Johnsen, who was deputy assistant attorney general at OLC in the Clinton administration, wrote in an August 2007 UCLA Law Review article that one of the most important roles of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the primary legal adviser to the executive branch, is to know when to say no to the president.

The “paramount principle that should guide OLC’s work is the imperative to provide accurate and honest legal appraisals, unbiased by policymakers’ preferred outcomes,” she writes in the article, “Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power.”

These principles come from a set of ten commandments laid down in December 2004 by Johnsen and 18 other alumni of the Office of Legal Counsel, after learning about (and being appropriately appalled by) the Bybee/Yoo torture memos.

“The Guidelines,” as Johnsen calls them, “come down squarely on the side of accuracy over advocacy, and most of its ten principles follow from and elaborate on the Guidelines’ first and most fundamental principle: OLC should provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies … In short, OLC must be prepared to say no to the President.”

For those looking to the Obama administration for a change in direction, here she is.

It’s an old Republican line of attack, but Obama’s latest ad throws it in Sen. John McCain’s face.

Zeroing in on last night’s exchange about McCain’s health-care plan — which taxes employer benefits — the new ad offers a succinct summation from the VP Debate:

PRODUCTION NOTES: Sen. Joseph Biden’s aides promised a prosecutor’s brief for the debate, and this ad carries on that style. Terse messages flash on a black screen, while soundbites from last night are aired. It’s “just the facts,” straight to camera, and Biden looks deadly serious about the health-care choice between the two tickets this year.

It’s a sharp contrast to Alaksa Gov. Sarah Palin — who is depicted as unable to “explain” her own plan.

Anyway, in a segment on Friday, a caller raised big questions about how Republicans can possibly seize the change mantle, if that means they’d have to clean up their own mess; while another suggested that the public is partly complicit in supporting a failing press.

Below are excerpts for interested readers:

Michael (Carmel Valley): Thank you, Peter. Hello, Ari. I just wanna make a couple quick comments about the Palin-McCain ticket, which I think, in some ways that’s what it’s become….one of the most important comments made during this campaign has gone almost under the radar, and it happens to be Jon Stewart interviewing Mike Huckabee—do you remember this one, where he [suggested] to Mike Huckabee that his position is basically, quote, “Our party is the only party that can clean up the mess made by our party.” And I think that’s the sort of thing we have got to get our arms around.

Ari: I think Michael’s right. I think that is the narrative that the Republicans settled on. But we should be careful here, in this sort of season of discontent, to understand that just as Democrats dislike it when politicians in the party move to the right — out of the perception that they can get votes that way, right or wrong — that worries the left.

Well, there is something positive for Barack Obama here, that after months of “Experience,” [and] “Ready to Lead” and “Country First” from the McCain campaign, they have settled here, in their final hours, on his message of “Change.” Now it’s working — that they’re co-opting part of it — and that Sarah Palin brought, as The New York Times put it, the “stamp of history to the ticket.” That’s not an insignificant thing — apart from ideology and apart from the lies we were discussing earlier.

But it also represents Democrats, for once, defining what is politically palpable and nationally desirable, and the trick for Obama is not to let it be co-opted. But they’re running on change because Obama made change universally desired in this electorate. That is something worth remembering…. they [now] value change over experience in their own politicking.

Pat (Humboldt): Hi Peter B. and Ari. The media will keep lying to us as long as we keep paying them to lie to us. As long as we subscribe to cable, as long as we subscribe to newspapers, they will keep lying to us…

Peter: Well, they’re trying to distract their way to the finish line, and some of it is working, right, Ari?

Ari: Yeah, I think distracting works. I think you’re right that there’s a market here, and if you can get away with it, it’s supported. There are changes–I was on Rachel Maddow’s radio show tonight before this. I think she’s great and I think she’s doing well with a marketable, successful show on television now. And then obviously, I’ll say it out of self-interest but not with any ambivalence, the places that I write for—The Nation, reader-supported since 1865 and not corporate; The Washington Independent, a different model but a non-profit, which allows us to do different things than corporate media. And you can go to those sites and support them any way you can. We appreciate it—it helps.