Everything You Wanted to Know About the Post-9/11 Executive Powergrab But Were Afraid to Ask

Again, breaking my no-political-speech rule for a moment, I really cannot recommend in strong enough terms Hilzoy's ultra-sharp post regarding the Domestic Surveillance Dragnet (given all the false positives identified in a number of mainstream articles, I think it's misleading to call it the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and of course misleading is the point). There's very little there we haven't already seen, but she specifically takes up some critical exchanges in Attorney General Gonzalez's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, drawing heavily from Glenn Greenwald's even longer post on the same topic, and does a nice job of illustrating the breadth of power to which the Executive is arrogating itself by drawing out a number of entirely defensible inferences from between the lines of Gonzalez's serial non-answers. Her lament is my lament, and her fears I share:

[A]sk yourself whether this is the country you always thought you lived in. As far as I'm concerned, the answer is: No. Obviously, no. And I want my country back.