Follow the money....

I believe that I have made it rather clear that I intend on supporting the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, however, I'm not a fan of blindly following anyone or anything without keeping an inner-eye open. It's not an issue of not being able to trust, it is actually more of an issue of trusting greatly, trusting my inner-voice - the voice of my essence, some would call it intuition. It's the same voice that wisely suggests that I not allow any experience to take me over completely because that's when people begin to make mistakes. I believe that history has shown repeatedly that blind trust in anything has ultimately proven to formulate as costly mistakes.

That being said, let me now question why BHO voted to pass the FISA Bill. This is the same bill that he strongly opposed in 2007 with a statements coming from his campaign like "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies" and "Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same".

This issue is deservedly getting all of the attention that it should. It seems to me that his decision to support this Bill after so vocally promising to vote against less than a year ago, was truly foolish and I can't see how it can be spun it any positive light.

Here is a very astute quote from an article by Bob Ostertag that sums it up quite nicely: "Here is another level on which this whole thing stinks. It is one thing for a presumptive nominee to adjust policy positions to reach out to constituencies he wants to bring in to his coalition which were not part of his primary victory. We have seen Obama do that with evangelicals, for example. Warrantless wiretapping has no constituency. There is no sector of the American population that just might jump off the fence and get behind Obama if he only agrees to give telecommunications corporations retroactive immunity for illegally collaborating with the Bush administration's spying. He is not courting votes here. Either he is caving in to pressure from the giant telecom corporations, or he has really bought into the idea that American actually needs warrantless wiretapping. Either option is equally unpalatable to many activists."

And here is a very compelling video produced by the American News Project.