The latter, thanks to my grandpa…recently deceased.

Currency is for wimps like George Soros.

Thanks Olly. Unsurprizingly, I heard the same argument on tuesday as Tabarrok gave, but in all seriousness.

Ian, as always, your sick and twisted remarks are on point. ;)

That things like this NSA business have been going on since at least the invention of the telephone, more likely since at least 1804 makes me think that freedom doesn’t die a glorious death in a hail of gunfire, but rather is picked to death one tiny bite at a time.

Many claim that the US can be changed for the better, especially in the tide of wiretaps and whatnot. The reality is that the US is headed for a certain doom, and when the presidents from Truman all the way down to GWB used wiretaps in such a way, it set the ball in motion for more things to be taken away.

For everyone to be outraged only now, when it’s obviously too late to turn back unless we all went into open revolt, shows just how blind the US people are.

The only way is to educate people and get ready for the worst.

Should I have used [SATIRE] tags?

I get your point (nice use of bold by the way), and I’d be fine with requiring a warrant for all interceptions of calls made from American soil or to American numbers. That might actually slow intelligence operations down, but I’m decreasingly convinced that would even matter. As one commenter over on H&R pointed out, it seems weird to be saying that FISA is a step in the right direction for due process.

Today, people interpret the contitution in order to advance their political power or to gain advantage over a competetor.

No, let us not be bound by the ideas of liberty and tyranny. Let us put those those ideas down the memory hole….

Tim, your boy Alex Tabarrok had the best quote on this one:

“Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional restrictions on torture and spying on Americans. Don’t they understand that the constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new events and understandings? An originalist reading of the constitution would throw us back into the primitive past when the minimum wage was unconstitutional. Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now. We live in a different world. The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyranny.”