Shrub Problems

I was attempting to do my homework when I came across this link to an article in the New York Times about the term "Unitary Executive". I read this article and was amazed and a little disturbed at the contents. I would now, at this time, like to share with the world at large, my thoughts on George W. "The Shrub" Bush.

BUSH IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PUSSY

Anyway, here's the article. I hope you, whoever you may be, enjoy reading it. Maybe i'll start a Bush bashing blog. I wouldn't want to be unoriginal though, so I might as well scrap the whole project while it's in its early stages.

The Unitary Executive: Is The Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?

By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN ----
Monday, Jan. 09, 2006

When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.
This news came fast on the heels of Bush's shocking admission that, since 2002, he has repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law.


And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and to indefinitely detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants.
All these declarations echo the refrain Bush has been asserting from the outset of his presidency. That refrain is simple: Presidential power must be unilateral, and unchecked.
But the most recent and blatant presidential intrusions on the law and Constitution supply the verse to that refrain. They not only claim unilateral executive power, but also supply the train of the President's thinking, the texture of his motivations, and the root of his intentions.
They make clear, for instance, that the phrase "unitary executive" is a code word for a doctrine that favors nearly unlimited executive power. Bush has used the doctrine in his signing statements to quietly expand presidential authority.
In this column, I will consider the meaning of the unitary executive doctrine within a democratic government that respects the separation of powers. I will ask: Can our government remain true to its nature, yet also embrace this doctrine?
I will also consider what the President and his legal advisers mean by applying the unitary executive doctrine. And I will argue that the doctrine violates basic tenets of our system of checks and balances, quietly crossing longstanding legal and moral boundaries that are essential to a democratic society.

