From Saturday’s Austin American-Statesman, "Women voters a battleground in 2004 election":
Just 37 minutes before the National Organization for Women was to host a forum for Democratic presidential candidates here late Friday afternoon, the Bush administration did what friends and foes alike say it does best: befuddle its adversaries.In this case, it was a three-page opinion from the federal Department of Education released at the curious time of 4:27 p.m. Friday upholding the basic provisions of Title IX, the federal law that expanded opportunities for female student athletes.
For more than a year, the law had been under review by a commission assembled by the Bush administration in response to conservative critics of the law arguing that Title IX hurt school sports programs for males.
Whether the timing of the Title IX opinion was deliberately calculated to undercut the NOW forum — the Education Department closed at 5 p.m., after which representatives could not be contacted for comment — its substance certainly came as a surprise to the hundreds of feminists in attendance.
Say, thanks, George! Can we gals also look forward to an Executive Order confirming your support of the 19th Amendment?
From the Washington Post last week:
In the first 15 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and supporters were detained worldwide, according to U.S. officials.
Yet it took the administration nearly two years to announce that torturing them is wrong:
The Bush administration pledged yesterday for the first time that the United States will not torture terrorism suspects or treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information, a move that comes as the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody are being investigated as homicides.
Of course, saying the words and actually meaning them are two different things:
"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job. I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this," said an official who supervised the capture of accused terrorists.
The Bush administration has allowed torture to be used by American forces in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and countless other countries where suspects were taken precisely because they could be tortured there. While the administration uses the terrorist threat to justify these actions, the fact that it has condoned the use of torture says something disturbing about our country.
Indeed, the United States is simply unable to be the bastion of freedom that Bush proclaims it to be if it responds to crisis - no matter how great - by acting like a country that is far from free.
Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have blamed the CIA and its director George Tenet for the inaccurate information that Bush presented in his 2003 State of the Union address regarding Iraq’s alleged attempts to buy uranium in Africa as part of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. Within hours, Tenet issued a press release accepting full responsibility.
However, in September 2002 the CIA tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British government to remove the uranium claim from an intelligence document. Four months later Bush used the same claim in his annual speech to the nation. Clearly, the CIA had early doubts about the information.
Tenet took the blame for the administration’s hawks in the Pentagon, who had decided before Bush took office that Iraq would be invaded and set about finding or - if need be - manufacturing the evidence to bolster the need for war. Indeed, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board, groups that most Americans have never heard of, have replaced the traditional intelligence agencies as the Bush administration’s top source for Iraqi intelligence.
It seems the “professionals” over at the CIA just weren’t coming up with the right information.
Yesterday there was this tidbit from Bush’s African adventure:
Mr. Bush also repeated his call for a change of government in Zimbabwe, which borders Botswana to the east."It's a shame that the economy has gotten so weak and soft," Mr. Bush said of Zimbabwe, which has been deteriorating economically and politically under the increasingly autocratic rule of President Robert Mugabe. "It's a shame for Botswana, it's a shame for southern Africa."
If a “weak and soft” economy is justification for a change of government, then Mr. President, you better start packing.
Please take Dick Cheney with you.
"Given the outcome of our work in Florida, and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."
- ChoicePoint spokesman Martin Fagan, December 2000
"A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.
US government purchasing documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) from the department of justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - that included names and addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included."
- From "Firm in Florida election fiasco earns millions from files on foreigners" in the May 5, 2003 issue of The Guardian
No need to be charitable with your friends when you've "overdosed on moral clarity."
And no need to worry about making enemies when you are so self-righteously sure of your ideology.
Islamic fundamentalists swept the Parliamentary elections in Kuwait last weekend, creaming the liberals who campaigned to give women the vote and to bring the country closer to democracy. Islamic parties doubled their Parliamentary seats in Morocco’s national elections last September. In May 2002, Islamist parties in Bahrain won over half of the contested seats in that country’s first democratic election in decades. Religious parties also won big last year in Turkey and Pakistan.
Bush completely misses the point.
Islamic parties don't win because of a lack of democracy in the Middle East - indeed, they win big in the very countries that are making slow but steady steps toward building real democratic processes. And Islamic fundamentalists don't garner support because those who support them are not lovers of freedom. They win because they are not corrupt and because they provide what other parties and the West do not: food, schools, support systems.
Sweeping into Iraq and installing a democratic regime, whatever that might look like, will do nothing to establish the kind of democracy George Bush wants in the Middle East. If Iraqi voters are truly free, they will cast their lot with the religious parties. And if they are not free, if their choice is between American puppets A and B, we will have another Iran on our hands.
In the meantime, the American presence in Iraq has given the Middle Eastern nations yet another reason to resent the ideals of democracy we claim to represent. The Islamic organizations, parties and religious leaders will be the direct beneficiaries of that resentment.
And G.W. might realize he preferred dictatorships after all.
Y’all remember John Poindexter from the Iran-Contra Affair, right?
And you know Bush has him running the Information Awareness Office, home of the Total Information Awareness System, recently renamed (but otherwise largely unchanged) the Terrorist Information Awareness System.
Did you know the IAO website pulled his bio, and any mention of him on its main pages?
It's a good thing his bio is still available; otherwise we might forget that as National Security Advisor under Reagan, "Major events in which he played a significant role included:...support for the democratic resistance in Nicaragua, and an attempt to begin rationalization of U.S. relationship with strategically important Iran."
Here's an idea: let's have Total Information Awareness for American citizens, not about them.
Courtesy helpful reader Rob, from an article in the current Washington Monthly by Nicholas Thompson, "Science Friction: The growing - and dangerous - divide between scientists and the GOP":
Any administration will be tempted to trumpet the conclusions of science when they justify actions that are advantageous politically, and to ignore them when they don't. Democrats, for instance, are more than happy to tout the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change, but play down evidence that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which they oppose) probably will have little impact on the caribou there. But Democrats will only go so far down the path of ignoring scientific evidence because they don't want to alienate their scientific supporters. Increasingly, the Republicans feel little such restraint. Hence the Bush administration's propensity to tout scientific evidence only when it suits them politically. For instance, though numerous studies have shown the educational benefits of after-school programs, the Bush administration cited just one recent report casting doubt on those benefits to justify cutting federal after-school funding. Meanwhile, the White House has greatly increased the federal budget for abstinence-only sex education programs despite a notable lack of evidence that they work to reduce teen pregnancy.
From Ari Fleischer's press briefing on July 2nd:
I think the burden falls on those who think he didn't have them to explain when he destroyed them, and why, after he destroyed them, he didn't tell anybody or show anybody. He, instead, decides to suffer the consequences.
There ya go, Ari! Who needs falsified evidence if spurious logic will do the trick?
From The Declaration of Independence:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Thanks to the work of our nation's founders, we don't need to be ready to take arms to change our government this July 4th; we just have to be ready to take up ballots on November 2nd 2004. And for God's sake can we all be a little more careful with those chads this time?
Also, if you haven't actually read the Declaration of Independence, you should, and note they only needed 27 reasons to dump their George.
From Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times Op-Ed section, "Picking Workers' Pockets":
The Bush administration, which has the very bad habit of smiling at working people while siphoning money from their pockets, is trying to change the federal Fair Labor Standards Act in a way that could cause millions of workers to lose their right to overtime pay....The act's overtime regulations have not been updated since 1975, and part of what the administration is proposing makes sense. Under existing rules only workers earning less than $8,060 a year automatically qualify for overtime. That would be raised to $22,100 a year.
But then comes the bad news. Nearly 80 percent of all workers are in jobs that qualify them for overtime pay, which is time-and-a-half for each hour that is worked beyond the normal 40-hour week. The administration wants to make it easier for employers to exempt many of those workers from overtime protection by classifying them as administrative, professional or executive personnel.
From yesterday’s New York Times:
CIA Said to Find Nuclear Advances by North KoreansAmerican intelligence officials now believe that North Korea is developing the technology to make nuclear warheads small enough to fit atop the country’s growing arsenal of missiles, potentially putting Tokyo and American troops based in Japan at risk, according to officials who have received the intelligence reports.
Yes, but how do we know that these “officials” are telling the truth, since we know the Bush administration has a record of overruling the CIA and producing intelligence reports of its own. Could be another falsified reason to bomb the bejeezus out of somebody.
