BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 08 Jun 07 - 10:30 PM

Dear Amos: The economy declined in 2000, before GWB came into office. He took steps to head off a recession and lessen the impact. Part of effort that was tax cuts.

Bill Clinton's bubble economy burst and gas prices started ro rise in the spring of 2000.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 05:21 AM

As Senate Deal Sinks, So Does Bush's Power

By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: June 9, 2007
The breakthrough on the "grand bargain" on immigration a few weeks ago had brought new life to a White House under siege, putting a long-sought goal suddenly within reach. After many grim months, there was almost giddiness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But that early euphoria only made the grand bargain's grand collapse on Thursday night all the more of a blow, pointing up a stubbornly unshakable dynamic for President Bush in the final 19 months of his term: With low approval ratings and the race to succeed him well under way, his ability to push his agenda has faded to the point where he can fairly be judged to have entered his lame duck period.

In all, 38 of the 48 Senate Republicans effectively voted against the White House on the crucial procedural vote on the immigration bill, leaving the president's No. 1 domestic priority somewhere between stalled and dead.

The White House has similarly been through a sharp reversal on the domestic politics of the Iraq war. After receiving a lift last month in the defeat of Democratic efforts to link war finances to Iraq withdrawal dates, the White House acknowledged Friday that it could not renominate Mr. Bush's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, because of expected opposition on Capitol Hill.

For a president whose muscular assertions of executive authority had overshadowed Congress for years, it was a striking indicator of how the balance of power in Washington has shifted away from him. ...)

(New york Times editorial)

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 08:46 AM

Dickey:

The economy collapsed the year Bush walked into office. While it would be nice to blame Clinton, which you seem to want to do for all ills, I would point out that Mr. Clinton is regrettably no longer President. Our national debt has never been higher; our balance of payments is skewed beyond reason; lower- and middle- class real income is declining while basic cost of living factors are staggeringingly high. If this is your idea of a healthy economy, I am glad you don't work for the White...oh, neve rmind.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 09:42 AM

ROME -- The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania to hold terror suspects from 2003 to 2005, including some now-notorious Al Qaeda operatives, according to a critical report released Friday by the Council of Europe.

The investigation, undertaken by Sen. Dick Marty of the council's assembly, states that the one-time Eastern Bloc countries were willing participants in a U.S.-directed war on terror and "knowingly complicit" in the practice known as rendition, in which suspects were snatched and held in foreign countries for interrogation.


Officials in Poland and Romania and at the CIA called the report's conclusions baseless.

The report, for the first time, cites unnamed CIA sources as providing the names of key terror suspects sent to Poland: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a leader in the 2001 attacks in the United States; Abu Zubaydah, a suspected senior Al Qaeda operative; and Ramzi Binalshibh, another Al Qaeda suspect.

Rendition remains one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration's attempt to quell terrorist attacks. President Bush acknowledged the secret detention program only in September 2006, and the administration has been silent and unresponsive to questions about where the prisons were.

The report by the Council of Europe, an influential, intergovernmental body focused on democracy and human rights, is an attempt to fill in the gaps.

It identifies a remote Polish intelligence service base at Stare Kjekuty as an important CIA interrogation center. The base is a few miles from a former military airfield in Szymany in northeastern Poland. From 2002 to 2005, at least 10 flights apparently operated by CIA rendition teams were received at the airfield, and six of those came directly from Kabul, Afghanistan, the report said.

In most cases, the flights were disguised so they could not be tracked by transnational air control, the report said.

According to airport personnel who spoke to the Tribune last year, the flights apparently dropped off prisoners who were then transported in vans to Stare Kjekuty. Marty's report Friday said that "local authorities were not supposed to be aware of the exact number or the identities of the prisoners who passed through the facilities -- this was information that they did not 'need to know.' "

Marty issued a preliminary report in 2006 that relied heavily on press accounts and laid out possible scenarios of cooperation. The new report offers more details, explanations from unnamed intelligence figures about the alleged operations and some insight into what led Poland and Romania to cooperate.

