Below The Beltway

Took a longer hiatus than anticipated, but things should be back to normal, or what passes for it, soon enough.

Once again, it’s time to but the blog on haitus for the holiday. I’ll be back at some point after Christmas depending on travel plans that are still up in the air, but definiately back up and running full time after New Year’s Day.

If I do pop in around here before 2009, it will be to start AND complete the long needed and long delayed theme update that I’ve been meaning to do.

In the meantime, if you really want to stay in touch, I’m more likely to update my Facebook profile and/or my Twitter account over ten days or so.

Merry Christmas and see you next year !

The new crowd estimates for Inauguration Day are down slightly from the high numbers estimated last months, but still pretty high:

Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that 4 million to 5 million people could jam downtown Washington on Inauguration Day, saying it is more likely that the crowd will be about half that size.

D.C. authorities said the earlier estimates, provided by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), were based on speculation surrounding the historic nature of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. After weeks of checking with charter bus companies, airlines and other sources, they’re reassessing.

“It’s more of an art than a science,” City Administrator Dan Tangherlini said. “The fact is, earlier it was speculation. Now we’re beginning to flesh it out and what the physical capacities of the system are.”

The Secret Service has dismissed the high-end estimates of 4 million to 5 million people. But there is universal agreement among security officials and planners that massive numbers of people will flock to the swearing-in of Obama (D), who had drawn huge campaign crowds.

Turnout could easily reach 2 million, officials said, far outstripping the 400,000 who attended the 2005 inauguration of President Bush. Although it is possible that 5 million people will descend on the area in the days leading up to the inauguration, it appears unlikely that trains and local roads could get them all to the Mall and parade route Jan. 20, officials said.

Jawauna Greene, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Transit Administration, said that inaugural planning committees had initially considered up to 6 million attendees. Lately, she said, D.C. officials had scaled back their estimates to about 2 million. “But there’s no telling,” she said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said the most recent estimates she has gotten from the Presidential Inaugural Committee and federal and local officials project between 1.5 million and 3 million people.

Still seems like the best idea is to just stay home.

From this year’s Nobel Laureate in economics, Paul Krugman:

This is the thing I’ve been afraid of ever since I realized that Japan really was in the dreaded, possibly mythical liquidity trap. You can read my 1998 Brookings Paper on the issue here.

Incidentally, there were a bunch of us at Princeton worrying about the Japan problem in the early years of this decade. I was one; Lars Svensson, currently at Sweden’s Riksbank, was another; a third was a guy named Ben Bernanke. I wonder whatever happened to him?

Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

As this goes on, I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more of the analogies to Japan circa 1993 that I wrote about last week.

In a post earlier today about the damage the Bush Administration has done to the Constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, I noted this telling exchange between former President Nixon and David Frost during their now-famous interviews:

FROST: The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him. To this end, the Deputy White House Counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the CIA, the FBI, and other police and intelligence agencies.

These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from J. Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the president’s approval was later to be listed in the Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.

FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.

Well, consider this exchange between Vice-President Cheney and Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: This is at the core of the controversies that I want to get to with you in a moment. If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?

CHENEY: General proposition, I’d say yes. You need to be more specific than that. I mean — but clearly, when you take the oath of office on January 20th of 2001, as we did, you take the oath to support and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

(…)

WALLACE: So what rights do the Congress — what constitutional rights do the Congress and the courts have to limit the power of the president when it comes to these matters of national security?

CHENEY: Well, the Congress has — clearly has the ability to write statutes and has certain constitutional authorities granted in the Constitution.

But I would argue that they do not have the right by statute to alter a presidential constitutional power. In other words, you can’t override his constitutional authorities and responsibilities.

So there you have it, if the President decides to do it, it’s not illegal, and it’s not reviewable by Congress.

In essence, the Bush/Cheney Administration spent the last eight years putting into practice the perverted imperialistic view of Executive Branch power that Nixon advocated and attempted to put into practice himself. The result has been a complete trashing of the idea that there are any real limits on the President’s power, and the complete emasculation of checks and balances thanks to a Congress that sat by and did nothing while the President and Vice-President trashed the Constitution, and it’s worth noting that for six of those years Congress was controlled by the party that claims to respect the Constitution above all else.

The Bush/Cheney Administration was, in the end, the final triumph of Richard Nixon.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

Apparently, the Christmas holiday season is about more than candy canes and egg nog:

WASHINGTON — ‘Tis the season for making whoopee.

The Christmas-New Year’s period produces a year-high spike in sexual activity and conceptions in the United States, according to biorhythm researchers and makers of sex-related products.

They attribute the increase to holiday leisure and New Year’s resolutions to have children. New Year’s irresolution fueled by alcohol and partying is another contributing factor.

“Right before New Year’s Eve is our highest sales peak,” said David Johnson, group product manager for Trojan brand condoms, the leading U.S. seller.

As expected, the holiday urge surge also expresses itself as a peak in U.S. births in September, according to David Lam of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center in Ann Arbor.

Holiday intimacies aren’t just an American rite, according to Gabriele Doblhammer of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Heavy Christmas-New Year’s sex “is characteristic of all Christian cultures in which it has been evaluated,” she and co-researcher Joseph Lee Rogers found.

Perhaps it’s the misletoe.

Last week, Grover Norquist sent a letter to President Bush about the auto bailout:

I’m beginning to think that Vice-President Cheney has spent the last eight years experiencing a far different version of reality from the rest of us:

Vice President Cheney offered an unabashed defense of the Bush administration’s claims of broad executive powers today, mocking criticism from Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and saying the president “doesn’t have to check with anybody” before launching a nuclear attack.

In an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” Cheney fired back at Biden’s contention that he was probably “the most dangerous vice president” in U.S. history. He also ridiculed Biden for mistakenly citing Article I of the U.S. Constitution, rather than Article II, in talking about executive branch powers during an October debate.

“If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney said of Biden. “President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

Cheney, speaking less than a month before he and President Bush leave the White House, was blunt and unapologetic about his central role in some of the most controversial issues of the past eight years, including the invasion of Iraq, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, and harsh interrogation tactics. Cheney also said he disagreed with Bush’s decision to remove embattled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2006, saying that “the president doesn’t always take my advice.”

“I was a Rumsfeld man,” Cheney said. “I’d helped recruit him and I thought he did a good job for us.”

The interview was the second in less than a week for the normally reclusive vice president, and it comes as part of a broad effort by Bush and his aides to focus attention on issues that they consider major accomplishments of their two terms in office.In an interview with ABC News last week, Cheney suggested the administration would have gone to war with Iraq even without erroneous intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction. Cheney also said in that interview that he approved of the administration’s use of coercive interrogation tactics, including a type of simulated drowning known as waterboarding, against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and others.

Yea, you go with that Mr. Vice-President. The rest of us have reached our own conclusions.

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . .

and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only “AMERICA” in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee.

(By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.)

And I mean that sincerely!