Bush has used presidential "signing statements" - statements issued by the President upon signing a bill into law -- to expand his power. Each of his signing statements says that he will interpret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."
Presidential signing statements have gotten very little media attention. They are, however, highly important documents that define how the President interprets the laws he signs. Presidents use such statements to protects the prerogative of their office and ensure control over the executive branch functions.
Presidents also -- since Reagan -- have used such statements to create a kind of alternative legislative history. Attorney General Ed Meese explained in 1986 that:
To make sure that the President's own understanding of what's in a bill is the same . . . is given consideration at the time of statutory construction later on by a court, we have now arranged with West Publishing Company that the presidential statement on the signing of a bill will accompany the legislative history from Congress so that all can be available to the court for future construction of what that statute really means.
The alternative legislative history would, according to Dr. Christopher S. Kelley, professor of political science at the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, "contain certain policy or principles that the administration had lost in its negotiations" with Congress.
The Supreme Court has paid close attention to presidential signing statements. Indeed, in two important decisions -- the Chadha and Bowsher decisions - the Court relied in part on president signing statements in interpreting laws. Other federal courts, sources show, have taken note of them too.
President Bush has used presidential signing statements more than any previous president. From President Monroe's administration (1817-25) to the Carter administration (1977-81), the executive branch issued a total of 75 signing statements to protect presidential prerogatives. From Reagan's administration through Clinton's, the total number of signing statements ever issued, by all presidents, rose to a total 322.
In striking contrast to his predecessors, President Bush issued at least 435 signing statements in his first term alone. And, in these statements and in his executive orders, Bush used the term "unitary executive" 95 times. It is important, therefore, to understand what this doctrine means.
What Does the Administration Mean When It Refers to the "Unitary Executive"?
Dr. Kelley notes that the unitary executive doctrine arose as the result of the twin circumstances of Vietnam and Watergate. Kelley asserts that "the faith and trust placed into the presidency was broken as a result of the lies of Vietnam and Watergate," which resulted in a congressional assault on presidential prerogatives.
For example, consider the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which Bush evaded when authorizing the NSA to tap without warrants -- even those issued by the FISA court. FISA was enacted after the fall of Nixon with the precise intention of curbing unchecked executive branch surveillance. (Indeed, Nixon's improper use of domestic surveillance was included in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the impeachment articles against him.)
According to Kelley, these congressional limits on the presidency, in turn, led "some very creative people" in the White House and the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to fight back, in an attempt to foil or blunt these limits. In their view, these laws were legislative attempts to strip the president of his rightful powers. Prominent among those in the movement to preserve presidential power and champion the unitary executive doctrine were the founding members of the Federalist Society, nearly all of whom worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses.
The unitary executive doctrine arises out of a theory called "departmentalism," or "coordinate construction." According to legal scholars Christopher Yoo, Steven Calabresi, and Anthony Colangelo, the coordinate construction approach "holds that all three branches of the federal government have the power and duty to interpret the Constitution." According to this theory, the president may (and indeed, must) interpret laws, equally as much as the courts.
The Unitary Executive Versus Judicial Supremacy
The coordinate construction theory counters the long-standing notion of "judicial supremacy," articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, which held that the Court is the final arbiter of what is and is not the law. Marshall famously wrote there: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
Of course, the President has a duty not to undermine his own office, as University of Miami law professor A. Michael Froomkin notes. And, as Kelley points out, the President is bound by his oath of office and the "Take Care clause" to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to "take care" that the laws are faithfully executed. And those duties require, in turn, that the President interpret what is, and is not constitutional, at least when overseeing the actions of executive agencies.
However, Bush's recent actions make it clear that he interprets the coordinate construction approach extremely aggressively. In his view, and the view of his Administration, that doctrine gives him license to overrule and bypass Congress or the courts, based on his own interpretations of the Constitution -- even where that violates long-established laws and treaties, counters recent legislation that he has himself signed, or (as shown by recent developments in the Padilla case) involves offering a federal court contradictory justifications for a detention.
This is a form of presidential rebellion against Congress and the courts, and possibly a violation of President Bush's oath of office, as well.
After all, can it be possible that that oath means that the President must uphold the Constitution only as he construes it - and not as the federal courts do?
And can it be possible that the oath means that the President need not uphold laws he simply doesn't like - even though they were validly passed by Congress and signed into law by him?
Analyzing Bush's Disturbing Signing Statement for the McCain Anti-Torture Bill
Let's take a close look at Bush's most recent signing statement, on the torture bill. It says:
The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
In this signing statement, Bush asserts not only his authority to internally supervise the "unitary executive branch," but also his power as Commander-in-Chief, as the basis for his interpretation of the law -- which observers have noted allows Bush to create a loophole to permit the use of torture when he wants.
Clearly, Bush believes he can ignore the intentions of Congress. Not only that but by this statement, he has evinced his intent to do so, if he so chooses.
On top of this, Bush asserts that the law must be consistent with "constitutional limitations on judicial power." But what about presidential power? Does Bush see any constitutional or statutory limitations on that? And does this mean that Bush will ignore the courts, too, if he chooses - as he attempted, recently, to do in the Padilla case?
The Unitary Executive Doctrine Violates the Separation of Powers
As Findlaw columnist Edward Lazarus recently showed, the President does not have unlimited executive authority, not even as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Our government was purposely created with power split between three branches, not concentrated in one.
Separation of powers, then, is not simply a talisman: It is the foundation of our system. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, that:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
Another early American, George Nicholas, eloquently articulated the concept of "power divided" in one of his letters:
The most effectual guard which has yet been discovered against the abuse of power, is the division of it. It is our happiness to have a constitution which contains within it a sufficient limitation to the power granted by it, and also a proper division of that power. But no constitution affords any real security to liberty unless it is considered as sacred and preserved inviolate; because that security can only arise from an actual and not from a nominal limitation and division of power.
Yet it seems a nominal limitation and division of power - with real power concentrated solely in the "unitary executive" - is exactly what President Bush seeks. His signing statements make the point quite clearly, and his overt refusal to follow the laws illustrates that point: In Bush's view, there is no actual limitation or division of power; it all resides in the executive.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense:
In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
The unitary executive doctrine conflicts with Paine's principle - one that is fundamental to our constitutional system. If Bush can ignore or evade laws, then the law is no longer king. Americans need to decide whether we are still a country of laws - and if we are, we need to decide whether a President who has determined to ignore or evade the law has not acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government.

Who Killed John Lennon?

I was humming Ellis Paul's "Who Killed John Lennon?" to myselft today, and I realized that I did't really know who had done that, as the song respectfully omits the name of the slimeball. I really realized for the first time since hearing that song what it was really about. The disgust that permeates that entire song is tangable, and illustrates the feelings of thousands of people around the world after the murder of the true embodiement of the sixties. I won't mention the killer's name here, but if you want to read about him and why he did it, this would be a good place to go.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/chapman/1.html

On Writing

Wtriting is something that I love to do. It is also something that I have been mostly incapable of doing until very recently. Occasionally, choice bits would be unintentionally born out of the cobwebbed destruction of the creative half of my brain, but it didn't happen very often. I wanted to write very badly. I still do, yet I feel less pressure now that I know that I am capable of writing anything decent. I have started a writing journal, just hand written, so that i can get little pieces of fiction out onto paper that I might possibly turn into a functioning story someday. This is very important to me, to be able to dump my thoughts onto some kind of medium, and if it is a lovely blank sheet of paper, than so be it. I don't entirely trust computers anyway.

So, if anyone bothers to read my meager blog entry, wish me luck on my writing, and the gods only know what I could be letting loose on the poor, unsuspecting populace of our dear planet.

Peace

I took the sorting hat quiz online, just out of curiosity. I go to Tuacahn High School for the Performing Arts and there is a big craze going on concerning Harry Potter and his ilk. I used to be a Ravenclaw when I first took the thing, but people change.

Well dad, I'm buying this. Ain't she a beauty? The paint looks pretty cheap, actually, but I don't care. I don't even care if it falls apart. I can afford it, and I want an accoustic guitar. I'll take good care of it, I'll polish it as much as I can (within reason, of course). I'll buy kapos for it and guitar pics and a stand eventually, cause I need one. There's a really nice one on Amazon.com that I want to get. It's metal, and you screw it into the wall. I don't know where I'm going to put it, but i'll find somewhere. Oh, and I really do want to get rid of my bed. I think I'll just borrow that foot thing in the closet under the stairs and sleep on that if I don't want to sleep on the floor. I'll have enough room for a guitar stand and a stereo if I got rid of it. I think I'll just get rid of a whole bunch of stuff in my room. I'll do that either sometime this week or this coming weekend. The end of the quarter is Friday, so I'm going to switch into choir on that day or monday, i don't know which. This guitar is forty dollars, but that means that it's only going to be thirty for me cause of that free $10 that I got from Aunt Angie+Uncle Frank. Hey, they're good for something at least. They are buying me a guitar. I know that sounds awful, but seriously, there is no love lost between us. I have come to dearly loathe them over the last decade of my life, but if they want to give me money, even if they're just going through the motions of being good relations, I'm not going to complain. AAAAAAHHHH!!! I wish my email was accessable from here!

Yeah, anyway. I like the guitar, so I'm going to buy it on Tuesday.

How is Your Inner Child

Your Inner Child Is Surprised

You see many things through the eyes of a child.Meaning, you're rarely cynical or jaded.You cherish all of the details in life.Easily fascinated, you enjoy experiencing new things.

How Is Your Inner Child?

