''Sometimes,'' he said, ''I feel like I'd like to wring somebody's neck.''

by OLGS, guest blogger

''Sometimes,'' he said, ''I feel like I'd like to wring somebody's neck.''

--Former Secretary of State George P. Schultz, testifying before the Joint House-Senate Iran-Contra Committee, July 25, 1987

Twenty-one years ago, I remember staying at home during the summer taking care of then pre-schooler Joe College Graduate, and the still-in-diapers Joe College. In between feedings, walks with the stroller, and diaper-changes, I spent my days watching the Congress hold hearings to investigate the secret White House- led covert operations in Iran, Lebanon, and Nicaragua. Perhaps the only witness appearing under oath who emerged with any of his or her reputation undamaged was Secretary of State George Schultz, shown above on the Stanford campus. The secretary testified that the White House and the National Security Council had kept secret from him and his State Department the sale of weapons to Iran and the transfer of funds and weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua, both actions in violation of U.S. law. Schultz’s feeling that he wanted to “wring somebody’s neck” was directed mainly at the President’s staff, who served their president badly, he testified.

It's summer again, and today's headlines reminded me of the summer of 1987 and Iran-Contra. Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued two reports. The first one, known as Report “Phase IIa,” recounted what had long been reported in the press: from August 2002 through February 2003, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell made statements about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction based on shaded, exaggerated, or sometimes on no intelligence at all. Here’s the link to the summary of the Phase IIa report:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775

The full report is also available from the Committee as a pdf file and is well-worth reading.

Almost overlooked was the second report, which brought Schultz’s 1987 comment about the White House and National Security Council to mind. The “Phase IIb” report made public that starting in 2001 and continuing through 2003, the National Security Council’s deputy director (Stephen Hadley) and the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Paul Wolfowitz), and the Office of the Vice President (Dick Cheney) approved a covert operation meant to lead to “regime change” in Iran. Who was the essential middleman to put the U.S. in touch with so-called “Iranian moderates”? None other than one of the arms dealers in the Iran-Contra affair, Manucher Ghobanifar, shown here in1987.

Just as Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Admiral John Poindexter, and Colonel Oliver “Ollie” North, kept the State Department in the dark about their dealings in Iran and Nicaragua, so, too, did the Bush Administration’s wannabe-spooks led by Hadley, Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and also Elliot Abrams (another Iran-Contra figure) keep Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet uninformed about the 2001-2003 Ghobanifar-inspired attempt at regime change in Iran. As much as $25 million dollars was funneled through Ghobanifar between 2001 and 2003 to promote “regime change” in Iran. The Phase IIb report also suggests that the Ghobanifar initiative was manipulated by Iranian intelligence to send false information directly to the White House. This reads like a reprise of the Iran-Contra affair.

One of the regrettable outcomes of the Iran-Contra investigations is how few Reagan Administration people were indicted and sent to jail. One of the regrettable results of that failure is how many have surfaced with responsible jobs in the Bush 43 Administration. Is it too much to ask the Senate Intelligence Committee to refer to the Justice Department for prosecution everyone involved with this second Iran-Contra scandal? Is it too much to ask to send Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Elliot Abrams and others to jail before they can start work on a third covert operation to effect “regime change” in Iran through Ghobanifar’s “Iranian moderates”?

The Twin Cities last night: Joe High School at the "U", Sen. Obama at the "X"

by OLGS, guest blogger

Last night, Joe High School and I went to an orientation session at the University of Minnesota (the "U") for metro area students admitted into the PSEO program. PSEO stands for Post-Secondary Education Options. The Minnesota state legislature provides funds for hundreds of high school seniors to take college-level classes on college campuses. Joe applied and got admitted for next year and last night showed up for orientation.

The "U" staff tried hard to keep the attention of the 400 or so students and family members in attendance. The staff provided handouts, pocket planners, a PowerPoint show, cookies & lemonade, but still, no high school kid wants to sit still through a two-hour orientation session. Even I got a little bored with trying to follow the specifics of how to read the online class schedule and how to pick a Chemistry lecture and lab section. Mercifully, the PSEO orientation session ended a little after 8:00 p.m.

