OBAMA REPUDIATED!

(That's Charlene's special title.)

Wellll, I nevah thought I'd live to see the day when Massachusetts would embrace a Republican with enthusiasm. Awesome, clean out of sight!

Well, he finally has an enemy to lead America against...

Now He's Preparing a Combative Response? - Jim Geraghty:

Politico: "President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say."

Well, we didn't really expect humility, did we?

Great to know, Mr. President, that Iran shot protesters dead in the streets, beat the hell out of young kids, North Korea's firing off missiles so regularly you can set a clock to them, al-Qaeda tries to blow up a plane on Christmas, al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch is winning "Franchise of the Year", China's hacking Google until every search brings back at least one smiling Mao photo, Kabul's blowing up, our southern border looks like a war zone, and after a year of outreach, reset buttons, "changing the tone" and 364 days of kumbaya we finally get to see a "combative response" from you... to a Republican winning a race.

I look forward to his Oval Office address announcing that the electorate has deeply disappointed him, and that he expects more of us.

Maybe I should run against Nancy?

Kathryn Jean Lopez quotes an e-mail from Massachusetts:

...On Tuesday, for the first time since I was old enough to vote, I will take part in a US Senate election whose outcome is not known to everyone in advance. I believe this is what most Americans call "democracy," and I'm looking forward to the experience!...

Today's quote...

Seen at Instapundit:

...Meanwhile, Dr. George Milonas writes: "If Obama thinks Bush is such an incredible incompetent, why did he send Bush to help rescue the Haitians? Does he hate black people that much that he is willing to inflict Bush on them?"...

If Democrats really believed the crap they lay on us, they would send Ray Nagel.

Today's giggle...

After Obama Rally, Dems Pin Blame On Bush - Hotline On Call (This is funnier if you know that Obam and what's-her-name couldn't fill a 3,000 person hall. And that The Brown campaign just had to turn people away from an appearance in a similar-sized hall. See below)...

By Felicia Sonmez. As audience members streamed out of Pres. Obama's rally on behalf of AG Martha Coakley (D) here tonight, the consensus was that the fault for Coakley's now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person -- George W. Bush.

"People are upset because there's so many problems," Rosemary Kverek, 70, a retired Charleston schoolteacher said as tonight's rally wrapped up. "But the problems came from the previous administration. So we're blaming poor Obama, who's working 36 hours a day ... to solve these problems that he inherited."

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by "George Bush and his cronies" are not so easily solved.

"If you think there's magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown," Kennedy said. "If you don't, if you know that it takes eight years for George Bush and his cronies to put our country into this hole ... then you know we have a lot of digging to do, but some work needs to be done and this president's in the process of doing it and we need to get Marcia Coakley to help him to do that."

(Curiously, Kennedy mentioned Coakley repeatedly during his remarks to reporters, each time referring to her as "Marcia," not "Martha.")

More Kennedy: "One thing the Democrats have done wrong? We haven't kept the focus on this disaster on the Republicans who brought it upon us. We've tried too hard to do that right thing, and that's to fix it, as opposed to spend more of our time and energy pointing the finger at who got us [here] in the first place."

Blaming their problems on Bush does carry a risk for Dems, however -- with their sights so firmly focused on the past, Brown's campaign has managed to wrest the "change" mantle from them....

They're just jealous. Little pipsqueaks who know they can never dare to do great things....

From a Friend at the Brown Rally in Worcester:

"It's an absolute mob scene. The police have closed off the streets. It's mind blowing. The hall is already full, and it holds 3,000 people. There may be another 1,000 people outside."...

A passion for justice...

The Just-War Tradition by George Weigel on National Review Online:

...The classic just-war tradition did not begin with a "presumption against war." Augustine didn't begin there; Aquinas didn't begin there. And indeed, no one in the tradition began there until the late 1960s (surprise!), when a Congregationalist moral theologian (James Gustafson) sold a Quaker moral theologian (James Childress) the idea that the just-war way of thinking began with a prima facie moral duty to do no harm. Childress then successfully sold the notion to J. Bryan Hehir, the Catholic theologian and political theorist who was the chief architect of "The Challenge of Peace."

In fact, however, the classic just-war tradition began, not with a presumption against war, but with a passion for justice: The just prince is obliged to secure the "tranquility of order," or peace, for those for whom he accepts political responsibility, and that peace, to repeat, is composed of justice, security, and freedom. There are many ways for the just prince (or prime minister, or president) to do this; one of them is armed force. Its justified use can sometimes come after other means of securing justice, security, and freedom have been tried and failed; but it can also sometimes mean shooting first. Two obvious examples of the latter come from modern history.

