Comfortable, compliant CONSUMER citizen.

I had a conversation with a 22-yr. old medical student yesterday. His opinion? That he's going to prioritize what affects him day to day- like taxes. I like the kid but I felt like whaling him in the jaw. I couldn't believe it.

And that's what it's all about now in our country: being safe and prosperous for ourselves- us and our immediate loved ones- and not giving a damn about how what we do or think affects the group, or just the outside world in general.

The atomized, self-soothing consumer unit.

This is also related to the whole "Bowling Alone" argument.

Speaking of this - I think that one of the drawbacks of the Net is that we're not out on the streets- we're sitting behind our computers.

We need to get away from our screens and get outside and protest. We privileged can learn from the poor who don't speak English and have computers but can mobilize themselves for mass protest (against immigration). We should be seeing million-person Washington protests against Bush and Iraq, on a monthly basis.

Democracy takes work, which is uncomfortable. We're seeing just how fragile democracy really is.

Add me to the impromptu petition for a starless commenting section.

The program is too irregular, and too incomprehensible to be meaningful. Glenn has commented that he can star things, but rarely does so, and other Salon editors occasionally come by.

As such, it becomes a very unpredictable mechanism of finding good comments.

If it is going to continue, I request a Salon Mucky-muck post some type of criteria they use to assess what makes a star-worthy post. If it's not transparent, what's the point?

Seriously: Naz's starred comment is indicative that the criteria are weak. The thrust of his comment is that Americans don't care and as a matter of public opinion, the issue is an electoral loser. That's a pretty weak rebuttal to the serious legal and moral issues Glenn raises, and the new evidence as provided by Comey's testimony. What made that comment starworthy? Naz didn't engage the substance of Glenn's post at all.

Lots of very important issues are unfortunately not electoral winners. Is a windy appeal to majority fallacy all it takes to get a star?

In that case, my rebuttal is Glenn's very high readership numbers and that almost every post he makes hits Salon's "most active stories" section. Lots of people agree with him, so Naz must be wrong by his own "logic"

Why does everyone on the right think that this scandal is a minor one? Does not the innate criminality and corruption of this administration raise some eyebrows? Doesn't anyone have any ethical or moral compass when it comes to law?

It is plain to me (an ordinary citizen) that this administration has broken more laws in the past 6 years than Nixon ever dreamed of; they have broken them with impunity and have had the sheer nerve to pass them off as being for "the good of all Americans".

When will someone in Congress finally get the courage to stop this insanity and start the impeachment hearings? Isn't there already enough testimony and evidence to convict all of the administration of high crimes and misdemeanors?

Watergate was about bugging the Democratic headquarters. This is about bugging the entire United States. There is a difference.

I was the 26th digger.

1) How do you know it's illegal? We haven't even told you what it is.

2) John Ashcroft thought it was illegal, whatever it is.

3) No, he never said that. He said he couldn't be sure that it was legal.

4) Did he know what it is?

5) I can't tell you that.

6) If you were just wishing him well, what were all those papers in your hand?

7) Papers?

8) Why did you try to stop us talking to Mr. Ashcroft or Mr. Comey?

9) They worked for us, not for you, and what we do is secret. People don't talk about it. Or else.

10) Or else what?

11) I can't talk about it.

Does anyone besides me think that in this case, the judicious use of a rubber hose or even (gasp!) waterboarding might be justified, or perhaps extraordinary rendition to a basement somewhere in San Francisco? (I bet the Cycle Sluts would know how to get the information we need out of this bozo. Tick, tick, tick, and all that....)

two meta-points:

1) joined and dugg

2) Yes, please editors, these stars are ridiculous. The "comment rating" systems are part of why I don't already participate in digg and similar sites.

And I have been told in the past that nasalfapppr is a troll, not a genuine winger, whether or not this is true, he's not contributed any serious debate that I can recall.

Glenn,

I think, in evaluating the program, you may be being a little too lawlerly here. Refashioning of the "President's Program" wouldn't have to be, wouldn't even necessarily be about whipping up a new (AUMF) justification. After all, that takes no more time (or effort) than writing a legal brief.

I expect that someday, when all this is revealed, we will find that the refashioning was technological/methodological within the NSA: perhaps adding constraints on the possibility of human intervention prior to the computer screening processes, or perhaps tightening the "degrees of separation" of allowable surveillance or the like. It happened too quickly to be the development and installation of a new computer system. It had to have been more in the nature of flipping switches in, or putting new limits on the capabilities of something that was already built. Now maybe Comey et.al. decided that the AUMF justification also required limitation of what had gone on before, but that conclusion itself would involve technological/methodological changes by the NSA--and it most probably were those that the senior WH thugs, uh staff, were resisting and trying to subvert/supplant.

(You need to pay more attention to how real people actually implement lawyers' and the law's decrees--like how companies build Sarbanes-Oxley compliance mechanisms: this was, most probably, much the same, but in a different context.)