During a brief mission to the North Korean capital Pyongyang, former US president Bill Clinton secured the release of two jailed Korean-American reporters, Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Lee and Ling had been sentenced to 12 years hard labor for allegedly violating North Korean law by filming without state permission. Clinton met personally with DPRK leader Kim Jong-il, who is reported to be in ill health, and there is speculation the visit could create an opening for US-DPRK dialogue on a range of issues.

It likely included the goal of arranging the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, but also of providing some insight into what the US might require in order to advance a meaningful range of humanitarian aid to the isolated country. The White House has stressed throughout that there was no direct communication from Pres. Obama to the DPRK government, and that Mr. Clinton’s trip, which included top-ranking current and former aides as well as Secret Service protection, was “a private mission”.

Speaking to a crush of journalists and supporters, Laura Ling fought back tears while expressing gratitude to all those involved in securing their release:

30 hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea. We feared that at any moment, we could be sent to a hard labor camp. Then we were told we were being taken to a meeting. We walked through the doors, and there before our eyes stood President Bill Clinton… Euna and I would just like to express our deepest gratitude to Pres. Bill Clinton and his wonderful, amazing, not to mention, super-cool team…

Ms. Ling also said that upon seeing the former president, “We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end. And now we stand here, home and free”. Ling, the sister of American television journalist Lisa Ling, spoke at a ceremony surrounded by family and dignitaries, including former Pres. Clinton and former VP Al Gore, who runs the media company, Current TV, where the two reporters work.

Clinton’s visit has been touted as a private mission, but an opportunity to re-open dialogue with the reclusive “rogue” state, especially on negotiations about its pursuit of nuclear weapons and international demands that it cease development of technologies related to building and deploying those weapons. The US administration of Pres. Barack Obama, however, said it is incumbent upon North Korea to verifiably recommit to nuclear disarmament, in order to further such dialogue.

Pres. Obama told the press today that “We have said to the North Koreans there is a path for improved relations, and it involves them no longer developing nuclear weapons and not engaging in the provocative behaviour they have been engaging in”. Conservatives have assailed the trip as capitulation to state terror and have said the deal gives too much “ransom” for the release of hostages, while critics of that view say the same conservatives now angered by Clinton’s winning release by way of a personal visit and brief dialogue, supported and defended Pres. Reagan’s dealing thousands of deadly missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial today, by Stephen Yates and Christian Whiton, charging that “The two prior U.S. administrations engaged in prolonged discussions with Pyongyang and provided aid in return for false promises to end its nuclear program. Mr. Clinton’s visit has continued the pattern of rewarding Pyongyang for bad behavior.” It is not clear that the visit rewarded the North in any substantive way, but as the possibility of dialogue begins to open up, it must be considered that direct, bilateral dialogue may not be the most effective means of persuasion.

Yates and Whiton argue that a strong international nuclear planning group is needed, to ensure that nuclear deterrence is targeted, credible and multilaterally applicable. This is not contrary to existing security policy, and the Obama administration has signaled its preference for engaging Pyongyang through the established program of six-party talks, involving regional allies of the US and China, which while sharing close economic ties to the US is a major supporter of the North Korean regime.

Adam Nagourney, writing for the New York Times, suggests that the trip has shown an important domestic political development, the increasing harmony between the most visible and influential families in Democratic party politics. Bill Clinton greeted his former vice president Al Gore, upon returning two journalists who work for Gore’s Current TV channel, is married to Pres. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Obama is pushing aggressive advances in carbon-emissions reductions and healthcare reform, the policies that Clinton and Gore have long championed, while reviving their administration’s cost-cutting “Reinventing Government” program and expanding the AmeriCorps volunteer service. And it has been reported that Clinton’s trip was the product of a request by former VP Al Gore to intervene in order to secure the release of the two captive reporters. This reunion is, in some ways, the most visible collaboration between the two men since early in Clinton’s second term as president.

Convergence of views and interests among the Clintons, the Gores and the Obamas, means an increased likelihood of establishing a unified national party strategy for the 2010 and 2012 elections, and a more effective means of lobbying the public on key issues of policy and reform. Observers are already speculating that conservative ire over Mr. Clinton’s diplomatic errand may be linked to fears of what an Obama-Clinton-Gore alliance could mean for their chances at chipping away at the sizable Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Pres. Obama must now seek a strong and united front among allies, including Russia and China, in confronting the North Korean security risk head-on. There are rumors of behind-the-scenes diplomatic contacts aimed at arranging a unified approach to the resolution of this crisis and the planning for future negotiations based on demands the US is prepared to make, now that Ling and Lee are safely home. Such reports remain unconfirmed, and no date is set for a next round of binding negotiations.

An anonymous State Department official is cited by the AFP as having revealed that former president Bill Clinton’s visit was requested by North Korea as early as 24 July, and that Mr. Clinton wanted to make sure there was a verifiable pledge to release the journalists before he took the trip. In light of those revelations, it is thought the North was, rather than seeking concessions from the US, seeking a high-profile political figure to carry their own diplomatic message to Washington. No report as yet reveals what, if anything, DPRK ruler Kim Jong-il or his aides requested Mr. Clinton convey to Pres. Obama after his return to the US.

Former US vice president Al Gore testified Friday in Congressional hearings on the subject of global climate destabilization. The hearings were linked to new legislation being considered that would establish regulatory measures that seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Gore said the legislation would serve to protect the environment, as well as national security, and urged unity in the interests of the country and the world. 

The anti-emissions legislation is part of a recent flurry of efforts to move the US toward a sustainable energy economy based on combustion-free renewable resources. The Obama administration, as promised during the campaign, has taken up the position that views the gravity of accelerating global climate destabilization as a “wartime-speed” phenomenon, requiring massive reforms to prevent major economic and public health fallout.

