians and members of the Tea Party for standing by their beliefs and thank my fellow Democrats for providing one of the first major challenges to the PATRIOT Act.

“It is expected that the bill will be brought up again, but the opposition has now surfaced. I look forward to working with this new coalition to continue to rally support to defeat the PATRIOT Act,”

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

Bob Herbert A Terrible Divide

The Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it’s more like twilight – with nighttime coming on fast.

Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an economy that is being divided ever more starkly between the haves and the have-nots. Not only are millions of people jobless and millions more underemployed, but more and more of the so-called fringe benefits and public services that help make life livable, or even bearable, in a modern society are being put to the torch.

Dana Milbank: Obama makes corporate America his business

Conservatives seemed as irked by Obama’s trip to the U.S. Chamber as liberals.

“I strolled over from across the street,” the president said of his trek from the White House across Lafayette Square to the Chamber’s H Street palace. “And look, maybe if we had brought over a fruitcake when I first moved in, we would have gotten off to a better start.”

When the laughter ended, Obama departed from his prepared text to add: “But I’m going to make up for it.”

He sure is – and if the list of goodies he read out Monday is any indication, he would have found it easier to deliver the fruitcake.

Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s selective memory on Ronald Reagan

As we mark the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, one of our major political parties has become imbued with the Gipper’s political philosophy and governing style. I mean the Democrats, of course.

The Republican Party tries to claim the Reagan mantle but has moved so far to the right that it now inhabits its own parallel universe. On the planet that today’s GOP leaders call home, Reagan would qualify as one of those big-government, tax-and-spend liberals who are trying so hard to destroy the American way of life.

Dennis Kucinich: The Tea Party’s First Test?

The House may vote tomorrow to extend three provisions of the PATRIOT Act and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that allow the government to conduct domestic surveillance of Americans.

The 112th Congress began with a historic reading of the U.S. Constitution. Will anyone subscribe to the First and Fourth Amendments tomorrow when the PATRIOT Act is up for a vote? I am hopeful that members of the Tea Party who came to Congress to defend the Constitution will join me in challenging the reauthorization.

This is a Live Blog and will be updated as the news is available. You can follow the latest reports from AL Jazeera English and Al-Masry Al-Youm: English Edition

The Guardian has a Live Blog from their reporters in Egypt that refreshes automatically every minute.

Al Jazeera has a Live Blog for Feb 8

As you can see we now have the live feed from Al Jazeera English.

It was a joyous day in the Tahrir Square with the news of the release of Google executive, Wael Ghoneim, Middle East marketing manager for Google, who was arrested on January 27 by police. Ghoneim oversaw the “Arabization” of Google’s on-line services and has participated in several projects aimed at supporting Arabic Internet content. His disappearance became a cause célèbre as Google and Human Rights organizations demanded that the Egyptian government disclose his location. Sunday the newly appointed Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafik, announced that Ghoneim would be released.

Life did start to return to some normalcy as banks and shops re-opened and once again the usual traffic jams clogged the streets. Tourism continues to suffer and tanks continue to guard government buildings, embassies and other important institutions in the capital.

On sadder note, a symbolic funeral procession was held for journalist, Ahmed Mahmoud, who was shot as he filmed the clashes between protesters and riot police from his Cairo office. The UN also reported that nearly 300 people have been killed since the unrest started on January 25th and thousands more injured.

The stand off between the Mubarak regime and the protesters demanding he leave office goes into its fifteenth day with mass demonstrations planned in Cairo.

Or the stuff you won’t hear from the MSM. The blogosphere is a big place and there is a lot going on that gets lost in all those pixels. The subtle background, the nuances to the top political news that don’t get aired in prime time. Lots of stories get buried or just ignored in news dumps. The White House does it all the time releasing stories late on Friday nights in hopes that in the rush to start the weekend, the media will miss what they’ve been doing, like caving to the right wing and blocking the habeas corpus rights of prisoners.

* We are finally seeing and hearing from the foreign press. Producers and Editors from foreign news organizations are turning up on NBC, ABC and the major cable network news programs giving their perspective on not just the Egyptian protests but the world in general. It took a revolution and the internet to start waking Americans to the reality that they aren’t be told all the facts. Al Jazeera may be coming to a cable service near you.

