John O’Sullivan in Sun-Times has a credible pre-speech analysis of what Bush has been saying and will continue to say to “smuggle” ill-advised ideas into the immigration debate, such as promising to beef up border security with 6,000 natl guard people: a bad idea, says O’S:

You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.

Oh my.  How alarmingly reasonable.  He also makes hash of the denials of amnesty and cites expected #s of immigrants coming in thanks to a “compromise bill”: 

 [I]t doubles the number of legal immigrants — and [and] would admit 103 million new people over the next 20 years. It’s estimated that 19 million people would otherwise enter America over the same period.

And

the long-term cost of government benefits could be $30 billion per year or more: ”In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years” [says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation]. It was very sensible of the president not to bore the listeners with such details.

Sounds awful.  This is not Bush’s finest hour.

====================

Later: 

Here’s an angry response from a non-lib source, as quoted in Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web:

Steve Sailer on VDare.com writes: “The Bush Administration has seemed never to notice that Mexico is not the 51st state, but a foreign country–one that is engaged in a slow-motion invasion of America. . . . Why is Bush doing this? I have suggested that his motives are dynastic–that he is selfishly sacrificing the GOP to build a family vehicle, much like Brian Mulroney sacrificed the Canadian Progressive Conservative party in a vain effort to build a personal fief in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Brenda Walker speculates he is a ‘MexiChurian Candidate.’ What he is not is an American patriot.”

Not B’s finest hour at all, no.

Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic in LA Times on silence at Harvard about the “Jewish lobby” paper by its drive-by Professor Walt and U Chi’s Professor Mearsheimer:

Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

No problem here, teachers et al. told her when she asked around about shots heard ‘round the world in furious dispute over the Walt-M 3/23 London Review of Books essay nailing Jews for lobbying vs. Arabs and turning the U.S. govt. around for their own purposes.  Her New Repub had run three articles.  She wondered what’s up in Cambridge, where dons get heated fairly easily.  Not this time.

One anecdote illuminated the puzzle. At a faculty meeting, the paper came up, and the department head remarked that she was sure everyone had the same reaction when they read it — approval. One professor piped up: “No, this article is rubbish!” The room became very quiet. Finally, someone changed the subject. Through moments like these, a de facto consensus developed not to discuss the paper at all.

It’s too serious for them to talk about it, apparently. 

Professors I spoke to offered various reasons they must tiptoe around the paper: That its style was too provocative. That they’re skittish after witnessing Harvard President Larry Summers’ ouster for making fractious comments. That the long-running PC wars have made them tired of controversy. That it’s too “personal.”

Anyhow, the Middle East is too hot a subject — “too strewn with ideological landmines for them because academics are supposed to be above dogma.”  Hence the Cold War doomsday scenario:

One observer close to the debate [explained ] that he had opinions concerning the paper but feared professional retaliation no matter what he might say.

“People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, “and promised that afterward everyone would be friends.”

Yes.  And we should bow to their superior wisdom?

From Wall St. Journal:

Liberals who object to datamining [as by NSA with telephone numbers] should wait until they see the “massive intrusion on personal privacy” that Americans will demand if the U.S. homeland gets hit again.

Moreover,

since the database doesn’t involve any wiretapping, FISA [the law vs. wiretapping without warrant] doesn’t apply. The FISA statute specifically says its regulations do not cover any “process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing.”

As for Di-Fi of Calif. (Feinstein) and invoking the 4th amendment,

the Supreme Court has already held (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that the government can legally collect phone numbers since callers who expect to be billed by their phone company have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” concerning such matters.

Leave us not forget the other Fein senator, Feingold of the great state of Wisconsin, who says

we should definitely be listening to al Qaeda but that Mr. Bush has committed an impeachable offense by doing it the wrong way. Republicans would love to see a Democratic Presidential nominee take that proposition into the 2008 election.

WSJ concludes by noting that “maybe–just maybe–the aggressive surveillance policies of the Bush Administration are one reason” why we haven’t been attacked since 9/11.  Maybe our fine senators should think more about that.

Lead for today’s Chi Trib headline story, “Bush: No laws were broken; Millions of phone records reportedly sold to NSA,” by Stephen J. Hedges and Mark Silva, Washington Bureau:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Thursday vigorously defended aggressive counter-terrorist electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency, which has obtained millions of domestic phone numbers in a so far successful effort to detect terrorist activity in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Kidding.  Here’s the real one, with italics added:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Thursday reacted defensively to news that the secretive National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, had obtained millions of domestic phone records in an effort to detect terrorist activity in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks.

I know it’s a lot to ask, but wouldn’t it be nice if Chi Trib writers & editors might sometimes let it go?

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.