Month: October 2007

Some reassurance:

On the accumulation of White House power under the current administration, Ms Clinton said the president and Dick Cheney both had taken actions "beyond any power the Congress would have granted" and – even when congressional authorisation was possible – chosen not to pursue it "as a matter of principle".

"The power grab undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration has gone much further than any other president and has been sustained for longer," she said. "Other presidents, like Lincoln, have had to take on extraordinary powers but would later go to Congress for either ratification or rejection."

Ms Clinton said the accumulation of executive power had put America into "new territory" because Mr Bush and the vice president had taken the view that were what previously extraordinary powers were now inherent powers that belonged to the White House.

"I think I’m going to have to review everything they’ve done, because I’ve been on the receiving end of that," she said. Ms Clinton stated it was "absolutely" conceivable that, as president, she would give up executive powers in the name of constitutional principle.

"That has to be part of the review I undertake when I get to the White House, and I intend to do that," she said.

I’m with Anderson:

When CNN producer David Doss announced that Planet in Peril would probably become a regular feature on Anderson Cooper 360º, Cooper groaned, "Jesus Christ! We really need to solve this whole environmental thing quickly, because I really don’t want to do it again."

What was it Fran Lebowitz wrote: her idea of the Great Outdoors is the distance between the hotel lobby and the cab? Actually, that’s not my position. I love outdoors, I just prefer to be in my own bed every night.

Four words:

Absolut secrecy. Absolut power.

Yes, it is made out of condom boxes. Do I always have to spell it out?

Richard Mellon Scaife has had some marital problems. The press is all over it.

Emma Larkin pays a visit:

While posing as a tourist to visit a monastery in Mandalay with a tour guide friend of mine (it is an incredible thing that the regime feels confident enough about its control on people and information to still allow tourists into some monasteries), my friend pointed out “new” monks with freshly-shaved heads – government spies, he warned.

On the morning I left Burma, I went to visit the Shwedagon pagoda, the country’s holiest site. Armed soldiers wearing flak jackets and helmets guarded each of the four stairways leading up to the pagoda. Heavy monsoon clouds hovered above the golden spire and the rain-wet marble platform was cool and slippery beneath my bare feet. I exited down the eastern stairway, an area that had been a rallying point during the protests. The stairwell and street, normally filled with vendors selling religious items (gold leaf, candles, garlands of fresh flowers), were mostly deserted. As I hailed a passing cab to take me back to my hotel, I noticed a statue of the Buddha on the fence surrounding a monastery. Whether it had been put there on purpose as some kind of secret symbol or had been there long before recent events, I’ll never know, but it seemed particularly poignant; the statue was broken and the image of the Buddha was headless, as if it had been decapitated.

I just came across this dialogue posted by Anthony Arend (and linked by Stephen). It’s from the president’s news conference last week:

Q Thank you, sir. A simple question.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. It may require a simple answer.

Q What’s your definition of the word “torture”?

THE PRESIDENT: Of what?

Q The word “torture.” What’s your definition?

THE PRESIDENT: That’s defined in U.S. law, and we don’t torture.

Q Can you give me your version of it, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever the law says.

Do you get the feeling that the president doesn’t know what the law says? The precise legal definition is "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to elicit information. How can the president know he is abiding by the law if he cannot remember the simplest phrase defining torture in the law?

It will be much harder for the Fox Business Channel to replicate the success of the Fox News Channel for obvious reasons:

Fox News’s bread and butter is the culture war, and it’s forever inventing new campaigns to boil viewers’ blood in the dead space between celebrity scandals. But how do you translate that to business? Where’s the us-versus-them? The obvious answer would be to embrace O’Reilly-style ostentatious populism: the forgotten little guy against the sinister corporate interests. But that is, if anything, the opposite of what Ailes has in mind.

Chris Gilmour makes his sculptures entirely out of cardboard and glue. Check out the Fiat 500 after the jump. (Hat tip: Reuben Miller.)