The First Hundred Days...Who Cares?

Citizen K. will not participate in the ludicrous efforts to grade President Obama's first 100 days in office because he thinks such stuff is pointlessly arbitrary. The lone observation he will make is that the president has been effective in communicating to the public that our problems run too deep to be resolved during an arbitrary period of time...

Dan Balz of the Washington Post wonders whether Arlen Specter's defection will motivate Republican's to the honest introspection necessary to revive the party:

Specter's decision provides further evidence that the party is continuing to contract, especially outside the South. Northeastern Republicans have gone from an endangered species to nearly extinct. Obama's victory in Pennsylvania in November was due in part to a sizeable shift in party registration toward the Democrats. Republicans have lost ground in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest in the past two elections. That is no way to build a national party.

Balz' observation is correct, if beside the point. His analysis casts the dying breed of big tent Republicans against those who see themselves as true conservatives and view Specter's departure as good riddance to bad rubbish. But the real issue is the dynamic underlying this looming civil war: The Republican party is in the grip of a coterie of whiny anti-intellectuals who blame their predicament on the lies of unscrupulous liberals as amplified by a compliant and biased mainstream media. This precludes introspection of any kind...

Just A Song: The Heptones' great reggae hit, "Book of Rules"...

Abita, I just drank a beer named Abita...I have it on trusted authority that the products of Abita, a new New Orleans microbrewery, are outstanding...

I recently discovered an excellent blog called Just my little piece of the world. It's author writes passionately and persuasively about torture and has an eagle eye for conservative hypocrisy. Check it out...

An Officer's Obligation: Say No To Torture. (Thanks to Just my little piece of the world for this link.)...

Jacoby Ellsbury's daring steal of home Sunday night prompted this look back on the practice by USA Today...

Book of Rules

This morning, the sound system at Eddie Bauer blessed my ears with one of the greatest songs ever: The Heptones' "Book of Rules." Check it out here. Not only can you dance to it and hum it to yourself all day long, it has great lyrics in the bargain...

President Bush doesn't care much about the rules -- at least, he believes that they don't apply to him. Senator Robert Casey (D-PA) caught him trying to sneak a signing statement past the American people...again. Here's what Casey had to say. In short, the president has excused himself from obeying law set forth in the recent Department of Defense authorization bill (i.e., the defense budget). According to the president, he can ignore the following requirements of the bill:

1. Establishment a commission on wartime contractors and profiteering;
2. A ban on the funding of permanent bases in Iraq

Think of it: The administration is claiming for itself the right to enter the United States into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government -- one that would establish a more or less permanent presence in Iraq -- without consulting the Senate. In essence, they can enter into a treaty agreement on their own, something explicitly prohibited by law. Thus, the administration claims that a treaty is only a treaty when they say it is, and that the elected representatives of the people have no voice in the matter. It's a never-ending source of amazement to me that President Bush can speak with a straight face (o.k., maybe he does smirk when he says it) about democracy in Iraq when he clearly doesn't give a damn about it at home.