Two Stories

The nation -- the parts of it not already locked into partisan knee-jerking, try to decide whether the National Security Administration story is a big deal or business as usual. My guilty confession is, I always figured the government was doing stuff like that. Maybe it's a residue of my time paying attention to the left, in the '70s and '80s. You just assumed Big Brother was real. When you got online, it became even more apparent. You'd go browsing on one site, and then you'd get pop-up ads for related products. Hell, if big business is crawling around inside your electronic files, and the federal government and the corporations are just one big collusion act, what are the odds that some alphabet soup spy agency isn't listening in to international phone calls?

To this pondering we now have added the question hether the investigation of the Gray Lady's sources on this one is more of Chimpy's fascist repression or a case of appropriate chickens coming home to roost.

But it seems to me, the anti-administration story based on leaks is not going to get anybody killed.

This one, on the other hand, assuredly is.