Midday Open Thread

• Can a president really revoke a pardon, once granted, as Bush has tried to do in the case of Isaac Toussie, the mortgage swindler? Josh doesn't think so.  

  Needless to say, I'm not an attorney or a constitutional expert. But I've seen few if any press write-ups with quotes from people with relevant expertise who say the president is actually able to do this. And my discussions with people with relevant expertise give me the strong impression that the president's action is highly dubious in constitutional terms, even if no Court case has specifically addressed this combination of facts.

  The WSJ Law Blog agrees.

• Via Kevin, 2009 is beginning to look rather grim:

  Corporate-turnaround experts and bankruptcy lawyers are predicting a wave of retailer bankruptcies early next year, after being contacted by big and small retailers either preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection or scrambling to avoid that fate.

• It's slightly old news, but Utah graduate student Tim DeChristopher has become a modern day folk hero and extremely effective monkey-wrencher. On December 19, the BLM put up some of southern Utah's most environmentally sensitive and significant public lands for sale, in an oil leasing bonanza. DeChristopher quietly disrupted the proceedings by signing up for the auction, then bidding up the price on a number of parcels. He won won bids totaling about $1.7 million. Now the Moab-based Center for Water Advocacy has stepped in, in a fundraising effort for DeChristopher's legal fund, and to complete the purchase of the lands he won. There's more on the Center's efforts at their Web site.
• Thank gawd we've now got Politico to round out the traditional media wankosphere.
• So Bush has supposedly read hundreds of books in the last few years, according to Karl Rove. This might be the most absurd assertion yet in the Bush legacy tour. But davenoon makes an excellent observation about how craven these men are:

  In the very least, this is an elaborate put-on by Rove; to be slightly less charitable, his insistence that Bush devoted time this year to reading Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name -- a book about torture, among other familiar ills -- is sickening. Or perhaps it's just as well. Bush "reads" books in the same sense that his government "adheres" to the Geneva Conventions.

• Speaking of Bush and books, via Think Progress, the London Times is reporting that the Bush presidential library is going to be just another boondoggle, particularly since Bush has decreed that he doesn't have to make public any number of documents from his administration.

  Despite their propagandist function, the libraries provide valuable access to archives that show the president "warts and all", according to Hufbauer. But after 9/11 Bush signed an executive order granting presidents the right to withhold documents held in the libraries from the public. Historians hope Barack Obama will overturn this.

• And more on the absurdist Bush legacy tour. Condi on CBS's "Sunday Morning":

  "You and the president have both described your relationship as almost family - brother and sister and cousin - like that... What do you think that the public doesn't know about him - what don't we understand?" Braver asked.

  "I think how much he gets into the detail," Rice said. "I have seen many an aide and myself I've been in that position or a cabinet secretary, go in with a very fine presentation and the president just takes it apart. People would be amazed."

• It was a banner year for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• You've got nine more days to participate in the Christmas bird count, if that kind of thing lines your nest. It's the longest-running wildlife census in the world, sort of an open-source biological research study. Who knows? You could make history.