Month: December 2007
Hilarious But True: Bush Reads Wrong Phone Number in Speech
“Call 1-800-DUMBASS.”
You just can’t make this stuff up:
ABC News’ Jennifer Duck Reports: President Bush announced new steps to help homeowners struggling with their mortgage payments. However, the president gave the wrong phone number to millions of viewers watching his statement on live TV.
President Bush said, “I directed Secretaries Paulson and Jackson to expand the public awareness campaign. And I have a message for every homeowner worried about rising mortgage payments: The best you can do for your family is to call 1-800-995-HOPE.”
However the president was off by a few digits. The real phone number is 1-888-995-HOPE.
The original phone number President Bush read to viewers apparently belongs to the Freedom Christian Academy* which has a full mailbox according to a recorded message heard by an ABC News producer.
The White House immediately sent an email correction to members of the press and a very loud overhead page was heard in the press room at the White House announcing the correct phone number.
The “best thing you can do for your family” is to find a way to get Bush/Cheney out of Washington. Try calling 1-800-DUMBASS.
*Freedom Christian Academy assists Christian home schoolers from its offices in Ponder, Tex. I’m just saying.
White House Admits Bush Lied About Iran; Biden Threatens to Impeach if Bush Acts
Nobody does incredulous as well as Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) After hearing George Bush claim he wasn’t specifically told until now that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003 just like we asked it to, Biden threatened to bring impeachment charges against him if he orders an attack on Iran without the consent of Congress.
A day later we find out, via an email from Press Secretary Dana Perino, that Bush was lying about everything.
Biden yesterday: “Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies of the United States government said [Iran] had abandoned their effort for nuclear weapons in 2003?” White House today: “Oh yeah, we just remembered, we were told in August.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, the President told reporters that he was briefed that there was new intelligence information about Iran, but nothing specific.
“I was made aware of the NIE last week,” Bush said Tuesday. “In August, I think it was [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.”
However today the White House is saying the President was told much more…
Perino stated Bush had been told in August that Iran suspended it’s (sic) covert nuclear weapons program.
“In August, DNI Director McConnell advised President Bush that the intelligence community would not be able to meet a congressionally imposed deadline requiring a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because new information had been obtained just as they were about to finalize the report,” Perino wrote in an emailed response…
Perino also said McConnell told the President the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program.
Biden was proven correctomundo in challenging Bush’s version of the facts. PR Editor Jon was also right that Bush was dishonestly blaming his intelligence director.
“Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies of the United States government said [Iran] had abandoned their effort for nuclear weapons in 2003?” [Biden asked.]
…Senator Biden also today reiterated that should President Bush initiate an attack on Iran without Congress approval, Biden would call for impeachment. In an afternoon Democratic debate hosted by NPR, Biden stated flatly, “you cannot trust this president.”
Cheney Lied about Iranian Nuke Threat While Suppressing Intel That Iran Suspended Weapons Program in ’03
Repercussions continue to shake out in the wake of the release this week of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that says Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program four years ago.
At a news conference yesterday, George Bush denied knowing that U.S. intelligence had learned the Iranian program had been suspended when he warned the American people last month that Iran was on the verge of launching World War III. He was not lying, he suggested, but rather it was his own incompetence that led him to give the false warning. He said that when Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell told him in August that new information about the program had come to light, Bush did not bother to ask the DNI about the nature of the new developments.
If the muted response from reporters at the news conference to this assertion is a guide, journalists close to the White House believe that it while it is unacceptable for Bush to lie to them, it is perfectly okay for him to issue false predictions about an impending apocalypse if the warnings are based entirely on Bush’s ineptitude and lack of curiosity.
Today we learn that Dick Cheney has known about — and actively suppressed — the intelligence community’s finding for over a year. In particular, Cheney knew that Iran had suspended its weapons program in 2003 when he made this statement on Oct. 21, 2007, in an address to a Washington think tank:
Dismissing Iran’s claims that it is seeking only nuclear energy and not a weapons program, Cheney accused Iranian leaders of pursuing a practice of “delay and deception in an obvious effort to buy time.”
“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions … The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.”
Yesterday, on CNN, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh reminded viewers that he’d reported on White House efforts to suppress the NIE last November:
HERSH: At the time, I wrote that there was a tremendous fight about it, because Cheney in the White House — the vice president did not want to hear this. So that there was a fight about that intelligence. And, actually, for the last year, I think the vice president’s office pretty much has kept — you know, the vice president has kept his foot on the neck of that report. That report was bottled up for a year.
The intelligence we learned about yesterday has been circulating inside this government at the highest levels for the last year — and probably longer.
The complete transcript of Hersh’s interview on CNN follows:
Quote du Jour
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
— Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) American writer
Go Helen! Veteran Reporter Helen Thomas Unnerves Bush’s Stepford Gal Perino
Something about the way Helen Thomas asked Bush flack Dana Perino about civilian war deaths seemed to rattled Perino’s usual robotic calm: “Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements… [To] suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.”
In reality, over 600,000 Iraqi babies, children and adults have been killed unnecessarily by U.S. bombs in pursuit of Bush’s misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Transcript from Dana Perino’s press briefing on Fiday, Nov. 30, 2007, follows:
U.S. Agriculture Dept. Says Poor People Suffer ‘Low Food Security’
I guess it was to be expected from the administration that brought us the global war on terror, but the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Office of Jargon and Nonsense (aka the Economic Research Service) has been working overtime preparing for its annual report. And the product of that effort was nothing less than replacing the hunger — “a strong desire or need for food; the discomfort, weakness, or pain caused by a prolonged lack of food” — with food security — “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
Just like on the Homeland Security front, seems we’re doing pretty well on the Food Security front:
In 2006, 89 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year. The remaining households (10.9 percent) were food insecure at least some time during that year, essentially unchanged from 11.0 percent in 2005.
