Today, exactly 150 years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began. Seen by most military historians as the turning point of the Civil War, the victory of North over South was indeed a profound moment in time. But I'm going to leave that sort of thing to the military historians who are much more informed about the battle itself, the meaningfulness of the victory, and all the rest of the arrows-on-a-map analysis. There should be plenty of such commentary this week to commemorate the battle, a three-day affair that left roughly 50,000 Americans dead. Instead, today I'm going to go off on a rather large tangent into the history of the American political world, so be warned.

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Well, we've been away for two weeks, and those two weeks were just chock-full of political news, so we've got a lot to cover. The reason for the interruption in columns was, of course, our attending Netroots Nation, the yearly conclave of bloggers, Progressives, and all and sundry who like hanging out with them. Which brings us to this week's unusual title -- today's Friday Talking Points, for the first time ever, are going to be professionally-produced and focus-group-tested. More on this later.

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However, for a whole lot of gay couples, life will have gotten one whale of a lot better. Today's Supreme Court rulings are a giant leap forward along the path to fully equal rights. The federal government will now recognize marriages which their states recognize, and the barriers to equal treatment under federal law have disintegrated for good. That is indeed something to celebrate. Which is why I'm going to stop using the term "gay marriage" ever again in my writing. There is no "same-sex" and "opposite-sex" marriage anymore. There is just marriage, period. From now on, the phrase I'll be using is "marriage equality," because we're all now equal under federal law -- as we should be under state law, as well.

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The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision today, striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. In essence, the court told Congress to come up with a better formula to determine which jurisdictions will have to pre-clear changes to their voting laws (because the old formula is outdated). This has caused much consternation and outcry, but what was notable was that the court did not throw out the concept of preclearance itself.

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This is an article about Paula Deen, racism, and the upcoming gay marriage decisions from the Supreme Court. But mostly it's an article about the long, slow road to true changes in American society. The beginning of this road always starts with the prevailing casual acceptance of bigotry and prejudice in everyday life, and the road doesn't end until society as a whole reaches the point of near-universal condemnation of a way of thinking which used to be widespread and unremarkable.

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We stand at the beginning of a grand debate on immigration. America goes through these grand debates every generation or so, and what remains constant is that both sides in the fight can be counted upon to accuse the other side of "playing politics" with the immigration issue. This has, indeed already begun.

Republicans are offering up a splendid display of doublethink on the issue, in order to be able to say: "Hah! We were right all along," no matter what happens. Republicans make two accusations, which are completely contradictory (which doesn't seem to bother them at all), that the whole thing is just a cynical political game: (1) Obama and the Democrats want to legalize 11 million people who will then immediately become reliable Democratic voters, and/or (2) Obama and the Democrats will somehow find a way to scuttle the deal because they really don't want to pass any law, they just want to use the issue to beat up Republicans, in election after election. As I mentioned, no matter what happens, they'll be able to fall back on one of these tropes. Democrats, however, are using the second of these (with slight modification) to explain their own wariness: Republicans just want to be able to say: "We tried something" during the next election, and they will find a way to scuttle the deal in the end while blaming Democrats for the legislative failure.

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Last week, Republicans seem to have decided that the whole "autopsy" business after they got beaten so badly in the 2012 elections was just hogwash, and that they should double-down on their demonization and scapegoatery efforts. The "Plum Line" blog over at WashingtonPost.com has a good rundown (although now that the site is disappearing behind a paywall, I may have to reconsider linking to its articles in the future).

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The Supremes could surprise me, of course -- they've certainly done so in the past, on many occasions. It's a lot tougher to pick outcomes on the Supreme Court than it is to, say, pick who is likely to win an election. Only nine people get to vote, after all, and they don't answer public opinion polls in the meantime. But I have a strong suspicion that the Supreme Court is going to try to kick the political can down the road a bit.

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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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