Posted in Berkeley: Adventure Travel

Visitgitmo

Stenciled on a wall along an outdoor walk on the wall of one of UC Berkeley’s life sciences buildings. Something like this, you’d think if you saw it once on campus you’d see it everywhere. But so far — over the past eight months — it’s shown up in just that one spot.

(Naturally, though, when you start rummaging through Google’s trunk of odds and ends, you find more of the same. For instance, this T-shirt. )

A Weezal Named Oscar

From Craigslist, by way of the vigilant Kate:

FREE WEEZAL AND SNAKE

Reply to: sale-134181576@craigslist.org

Date: 2006-02-15, 12:33PM

JUST STOP BY AND PICK THEM BOTH UP OR EITHER ONE OF THEM.

WEEZAL COMES WITH SLEEPING CAGE AND LEASH. HE IS VERY TAME AND EXTREMELY FRIENDLY. HIS NAME IS OSCAR

SNAKE IS A RED MILK SNAKE AND COMES WITH CAGE.

BOTH THE SNAKE AND THE WEEZAL GET ALONG FINE, GREW UP EACHOTHER AND COMPLIMENT EACHOTHER.

I HAVE NO PHONE HOOKED UP RIGHT NOW SO YOU WILL NEED TO JUST STOP BY AT:

1795 47TH AVE. APT. C

CAPITOLA CA 95010

Original URL: http://www.craigslist.org/sby/zip/134181576.html

Conjoined Presidents

It’s a little surprising to look at The New York Times site, a full 24 hours after Dick “Gunner” Cheney announced he had been promoted to co-president, and find the paper still chasing reaction to the former vice president’s accidental wounding of a quail-hunting partner last week. If you missed the announcement, it came during Cheney’s appearance Wednesday on the administration’s broadcast arm, Fox News. He disclosed a fact that really wasn’t secret, yet hadn’t been widely reported: That nearly three years ago, Bush had issued an order extending the power to classify and declassify national security information to the vice president.

Although the Times and others might be a little slow on the uptake, Byron York of the conservative National Review did a nice analysis of the Cheney news that appeared first thing Thursday morning. York concluded:

“In the last several years, there has been much talk about the powerful role Dick Cheney plays in the Bush White House. Some of that talk has been based on anecdotal evidence, and some on entirely fanciful speculation. But Executive Order 13292 is real evidence of real power in the vice president’s office. Since the beginning of the administration, Dick Cheney has favored measures allowing the executive branch to keep more things secret. And in March of 2003, the president gave him the authority to do it.”

Of course, in his Fox interview, Cheney was talking about blabbing secrets, not keeping them. He mentioned his powers when the interviewer, Brit Hume, brought up the Scooter Libby case:

Q: On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors — unidentified — authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?

A: It’s nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that’s been under investigation for a couple of years. I’ve cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He’s a great guy. I’ve worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it’s, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.

Q: Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?

A: There is an executive order to that effect.

Q: There is.

A: Yes.

Q: Have you done it?

A: Well, I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order …

Q: You ever done it unilaterally?

A: I don’t want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.

Cheney and Bush probably don’t think it’s a big deal to take formal steps to create a conjoined presidency. Maybe they’re right. During today’s White House press briefing? Not a single question on Cheney’s role as a manager of national intelligence.

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Presidents Week

I’d like to modestly propose that Presidents Day is not sufficient to honor our 43 chief executives and all they’ve done for our country. I’ve been on a president-related roll the last few days, so even though it’s Wednesday going on Thursday, I’m issuing a retroactive proclamation that this is Presidents Week as far as this here URL is concerned.

Taftgolf1With that business out of the way, here’s a president we should all get to know better: William Howard Taft. He served just one rather difficult term, nearly a century ago, and I think the most common impression of him now might be summed up by the question, “Wasn’t he the really big one?” Well, yes he was, tipping the scales at nearly 350 pounds when he left office — an all-time presidential weight record. But he was much more than that. He was also nearly 6 feet tall. He reportedly suffered from severe sleep apnea. He was the first president to own a car and is said to be the first to have been involved in a car wreck. He was the first president to throw out the season-opening “pitch” at a ball game. He loved golf and once hiked in Yosemite with John Muir. He was professionally versatile — he was secretary of War before he was elected, and after the voters sent him packing, he became the only president to also serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. And not just serve: He was chief justice.

