Barack Obama's team is briefed by Bush staff on after warnings about a terrorist attack - Telegraph
Topic: Politics and Law
1:09 am EDT, Oct 20, 2008
Mr Obama is also planning executive orders that do not require legislation on his first day in office, which could include plans to promote renewable energy resources and create jobs.
His transition team, which is reportedly much more extensive and active than Mr McCain's, features 10 working groups in different policy areas to convert campaign promises into concrete legislation. It is chaired by John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former White House chief of staff who runs the Centre for American Progress, a think tank long seen as a Democratic administration in exile.
Mr Podesta is working closely with Michael Signer, a former foreign policy aide to John Edwards in charge of homeland security affairs. Mr Podesta and Jason Furman, one of Mr Obama's two most influential economic advisers, have already held talks with sceptical conservative Democrats to line up the votes to pass a stimulus package.
Obama's transition team meets, candidate pushes on
Topic: Politics and Law
2:13 am EDT, Oct 19, 2008
Under the direction of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, the transition effort includes a dozen separate groups divided into different areas of responsibility, these officials said. One added that Cassandra Butts, a longtime associate of Obama, is in charge of the group dedicated to personnel for a new administration.
The effort is largely separate from the campaign structure that helped plan and execute Obama's remarkable rise to the position of front-runner in a race in which he is bidding to become the first black president.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss any post-election planning that might be under way.
Think Progress » Palin gives only ’silence’ when asked to name a SCOTUS decision besides Roe v. Wade.
Topic: Politics and Law
12:16 pm EDT, Sep 30, 2008
An aide to Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) told Politico’s Jonathan Martin that a yet-to-be-released portion of Katie Couric’s interview with Palin contains yet another embarrassing gaffe, this time about the Supreme Court:
palin1.gifThe Palin aide, after first noting how “infuriating” it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions. After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases. There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.
Palin also offered little more than silence when asked to name specific examples of times Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed for more Wall Street regulation.
Initially I thought Palin just hadn't been paying attention [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and didn't know what she was saying. But as her comment continues to reverberate, her intention becomes increasingly clear: this was not just an offhand or ignorant remark, but rather a big Fuck You to the Supreme Court and its decisions over the last four years. And in this she stands in league with McCain [and Yoo and Addington et al], echoing his disdain for the foundation of democracy.
Anthony Lewis writes:
Three times in the last four years the Supreme Court has rejected the Bush administration's legal defenses of its program for detention of alleged "enemy combatants."
Each of these decisions brought an outcry from the political right. Senator John McCain, a survivor of torture as a prisoner in North Vietnam who was once a critic of the Bush detention practices, called Boumediene "one of the worst decisions in the history of the country."
Opening the federal courts to habeas corpus applications from the detainees hardly promises them a swift ticket to freedom. But it marks at least a first step toward accountability—a forum where the treatment of a detainee and the asserted reasons for his imprisonment can be examined. As George Will wrote in a column blasting Senator McCain for the ignorance of his comments on habeas corpus, "the Supreme Court's ruling only begins marking a boundary against government's otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely."
A striking example of the importance of having courts check official decisions that someone is an "enemy combatant" is the case of Huzaifa Parhat, one of a number of Uighur Muslims from China who are in Guantánamo. Parhat, who the US military claimed was at a Uighur training camp in Afghanistan in 2001, was captured in Pakistan in the fall of 2001. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found in June that there was no persuasive evidence to support the government's labeling of him as an enemy combatant. The panel included the court's chief judge, David Sentelle, one of the most conservative federal judges in the country. Its opinion ridiculed the government argument, comparing it to the statement of a Lewis Carroll character: "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Obama to Palin: 'Don't Mock the Constitution' | The Trail | washingtonpost.com
Topic: Politics and Law
1:14 pm EDT, Sep 10, 2008
It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."
But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.
Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"
"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting,"
You can read MemeStreams discussions about this bill here and here. When a politician writes up a paranoid, funhouse mirror description of a widespread youth counterculture and attaches to it to a bill intended to target and shut down that culture, well, those youth ought to remind him of that when he desires their vote for political office.
The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.
The NAO surge continues roughly as you'd expect ...
"I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration," said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. "I won't make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program."
Thompson called DHS's release Thursday of the office's procedures and a civil liberties impact assessment "a good start." But, he said, "We still don't know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided."
