Congress is worse than Obama on detention, but congress is better than Obama on state secrets?

I am not seeing the distinction.

It's a fair objection, and points to an apparent paradox, but yes: that's how it is.

The only people who cared about legislating on state secrets -- people like Feingold, Nadler, Leahy, Specter -- were all proponents of restricting the privilege. Nobody was looking to expand it. Indeed, it's hard to see how it could be worse -- right now, the Executive branch claims the power to decree anything so secret that the entire subject matter can't be litigated and argues could should be bound. How could that be worse?

The only pending legislation would make it better: principally by instructing courts to not to dismiss suits if secrets can be protected by excluding specific documents, as well as by ensuring courts can review the evidence itself, rather than relying upon representations from executive agencies.

But on detention, most of them are eager to endorse the widest presidential authorities possible, which is what led to things like the Military Commissions Act, the blocking of detainees brought to the U.S., etc.

Detention and secrecy are both complementary to each other and detention relies on secrecy. Why would congress want detention but not secrecy?

The answer is political. It's easy to make attack ads based on a members' weakness on locking up Terrorists ("he wanted to give rights to Al Qaeda terrorists). The State secrets privilege is more arcane and complex and thus not really fodder for that sort of rank fear-mongering - certainly not as much.

i thought the point of having a constitution was to have a set of laws that cannot be violated, even by the congress, courts, or the executive without following the amendment process.

Who, in our system of government, determines when laws are in conflict with the Constitution?

But illegal activities by the executive branch that go unpunished for generations has led to the state we are at now. How can that be a "good thing"?

The administration argues, and courts have agreed, that this detention is not illegal because Congress authorized it when it enacted the AUMF.

Moreover, if the two alternatives are (a) the bad status quo and (b) something new and worse, then -- by definition -- avoiding (b) in favor of (a) is a good thing, even if (a) is still bad.

As long as Congress won't repeal AUMF and the war on terror is really a war without an end, there really is no practical difference between the Bush and Obama Administration with respect to the power to detain people indefinitely.

There is no practical difference. That's the point of everything I wrote today.

I was simply responding to Publican's claim that all of this institutionalizes the radical Bush theory of executive power. It doesn't do that.

This is an additional argument, nothing more.

It's not an "additional argument." It's the only argument. If the court finds that Congress did not implicitly authorize indefinite detentions, then they'll lose the case, because they're not claiming they have the inherent authority to detain, the way Bush did.

There's no way I can argue with your crystal ball claims -- "if they lose that or if Congress repeals it, then they'll claim Article II powers." You have no idea if that's true. What is true that, unlike Bush/Cheney, they are not citing inherent powers to justify detention, but are arguing that they have these powers only because Congress authorized it.

The "whole world" is more than Europe. Try to remember that. From Spiegel (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,638050,00.html):

A new survey finds that a majority of Europeans approve of, and trust, America's new president. But the rest of the world, the Middle East in particular, has yet to surrender to Barack Obama's international charm offensive. . .

But while Europe's ardor for Obama appears fervent, he has actually made little progress in the regions where the US faces its biggest foreign policy problems. In the Muslim world, American popularity has only increased slightly since Obama took office, and that was mostly in Egypt and Indonesia where the President spent some of his childhood. In Turkey or Pakistan, nothing really changed: Under 20 percent of those surveyed had a positive attitude towards the US. Figures were the same before Obama's election.

According to the Pew survey even Obama's much watched address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June didn't really have any lasting, positive affect. Afterwards Palestinian attitudes toward the US rose only a statistically insignificant five percent (from 14 percent to 19). Just as they were before, a broad majority of Palestinians are not convinced that the US president has their best interests at heart. Neither has support among Muslim respondents for suicide bombers and for Osama Bin Laden fallen in any meaningful way.

And just as before Obama's election, the US' economic influence was still being viewed as negative in most of the countries surveyed. There is widespread skepticism as to whether the Obama administration will really work for all sides equally.

I know this might upset you deeply, but whether Obama is a good President doesn't depend on whether Germans like him; Germans don't exactly have infallible political judgment. It depends on the reality of what he does.