This is intensely pertinent to Saturday's post, and quite relevant to Monday's.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003537.php

Seeing as how it's real journalism on a blog, I guess it applies to today's as well.

I also believe we cannot attribute all the violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda. There's a tendency now to lump it all together, and call it al-Qaeda. We have to be very careful with that. This is a very complex region. al-Qaeda is certainly a component. But there's larger components. al-Qaeda is a worldwide organization. It recognizes no national boundaries. And it's in areas where we ought to be focused.

I was going to mention that the whole rationale behind the Fairness Doctrine was based on the scarcity of the airwaves and the high price of admission to become a broadcaster or cable provider. The internet, with its low cost of admission and ability to provide a voice to all (even shooter) doesn't require a Fairness Doctrine nor would anything approaching it be wise.

I would have said all that, but that would have presumed that shooter was actually making a pertinient comment to generate discussion instead of simply being an ass.....

That sentence is false. In fact by pointing out it's falsity, I am simultaneously proving its falsity. See how easy that was.

Garbage dies instantly!

"the recent surveillance activities appear so far to have been aimed at mostly people believed to pose a terrorist threat"

The phrase "appear so far" provides all the necessary cover. As you continuously point out, having no information available whatsoever makes it pretty presumptious to pretend that the lack of evidence represents a lack of activity but the sentence in the story is essentially true. It does indeed appear to the reporter to have been aimed at terrorists.

I still ascribe to the panic theory and what I've read from Suskind and Tyler Drumheller seems to reinforce the impression.

After 9-11 the administration was so panicked that it ordered that all the stops be pulled on any and all intelligence gathering activity. Of course what they did, once they saw all that new data pouring in and realized what capabilities they had remains anyone's guess.

If Cheney was involved however, its pretty safe to assume the worst.

Why is the government collecting all this information, really? And what the devil are they doing with it?

They know they can''t use it to stop any real terrorist attacks (Too much data to mine), but if there IS a terrorist attack, they'll be able to easily backtrack and determine what they COULD have known. Which they will then use to rewrite the Patriot act enough to make spying on political enemies almost TOO easy.

I value your contributions here but things like this just make me shake my head in wonderment:

doubt that Libby could have been successfully prosecuted without the Democrats in power in the legislative branch.

The charges against Libby that Fitzgerald announced on October 28, 2005...

Libby was indicted over a year before the election. The prosecuter was one who had cut his teeth dealing with Chicago (Democratic) Machine corruption, The Judge overseeing the case was a Republican Bush appointee and his defense team was as high priced as they come. And you think he was convicted because Congress changed hands?!

Sigh.....

I'm already on record as thinking that the Fairness Doctrine is a genie that will never make it back into the bottle but I'd be willing to argue that the proliferation of cable channels would not have been an adequate reason to scrap it. Even though spectrum scarcity was less of a problem, the cost of admission to become a broadcaster was still sufficiently high (and of course the knowlege that cable operators on the local level were still government selected monopolies) still suggests that imposing an expectation of public service would still have been reasonable.

The internet is a different ball of wax entirely. Even though there is an informal heirarchal structure developing, the network itself remains peer to peer, and the cost of becoming a content provider is just the time necessary to create the content. Attempting to impose Fairness on such a structure would be ridiculous in the first place. As texting and e-mail and other viral forms of information tranfer flourish the idea of imposing ANY kind of control remains quite elusive.

But there are few with the talent to slice through BS like a hot knife through butter. Thank you Helen and thank you Glenn.

I think most people should agree that the placement of aircraft carriers is an element of diplomacy. To deny it would be to aid those who would disparage diplamacy as being ineffective. But in order to be effective, the threatened use of force needs to be credible. That's one of the many reasons that Iraq is such a disaster. It has shown the world that our military is incapable of providing anything but destruction and that even if we were able to selectively decapitate the Iraninan regime and disable their weapons development, there'd absulutely nothing to be gained for the average Iranian to cooperate with us on any level.

We've already blown it and we haven't even started.

Diplomacy is the difference between sticking a gun in somebody's face to get what you want and shooting them in the face to get what you want.

Your analogy neglects to mention that "what you want" is for the other guy to holster his own damn gun.