America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process or privacy when it came to protecting his power. In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a…

Egypt remains in a heightened state of political turmoil. Since the mass popular revolt in Feb. 2011 that toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, there have been four governments, three votes on revised constitutions, two parliamentary elections and one presidential election with another scheduled for May 26-27, 2014. This makes seven referendum or elections since Mubarak. These ineffectual democratic pretenses amounted to little more than reshuffling the deck of cards with the military holding all the aces. Mubarak castaways worked along with some new faces, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, who were willing to accept the old ways as long as…

I see innumerable news articles detailing the latest revelations from Edward Snowden, and a blizzard of pieces calling for leniency or a pardon for the world’s most famous whistleblower – but in the comments sections, including of my own columns on the subject, I find expressions of seemingly hopeless despair: "Yes, but what can we doabout it?" The answer: take action at the local level. Use as a model the efforts of Californialibertarian activists who have lobbied state Senators Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and Joel Anderson (R-San Diego) to introduce the Fourth Amendment Protection Actforbidding any state support to the National Security Agency. "I agree with the NSA that the world is…

A new book, as well as the first account written by a participant, remind us that, in the world of the national security state, when it comes to pure and simple illegality in the monitoring of, spying on, and surveillance of American citizens, there really is nothing new under the sun.  In a late-night break-in and theft in March 1971, eight antiwar activists – the Edward Snowdens of their moment – made off with the files of an obscure FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.  These proved to contain documents incriminating the Bureau for operations designed to breed paranoia in the anti-Vietnam War…

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday. What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened   The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.” The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that…