Some doings..

Gannets – Chris Weston – BWPA

Just a couple of things frm Tapper today…   Pols, they’d sell their mother…

Two weeks ago…

[H]e kept repeating this mantra.

“If we lose my seat they have 60 Democrats, they will pass card check, you will have the Obama tax increases, they  will carry out his big spending plans. So the 41st Republican, whose name is Arlen Specter is vital to stopping tax increases, passage of card check, and the Obama big spending plans….Those 41 seats are the only thing standing between a Democratic onslaught of higher taxes, more spending and card check.”

It was pointed out by a reporter that he voted for the $787 billion stimulus package.

“I voted for the stimulus package, which was the twin brother for what Republican President Bush had on the $700 billion bailout,” the senator said. “I voted for the stimulus because I was fearful we were on the edge of a 1929 depression. I thought it was necessary in order to put people to work, in order to maintain productivity and to avoid paying massive man hours of unemployment compensation.”

He was asked if he’d considered running as independent or Democrat.

“I am a Republican and I am going to run on the Republican ticket in the Republican primary,” he said.

Of course Ob and the Oblings along with a good number of so called conservative Dems and Red State Dems and whatever other pejorative… Bloooooooooo Dogs!  Boll Weevils! were never going to see card check to fruition.

Sure as shootin’!  Oops another one!  They won’t even speak [hardly] of curbing that ol’ gun issue… talk about guns and butter.  Lives and bullets…

***

And, I don’t care whether it is Bush, scraps of Bush Heap or Ob and his Oblings.. but I LIKE it when the gov loses these state secret scrambles in the courts.  Keep it up!!

Via Tapper:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Tuesday rejected the Obama administration’s claim that a lawsuit involving extraordinary rendition must be halted for national security reasons, and reversed a lower court dismissal of the lawsuit.

As we reported in February, the case involves five men who claim to have been victims of extraordinary rendition who sued a San Jose Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured. The Bush administration, and then the Obama administration argued, that the case would

The court found that United States v Reynolds — the “state secrets” precedent the Obama administration had been relying on to block the lawsuit — “recognizes that the Executive’s national security prerogatives are not the only weighty constitutional values at stake: while ‘[s]ecurity depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus,’ it ‘subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles [including] freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers.’”

Read the full Appeals Court decision in Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. HERE.

A press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs, quotes one of the men, Bisher Al-Rawi, who was released from Guantánamo last year without ever having been charged with a crime.

“I am happy to hear this news,” Al-Rawi said. “We have made a huge step forward in our quest for justice.”

And Feingold spoke up…

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who earlier today said that the Obama administration “seems reminiscent” of the Bush administration in its invocation of state secrets, has reacted to the 9th Circuit’s decision by calling it “the latest example of courts being skeptical of the government’s argument that entire cases should be dismissed based on the assertion of the state secrets privilege without any evidence being considered.”

The Obama administration has been invoking the “state secrets” argument in quite a few court cases, among them Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA “dragnet” (read more on that HERE); and Al-Haramain v. Obama, in which the leaders of a now-defunct Islamic charity, allege that the National Security Agency under President Bush engaged in illegal warrantless wiretapping (more on that HERE.)

Carry on!

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