You better be significantly older than me to be calling me pup. Grrrrrr... yip!

I'm not asking you to vote Obama. That's completely up to you, obviously, and I read your letters anytime I see 'em, so I know the score on that.

I'd love it if you'd apply your acumen and intelligence to making sure McCain doesn't get elected, though. There's a difference there.

I'd also love it if I'm just being paranoid, but, yeah, I think the right to vote is slightly more important than the FISA bill. Our franchise already been eviscerated by Bush, and it's hanging by a thread. All McCain needs now is a sharp pair of scissors.

So, if McSatan comes to power, hopefully you'll get your chance to vote for Hillary in 2012. I'll vote for her too, if she wins the primary. Even if she did plagiarize several lines from her husband's speeches (just kidding, cribbing a few lines from a few speeches isn't plagiarism).

I've been sitting on this for a few days, and I still think it's tough to sort out. Here's the thing. Obama is one senator, and even on a good day, almost three times of his Democrat colleagues jumped ship. Obama has a stake in it because, as we're seeing, sometimes it's really hard to create compatibility in what you really believe and how others will represent your beliefs.

Obama knows that his vulnerability is in foreign policy. No, it's not even that because he has pride and confidence in taking diplomacy in a new direction. His vulnerability is in the "war on turrorism" because THAT debate has been on the table for seven plus years before the man decided to run. Ass backwards as it is, Republicans learned a while back that they can champion this cause and use emotional rhetoric and verbal attacks to demean people who don't fall in line. If anything, their tactics make a good match for this wedge issue.

Even if most of the country is firmly against the war, a lesser proportion still get anxious and scared about protecting our safety. Maybe they have troop relatives, husbands, brothers, fathers overseas. Maybe they would rather be the aggressor than the fearful. It's all a bunch of head-trippin', but effective nonetheless.

Obama has to show the public that he can be strong on terror even when the only way to do that for the average American is to do the saber-rattling, no matter how artificial that is.

That said, it's probably a compromise that hurts his heart. When you do something against your sense or intuition, it is very painful. But at the end of the day, and like I have said before, I trust Obama a bit more to exercise these powers with discretion than what we've seen the Administration do that goes well beyond abuse and deception. For that, the Republicans have set the bar very, very low. I would hope that we won't inadvertently trip over the line.

So, if McSatan comes to power, hopefully you'll get your chance to vote for Hillary in 2012. I'll vote for her too, if she wins the primary. Even if she did plagiarize several lines from her husband's speeches (just kidding, cribbing a few lines from a few speeches isn't plagiarism).

As I tried to explain several months previously, taking lines with the permission of the author does not make it plagiarism but passing those lines off as one's own does. You can go back and search my archives if you want to review my very detailed explanations on why what Obama did was plagiarism but what Hillary said was not. It has to do with exact quotes and the common or uncommonness of the words and ideas chosen.

It was Obama's excuse of "no big deal" that appalled me and not his minor plagiarism.

However, look at what you do in your comments above. McSatan???? That is just silly and not very clever. First of all, you are falling into the trap that Glenn has suggested that many "Obamabots" fell into of idealizing Obama. The other side of the same coin is that of demonizing the opposition. This is weakness. I am sorry to say this of you, but it just is.

McCain is not Satan. Hillary is not a Castrating Witch. Obama wears no Angel's Wings. As long as people think in these sorts of terms, they stop themselves from thinking. Logic requires that we avoid those sorts of pathetic appeals. I take the word pathetic in this case from pathos. There are three retorical weapons: Pathos, logos, and ethos. Of these, the ancient Greek philosophers deemed pathos, an appeal to the emotions as being the weakest, not because it cannot be effective but because it appeals to the feelings which are easily manipulated in an audience. In a democracy, the citizenry are especially vulnerable to pathos. Obama overuses it to his own benefit and, to the extent that he does so, I think less of him.

If anything has characterized the Democratic primary, it has been the quickness with which Obama supporters have defended his slightest missteps and the lengths (combative) to which they have gone to demonize his opponents. This provides short term benefits but engenders long term resentments. Obama cannot run his general election campaign as he ran his primary campaign, in which he used an aggressive offense to distract from his weaknesses. Now his weaknesses will stand in stark contrast to John McCain's experience.

As to my support, it matters little. I live in Texas, which will undoubtedly go to McCain. However, in my posts here, I do not intend to waste my energy in pointless polemic. I have free speech to criticize Obama and I intend to do so when I think he is wrong.

Is he wrong or not in caving to the status quo on this bill? I contend that he is wrong. Where are you on the defense of our constitution?

If they "cross a border" (which is after all just a line on a map) are no conversations entitled to any sort of constitutional protection?-- AKA Smith

Of course there are... the ones made on phones to be tapped in the US.
The conversations made on phones tapped in Spain are not.

The thing that counts is where the tap is located.