Well, well.  USAToday - a front page story on the domestic spying the president said we were not doing - without a warrant.

The Q and A that follows the long piece is of little reassurance.  But the best part of the article has to to with the only major communications company that has refused to participate, QUEST.  BellSouth, Verizon and ATT have all agreed to cough up their customers calling records - domestic and international- despite potential liability (that's a laugh).  The FCC an independent governmental agency and the Congress, a dysfunctional governmental entity are worthless with respect to oversight of this activity that has been underway since  2001.

It's deja vu all over again.  This administration is trying mightily to outdo the Nixon administration.

For your convenience the part on QUEST follows:

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

When you have the conservative voice of Bruce Fein warning of unlimited executive or unitary executive as he is quoted by Charlie Savage in the 30 April 2006 Boston Globe piece about President Bush's' 750 signing statements, we had all better wake up.  Yes, Senator Arlen Specter has scheduled oversight hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee for June, it remains to be seen how many Republicans will come forth to challenge this president on his cavalier way with the signing pen.

It is possible that Bush's poll numbers on truthfulness and integrity will be sufficiently low enough to permit his partisans to raise questions about the frequency with which Bush as written off laws on torture, warrantless wiretaps, whistleblower protections and the like.  It seems to me that the House and Senate better read the Federal Register carefully to be sure that after this president signs a law it remains the law they thought they wrote.

It becomes more and more clear what the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis has really been about: restoring the imperial presidency that they saw weakened by Watergate and diminished by Congressional activism.  With a sympathetic president and republican Congress, not to mention a five to four majority in the Supreme Court, they have wrought an over reaching, authoritarian, unlimited unitary executive.

The plan included starting a war (Iraq) because the public rallies round the president not to mention reelects him.  While warring, classify everything in sight; don't veto a law just sign it and state that it doesn't apply to this president or the president decides just exactly how and when or if the law will be observed.

It couldn't be clearer:

Said Golove, the New York University law professor: ''Bush has essentially said that 'We're the executive branch and we're going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.' "

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.

''This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. ''There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power." 

Tim Russert's "Meet the Press this morning was one of a kind, not to be missed, hard-hitting journalism at its finest. 

This morning (May 7, 2006) Tim Russert interviewed George Bush on his show "Meet the Press". I wonder what Russert had to agree to for this appearance. Did Russert have to submit questions ahead of time or promise to change his testimony on the Valerie Plame leak? He asked Bush about the president's sense of humor, ego, and character and makeup.

Tim and his high-powered panel asked hard questions of great relevance including toughies on Congress and Bill Clinton. The unparalleled level of investigative journalism on Meet the Press this morning, (Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Todd Purdum who wrote the recent profile of Dick Cheney in Vanity Fair and Tim Russert 'himself') drove me to send a fan letter to NBC.

Wouldn't it be in country's interest to see George Bush appear more often on "news" shows not limited to FoxNews? Just think of all the questions he could answer. He could explain his thinking on Iraq, oil company royalties, bombing Iran, what he really saw when he looked into Putin's soul, what he thinks is the trouble with Tony Blair, what that "higher authority" is telling him about Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Safavian, what's his name the Target shoplifter, and so many other things. And we all thought that George W Bush had only contempt for the press. This appearance on 'Meet the Press' put that rumor to rest for sure.