Jack Kelly quotes the Anchoress, who describes a recent conversation with a neighbor at the supermarket on democrat partisanship and MSM coverage of the NSA Flap. The Democrats and the press seem to have lost all seriousness and all credibility regarding national security, ” says the Anchoress , to which her neighbor (a democrat) responds:

“Oh, you said a mouthful, kid! I’m so disgusted with my party I’m thinking of sittin’ out the next election, because these people have lost any sense of what their jobs are; they seem to think they were put into office to destroy Bush, and that is all that motivates them – it’s all they can think about, and they seem to think this is what they were charged with, when we put them in office. Hello? I didn’t freaking vote for Schumer to shove his face into every camera, promote himself and play obstruction games when we have a war to fight. I did not vote for Hillary so she could sit around waiting for opinion polls to tell her what to do before she runs for president, and you know what, if she doesn’t mean to be a senator then she shouldn’t be running for the seat in ‘06! Let her step aside, and be honest for once, and start her freakin’ presidential campaign, already, and let a serious legislator run for her seat – her office is rude and unresponsive, anyway – she’s useless! At least you call Schumer’s office, they are respectful – if you look for help, they actually respond, even if they don’t do anything, they send a freakin’ letter letting you know they know you’re alive and they need your vote again. Hillary’s office? They can’t be bothered with anyone! And don’t get me started on this Patriot Act nonsense! When I saw Reid saying they killed it I flipped out! I FREAKIN’ FLIPPED OUT! FOUR YEARS and we haven’t been attacked – what are Reid or Schumer or Hillary gonna say if they let the Patriot Act die and six months from now we’re attacked? They’re gonna blame Bush? Of course, they are, but they’re gonna have a hell of a time convincing the country that Bush is responsible for an attack when THEY were the ones who dropped the Patriot Act! And this FISA baloney is just that: BALONEY! I want to know whose (sic) leaking this crap! We had a big investigation on that stupid Valerie Plame deal, and who was she – she’s a nobody at a desk at Langley – we have two freakin’ years of investigations on that stupid issue, and it’s all probably Tim Russert’s doing, anyway – end it, already – let’s investigate who’s freaking LEAKING real national secrets! Whose leaking the CIA work? Whose leaking the surveillance? That’s what we need to know! THAT’S what we should be investigating, and if we find out who did it, we arrest the scum and throw him in jail, I don’t care who he is! I read that Jonathan Alter piece and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to puke my guts up! You know why? Because I remember something that maybe Alter has forgotten, that when 9/11 happened, Bush said he’d use ‘every tool’ at his disposal, and we all applauded that! Remember? We all said, THANK FREAKIN’ GOD this man is in charge, and he clearly means this! I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten what downtown NYC smelled like for weeks after the attack. I haven’t forgotten the big freakin’ hole in the city. I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to look at a plane taking off from the airport, and me worrying that it was going to be blown up before my eyes from some freakin’ crazed assh*le with a bomb in his shoe, or someone on the ground with a surface-to-air missile – I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN – and I’m getting damned fed up with my party leadership that seems to have forgotten, and I’ll tell you what, they had better start REMEMBERING, real soon, or they’re gonna find their asses tossed OUT, come November if they don’t get with the program! And don’t even get me started with the papers, I cancelled the freakin’ papers – I’m fed up with all of them! What do I need the papers for, so I can read how everything bad that happens in the whole world is Bush’s fault? I can predict what they’re gonna write! Now, I want news, I go look at the internet, I turn on C-span and watch things for myself! I’m an educated woman, and I can think for myself, I don’t need newspapers if they’re not gonna gimmee news!”

What if they gave a scandal and nobody came? asks one of Roger L. Simon’s commenters.

Posted by: chuck at December 24, 2005 05:07 PM

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The New York Times’ James Bamford cheerfully tells us all about “the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret,” and in the omniscient manner of journalists everywhere proceeds to evaluate the ultra-secret NSA’s current operations as “struggling to adjust to the war on terror.”

Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward.

Bamford naturally understands NSA’s mission better than its own leadership, or that of the elected administration. And he understands better too the limitations of data mining:

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country… “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands.”

Ignoring these insurmountable obstacles, Bamford scolds, the Bush Administration heedlessly proceeded to engage in automated data-mining, which he refers to as “eavesdropping.” Impersonal and automated monitoring of international communications searching for keywords, he thinks, should be out-of-bounds. US intelligence and defense agencies should be forced to investigate only on an individual basis, filling out the proper pile of paper work, and going to court, presenting a case, and obtaining an individual warrant. Such practices push the boundaries of the law, and might lead to tyranny.

