Note to Bush, et al: shut up about “tools needed to fight terrorism”

The bombshells are starting to drop in terms of the “domestic surveillance” debacle, it seems. First up we have Verizon admitting that they’ve turned over thousands upon thousands of phone records without either a court order or a warrant. Now as a Verizon customer, this worries the hell outta me.

Meanwhile in the blue corner, we have the president threatening to veto a wiretap bill coming from Congress because it’s too restrictive.

One of the points of contention we find between the President and Congress is that he wants retroactive immunity to be given to the telecommunication companies to protect them from any lawsuits concerning their previous involvement with this activity. That it is implicitly admitting guilt to request retroactive immunity for anything seems to be lost on the administration.

Anyway, the point is that their argument stems from the premise that they “need” these powers in order to protect us from terrorism. To them I say: shut your damn mouths.

The Right-Wing Hate Machine

Okay, I swear, the next time anyone tries to convince me that liberals are these angry nutjobs, I am going to have an aneurysm. I’m a little behind on the Graeme Frost story, wherein the 12 year old was used in a Democratic ad to show the benefits of SCHIP.

The right-wingers, so concerned about families and obviously perfectly level-headed, went on the warpath. ThinkProgress, doing their usual thang, has a great writeup on the situation from last week. These champions of “families first” politics and caring about the little guy decided to publicly smear this family, advocate violence against them, and send one of their more annoying attack dogs (Michelle Malkin) to personally stalk the family. Unbelievable.

As far as I am aware, this has never happened on the left. The closest I can come up with is Michael Moore’s Sodomobile that he used to follow Fred Phelps around (in one of the best videos I’ve ever seen), but that’s far removed from stalking a family.

There was a similar incident wherein a man tracked down Bill O’Reilly and staked out in front of his house, but both DailyKos and Keith Olbermann decried that measure, with Olbermann awarding Stark the silver in one of his “Worst Person in the World” bits, saying that as much as you dislike the guy, you don’t go after him at home. So even when the target is a public figure, the most lefty leftleft hate mongering moonbats don’t advocate invasion of privacy.

The right? Not so much. As a matter of fact, the White House promoted the blog that had posters calling for the deaths of the Frost family, putting up a post of their own on the site.

In the latest incidence, Air America host Randi Rhodes has been the victim of an attack in New York. While running with her dog, she was badly beaten and simply left. Keep in mind this wasn’t a robbery, as she wasn’t carrying anything to steal. She wasn’t raped. The crime was, in its totality, the attack. It’s hard to conclude that she wasn’t targeted by someone.

You never see this kind of vile behavior on the left. Someone explain to me why the myth that liberals are crazy partisans still perpetuates even when the conservative shitbags go around doing things like this? I’m not even going to mention Coulter any more.