It wasn’t that long ago, when the fanatics were once again pushing an anti-flag burning amendment (trust me: don’t get me started), that I was thinking that there weren’t too many things left we needed to do to the Constitution. “If Congress is seriously considerings such silly things to tack onto the Constitution, we must be running out of important things to have in there,” I thought.

How wrong I was.

It’s clear from Dick Cheney’s shenanigans, and many of the more heinous activities of the Bush Administration, that some additional Constitutional clarity is in order. Not that I think any of our Representatives are reading this blog (certainly not mine–it’s Lamar Smith, for crying out loud), but this is my blather, after all:

• The line of succession needs to be tightly defined. For one thing, if no non-native born American can be President, then the current line is obviously bogus. For another, the current line of succession can leave you with a President from the other party in a split government, which is really not okay. This obviously needs to be fixed.
• A very clear set of definitions on what the Vice Presidents powers and authorities are needs to be enumerated. I don’t think all the things a V.P. can do needs to be listed, but in the fine tradition of the Constitution, a nice clear listing of what he or she can never do would be a good idea. Especially in light of recent events.
• The recent use and abuse of Presidential “signing statements”, aside from being a clear violation of how the founders envisioned the separation of powers, has been spectacularly confusing for the poor schmoes who are trying to implement the laws Congress has enacted. Recent studies have shown that a significant percentage of laws that have had “signing statements” attached are not being followed. Is this due to confusion, or nefarious purposes? Who the heck knows; it just makes it clear that this whole “signing statement” nonsense needs to be taken care of. I would propose an amendment outlawing them altogether. I don’t think that would ever fly, but I think it would be more in line with the separation of powers that the founders had in mind. This “signing statement nonsense is clearly and obviously a case of the Executive just legislating; Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.

I could also make an argument for a “privacy” amendment too, honestly. A lot of people say that the Constitution has an “implicit” right of privacy in it; a lot of judges disagree. Well, screw it, I say–let’s either put one in there, or shut the heck up about it.

I’m probably going to have another whole post about the Supreme Court’s latest rulings, but one note that’s a follow-on to one of my earlier posts: the ruling against the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” guy, and particularly Scalia’s concurring opinion (where he feels the Court didn’t go far enough) , is a perfect example of Scalia being perfectly happy to throw out his “strict interpretationist” cred when he runs into an issue that bugs him (in this case, “Drugs! Evil evil evil!”). I do no have a problem with conservatives; I do have a problem with spectacularly hypocritical ones.

A lot of folks–Dan Froomkin, The Post, The Chronicle, The Times–are making a lot of Richard Lugar’s “defection” from the Republicans over the Iraq war because of his speech yesterday in the Senate.

No offense, but all you people are fooling yourselves if you think it means a damn thing.

Lugar spoke out “forcefully” before, too: right before he voted for the Iraq funding bill a couple of weeks ago. In other words, he’s perfectly happy to sound tough, but when it comes to actually doing something, he wimps out.

So I think Tony Snow, in the White House press “gaggle” (a profoundly stupid word for the daily press gathering that reduces the status of the White House press corps to the equivalent of geese) was absolutely right to literally shrug off Lugar’s comments. Until Lugar actually gets off his bloviating duff and submits a vote that actually counts, I think we can all safely assume that Snow is right to not take Lugar’s words into account. After all, the Republicans, led but such stalwart all-talk-and-no-action weenies like Arlen Specter, have been doing this regularly for the last six years.

Personally, I think Dana Millbank of the Post–who was on Keith Olbermann’s show last night–has the right idea; believe it when you see Lugar actually do something, and not just talk.

I’m going to be trying to get an iPhone this Friday (along with seemingly every other gadget-hungry geek in America). In the main, I am not an early adopter. I didn’t get a TiVo until last year; I still don’t have an iPod (although I do listen to music on my PDA–an HTC Universal); I waited quite a while to buy a DVD player; and so on. I like to let other people live with Release 1 bugs. Hell, I don’t even like to get Release 1 cars, and cars are pretty stable technology.

But every once in a while, I make an exception. The moment I saw my first decent PDA, I literally rushed right out and bought one (it was the Pilot 1000, which I still have). And this is another such case; I can hardly wait to get my hands on this durn gizmo. Will I be able to? I dunno, but I’m sure going to try.

My official “review” of the iPhone–again, presuming I get one of the damn things–will be appearing in Gear Diary. But I wanted to warn the three or four of you who actually read this blog that for the first few days after I get it, this blog will probably be filled with iPhone minutia. I might pop in with my usual blather about politics and whatnot, but You Have Been Warned.

