The Boston Globe sent a questionnaire out to all of the Presidential candidates in the Democratic and Republican parties, asking them their views on the power of the Presidency.  Without specifically using the phrase “unitary executive”, the 12 questions were nevertheless clearly designed to test each candidate’s willingness to roll back Presidential powers accumulated under George W. Bush.

A December 22 article on the results, as well as links to the full questionnaire and the responses, can be found here, along with a menu for viewing the questionnaire itself and the full responses, sorted by candidate or question number.  

This is among the most important issues, if not the most important issue, in the current election cycle.  The candidates’ responses to this questionnaire deserve scrutiny.

None of the front-runners are 100% reassuring.  

I thought it would be a good idea to post the entirety of Klein’s posts since Monday, at Swampland and at Time Magazine, on the Dodd filibuster maneuver and Reid’s pulling of the FISA telecom immunity bill:

It’s pretty obvious that a decision has been made.

I don’t know exactly when, or where, or who participated; I don’t know what was said during what phone calls.  And I don’t exactly mean to suggest that a conspiracy was involved, other than the ordinary everyday sorts of conspiracies involved in Washington cloak-room negotiations, in gentlemen’s agreements made in the back seats of Manhattan taxicabs, and most of all, perhaps, in the ebb and flow of conversations on the balconies overlooking shorelines and forests behind million-dollar homes during dinner parties in Nantucket, Massachusetts and MacLean, Virginia.

But it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of all of that a new normal was decided upon by people who don’t care about you or me: the new normal of the 21st century.

Consider this article from The Cleveland Examiner, Sept. 24, 2007.  In fact, consider it very carefully.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

As an example, Bush cited his detainee program, which allows him to keep enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay while they await adjudication. Bush is unmoved by endless criticism of the program because he says his successor will need it.

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

The decision – and I don’t even mean to say, here, that I know what the grammar of the decision was, or what it means to those who made it, or even that it was ever exactly articulated – can be seen everywhere in the news.  To see it, you need only read recent news stories and keep one thing in mind: The Bush Administration only has one year left in office.

U.S. Representative Robert Wexler (D-Fl) had one or two interesting things to say last week at a Palm Beach County Democratic Executive Committee meeting.

From the Palm Beach Post, hat tip to Steven D at Booman Tribune and David Edwards and Jason Rhyne at Raw Story.  This was also caught by joe shikspack at DailyKos.

“The way we pass stem-cell research, the way we get implemented a children’s health care plan, the way we get higher CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards to bring our energy debacle into a better condition for generations to come is to have impeachment hearings,” Wexler said. “Because that’ll get the president’s eye. That’ll get the vice president’s eye. That for the first time will show that the Democratic majority is here and that in fact we have the courage of our convictions.”

I think Rep. Wexler has been reading buhdydharma!  And eating his Wheaties!

In addition, Wexler continued, hearings would strengthen America’s hand in dealings with Iran, China and others. Every day the House Judiciary Committee isn’t grilling Cheney is a day world leaders such as Indonesia’s Yudhoyono keep their distance, he said. He described Yudhoyono as someone who “wants to be closer to America, but he can’t because we are so negatively viewed. Well, let me tell you one more thing those impeachment hearings will do. They will make America more popular.”

In addition, Wexler criticized Speaker Pelosi for her “off the table” rhetoric.  

Video can be seen at the Palm Beach Post sitehere, and at Raw story, linked above.

As a writer, Thomas Friedman is a goddamned miracle.

In the space of the first four paragraphs of today’s column in the New York Times, Friedman compares US-friendly Persian Gulf countries to carnival workers at a weight-guessing booth, and also to the stuffed animals that a lucky carnival-goer could win at that booth.  

The United States is — I think, having read this three times — like a carnival-goer trying to win a stuffed animal at the weight-guessing booth.  But Friedman’s point is not that the United States wants to win a US-friendly Persian Gulf country, which is what you’d think Friedman must mean, if those countries are stuffed-animal prizes at the weight-guessing booth; and his point is not that the United States wants to win something from a US-friendly Persian Gulf country, which is what you’d think he must mean if those countries are the carnies running the booth.

His point, which I confess I did not see coming, is that Iran is like a drug dealer.  Paragraph five:

The Gulf Arabs feel like they have this neighbor who has been a drug dealer for 18 years. Recently, this neighbor has been very visibly growing poppies for heroin in his backyard in violation of the law. He’s also been buying bigger and better trucks to deliver drugs. You can see them parked in his driveway.

Maybe a lot of carnies are drug dealers.  Maybe they use stuffed animals to smuggle heroin into the United States, with trucks.  I have no idea.  At various points over the next several paragraphs, the US is the police, and also holding a stuffed animal — but Friedman doesn’t mean that the US is holding a US-friendly Persian Gulf country stuffed with heroin that the US found in a truck.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that Friedman manages to insert a few paragraphs in the midst of that literary tsunami that are both wildly misleading and indicative of current misunderstandings in Washington punditry on the subject of Iranian nuclear enrichment.

Remember this moment from President Bush’s Dec. 4 2007 press conference?

[The President]: People said, well, why is it that you can’t get exact knowledge quicker? Well, the answer is, is because we’re dealing with a regime that is not very transparent and, frankly, we haven’t had a very good presence in Iran since 1979. And that’s why I instructed the intel community to beef up its intelligence on Iran, so we could have a better sense for what they’re thinking and what they’re doing. And this product is a result of intelligence reform and, more importantly, the good, hard work of our intelligence community.

Yeah.  Well.  Look at what we see in this morning’s LA times.  Turns out that when Bush came into office, he gutted Iranian intelligence operations, to boost intelligence on Iraq.  He partially, but only partially, revived intelligence work on Iran in 2005.  

It seems that a lot of people are misunderstanding a specific moment in Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech today.  In a speech nearly devoid of intellectual content, he did say one substantive thing; but unfortunately, rather that paying attention what his words meant, the blogosphere and also the talking heads on TV are completely misconstruing it, indeed flipping its meaning around 180 degrees.

I’m refering to this assertion:

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.

Person after person seems to be taking this to mean that, according to Romney, Atheists can’t be free.  But that’s not what Romeny meant; in fact it’s nearly the opposite of what he meant.  Romney was here interpreting a previously-offered quote from John Adams and asserting a specific thesis on the nature of humanity and political liberty.

Romney’s point was that people, on their own, can’t be trusted with political liberty.  People are too chaotic, too libidinous, too unpredictable, to be granted full autonomy in the absence of an outside  religious check on their actions.  A government that does not impose its will upon the desires of a population requires another institution that will, in order to keep things from spinning out of control.

Let me explain.  Here’s what Romney said.