Month: July 2006
Bush Uses ‘Snowflake’ Children As Props But Says They Are Not ‘Spare Parts’
If God is vengeful, She will smite President Bush with an illness that can only be cured by stem cells from discarded embryos.
The event staged by the White House today to announce the president’s veto of the embryonic stem cell research bill was one of the most obscenely crass political displays of the Bush presidency, and that is saying a lot.
In a cynical attempt to focus the public’s attention away from the estimated 100 million mostly adult Americans suffering from diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s who could have benefited from the research, the president’s political operatives filled the room with a dozen or so “snowflake” children who were born from frozen embryos reclaimed from fertility clinics.
The craven use of these children as political props became acutely ironic when Bush said of them, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.”
Indeed, the children were not spare parts — they were red herrings. What the White House did not want the public to know was that the potentially life-saving research the president vetoed would have been performed only on embryos slated to be destroyed because their infertile parents no longer need them.
Prior to the staged event, cameras weren’t allowed in the room when President Bush actually signed the veto, which was the first of his six-year presidency. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support embryonic stem cell research, and with midterm elections just four months away, Karl Rove and the president’s political team did not want clips of the president signing the veto showing up in Democrats’ campaign ads.
If God is vengeful, She will smite President Bush with an illness that can only be cured by stem cells from discarded embryos.
Pensito Review Releases Draft of Bush Veto Signing Statement
Executive power play: President George Bush today vetoed a bipartisan bill that sought to expand the limitations currently imposed on human stem cell research purportedly based on his religious beliefs. It was Bush’s first veto of a congressional bill in the five-and-a-half years of his presidency.
Instead of vetoing bills he disagrees with, Bush usually cheerfully signs them in public ceremonies that make it appear that he gets along with the legislative branch of government and even thinks it serves a useful purpose. Then, as soon as everyone leaves the room, he does a take-back via the signing statement.
A signing statement is a written proclamation issued by the executive branch that accompanies the signing of a law passed by the government’s legislature. Historically, they are mainly used for rhetorical or political proclamations, but U.S. presidents have used them to set forth how they intend the executive branch of the federal government to interpret and enforce the new law.
Pensito Review’s investigative team has uncovered what appears to be an early draft of a signing statement Bush intends to append to his veto of the stem cell bill today. Ordinarily, presidents do not attach signing statements to vetos, but it is obvious that Bush wants to extend his “take-back” powers to vetos, in case he ever does it again.
Here is what is believed to be an early draft of Bush’s veto signing statement recovered from a discarded dictaphone transcript:
As president of the United States of America, I hereby exercise my absolute power as supreme … no, strike that, … as commander and chief to determine at some time henceforth in the future … man, I like to add in those henceforths … to re-, re- … what’s that word? … oh yeah, rescind … rescind this veto of the Stem Cell Research Expansion Act and hold it not to be applicable to the executive branch except insofar as I say so.
It would be my perogative to rescind the veto as command and chief in the following circumstances: In the event that Mom or Dad, or both, or Jeb or any other close family relatives, and maybe Karl Rove, comes down with kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer or diseases of the nervous system, such as Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease, or any other illness that expanded stem cell research holds great promise for the treatment or cure of.
Katrina II: Bush’s Faltering Response to Middle East War Is a Disaster in the Making
We can only hope Sec. Rice won’t indulge in a shoe-shopping spree in Manhattan while she dithers over her itinerary in the Middle East.
Heckuva job: When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, millions watched in horror as the Bush Administration sat by while hundreds of thousands of American citizens became refugees in their own land, and hundreds more struggled and drowned in the flooded streets of New Orleans.
I remember thinking then that what we were seeing — or rather, not seeing — in response to Katrina could be a dire precursor of an even worse situation if the Bush team found itself confronted with an international crisis on the scale of Katrina or greater.
It is too early into the latest outburst of war in the Middle East to know whether it will erupt into a wider war, but what is abundantly clear even now is that the president’s strategy toward the crisis is harrowingly reminiscent of the hands-off, too-little-too-late approach we witnessed post-Katrina.
GA Lt. Gov: Reed Trailing Badly in Early Ballots
At 9:41 PM, Georgia time, Ralph Reed, the scandal-plagued rightwing Christian operative, is tanking in his bid for lieutenant governor, according to the Hotline:
LG (R) 33% in
Casey CAGLE: 55.2% 59,623
Ralph REED: 44.8% 48,344
Mood Dampens at Reed Headquarters:
At 9:15 p.m., Reed still had not come down to greet supporters at the InterContinental Buckhead Hotel, but was huddled with close friends watching returns come in. On his cell phone, Cobb County GOP chairman Anthony-Scott Hobbs got word that Reed was losing Cobb County by 10 percentage points, 11,000 votes to 9,000 votes. “You can’t win without Cobb,” he said.
