Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He's a little angry Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the Intelligence Committee Chairman, has struck a deal with the Bush administration that grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies for helping the White House spy on Americans without a warrant after 9/11.

This bill would effectively throw out a May 2006 ACLU class-action lawsuit against AT&T and Verizon. The Bush administration tried getting the lawsuit tossed out of court for "national security" reasons and failed, but that may change with the helpful obstruction of Senator Jay Rockefeller.

(Reposted from my blog.)

The second Agonist story that caught my attention was LJ's post on Leo Strauss. Strauss is regarded as the philosophical source of neoconservatism.

In international relations every theory with the exception of Constructivism has a philosophical underpinning. IR theory attempts to conceptualize conflict and peace, provide an answer to why states act the way they do, and gives us a way to make sense of the world by fulfilling a human need (or demand) to recognize patterns in events.