a message in a vast electronic ocean (that somebody's monitoring)

This was my e-mail to Glenn Greenwald from the other day:

Dear sir,
One thing I am curious about when I hear about various "blue dog" democratic congressman folding and crossing over-- is there any actual [current] data available about the views people hold in those congressional districts [and states]? I notice, for example, that freshman democrat Heath Shuler voted for the FISA bill, while Walter Jones, a republican who's also from North Carolina voted against it. I've been meaning to blog about this myself but it occurs to me you have far more resources at your disposal, like Lexis.

Also, your interview with Dodd regarding the abrupt switch in tactics suggests to me that the democratic votes for the bill may not have been responding to negative feedback from their districts back home. Although I'm sure you have no lack of topics you want to discuss, I do think it might be interesting.

I'm guessing most ordinary people have no real idea what's in the bill, and assume it relates simply to the use of cell phones when the popular press parrots the administration line on needing a bill to "modernize" the existing law to cover newer technology, sans context.

Jonathan Versen
http://hugozoom.blogspot.com/

I haven't heard back from Greenwald. I imagine he gets a ton of email, and he may even have his message filtering set so that if even one hyperlink is included it bounces into a spam folder and is never scanned by human eyes. Or maybe it's just links to blogs hosted by one of the popular free hosts, because he's tired of getting people sending him messages about how the guy across the street has a Jack Russell terrier who's spying on him for Karl Rove, with a link to
the appropriate blog entry, etc.

Nevertheless, the subterranean dimension to political polling is an interesting topic to me, which I might discuss at more length later. In the meantime I will also make an announcement about Iraqdoc 2007 some time in the next two weeks.