Al Gore echoed that sentiment, increasingly common among climate scientists, saying that 2009 amounts to the Gettysburg for efforts to protect the natural environment. The last two years have seen top climate scientists at NASA, the UN and various US agencies, reporting that evidence of severe climate destabilization is not only surfacing everywhere on the planet, but at far faster rates than expected just a few years ago. 

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The Republican party chose to offer former House speaker Newt Gingrich as their pointman for debate with Gore on the climate issue, but Gingrich who admits to not studying climate science closely and proudly announced he only read 200 pages of the 648 page bill being discussed, was relegated to an epilogue comment. Gore and Republican senator John Warner, who agrees that action needs to be taken to avert the security impact of climate destabilization, debated the legislation during the hearings.

Astonishingly, Gingrich sought to paint the climate bill as “an energy tax” and proposed that a new round of business-oriented tax cuts was all that was needed to fix the environmental problem. His presence essentially hardened the Republican party’s position that protecting the environment is a partisan issue, which they intend to use to paint the Democrats as “socialists”. Gore pleaded “I wish I could find the words to get past the partisan divide”, saying that responsible climate legislation “should be something we do together in our national interest”.

The Republican party, long diametrically opposed to action to protect the natural environment, due to its funding ties to businesses that pollute heavily or emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, risks its political future ignoring the position of over 90% of the American people, who support legislation and regulations to protect the environment and public health. Conservative Democrats are clearly showing signs of intimidation on the tax or antibusiness charge. 

The Washington Post reports:

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are negotiating among themselves on whether to scale back legislation that would impose a mandatory limit on greenhouse gases, with some conservatives and moderates calling for electric utilities to be given free pollution allowances and for more modest cuts in the targets for reducing emissions.

Some Democrats whose districts depend heavily on polluting enterprises, like coal-fired power plants, are proposing less strict limits on emissions. The Post reports the specifics of the competing emissions targets: 

The Waxman-Markey bill calls for cutting U.S. emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 83 percent below by 2050; the Boucher proposal would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent by 2020 while leaving the 2050 goal in place.

20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is, in light of the climate science now available, extremely slow progress. Efforts to reduce emissions cuts still further (especially considering the coal industry’s claims of revolutionary new “clean coal” technology — as yet unproven) are grossly irresponsible by any scientific examination of the evidence. The Repower America movement, backed by Gore, is calling for a complete shift to renewables within 10 years, a reachable goal if investment moves toward renewables and carbon-based fuels are no longer subsidized.

Former Democratic VP candidate speaks to RNC, praises John McCain; Shays says Lieberman’s political future at risk

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Al Gore’s choice for VP in the 2000 election, and still a self-proclaimed Democrat —though he was voted out in his party’s primary, before winning back his Senate seat as an independent— addressed the Republican National Convention last night, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lieberman enthusiastically endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and said his goal is to work as hard as possible to make him the next president of the United States.

Republicans had said Lieberman would not attack fellow Democrat Barack Obama, senator from Illinois and his party’s nominee for president, but in the end he did question Obama’s policies, his approach to foreign affaris and his depth of experience. Many Democrats have expressed outrage at Lieberman’s enthusiastic support of Bush Iraq policy and of Sen. John McCain. There is a grassroots movement —which originally started after Lieberman backed the Iraq war, and led to his defeat in the 2006 Democratic primary— seeking to oust him from the Senate and elect another Democrat in his place.

A number of Democratic party luminaries have speculated that Lieberman’s devout support for Sen. McCain is almost entirely to do with his convictions about the Iraq war. There is also speculation that if the Democrats win a handful of additional seats in the Senate, Lieberman will lose the committee chairmanships that keep the Democrats in the majority and allow Lieberman to excercise greater influence. Rep. Shays, also of Connecticut, has said he believes Lieberman put his political future on the line with this speech.

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Sen. Lieberman says he supports McCain because he believes it is necessary to transcend the partisan battles that tend to characterize Washington politics, especially since the 1994 “Republican revolution”, which pitted a deeply conservative Republican Congress against Democratic president Bill Clinton. Lieberman told the RNC crowd:

But when they look to Washington, all too often they do not see their leaders coming together to tackle these problems. Instead they see Democrats and Republicans fighting each other, rather than fighting for the American people…It shouldn’t take a natural disaster to teach us that the American people don’t care much if you have an “R” or a “D” after your name.

The weight of Lieberman’s message is, however, limited by a number of factors about this year’s campaign, not the least of which is the Democratic candidate’s own eloquent and impassioned calls for a “post-partisan” cooperative relationship in Washington. Obama burst onto the national scene in 2004, when he gave a speech about national unity to the DNC, declaring that “There are not red states and blue states; there are the United States”, a formula he has echoed consistently in speeches and town-hall meetings across the country.

In fact, Obama’s entire political philosophy seems to be channeled through his humanist vision of unity that comes through sharing in the process of democracy. In his 2004 DNC address, he declared that:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

So, Lieberman’s case for McCain being the candidate that can best be trusted to take action in a bipartisan way is mitigated by the fact that no candidate in recent memory has so wagered his political fortunes on that very message as McCain’s opponent in the 2008 race. McCain has had a history of bipartisan efforts, and has been close friends with many Democratic senators, both Joe Lieberman and Obama’s VP choice Joe Biden included.

