Oh No It's..

My Senator, Dick Durbin.

Democrats to America: Drop Dead!

What else could a headline writer write? Yesterday instead of considering a bill to extend the much needed FISA laws that allow our spies to intercept foreign terrorist's phone calls and e-mail messages that happen to come through the United States, the United States House of Representatives fumed over President Bush's legal use of his Constitutional powers as President to replace Federal Prosecutors. The current FISA law expires tonight and the House is not in session because the head Democrat, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is at the wedding of one of her daughters.

Let me perfectly clear, this is personal for me, I work in a target. I am not alone, there are workplaces across the country that are potential targets, including the United States Capital Building. The building that I work in, the Chicago Board of Trade Building, houses some of the world's most important interest rate and grain markets and this spring we will house even more of those markets as we complete a merger with the CME. I do not think that I am being arrogant or overly dramatic, it is not rocket science to figure us as a potential target. During my years in trading pits I have seen some real fear in people's faces but never the terror that I saw in some people's eyes on the morning of September 11, 2001. Those of us who were on the floor that morning (some markets never opened) all knew damn well that we could be a target, we also knew that we are virtually surrounded by potential targets, hell the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago is across the street. I stood across La Salle Street from the Federal Reserve Bank that morning when I gave an interview to CNN and I'll never forget looking up at our building and half expecting a plane to barrel down La Salle and plow right into the front of the Board of Trade.

What many Democrats and many of their allies object to is the NSA tapping into the communications of known terrorists. When those terrorists make telephone calls into the United States our government can listen to those calls until 11:00 PM Central Standard Time tonight, February 16, 2007. Strangely there are surely instances where the Democratic leadership is now protecting the "civil rights" or "human rights" of machines. That is no exaggeration, many times neither end of the communication are physically in the United States, however the communications line travels through the United States. Another interesting example is the "call forwarding" service that is just a *72 away for most of us, that service allows a call to be transfered from a telephone in the United States to a telephone outside of the United States. In both of those examples the only "rights" of an entity in the United States being protected would be the "rights" of machines. Maybe they are afraid of this.

I must note that of my two Senators, the aptly named Dick Durbin (D-IL) voted to make it much more difficult for America to listen in on terrorist phone calls and the "new politics", "change" and "hope" guy Barack Obama (D-IL) didn't even bother to show up for the vote. The measure of a politician is his or her ability to convince people to do the right thing even when it pains them; this measure only pains terrorists, the fact that so many Democrats are against it makes them appear utterly unprincipled.

Many thanks to Dr. Sanity for inclusion in her Carnival of Insanities again this week. Go read her blog!