I remember something like this cropped up back in 1992. I heard about a presidential directive that supposedly did something similar, and went so far as to call my Representative to request a copy (which I received...ah, the good ol' days). It was much ado about nothing.

This one sounds more serious, but people need to keep perspective. It's a policy directive. It has no weight as law. They can talk about how they want to run things, but if any president tried to whip this out as How It's Going To Be (TM), the other two branches of government would, at best, flip him off and then get on with trying to salvage things.

I'm not going to worry about this until I start seeing evidence that our military, or at least our domestic (federal AND state/local) police forces are on board. If the president can't enforce his will through one of those groups, this remains a pipedream for a wannabe king.

so far as the executive branch is concerned, and especially so far as the military is concerned. Yes, the executive can be corrected by the courts and, at least in theory overriden by the legislature, but the very premise of this document is that those agencies may not be fully functional--and that they would require executive assistance to regain full functioning. A ruthless White House could use this order to move quite some distance before other branches of government could react in opposition. And the power to change facts on the ground, as Adolf Hitler knew and Dick Cheney knows, is the power to dictate the nation's agenda for the immediate future. It is entirely possible that executive seizure of power under this order might never be fully redressed even if conditions returned to normal.

No, it certainly isn't law as far as the military or police are concerned - both have a constitutional and sworn duty to the Constitution, which specifies laws as coming from the legislature.

This is not a minor point. By your logic, anything the president says will be done by the military/police. Also by your logic, the president can declare a dubious emergency and seize power without any problem. But then why not simply, and equivalently, seize power directly? All these conspiracy theories assume that the only thing standing between the President and absolute power are the details of an order he himself issued. If the path to dictatorship in this country were that easy, it would have been followed already. Ron Rosenbaum was hysterical in the 70s and the passage of time has not sharpened his mind.

Why should President Bush worry about the military or police forces being on board when he has Blackwater USA?