I’m thinking about how to make use of the suggestions offered in the comments to my previous post. First I want to elaborate on something I said here and try to give you a little insight into what I’m up to.

When I mentioned high standards, I was not talking about how well you use grammar, punctuation, imagery and tropes. I was talking about a standard of intellectual discourse. You folks are the best group of bloggers that I know when it comes to calling bullshit when you see it. A lot of you make it seem like an art form. You don’t sugarcoat anything, and you don’t care whether it’s primary season or not. You say fuck when you see something that ought to make decent people say that. I’m amazed by how well you’ve kept this up over time. That sort of honesty is in my mind the most important element that is missing from our public discourse. It’s a big part of what’s wrong with the media. We need more of it if we’re ever going to get to the point where enough people are willing to put bodies on the line to change this country, and I am afraid that is exactly where we’re gonna have to go before we’re done.

My hesitation to post here doesn’t have anything to do with my confidence as a writer. I’m sure I can hold my own with most people in that department. I identify myself primarily as a writer, no matter what job I happened to be doing at any given time. I’ve been a writer since I wrote my first poem in 1984. It only took one to get me hooked, and when I look back on my life up to this point, the most miserable times were the times when I wasn’t writing anything. The hesitation I expressed is more about my confidence as a thinker and my confidence in my ability to put it on the line and let the chips fall where they may. Lucky for me, that gets easier with practice.

The whole thing is very good.

This goes to the other side of how this nation is changing radically - with a series of programs conceived largely by executive fiat that weakens civil liberties protections and subverts the plain letter of the law. This includes illegal wiretapping of American citizens, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, and the dehumanizing practice of torture, which is ineffective and deeply dangerous to the lives of our troops, as this senior interrogator in Iraq explains.
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Cass Sunstein cautions against prosecuting criminal conduct from the current Administration. He thinks that Alito and Roberts are "minimalists."

Robert Bauer advocated pardoning Scooter Libby.

I have a very bad feeling about this.

Perhaps.

The Senator said that he would restore Habeus Corpus, close Gitmo, restore the Constitutional balance between the Executive and Congressional branches of government, and return the US to the rule of law!

Keep up the pressure, lambert!

Bush welcomes probe of CIA leak

President Bush said Tuesday he welcomes a Justice Department investigation into who revealed the classified identity of a CIA operative.

"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.

"I want to know the truth," the president continued. "Leaks of classified information are bad things."

Do heads of departments like the NSA get sworn in, as in hand-on-the-Bible-and-take-an-oath sworn in? Or does some flunky just show them to their office and take them around to indicate where the cafeteria and the nearest men's room is? If there's a preserve-protect-and-defend-the-Constitution rule in effect, which being as this is the "National Security" Agency and all would seem like a good idea, it looks like we may need one of those stand-down time-outs for review of the pertinent operating rules:

Congress shall make no law...abridging...the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Because they seem to have gotten a little confused on the objective here:

Thirteen anti-war activists were given citations Saturday for protesting outside the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade.

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