"[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of [the] noblest characteristics of the late Revolution." - James Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrace" (1785)

So what number experiment on our liberties are we at now? If you count signing statements we're topping a thousand.

"Re: the Thomas Jefferson quote Glenn cites in the Update--

This is why we're paying Glenn the big bucks. ;)"

Um ...

I was recycling the version of that Jefferson quote I used in a previous post at the old UT. I forgot that the original text (the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798) is even more pertinent that the one I used.

that they may transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury, whose _suspicions_ may be the evidence, his _order_ the sentence, his _officer_ the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction: that a very numerous and valuable description of the inhabitants of these States being, by this precedent, reduced, as outlaws, to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution thus swept away from us all, no rampart now remains against the passions and the powers of a majority in Congress to protect from a like exportation, or other more grievous punishment, the minority of the same body, the legislatures, judges, governors, and counsellors of the States, nor their other peaceable inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the constitutional rights and liberties of the States and people, or who for other causes, good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views, or marked by the suspicions of the President, or be thought dangerous to his or their election, or other interests, public or personal: that the friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow, or rather, has already followed, for already has a sedition act marked him as its prey: that these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested at the threshold, necessarily drive these States into revolution and blood, and will furnish new calumnies against republican government, and new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed that man cannot be governed but by a rod of iron: that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism -- free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence ...

Let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on our President, and the President of our choice has assented to, and accepted over the friendly strangers to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws have pledged hospitality and protection: that the men of our choice have more respected the bare _suspicions_ of the President, than the solid right of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jeffken.htm

Impeccable timing. I'm getting ready to transform my draft review of Chait's book The Big Con into a blog post and one of the things missing was a section attempting to explain why in his otherwise excellent book Chait devotes a page or two to bashing the liberal blogosphere as unhinged, paranoid and Manichean equivalents of Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh. I was planning on explaining this in terms of Chait's Iraq war support and what not ... now I can just link here. Saves me a lot of trouble.

Another thing I noticed about Chait: he wrote a really good book explaining how "right-wing" extremists who believe religiously in quack economic theory have taken over the Republican Party and how the media continues to redefine the political "center" in the direction of those ideologues. Ok, so he reviews David Cay Johnston's book - Free Lunch - about how as a consequence of that takeover government, the wealthy, and corporations collude to subvert the market and take money from the poor, middle class, and moderately rich to give to the very rich and powerful. In the review he dismissed the book as left-wing populism (despite the book framing over and over again its criticism in terms of "corporate socialists" subverting the capitalism of Adam Smith which is why it got a sympathetic reading at Reason magazine http://www.reason.com/news/show/124116.html) and mocks Johnston for asking rhetorically who has not, feeling the sting of injustice, vowed to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

That seriously baffled me. The stuff Johnston wrote about (the flow of wealth upward like Niagra falls in reverse) is the consequences of what Chait wrote about, yet Chait is indifferent to what Johnston writes about and waves his hand at it. Indeed, Chait asserts that the redistribution of wealth upward doesn't exist. Yet over the last 30 years the share of the wealth of the wealthiest Americans have seen their income share go up, and the bottom 90% have seen theirs go down - and that's a result of the policy Chait wrote about. And what's more, Chait knows this because he points it out in his book when he points out that the reason the rich are paying a greater share of income tax is because they're getting a larger share of the total income.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/23/waste-army-proposal/

Johnston's book is full of stuff like this happenening. Having a problem with this make you a left-wing populist?

"[I]t would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism." - Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the "Kentucky Resolutions" (1798)