Obama tells us that "there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States...", and embraces preventative detention for them.

I am a staunch rule of law kinda guy, but if that's how you wanna play it...

So if we can't have our war crimes tribunals for Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Addington/Yoo/Bybee, et al., can we at least hold THEM in indefinite detention?

Here's another question I'd like to see answered by the David Broder and the Republicans who embrace Obama's new "maturity":

Obama tells us that "there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States...", and embraces preventative detention for them.

Would you still support this approach if Emperor Obama decided that Dick Cheney fits that definition? After all, as Cheney and so many others told us a few years back, dissent is tantamount to treason...

I started blogging and writing columns almost 5 years ago. It felt like there were just a few of us out in the wilderness trying to get everyone to WTFU and do something about the lawless but still reasonably popular regime in Washington.

And like so many others, I went from cautious optimism to elation when it looked, briefly, as if the changing of the guard represented an end to the reign of emperors.

It is Groundhog Day again. The new administration speaks a different language, but reserves its right to lawlessness. And there are again but a few of us sounding the alarm.

Obama is unlikely to be as awful as Bush in practice. But what I thought was a difference in kind has now been proven a difference only in degree. What sticks in my craw now is that I voted AGAINST the last emperor, so there was no sense of betrayal.

Perhaps the larger point in your anecdote (and one echoed in my own limited experience) is the near-absolute power trial judges have to tilt cases conclusively against a party they disfavor, and the limited recourse available given the minimal appellate review of such behavior. I'm not sure what the cure is, but few non-litigators are aware of the pervasiveness of the problem.

Remember when he said:

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

Dubya was apparently off only in his grammar: he made the mistake of phrasing the opening dependent clause as a future conditional, whereas it is more accurately phrased in the present continuous.

I for one am not terribly mollified that "our" guy is the one now wielding the dictatorial powers.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but if Sotomayor's Pappas opinion was a dissent, isn't it just an opinion, and not a "ruling" (par. 4, just before the long quote)?

One of the depressing things about the battle we have been waging against rampant hypocrisy is that (with a few notable and welcome exceptions) our media and political elites have proven remarkably immune to both facts and logic. Politicians and pundits rarely pay a price for their incoherence. Their milieu is simply unconcerned with such transgressions.

Law professors live in a different world -- a world where logic and facts play a much larger role. (Well, not all of them -- if you have a theory that explains Althouse and the Other Glenn (Reynolds), please share with the class.) When lal profs publish crap, the ridicule of peers has consequences. At the very least, it will be hard for Kerr to ignore Glenn's slings and arrows and hold his head high in the faculty lounge.

So perhaps the real import of this development is that Kerr's inside move creates a real vulnerability. And maybe peeling off peripheral legitimizing characters like Kerr is the best we can hope for in this agonizingly long slog.

The level of dysfunction at the NYT (which, I assume is no worse than the rest of the MSM, which can be counted on to reprise the same errors) beggars belief. (The dysfunction inside the Bush Administration no longer has that effect on me.)

1. Either they DID NOT READ the very documents that were leaked to them, or succumbed to standard "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?" spin from the leaker(s). Again.

2. The institutional process designed as the court of last (internal) resort -- the public editor -- appears to have the internal resonance and effect on ongoing reportage of, well, the blogosphere. Which is to say, approximately none. This is just a guess, but I'd wager that folks like Shane and Johnston and Bumiller react to Hoyt the way rowdy teenagers react to shushing librarians.

Whatever would we and our pajamas do without the derring-do of "real" reporters?

1. The whiny attack from the anonymous commenter in Mayer's piece combines an ad hominem with the factually false -- the fact that s/he does exactly what s/he accuses us of doing is just gravy. (Might I suggest to Mayer and the New Yorker that they require such commenters to register with the magazine and pick pseudonyms?) Sad that the ability and willingness to recognize and call out such nonsense are (pardon the pun) unclaimed territory among the MSM.

2. When Brennan et al. argue that we would be "handicapped" if we could not continue to torture, he commits the all-too-common error of conflating his self-interest with the interest of the nation. I would argue that that conflict of interest is exactly why it was so important to the old guard to stay in the game -- to compromise as much and as quickly as possible the new team. Mission accomplished.