“If anyone expects President Obama to roll back Bush’s illegally-gained dictator powers, they are smoking rope.”
- Mark Frauenfelder

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports:

Barack ObamaIt is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this “compromise” bill is the telecom amnesty part. It’s true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill’s expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

- Glenn Greenwald @ Salon: Link.

From the comments:

What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I’ll use them responsibly.

- Hume’s Ghost: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

Speaking of Barack Obama:

“Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million ….”

Breaking an earlier vow, Senator Barack Obama announced that he will opt out of the public campaign-finance system, in order to be able to spend unlimited amounts of money in the last two months of his presidential campaign, rather than merely $84 million, the amount to which Senator John McCain will be limited under public-funding laws. “It’ll be like George Steinbrenner’s Yankees in the 90s,” Democratic consultant Chris Lehane said of Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million, “against the 90s Kansas City Royals.”

- Harper’s Weekly Review: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.