The first (to which the president alluded in Oslo) was in the case of humanitarian intervention to forestall or end a genocide. (Thus all those liberal synagogues and churches with "Darfur: A Call to Your Conscience" on their lawns might consider whether there is any solution to that humanitarian disaster other than the use of armed force.) The second comes from a more classic instance of an "aggression under way" (as some just-war thinking construes "just cause"), but without a shot having yet been fired. As students of World War II in the Pacific know, a U.S. carrier battle group under Adm. William Halsey was steaming off Hawaii in early December 1941. Suppose Halsey and the Enterprise had run across Admiral Nagumo's carriers in their stealthy approach to the Hawaiian archipelago. Would Halsey have been justified in assuming that Nagumo wasn't there to check out vacation real estate on Oahu — and shooting first? Of course he would have been, and from every rationally defensible moral point of view. (The analogy here between my Halsey hypothetical and hard intelligence of Iran loading a nuclear warhead onto a medium-range ballistic missile will strike some as suggestive.)

So the notion that just-war analysis begins with a "presumption against war" (or, as some put it, with a "pacifist premise") is simply wrong. The just-war way of thinking begins somewhere else: with legitimate public authority's moral obligation to defend the common good by defending the peace composed of justice, security, and freedom. The just-war tradition is not a set of hurdles that moral philosophers, theologians, and clergy set before statesmen. It is a framework for collaborative deliberation about the basic aims of legitimate government as it engages hostile regimes and networks in the world. The president's lifting up of this venerable moral tradition, which has deep roots in the civilizational soil of the West, was entirely welcome, if not to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and other bears of little brain. The next step is the retrieval of the classic intellectual architecture of just-war thinking and its development to meet the exigencies of a world of new dangers and new international actors.

Difficult decisions...

Alan Sullivan, Decision Time:

Drudge has linked this comprehensive NYT article on the relief efforts in Haiti. A critical phase is arriving. As shock wears off, rage sets in. There will be anarchy and bloodshed in the ruined city. The US has military forces on the scene. How will they be used? Difficult decisions are imminent.

Yeah. I mentioned this post to Charlene, and she said, "Do you shoot them, or not?" That's what's involved. And the decisions are particularly difficult because they are precisely the ones we've been trying desperately to avoid or fudge...

Liberalism in its current form mostly says, "Nothing is worth fighting for." But it will sometimes make exceptions in favor of military action if the cause does not directly benefit the US. Well, here you go, Mr Obama.

And an even more difficult question is, "Do we add them to the empire?" Haiti has been a human catastrophe for 200 years, which pretty much tells us that they will never get their act together on their own. The situation cries out for us to take over. Hell-hole in our back yard, or protectorate. Them's the choices.

Yet even more difficult: Haiti is like.... Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is a continent of Haitis, with maybe a flicker of hope here and there. Haiti poses the question of whether the black parts of the globe will ever be able to govern themselves.

Update: Charlene adds, "But what about the Bahamas? They're not like Haiti. In fact they have problem with illegal immigration from Haiti." Well, they were British...

This may become an interestin' lawsuit...

Capital Press agriculture news (Thanks to Rand):

...A national beef group is invoking the so-called "Climategate" controversy as it challenges a recent U.S. government ruling on climate change. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association has filed a petition to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. to overturn the EPA's recent greenhouse gas "endangerment" ruling.

The ruling states that gases believed to cause global warming pose a human health risk and is the first step toward their regulation by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. The NCBA and other producer groups fear the ruling could lead to lawsuits and new restrictions on the nation's livestock industries.

The NCBA plans to argue the government's finding is based on faulty and incomplete science and that the Clean Air Act is the improper vehicle for regulating greenhouse gases, said Tamara Thies, the organization's chief environmental counsel.

"We are taking a position that we do not believe the science with regard to alleged manmade climate change is there," Thies said. "The EPA has a responsibility to conduct a rigorous scientific analysis and look at all the science out there instead of just cherry-picking certain studies that agree with its position about manmade climate change."

The cattle group points to Climategate, in which critics allege that e-mails stolen from Great Britain's University of East Anglia show bias and manipulation of data by scientists on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The fact that the EPA relied on some of the IPCC's data to make its finding makes the ruling questionable, Thies said.

