Original intend is a canard. The original intent of the founders was clearly that the people NOT rule--that's why the President and Senate were elected indirectly and the Supreme Court appointed. They intended for this Republic to have slavery. And, bud, they intended the CONGRESS to declare war, issues letters of marque and reprisal, and set rules for captures by land and sea. Or did you miss that at the Federalist Society meeting when they were jacking off to the Unitary Executive Dancers? If you look to original document, the President is largley a cypher and Congress runs the country. You like that? You want us to go back to the golden years of Millard Fillmore and Franklin Peirce?

I didn't think so.

The President of the United States is our Chief Magistrate, in charge of overseeing the daily operation of the State and seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. In time of war, the military answer to him or her for appointing officers to posts, determining the chain or command, and overal policy and direction. The author of a letter earlier who talked about the President "ordering men and women into deadly situations" has idiotically drank the koolaid, because only CONGRESS can do that lawfully. They have the power to declare war, and all the Nazi-era like enabling acts they may pass can't cover up the unconstitutional nature of Presidential war-making.

Our problem is we want a leader. Which implies we want to be led. Which is a sick, degenerate condition in a Republic, to say nothing of a nation that beats its chest and claims for itself the purest and most wonderful democracy and freedom of any state on Earth. That is why, although I will vote for Senator Obama, I have no desire for him to be my leader, or savior, or any other such nonsense. If he administers the government effectively, follows the laws and enforces them, and doesn't pretend he's got the right to attack other nations without a declaration of war, I'd be extatic. The less he acts like our commander in chief, the better.

This is extremely clever and very forced. The devil in the details would certainly prick the bubble with his pitchfork. It's like a terrific junior seminar paper by a really bright kid who has read just enough to have a wonderful idea but not enough to know that the world is just not that clear-cut or schematic.

And the assumtion that the United States has an industrial future may be a chimera. What if, to jump on another "big picture" thesis, our era of imperial "glory" was because we dominated the oil age, just as Britain was the alpha power during the coal age? They bestrided the world because they had coal and knew what to do with it. We dominated the world because we had oil and knew what to do with it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the golden age is no more? I mean, we haven't got a largely unexploited continet to bilk for all its worth any more. Perhaps, just as we must shrink to balance our consumption with our production, and not live on credit, the age of American expansion and hegemony is drawing to a close?

This is a guy who will work viciously and tirelessly AGAINST every fucking Progressive policy Obama might contemplate. Don't you guys get that? Don't you see this is a signal that the Power Elite (as Mr. Mills so well taught us 50 years back) are back in the saddle again? Some change! Some "bringing decency to government"! Obama wants to let the DLC shits and the Wall Street bastards kinow that it will be business as usual, Republican light government. I saw this coming, yet I am still happier with Obama than with McCain, but if you give me any of this "new kind of politics" shit I will call you the tools that you are.

this guy is why people don't trust us. He's so wrapped up in the "discourse" and showing oh how well read he is, and so objective, and so dispassionate, that he could give a damn about some guy spending months on end in solitary, under threat of torture or death, with lights on 24/7 and all access to the outside world cut off. Call it "cruel and unusaul punishment BEFORE the crime is even proved, or the charges even levelled", which is what it is. It's like the "good German" bureaucrats sitting around the table at the Wannsee Conference, trying to figure out if what they were doing was legal, and trying to make sure that the SS men did things according to proper procedure and not unilaterally or without benefit of law. Like way too many of these law school types, Kerr is lost in the labyrinth of the law, and could care less about Justice (which is just a word, don't you know, in a vast postmodern discourse, and as Professor Yoo has said, means whatever you want it to mean--Pomo Reactionaries!). Shameful behavoir, but all too typical of smart people who have no ethical standards or compass.