[If you missed it, please see the Program Note for an explanation of the repeat columns this week.]

[This column was the first one where I got a flood of comments in response. I can't tell for sure, since the original Huffington Post version now appears without the old comments displayed, but I believe it generated over 150 comments.

A little over a week ago, two of the architects of the new American policy on torture appeared before a House committee. Both David Addington and John Yoo were instrumental in providing the legal reasoning for what they termed "interrogation methods."

John Yoo refused to answer such simple questions as: "Could the president order a suspect buried alive?"

Continue Reading »

Program Note:

I will be taking a semi-vacation this week (I've got to get caught up on some behind-the-scenes stuff here at cw.com), and will be running older columns until Thursday. I will not be posting them to the Huffington Post, so the only place you'll be able to see them is here.

The good news is that live columns will return on Friday, since I couldn't very well skip two straight weeks of the Friday Talking Points. So rest assured, FTP will return this week.

But for the next four days, I've picked columns that I feel are relevant and interesting and worth re-reading (if you've read them before) or reading for the first time (if you haven't seen them before). Two of these will be "prediction" columns, where I previously made crystal-ball predictions, to update how I'm doing at the prognostication business. The other two columns are issues which are as relevant today as when they were posted.

In any case, enjoy the brief trip down memory lane. I apologize for the "summer re-runs," and I hope people aren't too disappointed.

-- Chris Weigant

First off, happy Independence Day!

I'd like to address, in as patriotic spirit as can be mustered, the wearing of United States flag lapel pins, and the inherent silliness this debate represents. Flag lapel pins are all the rage these days, but the battle over wearing the flag is older than you may have thought. Older than the battles in Congress over flag-desecration amendments to the Constitution (which stretch back to the 1980s... and which even Democrats who should know better still occasionally vote for in Congress... ahem).

In 1968, in the fading years of one of the most un-American chapters in our entire history, the "House Un-American Activities Committee" ("HUAAC" or "HUAC") still existed. This committee was set up to root out (as you can tell from the title) "un-American" activities... which started out as "communism" but soon morphed into "anything the right wing didn't approve of." It was in this later incarnation that, in 1968, it was holding hearings on those unruly and upstart youngsters, the hippies.

Continue Reading »

To understand why Americans are paying over four dollars a gallon for gas, and what we could be paying in the future, there are a few factors which are seemingly obvious to anyone who cares to look, but which are not automatically equated by the average American as having anything to do with the price at the pump.

Continue Reading »

As we enter the long summer days of the general election, the tradition in American politics is for the candidates to run as hard as they can to the vaunted "middle of the road." What this may mean is that by Election Day, the foreign policy positions on Iraq of John McCain and Barack Obama are going to get a lot closer and indeed may be different mainly in philosophy (rather than in substance) by November.

This is a shocking claim to make, but I think events will bear me out. I think either candidates' plan, by the end of the campaign, will merge toward a consensus: "We're going to leave Iraq as fast as events on the ground make it possible, while still leaving some troops behind."

Continue Reading »

"It doesn't take a lot of talent to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane."

I can just feel the rage building from the right wing echo chamber -- "Another Wes Clark smear of John McCain!!" Unfortunately, that quote comes from McCain himself. Which just goes to show, McCain might be protesting a little too much here.

Wes Clark is not a swiftboater. His comments on Face The Nation last weekend did not question McCain's medals, question his service record, question his injuries under fire, and was not an insult to every soldier who has ever won the Purple Heart. Republicans did do all that to John Kerry, four years ago. Remember them waving fingers with little bandages imprinted with tiny Purple Hearts at their national convention? That is what "dishonoring" or "attacking" a candidate's service records looks like. But you certainly wouldn't know it listening to some folks out there, most of them Republicans.

Continue Reading »

For the first time in the general election campaign, I am ready to take a look at the electoral map and do some electoral math. Now, we're still pretty far out from Election Day, so likely any of these guesses will be laughably wrong when it rolls around. But we've got to start somewhere.

Before we get to crystal ball gazing, though, we have to clean up some old business here. I ran a contest (right before the Pennsylvania primaries) to see who could predict the outcome of the Democratic nomination race most accurately. Since the race has been over for weeks, and since I have been remiss in announcing winners, I'd like to kick off the general election prognosticating by giving the winners and near-winners from the primary campaign their due.

Continue Reading »

Rather than beginning with my usual chatty yet absolutely riveting introductory remarks (ahem), the preface to today's column will be an introduction (for some) and a reintroduction (for others). Note: If you already know what this column is all about, then you can skip directly to this week's awards, as the only new thing I'm about to say here is that there will be no FTP column next week, it being the Fourth of July. And I plan to be otherwise engaged, with a hamburger fresh off the grill and a cold beer fresh from the ice chest.

Continue Reading »

President Bush is in the news today declaring, in essence, that North Korea need no longer be considered as part of his "Axis Of Evil." With absolutely no proof whatsoever, Congress is now supposed to remove North Korea from the list of countries which are considered state sponsors of terrorism. So much for all that fiery rhetoric Bush used to use about terrorism.

Continue Reading »

No, that's not a typo in the title. Because President George Bush may (to his own party's dismay, incidentally) wind up being remembered as "Mister Precedent," and not as "Mister President."

George Bush's term in office will be remembered for the precedents it set, particularly in relation to the power of the presidency, and the separation of powers between the three branches of American government. Vice President Dick Cheney has been at the forefront of this effort to "restore power" to the presidency, which he believes was unjustly taken from the office in the aftermath of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

This naked power grab has taken many forms. The most obvious, of course, is Bush and Cheney's assertion that because "we're at war" (even though, technically, we aren't), His Highness The President can do whatever he feels like -- and it's legal by definition. Somehow the words "commander in chief" in the Constitution are supposed to be read "when we're at war, the president cannot be questioned or restrained in any way, shape, or form." Since we're "at war" Bush can do any damn thing he pleases -- torture people, kidnap people anywhere on earth, send people to other countries to be tortured, eavesdrop on anyone he wishes without having a judge sign off on it, hold anyone in the world prisoner endlessly, and all the shameful rest of it -- and the Constitution and any international agreements we've signed (like the Geneva Conventions) are suddenly and magically no longer in effect.

Continue Reading »