"Highest state authorities" in those countries cooperated and knew of the alleged detention centers, the report said.

In Poland, Marty names then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski, among others, as a key collaborator with the U.S. In Romania, Marty names a "small circle of trust" that allegedly collaborated, including then-President Ion Iliescu, his minister of national defense and the head of military intelligence.

Both countries, democratic allies of the U.S. since the fall of communism, were eager to cooperate with the United States. Washington had been instrumental in supporting reforms, including those in the intelligence realm, the report said. Working with the U.S. on the secret program was seen as a matter of national interest, it said.

By Friday night, official denials were being broadcast in both countries. "This is all unfounded," Iliescu told Realitatea TV in Romania. The head of military intelligence, Sergiu Tudor Medar, told the same station that Marty's report was "pure speculation."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Little Hawk
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 01:42 PM

Yes, yes...but what about Paris Hilton? We must keep our minds on what really matters, don't you see?

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 09:32 PM

Paris Hilton is not a popular view of the Bush Administration. Every time the Bush Administration starts viewing her they have to go to confession overtime and they start making serious policy mistakes. In fact she is singlehandedly responsible for our rampant inflation, our bellicose foreign policy, our anti-scientific legal clangers, our bizarre and uneducated national contortions on Constitutional matters and a wide range of other sins of omission and commission that started shortly after Monica Lewinsky left the White House.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 07 - 09:44 PM

Cheney lied about Bush spy program
June 7, 2007 - 6:10am.
Blocked promotion of official who disagreed

(From Capitol Hill Blue's website)

Vice President Dick Cheney (AFP Photo)

Vice President Dick Cheney lied about his involvement in developing President George W. Bush's controversial and illegal program to use the National Security Agency to spy on Americans.

New revelations show Cheney was hip deep in developing the policy, often overruling the objections of Justice Department officials and blocking the promotion of one official who disagreed with him on the warrantless wiretapping program.

The same disclosures also show Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lied about his role in trying to get approval of the program from previous Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Writes Dan Eggen of The Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

The disclosures also provide further details about the role played by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. He visited Ashcroft in his hospital room and wrote an internal memorandum on the surveillance program shortly afterward, according to Comey's responses. Gonzales is now the attorney general. He faces possible congressional votes of no-confidence because of his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 09:37 AM

