I'm so glad I read (ok, mainly skimmed) to the end of the hundreds of comments, to get to your remarkable letter Holly. Though it's beautifully written what struck me most was how remarkably oratorical it was, and how much it deserved to be heard thundered, stentorian, in the House. In one short letter you've passionately, eloquently captured the very essence of the outrage felt and expressed here for months by the magnificent Glenn Greenwald and his large and (largely) brilliant commentariat.

All the way across the planet, in distant Australia, you've given a man, with outrage fatigue, genuine goosebumps.

As for you, L.W.M., your hatpin is a little more subtle, but you really shouldn't try poking your friends with it.

I was poking someone else with that hatpin. Some other great "protector" of the constitution. Think... think.

I could have told you where this would all lead years ago when the ACLU lost the fight over drug testing in the workplace. That was a good place to have drawn a line in the sand. What frigging difference does it make if some person in a non-critical job, like the janitor, smokes a little pot on the weekends? No, there is nothing in our constitution that prevents this. There should've been but they couldn't think of everything. And we would do well to remember that the Framers' notions of privacy were vastly different from our own. TJ and the wife probably had a house slave sleeping at the foot of the bed while they bumped uglies. So naturally I laugh at the people supporting Ron Paul, and not just because of the illuminati.

And unfortunately we don't know what Patrick Henry, another slave owner, actually said.

He may have said "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_Liberty%2C_or_give_me_Death%21

He may not have said it. Eyewitness and earwitness testimony is usually the most unreliable. Any lawyer will tell you that. But this is no endorsement for having the telecoms record everything for posterity and the gummint.

Perhaps market logic will ultimately save the human race from its silly nationalism--or at least make the issues apparent. I can hardly wait for global corporations to become so powerful that national governments outlive their usefulness. By then it will be obvious that constitutional protections from the government aren't enough: those protections will need to be extended to protections from corporations themselves. Granting them amnesty is the exact opposite of what needs to be done. They need to be held accountable as if they were part of the government, since they have been acting by proxy for the government. The founding fathers did not foresee this development.

This is perhaps off-topic, but I fail to see how the political philosophy of privatizing everything-including the Strategic Air Command--would do anything but exacerbate the situation. The pro-2nd amendment libertarian survivalist property-rights uber alles mindset would make matters worse, as global corporations rush in to monopolize whatever public resources the libertarians will happily sell to them, somewhat like the apocryphal account of the American Indians selling Manhattan for $24 in glass beads, only on a far greater scale. If that happens, the country will find itself in the world's biggest depression, as private corporations withhold access to their private property--formerly government property sold to them by the libertarians--on speculation that other global interests might purchase those resources for a profit. Such are the catastrophic consequences of believing that protecting property rights is the highest conceivable moral good.

Instant email to all Senate:

http://action.chrisdodd.com/t/41/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2050

In actuality, Congress exists — as a vital enabling arm of the most extreme abuses of the Bush administration. Could anyone wishing to dispute that depressing fact muster any evidence at all in service of their argument? I don't believe so.

Well, the facts are as they are, but I'm willing to dispute the contention that it's the White House in particular of which Congressional leaders are craven lackeys. It's increasingly clear (from research encouraged by discussions in this forum) that these Democratic politicians remain popular with their core constituents, and where their electability at home is threatened (as is the case with Reid, for example) it seems to be due to the perception that they're too liberal or too partisan.

It's an age-old truism in American politics that everyone wants to throw the bums in Congress out, but nobody wants to throw their own bum out. The paradox probably never occurs to most people, until, eventually, it sort of burbles up from under the pot lid as a vaguely generalized anti-incument feeling. And for the most part, the best one can reach people like that is on a visceral, emotional level. They aren't reachable by facts — or at least not by facts alone.

So we have the Congress that we (in the statistical sense) want. I get that it's not a popular thing to say around here, but it's the truth, and saying it isn't doesn't do a damn bit of good.

If we want Diane Feinstein (still popular at home despite all of her shenanigans, though that is finally starting to change) to vote differently, we have to change California. If we want Harry Reid to lead or retire, we need to get Nevadans to make him.

If Californians or Nevadans or anyone else wanted to hear the message that "Unclaimed Territory" is broadcasting loud and clear, nothing is stopping them. But for whatever reason, these people choose to get their news from USA Today instead. They don't know better, or they did but forgot, or they just plain don't process facts that don't fit with their worldview.

And who can blame them? Just the other day I had a conversation with a progressive activist and dedicated Bush critic who had no idea that the United States had apprehended Qaeda terrorists who were trying to hijack airplanes to use as missiles four years before the September 11 attacks. (I knew because I read about it at the time from an arcane source — the New York Times.) Most people think that Jesse Helms' public threats to have then-president Clinton killed are a myth — even the ones who were alive at the time when it was all over the news. We forget, and the echo-chamber version of history takes over.

... which makes it all the more important to keep driving wedges into the engines of cultural perception and hammer away. It's not just the DC Beltway press corps, though heaven knows life inside 495 is its own special kind of bizarre. Making us read something we don't want to is one of the hardest things to get Americans to do.

More than anything else, that's what makes the work here so important — I don't believe it will directly change politicians' minds much, but it can change (and has already done so) the way the popular perception of events is formed. And when it comes that's a transformation that will last.