One of the problems when a high government official commits heinous acts is that when one accuses him of doing so, one can too easily be accused of being shrill and demented. Folks in the 60s and 70s, who called Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, and so on (and not totally without reason) “war criminals,” “evil,” and what have you, made it difficult for reasonable people, later on, to actually point at horrific activity of their government officials later on and do anything similar. “Tinfoil hat behavior!” their opponents say. “You’re demented!” the opposition cries. This puts one at a disadvantage when truly awful things are actually occurring.

Which brings us to Dick Cheney.

Folks, I lived through Watergate. I was in D.C., and we watched it on T.V. at my Elementary school. I remember the secret bombings of Cambodia. I have read about the Shoah, and talked to Holocaust survivors. I don’t fly off the deep end. You can believe me or not, as suits you.

But I truly believe that Dick Cheney is a war criminal, and a deeply evil man.

Dick Cheney, with the aid of a few men, changed the policy of the United States significantly. No longer are we a country that abides by the law; we are a country that tortures people. Cheney himself denies this, with carefully parsed statements. He says that we don’t “torture,” but he has defined “torture” in such a way that it doesn’t include waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation, and other tortures that were, literally, sanctioned by the Nazis and Stalin’s secret police. I assure you that I am not making this up, nor am I making this connection as a rhetorical device; this is an established fact.

There is no doubt that our President, George W. Bush, has approved of all this, and he bears a portion of the blame. But this policy was forwarded and put into place by Cheney, and put through the system by Cheney. This is Cheney’s work. Cheney has changed the United States from a place of freedom to a place that tortures people, that imprisons them without trial, without telling them what they are in prison for, and keeps them incommunicado for years. American citizens have been removed from American soil and taken away with no charges, simply on governmental say-so. This is the work of Cheney.

I am appalled to live in a country where this has happened. I have no idea what we can do about it. I wish there was something I could do. I wish the Congress had the ‘nads to impeach this evil monster, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I can only hope that the damage he does in his remaining 18 months in office can be repaired by the next President. I pray that this is so. And I pray too that he pays for his heinous crimes.

Sorry I haven’t posted for a couple of days (not that anyone is reading this blog yet, but I digress); I’ve had a nasty head cold.

The iPhone is coming out this Friday, and my current plan–given that my birthday is this month, and my existing cell phone is an ancient Motorola v180 that even my 9 year-old son has noticed is getting long in the tooth–is to get one. And as a huge eBook fan, I’m hoping that eBooks will be readable on the iPhone. Certainly one can read eBooks on a Mac; the question is, will they be supported on an iPhone (which is essentially a Mac, but streamlined and tweaked).

I’ve done a lot of looking around, and I’ve looked at their promotional, welcome video, and I still haven’t found an answer, alas. I also emailed the good folks at eReader, but haven’t heard back as yet. And yes, I’m sure Apple will have some kind of support for PDF viewing, but as a person who is hugely, profoundly, horrifically familiar with Adobe products, I have to say that I am not a big PDF fan. I won’t go into it right now; let’s just say that I feel that PDF is not the future of online book and document viewing.

I read an interesting article today about the iPhone and eBooks, the gist of which seems to be that Apple should support the e-paper technology, and that is the future of online books. To which I say, yeah, well, maybe.

I tested the Sony Reader for Gear Diary, which uses the e-paper/e-ink technology. My understanding is, the big advantage of this technology is its low power use, which enables a huge amount of “page turns” or “page views” between recharges. You can read my review for the full report, but the bottom line is, unless some major changes are made in how the technology is implemented, I simply do not see how it can be sold in a big way. Aside from the fact that it is black-and-white, and the world has now become accustomed to color images embedded in their documents, there are a few other things about e-ink that I find really annoying (and the mavens at Sony assure me these are e-ink problems, not problems with their implementation):

• It’s dim. Really dim. While fine on a bright day in sunlight, if you are trying to read in a dim room, you’re out of luck.
• E-ink has a noticeable refresh delay. This causes a delay when you turn pages, when you change menus, any time you redraw the screen. The Sony folks said I would get used to this; I didn’t. I found it spectacularly annoying. The screen also “flashes” black for each refresh, which is extremely distracting, especially in combination with the slow refresh rate.
• It’s black and white.

So in any case, I think putting up with that simply to get more battery life is simply unacceptable. E-ink may be the Next Big Thing, but I think it’s got a ways to go first. I would invest in better batteries before I would throw my money behind e-ink technology, honestly.

