It Keeps Getting Worse

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is unloading what he found after being granted access to various Bush Office Of Legal Counsel opinions. Every time you think you’re hallucinating about the powers this president has accrued to himself, you come across a reality more surreal:

To give you an example of what I read, I have gotten three legal propositions from these OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note taking could reproduce them from the classified documents. Listen for yourself. I will read all three, and then discuss each one.

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

Richard Milhous Bush. And the evidence suggests Mukasey may have a bruising non-honeymoon as AG. I’m also hearing rumors that the obstruction of justice in the CIA tape=destruction case may be even more clear-cut than we previously thought.

Harman Update

Her office emails:

Several blogs are reacting to incorrect information about Jane Harman’s position on the videotapes destroyed by the CIA. The original AP story, which reported that Harman was informed of the tapes’ destruction in 2003, was wrong and has been corrected.  Harman was never informed of the tapes’ destruction (reported to have occurred in 2005) and made clear to the CIA that any proposed destruction would be a bad idea.  Her 2003 letter to the CIA General Counsel which she has urged be declassified has never been responded to.

Here’s the corrected AP story.

Yglesias Award Nominee III

"For years, many of us have been in awe of the Clintons, really in awe: a little scared and a little admiring. But the spell finally broke in the past couple of weeks, when both halves of the couple looked a little ridiculous, and a little desperate.

She, tone-deaf as so often (did she not talk about one-night stands with her middle-aged rural audience this week?), went for her version of the jugular, Obama’s musings as a 5-year-old. Her husband, a practiced liar, tried to get away with the biggest lie he could think of: that he had always opposed the war in Iraq.

After the hundreds of polls, focus groups, and various analyses they and others have paid for, surely the Clintons know by now that their Achilles’ heel is their unbearable prevarication. It goes to show how deeply embedded this deceptiveness is that these two smart, accomplished actors are simply unable to even pretend to be honest," – Paul Jenkins, HuffPuff.

Is this the 2007 Yglesias Award winner? Don’t Forget To Vote Here!

Quote For The Day

"Unfortunately, millions of Muslims all over the globe are humiliated and betrayed by the ignorance and lack of basic humanity that a small minority of Muslims too often exhibits. Should I, however, bring this up with many of my Muslim brothers and sisters a common response is: "It’s true, but look at what the West is doing to Muslims; 800,000 thousand dead in Iraq. And what about Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and the rest? Why don’t Western people denounce these atrocities against us and only harp about how backward we are?" A famous Iraqi poet once wrote, "If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people’s destruction is something to debate." Unfortunately, these Western horrors against the Muslims demand responses, but Muslims must also recognize and denounce these wrongs too often associated with our Prophet and our faith without always pointing fingers elsewhere," – Hamza Yusuf, Newsweek.