The last 100 days - an agenda of destruction

While Barack Obama's victory is giving many Americans a vision of hope for his first 100 days, the Bush administration is busy trying to wreak as much havoc on civil liberties, the environment, abortion rights as it can.

A sample:

Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

In coming weeks, we expect the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a final rule that would weaken a program created by the Clean Air Act, which requires utilities to install modern pollution controls when they upgrade their plants to produce more power.

Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women’s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options.  Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims. 

I suppose when your approval rating is already under 25%, you might as well just flip the bird to the 75%.    I can't wait to see who gets a pardon. 

Bush: I regret that I have but one life to give to my country telco

In the ongoing coverage of the FISA renewal, mcjoan of Dailykos notes that President Bush has immunity for telecommunications companies as his litmus test for the "Protect America Act" (gag me with a spoon).

The interesting twist? Bush has already declared that Americans could die if this renewal is not passed by Congress. In other words:

Let's just remember Sen. Kennedy's summation of Bush's position on FISA:

The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retro-active immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he's willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies. (emphasis mine)

You can get more on the new wiretap law from Moldy's ongoing FISA coverage.

Would you envy this economy?

An article in today's New York Times suggests that the economy under President Bush would be the envy of many past presidents.

Dean Baker says, "I doubt it," defending his statement with a table of average annual GDP growth for presidential terms in the past 50 years.

Kennedy-Johnson -- 5.2%
Clinton -- 3.6%
Reagan -- 3.4%
Carter -- 3.4%
Nixon-Ford -- 2.7%
Bush II --2.6%
Bush I --1.9%

Only Bush's father would envy this economy. And because I'm a partisan, I'd like to note that 3 of the top 4 are Democratic presidential regimes. None of the bottom three are. If it's the economy, stupid, then don't vote Republican.

Bush is smart - he plays word games

President Bush may have been informed that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program, but that hasn't stopped him from insinuating one.

No nukes in Iran

In case you were being whisked away on President Bush's (In)credibility Express (next stop: Iran), check this out. The report from the combined intelligence agencies of the United States - the Intelligence Estimate - says that the 2005 report was in error and that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program.

No nukes, no troops.

I need this t-shirt

Courtesy of Paul Krugman:

President Bush: a French terrorist?

Nothing like a little historical perspective on our "War on Terror" to make you think twice about who the terrorists are. A historian compares today's war with the French Revolution, defined by the Jacobins.

The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny.

Read on for more on how failing to understand history dooms us to repeat it.

Bush: the latest threat is zombies

Politics trumps science (again)

President Bush's executive order 13422 (pdf) took effect yesterday, guaranteeing that political appointees of government agencies will have final say over government regulations. The implications are widespread. This analysis from an environmental law firm notes that the executive order also requires that agencies identify the "specific market failure" that their regulation addresses. In other words, the review by a political appointee will have the potential to derail health and safety regulations, even if the best science has found them necessary or in the public interest.

January 2009 can't come quickly enough.

And the war goes on

Senate Democrats failed to convince enough Republicans to support legislation to end the Iraq War last night. The Democratic leadership pushed for an actual deadline this time - the legislation would have required troops to return home by May 2008.

Interestingly, a recent poll shows that while 43% of Americans want troops home by next spring (the bill's target), another 40% would be satisfied if troops were withdrawn to Iraqi bases to focus on training locals to take over the fight.

Asked another way, however, 53% of Americans want to end the military presence in Iraq in one year or less. In other words, it seems some people have bought the Republican line that withdrawal equals defeat (or that we're "turning the corner" in Iraq...)

A lot of the stalling has come down to the anticipated report by the leading commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus. Planned for September, it will provide feedback on the "surge" and provide President Bush with some badly needed political cover for the next two months. Bush has made a lot of hay about trusting the "commanders on the ground" (though his administration has demonized and fired three already), so I'm fascinated to see what happens to Petraeus should he refuse to toe the line.

