The student-visited-by-FBI-agents story I posted about here weeks ago turns out to be a bona fide hoax, as the student in question made the whole story up. I'm an idiot for passing it along, obviously, but I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a few moments bashing the kid who started the whole mess. I don't care what hole in his heart prompted him to do what he did, because I don't grade on extenuating circumstances when the security of my country is involved. And the security of my country is involved -- now, when the FBI really does something wrong, and when some whistleblower points to a real abuse of power, no one will believe it. Seriously, I feel like this kid just urinated all over the American flag. I don't care that he's sorry or that he cried afterward. In a healthy culture, etc., this kid wouldn't be able to get a job and he'd have to live on government cheese. But if he's capable of fabricating a drama about something as serious as this, and if he can get a few obviously noodle-headed professors to feel sorry for him, then he's probably going to keep finding enablers to help him out of future trouble.
The UPI reports new details on the matter of Mr. Bush's ambivalent relationship with the FISA court, which also require a correction on my part: FISA courts have outright rejected "at least six" requests for warrants just in 2003 and 2004 after having never rejected one before (versus the figure of four I gave here two days ago, which figure I'd seen in at least two articles and which figure I'd thought represented the total number of rejections over FISA's existence), and FISA has "modified" 179 of Tha Bush Mobb's 5,645 requests for surveillance, after modifying only 2 of 13,102 before Bush. Some right-wingers are no doubt ready to tell us that FISA has only modified a little over 3 percent of Mr. Bush's requests, so this isn't a big deal. These same folks probably won't give you the pesky "2 of 13,102" figure, and they won't add that Mr. Bush obviously thought the 3 percent was a big deal, because he stopped getting warrants. And, needless to say, these same right-wingers would be telling us that any government misstep in getting a warrant would be criminal if the President's name happened to be Clinton.
(Hat tip to Media Dissector for both items.)