Year: 2007

Bush at 28% Again – Is It a Sign of a ‘Dead Duck’ Presidency?

Jon Ponder

In the new Newsweek poll, approval of Bush’s job performance has dropped to 28 percent. That’s the second time this year — the first was in a CBS Poll taken in January, during the week before his State of the Union address. Twice in a little over three months is not a good sign for him but not yet a clear signal of a major shift.

George W. Bush has been rewarded for his phone-it-in attitude and his incompetence with money and power, time and time again. No one has failed as far upwards as he has.

Pres. Bush lost the support of independents long ago (and what little support he had from Democrats evaporated when he invaded Iraq), so it has been support from mainstream Republicans that has buoyed his approval ratings in the mid-30s. But if he skids along in the 20s for the next few months, it is a sign that the mainstream has given up on him.

Left with only the wingnut base of Christian nationalists and whackjob extremists behind him, Pres. Bush could become, not a lame duck, but a dead one.

George W. Bush was born lucky, but throughout his life he has taken for granted the extraordinary advantages handed to him — in military service, business and government. He wasted or mismanaged nearly every cushy assignment given him, usually with impunity. In fact — and here’s the luck again — despite his lifelong incompetence, phone-it-in attitude and cronies-only hiring practices, he has been lauded with power and money at every turn. No one has failed as far upwards as he has.

But if he loses the support of his party’s rank and file now — the way he lost it from the rest of us ages ago — his luck could finally run out. To save their own skins, Republicans in Congress, especially the 21 out of 48 GOP senators who are up for reelection in 2008, might feel compelled to abandon him on the war, and perhaps even to agree to corrective action against him, such as a censure or worse.

D.C. Call Girls Found ‘Shock and Awe’ Author, Mr. U., to Be ‘Unpleasant’

Jon Ponder

Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam, recently turned over thousands of phone numbers belonging to clients of her high-class escort service to Brian Ross at ABC News. Ross announced his findings last night on “20/20.” I’m glad I didn’t stay up:

The phone records trace back to thousands of men, including a career Justice Department prosecutor. There are NASA officials; at least five military officers, including the commander of an Air Force intelligence squadron … The phone numbers also track back to Georgetown mansions and prominent CEOs, officials at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and lobbyists both Republican and Democratic.

But as usually is the case in Washington, much of it is dull. There were no members of Congress that we could find in these phone records, no White House officials.

Quite frankly, but for the few exceptions, most of the men on this list just aren’t newsworthy, not even as customers of the D.C. Madam’s escort service.

Hiring a prostitute is as illegal as being one, or so I thought. So the fact that a Justice Dept. official and military officers are breaking the law would be newsworthy to a lot of people.

We knew that Deputy Sec. of State Randall Tobias, the head of the Bush administration’s global anti-prostitution crackdown, resigned after being outed as a Palfrey client.

(Tobias’ role as the anti-prostitution czar adds irony to this cavalier remark: “Tobias said [calling for a prostitute] was no different than ordering a pizza and denied there was any sex.”)

But the name Harlan Ullman was new to me:

Also named by Palfrey is Harlan Ullman, a leading military analyst who wrote the book “Shock and Awe,” a concept cited by the Pentagon in planning the war in Iraq.

Palfrey says she remembers Ullman as “Mr. U,” — remembers him well.

Jeane Palfrey: I think he was a disagreeable character. And there were some complaints about him, yes.

Brian Ross: From your women.

Jeane Palfrey: Yes.

Brian Ross: They didn’t want to go?

Jean Palfrey: Because he was an unpleasant person.

I assume Palfrey gave the phone numbers to Ross with the intent that he would expose her clients’ names so that they would suffer some of the same consequences she will, if she is found guilty. She should have known better.

As Melissa Farley, an academic who studies prostitution, said to “20/20” last night:

The women are arrested; the women are incarcerated; the women are taken out in handcuffs, and the men who buy and use women in prostitution slowly and quietly slink off, and they’re pretty much socially and legally invisible.

Same as it ever was.

Book Review: With God on Our Side

Buck Banks

What would you do if you found that people espousing a brand of intolerant evangelical religion were turning an organization that was responsible to a large degree for shaping your life and career into a tool for coercive recruitment? No, I’m not talking about the White House; I’m referring to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Mikey Weinstein, a self-described “militant Jew” took on the academy, the Air Force and the Department of Defense a couple of years back because of flagrant violations of the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution by the officers and cadets of the Air Force Academy. Their officers, chaplains and classmates were subjecting cadets to a robust and pervasive proselytizing of fundamentalist Christian doctrine. And if you happened to be Jewish, it was likely that you would be treated like an outsider, subjected to humiliation and possibly called a “Christ killer” by classmates.

“With God on Our Side: One Man’s War against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” chronicles Weinstein’s crusade against the school from he himself graduated with honors in 1974 and followed it with a distinguished record of service in the judge advocate general corps and three years on staff in the Reagan White House. So he’s no slouch. Instead Weinstein is the third generation of a four-generation military family, and both his sons graduated from the Air Force Academy.

While the narrative occasionally gets rather breathless — especially the first couple of chapters where the author is desperately trying to hook the reader with the power of Weinstein’s personality and the gravity of his crusade, the book is well-written.

For a look into the underpinnings of the race to theocracy and the rise of radical evangelicalism that we are witnessing in America today, read this book.

LAPD Caught on Tape Attacking Reporters – Again

Jon Ponder

The sound was off on my television when I first saw video of police in riot gear attacking reporters covering a demonstration. I assumed I was seeing footage from a police riot in Bogata or Buenos Aires.

