Winning to the neocons means suppression of violence from the insurgents (aka patriots) who are trying to kick us out of their country, since we have no right to be there, along with cooling down a civil war in which both sides are shooting at us, plus liquidating Al Qaeda. But the ultimate goal is perpetual occupation. It always has been.

This administration does not want peace. It killed the deal between the Sunnis and the Shiites that was on the table last fall. It can tolerate years of low-level casualties (compared to Vietnam or WWI). The Bushies just want to hang on there forever, dominate the region, defend Israel, and whip the Arabs into line.

Just like the Crusaders.

Republicans are still clinging to the notion that the Iraq war is a crusade like World War II, not a war of occupation by a country with no right to be there. That fantasy cost them the last election, and similar pipe dreams will cost them the next one. That includes the belief that mere hate can overcome Hillary's candidacy.

They are right about one thing, though. Hillary is inevitable. Her numbers are getting better and people are seeing that she knows her stuff, and of course a whole lot of people still love Bill, and when she is sworn in, he will have the most clout of anybody in the world with the new president. It's fun to speculate whether he will be given a Cheney-level portfolio, or whether he even needs that. For a lot of people, including a lot of independents, just the prospect of having him there is reassuring.

The way to beat Republicans next year is to hang their records on them like so many albatrosses. If Romney is the GOP candidate, his will offer plenty of opportunity for cries of hypocrisy. Hillary's is 90% solid achievement. She's weak on Iraq -- but unlike Romney and the GOP, she's moving in the right direction.

Calling divorce a failure has a presumptive germ of truth in it, but only because our society regards marriage as most religions do, a commitment for life, come what may. It's not like that anymore.

Living together as an alternative to marriage is common now. Lots of times those relationships, which are typically monogamous and otherwise committed, don't work out. Do we speak of the ends of those relationships as failures? No, we don't. The comments are neutral: it didn't work out, or they're not together anymore.

"Failure" is too judgmental a word to use about marriage. Sometimes they just don't work out and the parties are, or one is, unhappy continuing in them. Sometimes the couple is young and foolish. Sometimes they are old and fed up. There are lots of reasons marriages end, and often the end portends improvement.

I'd like to see a more neutral reference to divorce become politically correct. Try it, you'll like it.

"A distinction without a difference" -- That's what CNN is reporting at this hour, and they're right. I mean, what the hell is "data mining" anyway? It's a term of recent invention and has been used in several contexts. I thought it was when NSA massaged any kind of data supplied to or obtained by them en masse. That would cover databases and phone calls.

Anyway, Gonzales lied so many times about so many things that even if this objection lets him slide on one count, the rest of the indictment is going to be long.

You tagged Joe Klein pretty well. About time someone did. He's not evil, just hubrised.

As for FISA, I've just read "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind, which tells all manner of juicy secrets about what happened prior to the Iraq invasion and ever since. He says that the NSA data-mining generates such gigantically huge amounts of data they can't possibly harrass a bunch of Americans with it, they're doing good to gin out a list of possible terrorists, and even then nothing fits without on-the-ground intelligence to connect the dots. It's a good case for concluding that the constitutional threat is low, if it were legalized.

So Bush may actually be doing something positive with his amendments, like obeying the rule of law, for example, even if it takes writing a law that suits him so he'll obey it for a change.

But Suskind also reports that it may be too late. Al Qaeda eventually figured out that despite their best efforts, most of their electronic communications were being intercepted and doped out. So they went dark. They're now using personal messengers, almost poetically suitable to their medieval doctrines.

At the same time, it began to be seen that Al Qaeda doesn't depend on central command and control, rather they have a sort of franchise system. Some go to get trained, others just read about the concepts, and groups form here and there and do mischief, some more dangerously than others. For big operations that are important to bin Laden and his pals, they just take all the time necessary to get it organized. They consider the whole enterprise to be successful if the franchises keep increasing in number, regardless of what they do in the short range.

So the game is now much more than ever a ground game, using lots of human intelligence (humint) and much less signal intelligence (sigint). NSA is almost out of it.

So a good question is, if this amendment passes, who is NSA going to be targeting?