Suing For Our Civil Rights "Not Fair" According to G.W. Bush

As his days of official fear-mongering are winding down, President G.W. Bush has been trying to scare the shit out of the American public once again by throwing a fit about the House not approving the Senate's version of the Protect America Act.

Don't worry--the act, which expired on February 16th, doesn't actually protect you from anything. It deals largely with the process that government folks must go through to request a wire tap for a phone line. The Protect America act makes it a much easier and expedient process, requiring less hard evidence for a tap to be approved.

What is even more problematic is that the Senate's new version of the bill provides immunity to the phone companies who are letting the government trample all over our right to privacy. There are currently 40 lawsuits pending against various phone companies for allowing these wiretaps to happen after 9/11. Our president doesn't think Americans should get to hold these phone companies accountable at all, saying recently: “They’re getting sued for billions of dollars, and it’s not fair . . .If you’ve done something that you think is perfectly legal and all of a sudden you’re facing billions of dollars of lawsuits, it’s going to be hard to provide — with credibility — assurances that we can go forward."

The problem with this statement is that the phone companies should have known that it was NOT perfectly legal to allow these wire taps to happen. Sadly, only one phone company in the entire country told the government to bugger off when they came knocking at the door, and that was AZ's local Qwest Communications.

I am so sick of being told how scared we should be because our civil rights are NOT being violated (for once). I also get the impression from listening to G.W. that he is simply angry that he is not getting his way, despite all of his allusions to the terrorists that are hiding under our beds, waiting to kill us and our freedom.

You can read the NY Times articles that I lifted these quotes from here. I apologize that this is not such a well-written entry. It all just makes me so damn mad.