Day: October 6, 2006

Screw Columbus, I’m Celebrating Leif Erikson Day on Monday

Buck Banks

Not making this up: Leif Erikson Day, 2006

A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

Leif Erikson Day honors a great son of Iceland and grandson of Norway who became one of the first Europeans known to reach North America. This day is also an opportunity to celebrate the generations of Nordic Americans who have contributed to our country and strengthened the ties that forever bind the United States with Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

Like the crew of risk takers that Leif Erikson boldly led on a quest to find new lands, Americans have always valued the ideals of exploration and discovery. A desire to seek and understand inspired their voyage more than a millennium ago, and it remains a central part of our national character as a new generation pursues great new goals today. Nordic Americans continue to make valuable contributions to our society that have expanded human knowledge and helped make our world a better place.

To honor Leif Erikson and to celebrate our citizens of Nordic-American heritage, the Congress, by joint resolution (Public Law 88-566) approved on September 2, 1964, has authorized the President to proclaim October 9 of each year as “Leif Erikson Day.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim October 9, 2006, as Leif Erikson Day. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to honor our rich Nordic-American heritage.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Study: Daily Show has More Humor, Less Hype and About the Same Amount of Substance as Network News Shows

Buck Banks

But one’s funny: According to a study set to be released next summer by Indiana University, John Stewart’s Daily Show has more humor content, less hype, about the same amount of substantive news and is a hell of a lot funnier than, say, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Though I would suppose Couric would score higher on the cuteness factor.

“We’ve been wringing our hands for decades that the networks aren’t doing enough substance in the political coverage, so is it any real surprise that it’s just as substantive?,” Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, said of The Daily Show. “Our findings should allay at least some of the concerns about the growing reliance on this non-traditional source of political information, as it is just as substantive as the source that Americans have relied upon for decades.

“In an absolute sense, we should probably be concerned about both of those sources, because neither one is particularly substantive. It’s a bottom-line industry and ratings-driven. We live in an ‘infotainment’ society, and there certainly are a number of other sources available.”

GOP’s Focus on Smaller Government, Like Its Focus on Family Values, Is a Lie

Buck Banks

Bloated bureaucracy: The Republican Party has consistently run on the message of smaller government over the past three decades. One might say consistently and successfully, because it has framed the debate over the size of the government as a defining difference between itself and the Democratic “Big Government” Party.

However, according to a new report, since George W. Bush ascended to the imperial presidency, the government has gotten steadily and rapidly bigger, to a record 14.6 million civil servants, postal workers, contractors and people who work under the auspices of government grants.

‘It hardly matters who produces the goods and services as long as the federal government is honest with the public about the true cost of delivering on the promises it makes.’

Paul C. Light, the study’s author and a government professor at New York University, explains the sudden increase from 12.1 million in 2002 to 14.6 million now:

“This time, almost all of the growth can be attributed from the war on terrorism, which boosted Defense spending for both goods and services systems and covered the continued cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The rest of the hidden workforce held steady at roughly 2.9 million grantees, while civil service employment inched up and postal employment fell.”

This “hidden workforce” is the one that Republicans don’t like to count when they are tallying the smallness of their government versus the largeness of the Democrats’. Light says there are 10.5 million of them, and they absorbed nearly $400 billion in federal contracting funds and $100 billion in federal grants in 2005.

Politicians who focus on the size of the civil service and fail to acknowledge the hidden workforce “encourage the public into believing that it truly can get more for less,” Light said. And the heavy reliance on such workers, while sometimes necessary, makes it more difficult to figure out who is accountable when things go wrong, he said.

“The federal government often uses contractors and grantees to provide talent it cannot recruit, specialized services it cannot produce, competition it cannot generate among its own organizations, and equipment that it cannot and should not build itself,” Light wrote.

“It hardly matters who produces the goods and services as long as the federal government is honest with the public about the true cost of delivering on the promises it makes.”

When it comes down to the federal bureacracy, the Republicans are no better at counting than they are at accountability. But before Democrats concede the big-government argument, what say we let both sides whip out their bureacracy and see whose really is bigger.

Iraq Is the Real Scandal

Jon Ponder
We’d be a far healthier democracy if [House Speaker Dennis] Hastert was under fire for allowing Iraq to sink into a gurgling pool of its own blood.

Buck’s post yesterday summed it up: Foley’s Not the Story. If you want a sign of the true decadence of American culture, it is this: A sex scandal of any dimension or flavor will get the media up in arms in a matter of hours, whereas the senseless wasting of blood and treasure in Iraq — a killing every hour and a cost of $2 billion a week — that goes on for years is treated like a dull abstraction that partisans bicker over endlessly.

As the 16-year-old page wrote about Rep. Mark Foley’s request for his photo, that is sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick!

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman has the same thought:

It’s fitting that former Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s sex scandal will do in the 40 days before the election what years of reporting on Bush administration incompetence and corruption couldn’t — end one-party rule in America…

Republican rule wasn’t based on moral authority earned by good judgment and civic discipline. Judging by the legislation that comes out of D.C., there’s always more talk of virtue than evidence of its practice.

Still, it was a winning strategy while it lasted. For years, Republican candidates won elections by promising to keep taxes low, their pants on and their zippers locked in the “up” position.

Demonizing “liberal Democrats” also became part of the appalling Kabuki dance of self-righteousness that dominates American politics in the Bush era. For tactical reasons, even so-called Democratic “moderates” joined in the bashing of their party’s most loyal constituents.

Still, it was only a matter of time before the mandate of heaven would be brutally withdrawn from triumphalist Republicans. No party can expect to govern forever on a steady diet of triviality and cynicism…

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The L Word: Olbermann Calls the President Out for Lying

Jon Ponder

Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night:

While the leadership in Congress has self-destructed over the revelations of an unmatched, and unrelieved, march through a cesspool …

While the leadership inside the White House has self-destructed over the revelations of a book with a glowing red cover …

The president of the United States — unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.'”

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

President Bush hears what he wants.

Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, “Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we’re attacked again before we respond.”

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.

And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind reader.

“If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party,” the president said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, “it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we’re attacked again.”

The president doesn’t just hear what he wants.

He hears things that only he can hear.

It defies belief that this president and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.

Yet they do.

It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any president of this nation.

Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies of treason.

[…]