Flit(tm)

Progress in Palestine

Although the folks at The Corner may not see it, Hamas just gave George Bush 50% of US demands that Hamas no longer have an armed wing and recognize Israel's right to exist. This confirms that Hamas can count past its fingers and toes and knows what "making payroll" means for a government. This is encouraging. As the old song says, "one down, one to go, another town and one more show".

Hamas can bluster and fuss all it wants. They can keep their dignity and never admit they are giving in. That doesn't change the fact that they are giving in. Democracy forces people to grow up. Let's hope that the process is fast and relatively painless. When the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is folded into the Palestinian military structure, we'll really have made progress on ending the good cop/bad cop game of palestinian irresponsibility.

At that point, funding cutoffs become realistic because violence against Israel is violence initiated by the State. The PA will be responsible because they will have all the guns. Hopefully, Hamas will never lose the ability to count and never forget that they have to meet payroll and are utterly unable to do so without major outside help, 40% of their budget coming from the West (US & EU).

A Just Way for Google to Engage the PRC

After reading this condemnation of the left, I guess I better put my marker down on the Google/PRC censorship brouhaha. I think that Google, on balance, should move into the PRC. There is nothing, at least as far as I can tell, that would prevent them from providing a penance for their sins. If Google is to remain committed to its "do no evil" ethos, it has to explicitly work to overcome the necessary compromise in censorship.

It could do so by providing the list of censored terms in real time. By providing the list, it both aids in working around the censorship and also gives a fascinating bit of information for the world to see, what is the PRC government afraid of its people learning? A lot of the list would be unsurprising. Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, are almost guaranteed to be on the list. But I would be very surprised if the full list didn't also provide information on certain sensitive spots that virtually nobody knows the PRC is paranoid about. Who on the CCP purged list is also on the Internet censorship list?

There's no reason to just pick on the PRC. What search terms is Google blocking in France or Germany? Are there any blocks in the US? What are they? Engagement isn't worth a damn if you don't try to move the societal pile towards freedom. Boycotts aren't worth much either if you don't give the target a way out. Here's a way out. Here's a way to move the pile.

Laffering All the Way to the Bank

Every year, the CBO estimates how much money is going to come in. It changes those estimates based on changes in the tax law and will also research speculative estimates when legislation is under consideration. Donald Luskin reports that the 2003 capital gains tax cut turned the prior CBO estimate of $125B in revenue for 2004-2005 into one of $98B. The actual figure for capital gains tax revenue is $151B for those two years.

In other words, we have $26B in the US Treasury that we wouldn't have had had we kept prior tax policy. We gained actual money by lowering tax rates on "the rich".

This is a very good thing for the country. It also happens to vindicate standard conservative economic theory, specifically the Laffer Curve. I do wonder if Democrats will take note?

Letter to the Paper LI

Donklephant contends that there is no difference between Bush and Kerry Iran policy. I beg to differ in comments.

So what was GWB's last Iran policy? In public, it was non-interference with EU diplomatic efforts. Today, it's non-interference with Russian diplomatic efforts. The hidden caravan moves on despite all the noisy barking.

Iraq's shia are playing a dangerous cross-border game and the US is going to support it. The end result, if it works, will be a declaration of heresy from Najaf/Karbala and the fall of the Iranian regime as it's remaining support, religious conservatives, breaks apart.

Religious fights aren't fought the same way that secular ones are. The bombs can be one phrase in a 50 page document. Take Pope Benedict's 1st encyclical. It's ostensibly about love and that is, in fact, its real object. But then we have this:

In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant.

In other words, pay attention muslims! Pay attention haters of all stripes. God is love, not hate, and when somebody says that you have a duty to hate someone, that person is not from God.

No doubt, what will set off the Iran/Iraq religious strife is going to sound just as innocuous outside of Shia Islam as an agnostic may perceive the Papal statement above. Hopefully, it will have deadly consequences for Khomeinism and the current regime in Iran.

Getting back to the Kerry/Bush thing, I was absolutely convinced that we were sending troops into Iraq long before we declared hostilities to have resumed in order to prepare the battle space. I don't think a President Gore would have done that. I don't think that President Kerry would have instituted a hidden campaign against Iran or would push the wedge issue of Shia heresy as a solution for the problem of Iran. Later events showed that we had, in fact, sent troops in to prepare the battlefield in Iraq in advance of hostilities. Only time will tell if the hidden campaign that I (and probably many on the right) assume is going on is also a reality or just wishful thinking.

