Shane! Come Back, Shane!

A/K/A Arsinio, come back Arsinio!

Talk about things that make you go hmmm . . .

Everyone in the business community seems to be really up in arms about the Hewlett-Packard "pretexting" scandal. In case you hadn't heard, the Board of Directors was very upset about leaks of confidential Board business to the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets. So the Board authorized a plan to find the leaker(s) by getting the phone records of everyone who was suspected of leaking. [Please resist the temptation to call up a visual image of people leaking. Thank you.--Ed.] "Pretexting" comes in because the investigators pretended to be the very parties they were investigating in order to get the information they wanted.

And yet the business community in general seems to have no problem with Dubya's warrantless wiretapping program.

Weird.

I guess it's simply a matter of who is perceived to be in the cross-hairs of the investigation. ("Leakers" = "Bad." "Terrorists" = "Bad." "Simple businesspeople doing business" = "Good.") Which doesn't make it right, in either case. But for the sake of what makes America "America," I am more worried about warrantless wiretaps than big business shenanigans. Governmental abuse of power is much more frightening to me than business irregularities. Courts can deal with those who commit business irregularities . . . but when the government itself bends its power in an unchecked way against the individual, we are living in a totalitarian state, not the USA.

My country, where art thee?