TV News LIES

President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department to give Congress' intelligence committees access to classified legal advice providing the government's rationale for drone strikes against American citizens working with al-Qaida abroad, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

A drumbeat of demands to see the document has swelled on Capitol Hill in recent days as the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares to hold a confirmation hearing for John Brennan, who helped manage the drone program, to be CIA director.

The number of members of Congress who don’t identify with any particular religion is on the rise, according to an analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

In the 96th Congress (1979-80), not a single member of the House or Senate said they didn’t belong to any particular faith, didn’t know or refused to disclose their religion. But in the new 113th Congress, 10 members fall under that category.

That’s twice as many as in the 111th Congress (2009-10).

Christmas may be over, but the Senate is still singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” In a 73 to 23 vote on Friday, Senators renewed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act for another five years. The extension continues the authorization the government has to conduct warrantless wiretaps of communications that Americans conduct with foreign intelligence targets abroad.

With strong bipartisan support led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - Calif.) chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and President Obama promising to sign it, the extension has less media buzz than it did when it first went through Congress during the Bush years. Still, that hasn’t changed the controversial and potentially unconstitutional nature of the bill.

Congress stripped a provision Tuesday from a defense bill that aimed to shield Americans from the possibility of being imprisoned indefinitely without trial by the military. The provision was replaced with a passage that appears to give citizens little protection from indefinite detention.

The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 was added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but there was no similar language in the version of the bill that passed the House, and it was dumped from the final bill released Tuesday after a conference committee from both chambers worked out a unified measure.

Led by Republican opposition, the Senate on Tuesday rejected a United Nations treaty on the rights of the disabled that is modeled after the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.

With 38 Republicans casting "no" votes, the 61-38 vote fell five short of the two-thirds majority needed to ratify a treaty. The vote took place in an unusually solemn atmosphere, with senators sitting at their desks rather than milling around the podium. Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, looking frail and in a wheelchair, was in the chamber to support the treaty.

The destruction wrought by superstorm Sandy has been horrific enough, but if there’s anything to be grateful for, it’s the storm’s timing. If Sandy had hit just one week later, we’d be facing a constitutional crisis.

As it is, there is plenty of speculation on the possible effects of the storm on the Nov. 6 election. There are multiple and conflicting answers to the concerns being raised—from political to statutory to constitutional—but they all obscure a larger and more troubling truth: there is absolutely no reason for us to be in this situation in the first place.