Can we call it a police state now?

Here's the latest salvo fired by the White House in their war on information. Not content with destroying science as means of rational inquiry, they have resorted to intimidating historians. Maybe Bush figures, after that lousy poll came out, if he gets rid of 81% of the historians, history will be kinder to his "legacy." My post on this is at the Detroit News blog and I would add I think Chairman Mao would be proud.

Meanwhile, I'm still stewing over this illegal surveillance. Bush angrily defends it, saying secret domestic spying on law abiding Americans is legal, constitutional and "necessary" to save our lives. There's more than one decision lurking in the law libraries that would contradict that but more interesting to me is the press isn't letting the White House get away with their unsubstantiated blanket statements. Via Think Progress:

On Meet the Press today, Condi Rice couldn't cite the legal authority that makes a blatant violation of the law, legal because it's the President who is doing it.

RUSSERT: What Democrats and Republicans in Congress are asking, what is the authority that you keep citing? What law? What statute? Where in the Constitution does it say that the President can eavesdrop, wiretap American citizens without a court order?

Shorter RICE: I am not a lawyer.

True enough but you would think as National Security Advisor at the time the program was initiated that she would have bothered to check with one, just to make sure it was legal. Of course those were the heady days of high approval polls and the "Bush mandate." Maybe they thought they didn't have to bother because all that "political capital" could buy them anything, including clemency?

Perhaps they should have read this SCOTUS decision before they squandered all that political capital on their little "cake walk" war.

The 4th Amendment protects Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, said then-Justice Lewis F. Powell, a Nixon appointee, delivering the court's ruling, and such freedoms "cannot be properly guaranteed if domestic security surveillances are conducted solely within the discretion of the executive branch."

It looks like they'll end up blaming it all on poor old John Ashcroft though. Around the time that the program started, he said the president could order wiretapping without judicial oversight. I suspect if it comes to that, Johnny will use the God told me to do it defense.