Today I travel to Memphis to visit my family, so do not be alarmed if you see no new posts for a while.

I’ve been trying to reconcile the recent revelation regarding the authorization given by the President of the United States for the National Security Agency (aka the NSA) to monitor communications by US citizens without warrants, even those authorized by the FISA courts, which are almost notorious in their refusal to deny permissions for wiretaps.

To me this flies in the face of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, regardless of any legal infrastructure of thought built up since the time of the approval of those documents. I regard the original documents and thinking as supreme unless Constitutional Amendments have been approved to over-ride them, and as near as I can tell, none have for the issue at hand.

Regardless of the fundamentals, the usual suspects are presenting their usually supsect arguments, with those on the right-wing attacking the messengers, calling it “high treason” in their typical shallow thinking, regardless of the actual crimes being reported upon, and those on the left-wing attacking the administration, jumping the gun and calling for impeachment before all the facts are in and evaluated.

I have wanted to write something meaningful that would influence this imbroglio, but then I read what was posted recently at Velociworld:

I don’t want to piss on anyone’s parade, but I’ve been having the sinking feeling, for some time now, that the vaunted Blogosphere is a sickly puppy, the runt of the litter with rickets, and scabies.

Hear me out: when the World was relatively small, there was much interaction. Give, take, everyone knew everyone. Maybe didn’t like everyone, but knew them. Now there are Pajama parties with huge fucking budgets, one is In or Out, it is a fucking abortion of a thing.

All of this, I think, is driven by two things: number one: some people think there is money to be made here. Okay. Maybe for a few lucky enough to have enough traffic to generate ad monies. Have at it, folks.

Number two: many bloggers tend to forget they are amateurs. A little traffic, we are Dickens. Bullshit. We are fucking amateurs. This is the minor leagues. Worse. Pony League. No salaries at all here.

That is why this is titled “Post #1759″ because that is the post number that came up when I started writing this.

Even though I feel this recent revelation of how the Bush administration apparently completely skipped the Civics class that I thought we all were required to take in the 9th grade is tremendously important, and how they have no compunction in asserting the power of the executive branch with no oversight despite the principles written into our Constitution over 200 years ago is extremely dangerous, my opinions don’t really matter because I am indeed a fucking amateur in the minor league.

Who will listen to what I have to say on this?

I am doomed to watch as the founding principles of the nation I love are trampled upon and discarded, and all I can do is cry out on a weblog that is read by perhaps 200 people a day, if I am lucky.

My influence? Hell, I would probably give more folks the common cold than change their minds about this issue…

So, here is Post #1759, for what it is worth.