A completely self-indulgent post…

It’s been a chaotic day at Yearly Kos, with the presidential forum and all. I have audio of it, but won’t get it online until I’m back in Durham. Of course you can see the whole thing soon, I hope — the YK site doesn’t have it up yet. I have some video of the John Edwards individual session, but I’ll need a bit of time to slice and dice it.

Anyway, back to the whole point of the post. I was hoping that I would run into Glenn Greenwald again here (reference my blogger crush on him in an earlier post). The pic I had taken with Glenn was heinous, or rather, I looked like something the cat dragged in so I needed another chance.

After the individual presidential sessions, I was up on the 4th floor of the cavernous hall checking my mail in a quiet wing and lo and behold, there’s Glenn, dashing by looking for the interview room for Chris Dodd. This place is so confusing; lots of folks have gotten turned around here. I pointed him in the right direction. I packed up my gear and headed over, since I was eventually going to the same room. I had the good fortune of snaring Dodd’s busy Internet Communications Coordinator, Matt Browner-Hamlin, to give us a take 2 on the photo. This one gets a thumbs up:

BTW, Glenn has a slamming post up today on the horrid vote on the Hill that cedes even more power to Dear Leader. A snippet is after the flip.
You have to wonder — after all the effort spent taking back Congress, the Dems simply rolled over. This happened on their watch.

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 — almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history — that George W. Bush can “demand” that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

…Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush’s radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits — and then go far beyond — by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

…And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA — a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

Please go read the rest, and check out Kagro X’s diary, There is something fundamentally wrong here.