This week on TPMCafe's America Abroad, the bloggers are talking about...

The Absolute Presidency?

Judge Samuel Alito spent more than 18 hours in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, answering questions about his judicial philosophy and a variety of controversial issues.  One issue that dominated the hearings was limits on presidential power.  Anne-Marie Slaughter picked up on Ivo Daalder's posts on President Bush's defiance of these limits, asking if the Bush Administration's second term had become "the Absolute Presidency?"  Slaughter wrote, "For small 'd' democrats - all Americans who care about the health of our democracy - we must also be willing to fight the cancer of fear that is eating away at our polity and our values. We have to tackle this issue head-on and argue that an 'absolute presidency' is worse even than 9/11 itself or any future attack."

The FBI's Mayfield Mistakes

Juliette Kayyem discussed the report released last week by the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine on the arrest of Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer mistakenly tied to the 2004 Madrid bombings.  Fine concluded that Mayfield was not profiled because he is a Muslim, nor was his arrest a violation of the Patriot Act.  Instead, the arrest was the result of FBI bungling and over-confidence.  Assessing the broader debate about the role of the FBI, Kayyem asked, "As the Patriot debates continue, one question that ought to be answered, then, is this:  should we really be giving an agency that has failed in so many regards, new aggressive tools.  One way to read Fine's report is simply: no."

In Other News On America Abroad

• Richard Eichenberg analyzed public opinion about the war in Iraq, hypothesizing that the negative news coming out of Iraq would shift opinion back to where it was before the President began his series of "strategy for victory" speeches.
  
• Anne-Marie Slaughter shared two important pieces about U.S. actions in Iraq.  Slaughter linked to a Washington Post article on the U.S. General who took the fifth on the subject of issuing orders to soldiers to use "more effective methods" like using dogs in interrogations.  She also passed along the link to an Editor's note and accompanying piece in Military Review by British Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster that critizies U.S. counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq.  "Read it and weep," Slaughter wrote, "but also give credit to the army for being willing to run it and read it.