Terrorists hate America(n policy)

Courtesy of skemono, a way to shed the propaganda that terrorists simply "hate America."

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Carter, carries this analysis to address the question that obsesses us as a nation: What truly motivates the "terrorists," the insurgents, the suicide bombers, all those people who apparently hate us for one reason or another?

The commonly accepted knowledge in the administration and in the Pentagon is that this is a religious war, that these men blow themselves up for God. Not at all, says Brzezinski: "These are political questions. They may seen religious, but in reality they are directly related to our policies. Look at who they are against: the U.S., the Brits, the Israelis. We are seen as the new British colonialists, just as in Vietnam we were seen as the continuation of French colonialism..."

...The study of 300 suicide bombers made by professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago found that virtually none of them was religiously inspired; they were communists, socialists, Muslim Brothers, Arab nationalists, but above all, they were inspired by Western occupation and dominance of their lands.

In other words, suicide bombers are attacking the United States - its civilians on 9/11 and its soldiers in Iraq - because of our political support for Israel, our invasion of Iraq, and other political behavior. And unlike religious fanaticism, there are non-military solutions to politically-motivated killing - such as leaving Iraq.

For more on Pape's groundbreaking work, see his article in the American Political Science Review (pdf). The table on page 6 is very revealing.

Where's your liberal media now?

Over at the Time Blog, they're taking a look at the public opinion on impeachment. Compared to 1998, when the Republicans started impeachment proceedings over Clinton's perjury on Monica Lewinsky, nearly twice the number of Americans support beginning impeachment proceedings against President Bush (45%) and VP Cheney (54%). In 1998, the comparable figure was 26%.

And yet, there's scarcely a peep from the big media establishment about removing this President, despite his lying about Iraq, use of signing statements, clemency powers, and many other issues that undermine the rule of law.

From January 1 to July 7, 1998, Lexis Nexis shows 71 (+2 letters to the editor) newspaper headlines and 5 magazine/journal articles with the terms "impeach" and "Clinton." From January 1 to July 7, 2007, there are only 40 stories (+6 letters to the editor) and 1 magazine story on impeaching President Bush.

C'mon CNN, where's one of those famous scrolling headlines with the ubiquitous question mark?

"Is it time to impeach the president?"

Yes!

Back to politics: Why Bush hasn't been impeached

Hopefully most of you are reading this on Tuesday morning after a relaxing Memorial Day weekend (or Monday morning, for you international readers - ha, I flatter myself).

Salon.com writer Gary Kamiya examines the criminal activity of the Bush administration and argues that there's plenty of evidence for impeachment but not much will to make it so.

His administration has been dogged by one massive scandal after the other, from the Katrina debacle, to Bush's approval of illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of "signing statements" to disobey laws he disagrees with, to the outrageous Gonzales and U.S. attorneys affair.

There's little popular support for keeping the President in office.

[President Bush] is extraordinarily unpopular. His approval ratings, which have been abysmal for about 18 months, have now sunk to their lowest ever, making him the most unpopular president in a generation. His 28 percent approval rating in a May 5 Newsweek poll ties that of Jimmy Carter in 1979 after the failed Iran rescue mission.

Kamiya asks, "Why was Clinton, who was never as unpopular as Bush, impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for the far more serious offense of lying about war?"

Bush's warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America's support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly...To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it...

The rest of the article examines the declining respect for rule of law in America, hypothesizing that Americans have simply embraced the brazen bellicosity of their President.

The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush had lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway -- revenge was.

Anne Applebaum wrote on the subject of the rule of law in 2005, arguing that sticking to the rule of law will pay off in the "war on terror" as it did in the Cold War:

Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is not merely a military conflict but a battle of ideas. And just as the Cold War was won when Eastern Europeans abandoned communism and joined the West, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims have transformed the Arab world -- abandoning the radicals to their tents and their caves -- and joined the global mainstream.

