What drugs are you on and can I have some?

I think you misread Gail Collins. She wasn't saying we shouldn't care about FISA. She was saying: what ever gave us the impression that an eel like Obama would care?

Unlike many of you. I studied the FISA bill instead of just listening to Glenn. None of you can get beyond the Telecom issue.

That depends more on their district, their electoral strengths, etc., than it does on what motivates them to do bad things.

It seems reasonable to take Holly McLachlan's question as written — as being about who to target for replacement as opposed to other forms of consciousness-raising. In that respect motivation is quite salient.

One can appeal to fearful or purely self-interested legislators by making them more afraid of one's self than the alternative. It may be too late to cure them of cowardice and ignorance but they can still be brought on board, after a fashion. In fact we're already starting to see that happen.

(Not to mention that, as documented for a few thousand years, courageous politicians are a fabled rarity in any democracy.)

Those who genuinely believe in the surveillance state, as you aptly put it, or who are at least hoping to consult for it when they retire from public life, are a different case. They're going to go down with the ship.

And tellingly, those are the ones that MoveOn has been going after most aggressively.

..the congress, because they'll apply the breaks to these thuggish republicans who give bush everything he and his criminal cabal want.

I hardly ever agree with Glenn, but I do today.

The democrat leadership does not act on principle, they lack integrity.

Most politicians will waver in the face of a poll that tells them to do this, or do that. Why such a person is termed a "leader" is beyond me.

In any case, this lack of integrity is why democrats make such unappealling presidential candidates. You never know what you're going to get.

The actions of our congress, including Obama, are unsurprising, even to the most enthusiastic Democrat.

Why? Most of the democrats who voted for the bill are coming up for election. Unsuprisingly, all of the republicans voted for the bill. All of them, republicans and democrats alike, are more afraid of the republican smear machine than they are of the public.

They need to fear US more than they fear THEM. That means both republicans and democrats. It can't be "soft-on-terror" vs. "telecom immunity". It has to be "soft-on-terror" vs. "secret police, the end of America as you know it, the death of the American dream". It's hyperbole, but no more so than the arguments on the other side.

Someone should run an add that looks like a kid is being taken away by the secret police in the Soviet era and have it turn out to be America, because that's what's happening.

Or run the clips where john yoo says the president can legally torture a child in front of a parent to get information or bury someone alive or...

Or do something funny and ask if you want your ex-wife, the FBI agent, able to listen in to you all day - with no restraints.

This is not a hard argument to make. I'm sure the people reading this have much better ideas than I do. It's not even a right or left issue. Heck, just ask your friendly neighborhood libertarian if you want some rhetoric that will burn the roof of your mouth.

It may seem harsh to try and directly influence a politician by threatening to withhold our support - but how else are they going to know what's important to us.

As cresttwo reported regarding a chat with WaPo reporter Paul Kane, the cave in on FISA was largely a matter of squeezing swag out of Bush on the war supplemental. In the Dems view, Bush caved by signing the bill with oodles of what Republicans call "pork," like veterans' funding, New Orleans levee repair (we're still doing that how many years later?), GI Bill, unemployment benefits extension, and so on.

Bush had been adamant about all this stuff, much of it for years, but the deal was struck: if he wanted to get him and his friends off the hook for surveillance felonies, he had to cave on domestic funding.

Wah-lah! He did. And he got his FISA deal. Tit as it were for tat.

Glenn has been focusing specifically on the issues involved with shredding the Constitution and two tier rules of law and so forth, so he hasn't paid much attention to the tradeoffs in congress, and it sounds like the congresscritters have been pretty quiet about it all in any case.

But it's obvious that that's what happened. And that's probably why Obama went along with it. This is exactly the sort of thing that has to happen if Our Congress is to "get anything done," and Dame David Broder is not to call for the smelling salts every five minutes.

Constitution? Yes? So?

cresttwo's post:

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/10/democrats/permalink/182480e516b31033c18394b040e1adc8.html

This tradeoff, too, fits right in with the whole theory of "directed democracy" and consumerist desires fulfilled by Government.

When you can make such a mind-boggingly ridiculous statement as this:

The biggest win for Democrats and the most important improvement in the new FISA bill is the Exclusivity Clause: The new FISA law states no president can authorize surveillance(like Bush did with the N.S. A. program) under exclusive powers. Authorization must be done under congressional powers.

it becomes apparent that not only did you not "study" the bill, but that you have absolutely no clue what the hell you're talking about.

So there's no point — none whatsoever — in trying to restore the party to the same level of integrity through increased engagement with the political process and consistent demands for integrity and accountability.

It would only take time away from my bon-bons and American Idol. And Bush already said, way back when he was campaigning, that his administration would be all about 'accountability'. Since we take everything he says as gospel, I just don't understand all of this wah-wah that is going on about 'accountability'.

So everyone who says we should just vote for the Moon Unit Party or whatever it is this time around, you guys are the smart ones.

Is the Zappa family forming a political party? How cool!I would just love to vote for someone named Dweezil. I mean, since all things are now equal and all that.