Bush Receives Hero's Welcome in Albania

By JENNIFER LOVEN Monday, June 11, 2007 AP

TIRANA, Albania - President Bush, enthusiastically welcomed as the first U.S. president in this former communist nation, served notice Sunday he is running out of patience with Russia's objections to independence for neighboring Kosovo.
    "Sooner rather than later you've got to say `Enough's enough _ Kosovo is independent,'" Bush said, telling Albanians what they wanted to hear. He said independence was a certainty.
    Nearing the end of an eight-day trip, Bush got a hero's reception in this desperately poor country, still struggling to recover from being cut off from the rest of the world for four decades under the harsh rule of dictator Enver Hoxha. Hoxha died in 1985, and Albania emerged from isolation in 1990 but still is one of Europe's most impoverished lands.
    Cannons boomed salutes from mountains overlooking the capital. Huge banners proclaimed "Proud to be Partners," and billboards read "President Bush in Albania Making History."
    At home, Bush's job approval rating stands at its all-time low. But here, Prime Minister Sali Berisha said Bush was Albania's "greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times."
    Throngs of people grasped Bush's hands, arms and fingers on the streets of Fushe Kruje, a small town near the airport where he stopped to chat in a cafe with business owners. Unused to such adoring crowds in America, Bush reveled in the attention. He kissed women on the cheek, posed for pictures and signed autographs. Someone reached out and rubbed his gray hair.
    "Bushie, Bushie," people shouted. Some of the business people have received small loans under U.S. government programs.
    The scene was uncharacteristically wild for a presidential crowd. Bush spokesman Dana Perino said later that the Secret Service assured Bush's safety, as always. "If they didn't think the president was safe, obviously they wouldn't have put him in that position," she said.
    While the United States supports Albania's bid for membership in NATO, Bush said this country still has to make more political and military reforms and crack down on corruption and organized crime.
    "We are determined to take any decision, pass any law and undertake any reform to make Albania appropriate to receive the invitation" to join the western military alliance, Berisha said at a news conference with Bush.
    Albania has eagerly embraced democracy and idolizes the United States. Three stamps have been issued featuring Bush's picture and the Statue of Liberty, and the street in front of parliament has been renamed in his honor.
    The president spent just eight hours here and then flew to Bulgaria, another Cold War Soviet ally turned pro-American. The two stops gave an upbeat ending to Bush's six-country trip after big protests earlier in Rome and at the summit of industrialized nations in Heiligendamm, Germany.
    Kosovo has been run by the United Nations and NATO since 1999, when Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's forces were ousted after a NATO air war ended his crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population.
    The U.N. Security Council has been divided over Kosovo's independence. The United States and key European countries support Kosovo's statehood while Russia, traditionally a Serbian ally, opposes it. Moscow says it would set a dangerous precedent for other breakaway regions.
    Bush said diplomats from the United States, Russia and European Union will try to find common ground on a formula for independence.
    "But if it's apparent that that's not going to happen in a relatively quick period of time, in my judgment, we need to put forward the (U.N.) resolution," Bush said. "Hence, deadline." He did not specify a date.
    Negotiations must result in "certain independence," Bush said. "That's what's important to know."
    Bush said the summit in Heiligendamm had tried to determine whether there was a way to make Kosovo independence acceptable to Russia. French President Nicolas Sarkozy unexpectedly called for a delay on the issue, and the summit failed to reach agreement.
    Bush urged Albania to help maintain peace and calm in Kosovo as the independence talks move forward.
    Predominantly Muslim, Albania has 140 troops in Afghanistan and about 120 troops in Iraq _ a presence that President Alfred Moisiu says will not end as long as the Americans are engaged there. Bush met here with some of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    "Albanians know the horror of tyranny," the president said. "And so they're working to bring the hope of freedom to people who haven't known it. And that's a noble effort and a sacrifice."
In saluting Albania's democracy, Bush praised it as a country that has "cast off the shackles of a very oppressive society and is now showing the world what's possible." During his visit, the president had lunch with the prime ministers of Albania, Macedonia and Croatia, which hope to join NATO.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 11:29 AM

This is wonderful!! Finally, a place he will be welcome. Just wjat we were looking for.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 12:31 PM

The Huffington Post reports:

"Gingrich Forecasts GOP Losses in 2008
BEN EVANS | June 8, 2007 11:17 PM EST |


WASHINGTON — Republican Newt Gingrich, in a jab at President Bush, warned on Friday that the GOP will lose the White House and Congress in 2008 if the nominee is perceived as a continuation of the Bush presidency.

Addressing a conservative organization, the former House Speaker never mentioned the president by name, but his political point was clear.

"If the Republicans run a stand-pat presidential candidate who ends up being on defense for all of September and October and who is seen by the country as representing four more years, the fact is that Republicans are not going to" win, Gingrich told the American Enterprise Institute.

Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, is considering a White House run, with an announcement likely in the fall.

He has roundly criticized the Bush administration in recent interviews, describing the White House as dysfunctional and saying the president has driven the party into collapse. While he refrained from direct criticism Friday, he cited failures in Iraq, border security and the response to Hurricane Katrina as signs of a broken government.

His comments come just days after a Republican presidential debate in which GOP candidates criticized Bush over his handling of the Iraq war, his diplomatic style and his approach to immigration.

The biting words surprisingly have been uttered while the president is overseas attending an economic summit with other world leaders.

In the speech, Gingrich handicapped the current GOP field _ and the prospect of Fred Thompson joining the race.

He praised Rudy Giuliani's handling of crime as New York City mayor, saying that experience and his response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have propelled his candidacy. Gingrich contended that Giuliani's image on national security would offset his more liberal positions on social issues.