But Lieberman’s voice is really aimed more at dissuading voters from the perception that McCain has shifted ever closer to the policies of George W. Bush in recent years, once his arch-rival whose positions and methods nearly drove McCain to leave the party. In order to constrast Sen. McCain’s record with that of Sen. Obama, Lieberman did attack Obama on the question of experience, saying:

Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But eloquence is no substitute for a record—not in these tough times. In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party. Contrast that to John McCain’s record, or the record of the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, who stood up to some of those same Democratic interest groups and worked with Republicans to get important things done like welfare reform, free trade agreements, and a balanced budget.

Specifics to support Sen. Lieberman’s attack on the bipartisan question were, however, lacking. Obama instantly began to work with Republicans upon entering the Senate, something that ruffled the feathers of some elder Democratic senators who saw it as a presumptuous means of securing more influence even as a freshman senator. The following are a few examples of Sen. Obama’s bipartisan efforts:

• The Lugar-Obama threat reduction initiative, extending American efforts to curb the spread of WMD across the world to conventional weapons, with the aim of reducing the threat to American national security from rogue states or hostile militia groups
• The Coburn-Obama Transparency Act, which established an online database tracking all government spending, so taxpayers can, for the first time, see and analyze for themselves how their money is spent
• The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, of which he was one of the principal sponsors, which instituted new disclosure requirements for all exchanges of gifts or funding between lobbyists and elected officials, sweeping ethics reform that forced states to revamp their transparency policies regaring earmark requests
• Veterans’ issues: Sen. Obama is one of the members of the US Senate with the most consistent record, during his short time there, of defending healthcare and economic interests of veterans, in legislation often supported by cross-aisle efforts

It is clear that Sen. Lieberman’s participation in the convention stems from concern that the precise issues on which he supports John McCain are issues which voters tend to see Obama as more likely deliver on. But Lieberman’s message was strong and his presence itself is a significant coup for the McCain campaign. He said of his favored candidate that “you can always count on him to be straight with you about where he stands, and to stand for what he thinks is right regardless of politics.”

He clearly aims to court independent voters and Democrats skeptical of Sen. Obama. Analysts gave the senator high marks for his delivery and Republicans hope the central message will stick in viewers’ minds, that:

As president, you can count on John McCain to be … a restless reformer, who will clean up Washington and get our government working again for you! So tonight, I want to ask you whether you are independent, a Reagan Democrat, a Clinton Democrat, or just a plain old Democrat: This year, when you vote for president, vote for the person you believe is best for the country, not for the party you belong to.

It remains to be seen if the speech itself will have an impact on Sen. Obama’s support among Democrats and independents. Democrats sought to downplay the impact of the speech, and many have quipped that Sen. Lieberman has tied his political legacy and the very scope of his political activity to the issue of the Iraq war and the perception that Sen. McCain’s long Senate experience and military service qualify him to lead in a time of war, but a majority of voters side with the Democratic candidate on Iraq policy.

The speech has clearly set a tone that will be repeated endlessly throughout the fall campaign: that John McCain “puts country first” and that his experience should assure voters he will be a more capable commander-in-chief. It also has sought to take back the “judgment” issue from the Democrats, who achieved significant polling milestones after their convention last week, with 50% of registered voters saying they back Obama and an equal percentage viewing Obama as “ready to lead” as view McCain as ready.

Last night, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton interrupted the roll-call vote, asking her New York delegation to support her call for nomination by acclamation; the delegates supported the motion, and Sen. Barack Obama, far ahead in the delegate count, was officially nominated to be the candidate of his party for the presidency. Clinton had spoken the night before, giving her full support to Obama’s candidacy, saying the future of our children and of the nation “hang in the balance”, at risk should McCain win the November election.

Last night, former pres. Bill Clinton also spoke, giving a sweeping endorsement of Obama’s candidacy and saying “Clearly, the job of the next president is to rebuild the American Dream and restore America’s standing in the world.” Clinton also went as far as to ‘pass the torch’ as so many said he had to, declaring: “Everything I learned in my eight years as president and in the work I’ve done since, in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job.”

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Pres. Clinton was welcomed by an uproarious standing ovation that lasted more than 3 minutes, and had to insist “Please stop, please stop, sit down” in order to begin his address. He joked that the spring primary contest “generated so much heat that it increased global warming”, and he praised his wife for an historic campaign and her many accomplishments, but wasted little time in throwing the full weight of his popularity among Democrats behind Sen. Barack Obama.

Clinton also began his case with a dual exploration of what he sought to portray as reckless and irresponsible approaches to governing, on the part of the two Republican administrations of Pres. George W. Bush. He laid out a series of economic phenomena that paint a picture of a nation struggling through a series of shocks and inequities, and linked those negative data to the “extreme” policies which he says the Republican party has sought to implement since the election of Pres. Ronald Reagan.

The official nomination of Sen. Barack Obama for his party’s candidacy marks the first time in US history that a major party has named an African American as its candidate for the presidency. Tonight, in Denver’s Invesco Field stadium, he will address 80,000 people, accepting the nomination 45 years to the day from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

The resonance of history, the meaning of the course of American democracy, framed in its beginning as an experiment in forming “a more perfect union”, filtered through the intense struggles to advance basic individual liberties to the point where the match the founding ideal that “all men are created equal”, has fit within the rhetoric of Sen. Obama’s campaign from the first moment.

The sweep of American history, the meaning of its failure and its victories, its flaws and its virtues, comes full-force to this moment, and the Democratic party last night demonstrated it could gather firmly behind such a candidate, whose character and whose individual talents are the principal reason for his ability to harness that history. It will now likely fall to former VP Al Gore to throw the “red meat” to the delegates, and to a crowd of 80,000 tonight, and then to Barack Obama to make the best case for his own candidacy, when he speaks tonight.

The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.