The new iPhone specs put the battery life at 7 hours of video playback time, which is boucoup eBook reading time (take it from me–I watch a lot of movies and read a lot of books on handheld devices). So the question is, are people really going to want to trade off a full-color device with embedded images that can move for a black-and-white e-ink device that has a slow refresh rate for the nominal advantage of a few more hours of battery life? When most people are used to plugging their phone in at the end of the day anyway? What market would this be for? The international, 14-hour plane flight set? C’mon!

As a doc guy, I’ve been watching e-ink development for nearly 15 years now, and it still is a few years away from being completely there. Meanwhile, CRT and plasma screen technology and battery technology development marches on, as we see in the iPhone. I won’t say that e-ink is dead, but I read the first stories about it before I got married, and now my daughter is about to enter Middle School, so I’m not holding my breath, if you get my drift.

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” these days are thrown around so promiscuously that they are practically devoid of meaning, of course. But still, my understanding of “conservative” is a person who wants to “conserve” the “original” meaning of the Constitution. I think we can all agree on that.

But even there, I get pretty confused.

I won’t belabor the point that “neoconservatives” aren’t conservatives by any stretch; they are radicals. Cheney, of course, is advancing a truly radical definition of executive power, the “unitary executive,” that I can find in not a single one of the Federalist Papers. Bush’s unilateralist, pre-emptive war policy is basically imperialistic in nature, and flies directly in the face of the founders vision (George Washington, in particularly, would be appalled; Washington was an isolationist). Further, Bush’s huge expansions of government, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Medicare drug policy are very much anti-conservative, pro-governmental (and thereby classically liberal) in nature. And the interventionist, nation-building exercises that we’ve been engaging in are hardly “conservative” (unless you consider Woodrow Wilson a conservative).

No, what confuses me is when people who are lionized by the “conservative” movement turn out to have heavily non-conservative impulses. Or when things that would seem to be as conservative as can be–sections of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, say–are considered “liberal.”

For example, consider that lion of “Originalist Interpretation,” Antonin Scalia. Scalia has said, over and over, that hews to an interpretation of law that is what he views is the “original intent” of the Founders. (How he thinks he can know what fellows dead 200 years ago were thinking is beyond me, but never mind.) Even people who disagree with him feel that he does rule based on original intent.

Except, you know, when he doesn’t. Like in Bush v. Gore, where he tossed his original intent and federalist principals right out the window, and over-ruled a state court in a state matter. Or in Lawrence v. Texas, where his dislike of gays apparently over-ruled his desire for ruling based on original intent. (Although he was able to rationalize it pretty well.)

And in this, Scalia is similar to many conservatives; he blats on about federalism and small government and keeping the government out of your life, but when his moral outrage kicks in–in his case, it happens to be gays–he’s perfectly happy to toss his precious principals out the window and rule according to how he feels, rather than the law.

And conservatives, by and large, seem to have that problem. They want to keep government “out of your life,” except, you know, when they want to tell you what to do in the privacy of your own bedroom. My feeling is, if you’re going to be a conservative, be one; have a little intellectual honesty, for crying out loud.

Another thing that confuses me about conservatives is which principals they pick and choose as the “conservative” ones. “Defense” is a bedrock conservative principal. “Welfare” is a liberal principal. And this has always confused me, because of the following prose:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There it is, right there in the the Preamble, right after “provide for the common defense”: “Promote the general welfare.” I mean, how much clearer can you get? How much more conservative can a value be than one that is listed in the preamble, for crying out loud? And yet, this is constantly given as a liberal value. I just don’t get it.

Perhaps I am being too hard on “conservatives,” and folks think I should shine an equally harsh light on “liberals.” But during my lifetime, liberals have always been incoherent, basically a collection of pressure groups and single-issue people (labor, racial politics, gender politics, anti-war politics, what-have-you). While the classic definition of “liberal” may have a definition as strident as that of “conservative,” there has been no liberal “movement,” at least in the last 30 years, like there has been a conservative “movement.” And hence I am only focusing on the conservative ideology, because in my view, there really isn’t a liberal ideology per se.

Now, I am perhaps a little more cynical about politics than most. JFK was shot within a few months of my birth. By the time I was 7, Bobby Kennedy had been shot, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, Johnson had lied us into the mess in Vietnam, and Nixon had been elected. My formative years were covered by Watergate. Iran/Contra dominated my young adulthood. Is it any wonder that I’m cynical?

Even so, the whole “surge” seems cynically calculated, even by my low standards. It has always seemed clear to me that it is nothing more than an attempt by Bush to run out the clock on his disastrous war until January 20, 2009. First, he announces it in January, but it isn’t “complete” until June. 5 months to get the troops “in theater.” How convenient!

