Rachel Maddow spoke for a lot of progressives, as usual, when she admitted on her show Thursday night, about the rolling wave of revelations about NSA’s data-dragnet: “Part of me feels like screaming, part of me feels like we’ve known this was going on since 2006-2007.”

It’s true, we’ve learned a lot about aspects of the vast post-9/11 surveillance state in the last 10 years, and it’s hard to keep track of who knew what when, and what mattered most about each revelation (including these latest). It’s true that George W. Bush took both the Patriot Act and the Foreign In ... Read more »