The United States currently consumes roughly one-quarter of all the world’s petroleum, while representing just 4.6% of the world’s population. Experts calculate that global energy production is at or near its peak, and total demand is fast expanding beyond production capacity. In a globalized economy, with major developing nations like China and India expanding GDP by between 7% and 10% per year, this imbalance is untenable. So crude oil prices are shooting up, and the US is increasingly at risk for economic hardship, perhaps already in motion, as a result of coming market corrections.

Mr. Gore opened his address [full text] with a caution to those who fail to perceive the complexity of a new kind of security risk:

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

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The fact is, moods are changing, and the political environment has evolved dramatically in the last two years. Gore cites this trend as cause for hope in this moment of economic and environmental peril, and the best reason for calling for this grand infrastructure readjustment. Skeptics who have long cited the “prohibitive cost” of making the adjustment to clean energy technologies are out-argued by the soaring cost of carbon-based fuels: their historic efficiency is no longer guaranteed, and the economy as a whole is being magnetized to new technological opportunities to reduce energy overhead.

Noting the same problem of oil “addiction” Pres. Bush cited in his 2006 State of the Union address, Mr. Gore urged Americans to think with a can-do attitude about how to make fundamental changes to the core energy metabolism of our economy, specifically:

our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

How does an entire nation come together to undertake such a massive energy overhaul —priced at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion, according to a range of analysts from competing disciplines—, if not by using the levers of democratic political pressures to steer the entire economic output of the nation in a new direction? Moving public awareness can be as unwieldy as steering the ship of state, and in an economy that represents nearly one-third of the entire global economic output, the task is daunting.

But among the most instructive observations nestled within the text of Gore’s call for a new clean energy economy touches on the cost of making the infrastructure adjustment: while some critics continue to worry about impossible economic costs, ignoring what potential long-term benefits there might be, they overlook entirely the fact that the energy infrastructure of the United States is to some degree in poor repair.

Outages of the last few years have cost billions of dollars in lost business and damages, and upgrading the systems for traditional combustible-fuel-based power generation is not inherently less expensive than building a renewable infrastructure. This challenge is economic to begin with, so if the two economic challenges are treated with one solution, the combined cost of repairing what we have and reaching a sustainable future comes down dramatically.

Some members of the Democratic leadership in Congress are unnerved by the timing of Gore’s proposal, saying it comes shortly after a major emissions-reduction bill failed to pass the Senate and at a time when the Bush administration is pushing new drilling as the answer to high energy prices. Democrats don’t want to be seen as being on the side of an expensive government-spending scheme to abandon fuels that power the American economy and whose leading purveyors are the most profitable businesses in the nation.

But there is more to the timing that ignoring the whim of the Congress. Pres. Bush’s announcement he will life the executive ban on new offshore drilling has been met by some critics —environmentalists, economists, and even energy-industry analysts— as not well-attuned to the causes of the current price crisis. Major leading American corporations have publicly called for the government to speed new funding to the twin problems of tackling climate-altering emissions and overhauling the energy and vehicle-fuel infrastructure, so that business will know to follow what’s laid down as a federal funding priority.

Increasing numbers of observers and consumers have made known —anecdotally, in surveys and in formal organized campaigns— their desire to see the kind of assistance oil firms need to get serious about becoming energy-sourcing firms, diversifying their product, even as contaminant or heat-trapping emissions incur fines and heavier taxes.

The major import of Gore’s speech may not lie in the fine points of fact or analysis, but in the declaration of a national goal. If the banner of a clean energy economy is taken up by industry, commerce, politicians and consumers and voters alike, then the path to that goal will begin to be more visible, more comprehensible. We will be able to try and refine a number of potential contributing solutions that will get us closer to optimizing our use of energy without having to drastically cut back on our energy consumption.

TheHotSpring.com :: Former US vice-president Al Gore is calling on the nation to marshal its resources and divorce itself from the combustible fuels economy. Gore says the US can produce all its energy requirements from renewable resources within 10 years, if action is taken. The bold initiative is designed to drive debate on the topic and move discussions about how to deal with high fuel prices toward the new opportunity they provide for funding renewable infrastructure development.

According to the Associated Press:

Rising fuel costs, climate change and the national security threats posed by U.S. dependence on foreign oil are conspiring to create “a new political environment” that Gore said will sustain bold and expensive steps to wean the nation off fossil fuels.

When Pres. Bush announced he would lift the executive ban on offshore oil drilling and urged Congress to do the same, critics retorted that the science shows the potential energy output is too far off and too small to affect prices, but that new drilling would “enable” the nation’s “addiction” to carbon-based fuels. Pres. Bush himself used the word addiction in his 2006 State of the Union address, to describe what could be a crippling reliance on petroleum-based fuels.

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Gore’s proposed initiative has been compared to Pres. John F. Kennedy’s promise that the United States could land a man on the moon within the decade of the 1960s. Ecological economist Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute, has long called for the US to treat the climate crisis as a major threat and to begin to overhaul its energy economy “at wartime speed”, referring specifically to how Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the industrial economy of the US to war production to fight and win World War II.

Gore has not shied away from the issue of cost, but points out that the cost is no longer higher than simply filling in gaps in current demand with new output from high-contamination fuel-sources like coal:

The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group that he chairs, estimates the cost of transforming the nation to so-called clean electricity sources at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money. But he says it would cost about as much to build ozone-killing coal plants to satisfy current demand.

Gore says his goal is to drive public opinion toward an alternative fuels revolution, noting how this process seems to have begun already as a response to soaring gasoline prices. The fuel-source issue has come to dominate every aspect of current economic analysis, as transport costs are now being blamed for a rise in inflation across the US and for 9-figure losses for at least two major airlines.

