A new NBC News poll, and now a new CBS News poll, have just come out, and they say the same thing. They both went from 6% Obama leads in their last poll to 3% Obama leads now, with both putting it at 45/42. This appears to me to be good news for Obama. They do confirm that the race seems to have narrowed, but McCain is still stuck in the low 40s, no matter what the poll is. However, McCain only gained a single point in the NBC poll (from 41% to 42%), and only 3% in the CBS poll (39% to 42%). According to Chuck Todd, most of those undecideds in the NBC poll were former Hillary supporters, and this appears to be the case in the CBS poll. This is bad news for McCain, and should demonstrate to us how important it is to win over voters who agree with Obama but are still disappointed. This is our key to victory. It isn't that we run enough negative ads, or pander, or run like republicans. Rather, we win our disappointed fellow democrats.

I am glad to see Rachel Maddow get her own show. What makes this interesting is the fuming reaction of the blowhard Bill Orally. Right now, O'Reilly is waging a holy war against GE. He is putting up a nice like rationale, that it is because GE has done business in Iran. The real reason, however, is that he hates Olbermann, and sees Olbermann as a threat to his empire. O'Reilly's ratings have been stagnant for over a year now, which is in part because of Olbermann, whose show is on at the same time as is O'Reilly's. O'Reilly continuously gets annihilated amongst younger viewers, and remains strong only with the oldest viewers. Overall, his huge ratings advantage against Olbermann has disappeared. O'Reilly and his corporate master, former Bush 41 campaign advisor and president of Fox Noise Roger Ailes, have taken their little sh*t fest all the way to the president of NBC. When they were unable to browbeat MSNBC into firing Olbermann, they started their McCarthyesque campaign against GE. And how has that worked out? Ask Rachel Maddow. It seems as though MSNBC, through either intention or simply fact, is sticking it to the bully O'Reilly and Fox.

Over the last year, I have done a series of Roman history diaries, under the title of "Hadrian's Forum". I would like to start doing a series of ancient Greek history diaries, and so I will start here. I am not sure how much interest there is here for a series on classical Greece, so I am hoping this diary will answer this question. While the Romans provided the structural foundations of the modern world, the Greeks provided the intellectual foundations. Greek hegemony (led by Athens and Sparta) gave way to Roman hegemony, which gave way to (after centuries of darkness) British hegemony, which gave way to American hegemony. The Greek influence is especially apparent in our politics (the word itself derives from the Greek "polis" which means "city-state"). Athens, for example, created the first democracy ("demos" being Greek for "people") during a period in which it was being strong-armed by its rival Sparta. Sparta, on the other hand, provided the underlying foundations for the military and patriotic spirit we have today. From all of Greece, we have borrowed other such concepts, such as science, philosophy, theology, and history, among the most notable topics. Here I will talk about the first of the two major classical Greek Wars: the Persian War.

Recently, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato, wrote an article, called Time to Change the Unit Rule. In this article, he talks about a clause in the constitution that is virtually unknown. In the event that no presidential candidate emerges with a majority of electoral votes, the election for president is determined in the house. However, a majority of state delegations determines the president, not a majority of the members of the house. The state delegations all vote, and the majority vote in each delegation determines the way in which that delegation votes. Each delegation, regardless of size, gets one vote, and thus twenty six delegations are needed for a majority. Sabato's problem had to do with the fact that every state got the same single vote. The block voting concept, however, is the same as what the Electoral College uses. In effect, a 49% minority has no say, because the state, in both instances, votes as a block. This mechanism originated 2,500 years ago, at the dawn of the Roman Republic

Recently I wrote a diary, Hadrian's Forum: Our Senate Bows to Bush, Rome's to Caesar; Fall of Rome's Republic, Part 5, which described how the absolute capitulation of the Roman Senate to the unitary executive Julius Caesar led to the destruction of the Roman Republic, and the creation of the Roman Empire. Tonight I want to describe one key factor that led up to these events, and which ultimately led to the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire itself. Rome actually had its own military industrial complex, which began shortly after the greatest military victories in the history of the Roman Republic. Rome's military industrial complex was actually similar to our own. Both began as a result of imperialism. Both reached their climax under the unitary executiveships of two petulant, if unaccomplished, boy emperors who owed their power solely to their fathers ("You, boy, owe everything to your name", Mark Antony once said of his own boy emperor). God help us if the similarities continue from this point on.

