Tomorrow will be a rather momentous day in the history of our country. A vote on cloture will take place in the U.S. Senate, at 4:30 p.m. EST. Cloture, for the uninitiated, is the only means of overcoming a filibuster, actual or threatened. This vote concerns the renewal of the so-called “Protect America Act,” which deals with FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). At this point, without debate or a filibuster, the Republicans will most likely shove the bill through. If a debate/filibuster is allowed, Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd, and others will attempt to preserve our privacy in regards to FISA.

I’ve covered FISA several times on this blog, and will continue to do so, because I think civil liberties are a cornerstone of the America we’ve all been taught to believe in, and I have no intention of letting our civil liberties vanish without a fight. Additionally, I’m leery of allowing our government to have expanded powers where surveillance is concerned; too many times in our history, agencies and individuals have abused the power granted to them and to the government as a whole (for examples, see: J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO, the Church Committee…).

The battle right now isn’t so much over beefing up security, or fine-tuning FISA; no politician or citizen in their right mind wants to weaken security. The real struggle is over three things: 1) the fact that Smirk et al knowingly broke the law, including a public admission by Smirk; should we permit the executive branch to be above the law, and be unaccountable for its actions? 2) blanket warrants; in the past, warrants could only be submitted for use with individuals. Now our gummint wants the ability to just vaguely mutter about “enemies” and “suspects” and receive the right to snoop without oversight; should we as a country permit this? and 3) providing immunity, whether retroactive or future, for the telecommunications industry, which aided and abetted our gummint in breaking the law.

The squawking you hear comes from the gummint and its allies (including Jay Rockefeller, who is supposedly a Democrat), who claim the telecoms were merely doing their patriotic duty, that they shouldn’t have to be “punished,” etc., etc. What I find funny about this is that despite all the sympathy our “leaders” are trying to garner for these poor, defenseless telecoms is the fact that earlier this month, it was reported that these corporations (and they are national/global corporations, mind you) cut off the FBI from accessing our phone records because of unpaid bills.

So much for noble acts of sacrifice and patriotism. The telecoms apparently don’t care about their customers’ privacy or civil rights; they don’t care about “security”; they’re just in it for the money. Surprise, surprise…

Allowing our gummint (including Smirk and Shooter) the ability to evade the law and skirt rules and regulations where wiretapping is concerned angers me. But it also upsets me that Congress is willing to aid and abet by letting the telecoms off the hook. As I and others have said before, good prosecutors don’t let suspects or “persons of interest” off the hook without knowing all the details first. Yet, that’s exactly what the gummint wants us to do. One has to wonder why they’re so interested in the welfare of large, rich corporations that have well-paid lawyers on retainer. Who’s hiding what, and why? What is the real cost of allowing immunity to take place? What are the consequences that will happen in both possible outcomes?

We’ll never get the answer to these questions, and many more, if we allow the bill to pass as is, and for Smirk and his corporate pals to get their way. Right now, the Republicans are blocking all amendments, from every Senator that’s submitted one (including one of their own, Arlen Specter). Right now, Congress is potentially poised to once again sacrifice its constitutional rights of oversight, and in the process, once again upset our long-standing system of checks and balances. Right now, we have business executives and high-level government leaders, including our President and Vice-President, who don’t want to have to answer anything, who don’t want to be responsible for their actions, and who think they should be above the law.

If you’re okay with that, sure; no problem. Have fun re-living life in East Germany and other repressive nations throughout history that spied on their own citizens.

“It can’t happen here,” you say.

Oh? Want to bet? It already has. Check this out, at CQ Politics (h/t Firedoglake): “Collateral Damage: Surveillance Aimed at Terrorists Can Easily Go Awry.” As a writer and historian (of sorts), it alarms me what happened to Lawrence Wright. For those of you who are deaf, here’s an analogy: suppose I’m doing research into Deaf history or linguistics of signed languages in another country, and I call, write, or e-mail someone abroad about this. I am then subsequently investigated, wiretapped, my mail opened, my e-mails diverted, and I get a visit from government agents. It could happen; it’s already happened to Lawrence Wright.

Lest you think it’s just “lefties” like me who are concerned about what’s happening, check out this poll [PDF] commissioned by the ACLU (the folks who are fighting for all our liberties): even 51% of Republicans oppose this power grab.

If you’re like me and think that immunity and the ability to obtain blanket warrants should not be granted, then get on the phone NOW and call or fax your Senators, and tell them to vote NO  on cloture. Time’s of the essence. If this one is lost, the bill will most likely pass, and you’ll soon see a billboard in your neighborhood: “Wiretapping: Coming Soon Near You.”

The last couple of weeks, I’ve carved out some time to start cleaning up (ha!) the piles of papers and folders around here. Part of it is the usual housekeeping. But part of it is the annual preparation for the upcoming tax season. I always try to do this, because after seven or so years, you theoretically do not need to keep certain documents. So I always use the post-Christmas downtime to start weeding out reams of paper that I no longer need to keep.

