Change you can believe in... Not!

I do not share the enthusiasm of a lot of my countrymen on the upcoming elections in the United States of America. My reason is, no matter who wins, it won't change anything for us. Republican or Democrat, America will work for American interests -- which they should. I dont buy into the conventional wisdom that a Democratic victory this year would substantially change America's foreign policy towards its former colony. I say horsefeathers to that one.

Reports such as this only reinforce my views.

The award for the most bald-faced lie on the House floor Friday, however, goes to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who insisted that the bill "does not allow warrantless surveillance of Americans." She is wrong. It does.

The broader spying powers given to the executive branch by the compromise bill require intelligence agencies to "target" foreigners. But if those foreign "targets" happen to call or e-mail Americans, those communications are fair game. And since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is only permitted to review the broad targeting procedures government eavesdroppers use to determine that a target is abroad, and not the substantive basis for authorizing surveillance of any target, anyone is a potential target.

The bill, in other words, allows the government to conduct "vacuum cleaner" surveillance -- sweeping up international traffic willy-nilly -- then filter it for anything that looks interesting. Indeed, many believe that licensing such surveillance is precisely the point of this legislation. If so, "warrantless surveillance of Americans" could well become routine, whether or not they are the formal "targets" of eavesdropping.

Now why would they do this? They control the House and the Senate, and if polls are correct, theyll control the White House as well. It comes as no surprise therefore that they would want this sort of power. How does Obama feel about this 'compromise'? He thinks it aint bad at all.

In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen -- in places where one would never have expected to find them -- all sorts of claims about why this FISA "compromise" isn't really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration -- or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller -- suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did.

Add to this Congressman Ron Paul's accusation that Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress "which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote".

“She [Pelosi] removed it deliberately,” Paul says. “And then, the astounding thing is, when asked why, she said the leadership in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in ‘The Washington Post,’ that she was asked by [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and others not to do that."

So you see, boys and girls, nothing will change except theyll have a better looking and articulate president.