The NDAA thing is critical.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  It broadens the point somewhat against the central message, I would think — though a concern just about everyone seriously involved in whatever the “movement” is would hold.  Isn’t there an anti-war movement that should be hammering about this one, or has that merged in with “Occupy”?

More central to the “message”: The Occupy New Hampshire protesters are afloating about right now, hitting Mitt Romney on “Corporate Personhood” comments.  Shame there’s no Democratic Primary to run across to the other part of the “Two Party duopoly”…

What the NDAA means.

Obama’s decision hardly provoked applause from the NDAA’s critics. The ACLU statedthat it was a “blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.” Jonathan Turley has called Obama’s decision to sign the NDAA into law America’s “Mayan moment”—the dooming moment “when the nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between rounds of drinks.”

On the other hand, two legal scholars with strong civil-liberties credentials and close ties to the administration, Marty Lederman and Steven Vladeck, authored a serious review of the NDAA’s most controversial terms and found them to be a mixed bag, but far from a civil-liberties apocalypse. The measure can fairly be called the “Gitmo Forever” Act because it contains a series of provisions designed to frustrate Obama’s pledge to close the detention operations at Guantánamo. On the other hand, as the result of effective lobbying by the White House and civil libertarians, the worst of the provisions concerning what the military calls “detention operations” were reshaped into provisions that are either relatively harmless or sound statements of law.

Surely both of these views can’t be right?