a uniform and a badge, and, well...

Milgram and Zimbardo have already done the work on the inevitable upshot.

I once disembarked at Kansas City to make a connecting flight back home. We were way late, owing to severe weather, and my connector was about to depart. In the crush of equally frantic passengers, I inadvertently passed out of security (had never been to that airport before), and had to go back through. My belt buckle set off the detector alarm, and, sensing my anxiety, TSA peeps pulled me aside for the full-body wand and pat-down schtick. The more I protested about missing my flight, the slower the dude deliberately went. Then his sidekick leisurely opened and examined everything in my carry-on.

They knew I was pissed, and were just eagerly hoping I'd go off on them so they could call in the guards and have me detained.

When they finally let me go, I ran to the plane (only a gate away, mercifully) in my socks, dragging my belt and carrying my shoes and still-askew bag. I turned to see them watching me, smirking -- hoping, no doubt, I would yield to my impulse to flip them off so they might still have me detained. The flight attendant was holding the aircraft door, about to close it.

Shit.

You need to be tested for steroids after that one.

;)

I will be copying all my friends on this link.

You hipped me to some great stuff the other night. I appreciate it. Will be working some of it into my current blog post. Thanks, bro'.

Just read James' Bamford's 2006 "Big Brother is Listening."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance

It made me almost physically ill.

Maybe all this shit is a waste of time. They will let us rant on Quixotically reading the 4th Amendment and other constitutional tea leaves and interpreting them this way or that. It keeps us busy, the penultimate Bright Shiny Thing.

"Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led the first probe into the National Security Agency, warned in 1975 that the agency’s capabilities could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it is done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology."

Maybe the total tyranny is already in place, artfully window-dressed to keep us thinking our opinions and our constitution in fact matter.

Bu'ush, notwithstanding his in-the-crapper JAR and a Dem majority congress, got everything he wanted on FISA. What explains that capitulation?

Blackmail, judiciously targeted?

I'm just sayin'. I dunno. Read the entire article. And, keep in mind that it is more than two years old.

Article II Section 2:

"he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

Doesn't say "only with respect to others." In fact, it doesn't refer to "persons" at all.

It's plenary, with the sole exception of "Cases of Impeachment."

Given Bu'ush's Jones for pushing everything to the firewall when it comes to the ostensible prerogatives of His Unrestrained Unitary Executiveness, it would not surprise me one whit for him to do so.

Of course, all of this assumes he's gonna relinquish the office next January.

"Mooslims" here, even in obvious satire.

Anal-retentive censors.

(my comment got deleted)

Interesting. I'm voicing related concerns on my blog post about this whole issue. Link on my sig.

"Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power."

- Tom FriedmanUnit

___________

"Suck on it," asshat. The shift horse in relative geopolitical power and influence is way outa the barn. And, Rancher Bu'ush is the one who opened the barn door wide.

I'm one of those screaming my head off. Click my name link, work in progress.

This stuff makes me physically ill.

Yeah, Greenwald is all over it. I read his posts every day without fail.

In reading though the text excerpts from the decision, I find it depressingly telling that even the courts have now dropped the adjective "unlawful" from the original technical moniker "unlawful enemy combatants" formerly used to distinguish these putative (and legally undeserving) "worst of the worst" from the more mundane military adversaries.

Swill. Ugh.

Look, what you have is a very smart attorney general who's trying to protect his client and that's the president of the United States, an executive privilege.

________

Why am I not surprised by any of this; [1] the brazen assertion itself, and [2] that fact that it will not even register as noteworthy with in the MSM.