In fact, the scene had taken place at MacArthur Park near Downtown Los Angeles, just five miles from my home.

The demonstrators were protesting treatment of Mexican illegal aliens by the government, marking the first anniversary of immigrants rights protets that brought tens of thousands of people to the streets downtown. This year’s event was much smaller, and would have been relegated to footnotes in the news, if the cops hadn’t over-reacted.

It’s hard to imagine a worse PR move than clubbing reporters who are simply doing their jobs. It’s equally hard to think of an organization that needs to avoid bad PR, especially among minority communities, more than the Los Angeles Police Dept.

Worse, this is not the first time the LAPD has been caught on tape roughing up reporters at a big event. The department and the city were sued after the Democratic Convention here in 2000 for precisely that. The matter was settled in 2002, with an agreement that officers would not use force against reporters even when they were covering an unlawful assembly during an order to disperse.

Oops.

Spoiling Everything Else Just to Use More Energy

Trish

The Sierra Club is reporting even more depressing news on a day that included the devastation of honeybees and no end to problems with the nation’s food supply.

Get a load of this:

Have any doubts about the motivation for this treachery? It doesn’t apply to Texas. Nuff said.

Jaws dropped last week when the DOE proposed its first two so-called “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.” They covered the entirety of [Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey] and vast swaths of southern California, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and New York. Under everyone’s favorite bill, the Energy Policy Act of the 2005, the DOE can designate such corridors for new pipelines and powerlines. And if local or state officials want to protect their wilderness area, wetland, tribal burial ground, or Civil War battlefield — TOO BAD! The federal government can approve transmission lines over local objection and even if they conflict with other federal laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act.

Best of all, once they’re approved, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been granted sweeping powers of eminent domain. So FERC can then swoop in, take your property from you, and turn it over Energy Company X so they can pad their bottom line.

Have any doubts about the motivation for this treachery? Wait, there’s more.

This provision of EPACT 2005 — never debated on the floor of the House — does include one Texas-sized loophole. As in, the whole state of Texas is excluded from this vast and likely unconstitutional power grab by the federal government.

Nuff said.

On ‘Mission Accomplished’ Day, Desperate Bush Mentions al Qaeda 28 Times in Speech on Iraq

Jon Ponder

Yesterday, on the fourth anniversary of his “Mission Accomplished” debacle, Pres. Bush delivered a speech to a construction industry group in which he desperately tried to link the war in Iraq to 9/11 — using the words “al Qaeda” 28 times in 73 minutes. (He also used the word “progress” 15 times.)

The only rational explanation for reviving the 9/11-Iraq bugaboo now is to keep Fox News watchers in the fold. They’re the only ones who still believe Saddam was behind the attacks.

Here he is at his most shameless:

Al Qaeda is the group that plot [sic] and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens. I’ve got to tell you, that day deeply affected my decision-making. And I vowed that I would do anything that I possibly could within the law to protect the American citizens against further attack by these ideologues, by these murderers.

And:

For America, the decision we face in Iraq is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11. I strongly believe it’s in our national interest to stay in the fight.

The only rational explanation for reviving the 9/11-Iraq bugaboo now is to keep Fox News watchers in the fold. They’re the only ones who still believe Saddam was behind the attacks.

Or maybe, as Keith Olbermann suggested, the White House message team is forced to drag out this tired crap because that’s all they’ve got left.

Folks Who Brought Us Walter Reed Scandal Take Huge Bonuses for Being Loyal to Bush

Trish

At the Veteran’s Administration, it pays to support your president. Literally.

The GAO determined the VA used misleading accounting and claimed false savings of more than $1.3 billion, apparently because President Bush was not willing, at the time, to ask Congress for more money

By lying about their budget, doling out care so bad it risked the lives of wounded veterans, and presiding over rat-infested hellholes, the guys and gals who run the V.A. took the biggest “performance payments” of anyone in civil service.

The list of bonuses to senior career officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in 2006… documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among those receiving payments were a deputy assistant secretary and several regional directors who crafted the VA’s flawed budget for 2005 based on misleading accounting. They received performance payments up to $33,000 each, a figure equal to about 20 percent of their annual salaries.

Also receiving a top bonus was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps manage a disability claims system that has a backlog of cases and delays averaging 177 days in getting benefits to injured veterans.

The bonuses were awarded even after government investigators had determined the VA repeatedly miscalculated if not deliberately misled taxpayers with questionable methods used to justify Bush administration cuts to health care amid a burgeoning Iraq war.

Ever idly wondered what selling your soul feels like? Just ask the V.A. They sold theirs to Bush.

In July 2005, the VA stunned Congress by suddenly announcing it faced a $1 billion shortfall after failing to take into account the additional cost of caring for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan…

The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, determined the VA had used misleading accounting methods and claimed false savings of more than $1.3 billion, apparently because President Bush was not willing, at the time, to ask Congress for more money.

V.A. officials based in Washington D.C. got the biggest checks, triggering the Senate Chair of the Veteran’s Affairs Committee, Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) to ask what’s up with that. Smells like cronyism to me.

After six years of Bush, the big surprise is that we can still be surprised at his administration’s blatant raiding of the public till. After all, this is small potatoes compared to the rip-off which is private contracting. But still.

Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the VA bonuses appeared to reflect a trend in government where performance bonuses were increasingly used to reward loyal associates and longtime employees…

“Simply put, people who nearly shortchanged our veterans shouldn’t get a bonus check at the end of the year,” he said.