"Meek little handmaidens for government propaganda"

by: Jay Stevens

Thu May 29, 2008 at 20:19:28 PM MST

Yawn.

Is there anything revelatory in this thing? The only surprise is that someone who worked as an insider in the Bush administration would actually admit to the stuff they pulled.

The most interesting part of book from the reports so far, are the following passages excerpted in yesterday's Politico report:

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics and even charges: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

"The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

That's right; Bush's former spokesflack just called out the media for not being hard enough on the administration!

A little something to get your blood going this tax day

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 06:23:47 AM MST

In fact, you're probably too damn busy to be reading a blog. But here you are. I suppose on this day you probably don't need news that's really going to p*ss you off - but then you probably shouldn't be messing around on the Internet right now, either.

Unless of course you're from a major corporation. Then you don't really have to worry about your tax form too much:

The study, made public Sunday, points to "a historic collapse in audits." It found that major corporations - defined as those with assets of at least $250 million - have about a one in four chance of being audited, down from about three in four in 1990.

For Americans with incomes above $100,000, the chances of being audited in 2006 were 1 in 59. Above $1 million, the odds increased to 1 in 16.

The study's findings stand in sharp contrast to the tough talk coming out of the I.R.S. in recent years. The report suggests that the agency is shifting its focus away from big corporations to smaller companies, private partnerships and other private entities, a move that tax lawyers said was consistent with trends they were seeing....

While the report singled out the I.R.S.'s increased focus on partnerships, it also said that the agency was increasingly focusing on smaller corporations, or those with less than $50 million in assets. Such companies require less time and money to investigate - and the I.R.S. has long complained that it is underfunded. Such investigations, however, typically bring in fewer unpaid tax dollars than audits of large corporations.

Actually, if you've following Bush administrating tax policy, this shouldn't come as a surprise. At all. They've cut down their audits of the mega-rich and major corporations, and have basically ignored several common methods of tax cheating favored by the administration's and GOP constituents. All the while ratcheting up audits of regular joes.

Just another day in the Republican party's grand scheme to use government to redistribute the nation's income.

So, happy tax day!

What's "victory" in Iraq, anyway?

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 07:33:30 AM MST

I say "excellent," because Iraq is going to play a major role in the upcoming election, and will be used as a political cudgel for years to come, even if we withdraw in 2009, not a safe assumption. And I say "excellent" because the definition of victory is as elusive today as the cause of the war was in 2003.

Kaplan:

Originally, victory was conceived in grandiose terms. The defeat of Saddam Hussein's army and the toppling of his regime would spawn a new democratic Iraq, the example of which would ignite the flames of freedom across the Middle East.

Bush scaled back the standard in a November 2005 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy titled "A Strategy for Victory." This victory will come, he said, "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe-haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation."

Neither victory goal seems realistic, especially now that al-Sadr's cease fire shows signs of ending and the "Sunni Awakening" unravels, threatening to reverse the recent and relative quiet in Iraq, which never did provide the political compromises and coalitions needed to ensure a stable and democratic Iraq. Oh, and if you believe the "surge" was responsible for the quiet - though most evidence suggests otherwise - well, that's coming to an end, too.

If we can trust the Bush administration - and there's no reason to think we can - and take their avowed victory goals at face value, we've already lost. There's little or no chance we'll achieve especially the audacious and ignorant goals of administration pre-war rhetoric. There'll be no "Velvet Revolution" across the Middle East; our invasion has only inflamed tensions and pushed more people towards the region's radicals. The longer we stay, the worse it will become.

But I don't buy the administration's rhetoric. The causus belli and the definition of victory, like the term, "the war on terror," has always been vague and plastic. It gives the war's architects the power to indefinitely perpetuate conflict - which, if the war is about oil, fits in nicely with an endless occupation, the "100 years in Iraq" John McCain recently promised us.

This ambiguity also serves partisan political goals. The Republican party can claim that, in the event of a Democratic-led withdrawal, the left "lost" the war. Setting unattainable terms of victory, as Bush has done, only serves to foster that message. Even if Republicans want to end the war, they can shift the burden of withdrawal onto Democrats, hitting them politically for it, while simultaneously enjoying the economic, diplomatic, security advantages that would accompany the end of the war.

Unless it's about the oil. In that case we'll never leave no matter who's in charge.

Here's the thing. It's not a "war." The war was won long ago. We're involved in an "occupation." You don't win occupations, you endure them, then end them.  

Class warfare and the redistribution of income

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Mar 07, 2008 at 11:01:27 AM MST

What's most striking however is the income and tax shares. The IRS report shows that the Fortunate 400 now control 1.15% of the nation's income - twice the share they controlled in 1995. Over the same period, however, the average income tax paid by this same group has fallen from 30% to 18%. That's due mainly to the Bush tax cuts.

