IOKIYAR on Keystone

Oh, silly Kevin: consistency is for commielibs!

Kevin Drum:

Mark Kleiman points out (Wednesday) that support for building the Keystone XL pipeline is an article of faith on the right. However, it can only be built if TransCanada is able to acquire the land it needs to get its tar sands oil from Alberta down to the Gulf Coast:

Of course this runs into another article of the right-wing faith: that using eminent domain to seize property for private, as opposed to public, use — for economic-development projects, for example — is one short step away from the Gulag. Recall that some of the nuttier wingnuts wanted to seize Justice Souter’s home to punish him for his opinion in the Kelo case. I’d been wondering whether any of the anti-Kelo fanatics would let the eminent domain principle interfere with their support for Keystone.

....It’s perfectly consistent to think that eminent-domain powers can be used to complete projects better left unstarted, and also to think that bad projects ought to be blocked on their merits. It’s not quite so consistent to back property rights except when the big energy companies want to confiscate them.

As it happens, my view at the time — and still today — is that Kelo was properly decided. If Congress or the states want to place restrictions on eminent domain, that's fine, but the Constitution itself doesn't impose any restrictions except "just compensation." So if the government decides that the public needs a new oil pipeline, then it can use eminent domain to get the land as long as it pays for it. And if the government further decides that it prefers to have someone else build the pipeline, it can do that too. I might not always like this, but as near as I can tell that's what the Constitution says.

But most conservatives don't believe this. So here's the question: is it hypocritical for them to support the pipeline anyway? Or is their sole obligation to argue their position in front of the Supreme Court and then, if they lose, work within the court's rules to their best advantage? Generally speaking, I'd say the latter. Just because the government passes a law you don't approve of doesn't mean you can't — or shouldn't — exploit the law to your full advantage. Once it's passed (or handed down), the law is the law for all of us, even those of us who don't like it.

This isn't even speculation; it's history. When a repug president needs zillions of dollars to give away to all his obscenely rich parasite friends, deficits don't matter. When a Democratic president needs a couple of trillion dollars to rescue the economy and put people back to work, deficits are all that matters, and the only way to eliminate them is to eliminate social programs to help the non-rich.

Really, it's a waste of time and effort to refute repug positions (you can't call their "me hate!" grunts "arguments") - just take the opposite position and you're guaranteed to be right every time.

If the NDAA Is So Essential, Then Use It Right

Barack Obama is the most grown-up president we've had since Eisenhower. Yet even he cannot turn down unconstitutional power handed to him on a platter.

Adam Serwer at Mother Jones:

... there's a bipartisan group of Senators who want to protect the president's authority to imprison American citizens without proving they're guilty of anything at all. Barack Obama, for his part, hasn't weighed in on either side—but given that the president has promised never to attempt to use this power, it's a mystery why he wouldn't vocally oppose it. If Obama and his advisers believe this kind of indefinite detention is an anathema to due process, why not support a bipartisan effort to ensure that Americans' constitutional rights aren't dependent on the whim of whichever president is in office?

At least the battle lines here are clearly drawn in a way they weren't over last year's defense bill. One group of legislators thinks Americans can be deprived of their liberty in their own home country without a trial. The other thinks the government has to actually prove you're guilty of something first.

Or as Wonkette commenter Wile E. Quixote put it:

It's too bad that President Obama doesn't have my finely developed sense of irony. If Wile E. Quixote were in the Oval Office and was handed an Enabling Act like the NDAA by a bunch of teabaggers and craven Democratic dipshits like Carl Levin the first thing that President Quixote would do with his shiny new NDAA powers would be to declare everyone who voted for the NDAA a terrorist and have them sent to Gitmo. Just to be sure he'd also find all of the people who contirbuted to their campaigns, and everyone at Fox News, and send them there as well. Think of how much fun that would be.

Out-Cheneying Cheney

No, I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing lalalalalalala at the top of my lungs. This is happening; it's illegal, unconstitutional, unAmerican and unconscionable, and Barack Obama is doing it.

Kevin Drum:

Conor Friedersdorf on the Obama administration's creation of a "kill list" of individuals whom the US can kill anywhere, anytime:

I wish the right would do less scoffing at the ACLU. It's often unjustified. But I'll live with scoffing if it's followed by the dawning realization that the Obama Adminstration has imprudently asserted for itself an extraordinary extra-constitutional power, the potential abuse of which ought to terrify any citizen who is half paying attention.

Once that realization has sunk in, I'd encourage this followup thought: whereas the ACLU is standing against this radical expansion of federal power — an executive branch death panel, if you will — conservative instituitions like The Heritage Foundation aren't merely silent, they're hiring a senior staffer who believes that the ability to draw up a list of American citizens to be killed is inherent in the power of the presidency.

I don't write about this often enough. But it really is extraordinary. Right now this list is confined (we think) to suspected terrorists in places like Yemen and Pakistan, and I think that distracts us from what's going on. Even if, in principle, it seems wrong, killing jihadist wannabes in Karachi or Mogadishu just doesn't get our alarm bells going. Our instinctive reaction is that these are third-world hellholes where life is cheap anyway, so why not?

But it's the still the principle that matters. If you can do it in Karachi, you can do it in Paris. And if you can do it to a New Mexico-born cleric who preaches vengeance against the U.S. from a mosque every Friday, you can do it to an expat from Oregon who runs a grimy little anti-American newspaper from a basement in Berlin. We might not be doing that right now, but what's to stop us? The good will of whoever happens to be president at the moment?

For what should be obvious reasons, the U.S. government should not be allowed to execute U.S. citizens without trial regardless of whether they happen to be on U.S. soil. It's a little hard to believe that this is even a debatable notion.

Suzanne Ito at Crooks and Liars has video.

Now, no one disputes that the United States is at war. But wars are waged in specific geographic areas. Currently, the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Yet that is where a missile strike killed Ruben Shumpert, a U.S. citizen from Seattle.

The U.S. is also not at war in Yemen. Yet that is where Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, is purportedly in hiding, and where the government has attempted to assassinate him as many as a dozen times using armed drones.

The Constitution protects all Americans' right to life, whether they're living at home or abroad. If the government thinks you should be dead, it should at least tell you why. The fact that the standard that puts Americans on the "kill list" is a secret is itself unconstitutional. As our complaint states, "U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of what may cause them to be put to death by the state."

SNIP

A few weeks ago, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer was on Democracy Now talking about the targeted killing program. He said: "A lot of us agree that the last administration's argument for worldwide detention authority, the authority to detain people without charge or trial, was extreme and unlawful. This administration is claiming worldwide execution authority." It's death without due process, far from any battlefield, which is alarming, dangerous, and unconstitutional.

Read the whole thing and watch the video here.
Smirky/Darth are laughing their asses off.