Michelle Malkin is keeping track of the reactions to the Supreme Court's taking decision this week, and she is up to 36 trackbacks. For the insiders in the 'sphere, that's a significant number of bloggers who have picked up the baton and run with it.

Those insiders will also recognize that, when linking to a post, you necessarily encounter an artifact, in the sense that the version of the post to which you link is frozen in time, its content intact, but the number of trackbacks equally frozen in time. The number I've noted appears on Michelle's site today, and not in her permalink version. If you care.

There is an interesting thought in Michelle's piece as well. There is, and can be in the 'sphere, a place to which people with problems in the takings arena - the problems forecast by those who are critical of what they see (correctly, I think) as a green light for governmental mischief and the reverse Robin Hood result in the future - can turn, and there is a sort of Paul Revere resource (he said, mixing and twisting his metaphors with a vengeance) which can be used to alert us to what is going on.

The darkness is a whole lot less scary if there is someone standing nearby with a flashlight, and no shortage of people peering in to see what is illuminated by its beam of light shone into the corners of our society. As the metaphors continue to spawn, insouciantly defiant and oblivious to one another.

The point is a simple one:

We can stand watch, and call out an alarm, if and when government, anywhere, anyhow, misbehaves.

And that matters.

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