Category: America

I wonder what it’s like to be in President Bush’s world, a world unconstrained by checks and balances or, apparently, reality. That’s where it seems our president spends his days, anyway, based on this Boston Globe analysis of the President’s “signing statement” for the Patriot Act renewal.

In the signing statement, Bush (or his staff) wrote that “The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information” (emphasis added). This point was made in response to a requirement in the law that the FBI notify Congress within a certain period of time if they have used the expanded powers under the act.

Of course, on the one hand, the president has to make a statement like this, or else risk compromising his position that he doesn’t have to tell anyone about secret wiretaps. But on the other hand, it makes you wonder what the president believes does constrain his activities, if anything.

We are having a great time watching the Winter Olympics here. Unfortunately I slept through Bode Miller’s qualifying rounds this afternoon. Background: when we were in Austria, we told our German hosts that our skiing would be conducted “Bode Miller style,” and they obliged with rounds of jagertee and gluhwein on the slopes. Wonder how Bode is feeling today, and how he’ll be feeling after tonight?

Interesting too, that Google is going Bode Miller style. If you search on Bode’s name, or the name of any other Winter Olympian, you get his biography and the schedule of events in which he competes.

Hooblogger Joshua at WaxWorks provides a pointer into the most entertaining quote from constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe’s response to a request from Rep. John Conyers regarding the legality of the Bush administration’s wiretapping its own citizens. The relevant part of Tribe’s opinion:

If [Supreme Court case] Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld] treated the AUMF as an “explicit congressional authorization” … for imprisoning an enemy combatant despite AUMF’s failure to mention “detention” or “imprisonment” in so many words, the argument goes, the AUMF must be read to impliedly authorize the far less severe intrusion of merely eavesdropping on our terrorist enemies, and on members of organizations that indirectly support them. … Surely, then, now that Al Qaeda has launched a war against us, and now that Congress has responded with the functional equivalent of a declaration of war in the AUMF, even the entirely innocent American citizen in Chicago or Cleveland whose phone conversation with a member of an Al Qaeda-supportive organization happens to be ensnared by the eavesdropping being undertaken by the NSA cannot be heard to complain that no statute specifically authorized the Executive to capture her telephone communications and e-mails as such…

The technical legal term for that, I believe, is poppycock.

…The inescapable conclusion is that the AUMF did not implicitly authorize what the FISA expressly prohibited. It follows that the presidential program of surveillance at issue here is a violation of the separation of powers—as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied.

The further this administration goes into defending the indefensible, the worse the case becomes. I am starting to concur with Tin Man that we may want to start thinking about the appropriate constitutional response for such gross malfeasance.

I did not tell Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent. I figure that, as long as we in the blogosphere all come clean, and further vow that we’re not putting ourselves at risk of perjury to do so, we can narrow it down. I like the suspect that Michael Bérubé puts the finger on, but of course there are others. (Just don’t tell Pat!)

CNN: “Can I quit now?” FEMA chief wrote as Katrina raged. I knew I wouldn’t be the first to jump on the Congressional report of the analysis of the emails sent by Michael “Brownie” Brown during the Katrina crisis, but I couldn’t resist. But the coverage on CNN—“Humor is a stress relief, so we understand”—is pretty damned reprehensible too.

How can one look at the following exchange and not weep in rage:

Marty Bahamonde, FEMA employee on ground in New Orleans: Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here are some things you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.

The dying patients at the DMAT tent being medivac. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation
adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.

FEMA staff is OK and holding own. DMAT staff working in deplorable conditions. The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out.

Phone connectivity impossible.

Michael “Brownie” Brown, Presidential-appointed director of FEMA: Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?

I don’t have a lot to say about Scooter’s indictment and subsequent resignation last week, except to note two things.

Number one, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had Scooter nailed as being involved in the leak about two years ago, as you can tell if you read my transcript from the first BloggerCon (complete with my rushed misspelling of “Libbey” as livey). That lends some credence to recent complaints, from Salon and elsewhere, that the fact that the indictments are only coming now means that the coverup worked. Maddening.

