Digby has always had the best-written, least pointless, and most clearheadedly passionate political blog I've seen. Unfortunately she's extra-good when things really really suck. So if you want to read a good response to the very bad suckery of the surveillance bill that the supposedly Democratic Congress just passed, read this. (Follow all the links from there too, if your head has been reinforced against exploding.)

Of course Diane Feinstein voted for this. Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi didn't - and I guess I've gotten pretty damn cynical, because that surprised me.

Some will say what the hell, they've probably been spying on everyone for years anyway. Then why would they bother with this bill? My best guess is that they don't worry about the NSA getting sued, but once they started getting phone companies into the act on a larger scale, they needed more formal ass-covering.

And, I can't remember whether it was Digby or someone else who recently floated this theory: the real reason so many politicians and journalists have turned into frightened little babies and caved to Bush on nearly everything is, Cheney's spooks have been quietly spreading rumors and pseudo-evidence that there's some big terrorist disaster right around the corner - and that even mentioning it would ruin our top-secret defense plan -and no one wants to be the one who blew our chance of stopping the next 9/11, or (if it couldn't be stopped anyway) the one who voted against surveillance right before the disaster. It's really sad that that's almost a comforting theory. The alternative is that Cheney has naked pictures of them all with dead sheep or something; or they're just frightened little babies for real.