Stuff from last week

It is amazing when you are busy at work, how little free time you have outside to do these extra things like posting to the blog. Well this week should be back to normal after the holidays, so here we go...

This from my father, which is pretty darn funny. (I am sure he got it from somewhere else) :

George W. Bush has started an ill-timed and disastrous war under false pretenses by lying to the American people and to the Congress; ...he has run a budget surplus into a severe deficit; ...he has destroyed trust and confidence in, and good will toward, the United States around the globe; ...he has ignored global warming to the world's detriment; .he has wantonly broken our treaty obligations;...he has condoned torture of prisoners; ...he has attempted to create a theocracy in the United States; ..he has appointed incompetent cronies to positions of vital national importance. Would someone please give him a blowjob so we can impeach him?

Being a person interested in history, I found this article from the LA Times by Ronald Brownstein pretty interesting. It compares Pres. George W. Bush to Pres. James K. Polk:

Polk may be the only predecessor who matched Bush's determination to drive massive change on a minute margin of victory. Polk won by fewer than 38,000 votes of 2.7 million cast. Over four tumultuous years, he pursued an ambitious, highly partisan agenda that offered little to those who had voted against him. Sound familiar?

Strong on vision but weak on building consensus, Polk advanced his goals more than seemed possible in a closely divided country. But Polk's tactics deepened the nation's divisions and fanned the flames that later exploded into the Civil War. The war also profoundly divided the country....

The opposition Whigs, who would mostly dissolve into the Republican Party in the 1850s, accused the president of "deliberately provoking (The Mexican-American War of 1848-1850) war and then lying about Mexico's responsibility for starting the conflict," wrote historian Joel H. Silbey in his recent book "Storm Over Texas."
Among the Whigs most outraged by Polk's conduct was a freshman U.S. House member from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Doris Kearns Goodwin picks up the story in her panoramic new book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Shortly after taking office, Goodwin writes, Lincoln voted for a Whig resolution that charged the president with "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally" initiating the war. To accept Polk's justifications, Lincoln later complained, would be to "allow the president to invade a neighboring nation … whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary."

Just makes you wonder, which opposition party member we should be listening to now, that has the potential to be the next Abraham Lincoln.

Polk failed to understand the cost to his presidency, and the nation, of governing in a manner that increasingly was seen as championing the priorities of just one interest, Southern slaveholders. The charge wasn’t entirely fair, but the impatient Polk never recognized the value of concessions that could broaden consensus. When Polk stepped down, Silbey writes, he left behind “ominous cracks” in the political and social institutions that had encouraged “national unity.

Reading this piece makes me wonder about the similarities and how it is possible that a President and his policies could lead to some tragic outcome down the road in time, long after the current president has left office and his legacy is supposedly secure

And finally from Maurice's Humor of the Day: Topical Humor...

In what some legal scholars are calling a crucial test of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D- New York) was named an enemy combatant today and transferred to the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The CIA now says it believes new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not involved in the taking of U.S. hostages in Tehran 26 years ago. It turns out he was able to get out of hostage-taking duty by getting a cushy job in the Iranian National Guard.