Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Obama Makes Three Against Telco Immunity

After an enormous amount of pressure from the blogosphere, Barack Obama has decided to follow the leadership of Christopher Dodd and support a filibuster against granting retroactive immunity for the telecommunication industry's crimes against the American people. As accomplices to George Bush and his high crimes, the executives at AT and T, Verizon and others deserve justice for spying on our citizens, not a free pass.

From TPM:

It's official: Obama will back a filibuster of any Senate FISA legislation containing telecom immunity, his campaign has just told Election Central. The Obama campaign has just sent over the following statement from spokesman Bill Burton:

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."

As we reported here yesterday, MoveOn and a dozen top liberal bloggers were preparing to wage an aggressive campaign today to pressure Obama and Hillary to say that they'll support Chris Dodd's vow to filibuster any Senate FISA bill containing telecom immunity. And late yesterday both Obama and Hillary put out statements saying that they'd back Dodd's threatened filibuster of the current legislation that's just come out of the Senate intel committee.


MoveOn was a huge part of the effort to reach out to Obama and Hillary. Well, the effort is still waiting on Mrs. Clinton. Will she show her "leadership" abilities as Obama did today? Or are we just going to have to wait for another poll and a few focus groups to tell her what to do?

Oh and by the way, where is Harry Reid and the other forty-six Democrats that have not spoken out on this issue? Perhaps the telecommunication industry's lobbyists are keeping their mouths' full of money like they have been for Senator Rockefeller. They certainly have been giving out a lot of money these days.