Tag: Bush

Politics over Science

swanksalot0 comment

a common refrain for the last eight years

The inspector general of the Interior Department has found that agency officials often interfered with scientific work in order to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct, reviving attention to years of disputes over the Bush administration’s science policies.

In a report delivered to Congress on Monday, the inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found serious flaws in the process that led to 15 decisions related to policies on endangered species.

[From Report Finds Interference in Interior Dept. Actions – NYTimes.com]

Some of these actions are at least reversible, unlike other last minute fuck you’s delivered by Still-President Bush

Pollution is not Stewardship

Seth Anderson1 Comment

George Bush and his Republican lackeys envision a world without environmental regulation as a good thing, a goal worth striving for. I’m afraid they want this to happen:

The Citarum River, which winds its way through West Java past terraced rice paddies and teeming cities, is an assault on the senses. Visitors can smell the river before they see it.

Some fishermen still make their living off the river’s fouled waters, but many are no longer casting lures. Instead, they row their boats through floating garbage, foraging for old tires and other trash they can sell.

The river, considered by many environmentalists to be among the world’s most polluted, is woven tightly into the lives of the West Javanese.

…

Environmentalists blame rapid, and unregulated, industrialization and urbanization over the past 20 years for the degradation of the 5,000-square-mile river basin.The environmental damage is already costing lives; flooding, caused by deforestation and drains clogged with garbage, is a constant problem in cities along the Citarum.

[From Trying to Stop Pollution From Killing a Lifeline – NYTimes.com]

You might think I’m using hyperbole, but Bush doesn’t believe in being a steward of our planet: he’d rather corporations evade a few onerous regulations than protect the environment, and us.

Tim Dickenson of Rolling Stone writes:

With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it’s tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of “midnight regulations” — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush’s legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

“It’s what we’ve seen for Bush’s whole tenure, only accelerated,” says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch. “They’re using regulation to cement their deregulatory mind-set, which puts corporate interests above public interests.”

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. “The administration is handing out final favors to its friends,” says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. “They couldn’t do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose.”

[From Bush’s Final F.U. : Rolling Stone]

and despite common belief that the new President will be able to just overturn these last minute regulations, that isn’t really the case:

John Podesta, the transition chief for the Obama administration, has vowed that the new president will leverage his “executive authority” to fight Bush’s last-minute rule changes. But according to experts who study midnight regulations, there’s surprisingly little an incoming executive can do to overturn such rules. TheBush administration succeeded in repealing just three percent of the regulations finalized before Bill Clinton left office in 2001. “Midnight regulations under Bush are being executed early and with great intent,” says Bass of OMB Watch. “And that intent is to lock the next administration into these regulations, making it very difficult for Obama to undo what Bush just did.”

To protect the new rules against repeal, the Bush administration began amping up its last-gasp regulatory process back in May. The goal was to have all new regulations finalized by November 1st, providing enough time to accommodate the 60-day cooling-off period required before major rule changes — those that create an economic impact greater than $100 million — can be implemented.

Now, however, the administration has fallen behind schedule — so it’s gaming the system to push through its rules. In several cases, the Office of Management and Budget has fudged the numbers to classify rules that could have billion-dollar consequences as “non-major” — allowing any changes made through mid-December to take effect in just 30 days, before Obama is inaugurated. The administration’s determination of what constitutes a major change is not subject to review in court, and the White House knows it: Spokesman Tony Fratto crowed that the 60-day deadline is “irrelevant to our process.”

Once a rule is published in the Federal Register, the Obama administration will have limited options for expunging it. It can begin the rule-making process anew, crafting Obama rules to replace the Bush rules, but that approach could take years, requiring time-consuming hearings, scientific fact-finding and inevitable legal wrangling. Or, if the new rules contain legal flaws, a judge might allow the Obama administration to revise them more quickly. Bush’s push to gut the Endangered Species Act, for example, was done in laughable haste, with 15 employees given fewer than 36 hours to review and process more than 200,000 public comments. “The ESA rule is enormously vulnerable to a legal challenge on the basis that there was inadequate public notice and comment,” says Pope of the Sierra Club. “The people who did that reviewing will be put on a witness stand, and it will become clear to a judge that this was a complete farce.” But even that legal process will take time, during which industry will continue to operate under the Bush rules.

