By David Swanson

The book I just read is in the running, in my estimation, for second-best text on how to undo the imperial presidency. (Can't be first, of course.) It's called "Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy," by Peter M. Shane, and it's much more about what the problem is than how to solve it, but the two things are not really separable, and the analysis of the problem here is invaluable.

By David Swanson

In probably the most disturbing testimony to hit Capitol Hill since Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in May and refused to rule out lawless detention or to agree that government officials can sometimes be prosecuted for their crimes, on Wednesday Holder appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and, among much else, refused five times to agree that warrantless spying is illegal and unconstitutional. I spoke to Holder in April, and he assured me that I would be proud of my country. When?

Book Can Now Be Ordered, Book Tour Being Planned

You can now pre-order my book at Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/daybreakbook

It's a thick book containing everything I know - and then some - for $10 (pre-order discount price).  And you can support a good cause by pre-ordering it now.

You can also call or visit your local bookstore right now and ask them to be sure to stock the book.

If you're in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, or Ohio please see below.  I'm only coming once to any given state, so please schedule more events for the times I will be in yours! Please don't ask me later why I didn't come to your town!

If you're in another state, please contact me re dates in 2010. -- David Swanson

Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Robert Wexler (D-FL), and John Conyers (D-MI) yesterday introduced H.Res. 383 to establish a House-only Select Committee to review "national security laws, policies, and practices."

The Select Committee would consist of 4 Democrats and 3 Republicans. The obvious danger is that John Boehner would appoint rightwing ideologues to obstruct and sabotage any serious work.

The scope of the investigation would be broad, but it would focus on policy rather than prosecution.

By Dave Lindorff

For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able
to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of
progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and catering
primarily to the interests of Wall Street and the nation’s corporate
interests.

The Democrats managed this sleight of hand for so long by claiming
that while they had the best of intentions, reality, in the form of
their inability to pass legislation, even when they were in the
majority in both houses of Congress, that could avoid being
filibustered to death by a Republican minority.

That situation has continued to this day, with the party currently having 58 seats in the Senate.

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

Glenn Greenwald has the bad news: Barack Obama is watching you.

late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government's first response to EFF's lawsuit, the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush's NSA program.  But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets" privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications. 

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.

Hopefully the judge will reject Obama's claim and uphold our Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless wiretaps, but the courts are packed with Federalist Society judges who believe in Presidential dictatorships.

We'll be watching Big Brother as closely as he's watching us...

Glenn Greenwald's shocking report on the newly-released Yoo Memos may be his most important post to date. Here is a snip:

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Please read the whole post.

By Dave Lindorff

The dithering and ducking going on in the Obama White House and the
Holder Justice Department over the crimes of the Bush administration
are taking on a comic aspect.

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his
administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the
other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his
attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment
of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last
administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the
Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in
serious and felonious ways.

What gets silly is that America is either a nation of laws…or it
isn’t. It is either a place where “nobody is above the law”…or it isn’t.

There is really no middle ground here.

Today President Obama released several crucial memos from Bush's Office of Legal Counsel. And these memos make clear that from 10/23/01 to 10/6/08 - 7 full years - George Bush presumed the 4th Amendment as we know it did not exist. From Wikipedia, as "amended" by Bush: