Al-Maliki said he believed the U.S. talk of timelines was driven by the upcoming U.S. midterm election."We are not much concerned with it," al-Maliki said.

U.S., Iraqi Forces Raid Sadr City - washingtonpost.com

We The Creators of this site, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish Fantasy Congress for the United States of America.

In this game, we give you the power to draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. Enjoy our gift to you, o great nation: the power to play politics!™

NYT coverage here.

For those who have no idea how many yards Peyton Manning threw for on Sunday but can cite every legislative amendment proposed by Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, the game could be an alternative to the prevailing fantasy sports culture.

Wow... OK, whose down?

Fantasy Congress - Where People Play Politics!

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

The relevant section from Section 9 of Article 1 of the Constitution:

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Court Told It Lacks Power in Detainee Cases - washingtonpost.com

President Bush discussed his policies with conservative radio hosts last month at the White House, including, from left, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved.

The fact that the President gives these people personal audience is troubling. They are not serious people. Does the president take them seriously? Does he take their counsel?

As Talk Radio Wavers, Bush Moves to Firm Up Support - New York Times

After years of misrepresentation and pillorying by a variety of groups like the A.C.L.U. that ended up making a lot of money by opposing it and developed a lot of membership by opposing it, its renewal passed by 89 votes in the Senate.

They didn’t oppose the Patriot Act in order to make money, or as some kind of marketing scheme.

If you think they don’t care about membership, I think that’s a naïve understanding of the way politics works in America.

I find this assertion deeply dishonest and offensive. I expect this kind of tripe from mindless conservative koolaid drinkers but from a former public official its really not acceptable.

First, and foremost, the ACLU did not oppose the Partiot Act. They had a very limited list of specific reforms, that mostly related to requiring better oversight for the powers granted rather than curtailing them, and centered around a specific provision that has been found unconstitutional by a federal court.

Second, the people who work at the ACLU are not "in it for the money" as there is no money in it. These are mostly lawyers who could walk away from the 30-40k they make a year to jobs in the 100-200k range at the snap of a finger, but they are so devoted to the causes they are fighting for that they cannot do it. They are like civil liberties nuns. Of course they "care about membership." Show me an organization that doesn't "care about membership" and doesn't promote membership! The black and white politicizing of the Patriot Act came first from John Ashcroft, and second from certain Democrat politicians.

The bottom line is that there is a subset of the Republican party that simply does not beleive in civil liberties. They do not beleive in freedom of speech, nor of religion, and they absolutely do not beleive in the right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure, etc... They beleive in unrestrained majoritarian power and state coersion, and these rights stand in the way of that.

The first step in getting rid of those rights is to demonize people who've devoted their lives to defending them. This is, of course, a bit like shooting fish in a barrell, as civil liberties are by definition a check upon the power of the majority, and are apt to come up in unpopular circumstances. Once the majority is totally convinced that the ACLU is a corrupt organization and that the court system is activist and radical, they won't be concerned when these people complain about decisions that are made, and in the long run the structures that make the United States a free society can be disassembled under the approving eye of most of it's people. Unlike the people who maintain the website linked above, John Ashcroft is too smart to be confused about this, and so he must be complicit.

For God and Country - Questions for John Ashcroft

"Charlie has obviously done an exceptional job, a really extraordinary job," said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for Military Commissions.

Sullivan added it was "quite a coincidence" that Swift was passed over for a promotion "within two weeks of the Supreme Court opinion."

The administration appears to continue to dis the rule of law...

AP Wire | 10/08/2006 | Lawyer who defended bin Laden's driver denied promotion

The dude gets points for putting his web server on port 2006. The dude does not get points for using a light blue tint to indicate "no senate race."

Update: Everyone keeps complaining about this post. On the LCD screen on my Dell Laptop his light blue and his grey look very similar, and when I first saw the map it looked very Democratic for about 10 seconds, and then it occured to me that they don't have Senate races in every state every year. I've looked at this page on other monitors now and it looks different. LCDs can do odd things with color, as anyone who has ever designed a website will attest.

Election 2006: Senate and House Races Updated Daily

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we’ve seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount.

This is Kos, at Cato, talking about libertarian democrats. Its an interesting read. The responses are, I think, more interesting. They fall into several categories:

1. The liberal hater: I hate Kos because he is a popular liberal blogger. Liberals are responsibile for everything that is wrong with the world.

2. The wannabe libertarian: I am a partisan Republican (often, a social conservative) who would vote for a Republican no matter what, but I tell my friends I'm a libertarian because I think it sounds cool, so Kos must be wrong because clearly I am a libertarian but I'd never vote for a Democrat.

3. The anarcho-capitalist: Kos fails to address the idea that the only reason corporations can be coercive is the power governments grant them, ergo, Kos is wrong.

(This one is confusing. Apparently these people are unaware that Republicans also regulate markets. Democrats might have traditionally regulated markets more than Republicans, but there is more to his point than this...)

4. The disillusioned libertarian.

This is the response that I think is interesting. The disillusioned libertarians get something that the anarcho-capitalists are missing:

The Republican Party has become corrupted by power.

I'm not talking about Jack Abramoff. I'm talking about NSA surveillance, unlawful enemy combatants, and national security letters.

Republicans have spent years arguing, rightly, that government is a dangerous, coercive thing that ought to be contained, and yet the moment they gain control of both houses of Congress, the Whitehouse, and the Court (whether they beleive it or not) they have decided, instead, that there is absolutely no problem with big government as long as they are running it.

There is absolutely no assumption of unchecked executive power which is so dangerous or far-reaching that today's Republicans won't embrace it and fight for it.

Their's is a fantasy land in which everyone accused of terrorism is guilty and government officials never commit crimes or abuse their authority. Perhaps some are not so stupid, but they don't care, because they figure they'll never personally be the victim of such abuse. Either way, they don't seem to beleive in checks and balances, nor do they seem to believe that there ought be a limit to their ever expanding coercive power.

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Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Case for the Libertarian Democrat

The Public Expression of Religion Act - H.R. 2679 - provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees.

Erwin Chemerinsky - Legislating Violations of the Constitution - washingtonpost.com

Name this quote:

"I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether
it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether
he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right
that matters, but victory."

Godwin's Guffaw