"The EPA has only considered some (evidence) and never really seriously considered that climate change could actually be caused by natural causes," she said....

Rights come from Big Brother...

One reason among many why the Massachusetts Senate race is important...

Kathryn Jean Lopez, It's a Good Thing for Martha Coakley That There Are No Catholics in Massachusetts:

During an interview today, Martha Coakley was asked about the conscience issue Catholic medical personnel encounter when it comes to a law that mandates the distribution of  emergency contraception, which sometimes works as an abortifacient. (I wrote about the details of this issue as pertain to Scott Brown and Massachusetts and Martha Coakley's misrepresentation of all of this here.)

Coakley explained that this should not be a problem because "we have a separation of church and state." "Let's be clear," the attorney general added.

The radio host, Ken Pittman, pointed out that complex legal principle that "In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom."

Coakley agrees that "The law says that people are allowed to have that." But, making clear her view — the attorney general who wants to be the next senator from Massachusetts — she declared that "You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn't work in an emergency room....

"The law says that people are allowed to have that." In other words, rights are given to us by the government. If you change the law, you change our "rights." I'd guess the majority of Leftists believe exactly that. Coakly doesn't seem like a person who actually thinks about such things, or even is capable of so doing; I'm sure she's just absorbed it from the kultursmog.

I assert that rights exist, not only regardless of government, but regardless of the existance of humankind. They are part of the moral law which is embedded in the fabric of the universe. They are implicit in our being made in the "image of God."

Pretty funny...

This is a spoof on the attack ads being run against Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race...

"An absolute nightmare"

From Caffeinated Thoughts, A Little Perspective on Steve Schmidt:

...Let me give you some perspective from Iowa. Here is what I learned from two former Iowa McCain/Palin Campaign staffers. Because of campaigns they are currently involved with I'm keeping them anonymous. Here's what I learned:

• "Steve Schmidt was an absolute nightmare."
• "Incompetent"
• "We McCainiacs (people around from the beginning) never felt like he had McCain's best interest in mind."
• "Was never around, and once (when in Iowa) disappeared for three days and we were unable to get a hold of him."
• "Let his personal positions get in the way of the campaign."
• "Did not have a clue about Iowans." (demonstrated by canceling a hunting photo op with Palin without explanation and said, "Iowans won't care about that")

This doesn't paint a picture of competence. Schmidt is not credible, he ran a horrible campaign and is trying to cover his butt.

So please do us a favor Schmidt, shut up and never, ever go near a campaign ever again. Unless it's a Democrat's campaign; that would be all right.

"a rabbi, a priest, and a toff walked into a bar..."

This is pretty funny, American Thinker: NYT & David Brooks: Intellectuals R Us:

...So Brooks starts the New Year with anger, upset that Americans are digging in their heels -- that the ruled class does "not have faith" in its superiors, "the political class generally." And when he's upset, he gets analytical. His insight for Times readers: You have all these "fringe" people, those not belonging to the "educated class" "from states like Indiana who feel that they are fighting against a bunch of rich toffs ..."

"Toffs"? "Frissons"? "Toffs"?!

In Brooksworld, in Timesworld, in a world where "hockey players like ice" is a Pulitzer-worthy insight, people may refer to "toffs," which is British for a member of the wealthy elite. But in "mediocre" -- his word -- America, very few jokes start with "a rabbi, a priest, and a toff walked into a bar..."

Brooks is upset, and when he is upset, he talks "toff." The "educated class" must stop these very average Americans who are pulling the nation in an "angry direction." Otherwise, they may throw out the most educated and enlightened leadership the nation has ever had.

Brooks asks, in a mixture of anger and wonder, What is happening to our "educated class"?

And we the people answer: Simple -- you're in for some toff times.

So hands off our frissons....

The enemy of my enemy is....

Charlene noticed this post, and tried it herself with the same results. Google Blocking Negative Search Recommendations On Islam – Why?:

Religion always causes a stir when it is debated, and Google seems to know it. Google is not taking a fair approach to the way that it handles searches for different religions.

When you search for the major religions of the world, the monotheistic faiths for example, Google serves up suggestions for the search "Christianity is" such as, "a lie," or false." Try it on a number of faiths, and then Islam.

Notice any difference?

Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?...

