Plead the First

Josh Marshall makes a great point about our elevation of the “Commander-in-Chief” role of the President:
We need to re-familiarize ourselves with the fact that the point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure. It was precisely the opposite — to create no [...]

John McCain recently weighed in on the Supreme Court Gitmo decision regarding Habeas Corpus saying:
We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a [...]

An article by Cliff Kincaid on the Global Poverty Act has been getting mentioned quite a bit lately. The bill was passed in the House and is currently sponsored in the Senate by Barack Obama. According to Kincaid, this legislation would plunge the U.S. into an era of unprecedented economic despair and destruction at the [...]

The Pulpit Forum, a group of local, predominantly black ministers, is having a press conference today. Joe Guarino is attepting to paint it as a violation of the separation of Church and State, despite the fact that there has been no religious content to anything they’ve presented yet.
The gist of Joe’s argument (but be sure [...]

Republican lawmakers are having fits over the terrorist surveillance bill that the Democratic-led House allowed to expire. Will the evildoers run amok now, thanks to the bill’s expiration? Not exactly. Ed Brayton sums it up nicely:
[T]he law now reverts to the old FISA statute and the Patriot Act amendments to that statute. … It [...]

Rush Limbaugh dazzles us with his fifth level thinking:
“If I really wanted to torpedo McCain, I would endorse him,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “Because that would send the independents and liberals who are going to vote for him running away faster than anything.”
“What people don’t realize is that I am doing McCain the [...]

Greensboro Politics has posted an interview with Greensboro City Manager Mitch Johnson. One part jumped out at me (emphasis added):
Ryan: Does City Hall have a communications problem?
Mitchell: “Um…. Well, Um… I think based on, based on what’s…. I would say yes. We have not been effective getting a message out and communicating the environment in [...]

Great quote from Sam Spagnola over at David Hoggard’s blog:
Our government and system of justice puts the burden of proof on the government, not the accused. If Johnson has a case, it is up to him to prove it. Wray doesn’t have to prove his innocence, although I believe for the most part that he [...]

The FBI would like to get to know you a little bit better:
The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.
Millions of fingerprints are already kept [...]