Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.

Several provisions in the Patriot Act will be coming up for re-authorization this week. Now, I believe the Patriot Act was a big scam, and was pushed across on the American people to cover up for the fact that the Bush Administration was completely incompetent in the runup to 9-11. No rights needed to be stolen for them to be presented with a memo entitled "Bin-Laden Determined to Strike in the United States" a full month before that attack. Unfortunately our President at the time felt it was more important to stay on vacation.

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I am cross posting the following diary for a blogger friend at EENR.
Originally posted at EENR Blog and also cross posted at DailyKos
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Well, by now we all know that the House passed the shameful (and inherently unconstitutional by just about any study of the Constitution) disgrace that is the current FISA bill with a whopping 105 Democrats supporting its passage. This is the bill that makes the warrantless wiretapping legal as well as provides immunity for the telecom companies who knowingly provided the Bush Administration with our conversations illegally.

Many of us know that a filibuster is the surest way to kill a bill in the Senate and that there are 49 Democratic Senators, nine more than are needed to sustain a filibuster. By now, many of us also know that Obama intends to vote for the bill, as of course does head capitulator Harry Reid and other assorted Senators including some Democrats. And we are starting to hear the gurgling forth of excuses from a few of them, much of it akin to what we heard in the House last Friday.

Seeing that there may, in fact, not be enough Constitution-loving Democrats to filibuster this stain of a bill, and given that "not enough votes to filibuster" should never be an excuse for something this odious to pass in the Senate, I offer (or rather educate and/or remind) the Senators of not only the meaning of the FISA bill but also ways to block a bill that exist in the Senate in addition to a filibuster.

(Info below from the Senate's own website.)

Senators, please follow me below the fold...

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Yesterday posts appeared on Kos and MyDD telling of the disasterous new numbers that have been polled for Mitch McConnell recently. While these numbers were music to my ears, I noticed that only one link to one potential challenger of Mitch McConnell, Crit Luallen was linked in the story.

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