While John McCain talks tough on Iran in the first shots of the 2008 Presidential race, Hillary Clinton tries tacking to the right of President Bush on Iran but she's tacking left on nearly every other issue to offset her militancy on Iran.

File under: it's not fascism if we give you the green light. Remember that Senate hearing that the partisan Left is chomping at the bits to expose McChimpy's inate fascism in? Well it looks like the Dems are going to...

It's just that NSA doesn't want to adhere to the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause" standard. Read Drum's post, & the NYT article he links (the WaPo is more useless than usual), if you care about this issue at all.

The causal connection (Osama tape ---> let's have more eavesdropping) is very odd. Is Osama running the U.S. gov't now?

At any rate, I'm all for increasing our surveillances powers as needed, provided that *some* sort of oversight is maintained. This should be possible. A "data mining" or somesuch operation could have its parameters approved by the FISA court, and that court could be required to sign off on any consequent surveillance of particular individuals.

In fact they cannot stop Bush because he is constitutionally allowed to do this. This is nothing but an attempted power grab by the congress of constitutional executive power.

And btw, Herb, people only agreed (by a razor-thin margin, at that) with the general concept of tapping suspected terrorist sympathizers/supporters. The thing "most Americans" strongly _disagree_ with is doing it in direct contravention of existing laws. But then, see my first paragraph...