KO's attention to the recent Bushist positions taken by the Obama DOJ was indeed welcome, and since his reporting consisted largely of paraphrasing your article, you too deserve great credit here, GG.

Olbermann made the point that what seems to be going on is the new administration has found itself with "all these powers" that the last administration posited and the last Congress didn't stop, so maybe it's not all that surprising to see the Obama administration try to hold on to them whether or not they are really constitutional. Assuming, with the Framers, that this is really what's likely to happen, it is crucial that there be vocal, immediate and relentless objections lodged from all fronts.

It is now clear that it is too much to hope that Obama is going to wave a wand and "undo" all the most egregious and unconstitutional acts of the Bush administration. He may be accomplishing some good things, he certainly is a better bet to occupy the position than McCain would have been, he may even have good intentions but is getting and relying on bad advice. None of that really matters. What matters is that if Obama is going to allow his administration to advocate unconstitutional actions, he must be called to account.

Maybe, hopefully, if there is a way to raise enough serious objections to the type of constitutional attacks represented by the DOJ's immunity (and war crimes/torture) arguments, Obama may be forced to step out of the bubble of the self/bureaucracy-interested advice he plainly is getting, and it may be that President Obama can be persuaded to weigh the costs of ignoring constitutional obligations directly against the costs of adhering to them. This has not yet been done, it seems to me. The bureaucratic advice driving the bus so far is plainly "CYA" and little else, with the "ramifications" being assessed plainly limited to the comfort and security of those actually implicated in plainly illegal actions. If the President can be made to weigh that controlling motivation directly against the need for a Rule of Law, I really do hope and even dare to believe that Obama would reach the right result.

But he obviously is not going to do that unless he has to. The advice he appears to be accepting is premised upon the presumption that there will either be no appreciable objection, or that the objection will be "weatherable". That can't be allowed to happen.

Thanks to you, Glenn, and to KO for picking this up. Now many need to run with it. If Obama has a "secret plan", let's hear it. But if, as now appears much more plausible, he is being persuaded by his advisors that he can ignore these crucial issues, support unconstitutional usurpations of power and disregard clear constitutional obligations and massive governmental criminality because "he has a lot on his plate" so his actions here will be given a pass, he must be disabused of that notion.

Oh, and if Obama is doing this because he really, truly believes what he is allowing his administration to do in these respects is within constitutional authorization and consistent with the rule of law, then it really may be time to start mentioning the "I" word.

I'm sorry, but looking at the still of the clip appended to this piece, I see Mr. Bolten. This is the guy who the Bush Administration sent as our Ambassador to the United Nations and who famously referred to the UN as "irrelevant". And he's a spokesperson interviewed to come down on Obama for suggesting that maybe the US might have been perceived as "arrogant"? Good choice.

The folks who put together this type of montage of right wing bloviation may have a thankless task, but I still can't bring myself to watch it.....

Perhaps the scariest thing about this DOJ brief is that it was actually filed on April 3. I went to double-check the .pdf linked to the article, hoping against hope that it was only reported on April 3, but had actually been signed and filed on April 1. As a joke.

May the courts reject this atrocious attack on everything we know to be true. It is not a basis for dismissal of a lawsuit against the government that the lawsuit might inconvenience the government.