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The Washington Post’s Susan Spaulding editorializes indignantly that the Bush Administration went right ahead, and covertly conducted an impersonal and automated search for potential terrorist communications in such secrecy “that Congress was [only] briefed ‘at least a dozen times’ in the four years since the wiretap program started.”

Presumably, the president should have funded an international advertising campaign to notify everyone what he was plannng to do, then conducted a full-scale national political debate before proceeding with a secret intelligence operation in time of war:

Even assuming that these classified briefings accurately conveyed all relevant facts, it appears that they were limited to only eight of the 535 senators and representatives, under a process that effectively eliminates the possibility of any careful oversight.

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In U.S. News & World Report, David E. Kaplan shrieks:

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.

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The more sensible Mickey Kaus notes ruefully:

Another spy scandal and Bush will be at 60%.

While the Wall Street Journal quotes St. Paul on standing fast in liberty, the New York Times is publishing ersatz further revelations from the Pouting Spook Community attempting to build a case that the Bush Administation has been guilty of illegally defending the United States from legitimate forms of dissent, such as detonating nuclear devices in major cities like New York.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

I find it very simple to refute the left’s nonsensical theories of sinister Executive Branch plots to violate the Constitution and stifle dissent. If the government were actually doing what it could, and should, be doing lawfully in time of war, none of these kinds of stories would be being published at all, since all domestic subversives (including the leaking doves and their jounalistic collaborators) would have long since been interned for the duration of the war to some inclement locality, an hour or so south of Barstow, California, where from behind barbed wire, they could devote their attention to herpetological studies and counting Joshua trees, instead of providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.

If anybody has doubts about the Blogosphere constituting a serious form of media expression these days, I would point to the Sunday New York Times turning to Iraqi blogs for response on the recent election.

I found the Times’ choice of blogs interesting.

The first blog quoted was: A Star from Mosul, written by “Aunt Najma,” a 17 year old school girl, who has been posting from war-torn Mosul, deep in Sunni Iraq. It is impossible not to like this charming young girl (proud of recently becoming an aunt), who posts fairly regularly concerning the dangers and inconveniences the war has brought to her life. When I began reading her, she was apolitical, but in recent months as the fighting neared her home, her postings became anti-American. Najma reports that a Mufti informed residents of Mosul this time that voting was a religious duty, and Najma’s family responded enthusiastically. Her election post ended on a patriotic note.

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The Times’ second blog was predictable. It was, of course, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning. Its author describes Baghdad Burning as a “girl blog,” and uses as an epigraph: I’ll meet you ’round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend. But Baghdad Burning consistently features a lot more strident and inflammatory anti-Americanism than it does healing and mending. This one was a dead certain cinch for NYT selection.

Riverbend tells us in the Times:

Many Iraqis went to vote because the current situation is intolerable. It’s not so much with high hopes for drastic change that people went to the polls as it is in the national aspiration of putting an end to the occupation, and to the tyranny of the last year in particular….
In my opinion, elections in Iraq cannot be democratic under a foreign occupation – especially when the election lists were composed largely of the same people who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are recycling the same names, faces and ideologies of sectarian and ethnic divide.

Even so positive a concession as the admission of a large electoral turnout was reserved by Riverbend for the Times. Baghdad Burning has not been updated with the material appearing in today’s Times, and sits sullenly without new postings since Thursday, December 15, just before the election. Riverbend is refusing to acknowledge the news she doesn’t like, news of the size of the turnout and the election’s success. I used to consider this blog worth a regular look. Its author was obviously a passionate America hater, but I thought the blog worth reading as an effective voice for a particular point of view. This little exercise in self censorship shows just how honest a voice Baghdad Burning really is. Chances are “Riverbend” has a great big, bushy mustache, and is really the nephew of “Baghdad Bob,” aka Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information.

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No. 3 was an Iraqi blog I didn’t know, titled: Eject: Iraqi Konfused Kollege Kid. “The kid himself” brought an apolitical youthful rocker’s perspective to the election:

IRAQ’S first Election Day last January was another Anyday for me. As a so-called Sunni who would rather be identified as “Iraqi,” I wasn’t really into politics… Now, I’m not the kind of person who simply gets up and does whatever his ayatollah tells him to do, but I was rather fed up with all the bad blood that resulted from American-installed sectarian policy, and I felt that voting would restore much-needed balance….I chose List 618 (the so-called Sunni list), not because I want an Islamic government, but to restore the balance between Sunnis and Shiites. I considered the secularist Allawi list (731) for some time, but something told me that guy’s going to win anyway. Besides, Ahmad Radhi, Iraq’s most famous soccer player, is strangely supporting 618.

