I know, my blogging quantity and quality have both really slipped the past few weeks. The semester has entered its busy zone, the unending rain has had me down, and we’re going home for Passover, which has added to the chore list considerably.
I’ll try to get two or three decent ones up before we leave for New York, though.
There are well established processes for declassifying information which, in part, involve running the documents by people who supposedly should know whether revealing the information could harm national security or harm intelligence assets or whatever. So, whatever legal right the president has to declassify information at will is separate from the issue of whether any competent president would go about doing such a thing.
Whatever the legal issues, the president bypassed normal declassification procedures – put in place to ensure that revealing information does not threaten national security – in order to wage a political battle. Whether strictly legal or not, it’s an act of a man who puts himself above the country. For shame.
Looks like this temporary worker thing is going to happen after all.
Businesses will love it.
Workers, not so much.
UPDATE: Maybe I posted too fast.
Since my last post on the issue of how freaking much it has rained here in the Bay Area, it’s rained pretty much every day since. If this is what Seattle is like (I wouldn’t know, on my one trip to Seattle back in 2000, the weather was perfect the entire time), you can keep it.
I’m sick of it. I’m tired and cranky and generally unmotivated.
Some of this could be just regular second-half-of-the-semester workload issues combined with the job, but the weather definitely isn’t helping my mood any.
Wow. Strong words coming from the Washington Post this Sunday:
Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush’s conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.
We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before — in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.
I’m not enough of an expert on 19th century American history to make a firm call on whether the extent to which today’s Republican party has become dominated by religionists is unprecedented or not. You can definitely argue that other American political movements and parties have been deeply influenced by religion. Even if it is not unprecedented, though, it’s still troubling.
I’m amazed that the Post had the testicular fortitude to say so, though.
Tommy, unconcerned about what hour it is, sleeps on.