Week of May 11, 2009

At the meeting I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ I made the mistake of referring to Sen. Schumer as ‘that Jew’ and I should not have put it that way as this took away from what I was trying to say.

Presidential decision-making can be like parallel parking, Barack Obama told Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in January during his first presidential visit to the Pentagon. Were the street clear, he could park anywhere. But he came into office with two wars and a host of other issues left over from the previous administration. His goal, he explained, was to carefully find his spot between existing commitments.

Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years

There's something about former Vice President Dick Cheney that's been struggling to get out like a rare bald eagle chick ready to hatch. After listening to his remarks this weekend about Rush Limbaugh (loves him) and Colin Powell (doesn't), and his jut-jawed"I don't regret anything" moment on CBS, I know what it is:

Mr. Cheney is now replacing Richard Nixon in the national political and cultural consciousness as the Gorgeous George of our era, the guy whose very existence makes some people furious and who brings to the surface all those intense and complex emotions about power and the people who wield it. And, like Mr. Nixon, the former Bush Veep can't help himself and won't ever stop reopening the wounds.

In Saddam's time we dealt with officials who had a primary school education. They didn't even know who Nebuchadnezzar or Hammurabi was. Now in some of these provinces we suffer from the same problem.

The best refutation of Dick Cheney's insistence that torture was necessary and useful in dealing with threats from al-Qaeda just died in a Libyan prison.



Al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured trying to escape from Afghanistan in late 2001. He was sent to Egypt to be tortured, and under duress alleged that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda agents in chemical weapons techniques. It was a total crock, and alleged solely to escape further pain. Al-Libi disavowed the allegation when he was returned to CIA custody. But Cheney and Condi Rice ran with the single-source, torture-induced assertion and it was inserted by Scooter Libby in Colin Powell's infamous speech to the United Nations.



If torture can mislead you into launching a war that results in hundreds of thousands of deaths, then it should be avoided, quite apart from the fact that it is illegal and that the United States is signatory to binding treaties specifying its illegality.

In response to another question, Justice Scalia made a point about how he interprets statutes. He used an opinion by Justice Stevens in an important administrative law case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, to explain why he believed that comments from legislators were irrelevant in figuring out what statutes meant.

“Do I have to defer to John Paul Stevens because he’s the author?” Justice Scalia asked. “ ‘Oh, John, you wrote Chevron. You must know what it means.’ Of course not! John doesn’t know what it means! Once you let loose the judicial opinion, John, it has a life of its own, and it means what it says.”

“Now why should legislation be any different?” Justice Scalia added. “Once Congress floats that text out there, it has its own life. It means what it means. It means what it says.”