What They Were Saying: Gifts Of Links From The Commenters At Unclaimed Territory

I try to read Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory blog posts on Salon.com immediately followed by the comments. The regular commenters there include a poet/historian/philosopher/veteran/patriot, scholars wearing the robes of various disciplines, rabble rousers with literary elan and the occasional Bush dead ender, pot stirring with a resounding thud.
Yesterday the commenters to this post [...]

What They Were Saying: Benjamin Franklin’s Party For Virtue

From the Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Vol. 1: 706-34):

Observations on Reading History
ms Autobiography: Huntington Library
Observations on my Reading History in Library
May 9. 1731.

That the great Affairs of the World, the Wars, Revolutions, &c. are carried on and effected by Parties.
That the View of these Parties is their [...]

Reach Out And Touch The Toobz

Skippy is showin’ his roo.  Embrace the roo, and use the contact info to professionally and intelligently express how far afield from the public interest and public trust veered the ABC debate:

bc new york newsroom: (212) 456-5100 newsradio@abc.com newsroom fax machine 212.456.5150
peter salinger (the man in charge of election coverage) director, special events & sports [...]

A Trip To McBurney’s Point

 As a new graduate nurse, I had planned to move to NYC after graduation from FPB in Cleveland.  So I trekked to Brooklyn to take my NY State nursing licensure examination - the former two day all day paper and pencil multiple choice exam after exam after exam marathon - held at Pratt Institute during [...]

Daily Constitutional: The Torture, The Monarchy, and The Republic, For Which It Stands

I can’t bring myself to blog in depth about the Yoo torture memos yet, so instead, I’ll bring you some essential links from people whose work I respect, and who bring thoughtful, logical and critical thinking to the table:

The Nürnberg defence

A while back, the administration and the U.S. military announced that six ‘high-level’ detainees at Guantánamo Bay would be brought to trial under military commissions (authorized by the execrable Military Commissions Act of 2006 [MCA]).  They even had the chutzpah to claim that the defendants would be afforded “an extraordinary set of rights”, better than [...]

Patriots: Spies of the American Revolution

They weren’t who you think they were.

During the Revolutionary War, women applied the traditional skills they learned as homemakers to espionage work.  Both the British and American armies recruited housewives and young girls as cooks and maids. With their almost unrestricted access to soldiers’ campsites, these women could eavesdrop on conversations about troop movements, leadership [...]

Pakistan, Constitutions, and the Rule of Law

Next week, March 9-15, is Black Flag Week in Pakistan. The lawyers in Pakistan will carry black flags. And they will probably march, as they have done since November, for the reinstatement of the judiciary, for the rule of law, and for the return to the Constitution and democracy in Pakistan. The head of [...]

A Mountain of Sheet Ice

My comment at Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory blog in response to his post this morning:
Between reading Glenn, Scott Horton and the group at Balkinziation, I can’t help but think that the issues around FISA, torture and the corporate oligarchy/press used as organs of propaganda make up not a single slippery slope, but a massive mountain [...]

Forget Jack Bauer - Jack Balkin Saves the World!

Today’s post by Jack Balkin about Constitutional originalism and eligibility for the presidency is a must-read.  Psst: no one is eligible to be the Prez-
Who Cares About John McCain– George Washington Is Unconstitutional!
Apparently everyone is up in arms over the fact that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone in 1936. Is [...]

Daily Constitutional: Presidents’ Day

The LA Times’ Sarah Wire writes about the challenges of the ongoing work to catalog, transcribe and publish the complete works by many of the Founders:
For 65 years, scholars have been compiling, transcribing and annotating the writings of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. By the time the work [...]

What They Were Saying: From the Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789

A daily look at a snippet of historical documents of the founding of the US. Today’s look back is a view of the journals of the US Continental Congress, courtesy of the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress:

Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1776
Link to date-related documents.
Resolved, That the Secret Committee [...]

Valentine from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams

Thomas Jefferson wrote this to John Adams on February 14, 1787 from Paris.
The Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651-1827
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, February 14, 1787
Library of Congress, Jefferson Collection

Daily Constitutional

Potpourri.

Constitutional Originalism, Natural Law, and The Ninth Amendment

Conservative legal theorists spend a lot of time talking about how the text of the Constitution should be construed only as it was understood at the time of the Founding and Ratification. Building on this idea, they rail against “judicial activism” and the “creation of new rights” that are not “found in the text” of [...]