• This is summer

    This is another post that got lost in the shuffle, written sometime during the last week of June.

    My least favorite time of year is here, but a string of days with our typical (at one time) afternoon thunderstorms have my spirits up. It’s one aspect of summer in Florida I enjoy. It’s hot and sunny all morning, until the early afternoon. Then dark clouds start forming on the eastern horizon. We get blasted with a wicked downpour and window rattling thunder for twenty exhillarating minutes. You have to take the bad with the good though. The sun always comes back out. Any standing water seems to boil away in an instant, supersaturating the air with so much heat and water it’ll make the strongest person weep for their momma.

    Mr Carrier, we salute you.

  • I am a child of the 70’s and 80’s

    … therefore my taste in music is automatically suspect. Cheryl suffered the same fate, yet she still chuckles when she hears the West Wing theme come up on a random play through my iTunes playlist. Hey, I like an occasional rousing reminder of one of my favorite fictional Presidents. But what does the West Wing have to do with the 1975 – 1989 music scene? Nothing but me baby! (I feel like I’ve been channelling the living spirit of Dick Vitale lately.) I’m not sure she has room to speak though… we both kind of like the dance remix of the Six Feet Under theme.

    I wonder if admitting this kind of thing public is enough to land me on a government watch list?

  • For you consideration

    Josh Marshall:

    At some points during the Republican primary campaign especially, CINC (commander-in-chief) was being used almost as a synonym for president — much as we might substitute ‘chief executive’ for president. And the growing use of the term in this sense is an effective barometer of the progressive militarization of our concept of the presidency and our government itself…

    we can observe its concrete effect in the Bush administration’s claims of almost absolute presidential power well outside of war-fighting — almost as if the president is a kind of warlord simultaneously directing the military and the civilian governments with similar fiat powers.

    We need to re-familiarize ourselves with the fact that the point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure. It was precisely the opposite — to create no doubt that the armed forces answered not to a chief of staff or senior general or even a Secretary of Defense (originally, Secretaries of War and Navy) but to a civilian elected officeholder who operates with the constrained and limited power of that world rather than the unbound authority of military command.

    We’ve gotten the relationship seriously out of whack.