Free Republic

snip Their streamlined glass-and-steel forms proclaimed a faith in machine-age efficiency and an open, honest, democratic society. Newspaper journalism, too, is part of that history. Transparency, independence, the free flow of information, moral clarity, objective truth — these notions took hold and flourished in the last century at papers like The Times. To many this idealism reached its pinnacle in the period stretching from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War to Watergate, when journalists grew accustomed to speaking truth to power, and the public could still accept reporters as impartial observers. snip Maybe this accounts for the tower’s...

Congress, which is supposed to push back against executive attempts to amass overweening power, has hardly played its proper role when it comes to Bush. In the past, when evidence arose that the president had overstepped his authority, the Congressional response was generally to look for ways to make whatever Mr. Bush did retroactively legal. But the Supreme Court's decision on the Gitmo detention camp seems to have jolted even some of the most loyal Republicans back to reality. They are vowing that this time, they will not merely rubber-stamp presidential overreaching. Soon, Americans will get a sense of how...