“restoration of the rule of law” we can dream.

Obama, Holder, Leahy, Whitehouse, Pelosi, Feingold “no one is above the law” Damn I want to believe

It seems to me that one problem here is that too many positions require Senate confirmation. Section 2 of Article II provides that Congress could truncate the
number of appointees that require confirmation.

” but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers , as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the Heads of Departments.”

Perhaps this is something we should work on.

Thank you, Christy, for ringing the alarm bell on this. You are correct to be concerned. Extreme right-wing views, in reference to indefinite detentions, military commissions, and coercive interrogation, remain prominent in many of the mainstream corridors of power in Washington. They have Obama’s ear. They have the attention of Congress. We must not let down our guard, and I hope readers are following up on the ACLU’s Accountability Project links and actions. They are more important now than ever.

“Preventive detention” is exactly like “enhanced interrogation”: It is a phrase designed specifically to make a crime sound legitimate. It’s the kind of phrase that someone makes up when trying to defend the indefensible.

It sounds like congress is engaged in the fierce urgency of stalling.
Is there any danger of anything being enacted before Dawn is confirmed? Maybe the strategy should be to convince the WH to make the appointment while congress is on summer recess.

Who TF is this asshole Benjamin Wittes? I guess I’m not surprised that Brookings is aping AEI.

Back in the day there was a Steely Dan tune that really summed up this mess: Pretzel Logic. This is all part and parcel of the Republican Be Afraid (Be Very, Very Afraid) campaign.

If we’re afraid, we’ll go along with all of this stuff.

Have I said lately how disappointed I am with Barack Obama’s approach to the Justice Department?

They will soon be proposing the preventive detention of liberals, in case we should win elections.. or vote in them, for that matter. Suspected liberals will be preventively detained 4 months before election day and released immediately afterwards. This is the only way to guarantee rethugs the extra-proportional representation to which they believe they are entitled.

What the hell ever happened to the prohibition on attainder?

shrub happened

“preventive detention” — which could lock up “dangerous” terror suspects potentially forever without charge or trial.

Paging Jose Padilla….

Oh well, I guess it’s those evil Republicans who are making Obama do things he really doesn’t want to do…like unlimited preventive detention.

Damn, I wish the whole congress were 100 percent Dems.

That way, we’d get what we want, lobbyists would be banished….

Wait. Am I dreaming?

It is, by now, abundantly clear that the administration is “slow-going” the nomination. They either don’t really want Dawn Johnsen–offering her nomination merely as a sop to the liberal wing of the party–or else they don’t want her in office right now, which is to say, while they’re still playing footsie with the purportedly Other Side on issues like torture and wireless wiretapping. Either way, it does not speak well of the new Powers-That-Be.

I know that I, for one, expected a lot better than this.

Yeah, I’m a regular little ray of sunshine today, aren’t I? *g*

In case folks were wondering, I’m a little cranky. Could you tell?

The Senate is out of session for the next week for a break, so no legislation on this for at least that long. But I’m getting nothing back on what can or cannot be expected — and this was something that supposedly had some “fast track” discussion potential before people noticed it. I’m just hoping to throw a “whoa” up and make people think before doing something precipitously…but I’m not holding my breath on being fully successful at that, either.

I need a beer thirty. If I weren’t still feeling so gawdawful, I would anyway…

You, Christy! Never!

If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.

Orangeman Boner is on my TeeVee … do you have any idea what color his skin tone is,
on a 60″ HDTV ?

Must.Find.Beer …

Christy, when Dawn Johnsen gets confirmed, she really haz to invite you to the ceremony :)

And what a beautiful pic.

good point

If she does get confirmed, Christy, you will have been a major, major reason it finally happened.

This just up at WaPo.

God. What are they thinking? Do they really think they were elected by people like us in order to do stuff like this?

White House Drafts Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects
By Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn
ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 26, 2009 5:18 PM

I don’t know who “they” are, but, what, Holder, Craig, Obama, who?

The fact is that they are playing right into the playbook of the wretched Wall Street Journal editorial board. Shame on them. Shame on them.

And while I’m at it, let me say that this is yet another reason why I am proud to be a Democrat: Unlike our friends across the aisle, we refuse to march in lockstep with the our ostensible “Betters” when we know in our hearts that they’re wrong.

Attainder isn’t applicable here. A bill of attainder is a law passed penalizing individuals legislatively. There aren’t any ex post facto laws nor any bills of attainder involved in this one.

This is a habeas corpus matter, pure and simple. The Shrub set up Star Chambers that imprisoned people without trial, and the Obama administration hasn’t worked to reverse it at all.

I don’t know about that, but I refuse to sit back and allow a decent woman’s professional reputation slide in the crapper because people who ought to know better don’t bother to care.

That just pisses me off beyond all ability to be reasonable, frankly. Dawn is an incredibly nice and decent human being, and she deserves far better than this. Above and beyond the rule of law and the fact that it’s the right thing to do for the country, it’s just the decent thing to do as a human being who gives a crap about good people serving their government.

Exactly.

I think I must have overlapped with her when I was a grad student and she was an undergrad at Yale. I wish I’d known her then. She sounds like a mighty fine human being.

Do they really think they were elected by people like us in order to do stuff like this?

No. Your point?

We got Gonzo with Senate approval; imagine the horrors behind door number three if “inferior” offices are removed from Senate approval.

Wittes is another Michael O’Hanlon at the supposedly (LOL) liberal Brookings Institute. He does law and has been an apologist for a lot of Bush’s terror policies. Makes me wonder if Brookings was ever liberal or if it was always a haven for junior fascists.

The article also contains one very strange quote:

“”Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation”

What “civil liberties” groups worthy of the name would promote this idea?

The WH has to have been working on this for a while but I wonder if the Janko case had something to do with the timing of this story.

Hugh, you’re much better educated on financial matters than I, but in the wiki article on Paul Warburg can be found the answer to your query:

Following from my notes on this wiki article:

Makes me wonder if Brookings was ever liberal or if it was always a haven for junior fascists.

From 1921 to 1926 Paul Warburg was a member of the Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board, as president 1924-1926. He was also a trustee of the Institute of Economics, founded 1922, when it merged into The Brookings Institute in 1927 and he became a trustee of it, serving until he died [01/24/1932].

Paul Warburg’s wife was Nina J. Loeb, daughter of Salomon Loeb, founder of the NY investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Nina J. (Loeb)Warburg’s sister married Jacob Schiff.

He became a director of The Council on Foreign Relations at its founding in 1921, remaining on its board until he died.

My study of the Federal Reserve Bank System and its iron grip and absolute control over our (and world’s) economy has led to my learning a lot about the banking families who founded it, why they founded it, and through intermarriage of those 7 families have maintained control over it to this day.

The wiki article about German Immigrants who became naturalized citizens will show you the origin of nearly all these banking families who intermarried to an almost incestuous degree – Goldman, Sachs, Lehman, Loeb, Jacob Schiff, Warburg, etc…