(no subject)

Right on, one more day 'til Lumos and even the thought of a 9 hour drive isn't gettin' me down today. For we will be in a well air conditioned vehicle the whole way, woo! And I've heard it's gotten a little cooler there, down from 117 degrees to a balmy 104. Did I mention the air conditioning?

So in the span of about 10 hours Aelf has declared herself a full on Draco and the Malfoys groupie, welcome to the dark side :)

I got a little taste of the geekery to come this weekend last night and I gotta' say I liked it. Even though our little group was in the minority of audience members who were both legal to drink and vote, I didn't feel too old and out of place. I think knowing most of the words to both bands' songs helped a lot with that. Still there were many puzzled looks in the crowd when the Malfoys kicked into "99 Death Eaters", I don't think much of the crowd had been born when "99 Red Balloons" was getting serious airplay.

Anyway, this is mostly my long winded way of saying that I'm going to be incommunicado starting tomorrow, so expect to hear nothing from me until Monday-ish. I'm hoping to not go anywhere near a computer for the next 5 days.

No, really?

It's nice, if somewhat late, that the American Bar Association has begun to take notice of the naked power grab on the part of the president and this administration. Imagine the impact if this had come out in 2004:

Among those unanimous recommendations, the Task Force voted to:

- oppose, as contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers, a President's issuance of signing statements to claim the authority or state the intention to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law he has signed, or to interpret such a law in a manner inconsistent with the clear intent of Congress;

- urge the President, if he believes that any provision of a bill pending before Congress would be unconstitutional if enacted, to communicate such concerns to Congress prior to passage;

- urge the President to confine any signing statements to his views regarding the meaning, purpose, and significance of bills, and to use his veto power if he believes that all or part of a bill is unconstitutional;

- urge Congress to enact legislation requiring the President promptly to submit to Congress an official copy of all signing statements, and to report to Congress the reasons and legal basis for any instance in which he claims the authority, or states the intention, to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law he has signed, or to interpret such a law in a manner inconsistent with the clear intent of Congress, and to make all such submissions be available in a publicly accessible database.

It really is nice that people are starting to figure this shit out two damn years too late...

And continuing the better late than never theme, Glenn Greenwald points to this:

Andrew Sullivan today publishes an e-mail from an American solider in Iraq, reporting that "Baghdad has descended into complete anarchy" and that Iraqi police officers are afraid even to drive to Baghdad. Sullivan calls our invasion of Iraq, which he vocally supported, "one of the the biggest military fiascoes in American history." I realize there is always controversy generated when supporters of the war end up acknowledging that it was a mistake, but between someone who acknowledges error and those who continue to insist in the face of undeniable reality that things are going well in Iraq and that our invasion was the right thing to do, I will take the former over the latter every time.

You know it really didn't take a new Nostradamus to figure out way back in '03 that this was how things were going to turn out. In fact, many of us did, and were told in not so polite terms to STFU. I wish I could be as open and prepared to forgive the very people who referred to myself and like-minded folks as "terrorist lovers", "Saddam supporters" and lest we forget, "traitors"; sadly I find myself unable to. I kind of feel like I've spent the past 5 years watching a clusterfuck of a film and screaming at the tv, "What the fuck are you thinking? Are you even capable of higher thought? What the matter is wrong with you people?!"

The only downside is I can't switch the channel and watch something else.

The Way Back Machine

Matthews then:

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
- Chris Matthews, 5/1/03

Matthews now:

It’s all ideology with this crowd. All they care about is ideology. The President bought it, hook, line and sinker. He had– but you know, it was just put into his head, some time after 9-11, and his philosophy is what he has given it. He didn’t have to have any philosophy when he went in, and they handed it to him. These guys– the guys–you know, the guys that you used to make fun of at school–pencil necks, the intellectuals, the guys you never trusted. All of the sudden, he trusts the intellectuals, the guys you knew at school, yeah, they’re a bunch of pencil necks and now he buys–completely–their ideology, because he didn’t have one of his own coming in. That was his problem. I don’t know what Bush stood for, except I’m a cool guy and Gore isn’t, and that was our problem. We elected the guy because he was a little cooler than the other guy, and, I hope the next election, it isn’t a problem of who goes to bed with their wife at 9:30 at night, or who knows how to tell a joke on a stage. But it’s who had the sense of strength that comes from having read books, most of their life, tried to understand history.
-Chris Matthews, 7/25/06