Yes, he's still there

George W. Bush continues to rule us.

In the authorization bill, Mr. Bush challenged four sections. One forbid the money from being used “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq”; another required negotiations for an agreement by which Iraq would share some of the costs of the American military operations there.

The sections “purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations,” including as commander in chief, Mr. Bush wrote.

In the other bill, he raised concerns about two sections that strengthen legal protections against political interference with the internal watchdog officials at each executive agency.

One section gives the inspectors general a right to counsels who report directly to them. But Mr. Bush wrote in his signing statement that such lawyers would be bound to follow the legal interpretations of the politically appointed counsels at each agency.

The other section requires the White House to tell Congress what each inspector general said about the administration’s budget proposal for their offices. Such a requirement, Mr. Bush wrote, would infringe on “the president’s constitutional authority” to decide what to recommend to Congress.

[...]

Mr. Bush has used the signing statements to assert a right to bypass more than 1,100 sections of laws. By comparison, all previous presidents combined challenged about 600 sections of bills.

You aren't nearly afraid enough

So says the Bush administration, according to Eric Lithblau.

WASHINGTON — Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush’s defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush’s advisers assert that many Americans may have forgotten that. So they want Congress to say so and “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration’s effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress.

The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics.

A fitting monument, I'd say, to the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast. An American city destroyed by the terrorist organization known as the Bush administration. That -- and a McCain administration even less interested in domestic security and life preservers both literal and figurative -- is what we really need to be afraid of.

The real timing of this, of course, has nothing to do with Katrina, but rather yet another election year gambit by the White House. Maybe this time, with Democrats resembling somewhat less a beaten dog, this issue will be part of the debate; certainly it must be part of the presidential debate.

It's not too late

To impeach the bastards.

Will to power

Adam Liptak wonders aloud how much of the new and improved imperial presidency the Bush/Cheney successor will maintain.

I don't think it's that difficult to find an answer, at least for a few of the leading candidates. On the Democratic side, Hllary Clinton's voting patterns in the Senate have been consistent in upholding the power of the presidency, clearly with an eye on her future and inspired by her husband's battles with Congress. In Giuliani's case...please. Huckabee's imperious and nasty behavior towards "enemies" as governor of Arkansas are mighty telling. He may be stupid, and dangerous, but he certainly never forgets his prerogatives. And let's not forget Romney...

Facts are no longer theories

Michael Savage, the Globe reporter who broke the story about the extensiveness of Bush's "signing statements" -- and won a Pulitzer for it -- has written a book about the imperial presidency that Bush/Cheney have cemented. And whether you're on the right or the left of the political aisle you must be disturbed by what he concludes:

In the case of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and other post-9/11 legislation, the Bush administration did not need to resort to complex legal maneuvers or secret directives to get what it wanted; it was handed broad new authority by Congress. Mr. Savage writes that among that act’s momentous provisions were ones that “delegated to the president alone the power to decide whether any particular coercive interrogation technique was prohibited,” and “stripped the courts of the power to hear lawsuits based on the Geneva Conventions.”

Further, he says, the act “locked down the president’s power to arrest U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and imprison them in a military brig without a trial if he or she thinks they pose a terror threat.”

At the end of this chilling volume Mr. Savage offers a concise and powerful conclusion: “The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history — not controversies but facts. The importance of such precedents is difficult to overstate. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once warned, any new claim of executive power, once validated into precedent, ‘lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition embeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes.’

“Sooner or later, there will always be another urgent need.”

It will be a long, long time before the rancid toothpaste of these power mad cretins will be made to be put back in the tube.