This is Teague's

Third Place Fiction
Sheer Force of Will
by Teague

A one-hundred-pound pumpkin sits planted on the deck overlooking mountainous Pennock Island directly across the Tongass Narrows. A man exhales chalky puffs of breath as he finishes shoveling, the stacked snow galumphing to the ground below the edges of the deck. He leans the shovel against the house and looks around while he rubs one of his copper dreadlocks between his thumb and first two fingers -- his spidery dreads kinky long and fat like his favorite sunburst strain of marijuana, Matanuska Thunder Fucked. Several hundred miles north of here, his dealer was able to hook him up with not only a pound of this kind bud for the somber winter months, but also this overgrown vegetable from the Matanuska Valley of never-ending sunshine and glacial silt in the summer months below Mt. McKinley. Both were guaranteed to scare the hell out of the neighbor kids.
But what's been scaring him lately is Cindy's dark mood, and he's truly dreading the day he finds her lying in a pool of her own crimson wrist-slit blood or out stiff-cold with a vacant stare as empty as the lidless codeine pill container beside her on the tile. But knowing her, if she could muster enough energy, she'd be more literary and shoulder a backpack full of rocks, then trudge out into the hypothermic salt water at low tide on a new moon night in December, at least trying to complete the circle by crawling back into the womb.
Pushing his wire-rimmed glasses back to their regular perch further up his nose, he spies a rusty chaise lounge in the corner and rolls it out by the pumpkin. Breathing in the fresh air, he notices tiny icicles have begun to form on his beard around his lips. Ever since he quit smoking cigarettes, he's discovered he could smell again, and the steely crisp scent of snow is a treat since Ketchikan is mostly rain year round. But he doesn't mind that usual damp-earth odor either, mixed with the strong whiff of fresh pine needles. And the taste of food was succulent now, so he couldn't wait to find out how many pie tins he'd have to buy for this surreal squash.
Satisfied with the setup, he slides open the glass door and steps in to stand by the wood-burning stove and warm his hands in the half-light of the late October sun. He peers at the couch, where a disheveled brunette sprawls under a down comforter. "Hope you like pumpkin pie," he says.
Her voice heavy and thick with sleep, she says, "I fuckin' hate it when it gets dark this early."
He comes over and sits down on the edge of the couch, whipping his rusty dreads over his shoulder. "Yeah." He nods his head in complete understanding for her. "Aint it a bitch?" Selecting from the paraphernalia littering the coffee table, he begins to roll a joint. "Shit, you haven't even gotten up yet and it's damn near dinner time." He glances over to her to check for a reaction, but none comes. "You want me to pour you a glass of merlot and grill up some sockeye fillets?"
"I'm not hungry." She curls up into a ball on her side.
"Are you Cinderella or one of her wicked step-sisters?" he chuckles. "Because, by the look of it, someone didn't make it home last night."
"You're not funny," she restrains sounding amused. Then her voice, not quite whiny, fills with a dangerous push-pull balance of take-care-of-me and leave-me-alone self-pity. "You don't know what it's like."
Walking the razor's edge, he chooses his words carefully as his slow fingers crease the edges of the rolling paper and he sprinkles a fine layer of pot in-between. He reminds himself that this is really an oral test that he has to pass and time just right in order to elicit her desired responses by showing that he's trying to empathize with her, while at the same time, showing that he's not just going to give up and let her fade away. And all in some poetic imagery too.
"It's like you're stuck in the first half of a total eclipse," he says, "and you can't escape the platinum shadow of the moon as it tugs on you like the tide's undertow, threatening to suck you under at any moment." Damn, he thinks, dual metaphors that worked together and platinum shadow. Shit, he isn't even stoned yet. He smiles to himself, wishing at least somebody were around or in the mood to appreciate his brilliant, from-the-hip improv.
She grips the comforter tighter around her neck from beneath and moans, "I wish I'd just hit bottom or float back up."
Really trying to bridge the gap from his world to hers, he tries again. "I can see how each day you'd begin to dread the longest night of the year more and more. And hell, the Winter Solstice probably feels as if God just finished dragging a manhole cover over the earth."
"Forever," she shivers and her voice becomes more desperate. "That's when I feel the most distant from you, thousands of miles away, frozen in time."
He finds himself at the wordless dead-end of her sadness now. "Me too," he says, humbled. "Me too."
Her words leave him a vision of her dressed all in black inside a void where a soundproof see-through barrier separates her from him, and she looks likes she's screaming, yet he can't hear one iota of sound as she slowly begins to recede. A chill racks his body, snapping him out of it. Setting down the half-rolled joint, he rubs her back with one hand and reaches up with the other to click on the sun lamp, which then bathes them both in hot golden light, like when it was late June and he had taken her out to the quarry to teach her how to shoot.
That spring, she'd seen someone peeking in living-room windows a couple of times when he'd been out, and he thought it was time she learned to protect herself. So after work one day, they met outside the bank where they both had jobs, he as a maintenance man and she as one of the various vice presidents. They had both just smoked a bowl as he drove north out of town in her old Toyota 4x4 pickup she'd given him when she traded up to an Explorer. The "Toy" he liked to call it, as his large frame crowded the steering wheel and cab. Metallica blared through the tinny speakers, and his 9mm Smith and Wesson hung strapped to his right leg in a black nylon holster as he accelerated around the curves.