Why? Good question. My guess is that the people who run Google are just garden-variety Lefties, and have absorbed (without actually thinking, of course) the common Lefty position that "offending" Islam is a horrid thing, but other religions can and should be bashed. And my guess is that, on a deep level, the reason for this is that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Cunctando regitur mundus...

This is just something I fudged up for a friend...

I don't know who made the Palin/Reagan picture, it's just something I found on the web. So I can't give them credit...

And the "kick your ass" motto has apparently actually been used on Kern County Sheriffs cars... Here's a link to a photo. (Charlene grew up in Bakersfield, so it's kind of an in-joke with us.)

Update: By the way, if you feel like doing something that might make a difference, donate to Scott Brown today...

Feliz A�o Nuevo!

On New Year's Day the Weidners did something chronologically appropriate (quite by accident), we went to Año Nuevo State Reserve, to see the Elephant Seals, which come ashore for a month or so for mating and giving birth to pups.

Here's a little bit of video I shot, of some males moving about. The way they move is utterly weird; galumphing along like giant caterpillars. The big males weigh about 2 tons! More than your car. And they can move fast, though mostly they just lay there semi-comatose. They aren't hostile to humans, but if you got in their way they would just squash you like a bug. So one proceeds carefully!

One of the oddities about them is that, aside for this brief time ashore, the males and females live in different worlds. The females will soon go west, as far as Hawaii. The males head north towards the Aleutians. And they will all travel alone—no packs or herds.

And the dying-motor sound you hear near the end, ka-leckh ka-leckh ka-leckh... that's their means of self-expression!

The man who saw through time...

....In brief, original sin is that supreme negative with countless positively verifiable effects. It is the most experimentally true of all dogmas, because each of us experiences its effects a hundred times every day. It is also easy to experience that the same dogma is resisted by the world at large. Worse, the resistance translates itself into a haughty attitude that no counter-arguments are to be take seriously, as if man's fallen nature had been disproved once and for all...

...Newman knew full well that haughty attitude, especially strong in the worlds of academia, of publishing, and of public affairs. He could talk quietly about the progress of unbelief, but only up to a point. As he once elaborated on that progress in the Oratory's common room, he noted that there would be a time when the world at large would take it for granted that Christianity had been disproved. He foresaw—a most accurate prediction indeed—that those who believed in supernatural revelation would neither be listened to nor reasoned with. Arguments of believers would be brushed aside, so Newman remarked, with the claim that since revelation "has been disproved, we cannot disprove it again." These last words of Newman's were remembered precisely because in uttering them he put "a tone of anger and impatience into his voice."...

    -- Quoted from Newman's Challenge, by Stanley L. Jaki

"Arguments of believers would be brushed aside." That's for sure. There is no debate. It is maddening. "a tone of anger and impatience into his voice." Newman was every inch the English gentleman, and speaking with anger would be very surprsing in him—no wonder people remembered this.

Me, I have no such reticence. People who smugly hold views, and won't debate or seek truth...I want to kick them into the gutter and laugh at them. It's exactly the same in politics. "neither be listened to nor reasoned with." There's never any principled debate with Leftists. I've yet to see it happen. Cowardly dogs.

Palin/Cheney (Liz, that is) 2012....

From Facebook | Sarah Palin: It's War, not a Crime Spree:

...It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama's advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber.

John Brennan, the President's top counterterrorism adviser, bizarrely claimed "there are no downsides or upsides" to treating terrorists as enemy combatants. That is absurd. There is a very serious downside to treating them as criminals: terrorists invoke their "right" to remain silent and stop talking. Terrorists don't tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in, who they were trained by, and who they were trained with. Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information.

President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor. ...

"A commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor." Amen, sister.

Sarah Palin Rifle Training

A bit more of Yosemite...

Here's another picture from Yosemite Valley. (We're home now, by the way.) That's a bridge over the Merced River, with Half Dome in the background. Notice how nice the reflection of the bridge in the water is. We took a mid-week vacation, the best time because few people are around, and rates are low. Once I wandered away from the roads I'd hardly see another soul. We wouldn't dream of going to the valley in summertime, it would just be absurd...

Below the fold you can see Charlene relaxing in front of the fire in her "Fortress of Solitude," the rustic Weidner cabin, pondering deep and dangerous thoughts. Be very afraid, collectivists!

