To expand on points that Mentarch, Samson141, and others have made: given the specificity with which the framers of the Constitution delineated the powers of the various branches of government, it is hard to imagine that if they had intended for the President to be able to ignore the Constitution and federal law in times of national emergency -- if, in other words, they had intended to revive the Roman Republic's office of Dictator -- they would not have explicitly said so.

Then there's this:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

-- US Constitution, Article II, Section 4

As a "crime," by definition, is a violation of law, this would seem to imply that the authors of the Constitution intended the President and other officials to be bound by it in some way. Subsequent US history has established the precedent that "high crimes and misdemeanours" includes violations of federal law. Clinton, for example, was impeached for perjury.

At a minimum, it certainly shows that the Constitution's framers intended the Congress to have the ultimate power to remove the President from office, the presence of wars or other "emergencies" notwithstanding. That hardly squares with Mansfield's notion of the President as above any checks and balances by other branches of government. To my knowledge, there weren't too many medieval or Renaissance kingdoms in which the parliament had the legal power to remove the monarch.

. . .we need a new party, and fast. Neither of the two parties represents the American people any more. The only interests that count are those of the various factions of the corporate-military-industrial complex.

While there are some good individual Democrats such as Russ Feingold, the party as a whole has utterly lost my support with this pathetic rollover. I will not be voting for a Democrat for any office in 2008.

Dan Sexton: But evolution is not science. Neither is archeology and much of astronomy.

These fields are certainly a different kind of science than, say, neurophysiology, in that they rely for their data on inference and observation rather than controlled laboratory experiments. But they are most definitely still science, in that they build up bodies of knowledge from testable hypotheses that can be objectively verified or refuted.

Not only are these conjectural, but, they take on a life of their own which forms the foundation of future work. If there's a wrong direction discovered anywhere, it is heresy to reveal it and it will never be proven.

And this is total BS. Theoretical cosmology, for example, has undergone enormous changes over the past thirty years with the discovery of phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that contradicted previous assumptions about the make-up of the Universe. The theories behind archaeology and evolutionary biology have also been, and continue to be, extensively revised in light of new discoveries in the field.

Creation "science" does not have anything like this kind of self-correcting mechanism based on external, objective data, which is why it is not science.

I agree with the poster who emphasized the Punic Wars as marking the decline of the Roman Republic. And to the extent that such comparisons are possible, I think the best point of reference for modern-day America would be Rome around 100 BC. By then, Rome was already an empire in fact if not in name, and the decay of its republican institutions and practices had become quite evident even to contemporaries.

Its major early enemy, Carthage -- sort of Rome's equivalent of the Soviet Union -- had been destroyed a few decades previously, leaving Rome by far the strongest state in the Mediterranean world. In the wars, Rome had conquered large swaths of territory outside Italy for the first time, and as a result, large quantities of slaves had been imported by rich landowners to work huge plantations. Traditional Roman peasant farmers were ruined by this competition, and they wound up migrating to the cities, there to form a large urban underclass.

One might see parallels between the Roman land magnates and the huge corporations of our own day -- especially given the immense political power they both accrued. The rich plantation owners used their power to pass self-serving policies which further impoverished the Roman smallholders, whose plight can, perhaps, can be compared with that of the American middle and lower classes in the wake of corporate-pushed globalization and low-cost labor and imports from abroad.

Finally, the period around the beginning of the first century BC was when the Roman military was transformed by Marius's reforms from a militia-like body of wealthy volunteers, called up and dismissed as needed, into a permanent and professionalized standing army composed primarily of people from the lower classes. Military service became the best career option for poor young men from the boonies and the slums, especially since all soldiers were promised land at the end of their 25-year contracts. Foreigners could also obtain Roman citizenship by serving. Again, the parallels with the rise of the American military-industrial complex after World War II, the fact that military service is often the only choice available to young people without means who want to go to college, etc., are evident.

Rome, at the beginning of the first century BC -- like America at the beginning of the twenty-first century AD -- was still legally a republic, governed by elected magistrates, and subject to a written constitution. The period of civil war, military coups, and dictatorship that eventually led to the Caesars had not yet really started. But the political, social, and economic factors which produced it were all in place.

So, the important question is how far these parallels go.