John Yoo and Carl Schmitt

Some revealing parallels:

While Yoo cites Clausewitz, he seems to have another German thinker in mind: Carl Schmitt. As the “crown jurist” of Germany in the thirties, Schmitt is famous for a number of flashes of dark lawyerly brilliance that supported the deconstruction of the Weimar Republic and hastened the rise of an authoritarian, and then totalitarian dictatorship. One of these was the use of external threat to justify a “state of exception,” followed by a transposition of the external threat to the internal political dynamic. This was done with a purpose: collapsing the careful allocation of powers in the Weimar Constitution in favor of one all-powerful Leader. John Yoo would call him the “commander in chief.” Curiously, for John Yoo the commander-in-chief has narrowly circumscribed powers when he’s a Democrat, and robust and dictatorial authority when he’s drawn from John Yoo’s own political party.

Padilla In History

John Cole gets it:

I don’t know what the real story of Padilla’s involvement (if any) in this mess might be, and since most everything we do know was obtained while torturing the man, I doubt we ever will. I suspect that in the future, when cooler heads look back at this disgraceful period in our nation’s history, the alleged villainous treachery of Jose Padilla will be greatly overshadowed by the outrageous treatment he received and the dishonest and bumbling campaign to subvert the law while attempting to publicly convict him. The real story is not Jose Padilla, who for all we know may actually have been dangerous, but who is now, courtesy of the Bush administration, a broken and mentally deficient mess. The real story will be of the little men who, in moments of great patriotic fervor, decided it was up to them to destroy our nation’s principles in order to save us all.

Shaun Mullen comments here on what this case revealed about the Bush-Cheney administration.

How Panicked Is The Fed?

Clive Crook is worried. Krugman:

There’s still the question of how deep the slump will be. I can see the case for arguing that it will be nasty. The 1990-91 recession was brought on by a credit crunch, the 2001 recession by overinvestment; this time we’ve got both. I guess we’ll see. In any case, whatever happens will probably last quite a while.

Reich wants more pump-priming.