When Joe and I got to the car, we turned on the radio to listen to coverage of Senator Clinton's expected end-of-campaign speech from New York, and Senator Obama's expected victory speech from the Excel Energy Center (the "X") in St. Paul. The radio reporter live on the scene at the "X" said that the senator was in the building and that only about one-half the seats were filled. I asked Joe: "Should we drive over to the X and see the next president for ourselves?" Joe answered: "Let's go home and ask Mom if she wants to go." Mom--Louise--had baked a rhubarb cake. Joe dived into the cake and forgot the next president getting ready to speak in an arena with apparently plenty of empty seats and only about a ten-minute drive from our house. Under questioning from Louise, Joe admitted that he had homework that he had not completed. Therefore, Joe, Louise, and I passed on the chance to go see Sen. Obama deliver what some commentators said was the first of two nomination acceptance speeched (the other one to come in Denver in August).

Meanwhile, at the X, about 40,000 people had lined up for the 18,000 seats inside. The reason the arena was only half-full when the radio reporter gave his account was that so many people were still outside waiting to pass through security and the metal detectors. By 9:00 p.m., the place was packed and 20,000 people outside followed along on outdoor giant screens.

Louise and I listened at home on the radio. The senator mentioned four places in American history where Americans made their own history: Philadelphia in 1787, Antietam and Gettysburg in the Civil War, Omaha Beach in 1944, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. The people in the X last night certainly felt that they were making history watching their candidate accept his party's nomination.

Farewell to the lawyers

My job with the lawyer marketing guys in Eagan is over. Now I'm off to write web content for a career college web site. This has been heady week, full of tributes to my skills (all of which can be had for the price of a liberal education)and hugs and best wishes. These are remarkable people, and even those that I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with are very interesting and talented. In this day and age, that's a pretty good gig.

Joe High School's new job....

by OLGS, guest blogger

Joe High School started a new job this month at a local independent (non-chain) pizza parlor in South Minneapolis. One of his friends told him that the pizza place was hiring and Joe applied and got hired. His entry into the pizza business brings back memories to me, OLGS, because my first paying job at age 16 was also in a pizza place in suburban Chicago.

Joe started his first night as the "dough-roller," that is, the person who takes dough out of a trough and sends it through a rolling machine twice to get the crust to the right thickness. By his second shift, Joe had advanced to "Sauce Dude," the person who drops a ladleful of sauce on the rolled-out pizza dough and smooshes it around to the edges. Bright lad that he is, he also mastered pepperoni-placement and cheese distribution. By the time of his third shift, Joe even used the '97 Subaru to make a delivery to a residence and got to "keep the change" from a twenty on the bill.
Good work, Joe. We're proud of you.

Our first $60 fill-up

by OLGS, guest blogger

Well, that didn't take long. Last week, I blogged about paying $51 for a tank of gas in Minneapolis. This weekend, Louise, Joe High School, and I motored to Belgium, Wisconsin for a wedding. In case you are wondering, Belgium is south of Denmark, also south of Holland, south of Luxemburg, and while I'm dropping place-names, south of Oostburg. Joe High School did most of the driving and was very steady on the highways.

The wedding was delightful on the shores of Lake Michigan. The bride was lovely and Joe's second cousin, the groom, was very handsome. Louise and I enjoyed seeing a lot of relatives, including Joe's aunt & uncle. We learned one Wisconsin wedding custom: at the sit-down dinner, many of the guests repeatedly banged their forks on their water glasses. Louise, Joe, and I looked around for someone to make an announcement, a toast perhaps, but no, the noise was a prompt for the bride and groom to smooch for the crowd.

This morning, we set off for the long drive back to Minneapolis. The gas gauge was on empty so we pulled into the BP/Amoco in downtown Belgium. Sixty dollars later, at $4.11/gallon, we left Belgium.

While we were at the wedding, President Bush struck out in asking the Saudis to pump more oil. Meanwhile, in that other Belgium, the price of gas is $5.91/gallon, and the Danes are paying $5.93 per gallon. At this rate, gas will be cheaper by Labor Day in Oostburg, Netherlands than it will be in Oostburg, Wisconsin.

Sping flowers in Minnesota

A lovely spring day in flyover land. Tulips are up, as are many weeds. I feared that the daffodils were not coming, but they are reluctantly peeking up and, for a few, out. I must have planted them too deep.

