It promises powerful action against the terrible ‘scourge’ of tax evasion:

1. Tax authorities across the world should automatically share information to fight the scourge of tax evasion.
…
4. Developing countries [ed: like Greece, maybe?] should have the information and capacity to collect the taxes owed them – and other countries have a duty to help them.

Now, I’m all in favor of obeying tax law (and I do), and ending ‘free rides’. But isn’t it interesting that the alleged scourge (number one!) is G-8 governments feeling they don’t get enough from their people?

It would never be that governments spend too much – on promises they can’t deliver. Never that governments fail to live within their means. Never that they’re grinding their productive people to death with regulations and mandates.

Never, ever that governments are trying to collect too much tax, which kills the economy and which people are morally right to dislike and, to some extent, resist.

Remember, when you earn money, it’s your money. Or it should be. It only exists (for government to tax) because you took the initiative to earn it. You can prove it easily, by just not earning. Quit your job and live off the dole – as many people do.

Greedy governments drive their citizens into off-tax activity by claiming too much of what citizens earn. That’s the real scourge.

And what the G-8 really promise, in the quote above, is to share their surveillance of you – the better to fleece us all. Big Brother just got a little bigger. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find out in the next Obamascandal that the NSA and IRS share surveillance information – about everyone, and with foreign governments as well as each other.

Via Zero Hedge.

UPDATE: Don’t think government is greedy? Think again. Merely by cutting his $100 million Africa travel budget by a few million, Obama could have restored White House tours.

Via HotAir and The Weekly Standard, CNS News asked one of the bill’s opponents, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado:

“Many Democrats, when they were arguing for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting said even if this saves one life it will be worth doing. Why not support this bill then, if it undoubtedly will save lives of babies that have been carried throughout 5 months of pregnancy?”

Some have characterized DeGette’s answer to CNS as evasive, and I can’t agree that it was. In answer, DeGette stated her belief that the bill is unconstitutional and that the Kermit Gosnells of the world can be handled under criminal law. Ironically, that is the perfect answer to give against gun control (and many other Big Government overreaches).

Having said that: Just because DeGette gave a direct answer doesn’t mean she gave a good one regarding this bill – or that it isn’t a good question, one needing an answer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via HotAir. With Americans like that around, who needs al Qaeda?

But I’ll make it up to you, with something inspiring:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via Steve in the comments. While I don’t know anything about Senator Guillory, and I myself remain an Independent (not a Republican), his words ring true:

…the Left is only concerned with one thing: control. And they disguise this control as charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps: These programs aren’t designed to lift black Americans out of poverty; they were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control the black community.

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life, is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure! Our communities are just as poor as they have always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home, being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers, who control us by making us dependent on them.

Sometimes I wonder if the word ‘freedom’ is tossed around so frequently in our society that it has become a cliché.

The idea of freedom is complex and it’s all-encompassing. It’s the idea that the economy must remain free of government persuasion. It’s the idea that that the press must operate without government intrusion. And it’s the idea that the e-mails and phone records of Americans should remain free from government search and seizure. It’s the idea that parents must be the decision-makers in regard to their children’s education, not some government bureaucrat.

But most importantly, it’s the idea that the individual must be free to pursue his or her own happiness, free from government dependence and free from government control. Because to be truly free is to be reliant on no one, other than the Author of our destiny…

In that light, it’s interesting to note that beloved lefties Bill Maher, Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters all agree that it’s perfectly OK for a comedian to mock Sarah Palin’s Down Syndrome child as “retarded”:

Maher mocked Palin’s special needs son by referring to him as “retarded” during a June 8 Las Vegas show…

Walters, who grew up with a special needs sister, said on June 17 on The View that she did not think Maher was “mean-spirited” when he referred to Palin’s son as “retarded.” Walters speculated that Maher did not know the word could be hurtful…even Walters’s in-studio audience was not buying this defense and was left silent…

Goldberg lamely tried to assist Walters, saying “we, society took the word ‘retarded’ and made it into something derogatory…When I was a kid, it wasn’t derogatory…” Video here.

