To further prove my specific point above about the executive branch (and the positions it appoints), today was "how we saved Los Angeles day," right after Alberto Gonzales is grilled expertly by a bipartisan group of pissed off senators who want to know what the fuck was so hard about going back and getting warrants after the wiretapping, since the law works that way and all. By the way, the thwarted terrorists were of southeast Asian descent apparently. I guess the people in Indonesia will let us have their oil with less of a fight.
Remember all the times that terror alert level escalations have had dubious timing also, most questionably in the days following the 2004 Democratic convention, which happened one of the few things the Dems managed not to fuck up during the campaign. And hey, we got that bin Laden tape a week before the 2004 election too. He was able to release this because we decided Iraq was more important than the people who actually attacked us. He's far more useful alive than dead, so don't expect him to be captured or killed anytime between now and 2008. In the meantime, there'll be plenty of ammo to drum up support for this lunacy.
Then you've got the White House E-mails from the summer of 2003 that were deleted (a no-no, all correspondence and documents are required to be saved) and were found by, get this, the defense team for Scooter Libby.
And that's just in the last couple of weeks! This is not a crew that's genuinely working in the best interests of everyone.