One of his court highlights came in Olmstead v. United States, a landmark wiretapping case involving federal prohibition agents who had eavesdropped sans warrant on some Seattle bootleggers despite the fact the unapproved tap was against Washington state law. In Taft’s majority opinion, the violation of law was of no practical consequence, and the very nature of telephone technology made it fair game for unregulated police spying: “The reasonable view is that one who installs in his house a telephone instrument with connecting wires intends to project his voice to those quite outside, and that the wires beyond his house, and messages while passing over them, are not within the protection of the Fourth Amendment [prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures].”

I like the phrase “telephone instrument.” Taft’s opinion was overturned a decade later. But he seems like the kind of guy who would fit right in with today’s big White House thinkers.

Be Free, But Not Too Free

By way of judy b., a piece from The New Republic on the case of Jihad Momani. He’s one of two Jordanian newspaper editors jailed earlier this month for reprinting some of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad that have prompted the recent orgy of outrage across the Muslim world. As The New Republic recounts the case, Momani’s paper, al-Shihan, “published three of the Mohammed caricatures on the grounds that people should know what they were protesting about. The cartoons were accompanied by an editorial that pleaded, ‘Muslims of the world be reasonable,’ and asked, ‘What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?’ ”

Momani and an editor from another publication that also ran some of the caricatures were thrown in jail. Coincidentally, Jordan’s “liberal” potentate, King Abdullah, visited Bush at the White House just after the arrests. As TNR’s James Forsyth points out, the White House has been the source of some pretty heavy rhetoric the last couple of years on the transformative power of liberty and its institutions. Presented with a chance to speak up about a case in which the issue of freedom was a hard-edged reality instead of a soft-focus romance, Bush said nothing.

According to one press account, Momani and the second editor have been freed on bail. But charges under Jordan’s Press and Publication Law are still pending. PEN Center USA, the national chapter of the international group set up to defend writers facing official sanctions for their work, is conducting a letter-writing campaign on the editors’ behalf.

Dead Veeps Club

You know, looking at the histories of Dick “Gunner” Cheney and Aaron “Unfriendly Fire” Burr — brothers in the fraternity of vice presidents whose hunts have netted human trophies — disclosed yet another fact that until now escaped me: the number of U.S. vice president who have died in office. Here’s a brief list. Take note: November is the cruelest month for our unrevered second bananas, having claimed four of the seven executive understudies who died in office.

George Clinton (1739-1812): Served as vice president in Thomas Jefferson’s second term and was re-elected to the office for James Madison’s first term. Died April 20, 1812, the first vice president to expire in office.

Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814): Clinton’s office sat vacant, and Gerry — the Massachusetts pol whose skill at drawing imaginative legislative boundaries is memorialized in the word “gerrymander” — was elected for Madison’s second term. But serving as No. 2 for Madison proved too much for Gerry, too. He died November 23, 1814, having served just 20 months.

Daniel Tompkins (1774-1825; honorable mention): Just missed becoming the third consecutive veep to die in the traces. He served two terms as James Monroe’s vice president, leaving office in March 1825. He died three months later at age 50 after what one biography describes as “a decade of financial privation and heavy drinking, coupled with accusations that he had mishandled state and federal funds while serving as governor of New York. …”

William Rufus de Vane King (1786-1853): Served just six weeks as understudy to Franklin Pierce in March and April 1853. Actually, “served” might be padding King’s resume a bit. He suffered from tuberculosis when he was elected and was in declining health as his inauguration approached. He repaired to Cuba for his health and was granted permission to be sworn in there (reportedly the only vice president inaugurated outside the United States). With his condition apparently terminal, he returned home to his Alabama plantation, where he died April 18.

Henry Wilson (1812-1875): Grant’s second vice president. Died midway through his term on November 22, 1875. A former Senator from Massachusetts, he was eulogized thus by a former colleague: “He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not logical in a high sense, he was not always consistent in his political actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the people, and he retained it to the end of his life.” Except for the “confidence of the people” part, that sounds very familiar.

Thomas A. Hendricks (1819-1885): Elected vice president with Grover Cleveland as part of the first Democratic ticket to win since 1856. Hendricks died November 25, 1885, a little more than eight months into his term.

Garret A. Hobart (1844-1899): Elected with McKinley in 1896. I’m guessing that he and McKinley are probably the only running mates to both die in office — though McKinley wasn’t assassinated until early in his second term, when he had a brand spanking new vice president in place. Hobart, described in a Senate biography as a “rotund, jovial, hospitable man,” was beset by heart problems that finally killed him on November 21, 1899. Before passing into eventual blog fodder, however, Hobart cast the deciding vote against a resolution that would have promised independence to the Philippines. He made a difference.

