Ian Millhiser — Catholic Bishops To House: Shut Down The Government Unless We Get Our Way On Birth Control

One week before House Republicans shut down the government in an effort to force President Obama to enact many of their preferred policies, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote House members requesting that the government be shut down — and potentially that the nation be forced into default — unless religious employers were given a special right to deny birth control coverage to their employees.

This is a devastating criticism and echoes just what Pope Francis said he does not want, indicating a breakdown of papal authority. Of course, if the pope wish to exert authority is fully able to do so. We'll see his reaction to this snub, or better, poke in the eye.

Think Progress
Catholic Bishops To House: Shut Down The Government Unless We Get Our Way On Birth ControlIan Millhiser

When hostage taking works to exact ransom, then hostage taking becomes the norm.

This is much more the case in parliamentary government, which is likely why the Founding Fathers eschewed it in favor of a Roman style republic controlled by the power elite through the Senate and a strong chief executive rather than a prime minister.

In a two party, winner take all system, the calculation is based on opportunity cost between the two chief options, so the Founding Fathers structured the Constitution to allow for not only competition between the two chief power elites but also the necessity to compromise to prevent a zero-sum game unless one power elite could dominate all branches of government over a considerable period.

The good thing is that the Bush unitary executive doctrine seems to be discredited by his own party, although it will almost certainly be revived in a GOP administration unless Democrats are willing to similarly obstruct government. If the GOP sets a precedent in this regard, it is virtually certain that the next round of Democrats will be much more radical and adopt the same tactics, ensuring on-going political gridlock.

Ali Watkins — Sen. Wyden says he tried to warn of massive surveillance program

“If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will live to regret it,” [Sen Wyden] said.

“Sen. Mark Udall and I tried again and again to get the executive branch to be straight with the American public, but under the classification rules observed by the Senate, we are not even allowed to tap out the truth in Morse code,” he said. “And we tried just about everything else we could think of to warn the American people.”

Wyden blasted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the body that must approve surveillance requests, saying that the veil of secrecy behind which it functions negates the concept of balanced oversight. The court’s secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are too broad, he said, and render the legislation unrecognizable.

“I tell Oregonians that there are effectively two Patriot Acts,” he said. “The first is the one they can read on their laptop in Medford or Portland, analyze and understand,” Wyden said. “Then there’s the real Patriot Act – the secret interpretation of the law that the government is actually relying on.”

McClatchy News
Sen. Wyden says he tried to warn of massive surveillance program
Ali Watkins | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Jonathan Turley — President Carter: "The United States Has No Functioning Democracy"

Carter told Spiegel “America has no functioning democracy.” Of course, you have to live in Germany to read such views....

Carter’s voice at this moment is incredibly important. Most media has ignored such criticism of Obama and his authoritarian powers. Even the story on Carter has been given limited attention and only because smaller blogs have continued to spread the word. We are living in the greatest crisis of civil liberties in our history and the public is facing a unified front of all three branches against efforts to deal with erosion of the rights of citizens in this country. The question is whether the public will finally awaken to this peril. Carter’s courageous voice could not have been heard at a more critical time for this nation. 

Carter: The United States Has No Functioning Democracy

Jonathan Turley | Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, George Washington University

Washington's Blog
Former President and Commander-In-Chief: America Is No Longer a Democracy

And Says Snowden’s Revelations are “Helpful”

Washington's Blog
2 U.S. Supreme Court Justices – And Numerous Other Top Government Officials – Warn of Dictatorship

Rod Bastanmehr — Surveillance State: Appeals Court Says Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Americans

Yet another worrisome expansion of executive powers.

Translation: Making constitutional what is patently not only unconstitutional but also against what American representative democracy was founded to correct. This is the power that belonged to monarchs and now belongs to dictators. Talk about judicial activism.

This is a huge undermining of American soft power. Over the past decades, many nono-Americans have become afraid of the US as a rogue empire. Now many Americans are feeling the same fears with a government out of control in ratifying the doctrine of the unitary executive with absolute power. This cannot end well unless it is quickly brought to heel.

AlterNet
Surveillance State: Appeals Court Says Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Americans

Rod Bastanmehr



Paul Craig Roberts — It's Time for Americans to Admit That We've Had a Coup d’etat

Like serfs in the dark ages, American citizens can be picked up on the authority of some unknown person in the executive branch and thrown in a dungeon, subject to torture, without any evidence ever being presented to a court or any information to the person’s relatives of his/her whereabouts. Or they can be placed on a list without explanation that curtails their right to travel by air. Every communication of every American, except face-to-face conversation in non-bugged environments, is intercepted and recorded by the National Stasi Agency from which phrases can be strung together to produce a “domestic extremist.”

If throwing an American citizen in a dungeon is too much trouble, the citizen can simply be blown up with a hellfire missile launched from a drone....

The people who helped transform a democratically accountable president into a Caesar include John Yoo, who was rewarded for his treason by being accepted as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt school of law. Yoo’s colleague in treason, Jay Scott Bybee was rewarded by being appointed a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. We now have a Berkeley law professor teaching, and a federal circuit judge ruling, that the executive branch is above the law.

The executive branch coup against America has succeeded. The question is: will it stand?

AlterNet
It's Time for Americans to Admit That We've Had a Coup d’etat
Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy

Fred Branfman — Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy

Congress, judiciary and the mass media no longer provide constitutionally mandated checks and balances; they are largely extensions of Executive power.

Edward Snowden's revelations have illuminated the most critical political issue facing America today: how an authoritarian U.S. Executive Branch which has focused on war abroad for the last 50 years now devotes increasing resources to surveillance, information management, and population control at home, posing a far greater threat to Americans' liberties than any conceivable foreign foe.

AlterNet
Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy
Fred Branfman

Has the republic already ended and Americans are now governed as an empire? We don't know, but it sure looks like it. And if you are sure this is not the case, you've been drinking the kool-aid.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Americans seem to be asleep.

Jon Perr — Yoo Too, President Obama?

Back in December 2005, John Yoo was asked if any law or treaty could prevent the President of the United States from torturing someone, "including by crushing the testicles of the person's child." Yoo, then head of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, responded, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that." To put it another way, the American people just have to take the President's word for it.

That's what makes the revelations in the Obama DOJ's white paper on lethal strikes targeting American members of Al Qaeda so disappointing--and so disturbing. President Obama or an unspecified "informed, high-level government official" will decide if an American citizen anywhere in the world represents an "imminent" threat to the United States, even if no evidence of a planned attack exists. With no oversight from Congress or review from the equivalent of a FISA court, the President and his team will act as judge, jury and executioner.

Crooks & Liars
Yoo Too, President Obama?
Jon Perr

Unitary executive, torture, and assassination

An excerpt from the new book, 'Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.'

Ian Cobain
Shocking Story of How the US Ignored International Law to Become to World's Kidnapper and Torturer
Ian Cobain

The CIA's deadly campaign of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan will be exempt from the Obama administration's attempt to codify rules for targeted killings.

AlterNet
Obama's 'Playbook' for Targeted Strikes Has a Gaping Hole--CIA's Killer Drones in Pakistan Exempted
Alex Kane

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley on Obama's statism

TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.

Shannyn Moore: Just A Girl From Homer
John Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s Constitution
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

Chris Hedges — Criminalizing Dissent

The very name of the law itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against enemies within “the homeland” as well as those abroad.

truthdig
Criminalizing Dissent
Chris Hedges

What is taking place now as the no so hidden agenda is massive intimidation of those who would effectively express dissent against the ruling elite and the government they control through state capture.