Just to be clear

Liberal bloggers savaged a woman who wrote two books on the Bill of Rights and helped to deliver us a Senator who voted to back President Bush on this,

TICE: ...But in the world that I was in, as to not harpoon the wrong people in some -- in one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations just supposedly so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were, so as not to have a problem with them. Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. And that's -- I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me, to fire me. But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

OLBERMANN: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the "New York Times?" Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

TICE: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

Checking my RSS feeds today neither Klein nor Yglesias have even commented on the selection of Gillibrand. Make of that what you will but remember that next time either of them begins to harp on elite opinion makers and accountability.

Gillibrand is a terrible selection and progressives will now have to expend resources in 2010 to uproot her in a bloody primary. Surely those resources could be better utilized.