If you've been reading my recent posts, you understand why I am doing this. Please bookmark the new site and thank you for your patience now and in the future as I learn how to use Wordpress. This site will remain on line for anyone interested in browsing the archives. Please update your RSS feed if you have one.

Thanks again.

[T]oday, in a letter to the RNC, the White House made their position clear: you have to give them to us first. There "exists a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" in the emails on the RNC-issued accounts, wrote Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President.

There is an one obvious and one not so obvious flaw in the "reasoning" behind this claim of executive privilege.

The obvious flaw is that, by definition, email on an RNC server is not properly Executive Branch business. Any executive branch business on those emails is not just evidence of a crime, it is a crime, since it violates the Hatch Act. 

Less obvious is the incredible extent to which the White House is trying to stretch the concept of executive privilege. Nixon tried to use it to shield the plotting that took place in the Oval Office, but to the best of my knowledge and recollection, he never tried to stretch it to include all communications between executive branch employees. How far down, one must wonder, does this go? Can he claim executive privilege for emails between any two federal employees?

It is an unfortunate fact that both Congress and the courts are slow moving institutions. The executive is light on its feet, by design. Almost any lawyer can tell you that it's ever so easy for an unprincipled litigant to gum up the court system for years. The courts simply don't know how to deal with people who don't have a fundamental respect for playing by the rules. Still, sooner or later (unless our courts have truly been totally corrupted, in which case all is lost) the mills of the courts, like those of the gods, grind exceeding small. Congress has only two tools at its disposal: public opinion and the courts. It should get in to a court with this issue right now.

If this keeps up I am thinking of creating a new blog using different software. I'll keep this old site up just in case anyone wants to look at it, with a top entry linking to the new blog. By the way, in order to speed the interminable re-posting process I deleted the old videos. I doubt anyone ever looks at them, and it makes a big difference in the time required to try to rectify this problem.

While I have succeeded in posting this, it has been at great price. I am pretty well convinced I will have to ditch this software. If you look below you will see that the run on sentence is now properly formatted, but the software decided to delete the words "New York Times" and move a link to the words "I am among". One thing I definitely am is unhappy.

 Americans may have more news outlets today than two decades ago, but they still don’t know much more about current events than they did then, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

But here’s one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.

Only 69 percent of people in the latest survey could come up with Dick Cheney when asked to name the vice president; in 1989, 74 percent could name Dan Quayle. Fewer could name the governor of their state (66 percent now compared with 74 percent in 1989) and fewer could name the president of Russia (36 percent now compared with 47 percent before).

It may come as no surprise that even by these rather lax standards, people who are least informed watch Fox News.

But before my left leaning readers let their heads swell too much, look at whose breathing down our necks:

The six news sources cited most often by people who knew the most about current events were: “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” (counted as one), tied with Web sites of major newspapers; next came “News Hour With Jim Lehrer”; then “The O’Reilly Factor,” which was tied with National Public Radio; and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. 

So, while we're number one, two and three, (Gold, Silver and Bronze) they're tied for fourth (Tin, I guess). Of course, if you listen to Rush Limbaugh it stands to reason that you would know the vice president's name, since it's one of the few shows he appears on. Anyway, I'm at sea hear, since I always thought that the people who listen to Rush are the same people who watch Fox. Are there really enough people with dead brains to keep both of those propaganda mills in business?

Speaking of polls, Bush has hit a new low in this LA Times Poll (pdf) , from which we learn that the number of people who strongly disapprove of Bush's performance (46%), as opposed to only disapproving somewhat (16%) exceeds the total number of people who approve somewhat or strongly (36%). While this is surely good news for the Democrats, in terms of the next election, it is very bad or the country as a whole, when one considers the monumental stupidity necessary to produce a 36% per cent approval rating for the worst president in history.

The same poll gives Congress a 34% approval rating. That might sound bad, given that it's lower than Bush's, but in fact it's rather meaningless. It's an American tradition to scorn Congress as an institution. You might be able to get meaningful data by asking people if they approve of the job their own Congressperson is doing, and then do some comparisons Democrat vs. Republican.

I have solved the problem, as you can see, no thanks to the software, or the developer. In a former phase of my life I was an amateur computer programmer, so I learned a bit about computers, and I was able to analyze the problem and take corrective action.

The irony of this is that I have been thinking seriously of bagging this whole thing, inasmuch as I am aware that recently much of the writing on this blog has been, to put it bluntly, crap. It didn't seem right, somehow, to simply stop without explanation, which is what would have happened had the problem been insoluble. Anyway, given this new lease on life, I have decided to inflict myself on a defenseless world for a little while longer at least.

By the way, in response to a comment, the duck video is definitely not of my pond (as the commenter well knew). It was chosen for experimental purposes only, it being the last funny youtube video I had seen prior to the date I posted it.