Hamas in Power

Well, Hamas won and now everybody has to deal with it. President Bush in today's press conference took the bull by the horns:

Q Mr. President, is Mideast peacemaking dead with Hamas' big election victory? And do you rule out dealing with the Palestinians if Hamas is the majority party?

THE PRESIDENT: Peace is never dead, because people want peace. I believe -- and that's why I articulated a two-state solution early in my administration, so that -- as a vision for people to work toward, a solution that recognized that democracy yields peace. And the best hope for peace in the Middle East is two democracies living side-by-side.

So the Palestinians had an election yesterday, and the results of which remind me about the power of democracy. You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls -- and if they're unhappy with the status quo, they'll let you know. That's the great thing about democracy, it provides a look into society.

And yesterday the turnout was significant, as I understand it. And there was a peaceful process as people went to the polls, and that's positive. But what was also positive is, is that it's a wake-up call to the leadership. Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care.

And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. I like the competition of ideas. I like people who have to go out and say, vote for me, and here's what I'm going to do. There's something healthy about a system that does that. And so the elections yesterday were very interesting.

On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing. The elections just took place. We will watch very carefully about the formation of the government. But I will continue to remind people about what I just said, that if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace. And we're interested in peace.

I talked to Condi twice this morning. She called President Abbas. She also is going to have a conference call today about the Quartet -- with the Quartet, about how to keep the process on the road to peace.

Steve.

Q If I can follow up, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Are you cautioning Prime Minister Abbas not to resign? And --

THE PRESIDENT: We'd like him to stay in power. I mean, we'd like to stay in office. He is in power, we'd like him to stay in office. Sorry to interrupt. I knew this was a two-part question, so I tried to head it off.

Q Will this affect aid to the Palestinians? Will you be able to work with Hamas if they're -- assuming they take on a large share of the government?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally, Israel, and that people must renounce that part of their platform. But the government hasn't formed yet. They're beginning to talk about how to form the government. And your question on Abbas was a good one. And our message to him was, we would hope he would stay in office and work to move the process forward.

Again, I remind people, the elections -- democracy is -- can open up the world's eyes to reality by listening to people. And the elections -- the election process is healthy for society, in my judgment. In other words, it's -- one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box. And that's exactly what happened yesterday. And you'll hear a lot of people saying, well, aren't we surprised at the outcome, or this, that, or the other.

If there is corruption, I'm not surprised that people say, let's get rid of corruption. If government hadn't been responsive, I'm not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.

And so that was an interesting day yesterday in the -- as we're watching liberty begin to spread across the Middle East.

President Bush, short version, unless you want an aid cutoff, Hamas, merge your militia into the PA armed forces and change your charter so it doesn't mandate war.

The EU, not being unitary, is less organized but it seems to be lining up on a parallel course. If Hamas wishes to be able to pay government salaries or even continue its own charitable work, it needs Western aid. That aid will not be forthcoming without a renunciation of violence and a merger of the PA armed forces with the Hamas militia under the PA banner.

Egoism Is Not the Only Sin

TCS has an article talking down manifestos and romanticism. This is all well and good and cold water does need to be dumped on an absurdly large number of "head in the clouds" scatter brains. Unfortunately, he picks a poor example, the idea that the Internet has created a different enough experience that we've got something truly new going on. In fact the Internet is something new, something different in the form of orders of magnitude cheaper information storage and transmission. This radical change means that the information stream is significantly harder to reduce and filter than it is to just let pass. The larger that gap gets, the more behavior is going to go on that is useless or annoying to the powers that be but just isn't worth squashing. This is important because it creates a growing gap between contol regimes, reminiscent of the old medieval "free cities" that escaped feudal restrictions and eventually led to the downfall of the system.

Anyway, here's my comment.

With the Internet suite of technologies the cost (both monetary and nonmonetary) of transmitting and storing information has been lowered by orders of magnitude. Whenever you lop a few zeros of any cost, odd things happen. When the commodity being altered is as widespread and useful as information, the odd things that happen filter throughout society and have large impacts everywhere.

While it is true that the volume of traffic devoted to porn is quite high, this says more about the failure of moral guardians in our various societies than anything about the Internet. The only thing that the Internet is doing is lowering costs to transmit/store and increasing the ability to search out whatever you want in comfortable pseudonymity.

Radically reducing costs increases the amount of unimportant things committed to information systems. Past a certain point, it's more expensive to sort than to just store it all.

