I must admit to Catscradle that the presidents option of suspending Habeas Corpus is troublesome to me. Abraham Lincoln did it, but, dubya is no Lincoln. The matter of search warrants? They still need a judge to sign it, and the 4th amendment is still quite clear on this. Among other questions about the constitution, being required to quote the 4th amendment was one of the requirements we had to pass before graduating from the U.S. Treasury Dept. school of law enforcement & Criminal investigation.It was very important. Here in Maine, there was a big hoorah about checking into the background of teachers, including fingerprinting, to weed out the undesireables, and some of those teachers raised hell, some threatened to quit, some did quit. Why? I knew one of them, she had been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown some years ago, and she was afraid it would be grounds for removal.

In order to deal with foreign nationals on the high seas, I had to pass a security exam. Big deal! What's more important? Talking to Russians or teaching children? Old Maine proverb, If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, only the one it hits will yelp.