Senate Declines to Reauthorize Patriot Act-UpdatedNice to see the Democrats aren't even
pretending to be patriots anymore.
Five Republicans voted against the reauthorization: Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Craig and Frist. Two Democrats voted to extend the provisions: Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time. He immediately objected to an offer of a short term extension from Democrats, saying the House won't approve it and the president won't sign it.Update:
Captain Ed live-blogged the president's weekly broadcast, which concerned the filibuster of the Patriot Act.
Surprise! Bush went on the offensive on the NSA leak -- he stresses that the NSA only worked on international communications, not domestic. He called the leak "illegal", and he took complete responsibility for the program.It may seem hard to remember, but in the immediate aftermath of John Kerry's defeat in 2004, Michael Moore and the idiots at Moo-On were chastened by the experience. Moore even showed up on TV in a business suit (okay, a business tent). Peter Beinart, citing the post-WWII decision by the liberals to oppose communism and expel the communists in their midst, called for a
similar purge of Moore and Move-On. Beinart referred to them as "the softs", and pointed out that they believe that terrorism and radical Islam do not pose a threat to the United States, just as Henry Wallace and many "progressives" did not believe in the Soviet threat in the late 1940s.
Beinart has lost that battle. It is now apparent that "the softs" have taken over the Democrats.
As an aside regarding Henry Wallace,
check out this post by Sheldon Drobny at the HuffPo. It couldn't be more plain that Drobny believes that the Soviets were no threat to America:
Wallace was a liberal in the tradition of FDR because he supported an unproven yet reasonable idea that good relations with the post war Soviet Union was a good idea, something that conservatives abhorred. The Soviet system was perceived as a threat to capitalism in the minds of the conservatives. However, the reality was that the Russians had sacrificed dearly during the war and were entitled to a chance for a cooperative relationship.Of course, Wallace himself later repented his softness on communism in his 1952 book,
Why I Was Wrong.
