This layman welcomes this decision, as I welcomed Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's August, 2006 decision ruling the Executive Branch's reprehensible wiretapping illegal and contrary to the Constitution.

So IMO, this decision is to be applauded; in these desperate times, any sign that the judiciary still has a vertebrae and a pulse is heartening.

But the question is whether the slow drip of judicial pushback will arouse Congress, or a Democratic administration, or a significant bloc of citizens from their equally reprehensible torpor. Hard to be sanguine about this prospect.

The judiciary is necessarily the last bastion of personal ethics and principle; an individual judge with personal integrity intact may rule without fear or favor, and let the chips fall where they may. But, to restate my opinion-in-progress, both the executive and legislative branches have morphed into para-corporate institutions that retain traditional and customary procedures, but are populated by executives or managers-- technocrats-- each operating individual franchises.

Cooperation is required to make the sausage of legislation, and the legislation itself has ethical and moral components-- and of course political rhetoric is laden with ethical values. But with few exceptions, our political elite has forsaken the formerly-settled notion that office-holders have a higher duty to the Constitution that at least occasionally requires them to leave quotidian business-as-usual, and undertake politically inconvenient and risky duties to redress profound wrongdoing that undermines our constitutional republic.

The Kuchinches and Feingolds are exceptions. Regardless of their prowess at spellbinding speechifying and lip service to high ideals such as the rule of law, in practice our corporatized, money-obsessed incumbents eschew such service to ideals and trans-political duties as quaint and virtually obsolete. Everything is reduced to political calculus, and there's no more room for the notion that it is even possible to act responsibly without regard to such political calculus. Actions speak louder than words; by their fruits ye shall know them.

Which is why I am quite certain that our next president and Congress will remain the Immovable Object to the judiciary's salutary but Resistible Force. The slender hope is that We the People will become sufficiently invigorated by these discrete judicial victories to threaten the professional political class' business.

I appreciate your lucid and thoughtful comment.

I've been following this thread, but haven't kept up with the story sufficiently to add anything. But even as a layman reading second-hand snippets of information, I've been bothered by the accounts of this therapist-- I've thought of questions similar to the ones you've posed.

As many others have observed, there are too many aspects of her account that are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with Ivins work and activity in the past few years. It's just too simple to characterize Ivins as a deranged and dangerous malcontent who simply cracked, and chose a difficult and unreliable means to commit suicide.

I'm certain that Glenn will be following up this story! And by the way-- where is Glenn? Actually, I'm pleased that he takes time off, or at least away from the blog. He's more than earned as much R&R as he likes.

But this story is so spooky that I'm tempted to ask him to, you know, check in once in a while. Hmmm, you don't suppose that he went undercover and scheduled a session with Jean Duley...

I'm starting to feel like Scully, realizing that she hasn't heard from Mulder for too long a while.