Year: 2006

Bush Spent $1.62 Billion to Make Us Love Him and He Still Only Has a 42 Percent Approval Rating

Trish

Wondering how much all those paid White House product placements cost us taxpayers? Would you believe $1.62 billion?

“The extent of the Bush administration’s propaganda effort is unprecedented and disturbing,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif

Yes, fake news stories and secretly paid endorsements aren’t cheap, as we’re beginning to find out, thanks to the Government Accounting Office and our hero, David Walker, 54, U.S. comptroller general and one of the few people willing to challenge the Emperor Bush.

“The extent of the Bush administration’s propaganda effort is unprecedented and disturbing,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. “The fact is that after all the spin, the American people are stuck with high prescription-drug prices, high gas prices and high college costs. This report raises serious questions about this administration’s priorities for the country and I would hope that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle would agree that changes need to be made to rein in the president’s propaganda machine.”

… The White House did not immediately return a call for comment.

Do they ever? Give them another 22 hours, and maybe they’ll come up with something.

The biggest government spenders were: the Department of Defense ($1.1 billion); Health and Human Services ($300 million); Department of the Treasury ($152 million); and the Department of Homeland Security ($24 million).

The spending was for everything from military recruitment advertising to prizes for various promotions. Democrats pointed to the $10,212 the Air Force spent for items bearing the Coca-Cola logo including portable radios, victory t-shirts, hats and coolers, as well as more that $35,000 for promotional materials for a golf program.

Meanwhile, Bush’s proposed budget includes selling park lands to pay for schools and cutting commodity food programs for seniors and placing them on food stamps instead.

Eerie Parallels Between Cheney, Oswald

Buck Banks

Keeping the “ass” in assassin: The cold-blooded shooting of prominent Austin attorney Harry Whittington by Vice President of Torture Dick Cheney while “hunting” on Saturday bears some chilling parallels with the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963:

  • Both incidents involved a lone gunman.
  • Both incidents occurred in Texas.
  • Neither Cheney nor Oswald had a valid Texas hunting license.
  • In both incidents, the administration initially tried to conceal the facts from the media.

Coincidence? I don’t think so. Conspiracy? Probably. Cover-up? Undoubtedly.

WH Homeland Security Chief Says Bush Was ‘Engaged’ in Katrina Mismanagement

Jon Ponder

“I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved.”

— Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser

Now Bubble Boy is dead and the Mission Accomplished action figure preznint is back.

So the White House is now saying that President Bush was fully engaged in the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina by his government. This means that he was “fully involved” during the first 48 hours while thousands of Americans in New Orleans were dying and injured in the flooded streets or clinging to rooftops in the pouring ran with no help on the way.

Funny — what most of us remember was Mr. Bush cavorting with a guitar and Sen. McCain’s birthday cake.

Most tellingly, Townsend also said that the president’s critics were trying to “rewrite history” about the president’s actions. That was a dead giveaway that she — working from a script written by Karl Rove — was rewriting history even as she was speaking.

This is a remarkable revision of reality from the earlier revised reality that the White House floated in the weeks after the disaster. In the original concoction of events, Bush was a disengaged Bubble Boy who hates watching the news — even, apparently, the Fox News Channel where the news mullahs call the faithful to worship at his feet 24 hours a day.

In the original fictional narrative, it was the president’s phobia of the news, you see, that led to his confusion during the first 48 hours after Katrina. His aversion to information prevented him from watching live coverage of the destruction of America’s 44th largest metro area on television. This phobia was so bad that no one around the surly 59-year-old boy king — including his wife Laura or his parents, George I and Queen Bar — could muster the courage to convince him that something bad was happening in New Orleans, much less to tune in to the wall-to-wall coverage. It got so bad, finally, that one cowering but courageous courtier burned a DVD of news coverage and compelled Dear Leader to watch it.

The White House must have been surprised how readily the media and the public were willing to believe that Bush was such a dunce and a lout.

Now Bubble Boy is dead and the Mission Accomplished action figure preznint is back. So you know that something is up — a trick is in the works, records have been destroyed, memories have been cleansed, reality has been rewritten — if this strutting aristocratic popinjay is allowing anything close to blame to be laid at his own feet.

For one thing, it can only mean a fall guy has been chosen to take a bullet for Dear Leader. The question is, who will it be.

Schwarzenegger in Dead Heat with Angelides

Jon Ponder

Name recognition: If you have never heard of Phil Angelides or Steve Westly, you are not alone — even if you live here in Calfornia, where both men are Democrats running for governor against … what’s his name? Oh yeah, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

According to a new poll, Angelides, a comparative no-name, is beating Gov. Schwarzenegger by one point:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) is in a virtual tie with State Treasurer Phil Angelides (D) in California’s 2006 gubernatorial election, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.

Angelides received the support of 41 percent of respondents and Schwarzenegger came in at 40 percent. This is “the third straight poll showing the gap between Angelides and Schwarzenegger as smaller than the survey margin of sampling error.”

In the other possible matchup, Schwarzenegger leads State Comptroller Steve Westly (D) 39 percent to 34 percent.

It isn’t as if Angelides and Westly are complete unknowns. They were both elected to high office in a state that only has a half dozen or so statewide positions. Still, they both have some work to do:

[A Los Angeles] Times poll last month showed that both Angelides and Westly are pretty obscure.

Asked their impression of Angelides, 72 percent of surveyed voters had none. And 82 percent had no impression of Westly.

It is too early to know but as things sit right now, the contest is Angelides to lose. Schwarzenegger has made some progress since his disastrous performance last year but every step he takes to appease the left alienates the 33 percent of hard rightwingers in the state.