Donald Rumsfeld: Evasion Haiku
Donald Rumsfeld is a rabid right-winger. He is arrogant, evasive, dismissive of civil liberties and other legalities and downright hostile to those who disagree.
Evasion Haiku
I’m working my way
over to figuring out
how I won’t answer.
Knowing
As we know
there are known knowns.There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things
we do not know.But there are also unknown unknowns
the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Who's actually running the show? See for yourself in this timeline of Bush's activities on September 11, 2001.
Sure, the Bush administration has reduced our taxes, but it has also depleted social services while allowing the states to go broke. And in the meantime, Bush and his cohorts are failing to adequately perform a basic task: protecting citizens.
Today the Washington Post reports that a bipartisan panel of government and private sector experts is releasing a report on the nation’s readiness to respond to another major terrorist attack on American soil. In short, we are not prepared:
Government agencies across the nation are dramatically underfunding efforts to prepare police, fire and ambulance personnel for terrorist attacks, and should spend $98 billion on that task beyond current plans for the next five years, according to a study by the Council on Foreign Relations."Although the American public is now better prepared in some respects to address aspects of the terrorist threat than it was two years ago, the United States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil."
The study substantiates the complaints of many cash-starved states and cities that they need more federal help to pay first responders, and that even the money that has been dedicated to them is slow to arrive.
It’s not enough to create an ominous-sounding Department of Homeland Security. You’ve got to back it up with real dollars and meaningful measures, not mere words. And a president needs to make difficult spending choices that are in the best interests of the people, not his re-election.
This week the New York Times reported that Iraqi scientist Dr. Mahdi Obeidi has admitted burying plans and equipment to restart Iraq’s nuclear weapons program in his garden in 1991. Saddam Hussein ordered him to hide the stash so he could restart the program once the U.N. sanctions were lifted.
Today the International Atomic Energy Agency said the fact that the stash remained untouched was evidence that Iraq had not resumed its nuclear program since inspections began after the Persian Gulf War.…[T]he White House took a distinctly different view. It said the information that Dr. Obeidi volunteered … was evidence that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were correct in saying that Mr. Hussein had never given up hope of building nuclear weapons.
Ari Fleishcer, the White House spokesman, said today of Iraq’s nuclear program: "Nobody said it was operative. We expressed concerns about the development of a nuclear program, but nobody ever maintained that Iraq had nuclear weapons.”
Nobody said it was operative? Stop beating this horse, boys. And while you’re at it, stop your own damn lying. You’re embarrassing yourselves and making the liberals giddy.
The Bush administration went blundering into Iraq full of belligerence and exaggerated claims of WMD but no realistic exit strategy, the holy grail of all U.S. military action since Vietnam.
Now the remaining coalition forces struggle to maintain order in a country that doesn’t want them, barely functions, and isn’t structured for the kind of democracy America has in mind. Our soldiers are being picked off one by one by a populace that sees the American forces as just another dictatorial regime, merely the latest in a long line of rulers under whom the people have suffered.
Knowing their history, or at least what they've seen on TV, Americans have little patience for foreign entanglements that stretch out for weeks and months with few accomplishments and no resolution in sight. They have even less patience for seeing their countrymen and women blown up with grenades and attacked by ambushes day after day.
The American occupation of Iraq could last for years, with an untold number of deaths, or - given that the public simply doesn't have the stomach for a war of attrition - Bush could withdraw the troops, leaving a debacle behind. In either case, Muslims throughout the Middle East will have yet another reason to hate America, and we will all be less safe because of it.
Bush should know this, but it appears he does not.
Back in December, Dubya made a big hairy deal about smallpox vaccinations for military personnel and emergency response teams among medical professionals:
We believe that regimes hostile to the United States may possess this dangerous virus. To protect our citizens in the aftermath of September the 11th, we are evaluating old threats in a new light. Our government has no information that a smallpox attack is imminent. Yet it is prudent to prepare for the possibility that terrorists would kill indiscriminately -- who kill indiscriminately would use diseases as a weapon.
George even got one himself, reminding us that he was ready to step up to his obligation as Commander-in-Chief.
