When the Obama transition team opened a questions referendum on its
popular change.gov website in December, one issue quickly soared to the
top. "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald)
to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush
Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" And when
Obama stepped to the microphone at his first presidential press
conference, the question came again, this time with reference to a
Congressional call for a truth commission.
During the Bush presidency, there were few reporters, if there were
any, who were better on issues of civil liberties and executive power
abuses than Charlie Savage, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his work exposing the lawlessness of Bush's signing statements while at The Boston Globe.
For that reason, it will be very difficult even for the hardest-core
Obama supporters to dismiss away the following observations about Obama
as nothing more than the angry harping of excessively impatient,
unfair
The Obama administration on Tuesday agreed to
review whether it should regulate carbon dioxide emissions from
coal-fired power plants, portending a major reversal of the Bush
administration's policy on global warming.
The
Environmental Protection Agency granted a petition from environmental
groups seeking to overturn a rule that prohibited controls on these
emissions under the Clean Air Act.
David Rivkin and Lee Casey are right-wing lawyers and former Reagan
DOJ officials who, over the last eight years, have been extremely
prolific in jointly defending Bush/Cheney theories of executive power.
Today, they have one of their standard Op-Eds, this time in The Washington Post,
demanding that there be no investigations or prosecutions of Bush
o
WASHINGTON - Despite President Barack Obama's vow to open government more than ever, the Justice Department is defending Bush administration decisions to keep secret many documents about domestic wiretapping, data collection on travelers and U.S. citizens, and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
In half a dozen lawsuits, Justice lawyers have opposed formal motions or spurned out-of-court offers to delay court action until the new administration rewrites Freedom of Information Act guidelines and decides whether the new rules might allow the public to see more.
I have a plan to get NBC out of last place in the ratings. I'm
promising blockbuster audience and international buzz. As a once
disgruntled ex-employee,
I now just want to be positive and help NBC, which needs all the free
advice it
can get.
On Friday in Salon, Joe Conason argued
that there should be no criminal investigations of any kind for Bush
officials "who authorized torture or other outrages in the 'war on
terror'." Instead, Conason suggests that there be a presidential
commission created that is "purely investigative," and Obama should
"promis[e] a complete pardon to anyone who testifies
fully, honestly and publicly." So, under this proposal, not only would
we adopt an absolute bar agai
A student of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco
Zen Center, once sheepishly asked him whether he could sum up the
essence of Zen in a single sentence. "Everything changes," said Suzuki
Roshi without missing a beat, then moved on to another question. Now
that everything has changed, the despair of four years ago-not just
that Bush had been re-elected but that he would prevail forever in a
nation that would forever believe his lies and follow his cult of
imperial war and climate-change denial and free-market
fundamentalism-has vanished like morning mist.
Can we find ideas - political ideas - big enough to be worthy of this moment?
You know, before the cynicism and the disappointment and the recession and the dumbed-down media and, oh yeah, the regrouping Republicans, conspire to dull Barack Obama's election into the bitter memory of hope and harass his presidency into something that resembles Clintonism and business slightly to the left of usual (if that).