So, while we’re not winning the war on food insecurity, we aren’t losing it, either. And there’s always a semantic solution to delivering the not-so-great news:
The prevalence of very low food security was 4.0 percent of households, also essentially unchanged from 2005 (3.9 percent). In households with very low food security, eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and their food intake was reduced at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food.
At the Food Security Briefing Room, the USDA asks the pertinent question: How Often Are Food-Insecure Households Food Insecure? And then they give the answers:
- About one-third of households with very low food security at any time during the year experienced it rarely or occasionally — in only one or two months of the year. For two-thirds, very low food security recurred in three or more months of the year.
- For about one-fifth of food-insecure households and 30 percent of those with very low food security, the occurrence was frequent or chronic.
- On average, households that were food insecure at some time during the year were food insecure in six months during the year.
- On average, households with very low food security at some time during the year experienced it in seven months during the year and in one to seven days in each of those months.
Households with very low food security at some time during the year experienced it in seven months during the year and in one to seven days in each of those months.
It’s not about solving the problem of hunger, it’s about solving the word “hunger.” Here’s what USDA did to relieve “hunger.” They dropped it in favor of food security, which was defined as having “no reported indications of food-access problems or limitations,” or having “one or two reported indications — typically of anxiety over food sufficiency or shortage of food in the house. Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.”
What used to be called “food insecurity without hunger” — reports of reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet, with little or no indication of reduced food intake — is now “low food security,” and “reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake” was changed from “food insecurity with hunger” to “very low food security.”
You might be surprised, but a panel of experts formed by USDA actually suggested these changes, we assume with straight faces.
I remember when President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Hunger. It was 1966, and Viet Nam was escalating, but Time magazine reported that Johnson unveiled to Congress his “long-awaited proposal to turn agricultural foreign aid into breadbasket diplomacy.”
Of course, that hunger war also was mired in changing semantics, according to Time: “Dubbed Food for Freedom, the plan would replace the 12-year Food for Peace program that expires next December.”
Sounds eerily familiar to the kind of jargon juggling goings on coming out of the current administration, don’t it? At least Johnson’s program did feed people, though lord knows what. In 1965, the U.S. “disposed of $14 billion worth of surplus food and fiber, [and] shipped abroad agricultural products worth $2 billion, equal to 40 percent of all U.S. foreign aid.”
But it was mostly just another PR ploy, the redressing of a tired phrase in a fresher but just as meaningless one. That’s how we got from “peace” to “freedom,” and from “hunger” to “food insecurity.” But changing terms doesn’t put food on the table for the 30 million or so Americans who regularly feel more than just anxious about where their next meal is coming from — they are feeling one of the most basic of human sensations — hunger.
UPDATE: Co-editor Trish weighed in on this topic just a little over a year ago. Check out her post here“.
Quote du Jour
The grand achievement of the present age is the diffusion of superficial knowledge.
— John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English political economist, philosopher
Bush Blames Intel Agencies for His Claim That Iran Could Launch World War III
Is Bush Lying Or Is He the Head of an Intelligence Service So Incompetent That U.S. Security Is in Jeopardy?
In August, the U.S. government intelligence agencies sent word up the chain that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons programs back in 2003. And yet, about two months later, on Oct. 17, 2007, Bush issued a dire warning about Iran’s nukes to the American people:
Bush: “I’ve told people that if you’re interest in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
At Bush’s news conference today, amid his tired, cringe-inducing towel-snaps at the White House press corps, he denied knowing the Iranian program was suspended when he suggested that the apocalypse was nigh:
[BUSH:] I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was [Director of National Intelligence (DNI)] Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze. Why would you take time to analyze new information? One, you want to make sure it’s not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real. And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered: If they think it’s real, then what does it mean? And it wasn’t until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.
And:
Q I understand what you’re saying about when you were informed about the NIE. Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as “World War III” was making it into conversation, at no point nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, maybe you want to back it down a little bit?
[BUSH:] No, nobody ever told me that.
Normal U.S. presidents don’t generally suggest, especially off-handedly, that the planet is on the brink of World War III. Is it really possible that Bush could have been so woefully uninformed about his own government’s intelligence findings that he could make such a world-class blunder?
Chairman Waxman Asks Mukasey to Intercede in Bush-Cheney Obstruction on CIA Leak Case
The White House is blocking efforts by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to present evidence he collected in the CIA Leak investigation to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to the committee’s chairman, Henry Waxman (D-Calif).
Prompted by Scott McClellan’s statement last month asserting that top White House officials, including George Bush and Dick Cheney, were complicit in an effort to deceive the public about the leak, Rep. Waxman has written to Attorney General Michael Mukasey urging him to convince Bush to release the evidence.
In his letter, Rep. Waxman points to a strikingly parallel precedent from the Clinton administration:
“[There] is direct precedent for the production of these records to the Committee. During the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department provided the Committee with dozens of FBI 302 reports of interviews with White House officials. No White House official — including the President and the Vice President — was exempted from the production. Among the White House officials whose FBI 302 reports were provided to the Committee were President Clinton, Vice President Gore [and 10 other top White House officials, including current and former chiefs of staff].
Fitzgerald’s notes from his interviews with Bush and Cheney are of particular interest. Lying to federal prosecutors is a felony, so if they gave statements that contradict McClellan’s, a new investigation would likely be triggered.
Complete text of letter follows, via BuzzFlash.com:
