Is politics making you stressed? Anxious? Depressed? Some days are worse than others for me. Today was particularly bad, especially with that stupid, fear mongering, "scare us into calling our senators" ad I've been seeing all day. I've written about this FISA issue so much already, it makes me want to just SCREAM! I guess that makes me a wee-bit stressed? Do you ever want to scream at your television? Here is a video clip of the FISA ad with the "truth" pointed out...

It was a gray Tuesday today in central New Jersey,with intermittent rains falling steadily as fresh tears. There was little overt acknowledgment of the 9/11 anniversary, just over an hour away from Manhattan. No need -- the shadows of memory are palpable. That day in 2001, sitting in a computer lab that my students and I used to launch our local coverage, I wrote: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, individual Americans and people around the world siezed upon the Internet, as well as television, radio and telephones as a way of making sense of madness. What we saw and heard seemed scripted by some B-grade Hollywood hack: first the news that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then live images of a second plane, and the towers imploding, and then the word about the Pentagon and the rumors of elsewhere, and there were no words to be said, and no sense to be made, but we kept searching...." Six years later, we are still searching: for a way out of the morass in Iraq, for clues to the enigma of Osama bin Laden and his confederates, for clues about how we to make our differences a source of strength, instead of fear.

"We are in the midst of a critically important debate about the proper scope of the government's surveillance authority. This debate should not take place in a vacuum. The public has a right to know, at least in general terms, what kinds of surveillance the court authorized and what kinds of surveillance it disallowed." Jameel Jaffer, ACLU “…the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”Dick Cheney’s former Legal Counsel