Christmas Eve

Last-minute shopping (and shopping today is last minute, shopping yesterday was kind of last minute, but anytime before that is nowhere near last minute; someone at work sent out an e-mail two-and-a-half or three weeks ago with suggestions for last-minute shoppers, and I deleted it immediately for irrelevance) and preparations took up most of the day today. Here in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., there didn't seem to be throngs of people shopping. Either that means that most everybody else is more organized than I am or retailers didn't have the bumper year they were hoping for. Supposedly the economy is taking major steps toward improvement, but it doesn't feel that way. Maybe the more well-to-do journalists are looking at their tax cuts and assuming that the benefits will trickle down to the rest of us (as they so often have in the past).

Most everybody's attention is anywhere but on the news, and I had to go looking to see if there were any developments worth noting. The New York Times had more on the NSA spying situation. Apparently the NSA got American telecommunications companies to secretly give them all kinds of data about telephone and Internet communications to sift through for interesting connections. The Bush Administration has tried this kind of thing before (the Times mentions the Pentagons Total Awareness System and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program), but they've had to abandon it after a significant hue and cry. Will it happen again?

In another front of the war, the business magazine Barron's (like the Wall Street Journal, put out by Dow Jones), suggested Congress take a serious look at impeachment:

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

(quote via Atrios; non-subscription link via Article 19)

They may have made the statement on Christmas Eve, but Barron's is extremely influential, and this is a major story. I'll keep an eye on it to see if anything develops or it gets buried. I know which one the Bushies are hoping for.