Kamiya notes - and I agree - that Democrats are likely hoping that Bush's continued popular free-fall will bring the Republican Party low in the 2008 election, but it misses the point. Elections do not reinforce the principle of law - after all, Bush won re-election in 2004 despite his many legal transgressions.

It makes me wonder if this is Vietnam, but with a twist. In Vietnam, we lost our faith in government as they lied us into war. This time, the President has again lied about the war (the rationale, the evidence, the "strategy," the purpose) and once again Americans bought in and got a lemon. The President, mangling the popular phrase, still got it right: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, you can't fool me again. Damn straight, Mr President. You're fired.

President Bush gets his war bill

Congressional Democrats caved this week, giving the President Bush a war funding bill with no deadline. Let me count the ways this stinks:

1. The American people sent the Democrats to Congress in a landslide victory in November 2006 because of two things: Republican corruption (Tom DeLay, Tom Foley, et al) and the War in Iraq.
   
2. Congress has been reasserting its rightful constitutional authority by starting investigations of many highly corrupt activities in this administration (wiretapping, political nepotism, lying, cheating, stealing, et al). Taking control of the purse strings is part of that job.
3. What really serves the troops better? Giving the President license to keep them fighting and dying or bringing them home?

Let's put it this way. The constitution expressly gives the power of warmaking to Congress. Here's a quick tutorial on war powers, for those whose last constitution-reading came in high school:

ARTICLE 1, SECTION 8

The Congress shall have Power:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress....

ARTICLE II, SECTION 2

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States....

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur....

Notice where most of the bold type is? Congress - the people - rules the army. In other words, Congress decides how big the army is, when it should be called into action, how it shall be funded, and when it shall come home. The President's constitutional authority is to toot the horn.

Congress should pass a deadline for troop withdrawal by cutting off war funding. Then let President Bush decide whether to toot the horn for withdrawal - he either brings the troops home, or wants them to fight without money. Who supports the troops then?

The men Bush defends

Paul Wolfowitz has been near the center of the neoconservative capture of Washington under President Bush, first as an architect of the Iraq invasion in the Defense Department and now as the head of the World Bank.

However, serious allegations have arisen that Mr Wolfowitz used his position at the head of the Bank to get a significant raise for his "companion," done while he was heading up an anti-corruption drive to weed out the bank's aid recipients.

A special committee [of the World Bank board of directors found] that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules, ethics and governance standards in arranging for, and concealing, a pay and promotion package for his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, in 2005.

Wolfowitz has responded to the charges:

He promised to change his management approach by relying less on advisers from the Bush administration, restructuring his office, delegating more to managers and placing “more trust in the staff,” according to the text.

[However, he has also protested that] he has unfairly been "caricatured as a ‘boyfriend’ who used his position of power to help his ‘girlfriend...’" [Furthermore,] “I implore each of you to be fair in making your decision, because your decision will not only affect my life, it will affect how this institution is viewed in the United States and the world,” he said.

And how will it look to the world and reflect upon the World Bank if they don't fire a guy who has relied heavily on the Bush administration, placed too little "trust in the staff," and used his position of power to reward his girlfriend? Good riddance, Mr Wolfowitz. It's only a matter of time before you get your medal.

The bandwagon nearly full, President Bush hops on

In a reversal of his long-expressed belief that the federal government's Environmental Protection Agency lacked the authority to regulate carbon emissions, and on the heels of a Supreme Court decision explicitly overruling him, President Bush has hopped on the carbon regulation bandwagon.

President Bush yesterday ordered the Environmental Protection Agency and three other federal departments to write new regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and trucks, reversing his position that the federal government lacks the authority to mandate changes to curb one of the chief causes of global warming.

The turnaround is somewhat surprising, given Bush's slow conversion to fact-based theories on climate change. And yet, I've been baffled by the President's rationale for holding out so long. Since when has President Bush said he lacks the authority to do anything?*

*Note: see warrantless wiretapping, suspending habeus corpus, or condoning torture.