Bush Drunk Again

Seth Anderson0 comment

We were laughing at this last week, after watching the Daily Show clips of Still-President Bush looking red faced, and inappropriately full of mirth. Maybe his alcoholism was true all along, and the White House has been lying to the American public. Wouldn’t be the first time. Gee, these pretzels are making me thirsty…

The margarita-like drink combines pisco — a Peruvian brandy — with lemon juice, egg whites and other ingredients and is considered mandatory in the South American country for welcoming guests and other festive occasions.

This week’s gathering has been no exception.

Even teetotalling US President George W. Bush, who famously quit drinking at 40, was spotted apparently sipping a pisco sour during the summit on Saturday.
It was unclear whether he actually drank any, or whether it was an alcohol-free version.

The White House rebuffed questions about the matter.

[From AFP: Peru summit hits sour note with ‘Pisco diplomacy’]

Why “rebuff” questions unless you don’t want to be caught in a lie, especially in a foreign country where the White House handlers cannot force event organizers to agree. They don’t want to say, “no, no booze”, and then have some Peruvian staffer say, “but I added double brandy to Senior Bush’s drink!” Easier just to ignore the question. That strategy has worked before, after all.

And remember how pissed Laura Bush was?

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: “Stop, George.”

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against “falling off the wagon” and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

“When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot,” said one insider. “He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: “Stop George!”

“Laura gave him an ultimatum before, ‘It’s Jim Beam or me.’ She doesn’t want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it’s such tough going for her husband.”

Still President Bush Still wants to Kill Us All

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Still President Bush still wants to kill us all using his proxies in the EPA to gut any and all regulatory restrictions on polluting. Rebecca Clarren has written a compelling overview of the problem in Salon.

the story of the hundreds of sick people who live near the former Kelly Air Force Base illuminates an entirely new manner in which the Bush administration has diluted science and put public health at risk. This year, largely in obeisance to the Pentagon, the nation’s biggest polluter, the White House diminished a little-known but critical process at the Environmental Protection Agency for assessing toxic chemicals that impacts thousands of Americans.

As a coalition of more than 40 national and local environmental organizations put it in a letter to EPA administrators [4 page PDF] this past April: “EPA, under pressure from the Bush White House, has given the foxes the keys to the environmental protection henhouse.”

[From Environmental Protection Agency The Stalin Era Salon ]

Mechanics at the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio used a toxic chemical called tetrachloroethylene (or PCE for short) to degrease parts on the various airplanes serviced at the base. The chemical was discarded haphazardly, and seeped into the ground and water everywhere.

Although it has conducted limited testing, the EPA acknowledges that it’s possible for PCE vapor to rise from groundwater into people’s living rooms and kitchens. Yet it says the Alvarados and their neighbors have nothing to fear. Based on EPA air quality tests inside five area homes, the nation’s environmental guardian claims that it’s safe for residents to live above the plume for the next 40 to 100 years, or the amount of time it will take for the chemicals to naturally dissipate.

The fact is, EPA scientists haven’t completed an updated scientific assessment of PCE, including its health risks, for a decade. Worse, a comprehensive review of the carcinogenic chemical may never be coming. Anti-regulatory crusaders inside the Bush White House have peopled the EPA with top officials apparently more concerned with limiting government spending than public health. According to critics within and outside the EPA, the agency has stifled independent research and compromised scientific assessments of all manner of toxins and carcinogens that Americans breathe, drink and touch.

“It feels like Stalin-era Russia, like the administration set themselves up to decide what’s allowable science and what isn’t,” says a high-ranking staff scientist at the EPA, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Until the recent economic crash, this has been such an anti-regulatory administration. One of the ways to undermine regulations is to undermine the science behind them. It’s absolutely shocking what’s going on.”

Public health officials say this attempt to derail the scientific evaluation of toxins is one of the most damning legacies of the Bush administration. In late September, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing critique of the EPA’s new toxic-assessment procedures. It concluded that the secretive procedures compromise scientific credibility and sacrifice the public’s trust in government. Despite such hefty criticism, public officials fear that because the new procedures have been instituted at the EPA so far below the public radar, their harmful impact will survive long after Bush leaves office. It will take a bold and expedient move by Barack Obama or the next Congress to curtail the influence of the Pentagon and other government agencies on the EPA.