The bad beef you've already eaten

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 07:53:58 AM MST

It's rather unusual to get an email about an update from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) on midday Sunday of a holiday weekend. It's also rather unusual to go to the USDA's open cases website and find only a link to a PDF of the recall notice, rather than information posted online. How surprising then to learn from this low-profile PDF that the USDA's largest-ever recall is now under way - "approximately 143,383,823 pounds" (give or take a few ounces?) of raw and frozen beef products from the disgraced Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. That's almost half the amount of beef and poultry recalled since 1994 in the United States...

Another case of e. coli conservatism? You remember what that is: the "ideology" of gutting the federal programs that are actually useful in favor of an ever-expanding Pentagon budget and tax cuts for hedge fund managers. You know, like, say, hamstringing the USDA of its ability to actually do inspections and preventing sh*t like this from happening, instead of acting solely as a punitive agent, and then burying the news so the industry as a whole isn't affected.

And in this case the recall affects beef that, in large part, has already been eaten.

Look, folks. This isn't just a case of one "bad egg" making the industry look bad. These kind of jerks exist in all industries. These employers affect the health and wellbeing of their employees, the environment, and consumers. The "free" market can't do anything for this problem; it relies on free exchange of information, which the "free" market suppresses in order to remain a market. We need protection provided by responsible, non-involved publicly appointed bodies mandated to protect consumers and employees.

Too bad the Bush administration and its Republican sycophants don't agree.

Freedom from freedom of information

by: Jay Stevens

Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 12:55:13 PM MST

Great idea, right?

Which means, naturally, that President Bush is looking to kill the ombudsman's position:

It seemed that President Bush was behind this idea when he signed the OPEN Government Act into law on December 31. His proposed budget for 2009, however, includes a provision that would "repeal the ombudsman's office and shift its funding to the Justice Department.

If the President's attempt to get rid the ombudsman is successful, it would be tremendously unfortunate for both the public and the government. This new office is meant to give requesters a way to resolve FOIA disputes without having to resort to litigation, which would be cheaper and less burdensome for people who have trouble getting documents from the government, and might reduce the number of FOIA lawsuits that the government has to defend against.

Seems like a few of the last hangers-on were predicting that Bush would try to establish his legacy in this, his last year in office. By the look of things, I'd say they were right.

Stop me when you've heard this one before (the Attorney General remix)

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Jan 31, 2008 at 12:57:02 PM MST

You're crazy if you think I'm going to admit that any of the interrogation practices previously performed by the Administration that just hired me are illegal. Saying that would suggest that people in the Administration violated the law and are subject to criminal prosecution, and that previous OLC opinions have condoned war crimes. The only thing I will tell you is that I sure hope we don't continue one of these practices in the future (lucky for me you haven't pressed me about the others!). But don't ask me to say that the President can't do any of them later on if he wants to....

Oh, and by the way, the President, my boss, never violates the law. Got that?

The interesting thing about the questioning was Mukasey's implicit approval of torture:

"Under what facts and circumstances exactly would it be lawful to waterboard a prisoner?" Mr. Kennedy asked.

Mr. Mukasey said he could not answer the question because it might be "telling our enemies exactly what they can expect in those eventualities" and "those eventualities might never occur."

Get it? Torture might be just fine, given a predetermined set of "eventualities."

What a difference seven years makes...

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Jan 29, 2008 at 13:11:58 PM MST

To wit:

"America's armed forces need better equipment, better training and better pay . . . A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming . . . I don't have enemies to fight. I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect . . . We're learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back ... to lead this nation to a responsibility era, that president himself must be responsible. So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to uphold the laws of our land . . . I will not attack a part of this country because I want to lead the whole of it."

Given his track record over the last seven years, we can pretty much conclude his acceptance speech in 2000 was a complete crock of sh*t. What's a wonder is that Republican voters - who apparently nominated Bush for the promises he made that night - fell in lockstep behind their man when he systematically violated all of the sentiments expressed that night. And now we've got an unjust war, an environmental crisis, budgetary mess, a crippled rule of law, and extremely bitter and divisive partisan rhetoric from the president himself and his political party.

JEFF has some interesting thoughts about the SOTU. Namely, were the Bush years really so uniquely bad? After all, JEFF apparently has no frame of reference; this is the first administration he really paid attention to.

Is George W Bush really so bad? In short: yes, JEFF, he is.  

The database of liars

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Jan 23, 2008 at 12:31:19 PM MST

As ]Steve Benen said, it's "not exactly a new concept," but it's still worthwhile because "it quantifies the administration's mendacity in a way that hasn't been done before," it "points to the media's failings," and "establishes a searchable historical record that serves as a rather devastating indictment."