Death by Scientific Consensus

Charlene highly recommends this piece on Vitamin D, Pajamas Media   Sunshine, Vitamin D, and Death by Scientific Consensus:

...If you do take my advice and perform further research on this subject, you will still encounter holdouts who assert that unprotected exposure to sunshine is always dangerous and that a normal diet supplemented by a daily multiple vitamin provides sufficient vitamin D. Behind the scenes, however, even the NIH is now looking for a face-saving way to change positions on vitamin D without taking too much blame for having resisted those who have urged reassessment for decades.

The stakes are huge, as are the benefits of attaining optimal vitamin D levels. The embarrassment for those who must admit past error, however, may be even greater. The reason is that untold millions have suffered and died prematurely because those who challenged the “settled science” regarding sunshine and vitamin D decades ago were treated like crackpots and demonized.

Now we know that very few people have optimal serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], the principal form of vitamin D circulating in the blood. Moreover, those with more melanin manufacture less vitamin D in their skins, so they suffer disproportionately from diseases exacerbated by vitamin D deficiencies.[...]

....Optimal vitamin D serum blood levels, attained through sunlight or supplementation, dramatically reduce the risk of many diseases other than bone maladies. Many of the most serious are ameliorated by an astonishing 50 to 85 percent. These diseases include cancers, from breast and colon to deadly melanoma skin cancers.

Yes, that's right. The really nasty skin cancers can be prevented by getting moderate, sensible sunshine or through vitamin D supplementation. Non-melanoma skin cancers do increase somewhat with sun exposure, especially with sun burns. These skin cancers, however, are relatively benign as they tend not to spread into other parts of the body. They are easily detected and removed because they appear on skin exposed to the sun...

"Treated like crackpots and demonized." Gee, doesn't that sound familiar. [Link. link, link, link, link, ]

You don't even need to ask the name...

Charlene's quote for the day, by Orrin Judd:

"She was so mad her expression nearly changed"

We are away for a few days...

Charlene and I and one of our sons are spending 3 days in Yosemite Valley. Stunning place of course. I won't try to do it justice, and right now I'm more inclined to drink Scotch by the fire than blog.... but here's one picture that I liked. We hiked up to lower Yosemite Falls, and this is the stream that flows therefrom....

Instauration...

Alan Sullivan, Dead Souls, Arise!:

Peggy Noonan misses the point again. Our problem isn't failure of institutions. It is excess of institutions, and an excessive disposition to rely on them. How does it avail anyone that "journalism" has come to regard itself as an "institution?" This is the same nonsense as "consensus science." A stale collectivism has pervaded almost every aspect of American life. And not just American. We are the trailing indicator of what Europe has already achieved — a continent of dead souls. Why? Because the entire culture has turned away from the faith that defined it and gave it meaning. That faith came to seem untenable in the face of a new one whose miracles were physical rather than metaphysical. Too few were the thinkers who recognized that the two realms were a continuum, not a dichotomy.

It may seem a long leap from this deep thought to a secret Catholic boy-cult among Boston clergy, but it is just a little sideslip, a dance of ennui. Poor Ms. Noonan, still trembling in dismay. She wants to salvage institutions. Let them fail! Let the grace of individual redemption explode through them. It is not a question of taking responsibility; it is a challenge to walk away with Christ, for those of us who seek him. Or simply to heed God, immanent and unrecognized.

Addendum: And yet I love the Church — its antiquity, its dignity, its vast storehouse of wisdom and art. Let it fail, but let it also be reborn.

"Let it fail, but let it also be reborn." Amen, brother. Truth to tell the Church has failed and been reborn a hundred times, or ten thousand times if you look at local instances. There is no point in her history where you cannot find holy men and women deploring her fallen state, and setting to work reforming and renewing. But what other institution can you name that can renew itself repeatedly for 2,000 years!

...Shall the past be rolled back? Shall the grave open? Shall the Saxons live again to God? Shall the shepherds, watching their poor flocks by night, be visited by a multitude of the heavenly army, and hear how their Lord has been new-born in their own city? Yes; for grace can, where nature cannot. The world grows old, but the Church is ever young. She can, in any time, at her Lord's will, "inherit the Gentiles, and inhabit the desolate cities."...
      -- John Henry Newman, The Second Spring

As an example of renovatio, it's very interesting to consider the Holy Father's new Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, [Link] which allows groups of Anglicans to join the Church by forming personal prelatures, which are something like bishoprics, but not attached to any territory such as a diocese. And to join while keeping much of Anglican liturgical and spiritual tradition.

