Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs while touring America to
honor her promise to speak out, gratis, at least once a month in
defense of free speech. In her travels Ivins met ordinary people going
to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most precious liberties, and
when she first started writing this book, she intended it to be a
joyous celebration of those heroes. But during the Bush years, the
project’s focus changed. Ivins became concerned about threats to our
cherished freedoms–among them the Patriot Act and the weakening of
habeas corpus–and she observed with anger how dissent in the defense of
liberties was being characterized as treason by the Bush administration
and its enablers.