On its front page today, the conservative Washington Times reports that “intelligence scholars and analysts outside the government say that today’s expiration of certain temporary domestic wiretapping laws will have little effect on national security, despite warnings to the contrary by the White House and Capitol Hill Republican leaders.” One scholar said “there’s no reason to think” America is “in any more danger” than it’s already been in since 9/11:

Timothy Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, said the last time Congress overhauled FISA — after the September 11 terrorist attacks — President Bush praised the action, saying the new law “recognizes the realities and dangers posed by the modern terrorist.”

“Those are the rules we’ll be living under after the Protect America Act expires this weekend,” Mr. Lee added. “There’s no reason to think our nation will be in any more danger in 2008 than it was in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, or 2006.”

As a result of a “technical glitch,” in 2006, the FBI received access to “e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation.” The episode is an example of a “regular if little-noticed occurrence,” but has received “no discussion” in the congressional debate over expanding the government’s wiretapping powers.

The governor of Kansas fired back against the Clinton campaign’s habit of deriding entire states where they happen to lose elections:

Senator Clinton and her campaign surrogates keep deriding Senator Obama’s wins in red states by saying that her victories in the ‘big states’ are the ones that matter,” Governor Sebelius said. ” The right Democrat, like Barack Obama, can carry red states, just like the 14 Democratic governors elected in states won by George Bush in 2004. We can’t tell people their votes don’t matter and then expect their support against John McCain in November. Senator Obama is reaching to Independents and Republicans because they desperately want to change our politics. I hope Senator Clinton will follow his lead and stop dismissing Democrats that don’t live in New York or California.

Of course it’s not just red states — those of us in DC, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Washington, Minnesota, etc. don’t like to be told we don’t count either.

This morning, CNN ran a story “tracking the strain furious campaigning puts on the human body” for the presidential candidates. During the segment, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee joked that his campaign schedule is not providing enough time to sleep and that, for him, is “like being waterboarded”:

HUCKABEE: I’m finding just out how long I can go sleep deprived. You know, running for office is sort of like being waterboarded, I think.

Watch it:

A recent CNN article on the same subject also noted Huckabee’s comments and added: “He was only half-kidding.” But waterboarding is torture, illegal under both U.S. and international law, and certainly nothing to joke about.

Unfortunately, Huckabee is not the first Republican presidential candidate to compare lack of sleep and torture in jest. Last year, former New York City mayor (and current waterboarding supporter) Rudy Giuliani called liberals “silly” for describing “sleep deprivation” as torture, joking that “on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States.”

Digg it!

I’m reading some sentiment that maybe the Democrat’s large lead in generic congressional balloting doesn’t matter, because Democrats always lead in generic balloting. Here’s Gallup’s table of historical context for the numbers:

Long story short, the fourteen point lead is a big lead by historical standards. It’s February right now and the election’s in November. That’s plenty of time for things to change so in that sense it’s not necessarily very significant. But the size of the lead is genuinely large.

On the stump, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has repeatedly bragged about calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation as Defense Secretary. “I’m the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go,” said McCain on Jan. 30. Yet as the Washington Post reports today, that claim isn’t quite true:

The trick is that he never did, at least not publicly. The senator from Arizona was a tough critic of Rumsfeld and more than once said that he had no confidence in the Pentagon chief in the two years before Bush finally dumped Rumsfeld in November 2006. But even as he was criticizing Rumsfeld, McCain typically stopped short of calling for the Pentagon chief to step down. [...]

McCain’s false account has been unwittingly incorporated into the narrative he is selling by some news organizations, including The Washington Post.