[Newsweek]
The War on Terror didn't start as an attack on Americans' rights, but several new books argue that's exactly what happened. In excruciating detail, these tomes tell of torture and warrantless wiretaps; they show a relentless arrogation of power and abrogation of what were thought to be solid constitutional principles. In these books, apocalyptic delusions got us into Iraq and misjudgments have helped keep us there. The picture that emerges is so bleak that even serious journalists and scholars sometimes veer toward conspiracy theories.

[The Nation]
Under the guise of a stop-gap spending bill that is simply supposed to keep the government running until a long-delayed appropriations process is completed—probably in November—the Congress has just approved a massive increase in war funding.

[MSNBC]
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken has ruled that two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause. For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law—with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised.

[Slate.com]
The U.S. military budget—not including any money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—totals $500 billion. This is roughly equal to the military budgets of all the rest of the world's nations combined. Adjusting for inflation, it is larger than the U.S. military budget at the peak of the Cold War—in fact, larger than any budget since the Korean War. Again, this is true, apart from the money allocated for the current wars. Shouldn't some legislators be asking about the ways the Pentagon is spending so much money and whether all those ways are necessary?

[The New York Times]
I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics—I mean, what's really happening—I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My politics are actually quite moderate.

[TPM Election Central]
In the latest Gallup poll, more Republicans approve of the job Congress is doing than Democrats. According to the poll, 37% of Republicans approve of Congress' performance, compared to 23% of Democrats and 14% of independents.

[Yahoo! News]
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

[FindLaw]
Authoritarian conservatism was growing in force in Washington for a decade before Bush and Cheney arrived at the White House, but their administration has taken it to its highest and most dangerous level in American history. It is doubtful they could have accomplished this, had authoritarian conservatism not already taken hold in Congress and the federal judiciary.

[The Raw Story]
Ralph Nader chastises "spineless, gutless" Democrats in Congress for failing to boot Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney from office.

[Yahoo! News]
The Iraqi government says that it is revoking the license of an American security firm accused of involvement in the deaths of eight civilians in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion near a State Department motorcade.

[CommonWealth]
The 10 regions of U.S. politics.

[Slate]
Bush's TV address was the worst speech he's ever given on the war in Iraq, and that's saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

[Salon.com]
The real lessons of 9/11: the attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character.

[ars technica]
In the over 20,000 file-sharing cases filed so far, the RIAA has relied on a simple procedure: scour P2P networks for shared music, file a John Doe lawsuit to learn the identity of the account-holder responsible for the IP address flagged by the RIAA's investigative arm, and, if the account-holder doesn't agree to the RIAA's settlement terms, file a lawsuit using a boilerplate complaint. A federal judge in California has now refused to grant the RIAA a judgment based on just such a complaint, forcing the RIAA to draw up a new complaint containing specifics.

[SFGate.com]
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a parolee can't be ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a condition of staying out of prison, saying that the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering a parolee to go through rehabilitation at AA or an affiliated program for drug addicts. Rulings from across the nation since 1996 have established that "requiring a parolee to attend religion-based treatment programs violates the First Amendment," the court said.

[TechCrunch]
In two determinations handed down yesterday, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.

[Yahoo! News]
Justice Department comes out against Net Neutrality.

[Yahoo! News]
A federal judge has struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act, saying investigators must have a court's approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act "offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers."

[CommonDreams.org]
According to opinion polls and interviews with political experts and voters, the U.S. population is more liberal than at any time in a generation, hungering to end the Iraq war, turn inward and use the federal government to solve problems at home.

[Winston-Salem Journal]
The National Coalition of American Nuns has called on Congress to impeach Bush and Cheney because of their roles in the war in Iraq.

[Economist.com]
The United States ranks 17th on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy index.

[Texas Citizens for Science]
Under a new Texas law, students will be allowed to substitute their own sectarian religious explanations for scientific, historical, and cultural events and phenomena without fear of contradiction or correction.

[Slate]
Detractors of an impeachment inquiry by the House judiciary committee into whether President George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses contend that no questions should be asked until conclusive incriminating evidence is either volunteered up by the suspects themselves or appears before them by spontaneous combustion. In other words, they say, no inquiry should commence until proof of the president's guilt has been unearthed—proof which would, of course, make the inquiry superfluous!

[The New York Times]
Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, under intense pressure from party leaders to step down in the aftermath of an undercover sex sting, plans to resign his seat on Saturday, Republican Party officials said.