Glenn wrote: I'm increasingly convinced that the effort to battle the growing lawlessness of our political class and the sprawling surveillance state that assaults core Constitutional liberties will come not from the Democratic Party, but from citizen coalitions of this sort. Does yesterday's episode allow any doubt about that?

No. Might future steps include tracking and publicizing the efforts like the one being made by the group who is opposing the fingerprint registry? Or make other efforts like the one below more widely known? I'm sure many, including me, would be willing to help.

The House has voted 286-137 to expand the National Archives and Records Administration’s powers on the oversight of federal and presidential record-keeping practices. However, the bill failed to get a veto-proof majority and the White House has said President Bush likely would reject the legislation if it reached his desk.

The Electronic Message Preservation Act would amend both the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The measure would create mandatory minimum requirements for electronic records management systems to be used by federal agencies and require agencies to preserve electronic communications in an electronic format. The measure passed July 9 would also have NARA set standards for the management of presidential records, including specific standards for managing electronic messages.

The bill's backers say it represents necessary reforms to records laws because of the increasing use of electronic forms of communication in government. They also cite what they say have been unsatisfactory record-keeping practices by the Bush administration which allegedly resulted in the loss of White House e-mail messages....

The Senate is not considering a similar bill.

http://www.fcw.com/online/news/153093-1.html

Here's the bill that passed the House yesterday: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR5811:/

This particular bill doesn't have a chance of going anywhere now, but very few even knew about it.

I'm drafting a letter to my Senators (Clinton, Schumer). Obama, huh? I'll try, but I think it would get in the way of his campaign. ;-)

Is this what you're referring to? From the transcript:

Turning what could have been a minor updating to let the U.S. eavesdrop on purely overseas calls that happened to come through switching stations, turning that into unchecked power to listen in on American calls to or from overseas as well.

This refers to foreign-to-foreign calls that pass through the US. This is the minor update you've heard about that wasn't covered by FISA.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're getting at. This is what I was referring to and what I believe Rachel Maddow was referring to:

It is important here to recall that there is actually an amendment to FISA that is at least arguably justifiable. Even the original FISA law never required warrants in order to eavesdrop on (a) foreign-to-foreign calls or (b) calls involving a U.S. citizen where the target was a non-citizen outside the U.S. (who just happened to call into the U.S.). But recently, technological developments resulted in such calls, even foreign-foreign calls, being routed through the U.S. via fiber optics, and a FISA court ruled this year that the language of FISA requires warrants for such calls.

Even civil libertarian stalwarts such as Russ Feingold agree that it was never the intent of FISA to require warrants for those categories of calls and that amending FISA strictly to fix that problem is justifiable.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/09/fisa/

I'm not so sure the foreign-to-foreign communications that are routed through the US are limited to emails, Silash. According to a research company that tracks international communications, calls are included in that:

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it....

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/domestic_taps

Yes, the Attorney General did have the authority to tap "purely foreign-to-foreign" calls. But, as Glenn said, the administration claimed that the court said that foreign-to-foreign communications that passed through the US required a warrant.

I think I understand what you're saying. It's true that some have falsely said that Democrats wanted warrants for purely foreign-to-foreign communications (this, for example: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/29/hoekstra-joe-klein/), but that is not what Rachel Maddow said.

Just for the heck of it, I went back to Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritaritans" to see if I could find any parallels with the few, but annoying, Obama supporters. This made me laugh...

You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

"...Bloody Mary made with aquavit is fantastic."

It's the only way to drink them.

With Derbig, Bamage...mixes might drown out the flavor of the aquavit. And if you can, get Linie (http://www.linie.com/) - it's the best.