Access to vice presidential records in the aftermath of Executive Order 13,233: From haphazard past to uncertain future

Because the vice presidency of the United States was for so many years considered a “nonjob,” it is hardly surprising that preserving its records has been a nonissue for most of the nation's history. However, the vice presidency in recent years has emerged as an executive rather than a decorative role, and vice presidential papers have been included both in legislation to promote access to historical documents, and presidential orders delaying that access, such as Executive Order 13,233. The end result is that researchers arguably have less access to vice presidential records than before the groundbreaking Presidential Records Act of 1978, which should have opened doors to this increasingly rich source of government information.     

The birth of the tenth presidential library: The Bush presidential materials project, 1993–1994

The Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the tenth Presidential library, will be built on the campus of Texas A&M University between 1995 and 1997 and administered by the National Archives. It will be the archival depository for all of George Bush's Vice-Presidential and Presidential records and memorabilia as well as voluminous personal papers dealing with his life before and after his service in the White House. Every Presidential library undergoes an evolution from a Presidential materials project to a fully functioning facility, and the Bush Library currently is in its earliest period of development. The Bush Presidential Materials Project is systematically processing President Bush's records and museum objects for exhibit when the library opens to the public in 1997. The Bush Library will be the most highly computerized Presidential library to date, with automated systems, including an optical scanner for documents, facilitating archival processing and reference services.     

Audiences,metaphors, and the Persian Gulf war

This paper examines George Bush's Persian Gulf war addresses as a representative anecdote of Bush's campaign to build an international military coalition. The paper argues that in war rhetoric international audiences should be considered. A theorization of the international audience is offered. George Bush's public speeches are then analyzed as they use two metaphoric clusters. The SAVAGE cluster is used to justify a response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The CIVILIZATION cluster is used to justify an American‐led military response. The metaphoric clusters are shown to be persuasive to the international audience as they are adopted and recirculated by this audience. Conclusions and implications of the interaction of these two metaphoric clusters for future war rhetoric are offered.     

President Bush's Image Repair Effort on Meet the Press: The Complexities of Defeasibility

The candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 were united in attacking President George W. Bush. Their continued criticism, combined with news stories about such topics as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and job losses in the United States, steadily eroded the president's image. On February 8, 2004, President Bush appeared on Meet the Press to repair his reputation, exemplifying the problem of how an incumbent president can reply to such attacks while in the midst of a campaign for re-election. This essay applies the theory of image repair to this discourse to critically analyze and evaluate Bush's attempt to repair his image. Bush responded to two key accusations: justification for the war in Iraq and concerns about the economy (including jobs and the deficit). He tried to frame himself as a “war president” (transcendence) who should be evaluated on those grounds but failed to make this the most important problem for most voters. He employed denial, but the support for denials was often weak. He also relied heavily on defeasibility. However, Bush's use of the strategy of defeasibility raises doubts about whether he will be able to solve problems in a second term. Thus, President Bush's image repair effort was largely ineffectual.     

Toward a Theory of Simulated Atonement: A Case Study of President George W. Bush's Response to the Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal

In response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, President Bush delivered an apology that was widely criticized by domestic and international audiences. Nevertheless, the apology succeeded in allowing the President to stop the momentum of negative public opinion following news of the crimes, and to avoid accountability for his role in the crisis. In this essay, I argue that Bush's success stemmed partly from his use of a special subgenre of apologia, simulated atonement. After explaining the strategy in detail, I describe some of the conditions in which it will likely be effective and apply the theory to Bush's statements.     

Role regulation and normative expectations: the discursive erasure of Middle Eastern forced migrants in U.S. news outlets

ABSTRACT

This thematic analysis of 510 news articles – spanning the leftist-rightist ideological spectrum – examines media rhetoric surrounding President Trump’s 27 January 2017 Executive Order (EO) 13769 barring immigrants and refugees from U.S. resettlement. In this article, I examine how both liberal and conservative news media rhetoric reinforce respectability politics that create a hierarchy of victimhood for those affected by the EO. Interrogating U.S. civil society’s discursive construction of the forced migrant, I expose expectations for appropriate roles for these communities seeking asylum, though these roles are often veiled by normative U.S. mythology. As this analysis illustrates, the news media articles’ discursive erasure of Syrian, Iranian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni immigrants and refugees elide forced migrant self-representation and neglect the political/historical reasons for fleeing from their nations of origin.     

Progress and problems in declassifying U.S. government records

For the first time ever, Executive Order 12958 signed in 1995 established a process to greatly reduce the huge number of classified federal records accumulated since world war II. Although some progress was made under it, subsequent orders and legislation significantly decreased its effectiveness. The U.S. government must take certain actions now to reverse this trend.     

George W. Bush,Television News,and Rationales for the Iraq War

Popular sentiment holds that President George W. Bush was able to successfully “spin” the news during the early stages of the Iraq War. Research on the president-press relationship gives some reason to believe this sentiment but leaves ample room for skepticism. This article clarifies the relationship between presidential and press rationales for the Iraq War, focusing on whether Bush's emphasis on certain rationales influenced the extent to which news media emphasized these same rationales. Using computer-assisted content analysis to analyze a year's worth of presidential communications and television news, the study provides insight into the interaction of these important discourses.     