The good news is that this is only the beginning. With the investigation still open and the Sword of Damocles hanging over Turd Blossom’s head, there’s still plenty of room for this indictment to become a big party. We can only hope.

For someone (like me) interested in the Bush administration’s ongoing troubles, it was a bad morning to spend in a dress rehearsal. The withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination for the Supreme Court signals more troubles on the horizon and a further diminution of the President’s mojo. Even if the withdrawal came as no surprise.

And it should come as no surprise at all: Salon’s War Room points out that columnist Charles Krauthammer practically scripted the withdrawal and the reason for it in a post on Townhall.com last Friday. For a man whose biography brags that he found Stephen Hawking’s popular books on cosmology “entirely incomprehensible,” Krauthammer nailed this one on the head. The adminstration and the Senate, in deadlocking over the release of documentation  from Miers’ tenure in the White House, found a way to force the withdrawal of a nominee who was widely seen, on all sides of the political spectrum, as unfit to serve in the nation’s highest court. A neat trick: by quibbling over matters of executive privilege, we can still pretend that the emperor has clothes and that he has not shown himself incapable of finding them.

Rosa Parks’ world seems a million miles away. It’s hard to believe it was (just) less than fifty years ago that segregation was commonplace, that someone could be arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, that we accepted unequal treatment for citizens of our country based on the color of their skin.

Of course, in some ways, it still seems very real.

And it’s more apparent than ever that there is still a lot of work to do. That we have barely addressed the deep social injustices and divides that were reflected in the laws that Ms. Parks helped to erase, much less the economic factors that continue to put the lie to the image of the US as a land of prosperity and opportunity.

But if there is one lesson to be learned from Rosa Parks, it is this: sometimes even causes that have decades of rising social pressure on their side need a single person to stand up—or, in this case, keep her seat. One person doesn’t change the world, but one person can be the pivot on which the world starts to change.

(I decided to finish writing this even though I think David Weinberger has said it better.)

Financial Times: Transcript: Colonel Wilkerson on US foreign policy. Don’t let the title throw you—this is one of the most astonishing insider critiques of the administration, and of the execution of US foreign policy generally, that I have read yet—and it’s only a partial transcript. The summary: a “cabal” of insiders led by Cheney and Rumsfeld has been making foreign policy decisions in secret, with disastrous results when the decisions go to the bureaucracy for implementation, and that we are all screwed as a result. But the actual transcript is far more entertaining. As Salon notes, “Wilkerson has a long working relationship with Powell and was often thought to be someone who would say aloud what Powell thought himself but was too cautious to reveal. If that’s what was happening Wednesday, the former secretary of state has a lot to get off his chest.” Yep:

And I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again…

Under Secretary of Defense Douglas [Feith], whom most of you probably know Tommy Frank said was stupidest blankety blank man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

And yet, and yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere.

Wrap-up of press coverage at The Washington Note by Steve Clemons, who was instrumental in organizing the talk at the New America Foundation (full video is also posted at that link).

Democracy for America : America Needs a Friend on the Supreme Court. Why Not Yours?. If you saw Bush’s nomination of his pal Harriet Miers and said, “Huh. So the only qualification she has is that she’s his friend? I bet my friend could do better”—well, now’s your chance to put your nomination where your mouth is, Binky! I nominated my good friend Greg Greene, because he makes a killer gumbo. Though as an actual, you know, lawyer, he might be overqualified.

I’m sure that there are equally snobby qualifications that you could put forward for your friends. Enter early and often. Recommended nominee types:

1. Your mom.
2. The neighbor—you know, the one with the really annoying cough.
3. Bono.
4. Anthony Kiedis: because all of his friends are so depressed.
5. Larry Lessig. God knows he needs something to do to take up all his free time.
6. The Tin Man: because then he’d have to blog about something else.

It’s fun! Anyone can be a Supreme! Play along!

