Not when they run one on top of the other on the ed page:
"Limiting Power’s ‘Natural Tendency’
After a long and frightening period of acquiescence, Congressional Democrats are standing up to President Bush’s assault on civil liberties — demanding an end to spying on Americans without court supervision.
Last week, the full House and the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed major improvements to a deeply flawed measure that the White House pushed through Congress just before the summer recess. The leadership will have to stand firm to enact more needed fixes to that law — and prevent the White House from using the occasion to encroach even further on civil liberties.
The bill had a narrow aim, to close a loophole in the 1978 law on electronic spying that was created by new technology. But Mr. Bush added provisions that gave legal cover to his decision to spy on Americans’ international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant after 9/11 — and actually expanded his powers.
Yeah, except Bush's Wiretapping Began BEFORE 9/11!!.
The only thing good to come of last summer’s rout is that the law was set to expire in February, and a group of Congressional Democrats are fighting to get it right this time.
The House passed a measure last week that contains the necessary updates to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It allows the collection of e-mail messages and phone calls between people outside the United States that happen to go through American data hubs. It grants some additional latitude for starting eavesdropping on communications originating or ending in the United States, and then getting court approval afterward.
But it restores critical oversight powers to the special foreign intelligence court — to monitor such programs, compel the intelligence agencies to comply with the rules and impose sanctions if they do not. These legitimate restraints on the government’s power are reflected in a Senate bill that was approved by the Judiciary Committee last week.
Mr. Bush opposes that bill, as well as the House bill, because it restores the court’s oversight powers. The president is also insisting that Congress give immunity to telecommunications companies that turned over data to the government without a warrant — which they did for five years after Sept. 11, 2001.
Yeah, except Bush's Wiretapping Began BEFORE 9/11!!.
Both measures could use strengthening, but they are a good start. Much depends on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who should allow the Judiciary Committee bill to come to the Senate floor and permit vital amendments to be proposed by Senator Russ Feingold. Mr. Reid should allow a parallel, badly flawed bill passed by the Intelligence Committee to die a well-deserved death.
Here are some red lines for this debate:
SUNSET The law must have an expiration date. Congress should not grant the government unending powers to spy on Americans. The Bush administration, predictably, wants just that. We support the House bill’s two-year expiration date.
COURTS AND WARRANTS Any new law must include real supervision by the special FISA court. The administration wants to gut the court’s powers, taking away the requirement for advance warrants for most eavesdropping on international communications originating or ending in the United States. The administration would allow the court to rule afterward on whether required procedures were followed, but strip the court of its remaining powers to enforce such a judgment. It is vital to retain provisions in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s bill that would make it clear that the government cannot just collect information in bulk — by, say, tapping all calls to and from Pakistan — but has to cite targets, including specific phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Even if the government is legitimately targeting someone overseas in an eavesdropping operation, the 2007 law would permit it to collect vast databases that would include Americans at the other ends of those communications. Mr. Feingold is working on vital amendments that would restrict the ways the government could store and use such information.
The Senate bill would require a warrant to eavesdrop on an American who is in another country. The White House opposes this provision. It must be retained.
AMNESTY The telecommunications companies must not get amnesty. Lawsuits against them must be allowed to proceed, in the interest of the rule of law and also to force disclosure of the nature and extent of the lawless eavesdropping that began after Sept. 11, 2001.
Yeah, except Bush's Wiretapping Began BEFORE 9/11!!.
Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, is expected to propose an alternative that would allow plaintiffs to sue the government rather than the companies. That would leave the taxpayers holding the bag for monetary damages and allow the government to use claims of sovereign immunity and state secrets to kill the suits. If the government wants to protect the companies, it can set caps on damages. Mr. Bush wants this amnesty to ensure that his own administration’s culpability is never revealed in court.
As this debate proceeds, Mr. Bush and his allies will tell Americans that these reforms — and the Democrats — will make it impossible to eavesdrop on Osama bin Laden. That’s not true. American intelligence has most of the tools it needs to do that already, and the Democratic bills give them the few extra ones they may be missing. Mr. Bush will present Americans with a false choice between effective intelligence and protecting their freedoms. It is possible, quite easily, to have both.
Senator Sam Ervin, the author of groundbreaking legislation in this area, warned eloquently in June 1974:
"[The dangers that arise when the] natural tendency of government to acquire and keep and share information about citizens is enhanced by computer technology [without legal and judicial restraint]. Each time we give up a bit of information about ourselves to the government, we give up some of our freedom. For the more the government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us. When the government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.”
Bush says it is just a goddamned piece of paper.
We hope that lawmakers, both the remaining passive Democrats and those Republicans who cherish the Constitution but have been afraid to buck this president, bear those words in mind as they debate the electronic espionage law."
Noting the abuses of the Bush regime, the NYT still calls for disarming the American people in the face of these monsters!
"The Court and the Second Amendment
By agreeing yesterday to rule on whether provisions of the District of Columbia’s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a roiling public controversy with large ramifications for public safety. The court’s move sowed hope and fear among supporters of reasonable gun control, and it ratcheted up the suspense surrounding the court’s current term.
The hope, which we share, is that the court will rise above the hard-right ideology of some justices to render a decision respectful of the Constitution’s text and the violent consequences of denying government broad room to regulate guns. The fear is that it will not.
At issue is a 2-to-1 ruling last March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that found unconstitutional a law barring handguns in homes and requiring that shotguns and rifles be stored with trigger locks or disassembled. The ruling upheld a radical decision by a federal trial judge, who struck down the 31-year-old gun control law on spurious grounds that conform with the agenda of the anti-gun control lobby but cry out for rejection by the Supreme Court.
Much hinges on how the justices interpret the Second Amendment, which says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Opponents of gun control sometimes claim a constitutional prohibition on any serious regulation of individual gun ownership. The court last weighed in on the amendment in 1939, concluding, correctly in our view, that the only absolute right conferred on individuals is for the private ownership of guns that has “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” The federal, state and local governments may impose restrictions on other uses — like the trigger guards — or outright bans on types of weapons. Appellate courts followed that interpretation, until last spring’s departure.
A lot has changed since the nation’s founding, when people kept muskets to be ready for militia service. What has not changed is the actual language of the Constitution. To get past the first limiting clauses of the Second Amendment to find an unalienable individual right to bear arms seems to require creative editing.
So the Times knows we have a law-breaking, fascist government, yet they still want to deny Americans the right to defend themselves!
Beyond grappling with fairly esoteric arguments about the Second Amendment, the justices need to responsibly confront modern-day reality. A decision that upends needed gun controls currently in place around the country would imperil the lives of Americans."
Just playing more FOOLEYS with the public, 'eh, Times?
You know, the framers didn't want a standing army.
So what do you make of that?