There is also the national scourge of perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel that has been found in the water supply of most states.

Since the early 1990s, the EPA has been conducting a toxic assessment of perchlorate, a major component in rocket fuel, used by the military and its contractors in bases throughout the country.

The chemical is incredibly widespread. It shows up in the groundwater of 35 states from New England to California; it has contaminated 153 public water systems in 26 states. Between 17 million and 40 million Americans are exposed to perchlorate at a level many scientists consider unsafe. According to a 2006 CDC study, 36 percent of American women are iodine deficient, putting them at risk for perchlorate-related thyroid problems. Due in part to perchlorate-contaminated irrigation water, most Americans who eat lettuce in the winter ingest the chemical. It has also appeared in melons, spinach and milk, according to 2005 and 2006 studies by the Food and Drug Administration.

A 2002 IRIS assessment led the EPA to call for a safe exposure dose of one part per billion — roughly the equivalent of a drop of water in a home swimming pool. That finding was expected to propel a stringent cleanup policy, one that could cost the Department of Defense billions of dollars.

That did not happen because the Pentagon has an ally in the EPA, an ally that decided that the budget of the Department of Defense was much more important than the health and safety of the nation.

In 2005, the EPA distributed a proposal to revise the chemical assessment process; officials at the Office of Management and Budget sat down with the IRIS blueprint and pulled out a red pen.

The plan that emerged calls for expanding the role of other federal agencies in determining which chemicals are assessed each year. It allows agencies like the Pentagon, Department of Energy and NASA to identify “mission critical” chemicals to the agency’s operations.

Significantly, the new process affords OMB more oversight and involvement in what critics say should be a purely scientific assessment. Now OMB and other non-health agencies have three additional opportunities to comment. Such comments are off-limits to public scrutiny and not available to congressional review unless subpoenaed. If OMB doesn’t agree with certain scientific findings, it can effectively block EPA from moving forward with the assessment.

Obama’s administration could reverse this crap, if they wanted. The question is, do they want to?

With a flick of a pen, Obama could reinstate the old IRIS process. Whether this will happen remains to be seen. His transition office didn’t return calls and e-mails asking if it would be likely to reverse the Bush administration changes to the IRIS process.

“If the Obama administration is serious about protecting poisoned communities, fixing the IRIS program is the place to start,” says Jennifer Sass, a toxicologist at Natural Resources Defense Council. “This should be the top priority at EPA. It’s really fundamental.”

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science and Technology, has taken matters into his own hands. In September, he introduced legislation that would make EPA solely responsible for the IRIS process. The agency would be barred from consulting with any agency, including OMB, that had a conflict of interest in the scientific review.

Read the entire article here.

Enemies of Truth and Justice

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Dan Rather lawsuit against Bush’s cronies at CBS continues to move forward, and the New York Observer found this exhibit1 among the documents:

re-defeat bush

This week, Dan Rather’s legal team submitted a memorandum to the judge overseeing Mr. Rather’s $70 million civil lawsuit against his former employers, which for the first time made public some of the thousands of documents that CBS has already turned over in the ongoing discovery process.

…

In Exhibit J of the current filing, Mr. Rather’s legal team include a list (turned up in discovery) which CBS executives apparently compiled in the fall of 2004, prior to settling on Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Boccardi.

The list includes Mr. Boccardi’s name as well such seemingly reasonable potential candidates as David Gergen, Gene Roberts (former managing editor of The New York Times) and Dick Wald (former president of NBC News).

Then things get a little bit more conservative. Under the category “others” are the names of potential candidates such as… Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh.
Herein, CBS’s full list of “others”:
William Buckley
Robert Novak
Kate O’Beirne
Nicholas Von Hoffman
Tucker Carlson
Pat Buchanan
George Will
Lou Dobbs
Matt Drudge
Robert Barkley
Robert Kagan
Fred Barnes
William Kristol
John Podhoretz
David Brooks
William Safire
Bernard Goldberg
Ann Coulter
Andrew Sullivan
Christopher Hitchens
PJ O’Rourke
Christopher Caldwell
Elliot Abrams
Charles Krauthammer
William Bennett
Rush Limbaugh

At the very bottom of the list, someone wrote in one more name. “Roger Ailes.”