The man who would be king

After viewing the Jon Stewart - Bill Moyers discussion yesterday, I was left pondering Stewart's argument about the President: that his underlings take the fall when the President steps on the law. Today I came across several interesting tidbits on the administration's assertion that Bush is above the law.

One writer at Dailykos notes that Bush's decision to veto the war legislation differs from his previous use of a signing statement to essentially ignore certain portions of the law. Previously, Bush has asserted the power of the executive by simply ignoring directives of Congress or laws that he feels impede his role as Commander-in-Chief. In this,

Another post from a Kossack says that the academic underpinning to Bush's extralegal manuevers is essentially this: by being President, Bush is above the law. He quotes extensively from blogger Glenn Greenwald, who digs through the academic-speak to the point:

In that article, Mansfied claimed, among other things, that our "enemies, being extra-legal, need to be faced with extra-legal force"; that the "Office of President" is "larger than the law"; that "the rule of law is not enough to run a government"; that "ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion"; that "with one person in charge we can have both secrecy and responsibility"; and most of all:

Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.

"Law does not apply" -- that is Mansfield's belief, and the belief of the Bush movement. (emphasis from dKos)

And how do Americans respond to such actions? We could start by listing our grievances regarding President Bush:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records...He has obstructed the Administration of Justice...He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people...He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

The last time we had these grievances, we took this action:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Or we could help Congress re-assert the rule of law.

Bush vetoes war spending, cuts off troops

If the media were actually liberal, that'd be the headline. A quick survey of Google News shows that while the media likes drama - "a standoff, a showdown" - they shoot ideologically straight.

It'll be interesting to see where the debate in Congress goes, since the Democratic leadership doesn't seem inclined to kowtow to the Single Track Mind In Chief:

REID: The president may be content with keeping our troops mired in the middle of an open-ended civil war, but we're not _ and neither are most Americans.

PELOSI: The president wants a blank check. The Congress is not going to give it to him.

President Bush opens his mouth about Iraq spending

I wanted to write on the inanity of President Bush's comments against the war funding bill headed for his desk, but I couldn't get it together yesterday. Fortunately, the folks at DailyKos did. Here's a teaser, before you head to DailyKos for the punchline:

Yes, George Bush hates the thought of the troops being caught in the middle of the showdown between the White House and Congress over the supplemental spending bill for Iraq...

Iraq War: is this a surge or an escalation?

Today Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced he was extending tours of duty in Iraq for troops deploying soon and for troops already there, from 12 months to 15 months. The policy is intended to guarantee 12 month stays at home between deployments, a necessary step with the recent addition of more than 20,000 troops to Baghdad in hopes of securing the city.

So is this really an escalation of the war?
The troop "surge," which some soldiers opposed, was suggested as a short-term solution to the rising violence in Baghdad. However, extending deployments in order to maintain troop levels suggests that this surge is longer-lasting. That's an escalation.

Other Iraq questions roundup:

1. Is there any reason why, coming in to the fifth year of the Iraq War, we are still funding this through "emergency appropriations"? This analysis from the Republican staff on the Senate Budget Committee looks at the complex definition of emergency and the overuse of the term for many spending items. One excerpt:
   

Labeling war costs as an emergency is not consistent with the President’s proposed statutory definition: while the 2007 and 2008 costs of the war may be necessary and ultimately not permanent, they are not sudden, urgent, and unforeseen, since the war in Afghanistan commenced in November 2001 and the war in Iraq commenced February 2003.

2. Just when does President Bush have to start answering the "do you support the troops?" question? The President has threatened to veto the Iraq spending bill (bill summary - pdf) that Democrats have ushered through Congress because he doesn't want deadlines. Is he failing the troops by vetoing the money they need to keep fighting? Let's say the Democrats send a second bill with deadlines to the President later this spring when the Pentagon is much closer to running out of money for the war (July, by the way). President Bush can still support the troops and get them the money he needs, he just has to compromise. Of course, there's also the theory that "you can't hurt a troop by defunding a war." So really, Bush can support the troops by signing or vetoing the appropriations bill.