James Sherman (1855-1912): Taft’s vice president, he came darn close to serving a full term before dying on October 30, 1912, of chronic kidney failure. He died just days before the presidential election (Taft vs. Wilson and Roosevelt, T.), thus became the only deceased candidate for national office to stand for election (that’s an unverified claim).

A Lifetime of Lincoln

Lincolntolono1

(Lincoln marker in Tolono, Illinois; September 2004)



Growing up in the adopted land of Lincoln, and growing up in the ’60s, when Civil War echoes were loud, reminders of the 16th president were everywhere — license plates, highway and street names, and parks. Oh, yeah: And log-cabin-type toys. So on his birthday, I’m thinking of all the places I’ve run into Lincoln.

1954

I’m born 145 years after Lincoln. The Lincoln connection: This is the year Illinois began printing “Land of Lincoln” on its license plates.

1960.1

During two weeks when I was out of school with first the chicken pox, then the mumps, my dad gets me a Fletcher Pratt history of the Civil War. Words like “Potomac” enter my vocabulary (pronounced “POT-o-mac”).

1960.2

Mom and Dad bundled the three of us kids (me and sibling costars John and Chris; my sister Ann joined the cast in ’62) into our red-and-white Ford stationwagon early one Saturday evening for a sudden road trip. I think it was a Saturday, anyway. That night, we wound up in a motel in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, where Mom’s brother Tom was serving as a Carmelite priest. We spent the next day doing north-central Kentucky sight-seeing. The two stops I remember: The Cistercian monastery at Gethsemane and Lincoln’s birthplace near Elizabethtown. The cabin in which he was said to have been born — and later, I came to the disappointing realization that the cabin is a reconstruction — was tiny and dark.

c. 1960-62.

I see Carl Sandburg’s multivolume biography, “Lincoln, the Prairie Years and the War Years,” on my parents’ bookshelf. I don’t think I ever cracked it. On the other hand, I did open “The Day Lincoln Was Shot,” by Jim Bishop. My mom liked to tell the story of how I came to her after reading the book. She said that I was crying and told her, “They killed him.” I’d love to be able to say I remember all this like it was yesterday, but I don’t recall it.

c. 1962-63

Another semi-literary encounter with Lincoln: Another book that wound up in my hands thanks to my parents was a sort of abridged kid’s editions of notable American Heritage magazine articles. The book’s long lost now, but it seems like I spent years poring over it. It had stories about a colonial siege of a French fort, the naval exploits of Oliver Hazard Perry and James Lawrence (the latter credited with coining the phrase “don’t give up the ship), a star-crossed early Navy ship called the USS Constellation, the country’s first oil boom (Titusville, Pennsylvania), and the art of Gilded Age valentines. The book also had a piece on how when the Lincoln Memorial opened, the lighting on the statue of Lincoln was all wrong and had to be fixed (an unabridged, pictureless version of the article is online: “Light for Lincoln’s Statue“).

1970

Lincolnian Nixon: In the midst of the antiwar upheaval, right after Nixon had sent U.S. forces into Cambodia and four students had been killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio, a big march was called in Washington. Very early the morning of the demonstration, Nixon went out to the Lincoln Memorial, where many protesters had already gathered. Getting out among the people — it was a positively Lincolnian gesture when viewed from an era in which the president systematically excludes critics from his audiences. (A second Nixon/Lincoln Memorial memory: Ask me and maybe I’ll tell you about the time I dreamed I assassinated Nixon on the steps of the memorial. Really.)

1971

My dad and my brother Chris and I drove out to Gettysburg (John was sick with pneumonia and I guess Ann didn’t come because it was a guy trip or something. I’m sure she’ll set me straight). History will little note nor long remember my visit, unlike Lincoln’s in 1863.

1973

On a whim, I hitchhiked to Washington to see the Watergate hearings. It was tough getting rides and I wound up taking a long detour to Watkins Glen, New York, where The Band, Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead were playing a one-day concert at the racetrack there. I eventually made it to Washington, but without enough money to get a motel room anywhere. I wound up at the Lincoln Memorial after dark — the first time I’d ever been there. I was so tired from the trip that I sat down, leaning against one of the columns outside, and fell asleep. It was a very warm night, and eventually I stirred myself, strolled out toward the Washington Monument, found a spot that seemed inconspicuous, and went to sleep. I got into the hearings the next day. Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA, was testifying. Dick Cavett was in the audience, wearing a blue workshirt and a kerchief around his neck.

