Today the odometer on my 1997 Nissan Sentra (purchased new in 1997) finally passed 50,000 miles.
I’m sorry I didn’t post today. I was absolutely swamped doing something else. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.
Category Archives: Bush Administration
Fire Sale Nation
The weak dollar has drawn hoards of bargain hunters to America, the Associated Press reports:
Many shoppers go to great lengths to find Black Friday bargains, and some are even crossing the ocean this year.
A weak dollar is bringing in overseas visitors looking to take advantage of holiday weekend sales.
The dollar hit a new low against the euro today, while the British pound is valued at more than two dollars.
The CEO of toy store FAO Schwarz estimates foreigners will make up about one-third of customers at its flagship New York location this holiday season.
One European says he may spend $2,000 dollars or more on an American shopping spree. Another Northern Ireland resident says the effect of the weak dollar is, as he puts it, that “everything is half price for us.”
Great. We’re the new Hong Kong.
See also Michael Hirsh, “In the Realm of the Dying Dollar“:
In a blistering essay in the current Vanity Fair, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a former World Bank economist, notes that Bush took a nation with a budget surplus upon assuming office and turned it into a global debtor, and he has underinvested in education and alternative energy. “In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous ‘war of choice’ in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II,” Stiglitz writes. “Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle ‘worst president’ when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.”
Juicy Bits for Politics Nerds
Believe It, or Not
I really would like to know exactly who was behind this:
The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.
To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.
Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.
The article linked said that veterans have received letters from “the military” — I assume the Department of Defense — demanding a return of a portion of their sign-on bonus. Spencer Ackerman says he has attempted to get a response on this from the Pentagon. But, apparently, this has been going on for a while, under the radar. Last month Jonathan D. Silver wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
The problem, as U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire sees it, is that soldiers wounded in Iraq are being denied bonuses when their injuries force an early military discharge. …
… “Hard as it may be to believe, the Department of Defense has been denying injured servicemen and women the bonuses that they qualified for,” Mr. Altmire said.
Altmire, a Democrat, has sponsored legislation to ensure the wounded and discharged vets enjoy the benefits of their entire bonus.
Not even rightie bloggers are defending this policy, but while leftie bloggers are blaming the Bush Administration, rightie bloggers mostly blame “bureaucracy.” Maybe this policy did not originate in the White House, but someone at some level of management, somewhere, must have authorized the policy. The letters didn’t write and mail themselves.
Someone please explain to me why Malkin and Bob Owens work themselves into a feedback screech about Scott Beauchamp rather than crap like this.
Good question.
Scotty Squeals
I just have time for a quick note — I have been out this evening and just learned that Scott McClellan is dishing on his old White House homeboys in a new book, to be published in the spring. Mike Allen and Michael Calderone write for The Politico:
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being “involved” in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.
McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.â€
The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.
But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.
“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,†McClellan wrote.
“There was one problem. It was not true.â€
McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information,†McClellan wrote.
“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”
McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: “The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his
behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.â€
I’ve wondered if McClellan’s resignation as White House Press Secretary in April 2006 had anything to do wit the Plame-Wilson mess. Perhaps.
Sorry We Missed You
If you like Halloween, you’ll love this. Drop a few of these around your right wing neighborhood:
Much less funny is this video of AT&T whistleblower and former technician Mark Klein explaining how AT&T was copying all internet traffic coming across its cables:
…It affects not only AT&T’s customers, but everybody….and so they’re basically tapping into the entire internet. If they’re doing what they say they want to do – look at international traffic – none of this makes any sense. ….these installations only make sense if they’re doing a huge, massive, domestic dragnet on everybody in the United States. These companies know very well what’s legal and illegal – they’ve been dealing with this for decades…this is why Qwest refused the NSA’s approaches because they weren’t shown any legal justification for it – they did the right thing and said No….
And yet, Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms. Will we hear more of her brilliant “Mukasey is not Gonzales” logic? Perhaps she can arrange for the immunity law to require telecoms to drop a friendly "Sorry we missed you" e-notice into our inboxes.
h/t to Avedon Carol.
Not Over ‘Til It’s Over
It seems to me that much ommentary on President Bush has already taken on a retrospective tone, as if his Administration were already over. It is over, in the sense that most Americans have had it with the Bushies. Eugene Robinson writes,
It’s official: Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon. …
… A Gallup Poll released this week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough — nearly two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush’s abysmal report card — only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he’s doing — actually overstates our regard for his performance.
According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who “strongly” approve of Bush as president with those who only “moderately” feel one way or the other about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full 50 percent who “strongly disapprove” of Bush — as high a level of intense repudiation as Gallup has ever recorded in its decades of polling.
Gallup has been asking the “strongly disapprove” question since the Lyndon Johnson administration. The only time the polling firm has measured such strong give-this-guy-the-hook sentiment was in February 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, when Nixon’s “strongly disapprove” number was measured at 48 percent. Bush beats him by a nose, but the margin of error makes the contest for “Most Reviled President, Modern Era” a statistical tie.