Best of all, the project provides a searchable database:

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001 . It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Naturally righties are apoplectic and tie the study to George Soros. (Sort of ironic, given that most of conservative claims about history and economy stem from think tanks - like the Heritage Foundation - whose self-admitted goals are to create a conservative spin on reality. "Liberal Fascism," anyone?) But here we see the facts at work, those stubborn little nuggets of non-partisan information that depict the Bush administration in all its glory, and from which history will be written.

Yes, I know, it's a b*tch: reality has a known left-wing bias.

Prosecutor Purge to return in the news?

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Jan 22, 2008 at 15:01:57 PM MST

recent behind-the-scenes activity in several investigations suggests that the issue that roiled Congress in 2007 could re-emerge in the heat of the election year. Two inquiries by the House and Senate ethics committees are examining whether several congressional Republicans, including one running for the Senate this year, improperly interfered with investigations.

As potent as the congressional probes might be, they appear to be far narrower than a sprawling inquiry launched by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

Investigators from these offices have been questioning whether senior officials lied to Congress, violated the criminal provisions in the Hatch Act, tampered with witnesses preparing to testify to Congress, obstructed justice, took improper political considerations into account during the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys and created widespread problems in the department's Civil Rights Division, according to several people familiar with the investigation.

The internal Justice Department probe cannot bring charges but can refer findings to a U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia or a special prosecutor, who could then pursue a criminal investigation. One source close to the investigation expects the offices to issue a scathing report within the next three months, but they have not announced a timeline for their joint inquiry.

"I think it could be historic," said David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in New Mexico , who was one of the nine ordered to resign by the Bush administration. "Arguably it's the most significant investigation OPR and OIG have done in a generation, or maybe ever."

(For my wingnut fans, a "rumor" is "a statement or report current without known authority for its truth.")

Hopefully the investigations do yield tangible results. The rule of law needs to be free from political interference and consideration.  

Disgrace

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Jan 18, 2008 at 10:08:46 AM MST

Read the editorial. Have you ever seen such contempt for our legal system in print before? Read this passage:

But Padilla and his Yale Law School attorneys think that these decisions are better second-guessed by plaintiffs' lawyers and judges rather than our elected leaders.

Look, I'm no law professor, but even I know that "elected leaders" don't interpret the law - that's the role of the judiciary. You'd think by reading this that John Yoo has yet to read the Constitution. Yet he holds a teaching job at UC Berkeley's prestigious Boalt Hall school of law.

What a disgrace to his profession, UC Berkeley, and to the country.

Reading First funds dry up for Montana schools

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 16:16:26 PM MST

Either way, the outcome appears to be the same. Tying federal funding for public schools to a mandate to ever-improving standardized test scores has an inevitable conclusion: all schools will eventually fail to improve, and will lose funding. Likewise, the effect of the test-taking on the schools is that the federal government has unprecedented control over our communities' curriculum, and simultaneously ensures that the quality of public education degrades, as teachers are forced to teach to the standardized tests.

The news today is that federal funds for a reading program that help Montana schools achieve test results are being slashed:

Federal budget cuts may ax most of a reading program credited with helping struggling Montana schools boost their No Child Left Behind test scores.

But enough benefit may be left from the program to keep its effect alive, according to educators who've worked with the Reading First curriculum.

The new federal education budget signed by President Bush last week reduced Reading First from last year's $1 billion to just $393 million in 2008.

But, wait! It gets better! The president's brother, Neil Bush, was one of the vendors selling educational software to schools, software that mysteriously fails to meet "standards of financing" under NCLB law.

Get it? The Bush administration creates ever more difficult testing criteria for schools, and then directs federal funds for helping schools reach those goals to friends (and family?). Kill the public school system and enrich your friends while doing so! Kind of ingenious, actually. And utterly typical.

So where does that leave Montana schools? Begging for funds to buy textbooks from Bush administration friends.  

So much for states' rights

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Dec 26, 2007 at 13:36:57 PM MST

...I would like to highlight the efforts being made by State and local governments in the United States to address climate change. Geographically, the United States encompasses vast and diverse climatic zones representative of all major regions of the world -- polar, temperate, semi-tropical, and tropical -- with different heating, cooling, and transportation needs and with different energy endowments. Such diversity allows our State and local governments to act as laboratories where new and creative ideas and methods can be applied and shared with others and inform federal policy -- a truly bottom-up approach to addressing global climate change.

The Guardian, December 24, 2007:

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, was behind a controversial decision to block California's attempt to impose tough emission limits on car manufacturers, according to insiders at the government Environmental Protection Agency.

Staff at the agency, which announced last week that California's proposed limits were redundant, said the agency's chief went against their expert advice after car executives met Cheney, and a Chrysler executive delivered a letter to the EPA saying why the state should not be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases.

Grist's David Roberts:

Bush and his allies in Congress have steadfastly rejected the "new and creative ideas and methods" implemented at the state level. They fought efforts to get a mandatory nationwide GHG inventory in the energy bill; they still have no comprehensive plan to address climate change; they moved heaven and earth to keep a Renewable Portfolio Standard out of the energy bill; and they have set no goals for reducing emissions.