"In a world where a nuclear weapon could eliminate an American city in seconds, he has a very strong case," said Gingrich. "He has certainly done better so far than people would guess."

He said Sen. John McCain of Arizona has more to overcome, including explaining his positions on immigration and campaign finance regulation.

"If you were to handicap this race, he has the greatest challenge in a Republican primary," Gingrich said.

Thompson, the former Tennessee senator, is a "very formidable" candidate, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is a "very serious person who is working very hard," Gingrich said.

Gingrich, who helped shut down government over spending fights with the Clinton administration in the 1990s, said Republicans must offer a more dramatic platform for remaking government that focuses on private-sector innovation.

In a glimpse of what his candidacy might look like, he said he would shut down public schools that aren't performing and offer a $20 billion reward for the first private company that successfully completes a Mars mission.

"Somebody would be there and back about 40 percent of the way into the NASA process," he said.
..."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 10:10 AM

NY Times reports:

For years, President Bush has made the grandiose claim that the Congressional authorization to attack Afghanistan after 9/11 was a declaration of a "war on terror" that gave him the power to decide who the combatants are and throw them into military prisons forever.

Yesterday, in a powerful 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit utterly rejected the president's claims. The majority made clear how threatening the administration's policies are to the Constitution and the rule of law — and how far the administration has already gone down that treacherous road.

Mr. Bush, the majority said, does not claim these powers for dire emergencies but "maintains that the authority to order the military to seize and detain certain civilians is an inherent power of the presidency, which he and his successors may exercise as they please."

The prisoner in this case, a citizen of Qatar named Ali al-Marri, was living in the United States legally when he was arrested and charged with being an Al Qaeda terrorist. In 2003, Mr. Bush declared Mr. Marri an enemy combatant, took him from civilian authorities and threw him into a military brig where he remains today without charges being filed.

The court did not say Mr. Marri was innocent, nor that he must be set free. It said that the law does not give Mr. Bush the power to seize a civilian living in the United States and declare him to be an enemy combatant based on whatever definition he chooses to apply. If Mr. Marri is to be kept in prison, it said, he must be tried and convicted in a civilian court.

The ruling said the Constitution and numerous precedents made it clear that foreigners living legally in this country have the same right to due process as any American citizen. It found no merit in the president's claim that the Congressional approval of the use of military force in Afghanistan gave him authority to change that or that he has "the inherent authority" to do it on his own. Sanctioning that kind of authority "would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and for the country," the judges said
...This ruling is another strong argument for bringing Mr. Bush's detention camps under the rule of law. Congress can do that by repealing the odious Military Commissions Act of 2006, which endorsed Mr. Bush's twisted system of indefinite detentions, by closing Guantánamo Bay and by allowing the courts to sort out the prisoners — not according to the whims of one president with an obvious disdain for the balance of powers but by the rules of justice that have guided this nation for more than 200 years.

---

Mebbe there's hope yet!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 13 Jun 07 - 11:07 AM

Washington - Suspected Al Qaeda sleeper agent Ali Saleh al-Marri had been held for four years in military detention – with no indication from the US government when or how his imprisonment might end.

On the surface, his treatment seemed no different than any of the hundreds of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But Mr. Marri is confined in a military brig in the United States, not Cuba.

On Monday, that difference proved decisive in prompting a federal appeals court panel to reject what had been a sweeping argument by the Justice Department. Citing the recently enacted Military Commissions Act of 2006, government lawyers last fall said the law had stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Marri's case.

As a noncitizen who had been designated an enemy combatant, Marri had no right to test the legality of his indefinite detention through the usual habeas corpus process even though he was in the US under a valid student visa at the time of his arrest.

Legal scholars had highlighted the dire implications of the government's position. "Such a statutory construction would create an unprecedented and unconstitutional distinction between the rights of citizens and non-citizens and would permit the government to effectively 'disappear' non-citizens into legal black holes," wrote New York lawyer Paul Smith in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the Center for National Security Studies.