What makes Angelides the frontrunner by a nose now is that he has something that neither of his opponents has: the endorsement of Sen. Dianne Feinstein — and he can take that to the bank.

Poll: Americans Pessimistic About Middle East Peace Prospects

Buck Banks

Conflict fatigue: A recent Gallup poll found that few Americans believe there will be peace in the Middle East anytime soon, if ever. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they didn’t think there will “come a time when Israel and the Arab nations will be able to settle their differences and live in peace.”

  • Just 32 percent predicted more harmonious times.
  • Six in 10 said their sympathies were with the Israelis.
  • 15 percent said they felt more for the Palestinians.
  • 13 percent sympathized with neither group.
  • A 44-percent plurality of one half-sample said the U.S. should conduct diplomatic relations with Hamas only if it recognizes Israel as a country.
  • 57 percent of the other half-sample said the U.S. shouldn’t offer financial aid to the Palestinian Authority while Hamas is in power, regardless of its stance toward Israel.

    Heckuva job, Georgie!
    Nearly four in 10 respondents said they approved of President Bush’s work on foreign affairs, and 55 percent said they disapproved. His overall approval rating came in at 42/55, only slightly off from January’s 43/53.

VA Nurse Accused of Sedition for Criticizing Gubmint

Buck Banks

Exhuming McCarthy: Little did Veterans Administration nurse Laura Berg suspect that when she dashed off a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque weekly Alibi it would lead to her work computer being seized by her bosses, who also accused her of “sedition.” Let’s be clear here. Dr. Webster defines sedition as “the stirring up of discontent, resistance or rebellion against the government.” Judge for yourself if what Berg wrote, as reported in The Progressive, constitutes sedition:

“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.

“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Seditious? — “Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence.”

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”

Thinking she wrote the letter on her work computer, her bosses at the VA seized her computer and, in a memo, accused her of sedition:

Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that “your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi.”

But rather than apologize, he leveled the sedition charge: “The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition,” he said. “In your letter . . . you declared yourself ‘as a VA nurse’ and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have ‘tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence’ and advocated, ‘act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.’ ”

Berg has worked as a VA nurse for 15 years and is concerned for her job. The New Mexico office of the American Civil Liberties Union is working with her to clear her name, but so far, the VA has not admitted wrongdoing nor has it apologized.

Was Cheney Drunk at Time of Shooting?

Jon Ponder

In any other instance where one hunter shot another, the authorities would have undoubtedly tested the shooter’s blood alcohol. However, the Imperial Veep put a hold on speaking with investigators overnight, and then submitted to an interview by a sheriff.

What else was he could he be hiding:

Cheney spokesman Lea Anne McBride would not comment on whether the Cheney office or the White House would have ever released the information had the Caller-Times not contacted them.

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occurred and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but it is not known for certain that Cheney’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner…

The Cheney spokesman with whom Powell spoke, Lea Anne McBride, would not comment on whether the Cheney office or the White House would have ever released the information had the Caller-Times not contacted them.

Weather Report: No Blizzard on Us

Jon Ponder

Pictured above: Car belonging to friends of PR in NYC

Because we know you care, here’s the weather in the various corners of Pensito Review’s electronic garret:

Buck in South Florida: Tropical temps: 69 degrees.
Jon in West Hollywood: A scoosh warm for February – 86 degrees, clear skies, mild winds.
Trish in Northeast Florida:

Brisk 46 degrees but no snow. Photo in comments shows PR staff canine Pepsi dressed for cool weather outside NE Florida offices.

So how’s by you? If you live in the blizzard zone, tell us what we are missing. Leave a comment and tell us what’s up.

Whitewash: House GOP Katrina Investigation Blames Chertoff, Shields Bush

Jon Ponder

Fix is in: A report on the investigation into the Bush government’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina by Republicans in the House of Representatives will be released this week. Excerpts that have been leaked to the media show that while the report criticizes President Bush, it lays the blame for his government’s response at the feet of Sec. of the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff.

It may be cold comfort now but whether or not Republicans in charge of federal oversight impute Bush today, history will record that it was the president’s incompetence that created the crisis within the disaster that cost the lives of hundreds of Americans.

The current scapegoat, Michael Brown, who was fired in September because of his negligence in handling the disaster, has provided damning testimony against Chertoff, who was his boss.

You may recall that House Democrats refused to participate officially in the investigation because it was clear from the start that the Republicans’ over-arching motivation was to protect President Bush from blame.

Two Democrats from the region — Reps. Charlie Melancon and William J. Jefferson — did participate unofficially in the investigation, and from their statements it appears that the House GOP did indeed bend over backwards to let the president off the hook:

In their response [to the report], Melancon and Jefferson pointed out that the White House refused to release communications from Brown, who told the House committee and a Senate committee investigating the disaster response that he warned the White House in 30 conversations that he could not establish command and control, that the levees had failed and that he needed help.

“When the White House refused to provide any of these communications, the committee rejected our requests to subpoena them, effectively shielding the White House from scrutiny,” the two Democrats said.

The committee refused to provide a copy of its report to the Democrats, allowing them only to take notes as they read it in the committee staff offices, they said.

Once again, Republicans put their worship of George W. Bush and their quest for poltical power ahead of the national interest.

After Chertoff is gone, the next candidate for blame will probably be President Bush’s assistant Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who took the most of the 30 calls from Brown that night. Republicans will blame him for not waking the president up to deal with disaster, or not dealing with it in the presidents’ stead.

They can set up all the scapegoats they want, but the buck stops at the top. It may be cold comfort now but whether or not Republicans in charge of federal oversight impute Bush today, history will record that it was the president’s incompetence that created the crisis within the disaster that cost the lives of hundreds of Americans.