Slipping out of her clogs, she stretched her skirted legs, pale and smooth, toward the dashboard, where she placed her bare feet and displayed her newly painted toenails. She leaned back into the seat, her velvet hair flowing in the wind, and stuck her hand out the window, flying it through the air like she was a kid again. She looked over to him with a smile that was like the liquid sunshine washing over the windshield, and her chocolate eyes drank him in with years of trust.
"So where we going to shoot?" she yelled.
He turned down the music some and said, "Well, there's the shooting range. But that place gets busy with rules and regulations." Then he winked at her. "We're going out past Totem Bite to the rock quarry where the outlaws go. No one will bother us there."
"A rock quarry?" She squinted at him as if from the other side of a dream, trying to wake up, but not really wanting to. "What the hell's going to keep the bullets from ricocheting back at us?"
Staring off down the road, he methodically rubbed his index and middle finger with his thumb and said matter-of-factly, "Spirits unknown to us and sheer force of will."
She was taken aback a moment at his seriousness and then laughed, falling against his shoulder, "That's why I love you J.D. I never know what you're going to say." She reached toward the volume to turn up the heavy metal again and said, "I hope this day never ends."
But now under the dusty din of the sun lamp, he wishes he could flash her back to the longest day of the year, that summer solstice at the rock quarry. She had taken to that 9mm like she was Calamity Jane. Clip after clip she shot up the bull's-eye targets tacked to a wooden stand he'd placed 50 feet out. Sometimes she'd shoot two-handed, focused and poised, measuring each blow as she sighted down the barrel. Other times, she'd shoot single-handedly from the hip, the pistol's kick recklessly jumping her hand around in ear-shattering explosions as she drained the whole clip, round after round, in a matter of seconds. What a picture. There she was, her six-foot figure standing there in her business suit like some Mafia hit woman, shells littered about her and a smoking barrel, letting out a heartfelt whoop when she was done.
Forty dollars of ammo buried in the dirt and four months later, he's now done trying to convince her things are going to get better again. He stops rubbing her back, but keeps his hand on her, letting her soak up his warmth. The little things he tries to do don't seem to be enough anymore, like trying to anticipate when she was going to bed so he could get ready first and slip between the cold sheets to warm her side for her. Or like in the morning, he'd get up in the blue-black chill of dawn and start a fire and the shower running so that when she joined him, the water was already steamin' hot. But lately, he's had to shower alone. Yet he still makes her coffee and starts her car so that the cab is toasty and there's no excuse for her not to go to work that day.
He moves his hands up to massage her shoulders. "You know I love you, and I'll do anything for you, but you won't let me help. You refuse to take Prozac. You won't move to Hawaii or the lower 48, and you hate to exercise." Exasperated, he throws his hands up into the air and lets them slap down onto his thighs. "I don't know what we're going to do because it's a long stretch to spring."
Crying now, she wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand and says, "I can't take this anymore. I'd rather kill myself than live through this again."
"Maybe so." He finishes rolling the joint, licking the zigzagged edge for a good seal. "But don't think that I'll attend your funeral if you kill yourself. I've got no respect for suicides."
"Leave me alone," she hisses.
He realizes he's just lost some ground. He's always been the one who was able to calmly take everyone's realities in stride; this used to be his specialty, like the time when she freaked out from an anxiety attack in a car full of people and wanted to stop and get out. He understood that's what she needed, even though they were late to the company dinner. So he pulled the car over and got out for a smoke as she paced up and down the shoulder until she had calmed down enough to get back on the road. Now it seems like she's telling him to pull over again, that this is where she needs to get out.
He lights the joint and inhales, staring out the window at the bloated pumpkin. While not exhaling yet, he ekes out, "But I do know that I'm not handling that monster carving myself."
She covers her face.
Exhaling a lung-full of smoke, he stands and walks into his room, speaking over his shoulder. "Come on, it'll be fun. I'va great idea for some wicked eyes." A dresser drawer scrapes open, and seconds later, he walks back out into the living room stuffing something into the inside pocket of his Carhartt jacket. Tucked into the corner of his mouth, the joint moves up and down as he speaks. "You don't even have to move." He reaches down and gathers her comforted body into his arms.
She shrieks, "J.D. put me down!"
"In a second hon." He shoulders open the sliding glass door and shuffles through sideways on to the deck. He sets her down on the chaise lounge and props her up to face the whale-sized pumpkin head on, her face a mean frown of sooty eyebrows and tangled raven locks. "Let's get this over with once and for all," he says, and in one sweeping motion from beneath his jacket, his hand flashes out the metallic 9mm Smith and Wesson. He ratchets back the headstock and lets it snap back into place, filling the chamber with the first bullet. He aims at the dirty orange hide and squeezes off two alarming bursts. Jagged bits of bile-yellow shell blast onto the deck and pulpy seeds leak out of a gaping eye socket like a coagulating tear. Almost dark now; he hands her the icy butt of the gun as the acrid odor of discharged gunpowder hangs between them and the thundering echoes kick back through the low-slung clouds like forgotten stardust settling on the dark side of the moon.

Footnote: Yep this is really his. I found it on the internet. I was just lookin around, and I finally found something.