Category: Civil Rights

Yes, this is a Change for the Better

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One of the things that happens in the US Navy is that, after a long deployment, there is a passionate reunification on the dock.

Well, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has caught up with this:

A Navy tradition caught up with the repeal of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule on Wednesday when two women sailors became the first to share the coveted “first kiss” on the dock after one of them returned from 80 days at sea.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta of Placerville, Calif., descended from the USS Oak Hill amphibious landing ship and shared a quick kiss with her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles. The crowd screamed and waved flags around them.

Both women, ages 22 and 23 respectively, are fire controlmen in the Navy. They met at training school and have been dating for two years.

Navy officials said it was the first time on record that a same-sex couple was chosen to kiss first upon a ship’s return. Sailors and their loved ones bought $1 raffle tickets for the opportunity. Gaeta said she bought $50 of tickets. The Navy said the money would be used to host a Christmas party for the children of sailors.

The happy couple.

Works for Me

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Marcy Wheeler looks at the defense authorization bill, and its provisions for indefinite detention without trial, and observes that it could be used to lock up JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon forever.

You see, his firm has attempted to thwart sanctions against Iran, allowed their bank to be used to to funnel money to terrorist assassins, and a whole bunch of other people who have, “supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces.”

If Obama was willing to do this, I might actually vote for him.

Then again, considering the fact that he’s signing the Defense Authorization act which tramples on the very notion of civil rights, which, ironically enough, is what gives him the power to lock up Jamie Dimon forever on nothing more than his say so.

I just have to figure out who I’m going to write in for the primary and the general.

Just When I Thought that I Could Not Get Any More Cynical………

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I read this analysis, which makes the very convincing case that Barack Obama does not object to the detention provisions of the defense authorization bill because he supports the rule of law, but because it classifies these detainees as prisoners of war, and so subject to the strictures of the Geneva Conventions:

However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens.  The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it:  Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights.  These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas.  This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.
A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion.(See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf)

The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”

In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.

Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.

(emphasis original)

Read the White House PDF.  They flat out  say that the reason that they object is because they want more “flexibility” (to torture, etc).

It’s not for nothing that I call Obama the “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever”.

H/t Washington’s Blog.

This is Literally the Worst Idea I Have Ever Heard

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The Department of Justice is seeking to expand anti-hacking laws to make it a criminal offense to violate the terms of a click-through license on a web site:

A commonly invoked anti-hacking law is so overbroad that it criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake user name on Facebook or fibbing about your weight in a Match.com profile, one of the nation’s most respected legal authorities has said.

This came to prominence when the DoJ decided to prosecute the infamous (and unsuccessful) Lori Drew Myspace cyberbulling prosecution.

And the Response of the USDepartment of Justice?

In fact, quite the opposite: Downing and the Justice Department want to expand the law’s scope and impose harsher sentences on cybercriminals.

As CNET reported, the Justice Department is after an expansion of its powers under CFAA because of what happened when the agency attempted to prosecute Lori Drew, a Missouri mother who created a phony MySpace account to harass her 13-year-old neighbor, who later committed suicide. Drew was in 2008 convicted under CFAA of felony conspiracy and three counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization.

What you have to understand here is that the goal of the DoJ is to have another “arrow in their quiver”.

They want to have a world where everyone can be criminally prosecuted for something, because that way, they can go after anyone that they find inconvenient.

The fact that the Obama DoJ is in full throated support of this is why I refer to him as the “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever”.

When you give the state security apparatus the power to manufacture criminality, which is the desire of most agents of the state security apparatus, you create a blueprint for tyranny.

More Like George W. Bush Every Day

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Barack Obama is now claiming that the legal opinion granting him the authority to assassinate American citizens is a state secret, and so it is not subject to any sort of public scrutiny.

You know, as scary as George Bush was, he was basically a dunce, Barack Obama is a lot of things, but he is not stupid.

This not a fact that I find particularly reassuring:

Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn’t a military secret. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress’ post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It’s time for the president who promised to create “a White House that’s more transparent and accountable than anything we’ve seen before” to release the DOJ memo. As David Shipler writes, “The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion.” And then there’s the fact that “a good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department — rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example — had gone out the door along with the Bush administration,” he adds. “But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine.” What doesn’t he want to get out?