I regret that I couldn’t find the exact original quote of Maher’s, but Walters and Goldberg clearly wanted to speak out in Maher’s favor: the camera flashed to an old family photo of Walters’ as she spoke, which means that Walters’ remarks were planned.

So, what’s the official standard? Is it still baaaaad to refer to anybody (whether mentally challenged or not) as “retarded” – with an exception for Republicans perhaps, or Sarah Palin’s children? On what grounds?

Lefties, please don’t try to say “Oh who cares, it’s only Bill Maher” – because it isn’t, now: it’s also Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters.

Undercover video shot in May by a conservative activist shows two corporate distributors of free cell phones handing out the mobile devices to people who have promised to sell them for drug money, to buy shoes and handbags, to pay off their bills, or just for extra spending cash.

The ‘Obama phone,’ which made its ignominious YouTube debut outside a Cleveland, Ohio presidential campaign event last September, is a project of the Federal Communications Commission’s ‘Lifeline’ program, which makes land line and mobile phones available to Americans who meet low-income requirements.

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

That seems to be changing. Via HotAir, a CNN poll puts Obama’s approval rating at just 45%, a drop of eight points from a month ago. His disapproval is up nine points, to 54%.

RTWT. “The drop in Obama’s support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30…” “The number of Americans who think he is honest has dropped nine points over the past month, to 49%.”

UPDATE: We know he’s in trouble…because he’s lost Germany:

several hundred leftists staged a colorful demonstration on Monday afternoon in Berlin…with a poster showing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uttering his famous line, “I have a dream.” Underneath was Obama saying, “I have a drone.”

What now, are we supposed to believe that even German leftists must be motivated by racism? Oh wait…sorry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First, there is what Cheney didn’t say: Cheney apparently did not call Snowden a liar. I’m not sure if that puts Cheney at odds with Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who said last week:

“[Snowden] was lying…He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he’s even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

Rogers’ language is a bit slippery: He plants the word “lying” but doesn’t indicate that Snowden was lying about the most crucial revelations, namely, the extent of NSA surveillance of people’s phone records and Internet activities. Between that and Cheney’s apparent silence on the same, I will take the NSA surveillance revelations as ‘confirmed’.

Rogers and Cheney do both call Snowden a “traitor” and suggest that he is a front for someone else; perhaps China. They are not the first to wonder if he’s a front. I figured that Snowden could be acting for an NSA higher-up (who opposes the surveillance programs); but I never totally ruled out (and still don’t) that Snowden could be acting for China. It struck me as a bit odd, from the beginning, that Snowden is holed up with a foreign power which delights in the embarrassment to the U.S. here, and as well, benefits from it.

Anyway, Cheney goes on to strongly defend the NSA surveillance; he suggests it would have prevented the 9-11 attacks, and takes a ‘trust us’ type of stance.

I disagree with Mr. Cheney. I do so respectfully; he’s a great American, and there are two sides to every story. I come down on the Rand Paul / civil liberties side of this one. The current extent of surveillance goes well beyond anything I ever defended the Bush-Cheney administration doing.

And the Obama administration’s other scandals – for example, their IRS / Tea Party scandal, or their multiple spy-on-the-media scandals, or multiple occasions when they happily manipulated classified info for political gain, and/or lied to the American people – have, by now, proven that they (the Obama administration) are profoundly unworthy of trust.

UPDATE – Some tidbits from the last several days:

• Snowden was a prolific online commentor. (Heh)
• Thousands of firms trade confidential data with the U.S. government. Did you know that Internet companies answers tens of thousands of government requests per year?
• More video of the Obama administration contradicting itself on surveillance and civil liberties; this time, Joe Biden of 2006 attacking the Bush programs which were, again, less than what Obama has now.

UPDATE: NSA surveillance has provoked disagreement among the scholars at Cato. Here is a lengthy piece from Julian Sanchez, discussing many legal details from a viewpoint I agree with.

Here’s a preview.

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people that would have to read Graham’s mail.  There’d be a lot of rambling love letters with a return address from Sedona, Arizona.

