[The Huffington Post]
Marty Kaplan: I wonder what we will say, looking back at 2000-2008. "The system worked"? No matter what this Democratic Congress does, how can we call the generations of broken crockery these ideologues have bequeathed us a sign of a healthy system? However this war ends, how can we call its existence anything but a megalomaniacal abuse of power? Whatever vermin the oversight committees at long last uncover; whatever the prosecutions and trials of apparachiks may finally reveal and punish; however historians diagnose our good-German complicity with demagogues, our Stockholm-syndrome affection for the bullies, our frog-in-a-warming-cauldron capacity for denial—no matter how we ultimately awaken from this madness, it will not be with the comfort that our Constitution alone was enough to prevent us from spending this long season in hell.

[The New York Times]
Bush makes another power grab, placing political appointees in roles previously held by civil servants and scientific experts.

[News.com]
The FBI is now tracking web browsing and email of large numbers of Americans. What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore, said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets.

[The New York Times]
The President is not the "Commander-in-Chief of the United States."

[The New York Times]
Tens of thousands of protesters converged on the National Mall on Saturday to oppose Bush’s plan for a troop increase in Iraq.

[The Nation]
Scott Ritter: Democrats should seek immediate legislative injunctions to nullify the War Powers' authority granted to the President in September 2001 and October 2002 when it comes to Iran. Congress should pass a joint resolution requiring the President to fully consult with Congress about any national security threat that may be posed to the United States from Iran and demand that no military action be initiated by the United States against Iran without a full, constitutionally mandated declaration of war.

[News.com]
The Maine legislature has approved a resolution saying the state flatly "refuses" to force its citizens to use driver's licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

[AlertNet]
Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Vice-President of Iraq, says the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States was an "idiot decision."

[Editor & Publisher]
Carl Bernstein: Nixon and his men lied and abused the Constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped.

The Bush Administration was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a (Republican) bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, "Nobody died at Watergate." If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush, and that our elected representatives in Congress and our judiciary had been courageous enough to do their duty and hold the President and his aides accountable.

[Guardian Unlimited]
Sir Ken Macdonald: London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7, 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, "soldiers." They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a "war on terror".... The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.

[The Washington Post]
House Democrats have passed a bill that would repeal billions of dollars of tax breaks to American oil companies to raise money for alternative-energy research. The 264-163 vote came after Democrats questioned the record profits earned by American oil companies and asserted their bill would go a long way toward reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

[International Herald Tribune]
The Defense Department has drafted a manual for trying detainees at the Guantanamo, Cuba, jail that would allow terror suspects to be imprisoned, convicted and executed on the basis of hearsay evidence or coerced testimony.

[The New York Times]
What can $1.2 trillion buy?

[Yahoo! News]
The Pentagon has abandoned its limit on the time a citizen-soldier can be required to serve on active duty. Until now, the Pentagon's policy on the Guard or Reserve was that members' cumulative time on active duty for the Iraq or Afghan wars could not exceed 24 months. That cumulative limit is now lifted; the remaining limit is on the length of any single mobilization, which may not exceed 24 consecutive months.

[Crooks and Liars]
Keith Olbermann examines Bush's credibility on Iraq [video & transcript].

[USA Today]
The Supreme Court has rebuffed a challenge to the federal government's policy of requiring airline passengers to show identification before they board flights, spurning arguments that the well-known but unpublished policy would lead to more secret laws. John Gilmore, a founder of Sun Microsystems and an advocate of libertarian causes, sued the government because it has long refused to disclose the text of the regulation that forces air travelers to present an ID. The question before the justices was whether travelers have sufficient notice of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) ID policy to satisfy constitutional due process of law, which typically requires a law to be published so people know how to comply with it.

[The Carpetbagger Report]
John McCain: Not who you think he is.

[The American Conservative]
The rats jump off the ship: pro-war pundits, proven disastrously wrong, are now attempting to claim they were against the war from the start. Will they get away with it?

[The Seattle Times]
Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

[BBC News]
South Korea's Ban Ki Moon has taken over as secretary general of the United Nations—the first Asian to hold the post in 35 years.