by Frank Paynter on February 12, 2008
I’m voting for Barack Obama in the Wisconsin primary next Tuesday. Some great orators are all cadence and cant. Obama gives us content, conviction and commitment. 20,000 people waited patiently in the sub-zero wind chill outside the Kohl Center tonight for up to an hour in order to get a seat to hear Barack Obama’s message of hope. It was worth it. Obama has a vision and the personal integrity to realize that vision.
Here’s a transcript of the speech he delivered:
Today, the change we seek swept through the Chesapeake and over the Potomac.
We won the state of Maryland. We won the Commonwealth of Virginia. And though we won in Washington D.C., this movement won’t stop until there’s change in Washington. And tonight, we’re on our way.
But we know how much farther we have to go.
We know it takes more than one night – or even one election – to overcome decades of money and the influence; bitter partisanship and petty bickering that’s shut you out, let you down and told you to settle.
We know our road will not be easy.
But we also know that at this moment the cynics can no longer say our hope is false.
We have now won east and west, north and south, and across the heartland of this country we love. We have given young people a reason to believe, and brought folks back to the polls who want to believe again. And we are bringing together Democrats and Independents and Republicans; blacks and whites; Latinos and Asians; small states and big states; Red States and Blue States into a United States of America.
This is the new American majority. This is what change looks like when it happens from the bottom up. And in this election, your voices will be heard.
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by Frank Paynter on February 12, 2008
J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy, sitting in an off-track betting parlor somewhere in the ninth circle of hell, doomed to handicap cockroach races for all eternity, got a break today from studying their bug spattered racing forms when Satan brought in a TV and tuned it to the US Senate roll call vote on the Dodd Amendment “to strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government” from the FISA amendments act of 2007.
The jeering and cheering from the ninth circle of hell were audible everywhere in Washington DC, particularly in the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Hoover and McCarthy didn’t live long enough to see their paper based systems of secret files and intimidation converted to Internet Protocol but their spirit was with us today when the Senate caved in to pressure from the Bush administration and the AT&T lobbyists to provide retroactive immunity for lawbreaking in the area of wiretaps and surveillance, an immunity which can be applied to the Bush administration officials who suborned their telecom industry corporate accomplices.
According to the Washington Post today,
The vote represented a victory for the Bush administration and a number of telecommunications companies — including AT&T and Sprint Nextel — that face dozens of lawsuits from customers seeking billions of dollars in damages.
Approval of the amendment would have exposed the companies to privacy lawsuits for helping the administration monitor the calls of suspected terrorists without warrants from a special court….
The Post makes no mention of the sulfurous stench and smoke coming out of the fissured ground near FBI Headquarters at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, nor the hideous preternatural laughter that has echoed throughout the city since it became clear that the Senators had no intention of exposing themselves to fallout over whatever dirt the NSA, in the true spirit of J. Edgar and Tailgunner Joe, might leak exposing their own little peccadilloes.
The House of Representatives might yet make things right on this bill. Unfortunately, the NSA probably has Keyhole satellite images of Congressmen in the floating crap game in the alleys south of Independence Avenue, or illegal Internet email surveillance or some other Spook 2.0 nonsense.