As a tribute to the weeds, OLGS and I were out in the gardens this morning. Mitzi the cat was frolicking about, chasing blowing leaves and generally making a fool of herself. The neighbor cat, her spittin' image, was also out, trying to throw his weight around by playing alpha male. The problem: she is twice his size. You go girl!

Daffodil Society of MN

My first $50 fill-up: ”Who could have expected such a thing…”

By OLGS, guest blogger

Well, it finally happened. It cost $51 to fill up the car. It’s the first time I had to pay fifty dollars for a fill-up. Sure, I’ve seen other motorists spend that much and more to fill up their SUVs and their pick-up trucks, but not for a car. Gas in Minneapolis is in the $3.65/gallon range. Joe College-on-leave tells me it is at $4/gallon in Southern California. I suppose we will see that $4 price-tag in Minnesota by Memorial Day, if not sooner.

Today’s crude oil futures are selling at $125/barrel and are also likely to go up. Secretary of State Rice’s standard answer to difficult questions “Who could have expected such a thing” is literally true in this case, but also misleading.

In my spare time, I’ve been reading some of the unclassified and now published documents of the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Last fall, the Senate Intelligence Committee published two documents written in January 2003 for the Administration, one on the likely effects of invasion on Iraqi society (short summary: unwelcoming to U.S. occupiers for a year or so, but they’ll get over it), and the second on the likely effects of invasion on other Middle East countries. One item particularly caught my eye—crude oil prices might skyrocket from $15/barrel to as high as $40/barrel, but that after a period of uncertainty, the prices would decline because western oil companies would come in to modernize the Iraqi oilfield production and increase output from Saddam’s 3 million barrels/day to perhaps twice that figure. So the Administration, and in particular, Dr. Rice's staff, was warned that it might have a difficult first year of occupying Iraq with corresponding higher oil prices, but that by 2005, the promised liberation would start to reward the invaders. Here we are in 2008 with $4/gal gas and $125/bb oil….Who could have expected such a thing….

Urban turkey...

by guest blogger OLGS

Quite a spring in Minneapolis. Louise and Joe H.S. saw two wild turkeys last week in the front yard, but did not get a snapshot. Yesterday, Joe College-on-leave was home, and he and I had this downstairs-upstairs exchange:

Joe: Dad, there's a turkey outside.

OLGS (with snark): Tell Gov. Pawlenty we already paid our Minnesota State Income Tax

Joe: No, there really is a turkey in the yard.

OLGS (grabbing camera): This I gotta see...

Note: the first snapshot is of Mitzi (below) running back inside from the wild gobbler. The second, shown above, is of the turkey next store on our neighbor's walkway, right by the "Minnesota" paving stone.

Candidates in Selma

I was browsing Louise’s January 20^th post about the family trip to Selma, Alabama. She mentioned that Selma in 2008 is filled with churches, both established and storefront. When the family visited there just after the New Year, the presidential selection process had passed through Iowa and New Hampshire and on the Democratic side, the race was down to the big two, Senators Obama and Clinton. Both senators had visited Selma the previous March to honor the 1965 voting rights campaign that was centered on Dallas County, Alabama. Senator Obama spoke at the Brown AME Church, just down the street from the pecan wholesaler. Senator Clinton spoke at First Baptist Church. Last week, Senator McCain made a visit to Selma and spoke outside the St. James Hotel (also just down the street from the pecan wholesaler), where our family stayed in January.

Look at the photos of the three candidates speaking in Selma. Notice anything unusual? Readers of Domestic Tranquility are invited to post their answers in the comments section.

--OLGS

National History Day--Minnesota Edition

*contributed by OLGS, guest blogger *

The household members all went their own ways today. Joe College-on-leave is working on his marionette for next weekend’s May Day celebration, courtesy of the “Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater.” A crowd of up to 50,000 watches the parade of hundreds of puppets, floats, and other celebrants from East Lake Street in Minneapolis to Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis. Pictured above is last year's two-story "Tree of Life" puppet. Joe is not quite finished with his creation and Domestic Tranquility promises a photo of his creation after May Day.

