There was a moment in tonight's YouTube Republican debate that terrified me.

No, it wasn't Romney's chilling equivocation on waterboarding: that was expected, and at least for this electoral cycle, thank God, the party still has John McCain's awesome moral clarity on that issue.  Nor was it Tom Tancredo's conflation of the U.S. armed forces with medieval Christian crusaders; after all, the guy doesn't have a chance, any more than does Ron Paul, whose views on the Trilateral Commission reveal him to be only one missed day of meds shy of the reeking lunatics with hand-lettered signs who prowl Lafayette Square.

No, what had me shaking with anger and fear tonight was the moment when the Constitution slipped into the abyss for good, and nobody--but nobody--in that auditorium appeared to notice that it has.  Did you?

Or, perhaps, many lives.

I'm quite serious.

If you do nothing else this evening, read gildareed's just-posted diary, take the action it urges on us all, and recommend it so everyone else on dailykos can do the same.  Here's why:

Given the bleak picture in teacherken's diary today -- God was wrong.  Support mountaintop removal. -- people here might be heartened by the ruling of a Federal Judge in Charleston, WV.  The AP story can be read here.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Chuck Chambers, which was issued Wednesday, says that

. . . using settling ponds to remove sediment from streams at mountaintop removal coal mines violates the Clean Water Act.

Judge Chambers also ruled that

. . . the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn't have the authority to allow mines to discharge sediment into settling ponds.

Okay, so they never actually use the i-word.  But there's no mistaking what this most infuriatingly supine of major editorial pages has committed tonight, starting with the sly title of the link on washingtonpost.com:

"What Did Bush Know, and When?"

The unmistakable echo, of course, is the Howard Baker question that became the yardstick for Richard M. Nixon's inexorable slide toward impeachment: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" And that's just what the Post editorial page is demanding to know in tomorrow's editorial--which inches towards a call for this president's impeachment, as you'll see across the jump.

Okay, how did we miss this one?  

Have we--Progressives, Liberals, the Left; but also the MSM--become so inured to Republican attempts to override the Constitution at the highest levels that a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination can publicly declare that the Constitution needs to be violated and no one even notices?

Because if not, where's the explosive outrage at the following comment from leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?:

Andrew Sullivan has posted a striking quotation today (via the blog Reasons and Opinions) from the martyred archbishop Óscar Romero:

There is no dichotomy between man and God's image.
Whoever tortures a human being,
whoever abuses a human being,
whoever outrages a human being,
abuses God's image.

Please follow me over the jump to learn why Romero's words are so important on this Valentine's Day.

Virginia's new senator-elect, Jim Webb, is featured in a long and generally very positive article that will run on the front page of tomorrow's Washington Post.

Follow me for some highlights:

More shoes are dropping, and still more may be about to drop, on George Allen concerning his habitual past use of the n-word.

In tomorrow's Charlottesville Daily Progress, Bob Gibson devotes much of his column to the testimony of a nurse and a former classmate of Allen's, both of whom attended poker parties with then-law-student Allen and recall his habitual use of the slur.

The real story is the inexorable march of executive tyranny, and whether the American people will muster the wisdom to elect a Congress that will check it.  

A big chunk of evidence about why they should has just dropped into our laps, from a source even Dick Cheney will find it hard to impugn. . . .

There's more of it.  And like a mess of noxious, foul-smelling decayed matter that lay at the bottom of memory for years, more has already risen to the surface than we've been told.  

What if you're someone who heard George Allen say those things?  It's not the kind of thing you want to dredge up and talk about.  And would anyone believe you?  Why risk retaliation from a very powerful politician with a taste for violent rhetoric ("we're going to knock their soft teeth down their whiny throats") and violent symbols (a noose in his office), when no, you didn't have a tape recorder when you heard him say it? Why risk what his supporters might do to you and your family?

But you can't forget.  It lies there, rotting, at the bottom of your memory, still exhaling its nauseous stench.  And so when former Allen teammates come forward with their memories, and an anthropology professor does the same--something stirs in your memory, too; something foul and evil-smelling and too-long undisturbed.  So you sit down at the keyboard and this is what you write:

So did Etty Allen's poignant confession last week of fear and historical silence absolve her son of the apparent dissimulation, shame, and lurking bigotry that had clouded his acknowledgement of his family's remarkable Jewish roots? 

Well, maybe not.  Bob Gibson, the columnist for the Charlottesville Daily Progress who has known and written about Sen. George Allen as long and as well as anyone in the Commonwealth, published a column in Sunday's paper that clarifies Allen's attempts to hide his heritage as perhaps no other writer could.  That it manages to avoid accusing Allen of outright lying is a tribute to Gibson's forbearance and--evidently--acutely honed sense of irony.

The Washington Post has a front-page story this morning in which Henriette (Etty) Lumbroso Allen, George Allen's mother, takes responsibility for having hidden her Jewish identity from her son until he asked her about it point-blank last month:

Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States.

More to come. . . .

Yet evidence has begun to emerge that far from being a source of understandable pride, his family history has caused Allen to play deliberately to antisemitic bigotry.

And size 6 this one isn't.

In a column posted early Monday in the WSJ Opinion Journal, John Fund quotes from notes from a conference call Dobson participated in in which two judges close to Miers assured him that they had spoken with her about Roe v. Wade and that she had indicated she would vote to overturn it.

Amid all the agony of the hurricane's aftermath, we may well be witnessing the moment of this country's decisive pivot away from the course of conservative folly it has been pursuing since at least 1980.  

For like the shattered foundations of houses, the foundational premises that have dominated our public life for a quarter of a century have been uprooted by a mighty and terrible wind.

Among the lies now hideously exposed: . . .

My Dad will be featured in what I offer below the fold.  He is a retired math professor from Swarthmore who began working with Natural Lands in about 1980, although he has been passionate about the natural environment his entire life.

Well, they've been caught at it again.  Tomorrow's New York Times has an article about an American Library Association study on

How frequently and in what circumstances?   Enough to make you queasy.  Will it be enough to stop the renewal of one of the most noisome elements of the Patriot Act?  That remains to be seen.  But the evidence is irrefutable--even by the White House.