Current Mood: determined

Glenn Greenwald: Salon.Com: Orin Kerr and the responsibility of elites for the last eight years

[...] Over the last eight years (at least), we have not only crossed the line of what ought to be within the realm of reasonable, respectful debate, but we have crossed it repeatedly, severely, and with great harm to our political system and huge numbers of people. And one of the prime reasons that happened is because those with the most vocal platforms and with the greatest claims to expertise failed in their responsibility to oppose it passionately and to describe its extremism, and, instead, eagerly served as apologists for it. Those who seek now to depict their tepidness in the face of all of that as some elevated form of enlightened reason are merely illustrating one of the key mechanisms that enabled all of it to happen.

Current Mood: contemplative

How to Begin Repairing the Damage to Freedom in America After Bush

Barack Obama will become chief executive of a nation that has been greatly weakened - in particular, our freedoms, our values, and our international reputation have been greatly undermined by the policies of the past eight years.

Presidents have enormous power not only to set the legislative agenda, but also to establish policy by executive order, federal regulation, or simply by refocusing the efforts and emphases of the executive agencies. The new president must use all of these tools to restore our freedoms and move the country forward.

Doing so will require determined action in the face of inevitable opposition. It will require conveying to the American people why grants of unchecked power do not actually make us safer, and why Americans must stand firm in protecting the values that at our best we have always represented and defended at home and around the world.

It will not be easy to undo eight years of sustained damage to our fundamental rights. But it can be done.

This paper lists many of the actions that the new president should take in order to decisively signal a restoration of American values and a rejection of the shameful policies of the past eight years.

The first year of any new administration is crucial and sets the stage for what will follow. The new President needs to hit the ground running and to make full use of that first crucial year.

We have grouped needed actions into those that the new president should take on day one, in the 100 days and then the first year. Those actions include executive orders as well as mandates or directives from the president to his cabinet secretaries and agency heads.

Current Mood: impressed

British debate highlights the cravenness and complicity of congressional Democratic "leaders"

The intense and escalating political dispute in Britain over civil liberties is interesting in its own right, but it also vividly illustrates how craven and barren our own political system -- and the U.S. Democratic Party -- have become. The sacrifices now being made by British politicians of all parties in opposition to expanded government detention and surveillance powers is, with a few noble exceptions, exactly what our political elite in the Bush era have been -- and still are -- too afraid or too craven to undertake. As the Democratic Party prepares this week to endorse the Bush administration's illegal spying program and immunize telecoms which deliberately broke our surveillance laws for years, these contrasts become even more acute.

[...] Democrats are about to institutionalize a proposition that has been rejected since the Nuremberg Trials -- namely, that individuals (or, more accurately, lobbyist-protected corporations) are free to break the law as long as they can claim afterwards that they were told by the Leader to do so. That's the principle which the Democratic Party -- following their standard pattern of having enough of their members join a virtually unanimous GOP while the Democratic leadership enables it all -- is about to write into our laws. [...]

Current Mood: aggravated

The Anti-Family Planning Movement: Coming to a Bedroom Nearest You

( Excerpt. Click headline for full story. )