Wiretapping update: The Senate debates FISA

I don't have time to provide much summary, but the U.S. Senate is embroiled in a debate about wiretapping and other domestic surveillance. They passed a stopgap bill that expires in February and there are two key issues:

• Will phone companies that broke the wiretap law at the behest of the Bush administration be given immunity for their illegal activities?
• Will Congress give Bush a de facto censure by stripping his efforts to legalize the warrantless wiretapping after the fact?

Read more on it here.

What would you buy with $1.2 trillion?

You could buy a few of these things:

• A doubling of cancer research funding
• Treatment for heart disease and diabetes for every American needing it
• A global immunization campaign

Do these each for a decade and you've only spent half. You could still pay down a good 7 percent of the $8.6 trillion national debt.

Or, you could start and prosecute a war in Iraq.

To date, direct spending for the Iraq War has already reached $700 billion, with another $250 billion in anticipated costs to treat wounded and returned veterans, $100 billion to get the armed forces back to prewar fighting readiness, and other incidentals. All told, that's $1.2 trillion gone.

The author notes that it's not that $1.2 trillion is wasted, not if all goes well in Iraq. But it's to note that we need to evaluate whether the $1.2 trillion could have been better spent: on national security, fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or beefing up airport security. Any one of which would have had a higher success rate than this failed war.

John Lennon and National Security

If you're looking for a reason why John Lennon's FBI files are considered key to national security, you better ask the Bush administration. According to this story, several of the documents in his file are being kept classified long past the date that documents usually enter the public record. Perhaps it had to do with his fervent opposition to the Vietnam War, though I wouldn't put it past some Bush administration bureaucrat who's nervous about Lennon's wife's foreign name.