Hoyer, Pelosi sell out Fourth Amendment

Glenn Greenwald has this truly disgusting example of why the House leadership needs to be replaced:

It is now definitively clear that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is the driving force behind a bill — written by GOP Sen. Kit Bond — to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to vest lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty. Even as his office dishonestly denies that he is doing so, still more reports yesterday — this one from the NYT and this one from Roll Call (sub req’d) — confirm that a so-called “compromise” is being spearheaded by Hoyer and the House Democratic leadership. The ACLU and EFF are holding a joint call tomorrow to denounce Hoyer’s “compromise” as nothing more than disguised guaranteed immunity for telecoms and, further, because “the proposed deal could be used to authorize dragnet surveillance of Americans’ communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

A letter writer to Salon, JimPharo, says:

Motives are always hard to know, especially with barren Beltway politicians, so I’ll just pass on what seems to be the consensus among the Washington people I talk to about this:

They think that, come August, when the PAA orders expire, the GOP is going to have a club to beat them with as they go to their convention to nominate Obama (“The Democrats are leaving us vulnerable to the Terrorists”). Since Obama is against telecom amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping, they think it’s necessary to take that issue off the table, hence the “compromise.”

Glenn’s column has suggestions on what to do to oppose this sellout.

Some People Need To Get A Grip

This reaction to Patti Solis Doyle’s long-expected hooking up with Team Obama just cracks me up:

A Clinton insider told CQ: “Translated subtitles aren’t necessary. There is no other way to interpret this other than ‘[Expletive] you.’”

Yeah, yeah, so this is inside-baseball stuff, right? Not really. If PSD is Obama’s czarina of Vice Presidential Nominee, then guess who probably isn’t going to get the nod? Uh-huh. And some of Hillary’s peeps are p.o’d. Like San Francisco’s own Susie Tompkins Buell. She told the Washington
Post:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Buell said. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.”

She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Guess what, Susie? It’s Not About You.

As responsible adults have known for some time, Patti Solis Doyle has been a long-time friend of top Obama staffers David Axelrod and David Plouffe. She’s known them longer than she’s known Hillary Clinton.

What’s more, the scuttlebutt for some time has been that Solis Doyle, who was the Clinton team’s chief outreach person for Hispanics, was made the scapegoat for the blunders of far more powerful people, people such as Mark Penn. (This belief was further heightened by a suspicion among many Hispanics that Hillary waited until after most of the states with heavy Hispanic populations had finished their primaries before dumping their highest-profile Hispanic staffer.) Key Hispanic politicians were angered by the scapegoating, enough to cause a few high-profile early Latino defections to Obama.

This may bode ill for Hillary’s 2012 Senate chances, if some of her high-profile backers keep trashing Solis Doyle.