You have every capability to launch a blog and talk about it.

But here you are, spending time attacking a commentor instead of doing the action that would be in the greater good – transmitting the story.

Ask yourselves, why aren’t other bloggers than just a few liberal leaning ones?

Perhaps the same things are in play for you and other bloggers that Jon Garfunkel attributed to journalists.

The Web empowers ALL of us to reach out and communicate.

The question – is – why do ANY of us do what we do.

Think for a moment about yourself. The capability the Web gives you.

And what you are doing with it.

The world that many digerati celebrate is one of libertarian ideals – it is UP TO YOU to inform yourself and get out the word.

If you don’t – you have no one else to blame.

You either ‘get it’ – or you don’t.

Perhaps you too have missed the relevant point there: It’s not about whether or not the call should have been moved it up on somebody’s priority list, it’s about the failure of the NSA to act on intelligence it had AND how the government is now using the consequences of their own intelligence failure to demand even broader eavesdropping powers without oversight.

This “we dropped the ball because we’re underfunded” is exactly an excuse. A lame one, and it tries to distract from the stark fact that they dropped the ball. Apparently the decoy worked one you — you went running after that ‘low priority list’ excuse.

I am not trying to excuse the government’s not acting on this call, assuming Mukassey is telling the truth. In fact, the explanation does not excuse the government’s not acting on this call since, if they knew it was from an Al Qaida safe house in Afghanistan, they could have moved it up on the priority list and found someone to translate it.

Meanwhile, the facts are specific and speak for themselves — no diversionary “maybes” about it:

The media has abundant time to aggressively investigate fake smears, such as those myriad against President Clinton, and to themselves make up out of whole clothes distoritons about and with which to attack Al Gore.

So “maybe” that’s why they haven’t the time to report actual news, instead of substituting partisan politics and editiorializing for that which is actual journalism.

Tell us, Garfunkel: is it true that Obama actualy smoked a cigarette after asserting that he’d quit smoking tobacco? If so, what a terrible lie — should be investigated, and re-investigated, to death — spare no amount of double figure millions of dollars to do so. After all — who knows — that apparent lie maybe ties back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But, in any event, by the asssessment and current standards of professional journalists in the legitimate media, that apparent lie is certainly and obviously of immeasurably greater importance than a little white lie or two or three by US AG Mukasey in defense of lawlessness, and in avoidance of the fact that torture is a war crime that cannot be made legal, and thus is lying in behalf of the war criminals who authorized and continue to engage in that war crime.

Thanks to enablers such as you, Garfunkel, the rest of us are saved from losing our heads and going off half-cocked and as consequence demanding irrelevancies such as facts and truth, when in our sane momets we recognize that the best thing for us little folks is to be constantly buried in trivia and mindless entertainment. After all, we aren’t elected public officials authorized to deal with — or fabricate for our own good — reality.

This reasoned rant, alas, is discredited by the fact that I sat behind my keboard while writing it, instead of sitting somewhere from which location it would have been beyond my reach.

Dan, you wrote this at 4:24pm? I suppose you didn’t know that an hour earlier, Pelosi’s staff made public the letter that John Conyers and the other members of the judiciary committee sent to the AG. Right after Greenwald linked to you, he linked to that.

Though Conyers didn’t put it on his own blog.

It’s tempting to cast blame on reporters for missing the story. But there’s a thousand explanations before institutional laziness. Maybe they are working on it. Maybe they’re waiting on an answer. Maybe there are other critical stories to report.

Take a look again at megite, tailrank, memeorandum.com and the blogs they aggregate well. Take a look at the right, left, and footer rails on those blogs.

What’s ‘big’ to one is ’small’ to another. And vice versa.

I’ll stick to this – the wheel has definitely turned.

People get their news from the web now. From blogs, from larger sites and services (I am not noting who is doing the original work, and who is passing it on – simply that it is the Web and our social networks that primarily inform us now).

Finger pointing at the ‘big bad’ isn’t getting us anywhere since ALL of us are empowered to reach out to the entire world via the URL.

There is NOTHING stopping US.

And yet we are apparently no better informed.

So I ask you *think*. *THINK*