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Obama does good

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Somewhat lost in the flurry of presidential orders of the last few days is this one, revoking Bush’s executive order allowing incumbent presidents and ex-presidents to exercise absolute control over access to their records held in the National Archives. Bush’s order went so far as to allow a president to exercise control from beyond the grave:

The former President may designate a representative (or series or group of alternative representatives, as the former President in his discretion may determine) to act on his behalf for purposes of the Presidential Records Act and this order. Upon the death or disability of a former President, the former President’s designated representative shall act on his behalf for purposes of the Act and this order, including with respect to the assertion of constitutionally based privileges. In the absence of any designated representative after the former President’s death or disability, the family of the former President may designate a representative (or series or group of alternative representatives, as they in their discretion may determine) to act on the former President’s behalf for purposes of the Act and this order, including with respect to the assertion of constitutionally based privileges.

Bush’s order allowed either an ex-president’s wishes to control, even where the incumbent president disagreed, though it allowed the incumbent president to veto an ex-president’s decision to allow access. The order took a statute, the intent of which was to broaden access to presidential records, and “amended” it to make non-disclosure the default.

You may remember from civics class that in this country laws are allegedly made by Congress, but in this case, as in many others, Bush transmuted the executive order into a legislative instrument.

As with so many of Bush’s power grabs, this was done in a way that made it very difficult to challenge in court. According to wikipedia, a lawsuit challenging Bush’s action was partly successful, in that one provision was struck down, but the rest of the case was dismissed for lack of ripeness, meaning that the plaintiff could not establish that abuses had yet taken place.

Obama’s order allows a former president to assert a privilege, but essentially allows the Archivist of the United States to overrule the former president, and the incumbent president to overrule the Archivist. Dead presidents need not apply.

Bush’s order was a two-fer. It violated the constitutional separation of powers and it struck at the heart of open government. What is so heartening about this act on Obama’s part is that it was not something on everyone’s radar. Had he done nothing no one would have noticed. It’s a sign that he’s serious about getting back to constitutional first principles.

Now, if only he’d go back to his original position on wiretaps.


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Can’t stop saying good-bye

Wednesday, January 21, 2009


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Holding up Holder

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A short time ago I expressed some cautious optimism about the possibility that the Obama administration might go after the torturers. My basic argument was that a flat out declaration of intent to do so would give Bush the cover to pardon his henchman, on the grounds that any such prosecutions would be political harassment, etc. Equivocation was therefore in order, no matter their intentions.

At least one Republican Senator appears to have come to the conclusion that Eric Holder has left himself too much wiggle room:

In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General nominee Eric Holder unequivocally declared that “waterboarding is torture” and has signaled a willingness to investigate Bush officials. But torture advocate Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is holding up the nomination because he wants to know exactly whether Holder will pursue criminal prosecutions of “intelligence personnel” involved in torture.

Of course Cornyn doesn’t care about the line personnel. It’s the top guys he’s protecting. This may be an early test of the Democrat’s willingness to control the Senate. It may be buried there somewhere, but I couldn’t find anything in the Senate rules giving any Senator the right to hold up a nomination. This may be, like so much else, one of those Senate traditions the Republicans take such pleasure in abusing when their in the minority, and quashing when they hold the power.

In any event, it can’t be a bad sign that the Republicans haven’t received the same message from Holder or Obama as have so many of us on the left. I’m still betting against prosecutions, but I think there’s a glimmer of hope, particularly in light of the fact that more dirt will be coming out soon, as Seymour Hersh promised:

“You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January … ‘You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.’ So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.”

Well, nothing awful happened, (not counting economic meltdowns and Gaza wars) so I’m guessing we’ll be hearing more, and it will be grisly. The pressure may build for some sort of effective response. As others have noted, this may be one of those issues on which Obama would like to appear to have been pushed into doing something he would very much like to do anyway.

UPDATE: That was quick. Russell Tice was just on Countdown, revealing that (surprise, surprise!) the Bush Administration was spying on people with no suspected links to terrorism.


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Inauguration Day in Groton

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

It has been an almost entirely satisfying day, at least for those of us who watched on television. Bush is gone. The speech was good, though not one for the ages. For those on the front lines, braving the cold and the crowds, the reports filtering in suggest that the folks in charge of crowd control weren’t up to the task. One of our liberal drinkers, who had gotten a ticket to the proceedings, told us via text message that he had waited for hours and never got in to the mall, or anywhere near the Inauguration. My son, who braved the cold from about 5 in the morning, wrote and said he saw people give up after seven hours of waiting, and a woman leaving on a stretcher.

Here in Groton we had a crowd, but no problems accomodating it. Herewith, a few pictures.

Early Arrivals:

A group sporting an array of Obama T-Shirts.

My wife bought a silly hat, and a number of folks made the mistake of wearing it, their punishment being having their pictures immortalized on the internet.

The Noank Contingent

The Moment comes. Obama took the oath of office and the crowd went wild (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof)

Someone even brought a cake

My son sent some pictures from the parade. He was apparently pretty close to Joe Biden:

And he says that, if rumor is to be believed, this is the helicopter taking Bush out of our lives and into the dustbin of history (until, one can hope, he’s in the dock at a war crimes trial):

Tomorrow the hard work begins, but for the rest of the day we can enjoy the moment. A lot of people have worked very hard to make this happen.


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Reminder

Monday, January 19, 2009

It you’re from Groton, or wish you were from Groton, or just don’t have anywhere else to go to to celebrate the end of an error, and the beginning of a truly new era, come to the Par Four Restaurant in Groton (93 Plant Street). People will be arriving about 11:30 and staying until whenever they decide to leave. Early indications are that we’re going to have a good crowd.