You could call this an institution-busting innovation. For one thing, the prelatures do not have to obey any bishops within whose diocese they happen to be operating! Wow. They are supposed to consult, but no more is required; they can consult, and then (with utmost respect of course) thumb their noses at bishops. This is surely no accident—Benedict is a deep old file, and has been dealing with entrenched Catholic bureaucracies since I was a little boy.

Also, this is a model that could easily be extended to all sorts of other Christian groups. And if so, if they start to become successful and attractive, the result would be competition within the Church! Prelatures are not supposed to be open to other Catholics, but if they are flourishing it will be hard to keep the others down on the farm. Benedict is a Tocquevillian, and can't be unaware of the greater vigor of Christianity in places where Christian groups compete for souls, compared with the state-church model of most European countries. We could live to see the day when Catholic Bishops have to hustle, and run lean 'n mean sees to keep Lutheran or Syriac prelatures from grabbing market-share!

And this is a possible step towards an Information Age structure for the church. The Anglican Prelatures do not have to have any "locality," except that they are to be formed within a particular conference of bishops, ie: The United States, or Australia. Presumably there will be headquarters, parishes, church buildings, etc. But none of these is required. The whole Chancellery could reside on a laptop.

Of course the whole thing may flop, and the assorted Anglicans may chicken-out and decide to do nothing. But that obvious worry is itself a blow against entrenched institutions, which are always averse to risk. Not B-16; he's just pushed a pile of chips to the center of the table with a smile. Be not afraid!

Classiest of the lawyers...

The Weidners are fans of John Yoo. [Link] Charlene's heard him speak at Federalist Society meetings, and she says this interview is just like he is in person! Totally smart, in the same understated dead-pan-funny way.

Questions for John Yoo - NYTimes.com. I wonder if the reporter has really grasped how completely outclassed she is here...

Your new book, "Crisis and Command," is an eloquent, fact-laden history of audacious power grabs by American presidents going back to George Washington. Which president would you say most violated laws enacted by Congress?

I would say Lincoln. He sent the Army into offensive operations to try to stop the South from seceding. He didn't call Congress into special session until July 4, 1861, well after this had all happened. He basically acted on his own for three months.

Are you implicitly comparing the Civil War with the war in Iraq, in order to justify President Bush's expansion of executive power?

The idea is that the president's power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that's what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.

Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?

No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.

When you say you had "a client," do you mean President Bush?

Yes, I mean the president, but also the U.S. government as a whole....

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Lincoln of course trampled the hell out of "civil liberties," and quite properly so. [Link, link] It needed to be done, and he did it.

And speaking of Lincoln, this is a slam bang story. And this too.

And here's my favorite (for oddness) Civil War image. Colonels Kit Carson and Lafayette Baker! Baker did a lot of Lincoln's dirty work, such as kidnapping and imprisoning suspected Confederate agents in the then equivalent of Gitmo, Old Capitol Prison. Popularly known as "Baker's Bastille." [Link]

Let us never forget... Sidi Bou Zid

(This is an old post I stumbled upon from 2002, inspired by someone who had expressed disappointment upon discovering that the Wright Brothers had in fact flown not at Kitty Hawk, but at nearby Kill Devil Hill)

I wrote (and still think):

Names are part of the poetry of history. It's worth a bit of historical inaccuracy to get a name that rings in the mind.

What if the Battle of Waterloo had been called the Battle of Hougemont? Or Shiloh called The Battle of Pittsburg Landing? Ugh. Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed's Hill, but which is the better name?

Kitty Hawk is a splendid name, so it was the correct one to use. Nothing's really lost, because anyone who is interested in the subject soon learns about Kill Devil Hill.

And since I'm on the subject of battle-names, the American defeat at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia should really have been called Sidi Bou Zid, which is where the real defeat happened. Thank goodness somebody wasn't pedantic.

And I didn't mean that the names Waterloo or Shiloh were inaccurate. But the names were chosen from several possibilities, and probably because they were noble-sounding. For the happy few who still love history, hearing the word Shiloh immediately fills the mind with profound reflections; of bloodshed on a scale until then unknown, of courage and sacrifice, of the greatness of Ulysses Grant, and of a frontier faith that named a log-cabin church in the woods after a village in Palestine. And to think that it could just as easily been called The Battle of Owl Creek!

Thinking of names of battles, the North called it The Battle of Antietam; the South The Battle of Sharpsburg. Which is better? And would perhaps a certain battle be better remembered if it had a better name than The Meuse-Argonne Offensive?