I've asked you once to please stop throwing up on the comment threads. Post something someone else has to say. It may be worth reading. -- L.W.M

You may not have noticed LWM but this comments thread is not yours to tell people what they can and cannot do within. You are not the decider. You may want to take your own advice and start your own blog. Then you can be as authoritarian as you like and rule the roost. That is, after all, what self important cocks do.

Good luck. I mean that. I may even join you, depending on what it is you come up with besides angry exhortations and criticisms of everyone else.

Isn't that the very essence of blogs? Angry exhortations and criticisms of everyone else?

Someone asked if Glenn thought having a Blue Dog Dem was no better than having a Republican in the seat. Answering for myself, there is at least one way in which it is preferable: even if the Blue Dog votes 100% Republican, he still counts towards Dems having the majority. That's more meaningful in the Senate, however; once the majority is assured, having someone who votes against you all the time (or at least on the important things like FISA expansion) is a liability no matter what party they nominally represent. So in this particular instance, my answer would be yes, having a Blue Dog Dem is indeed no better than having a Republican in the seat.

Electing Obama to the Executive is only one step that needs to be taken to get the Progressive agenda addressed. All Blue Dogs must be relentlessly hounded (heh) out of the party. Yes, that's exclusionary shirts-and-skins talk; but the Blue Dogs don't support the policies we want to promote and enact, so as long as we can purge them without losing our majorities, it makes little sense not to try to run them out. The reason we have seen no change in our Iraq policies after supposedly taking control of Congress in 2006 was that we Progressives didn't really take control. The Blue Dogs + the minority Republicans still constitute a majority of both houses of Congress, and they kill or forestall any measure put forward that the President doesn't like while they promote and pass the measures the President does like. Until that equation changes, we're not going to get anywhere.

I've said before that I love Glenn's writing and agree with what he says. I also know he's going to lose this telecom immunity fight, as I have said before. Telecom immunity will pass, because that's what those who are currently in control of the levers of power want. I don't like being proven right; but there is cause for hope. As long as people like Glenn are free to campaign against the shredding of our Constitution, and calls for action result in raising of significant amounts of money and activity that gets the attention of politicians, the possibility of changing the equation still exists. The call to action should not be simply "more and better Democrats." It should be "more and better Progressives" or even "more and better citizens."

I wonder how much of the support for telecom immunity stems from simple ignorance and laziness. After all, Nuremberg was 60 years ago; few people are still alive who remember that era, and "I was just following orders" sounds very much a plausible defense at first glance. It does sound unreasonable (and unpatriotic- let's be realistic, patriotism is still a force to be reckoned with in this country) to expect telecoms to be suspicious when you have the Executive Branch and/or Justice Department itself telling them that it's OK to supply information to the government. If the people who would be prosecuting you are telling you it's OK, why should you be expected to doubt them? Don't you expect that they, who are charged with seeing that the laws be faithfully executed, would know the legal ramifications and have accounted for them before asking you to supply the information? It may seem outrageous to someone who lives and breathes the law and has an inherent (and healthy) suspicion of authority, that anyone could so blindly trust anyone else on such a seemingly-obvious point; but I don't find it that out of the realm of possibility, given what we know about how incurious a lot of people are with regard to history and philosophy. They may simply make a layman's analysis of what they would do if faced with such a request from such an authoritative source, and decide that it's unfair to expect any citizen, corporate or private individual, to thoroughly research the legality of every request presented to them; especially one presented as a matter of national security. They may also believe that the lawsuits against the telecoms are a form of blaming the victims. After all, it was the administration that made the illegal requests; it is the administration that should be punished.

I'm not saying that telecom immunity should be passed; I'm saying I can understand why some people would support it.

LWM - I'm really at a loss for how to communicate with you. You seem to be imposing some sort of intention or content onto my relatively few posts which is not there.

My elaborating on one point of one post of Adnoto's doesn't me an Adnoto2 make. I don't know enough about his overall views and opinions to make that judgment myself, so I doubt that you can.

Honestly, I don't know what your hard-on against Adnoto is about, or why you're rubbing it all up against me now, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with anything I've actually said.

I can't speak for Adnoto, but I don't know where you got the idea that I want to destroy the police, democracy, or otherwise smash the state. -- djmagaro

He knows full well that is not what we are advocating. He is attacking straw-men because a) he knows we are correct, b) he knows people are listening to us and seriously considering what we have said and c) he is afraid.