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Contributed by Scott Horton
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The American media has seen a proliferation of legal affairs commentators, largely drawn from the legal profession. On cable news we see a crew of figures who offer non-stop commentary on the trial du jour, filling in technical legal analysis and pearls of wisdom on life in a seemingly relentless torrent of words. Magazines and newspapers increasingly turn to lawyers to understand news in the headlines?the technicalities of the FISA statute, questions surrounding state secrets, the torture debate. Not since the headiest days of the Civil Rights era have legal policy questions had such a prominent role on the news stage. . . .
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Contributed by Scott Horton
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This summer Condoleeza Rice repeatedly sought a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI and was refused, reports Italy?s Corriere della Serra. The story, authored by a leading figure in the Vatican press corps, Massimo Franco, makes clear that the snub was conscious and was intended as an expression of anger with U.S. policies in the Middle East which the Vatican considers immoral and reprehensible, including the systematic mistreatment of prisoners and the use of torture techniques. Franco suggests that the Pope has also not forgotten the rude way in which Rice countered the Holy See?s expressions of concern about the invasion of Iraq in 2003: . . .
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Contributed by Scott Horton
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Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that ?a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,? but note he?s talking about a foolish consistency. For Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, there is no role for consistency. When he?s got the majority behind him, then the filibuster is a horrible thing which threatens the nation?s constitutional order. Note, mind you, that the Democrats threatened to use it a handful of times in connection with some truly odious judicial nominees?people who would have a lifetime sinecure if put through. And in the end the Democrats faded from this threat in the face of a massive Republican media campaign in which Mr. McConnell played a focal role. . . .
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Contributed by Administrator
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With the thoughtlessness of youth and of a second childhood, I had deemed the beauty of the countryside to be the product of an historical-political process, in a certain measure the patriotic deed of the people to be equated with freedom itself, and so hale I strode through the Catholic and Protestant regions, through those which had been awakened and which were stubborn in their obfuscation, and what appeared to me to be a great sieve filled with constitutions, confessions, parties, sovereignties and citizenries, through which at length a certain and clear consensus was to be squeezed, which was at once a consensus of power, of temper, of spirit, which was prepared to live on, and then I was struck by a great desire to raise myself up as an individual and as representative piece of the totality and to do battle? to aid in the hunt of the noble quarry of the majority, of which I was a part, but which to him is therefore no dearer than the minority which he has vanquished, precisely because they were in the end of the same nature. . . .
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Contributed by Ken Silverstein
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Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon?s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), has been working at the Defense Department for more than three decades and has never met a threat to national security he didn?t like. During the Cold War, the ONA was charged with assessing the Soviet threat to national security and it always described said threat in the most alarming terms. During the Reagan years Marshall helped write a secret document that called for the United States to have the ability to fight and win a nuclear war with Russia and in late-1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the Soviet Union on its last legs, Marshall was still calling for big increases in military spending. . . .
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