NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 15 through October 21, 2006, as National Character Counts Week. I call upon public officials, educators, librarians, parents, students, and all Americans to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs.
Hey…I have an idea for an appropriate activity during National Character Counts Week… Let’s have a fundraiser for a fellow republican who cheated on his wife and then tried to choke his mistress…
President Bush’s appearance Oct. 19 in Northeastern Pennsylvania will be for a $350-per-person fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood at Keystone College, LaPlume Township.
Keystone spokesman Fran Calpin confirmed Mr. Bush’s appearance at the college but had no other details. However, a Republican source confirmed the ticket price and said the event will not be open to the public.
The visit will be Mr. Bush’s fifth to the region as president, by far the most of any president. He also visited once as Republican presidential nominee in 2000.
Mr. Sherwood, R-Tunkhannock Township, is locked in a tight battle with Democrat Chris Carney, of Dimock Township, for the 10th Congressional District seat.
…In Pennsylvania this week, Representative Don Sherwood, a suddenly endangered Republican, bought time on television to offer an apology in response to allegations that he had abused his mistress. Analysts for both parties said the sweep of outrage over Congressional misbehavior had weakened Mr. Sherwood and forced him to deal directly with the issue.
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters.
The best bit is this:
When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, "If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?"
Maybe he wanted to see if your nose grows when you repeat the white house storyline Kent.
USNews.com: Washington Whispers: Animal House in the West Wing: He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.
"He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place." -D.C. pundit David Broder, bloviating on the unacceptable personal behavior of…Bill Clinton.
It’s been a long six years of George Bush…but it looks like all those folks who thought the old politics-as-usual were still preferable to "partisanship" and "divisiveness" are finally starting to get what they’re dealing with now. This from Oliver Willis:
I can completely identify with Josh Marshall here and his portrayal of the bare-knuckle style of our politics nowadays.
With all those caveats though, there is a difference. And I think at some level or another, it’s one almost everyone in the center-left can relate to, at least at some level. For my part, I don’t feel my politics have changed much over the past half dozen years, if by that we mean my basic political orientation, policies I believe in and don’t, basic understanding of how the world works and so forth. Many people who read my site are much more to the left politically than I am. And occasionally, some issue will come up where that fact suddenly becomes evident, often to people’s surprise and sometimes anger.
I was going to start by saying that what’s changed for me is that the country I know and value is under attack. But that’s not quite it.
I live in Manhattan and have a certain perspective on the country. Folks in Oklahoma or evangelicals in South Carolina have a different one. And that’s fine. It’s their country too. What I think is that a certain political movement has taken over the country — call it movement conservatism in its late, degraded form — and wants to govern it by all or nothing rules.
I’ve not really moved an inch on my positions on the important issues, but the insanity of the Bush presidency makes my center-left proclivities appear to be on the far, far, left (which, in a Democratic presidency will probably be the second biggest pain in my butt).
I dislike the two-dimensional political spectrum. I seem liberal on some issues (censorship, victimless crime, minority rights, war, immigration, church-state separation, education) conservative on others (gun control, free trade, national defense) and moderate on still others (regulation of the economy, taxation, state’s rights, science and research). I don’t see myself so much as liberal or conservative, as a social engineer. A rule of law is social engineering. A constitution is social engineering. Societies either engineer themselves to work or they don’t. Ask the children of Marx and Lenin, ask the shades that walk the fields of Gettysburg what happens to a society when its understanding of the human identity and society is profoundly wrong. I am of the party of Whatever Actually Works.
But in these times anyone who isn’t with Bush is a liberal, so I reckon that’s what I am now too. And it’s not because we’ve all actually become liberals. It’s because the Bush gang has deliberately, cynically, and with malice, sought to up-end politics-as-usual in America, destroy the American political consensus and, quite literally, destroy the democratic political process. And they did it so they could seize power for themselves and hold onto it indefinitely. Pat Buchanan saw it back when he was working for Nixon, and called it "positive polarization": divide the country, and they’d have the bigger half. But the Bush gang has gone beyond that, into the destruction of the democratic process itself. They are radicals, in the mold of the 1930s brownshirts, who reject not just social liberalism, but democracy itself, as decadent.