I haven’t really been able to write about New Orleans. Part of it is that I’ve been on the road. But that’s an excuse. I haven’t wanted to think about it. New Orleans, even though I only visited once, figures so deeply in my growth as a young man that I can’t bear to think of what has happened to it.

I’ve written a little about my discovery of jazz. In the year or two afterwards I started diving in deeper—broadening my listening to many of the 60s-era greats, developing an appreciation for the avant garde. But I didn’t understand the roots of the music. (And I certainly wasn’t going to learn listening to Wynton Marsalis, who, though he was pretty well grounded in the traditions, was compositionally just as avant garde as his brother, in an extremely traditionalist sort of way.) So I was completely unprepared for what I found when we rolled into New Orleans and stumbled into the back of Preservation Hall.

To set the context, this was the same trip as our nocturnal visit to William Faulkner’s house. So, by the time we rolled into New Orleans we had been on the road for four days and several thousand miles, all on a bus and a small minivan, and were looking and smelling and feeling awful. We had a gig that first night, a concert at the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus (aka Holy Name) at Loyola, which is a story in and of itself, and then a reception hosted by the local alumni club with liquid refreshments, followed by a mass exodus to a local student watering hole. It was there that I had my first (and last, I think) Hurricane. But I still hadn’t really seen the city.

The next morning I walked with friends to the Café du Monde, through the French Quarter, past a voudoun shop or two, into a storefront for a po’ boy, out and along a levee. I particularly remember the levee, as the heat and humidity were really getting to me, but I was still awestruck by the scale of the thing. It didn’t look like something that could be broken apart like a cracker.

But the jazz? That night I don’t remember where we ate or anything else, just lining up with Poulson Reed and John McLaughlin outside Preservation Hall, where there was a crowd—despite the lack of drinks, or anything else that might pass for conventional tourist New Orleans, inside. What there was, was the band. Percy and Willie Humphrey were still there, in their 70s or 80s but still playing. A big sign behind the band said, “Requests $2. ‘Saints’ $10,” suggesting that perhaps they had been asked to play “When The Saints Go Marching In” one too many times. The music was rough, unpolished, sloppy in some ways, but amazingly compelling. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was both stranger and more wonderful than I could have expected.

The night ended some hours later in Pat O’Brien’s, but for me, it was over when we left Preservation Hall. A seed had been planted in me that led to my exploring not only older jazz but also other American musical experiences—the “old, weird America” that shared the roughness and power of the seven septuagenarians in a rundown old unpainted hall playing for a rapt audience on wooden benches.

And now, it’s gone.

Update: Greg points me to a story that suggests there is a happier ending.

Two personal thoughts this morning for residents of the Gulf Coast: one family friend who’s visiting my parents right now who has no idea what has happened to his Mississippi house and whose wife is stranded (but safe) at a hotel with no power; one for Hooblogger Todd at Frolic, who has now updated after a scary silence (turns out he was just out of the country).

For those who unlike my friends were in the city, prayers, of course, but also support. Governor Howard Dean has joined other voices in my inbox asking for donations to the Red Cross (see details for making a donation at the DNC). It’s going to take a lot of help. As Dave pointed out, the city is under sea level, so the flood waters aren’t going to go down on their own without a lot of pumping.

Half the Sins of Mankind points to the statement of copyright that Woody Guthrie wrote for his “This Land is Your Land”:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Right on, Woody.

This is going to get a little more interesting later today, I’m told. Here’s the teaser. For us code-heads, the interesting part is behind the scenes; stay tuned.

Library of Congress: The James Madison Papers. A welcome addition to the trove of primary documents from our founding fathers that are now available online. Searchable, of course, though since I can’t link directly to a search results page you’ll have to try it out for yourself. (I suggest the searching the keyphrase university of virginia.)

Also of interest: this essay on Madison’s use of code and cipher, which will resonate with readers of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Interestingly, some of his cryptographic correspondents included Edmund Randolph, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson (this detail is left out of most Jefferson biographies).

Sadly, the images of the papers don’t come with transcriptions. This is a frustrating flaw in an otherwise impressive collection.