Spying on Americans Without a Court Order for Fun and Profit

I was baffled as to why the White House would authorize spying on U.S. citizens without court approval. When you can get the approval up to 72 hours after you begin the spying, and very, very few requests are turned down, why would they do this and what in the heck are they trying to hide?

Well, John from AmericaBlog might be on to something. His hypothesis, assuming that Bush is doing this for national security purposes and not for political gain, is that they were spying on US journalists, and he was afraid the courts would turn him down. Some American journalists have "ties to Al Qaeda" in order to get information for their stories. The "terrorists" trusted the journalists, and the sources would dry up if the "terrorists" found out that the US was spying on it's journalists.

I don't have proof yet, but Bush spying on US journalists would explain
everything UNEXPLAINED about this entire story. Bush refusing to follow
the law, Bush refusing to go to court, Bush refusing to tell more members
of Congress, Bush's concern that the terrorists, if they knew we were
doing this, would be tipped off, and Bush's desire to keep this from the
public. It all makes sense that the target of the domestic spying could
be US journalists.

But the scary part about this, is John's very next post says "I'm off to a meeting at the Capitol, more later." Ya think he'll come back?

And another question I have is, if this is true and Judy Miller had a reputation for sleeping with her sources, will we find out which one's they were? If the White House is going to take away our rights and circumvent the system to eavesdrop and US citizens, they oughta at least throw us a bone on this one. We do love gossip!