The grammar police

There's an entertaining debate on the Language Log as to the exact grammatical infringement this cartoon is actually about. Personally I'm hesitating between two options:

1) We, the people...
2) We are the people

There is a school of thought that says it should be "Us the people", but not only is that an ugly sentence, but I fail to see why it should be considered correct; anyone who can enlighten me on that score is more than welcome to do so. Another argument is that the word "persons" should be used instead of "people", but that appears to be based on the premise that you shouldn't use "people" at all unless talking about a political entity. Which is clearly ridiculous.

There's some small-scale cultural dissonance in the Language Log post, when a British contributor comments:

What's the matter, don't you know how to use our great and beautiful language with full correctness? Are you one of the vulgar persons who say "Where's the bus station at?" (correct version: "At where is the bus station?")?

Unusually, the joke appears to have passed by the post author, who makes the slightly baffled-sounding observation that "I guess that's the correct version in Geoff's native England..."

And the icing on the cake, for me at least, is the small item of Economist trivia further down the page:

We once had an internal Economist tiff between two editors, one of whom insisted that you must say "Joe Bloggs, of Oxford University, says" and one of whom (the boss, who won by pay grade) said it's OK to say "Joe Bloggs of Oxford University says".

Personally I'd say that would depend on the length of the sentence, but that's style rather than grammar.