Newstands

Aravois' thoughts on that fascinating story blogger Glenn Greenwald broke yesterday:

The Bush Administration opposed legislation that would have given them the very power they now claim they needed, power they now claim they didn't have under FISA. It's because they didn't have this power, they now claim, that they had to break the law and spy without a warrant. But this law would have given them much of the legal power they wanted. Yet they said they didn't need it, and worse yet, that the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. But now we know they did it anyway.

...
So Bush chose to break the law when he had an alternative. And what's worse, this suggests that Bush feared the Supreme Court would never let him spy on Americans the degree to which he wanted, the court would find it unconstitutional, so that's why Bush never sought the change in the law proposed in 2002 - Bush thought it would have been struck down by the Supreme Court. So Bush chose to break the law in order to circumvent the Supreme Court enforcing the US Constitution.

Basically, a decent wrap of of this issue. At the center of it is The Administration's hypocrisy on this issue- they currently claim the need for this spying capability was so urgent and so restricted that it must be enacted immediately, and secretly- yet they'd already terminated amendments which would have given them the legal capability to do just this- on constitutional concerns.

But now, wait a couple years, hopefully your Supreme Court takes a sudden and dramatic lurch to the right...

This story could be incredible. It's quite an amazing story broken by a blog. And Atrios points out that this story will be hitting your traditional news media... Tomorrow morning. In the Washington Post and the LA Times.