Sherry Chandler

From the Boston Globe (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON - President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

Bush made the assertion in a signing statement that he issued late Monday after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. In the signing statement, Bush asserted that four sections of the bill unconstitutionally infringe on his powers, and so the executive branch is not bound to obey them.

“Provisions of the act . . . purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief,” Bush said. “The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.”

One section Bush targeted created a statute that forbids spending taxpayer money “to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq” or “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

The Bush administration is negotiating a long-term agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The agreement is to include the basing of US troops in Iraq after 2008, as well as security guarantees and other economic and political ties between the United States and Iraq.

Link via Juan Cole.

According to Think Progress, Bush has signed 151 of these statements challenging 1149 provisions of laws. Other provisions in the Defense Bill that Bush will ignore include:

…a commission to probe contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another expands protections for whistleblowers who work for government contractors. A third requires that U.S. intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents…

Bush seems to be trying to tie us up in Iraq so that, with a change of administration there can be no change of policy. He also continues to try to set the Executive Branch above the law. You should click through to the Boston Globe story to see the photo of Bush with Cheney smirking in the background. It’s sort of creepy.

My benchmark for these matters of executive power and privilege is usually to point out that what this President sets as precedent, future presidents will take as privilege. And do you want Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain or Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee to be able to set themselves above the law?

It’s not enough to hunker down and wait for Bush to be replaced by somebody more sane (and on the subject of war I’m not sure I’d put John McCain in that category). I think we need to be fighting some of this stuff pretty hard right now. The man still has a year in office.

See also The Sideshow on the bottom line implication of what Bush has done:

Bush has now declared that he has the power to decide whether Congress can control the purse strings. He also says they can’t stop him from building permanent bases in Iraq, a tacit admission that he’s been lying all along about not building them. He also says Congress can’t stop him from stealing Iraq’s oil.

Or a return to another older culture war.

Back last October, we had a conversation here about the claim that Portsmouth, Ohio had stolen an historical artifact called the Indian Head Rock from the Ohio River, which actually lies, mostly, in Kentucky.

The story was that a group of volunteer divers from a private company had lifted this 8-ton boulder, covered with 19^th century graffiti and possibly some Native American petroglyphs, from the Ohio where it had been under water since the river was dammed in the 1920s. The rock was delivered to Portsmouth for display in their cultural center.

This photo, by T. W. Allen of the Portsmouth Daily Times, shows the Indian Head Rock currently housed in Portsmouth’s city service department’s garage.

It was then that Tanya Pullin cried rocknapping. Pullin is a Kentucky legislator from Portsmouth’s sister city, South Shore, Kentucky.

Now Charlie Whitt, our South Shore correspondent, has logged in with a new chapter in the story. Seems it’s gone all the way to the Kentucky General Assembly (which, apparently, has time on its hands). From the Portsmouth Daily Times:

In a resolution from the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, posted Jan. 7, part of the document reads, “Whereas, the citizens of Kentucky believe that removing Indian Head Rock to Portsmouth, Ohio for display shows disrespect to this country’s Native American heritage; and Whereas, Kentucky’s Native American Heritage Commission voted on November 1, 2007 for a resolution calling for the return of Indian Head Rock to its original location; now, therefore, Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky: Section 1. This honorable body condemns the removal of Indian Head Rock from its original location on the floor of the Ohio River to Portsmouth, Ohio, and requests that it be returned to its original location. Section 2. The clerk of the House of Representatives is directed to transmit a copy of this Resolution to the city of Portsmouth, Mr. James D. Kalb, mayor, 728 Second Street, Portsmouth, OH 45662.”

…

Rep. Reginald Meeks, D-Louisville, who is a member of Kentucky’s Native American Heritage Commission, is sponsoring the resolution in the assembly.

Meeks also has been quoted as saying if legal means does not bring the rock back to Kentucky, “we may have to send a raiding party into Portsmouth.”

In the old days, the Native Americans, with some help from the British, raided out of Ohio into Kentucky. That didn’t work out too good for them. I think maybe the last time Kentucky raided into Ohio was during the Civil War. That didn’t work out too good for us either.

South Shore Commissioner David Piatt says the lege is getting a little ahead of itself:

“Mayor (James) Kalb contacted the city of South Shore 24 hours after the rock was removed and offered it back to the city of South Shore,” said City Commissioner David Piatt. “(South Shore) Mayor Cheryl Moore and I talked with Kalb, and he offered the rock to us on several occasions, and we just didn’t have a place for it. It is very fragile, and until we have a place for it, we know Portsmouth is taking good care of it for us.”

Kalb said it may be true it legally belongs to the state of Kentucky, but he thinks with all the Ohio carvings on it, it really wouldn’t make sense to the people in Kentucky to want it. Kalb said the decision as to the placement of the rock probably will be made in the courts. But he has an idea what might make the best compromise.

