Answering questions about unanswered questions

Good Morning! After yesterday’s chilly 39° to 45° (F) weather, today is a relatively balmy 54° in Boston. A good blogging day; unfortunately I need to study.

I got a couple of good questions about some of the things I’ve written that I wanted to respond to. Michael Terry asks, “What new categories of information or action is the administration keeping secret?” I should have done a bit more link research before posting the pointer in question, covering John Dean’s editorial. Dean was concerned in general about Bush’s “mania for secrecy,” including building an Office of Homeland Security with the authority to classify anything it deems appropriate as top secret.

But in particular he was concerned about Executive Order 13233, Bush’s gutting of the 1978 Presidential Records act (44 U.S.C. 2201-2207) and of Reagan’s 1989 Executive Order 12669 that implemented it. The original act was intended to ensure that presidential records were made public. The new act ostensibly defines a procedure to make the records public. But the devil is in the details. The President or former President may indefinitely review the documents to be made public; during this period the public has no access to the documents. It explicitly gives a sitting President the right to block release of the records of a former President. It extends the protection to the records of the Vice President. It’s interesting that this order was issued now, when there are a lot of people in power who were in office during the Reagan administration.

There was a second question that I will address later. Got to run now.

More voices of dissent

Another commentary on the current administration’s mania for keeping things hidden, this one, ironically, by John Dean III of Watergate fame:

While some secrecy is necessary to fight a war, it is not necessary to run the country. The terrorists will win if they force us to trample our own Constitution.

The Bush administration would do well to remember the admonition of former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report on government secrecy: ìBehind closed doors, there is no guarantee that the most basic of individual freedoms will be preserved. And as we enter the 21st century, the great fear we have for our democracy is the enveloping culture of government secrecy and the corresponding distrust of government that follows.î

Throwing out the rulebook

Another New York Times editorial, this one from the paper itself, about the erosion of civil liberties and due process being perpetrated in the name of security:

“With the flick of a pen, in this case, Mr. Bush has essentially discarded the rulebook of American justice painstakingly assembled over the course of more than two centuries. In the place of fair trials and due process he has substituted a crude and unaccountable system that any dictator would admire…[At Nuremburg] Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, warned of the danger of tainted justice. ‘To pass those defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well,’ he said.”

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Lucky

So as evidenced by the previous news item, I’m pretty lucky as a programmer. I hadn’t bothered testing iTunes2Manila with a streaming audio source as the current item before, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Not sure why it doesn’t have a closing quotation mark, but at least the script doesn’t crash.

Good Morning

I’m a little slow moving this morning. I’ve been getting this wonderful almost-cold for a couple of days now. It hasn’t really blossomed into runny-nosed sneezing fits, but I’ve been lethargic and stuffy and it’s been really difficult to think. That probably explains yesterday’s scripting fit. Ever since I first started writing code–even the good old, bad old days of Excel macros for my physics professors–it’s been easier for me to sit down and write code and fight with it until it works than to do something that requires actually talking to someone….

Seizing the rhetorical high ground

OK, so I feel less bad for having referred to Bush’s speeches about going to war in Afghanistan as ‘The Rhetoric of Failure‘ now that I’ve read Safire’s editorial in the Times today. I’ve talked with a lot of people about the PATRIOT act that got ramrodded through Congress and about the suspension of due process, and I thought I was the only one that was concerned. It’s a bit weird for me to find Safire, a staunch conservative, agreeing with me on this one:

“Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts…. No longer does the judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and the accused. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush’s order calls this Soviet-style abomination “a full and fair trial.”

Call your congressman. It’s time to put the brakes on before this creeping abuse of power gets any worse.
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Cold Naked Guys!

More comments from Pam on the Vermonty.com link:

“Those guys were on the Today show yesterday and their site had so many hits afterwards that the site crashed several times, they are on a bigger server now. The calendar is very tasteful, and they use all the proceeds to fix up their community center. They were struggling for ways to pay for the center repairs and one guy jokingly said ‘Well, hell, I just bought a new tractor, i oughtta pose nude on it!’ Months later the calendar was made.”

Why you should buy cases of wine

Got this list in an email from our friends at the Wine Bottega (who still don’t have a Web site; hmm, maybe I should do something about that). It’s excerpted from Wallpaper magazine:

Buying Wine

There’s one golden rule when purchasing wine: buy it by the box. No, we’re not talking about wine in a box but 12 tempting bottles packed into a cardboard container. While this does involve a little planning and is perhaps not as spontaneous as nipping out for an extra bottle of Kent Rasmussen you should remember that:

  1. You will always drink more than you planned
  2. A box demands you try new varieties.
  3. You usually get a discount for buying volume.
  4. For every degree the thermometer drops in winter, the wine shop moves another block away.
  5. It will never go to waste.
  6. You always have something to bring to impromptu dinner parties.
  7. Carrying home a single bottle of wine after work makes you look like an alcoholic.
  8. Walking out with a full case suggests you have your intake under control.
  9. You never know what you are going to cook, so diversity is important.
  10. Boxes usually mean delivery. Delivery means delivery boys (or girls). You fill in the rest.