In its 86-page decision released on Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with that basic argument, rejecting the Bush administration's broad assertion that the courts had been stripped of jurisdiction. All three judges on the panel agreed that the Military Commissions Act did not undercut Marri's constitutional right to the protections of habeas corpus. As a person present on US soil he is entitled to such protection, the court said.

But the appeals court panel split, 2-to-1, on how other constitutional protections should apply to Marri. Judges Diana Gribbon Motz and Roger Gregory concluded that President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered Marri's indefinite detention as an enemy combatant. US District Judge Henry Hudson dissented to that portion of the ruling.

Specifically the majority judges said the president's actions were not authorized under Congress's 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda. In addition, they said the indefinite detention was not authorized under the president's inherent constitutional authority as commander in chief. ...
(Christian Science Monitor)

---

Unauthorized wrongful detention? Hmmmm.... could be a crime, no?


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 13 Jun 07 - 12:40 PM

In Albania:

I thank the president of Albania and his fellow Albinos for the warm reception I recieved yesterday. I got hundreds of hearty hand shakes in the crowd but now it seems I am missing my watch. Thats OK because we all know what time it is. ITs time to preempt every terrorist nation that threatens democracy around the world and let freedom reign.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 09:35 AM

The stolen watch was a rumor. His watch was not stolen.

However the Mayor of Baltimore had his watch stolen off of his wrist while riding in a car with the window down and his arm hanging out.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 09:40 AM

Neglect versus creed. (Christian Science spiritual healing vs. child neglect case)
From: The Economist (US) | Date: July 7, 1990 | More results for: Christian Science child neglect
See more articles from The Economist (US)

IN THE shadow of Christian Science's international headquarters in Boston, two of the church's members have been found guilty of the "involuntary manslaughter" of their young son. Before the verdict, which came on July 4th, the normally withdrawn sect had launched a publicity campaign to defend itself against what is saw as a latter-day witch-hunt.

At issue was a tragedy that struck David and Ginger Twitchell. Their 2 1/2-year-old son died in 1986 after a five-day illness, which was subsequently diagnosed as a bowel obstruction. Following a central tenet of the Christian ..."

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-9185027.html

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 09:41 AM

VI. History of the Massachusetts Religious Exemption Law



Sheridan Death - 1967

In 1967, five-year-old Lisa Sheridan of Cape Cod died of pneumonia. She had been seriously ill for three weeks and received no medical care. Her mother, a Christian Scientist, attempted to treat Lisa's illness solely by prayer. That same year the mother, Dorothy Sheridan, was convicted by a jury of involuntary manslaughter for failing to provide her daughter with sufficient medical care.

In his instruction to the jury in the Sheridan case, the judge referred to a section of the state's then existing child neglect law (Chapter 273, section 1) which set criminal misdemeanor penalties for any parent of a minor child who "…willfully fails to provide necessary and proper physical care." The judge ruled the phrase "proper physical care" to mean "medical attention."

Religious Exemption - 1971

In 1971, in an effort to eliminate any requirement under the child neglect law that Christian Science parents must provide their children with medical attention, the Christian Science Church successfully lobbied the Massachusetts legislature to pass the religious exemption law. The law added the following language to the child neglect law (Chapter 273, section 1):

    A child shall not be deemed to be neglected or lack proper physical care for the sole reason that he is being provided remedial treatment by spiritual means alone in accordance with the tenets and practice of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner thereof.

Twitchell Death - 1986

In 1986, another tragic and preventable death of a Christian Science child came to the attention of the Massachusetts public. In April of 1986, two-year-old Robyn Twitchell lay dying of a medically treatable bowel obstruction. His parents, as Christian Scientists, were attempting to overcome Robyn's illness solely by prayer. When Robyn did not improve, the worried parents sought guidance from a senior church official and lawyer, Nathan Talbot. Talbot referred the parents to a relevant section of a church publication, "Legal Rights and Obligations of Christian Scientists in Massachusetts," which stated that the religious exemption law:

    ...is a criminal statute and it expressly precludes imposition of criminal liability as a negligent parent for failure to provide medical care because of religious beliefs.

