Go forth and read

I read a lot of news on any given day and I always collect more links than I can reasonably blog about so it being Friday, I going to have my own little Friday link dump of important but underreported news I've collected over the week.

Cernig caught this one at Newshog. Our new intelligence czar wants more power but he can't tell us why because it's a secret.

McConnell's plan would give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States. It would also triple the life span of a FISA warrant targeting a non-U.S. citizen from 120 days to one year, allowing the government to monitor much longer without checking back in with a judge.

Am I going into early Alzheimer's or didn't we have this argument in Congress a while back and the White House agreed to some oversight? This kind of back door circumvention really pisses me off. It's so reptilian.

You've heard of course, that the White House altered the report on voter fraud but you may have missed the long list of other altered and withheld reports that was compiled at TPMmuckracker. Keep that one for your archives of malfeasance.

David Sirotta had a really searing post on the lie of the labor shortage. The administration isn't soft on immigration for altruistic reasons. They're using illegal and legal immigrants to drive down wages.

This one didn't get any play that I saw outside of The Left Coaster but's it's rather frightening if they're right.

New measurements indicate that the effects of global warming are much worse than previously suspected and could lead to a complete melting of Arctic summer ice in as little as 13 years, a leading climate scientist says.

Scientists had previously predicted that the summer sea ice would disappear from the Arctic by 2040. But Wadhams’ measurements indicate that the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that the ice could disappear by 2020.

I'm sick of arguing over the cause with the skeptics. I don't care what caused it. The bottom line is there's way too much open water and there's way too little multi-year ice. That can't be good.

This one is just in, it looks like Bush was foiled in another little dirty trick. He's been running around making noise about how the Dems refusing to pass a miltary funding bill without any measurable performance metrics was going to force the troops into extended deployments. Turns out he knew all along that it was going to happen because of the surge.

The plan was to shift the blame to the Democrats, but someone leaked the plan to the press so they had to announce it two days after he set the stage. Now he's left holding the bag on that one. Thank God for whistleblowers.

The only other thing I have to say about that at the moment is, when they've D.G. Hall, they've lost the war.

Libby Spencer