No longer a politician, but keenly involved in the political sphere, Gore is now devoted to the complex project of informing and changing attitudes, hoping to “enlarge the political space” where government and the private sector can “deal with the climate challenge.” His words may help spur bolder action by politicians, which would help business make the investment commitments necessary to revolutionize their own infrastructure and/or industrial output.

Last year, consumption of renewable energy actually declined slightly in the US, the fall attributed largely to lower levels of precipitation affecting hydrological energy output. But solar and wind energy are now rapidly expanding their production capacity, and Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens’ personal wind-energy initiative —aimed at building a continent-wide wind-energy corridor to produce 20% of power-generation needs— is the latest major sign of progress.

New solar technologies that make solar-power generation perhaps 10 times more efficient mean prices for producing renewable energy are coming down dramatically, just as prices for conventional fuel sources are skyrocketing. While both candidates’ energy plans include coal as a viable resource for expanding production, the major progress being made in renewable fuel sources may make such expansion unnecessary before new plants come online.

Former Republican House-member Bob Barr (L-GA) has been named the Libertarian party’s candidate for US president. Barr told CNN “We are going to launch a very vigorous campaign all across America”, and that he believes he can win more votes than either of the two major-parties’ likely candidates. Polls appear to show his candidacy could bring in as much as 7% of the national vote.

The candidate has some well-documented problems with traditional Libertarians, due to his support of the “USA PATRIOT Act”, which gave federal authorities unprecedented leeway to take actions that would otherwise violate fundamental constitutional liberties, the “Defense of Marriage” Act, which would ban same-sex marriage in the US, and his opposition to the legalization of medical marijuana.

Barr says he has spent the last 5 years working to have the Patriot Act repealed “because of the way it has been used and abused by the Bush administration”. He also co-sponsored an event at which fmr. VP Al Gore spoke to the Liberty Coalition, a sweeping historic narrative and critique of current policy in which Gore noted of Barr:

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

Barr’s platform also includes withdrawal from Iraq, another issue where he is likely to pull splinter-voters away from McCain, whose policy is to pour more money and time into Iraq until “victory” is achieved. McCain has pulled back from his talk of a “hundred years” war in Iraq, but for Republicans unsure about McCain and unhappy about the war, Barr’s platform is thought to be a potential draw.

One of the ironies of this year’s race is that, should Obama capture the Democratic nomination, the three most prominent candidates for president will all be classed by their supporters as bold reformers: McCain has historically been an independent voice and has been a leader on ethics reform, but is embattled now by talk of ties to lobbyists; Obama is the fresh face, vowing sweeping reform and the ability to change the course of history, with opponents crying inexperience; Barr has left his party in order to take on what he sees as abuses of its ideas and its platform and to push for individual liberties.

Clearly in a field of three self-appointed reformers, the one with the clearest and most viable message of reform will take the title and win the pro-reform votes. But whether McCain has left some of his reformist mettle behind in order to seal up the GOP nomination and win the support of those who backed Bush is a question that could determine the outcome of the November elections, and Bob Barr now seems intent on robbing McCain of that maverick image.

9 April :: Reuters reporting: “The self-described mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] has been assigned a U.S. military lawyer to defend him in the Guantanamo war court, where he could face execution if convicted, The Miami Herald reported”… Famed Harry’s Bar, owned by Cipriani family, in Venice, offers 20% discount to Americans hit by plummeting dollar exchange; bar made famous by Ernest Hemingway, sees significant portion of business from American travelers… Bush admin. urging lenders to erase portion of homeowner debts to avoid swell in foreclosures; borrowers will be permitted to pay off lower total amount, lenders to secure money lost in revaluation by “other arrangements”… Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama now within 6 percentage points of Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, according to latest Quinnipiac University poll; Clinton supporters have said she must win PA handily to stay in race… Protesters gather in San Francisco as Olympic torch set to pass through, IOC says no detour for torch relay; protests in Paris, London marred by aggressive protests, heavy police presence… Fmr. VP Al Gore becomes “green” political commodity for Dem candidates: both Obama, Clinton regularly phone Gore, consult on ecological issues; Gore has yet to endorse either candidate, will cast a “super-delegate” vote at DNC…

At the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, a range of ideas from international disease relief, healthcare, security, climate change, extreme poverty, and the responsibility of market incentives, took the discussions in a new direction. Fmr. US vice-president Al Gore spoke of the need for a “marriage” of policy regarding extreme poverty and the climate crisis.

A big part of the reason is that sweeping economic trends, that encourage rampant industrialization of regions where economies are still deeply rooted in subsistence farming, and whose governments are broken by unfundable international debt, often leave the poorest people with little or no access to real economic benefits of any surge in investment.

Activist and musician Bono also spoke of his efforts to help reach the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and the Gleneagles G8 aid pledges, amounting to some $50 billion in aid and debt cancellation. A fundamental principle of what might be called a ‘unified Earth theory’ for economic integration and socio-economic sustainability is that overcoming the severe drag of extreme poverty and environmental degradation will lead to widespread economic health across poorer and wealthier markets alike.

The focus of the forum presented in the embedded video is the ongoing effort to integrate hard scientific data and the most effective policies for reaching long-term solutions and moving world economic structures toward a prosperous, sustainable, open and accessible future.

