Last night, Barack Obama did the favor of giving a nationally-televised audience for Rick Warren, the ambitious preacher who espouses a radical agenda of mixing religion and politics. At Warren’s church, Obama helped Rick Warren make Christianity into a test for public office, answering on television questions about his religious beliefs, and how he would impose those religious beliefs on the White House.

Barack Obama was eager to submit himself to the test of whether he was Christian enough to be President, and so he embraced the fundamental idea of theocracy - that the duty of leaders like himself is to carry out the will of God. Obama said,

“I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins and that I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis. Yeah, I know that I don’t walk alone. And I know that if I can get myself out of the way, that I can maybe carry out in some small way what He intends… a sense of obligation to embrace not just words but through deeds the expectations that God has for us.”

It’s stated less blatantly than George W. Bush’s claim that “God speaks through me”, but the meaning is the same. Barack Obama has stated that he thinks it’s possible for him to serve as a channel for the will of God.

Is that what Barack Obama intends to do as President? To serve the expectations of God?

I thought that the job of the President of the United States was to carry out what the American People intend, and embrace the expectations of the American People.

So, who does Barack Obama really intend to represent in the White House? God or the American People?

You would do well to pay attention to the latest flip-flop in the 2008 election. In what seems to be a growing abandonment of the progressive politics that earned him the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama has announced that, in spite of his earlier promise to “keep in place the moratorium” against additional offshore drilling, he now supports the expansion of offshore drilling for crude oil.

Here’s an important speech on the subject. Can you guess who gave the speech?

“In what’s become a bit of a regular occurrence in this campaign, Senator Obama once had a different position on offshore drilling, and it’s clear why he did. It would have long-term consequences for our coastlines, but no short term benefits, since it would take at least ten years to get any oil.

Well, the politics may have changed, but the facts haven’t. The accuracy of Senator Obama’s original position has not changed. Offshore drilling would not lower gas prices today. It would not lower gas prices tomorrow. It would not lower gas prices this year. It would not lower gas prices five years from now.

In fact, President Bush’s own Energy Department says that we won’t see a drop of oil from his own proposal until 2017, and in fact, you wouldn’t see any full production out of any oil drilling off the coast until 2030. It will take a generation to reach full production, and even then the effect on gas prices will be minimal, at best.

So, let me just repeat: Barack Obama’s proposal, George Bush’s proposal to drill offshore here in Florida and other places around the country would not provide families with any relief this year, next year, five years from now. Believe me, if I thought there was any evidence at all that drilling could save people money who are struggling to fill up their gas tanks by this summer or the next year or even the next few years, I would consider it, but it won’t, and Barack Obama knows that.

The fact is, Senator Obama’s decision to team up with George Bush on offshore drilling violates the bipartisan consensus that we have had for decades that has protected Florida’s pristine coastline from drilling.”

Did you figure out who gave this speech? It was Barack Obama - only he was attacking John McCain for flip flopping on offshore drilling. The speech was delivered by Obama just a month and a half ago, in Jacksonville, Florida,

All I did with this speech is replace John McCain’s name with Barack Obama’s name. Sadly, the criticism that Barack Obama sent McCain’s way now applies to him as well.

If Obama would measure himself up against his earlier standards, he would find himself failing. Bit by bit, Barack Obama is becoming an embodiment of the dirty old politics he promised us he would change.

How disappointing Obama has become.

One of the things that many people don’t understand about progressive dissent is that it is borne not out of a hatred of America, but out of a patriotic love for America. We criticize the American government when it betrays the promise of the American vision of a nation of laws and of liberties established by the Constitution. We are progressive patriots, and that demands that we criticize our government when it betrays the cause of American freedom.

Yesterday, in the House Judiciary Committee, there was a hearing organized in response to the effort by Dennis Kucinich to impeach George W. Bush. At that hearing, Frederick Schwarz of the Brennan Center for Justice summarized the constitutional crisis caused by the kind of false patriotism that supports the President even when the President attacks the constitutional foundations of liberty. Schwarz said,

“Based on what we know now—about torture, about extraordinary rendition to torture, about permanent detention, about warrantless wiretapping, and about the Administration’s “monarchical” theory of presidential power—it seems clear that the course we have chartered over the last seven years has in fact made us less safe, as well as less free.”