Think about it for a second: This ruling just an evaluations of public court rulings and public statutes, but they have buried this from any sort of public scrutiny.

There can’t be any sensitive secrets involved, but they are covering it up.

Something is hinky here.

DoJ Files Against Texas Congressional Districts

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They are saying that the new districts violate the Voting Rights Act:

The Justice Department said Monday that Texas’ state House and congressional redistricting plans didn’t comply with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), indicating they thought the maps approved by Gov. Rick Perry (R) gave too little voting power to the growing Latino population in the state.

Officials with DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said the proposed redistricting plan for the State Board of Education (SBOE) and the state Senate complied with the Voting Rights Act, but indicated they had concerns with the state House plan and the plan for congressional redistricting.

The federal government “[denied] that the proposed Congressional plan, as compared with the benchmark, maintains or increases the ability of minority voters to elect their candidate of choice in each district protected by Section 5,” DOJ lawyers write in a filing. “Defendants deny that the proposed Congressional plan complies with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

For all I complain about Obama, the fact that the professional staff in the DoJ’s civil rights division are allowed to do their jobs is an improvement over Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Stage Two of the Phone Hacking Scandal

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It looks like the government and the police are using Britain’s odious Official Secrets Act in an attempt to ferret our the leakers:

The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal.
In an unprecedented legal attack on journalists’ sources, Scotland Yard officers claim the act, which has special powers usually aimed at espionage, could have been breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. They are demanding source information be handed over.
The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, said on Friday: “We shall resist this extraordinary demand to the utmost”.

Tom Watson, the former Labour minister who has been prominent in exposing hacking by the News of the World, said: “It is an outrageous abuse and completely unacceptable that, having failed to investigate serious wrongdoing at the News of the World for more than a decade, the police should now be trying to move against the Guardian. It was the Guardian who first exposed this scandal.“

The first rule of law enforcement is that the Cops will go after you if you embarrass them, and so now they are going after the paper that broke the story.

They haven’t invoked the Act againt the Murdoch papers, where police took bribes for information, but they are going after the Guardian, where police misconduct was revealed.

The fact that they are bringing out the big guns indicates that this is going to be getting a lot worse very soon.

Cheesehead Jim Crow

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Wisconsin passes a voter ID law, which included a provision for a free voter ID card, and now the head of the Wisconsin DOT has instructed his staff to do their best to conceal this fact from potential voters:

An internal memo from a top Department of Transportation official instructs workers at Division of Motor Vehicles service centers not to tell members of the public that they can obtain voter identification cards free of charge — unless they know to ask for it.

The memo, recently obtained by The Capital Times, was written by Steve Krieser and sent to all state Department of Transportation and Department of Motor Vehicles employees on July 1, the same day employees were to begin issuing photo IDs in accordance with a controversial new voter photo ID law adopted earlier in the year.

As laid out in the memo, failure to check a box when applying for photo ID with the Division of Motor Vehicles will result in the payment of $28. Interviews conducted about the memo suggest the state is more interested in continuing to charge the fee, which is required for a photo ID used for non-voting purposes, than it is in removing all barriers and providing easy access to a free, photo ID.

“While you should certainly help customers who come in asking for a free ID to check the appropriate box, you should refrain from offering the free version to customers who do not ask for it,” Krieser writes to employees.

Like this is not a blatant attempt at voter suppression.

As to “Bull” Kreiser’s response when the story broke, he’s saying that:

In the meantime, Krieser says the Department of Transportation is planning to place signs at each of the DMV service offices that say people need to check the box on the form in order to receive an ID for free. He says the signs are “in the design phase” and could not give a date when they would be placed in DMV offices.

My guess is that there some serious typography issues here, so it will be 2022 before the signs are ready.

A family friend of ours grew up in Mississippi, and is old enough to remember the literacy tests.

Hers was straight forward, a simple section of the Mississippi constitution, and when she finished, the clerk says with a smile, “You should see the ones [section] we use for the n*****s.”

This feels just the same.

Jury Pushes Back Against the Police State

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A stripper attempted to file a sexual harassment complaint against a Chicago police officer, and when she approached Internal Affairs, instead of making an effort to investigate the allegations, they attempted to get her to withdraw their complaint.

In response, she taped their malfeasance, and the response of the District Attorney was to charge her with a felony.