This virtual society of abundance leads to a quest for attention, influence, and reputation, Things that are not affected by the lowered costs of the Internet. There are tens of millions of blogs but how many operate at the level of an Instapundit or Daily Kos? The long tail of blogs create the bulk of the traffic but they have no influence, no reputation to speak of. They are generally unimportant unless they consistently offer good content at which point they rise in the standings and start to be widely read. The same power law phenomenon that affect blogs affect most other communities on the 'Net.

The writer sees unfamiliar rules presented in insider shorthand and imagines there are no rules at all. I recommend a decent course of ESR. Homesteading the Noosphere is especially apropos.

12:28 PM | Comments

Dividing Lines

Alvaro Vargas Llosa critiques the too common (and too emotional) fears that Latin America is swinging back to leftist radicalism and a resurgence of communist revolutionary excess. The labels of left and right are too limiting, according to Mr Vargas Llosa. Instead, the left should be divided between herbivores and carnivores. The carnivores are Castro and Chavez, leaders who are not only leftist but toxic to civil society and political freedom. The herbivores, though no less wrong on economic theory are tolerable in their practice, not least of which is that they simply will not try to retain power once the people want a new choice. This latter brand of leftist seems to be what is currently on the rise.

The right has its herbivores and carnivores too. Pinochet was a carnivore, for instance, as were many of the military juntas of yore. But today's right is decidedly not dominated by carnivores. In fact, I can't think of one right-wing latin american carnivore in power or likely to get power in the future.

For Latin America to become a normal political zone, the left has to go through this process too. The herbivores must triumph and only then will the people be safe.

Got to Move Soon

I go through mood swings in my writing. Sometimes I want to write posts. Other times, it's comments that get my juices flowing. Unfortunately, my current arrangements don't allow for comments so when I get in a "comment" mood, I end up commenting in other people's conversations and not on my own blog's. I've got to change that.

Now if only I could afford it.

Will Pixar Buy Disney?

There are lots of stories out and about mooting a Disney purchase of Pixar Steve Jobs' other hugely successful company. What's not there is any sort of analysis of Steve Jobs' other company, NeXT and how that guppy swallowed the beached whale that was Apple at the time. If you look at the top executives of NeXT and Apple at the time of the merger and then took a snapshot of Apple's executives a short two years later, all the Apple people were gone, either replaced by outsiders or by their NeXT counterparts. In a very real sense, the corporation known as Apple is Apple in name and brand only. What is sitting at 1 Infinite Loop is NeXT in terms of corporate culture and philosophy which is all that really matters.

If Steve Jobs allows himself to be acquired again, is it really reasonable to think that he'll go through such a merger with anything less than the intention of proving that he can do the same fantastic trick all over again? Why would he tie himself down with a boss when he doesn't have to? Pixar can get a distribution deal anywhere, with anyone. It's got one of the best batting records of any studio in the world. So why sell? For a man with an ego the size of Steve Jobs there has to be more than money at stake. Taking Disney and turning it into a Pixar writ large would fit. Is there any other challenge that would justify the deal? I don't think so.

Best Blond Joke

Donald Sensing joins the Conga line with the best blond joke ever.

EFI

As I speculated earlier might happen Apple is going with Intel's next generation EFI. This quite likely means that buying a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 in 2007 will permit you to install that OS on non-Apple hardware. All that need happen is for Dell to implement their EFI systems for Vista the same way or a way compatible to Apple so that a little firmware adjustment will allow OS X to run.

There are some neat things that Apple's ported over from its previous firmware system OpenFirmware to EFI. Target Disk Mode is one of them. I can plug in a laptop to a desktop with a firewire cable, hold down the T key and turn it on. It boots as a hard disk. This makes it very easy to recover data on a heavily virused disk because the compromised OS doesn't run at all. It's just another new disk available to the admin system. I hope that Windows will be supporting that too when Microsoft gets around to releasing Vista.

Hard Kill v Soft Kill in Iran

An old conversation cycles through my head lately. Dr. Thomas Barnett, in email wrote repeatedly that the US should go after the soft-kill in Iran. He just did it again on his blog. Connect with them and drown the mullah's madness in outside interdependence and relationships that compete with loyalty to the regime. I reject the idea, feeling that it's just not going to work, not that it couldn't in some idealized world but that the real world craziness of the mullahs would make it impossible. I fear I didn't carry my argument off very well, certainly not well enough to convince.

