Journalists who use Twitter as a real-time way to react to breaking news were quick to tweet about it. Here are some of our favorites:

https://twitter.com/nickconfessore/status/334044996997103616

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/334050215864696834

https://twitter.com/HuffPostMedia/status/334053329028128769

https://twitter.com/ethanklapper/status/334053677448957952

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/334051864196816899

https://twitter.com/carr2n/status/334055243379785728

https://twitter.com/NYTFridge/status/334055971137667073

Mr. Klein, of course, took over as chancellor of the city’s new Department of Education in 2002, after newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his political muscle to scrap the patronage haven that was the old Board of Education, replacing it with a mayoral agency under his direct control.

As the first chancellor of the post-board era, Mr. Klein has presided over rising test scores, an end to the counterproductive practice of social promotion, the creation of smaller high schools and the expansion of charter schools. Public school parents and students have more choices, greater opportunities and brighter prospects now than they did under the old system.

Mr. Klein’s success is a tribute to his determination and vision, but that would have only gotten him so far. New York has had other chancellors who were just as determined. The secret ingredient of his tenure has been his nontraditional background: He was the chairman and chief executive officer of Bertelsmann Inc., the giant media company, before Mr. Bloomberg tapped him for the schools job. Before his stint with Bertelsmann, Mr. Klein served as an assistant attorney general with the U.S. Department of Justice.

In other words, Mr. Klein is not a career educator, at least in the traditional, bureaucratic sense. That allowed him to see problems, and solutions, that others might have missed or simply dismissed as unworkable. His boss, Mr. Bloomberg, also happens to be a nontraditional mayor—it’s no coincidence that the two men have worked so well together, and produced such noteworthy success.

When this newspaper endorsed Mr. Obama in the New York primary—the first major print organization to do so—we recognized him as a man who was not wedded to the politics and disputes of the past. We saw him as a candidate ready to challenge conventional approaches to the nation’s deep-seated problems.

The American people ratified that judgment on Nov. 4. Now, the president-elect has a chance to demonstrate that he is ready to tackle the nation’s education system in new and interesting ways. Hiring Joel Klein is one way to show that the Obama administration is ready to explore and implement educational policies for the new century.

The national teachers’ unions may oppose Mr. Klein’s promotion, but they would, wouldn’t they? Part of Mr. Klein’s appeal is his willingness to challenge the unions for control of the classrooms. His impatience with outdated work rules and other anachronisms has allowed him to create stronger schools and better student performance.

Yes, we’d hate to lose him. But our loss would be the nation’s gain.

Very much by contrast, the ever amnesiac, whiny and incompetent head of the Bush Justice Department asserted in a brief statement that his term in public service had been “noble and honorable”—to the extent, one imagines, that he can still recall any of it. And for perhaps the 7,000th time in that term, made a crass look-over-there reference to his humble immigrant roots, saying “I have lived the American dream.”

Though in a certain sense, Gonzales—who presided over the most rampant politicization of federal law enforcement since Watergate—had a point: the man whom President Bush affectionately nicknamed “Fredo” was living the gaudy, vindictive version of that immigrant dream immortalized in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. And like his Coppola namesake, he was now getting thrown overboard—only not for breaking faith with the family, but for hewing all too closely, and ineptly, to the politics-first strictures of the Bush governing style.

“This administration holds lawyers and our legal system in disdain,” says Jonathan Shapiro, a former assistant US attorney who now divides his time between teaching law and writing screenplays in Los Angeles. “They don’t like the legal system as it’s now oriented, and they don’t want to give power to lawyers.” So in Gonzales, whose legal career launched in earnest when Bush appointed him to the Texas bench, they found the perfect party hack to administer and defend an agenda freely bending the rule of law to the extension of executive power. “I was chief of staff for Cruz Bustamente, the lieutenant governor out here who was the Gore co-chair in California,” Shapiro recalls. “And we did research on Gonzales, when his name was out there as a potential Supreme Court appointment. He was the guy who did such a bad job vetting clemency appeals in Texas’ Death Row cases. So it’s not like we didn’t know the guy was a hack who would put politics over life-and-death issues.”