[From Juicy Bits Surfacing in Rather Case: In 2004, CBS Considered Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter Independent Panel | The New York Observer]

In other words, CBS was only interested in squelching the truth, destroying Dan Rather, and collecting scalps to ensure that George W Bush won the election in 2004. I hope Dan Rather keeps pushing this matter, and that more juicy documents get released. All of the rabid Republicans on this list are enemies of the state, I hope they all get deposed and publicly humiliated.

Footnotes:
  1. I corrected any obvious typos [↩]

Hack It Up

swanksalot0 comment

Still-President Bush will be stuck in our collective craw for another 70 some days.

Hack it Up

Hack it Up


Pat Bagley
[From Salt Lake Tribune Home Page – Salt Lake Tribune]

If we’re lucky, Bush will accept an early buyout, with full pension of course, and leave the White House sooner than that.

War Dead Project

Seth Anderson3 Comments

My aunt Michelle writes:

My husband Bob, who is an artist, a poet, a veteran, a registered Republican and something of a nut, decided last spring that he wanted to create something that would express his deep feelings about the Iraq war. Starting in August he began to write, with a black sharpie, the names of the more than 4,000 soldiers who were killed in the war. He pasted the names written on wallpaper liner to the wall in front of our house which faces the Pacific ocean and a busy pedestrian walk. Above the list he wrote: “These Are the Brave Men and Women Our Government Sent to Die in Iraq.” It took about a month to complete the project and he added a statement at the end of the list. As more die he adds their names to the list.

He placed a spiral notebook near the project and urged people to write down their reactions and thoughts. Passing walkers from several countries and varied political persuasions have left dozens of their ideas in the notebook.

[From War Dead Project]

Robert Contemplative
[a photo I took of Bob last summer, somewhere off the coast of Alaska]

If you don’t get a chance to stroll by, reflect, and add your own comments, here is Bob’s statement:

Dear Neighbors,I honor these dead, the over 30,000 American wounded, and the hundreds of thousands who have served during this war. A veteran myself I understand some of their sacrifice, and understand that U.S. Troops do not choose their missions. The government chooses the war, and we the people choose the government.

These deaths are doubly sad because in Iraq our government ordered an attack, invasion and now occupation against the will of its people*of a country smaller than California* which did not threaten us, did not attack us,* and was an enemy of both Iran and Al Qaeda. this war insults our American tradition that every nation (starting with our own, in 1776) has the right to choose its own government, a tradition which has made us a beacon for freedom. We do not bully small nations. We justly act when strong nations – Nazi German, the USSR and Iraq in 1991 for examples – invade weaker ones.

Yes, al Qaeda earned our wrath on 9/11. Iraq, though, had nothing to do with 9/11,* yet we spill our soldier’s blood and rain terror in Iraq. Terror? Consider: our war (not our troops, but our war) has killed over 87,000 Iraqi civilians,* meaning that, per capital, it has killed more Iraqi civilians every week for 5 years than we lost on 9/11. * Whether you call that “shock and awe” or terrorism, it is unworthy of America.This doesn’t diminish the valor of our men and women. They have properly done their duty to follow the orders of the government we elected. But if we support freedom, if we support America’s principles, we will now do our duty and choose a government that will end this war without pursuing a “victory” which could further disgrace us by killing or cowing those Iraqis who don’t support the government George Bush or John McCain* impose.On November 4, please vote to save our lives, our treasure and our sacred honor by demanding an end to this immoral war.

* You can check these facts. See the “Sources and Calculations” page in the comments book (see below)
SOURCES AND CALCULATIONS

*”over 30,000 american wounded”: see . the names on the wall are only of the dead, but their numbers match the official ones.
*”against the will of its people”: see reporting several polls over a long time for the BBC, ABC and other. This March’s, for example, showed 72% of all Iraqis (including Kurds) oppose continued occupation and 61% think our forces make their country less secure.