This language was taken directly from the 1976 Attorney General's Opinion regarding the meaning of the religious exemption law. Notice, however, that the opinion does not state that the parent is exempted from the crime of manslaughter should the child die due to lack of medical care.

The parents subsequently did not seek medical attention for Robyn who died within 48 hours...."

http://www.masskids.org/dbre/dbre_6.html

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 10:26 AM

Another Sorry Ascension

Published: June 14, 2007 -- New York Times editorial

It apparently wasn't enough for the Bush administration to pack the Department of Justice with political operatives. The White House has now nominated one of the most meddlesome of those partisans, Hans von Spakovsky, to a powerful post on the Federal Election Commission.

This is the agency charged with making sure elections are fair — an especially ludicrous perch for Mr. Spakovsky. As a voting-rights appointee in the Justice Department, he promoted Republican initiatives to crimp the ballot power of minorities and the poor who typically favor Democrats.

In one of his party missions, Mr. Spakovsky overrode the recommendations of the department's staff professionals and approved a regressive law in Georgia that required voters to provide photo identification. The law, a voter suppression tool worthy of the Jim Crow era, was later blocked by the courts. A former G.O.P. county chairman in Georgia, Mr. Spakovsky failed to recuse himself from such an obvious conflict of interest. He also pushed for department approval of Tom DeLay's Texas gerrymandering plan — the plan that the Supreme Court ruled violated the Voting Rights Act.

Feverish for the Republican edge, Mr. Spakovsky drove career lawyers from the Justice department and constantly parroted the (Karl) Rovian line that voter fraud is rampant, though studies have found otherwise. ....

---

More details on this round condemnation of blatant Bush administration corruption can be found in the full article.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 10:42 AM

"...This month six human rights groups listed 39 people they believe are secretly imprisoned in unknown locations by the United States as part of the war on terror.

President George W. Bush acknowledged last year that some individuals deemed particularly dangerous had been moved "to an environment where they can be held secretly." In effect, categorized as enemy combatants, they have been "disappeared."

This practice is unconscionable. It does not matter that the purpose of the disappearance is not murder, as it was in Argentina.

Once people disappear, every basic human right is at risk because every check, every balance, has gone with them. The worst becomes almost inevitable because there is nothing to stop it.

The United States demands accountability of others when its own people go missing. It must demand the same accountability of itself, whatever the fight.
..."

---

Dickey -- you seem to be posting random slices of internet news with no bearing on the topic of the thread. How do you explain this? Would you consider just posting on-topic views?


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 10:46 AM

It is now clear that most Republicans in the Senate place protection of one of their most incompetent party members over the good of the country. The once Grand Old Party is exposed once again as a travesty of what it once was.

We, the voters, will remember that fact next Election Day even if Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales can't seem to remember anything. Unfortunately, until the end of President Bush's term, the country will have to endure a dysfunctional Justice Department at a time when the demands of national security remain critical. It is a sad day for the Republican Party and yet another disgrace for America.

William B. Spillman Jr.
Floyd, Va., June 12, 2007

•

To the Editor:

I congratulate the seven Republicans who joined Democrats in voting to end debate and move to a no-confidence vote against Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

I find it repulsive that this administration stands behind a man who abused his power and lied to Congress and to the people.

But again, President Bush's support for Mr. Gonzales is a reflection of his own doing. I am wondering when and if I will ever see justice applied before 2008.

Monique Frugier
Ardmore, Pa., June 12, 2007

•

To the Editor:

I was troubled to learn that the attorney general is "not focusing on what the Senate is doing" but rather "focusing on what the American people expect" of him. We the American people elected senators to represent us, and we expect Alberto R. Gonzales to focus on what they do.

Edwin Everhart
Chapel Hill, N.C., June 12, 2007

•

To the Editor:

President Bush is quoted as saying, "They can have their votes of no confidence, but it's not going to make the determination about who serves in my government."

