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"heres the plan"
Such efforts may help raise money and win elections, but the chance that they will actually change the court, in the near or medium term, is remote. Even if the Democrats win the White House and hold the Senate, the court’s demographics are likely to trump politics. The average age of the four more liberal justices is 74; the five conservatives average a youthful (for federal judges) 61, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. the youngest at 52.
Confronting that reality, some liberal legal scholars suggest that beyond political tactics, what the left urgently needs is a long-term strategy built around an affirmative message of what the Constitution means and what the enterprise of constitutional interpretation should be about.
bush commutes libby's sentence
Help Hillary Clinton pick a song.
"The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert."
Scott Ritter: Calling Out Idiot America
"Now, at a moment that couldn't be more crucial, Gates and his "inheritance" get their due, thanks to Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons. Over the next week Tomdispatch.com readers will get not just a portrait of the real Robert Gates, but a full-scale, yet miraculously concise, always surprising, history of American "intelligence" (for which read: global covert action and covert intervention). Morris, who previously offered a striking two-part portrait of Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department at this site (The Undertaker's Tally, parts 1 and 2), now offers the Gates legacy, which is really the legacy of mainstream Washington, the globe's imperial capital for this last half-century-plus."
heeeeeeerrreeees digby!
On the afternoon of May 6 2004, Army Major Genera Antonio M. Taguba was summone to meet, for the first time, wit Secretary of Defense Donal Rumsfeld in his Pentago conference room. Rumsfeld and hi senior staff were to testify the nex day, in televised hearings before th Senate and the House Arme Services Committees, about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. Th previous week, revelations abou Abu Ghraib, including photograph showing prisoners stripped, abused and sexually humiliated, ha appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.
sy hirsh from this weeks newyorker