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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

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David Peterson's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/davidpeterson
Bio: I am an independent writer and researcher based in Chicago. (More)

All Peterson Blogs

The Tyrant in Chief II

By David Peterson at Mar 24, 2006


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No doubt about it: The story that Friday's Boston Globe reported about the President's March 9 signing into law of two different bills authorizing new versions of the frightening USA Patriot Act, while adding "an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers" ("Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement," Charlie Savage, March 24), was pretty important.  For all of the "oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers," as the Globe pointed out, Bush countermanded them with a statement that flat-out rejected their applicability to the Executive Branch.   

Still.  It also was pretty old news.  As the Bush Administration has been employing this so-called signing statement apparatus all along.

There is nothing constitutionally or legally sublime about it.  Any given law the President signs very well may state A, B, C,.... 

But---so what?  The President can do A or not-A; B or not-B; C or not-C;.... 

The real question is: And who's gonna stop him

Besides.  Here's exactly how Bush put the matter on March 9, reaffirming the executive privileges of god-only-knows how many other signing statements to date ("President's Statement on H.R. 199, 'USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005';"):

Today, I have signed into law H.R. 3199, the "USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005," and then S. 2271, the "USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006." The bills will help us continue to fight terrorism effectively and to combat the use of the illegal drug methamphetamine that is ruining too many lives.

The executive branch shall construe the provisions of H.R. 3199 that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch, such as sections 106A and 119, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.

The executive branch shall construe section 756(e)(2) of H.R. 3199, which calls for an executive branch official to submit to the Congress recommendations for legislative action, in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to recommend for the consideration of the Congress such measures as he judges necessary and expedient.

GEORGE W. BUSH

The only difference between this one, and so many of the President's other, more public statements, is that this one lacked the canned "Applause" and climactic "God Bless."

As far as I know, one-hundred percent of the bills that the President has signed into law have been accompanied by assertions of executive omnipotence such as this.  But---who's counting?

Proclamations, to be more precise.  EdictsDecreesCommandments.

"La Loi, c'est moi," as one commentator put it some months back, echoing Louis XIV. 

Indeed.  I've dealt with topics such as these a bunch of times.

"The Tyrant in Chief," ZNet, May 25, 2005
"Attacking Domestic Society I," ZNet, January 9, 2006
"The Tyrant in Chief II," ZNet, March 24, 2006

 

 

Postscript (April 30): More invaluable work by Charlie Savage:

"Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws," Charlie Savage, Boston Globe, April 30, 2006


 
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