*”smaller than California”: See CIA Fact Book (you can google it) The CIA estimates Iraq’s present population at 28,221,180. California’s in 2000 was over33,000,000 and has grown since.
*”didn’t attack us”: See The 9/11 Commission, at “A Pentagon Study of 600,000 Iraqi Documents Finds No Link Between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”

President Bush also acknowledged this:

“Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

THE PRESIDENT: Nothing except for it’ part of —and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a—the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has even suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”


*”starting with our own,in 1776”: see the Declaration of Independence
*”We were so menaced on 9/11 but not by Iraq.” See “didn’t attack us”, above
*Over 87,000 Iraqi civilians”: See This is a very conservative number. Most estimates are much higher, but iraqbodycount.org does not do estimates at all. It only counts verifiable violent deaths of noncombatants that are reported in the press or official reports, and cross checks those.
*”per capita, our war has killed more Iraqi civilians every week for five years than we lost on 9/11.” Here’s the calculation: On the five-year anniversary of our attack, March 20, 2008, the numbers were: The U.S. population was 301,139,947 (source CIA factbook). 2998 people (including military but not the terrorists) died in the 9/11 attacks (source Wikipedia), or .000996% of our population.Iraq’s population was 27,499,638 (source CIA factbook). (Those population numbers have grown slightly since then, in both countries). At that time, iraqbodycount had counted 81,874 Iraqi civilians killed. that’s .2977% of their population. Divide that by 5 years and again by 52 weeks per year and you bet .001145%, a greater per capita loss each week that we suffered on 9/11. Since March 18, over 5,000 more civilians have been killed, so if you repeat the math using today’s numbers you’ll find we have now inflicted a 9/11 a week for nearly 5 and a half year.
*”victory…John McCain”: See where Senator McCain clarifies his “100 years” in Iraq statements to the effect that he would be in favor of continuing to occupy Iraq that long, though he does not favor 100 years of American losses. See also Senator McCain’s web site,
*”our lives, our treasure and our sacred honor”: See the Declaration of Independence.

Michelle has been typing up people’s handwritten comments to the War Dead Project, and adding them to the blog. Check it out.

Incompetents in Charge

swanksalot0 comment

Gee, ya think?

Reserved Light

Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

It has also raised questions about whether the administration’s deep philosophical aversion to government ownership in private companies hindered its ability to look at all options for stabilizing the markets.

Some experts also contend that Treasury’s decision last month to not use taxpayer money to save Lehman Brothers worsened the panic that quickly metastasized into an international crisis.

[From White House Overhauling Rescue Plan – NYTimes.com]

2009 can’t come fast enough. Everyone who lost value in their pension and their 401(k) should sign up to tar-and-feather Bush and his lightweight cronies who mismanaged every crisis they every met, including this one.

Good Cash for Trash

swanksalot0 comment

Paul Krugman is concerned about the outrageous new Bush proposal to give unprecedented power to the Treasury Department without even a twinge of oversight. The entire article is well worth a read, but here’s a sample:

Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

…

So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

[From Paul Krugman – Cash for Trash – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Paulson wants to focus on Step 4 (theoretically breaking the cycle of de-leveraging), but Krugman notes this will subsidize a massive windfall for financial corporations, their executives, and their remaining shareholders – all at taxpayer expense.

Krugman instead suggests intervention at Step 2: investing capital into the financial sector, but getting something in return – ownership. Ownership means if and when the financial corporations get back into profitability, the taxpayer will receive some return on investment, not just the executives who ran the financial sector into the ditch in the first place.

Loneliness is an ATM

Krugman concludes:

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.

President Bush goes AWOL

Seth Anderson0 comment

Roger Simon wonders, Where’s Georgie?

Bush Shoots Nation the Bird

Bush Shoots Nation the Bird

Where’s George? The president, I mean.

You remember him. Dubya. No. 43. Won a second term a few years ago. It was in all the papers.

But where has he been lately? Where has he been during America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

Nowhere. AWOL. Every now and then, when the stock market takes yet another sickening plunge, a few words issue forth from the presidential lips. A very few words. Delivered with the greatest reluctance.

…

George W. Bush will continue to draw a paycheck until noon on Jan. 20, 2009. (If there is still any money left in the U.S. Treasury to pay him, that is.) But what has he been doing to earn his pay lately? Not calming fears among his fellow citizens about their life savings, that’s for sure.

On Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 504 points, its worst drop since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But Bush did not address the nation that night.

Instead, he held a state dinner for the president of Ghana. Gratin of Maine lobster, late-summer corn pudding, ginger-scented farm lamb and graham cracker crumble with cocoa pod shell was served. Eleven members of the cast of “The Lion King” came down from Broadway and performed. It was quite a bash. The Washington Post described President Bush and Ghanaian President John Kufuor as “ebullient.”

[From President Bush goes AWOL – Roger Simon – Politico.com]

On the one hand, George McBush has damaged the country enough over these seven years of famine, but on the other hand, he still is the putative head of our government, and should at least pretend to be working. Sets a bad example for the easily influenced. I thought he was worried about his legacy?

and then there’s this aspect:

The stock market swoons, home prices fall, job losses mount. But the president does not want to talk about it. Not really. And he certainly does not want to take any questions about it.

He has not taken any questions on anything since Aug. 6. On Wednesday his press secretary, Dana Perino, explained why. “If you guys [i.e., reporters] had him in here, almost everything would be geared towards the election, and he is cognizant of that,” Perino said. “I mean, every time that I would think about maybe having a press conference, the news of the day would be such that we might be talking about lipstick on a pig, and the president is just not going to get involved in it.”

In other words, the president is not going to get involved with restoring public confidence in our financial system because he is afraid somebody might ask him a question about politics. And because he doesn’t want to talk about politics (and why doesn’t he, considering he is supporting John McCain?), he won’t talk about anything.

When Doves Cry

Seth Anderson0 comment

More precisely, this is what happens when Republicans are in charge of a government they profess to despise – total and complete failure to govern.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

[From Wide-Ranging Ethics Scandal Emerges at Interior Dept. – NYTimes.com]

Hey, but according to the polls, Americans are still evenly decided if they want 4 more years of this sort of leadership or whether they would prefer having a government that attempts to serve the country (versus the Republican mentality of crony capitalism and ethical considerations be damned).

John McCain and his little red Corvette, Sarah Palin, would fit right in to this mentality, since they’ve already expressed their joy to reward lobbyists with federal money whenever possible.

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing probes of the troubled program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency has had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, the new set of reports raises questions about the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

In one of the new reports, investigators conclude that a key supervisor at the agency’s minerals revenue management office worked together with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.

Two other reports focus on “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” and unethical behavior in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in the form of oil and gas rather than cash royalties.

The Interior Department dropped all pretense of being anything other than a division of the oil and gas industry. I wonder what does happen in the Bush White House since Bush and Cheney both consider themselves part of the oil industry taking a short sabbatical, and why exactly did Jeff Gannon make all those hundreds of visits to the White House?

One of the reports says that the officials viewed themselves as exempt from [ethical] limits, indulging themselves in the expense-account-fueled world of oil and gas executives.

In addition, the report alleges that eight royalty-program officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business, and took money from a technical services firm in exchange for urging oil companies to hire the firm. In sometimes lurid detail, the report accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said.

There are plenty more details in Charlie Savage’s article, including this lovely tidbit:

two of the highest-ranking officials who were targets of the investigations will apparently escape sanction. Both retired during the investigation, rendering them safe from any administrative punishment, and the Justice Department has declined to prosecute them on the charges suggested by the inspector general.

Cheney would have instructed Bush to pardon them anyway…

from the (redacted) document covering Gregory Smith, page 19:

The RIK employee recalled that on one occasion in late 2004, Smith telephoned her repeatedly asking for drugs. She said she provided cocaine to him early that evening, but he continued to call her. Eventually, she said, Smith traveled to her house and wanted her to have sex with him. She said he also asked her if she had more cocaine, and she stated that she did not but that someone who was staying with her might. She said Smith obtained crystal methamphetamine from one of these individuals and she watched him snort it off the toaster oven in her kitchen. The RIK employee also said she and Smith engaged in oral sex that evening.

update: the actual documents (PDF) are available at ProPublica.org and are quite a fun read.

Some of these files are quite large, so beware.

In a cover letter (PDF), Inspector General Earl Devaney details the “culture of ethical failure” in the department.

