That was a great lecture! but perhaps I know something about these things (full disclosure - I'm a telco employee) and don't want to put in a lot of technical detail here that obscures rather clarifies the issue of network neutrality.

To reiterate, network neutrality should mean that providers can offer various types of connections with various speeds, different mixes of various classes of services, etc., at various price points; what I do with the connection I purchase is my business.

Since the provider has sold me a connection with a specific profile, the provider has no issue in figuring out how to engineer its network. My choices on how I use my connection do not degrade anyone else's service. The various Robot-3 objections are irrelevant.

How to put together and market these various connections, hiding the technical details which most people won't follow, is an issue for the provider to solve. Hopefully, an Apple-like company will figure this out rather than a IBM-like company.

To reiterate, the version of network neutrality that says every IP packet is treated the same is a red herring, flies in the face of reality, and is pushed only by people who either do not understand the issue, or else want to sabotage network neutrality by posing an impossible version of network neutrality.

The malaise is in the Administration, in both branches of the legislature, and in the media. None are performing as imagined by the writers of the Constitution. We have a President who is executive-ordering his way to becoming an elected monarch; the legislature is not guarding its prerogatives, and media is lapdog, not watchdog.

The malaise then is not of people - it is not Reid, Bush, Cheney, Pelosi, Hiatt, Lichtblau - it is in the system undergirding the Constitutional institutions. Replacing the above named will not change the results. The dominant forces in the system are aligned to produce the results that so concern us.

Either the 2008 elections produce a massive realignment or else we need a new American Revolution, that Jefferson warned us we might need every generation. At the same time we need a media revolution that blows the existing networks, the NYT, WaPo into irrelevance; and a legal/economic revolution that changes our relationship with corporations.

It seems unrealistic; it seems unimaginable. It will take a burst of creativity of a magnitude that has only been seen a few times in history. The cost of not trying, however, will be enormous. The Iraq war disaster is just a minor example of what is to come.

The President in some sense is pursuing his responsibilities. Not very well, not with truth on his side, and by trampling the Constitution.

However, that a vigorous President might be tempted to overstep his Constitutional bounds was foreseen by the founding fathers. That is why we have the Congress.

It is the Congress that has abdicated its Constitutional responsibilities, more so than the President. It is tempting to point out that Congress has lower approval ratings than the President as proof that Americans understand this. That is a dubious argument however.

What is not dubious is that the Republican-controlled Congress was a rubberstamp for the President; and that the Democrat-controlled Congress is only slightly better.

What is strange is that the cure is supposed to be voting for more Democrats. A Constitutionalist might argue that to make the Congress follow its duties, if we're voting for a Democratic President, we ought to vote for a Republican Congress. A realist would say that we have no good choice, we have only bad and less bad choices.

Glenn, as Atrios put it - "Democracy hangs on a 5-4 thread". We desperately need to understand the 4 dissenters in this decision. Please comment on the dissent and how/where its weakest points are.

Is this correct, and if not, corrections, please!

The US government has the power to take two kinds of detainees -

1. Criminal detainees - to whom habeas corpus applies

2. Prisoners of War - to whom the Geneva Conventions apply

Post 9/11, Bush & Congress tried to create a third class of detainees

3. Enemy Combatants - for whom neither habeas corpus nor the Geneva Conventions apply. These can be detained indefinitely without being charged with anything and have none of the POW protections.

What the Supreme Court said today by a single vote - no can do without a Constitutional Amendment.

Yes, I saw a bit of Pat Buchanan being absurd - did you switch the channel as fast as I did, I wonder.

GG wrote:

If Conservatives are only opposing these detention powers as a means of undermining Brown, that's fine with me. That's exactly the kind of adversarial check on the ruling party that has been so tragically missing in our country. That's how it should be -- the opposition party should be a check on efforts by the ruling party to seize more power. Whether they're doing it out of base political motive or principle doesn't much matter.

Which reminds us what a failure the Democrats have been and how utterly shameful it is that our only realistic option in the 2008 elections is to vote for yet more Democrats. We can't risk another rightwing authoritarian ideologue on the Supreme Court, and that is why we have to vote for a Democratic President and Senate; and yet the Democratic Senate (even more so than Congress) is fully complicit in the rightwing stomping of the Constitution.

I think one of the big failures we had was in the Lamont/Liebermann contest - it confirmed to the Democratic Senators that kowtowing to Bush was politically viable.