Today, as the coup de grace, the Bush EPA denied California -- our greatest national "laboratory" for climate policy -- the right to implement its own emission reduction policy. In doing so, EPA chief Stephen Johnson explicitly rejected diversity, calling the move from one fuel economy standard to two a "confusing patchwork" that would befuddle the poor automakers.

When it was a good excuse for the lack of federal action, the Bush administration lauded state initiative. But when it actually threatened one of their corporate contributors, they shut it down. Such is the Republican commitment to federalism.

The Bush economy benefitted the top one percent

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Dec 14, 2007 at 14:00:24 PM MST

Moreover...

One other thing that's striking from the report, by the way, is that over the 26 years the estimates span, the only significant gains for the bottom two quintiles, and most of the gains for the middle quintile, took place during the Clinton years. Exactly why is an interesting question, but the empirical fact is that over the past generation the only good years for lower and middle income families were when a Democrat was in the White House.

Matthew Ygelias has a visual representation, although it doesn't do the distribution of income justice. The biggest bar on his graph goes out to only a tiny percentage of Americans...

Bush administration: the best government oil money can buy

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Dec 11, 2007 at 07:21:36 AM MST

This report presents the findings of the Committee's investigation. The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal "Communications Action Plan" that stated: "Victory will be achieved when ... average citizens 'understand' uncertainties in climate science ... [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry's communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.

Look, I don't expect apologies from the climate-change denier crowd. But it's long since past the time that we need to be alarmed about our changing weather patterns.

Built into the DNA of corporations is a mandate to make as much money as possible, which means they're programmed to screw consumers. And when they've screwed consumers as much as they can take, they externalize costs as much as they can - which means pushing costs onto taxpayers' backs.

What I'm trying to say is that corporations are great at inventing new types of salty snacks and frozen juice concentrates, but they're abysmal at weighing long-term costs to "external" entities...like the environment, or human health, say.

We should have expected this. And, indeed, many of us did. But the traditional media did not.

FCC considers massive deregulation favoring corporate media

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Oct 18, 2007 at 07:31:53 AM MST

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

Considering how poorly radio deregulation has gone - or well, if you dislike diversity in opinion and program format - this is a terrible idea.

Public Health Threat in China? Heads Roll

by: Matt Singer

Tue Aug 21, 2007 at 12:52:01 PM MST

When people died because of incompetence by the Chinese government, Hu Jintao didn't say, "Heckuva job, Zhengie." In fact, the Chinese government straight-up executed the man who had been responsible for food safety.

Now, I think execution is going too far in terms of punishment, but the difference between Chinese reaction and American reaction to utter corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence in government is striking. Accountability, it seems, no longer exists among the ruling class in America. You could literally screw up everything. You'll be handed a pension and an honorable discharge (if you're discharged at all).

This isn't just true in American government. It's increasingly true in the private sector. It's the mindset that claims Pat Davison is being unfairly punished, that Scooter Libby should get off scot free for lying to a grand jury and obstructing an investigation, that pay should be set by peer compensation not performance, and that CEOs deserve millions in bonuses regardless of how well they do their job.

Now, just to pre-empt the seemingly inevitable "But what about the Clenis?!?!?!?!," I, like many progressive Americans, didn't like what Bill Clinton did -- we just didn't think it was an impeachable offense. In fact, you may remember that the radical group known as MoveOn.org got its start calling for Clinton's censure.

So where's the accountability in America today? And can anyone honestly even imagine a moment when Bush might punish one of his lackies, much less execute one of them?

Bush Administration Declares War on Children's Health Care

by: Matt Singer

Tue Aug 21, 2007 at 12:24:12 PM MST

Under the proposal, states would only be able to expand CHIP if they can prove 95% participation rates, something our Senior Senator points out is an impossible request, out here in the real world.

Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, argued against the proposal, saying: "No state can meet 95 percent. No state currently meets 95 percent."

Sick.

All Politics. All the Time.

by: Matt Singer

Mon Aug 20, 2007 at 09:30:46 AM MST

It's good he's leaving. Maybe the federal government can finally focus on, I don't know, governing.

Corralling Dick Cheney

by: Jay Stevens

Sat Jun 23, 2007 at 16:26:55 PM MST

Cheney's office, according to a story first reported by the Chicago Tribune, has resisted attempts by a tiny federal agency to compile information -- in accordance with an executive order signed by George Bush himself -- on the classified documents being held by the Vice President's operation. Cheney's office argued that the Vice President's office, because it has both executive and legislative branch duties, is exempt from the order.

This would be funny if it weren't so serious. If he claims he's not in the executive branch, then he's obviously not considering himself suspect to the rules governing that service.