Update: Reed conceded at 6:55 Pacific.
Wes Clark Surpasses Gore and Feingold in Presidential Poll at MyDD
Wow:
Tired of online straw polls that showed Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) “would win any poll [by a] huge [margin] that did not include Gore, and that Gore would win any poll huge no matter who else was included,” Chris Bowers suspended progressive activist MyDD polling for four months. Now they’re back and the results looks a little different:
Wesley Clark 546 (27.2%)
John Edwards 522 (26.0%)
Russ Feingold 444 (22.2%)
Mark Warner 311 (15.5%)
Not Sure 47 (2.3%)
Bill Richardson 41 (2.0%)
Hillary Clinton 40 (2.0%)
John Kerry 18 (0.9%)
Evan Bayh 17 (0.8%)
Joe Biden 10 (0.5%)
Tom Daschle 3 (0.1%)
Tom Vilsack 3 (0.1%)
Chris Dodd 2 (0.1%)
As a review of these pages would show, I voted for Gen. Clark in the California primary in 2004, however I stand by my more recent prediction that Al Gore, whose fan I am not, will be Democratic nominee in 2008.
Polls: Primary Races are Getting Hot
Tussling toward midterms: National Journal’s PollTrack notes that as we move into the last of the midterm primaries, several races are making for interesting political drama — if you like that kind of stuff — and we do.
PollTrack analyzed recent poll numbers for four of the more hotly contested races with upcoming primaries:
- Connecticut Senate: In perhaps the most closely watched primary race of the cycle, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman is enjoying a 25-point lead among state Democrats over his anti-war primary challenger Ned Lamont, according to a Quinnipiac University survey conducted a little over a month ago. The results dovetail with Lieberman’s approval ratings among likely Democratic voters; about the same percentage — 56 percent — who would vote for Lieberman in the Aug. 8 primary said they approved of the job he is doing.
Pollsters also tested a hypothetical three-way matchup with Lamont as the Democratic nominee and Lieberman running as an independent. In that scenario, pollsters found Lieberman would win with 56 percent — but Lamont would garner about a third of the Democratic vote.
- Florida Senate: Despite the recent turmoil surrounding her campaign, Republican Rep. Katherine Harris remains the front-runner for her party’s nomination in the latest Quinnipiac University survey. A plurality of the likely voters surveyed, however, said they were still undecided when presented with Harris and three other GOP candidates. In a general election matchup, incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D) leads all the GOP hopefuls with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Another poll from Strategic Vision (R) also favors Harris for the GOP nomination and Nelson in the general.
- Georgia Governor: Today’s Democratic primary, which will decide whether Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor or Secretary of State Cathy Cox will face incumbent first-term Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) in the general, promises to be a nail-biter. In a dramatic turnaround from the earliest days of the race, Taylor has steadily inched his way up the polls and now leads Cox, 49 percent to 41 percent, in the latest Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion survey. But Cox has also experienced a bump in support over the past month as the number of undecided voters in the Peach State has dwindled.
- Missouri Senate: With state auditor Claire McCaskill running solo in the Aug. 8 Democratic primary, the real story in Missouri — ranked the No. 3 Senate race in the nation by Hotline’s Chuck Todd — is the general election. The latest Research 2000 poll shows the candidates in close competition, with McCaskill edging out incumbent Sen. Jim Talent (R) by just 6 points.
Quote du Jour
Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs — statistically speaking the most powerful.
— Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), American political philosopher
GA Lt. Gov: Reed Tied with Challenger on Primary Day
Republican lieutenant governor candidates Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle are locked in a statistical dead heat, with each holding 43 percent of the responders in the survey.
Gullible Georgia Gops: Voters vote in the primary election today in Georgia, and if more evidence were needed that conservatives are as deluded as they are corrupt, you’ll find it in a last-minute poll on the lieutenant governor’s race:
Republican lieutenant governor candidates Ralph Reed and Casey Cagle are locked in a statistical dead heat, with each holding 43 percent of the responders in the survey. Voters who were undecided made up the remaining 14 percent of respondents.
“This race has been within the margin of error the entire week. We’ve seen a slight shift back in favor of Reed over the past two days,” Towery said. “This may well be because Reed has new ads on TV, and voters who are interested are hyper-sensitive to any new information concerning the race.”
What more information do Republican voters in Georgia need about Ralph Reed? He represents the Christian Nationalist wing of their party, and yet he was paid millions of dollars from gambling interests tied to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who hired Reed to convince his Christian followers to lobby their political leaders against a gambling enterprise that would have harmed the business of the people who paid him millions.