Since its inception in 2006, Al Jazeera English has been fighting for access to American viewers. Distributors have been unwilling to carry the service, but Mr. Anstey, the managing director, said in an interview that renewed talks with the major distributors were now under way. “There’s a growing call for Al Jazeera. That’s clear,” he said.

Al Jazeera English has contacted Comcast, for instance, and a meeting has been scheduled for later this month.

In an indication that perceptions of Al Jazeera may be changing, one of its correspondents in Washington reported on Thursday that people there “are all of a sudden very welcoming” to the network. “We’re on TVs all across the city.”

Of course, this scares the pants off the right wingers and Fox news, who sent one of it fear mongering minions, former United States ambassador to Morocco and a former contributor to Fox News, Marc Ginsberg, rushing to post an opinion at Huffington Post with wild accusations that Al Jazeera is fueling the unrest by “using events in Tunisia to fuel its favorite political pastime of disgorging its anti-authoritarian editorial bias across all of its media platforms — much to the anger and hostility of most Arab rulers, particularly those Al Jazeera views as too pro-western (Al Jazeera gives quite a pass to the despotic Syrian regime as well as to its Qatari benefactors).”

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

Frank Rich: Wallflowers at the Revolution

A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all but invisible throughout the 2010 election season. Foreign aid is the only federal budget line that a clear-cut majority of Americans says should be cut. And so now – as the world’s most unstable neighborhood explodes before our eyes – does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents. After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely distinguish Sunni from Shia.

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video – even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Paul Krugman: Droughts, Floods and Food

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis – the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t so much why they’re happening as why they’re happening now. And there’s little question that sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for popular rage.

Laurence Lewis: Egypt Is the Future

While many have been surprised by the seemingly sudden uprising in Egypt, the real question isn’t about how it happened but why it didn’t happen sooner. Despite brave and noble opposition efforts by various individuals and groups over the past decades, it seems nevertheless to have been taken for granted by much of the world that the Egyptian people would live under oppression indefinitely. It seems to have been taken for granted that the revolutionary movements that have shaken half the globe in the past half century somehow couldn’t touch one of the world’s oldest nations, as if that very ancient history stultified the very modern Egyptian people. Of course, most of the efforts within Egypt have been ignored by much of the world for decades, and if noticed at all, were mostly written off as but spasms of extremism. So the surprise at current events is not, itself, surprising. The grace and humanity of the current revolutionary opposition is a wake-up call not for Egypt, but for the world.

This is a Live Blog and will be updated as the news is available. You can follow the latest reports from AL Jazeera English and Al-Masry Al-Youm: English Edition

The Guardian has a link to Twitter from their reporters in Egypt that refreshes automatically every minute.

Al Jazeera has a Live Blog for Feb 6

As you can see we now have the live feed from Al Jazeera English.

It has been reported in all the news media, President Barack Obama is supporting Vice President Omar Suleiman, the man that helped plan and oversee the CIA/US rendition/torture program in Egypt, to lead the transition government after Mubarak steps down. This should be not only unacceptable for the Egyptian people but for Americans, as well. As Jane Mayer points out in her article in the New Yorker, “since 1993 Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions, the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.” That Suleiman has said he would not be a candidate in September is not an valid excuse for letting this man anywhere near a transitional government. As a former CIA officer, Michael Scheuer, who helped set up the practice of rendition, said, assurances that were made by Suleiman on behalf of the Egyptian government that they would not torture, “weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” Yet, Obama is willing to trust this criminal.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Live from Egypt, Ms Amanpour’s guest will be the US Ambassador Sameh Shoukry to Egypt. She will host special round table discussing with journalists covering the demonstrations including veteran Egyptian journalists Lamia Radi and Nadia abou el-Magd, BBC’s John Simpson, Tony Shadid of the New York Times, and ABC’s David Muir.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Mr. Schieffer’s guests will include Martin Indyk, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, Thomas Pickering, Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Israel and Jordan, and Dr. Abderrahim Foukara, Al Jazeera, Washington and New York Bureau Chief

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s panel is Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor, Katty Kay, BBC Washington  Correspondent, Joe Klein, TIME Columnist, and Anne Kornblut, The Washington Post, White House Correspondent.

The question are: Did the U.S. Miss Signs That Egypt Could Become a Hostile Islamic State?

Donald Rumsfeld’s Rewrite of the Iraq war

Fear the Muslims! Rummie would look good in orange.

Meet the Press with David Gregory:MTP is live from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library marking the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth. Mr. Gregory’s has interviews Mohamed ElBaradei and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The round table will be former Secretary of State and Reagan White House Chief of Staff, James Baker; former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan; former Speaker of the California State Assembly and Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown; and W.H. Correspondent for NBC News during the Reagan administration, Andrea Mitchell.

Rah, rah, St. Ronnie who laid the foundation for the economic decline of the middle class.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: As the second week of protests comes to an end, we’ll discuss America’s standing in the Middle East and what’s next for Egypt and the region with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — exclusive, live and in-studio.

Then, former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Edward S. Walker, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte join us again to assess the ever-changing implications for the U.S.

Plus, live reports from CNN’s team of reporters on the ground.

And, we sat down with the co-chair of the White House Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Alan Simpson. The former senator from Wyoming outlined the commission’s plan for tackling the ever-growing national debt.

War criminals and “let ’em eat cake” misogynist

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The latest on the turmoil in Egypt with live reports from our correspondents around the country and the region.

Egyptian opposition figure Mohammed ElBaradei speaks with Fareed on situation in Egypt and what might come next. Will Mubarak leave before September? Will ElBaradei run in the upcoming elections? Stay tuned to GPS to find out.

And, Fareed’s interview with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Will his austerity measures save England? Will Britain bail out its neighbors? And who will foot the bill for the royal wedding?

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

New York Times Editorial: Politics and the Court

When it comes to pushing the line between law and politics, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas each had a banner month in January.

ustice Scalia, who is sometimes called “the Justice from the Tea Party,” met behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to talk about the Constitution with a group of representatives led by Representative Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus.

Justice Thomas, confirming his scorn for concern about conflicts of interest and rules designed to help prevent them, acknowledged that he has failed to comply with the law for the past six years by not disclosing his wife’s income from conservative groups.

Gail Collins: The Siege of Planned Parenthood

As if we didn’t have enough wars, the House of Representatives has declared one against Planned Parenthood.

Maybe it’s all part of a grand theme. Last month, they voted to repeal the health care law. This month, they’re going after an organization that provides millions of women with both family-planning services and basic health medical care, like pap smears and screening for diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

Our legislative slogan for 2011: Let Them Use Leeches.

Robert Reich: The Jobs Report, and America’s Two Economies

At a time when corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow is flirting with 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs be coming back. But you’d be wrong.

The U.S. economy added just 36,000 jobs in January, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Remember, 125,000 are needed just to keep up with the increase in the population of Americans wanting and needing work. And 300,000 a month are needed — continuously, for five years — if we’re to get back to anything like the employment we had before the Great Recession.

Well, he’s a tax raiser, an amnesty giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists. Why is he a hero to conservatives? I don’t think you understand it.

The transcript can be read at Mike Stark’s here web site, The StarkReport

This is a Live Blog and will be updated as the news is available. You can follow the latest reports from AL Jazeera English and though Mishima’s live blog, our news editor.

The Guardian has a Live Blog that refreshes automatically every minute.

Al Jazeera has a Live Blog for Feb 4

As you can see we now have the live feed from Al Jazeera English.

Today was the largest protest against the Mubarak regime that has been stages yet. Vowing not to leave Tahrir Square in Cairo until Mubarak is gone. The day has been relatively peaceful and there have been only small clashed with the military establishing order keeping the pro-Mubarak supporters out of the square and re-instituting searches for weapons as people entered the square. Night is falling and thousands still remain.

The attacks on the independent news media continues with the burning of the Al Jazeera offices with all their equipment destroyed and Al Jazeera reporters beaten and arrested. The major American news media has taken refuge in hotels as it is completely unsafe for them on the streets. Also reporters from the New York Times, the BBC and others have also been detained and threatened.