Joe High School stayed home and made dinner for us—vegeterian lasagna, very good. Louise worked at the church library at Unity Church, and your guest blogger, OLGS, volunteered as a judge at the Minnesota state competition for National History Day. NHD began in Cleveland in 1974 and has expanded in size and scope to involve middle school and high school students in primary source research projects in history. Categories include posters, research papers, video documentaries, and performances. OLGS was assigned to examine and rate poster projects created by groups of middle school students from around the state.

Several of the middle school boys seem enamored of the movie
“The 300” and produced posters about the Battle of Thermopylae. One group, not entirely certain of its facts, reported that Herodatus was a “historical consultant” to the film-makers. Ah, may the works of OLGS and his friends be consulted by film-makers 2,500 years from now!

Some of the girls did group poster projects on a woman named Sister Kenny, who in the 1940s created an alternative therapy regimen for polio patients. Instead of requiring patients to wear braces and casts, Sister Kenny (shown at right) offered baths and massage to help ease the pain of polio suffering. The “sister” in her title was a reference to her training as a nurse in Australia, not her membership in a religious order. The girls were inspired by her compassion and also her feminism in standing up to the male-dominated medical establishment that branded her treatment as quackery. At a time before the Salk vaccine, her human touch was probably as much as the practice of medicine could offer.

Across Minnesota, 30,000 middle school and high school students started in National History Day last fall. Twelve hundred were nominated at regional competitions to come to the state meet today, and after we got done judging, about fifty go on to the national meet in College Park, Maryland in June. Go Minnesota History Day.

What do Louise and OLGS (and Mitzi) do on a Saturday night?

There are no Joes around tonight. Louise and I (OLGS) combine the best of 1961 and 2008 technology for a night at our make-shift home theater. The 1961 element is a huge eight feet-by-eight feet movie screen that drops from the ceiling. The owner of the house in 1961 must have installed it for showing slides of vacations or maybe Super8 home movies. Whatever. We use it for watching movies, too, but not Super8s. We use a digital projector to display DVDs on the big screen. Combined with a bunch of speakers that Joe College set up for us, we have our own home theater. Oh, and there is another 1961-era element to the home theater: a “LazyBoy” recliner that Joe College picked up out of some Minneapolis alley. It’s surprisingly comfy and Louise stretches out with her feet up, while Mitzi sits in Louise's lap and purrs.

Tonight, we are finishing up Season Two of “The Wire.” It looks like "Stringer" Bell is trying to supercede Avon Barksdale while the latter is behind bars. Back to the LazyBoy!

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.

Two anniversaries

Today, April 18th, marks two important anniversaries. The first was made famous by the poet Longfellow in his verse “The Landlord’s Tale”:

“Listen my children and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”

April 18, 1775 was the night of Paul Revere’s ride from Charlestown westward to Lexington to warn the Massachusetts militia of the impending march of the British garrison out of Boston. The historian David Hackett Fischer wrote a wonderful biography of Revere, whose family name was once “Rivoire” until his French Protestant immigrant family changed it to the English-sounding “Revere.”


Today is also the 65th anniversary of Louise’s parents’ marriage. To maintain a marriage from 1943 through 2008 and beyond may be an even more remarkable accomplishment than Revere/Rivoire’s ride. Below is a page 1 story from the New York Times the day of their wedding. Congratulations to Louise’s parents. Many happy returns.

--OLGS

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Civilian Car Owners Will Get Few Synthetic Tires for a Year; Synthetic Tires Unlikely Until '44
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
April 18, 1943, Sunday
WASHINGTON-- The Office of War Information stated today that most civilian car owners could not hope to obtain synthetic rubber tires before the last half of next year. For essential civilian driving some synthetic tires may be available earlier but how many, said OWI, "is still an open question."
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Introducing your guest host

Hello, faithful and occasional readers of Domestic Tranquility:

Louise is taking a break from blogging and has graciously turned over the keyboard at Domestic Tranquility to yours truly. I am the spouse known as OLGS. I will continue Louise's tradition of blogging about politics, middle-age, and children. In that spirit, I have included a photo of Joe College, taken last summer at Niagara Falls.

Guest poster

OLGS, who lusts for the fame and fortune that come from having a blog, will be taking over Domestic Tranquility for a while. He brings to this important task 24 years of experience as a dad, 35+ years of partnering yours truly, and an unusual appreciation, even among guys, for sports statistics. Stay tuned!