It appears that President Abraham Lincoln's fervent hope for government of the people, by the people and for the people is not happening in George W. Bush's "this is my government" world.

Janice L. Winchester
Seattle, June 12, 2007

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 01:50 PM

June 14, 2007 at 09:34:22

Up and Down the Bush Philosophy

by Walter Brasch    Page 1 of 1 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com

Every president has a political philosophy that guides him and, sometimes, the nation.


            George W. Bush believes he has divine inspiration to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it, and to make his subjects adhere to whatever beliefs he holds for the moment. His political philosophy is a chunk of swiss cheese that is being forced down the throats of a lactose-intolerant nation.



            During his first campaign for presidential office, he preached a doctrine against nation building and pre-emptive military strikes. But, within a year of his inaugural he was already planning to export his version of democracy to the world. Within two years, he had begun plans to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq and to create a "regime change." That "nation building" plan, however, has proven as strong as a bridge built by non-union labor working for a corrupt contractor.


            As the "commander-in-chief," which he is not hesitant to use on almost every occasion, he found out he could move billion dollar warships as easily as the toy boats and rubber duckies in his bathtub.


            George W. Bush, in attacking Bill Clinton for putting troops into Bosnia, demanded deadlines for withdrawal. But, for the war he created in Iraq, and which looks like the quagmire that became the Vietnam War, he has decided that deadlines were blueprints for failure, that "It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing."


            As president, George W. Bush pushed the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires extensive testing of students to see that they meet Republican-approved goals. Within months of the creation of the program, teachers were forced to "teach to the test," rather than to improve a student's education. Yet, President Bush becomes infuriated when critics suggest he has failed every test of success in Iraq, and defiantly tells a nation worn down by the cost of a failed foreign policy that it's impossible to measure success in war.


            When the majority of Americans declared, in poll after poll, they opposed the use of torture, even against al-Qaeda operatives, the commander-in-chief decided the majority didn't matter.


            He has disregarded the wishes of the people who believe in better health care for all Americans. Shortly after he took office, President Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyota Agreement, signed by 37 industrialized nations. His response was to gut the environment and, against the findings of an overwhelming majority of scientists, has not only claimed that global warming isn't a problem, but has suppressed the views of government scientists.


            In almost every campaign speech, even those after he was elected, he pontificates about fiscal responsibility, personal freedom, and less government in the lives of people. His fiscal irresponsibility has led to deficit spending and a national debt that our grandchildren will still be paying; he launched an extensive spy system against Americans, and believes there needs to be even more legislation—Constitutional amendments, specifically—to ban flag burning (an issue the Supreme Court has already dealt with) and same sex marriage.


            When the Republicans controlled Congress, the smirky President demanded that the senate adhere to an "up-or-down" vote on all of his appointees—a majority vote was all that should be needed to approve his candidates. His belief, echoed by the nation's elected Republicans and googles of conservative radio talk show hosts, opposed the entire history of the Senate that allows debate until 60 or more senators vote to end that debate. President Bush invoked that 'up-or-down" vote on the appointment of John Bolton, who had a long history of opposition to the United Nations, to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. President Bush demanded "up-or-down votes" in the Senate to approve his nominees to the federal courts, ambassadorships, and the cabinet. It's democracy, he bleated. Majority vote. Majority rules. Of course, he conveniently forgot that had he truly believed in majority vote, Al Gore would have been president.


            Nevertheless, after the Democrats took control of Congress, President Bush saw the light and decided that up-or-down votes didn't matter. The President's lieutenants blocked an up-or-down vote on the "surge" in Iraq. When the House voted 247–176 and the Senate voted 63–37to allow federal funding for stem cell research, the oh-so-moral President decided the majority and up-or-down votes didn't matter, and vetoed the proposed legislation.


            When Congress voted to require phased withdrawals from Iraq, President Bush vetoed that legislation. When the Senate, by 53–38, voted "No Confidence" in Attorney General Ambrose Gonzales, the President ignored the wishes of the majority; the "Decider-in-Chief" decided that he would continue to mismanage the country without judicial or Congressional advice or overview.