“in the nearly eight years that have passed under the current Administration, and especially in the seven years since the tragedy of 9/11, the White House has arrogated to itself unprecedented powers of coercion, detention and surveillance. All the while, it has tried to use a patina of legal and constitutional excuses to disguise the degree to which it has abandoned the very ideals in whose defense these immoral tactics have been employed. The result has been a distortion of the Constitution, an evisceration of the rights and liberties of individuals, and a perversion of American values. All of this has done grave harm to our nation’s reputation and has reduced our security here and abroad.”

(Read the rest of his testimony)

We here at Progressive Patriots stand with Mr. Schwarz in criticizing the government’s program of undermining the authority of the Constitution in favor of the authority of individual political leaders in the Executive Branch. We engage in this criticism because we love the promise of America, and we want our liberty back.

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

It is with a growing depression that I read all the glowing reviews of Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in the new Batman movie, Dark Knight. The film is a vigilante thrill fest, with lots of great stunts and special effects, and the moral vision of a six year-old.

In this movie, you can tell who’s good and who’s bad, because the bad people look bad. They have frightening costumes and sinister voices. The good people, on the other hand, are strong and noble. The law is weak, and so what is needed is a big strong, super-powerful person to pass judgment and deliver punishment without a trial. Fair trials are for sissies.

Batman gets to sneak around too, eavesdropping on criminals, breaking into their private buildings without any proof that anything criminal is going on. Gosh, if Batman were to wait for a search warrant, and have to provide proof to a judge, then it would be too late, and the criminals would get away with it and destroy the whole city!

Batman’s vigilante justice, his illegal invasion of privacy, and his disregard for the law is justified by the fact that he’s big and strong, and filthy rich. These qualities, it’s assumed, bring Batman a sense of justice that is superior to anything that democratic government could provide.

To anyone who truly believes in the vision of freedom and democracy established in the Constitution of the United States of America, it’s a disgusting insult to liberty. Dark Knight is a slick justification for all the abuses that have taken place in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the National Security Agency. It’s a celebration of the legalization of a vigilante government legalized by Congress through corrupt laws like the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, and FISA Amendments Act.

But then, little children don’t know about freedom or democracy. They’re just afraid of bad people, and they trust big people with power to protect them.

Children don’t understand that Batman is himself a criminal, and a threat to the security of the people of Gotham. They’ll never see a movie in which Batman makes a mistake, and persecutes an innocent person he suspects of being an arch-villain. In real life, government agents given the dark vigilante role that Batman represents make those mistakes on a very frequent basis.

Yet, to childish America, complaining about such abuses seems unfair. It’s picking on Batman, who is a good guy, and as all children know, anyone who picks on a good guy must be a bad guy.

Welcome to the regressive cartoon politics of 2008, in which John McCain and Barack Obama are fighting over who can adopt the pose of the baddest Dark Knight.

Barbara Mikulski has been in the United States Senate for so long that she seems to have forgotten what her Oath of Office was upon entering the Senate. In that Oath of Office, Mikulski vowed to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic.

Now, Senator Mikulski is voting for the FISA Amendments Act. The FISA Amendments Act does not uphold the Constitution. It attacks the Constitution.

First, it’s an ex post facto law, changing the consequences of a crime after someone has been caught committing the crime, for the very purpose of protecting the criminals. That’s strictly forbidden in the first section of the Constitution, but Barbara Mikulski doesn’t seem to care about that.

Second, the FISA Amendments Act establishes some legal standards for some people, and different legal standards for others. Giant telecommunications companies get off the hook for violating the privacy agreements they made with their customers, but others who may have committed the same crime don’t get off the hook. That’s against the fourteenth amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Third, the fourth amendment guarantees protection against unreasonable search and seizure and requires a search warrant against a specific person in a specific place if government spying or physical searches are to take place. The FISA Amendments Act doesn’t do that - it gives blanket permission to spy, without requiring the specification of any particular people or places that will be spied against.

Furthermore the FISA Amendments Act gives the Attorney General the power to make declarations that the Attorney General’s spy operations against the American people are legal - and those declarations cannot be challenged by the FISA court or anyone else. So, in effect, any spy program against Americans that the Attorney General declares to be legal can not be challenged, even if it actually breaks the law. That’s not just a violation of the fourth amendment. It’s also a violation of the concept of the separation of government power into coequal branches that provide controls on each other. That concept is at the core of the Constitution. Without it, the Constitution means almost nothing.