27 November :: 40 nations to gather at Annapolis summit for Mideast peace negotiations; Israel, Palestinian leaders express hope for progress on comprehensive peace deal, while Hamas leader, ex-Palestinian PM, Haniyeh, says the Palestinian people will not be bound by what his rival Abbas agrees to… French pres. Nicolas Sarkozy has urged calm as riots spread through Paris suburb Villiers-le-Bel in wake of hit and run death allegedly involving police; residents allege the police involved fled on foot after being unable to start their car, damaged by the accident, opposition leader François Hollande, condemning the violence, said it sprung from a “social and political crisis” the gov’t was unable to handle; similarity to situation that sparked 2005 riots across France leads some to fear more violence will ensue… In first private meeting since 2000 presidential election, US pres. Bush, fmr. rival Al Gore discussed climate change for 30 min. while Gore attended White House dinner for Nobel laureates… US, Iraq leaders sign non-binding bilateral cooperation agreement, via video conference; document is attempt to “codify” a relationship that would see phase out of US combat mission, conduct parallel security policy to UN mandate for occupation, stabilization troops…

Climate change is no longer controversial; it has been accepted as scientific fact by a global consensus of researchers and policy makers, including the Bush White House, which resisted acknowledging human activities were a vital contributing factor, until recently. Now the Nobel committee selecting the Peace Prize laureate has raised the issue of warming posing a major international security crisis.

At a September conference he hosted on ‘Energy Security and Climate Change’, Pres. Bush acknowledged the validity of the IPCC’s research, stating “A report issued earlier this year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded both that global temperatures are rising and that this is caused largely by human activities. When we burn fossil fuels we release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased substantially.”

And now, the political class in the US liberal-conservative hot-bed must grapple with the fact that climate change will be, when its most serious repercussions are felt, an international security issue, pushing millions of refugees across borders in search of basic sustenance, like water and food. And policy-makers in the US must come to terms with their very real role in shaping the global capacity to confront these adverse consequences.

The Sudan is cited as a first-case. It’s long civil war, in which the Khartoum-based regime fought against rebellions in the east, south and west of the country, had a lot to do with food and water scarcity, and the need to control natural resources like oil in order to have the wealth to import sufficient amounts of those vital commodities or to build needed irrigation. Khartoum would not allow local control in any part of the country. Further desertification, the “advance of the Sahara”, threatens to return Sudan to multi-party civil war.

More global cases involve countries like China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers, which could find themselves engaged in a brutal life and death struggle to provide water to their immense populations, as snow-melt from the Himalayan Plateau becomes scarce. The world cannot afford to allow such a war, or its causes, to burst forth.

The IPCC, which shares the award with Mr. Gore, the world’s most visible climate campaigner, has issued several reports this year alone putting top-line consensus climate science into the public domain and forcing governments to keep dealing with the issue publicly and diplomatically. [Complete Text]

12 October :: UN Security Council passes unanimous non-binding declaration that it “strongly deplores” the violence used by Burma’s military gov’t against peaceful demonstrators; statement also calls for release of “all political prisoner and remaining detainees”, as well as urging direct talks with opposition, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, significant action to move Burma toward a lasting democratic process; statement is first ever Council action on Burma’s military junta… Fmr US VP Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to raise global awareness of the climate change crisis; since spring 2007, Gore has won an Academy Award, an Emmy and now the Nobel, he said in response “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity”, two advisers told the press the award does not make it more likely he will run for US presidency… CNN reported yesterday “Afghan authorities this week shut down two private security companies and said more than 10 others —some suspected of murder and robbery— would soon be closed, Afghan and Western officials said Thursday”; move comes amid growing concerns over role of private security firms in Iraq violence, UN urging US to investigate alleged crimes… Crude oil hits record high trading price of $84/barrell, just after noon New York time; cost for alternative fuels expected to drive adoption of new fuel sources, transport costs straining overall economic output… Russian Soyuz rocket launched from Kazakhstan carrying American, Russian, Malaysian to Int’l Space Station; Peggy Whitson to be first woman to command Space Station, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor 9th Muslim in space, 1st Malaysian…

9 October :: The fabled ‘Northwest Passage’ through northern Canada was ice-free this summer for the first time in recorded history, and is being explored by a Canadian Coast Guard ice-breaker, whose journey will be far easier than any before through the glacial route; climate models had not foreseen such intense Arctic-wide ice-melt until one or two decades further into the future; Canada, Denmark, the US and Russia, may now compete for the right to use or control parts of what may become a seasonal shipping route as the planet keeps warming… Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) proposes national cap on greenhouse gas emissions, auction system that would force polluters to pay, saying “No business will be allowed to emit any greenhouse gases for free”; plan would bring US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, to 80% below that by 2050… Mexico pres. Felipe Calderón has criticized US pres. Bush for building security barrier between two countries, saying nations should “build bridges, not fences”, says he believes economic expansion in Mexico is best way to solve problem of mass economically-driven migration to the north… Israel PM Ehud Olmert has told MPs he will devote the coming year to security a lasting peace with Palestinians; while conservative ministers berated him, Olmert said he believed the Abbas gov’t was devoted to peace and its commitment to that end should not be squandered; senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat welcomed the remarks saying it showed Olmert understood that “time is of the essence”… CA group reported to be collecting signatures to put former VP Al Gore’s name on ballot for 5 February primary elections; 2000 Democrat candidate for presidency has repeatedly said running is not in his plans, but has never fully ruled out running… Burmese junta names retired general as liaison to Nobel-laureate opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest; move is direct response to suggestion by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari, opposition worries it is “cosmetic” step meant to deflect attention from violent crackdown; Singapore arrested 6 demonstrators who criticized Burma’s military gov’t, as it does not allow gathering of more than 5 people in public without permission…

