Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) stood on the Senate floor for 10.5 hours, staging a quasi-filibuster to protest the USA Patriot Act. Almost all of his GOP colleagues rolled their eyes at him — literally, sometimes — but if the Senate doesn't act, the Patriot Act will expire on June 1. Good, said Jon Stewart on Tuesday's Daily Show. It was always meant to expire, "and why should we allow the U.S. government to continue to infringe on liberty?"
The Republican answer is that the law, and the NSA mass surveillance it didn't quite authorize, are important tools to prevent terrorism. "I guess the lesson here is that saving American lives is sometimes more important than civil liberties and government overreach," Stewart summarized — "you know, unless you're, obviously, trying to save those lives by providing health insurance." NSA surveillance and ObamaCare, connected. One statistic — that 45,000 people die every year because they lack health insurance, per a 2009 Harvard study — blew Stewart's mind: "How do we make that the thing the government cares about? Do we have to rename Type 2 diabetes 'Osama bin unable to process insulin'?" Well, it's a thought. —Peter Weber
The Week
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