Barbara Mikulski supports the FISA Amendments Act, and that means that she supports all these attacks on the Constitution.

Senator Mikulski has become one of the enemies of the Constitution she swore an Oath to work against. That’s why Democrats who still care about the Constitution are turning their backs on Barbara Mikulski, and organizing to challenge her right to represent the Democratic Party in the United States Senate when she is up for re-election in 2010.

If you hear someone talk about the FISA Amendments Act and all that person ever talks about is the question of retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications corporations that broke the law by helping George W. Bush spy on millions of Americans, watch out. You’re witnessing a piece of political spin developed by politicians who are attempting to justify the unjust proposed law.

It isn’t that the retroactive immunity isn’t an important issue. It is, especially given the fact that the Constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws. The trouble is that retroactive immunity isn’t at all the total of what the FISA Amendments Act is about.

Read the FISA Amendments Act, and you’ll see that the bill actually makes it legal for the President, through the Attorney General, to conduct physical searches of Americans home without telling any court at all, not even the FISA court, until weeks after the spying has begun. Even after the FISA court finds out about the spying, the court can’t do anything to stop it. The FISA court doesn’t even have the power to rule that illegally-obtained information is inadmissible for use in a trial. The same outrageous standards also apply to electronic surveillance.

The FISA Amendments Act essentially authorizes the White House to break the law and violate Americans’ constitutional rights without any consequence. The FISA Amendments Act shoves the FISA court out of the way, making it an irrelevant, mute witness of government crimes.

That’s pretty heavy stuff. So how come the people who discuss the FISA Amendments Act almost never mention these provisions? How come people like “Paul V”, commenting on an article about the FISA Amendments Act, describes the FISA Amendments Act only as “a bill going through Congress giving immunity to telephone companies involved in the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretap programme”?

Surely, you’ve figured the answer out by now. These people are following a script written by Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, who are hoping that if they never mention the gross violations of your freedom contained in the FISA Amendments Act, you’ll never actually read the FISA Amendments Act, and so you won’t notice that you’re there.

The author of that article that Paul V. commented on had a comeback that pretty well describes the huge gap in mainstream media coverage of the FISA Amendments Act:

“Saying that the FISA Amendments Act is ‘a bill going through Congress giving immunity to telephone companies involved in the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretap programme’ is like saying that a giraffe is an animal with ears.”

It is a sign of the trouble that Barack Obama invited when he broke his promise to his supporters and announced his support for the FISA Amendments Act that Obama’s supporters are beginning to pull away from his campaign. In supporting the FISA Amendments Act, Barack Obama turns his back on the Bill of Rights, and embraces the politics of fear promoted by George W. Bush himself.

The FISA Amendments Act retroactively legalizes George W. Bush’s program to spy on the private communications of millions of Americans. The proposed law would allow physical searches as well as electronic spying against American citizens without search warrants or other judicial control. Only two people, the Attorney General of the United States and the President, could have control over the spying. Only they would have the power to stop it.

The FISA Amendments Act creates an opportunity for tremendous abuse of power. No one who truly respects the Constitution and the rule of law could support it.

Yet, Barack Obama has announced support for the FISA Amendments Act. Obama says that he will vote for the law when it comes up for a vote in the Senate on July 8. He justifies this support of one of the worst programs of George W. Bush in the same way that Bush does - Obama says it’s necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorists.

I thought Barack Obama said he was going to bring America away from the politics of fear.

Obama once inspired. Now he disappoints. And so, now on Barack Obama’s own campaign web site, the largest grassroots group will soon be a group that opposes Barack Obama because of his support of the FISA Amendments Act. As of this evening, the group against the FISA Amendments Act is the second largest group on Barack Obama’s site.

The chart below shows the damage. The Million Americans for Obama group actually has only 8,541 members. The top group has 13,431 members, but the anti-FISA Amendments Act group is right behind it, with, 12,614 members, and gaining between 100 and 200 members with every passing hour. By the time today is over, the anti-FISA Amendments Act group on Barack Obama will become the largest grassroots group on BarackObama.com.

Barack Obama, listen to your supporters. Admit your mistake. Vote NO on the FISA Amendments Act.