Gonzales’ extreme fealty to his White House patrons had, indeed, made his departure all but inevitable, since it eroded the crucial, if informal, brief of judicial autonomy that the Justice Department needs to operate, particularly for the career attorneys who make up the rank and file of the federal prosecution business. “I think it became very clear that it was long past time when he could continue to function, and the Justice Department was also suffering extreme morale problems,” says Bruce Fein, a leading Republican critic of the Bush White House’s legal excesses, and a veteran of the Nixon and Ford Departments of Justice. “I know from reliable sources that when Gonzales would go out to visit U.S. attorneys offices, no one would show up for his sessions. And when there were people in attendance, he’d have to organize claps, where people would stand up to applaud. His credibility is shot in Congress. He probably thought if he didn’t leave, he would be one of the most embarrassed and discredited people in the history of American government.”

Which raises the question of who the Bush administration should bring on to begin reclaiming some of Justice’s credibility, provided that senior White House officials still car about such things. “Where’s Ed Levi now that we need him?” asks legal historian Stanley Kutler, referring to the eminent legal scholar Gerald Ford tapped to head the Justice Department after Nixon’s main justice henchman, John Mitchell, had debauched it with that White House’s paranoid political agendas. “At the time, Levi was president of the University of Chicago, and a former law school dean. Ford brought him on to shake up Justice, and that’s what he did. He got his good friend John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Ford understood that was internally what the department needed—that the department was so politicized and so demoralized by Nixon, it needed a strong signal that this was a new era.”

But doesn’t that sort of strategy require, you know, a Gerald Ford in the role of White House Decider? Mr. Kutler laughs bitterly. “That’s right—I didn’t string it all together. What world am I living in?”

Mr. Fein, too, sees little prospect that the Bush White House will heed the lessons of Justice departments past. “I was there when Levi was appointed. You want someone who can look under the rug and find the family jewels, as the expression goes.”

That won’t be the main order of business in Justice during the last lame-duck months of the Bush era—which is not to say, as Mr. Fein notes, that Congress will sit still for another crony appointment, as it did so docilely when Gonzales came up for confirmation. “The Democrats aren’t going to be so dumb as to not call on a new nominee to look into all these questions. You’ve got to look into warrantless domestic surveillance, you’ve got to look into the perjury and other charges with the U.S. attorneys scandal, and you’ve got to do the same with executive privilege claims arising out of Congress’s investigations there,” Mr. Fein says, ticking off just three of the best known failures of Gonzales’s pitiful career at Justice. (His most lasting claim to legal infamy, apart from those botched Texas clemency reviews, may well be his cursory application of the fanciful doctrine of the unitary executive in the defense of detainee torture and the gutting of what he then called the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions, which he carried out during his equally obsequious term as White House counsel.)

And even with Gonzales out of the picture, there’s no reason to believe that the White House will let up on its political Corleone act. Indeed, the personal record of Gonzales in office is not so much the point, some observers say, as the unchallenged executive prerogative that makes a Gonzales appointment—and confirmation--possible. “Gonzales was a failure, but it was a characteristic kind of failure of cronyism,” says Bruce Ackerman, Sterling professor of law at Yale University. “You should recognize the way we go about electing presidents now greatly encourages cronyism in the selection of attorneys general. When the party was centrally important to the nominating process, the president tended to select someone who was strong in the party. With the modern president, when the candidate runs his own campaign, he no longer has to respond to others, in the selection of a crucial cabinet post—and one can argue few posts are as crucial as the attorney general. So you have this rather regular--not inevitable, but striking—pattern of cronyism, sort of starting with Kennedy-Kennedy, then Nixon-Mitchell. In appointing Levi, Ford had a special imperative. And Janet Reno had been more independent, but those were special circumstances, too,” Mr Ackerman says, noting the failed earlier nominations of Clinton cronies Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood to the post.

More fundamentally, Mr Kutler contends, the political DNA of the Bush White House is too deeply imprinted on its everyday operations for anything to change now. Even after deputy Chief of Staff and senior political adviser announced his resignation, after all, President Bush rose to deliver a “foul and nasty” address likening this juncture of the Iraq occupation to the final days of America’s engagement in Vietnam—a performance, in Mr. Kutler’s judgment, that shows “Karl Rove remains embedded in this White House.” The reason, he says, is again plain to anyone who cares to heed the lessons of the Nixon executive branch: “When Nixon reorganized his White House, he put his White House counsel in charge of the domestic policy arm, which was then called the White House Council. It was quite clear that this was a sort of White House mirror for the cabinet, and the offices of all department heads reported to John Ehrlichman,” that White House’s Roveian adviser-cum-enforcer, later fired and jailed for perjury and obstruction of justice. “That structure is now embedded in the American government,” Mr. Kutler says. “We can say that Rove and Bush improved on it, but to me it’s an interesting legal question: How far can Bush’s umbrella extend?”