In the first report (PDF), investigators focus on Gregory Smith, the former program director of the royalty-in-kind program. As the Times reports, “The report accuses Mr. Smith of improperly accepting gifts from the oil and gas industry, of engaging in sex with two subordinates, and of using cocaine that he purchased from his secretary or her boyfriend several times a year between 2002 and 2005.”

The second report (PDF) look at the Interior officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil. From theTimes: “The report found that 19 officials — about one-third of the program’s staff — accepted gratuities from oil companies, which was prohibited because they conducted official business with the industry.”

And the third report (PDF) focuses on Lucy Denett, the former associate director of minerals revenue management, who allegedly manipulated the contracting process to steer a contract to her friend Jimmy Mayberry. Mayberry pleaded guilty to conflict of interest charges earlier this year.

I could only imagine the sustained gnashing of teeth if this scandal could be linked to a Democratic client. Since it only involves Republicans and oil industries, it will get a mention or two in passing, and be off the news cycle by the weekend.

The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder

Seth Anderson4 Comments


“The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” (Vincent Bugliosi)

I picked up a copy of this book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I should start soon. Funny how the book has been basically ignored by the media, and yet still appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list, even without bulk orders1…

Vincent Bugliosi wants George W. Bush prosecuted for murder. There are others who are complicit in the crime, namely the Vice President and Condoleezza Rice, but Bush is the target of this famed former Los Angeles prosecutor (the Charles Manson case) and best selling author (Helter Skelter and The Betrayal of America as two examples). He is undeterred by the virtual major media blackout on interviews and advertising. He’s taking his case directly to the people through alternate media and the internet.

Bugliosi constructs a devastating case in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. As I write this review, it is still difficult to grasp my sense of shock at this title with this author’s name below it. A legendary prosecutor with a near perfect record in big cases, Bugliosi articulates one of the most revolutionary ideas imaginable in a mix of today’s otherwise vapid and obtuse political thinking. But first, the book and how the prosecutor makes his case.

He wastes no time in following up on the shock generated by the title. In the first sentence, we’re told:

The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history – – the president of the nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false presences, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 American soldiers, to horrific, violent deaths.” (V. Bugliosi, p. 3)

The president “knowingly and deliberately” caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians and that’s called murder, plain and simple. This is not a hypothetical case that could happen under special legal interpretations. When the president leaves office, he is subject to the same law as the rest of us. Bugliosi explains the ability to prosecute the case against George W. Bush by a district attorney or states attorney in any local jurisdiction where a life was lost in the Iraq war. Federal prosecutors also have that option. Bugliosi’s detailed analysis of this phenomenon offers some of the best analysis in the book and the detailed end notes.

[From A review of Bugliosi’s The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder]

George Bush better get his world traveling finished before he leaves office; once 2009 arrives, there might be a few impediments to visiting certain enlightened countries.

Oh, Mr. Bugliosi has a website too, check it out.

Footnotes:
  1. certain right wing organizations bulk purchase, and give away, books they want publicity for. Many bookstores will prominently display a book if it is on the NYT best-seller list. If I was wealthy enough, I’d bulk purchase selected liberal-leaning books [↩]

Russia and the US

Seth Anderson1 Comment

David Remnick writes a brief essay re: the history of the collapse of Soviet Union, and makes this point:

Taken individually, the West’s actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union—from the inclusion of the Baltic and the Central European states in NATO to the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state—can be rationalized on strategic and moral grounds. But taken together these actions were bound to engender deep-seated feelings of national resentment among Russians, especially as, through the nineteen-nineties, they suffered an unprecedentedly rapid downward spiral. Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert—politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.

There is little doubt that the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, provided Putin with his long-awaited casus belli when he ordered the shelling of South Ossetia, on August 7th. But Putin’s war, of course, is not about the splendors of South Ossetia, a duchy run by the Russian secret service and criminal gangs. It is a war of demonstration. Putin is demonstrating that he is willing to use force; that he is unwilling to let Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO without exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as hypocritical, overextended, distracted, and reluctant to make good on its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia.

[From David Remnick – Boundary Issues: Comment: The New Yorker]

Thanks, George Bush and the Republican Party, for squandering any possibilities of moral suasion. Not that the United States has ever had much moral suasion to spare, but even less so since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan on minor pretext.

