[TCS Daily]
Who needs government? The Czech Republic, which held general elections in June, still has no government. Notably, the sky has not fallen. The country's institutional framework remains sturdy, the economy continues to grow apace, and some Czechs wonder if they even need government at all.

[information liberation]
Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement.

[Boston.com]
Bush says he can violate the new law establishing basic qualifications for the position of FEMA director.

[The New York Review of Books]
Religious nutters in the White House.

[The News & Observer]
Dick Cheney on torturing suspects: It's a no-brainer for me.

[International Herald Tribune]
Patents now being issued for tax dodges...

[Yahoo! News]
The head of the U.N. nuclear agency has warned that as many as 30 countries could soon have technology that would let them produce atomic weapons "in a very short time," joining the nine states known or suspected to have such arms.

[rsf.org]
Freedom of the press? Not in the United States, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2006 Press Freedom Index.

[Wayne Madsen Report]
State-by-state GOP scandal scorecard.

[The Washington Post]
Russia has suspended the activities of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and more than 90 other foreign nongovernmental organizations, saying they failed to meet the registration requirements of a controversial new law designed to bring activists here under much closer government scrutiny. The law, signed by President Vladimir Putin at the start of the year, drew broad criticism as part of a general rollback of democratic freedoms in Russia.

[AOL News]
According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the Republican party's approval ratings are at an all-time low.

[Boston.com]
Bush ties "faith" to foreign aid.

[multiple]
Did your Congressman vote to kill habeas corpus? Did your Senator? Find out, and HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE!

[Rolling Stone]
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula—a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable. But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests.

The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment, says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School.

[BBC News]
Bush threatens to politicize, militarize space.

[SFGate.com]
Bush got what he wanted, ostensibly as a tool in his unfocused "war on terror": By signing into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Bush has made it legal for the C.I.A. to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries, and for the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended for individuals who are designated "enemy combatants" against the U.S. The provisions of Bush's new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that's the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China or Pol Pot's Cambodia, anyone labeled an "enemy combatant" can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of "war on terror," but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.

[The Washington Post]
The U.N. Security Council has voted unanimously to impose punishing sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test, declaring that its action posed "a clear threat to international peace and security." North Korea immediately rejected the resolution, and its U.N. ambassador walked out of the council chamber after accusing its members of a "gangster-like" action which neglects the nuclear threat posed by the United States.

[truthdig]
Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today.

[therawstory]
It is just one bill, you may object; it only applies to terrorists, you may say; we are not Nazi Germany, you may insist. And yet.

[Yahoo! News]
Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio has pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation, an election-year scandal that has stained the Republican-controlled Congress and the Bush administration.

[Yahoo! News]
The charge of treason was used for the first time in the United States' war on terrorism Wednesday, filed against a California man who appeared in propaganda videos for al-Qaida.

Okay, so when is it Bush's turn?

[The New York Times]
New estimate for the number of Iraqi civilians who have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion: 600,000.

[Yahoo! News]
North Korea's Foreign Ministry has warned in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency: If the U.S. keeps pestering us and increases pressure, we will regard it as a declaration of war and will take a series of physical corresponding measures.

[People for the American Way]
Federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush are threatening and undermining Americans’ rights and liberties, and working to reduce congressional authority to protect those rights and liberties.

[Pahrump Valley Times]
Garrison Keillor: Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

[Detroit Free Press]
A federal judge has rejected the government's request to dismiss an ACLU lawsuit challenging the constitutionally of the controversial USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism measure Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks. U.S. District Judge Denise Hood issued the decision without fanfare on Friday, nearly three years after promising a speedy decision in the case.

[Yahoo! News]
GOP = Group of Perverts? How long did the Republican leadership suppress their knowledge of Representative Mark Foley's pedophilia?

[The Washington Post]
How the Bush administration hung Colin Powell out to dry...then fired him.

[The New York Times]
In the autumn of 68 BCE the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped. In the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.