Day: May 17, 2006

Ethics Committee Finally Finds One Bad Democrat to Balance 434 Questionable Republicans

Trish

After 16 months of “political gridlock,” the House Ethics Committee finally got the vital missing piece it needed in order to begin investigating Bob Ney and other Republicans involved with both Jack Abramoff and Inmate Duke Cunningham: a dirty Democrat.

The committee waited to investigate U.S. Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who has “stink” written all over him until — praise Jesus! — they uncovered equally fetid Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.). CNN:

Now Republicans everywhere can hold Jefferson up as living proof that we are just as bad as they are.

The simultaneous investigations of Ney and Jefferson give a bipartisan tone at a time when Democrats are trying to make a campaign issue out of Republican misconduct.

The committee of five Republicans and five Democrats had been in a partisan deadlock since the beginning of last year. The House GOP leadership removed two GOP members of the committee and the Republican chairman after they had admonished DeLay for his conduct. Since then, the committee has fought over committee rules and staffing, and failed to get a sixth vote to begin any investigation.

Members of the committee added that they would have investigated Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) if he had just been patient and waited for a defiled Democrat like the rest of them. Instead, he opted not to face the voters this fall, denying the glacial Ethics Squad potentially their biggest prize.

“But for his imminent resignation from the Congress … we would have recommended to our colleagues on the committee the formation of an investigative subcommittee to conduct a formal inquiry into those allegations,” [committee members] Berman and Hastings said.

Well darn. Who would have thought letting nearly a year and a half go by without acting would have consequences? But then again, Jefferson was worth waiting for. Now Republicans everywhere can hold him up as living proof that we are just as bad as they are. I mean, a 434 to 1 ratio pretty well speaks for itself, don’t you think?

Bush Makes Insulting Personal Remarks to Australian PM to His Face — Media Yawns

Jon Ponder

Towel snaps: If the United States had a normal president, we’d be in the midst of an international incident right now had he personally insulted Australian Prime Minister John Howard to his face the way President Bush did today:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Somebody said, you and John Howard appear to be so close, don’t you have any differences? And I said, yes, he doesn’t have any hair… He may not be the prettiest person on the block … but when he tells you something you can take it to the bank.

And yet as of 7:00 PM PST, as far as I know, only Keith Olbermann on MSNBC has picked up this story.

Klosterman: The Era of Predictable Disillusionment

Trish

Chuck Klosterman wrote a great piece for ESPN Magazine about why Barry Bonds matters. We’ll save his five reasons on that subject for another day, but his summation of the post-Clinton years is dead-on. The essay was excerpted in The Week magazine.

…the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and The Simple Life premiered, and we re-elected the same president we never really elected in the first place

In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election, and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act as if that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings, and everybody cried for two months. And then Enron went bankrupt, and the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and The Simple Life premiered, and we re-elected the same president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and three Oscars for an especially bad movie called Crash…

If it’s the era of anything, it’s the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually — and then suddenly — hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn’t been paying attention to begin with.

Right. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, nor does it provide exemption from being strapped in a seat on the Rove-conceived roller coaster of division and made-up strife we no longer even recognize as such.

Instead, we routinely take ardent stands on things previously of only passing interest to us, like stem cell research, gay people holding weddings, husbands unplugging wives from life support, and citizenship for Mexican workers. We debate absurd “solutions” to illusionary “problems” like putting a fence around the lower 48. Meanwhile, we either don’t notice or claim not to care when cameras are erected on every highway exit ramp and bridge, and better records of our cell phone calls are provided to the government than to us.

As Paris Hilton herself said, if caviar wasn’t expensive, no one would eat it. I’d rather think they’re putting something in the water than think we are just this easy to play.

Poll: Like Father, Like Son — Bush Drops 5 Points to 33% in WaPo Poll

Jon Ponder

Same as Poppy in the Washington Post-ABC Poll:

Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush’s father fell below 30 percent in some other independent polls that year.

Bush Guts Education, Human Services to Save a Pittance

Buck Banks

Unkind cuts: There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the budget battles over the 2007 federal budget and the ballooning supplemental spending bill that Herr Bush has threatened to veto. But there has been virtually no coverage of what Bush says he wants to cut out of the federal budget.

The Office of Management and Budget has just released its report on the spending reductions Bushco wants — surprise! — they are mostly in education and health and human services areas. The total is nearly $7.3 billion, almost half of it in education spending cuts.

Here are some of the program terminations I consider to be most egregious.

From the Department of Agriculture Bush wants to cut $511 million, including $75 million from watershed protection and flood prevention, and $10 million from the beleaguered Forest Service.

Given our current gasoline ‘crisis,’ does it make sense to also cut the $64 million Oil and Gas Research and Development program?

From Education, the “Education President” wants to cut 42 programs for a total of $3.5 billion. High school vocational training will see elimination of $1.15 billion in programs. Other education programs getting the axe include Arts in Education, Civics Education, National Writing Project, School Dropout Prevention and Vocational Rehabilitation for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers. You can bet some children are getting left behind.

Remember, these are eliminations, not budget cuts — gone, daddy, gone.

From the Energy Department Bush is slicing $114 million in programs. Those include the University Nuclear Energy and the Geothermal Technology programs. Given our current gasoline “crisis,” does it make sense to also cut the $64 million Oil and Gas Research and Development program? It does to somebody, ‘cause it’s history.
[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

These solid people of capital, the press, the pulpit — where have they ever fought? They are accustomed to finding out by telegraph and telephone the results of battles which settle their fate.

— Leon Trotsky (1870-assassinated 1940), Soviet Russian leader, journalist

We’re Number One — In Fatties

Buck Banks

Tubbo nation: According to an American Demographics analysis of census information, the United States leads the world in overweight and obese people, with nearly 23 percent of the world’s obese population aged 15 or older.

The U.S. share of the merely overweight (about 7 percent) isn’t that far out of line with its share of world population (less than 5 percent). But the problem is obesity, as determined by body mass index, which measures weight in relation to height. “Overweight” means a BMI of 25 up to 30; “obese” is 30 or above.

BMI is not a perfect measure. For example, a 200-pound, 5-foot 10-inch body builder has a BMI of 29, or borderline obese, despite having more muscle than fat. However, such cases are the exceptions to the rule, and BMI, which dates to the 1800s, remains the standard for governments.

U.S. males aged 15 or older last year had a mean BMI of 28.4, according to World Health Organization. Women’s average was 28.8. For adults of average height in the U.S., a man is considered obese at 196 pounds; a woman at 174 pounds.

The nation is getting fatter. U.S. government surveys show the average U.S. adult man aged 20-74 weighs 191 pounds and the average woman weighs 164, both up about 24 pounds (or 96 McDonald’s Quarter Pounders) from the early 1960s. About three-fourths of Americans aged 15-plus in the U.S. were overweight or obese in 2005, with about four in 10 obese, according to WHO.

With 22.6 percent of the world’s fattest residents age 15+, the U.S. is far above the 5.3 percent share of runner-up Mexico, according to American Demographics. The analysis found 1.6 billion overweight people age 15-plus worldwide last year (34.5 percent of that population), including 400 million clinically obese.

Across 192 nations, WHO’s mean BMI 2005 projection for males 15-plus was 24.4; for females, it was 25.3 — past the tipping point for overweight.