Well, in the process, I also decided to (slowly!) clear out little corners in my deskspace, and upon dumping out the contents of one drawer, I found something I didn’t expect to see: my old Wyndtell pager.

At that moment, I felt like an archaeologist, sifting through the layers of a lost civilization. A Wyndtell pager! A hard clamshell of a communication device, with a seemingly large keyboard! Black and white screen! I marveled at it, then showed my walking partner. She too was incredulous.

We gazed for a while at our find, pondering in our mind just how rapidly wireless communications have developed within the last few years, and savoring our own memories of the days when we proudly touted our very own pagers. Now, just like our hearing brethren, we too were captives to a mobile device!

“It’s a good thing I’m cleaning stuff out,” I remarked. “Just imagine if I’d kept this much longer.”

We nodded sagely in agreement. We were now faced with a choice: keep it hidden in a corner, and someday donate it to a museum, or do the wise, environmental thing, and cart it off to the local recycler.

Too bad there’s no deposit on a pager. I get a nickel or dime for each beverage container I bring back. This time, all I got was a nod of the head and grunt. Oh, well. Adieu, Wyndtell.

In my last post on the Deaf Blogosphere, all of my commenters were optimistic about the future of our online community. But if you look at DeafRead lately, there seems to be a different tone. While some people are indeed touting the message that we can work together towards common goals, others are wondering about a split in the community, and speculating on how deep the divide is. There’s also critical self-examination and navel-gazing going on too; the latest is Carl Schroeder’s post on Deaf community archetypes; his exposition focuses on why we “betray” each other.

Despite the drama and introspection, I think the reality encompasses both, and is slightly more complex than the black-and-white segmentation some people see. One one hand, yes, there are divisions, there are differences; to ignore that is to be unrealistic. But do we need to obsess about these differences constantly? Mishka Zena recently wrote a succinct post stating that she felt this was not necessary, and I agree.

Naturally, there will always be certain areas, topics, and issues that are controversial. Deaf education, obviously, is the Big Enchilada. It’s sort of comparable to abortion– everyone has an opinion, and very few are willing to find a middle ground. That debate is never going to be completely resolved, and the more time we go around and around on it is time taken away from other areas of concern that could be tackled.

This isn’t to say that discussion about Deaf education or reform isn’t needed, or worthwhile. While I have no problem with blog posts, vlog clips, or online forum discussions of ASL, oralism, Cued Speech, bi-bi, and other educational methods, systems, and linguistic uses in the classroom, I see tons of other areas that are sort of shuffled to the side. My concern is there is so much more we could be accomplishing, and we’re not– or if we are, we’re only making incremental steps towards concrete goals.

I celebrated the Deaf Blogosphere the other day. I agree with Deaf Pundit’s assessment of the State of the Blogosphere, January 2008: “People are… gaining awareness and knowledge through that … People will be starting to use their awareness and knowledge to use.”

This is the promise of our corner of cyberspace: the ability to exchange information over long distances, even across continents, and the use of such information to develop awareness and a broader sense of our world that can then be applied in a more practical form off-line. This doesn’t mean we stop acting locally; there never is a substitute in our world for an old-fashioned get-together, where we sit around chatting, brainstorming, and gathering the energy within that group discussion and fashioning it into action. But now we have the potential to act on a larger scale without time constraints. We had a taste of that during the Tent City protests in 2006 at Gallaudet, but imagine if an individual or group harnessed that energy and used it to enact change?

“Sure, that’s already happening,” some of you might say. You’ll point to groups like the Deaf Bilingual Coalition. Ok, that’s great, but again, without getting back into the storm of controversy about the DBC, it’s focusing on that perennial issue, education.

What happened during the recent protest was that our community revisited a lot of issues– there were divisions that appeared, that had been lying underneath the surface, and people picked the scabs off and exposed the angry wounds. While there was a lot of rancor, there was also a chance to start to really examine some of the damage on both sides, and the open aspect of the blogosphere brought in various points-of-view (which continues to be the case). I thought this was necessary, but I also saw the risk in doing so. The danger was that we ended up rehashing a lot of the same arguments again and again, without truly breaking out and tackling the problems and issues we face from a different angle.

Education is an extremely important issue, yes. But what about under- and un-employment? What about communications and captioning issues? What about equal access outside the cocoon of residential schools and programs geared for the Deaf/deaf communities? These are areas and issues where we can definitely find common ground, regardless of which communication method or language we use. These are problems we can find allies within and outside all of our communities. All of us, whether we are late-deafened, prelingually deaf, ASL users, oralists, cued speech users, cochlear implantees, or any combination thereof, face discrimination and frustrations at hiring time and once on the job. Why can’t we discuss these problems and work together to find solutions? The more we do so, the more we can find the commonalities we all have, and reduce the overall number of issues. By doing so, we can perhaps begin to understand each other better and see how each of us adapts in terms of communication. That in turn could foster some possible compromises in deaf education, new avenues in education, or at the very least, tolerance on all sides for opposing viewpoints.

