Blog Update

from Mt. Algonquin, New York State

Continuing my hiatus from blogging ... zjm

Forever Changed

President of the United States

How would you spend your last day before you became President?

NBC News and news services

WASHINGTON - On the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama talked with wounded troops at a military hospital and then visited an emergency shelter for homeless teens, grabbing a paint roller to help give the walls a fresh coat of blue. He appealed to the nation he will soon lead to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. through service to others.

"As we honor that legacy, it's not a day just to pause and reflect — it's a day to act," Obama said on King's national holiday. "I ask the American people to turn today's efforts into an ongoing commitment to enriching the lives of others in their communities, their cities, and their country."

Large crowds thronged to the capital city on the eve of Obama's elevation to the presidency. "Tomorrow, we will come together as one people on the same Mall where Dr. King's dream echoes still," Obama said.

A day away from becoming the nation's 44th president, Obama visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center to talk with troops injured in battle.

Then he visited Sasha Bruce House, a shelter for homeless teens in the District of Columbia, chatting with volunteers who were helping to repaint rooms and then pitching in himself.

Obama once was immersed in such work as a community organizer in Chicago.

Pausing to remember winds of change from another time...

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Just like Lincoln, Obama takes the train to Washington

Speaking in Philadelphia

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Speaking in Baltimore

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No Torture: Justice Back in the Justice Department

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When Bush Is History

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Not to kick the president on his way out the door, but he was wrong when he told White House reporters at a wistful, nostalgic news conference yesterday that "there is no such thing as short-term history." It's true that some presidencies look different after a few decades. But it's also true that presidential acts can have immediate consequences -- and that George W. Bush will leave office next week as a president whose eight years in office are widely seen as a nadir from which it will take years to recover.

"I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged," Bush said in perhaps his most spirited response of the session. "I disagree with this assessment that, you know, people view America in a dim light."

Has he been paying attention? Did he not notice that both President-elect Barack Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, felt the need to promise to restore America's honor and standing in the world? Or does Bush believe they were just joshin'?

Asked to identify the biggest mistake of his presidency, Bush gave a curious answer that had more to do with public relations than presidential decision making. He mentioned the "Mission Accomplished" banner that prematurely announced the end of major conflict in Iraq -- but not his decision to invade Iraq in the first place. He mentioned his failure to visit New Orleans at the height of the devastating, deadly flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina -- but not the decision to entrust the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the hapless and ineffective Michael Brown.

In Bush's mind, the revelation of shocking prisoner abuse by U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was "a huge disappointment" -- but he doesn't take any responsibility, as commander in chief, for the atmosphere of lax training and supervision that allowed the abuses at Abu Ghraib to happen. The failure by U.S. forces to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq qualifies only as "a significant disappointment" -- even though the administration's apocalyptic rhetoric about WMD was what sealed the deal for an invasion and occupation that never should have taken place.

In what may turn out to have been his last news conference as president, Bush spent surprisingly little time on his actual achievements. Yes, I said achievements. Bush was the first U.S. president to put real money and serious effort into a campaign against AIDS in Africa. Even if the administration wastes far too much on "abstinence only" programs of questionable effectiveness, the fact is that millions of people in Africa are being kept alive and relatively healthy with antiretroviral drugs that wouldn't have been available without Bush's funding and commitment. In sub-Saharan Africa, he made a difference.

Bush also tried his best to move his party away from small-minded xenophobia on the immigration issue. This doesn't really count as an achievement, since Bush never got a reasonable immigration bill passed. But short-term history has proved him right. Latino voters defected to the Democrats in such numbers that the Republican Party looks even more like a country club than when Bush took office, and that's saying something.

As his greatest achievement, Bush would cite the fact that there has been no terrorist attack on U.S. soil -- I won't use Bush's unfortunate term, "the homeland," which sounds vaguely Teutonic and evokes lederhosen -- since the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda atrocities. Here, though, he relies entirely on short-term history. His argument, in effect, is that since we've made it through seven years and four months without an attack, his administration's anti-terrorism methods must be both necessary and effective.

That must be a comforting thought for the president, but it's unjustified. That there has been no new attack does not justify waterboarding, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons or warrantless domestic surveillance. Bush believes these departures from American values and traditions were necessary, but from what we know so far, they look more like overkill -- an excess of cruelty and a disdain for the rule of law that have seriously damaged this nation's sense of itself.

What we know so far isn't enough. I understand Obama's reluctance to conduct criminal investigations of the Bush years -- and I realize that Bush might well pardon everybody in advance anyway. But it's important to convene an investigation and learn the truth, all of it, so that no president is tempted to take such liberties again. History, both short-term and long-term, will be grateful.

Finally, the voice of conscience and law: Obama to issue order to close Gitmo -

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers.

It's unlikely the detention facility at the Navy base in Cuba will be closed anytime soon. In an interview last weekend, Obama said it would be "a challenge" to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration.

But the order, which one adviser said could be issued as early as Jan. 20, would start the process of deciding what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held there. Most have not been charged with a crime.

It's baptism by fire for Obama

Lisa Van Dusen |Monday, 12 January, 2009

There must be mornings these days when Barack Obama looks out his window at the Hay Adams, across Lafayette Park to the White House, and thinks, "I should have gone to Disney World."

At a news conference at his transition headquarters Wednesday, where the president-elect unveiled his chief performance officer, the post-announcement Q&A started with an ironic, "Welcome to Washington," from a reporter. Obama responded with an equally ironic, "It's great to be here."

Obama's not entirely new to Washington, but being the change behemoth with the 82-per-cent approval rating draws a whole new kind of welcome wagon. Already, it was that kind of week.

