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1.12.2009

john yoo and the balance of power

I have a List. You do not want to be on the List. The criteria is a little vague, but they're basically Asian American individuals who truly make me very very sad. And there are actually only a handful of names on it. Bai Ling, Michelle Malkin, Kenneth Eng, to name a few. I think you get the idea. They've made me sad.

One man who has prominently earned himself a place on the List is attorney John Yoo, professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, and one of the chief architects of the Bush's administration's major post-9/11 legal policies -- most notably regarding the issue of torture of detainees ("the torture memos").

Yoo and John R. Bolton, one of his PATRIOT Act buddies, wrote a New York Times editorial last week on treatymaking and bipartisan foreign policy in Barack Obama's administration: Restore the Senate's Treaty Power.

This did not go over particularly well with a lot of people, who wrote into the Times with their own responses: Making a Treaty: The Senate's Role. Kind of funny, how Yoo and Bolton would suddenly be so interested in restraints on power.