The speech jerks

* "Now we learn from the WaPo that two separate judges who have headed the FISA court during the time of this domestic surveillance program told the Bush Administration flat out that what they were doing was likely unconstitutional and illegal -- and that evidence obtained via this program was not to be used in their court as the source of probable cause in order to preserve the integrity of the FISA process." (link)

* georgia10: "Take for example the one year period following the 9/11 attacks. From 2001 to 2002 , the Bush administration had exercised the emergency FISA option 113 times. To total number of emergency FISA wiretaps in the court's 23-year history before Bush took office?
Forty-six.
Forty-six emergency FISA wiretaps in 23 years, and here we have 113 such warrantless wiretaps in a single year. By April 1, 2003, that number was 170. That's more than three times the total number of emergency wiretaps before Bush took office."

* froomkin:

"A White House Briefing reader points me toward this National Catholic Reporter editorial , in which an outsider actually attends a Bush speech, listens to words -- and marvels at how his speech was covered.

The editorialist writes: "One . . . comes away with the impression that the national media, for all the disparaging remarks tossed its way by this administration, is considerate to a fault. Comparing the sound bites and the quoted portions in news stories to what we heard and to the actual transcript posted on the White House Web site, it is clear that the president was the beneficiary of some very generous spirits. The press constructs a far more cogent argument on the president's behalf out of discrete passages than anyone could manufacture from the whole speech itself.

"It is difficult to imagine that a presidency so closely guarded and protective of image could come up with nothing better. The speech jerks, in a syntactical and grammatical mishmash, from topic to topic. It engages in flights of imagination to make its case without regard for fundamental corrections that have already occurred to the record or for the deep questions posed about central tenets of this administration's policies by Republicans and Democrats alike.""