Fast on our feet, part deux

When his lips are moving. A couple of followups to my Fast on our feet post.

From David Sirota:

Bush might have had a point, except for one tiny little detail he refused to discuss at his press conference: namely, the fact that current law is so lax that he is already permitted to get a search warrant 72 hours after surveillance is conducted. Put another way, the law currently allows Bush to order surveillance as fast as he possibly can, and allows surveillance operations to take place immediately.

I said in that earlier post "The ONLY reason Bush would avoid following the FISA guidelines is because he is bugging people he definitely should not be." The WSWS suggests an even more ominous motive:

Given the fact that the threshold for obtaining warrants from the FISA court is extremely low, and the court has refused only a handful of such requests, generally granting them within a few hours, the decision of the Bush administration to proceed independently indicates that it deliberately sought to establish a precedent for unchecked presidential powers.

And Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair point out the nearly criminal lethargy of the NY Times in withholding this evidence of further Bush crimes for over a year. I would suggest that it might have changed the last election, except John Kerry ca. 2004 probably would have leaped to Bush's defense, and the Repugs would have still had the election stolen anyway.

The fact that aWol insists on continuing his crime, even after it has finally been exposed to the light of day, makes a case for urgency in impeachment, as well as a lack of leniency in sentencing if and when he is finally brought before a court of law.