Day: March 1, 2006

Bush: ‘I Did Not Have Sex on That Levee’

Jon Ponder

Now there is videotape of President Bush being briefed on Katina in which damage to the levees is anticipated:

So when the president told Diane Sawyer on September 1 that, “No one could have anticipated the levees being breached,” it was a lie.

Federal officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief of possible devastation just before Hurricane Katrina struck.
Six days of video footage from briefings and transcripts were obtained by The Associated Press.

The warnings were that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome and overwhelm rescuers.

A-P reports Bush didn’t ask any questions during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on August 29th.

He assured state officials that the government was fully prepared.

Several hundred thousand Louisiana evacuees ended up in Texas and other states after Katrina hit.

The tapes and documents show federal officials were fatally slow to realize they didn’t have enough resources.

So when the president told Diane Sawyer on September 1 that, “No one could have anticipated the levees being breached,” it was a lie.

At Last: What Total Lack of Separation of Church and State in America Looks Like

Trish

A bizarre town is taking shape in Southwest Florida, built by Domino’s Pizza C.E.Nutcase Thomas S. Monaghan. Monaghan will rule his town according to Tali-Catholic-ban guidelines.

Jesus will be hanging just overhead at all times, in case anyone starts thinking about doing anything that might lead to a need to prevent pregnancy

The pizza magnate, raised by wolves nuns in orphanages, is bankrolling the town called Ave Maria with millions of dollars, calling its construction “God’s will.”

Stores won’t sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies won’t carry condoms or birth control pills, and cable television will carry no X-rated channels, he said in a speech last year to the Boston Catholic Men’s Conference…

The town is being built around Ave Maria University, the first Catholic university to be built in the United States in four decades, which Monaghan also founded.

The community…will be set on 5,000 acres with a European-inspired town center. It will encircle a massive church and what planners call the largest crucifix in the nation, standing nearly 65 feet tall.

So Jesus will be hanging just overhead at all times, in case anyone starts thinking about doing anything that might lead to a need to prevent pregnancy. Of course, some people are wondering if it’s constitutional to do all this banning of perfectly legal activities.

“This is country club Christianity,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, which opposes the church’s bans on abortion and birth control.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, agreed.

While Simon notes there are religiously homogenous communities across the country, none can “wield governmental power along the lines of religious principle.”

The folks in charge of Florida are currently punting.

“The community has the right to provide a wholesome environment,” [Florida Attorney General and candidate for governor Charlie] Crist said Tuesday. “If someone disagrees, they have the right to go to court and present facts before a judge.”

Gov. Jeb Bush, at the university’s recent groundbreaking, lauded the development as a new kind of town, where faith and freedom will merge to create a community of like-minded citizens.

And I just love it when that happens. Meanwhile Monaghan has no qualms, but all the self-assurance of a true religious fanatic and extremist.

“I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don’t want to be on the sidelines,” Monaghan said in a recent Newsweek interview.

No worries there, Tommy. You bought a seat in the front row.

Ethics Quietly Removed from Defense Spending Bill

Buck Banks

Oxymoron — military ethics: Where do the Pentagon’s military officers go after their retirement from active service? Many go to work for big defense contractors as liaisons between the contractors and the people who sign the contracts on Capitol Hill.

For instance, one of the more notorious cases involved Darleen Druyun, a high-ranking Air Force procurement official who was in charge of overseeing Boeing Co. air tanker negotiations at the same time she was applying for a top Boeing job. Talk about padding your resume!

She pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison.

Duh — problems likely ahead in changing ethics rules for both lawmakers and lobbyists.

The Senate unanimously passed a plan last November to officially identify former Pentagon officials who go to work for defense contractors as part of the $491.5 billion defense authorization bill. But somewhere in the House-Senate conferences of December, the provision disappeared, quietly, without a peep of conscience.

Congress Daily offered this insipid insight that’s one for the “Duh” file: “The removal of the provision from the defense bill that would have required the defense companies to report the names of former members and military officers to benefit from government contracts signals the problems likely ahead in changing ethics rules for both lawmakers and lobbyists.” (emphasis added)

The provision would have required companies with defense contracts over $10 million to name former defense officials or military officers who received compensation from the contractors in an annual report to the Pentagon. Now that doesn’t sound too egregious, does it?

Contractor disclosure apparently got scrubbed after the Pentagon raised objections, according to one top Senate staffer involved in the talks.

The department apparently felt “there were too many people covered” by the provision, and there also was resistance by the House during a short conference meeting prior to the lawmakers’ departure for the Christmas holidays.

In the fiscal free-for-all that characterizes the Bush administration, such week-kneed attempts to inject an iota of ethics into the self-enrichment process will undoubtedly continue to fail. All hail the Commander-In-Thief!

Bush Greeted by 100,000 Protesters in India

Jon Ponder

Here’s a bet: There will be scant coverage of these protests on American news broadcasts:

Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting “Death to Bush!” rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush.

Surindra Singh Yadav, a senior police officer in charge of crowd control, said as many as 100,000 people, most of them Muslim, had gathered in a fairground in central New Delhi ordinarily used for political rallies.

“Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message — killer Bush go home,” one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.