In order to manipulate public opinion to get his money, Bush sends out his cronies in the last few months saying that General Patreaus will give Congress an “update” on the “surge” in September. So we have a “new strategy” in January, which is not “complete” until June. In June, we get further stalling tactics until September. And in September, what will we get? The real information?

Don’t be absurd. A few weeks ago, Bush starting informing us that we would see escalated violence during the summer, i.e. between now and September. And Tony Snow has spent the last couple of weeks backing off of the Administration’s stance that we can expect to see any results by September. And General Patreaus himself has been lowering expectations for his September report right and left.

So what can we expect in September? There are three options:

• There will have been more violence over the summer, in which case the Administration will say, “This is exactly what we expected. This is proof that the surge is working. We need to stay the course.”
• There will have been less violence over the summer, in which case the Administration will say, “Violence is receding! This is proof that the surge is working. We need to stay the course.” (There will also be accusations that anyone who suggests otherwise is a coward, a traitor, or worse.)
• As General Patreaus noted today, it’s possible that the level of violence may remain the same, in which case the Administration will say, “Violence has stabalized! This is proof that the surge is working. We need to stay the course.”

There are no other options. This Administration will never admit that the surge is not working, or that the war in Iraq is lost, despite the fact that majority of Americans already believes that to be the case (57% in the latest poll, and trending upward). The Administration will continue to play the “surge” card until the noise from the election grows loud enough, and then they will play some other cynical card (Iran invasion? Another trumped-up terrorist plot? Syrian invasion?). And in the meantime, our brave troops will continue to die, manipulated like pawns.

(And yes I’m angry; I may not be in uniform, but my father was, my father-in-law was, and countless uncles, aunts, and cousins are and have been. They do not deserve to die due to a stubborn man’s inability to admit a mistake.)

The only way out of this I see–the only way–is for Congress to cut off the funding. And with a Presidential election coming up, I don’t think that will happen. So for the next 18 months, we will continue to see innocent Americans and Iraqis die. Because of Bush.

When I read about the current situation in Gaza, I feel two very powerful, completely conflicting emotions.

On the one hand is, not exactly schadenfreude, but vindication. Israel has taken it on the chin for decades (sometimes fairly, in my view) for how they have treated the Palestinians. We can talk about how the press has conveniently ignored how much more poorly the Palestinians are treated in places like Jordan and Egypt, where the press is, to put it mildly, not exactly “free.” We can talk about how Israel is held to a completely different set of standards than any other country in the world in how their treat their religious minority. But even so, I don’t think anyone can deny that the Israelis and Palestinians haven’t exactly gotten along in an area of the world that’s not much bigger than New Jersey. And the Israelis, being the ones in charge of the area, have taken a large portion of the blame for Palestinian behavior.

But the point here is, now the Palestinians largely have autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank. And there is, for all intents and purposes a civil war raging in Gaza. And one of my powerful, conflicting emotions as a supporter of Jews in Israel is, “See, all you people who have been harshing on how the Jews have been governing the Palestinians! They can’t even govern themselves!” Total vindication.

But counterbalancing that is an equally powerful emotion: sorrow for the Palestinians. And I am not completely ignorant of history. I am well aware the United State Constitution did not spring, lo, full blown from the brow of Thomas Jefferson like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. It was the product of generations of western thought, and Jefferson himself was the product of of years of education and debate, living in a period and a place that allowed him to midwife this incredible system. Not to denigrate the work of the founders; their effort was profound, and I personally believe that Jefferson and Franklin were–and I do not use this term lightly–geniuses. But it is absolutely critical to consider the period of time and the cultural matrix in which they were embedded.

And the Palestinians? Have the Palestinian leaders been going to their equivalent of Harvard or Oxford, and educating their children in the principals of democracy and abstract thought, for generations? Or have they been scrambling to survive (in some cases), or (in others) filling the heads of their children with fundamentalist ideas about paradise in the afterlife if they become revolutionaries or suicide bombers? Even if a Palestinian Jefferson or Franklin exists–and he or she probably does–does he or she have the leisure to sit and think Great Thoughts, or is he or she simply trying to get through the day alive without getting caught in a Fatah/Hamas crossfire on the way to the market?

And so while I feel strongly that the current chaos in Gaza helps show the world that perhaps the Israelis haven’t been the brutal bullies that the world press tends to portray them as, I simultaneously feel incredible sorrow for the Palestinians as they struggle to put together a nation. They don’t have generations of democratic thought to build on. They don’t have peace and prosperity to lean against. They have chaos; they have autocratic leaders; they have schemers and connivers who have been funneling foreign aid into offshore accounts for personal enrichment; they have the authoritarian rulers of neighboring countries, co-religionists who one would expect to help them, who are instead using them as a political football for their own countries’ purposes. And I feel nothing but sorrow for the Palestinians themselves.