President Ahmadinejad seems to be fixated on carrying my argument for me. He's playing a special mullah version of 'crazy Nixon'. Nixon ran heavy bombing raids against North Vietnam during the Paris Peace Conference according to later reports in order to convince the PRC that Nixon was somewhat unhinged and that the US shouldn't be pushed too hard. President Ahmadinejad seems to be setting up a scenario specifically tailored against letting "soft kill" work. In all conflicts, the enemy gets to have a vote and the Iranian government seems to have voted to protect itself from the soft kill.

Iran doesn't fear the hard kill because it perceives that nobody who has the force levels necessary to accomplish the goal is free to act. The soft kill is the major threat so the Iranian hardliners will make themselves as repulsive as necessary to make it politically impossible to strategically coopt them by economic and social contacts with the West combined with political engagement. Iranian policy for hard liner survival must be all connectivity shall be mediated connectivity with safe implicit villains filtering out the unwanted aspects of international contact. This is a real, practical motivation behind the apocalyptic statements of President Ahmadijenad.

This takes care of western contact but what is left is the Iraqi threat. Iraq's religious scholars have a consensus belief that Khomeinism is heresy. If they are successful at establishing a superior alternative in Iraq, they are a deep threat to the regime as they have influence with the regime's strongest supporters, the ultra-conservative minority that forms the backbone of what's left of regime support (which putters around 30%). These scholars are neutralized by Iranian influence in Iraqi movements like the SCIRI and the Sadrists. Placing assassins near enough to the scholars so that they can remove anybody who writes anti-Khomeinist fatwas as an object lesson to silence the others neutralizes the threat from Najaf and Karbala.

Iran's doing a very good job at defending on both the hard kill of invasion (fomenting trouble in Iraq to keep US forces occupied) and the soft kill of connectivity. No matter how open and inviting the West resolves to be, we must maintain a level of self-respect and dignity. Ahmadinejad will ensure that we must degrade ourselves further than we can bear to avoid the soft-kill's deadly embrace of reforming connectivity.

Small Effects Consistency

The crux of the global warming position is the assertion that the small amounts of human inputs into weather systems via pollution of various types are sufficient to measurably change the weather. It occurs to me that nobody ever really gives us the relevant % that human activity contributes to these systems. The reason to want to know that number is to examine proposed large human projects and see if their effects will trip the threshold. For instance, how much of the earth's surface can you cover with solar cells before you start affecting the weather? Will it be a warming or cooling effect? How much energy can you extract out of wind, tidal surge, or river current before you achieve the same altering effects?

Are renewable energy sources really the environmentalist free lunch that everybody makes them out to be. It would be painful to find out that we've ripped out our infrastructure to make room for vast "green" energy structures that had their own nasty climate forcing effects. It would not surprise me in the least to find near zero studies on the subject.

Securing Against EMP

All I could think of when I read this scare story regarding an EMP attack is "Why aren't people insuring themselves against this?" and I still can't imagine why not. It's not really that hard to set up a reasonable scheme. You talk to manufacturers and get them to license the production of certain replacement components in their current lines, the ones that would be vulnerable to EMP blast. Your license to produce only kicks in after there has been an EMP attack so their current supply chain has no problems with this new arrangement. Even if their equipment would survive, there's no way they could deal with the surge in demand at the time so they're not really losing anything.

You offer EMP insurance for reasonably low prices in the form of guaranteeing the existence of hardened production facilities to create the parts needed to replace EMP damaged components and granting the right to buy when an EMP blast goes off. You have a small factory that is created to produce very short runs of electronics quickly with stock sealed to prevent EMP damage. Under normal conditions, such a plant is uneconomic but if nobody is operating due to component failures, such a plant is worth pure gold in restarting factory lines or in replacing hard to find, discontinued parts.

Alternatively, you offer safe, secure storage for the necessary parts in bunkers designed to withstand any EMP blast and simply store these parts for your clients, something like a safety deposit box. It's a reasonable solution for larger institutions like UPS that might need thousands of truck computer replacements to get their fleet back up to snuff. A secondary line would be selling off that inventory of replacement parts for your clients when they change equipment models and no longer need the parts they had been storing.

Prime customers would be the very SCADA system managers that the authors fear would lead to cascading societal failure. However, if the system could be made efficient enough, paying insurance to maintain idle, expensive, hardened production capacity might be a fairly standard rider offered by all sorts of existing property insurance, such as renters, auto, and home insurances as well as part of extended warranty offers on lots of electronics.

A Small Thought On Inversion

Rates have recently started to flatten and even started to invert. This means that it costs less to borrow money for the use of the US government for 10 years than it does to borrow it for 3 months. Considering our mammoth debt, why would we issue *any* short term paper at all? Why not just issue only 10 year notes or longer, pushing up the long rate with extra supply and lowering it on the short end with lower supply?

