Interesting numbers

Laer, at Cheat-Seeking Missiles, has two interesting sets of numbers today. First, he reports that a huge majority of Americans favors the type of NSA eavesdropping that the President authorized. Second, he points out that, while the MSM has been obsessed with bloodshed in Iraq, the real news has been the huge economic growth there since Saddam's murderous regime ended. Both of the stories have a common sense element. The first shows that Americans, unimpressed by MSM/Democratic screaming, understand that the President was taking a common sense step in today's technological age to preserve American safety, at home and abroad. The second shows the obvious point that murderous tyrannies are bad economic news, and that freedom is the best economic indicator. UPDATE: Bruce's comment about NSA was so interesting, I'm moving it up here, to text:

I have to admit I haven't been following the NSA brouhaha very closely - family christmas activities have been much more fulfilling. Having said that, let me toss in a different slant on the discussion... Working in the computer industry I've come to realize that large-scale data collection on every human being on the planet is basically inevitable. If the government doesn't do it, then private industry will - its just too useful a tool. You don't even have to do it on purpose - in today's computerized corporate world you end up accumulating masses of data simply as a side effect of doing business. So I take that as given - each individual's personal information is going to accumulate "out in the world", in greater and greater detail over time. Given that, what we really need are better laws and consequences for people who abuse that information. We can't stop the information from getting out, but perhaps we can discourage people from abusing it. So when I approach the current flack, I'm concerned that the existing 'secret court' mechanism wasn't used - and if the existing laws and mechanisms are not adaquate to deal with modern technological scenarios, then I'd like to see new, more-pertinent checks and balances put into place - rather than just saying "the current stuff doesn't work, so we're going to secretly blow it off and do what we have to do." It sounds like just as we need new legal mechanisms in the corporate data privacy sphere, we need new ones in the intelligence gathering sphere as well. (On a side note - secret laws and regulations really, really scare me. Secret courts - ok, you can convince me we need them ocassionally - but secret laws? How can we be law-abiding citizens if we don't even know all the rules?)

If you want more of this type of thoughtfulness, visit Bruce's blog, here.