The Daily News gets It: Why Doesn’t Obama?
IS BARACK OBAMA a Manchurian candidate after all? The minute that Obama became the Dems’ presumptive nominee, he traded his cloak of liberal-oriented change for the same thing that he saw John McCain wearing around town, a stylish pair of flip-flops.
Last week, he exhibited some convoluted back-tracking on campaign finance, but Friday’s flip-flop on the U.S. Constitution - and the right of the government and corporations to spy on you - is a less inside baseball, and a lot more serious. When Obama was wooing liberal Democratic primary voters, he promised to filibuster any bill that gave retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecom companies. But now he won’t - he says only that he’ll “work” to remove it from the final bill . . . kind of in the way that the Washington Nationals are going to “work” real hard between now and September to win the National League East.
Good luck with that, Barack.
Where I come from, we call a person like that a “Bullshit Artist”. Any progressives who don’t keep a sharp eye on Mr. Obama from now on are fooling themselves. As a smart guy once said, “These people are NOT your friends.” Even his Philadelphia campaign co-chair, one of the most enthusiastic Obama supporters I know, is disappointed and upset with his stance.
Luckily, there is hope, but it doesn’t come from Broken Promise Barack: as usual, it’s Chris Dodd and allies like Wyden, Boxer and Feingold who have signaled their oppostion to the bill and intent to derail it. Harry Reid seems to have gotten the message as well and doesn’t believe the bill can be completed before July 4th Recess:
I know of only one holdup on our being able to complete the housing legislation. If we can’t get that Senator to sign off on this, then we only have one alternative and that is we’ll file cloture tomorrow on another arm of this housing legislation. We will have cloture on that two legislative days later and then we still have one more to do. Now, that would mean we would have to be here over the weekend. Now, that was not anticipated we would do that. In the meantime, having done that, we are not going to be able to — it will hold up our being able to do FISA. We wanted to do a consent agreement on that tonight. That was — I was told that would not be possible.
Now, Mr. President, on that, there are people who don’t like the FISA legislation. Now, I recognize that the majority of the Senate does. But some people don’t like it. But in spite of that, I have found the two people that speak out mostly against that — and there are others — but Senator Feingold and Senator Dodd have been very — Senator Feingold and Senator Dodd have been very diligent in their opposition to the legislation. But, of course, they understand the Senate very well. They understand the Senate very well.
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And so what we would like to do is have a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to that. Well, we can’t do that unless it’s by consent. So, therefore, we’re going to have to do cloture on the motion to proceed to FISA at some later time. And then that only allows us to proceed to the bill. And then we still have to do cloture on the bill.
Call your senator and tell him to vote no on cloture if the FISA bill comes up. Donate to actblue to punish Democrats that want to spy on you.
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