Soviets Lithuania

And I like this Bishop Joseph Butler quote, I’m adding it to my pantheon of pithy epigrams:

Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War.

Only one with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the spectacle of the leaders of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states standing by Saakashvili last week at a rally in Tbilisi. But Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners.

Bush officials sneak-attack on Endangered Species Act

Seth Anderson0 comment

Assholes, all. As someone commented somewhere1 “What did the planet do to Cheney that he hates it so much?”

In the excitement of the Olympics, the run-up to the presidential conventions and the flurry of late summer vacations, it was easy to miss the Bush administration’s stealth attack on the Endangered Species Act last week. A proposed regulation would simply eliminate independent scientific reviews that have been required for over 30 years.

“I have been working on the Endangered Species Act for 15 years and have never seen such a sneaky attack,” declared John Kostyack, executive director of wildlife conservation and global warming at the National Wildlife Federation.

In a proposal, first reported by the Associated Press, biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service would no longer have input into the actions of many other federal agencies in evaluating projects that could impact endangered species.

Essentially it would be up to officials at agencies like the Forest Service, the Minerals Management Service and the Department of Transportation to decide for themselves if a new timber allotment, mining project or road would harm endangered animals and plants, without consulting third-party biologists from Fish and Wildlife.

Many of the agencies, which would now be making decisions affecting the fate of species themselves, don’t even have biologists on staff to make such determinations. The proposal presents a conflict of interest, which could effectively gut the Endangered Species Act, by asking the very agencies the act regulates to also enforce it. A 2008 Fish and Wildlife Service memorandum obtained by environmentalists states that when agencies regulated themselves in the past, they consistently violated the Endangered Species Act.

If the new regulation is approved by the Department of the Interior in the next couple of months, it would undercut the authority of the Endangered Species Act. “With this change, the Bush administration threatens to undo more than 30 years of progress,” said Kostyack. “This move is consistent with other efforts by the administration to cement industry-friendly policies before leaving office in January.”

[From Bush officials sneak-attack nation’s wildlife | Salon ]

I hope they aren’t allowed to get away with this brazen act of ignoring the wishes of the public.

Green Zone

Announcing the proposal last week, the Department of the Interior asserted that greenhouse gas emissions are exempt from regulation under the Endangered Species Act. It stated the “proposed rule is consistent with the FWS [Fish and Wildlife Service] current understanding it is not possible to draw a direct causal link” between the fate of a species, like the polar bear, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmentalists say the Bush administration’s motive is to preempt environmental groups from suing the government in the name of protecting the polar bears when the feds do things that would increase greenhouse gas emissions, like approving new coal-fired power plants.

To add insult to injury, the Bush administration said it will accept public comment on the proposed changes for a mere 30 days, and itwill not accept such comments via e-mail, which is the common way that many environmental groups activate their memberships to fight egregious policies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now accepting public comment about the proposed changes through Sept. 15 on the Regulations.gov Web site.

Rep. Nick J. Rahall II, D-W.V., chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, called the proposed changes to the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act “deeply troubling.” Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works committee, said that they’re “illegal.” The senator from California has legal precedent for that charge. In 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved hundreds of pesticides for use without consulting either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Services about their implications for endangered wildlife and sea critters. When environmental groups sued, a federal judge ruled against the EPA.

“It takes great hubris to resurrect an issue the court has already definitely struck down,” stated Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice. “This is like a zombie movie … their proposal to toss the Endangered Species Act over the cliff died, but now has somehow come back to life.”

Footnotes:
  1. I don’t remember where I read it, or I would cite the reference [↩]

Russia Is Not Jamaica

Seth Anderson1 Comment

MoDo’s best line in a while:

If only W. had taken the rest of his presidency as seriously as he’s taken his sports outings.

[From Maureen Dowd – Russia Is Not Jamaica -NYTimes.com]

Bush doesn’t care that he’s a light-weight, more interested in vacations and sight-seeing than governing.

After eight years, the president’s gut remains gullible. He’ll go out as he came in — ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there’s still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

This count, outrageous as it is, doesn’t include all the time spent attending sporting events, exercising, and traveling the world.

Red Stripe
[and not drinking Red Stripe]