A newcomer looks at the broadcast curriculum controversy

The following article was also written in response to Dr. John Penny‐backer's article, “Working with Universities” that appeared recently in the Journal of Broadcasting. This reply is intended to present the point of view of a relative newcomer to the position of “teacher of broadcasting.” This point of view is quite different from that of Dr. Pennybacker, who now holds dual positions as Executive Secretary of the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters and Assistant Professor of Speech at Louisiana State University. (A brief commentary written by Dr. Pennybacker is printed following Mr. Davlin's article.)     

Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War: George W. Bush on Iraq and the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Japan

This essay explores the relationship between epideictic discourse and war through the analysis of George W. Bush's August 20, 2005, address at the Naval Air Station near San Diego, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. The case also serves as an exemplar for how Bush routinely interwove epideictic appeals with collective memories of World War II in order to promote the Iraq war and deflect criticism of his policies there. Bush praised the greatest generation and linked it to the current generation; blamed and dehumanized enemies of the past and present; advocated for war based on “lessons” from the past; and reinforced a shared identity to instill both obligation and confidence.     

Free Books: Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Catalog

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Library's experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project. Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog. Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Library's Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Library's physical collections. As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.     

An Analysis of the Relative Influences of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Presidential Debate Viewing on Shifting Confidence in President George W. Bush

This study analyzes the influence of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in coordination with presidential debate viewing on the outcome variable of confidence in George W. Bush's policy positions. In addition, the combined influence of these competing persuasive appeals is assessed across three political ideology groups: liberals, moderates, and conservatives. There is a statistically significant experimental stimulus-by-political ideology interaction, with Bush making substantial gains among political moderates who viewed Moore's film prior to a Bush-Kerry debate. The study also reveals similar patterns of influence for liberals and conservatives.     

Preserving Electronic Government Information

Abstract

Over the last ten years the Government Printing Office has made a massive shift from print to electronic media as the preferred distribution medium for government documents. Federal agencies over the same period have created large numbers of electronic records that require long-term preservation under the law. This article examines how the National Archives and the Government Printing Office are responding to the technical, financial, legal, and political challenges of providing permanent public access to electronic government information. NARA efforts to collect, appraise, and preserve records following the mandates of the courts in the wake of the PROFS litigation in Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President are discussed. The work of the GPO to develop an electronic archive and develop electronic partnerships with depository libraries and federal agencies is also examined.     

Library Facts from International Business Machine Cards

Our classic article for this issue represents one of the first if not the first working application of punched cards in a public library. It is interesting to compare some of the characteristics of the state of the art in 1941 with those of today's "automated" circulation systems. This early system isn't really much different from some of the more recent "newer" systems. This article also illustrates how important it is to carefully select the library's board of trustees (see paragraph two). The IBM Corporation installed the equipment without charge and covered all costs during the long period of experimentation. Margery Quigley was librarian of the Endicott (New York) Public Library from 1918 to 1924, and since 1927 had been librarian of the Montclair (New Jersey) Public Library when she wrote this article in 1941.     

Congress's contempt power: Three mechanisms for enforcing subpoenas

Since the beginning of the 110th Congress, increased oversight by congressional committees into activities of the President and Executive Branch has sparked renewed interest in both political and legal questions involving the separation of powers. Congressional subpoenas for general information, documents, and testimony from high-ranking executive officials has not only generated significant inter-branch conflict but has also developed into a controversy that could result in a legal standoff between Congress and the President. Congress's ability to obtain access to information, whether in the form of documents or testimony, from the Executive is primarily enforced through political negotiation and accommodation that generally take place outside of public view. Contempt may be used by Congress to coerce compliance, punish the contemnor, and/or remove the obstruction. This paper focuses on Congress's contempt power and congressional authority to enforce its requests for information, documents, and testimony from both private individuals and the Executive Branch. First, it examines the source of Congress's contempt power. Next, it discusses and analyzes the procedures associated with each of the three different types of contempt proceedings—inherent contempt, statutory criminal contempt, and statutory civil contempt. Finally, this paper concludes by addressing several of the unique constitutional, legal, and political problems that are associated with congressional contempt proceedings against Executive Branch officials.     

Librarians,Faculty, and the Writing Center Partnering to Build an Interdisciplinary Course: A Case Study at the University of Houston,USA

This article covers how an interdisciplinary course was developed using the expertise and resources of a history professor, the history and psychology subject librarians, and the university's writing center. The course, supported by a grant, was aimed at helping students improve their research, information literacy, and writing skills across disciplines. The article discusses the involvement of the partners from the initial planning stages to its conclusion, focusing especially on how the librarians created a library session, course-specific guide, annotated bibliography assignment and grading rubric, and how these were used as opportunities to interact with the students throughout the course. Also covered are research and writing challenges, especially for English-language learner students, and how they were addressed by all the partners. It also discusses how the librarians used this experience to seek out opportunities to create similar collaborations with other instructors, and to strengthen ties with support services on campus.     

A Funaholic in the Reference Room

This article is a collection of humorous data gleaned from reference works. These books include handbooks, such as Chase's Calendar of Annual Events, the Guinness Book of World Records, Famous First Facts, American Nicknames, Post's and . Vanderbilt's etiquette books, and Robert's Rules of Order. Dictionaries cited include A Table Alphabeticall (1604), Dictionarium Britannicum (1736), Webster's, Fowler's, the Acronyms and Initialisrns Dictionary, and the Abbreviations Dictionary. Amusing statements have been cited from Britannica from its first edition through reviews of the eleventh. Biographical works quoted include .the Dictionary of American Biography, Notable American Women, and Who's Who in America. Citations from such directories as the Directory of Directories, the Encyclopedia of Associations, and the Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines, are provided.