One thing’s for sure: It’s not a question likely to be taken up by the next Bush-appointed attorney general. Indeed, the final days of the Bush era seem as much as anything to be like the Nixon White House in reverse. Where Bush’s predecessor in scandal imploded in a self-destructive fury of lawbreaking, this administration carelessly sheds cronies in pursuit of an ever-more hermetic brand of executive prerogative, placed carefully and deliberately outside the customary reach of the law. Bush policy makers “want an acquiescent, a somnolent Justice Department,” Mr. Fein says, “which is what they’ve had ever since 9/11.” All the president needs now, of course, is a secret plan to end the war.

Unfortunately, the credibility of Mr. Gonzales—which was never very great—is diminishing further as the facts behind the controversial round of firings continue to emerge. As his excuses and explanations for those dismissals evaporate under scrutiny, what can be seen instead is a familiar pattern of dubious ethics and partisan misconduct.

This story can be traced to the strange firing of Carol Lam, the United States Attorney in San Diego, who had successfully prosecuted former Representative Randy (Duke) Cunningham, the ultra-right Republican and powerful defense-subcommittee chairman whose incessant flag-waving concealed brazen larceny on an unprecedented scale. Ms. Lam deserved praise from every honest conservative for sending Mr. Cunningham to prison, and she deserved their support for her ongoing probe of his confederates on Capitol Hill, on K Street and in the federal bureaucracy. Instead, she felt the wrath of Mr. Cunningham’s Republican colleagues, some of whom sought her dismissal—supposedly because she wasn’t sufficiently zealous in curbing illegal immigration.

But the Justice Department’s last performance evaluation of Ms. Lam, completed in February 2005, described her as “an effective manager and respected leader in the district.” That was typical of the department’s official assessments of the fired prosecutors, despite the public insistence by top Justice officials that the dismissals were related to “performance.”

At the same time last December, highly regarded prosecutors in other districts were dumped under equally suspicious circumstances. Paul Charlton, the U.S. Attorney in Arizona, was let go while investigating corruption allegations against Representative Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), despite sterling evaluations of his integrity and competence. H.E. (Bud) Cummins III, the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, was thrown out to make room for a crony of Karl Rove who specializes in opposition research. (Could that possibly be related to the Presidential candidacy of a certain former Arkansas resident?)

And David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, was forced to resign after complaints from the state’s most powerful Republican politicians that he had not yet completed a corruption probe of a local Democrat. Both Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson called Mr. Iglesias before last November’s midterm election to talk about that case, although both insist that they meant to impose no “pressure” on him.

According to Mr. Iglesias, however, Mr. Domenici contacted him at home to ask whether he would issue the desired indictment of the Democratic official before November. When he said no, the Senator hung up angrily. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Iglesias said that the obnoxious phone call caused him such revulsion that he felt “sick.”

Mr. Domenici, who also brought pressure on the Justice Department to fire Mr. Iglesias, claims to have been dissatisfied with his “inability” to expedite criminal cases. But Justice Department statistics show that Mr. Iglesias improved the speed of prosecutions in his office, and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey has told reporters that he regarded Mr. Iglesias as one of the best prosecutors in the country.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who actually executed the firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys has since quit himself. Michael Battle, former director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, resigned last month amid reports that he had been “unhappy” in carrying out the hatchet work for Mr. Gonzales.

News of Mr. Battle’s resignation was followed by an allegation of a threat by a top Justice official to the fired U.S. Attorneys, warning that if they didn’t stop talking about their dismissals, the consequences could be unpleasant. The McClatchy newspapers reported that two of the fired U.S. Attorneys, speaking on condition that they remained unnamed, said they had heard from a top Gonzales aide that “if any of them continued to criticize the administration for their ousters, previously undisclosed details about the reasons they were fired might be released.” The Justice Department’s press office denied, of course, that any such threats had been delivered.

The U.S. Attorney purge is important because federal prosecutors are supposed to be nonpartisan and free from political meddling. Their highly sensitive and powerful positions include responsibility for policing the politicians, and their independence distinguishes American law enforcement from the disreputable charades of banana republics and authoritarian regimes.

It is troubling, but not surprising, that the Bush administration and its political allies have violated those traditional protections for partisan advantage. Now, the appropriate Senate and House committees should not rest until those machinations are fully exposed—and all of the players involved, including their colleagues from New Mexico, are held accountable.

