Sherry Chandler

Go to NPR’s Morning Edition site and listen to this commentary from Natasha Watts of Blackey, Kentucky:

Imagine you are sitting in a room with everyone you love: your elementary school teachers, neighbors, childhood friends. And then you leave the room and find out that every single one of those people is an addict. That’s how I felt when I returned home after fours years away at college.

I have no social circle here (in Blackey, Kentucky) anymore. The one friend I have struggles with her ex-boyfriend as he tries to recover. Almost all my other friends are addicted to prescription drugs.

…

It’s not hard to see how we got to this point. With hundreds of injured coal miners, this area has one of the highest chronic pain rates in the country. For generations we’ve suffered from all kinds of pain — without the kinds of health services and resources we needed to deal with addiction, poverty, and depression.

Read the whole thing.

Looks to me like the Democrats are set to cave on passing a FISA bill that gives the administration broad domestic surveillance powers. They don’t want to look weak on terrorism so they’re willing to look stupid on terrorism.

Just as this administration has been stupid on terrorism.

I don’t trust any government, but most particularly this government that has politicized the Department of Justice and stacked the Supreme Court with right-wing yes-men, not to abuse such power.

Here is the full text of the [RESTORE] bill.

I wish you all would weigh in and let your Congress critter know what you think.

Added: Here is information from the ACLU, which is advocating a call-in campaign against the RESTORE bill and in favor of the FISA Modernization Act:

Two bills were introduced yesterday to fix the disastrous Protect America Act that was rushed through Congress in August, rubberstamping the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Both were efforts to fix FISA, but we must make it clear that only the FISA Modernization Bill does the job.

The RESTORE Act caves in to Bush’s fear-mongering in a major way by allowing for program or basket “warrants,” which aren’t really warrants at all. They’re the modern-day equivalent of allowing government agents to sit in our living rooms, recording our personal conversations. Only they’re more frightening, because the government now has the capacity to monitor us remotely and without our knowledge, and to save the information in a secret database forever.

It’s no surprise that the Bush Administration is again using the threat of terror to bully Congress into giving them more power than it needs to keep us safe. To counter these misrepresentations, your representative needs to hear that America can be both safe and free by passing a FISA Modernization bill that protects our Constitutional rights. Please, call your representative right now. Tell him or her to support the FISA Modernization Act instead of the RESTORE Act.

If you click through to the ACLU site, they provide a look-up form for your elected officials.

Added #2: from TPMmuckraker:

The ACLU has its differences, you might say, with Admiral Mike McConnell. Its website, for instance, features a page with the sub-headline, “McConnell Tries to Scare America in to [sic] Giving Up Fourth Amendment.” But they do share one thing in common: neither much likes the Democratic RESTORE Act.

To be clear, the ACLU’s opposition is intense, and centered around the so-called “umbrella warrants,” whereby the director of national intelligence and the attorney general submit an annual explanation to the FISA Court outlining why their surveillance methods target non-U.S. persons “reasonably believed to be outside the United States… for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information.” McConnell’s concerns, it’s safe to say, don’t center around whether umbrella authorizations violate the Fourth Amendment. Rather, he’s concerned about the bill not providing retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with warrantless surveillance requests from 2001 to 2007. He’s also more tentative than the ACLU, leaving himself room to negotiate with Congressional Democrats.