It's something of a puzzle.

How to Make Things Not Go to Hell in Peacetime

StrategyPage has a very informative list of items showing how military preparadness will inevitably backslide once peace breaks out. I can see why they've been true in the past but I don't see why all of them have to be true in the future. Out of five items, I think that two are solvable.

@ Make sure all troops have their basic infantry skills down cold. This means making sure that, during Basic Training, the civilian recruits get that necessary mental adjustment needed to deal with stress and combat. But Basic tends to get watered down in peacetime, mainly for political reasons. Too many (or just any) injuries during training can get the media and politicians in an uproar. During the 1990s, there was a major flap over the problems female trainees had keeping up with males. It wasn’t fair. For the moment, everyone is getting pretty strenuous Basic, but that will change one peacetime returns.

Why not make it a requirement to calculate the likely increased battle deaths that will be incurred by reducing training in infantry skills? By making the blood for money tradeoffs explicit, backsliding can be minimized.

@ Let the troops fire their weapons a lot, with real ammo. Marksmanship is a perishable skill, so you have to find the time, and money (for the ammo and building enough firing ranges) to do this. Gunfire is unpopular in peacetime, no matter how important it is. In wartime, it’s easier to get this done. Which is why the U.S. Department of Defense has, since September 11, 2001, been buying three times as much rifle and machine-gun ammo for training. Come peacetime, the amount of ammo bought will shrink, as will all that damn (to the increasing number of civilians building homes near military bases) noise.

Missing the Freaking Point

Not all ventilators are created equal and that's the point that Steven E. Landsburg fails to understand in his otherwise on target fisking of Yucutan man's generally idiotic tear jerker post blaming George W Bush for a terminally ill cancer patient's ventilator support withdrawal.

Let's face facts. Not every poor person gets the charity care that we'd wish they had. There isn't enough money to provide 1st class medical care equivalent to what a member of Congress or a corporate titan gets. There just isn't enough money even in the most liberal of fantasy budgets.

So when you have X ventilator bed days available in your charity care budget, who do you give it to? Do you give two weeks of ICU to the poor guy who got caught in a building fire and has smoke inhallation and serious burns allowing him to recover and go back to supporting his family or do you give two more weeks to the terminal cancer patient who is waiting for her mom so that she can have her plug pulled and die in her mother's arms?

Did her brother offer a spare room and rent a ventilator for $80 a day? Let's say they did an ambulance transport (~$500), bought a hospital bed (~$700), and got somebody from the neighborhood to stay with her (~$700/wk). If mom took two extra weeks we're talking about under $4000 in expenses here. Her family could have raised that. Her family could have financed that. They didn't care enough to set back their own financial plans. (In reality, you'd shop for a cheaper bed or rent it and you'd pay more for skilled nursing visits but I can't find the appropriate numbers).

Hospital beds are an expensive way to wait to die. ICU beds are ~$1800 a day. That's the hospital overhead with all that equipment, all that specialized training waiting to resuscitate you at the drop of a hat. A two week wait for mom to show up would have pulled ~$25,000 from that hospital's charity care budget.

Tirhas Habtegiris' family decided that if society wasn't willing to pay ~$25k, they weren't personally willing to pay ~$4k and spend the time and effort to keep Tirhas alive. The reality is that Tirhas was failed. But it was her family that failed her. Her touching wish didn't merit her family's consideration. Why should society have granted her wish at 6 times the cost? And if her mom would have taken more than two weeks to arrive, the cost differential would have widened, not narrowed.

Providing charity care is something that a decent society does. You can do it publicly, privately, or using a mix of the two systems. It's always rationed though and the bottom of the list for that sort of care is, and should be, very expensive care for the terminally ill that has no medical benefit. The hospital, no doubt, would have been willing to move her home, helped out with providing a ventilator, maybe even educated a family member how to tend to the machine so Tirhas could have her wish. All that could have been done for less net expense. Hospitals are willing to do all sorts of unorthodox things if they're asked. Instead, Tirhas stayed in ICU and she died of it.

It's a real shame.

I'm speaking as someone who has gone through the process, including paying the bills afterwards (in my case the relative lived and continues to live). This sad story could have ended differently. The system provided a way out. The family either didn't choose to take it or the hospital didn't educate them that there was an alternative. Either way, the fault is not George W Bush's.

