It was of course followed by a fantasy about how Obama will do something amazing at some unnamed time in the future.

Because, you know, he's, like, awesome and stuff.

But let us all remember the operative word in the phrase "informed guess" is not "informed."  

Really just too bad that our members of Congress couldn't muster enough spine to assert themselves in the name and cause of the current and future health and strength of a democracy and a Constitution that was designed to prevent the few from accumulating power at the expense of the many.

Buy, hey, when we elect people who are as deficient in their knowledge of even fairly recent history as a House member currently in the news, why should we ever have expected more?

They're sensitive to the politics of the case, but they're not motivated by what civil libertarians may write on their blogs.

I'd really like to know who said that.  And I'd really like to know if that is the conventional wisdom at the new DOJ.

So where does this leave the policy itself?  My informed guess is that the Obama Administration will find cases to revoke the privilege's assertion. They will do so publicly and with great fanfare. They will simultaneously announce a new set of restrictions on when and how the privilege should be invoked. They will do so on their own timetable (to the extent that the courts don't force their hands), and they will do so in conjunction with the broader ideal of reconciliation and accountability. They're just not ready to do so 22 days in, and the particulars of this case weren't, in any case, ideal for them.

Um, no sh*t.  Publicly with great fanfare.  Own timetable.  Funny, I thought during the inauguration the watchword was "rule of law."

Basically, Obama and co. are total flakes.  Complete and utter flakes on this issue.  There is no committment...maybe they're waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on some of the most heinous of Bush's federal crimes before they make such a "daring" move.

Meanwhile, this is staggering.  Obama can triangulate all he wants but it seems some under his command are still serving the past:

In a shocking revelation just posted at UK Guardian, Binyam Mohamed's attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who is also director of the legal charity Reprieve, reports that "substantial parts" of a memo, attached to a letter to Barack Obama, documenting evidence of Mohamed's torture at the hands of CIA agents and their extraordinary rendition proxies, were blanked out so the president could not read them. Who did that?

US defence officials are preventing Barack Obama from seeing evidence that a former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay has been tortured, the prisoner's lawyer said last night, as campaigners and the Foreign Office prepared for the man's release in as little as a week....

Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the "bizarre reality" of the situation. "You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command."

pres. obama is the second coming, or so i've been pretty much told; he can do no wrong.

pres. obama may not be a whiz in economics, that's kind of why he has an advisory group, or so i thought.

Then we had Panetta come out and say effectively that renditions were 'In' via our desire to ship these bad guys to other countries for "prosecution'. Of course you didn't read about that on the front page of this blog for obvious reasons.

Now I don't want to actually name names on who these people were who mistakenly argued in Obama's favor before the recent revelations, but you know who I mean.

Now This:

Solicitor general nominee says 'enemy combatants' can be held without trial
Elena Kagan tells a senator she agrees with Attorney General Holder that the U.S. is at war and therefore may detain suspected terrorists indefinitely.
By David G. Savage
February 11, 2009

Reporting from Washington

Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, President Obama's choice to represent his administration before the Supreme Court, told a key Republican senator Tuesday that she believed the government could hold suspected terrorists without trial as war prisoners.

She echoed comments by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. during his confirmation hearing last month. Both agreed that the United States was at war with Al Qaeda and suggested the law of war allows the government to capture and hold alleged terrorists without charges.

Change is not change after all. Here we have Obam's hand picked choice for solicitor General and she says catch um and throw them it Gitmo or elsewhere. And if we can't legally hold them here then Panetta is fine with shipping them to Egypt or whoever will trump up some charges on them. Oh yeah, I remember some posters here saying none of this would happen with him at the helm of the CIA. I disagreed. Now you know why.

Obama will never be a man we can trust. His flip-flop list so far is as long as I-5 which runs from Mexico to the Canadian border. He is aiming for a Flip Flop list that will be so long it will be coined Around The World In 80 Days.

It seems to me that Obama is one of those folks who counts the compromise--regardless of the terms--as his measure of success. And so he enters 'negotiations' (at least domestic ones, so far) willing already to concede without any necessary expectation that something of value OTHER THAN THE FORMAL COMPROMISE ITSELF will ensue. He seems always ready to concede something. Pragamtism trumps principle. He's peeing himself to get a deal on a package a lot of folks who study such things say is 1) too small, 2) poorly targeted, 3) unwieldy, and 4) won't do what it is said to be for.

I suppose there are partisan right wing sites as ideologically blind as this one, however when reality bites it really won't matter who was 'running' the show.

The Sith apprentice only becomes the Master once his own Master dies, either by accident, natural causes, or the apprentice's own hand