There is some debate about that 4th Circuit court ruling yesterday as to whether it means the Executive branch can designate US citizens arrested within US soil as "enemy combatents" or merely "civilians" (legally present non-citizens).

The ruling is 216 pages because almost every judge wrote his or her own opinion, but I'm pretty sure this ruling is not limited in any meaningful way to civilians and would easily encompass citizens too.

I rebutted in a comment to the diary about this on the rec list, but let me do so again here:

Last night in his otherwise excellent (apparently extemperaneous) victory address, Barack Obama said something like "When I'm your Commander-In-Chief, I will..." and went on to say some (sensible) things he'd do in defence of the United States.

It's the beginning of the sentence I will take exception with.  The President of the United States is not the Commander-in-Chief of the United States;  (S)he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.  There is a crucial distinction here and one I am alarmed to see such an accomplished public speaker as Obama fudging.

The broad sweep of economic history for the past century has been a tug of war between unrestrained capitalists and constrained capitalists. It may surprise some that liberals used to be the former and are now the latter, and conservatives were the latter but are now the former.

More importantly, the constrained capitalists are losing and the consequences of that are severe.

Cross posted at OpenLeft

Something has been nagging me about the primary campaign of 2008 among the Democrats:  The lack of direct critiques of conservatism.  Both the brand, and the ideology.

Today, Glenn Greenwald crystalized one salient aspect of that, in the bi-partisan consensus on Defense spending:

Some good news, the immunity-free House version has passed 223-189.

Small Edit:  Roll call on passage.  Only 5 Dems voted against, only 5 Republicans voted for.

Yesterday, I posted an article by Jim Landers comparing the US and Canadian Health Care systems at a fairly substantive macro level.  As a Canadian fiercely in love with our UHC system, I think the article was fair, particularly in its treatment of the inevitable waiting list bogeyman (which I will not deny is an issue, just one usually overblown by opponents of UHC).

Well, when I wrote to him to compliment him on that article, he sent me one he had previously written on the Swiss system.  I know very little about the Swiss system, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy beyond seeing how fair Landers' take on Canada was, which inclines me to trust this.

Again, with Landers' permission, here's his take on the Swiss health system.

My Google News Alert for "Canada" brought me to a fine piece of exploratory journalism comparing the US and Canadian Health Care systems in the Dallas News by Jim Landers.

Now I know nothing about the Dallas News generally, but I was pleasantly surprised by the depth, objectivity and quality of the piece.  Usually when I stumble across US articles (outside overtly liberal sources) on Canadian health care it's little more than "socialized health care" anecdotal scare mongering.

I wrote to Mr. Landers to praise his work, and obtained his gracious permission to repost the entire article, plus another one he sent me on the Swiss health care system (of which I knew nothing).  Article below the fold and some further comments from me.

This is an update on the credibly rumoured September "roll out" of the Administration's newest product:  War with Iran.

Last Thursday I diaried this information (thx for the many recs!) from Dr. Barnett R. Rubin, who blogs alongside Juan Cole at the Informed Comment Global Affairs group blog.

I'll stress in advance that Rubin is not claiming war with Iran is imminent, only that the effort to sell this war in a concerted way is.  The war won't start until they believe they have enough support for it (where "enough" is probably a very small number).

This morning Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment alerted me to this story from the group blog he shares with Dr. Barnett R. Rubin, another respectable foreign affairs academic:

Barnett Rubin relays a message from a well-connected friend in Washington on the Cheney Administration's plans to roll out a military confrontation with Iran in September.

FISA.  Iraq funding.  How confident are we that our Democratic majorities will do anything close to the right thing on those issues?

My fear is that they will cave to the new gestalt brewing that the surge is somehow achieving anything meaningful.  They will fall into the trap and provide more no-strings-attached war funding.

As to FISA, they always seem to chicken out when the terrorism bogey-man spectre is raised.  And to a very small degree, I have a bit of sympathy - they think they will be blamed if there is another terrorist attack for having denied the Administration some "vital" tool to catch terrorists.