“I talked with the mayor (Moore) and the commissioner (Piatt), and I have told them I would be pleased to display it near where it came out of the water, and to put a plaque on it that reads, ‘on permanent loan from the state of Kentucky,” Kalb said. “I have sent numerous letters to state officials, and I haven’t heard back…”

But looks to me like the lege is saying the rock doesn’t belong to South Shore either but should be put back in the river under water. Not sure how that could be accomplished at this point. We’re not talking about some gentle stream here. The Ohio River is a force to be reckoned with. Getting the rock out was a feat; putting it back where it was looks like a folly.

But we all know, to our sorrow, that administrations looking to start a war aren’t interested in real intelligence.

Thanks, Charlie.

may not talk — mine has never spoken above a whisper for sure — but it has faces. And Fun Forever has given them a certain origami flair. I like this jaunty hat on Elizabeth R.

See the whole series at the link.

H/T Donna Rhae Marder.

Youth’s the Season made for Joys,
Love is then our Duty,
She alone who that employs,
Well deserves her Beauty.
Let’s be gay,
While we may,
Beauty’s a Flower, despis’d in Decay.
Youth’s the Season, &c.

Let us drink and sport to-day,
Ours is not to-morrow.
Love with Youth flies swift away,
Age is nought but Sorrow.
Dance and sing,
Time’s on the Wing.
Life never knows the Return of Spring.

Sung by Macheath in Act II. Scene I of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first staged 280 years ago today.

Macheath the highwayman becomes Mackie Messer or Mack the Knife in Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera. A much darker character.

Who was then lightened up again for the 1950s pop song “Mack the Knife.”

Watch at YouTube.

Everybody knows Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” but who remembers that Ernie Kovacs liked to use the song “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” as a theme behind the bits in his early television show? Same tune, not quite so jazzy.

Watch at YouTube.

Reluctance

OUT through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

— Robert Frost

Here is the opening paragraph of poet Ann Neelon’s editor’s introduction to the Winter 2008 issue of New Madrid — Mexico in the Heartland:

On August 12, 2007, Covarrubia Manuel Montes, 34, of Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, Mexico, was killed on a tractor while working tobacco in Calloway County, Kentucky. Although I did not know him, I found myself saddened upon reading his obituary in The Murray Ledger and Times. I wondered if I had passed him in a straw hat in Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon and failed to say hello. His dead body struck me as the elephant in the room of the immigration debate. It made all the talk about getting tough on immigration into a moot point. Here was a human being who, on some level, had sacrificed himself for us. I remembered what the Nobel-Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz had said so famously in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “It seems to me that North Americans consider the world something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed.”

As one who has worked those tobacco fields in hilly country, one who has known many fine men who have been lost on and under tractors, I feel a sense of kinship with Mr. Montes. Not so much that he has sacrificed himself for us as that he has suffered and died as one of us.

Mexico in the Heartland has a series of black and white photos of Mexican’s working in tobacco fields and in most instances, they look not much different from my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters. The photos could fit right into James Baker Hall’s Tobacco Harvest.

Hall and Wendell Berry have sung the elegy. Mr. Montes is like a soldier who has died after the generals signed the treaty.

Danielle Nethery’s photograph of a Mexican farm worker from New Madrid, Winter 2008.

My family cutting tobacco in the early 1940s. Pictured are my maternal aunt, my mother, my sister, my maternal grandmother, my father standing, my paternal grandfather kneeling with my older brother, our neighbor, my paternal aunt on the horse, my maternal grandfather, my younger brother, and my paternal grandmother.

The Green River Writers Writing Contest is now open for submissions.

This year’s contest offers 17 categories in fiction and poetry, along with six categories for Young Writers (grades 3-12).

Entry fees are $8 each entry for the three grand prize categories, $4 each entry for all other categories. Young Writers enter free.

Unless otherwise state, categories are judged by the sponsors.

Post-mark deadline February 29 (Leap Day).

Guidelines are here (PDF).

Via Have Coffee Will Write, the BBC News has this item:

The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country’s military leader.

Poet Saw Wai’s work - titled February the Fourteenth - was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal.

Taken together, the first words of each line read: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.”

Dissidents in Burma have used similar techniques before to get their messages past government censors.

At first sight it appeared to be a straightforward love poem looking ahead to Valentine’s Day, but eagle-eyed readers soon noticed what the Burmese government censors had missed.

It was not long before the authorities became aware of the poem and Saw Wai was arrested.

It is not clear what will happen to him now.

Thanks to Rebecca Clayton at Pocahontas County Fare for finding out that another creationist museum seems to have financial troubles:

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction.

The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder.

“If it sells, well, then we can come another day,” Joe Taylor said. “This is very important to our continuing.”

Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000. The artifact discovered in La Grange in 2004 is believed to be the largest of its kind, Heritage spokesman David Herskowitz said….

Claims on the museum’s Web site include that Noah took dinosaurs aboard his ark….”We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going,” Taylor said. “We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long.”

As Rebecca said, it’s a case of natural selection. No ark in sight to rescue these drowners.

Though I hate to think of a mastadon head going on the auction block to keep this place open.

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.

—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, (Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1922)