5 October :: House and Senate judiciary committees have ordered Justice Dept. to turn over legal opinions on harsh interrogation techniques, alleging the Department’s lawyers, who had in 2004 found torture “abhorrent” had in 2005 “reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime, in essence reinterpreting the law in secret”; White House spokesman says “The policy of the United States is not to torture”, adding “The president has not authorized it, he will not authorize it”, while suggesting that policy was “within the corners of the law”… UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has warned the Burmese military gov’t it cannot return to past practices, must release jailed dissenters, cease using violence to crush democracy movement… Pakistan pres. Musharraf gives fmr. PM Bhutto immunity for corruption charges in hopes of forming power-sharing gov’t after elections, Bhutto seeks more protections before signing on to new deal, Supreme Court still to rule if Musharraf permitted to continue serving dual role as pres., head of military… Canadian dollar passes US dollar in currency markets, rising today to $1.02, its highest mark since 1976 against the US currency; new job data cited as cause for day’s jump, US dollar has been steadily falling against major currencies in recent months, stands now at $1.41/1€, $2.04/£1… Global carbon footprint is 24.627 billion tons, as of mid-day GMT… New ‘green’ roofing material reflects heat back into atmosphere, reduces weight stress, reduces overall demand on heating, cooling; ENN reports “The product, many say, represents a major shift in the roofing industry because existing roofing materials of the last 100 years resemble heavy metal armor. The ArmorLite roof is lightweight and strong, like a Kevlar bulletproof vest that replaced heavy armor vests”… Climate campaigners including fmr US vice president Al Gore nominated for Nobel Peace Prize; if group wins award, it would signal shift away from traditional role for prize, rewarding statesman, political leaders who enhance conditions for political settlements…

24 September :: Estimated 100,000 march in Rangoon (Yangon) to support Buddhist monks calling for end to military rule in Burma; some fear junta will impose another harsh crack-down… Iran pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said his nation does not need nuclear weapons and is not headed for war with US; news comes amid heightened tensions between Western powers and Teheran, over nuclear allegations, apparent French threat, upcoming UN General Assembly… Reuters reports “U.S. troop movements are being monitored by Iran using satellites and other technology and would be in range of Iranian missiles if an attack was launched, a top Iranian military official said”; Yahya Rahim Safavi, an advisor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also said he does not expect a US strike, as Iraq is taxing its military resources… US has said it considers Syria a “natural invitee” to Mideast peace conference it will host in November, but urges all participants to renounce violence, commit to peaceful, negotiated solution that recognizes Israel… CA gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and fmr. US vice pres. Al Gore to join world leaders at climate policy summit, aimed at establishing new solutions for global emissions reductions… Pudding Media, a new VoIP venture, is planning to monitor users phone calls in order to harvest keywords and target advertising to their computer screens as they talk; some say business method is one step too far in handing private information to online service providers… The NY Times has apologized for running a political ad criticizing the Petraeus report at a discounted rate; Moveon.org, who purchased the ad has already said it will wire the difference between the “standby rate” —for “political and advocacy groups willing to be flexible about the day their ads run”— and the full rate, according to Reuters…

Former US Vice President Al Gore gave what is being described as an historic non-partisan speech, calling for a passionate nationwide movement to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. Gore gave the speech in a non-partisan context, speaking at the Daughters of the American Revolution hall, with the express support and participation of Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia.

The speech was attended by both Republicans and Democrats and thousands of people who fear that new arguments made by the Executive branch for expanded police powers pose a serious threat to the nation’s system of government and the rule of law.

Noting the plurality of ideological underpinnings adhered to by those in attendance and those who supported the event, Gore remarked “In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.”

<!–more–>The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition praised Gore’s speech as non-partisan and as containing sound practical and legal recommendations for protecting whistleblowers who reveal constitutional abuses and to protect constitutional provisions against erosion or infringement by the executive.

He warned that after being found to have violated constitutional protections in eavesdropping on large numbers of Americans, without judicial warrant or review, the current administration “has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses”.

The speech was organized and sponsored by the Liberty Coalition, an alliance of grassroots organizations designed to approach issues of individual liberty and rule of law in a “transpartisan” way, without ideological preconceptions. According to the organization’s mission statement:

“The Liberty Coalition works to help organize, support, and coordinate transpartisan public policy activities related to civil liberties and basic human rights. We work in conjunction with groups of partner organizations that are interested in preserving the Bill of Rights, personal autonomy and individual privacy.”

Using the non-partisan nature of the event to highlight worrying, historically unusual executive activities, Mr. Gore by all accounts has taken an important step toward reframing the public debate on the issue of executive power, noting that the Bush administration’s claims for expanded authority and control over individuals’ private lives truly represents a major departure from all historical precedent.

The speech was given in conjunction with the national commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his work for civil rights, justice and equality before the law. He noted that King was “illegally wiretapped” and was considered a “dangerous” man by the FBI, despite his work being oriented toward enacting and securing the Constitution’s protections for individual liberties and civil rights.

Mr. Gore concluded his remarks by citing the following King statement: “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”

The feeling that “a new spirit” may be on the rise was present in the message of the speech and in the reaction of the public. Gore received several ovations described by observers as “thunderous”, as he very boldly accused the administration of wilfully violating constitutional law and undermining the time-tested American system of checks and balances.

Gore took pains to note that the rule of law was in danger and that it needed conscious and active defending. For this reason, he said, “many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.”

He cited the New York Times’ report that revealed the eavesdropping program, and stated unequivocally that the program was instituted and carried out “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection”.

He also went on to note the important fact that, again in Gore’s words, “During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.”

The dual facts that the president noted the legal requirement for such safeguards, and that he was fully aware of the falsehood of his assurances, imply that there was awareness of the illegality of the wiretapping program at all levels. What’s more, the executive now asserts that the law is irrelevant, because the administration now claims inherent war powers that allow it to go beyond or even “make new law” in the interests of national security.