I'm going to entertain a certain conceit in this diary; the conceit is that my perspective as a non-American (Canuck) allows me to observe American problems in a way you cannot yourselves easily see.  Not that I am gifted in any unique insight, just that it is always difficult to self-diagnose our own flaws.

Here goes:  The reason you are unable to prevent Bush from continuing to slice away civil and human rights is that Americans have come to complacently believe the constitution defends itself.  That there is some kind of inherent force of nature that resists erring Presidents.  As such, for far too long, there has been no one playing Offence in defence of the Constitution.  That's my perception.  Americans seem to believe it always worked out before, so it somehow will again today.  Many here and elsewhere in the netroots are awake to the danger, but not yet the populace at large.

In my last diary, I made an elementary effort to apply game theory to a couple pervasive patterns of media failure we can easily observe today.  I left off in that diary absent any solution to these ails, hoping more inspiration would come from the comments.

Well, in a way they did.  Both here, where several experts in journalism and game theory provided input, and in the companion cross-post at Openleft.  It's there we begin to find the next step in fixing the broken media:

I'm finding the meta-analysis of media failures in the netroots to be lacking in something.  We do an excellent job of focusing on the particularly delinquent and malfeasant prominent media repeat offenders like Broder, Brooks, Dowd or Fox News.  We have excellent media critics like Digby, Glenn Greenwald and of course Media Matters who are able to incisively tear apart flawed journalism and note the broader storylines the media are adhering to without evidence.  But we're not thinking enough at the systemic level of how the media is organized, and how that system itself is contributing to the negative results we see.  After all, if we replace the current occupants of Versailles on the Potomac, how will we prevent their replacements from being just as bad eventually?  Joe Klein must have been a sincere and well meaning liberal at some point.

Here I will attempt to apply game theory to the media, in hopes of finding a better understanding for how it all went so wrong, and continues to do so.

I know he's not exactly everyone's favourite around here, but from some sites I read, and a small crew of Kossack libertarians I have encountered, plus his stance against the Iraq war, there are some that have been taken in by the Ron Paul crazytrain.

Today, alone of the entire U.S. House of Representatives, Representative Ron Paul, M.D. (R-TX) voted against the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act.  The bill passed the House, 418-1.

Let's spell out what this means.

For some reason I woke up just after 5 this morning, and couldn't get back to sleep.  I guess since I've been reading Al Gore's book lately, I have some thoughts on issues of fear and rationality clunking around back there, and they poured out onto my screen in the form of a speech given by an abstract Democrat running for President...not my usual diary, but here it is:

Once in awhile, Glenn Greenwald manages to rise above his already stupendous writing and awesome reasoning to make a point of supreme insight and Digbyesque prescience.  Today is one such.

The Risks of Staying

One of the most under-discussed facts with regard to Iraq is that the very people who conceived of the invasion and who are the architects of our current military strategy have always believed, and still believe, that we must go to war with Iran. Our current strategy in Iraq was designed and, to a large degree, implemented with that goal in mind. emphasis in orig

A conservative encyclopedia you can trust. - (tag line on the main page)

Launched November 22, 2006, Conservapedia was going to chart a bold new course in the information wars.  No longer could conservatives be shouted down by legions of liberally biased wiki admins!  No, damn it, they were going to take their ball and go home.

Being an avid follower of this scandal, I have decided to try and coagulate a set of talking points and talking point responses for the Republican talking points on the Attorneygate Eight/Dogate/Purgegate/Karl-Rove-tried-to-turn-America-into-a-one-party-State scandal.

I know that the concept of "talking points" has taken a credibility hit because of how Republicans have used them like bleating sheep straight out of Orwell's Animal Farm, but having seen a fair amount of internet debate going on about this topic, and more to come, it behooves us to have concise responses ready to sway the uninformed correctly, and make the Administration defenders look as foolish as they are.