In an interview with the London Guardian back in September 19, 2003, Paul Krugman spoke of when he saw it himself…ironically through the words of Henry Kissinger…
Even more confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman’s new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, Krugman describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it’s Henry Kissinger.
"The first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study – but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s – describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.
This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn’t comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger’s theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, according to Krugman, that includes social security; the idea of pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections – as opposed to, say, from God.
But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." Exactly, says Krugman, who recallss the response to his column about Tom DeLay, the anti-evolutionist Republican leader of the House of Representatives, who claimed, bafflingly, that "nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes".
"My liberal friends said, ‘I’m not interested in what some crazy guy in Congress has to say’," Krugman recalls. "But this is not some crazy guy! This guy runs Congress! There’s this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we’re facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane." ("Those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word are usually accused of being ‘shrill’, of going over the top," Krugman writes, and he has become well used to such accusations.)
Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn’t have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."
Why anyone would be surprised to see all this in that open sewer that is the Bush base after the election of 2000 is beyond me, other then, as Krugman says, people just find it nearly impossible to take at face value what they’re seeing, when it comes to dealing with a group of anti democratic radicals who are actually in power. Somehow, power is supposed to moderate the radical impulse. But sometimes it just feeds it.
I came of political age during Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. Back then Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, in response to a reporter’s question about desegregation, said something that I have thought ever since should be engraved on every ballot presented to every voter in every election, in every polling place in America: "Watch what we do, not what we say." I never thought I would see a president tell a bigger lie to the American people then Nixon’s "I am not a crook." But George Bush has looked us all in the eye and said "I’m a uniter, not a divider", and now America is more divided then ever, and that was deliberate. They knew they couldn’t govern from a majority consensus, but they figured they could have the biggest piece of a factionalized America. So they waved the flag in our faces, while they were busy ripping the America it stood for apart, and now there is no more politics-as-usual.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
But…but…Bush said they were only going after terrorists. And he wouldn’t lie to us. Look at all the weapons of mass destruction we found in Iraq…just like he said we would…
BERLIN (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake.
"You know, I’ve experienced many great moments and it’s hard to name the best," Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.
"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.
Bush said the worst moment was September 11 when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
Yep…sitting in your boat catching perch on your lake has just about got to be the best part of presidenting.
The Bush Administration announced last week that the nation is no longer losing wetlands–as long as you consider golf course water hazards to be wetlands.
Really.
Thursday (March 30), Interior Secretary Gale Norton called a press conference to claim our long nightmare of wetlands loss had finally come to an end due to unprecedented gains since 1997 (click hear to read the report she cites). However, she then admitted much of that gain has been in artificially created ponds, such as golf course water hazards and farm impoundments.
The sporting community–from Ducks Unlimited to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership–reacted quickly, and not favorably.
I’ll bet not. Next they’ll be saying that global warming is on the decline, because worldwide sales of air conditioners are up.
Heroes Of The Conservative Movement Trading Cards…Collect Them All…
Card 31: Barbra Bush donates a portion of her vast wealth to help her fellow Americans recover from Katrina. Well…to her son actually…
The Houston Chroniclereports this morning that the donation Barbara Bush made to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund was ‘earmarked’ for the educational software company Ignite!
As some of you probably know that’s the junk company owned by her ne’er-do-well son Neil Bush.
Actually, though, it’s way better, or worse, depending on your turn of mind.
Ignite!’s has a unique business model, which works like this. Neil goes around the world finding international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to ‘invest’ in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with the brother in the White House.
A couple years ago when I was at Salon I wrote about the craze for investment in Ignite! then taking hold among Red Sea oil magnates and progeny of the rulers of the People’s Republic of China (See this article as well about the craze for investing in Ignite! in the United Arab Emirates and specifically in Dubai). Now, Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has awakened to the wonders of investing in Ignite!
Kudos to Joshua Marshall. Yes…her donation was tax deductable.
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