Thankfully, the jury realized that this was yet another attempt to exempt police from any sort of public scrutiny, and acquitted her:

A former stripper, who secretly recorded two Chicago Police Internal Affairs investigators while filing a sexual harassment complaint against another officer was acquitted on eavesdropping charges Wednesday.But why the f%$# did the reporter feel it germane to the story.

She alleged that she was fondled by a cop on a domestic abuse call.Why the hell is this in the story/

It doesn’t matter if she was a freaking nun, or a lobbyist, it was a damn domestic abuse call, and there were allegations of sexual harrassment.

“I’m feeling a lot better now,” a smiling Tiawanda Moore said after a Cook County jury returned the verdict in a little over an hour.
The 20-year-old Indiana woman admitted she taped the officers on her Blackberry in August of last year. But she said she only did it because the investigators were coaxing her to not go forward with her complaint.
“I wanted him to be fired,” Moore testified of the cop she alleges fondled her and gave her his phone number during a domestic battery call at the South Side residence she sometimes shares with her boyfriend.
Moore said she didn’t know about the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which prohibits the recording of private or public conversations without the consent of all parties. Even so, Moore’s attorney, Robert Johnson, said his client was protected under an exemption to the statute that allows such recordings if someone believes a crime is being committed or is about to be committed.
The Internal Affairs officers were “stalling, intimidating and bullying her,” Johnson said. The recording, which was played in court during the one-day trial, proved it, Johnson said.
Assistant State’s Attorney Mary Jo Murtaugh told jurors, “The content of the tape is not the issue. The issue is that the words were taped.”

No, the IA officers were conspiring to conceal an alleged crime, and as such they were engaging in conspiracy, abuse of office, and probably a few dozen other crimes that someone better versed in the law would be aware of.

But Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the verdict “reflects a repudiation of the eavesdropping law in Illinois. Clearly, the public believes that individuals should be able to record police engaged in their public duties, in a public space in an audible voice.”

Your mouth go God’s ear, Mr. Yohnka.

There is a word for societies where law abiding citizens are prosecuted for uncovering and revealing police corruption, and that work is police state

Military Ends Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

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And what do you know, they buried the news with a Friday afternoon announcement:

The ban on gays in the military has stood for nearly a century.

In 60 days, after decades of discharges, lawsuits and lobbying, that will change.

On Friday, President Barack Obama fulfilled a 2008 campaign pledge, formally ending the ban. After meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the joint chiefs of staff chairman, the president certified to Congress that repealing the ban would not jeopardize the military’s ability to fight.

“As commander in chief, I have always been confident that our dedicated men and women in uniform would transition to a new policy in an orderly manner that preserves unit cohesion, recruitment, retention and military effectiveness,” Obama said in a statement. “Service members will no longer be forced to hide who they are in order to serve our country.”

I still think that this happened because he was forced to (Google “don’t ask don’t give”) and they went with a low profile release in an attempt to bury it.

The basic rule here is that they will do the right thing, if they are absolutely forced to do do, and then they will try to minimize their involvement.

How is Barack Obama Different from George W. Bush?

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No this is not a lead in for a joke it’s a real question because Barack “I’m Shutting Down the CIA Black Sites” Obama has set up a new CIA black site:

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”

Bullsh%@.

This is not an existing state security apparatus who is doing us a favor, this the CIA, and possibly the NSA running another black site.

The “official government” in Somolia controls, “Somali government forces control roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu thanks in large part to the US-funded and -armed 9,000-member AMISOM force.”

This government controls about half the land area of Liechtenstein and that only by dint of massive foreign aid.

Seriously, what Barack Obama has done by way of the rule of law and civil rights is worse than what George W. Bush did, because he has normalized behavior, both by refusing to investigate criminality, and by aping the policies of Bush/Cheney.

…and it’s not getting any coverage by the MSM.

Appellate Court Reinstates Injunction Against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”

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This is a good thing, since it appears that the Obama, in another example of moral cowardice, is slow walking this process.  What I like is the fact that they use the Obama DoJ’s words against them:

The government must stop enforcing the law that prohibits openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from serving in the military, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a two-page order against the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” in a case brought by the group Log Cabin Republicans.

…

Judges Alex Kozinski, Kim McLane Wardlaw and Richard A. Paez stated in their order that “circumstances and balance of hardships had changed” since their initial ruling: the Obama administration had informed the court that repeal of the policy was “well under way,” and in a filing in another case on July 1, the Department of Justice took the position that discrimination based on sexual orientation should be subjected to tough scrutiny. The government, the judges wrote, “can no longer satisfy the demanding standard for issuance of a stay.”

