Every so often as I sit down to write these Friday columns, the spirit of the rant overtakes me. Instead of our usual Talking Points section this week, I offer up such a rant, on the death of the Fourth Amendment. You have all been warned. I did consider calling this rant an "Ode To Dianne Feinstein," but then I thought that was too limiting -- she certainly isn't the only one out there singing from the same hymnbook. And I certainly wouldn't want to have anyone feel left out.

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I realize that the news Glenn Greenwald just broke on the National Security Agency glomming onto the records of everyone who made a phone call through Verizon is what I really should be commenting on today, but then I realized I had written an article a long time ago which is germane to this debate. Back in August of 2007, I wrote the following piece on warrantless wiretapping, which poses a few questions that have not only never been answered but indeed never even really discussed. Now, I realize that the situations between now and what I was commenting on then are not clearly parallel, since actual wiretapping (recording or analyzing the content of phone calls) is different (and much more intrusive) than merely accessing the records of who called what phone (which is what apparently happened with Verizon). But the wider picture brings up the same basic question this article asks: should vacuuming up all available data and then weeding it out with computers be legally-admissible evidence in a court of law? So I thought it was worth re-running this column today to examine an aspect of governmental communications intercepts that never seems to get talked about.

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Mister Attorney General, the reason I have such a problem with issuing warrants or subpoenas for news reporters is because I am aware of the history of the laws being used to do so. I have a hard time believing that you or your boss (a former constitutional professor) are completely unaware of these precedents in American history, but I haven't heard anyone else mentioning them, so I thought it fell to me to bring them up.

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Some weeks, not much happens in political news, and other weeks it seems like almost too much happens. This was one of the latter types of week.

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We've got a number of oddities to dispense with before we get started this week.

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If we had a "best quote" awards category, we'd certainly have to nominate what outgoing House Republican Steven La Tourette had to say about the whole situation, after the Senate had voted 89-8 to approve the fiscal cliff avoidance deal: "We should not take a package put together by a bunch of sleep-deprived octogenarians on New Year's Eve." Now that's funny!

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A federal appeals court has reaffirmed every American's right to communicate with the police solely through the use of the middle finger. You read that correctly: what is variously called "flipping off" or "flipping the bird" or "the one-finger salute" -- even to a police officer -- is indeed protected speech under the United States Constitution. Which is a victory for free speech and the First Amendment.

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We're all talking about the same thing today. We are, indeed, having a "national conversation." The subject is tragic, which is why it has everyone so focused. Another shooting rampage, another town consumed by grief, all played out on the nation's television screens. But precisely because everyone's talking about it, I find that I don't have much to add to the main discussion. All I have are a few fragments that are mostly peripheral in nature, and mostly to do with the news media.

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Every so often, I get an idea which I know would make me millions of dollars. Today, I had another one: develop and market a pill which, when taken, would put you to sleep until the morning after the election. The pill would be magically timed to work no matter when you took it, meaning a citizen in Texas or California might not want to take one until perhaps mid-October, but the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire might be expected to take one New Year's Eve -- thus avoiding not only the debates and punditary frenzy of the general election, but the entire primary season as well. It would be marketed under the name "The Rip Van Winkle Pill."

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Unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign: this is not the way to convince voters that your candidate isn't Thurston Howell III. I'm just sayin'....

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