Separated at Birth?

And the Bush-Nixon comparisons vis-à-vis the NSA scandal keep on flying. The Democratic Party has launched an online movie reminding America that no president is above the law. Just cause it's an easy comparison doesn't make it any less true.

AMERICAblog has this interesting tidbit: Seems NBC deleted an entire question and response between NY Times NSA scooper James Risen and Andrea Mitchell dealing with whether a prominent journalist like CNN's Christiane Amanpour could have come under scrutiny by the NSA's wiretapping program. CNN, however, is reporting an NSA denial and an NBC explanation that the transcript was posted "prematurely." Still, the network pretty surgically removed the Q&A. Very weird.

Also in the news, an NSA whistleblower is set to testify that the agency collected illegal intelligence. Our Executive Director Anthony Romero spoke out about this inquisition the other day:

... rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law. To avoid further charges of cronyism, Attorney General Gonzales should call off the investigation. (read the full Romero quote)

And the Washington Times has this on plans by Senate Democrats to ask Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito about his views on the NSA surveillance program.

Looks like the Republicans are closing ranks on the adequacy of the milquetoast NSA briefings Congress received after 9/11/2001 and long before the program became public

And Senator Russ Feingold has a new job. He'll be replacing Senator John Corzine on the intelligence committee, meaning he'll sit on both intelligence and judiciary. This is good news for civil liberties.