As for suggestions upstream to clutter the automatic warrantless listening with static: ask your friends abroad to use public computer locales to contact the Congress Critters themselves, giving preference to the goofs that rubber stamped this.

If they have excellent recipes for Red Flag Bhaba Ghanoush and Hey NSA Hummous to share: COOL! If s/he knows a great little Central Asian takeout that serves rilly kickass veggie shawarma, all the better.

At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Now what might have caused this?? Could it be that some judge threw a monkey wrench in the works?

After all, I have been assured time and again that such a thing would never happen. (And the check's in the mail, the beamer's paid for....)

The prelude to approval of the plan occurred in January, when the administration agreed to put the wiretapping program under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with guarding against governmental spying abuses. Officials say one judge issued a ruling in January that allowed the administration to continue the program under the court's supervision.

A ruling a month or two later -- the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear -- restricted the government's ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication "switches" on American soil.

The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications "kept getting ratcheted down," said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. " We were to a point where we were not effectively operating."

Pelosi and her so-called "Democratic leadership": what are they leading, exactly?

When was the last time that Congress willingly postponed its vacation at the  behest of a lame duck president?

Why, oh why, should they have believed any "recent intelligence" from an administration who is known to lie copiously - who fudged its own intelligence after the CIA, masters of lying, refused to lie for it in order to invade a country that never threatened the US; who still denies its use of torture while simultaneously promoting and justifying that use?