that the press's coverage of Obama's "change" on the FISA bill will actually have the (unintended) effect of educating some voters who might not otherwise know what it's about?

In order to make Obama appear at his worst, they might actually have to explain why it's so significant. Substance!?

I bet you can't stop at one potato chip.

I bet you cant stop with one bowl of soup.

Cow Head Soup? No eat anything that had a face.

Eyeballs stare back at you, floating in a bowl of stew.

to implement "any steps I deem necessary" **

I find this extraordinarily arrogant ... as I find the proposed Brandenberg Gate speech, as I find the "on the anniversary of the I have a dream speech" piffle ( the security cost of holding Obama's (preordained) acceptance speech at not just a "second venue" (not previously planned) but an open air football arena, are truly boggling.

I don't know if he's just "getting bad advice" or if he has crossed into the twilight zone of "believing his own hype" ...

okay, I'm prejudiced, never cottoned to the man ... but I find this in grandiose "ego the size of all Wyoming" territory

** I had a cut/paste malfunction, please forgive any glitchy stuff here.

Thanks for staying on topic. Poor FISA and NSA. YEA to ACLU!

The class @ UT can downgrade towards immature school kids? BRATS.

BRAWLS. NO eat Snicker bars in grade school, and tease kids with BO.

VOTE for the presidential candidate who's partner has a tongue STUD.

As usual Bill Moyers had another outstanding program tonight (see sig for video and transcript). I have put together some of his opening comments that should wet your appetite to want to see, hear and/or read more.

BILL MOYERS: Now, controlling the party, the Presidency, and Congress, conservatives had what historian Rick Perlstein describes as their first chance in the modern era to govern on their own terms - to prove themselves. They were euphoric. And they blew it. On top of such bungled calamities as Iraq and Katrina…

The conservative regime sent spending into the stratosphere…borrowed trillions from the future to pay for their agenda, and rewarded their wealthy base with huge tax cuts. Earmarks and contracts fattened lobbyists on K Street, which Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay honed into a ruthless shakedown machine exploited by conservative movement stars like Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff.

And after crusading for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, conservatives pushing family values turned out to be their own worst enemies. Some of their foot soldiers in politics and the religious right were outed for adultery, stalking Capitol Hill pages, soliciting sex. Believe it or not, just the other day Senator Larry Craig, who had been arrested for lewd conduct in a public bathroom, and Senator David Vitter, a strict moralist revealed to have been a frequent customer of brothels, signed on as co-sponsors of the Republicans' Marriage Protection Amendment.

Meanwhile, over 50 top Administration officials have been implicated in scandals that cost them their jobs.

So the Bush Administration is ending as the conservative movement has run out gas. It's demoralized and in disarray.

Unable to cope with stagnating wages, loss of jobs, gross inequality or the environmental crisis, 80 percent of the public says America is heading in the wrong direction. How did the right go so wrong?

This week, we're devoting the Journal to a conversation with two men a generation apart, but joined at the hip, so to speak, as conservatives deeply troubled that their movement has run aground.

Mickey Edwards signed up with the movement early on. He was part of the political forces that Barry Goldwater first mobilized in his campaign against President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The conservative columnist, George Will, wrote that Goldwater lost 44 states but won the future with the movement he inspired.

Mickey Edwards became a leading figure in that movement. One of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation, he served 16 years in Congress and was elected National Chairman of the American Conservative Union. He's the author of this widely discussed book: RECLAIMING CONSERVATISM: HOW A GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL MOVEMENT GOT LOST-AND HOW IT CAN FIND ITS WAY BACK.

If Mickey Edwards belongs to the founding generation of conservatives, Ross Douthat came of age in its floundering generation. He was born in 1979, one year before Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. He has written what many of his peers, including David Brooks, consider the political book of the year. This is it: GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM. It's co-authored with his colleague at ATLANTIC Magazine."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07112008/watch.html

Granted, the conflation argument was imprecise, however, it still doesn't show that 'this is happening', which is the more important point. And there is a degree to which what you claim this shows is contingent on the assumption that significant carelessness and/or malice is an inextricable feature of data mining, which is an assumption for which there is no evidence, and that isn't intuitive on its face.

It is an example of who is al Qaeda, on its face. There is no dispute that can be mounted about "this is happening" or anything else. During the entire time that Arar was in U.S./Syrian custody, and for quite some time after, he was part of the U.S. definition of al Qaeda. If he showed up on your speed dial, he qualified for Kit Bond's comment. End of story. Ever hear of Yvette Henry?

Terrorism has a definition and a terrorist is a practitioner of said, but I won't go to the textbook for this. We both know, or should know what the underlying issue here is. I claim, perhaps because I swallow wild eyed propaganda, that there are people, (such as those that were responsible for planning and carrying out 9/11, or bombing the trains in Spain or the transport in London, etc.), who believe it is in their interest to attack the civilian populations of the West.

Give me an example of one out there right now, not of one in the past. What are his/her attributes? What has s/he done? It s/he a software engineer from The MathWorks?

Do you know whether there are still people out there who can attack us and want to? More importantly, as pertains to this law, when will you know you have found them all? Does the law stop surveilling when that happens or does it assume that with more data, there will be more targets? Does it have a null state? If your profile of a terrorist in the data mining algorithm is wrong, will this law allow you to spy on the wrong people? When will you know? Will you have to incarcerate them first? What will you charge them with? Do they have rights? They subject terrorists to abuse in military and CIA custody. Will the people your data mining algorithm finds be subject to abuse? Why or why not? The people supporting this law laughed at Marjorie Cohn when she said that she would question a terrorist using rapport building. The people who crafted this law believe terrorists need to be abused before they divulge their plots. If the data mining finds me, they issue a warrant and I become a target. They listen with prejudice at that point because they are sure I'm up to something. When they think they know, they arrest me. After that, if recent history is any indication, I have zero rights, and an presumption that I must be tortured because I have dangerous information I'm trying to keep secret.

So I want to know before that happens: Do you know what a terrorist is?