Graham needs to remember that he is hired and fired by the people of South Carolina. The facts show that Graham has more in common with John McCain, Barack Obama and the Washington DC crowd than he does with anyone who will see his name on a ballot next year.

Please read the whole thing!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

But, Ms. Landrieu is a Democrat, so it’s just a slip of the tongue.

Senator Mary Landrieu: South Dakota Borders on Canada, You Know

In a Gallup tracking poll released Tuesday, former-President George W. Bush currently stands with a favorability rating of 49%, compared to 46% who see the 43rd president unfavorably. Meanwhile, another Gallup poll shows President Obama with only a 47% approval rating, with 44% disapproving.

John Nolte from Breitbart explains why:

After all, Obama fooled everyone when he ran as the anti-Bush in 2008.
Everyone thought Obama meant he would be less hawkish than his predecessor. But as we have seen, Obama apparently has no problem killing American citizens via remote control with drones or greatly expanding on Bush’s surveillance state. This, even though Obama told us he had pretty much won the War on Terror.

Read the whole thing!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The humanities division at Harvard University…is attracting fewer undergraduates…

Universities’ humanities divisions and liberal-arts colleges across the nation are facing similar challenges in the wake of stepped-up global economic competition, a job market that is disproportionately rewarding graduates in the hard sciences, rising tuition and sky-high student-debt levels.

Among recent college graduates who majored in English, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; for philosophy and religious-studies majors, it was 9.5%; and for history majors, it was also 9.5%…By comparison, recent chemistry graduates were unemployed at a rate of just 5.8%; and elementary-education graduates were at 5%.

Coincidence?

But, not to worry: Harvard’s Humanities department is prepared to sneer at anyone who doesn’t see how tremendously valuable they are:

This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities…

Homi Bhabha, director of the Humanities Center at Harvard….said he didn’t give much weight to criticism from some elected officials who carp that young people need to go into fields that are supposedly more useful. “I think that’s because they have a very primitive and reductive view of what is essential in society,” he said.

Get it? If the Humanities are in decline – despite this being an age of left-wing triumph, and with university revenues/budgets near all-time highs – it’s not the fault of Humanities professors for too often failing to teach kids how to reason, usefully, about life’s problems. No, no, no. It’s everyone else’s fault for being primitive, reductionist and anti-intellectual.

All I can say is: I have an idea of what’s genuinely intellectual, and Sorensen/Bhabha are not it.

Via Zero Hedge.

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff addresses a topic near and dear to my heart. There are many reasons the humanities are in decline and a good number of them trace back to the humanities professors themselves who focus on esoterica and offer, in the words of Homi Bhabha (whom Jeff quoted above) a “reductive view of what is essential in society”.

Perhaps were more humanities professors to show a genuine passion for the ideals which had defined their professor until scholars (thinking they were really quite clever) started “deconstructing” it in the 1970s, they would find greater interest among students.  But, professors would then have to make the case why the study of philosophy and great works of literature mattered to those who pursued careers in law, medicine, banking and commerce.

I highly recommend Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind which explores one aspect of the humanities’ decline in contemporary academia.

…I’m also concerned with what could be done with the information gathered about American citizens not suspected of a crime if put into the hands of politicians and political groups, and bureaucrats who work for or are sympathetic to such politicians and political groups.

The threat, oddly enough, is proven by the [present] leaks…If some government employee who has sworn to keep information secret is willing to leak [it]…for (allegedly) good purposes, what’s to stop that person from violating his or her oath by leaking data-mined information…for other than good reasons…?

…The issue goes beyond the NSA programs. Obamacare is a form of data mining. Obamacare will put into the hands of the IRS medical and health information of an unprecedented level.

And from Reason:

…everything and everyone are relevant to everything, because anything could yield some clue that could conceivably solve some crime. But that view is the same one that justified those general warrants from King George III.

The problem with indiscriminate [surveillance] of homes and effects is not that it’s ineffective in finding wrongdoing. It’s that the innocent people should not be punished in the pursuit of the guilty….

The danger isn’t (just) in what’s being done with the surveillance databases now; it’s in the fact that they exist, i.e., what could be done with them – and will be, sooner or later. Especially under an administration as power-hungry, deceptive and corrupt as Obama’s.

