“I am firmly commited to my position unless I decide to change my position. However, changing my position is not changing my position, it’s refining it. I promise Change®, but refining is not Change®, no matter how much refining I do.”

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” –Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope

I’m just waiting for the next flip-flop. Will he continue to throw his supporters from the primaries under the bus?

“I also believe that the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year.” – BO

Whether it’s better than the Protect America Act (PAA) is irrelevant. The PAA already expired last February. If the new FISA bill is rejected, we don’t revert back to the Protect America Act. We just continue to live under the same FISA law that we’ve lived under for 30 years (with numerous post-9/11 modernizing amendments). So whether this bill is a mild improvement over the atrocious, expired PAA is not even a coherent reason to support it, let alone a persuasive one.

The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. – BO

The current FISA law — as a federal court ruled just yesterday — already has the same exclusivity provision, and it did nothing to stop the President and the telecoms from breaking the law anyway. The fact that Obama is now going to vote to end the telecom lawsuits and immunize the lawbreakers means that there will be no consequences for their having broken the law. How can Obama possibly claim that the “exclusivity” provision in the new FISA bill has value when the current law that they broke already has the same provision?

As I wrote today:

They’re presenting as a “gift” something you already have, and telling you that you should give up critical protections in exchange for receiving something that you already have — namely, a requirement that the President comply with eavesdropping laws. What they’re doing is tantamount to someone who steals your wallet, takes all the money out, gives the empty wallet back to you, and then tells you that you should be grateful to them because you have your wallet.

Exclusivity is obviously no reason to change the current FISA law since it already has exclusivity in it. Obama:

In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people.- BO

The government already has “the authority to collect the intelligence it needs to protect the American people.” That authority is called FISA, which already allows the Government extremely broad authority to spy on any suspected terrorists. The current law results in virtually no denials of any spying requests. So how can Obama — echoing the Bush administration — claim a new law is needed to provide “the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people” when the current FISA law already provides that?

“But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited. As I’ve said many times, an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people. This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility.”- BO

This is just false. The new FISA bill that Obama supports vests new categories of warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President (.pdf), and allows the Government, for the first time, to tap physically into U.S. telecommunications networks inside our country with no individual warrant requirement. To claim that this new bill creates “an independent monitor [to] watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people” is truly misleading, since the new FISA bill actually does the opposite — it frees the Government from exactly that monitoring in all sorts of broad categories.

This bad bill is going to pass this week with Obama’s help, and it is a very sad day for America.