There is a very simple explanation for why Bush needs this immunity deal passed. If the telecom companies did anything illegal, then he and his government also committed a crime. Ordering someone else to commit a crime is conspiracy. By immunizing the telecoms, he's giving himself and his people a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Bush and House Republicans pulled a desperate maneuver last night to get immunity for telecom companies who illegally spied on Americans. And it's not working. Democrats finally are understanding that the fearmongering isn't working.

It's about time someone stood up for the rule of law. If Bush had his way, the Constitution would be written in pencil.

Gee, the FBI chief says his agency has been violating your privacy rights. So of course, we should trust the Bush Administration to safeguard our privacy and allow the government to conduct warrantless wiretaps with no oversight.

How many more of these "lapses" do we have to have to realize that we can't trust the government to operate in secret in violation of our privacy rights?

Jay Rockefeller, Patrick Leahy, Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers have an op-ed on washingtonpost.com that destroys Bush's scare tactics on the Protect America Act:

First, our country did not "go dark" on Feb. 16 when the Protect America Act (PAA) expired. Despite President Bush's overheated rhetoric on this issue, the government's orders under that act will last until at least August. These orders could cover every known terrorist group and foreign target. No surveillance stopped. If a new member of a known group, a new phone number or a new e-mail address is identified, U.S. intelligence can add it to the existing orders, and surveillance can begin immediately.

After years of playing footsie with the language, the Attorney General and director of intelligence basically have to admit that eavesdropping on phone calls and email outside the FISA regulations is illegal.

In their fearmongering to get Congress to pass the Protect America Act revisions that include retroactive immunity for telecom companies, these officials were trying to make the case that we are "losing" intelligence since the old law expired. To do so, they had to say that they can't just carry on with their spying activities because it's "illegal" under FISA.

When officials at the highest reaches of government can't be trusted to abide by the law, then why should we?

My column this weekend is about the Protect America Act that Bush is pushing through Congress. It is an egregious piece of legislation for which both parties seem determined to make into law. As I say in the column, it should be renamed the "Use the Fourth Amendment as Toilet Paper" Act, for it just obliterates any semblance of accountability and constitutional restraint. It's a law more suited to dictatorship than democracy.

I'm sure there will be some who think this column goes to far. But frankly, there wasn't room to show just how far outside the Constitution this act really goes.

Here is one example that I didn't include:

In rejecting the Feinstein "exclusivity" amendment to the FISA revision considered on the Senate floor today -- an amendment that failed by a vote of 57 Ayes to 41 Noes, thanks to another "painless filibuster" of precisely the type we were promised would not be tolerated on this bill -- the Senate has voted to say that although they were passing a law governing surveillance, it was OK if the President decided that he really didn't like the law very much and wished to make up his own instead.

Exclusivity -- the purpose of the amendment that "failed" -- meant simply this: that the law they were passing was the law, and it was the governing authority for how surveillance could be conducted in America.

The Senate just rejected it, so that means that they're passing a law, but if a president decides later on that he thinks there's really some other controlling authority besides the law, that's OK.

For Bush, this gives him blanket amnesty for God knows what crimes he has committed in office. It's an assault on the American public that doesn't deserve to see the light of day, much less a place in the law books.

For anything you ever wanted to know about this act and government spying, there is no better source than Glenn Greewald.

Though I'm not a big fan, Ted Kennedy hit the nail on the head here:

Think about what we’ve been hearing from the White House in this debate. The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity. No immunity, no new FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he is willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.

Glenn Greenwald delivers a royal smack-down to Time Magazine's Joe Klein.

Klein wrote in Time that the Democrat-backed FISA bill would force the government to get FISA court approval to eavesdrop on non-U.S. persons, and how this would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. He also implied how Democrats must be "beyond stupid" for passing this bill, and hit them for their partisanship.

The only problem is that the bill doesn't do any such thing. Greenwald points out how the wording of the bill is plain in this regard, and how Klein obviously didn't read the bill at all.

Once caught in the act, Klein digs his hole deeper by trying to pretend that his error in fact was still in dispute.

What Klein did was what too many journalists do. He relied on what his sources told him, instead of checking out the facts. It happens far too often. I remember getting hit with this once last year when I asked U.S. Senate candidate Jack Carter a question I had picked up somewhere without checking. Carter shot that one back at me, which made me look rather stupid. It was a good lesson that needs to get relearned from time to time. It's too easy to trust a trusted source and not do the homework in checking the facts.

We all need to hold journalists' feet to the fire in this regard.