Well, that’s it. Barack Obama has failed to support the filibuster of H.R. 6304, the bill to gut the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and legalize warrantless wiretaps and physical searches. A number of people are asking themselves how they can support a presidential candidate who fails to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Democratic partisans like Racht are asking them to stop thinking about it:

Nobody should be shallow enough to abandon support for the best Presidential candidate we have on a single issue.

My response to Racht:

The media (and a lot of bloggers) have focused on telecom immunity. But there is a lot more to this bill.

This is about the passage of a bill that only takes away standing from citizens to bring a court case that could possibly strike the bill down. How can you declare the bill unconstitutional if you can’t get it in court? There is more. The bill enables both electronic AND physical searches on an “emergency basis” without any court review or warrants. The presidential administration gets to keep the information from those electronic AND physical searches solely on the presidential administration’s say-so.

This is about the gutting of the Constitution, which is THE single foundational basis of the rule of law in the most powerful nation on the planet. It’s about unchecked power and the destruction of checks and balances that keep this most powerful nation on the planet from going completely unhinged.

It is not shallow to consider the Constitution of the United States when voting.

People who care about the Constitution are not shallow.

What is patriotism? Is it the mere defense of a piece of turf? Any fool can defend a piece of land.

No, patriotism is the defense of the ideals that a nation stands for. In the case of the United States of America, the ideals that the nation stands for are established by the Constitution.

In America, to be patriotic is to stand in defense of the Constitution, whether it is under attack from outside the nation’s borders, or from within, by domestic enemies.

I count Representative Jan Schakowsky as a patriotic hero for her role in the effort to stop the FISA Amendments Act.

Democratic Party leadership is shamelessly repeating Republican talking points. They claim that the FISA Amendments Act is some kind of “compromise”. Anyone who has actually read the law knows better. Listen, for example, to what the legal experts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation say about the FISA Amendments Act: “Some have called the bill a balanced compromise between extremes, but this is pure spin. In reality, it’s nothing less than a complete cave to the phone companies’ and White House’s demands.”

Jan Schakowsky read the law, and saw that the FISA Amendments Act will give legal immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke the law by working with George W. Bush to spy on the private communications of millions of Americans. So, instead of just going along with the crowd, and obeying the Democratic Party leadership, Congresswoman Schakowsky took to the floor of the House of Representatives and stood her ground, speaking out against the terrible law.

Schakowsky reminded us of the wisdom of the leaders who crafted the Constitution: They knew that liberty makes us stronger not weaker. They knew that freedom is the foundation of true security, and that whenever freedom is sacrificed, people actually become less secure. Schakowsky said,

“The Bush Administration has put forward the idea that Congress must choose between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I disagree wholeheartedly with this premise. The Congress can and must take stronger steps to protect the civil liberties of ever American, to do anything less is simply contrary to everything for which this country has stood.”

Thanks to Jan Shakowsky for doing her part to stand against the domestic enemies of the Constitution.

Republican-leaning Blue Dog Democrats like Congressman Michael Arcuri tried to trick their constituents this week, by saying that when they voted in favor of the FISA Amendments Act, they were voting for a compromise. The truth is that the only compromise that took place was a compromise of principles.

The FISA Amendments Act gave George W. Bush and the Republicans everything they wanted. That’s not a compromise. It’s a surrender.

Assuming that you haven’t actually read the FISA Amendments Act for yourself, these dishonest members of Congress will try to tell you that the law does not give retroactive immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke the law by helping the government engage in illegal spying against millions of Americans. Read the legislation, and you’ll see that these Blue Dog Democrats are out-and-out lying to you. The law provides retroactive immunity, letting criminal corporations off the hook, and encouraging future crimes against the American people.

Don’t just take my word for it. Listen to what Congressman John Dingell had to say on the matter on Friday. He rose to speak before the House of Representatives, to warn them about the law they were about to pass:

“The immunity provision contained in this bill purporting to allow for judicial review to determine whether immunity is appropriate is a sham. As drafted, courts will have no real discretion and will be forced to grant immunity so long as the Government claims its actions were legal.”

Under this law, all the Bush White House has to do is present a piece of paper to a court claiming the privilege of granting legal immunity to a corporation, and then the court has no choice but to grant that immunity.

Thanks to John Dingell for sharing this unfortunate truth.