You're feeling guilty about the sake.

A bit, but we've been pretty good these last number of weeks and feeling better now that the weather has turned or the sinus thing has receded or for whatever good reason from the good reasons list. We are amused. We are not complaining, although I don't need to overdo the sake more than once every other once in a while. Here in Oakland.

There's a Saint Patrick's Day parade tomorrow in San Francisco and I'll photograph it if it isn't raining all that hard. They're predicting showers, a sixty percent chance, but what the hell, I and my cameras are relatively waterproof. (As I've said before to no effect.)

And, a political comment: The House Democrats have passed a FISA bill today that doesn't include amnesty for the phone companies. Pelosi actually got up and called the President a liar when he said amnesty was critical in catching terrorists. Although the House FISA bill, even if it gets through the Senate, will be vetoed by the President, the reality is we probably won't have a revised FISA bill until we get another President. The old FISA bill, which will now remain in place, allows and has always allowed the administration to wiretap to its heart's content as long as they get a warrant from the FISA court, a court that's always, for the last thirty years, pretty much given them anything they've asked.

No one who's been fighting this amnesty provision has really expected this. This is the first time the President has played his “aiding the terrorists” card and the Democrats haven't fainted. Maybe there's hope. Maybe we'll find how far off the reservation the administration really travelled after nine-eleven, why John Ashcroft, as conservative a son-of-a-bitch Attorney General as you can get, wouldn't sign off on the administration's surveillance program from his hospital bed. Would not, one assumes, because it was illegal (it was illegal), but perhaps because it was way out there somewhere in illegal outer space and that was the real reason for all of the fuss. Interesting, this life. [End of politics.]

Oh, and I filled the car with gas after breakfast with just under twelve gallons of gas. The last time I filled the tank was four weeks and one day ago on February 4th, just under three gallons a week. So no complaints, although the price continues to rise.