In the Bush 43 days, I believed that the government was only after real terrorists. But because of Obama’s IRS/Tea Party scandal specifically, I now know otherwise. That scandal has proven that the government’s motives are not pure.

And thus the NSA revelations, while they may be a non-scandal by themselves, they do carry the whiff of all of Obama’s other scandals. Because all of them fit together in a disturbing pattern. I am not against responsible counter-terrorism; I am against Obama’s pattern.

As these revelations dominate the headlines, perhaps they do obscure other important Obama scandals like Benghazi, IRS / Tea Party, DOJ spying on AP, Pigford, the many EPA scandals, and more. But I say, look at the bright side. There are plenty of revelations to come in those other scandals, so it’s probably temporary.

And, although it’s bad that the Obama administration is so scandalous: given that it is, it’s good that so many of them are coming to light. If some voter doesn’t care about scandal X, they may well care about scandal Y. Even a good chunk of Obama’s left-wing base who may approve of his IRS abusing the Tea Party, is disturbed that he has gone from criticizing to defending the NSA’s activities in spying on ordinary Americans.

So, meet Edward Snowden, now receiving media attention as the NSA whistleblower. I found the whole article interesting. One minor detail which caught my eye is that Snowden sounds like a disillusioned Obama supporter:

…the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms [of CIA and NSA activities], rendering disclosures unnecessary. [Snowden] left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility…It was then, he said, that he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in”, and as a result, “I got hardened.”…”you can’t wait around for someone else to act…”

By the way, it looks like Obama means to prosecute the recent leaks. If he does, let’s remember that he will be carrying out the law.

Having said that: The difference between Candidate Obama and President Obama on these issues is astounding, even to a seasoned cynic. Here’s Obama from 2007:

[The Bush] administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest…

Now click here for some video of Obama hemming and hawing about how we should all trust the Congressional and judicial oversight of these massive surveillance programs.

I want to note that in the past, a point I’ve made in defending some Bush anti-terror programs (the ones I knew about) was that they had Congressional and judicial oversight. But the programs we’re talking about now are a leap I never envisioned. I supported programs that not only had oversight, but that were limited in nature, and reasonable in being tied directly to known terrorists / terrorist activity.

These newer programs appear to be practically unlimited. The sphere of freedom from government surveillance in America is getting awfully small. Maybe they still can’t legally open the letter or hear the phone call; but given that they can read your e-mails, and gather so much other information about your phone calls and other movements, “What difference does it make?”, to coin a phrase.

Sane people know there is no hypocrisy, none whatever, in (as a simple example) supporting ice cream as a product or industry while also questioning people who abuse ice cream by eating gallons of it. I support counter-terrorism – until it is abused.

(NB: Since publication, I’ve removed a crack from Jay Leno that could be misleading, added a new closing sentence, and done additional small edits.)

Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to two cities where unrest has occurred and again condemned his detractors as “a handful of looters” and vandals.

In the southern city of Adana, where pro- and anti-government protesters clashed Saturday night, Erdogan greeted supporters from the top of a bus before lashing out at his opponents in the highly polarized country

If he wanted to defuse the situation, he might do well to acknowledge the protestor’s grievances rather than insult them.

Another nation’s leader said that Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, “is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “’friendships and the bonds of trust.’”

The message here boils down to: freedom doesn’t matter, liberty doesn’t matter, rights don’t matter, and the most important role for government is to stand for “social justice.”  Here’s the link, but I’ve quoted the whole thing in its appalling entirety below:

Things I’m more worried about than my phone being tapped:
Global warming. The richest 1% controlling more wealth than the bottom 50%. Homelessness. Gutting the food stamp program. The rich hiding several Trillion untaxed dollars. Secretaries paying more in taxes than billionaires. Politicians being bought and sold. Malaria and starvation. More people per capita in prison than any other country. The “war” on drugs. More black men in prison than in college. Rising cost of education and health care. The rise of extremism. The continued oppression of women. The general lack of compassion in the world. The degree to which we all blame our problems on others and close our eyes to our own irrationality.
That more people are outraged by a small loss of privacy than any of these other issues.

