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Pope Benedict embraces a holocaust denier

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Having long since joined the ranks of the non-believers, I have no personal stake in any particular religious faith, but I must confess that, having had Catholicism pounded in to me at an early age, I still feel a bit of a preference for the old faith. Perhaps the way I feel is a bit like many ex-Republicans feel about the party that has forced their departure.

For it appears that the Catholic Church, like the Republicans,has decided that it’s future is in its base, and only in its base. The Church that requires each of its adherents to agree on the unknowable: the moment of the beginning of life, is not so exacting when it comes to unquestioned historical fact:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has increasingly moved in line with traditionalists who are hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

A theologian who has grappled with the church’s diminished status in a secular world, Benedict has sought to foster a more ardent, if smaller, church over one with looser faith.

…

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of St. Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, also called Vatican II. Archbishop Lefebvre made the men bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.

Another “bishop” that the Pope has re-admitted to the faith believes that the event of 9/11 were masterminded by the federal government. It should be noted, too, that the Pope apparently reached out to these people; they did not come crawling back.

There is, I think, a parallel here with the Republican party. For years it catered to an ever shrinking base. Its successes masked the underlying dynamic of its shrinking appeal beyond the base. It took a while for the reality of the modern Republican party to shrink in for its old adherents, but when it did, they melted away, leaving it exposed as a regional party of dead enders. It will come back, but only when it finds a way to appeal beyond the crazy people to whom it has hitched its wagon.

The Catholic Church has been around a lot longer than the Republican party, but nothing lasts forever. After all, the religion of Zeus and Jove existed at least as long. It has nearly died in Europe, and it hangs on in America much like the Republican party hung on here in the Northeast for a while-by the willingness of its hereditary adherents to overlook its faults and excesses. But, as with the Republicans, the Church’s insistence on intolerance and rigidity in an increasingly tolerant America will eventually lead to its collapse. The Catholic Church is, in some ways, more vulnerable than the Republicans. Republicans can count on a financial base of support from their religious nuts and their corporate sponsors. The Church, having lost all secular power, and any influence in Europe, relies on American Catholics for its financial lifeline. Long before they formally leave the Church, they will start withdrawing financial support. A future Pope will have to decide whether dogma or money is more important. My own experience leads me predict that the financial issues will prevail. If not, then there will come a time, at least in this country, when American Catholics will decide that they have had enough, and Benedict, or his successor, will surely get the smaller, if more ardent, Church he is seeking.


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Obama’s First Address to the Nation

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Obama has updated the weekly radio address. It’s on youtube now.

Sounds like he’s listened to Al Gore on the power grid issue. Isn’t it great to have a president who knows what he’s talking about, and makes sense to boot?


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Friday Night Music-Don McLean

Friday, January 23, 2009

One of the weirder moments in the Inaugural concert was Garth Brooks singing “American Pie”. He chose to stick to the chorus and didn’t sing the verses. It’s an odd song, to say the least, to sing at a concert that is delivering a message of hope and optimism. The song does neither. It reminds me of Republicans using Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a patriotic anthem. Doesn’t anyone listen to lyrics? Anyway, Brooks’ performance at least gave me an idea for a Friday Night song. I suppose this song has become a bit of a cliche, but I like it.

http://www.youtube.com/v/iMlzfpwJZuc&hl=en&fs=1“>


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Obama does bad

Friday, January 23, 2009

Yesterday I noted that Obama had done a great thing in dismantling a portion of the Bush cloak of secrecy be repealing Bush’s executive order on presidential records. Today, I’m sorry to report (you won’t see much about this in the press, I would suspect) that he has taken a huge step down the Bushian road by adopting Bush’s legal position in the wiretapping arena. There are two issues involved. The first came up in a case in which two American lawyers are suing the government for illegal spying. Now, in order to sue someone you need to have “standing”, meaning, basically that you have to prove that you were injured by the person you are suing.

No one disputes that the two plaintiffs were wiretapped without a warrant. The problem is that they found out when the government released a “top secret” document to them revealing that fact. The government moved to put the genie back in the bottle, and a judge has decided that he won’t allow it. The government has taken an appeal from a pretrial order in which the judge ruled that the document in question could be used by the plaintiffs to prove they were spied upon:

The Obama administration urged a federal judge on Friday to stay enforcement of a ruling favoring the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging President George W. Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

Justice Department special counsel Anthony Coppolino told U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker during a 60-minute hearing here that the appellate courts should review his Jan. 5 decision allowing classified evidence into the case, a position the Obama administration took in court documents the day before.

Without the classified evidence, Coppolino said, the government wins the case by default, and two American lawyers who claimed they were unlawfully spied upon can’t pursue their lawsuit.

…

The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo – sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the Top Secret memo to them, then successfully demanded its return. The memo was barred from the lawsuit through years of litigation, until Walker recently ordered the government to turn it over, after the plaintiffs successfully gathered unclassified evidence to support their case.

So the government, Obama’s government, is asking the court to allow the government to avoid accountability for its own actions by, in effect, turning an undisputed fact into one that cannot be proven. There is something rather Orwellian about it, and certainly something Bushian. In effect they are saying, “Yes we did it, but we’re declaring the evidence that we did it out of bounds”.

But it gets much worse. Obama has also committed himself to defending the grant of retroactive immunity he claimed to oppose back in the summer. Recall that he supposedly held his nose and voted for the amended FISA bill, despite the immunity provision, which he claimed to oppose. But that’s in the past:

The incoming Obama administration will vigorously defend congressional legislation immunizing U.S. telecommunication companies from lawsuits about their participation in the Bush administration’s domestic spy program.

That was the assessment Thursday by Eric Holder, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general, who made the statement during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A court challenge questioning the legality of the legislation is pending in U.S. District Court in San Francisco — where the judge in the case wanted to know what the Obama administration’s position was.

It is hard to see how the Congress can immunize unconstitutional behavior. Even if it can, it is hardly sound policy. And recall, the real reason for this legislation was not to protect the telecoms, but to protect the Bushie co-conspirators. Obama talks about ushering in an era of responsibility. You and I are going to be expected to be responsible, but apparently no one will be held to answer for the Bush era crimes.

Obama is a vast, vast improvement over Bush, but we’ll be no better than Republicans if we don’t call him out when he messes with our freedoms. We now know for sure, as we always knew to a moral certainty, that the spying wasn’t confined to terrorist or suspected terrorists. It’s recently been revealed that the NSA spied on members of the press, among other groups. The price of liberty, it has been said, is eternal vigilance. Like anyone else in a position of power, Obama will bear watching. His apparent comfort with large scale spying on the American people is disquieting to say the least.


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More Silly hat Pics from Inaugural day

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I was put on notice by my spouse that I should post these pictures, which were sent to us by one of the other attendees at the bash at the Par Four. I posted a number of pictures of people wearing a silly hat. Little did I know that someone got a picture of me wearing said hat (I have no memory, but pictures don’t lie). While I am not a Christian, I can’t argue with the maxim that you should do unto others as you would want done unto you. So the picture must go up, along with a couple of others taken that day. Lately I’ve made it a practice to avoid identifying people in these pictures, so you’ll just have to guess which one is me, which shouldn’t be hard.


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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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