The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy" is the title of Charlie Savage's 2007 book.

I am reading it right now and it is depressing to see how Cheney pulled off a takeover of government. I hoped that after Obama's election that this subversion would be reversed. A few thought that once these forces were unleashed, it would be very hard to regain our republic.

Because Obama is going down many paths that Cheney/Bush laid down the subversion of our Democracy continues. Can it be stopped?

Charlie Savage wrote the Boston Globe articles that exposed Bush's use of signing statements.

Many have commented about what to do about these ongoing violations of the law and the political class that is beholden to the powerful.

You may want to spend time with activists.

The progressive web site dailykos.com now gets 1 million unique views per day and 1.3 million world wide. They often discuss columns by Glenn and their respect is shown in the name for him as Glennzilla based on Godzilla.

The dailykos.com has an annual convention that is now called Netroots nation and can be found at

http://www.yearlykosconvention.org

It runs from August 13 to 16 and is being held this year in Pittsburgh. There are about 100 presenters including panels on the law and the constitution. John Dean, Howard Dean, and several congress people, noted legal scholars and David Swanson, the co-founder of the afterdowningstreet.org web site.

The registration fee for adults is $275 and for students it is $50.

I'm going to get my batteries charged for the long battle ahead to restore the rule of law -- it it is possible.

Regular readers know that some topics, like Israel, bring out a bunch of regular trolls.

We saw the usual posts about how Glenn should spend his time differently than posts like this one or to not be so shrill. But I got a sense that there was a new bunch of trolls. Their attacks were more sophisticated indirect attacks.

Glenn's last 5 posts have been truly outstanding.

Here is a thought:

Is the power structure getting worried about Glenn? Have they released a new group of trolls to try and disturb the dialog in the comments on this site?

I have never seen Glenn make so many comments in the thread. And he has said the same thing many times because it does not seem to go register. He is trying to figure out why the same arguments comes up over and over again.

Glenn typically lays out a clear argument with the facts and warrants to reach the claim. (Outstanding books by the philosopher Steven Toulman on reasoning with the easy one being "Introduction to Reasoning." In this case he knew more than he could tell and Olberman confirmed that Glenn's case was essentially correct so what else is going on? True, this case is more nuanced than usual, but not so much as has shown up in these comments.

A couple of days ago I suggested that more sophisticated trolls are showing up here because the power structure is getting worried about Glenn's incisive work. In this exchange, some people that I thought were OK seemed to fall off he wagon which led to Glenn's extensive comments. Maybe there is something in our normal paradigm that just cannot understand the point that Glenn is making.

Another thought is the Republican tactic right now of disrupting town hall meetings to try and derail health care reform. When some of the regular trolls show up over and over again like they did on this post I wonder how much they are getting paid for their comments. Do they get paid by the word, by the number of comments or by the number of references to the comments which indicate that they have hooked some one.

I think he's dealing with something that happens whenever people hear something their need to feel secure causes them to block out (see Alice Miller). The truth causes so much discomfort that the message is not only disbelieved, but the messengers are attacked, blamed, or punished.

-- Papa Boule

Thanks, that was what I was trying to figure out.