Posted by James O'Rourke on December 25, 2008
Why History Can’t Wait
By DAVID VON DREHLE Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008
CALLIE SHELL / AURORA FOR TIME
You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There’s a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.
To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can’t quite put your finger on it …
“It’s like the set of The Office,” someone offers.
Bingo.
It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt’s — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Opinions | Tagged: Obama, Person of the Year | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James O'Rourke on December 25, 2008
By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted December 24, 2008.
In a series of departing interviews, Cheney challenges anyone to repudiate the imperial presidency constructed in the Bush era.
As Vice President Dick Cheney goes public in exit interviews about his vision of expansive executive powers, it’s getting clearer how close the American Republic came to suffering major deformity – if not destruction – in the past eight years.
It is also apparent that the risks to the Republic are not over, unless incoming President Barack Obama repudiates many of the executive powers that Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, made central to their governing style.
In a revealing Dec. 21 interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Cheney disclosed that he briefed congressional Republican — and Democratic — leaders about the administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping inside the United States and that the leaders, presumably including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed the spying.
This so-called “terrorist surveillance program” fit with the Bush-Cheney view that the President wields virtually unlimited powers during wartime, even a conflict as vaguely defined as the “war on terror.”
Though Cheney cited constitutional precedents from the Civil War and World War II to justify his position, what has made the “war on terror” such an insidious basis for asserting the broadest presidential powers is that it is amorphous both in time and space. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Bush Administration | Tagged: Bush, cheney, empire, imperialism | Leave a Comment »