One example of a blogger who’s doing something in this vein is Andrea Shettle, over at Reunify Gally. Although her latest post is on captioning, she’s been writing a lot about the ADA Restoration Act of 2007, a piece of legislation that *all* of us should be concerned with, no matter our childhood background or present-day standing within the community. This is the kind of issue that can unite, rather than divide.

So what do I see for the Deaf Blogosphere? I see continued expansion and contraction of blogs and vlogs, with those that have staying power bringing their perspectives to the table. We can continue our discussions, and I look forward to them. But what I see as the next needed step is to distill the issues we have, deconstruct them, and then concentrate our efforts on each element of each particular topic. From there, we can start to formulate solutions and compromises.

There’s only so many times we can go around and around on the merry-go-round, so many times we can ride the roller coaster. We can all write and read another hundred blog posts and entries on the same old issues. Instead, let’s get off and start using the potential and promise of the blogosphere and scale even greater heights.

Addendum: I forgot to include this when I originally wrote this, but one good example of proactive thinking is this excellent post by LaRonda over at The Ear of My Heart. Do check it out.

As I write this, the media has declared John McCain, who thinks we should be in Iraq for as long as it takes, the winner of the New Hampshire Primary, with the rest of the pack in tow. On the Democratic side, it’s a neck-and-neck race, with Hillary Clinton just ahead of Barack Obama. Despite the seeming win tonight, it’s got to be unnerving for her knowing Obama’s that close behind. Edwards is, at this time, a distant third.

What frustrates me about this whole process more than anything else (including the ridiculous length of time we have to go through it) is how the media shapes events, rather than reporting on it. For example, as I pointed out in my last election-related post, we’ve heard more about the candidates’ grooming habits, emotional makeup, and other personality characteristics far more than we’ve heard about their positions, the strengths and weaknesses of their beliefs, and what they will do if elected. The latest these days is Hillary “crying.” Oh, please. This is manufactured garbage, and doesn’t tell me anything other than she’s stressed; which, when you think about it, is par for the course (16-20 hour days on the campaign trail will wear down anyone, man or woman).

This is not stuff I want to know. I also don’t want to know that a candidate is considered invincible, or potentially unstoppable, but that’s what the Corporate Media is doing, by touting polls, puff pieces, and allowing the talking heads to blather on. The meme at the moment is that Obama is supplanting Clinton.

What I don’t like about this is that it totally ignores all the others who are running for President. It’s the same on the other side– tons of stuff about how Giuliani has tons of negatives to overcome, is potentially unelectable, and a tendency on the part of the media to try to script the race as a two-man battle between Huckabee and Romney, with McCain as a potential third.

This ignores the real players in the election: the voters. Nowhere does it say that the Corporate Media is in charge of the elections. Nowhere does it say that the media gets to pick the candidates. Certainly, nowhere does it say the media decides the election. But that’s what’s happening.

A good example of this is the decision by ABC to cut three candidates from the debate last week. In response, Dennis Kucinich, one of those “eliminated,” filed a complaint with the FCC.  Good for Kucinich– I don’t think ABC is doing anyone a service by cutting candidates. It isn’t their job to vet candidates– it’s OURS.

Despite my post the other day, I was not too happy with Iowa either. We are essentially allowing the media and a small number of voters to winnow out the field  before the rest of us have our say. While I wasn’t enthusiastic about Biden, I was disappointed to see that he and Dodd called it quits before anyone else anywhere else had a chance to weigh in on them. That doesn’t really benefit anyone, no matter what the Corporate Media loves to tell you. All it does is limit our choices, limits the discussions and debates, and exposes once again one of the biggest flaws in the system: money. Money rules, the Corporate Media rules, and the rest of us lose as a result.

Obviously it’s too late in the game for anything to happen this time around. But if someone has the guts to do so, the two changes we need for the next election will need to be *serious* campaign finance reform, and some regulation of the media, including reinstatement of the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was tossed out during the Reagan era.  Of course, there’s a lot more that could be changed/reformed, but I’d start there.

This election is interesting in one way– our communications has changed, and more and more people have switched to cell phones, texting, IM, and tons of other forms of communication.  A friend forwarded me this post– there’s been quite a bit elsewhere about Facebook and other social networks– but “Madison Guy” chose to observe the current election through the prism of Flickr. I found what he had to say rather interesting. I’m not sure if Edwards will survive and validate the findings of Madison Guy, but I do find his observations about Clinton and Obama interesting in context.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the primary, I am… I just wish things were different, is all.