Dangnabit, ew, you were right here in Duluth??? Geez, I feel like the time I missed a phone call from a friend who got comped tix for Springsteen that very night and did I want to go….

On topic: did those talks with the telecoms happen to include any mention of campaign contributions?

Ah ha! Is this what they were waiting for?
http://blogs.usatoday.com/onde…..-mode.html

Fire Chief Rickman Eastman tells KING-TV that they found a sign at the scene that may link the blazes to Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that has reportedly set fires in other parts of the state.

Terrorist are winning! The are attacking the most important people; the rich! We need to give the Big Dick (I love saying that) more power to spy on Democrats!

In a computer upgrade recently some spring cleaning on the electronic desktop resulted in my rearranging the chronicles of the current presidency. Several relationships among the historical documents were apparent, renewing once again the sense that this president under color of emergency authority has attempted to skip many of the checks and balances laws on the books. I had the impression it was Chuck Shumer’s interchange with Jim Comey in the famous hearing about the hospital visit which elicited first in a public arena the revelation that ‘the program’ puttered along with only whitehouse counsel approval during the time following Comey’s refusal to reauthorize it, though the specificity of this observation is obscured by Comey’s own reluctance to talk about it in public, instead having me draw substantially from the available online analyses of his vague allusions, after he seemingly had blurted out more than he had intended regarding the rudderlessness of the legal status of the wiretapping program; most of what people took to be his forthcomingness I thought guarded and prescreened divulgations accompanied by feigned political outrage on the part of committeemembers at that hearing; Comey certainly clammed up by the time the House had occasion to ask followup questions at the lower chamber’s own hearing with him as a reluctant ‘witness’. I agree with the original comment by ew in the post above that the ‘after’ could be AP syntax, maybe authored by a journalism school graduate who momentarily lapsed into imprecise terms; but also, touring Reyes’ colorful website with much historical and demographic rambling prose about the 2 million population area which is his district 16 in TX around El Paso, and reading of his background careers from which he retired to run for congress somewhat more than a decade ago, it seems also feasible that his asynchronous ‘after’ remark has more bilingual syntax than it appears to have, because the usage is also viable in English, albeit differently nuanced. His region has nearly 3/4 population of Hispanic descent. Spanish syntaxes for addressing chronologic relationships in constructs depicting events past carries a great burden of the speaker and reader’s needing to have a grasp of archaic grammar and highly inflected forms of verb tenses not available in English, and, indeed, commonly avoided by ordinary speakers of that language. In sum, I think his remarks were politicized, but rendered in a hybrid syntax which muddied even further his purposeful obfuscation regarding his plans, which he is coordinating under the direction of Pelosi, and with parallel effort linked to Reid’s roadmap for extracting maximum advantage from the process of preserving the rights which innure to private citizens and businesses under tort claims with respect to first and fourth amendement matters, and extending to the other areas the ACLU addresses in its courtbrief in the Hepting matter now in Vaughn Walker’s court. Like the penalty phase relief Exxon just last week continued to seek in Scotus in the Valdez oilspill matter these many years after the event, telcos want to avoid fines for which they are liable; Nacchio seems to have been the only one to try to argue in support that obligation, though certainly his company, too, had to cooperate in order to stay on the vendor list for government contracts and stay out of jail; but Seidenberg at Verizon made initial complaints, at least in media, when the wiretap story was published, though much of his rhetoric later seemed proven vacuous, as all the telcos were onboard with only minor gradations of reluctance to participate. I hope Pelosi stays firm; she can take the heat; and Reid can remain adequately aloof from the atavistic resoluteness which is a principal trait of laws manufactured in the House of Representatives. There was one idea last week spoken to the media by a member of the house who was not privvy to the documents the committee Reyes leads had reviewed, nor were the proceedings of the secret meetings on the wiretap programs divulged to the plenary membership of the House; the member, whose article I am not finding at the moment, regrettably, had suggested the entire lower chamber meet in executive session excluding the public, a rare process, solely for the purpose of discussing on the floor what has been confidential information held private in committee, concerning the several months when the telcos skipped their legal obligations and simply tapped phones as the president demanded. I think the House’s attempt to nullify the Senate’s overly compliant initiative to cancel law retroactively in the form of ‘immunity’, promises to serve as one of the few counterbalances the public has in matters such as this, which border on security issues, but which also serve as political ploys by an administration whose short shrift given to mere legality is legion in many initiatives. The House should stand firm, and override Reyes’ wishes if he decides to err on the side of favoritism for the telcos. This comment is wending toward the other thread about the now debilitated foreign intell advisory board, about which I located an interesting membership roster, there.
For a succinct summary of the drift of TX politics in the past ten years written by the Supreme Court in the gerrymander case which partly reversed the DeLay countergerrymander see the first few pages of the LULAC v Perry opinion published in 2006, syllabus edition there; AJ Anthony Kennedy wrote the first section.