Sorry if this is a dupe;

[greiner3]

I turned off MTP yesterday as it did not seem to be a good one. Most aren't anyway! Well it looks like I should have toughed it out;

William Safire: "I'm with the critics"- over warrantless wiretapping

Mr. Safire was on MTP today and condemed President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens by using his own personal experiences to justify his position.

Safire:

"I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?" And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.

"So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses."

http://www.crooksandliars.com/

I can safely say that I have never agreed with this person. Maybe I'll never do it again, but this is great!