The part of the plan that called for the inoculation of 500,000 military personnel proceeded without much fuss. The planned inoculation of 500,000 first responder healthcare workers is a different story.
Many were concerned that the risks associated with the vaccine weren’t adequately justified; others refused to be vaccinated without a pre-established compensation fund for those who suffered ill effects (the Bush administration’s initial response: workers’ comp can cover it, or you can sue the federal government for negligence). Ultimately, Bush signed a compensation plan, but in the meantime local governments struggled with the costs associated with the program and a shortage of federal funds.
As of the beginning of June - with the program in place for five months - 36,217 healthcare workers had been vaccinated.
A quarter of those are in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.
So we have two possibilities here:
1) The inoculations are necessary for the safety of the American people, in which case the Bush administration has failed to carry out a vital program, or
2) The inoculations aren’t necessary, and Bush values fear-mongering, manipulative hype more than the health of American citizens.
Guess which one we’d pick.
"The Bush administration late Thursday filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court outlining its opposition to the University of Michigan's affirmative action program."
CNN.com
01/17/2003
“I applaud the Supreme Court for recognizing the value of diversity on our Nation's campuses. Diversity is one of America's greatest strengths.”
President Bush
06/23/2003
Spin it, baby.
Yesterday, from the mouth of Fearless Leader:
Acting on unfounded, unscientific fears, many European governments have blocked the import of all new biotech crops. Because of these artificial obstacles, many African nations avoid investing in biotechnology, worried that their products will be shut out of important European markets.
Yeah! What're you all worried about?
And really - it's not about the money.
The treatment of the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba goes beyond inhumane. The 680 prisoners from 42 countries being held by the U.S. military live in conditions so desperate that suicide – specifically forbidden by the Koran – is increasingly common. They live in tiny cells unprotected from the scorching heat and are allowed to exercise only 30 minutes a week. Three of the prisoners are under the age of 16.
The prisoners, who are suspected of having ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban, have been held for a year and a half without being charged and without access to legal representation. They have no contact with the outside world.
An untold number of the detainees are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The U.S. has released a mere 41 men – surely not all of the innocent – who are dumped back onto the dusty streets of their home countries frightened, depressed and telling tales of horror.
The Bush administration claims that the captives are not prisoners of war but rather “unlawful combatants”, and that because of this status America does not have to abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention to which it is a signatory. Last March the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the Guantanamo prisoners do not have rights under U.S. federal law and do not have access to American courts. In May, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.
If the captives have no rights under either American or international law, imagine the utter hell they have fallen into.
Bush’s actions in Cuba make a mockery of the goodness that he claims America stands for. A country that violates international law and treats prisoners who have not been tried or found guilty with such injustice is no better than the terrorists who violently take the lives of the innocent. This is not how a modern, democratic society is supposed to function. We are no longer victims, but perpetrators as well.
Greetings, Rabid Right-wingers!
You’ve made it pretty clear that you hate and fear Hillary Clinton, so here’s an idea: help put a centrist Democrat in the White House in 2004. He’ll naturally have the Democratic nomination in 2008, thereby locking out Hillary’s bid until 2012.
Alternatively, you can let Bush run the country deeper into the ground for one more term, and make it that much easier for Hillary to run in 2008.
Give it some thought, but remember: our way gives you four extra years to practice saying "Madam President" without cartoon smoke pouring out of your ears.
President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks has never taken into account the reasons why we were vulnerable to attack – and we’re not talking about a lack of homeland security.
Bush ran his pre-September 11 foreign policy by using the might of the United States to bully the world – refusing to sign treaties, ignoring international commitments and generally demanding rather than consulting. His post- September 11 foreign policy has gone from bad to worse, from “you’re either with us or against us” to the axis of evil to the invasion of Iraq.
And the world took notice.
The President reigns over a Washington that embarrasses itself by renaming French fries in the House cafeteria, lies about a war in which nearly 200 Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians have died, and, with a post-war Iraq in shambles, moves on with swords drawn towards Syria and Iran.
Once again Americans are fearful as they travel throughout the world. Even worse, we are embarrassed to admit where we've come from - disheartened by our government's actions in the world and despairing of the woe we have wrought.