As congress prepares to abdicate whatever powers it may have left to Bush, I want to discuss what happened the last time a great constitutional superpower followed their own unitary executive to autocracy and empire. Barack Obama even reminds me of a senator of that day, Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose dubious constitutional loyalties wavered between the forces of constitutionalism and extra-constitutionalism as the winds blew. Between 59 and 44 BC, the Roman Senate bowed to Julius Caesar as the U.S. Senate and House now bow to George Bush. Given, Julius Caesar was a competent leader and successful military strategist who did not have the intellect of an aristocratic C- student, but he also had little interest in following his republic's own constitution. As a result of the events which followed Caesar's dictatorship, 500 years of constitutional and republican development was lost. This legacy would only be rediscovered 1800 years later, by a group of wealthy land owners who despised the name "Caesar", and who sought to resurrect that ancient republic on their own shores.

Given the recent Supreme Court decision, upholding the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, I wanted to talk about the Roman origin of habeas corpus. If you ask almost anyone where habeas corpus originated from, they will tell you that it originated in the Magna Carta, which was signed by King John of England in 1215. The only problem with this answer is that it is not true. The right actually originated during the second year of the Roman Republic, during the consulship of Publius Valerius Publicola in 508 BC. The founding fathers so admired this Roman consul that when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers, they signed the papers under the eudonym "Publius," in honor of Publius Valerius Publicola.

On July 10, Karl Rove will legally have to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to answer a subpoena regarding the Don Siegelman case, and the US Attorney issue. We know that Rove has nothing but contempt for the law and for the constitution. But this isn't because he is crazy. The law is only worth anything, so long as it is enforced. Karl Rove knows that if congress holds him in contempt, the "Justice" Department won't prosecute him. He knows that his party has so corrupted the courts that they won't hold him liable in a civil suit. And even if a district court did hold him liable, either the appeals court, or the Supreme Court, would uphold Rove's right to break the law. So after Rove breaks the law on July 10, congress will have a decision to make. They can hold him in contempt, or they can hold him in inherent contempt. If he is held in inherent contempt, he will be brought before congress by force, and tried by congress. This decision will not be unlike the decision that faced the Roman Senate in 27 BC. In 27 BC, the Roman Senate decided to abdicate all of its remaining powers to the executive. The result was the destruction of the Roman Republic, and the creation of the Roman Empire

The party, and the world, have realized that Obama is our nominee. So now, the endless guessing game begins. What was it that ultimately defeated Hillary? Was it her decision to skip the caucuses? Was it her reckless spending in 2007? Was it her failure to take Obama seriously? Was it her decision to shift into general election mode early, and vote for war with Iran? There are many possibilities. However most, if not all, of these possibilities have one thing in common: hubris. From the days of Homer, to the days of Rome, hubris was well known in the ancient west. And hubris has always had the same ruinous consequence on those who displayed it.

I have taken a bit of a break from my Hadrian's forum series. I am currently putting together a series of Wikipedia entries on the Roman Constitution. I have separate sections for the Roman Kingdom, Republic and Empire, as well as the senate, legislative assemblies, and executive magistrates. When I was putting together one of these entries, I came upon a law that was passed in the year 69, called the Lex de imperio Vespasiani, or the "Law on Vespasian's Imperium". This law was passed to give the Emperor Vespasian the legal authority to be emperor. When I looked at it, I realized that it reads like the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF, passed right after 9/11) or the Iraq War Resolution.

I was reading a new diary on the front page, where house republicans tried to intimidate some people who were going to testify against credit card companies. It occurred to me that during the Roman Republic, there was also a group of corrupt conservative republicans, who waged a war on the middle and working class. In high schools across the country, students are taught that it was Julius Caesar who brought down the Roman Republic. According to the conventional reasoning, Caesar seized a tyranny, and passed that power down to his heir, Gaius Octavian (Rome's first emperor, Augustus). The result, supposedly, was the transformation of a constitutional republic into an autocratic empire. That transformation occurred, there can be no doubt. But what caused it to occur? A line of reasoning has developed that Caesar's rise was a reaction to this transformation, not its cause. The thinking is that it was actually the corrupt conservative republican aristocracy in the senate which was responsible for that transformation. And it seems that our own corrupt conservative republican aristocracy is taking us down the same path.

As a recent convert to the Obama movement, I want to take some time to discuss some parallels that I had long ago realized. I do see many parallels between the American Republic today, and the Roman Republic of antiquity. I always keep in my mind the saying that, over time, while history doesn't repeat, it often does rhyme. So today I want to compare the early political career of the greatest orator of the Roman Republic, Marcus Tullius Cicero, to that of the great orator of the American Republic, Barack Obama.

For those who have not yet noticed, today is a leap day. Normally, February only has 28 days. The story of why the leap day was created begins during the era of the Roman Kingdom, in the 8th century BC. The western calendar is the standard calendar used around the world today, much like English is the standard international language. But the calendar we use is actually a modified version of the Roman calendar from the early Roman Republic (which itself had derived from the calendar used during the Roman Kingdom). Julius Caesar modified this calendar in 46 BC, two years before he was assassinated. Other than a slight modification by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the calendar we use today is almost identical to the one that Julius Caesar had created in 46 BC. Caesar modified the calendar because of a major defect in the early calendar. His solution for that problem was the creation of the leap day, February 29.