It started with the withdrawal of Bill Richardson as Commerce secretary nominee over a grand jury investigation, segued into the public slamming of former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta as nominee for CIA director by fellow Democrats. Meanwhile, embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was all over everywhere on Capitol Hill without ever leaving home in the form of Roland Burris, his legally appointed senator and human shield.

Anyone who thought winning the toughest nomination campaign and then the toughest election campaign in memory would be the hard part, must be slapping themselves now. There's a very good reason why one of the symptoms of transitionitis is campaign nostalgia: Some days, pre-governing, like governing, truly sucks.

When you come down to earth after a successful election and thud into to the entrenched guerrilla warfare of a government town, there aren't too many days when that schedule blocked out in 15-minute increments stays intact past noon.

As tough as Chicago may be, Washington is arguably tougher in its own way because the stakes are so much higher and the currency of power gets traded in ways that aren't always obvious.

During the nomination and election campaigns, there was always the question of whether Obama, if he won, would be able to govern by the same rules that applied on the road and that generally prevailed from the top of his organization to the street-level volunteers whereby winning wasn't worth it if it meant resorting to old-style tactics.

If there was any doubt, last week proved that not only is he not in Kansas anymore, he's not even in Chicago.

Along with the Burris soap opera, the Panetta panning (the Obama team neglected to inform Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, incoming chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, of the appointment, which may or may not have helped . . . likely not) and the Richardson implosion, there was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, another Democrat, saying, with a breathtaking dose of denial, "If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him . . . I do not work for Barack Obama." Maybe it's more like Dodge City.

By noon on Wednesday, it must have seemed like excellent timing for a chinwag with the four other living presidents at the White House; an opportunity to commiserate with an exclusive support group of fellow survivors.

The media avail that preceded the lunch may not have been the most awkward Oval Office photo op on record but it was right up there in the top five with Richard Nixon shaking hands with Elvis.

Jimmy Carter was hovering almost out of the shot, looking like he was being timed out, which maybe he was. Then the lights went out just as the president-elect was starting to talk. Thankfully, Bill Clinton broke the tension by observing, apropos of the first floor covering, "I just love that rug." Maybe it's more like a waking nightmare where you can hear late Ronald Reagan-era image guru Mike Deaver laughing from photo-op heaven.

By Thursday, the unveiling of his economic stimulus package held out the brief premise of a substantive diversion, until members of the Senate finance committee, again, notably the Democrats, started picking apart the tax cuts in the plan.

This happens in every transition and the only way to avoid a weekis horribilis would be to anticipate every possible exploitable downside or unintended consequence to every major appointment, policy announcement, family decision and public pronouncement, which is impossible in practice but ideal in theory.

Can you even aim for the level of preemptive paranoia required for a zero tolerance policy on unforced errors and still be the guy who eschews the old-style tactics?

Welcome to Washington, Mr. President-elect, where even when it's more like a big high school, hazing runs its course.

Best Actor, Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler from Golden Globe Awards on Vimeo.

Ray of Hope

Mideast madness insanely complex
By LISA VAN DUSEN | Thursday, 8 January, 2009

While another bloody chapter in the most dysfunctional bilateral dynamic on Earth unfolds in Gaza, the only thing harder to fathom than what got us all here is what might get us all out.

Whatever did get us all here, it's definitely all of us and not just the Israelis and the Palestinians anymore, not that it ever really was.

If you're interested enough in the Middle East to have read this far, then you probably already know that Iran and Syria back the Hamas hold on the Gaza Strip that Israel is aiming to end and that the timing of this, toward the end of a tough Israeli election campaign and on the eve of a new U.S. administration, is crucial.

There are now so many proxies haunting the streets of Gaza, it's like the armed combat version of the truism that there's never just one other person in your bed.

For people who haven't had reason to wade into the peace processes come and gone and the conditions, concessions and withdrawals that sustained or undid them, the question of why these people are still killing each other can seem insanely complicated.

Even when you've been immersed in it for years, you come up with tricks to conceptualize it. My latest is a straight line on a 100-degree gradation with the zero point in the middle and 50 degrees on either side. The zero point in the middle represents the status quo, one end of the line represents peace, the other mutual annihilation.

The demarcations aren't national, ideological or religious, because each of those labels is found at every point in the scale and because those divisions have been blamed for so long that it can seem more useful to construct a bottom line based on everyone's bottom line.

The status quo-middle marks the position of those, including politicians elected and unelected, armed and unarmed, who feel no urgent need to change that status quo and who may even be doing everything in their power to maintain it, mostly out of fear of the alternative.

The 10-degree margin on the peace side of it includes the Bush administration, notwithstanding the deathbed blip of Annapolis, which absolutely nobody, including everyone sitting around the table in Annapolis, actually thought would work.

The mutual annihilation end represents everyone willing to die in the name of destroying the other side.

This includes most of Hamas, suicide bombers, the most radical of radical Israeli settlers and the assassins of peacemakers.

The opposite -- or peace -- end of the line represents people who believe in the possibility of a reality closer to what both Israelis and Palestinians would rather raise their children in.

Those final five degrees are where the ones who died for peace once lived (a smaller fringe, they don't usually self-identify ahead of time).

To people halfway between the status quo and dying for peace -- whose bottom line is that they are against anything that undermines a negotiated, peaceful solution -- the horror on the ground now is only part of what Barack Obama's new American administration will be working with Jan. 20.

And the one ray of hope there, the thing in this story that you could chart on a whole other graph, is that it never gets better without getting worse first.