Over the holidays, one of my relatives (who could no longer stand my righteousness in criticizing Bush as a terrible Republican) adopted an interesting coping strategy: if only the media would lay off Obama, because they have been so cruel to Bush over the last 8 years.
On a side note, Bush deserves far harsher treatment than to merely be “criticized.”
…but back to the story: I was unaffected by these appeals, because it was completely obvious that not a second would be lost before Obama would be scandalized by the same crowd that had previously deified and idolized that golden mule named “W.”
The following video is, by no means, the first example… but Fox has no shame. Absolutely none.
The New York Times has produced a wonderfully interactive infographic that includes the most commonly used words from each of the US Presidents’ inaugural address. This is a really great way to get a sense of the scope of this country’s history. I came away from this infographic with a better sense of the challenges that faced the nation at different times, and also with a sense of how young this country really is.
The New York Times infographic presents a very intuitive timeline, featuring portraits of the presidents, along with a representation of the text of their inaugural address. The words have been scaled by frequency – more frequently used words appear larger. Words shown in yellow are special, in that they are quite different from the words used by the previous president.
Scroll through this infographic, just paying attention to the yellow words. You can instantly grok the big issue that a certain president is dealing with, and I think that reflects very positively on the value of this infographic. Next, scroll through the timeline, paying attention to the biggest words, and you can get a feeling for how the presidents ideologically approached their term. Great work!
A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.
Former NSA intelligence analyst Russel Tice has blown the whistle on Bush’s complete, mass surveillance of US citizens. Tice’s involvement in the NSA program was to identify specific groups of interest, such as journalists, based on an analysis of their communications. When Tice realized that he had access to complete, 24/7 intercepts of every communication involving these groups, he determined that such access amounted to total surveillance of large groups of US citizens. Contrary to official claims, these groups certainly had no established terrorist connections, and were in fact “plain citizens.”
From the Interview (transcription is my own):
Tice: An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists.
Olbermann: To what purpose, I mean is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?
Tice: If it was involved in the specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.
Tice makes it clear US journalists are one such group “in the specific avenue of collection,” and that their records have been stored in a database at the NSA. It is chilling to know that this information is now on record, to be analyzed in any manner at any time, possibly decades down the road.
Despite a financial crisis for the ages, the catastrophic collapse of a Republican Party crippled by his political legacy, and the highest presidential disapproval rating in the history of American polling, outgoing commander in chief George W. Bush has not completely lost his sense of fun. When Rolling Stone caught up with him at the White House shortly after the holidays for what would turn out to be his final extended sit-down interview as president, the graying but still quite fit Texan had just finished his morning exercycle session in an eagle-emblazoned sweatsuit and was fiddling with a new toy.
“They call it a Wii, or a Mee, or something,” Bush tells me, smiling as he waves a wandlike plastic device in front of a 54-inch plasma TV in the Treaty Room, a large, brightly lit chamber on the second floor of the Executive Residence that traditionally functions as the president’s private study. The president is playing a friendly game of Major League Baseball – the Boston Red Sox against his cherished Texas Rangers – and a computer-rendered Daisuke Matsuzaka drills a hard slider right past him, down and in.
“Huh,” says the president. “Might have to choke up a little.”
Although now used as a game room, the Treaty Room still has a classic feel, with a century-old painting by Theobald Chartran depicting the signing of the peace treaty after the Spanish-American War, and a magnificent mahogany “treaty table” first used by Ulysses S. Grant. A bookshelf on the north wall displays standard-issue Americana such as Poor Richard’s Almanack, but it also contains former swimsuit model Kathy Ireland’s Powerful Inspirations: Eight Lessons That Will Change Your Life (”There’s a lot of good life stuff in there, a lot of stuff about patience,” the president says) and a well-worn copy of 101 Dumb Dog Deaths (”Makes me laugh every time, especially the one about cow-tipping”).
Matsuzaka delivers again, but the president looks fastball when the pitch is a change. “Damn it!” he shouts, bouncing the Wii wand off an antique globe in the corner. “Goddamn motherfucking shit!”
Mmmmmm – that’s good satire! The treaty room has become so useless and unused that Bush converts it into a game room. Classic!
Of course, the whole article isn’t online, and I don’t have access to the rest of it, but now I’m curious enough to read it in some magazine store.
The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.
At issue in the high-stakes showdown – set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST – are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.
In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.
“I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it’s okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later,” says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. “It’s very troubling.”
I watched the FISA debate on the Senate floor, and although I was sometimes encouraged by the discussion, I was equally disappointed by the arguments I heard.
Retroactive Immunity is unacceptable if only because there were some phone companies that refused to comply, on the basis that they suspected it was illegal. Let’s be clear: certain companies proactively determined this would be illegal. This is a perfect case for a … what do you call it? Oh yeah: a Judge. See, a Judge would clear up the uncertainty because there’d be a record of the judgment. This could later be overturned, but that’s a world apart from the current situation.
The whole idea about warrants (or the FISA court, for that matter) is to determine if an action is legal BEFORE you commit that action.
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