When I build my Wikipedia entry on the Constitution of the Roman Republic, I do various types of analysis in order to produce a better entry. One such analysis has shown me yet another comparison between the ultimate destruction of the Roman Republic (and creation of the Roman Empire), and the current state of our own terminally declining Republic. Rome was the first world empire (the term "empire" is often used to describe the still constitutional later-Republic) to invent the concept of a unitary executive. The idea was first used by the Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla and then again by the last Dictator Julius Caesar. Both Sulla and Caesar used force to make themselves Dictator. But both only served in that office for a couple of years. It was Caesar's adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavian (known to posterity as the first Roman Emperor, Augustus), who used the principle of a Unitary Executive to finally destroy the Roman Constitution, and its Republic along with it.

The Federalist Papers were a collection of 85 essays, which argued for the creation of a new American Republic, and for the ratification of the constitution. The authors were Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. They signed the Federalist Papers with the allonym "Publius." The Publius whom they were referring to was Publius Valerius Publicola, who served as one of the first consuls of the Roman Republic. The consuls were the supreme military and civil leaders of the Roman Republic, like our president (except that two consuls would always be elected to serve together, and the term in office was for just one year). Publius played a major role in the expulsion of the last King of Rome, the tyrant Tarquin Superbus. In his four consulships, he not only prevented Tarquin from reestablishing his tyranny, but he also established much of the early Roman Constitution. As such, the founding fathers who wrote the Federalist Papers (who had also fought against their own tyrannical king) saw themselves as doing for the American Republic at its founding, what Publius had done for the Roman Republic at its founding.

Most Americans today are familiar with the Roman Emperors. They know of people such as Caligula and Nero. But for the first century of the American Republic, the Romans that most Americans were familiar with were from the era before Julius Caesar and the creation of the Roman Empire. The early Americans were not interested in the depraved emperors, but rather in virtuous Romans such as Tiberius Gracchus, Fabius Maximus, Cicero, Cato, Scipio Africanus and Cincinnatus. It was the Republic of these Romans that the American founding fathers attempted to model our Republic after. These Romans, like our own founding fathers, were the great patriots (a word deriving from the Latin pater, meaning "father") of their day. Of those Romans, George Washington was the most interested in Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. George Washington was seen as an American Cincinnatus. Washington served as the first president of the Society of the Cincinnati, named in the honor of Cincinnatus. Later, the city of Cincinnati Ohio was named in honor of Cincinnatus. Like Washington, Cincinnatus served his country, retired to his farm, and came out of retirement in order to save his country. And then, like Washington, Cincinnatus refused to be given the permanent powers of a monarch, and resigned his office.

The Roman Republic was (according to legend) founded in 509 BC, when the tyrant King Tarquin Superbus was expelled from the city. Over the next 300 years, Rome fought a series of wars. At the beginning of this period, Rome controlled nothing outside of the city of Rome itself. At the end of this period, Rome dominated the entire Mediterranean world. And yet it didn't do this under the rule of emperors. It did this under the leadership of annually elected consuls, elected by the people, and overseen by a senate of senior magistrates. In other words, it did this while a lawful republic, functioning under a robust constitution. Most of the land we think of when we think of the "Roman Empire" was acquired during the period of the Republic. It was its constitution that enabled this. According to contemporary historians, such as Polybius, this expansion never would have occurred if it had not been for the Roman constitution. And one such series of wars that resulted in this domination of the Mediterranean world started due to Greek incompetence, and ended due to Greek hubris. The year that this ended, can be described as the "Roman Year", because of one other event that occured that year.

The founding of the American republic began an age of constitutionalism that continues to this day. Most nations today consider themselves republics, and are governed by constitutions (to one degree or another). When the American republic was founded in 1776, very few successful republics had ever existed before. A few short-lived republics had existed in the centuries leading up to this point. However, the only successful republics that had existed before were those in various Greek city-states, as well as the Roman Republic. As such, the founding fathers had few good examples with which to model the American constitution off of. Because of this, the first constitution (the Articles of Confederation) was an abject failure. The founding fathers realized that they needed a good template with which to model the American constitution off of. Thus, they turned to those few examples of successful constitutions. The Greek constitutions weren't well known, and had not governed large territorial areas. Therefore, the American founding fathers turned to the only good example that they had: the Roman Republic. They copied many of the concepts, often in an identical manner, from the constitution of the Roman Republic. One aspect of the Roman constitution that they copied was the Roman Senate.