Today is Constitution Day. Not alot of people know that. Or care. You should care. Why? Many reasons, not the least of them……..

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Constitution Day was created by Congress in 2004. It was the brainchild of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket. The law requires any school and college receiving federal money to teach about the Constitution on or about Sept. 17. It appears, if they are teaching it, the students aren’t getting it.

I wonder how many congressmen and women get it. I bet not many of them would pass a test on the Constitution. I’m thinking there SHOULD be a test on the Constitution for anyone who enters congress. For every President and Vice President and Attorney General………hell, let’s go all the way and say every government employee has to pass a test on the Constitution.

I plan on spending some time today studying the Constitution. I suggest the people who are running our country do the same. And if you have kids…… you might want to teach them their constitutional rights at home, because odds are they aren’t going to learn them at school. They need to know it’s NOT just a goddamned piece of paper. And so does our President!

Unsurprisingly, Dan Froomkin has a splendid round-up of editorials, articles and blog posts on the recent, horrendous FISA bill. (All the cartoons were linked by Froomkin, except the last one, which I’ve meaning to use for a while now.)

Crooks and Liars has video of Glenn Greenwald and Marjorie Cohn discussing these issues here with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! The full show is here.
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From the ACLU, information about the Day of Action:

For nearly seven years, our core values of freedom and fairness have been eroded, from the suspension of habeas corpus and due process, to shameful acts of torture, CIA kidnappings and secret prison programs.

On June 26, 2007, join us in Washington, D.C. as we call on Congress to restore habeas corpus, fix the Military Commissions Act, and restore all our constitutional rights. We even have free buses leaving from many parts of the country… It’s easy to come!

Rally with us outside the Capitol, then help deliver our urgent message in person to Members of Congress.

Go here to sign up (free buses) or sign the petition

By Elizabeth Drew

TODAY MARKS the 35th anniversary of one of the most famous and most misunderstood events in modern American history: the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972. The break-in set off a chain of events known as “Watergate,” which led ultimately to Richard Nixon’s forced resignation as president - and which is also misunderstood. For history’s sake, it’s important to set these things straight.

The break-in became famous, of course, because the inept burglars got caught by the night watchman - did they not expect that there would be one? - who called the police, who in turn called in the FBI and federal prosecutors. But it was in fact the fourth attempt by the burglars and their supervisors, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy - collectively known as the “plumbers” - to get into the DNC offices and, among other things, place a tap on the telephone of the party chairman, Lawrence O’Brien.

The plumbers got their label because they had originally been hired by the Nixon White House to plug leaks to the press; Nixon had been particularly enraged by Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, a study of the Johnson administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War. (Nixon feared that the study would reflect badly on his own handling of the war, and besides, he hated leaks.)

The first attempted break-in failed because the conspirators got locked in a closet off the main dining room of the Watergate complex. The next one didn’t work because the burglars - most of them Cubans and veterans of President Kennedy’s failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs - couldn’t figure out how to pick the lock on the committee’s door. After that, one of the burglars returned home to Miami to collect better equipment.

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ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON, Associated Press Writer

RICHMOND, Va. - The Bush administration cannot legally detain a U.S. resident it believes is an al-Qaida sleeper agent without charging him, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday. The court said sanctioning the indefinite detention of civilians would have “disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country.”

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court.

It ruled the government must allow al-Marri to be released from military detention.

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master’s degree.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the constitution - and the country,” the court panel said.

Al-Marri’s lawyers argued that the Military Commissions Act, passed last fall to establish military trials after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, doesn’t repeal the writ of habeas corpus - defendants’ traditional right to challenge their detention.

Source: Yahoo News

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Len Hart, “The Existentialist Cowboy,” has a great post titled “Why the Bush regime is illegitimate” (hat-tip to Mike’s Blog Roundup). He provides a great overview of some key philosophical and legal foundations of America’s founding, and how the Bush administration has systematically attacked them. My favorite passage that he quotes is (emphasis mine):

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the government.

[...]

That (it might seem) was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The authoritarians of the Bush administration and their allies are not solely seeking power within the existing American system of government. They have been trying to undo the system itself. The Bushies and King George really aren’t far from the monarchists of years past.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

(The Greek muse Erato, painted by Simon Vouet.)

To combine the Blog Against Theocracy weekend with National Poetry Month, here’s several poems.

Dogma and great art don’t mix very well. Totalitarians generally respect and fear the power of art, and thus often seek to restrict and control it. Art can say more than one thing at once, and often deals with nuance and subtleties. Authoritarians typically cannot tolerate ambiguity. Biblical literalists cannot handle allegory, metaphor, symbolism and competing points of view in other literature, either. For them, truth is derived from, and dispensed by, authority. Authoritarian leaders like power, but for authoritarian followers the chief appeal of their movement is certainty. Certainty is a great solace, as is a sense of belonging with a group, and both diminish fear. A regulated path in life, however unpleasant, can be more appealing than a more naked, honest, unpredictable one. However, the comfort of an artificial, hierarchical order sacrifices some of the wonderful, occasionally chaotic beauty of life in the world.

Some religious organizations promote what could be called a Hobbesian view of human nature - humans are inherently bad, or prone to evil, and need some sort of external order. Control must be maintained or imposed. The Catholic Church at one point wanted to ban polyphonic music, because they feared its beauty would seduce congregations, and distract them from God (happily, they relented). It’s one thing to condemn materialism, another to condemn a selfish hedonism, yet none of that requires condemning life, joy, beauty and art. Not all art is good, or effective, or resonates with everybody. Plenty of great art has an overtly religious theme. However, great art encourages an individual and often complex reaction. And even though the words that make up a poem are seemingly much more concrete and less ambiguous than, say, an abstract painting, there’s no question that a favorite poem carries intensely personal meaning.

Dogma and the need for certainty can overwhelm the beauty of life and art:
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