Should I add “People who write in sentence fragments” to his list of outrages more “worrisome” than a government which spends all its time monitoring its people, or is that just my pet peeve?

Not surprisingly, the best responses to this kind of thing date to the founding of the Republic.  We’ve always got the classic from Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But in this context, where the message is to sacrifice liberty for “social justice,” I think Sam Adams might be better, though trying to choose just one passage that is appropriate is rather like an embarrassment of riches.  I have long admired this one:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Perhaps this one is better: “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”

And just in case the Obamalaise is getting to you, here’s one worth repeating regularly: “Nil desperandum, — Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”

If the War on Terror is over and the administration views terrorism through a pre 9/11 prism, why is the administration assembling and wielding the most powerful and intrusive systems of surveillance ever conceived?

Sweeping up Americans’ telephone records and monitoring Internet activity from overseas are “modest encroachments on privacy” that can help U.S. intelligence analysts disrupt terror activity, President Barack Obama said Friday.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he reassured Americans…

And from Yahoo!:

“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Obama said…”My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards.”

Isn’t that reassuring? Obama says he means well!

Dan has posed the question, Is revelation of phone data gathering “scandal” a (kind of) distraction?

With respect, my answer is: Perhaps. Maybe the Obama crew staged the NSA revelations, to divert attention from their main scandals.

But, if true, wouldn’t it mean they’re getting desperate? (Telling the media “Don’t cover that scandal, cover *this* one.”) As a fan of truth coming to light, I’m pleased. And don’t worry, the other scandals are still under investigation and have plenty of revelations to come. There will be plenty of oxygen for them.

So, getting back to the NSA revelations…I’m worried by some of the commentary I’ve seen.

Dan quotes law professor John Yoo as saying that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.” And Yoo may well be right, as regards the state of the law today.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it right. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The right to be secure in your “papers”. Now, the Framers (of the Constitution) said “papers” in part because they couldn’t conceive of phone calls. In their day, people communicated over distances by paper letters. Can you imagine one of the Framers saying the following?

Having the Post Office collect data for the President on every letter that every person sends isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of letters and not information on the sender and recipient, the weight of the letters (or number of pages), etc.

I can’t. In other words, I don’t find it terribly reassuring to be told that they don’t actually open the letters phone calls and read listen to them.

Finally, I would remind people that the NSA is traditionally much closer to the White House than the other security agencies, which is why I put “for the President” in the above mock-up. I do support counter-terrorism, but… Color me skeptical. I have concerns on this.

Please note the inclusion of this post in the Random Thoughts category.

Yesterday afternoon, taking a break from editing the now-completed first half of my novel, I learned about the reports of the federal government gathering data from various phone services, notably Verizon, and thought it yet another of the administration’s many scandals, but later caught Andrew C. McCarthy’s piece on National Review’s  Corner saying this was being blown out of proportion.

Later, caught a few minutes of “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” where Karl Rove was giving the president the “benefit of the doubt” on this issue. Just before bed, via Instapundit, learned that University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo who “served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department of President George W. Bush” offered a view similar to McCarthy’s claiming that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.”

Do wonder if someone in the White House deliberately leaked the information to the Washington Post (which broke the story) knowing it would be blown out of proportion and so creating a large audience for administration flacks when they set the record straight.  And when people learn that this story, sucking (at present) the air out of other administration scandals, has been blown out of proportion (if indeed it has), they might be more likely to discount those other scandals.

Just a thought.  And now concluding where I began, you know why I include this in the “Random Thoughts” category.

UPDATE:  Glenn reports that Ann Althouse offers similar thoughts to those expressed above:

ANN ALTHOUSE ON WHY THE DATA-MINING SCANDAL LEAKED: “I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that’s about Bush.”

How cynical we’ve all become, in this age of Hope And Change. But then: “Here’s where the other Obama scandals come in. How do we know the government is dutifully concentrating on national security — fighting terrorists and not political enemies? That kind of mistrust matters, but it’s not specific to the NSA program. It undermines everything government does. What would you like government to stop doing now that you can’t trust it with anything?”