Gore’s speech very importantly made no reference to ideology, no reference to liberal or conservative ideals, no reference to Republican or to Democratic party-platform politics. Instead, he structured his analysis and his rhetoric around the provisions of the US Constitution itself and the intentions of its framers.

His goal seemed to be to re-orient public debate on the issue of the legality of expansive assumption of new powers by the executive, using the founding ideals of the nation as a yardstick. So, he warned of the threat of the rise of tyranny from within the democratic system, saying “A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men.”

He also reminded the nation’s public and leaders that the American Revolution was driven by a mission to throw off the chains of abusive monarchical powers, which without colonial representation in the British government, amounted to an unchecked executive tyranny.

In what may have been the philosophical backbone of the speech, the former vice president remarked that “An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free.”

Continuing with the words of James Madison, considered the philosophical and political father of the Constitution, he stated: “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

He went on to detail many of the troubling occasions on which the executive took deliberate action to bend or to depart from existing legal and governmental constraints on police powers. He also noted actions and interpretations that show the administration has long been aware of the fallacy of its own arguments in favor of these “implied” powers.

Specifically, and perhaps most notably, Attorney General Gonzales himself “concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute.”

He then added that in talking of how those negotiations proceeded, “Gonzales says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along?” Gonzales has agreed to testify before the Senate, in public, and to answer questions regarding the NSA program, its extent and its legality.

It might be noted that after Mr. Gore’s speech, the attorney general appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live and refuted the assertion that he knowingly participated in a program that violated the law or undermined the Constitution. He also said the Clinton administration’s policies were not in keeping with Gore’s current position.

The White House has sought to deflect attention to the NSA wiretapping program by citing examples where they allege the Clinton administration engaged in “warrantless physical searches” and to one occasion where Clinton’s deputy attorney general defended the president’s power to do so.

What is striking in this particular political controversy, is that the branch of government sworn to enforce and to uphold the rule of law has come to argue that laws have somehow given it the implied power to ignore, circumvent or entirely violate existing law, without any possibility of constraint from other authorities or any checks on its powers. Whatever one’s political persuasion, this assertion clearly contradicts several provisions of the United States Constitution.

The speech also makes clear that the apparent violations of constitutional and federal law inherent in the decision to wiretap American citizens without judicial review constitute impeachable offenses. Gore called on Congress to act within its constitutional authority to thoroughly investigate, declassify and reveal the extent of the eavesdropping program.

The speech supports the idea that the process must prevail, and that it is the rule of law and not political competition or enmity that is at stake. And Mr. Gore clearly defended at several points the importance of due process in the US system of law-enforcement and justice. But, he admits that on legal grounds, he believes the issue is already decided.

According to Gore’s comments, it is not in doubt that the administration acted without legal authority. He alleges, in fact, that it is precisely the violation of the law which is the goal of the plan. And, in defending the NSA program, the White House has repeatedly asserted its belief that —paradoxically— the law implies that the executive branch has the right to violate the law’s provisions, regardless of protections against such acts.

Through an investigative process, it might then be one of several possible remedies to initiate the prosecution of executive officials directly involved in wilfully violating the law. Whether or not this is likely to happen may depend on the outcome of Republican party leadership contests and/or the upcoming November elections.

Certainly, if the opposition Democratic party were to gain a majority in either house, it would be more likely that some price would have to be paid for violations of constitutional law. But, events may also depend on the style, ideology and comfort-level of new Republican leadership regarding these apparent abuses. And, there does not appear to be an electoral agenda in the format or the forum of this speech.

Every top Republican in the House has been implicated in the Abramoff lobbying-bribery scandal (though innocent until proven guilty), and the former majority leader has stepped down after being indicted on charges of money laundering; money has been returned or donated to charity, and there is a scramble among some opportunists for the top positions. The Senate majority leader Bill Frist is still under scrutiny for possible insider trading violations. With or without significant leadership changes, political pressure could go a long way toward motivating action to correct abuses.

Currently, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has been accused by some Republicans of going too far in proposing lobbying reform in a reaction to the toxic political weathers surrounding the Abramoff scandal and related allegations of bribery. The Speaker may have genuine reasons for wanting to reform the lobbying industry, but his reaction to the scandal clearly shows that political pressure can yield a legislative response, sometimes for the better health of the republic.

One commentary on About.com observed “One day, we will all look back to Mr. Gore’s speech, and either be proud that we listened and understood and fought for the sanctity of the US Constitution…..or be embarrassed and shocked that we didn’t comprehend the utter seriousness of the predicament of the United States of America in 2006.”

REMARKS AS PREPARED BY AL GORE, REPORTED IN PUBLIC DOMAIN, ON SUBJECT OF CONSTITUTIONAL ABUSES BY GOVERNMENT

The following transcript is provided by Café Sentido as a matter of national and historic newsworthiness, and on the basis of its lying in the public domain. The text does not represent the specific views of or any political agenda of CafeSentido.com, and Café Sentido’s editors claim no relation to its content, source material or authorship…

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King’s murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King’s life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.”

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President’s men have minced words about America’s laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically – and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.”

This is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then – until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan – one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons – registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch’s handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.”

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America’s freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders’ wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: “[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation… [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.” So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don’t misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president’s powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President’s authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America’s carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America’s foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover’s view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King’s innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street…. The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. … so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in.”

The Constitution’s framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “a power over a man’s support is a power over his will.” (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet’s CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration’s eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn’t know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands – notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process — by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President’s decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive – a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not – and I do not – we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President’s judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don’t really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70′s and 80′s, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire – no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress’ role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America’s democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here”-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.”

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people – in their various States – that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television – a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln’s memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can’t check an abuse of power if they don’t know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.”

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.”

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing — especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”