"It's pretty bad," said Ted Lazarus, campaign spokesman.

One voter report they got was of a fellow dressed as a state trooper--gun and all--who has been touring with Republican poll watchers. This morning, he showed up at Lincoln High School. The trooper claimed to be off-duty, and Department of Justice monitors asked him to leave the site. The trooper showed up at another polling place later in the day.

Around 9:30 this morning, a woman complained that after voting for Stewart-Cousins, her fingers were sticky--and later, that woman's aunt reported that the lever for Stewart-Cousins was stuck. The campaign says that the DOJ monitors called in a technician, who confirmed glue on the voting machine.

The campaign also reports that a lawyer (and Democrat) confronted a group of men at yet another polling place who were attempting to hand lists of voters to be excluded to poll workers.

"They've been trying to do it all over the district," said Mr. Lazarus.

This is all unconfirmed at the moment. If you have more information, let us know.

--Choire Sicha

The DOJ will also be on the ground in Arizona.

The Voting Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is at 1-800-253-3931. Just in case.

-- Azi Paybarah

Rudy Giuliani, who says he's "seriously considering" running for president, wants people to help him help others.

In a new blast email soliciting donations of between $25 and $500 for candidates in federal races this year, Giuliani urges recipients to rally around the White House and the Republican Congressional majority:

Giuliani ends the note by asking readers to go to the Solutions America website -- "so that I can be on the forefront of helping our Republican candidates in these important 2006 elections."

-- Josh Benson

Worth noting that Chuck and Hillary were the only two United States Senators to vote against the bill in the Senate, opposing its mandatory I.D. check. Certainly, car-poor New York presents an unusual challenge in a country where everyone has a drivers license.

But still, the lawsuit suggests that New York's state government is, indeed, extraordinarily screwed up.

The Pentagon has a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA). The courtroom is in a windowless room on the top floor of the Department of Justice. There are seven rotating judges. The court meets in secret, with no published opinions or public records. No one, except the FISA judge involved and the Department of Justice, knows what is done. No one, except the government and the FISA judge, knows at whom the warrants are aimed. There is no review by anyone. Over 12,000 search warrants permitting eavesdropping, surveillance and break-ins have been sought by the government. Only once has the FISA court denied a warrant.

The FISA court has issued more warrants than the more than 1,000 district judges in the federal system.

The Pentagon has already expanded its domestic-surveillance activity beyond any previous time in history. It breaks into homes, wiretaps and eavesdrops at will, and builds secret dossiers on citizens while arguing that there can be no judicial review of its activities. President George W. Bush argues that there can be no judicial review of any decision he makes when he decides whether an alien or an American citizen is or is not an enemy combatant. Congress supports this; so does the judiciary.

The expansion of Presidential powers and the expansion of police powers is the single most important issue facing this country. It is safe to say the new Supreme Court and a majority of Congress (both Democrats and Republicans) are prepared to give Mr. Bush a blank check. On Nov. 15, Carl Levin, the liberal Democratic Senator from Michigan and an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, joined his Republican counterpart from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, in supporting legislation validating the President’s Alice-in-Wonderland legal system and the expansion of his police powers. The Senate vote was 79 to 16 in favor.

What’s more, the Patriot Act had been extended. For the last three years, the President has justified torture, and Congress will soon give him legal permission to use it.

If or when there’s another terrorist attack, the government will seek more powers, claiming that it shows current laws are inadequate. We will certainly see, as we recently saw in Britain, the head of government ask for 90-day detentions of terror suspects without access to court. The attempt to end habeas corpus started at Guantánamo; it is now spreading to the rest of America.

Five years after we opened the Guantánamo prison, not one person in that prison has been found guilty of anything.

The legal system to treat the new prisoners of the war on terror, created out of thin air, disgraces us. No one ever before suggested such a legal system—not during the Civil War, not during World War I or World War II, and not during the Cold War.

We are better than military commissions, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act and “rendition”—the sending of prisoners overseas to be tortured at C.I.A.-controlled prisons.

This country is approaching a dangerous turning point. There has long been a desire and a political movement in America for restrictions on democratic rights, for an authoritarian government propelled by a combination of religious and nationalistic fervor. The helplessness caused by the events of Sept. 11 and the domestic and international war against Muslim “terrorists” deepened this desire. Never before was there such a possibility of such long-term constitutional violations, because there has never before been such an open-ended war.

