What the frickin’ hell does Hoyer think he’s doing?

[A] civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be properly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that . . . (4) the assistance alleged to have been provided . . . was –

(A) in connection with intelligence activity involving communications that was (i) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007 and (ii) designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States” and

(B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President; and (ii) determined to be lawful.

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

Call now.

Call Obama: tell him to speak out today, not wait until it passes and then complain about it. 866-675-2008

Call Hoyer: tell him to pull the bill. 202-225-3130

Call your Congresscritter: tell him or her to remember their oath to defend the Constitution.

No, rights for everyone under the jurisdiction of our country.

Why shouldn’t we allow Government, from time to time, to act outside of the Constitution? There are those who will point out that we are in dangerous times, and that it is sometimes necessary for the Government to take exceptional measures to ensure our protection.

The answer is fundamental: the Constitution exists to enumerate exactly what Government is allowed to do. In this country We, The People, control all the rights and liberties of our Nation…and we grant to Government some powers from time to time as we choose through the Constitution. From time to time we also remove some of those powers.

What we never do is allow Government to grant unto itself rights, or to strip We, The People of rights.

The Court, in this ruling, reasserts that most basic of American principles—that Government is under the control of The People—that it is not a power unto itself, that its powers derive from the grants we give it…and that every person affected by the Government’s actions has a basic right to contest those actions, whether the Government likes it or not.

I’ve said this before, but not nearly so eloquently.

But he is not alone in the delusion he propounds in the first sentence of today’s killer graf. Nearly every candidate, commentator and speechifier will, at convenient times, refer to the President of the United States as “the nation’s commander-in-chief” or “our commander-in-chief.”

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution begins:

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”

This is a very specific delineation. When broad powers are claimed for the President, many rightly so, in his role as “commander-in-chief,” these broad powers do not automatically apply to those persons not in the armed forces of the United States. Where they exist at all, they apply to the men and women of the uniformed services of the Army and Navy, the state Guards and other armed services.

The president not only is impotent to hold me without allowing me to demand the charges against me, he is impotent to search or seize my person, goods and papers without a warrant showing probable cause. He is enjoined from quartering his armed troops on my property.

In point of fact, the president of the United States cannot do a damned thing to me that the Constitution does not specifically allow him to do. And this limitation to his powers, embodied in the purposefully broad Tenth Amendment, holds because I am not a member of the armed forces.

In short, the president is not my commander-in-chief. Odds are, he is not yours, either. He is not Antonin Scalia’s commander in chief, not Hillary Clinton’s nor Chris Matthews’.

For us, the citizens of and visitors to the United States, he is the Chief Executive, pledged to take care that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. He is not our commander. He is our servant.

The Supreme Court today ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo do have the right to try to prove they shouldn’t be there.

It bears repeating that our opinion does not address the content of the law that governs petitioners’ detention. That is a matter yet to be determined. We hold that petitioners may invoke the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus. The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law.

Cringely had a recent discussion with Bob Frankston, the developer of VisiCalc, about why arguing about Net Neutrality is missing the point.

To Bob the issues surrounding Net Neutrality come down to billability and infrastructure. While saying they are doing us favors, ISPs are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event. Take WiFi hotspots, for example. Why should the telephone or cable company care about who connects to my WiFi access point? They are my bits, not the ISP’s. I paid for them. If I can download gigabytes of pornography why can’t I share my hotspot with someone walking down the street wanting to check his e-mail? Frankston’s analogy for this is accusing someone of stealing your porch light by using it to read a street sign.

BoingBoing points us to this report of extreme stupidity on the part of the “child protection” authorities.

“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”

But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.

“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.

I’m down at the Brewer Library, thanks to a very late cable bill payment, and I just tried to connect to DowneastPolitics.com. The filter popped up as “Malicious site”.

Yeah, right. I submitted it to the “network admin” for evaluation, but I’m not holding my breath. (In related news, it blocks my BoingBoing mirror as an “anonymizer”. Let’s hear it for search engine caches….)

Must-read article in Harper’s.

In particular, Davis and other Guantánamo prosecutors were crest-fallen over the handling of the case of David Hicks. An Australian sheepskinner turned Middle East adventurer, Hicks was labeled one of the “worst of the worst” and was charged with being a weapons-toting terrorist. Just as his trial got under way, and Davis confidently delivered a searing opening promising to make Hicks out as a bloodthirsty figure who had betrayed his homeland and turned to a path of “Islamic” violence, the public learned that a plea-bargain had been reached. Curiously however, all this transpired without involving the prosecutors.

Occams hatchet at Kos spent quite a bit of time today demolishing the arguments against impeachment. Part of his post was a lengthy list of the admitted — not suspected, but proudly admitted — crimes the Bush administration has committed.

Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998 and acquitted by the Senate on February 12, 1999. Fifty-five days. Granted, the fishing expedition boondoggle witch hunt investigation that finally resulted in impeachment charges took almost five years, but BushCheney have made the job easy for those seeking impeachment against them - they have admitted, very publicly, to several impeachable offenses, and have very publicly committed others.

• The BushCheney administration is on the record as having tortured prisoners and repeatedly lied about it - indeed, it has now defiantly stated that torture is legal, in contravention of many treaties to which the United States is a signator.
• It is on the record as having illegally wiretapped Americans from the very first days of the administration.
• It is on the record as openly defying established laws written by Congress and signed into law by the administration itself.
• It is on the record as defying multiple congressional subpoenas stemming from investigations into executive branch wrongdoing (this is known in the vernacular as “obstruction of justice”).
• It is on the record as being “unable” to produce evidence in congressional investigations into administration malfeasance, often claiming that the evidence was “destroyed” or “lost” (this, too, is commonly known as “obstruction of justice”).
• It is on the record as having repeatedly lied about the threat posed by Iraq with respect to weapons of mass destruction and connections to terrorists, in order to mislead the American public and members of Congress into support for an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (such an invasion and occupation being known in the vernacular as a “war crime”).
• It is on the record as having facilitated the the misappropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars during the illegal invasion on and occupation of Iraq, and shielding criminal and murderous acts by agents acting on behalf of the U.S. government during that occupation.
• It is on the record as having lied about the potential threat posed by Iran with regard to nuclear weapons.
• It is on the record as having lied to Congress about a whole range of activities, from the firing of U.S. attorneys to illegal wiretapping of Americans to the threat posed by various nations.

With all of this evidence already on the record, an impeachment investigation should not take very long - and with respect to at least a few cases, probably isn’t even necessary.

As occams hatchet points out, if this administration is getting away with this much, what’s the next rogue one going to try?

Dan Kurtzman, in How to Win a Fight with a Conservative, wrote a Liberal Manifesto that he was kind enough to let the folks at DailyKos republish.

Liberals believe in clean air, diplomacy, stem cells, living wages, body armor for our troops, government accountability, and that exercising the right to dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Liberals believe in reading actual books, going to war as a last resort, separating church and hate, and doing what Jesus would actually do, instead of lobbying for upper-class tax cuts and fantasizing about the apocalypse….