In a report on the latest of President Obama’s attempts to circumvent Congress and govern by decree — this time by getting the Federal Communications Commission to raise “fees” on cellphone users by billions of dollars to expand federal subsidies for high-speed Internet access in local schools — the Washington Post also lets us know what the president thinks of revelations that the National Security Agency is scooping up all our emails and Internet traffic. We found out only later, though the president presumably knew back on June 6, that contrary to what we were told at the time, government officials also read some of the email. 

And what does the president think of these revelations that set off the “debate” he’s so supportive of? He thinks they’re “noise” getting in the way of announcements of programs that are, though of dubious constitutionality, “real and meaningful”:

On the same day of Obama’s visit [to a school to announce his ConnectEd program], news reports were dominated by details of a wide-ranging National Security Agency surveillance program that has since become one of the major controversies of the president’s second term.

As Air Force One flew toward North Carolina that day, Obama lamented to his education secretary that one of the administration’s biggest ideas was going to be overtaken by other news.

“I remember him sort of saying, ‘It’s a shame that there’s going to be a focus on the noise rather than something that’s real and meaningful,’ ” [Arne] Duncan said.