As sickened as I am with this FISA debacle--and the charade truly sickens me--I'm eager to see whether the ad campaign will get results.

Ideally, folks like Hoyer, Carney, Barrow--not to mention Pelosi--would inhabit an O.J. Simpson-like world.

These particular politicians should be ostracized by their districts, not representing them.

The money raised at ActBlue and the ad campaign it'll fund is a start. But let's face it -- it's time for Steny to leave political life behind and assume his role as an Executive Vice President at Verizon or AT&T. His work in Congress is done and he'll be well-rewarded for it.

The real answer is to keep these bastards from getting their hands on the levers of power in the first place. Until a third party arises that is committed to representation of it's constituents, the progressive movement is doomed to fighting rearguard actions like FISA.

Funny, I was just thinking that with Hillary out of the presidential race, she has plenty of time (and leftover energy) to lead on this issue.

Where is she? What is she doing about it? All I hear are crickets.

Perhaps she's working on another anti-flag-burning amendment, or ramping up to support another illegal, unjustified war.

Once again, my Senator -- whom I campaigned and voted for -- has let me and my country down. It's why I couldn't support her run for the presidency and why I'll support her Democratic challenger if she runs for re-election to the Senate.

@Paul

Please please for the love of all that is holy in this universe GO AWAY. Your beloved Hillary led the charge on the Democratic side to lead us into the Iraq war. She got all snuggly with Lieberman to declare how big and bad Iran (IRAN!) is. Her "leadership" is what lost her the nomination despite overwhelming support from the Democratic establishment and her ex-president husband.

If you're too stupid to see this, go hijack a thread over at the McCain board (I'm sure its hopping) and let us figure out how to really solve our problems. Your cult of personality is tiresome and not helpful.

I heard Kit Bond on "Morning Edition" this morning. He said:

"When the government tells you to do something I think we all realize that's something you should, uh, do"

This man is my senator, and he's spouting perfect fascist rhetoric. I was never ashamed of America until the past seven years, and I've never been more ashamed to be an American than I have this week. Between the McClatchy stories about prisoner torture and this completely unnecessary Democratic capitulation to the Bush administration's demands for unlimited power to spy on American citizens I despair for the future of the U.S. I'm not sure even electing Barack Obama will do much to change the direction this country is going in. Will the citizens ever wake up from their media-induced bread-and-circuses coma to see what's going on? I'm afraid that they will wake up one day and realize that they're living in a totalitarian surveillance state. Will they then wonder how that happened? If they do they should point the finger at themselves.

These days I check salon.com solely for the purpose of following the fisa issue. Thank you for your dogged persistence in tracing the tracks of the players. Because of the information you've provided over the past months, and because of the most recent turn of events, I have made a conttribution. It makes me feel much better than sending in another letter to my Democratic representatives in Washington.

This literally makes me want to wretch. Until someone shows some real leadership, they get nothing from me. Everything will go to BlueAct and taking these motherf*ckers down. I pity the next poor soul at the DNC who is unlucky enough to dial my number, cuz I'm going to rip them a new one.

I don't understand how placing an ad in the Washington Post targeting Representative Hoyer will accomplish anything. It will simply be dismissed as an attack on him based on a single issue. Mr. Greenwald has made the argument time and again that the issue is the clear failure of the entire Democratic party leadership to differentiate themselves and rise up to the rich and patriotic history of the party.

The real targets at this point are Obama and Pelosi. These are the leaders of the party, and it is they that share the shame of this bill. All I see in Obama now is someone looking to avoid a fight in order to preserve his horse-trading abilities later. I can't begin to express my rising disgust at both Pelosi and, more importantly, Obama. As I've noted in e-mails to both of their offices, and as Mr. Greenwaldwald mentions, if there is nary a Republican across the land that has anything bad to say about this bill, it must be exactly what they want which leads me to believe that the Democrats believe in exactly the same policies as the Republicans, and therefore I should just vote for those that are actually able to get the job done and get what they want, which are the Republicans. At this point the Democrats, led my Pelosi and Obama, are just carrying the Republican water.

Glenn,

Can the coalition use some of the money to get someone like Feingold to put a hold on this? Please?

Is he happy today?

Talk about your Rope-A-Dope. Pelosi just lured the Prez into impeachment, big time. Yep.

This FISA bill effectively presumes that the President broke the FISA law and violated the Fourth Amendment when he falsely assured the telecoms they should participate in warrantless wiretapping. And, while this FISA bill allows the telecoms immunity, retroactively, for what they did, the bill does not purport to grant any such immunity to the President. If I read it correctly (and it may be there's something buried in there that everyone is missing), the "illegality" of the President's instructions is not questioned at all by this legislative grant of immunity to those who, when told by the President that this was legal, accepted the President's lie and acted on it as if the President of the United States had some kind of integrity or something.

So now, the civil suits against the telecoms will go away; the government already has been dismissed from those civil suits based upon strained, but accepted, claims of national security. The only place left to air the question of the propriety and legality of the President's spying program and the "assurances" that were given to the telecoms is, therefore, by proceeding to congressional consideration of Articles 24 and 25 of the pending Impeachment Resolution presented by Representative Kucinich.

So, while everyone is assuming that Pelosi and the Democrats have miserably capitulated in yet another round of embarassingly misguided fear of George Bush, maybe what's really been going on is that Pelosi has lured Bush out into the open by her past "impeachment off the table" remarks (which, of course, were and could only ever have been based on what she knew about when she said it, and are obviously fair game for reconsideration and revision upon further reflection, right?). Now, the course of the FISA negotiations has resulted in the President's own handlers demanding and receiving an immunity provision that not only excludes the President's causal acts, but in fact presumes the illegality of those acts as a predicate for immunity to those who acted in response to the lies.

So, I guess we'll be impeaching Bush right away now, since Articles 24 and 25 have just been essentially conceded by the Republicans, the Administration ... and our Democratic leaders, too.

I'll be waiting for the announcement.