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Category Archives: Creeping Totalitarianism

Something to keep an eye on

Monday, February 16, 2009

It is a sad fact that the Obama administration has not been sufficiently aggressive about going after the criminals that ran the last Administration. What’s even more worrisome is the possibility that it will actively assist the ongoing obstruction of justice and contempt of our constitutional system. Latest possible example: The Obama administration is asking […]

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Waterboarding the least of it?

Monday, February 9, 2009

This is one of those stories that you have to hope isn’t true, while more or less assuming that it is. Via Firedoglake from the London Daily Telegraph, writing about evidence that the British government has attempted to suppress: A British official, who is regularly briefed on intelligence operations, said: “The concern was that the […]

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Speculative history

Thursday, January 29, 2009

A little exercise in alternative history. What if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, and that presidential crook had done some hard time? What lessons did Ford’s deputies, Cheney and Rumsfeld, learn from that little episode and what would they have learned, instead, had Nixon gone to jail. And, oddly enough, given the widespread notion […]

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From little rotten acorns, rotten oaks are grown

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

This is a story about what happens when one branch of our government relinquishes its proper role in the name of national security. In 1948 an Air Force plane crashed. A number of people were killed, including some civilian employees of RCA. Their family members sued the Air Force for negligence, and asked for a […]

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Obama does bad

Friday, January 23, 2009

Yesterday I noted that Obama had done a great thing in dismantling a portion of the Bush cloak of secrecy be repealing Bush’s executive order on presidential records. Today, I’m sorry to report (you won’t see much about this in the press, I would suspect) that he has taken a huge step down the Bushian […]

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Holding up Holder

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A short time ago I expressed some cautious optimism about the possibility that the Obama administration might go after the torturers. My basic argument was that a flat out declaration of intent to do so would give Bush the cover to pardon his henchman, on the grounds that any such prosecutions would be political harassment, […]

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Where is Obama going on torture and war crimes

Monday, January 12, 2009

Most commentators I’ve read interpret Obama’s statements yesterday regarding torture, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, pretty much put paid to any notion that an Obama government will go after the evildoers. That’s likely true, but we shouldn’t give up hope quite yet. Here’s the exchange: OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going […]

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Unmitigated gall

Monday, January 5, 2009

It’s hard to decide which is more egregious: the gall of John Yoo and John Bolton warning Barack Obama to stay within the constitutional limitations of the presidency, or the outrageousness of the New York Times decision to give these two fascists a platform. I have said on numerous occasions that both the courts and […]

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Russ Feingold wants to restore the rule of law

Friday, November 14, 2008

This is one of the many reasons why an Obama victory was so important. Adam Cohen writes in the New York Times (Democratic Pressure on Obama to Restore the Rule of Law): In a Senate hearing room in September, weeks before Barack Obama won the election, a series of law professors, lawyers and civil libertarians […]

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Censorship

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Via Americablog, yet again. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZII0GjcJMus[/youtube] Librarians have been silent heroes in a lot of ways over the course of the last seven years. They resisted the Patriot Act’s Big Brother is Watching provisions requiring disclosure of library patron reading habits, and they have consistently opposed attempts at book banning of the type Palin was contemplating. […]

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