Ondelette: I have had the beginnings of a similar line of thought, but you have fleshed it out to a much greater extent. I think a lot of this is explained by the distinction between "intelligence" and "evidence" where the right wing thinks only the latter is protected by the 4th amendment. Obviously one can easily craft a scenario where the police spy on a person until they get some hint of a crime, and then use what they already know about the person to construct "probable cause" to get a warrant to get the specific evidence they need to secure a conviction.

So yes, the unlimited intelligence model creates incentives for the state to do fishing expeditions and get good at crafting up plausible scenarios where the evidence they present in court isn't tossed out as poisoned fruit.

Also, I have to wonder more prosaically how many NSA employees eavesdrop on their wives or girlfriends, or supermodels they think are hot or whatnot. How may are listening to Bill Gate's phone calls hoping to get good stock tips? There are plenty of non-conspiratorial ways unlimited spying can be abused that don't involve the government setting out to create 1984.

Aya:

Not to mention that Ford had, at least to my knowledge, no part in the Watergate affair

Yeah well I suppose we'll never know for sure if there was a quid-pro-quo in Nixon's choice of Ford for VP. But yes, you are right that Bush I's pardons had more personal incentive to cover up his own crimes than Ford's pardon.

It is great when one of your body blows actually lands and doesn't just get ignored. This is precisely the kind of thing the media is really good at ignoring.

Although that means cynically that it isn't Glenn's work at all which caused this, but instead Donahue who is Important whereas Glenn is a blogger and should only be mentioned in campy 13 second "what's on the blogs today" segments.

Nonetheless, this is awesome. McCain's perceived maverick independence from the hateful right takes a giant hit. Maybe someone will even mention his backtracking on "agents of intolerance" again.

Yes, but today's irrelevant blogger could very well be tomorrow's policy-maker. I know that, even now, Serious Mainstream Media considers the blogging nation no more than an amusing troupe from beyond the fringe. I think, though, as more and more citizens get their information and news from non-traditional outlets, you'll find the corporate media becoming the irrelevant bunch.

Well firstly I think you missed the scornful target of that comment which certainly wasn't bloggers but the way the media tries to downplay them into a cute sort of novelty. A fad.

But to address your substantive claims, as much as I love certain bloggers, I don't agree they will overtake the traditional media in terms of reach or influence.

Even assuming >50% of citizens get their news from non-traditional outlets, they will all be looking at different outlets. The remaining media organs will still have proportionately greater influence.

Also at a practical level, blogs cannot replace newspapers for gathering news. Talkingpointsmemo is fantastic, but they had to hire full time staff who go around investigating stories and so forth. They're essentially a newspaper that doesn't have a print edition. They're certainly more interactive with their readers, but to the extent they do original reporting, it is mostly by very traditional means of information gathering that they do so.

My best hope for blogs is a kind of symbiosis with TV and and the big print media where blogs supplement, fact check, highlight and inject important stories. The few million people who comprise the netroots can act as a kind of mass thinktank and media quick reaction centre for progressive causes. The other 290M Americans will have their news improved by us.

Remember, the blogs wouldn't exist in this form if the news media wasn't so damn bad. If the news media were to improve, a lot fewer people would feel the need to get online and scream outrage about what they're seeing. If that changed, we might continue to exist, but we'd need a new raison d'etre.

I said the following but it needs more elucidation:

Even assuming >50% of citizens get their news from non-traditional outlets, they will all be looking at different outlets. The remaining media organs will still have proportionately greater influence.

What I'm trying to get at is, a unified 5% of the population is more powerful than a disjoined 10%. So if my cable news network has 10M viewers, and 200 liberal blogs have 15M readers, the news network will still be more influential.

This is largely why the Religious right has been so impactful. There are other large groups of people in the US, but none so unified (at least until recently, we'll see going forward if that's still true).

Moving past Hagee's views on Catholics, what about blaming gays in New Orleans for Katrina? Does John McCain stand by that?

Is that the kind of rhetoric we should all applaud?

And if not, why is McCain allowed to welcome Hagee's endorsement while Obama is required to declaim and reject some praise from Farrakhan?

The whole point of this exercise is about the double standard being applied to white hatemongers versus black ones. I don't give a shit if Hagee once praised JPII, he's a despicable hate monger and not someone a Presidential candidate should seek out for support.