Bush Gets His Ears Boxed

US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is the first federal judge to rule the government's warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional. She has ordered an immediate halt to the program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers. (The Justice Department is appealing Taylor's ruling because it believes that it must continue to infringe on American civil liberties in order to protect our freedom. Or something like that.)

On the other hand, Taylor dismissed a separate claim by the ACLU over the NSA's massive data mining of phone records, saying that not enough had yet been publicly revealed about that program and further litigation would jeopardize state secrets. This suggests to me that the Judge was more het up about the Bush administration's sneaky bypass of the judicial branch (in the form of their special surveillance court) than about violations of our citizens' right to privacy per se.

Bottom line: Bush is listening... Use big words!