"... our youth are being degraded. The electronic systems we're putting in place are helping to do that. And until we curb that, I am more reluctant than any of my colleagues to move forward."

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as superstitious Russian peasants fearful of electrification of their homes (when they took the time, between stints of abject terror and hatred of foreigners) because they thought it was going to afflict them with evil spirits. Presumably there were once purse-lipped, weasel-faced tribal auxiliary sub-chieftains, too, who came down on paleolithic cave art because it could be used to draw voluptuous goddess pictures.

So here's an idea — let's start enforcing anticompetitive telecom policies again, provide incentives for ambitious telecoms to expand laterally instead of vertically if they want to increase marketshare, and give all the terrified serfs the option of opting out on a county by county basis if they want. You don't want any broadband, you don't get any broadband. You just don't get to make everyone else go along with your crazy talk.

Competition, innovation, and self-determination. Aren't those the quintessential American virtues? Who are these yahoos who claim to represent "the real America?" Democrats, throw the knuckle-draggers out into the wilderness of their ignorance, where they seem to wish to reside, and start sending some real homo sapiens to Washington.

Not to be a chatterbox, but it's worth adding here that the idea that government regulation and the free market are antithetical is utter, utter horse pucky. It's a purely American conceit that simply because you regulate a market you have somehow eliminated the possibility of competition.

In fact very nearly the opposite is true — it's alarming how poorly understood the concept is but the American telecom issue boils down to a simple, classic case of hydraulic despotism (tube analogies notwithstanding — though the term "etheric despotism" does have a certain zing).

Adam Smith was referring to just such a phenomenon when he observed that

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The solution, the godfather of the free market went on to say, is for the rest of us to prevent these people from actually monopolizing resources contrary to the public interest. What he is telling us, in essence, is that the free market must be kept free. It doesn't stay free by itself. That means intervention, and intervention means regulation. You can have good regulations or you can have bad regulation, but you can't have no regulation or you will quickly have no free market, either. ... a la American telecommunications sector.

Somehow or another we came across this foolish idea that accumulators of massive capital and monopolizers of basic resources are acting in accordance with the free market. But we invented that out of whole cloth to serve some national mythology of oligarchical good. It doesn't suit us as a people any better now than it ever did — today all we lack is the good sense to put a stop to it.

These are very small straws in a howling wind — but then again, it only takes a few straws to start a fire.

Straws on fire to check a howling wind! Or a howling wind that ... what, feeds the fire? Banks the fire? Howls some more? This whole metaphor is really baffling.

... as is the crux of Chris Floyd's complaint. Impeachment not moving fast enough? Give me a break! The time to start impeaching the key members of the Bush regime was years ago, not now in the middle of the next election. However frustrating the reality may be, we don't get to stamp our feet now and expect our elected representatives to take us seriously. Where, they ask themselves, was all this energy and involvement in 2005? In 2003? Heck, in 1999?

And well they should ask. Tossing those crooks out would be great, and anyone who wants to try it has my vote. But let's get one thing clear here. Trying to undo 7 years of degeneracy does not happen — cannot happen — in the middle of the end game. Anyone who expects Congress — any Congress — to suddenly make impeachment an overriding eleventh hour priority is only trying to assuage their own guilt in the cheapest, most self-deluding way possible.

Put another way, if impeachment really is the bedrock test of devotion to this republic — if anyone who opposes it, even through insufficient fervor, is guilty by association of mass murder, corruption, and all the crimes of the Bush regime — then that guilt extends all the way back to the 2000 election, to Bush v Gore and even before.

We know nothing new about the Bush regime now that hasn't been staring us in the face since before its inauguration. Where was Chris Floyd then? Where was Glenn Greenwald, for that matter? Where were you, readers of Salon? Sniggering at us "crazies" with our "Impeach Bush" stickers and our petitions that no one paid any attention to?

So knock it off with the loyalty tests and the "with us or against us" crap. You all weren't with us when it would have actually prevented this insanity. By Chris Floyd's own logic, that makes him and everyone else just as culpable as Bush — I didn't accept that then, and I don't now.

Turning the doomed course of the American ship of state around is going to take patient, dedicated effort and unrelenting pressure on members of Congress so that they know that their constituents are, finally, serious about these issues. It will take finding and funding energetic progressives to beat old-guard Democrats in the primaries. And it will take voting a Democrat into the White House in 2008, come hell, high water, or Hillary.

If you can do all that and impeach Bush at the same time, great, do it. But otherwise, less talk and more passing the bucket.