General Hayden may be viewing this blog. Slowly back away.

Evil Bush is at it again. Turns out he's had the NSA looking at patterns of phone calls for millions of Americans since 9/11. Can you believe it? What an invasion of our privacy!

Have you ever thought about the amount of staff it would take to personally investigate all the phone calls that take place in even one day, let alone to eavesdrop on them? There are nearly 300 million people in the U.S. Of these, more than 200 million have a telephone. If all of them use the phone for even 5 minutes a day, that's a billion minutes of call time to analyze. You would need millions of people just to monitor all those calls. Your privacy is safe.

By the way, you may know that our gallant local Baby Bell, Qwest, refused to help the NSA in this matter. Qwest values the privacy of its customers, except when they sell similar data to any marketer who is willing to pay them. So their principles are negotiable as well. And every visit you make on the Internet leaves footprints that marketers use to find you and to offer you everything from financial services to Viagra (sometimes you may need both, depending on the sequence of use).

I'm not sure what's more annoying - the silliness of the people who are complaining about this program, or the fact that the Bushies seem incapable of returning fire with the scorn and contempt that the Pat Leahys and Ted Kennedys of the world so richly deserve.