Bruce Springsteen offers a pointed critique of the war in Iraq, through the lens of Pete Seeger on the song “Bring Them Home” — which is only available as a audio stream from the Boss’ Web site (in Real Audio, Quick Time or Windows Media).
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Another turning point, another ebbing tide
Tom Englehardt of TomDispatch offers this bit of perspective in the death of Abu Musad al-Zarqawi:
Every now and then, you have to rely on history as your guide. And hasn’t this happened to us enough? Don’t we know that, in every turning-of-the-tide moment in Iraq, it soon turns out that, despite the hoopla, our tide was ebbing and someone else’s invariably rising? A number of experts are already suggesting that Zarqawi’s death will have “minimal impact” on the Iraqi resistance and may, in fact, serve to strengthen it by removing the most divisive and detested oppositional figure in the country; or perhaps, as the superb independent journalist Nir Rosen suggests in a thoughtful obit at the Truthdig website, Zarqawi’s death “was the greatest advertisement for his cause” and the path he blazed into sectarian warfare is now unstaunchable.
Deadly questions
Aren’t we just quibbling here? Doesn’t anyone see that discussions about particular methods really just obscure the ethical and moral failings of state-sponsored revenge killing?
Traffic jam — Route 27 along Kendall Park
I was driving along Route 27 the other day when I came to a realization: The stretch between Finnegan’s Lane and Route 518 has all the traffic without any of the charm of Princeton Borough.
Rather than a quaint downtown — obviously, not something that can be manufactured from scratch — we have a series of strip malls on the Franklin side with closed supermarkets and sprawling parking lots and a bunch of residential developments, back turned as if they were shunning the road.
The problem comes from a series of bad decisions and shortsightedness by elected officials of both parties in both towns, residents and the state. The goal has been to avoid developing like Edison, rather than to craft a real plan for development and in the end we get a sort of Edison-lite — not as bad as that north-county town, but still haphazard and painfully annoying.
A unitary danger, Part II
More on the theme of Saturday’s post — the Bush administration’s power grab and its theory of a unitary executive.
Charlie Savage in The Boston Globe talks to constitutional scholars about the theoretical unpinnings of the Bush docrine and misue of the historical record by Vice President Dick Cheney and others to justify their approach.
To make his case for these broadened powers, Bush and his administration have fallen back on a familiar strategy: pointing to the Constitution and looking to the founders as a guide to its meaning. This “originalist” approach has been a hallmark of the Bush White House, informing everything from its taste in judges to its opposition to abortion. Relying on a tried and true method of divining the original intent of the Founding Fathers-reading the Federalist Papers, the essays written in 1787 and 1788 by three of the founders to explain the meaning of the Constitution-the administration asserts that it is using executive power as the founders intended.
Yet scholars from across the political spectrum question the historical cases Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made. In an effort to find backing for their view of presidential power, these scholars argue, the administration has quoted selectively, taken passages out of context, and simply ignored what many constitutional scholars say is the Federalist Paper that most squarely addresses the president’s wartime powers: Federalist 69.
The scholars say defenders of the unitary executive theory have relied on selective evidence to press their view, misreading Federalist 70 — the scholars say it was meant to explain “explain why the founders decided to put just one president atop the executive branch instead of a council. The essay says nothing about limiting the power of Congress to pass laws regulating how the executive branch carries out its responsibilities for protecting national security-a power the Constitution gives Congress in Article I.”
But Federal 69 is key, the scholars say”
Alexander Hamilton, wrote Federalist 69 in 1788, as the nation was debating whether to ratify the Constitution. At the time, many Americans feared that the proposed Constitution might concentrate too much power in the president. Having just fought a war to rid themselves of the British king, they did not want to end up with a home-grown dictator.
The Constitution called for the American president, like the British king, to oversee the nation’s military. But in Federalist 69, Hamilton explained that the American commander in chief’s powers would be subject to strong checks and balances, including submission to regulation by laws passed by Congress. Hamilton describes the commander in chief as “nothing more” than the “first general” in the military hierarchy. The commander in chief’s powers are “much inferior” to a king because all the power to declare war and to create and regulate armies is given instead to Congress, he explained.
Some state governors, Hamilton noted, had greater security powers as head of their state militias than the president would. “It may well be a question whether (the constitutions) of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in particular, do not … confer larger powers upon their respective governors than could be claimed by a president of the United States.”
There are scholars — generally affiliated in some way with the president or vice president — who read the Federalist Papers differently, but they seem to be in the minority, with many conservatives who embrace the doctrine of originalism (or attempting to divine the original intent of the founders) questioning the administration’s reading.
Hank Kalet 