From the Google Cache

I'm currently in a bit of a spat over at City Comforts regarding the warrantless foreign taps where 1 end is inside the US. In the process of setting up my current reply, I find that something that I relied upon is in danger of dying from bit rot. Thus I'm going to rescue it and put it up on my own blog.

From Google cache here's a very useful comment on the FISA process from Jim Rockford, originally on The Moderate Voice.

Jim Rockford (mail):
What are the stakes? NY Posts reports that there was a conference with Feds, locals in NYC for atomic bombing disaster relief. Prediction: 1.6 million dead.

Those are the stakes. Pretty high if you ask me.

Next, what is FISA? You can read the WHOLE THING online at Cornell.edu . Just google it (use Cornell.edu as the domain in advanced search) and "FISA Law" as the search term.

It's true that almost no FISA warrant is turned away. The real gate is the application process which has ELEVEN major steps and requires about 6 months time to complete from start to finish. These steps are set BY LAW in the FISA statute itself.

The require certification in WRITING by the National Security Advisor (actually, his legal staff which likely runs about 3-10 people and is a bottleneck) on the facts of the issue, WHY the information is foreign intelligence, WHY it cannot be gotten any other way through normal investigative MEANS; and specific minimization issues to protect privacy of any intercepted communications.

The FISA statute is written to limit wiretaps, and requires extensive documentation for each "facility" i.e. telephone, computer, cell phone etc and limits to that facility. If Joe Jihadi walks into a friends place and it's not on the FISA Warrant specifically, no dice. You can tap but have to go back in 72 hours with the National Security Advisor AND the AG written approval.

Which are the two big bottlenecks. Legal staff is going to push back for the bare minimum; their job is to CYA their own legal behinds; and then their bosses. Bad guy catching and terrorism prevention are low on that list. This is why Clinton despite being over-run by terrorism and not being either stupid or a fool rarely used FISA warrants. Consider 1993 WTC attack; the Blind Sheik bridge and tunnel bombing plots; Cole, Khobar Towers, 1998 Embassy bombings, the Millenium LA Airport plot, etc. Clinton hardly applied for FISA warrants because it's a massive undertaking for "circle the fighter jets over the airfield boys!" You can only go to that well once or twice. You can't just add lawyers to NSA or AG staff; these are limited positions with high national security vetting, from a limited pool of people.

You capture 9/11 and 1993 WTC attack architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and find his laptop computer. He has over a hundred names or phone numbers in the US. Imagine the effort to prepare a 2 inch thick binder for the FISA court full of documentation and carefully sworn written affadavits that won't cause legal problems for the lawyers or their bosses.

FISA was written in 1978 to basically kill with paperwork all but a handful of wiretap warrants, and it did it's job quite well.

Bush argues that if one end terminates overseas, he has a right under terrorism fighting authority as Executive to listen in on that conversation as long as it is related to and tied to information gathered about Al Qaeda activities. If Bush's actions wrongly cause an innocent person to be wiretapped, the worst is that time is wasted by investigators and some secret info of a man or woman's personal life is overheard and soon forgotten as the lead is dropped.

If Russ Feingold's advice to never wiretap at all unless you can push it through FISA, the worst that can happen is that promising leads simply can't get through the system and to the Judge because of the show-stopping requirements, and information that could stop an attack killing 1.6 million people is never obtained.

I know what MY RISK PROFILE IS. Perhaps you'd trade 1.6 million people for civil liberties absolutism. Not I.

In the event of the worst case; 1.6 million people dead, I can imagine not a mosque standing and many Muslims simply dead or interned. A military government. And strategic nuclear retaliation. I think GWB is ironically the greatest protector of civil liberties seen in generations. Yes there is a reason he's angry.

Consider these stakes. Or pretend the fact that we were not hit despite London, Beslan, Bali, Madrid, Tunisia, Amman, Istanbul, Thailand, etc was because bin Laden really likes us now. Or he's no threat. Or maybe what GWB did actually saved lives.

I happen to disagree with Jim Rockford on the nature of the threat. I'm pretty sure that if we were to undergo an order of magnitude higher casualties than 9/11 (30k instead of 3k), we'd have enough anger to roll through constitutional amendments that would gut current protections. We wouldn't have to go all the way up to losing an entire city and million plus casualties. We'd lose the Constitution well before then. The rot has set in enough that we've already endangered political free speech with campaign finance reform and that's just over instances of buying policy outcomes. When lives are at stake, tens of thousands of funerals are already being held, the paper protection of the Constitution won't last long and it'll be overthrown in a way that can't be lawyered away, by amendment and with teeth in it that can't be gotten around.