were now obsolete and dismissed away as "quant" relics

s/quant/quaint/

As always, excellent analysis.

lack of a coherent 200military strategy (after first block quote)

s/200military/military/

Glenn,

At the beginning of the program, Moyers said:

John Stewart of the Daily Show joins me this week to talk about how faking the news can reveal more of the truth than all the Sunday morning talk shows put together.

John Stewart has been on a rampage this week on The Daily Show. He had Matt Cooper (of Time) on Monday and tore into him about his cozy relationship with the administration and his role in Plamegate. On Tuesday, he rebutted the GOP talking points spewed from McCain, pointing out the absurdity of how extending tours of duty is supposed to be "supporting the troops" (video is on C&L).

I'm thinking he got fed up with waiting for the press to do its job, and decided to do it himself. While he influenced the cancellation of CNN's "Crossfire" from his appearance in 2004, there obviously has not been any real substantive change -- and now he's acting directly.

Do you agree that such a frivolous assertion of privilege will only hurt the administration when the issue hits Federal Court?

I think the American people may relate to this issue more than the abstract issues involved in the US Attorney and FISA scandals. For example, when you get the quarterback of the Denver Broncos riled up [1] against the administration, it may be possible to pierce the Manichean shroud of the "base." Can't wait to hear the excuses for this one from the Hewitt/Reynolds/Malkin wing.

[1] See Jake Plummer on Pat Tillman's death http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcqLlT44rR8

I was going to point everyone in the direction of SSRN, but obijuan beat me to it. A complete list of Chesney's publications may be found here:

http://www.law.wfu.edu/x2987.xml

I glanced at the Paper, and Chesney takes on the points raised in the Weaver and Pallito paper. I was surprised by his conclusions (begins at pg. 52 [pg. 55 of the PDF file]):

(1) It's difficult to assemble a reliable list due to the difficulty in finding unpublished examples.

(2) The date when the assertion was raised, and the date of its origin are separate events -- thus, making it difficult to assess which administration was responsible for raising the privilege in the first place.

(3) Year-to-year comparisons have little value unless one assumes the government is presented with an equal number of opportunities each year to assert the privilege.

Thus, according to Chesney:

Taken together, these considerations establish that there is little point in asking whether the privilege has been asserted at an unusually high rate in any given year ... For all of these reasons discussed above, the quantitative debate is best set aside entirely on the ground that it presents a largely unanswerable question. The more significant and appropriate question is whether the state secrets privilege has expanded in recent years in substantive terms.

In other words, because it's "hard" to find unpublished opinions and assess dates the problem is completely intractable; further, just because the government has had more opportunities this year to assert the privilege means we can't compare it to previous times. However, the opportunities to assert privilege are proximately caused by the administration's own policies (e.g. implementing the NSA program) -- maybe Chesney forgot this. The difficulty in finding statistics does not make the problem impossible, it just makes Chesney's conclusion lazy.

Translated from law professor speak: reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Chanan,

Maybe it is a bit broad saying ADL has a Republican agenda. They do, however, have an extreme neoconservative agenda -- that's why I'm not holding my breath waiting for a response from them. Even if they do respond, they'll issue a general condemnation and not even mention Fox News or Hannity by name.

Specifically, if you had done a few minutes of research, you would have realized Glenn has covered this last year when Bill O'Reilly branded Markos Moulista a "fascist" and "Nazi.":

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/01/nazi_insult/index.html

Similarly there was no outcry when Jonah Goldberg released his book comparing all liberals to facists (seriously):

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/05/adl/

The pattern is clear: ADL will only condemn you by name if your position is not in line with an agenda considered supportive enough of Israel.