1988

During a family visit to New Jersey, my brother John and I rented a car and with my older son Eamon (who was going on 9) took the Garden State Parkway down to Cape May, where we got on the ferry to Lewes, Delaware. We decided to drive into Washington along U.S. 50, from the east. The day had been blistering, and it didn’t cool down much after dark. We got a room at the first motel we saw, the Day’s Inn on New York Avenue, as I recall, and then went out to explore a little. We made it to Georgetown, called our Illinois friends the McCrohons about 10 o’clock, and went over to their place, on Connecticut a few blocks above DuPont Circle. We got to talking, the natural state of affairs, and didn’t leave until about 2. Eamon was asleep in the back seat, so John and I decided we should do a little more landmark reconnoitering. We wound up down at the Lincoln Memorial around 3. I’m having a hard time believing I did this — maybe we took turns getting out of the car or something, or maybe I trusted that since we were parked nearby it would be OK to leave Eamon in the car — but we spent half an hour or so at the Vietnam Memorial. We spent the next day in Washington with the McCrohons. The following day, we returned to New Jersey by way of a sweeping detour to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, and the Antietam battlefield. Antietam: Lincoln went there, too, to try to prod his commanding general into action (he wound up having to fire him).

2004

I went back to Illinois in September 2004 to take a driving trip with my dad. We weighed a couple long road trips — out to western Kansas on two lane roads, for instance — and settled on a trip down to the southern tip of Illinois. Headed down Interstate 57, we rolled through Champaign and then saw a sign for Tolono, a place I wanted to see because an old Utah Phillips railroad song carries the name of the town. Our first improbable sighting after deparing the interstate: an inline skater in the oncoming lane, wearing shorts and a backpack but no shirt. The second was in town: A historical marker commemorating Lincoln’s stop at the railroad junction there on February 11, 1861, as he headed east for his inauguration. The marker, on the grounds of a gas station, reported that Lincoln made his last speech in Illinois in Tolono (reporters on the train with him said he made “remarks” in Danville, a little further east, as well as at the Indiana-Illinois border). Dad and I drove on south to Cairo and a little beyond, then doubled back north along the Mississippi, crossing the river several times on car ferries. On the way back to Chicago after stopping to see Mother Jones’s grave in Mount Olive, we got off the highway in Springfield to see the important public buildings there. Then we found our way to the cemetery in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood north of downtown where Lincoln is buried. The tomb is heroic in scale and much more martial than I expected with statues of Union soldiers in a variety of vigllant, fighting poses. We left as the sun started to set and drove back to Chicago in the dark.

Don’t Rush, Don’t Judge

I wrote to the Chronicle’s “readers’ representative” — in quotes because I’d like to meet the readers who appointed him — to ask what the paper might do to explain how it wound up identifying a picture of a cabdriver/security guard, played over six columns, as that of a notoriously violent police officer. I wrote, in part:

“… Does the Chronicle intend to offer a detailed explanation of how the picture wound up in the paper? It’s clear the mistake has damaged what I’d call the presumption of credibility such a thoroughly reported and well-executed investigative project might otherwise be accorded. It’s also clear that a mere acknowledgment of error, or covering a press conference convened by an attorney for the misidentified citizen, doesn’t begin to repair the damage. At a time when papers everywhere are struggling to hang on to readers, and when more and more of the news-consuming public has become dismissive of the established media, it seems the Chron’s long-term cause would best be served by full disclosure of the steps and processes involved in this picture making it into the paper. I think readers have moved on from being a passive audience and want to be treated as partners in the project of journalism. A detailed explanation of the error would be responsive to that demand and help the paper learn how to avoid repeat episodes. …”

Although the readers’ rep is someone I worked with for a decade or so at the old Examiner, I didn’t really expect an answer. So I was pleasantly surprised to get one just a day after I emailed my note. The germane part of the reply:

“Phil [Bronstein, the Chronicle’s executive vice president and editor] has said to me and to the public (Ronn Owens show) that he’s disposed toward telling whatever he can, but he doesn’t want to compound the mistake by misstating what happened. I think that’s a fair position. I certainly wouldn’t address this until I was darn sure what I was talking about. Like you, I’d like to see this clarified sooner rather than later but I’m wary of a rush to judgment.”

That’s a pretty responsive note, I guess, though I’m bothered by the suggestion that the paper’s position is cast as a matter of how the editor feels about things. Beyond that, two observations: First, it stretches credibility a little that the paper and its editors don’t have a pretty good idea what happened. And second, it’s at least a little ironic to hear a paper that often shoots first and asks questions later plead for restraint in examining its own faux pas.