UP-UPDATE: Maybe the White House didn’t leak the information, but it is, as the folks at Politico put it a “welcome plot twist” for the beleaguered incumbent:

It’s a reprieve for Obama, who was taking hits in the press, from Democrats and even some Republicans for running a program they cried is too reminiscent of the George W. Bush era– a new storyline that takes the focus off Obama, even briefly.

. . . .

Snowden may even draw some of the fire away from the Obama administration’s other scandals — especially the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

She starts by reminding about the NSA phone surveillance of the Bush administration:

The Bush NSA’s special collections program grew in early 2002 after the CIA started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah. The CIA seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories. NSA surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible. As a result of Bush NSA work,the terrorist plot involving convicted al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris was uncovered — possibly saving untold lives…

Normally, the government obtains court orders to monitor such information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But the window of opportunity to exploit the names, numbers, and addresses of those associated with the top terrorist leaders was obviously small…

So the Bush administration had the NSA track Americans’ overseas phone calls, insofar as captured terrorist phone numbers might show up. But the Obama administration? Not so much…err, so little:

The new Obama order covers not only phone calls overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism surveillance, but all domestic calls by Verizon customers over at least a three-month period.

[Malkin now links/quotes an article at Politico:] Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.” …The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the request of the FBI instructs the telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA with daily reports of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

I’m willing to preserve our counter-terrorism efforts. And I don’t know much about the legal ins/outs of all this. But, all domestic calls by Verizon customers? Sheesh! This surely goes beyond the Bush NSA surveillance that the public debated in 2005-6.

So, it’s worth discussing the rightness (or wrongness) of the broadened surveillance. The more so if (note IF) the War on Terror is over, as some international observers thought Obama to be implying in his speech last week.

By way of counterpoint, Senator Feinstein implies that the broadened phone surveillance did start under Bush, in 2007. But that still wouldn’t make it right. Or make it anything that the public has approved, because we haven’t learned about the broadened efforts (or been able to debate them) until now.

As always, please feel free to post whatever more you know about this issue, in the comments.

“After watching the pilot, where the parents come across so saintly,” Geraghty suspects . . .

. . . that the writers will be terrified about portraying them with any flaws, either because they’ll be afraid they’re portraying gay parents negatively, or because they fear their audience will be even momentarily repelled by characters that the entire show’s purpose is to get you to love and accept.

In other words, if Hollywood is afraid to portray a gay character as human, with strengths and failings, moments of character and moments of weakness, and so on . . . are they really being all that groundbreaking or brave or honest in their creation?

Reading that concluding question, I recalled an essay that both Bruce and some eaders shared with me, Bret Easton Ellis’s overlong, but insightful rant, “In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves,” where the novelist also wondered about Hollywood’s depiction of gays:

The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

. . . .

Where’s the gay dude who makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It?  . . . . But being “real” and “human” (i.e. flawed) is not necessarily what The Gay Gatekeepers want straight culture to see.

Interesting how the views of a conservative pundit and a non-conservative gay iconoclast parallel each other.

(If you have time, Ellis’s piece is a fun read and has a bit of a libertarian flavor; he does not dispute GLAAD’s decision to disinvite him from their media awards shindig, offering that “they’re allowed to invite or disinvite anyone they want to.”)

*UPDATE: As per the below, seems the answer is “Yes”:

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Nick reports that one show has depicted flawed gay character and asks an important question:

FWIW, I think the most evenhanded treatment of gay characters on a TV show came from The Wire. Kima Griggs, an out lesbian, was a good cop who over the course of the series, was addicted to hunt of the suspects and lost a partner and child to breakup. Same with Omar, the shotgun-toting robber of drug dealers. He happened to be gay. Omar was a morally reprehensible yet fascinating character first, and gay somewhere down the line.

. . . .

With respect to “The Fosters” – I could care less if they’re lesbians. I mean, the first question we should ask is if the show is any good? Well written? Good acting? Compelling storyline? Do the characters make me empathize with them?