See Power Line for common sense on today’s USA Today story about telephone numbers.  For instance,

 It’s considered a news flash that the NSA is collecting data on phone calls, with the cooperation of almost all of the major telecom companies, to look for suspicious patterns.  [Duh]

…………………….

[The] article identified Qwest as the one major carrier that declined the NSA’s request for cooperation. Presumably Qwest has now become the terrorists’ telecom company of choice. Way to go, USA Today!

[I]t’s obvious that what the NSA does with this vast amount of data is to run it through computers, looking for suspicious patterns, especially involving known or suspected terrorist phone numbers. I did a quick calculation: assuming that there are 200 million adult Americans, each of whom places or receives ten phone calls a day (a conservative estimate, I think), it would require a small army of 35,000 full-time NSA employees to pay a total of one second of attention to each call. In other words, lighten up: the NSA obviously isn’t tracking your phone calls with your friends and relatives.

On the other hand, PL points out, last summer’s London subway bombings were preceded by “a series of suspicious contacts from an unknown individual or individuals in Pakistan” which British intelligence knew about but did not listen in on.  Says PL:

These are exactly the kind of communications that are intercepted by the NSA under the terrorist surveillance program that has been widely denounced by Democrats.

George Will tears into Sen. McCain today in Sun-T as possessing a tin ear for what the hell he himself is talking about or utter disregard for the Constitution.

“I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government,” McClain told Don Imus 4/28.

In this he was consistent, of course, his McCain-Feingold law being a frontal attack on free speech, sold by demagoguery about corruption, about which McCain remains vague and oratorical.

He puts “first amendment rights” in scare quotes?  Would he do the same for “constitution” if he takes the oath of presidential office in January, 2009? Will asks, dissecting and explicating the man’s recent comments.

Why do newsies love him, anyhow?  Don’t they get it, that he’s soft on protecting free speech?

A little perspective, please, on the so-called domestic spying by Bush, a favorite item with bashers everywhere:

An obvious problem with the current debate over NSA surveillance is that it’s been personalized around President Bush. Many critics of the surveillance have an obvious hatred for the president that colors the way they see the administration’s actions. Thus, it’s instructive to see how the Roosevelt administration handled a similar situation on the eve of World War II. Our Spectator piece examines FDR’s surveillance program — and finds striking similarities to the present controversy. In researching the article, we obtained relevant memos from Justice Jackson’s archives at the Library of Congress that haven’t been previously discussed in the press.

Interesting, I’d say.  It’s in an American Spectator piece noted by PowerLine.  It begins:

IN A BOLD AND CONTROVERSIAL DECISION, the president authorized a program for the surveillance of communications within the United States, seeking to prevent acts of domestic sabotage and espionage. In so doing, he ignored a statute that possibly forbade such activity, even though high-profile federal judges had affirmed the statute’s validity. The president sought statutory amendments allowing this surveillance but, when no such legislation was forthcoming, he continued the program nonetheless. And when Congress demanded that he disclose details of the surveillance program, the attorney general said, in no uncertain terms, that it would get nothing of the sort.

In short, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt charted a bold course in defending the nation’s security in 1940, when he did all of these things.

And he did so before Pearl Harbor, while Bush’s surveillance is after our Pearl Harbor, 9/11.  He acted before we were at war, Bush after it.

Chi Trib today has two good stories and two good columns that struck the eye.  Probably more.  One story kicks off the Robert Sorich trial in federal court (where else?), all about City Hall patronage and job-stealing — that is, being sure jobs go to friends, which requires stealing them from qualified non-friends or neutrals.  It’s by Dan Mihalopoulos, Laurie Cohen and Todd Lighty, who do an excellent job summing up a citizen’s case, much of it the government’s too, against the newly constituted Dem machine.  It’s here.

The other story is another in an unannounced series about how farming out Austin High students to other schools has unleashed mayhem, this time at Clemente High.  Stephanie Banchero has this one.  An idea of what’s happening:

This year, nine teachers, an assistant principal and two deans were threatened or hit. Students were stabbed, choked and robbed, school reports show. A schoolyard brawl sucked in 40 students.

Amid all this, the principal of 10 years abruptly quit in March without a specific reason.

The columns are by Charles Krauthammer and Dennis Byrne, Trib’s Monday morning reliables, the former on Jews facing 1938 again, when Hitler promised their extermination and the world yawned.  Now it’s the Iranian president, soon to be nuclearly armed and happy to find so many Jews concentrated (no camps necessary) in one place, namely Israel.

Byrne’s is about pols lying in their teeth with (a) phony immigration legislation calling for unenforceable voluntary exile-taking by some 1.6 million Mexicans and others and (b) a new state budget that does it with mirrors but is declared marvelous by legislators who, Jack Horner-like, put their thumbs in pies and say what good boys they are.  Bully for them.

More on backlash from today’s Chi Trib:

Marches that turned out hundreds of thousands of people in support of immigrant rights also appear to have raised interest in the Illinois Minuteman Project, which supports a clampdown on illegal immigration.

The group, which began in Arlington Heights in October, had about 125 members until the first pro-immigrant rally was held in Chicago’s Federal Plaza in March, said Evert Evertsen, the group’s membership coordinator.

That number has grown to 360, he said, in the wake of that event and another massive march on Monday to Grant Park.