A new day

It happened. Former Occupant has fled back to Texas and President Obama is now in charge. Doesn't that have a lovely ring? Especially since he's using his bully pulpit to change some stuff that cried out for change. And, not surprisingly, he's being smart. He knows that he doesn't have a long honeymoon period, so he's using it now.

While all the preparations for his inauguration were underway, OLGS, Joe College and Joe High School and I journeyed to Los Angeles. It was -22 when we left Minneapolis and 80 when we arrived in LA. That was the good bit. Then it took us two hours to reach our hotel in Pasadena. The traffic and the smog were unbelievelable. I do not know how people live like this. But clearly they do, perhaps mesmerized by the beautiful weather.

In addition to visiting Joe College Grad at his house in East LA (the only non-Spanish speaking person within 10 miles, I suspect), we did a number of touristy things. Visits to the Getty Museum and the Huntington Library reinforced my belief that the desire to construct a monument with your name on it is one of the benefits of unrestricted capitalism. These are amazing collections and amazing places.

And then we returned on the red-eye, in time for the swearing-in of President Obamna. As such ceremonies go, it wasn't that grand an occasion. That's good, as what's important is the work of rebuilding.

The Joes at the Getty Museum, January 2009

Economic depression, 21st century style

My resolution--not to get down in the mud with the Republicans--has gone south, so to speak. McCain and the Bushies have used the probably manufactured financial crisis to sandbag the Democrats. This may be a tad conspiratorial, but boy, did these guys get religion fast. Quicker than you can say "I believe", the guys who brought you unfettered capitalism for the last eight years have had an epiphany--the times cry out for government intervention, according to the president and his minions.

This is pretty remarkable. First of all, the notion that there will be absolutely no mortages or car loans--the stick used by the president this evening--is absurd. There will be fewer car loans and mortgages, because people will be hurting and folks who can't pay their mortgages anyway probably won't be borrowing more . However, banks do need to make money, and the way they make money is by lending it--in times like these to folks and businesses with gold-plated credit ratings. And the people with the impossible mortgages won't be doing their part to keep this consumer-based economy afloat.

What is interesting is that the sense of the country seems to be--so what? We probably wouldn't have gotten a loan anyway. So while the Dems may have been thown a curve, the notion that we are giving Bush and his friends a blank check doesn't seem to sit well with even the so-called conservative base.

And here's the delicious thing: I heard Newt Gingrich on the radio the other day. He was saying, "Wait a minute" in that professorial way of his. And, he made sense. I never thought I'd see that day. And the other cheery thing--we haven't heard from the Gov. of Alaska for a few hours. Every cloud does have a silver lining.

Bedside Reading…., or, the continuing presence of King George III in our lives

Louise prefers mysteries and fiction for her bedside reading. Right now, she is reading a novel by a Worcester, Mass author called *The Resurrectionist* By Jack O’Connell.

I—OLGS—have been dipping into non-fiction books on the Bush Presidency. I just finished a very thoughtful book by Jack L. Goldsmith, *The Terror Presidency.* Goldsmith served for less than a year as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Justice Department, under Attorney General Ashcroft during the first Bush term between October 2003 and July 2004. He came to government service from the University of Chicago and is now on the faculty of the Harvard Law School. It was Goldsmith who took the formal and highly unusual step of rescinding the so-called “torture memos” written by former OLC deputy John Yoo. Some of Yoo’s work is posted on OLC’s website. Search under his surname and the opinions on presidential power that are not still classified appear.

Many commentators have decried Yoo’s inhumanity in the torture memos. There is an Internet petition to demand that the University of California School of Law revoke his tenured position on the faculty, an action not likely to happen given the dean’s defense of Yoo’s academic freedom. Until and unless Professor Yoo is indicted and convicted on the charge of committing a war crime through the writing of his memos, he will keep his faculty status at UC-Berkeley.

What grabbed my attention in Goldsmith’s account of the reasoning behind Yoo’s torture memos in 2001, 2002, and 2003 is that Yoo began with the proposition that the president of the United States has all the powers—the prerogative—of the monarch of the United Kingdom at the time of American independence, except for what the U.S. Constitution specifically denied him in 1787 in Article II. In other words, George # 43’s powers begin with the same powers of George III as the British king. According to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chapter 7):

UPON the same principle the king has also the sole prerogative of making war and peace. For it is held by all the writers on the law of nature and nations, that the right of making war, which by nature subsisted in every individual, is given up by all private persons that enter into society, and is vested in the sovereign power u: and this right is given up not only by individuals, but even by the entire body of people, that are under the dominion of a sovereign.

Blackstone wrote that summary in 1765. The British monarchy may have been a constitutional one after 1689, but in matters of war and diplomacy, it was still rather absolutist at the time of the American Revolution. In the 21st century, John Yoo recognizes that the Congress has the power to declare war, but once it has done so, as he says it did in its September 18, 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” then Article II of the Constitution’s designation of the president as “commander in chief of the Army and Navy” gave President Bush the powers of King George III over the conduct of the war, including the power to ignore treaties, statutes, and court decisions in regard to the laws of war, and most notably, the power to torture.

Goldsmith’s book is an important one and I commend it to readers of “Domestic Tranquility.” His courageous action as head of OLC in 2003-2004 in cancelling Yoo’s opinions means that any legal justification for torture by U.S. personnel under the president’s war powers was also cancelled at that time. In his own way, Goldsmith is a modern-day Paul Revere/Revoire warning us about executive tyranny. Perhaps our news media can ask all three remaining candidates for president in 2008 if they would consider what Professor Yoo (and his bosses) did as a crime of war.

Boomer blues

So much going on. Elderly dad not doing so well. Elderly mom coping, but exhausted. Young adult children need money, apparently supporting friends. Enabling sandwich generation parents wondering what to do. Anxiety producing times, but a story duplicated by the millions across the country as baby boomers finally come to grips with reality.

But what's truly amazing is the behavior of the two chief boomers, George and Dick. How can any sane person think that war with Iran would be a good thing, let alone something we could actually win? How does anyone accept with a straight face the juggling that is Dick's characterization of his position as VP not being part of the executive branch? How can one see George as anything more than a cardboard suit when he supports his master's maneuverings in public? And how can anyone see the commutation of ol' Scooter's sentence as anything more than payback for keeping mum?

And this was very, very clever. Scooter was not pardoned, and his conviction is being appealed. This means that he will not be able to testify before Congress for some time--maybe through 2008, because of the pending appeal. If everything goes correctly for George and Dick, the wheels of justice will grind exceeding slow. And the two chief boomers will leave their offices having avoided the reckoning that is surely theirs. It's enough to make one hope that Armageddon is real.

And it's clear from their actions and speach that Mutt and Jeff smoked a little too much wacky weed in those wonderful days gone by. We know that George indulged. We now have pretty clear evidence that Dick was a pothead too, leaving him with only a few brain cells to use to function as Veep. Too bad he didn't smoke more.