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Sunday night music special

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen and a cast of thousands:

I’ve always thought the Democrats should have closed their convention with Pete and assorted others singing this song. This is even better, and he sings all the verses.

UPDATE: Too good to be true. Josh Marshall says it well:

As most of you likely know, the inauguration committee sold HBO the exclusive rights to broadcast yesterday’s inaugural concert festivities. I don’t think that was a good idea since certainly not every American subscribes or can subscribe to HBO. But they at least had it available free on their website. But now it seems that HBO is going over Youtube with a fine tooth comb and having all clips of the event pulled under copyright claims. Want to see the special moment where an 89 year old Pete Seeger sang This Land Is Your Land on the footsteps of the Lincoln Memorial? Tough luck.

You can “watch” the whole concert on the HBO website, if you’re willing to sit through endless pauses. There must be thousands of people trying to watch it.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to a commenter, here’s the video.


UPDATE 3: I loved this comment posted at youtube, which I just had to reproduce:

One cant help but smile when one remembers that Pete Seeger went up before the House of Un American activities,was black listed ..and 50 years later they’re all dead, and he’s playing Woody Guthrie songs in front of the Lincoln Memorial for an African American president.


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Who’s the worst president of all?

Sunday, January 18, 2009

We have had 43 presidents. About a week ago I decided that I would take a crack at making the case for Bush as the very worst of the lot. It quickly became apparent that it would take a while, so I tried to be a bit methodical about it. I used an outline program to try to structure it, researched through the various computer “notebooks” I’ve kept for the past five years for examples of particularly heinous behavior, and sprinkled my work liberally with links, to prove that if anyone was making this stuff up, it wasn’t me.

The links turned out to be my downfall, because try as I might I couldn’t cut and paste my work into a blog post without losing all the links. A better man than I might have re-inserted all the links, a tedious task and beyond the limits of my patience. A lesser, but perhaps wiser man would have chucked the whole thing. I chose the middle path of turning the whole thing into a PDF, in which the links survive.

For anyone interested, I’ve attached it below, just click on the little link. Be warned, it’s 13 pages long. I don’t know how it got so out of hand. If I weren’t a working man, I would seriously consider trying to do it right, as a full fledged book, with actual comparisons to the other “worsts”, who really can’t hold a candle to our guy. George Bush deserves the recognition and we deserve some credit for living through this and being among the few who, from the very first, recognized the enormity of his ineptitude, venality, incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

The worst of the worst


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It’s cold out

Saturday, January 17, 2009

We are lucky enough to live within walking distance of a state park (Haley Farm), which is on Palmer Cove. So while my property is not waterfront, I am five minutes distance from a waterfront park, saved from destruction over 30 years ago by the Groton Open Spaces Association.

When we woke up this morning my wife’s Iphone informed her that the temperature was one below zero, so I thought it might be fun to get some shots of the cove, which I was sure would be frozen. This is not a common occurrence, by the way, and based on my own unscientific and possibly unreliable observations, it is becoming less common. However, as I’m sure they’ve been saying on Fox for days now, the fact that we’ve had a cold snap is sure proof that global warming is a myth.

I wander. As I did when I got to Haley Farm. Here’s the entrance to Haley Farm Road, where the water of Eccleston Brook meets the water of the cove.

The cove is indeed frozen.

As I proceeded up the path I came upon several deer who were scrounging for food. I’m guessing that these guys didn’t think it was worth expending the energy to run away until they could assess my threat level. This one went into the brush and just stood there. This picture is only slightly cropped from one taken with a wide angle lens. I was no more than 10 feet away from her. Somehow, they’re both more interesting and more photogenic when they’re not chomping on your shrubbery.


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Chris Donovan makes himself look very bad

Saturday, January 17, 2009

I don’t know much about Chris Donovan, the man who replaced Jim Amann as speaker of the Connecticut House, but I was certainly prepared to be well disposed toward him, since he was replacing Jim Amann, a man who truly needed to be replaced. Apparently, Donovan himself didn’t agree with that basic premise, because Amann’s legislative seat was still warm whenDonovan offered him a cushy $120,000.00 job at the legislature. The move isn’t unprecedented, but that doesn’t make in any the less outrageous.

Amann was a terrible Speaker of the House, a man who stood in the way of any meaningful progressive activity in this State and a traitor to the Democratic Party. Somehow, according to Donovan, that all makes him “larger than life”.

So now we taxpayers can indirectly subsidize Amann’s delusional run for governor. Oh wait, I’m sorry, we’re going to be getting real value for that $120,000.00:

Donovan’s office also provided a list of official duties, which states that Amann will be responsible for meeting with lobbyists and summarizing their requests for Donovan; reviewing bonding requests from legislators; and occasionally “working out differences of opinion” on “smaller legislative matters.”

I’m sure that Amann will find all those meetings with lobbyists especially onerous as he runs for governor and tries to fill his campaign war chest. Reviewing bond requests is even more backbreaking. Handing out money to people whose support you are currying is a dirty job, but someone has to do it, I guess. Good thing that Amann is a man of spotless integrity, or one might suspect that he could use this “job” to his own political advantage.


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Friday Night Inaugural Concert

Friday, January 16, 2009

Here we are in the waning days of the Bush Administration. We all have to hope that there’s truly a new day dawning. So, to celebrate, I’ve tried to find some songs that are a bit appropriate.

First, while the lyrics are not precisely apt, there’s enough in here to serve as a not so fond good-bye to George. The Doug Dillard Band:

Next, some geezers who I fondly remember from my youth. Peter, Paul and Mary with John Sebastian on harmonica:

Neil Young:

Finally, the best version, at least in my opinion, of one of the best of Dylan’s songs, and a particularly apt one at this moment. Somehow, the Irish accents seem perfect for this song. The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem:


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