In Weimar Germany, a feeling of helplessness led to Hitler’s rise and the creation of the ultimate police state. There are similarities—and, of course, very significant differences—between America in the 21st century and Germany in the 1920’s.

Mr. Bush has suggested that he was chosen by God to lead the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Nazi government, against religion, saw the salvation of the German people in messianic terms.

Many liberals and conservatives are concerned where all of this might lead. Professor Fritz Stern, a professor of German studies at Columbia University, pointed out that Hitler saw himself as “the instrument of providence” who fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” Paul Craig Roberts, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former Wall Street Journal editor, writes of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—he says the hype about terrorism serves little or “no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.”

The pressure for fascism comes not just from the top. Without the people’s support, the Weimar government would not have been overthrown.

The change here is incremental and harder to see.

How we conduct the “war on terror” tells the American people who we are and what this country stands for. America has the oldest and most dynamic democracy in the world. It can right itself if the people want it bad enough to fight harder.

The Pentagon has a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA). The courtroom is in a windowless room on the top floor of the Department of Justice. There are seven rotating judges. The court meets in secret, with no published opinions or public records. No one, except the FISA judge involved and the Department of Justice, knows what is done. No one, except the government and the FISA judge, knows at whom the warrants are aimed. There is no review by anyone. Over 12,000 search warrants permitting eavesdropping, surveillance and break-ins have been sought by the government. Only once has the FISA court denied a warrant.

The FISA court has issued more warrants than the more than 1,000 district judges in the federal system.

The Pentagon has already expanded its domestic-surveillance activity beyond any previous time in history. It breaks into homes, wiretaps and eavesdrops at will, and builds secret dossiers on citizens while arguing that there can be no judicial review of its activities. President George W. Bush argues that there can be no judicial review of any decision he makes when he decides whether an alien or an American citizen is or is not an enemy combatant. Congress supports this; so does the judiciary.

The expansion of Presidential powers and the expansion of police powers is the single most important issue facing this country. It is safe to say the new Supreme Court and a majority of Congress (both Democrats and Republicans) are prepared to give Mr. Bush a blank check. On Nov. 15, Carl Levin, the liberal Democratic Senator from Michigan and an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, joined his Republican counterpart from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, in supporting legislation validating the President’s Alice-in-Wonderland legal system and the expansion of his police powers. The Senate vote was 79 to 16 in favor.

What’s more, the Patriot Act had been extended. For the last three years, the President has justified torture, and Congress will soon give him legal permission to use it.

If or when there’s another terrorist attack, the government will seek more powers, claiming that it shows current laws are inadequate. We will certainly see, as we recently saw in Britain, the head of government ask for 90-day detentions of terror suspects without access to court. The attempt to end habeas corpus started at Guantánamo; it is now spreading to the rest of America.

Five years after we opened the Guantánamo prison, not one person in that prison has been found guilty of anything.

The legal system to treat the new prisoners of the war on terror, created out of thin air, disgraces us. No one ever before suggested such a legal system—not during the Civil War, not during World War I or World War II, and not during the Cold War.

We are better than military commissions, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act and “rendition”—the sending of prisoners overseas to be tortured at C.I.A.-controlled prisons.

This country is approaching a dangerous turning point. There has long been a desire and a political movement in America for restrictions on democratic rights, for an authoritarian government propelled by a combination of religious and nationalistic fervor. The helplessness caused by the events of Sept. 11 and the domestic and international war against Muslim “terrorists” deepened this desire. Never before was there such a possibility of such long-term constitutional violations, because there has never before been such an open-ended war.

In Weimar Germany, a feeling of helplessness led to Hitler’s rise and the creation of the ultimate police state. There are similarities—and, of course, very significant differences—between America in the 21st century and Germany in the 1920’s.

Mr. Bush has suggested that he was chosen by God to lead the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Nazi government, against religion, saw the salvation of the German people in messianic terms.

Many liberals and conservatives are concerned where all of this might lead. Professor Fritz Stern, a professor of German studies at Columbia University, pointed out that Hitler saw himself as “the instrument of providence” who fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” Paul Craig Roberts, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former Wall Street Journal editor, writes of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—he says the hype about terrorism serves little or “no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.”

The pressure for fascism comes not just from the top. Without the people’s support, the Weimar government would not have been overthrown.

The change here is incremental and harder to see.

How we conduct the “war on terror” tells the American people who we are and what this country stands for. America has the oldest and most dynamic democracy in the world. It can right itself if the people want it bad enough to fight harder.