The fact that the most conflicted Republicans in the nation are more proactive in pushing basic civil rights than the Obama administration.

Judge Enjoins Kansas Defacto Abortion Ban

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Maddow has been on this like white on rice

Kansas just passed a series of regulations that closed down the 3 abortion clinics in the state.

Following the adoption of the regulations, which included things like the size of janitors closets (!), the clinics had about a week to comply:

After deliberating about an hour, U.S District Judge Carlos Murguia issued an order late this afternoon blocking new Kansas licensing regulations for abortion clinics.

The temporary restraining order was sought by two Kansas City area abortion clinics that had been denied licenses under rules that took effect today. It will be in effect until a later court decision on the issue.

…

They contend that the licensing process was an organized and deliberate attempt by Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration to shut down abortion clinics in Kansas.

…

Brownback, a staunch abortion opponent, signed the new licensing requirements into law along with three other new abortion restrictions approved by the Legislature this year.

Providers said the state didn’t send out the rules until after the close of business June 17, less than two weeks before the new licensing was scheduled to start. They said they didn’t receive the new regulations until the following Monday, June 20.

The compressed licensing process, coupled with the strict requirements, made it impossible to meet the law, they argued in their legal filings.

Six days after Aid for Women applied for a license, the state said it wouldn’t grant one based on its application alone, the clinic’s complaint said. At no point, the clinic contends, did regulators discuss why they denied the license or what corrective measures might be undertaken.

The clinic argued that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment had no factual basis for the denial because it hadn’t even inspected the clinic.

One of the things that the above article does not mention, and Rachel Maddow does, (at about 5:30 in the video) is that, in addition to banning abortion clinics, the new regulations allow Kansas authorities do have access to people’s medical records without a warrant.

So they take the records, and they will use those records to harass the patients.

We really need to understand that those who would criminalize abortion folks with a minor political difference whose feelings we should try to accommodate.

These are people who offer open and enthusiastic support to assassination and other forms of terrorism, and if we are to use material support statutes against Islamists, we should use them against them as well.

This is a Big F%$#ing Deal

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H/t Good Girls Finish Last for the rainbow Empire State Building

The New York Senate just voted to approve gay marriage in the state.

For all those who were for it, this is something to be proud of.

For those who opposed it, and in particular those in the religious community who carved out a specific right to use God as an excuse for bigotry, blasphemy* by any sane standard, you are evil small people who history will view as evil and small people.

*I would note that I consider the right to blaspheme to be one of the most basic human rights, I am merely pointing out their hypicrisy.

Too Big to Fail, and Now Too Big to Sue

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That is what the Supreme Court ruled today. They basically said that despite the fact that Wal-Mart systematically discriminated against women in every one of their stores, the millions of women impacted were too large a group to be certified as a class for a class-action suit:

But Wal-Mart doesn’t have to worry any more.

Justice Scalia expressed the Court’s opinion — which was unanimous — that the class action suit was too large and varied to carry forward.

So the solution to avoid pesky lawsuits for real wrong doing, you just have to be so big that the courts will give you a free pass.

First the banks are above the law, and now the monster that Sam Walton created.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

They Went After Juan Cole?

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The New York Times has discovered that Bush and His Evil Minions™ set the CIA on distinguished professor, and well known blogger, Juan Cole:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

And just in case you are wondering if he is a disgruntled spy who went to the Times, he isn’t. The Times came to him:

Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.

My money is on it being someone in Dick Cheney’s office, because it smells like Cheney.

Daniel Ellsburg Says the Most Depressing Thing This Century

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When he notes that all the crimes committed against him, crimes which were a significant part of the impeachment case that drove Richard M. Nixon from office under threat of impeachment, are now legal:

Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)

He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.

That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.

There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon’s bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years.

Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three).

He could only admire Obama’s boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA. [ED Note:  The Drake Case Collapsed, and the government settled on a plea for a no-jail-time misdemeanor]

Drake’s trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend.

While the erosions of civil liberties began under Reagan, and picked up steam under Bush II, it’s clear that that Obama has devoted the power and prestige of his office to further expanding the role of the Presidency and normalizing what are extreme views of executive power.

Obama is like Nixon, without the charm.