Off and on over the last several years, I’ve read a number of opinion pieces that show that a majority of people my age (43) and younger get their news from online sources, or programs like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, instead of newspapers or network news. The subtext of these pieces always seems to be, “Well, yes, I’m smart enough to know that Jon Stewart is being satirical, but do these dumb GenX people know it? I mean, what if they believe it? And those bloggers! My god . . .”

I’ll discreetly draw a veil over the absurdity of preferring news channels that highlight the “skills” of a person like Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn, or Katie Couric over someone as obviously intelligent as Jon Stewart and his team, or as ballsy as Steven Colbert (one of the few people in the last 6.5 years to have the nerve to confront Bush to his face). Personally, I’d rather watch John Oliver or Aasif Mandvi’s faux analysis than yet more empty-headed sonorous pronouncements from Wolf Blitzer any day. But hey, that’s just me.

First, Jon Stewart can do something in under two minutes that the entire White House press corps seems to have been unable to accomplish in the last 6.5 years: call the Bush Administration on its lies and bullshit. And one of the beauties of Stewart and The Daily Show is that they actually call these people liars when they, you know, lie.

Also, you pundits? Are you seriously more worried that the folks getting their news online and via Jon Stewart–a demographic that skews towards the more educated and (obviously) computer-literate–is less-involved, less intelligent, and more likely to be fooled than people who only get their news from network TV, Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh? Really? Or are you just honked that you are losing audience?

I can’t speak for my generation–and heck no I’m not talking about Boomers, I’m talking about us what comes after the Boomers–but I know that for me, it’s a relief to be able to read and watch people who call liars liars, who write what they actually think instead of qualifying it with a bunch of weasly language. They may be biased, but at least you know their biases, and at least you know their opinions, which is often not the case with the high-profile pundits. (And this, I think, helps explain the boom in ratings for Keith Olbermann since he started venting. Now you know where he stands, and people like that!)

Our legal system confuses me utterly. It confuses me for any number of reasons, but the thing that confuses me the most is how stinking slow it moves.

Consider the Scooter Libby trial. Let’s leave aside the fact of how long the trial itself took, which was insane enough. (I mean, why does it take several days to select a jury? Am I the only guy who finds that absurd?) Libby was indicted on October 28, 2005. His trial started January 16, 2007. What the heck was everyone doing in the intervening time? Filming a movie? Writing a novel? Taking trips to Zanzibar? (On foot?) In the high-tech world, that’s nearly two software development cycles, and about one hardware development generation. That’s insane.

Libby was found guilty on March 6, and sentenced on June 5. What the heck was Judge Walton–who I actually have a lot of respect for–doing during those three months? In that time, I delivered the documentation for two major products, my kids finished 2nd and 5th grades (respectively), I had a new roof put on my house and a new ceiling put in in my living room, I re-read Shogun and all six of the Harry Potter books, and I watched (among other things) the entire first season of Avatar: the Last Airbender, the first four episodes of Heroes, and several movies on DVD. And it took all that time for Judge Walton to come up with “30 months?” (And these guys already have sentencing guidelines to abide by!) No wonder our courts are so backlogged.

When Judge Walton finally got a grip and the words “30 months” came out of his mouth after that three month wait, Libby’s lawyer said, “Yo, can he stay out of jail pending appeal?” Had the judge spent part of that three months thinking, “Hm, what will I do if they ask me to let this guy walk free pending an appeal once I pronounce sentence?” Nosirree! He said, “You know, I need to think about that one for a week.” And so he delayed judgment on that decision for another week, until today, at which point he said, “No, off to The Big House with you, Mr. Convicted Felon.”

So does that mean he’s off to jail today? No! According to the news stories, Libby “will be required to report to a federal penitentiary sometime within the next few weeks.” A convicted felon, whose crimes, one might reasonably presume, helped cover up even worse crimes higher up in the White House, and he gets a few weeks before he has to go to jail.

Somehow, I don’t think that if he was Mr. Random Bonehead, he would get those “few weeks.” Somehow, I think that Mr. Random Bonehead would already be dressed in an orange coverall and be riding a bus with bars over the window, heading off to the nearest Minimum Security Prison. Hey, call me crazy.

So to sum up, Libby was charged on October 28, 2005, and was finally told to go to jail on June 14, 2007, but he still hasn’t had to yet.

Like I say, our legal system baffles me. If those guys had been in the high-tech business, they would have been laid off a long time ago.