The shrinking Republican base still supports Bush, but Independents have joined the Dems in the Anti-Bush League.
Bush didn’t come by this distinction with help from family connections or the Supreme Court. No, he earned it.
And, you know, being President is just about the only thing the sociopathic little bleep ever did in his life without help from family connections.
What’s hard to fathom is how we’ll make it through the next 14 1/2 months.
Maybe that’s why retrospectives feel so soothing.
Sidney Blumenthal describes the Bush Administration as something like a smoking ruin:
Every aspect of George Bush’s foreign policy has now collapsed. Every dream of neoconservatism has become a nightmare. Every doctrine has turned to dust. The influence of the United States has reached a nadir, its lowest point since before the second world war, when the country was encased in isolationism.
Don’t hold back, Sidney. Tell us what you really think.
Gone are the days when the stern words of a senior US official prevented rash action by an errant foreign leader and when the power of the US served as a restraining force and promoted peaceful resolution of conflict. In the vacuum of the Bush catastrophe, nation-states pursue what they perceive to be their own interests as global conflicts proliferate. The backlash of preemptive war in Iraq gathers momentum in undermining US power and prestige.
The resignation last week of Bush’s close advisor, Karen Hughes, as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, whose mission was to restore the US image in the world, signaled not only failure but also exhaustion. The administration’s ventriloquism act of casting words into the mouth of the president’s nominee for attorney general, former federal judge Michael Mukasey, who would not declare waterboarding torture, demonstrated that Bush is less concerned with the crumbling of America’s reputation and moral authority than with preventing an attorney general from prosecuting members of his administration, including possibly him, for war crimes under US law.
The neoconservative project is crashing. The “unipolar moment,” the post-Cold War unilateralist utopia imagined by neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer; “hegemony,” the ultimate goal projected by the September 2000 manifesto of the Project for the New American Century; an “empire” over lands that “today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” fantasized by neocon Max Boot in the Weekly Standard a month after September 11, have instead produced unintended consequences of chaos and decline….
…The Bush administration finds itself devoid of options. Neoconservatives are left, happily at least for some of them, to defend torture. They have no explanations for the implosion of Bush’s policies or suggestions for remedy. Self-examination is too painful and in any case unfamiliar. Bush regrets Musharraf’s martial law, yet tacitly accepts that the US has no alternative but to support him in the war on terror that he is not fighting – and is using for his own political purposes.
On the rubble of neoconservatism, the Bush administration has adopted “realism” by default, though not even as a gloss on its emptiness. Bush still clings to his high-flown rhetoric as if he’s warming up for his second inaugural address. But this is not rock-bottom. There is further to fall.
Um, that last bit wasn’t so soothing.
Be sure to read Craig Unger’s piece on “How Cheney took control of Bush’s foreign policy” at Salon. Colin Powell was already being shoved out of the loop by Cheney and Rumsfeld before Bush was inaugurated. Unger also writes that Paul Wolfowitz probably would have become Director of the CIA were it not for his affair with Shaha Riza, a.k.a. the “neoconcubine.” Somehow Mrs. Wolfowitz found a way to take her marital grievances to the White House.
See also “The Battle of the Bushes” and “How George Bush Really Found Jesus,” which are taken from Unger’s new book The Fall of the House of Bush.
Override!
David Stout writes for the New York Times:
The Senate voted overwhelmingly today for a popular $23 billion water projects measure affecting locales across the country, thereby handing President Bush his first defeat in a veto showdown with Congress.
The vote was 79 to 14, far more than the two-thirds needed to override the veto that President Bush cast last Friday. On Tuesday, the House voted by 361 to 54 in favor of the bill, also well over the two-thirds barrier to nullify the veto.
Enactment of the water projects measure had been widely expected, despite the veto, given the importance of the bill to individual districts and, of course, the lawmakers that represent them. The measure embraces huge endeavors like restoration of the Florida Everglades and relief to hurricane-stricken communities along the Gulf Coast and smaller ones like sewage-treatment plants and dams important to smaller constituencies.
Well, at least it shows they can override something.
Enjoy
Kevin Drum has posted the winners of the Golden Wingnut Award. And may I say that it’s a testament to the depth of prattle on the Right that Jonah Goldberg was only a runner-up.
If you feel like indulging in a rich, ooey-gooey conspiracy theory, check out “January 19, 2009: The One-Day Cheney Presidency, and the Planned Pardon.”
Irony Is Dead, Embalmed and Buried
White House Tells Musharraf: Never ‘Restrict Constitutional Freedoms’ To Fight Terror
During today’s White House press briefing, spokeswoman Dana Perino condemned Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of “emergency rule†in Pakistan. She said that the administration is “deeply disappointed†by the measure, which suspends the country’s constitution, and believes it is never “reasonable†to “restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorismâ€:
Q: Is it ever reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?
MS. PERINO: In our opinion, no.
And she can say this with a straight face.