Looks like telecom amnesty is dead.
Via Chris Bowers at Open Left, the Wall Street Journal posts a whiny editorial on the the diminishing chances of telecom immunity being inserted into a new FISA bill:
We're told that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is saying privately he now won't attempt to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on the wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects. Instead, he'll merely support another 18-month extension of the six-month-old Protect America Act. Among other problems, the temporary bill includes no retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that cooperated with the feds after 9/11.
The petulant tone of the WSJ article is something to behold, as is the twisting of the facts and the timeline of the wiretaps.
Bowers does a good job patting the blogospherians on the back, so I won't repeat that, but I want to add that it's a crying shame that there are so few in national office willing to work for what America should be, and so many who instead cynically measure their efforts by how it impacts their electability.
And outside of the netroots, so few that notice the difference.
Drop Chris a line and give him a pat on the ass. Because of the volume of his mail, he doesn't reply to non-Connecticuttians, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind being reminded that he has a national base of support, on top of his local constituency. And maybe scratch a few lines in an LTE to the dinosaur media, to let the less wired know that there's still a few folks working for them.