“The kid himself” is not a high volume blogger. He hasn’t posted since Monday, December 12, and his posts have nothing to say about politics. Way to go, Times, there’s a great job of journalism, really getting the real inside dope on the Iraqi point of view on the election.

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No. 4 was Hassan Karuffa, a civil engineering student, and the author of A Star from Mosul‘s cousin, who writes An Average Iraqi. Hassan, like his cousin, was much more enthusiastic about this election. He does describe some of the electoral slates who were running in a recent posting. Alas! for the Times, Hassan too strikes a positive note:

Looking back at the things we achieved since the war, I feel very proud. Although we hear shootings and bombings every day. We reached this far, and we are going on, on and on to the finish. Yes, I am optimistic about the future. Life in Iraq has been so bad so far, but I see a bright future. I see an Iraq with full-time electricity, full-time water and full-time security.

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Studiously overlooked by the Times were Iraq the Model and Hammorabi, both pro-American, and both far more more widely read, and much more politically substantive than the Times’ choices: three nice kids plus Baghdad Bob’s hairy nephew.

Christopher Shea reports:

Victor Yakovenko, a physicist at the University of Maryland, happens to think that current patterns of economic inequality are as natural, and unalterable, as the properties of air molecules in your kitchen.

He is a self-described “econophysicist.” Econophysics, the use of tools from physics to study markets and similar matters, isn’t new, but the subfield devoted to analyzing how the economic pie is split acquired new legitimacy in March when the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, in Calcutta, held an international conference on wealth distribution.

Econophysicists point out that incomes and wealth behave suspiciously like atoms. In the United States, for example, beneath the 97th percentile (roughly $150,000), the dispersion of income fits a common distribution pattern known as “exponential” distribution. Exponential distribution happens to be the distribution pattern of the energy of atoms in gases that are at thermal equilibrium; it’s a pattern that many closed, random systems gravitate toward. As for the wealthiest 3 percent, their incomes follow what’s called a “power law”: there is a very long tail in the distribution of data. (Consider the huge gap between a lawyer making $200,000 and Bill Gates.)

Other developed nations seem to display this two-tiered economic system as well, with the demarcation lines differing only slightly.

To an econophysicist, the exponential distribution of incomes is no coincidence: it suggests that the wealth of most Americans is itself in a kind of thermal equilibrium. To change it, “you will have to fight entropy,” Yakovenko says. That people aren’t mindless atoms and that governments try limited wealth redistribution doesn’t really matter, he adds: large, complex systems have their own statistical logic that trumps individual, and state, decisions. In March, Yakovenko told New Scientist that “short of getting Stalin,” efforts to make more than superficial dents in inequality would fail. Recent increases in inequality in the United States, he adds, stem from the rising fortunes of the top 3 percent; there has been little change in the rest of the distribution.

Editor & Publisher is previewing an article from next Sunday’s New York Times to be titled “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Michael Crowley evidently concludes that blogs on the Right do a better job of using their on-line soap-boxes to influence the public debate, while liberal blogs primarily just talk to liberal audiences. We knew that already.

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Ho, ho! The contemptible Atrios is blogging indignantly, in his usual foul-mouthed manner, and in extreme looney-tune-leftist paranoid mode about how it wouldn’t even matter

If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn’t have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they’re there and the Right is better at using them but they don’t really *need* them

Because we’ve got on our side, according to the addled Atrios,

both the massive right wing media

(Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News [sort of], and the Manchester Union-Leader]

and the mainstream media.

Welcome NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, 5000 other papers, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, HBO and Showtime, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the NY Review of Books, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and these days, Fly Rod & Reel and Field & Stream, all former leftist MSM stalwarts to the Right!

Poor Little Atrios alone on the barricades with only, what? the Daily Worker? Mother Jones? CounterPunch? on his side.

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

is the title of a chin-stroking meditation in the Sunday New York Times News of the Week in Review section. Home ownership has traditionally been viewed as a good thing all around. But is it, after all… entirely? wonders the Times. Certainly, there are positives, but it’s hard to be sure about the role of home-ownership in some things the Times is not at all keen on:

Owning a home relates to a bunch of other things, too, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that homeownership causes or encourages them. For instance, according to the 1998 study, homeowners are older, richer, more likely to vote Republican, and more than half of them own guns, while only a quarter of renters do.

“There’s a pervasive problem in trying to sort out whether there is something intrinsic about homeownership that causes these externalities or whether the people that become homeowners are the kind of people that generate these externalities,” said James Poterba, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.