            To an audience at Tsinghua University, President Bush said that "life in America shows that liberty paired with law is not to be feared. In a free society, diversity is not disorder, debate is not strife, and dissent is not revolution." How his Administration created and enforced the USA PATRIOT Act; how he and his Administration have routinely and maliciously suppressed the rights of dissent, linking dissent to treason; and how he and his Administration have consistently shown the disregard for to Bill of Rights puts the lie to what he told Chinese students was his philosophy of government.

             In forming the Constitution, this nation's Founding Fathers rejected the concept of the divine right of kings. It's doubtful the President has read the Constitution. Perhaps if he had, his philosophy, like swiss cheese, would not be so full of holes, and he might not be so cavalier in thinking he has divine wisdom to shred that document as easily as one shreds a pound of cheese.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jun 07 - 05:25 PM

editorial | posted May 24, 2007 (June 11, 2007 issue)
Sick Justice


The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey's foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller's startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens's being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.

The histrionics of that night, recounted by Comey to the Senate Judiciary Committee after three years, further erode Alberto Gonzales's already fatally compromised capacity to run the Justice Department. And they expose an internal Administration conflict between hyper-politicized operatives like Card, Gonzales and Karl Rove and Justice professionals like Comey--Bush appointees who nonetheless understood that their oath was to the Constitution. But there is also a risk that the drama of this good guys/bad guys confrontation--with Comey protecting his boss the way Michael Corleone took it on the chin for the Don at that lonely, dark hospital in The Godfather--is obscuring the real story: just how many ways the Bush Administration was finding to break the law, and just how high the chain of complicity ran..."


From The Nation

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 15 Jun 07 - 12:44 AM

Amos:

You are a flagrant violator of the one screen rule. Your fanaticism is a manifestation of your OCD.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jun 07 - 03:09 AM

I'm sorry, Dickey. I don't think you know what you are talking about. I am neither obsessive nor compulsive.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 15 Jun 07 - 10:49 AM

That's what they all say.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jun 07 - 11:16 PM

From CNN:

Report: White House aides used GOP e-mail to skirt law

POSTED: 7:37 p.m. EDT, June 18, 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House aides with Republican Party accounts, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee reported Monday.

The White House says the accounts were set up to keep political work separate from official business, but investigators concluded White House officials used the accounts to conduct official business in a way that circumvented the Watergate-era Presidential Records Act.

The 37 accounts the Republican National Committee did save include nearly 675,000 individual messages -- more than 140,000 of them from Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser.

"Whether intentionally or inadvertently, it appears that the RNC has destroyed a large volume of the e-mails of White House officials who used RNC e-mail accounts," the report states.

The committee found 88 officials who held GOP e-mail accounts; the White House had acknowledged 50.

In a deposition given to committee aides, former Rove deputy Susan Ralston listed a series of White House officials who used party accounts daily. But the RNC "has not retained a single e-mail to or from any of these officials," the report states.

Ralston testified that Ken Mehlman, former director of political affairs, used his account daily, but the RNC has no e-mail records for him.

Additionally, "there are major gaps in the e-mail records of the 37 White House officials for whom the RNC did preserve e-mails," the report states.

The committee, led by California Democrat Henry Waxman, began looking into the GOP e-mail accounts after messages from the accounts turned up in two cases -- the case of imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the 2006 firings of eight U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department.

The committee found that although then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered presidential staff to preserve official e-mails from outside accounts, he failed to enforce that policy.

Ralston told investigators that Gonzales, now attorney general, knew Rove was using his party e-mail account for official business, "but took no action to preserve Mr. Rove's official communications," the report states.

GOP spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said the report "jumped the gun and appears to be representing Democrats' partisan spin as fact."

"Not only have we been clear that we are continuing our efforts to search for e-mails, but there is no basis for an assumption that any e-mail not already found would be of an official nature," Schmitt said in a statement issued Monday afternoon.

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to comment on the report's specifics, but said separate accounts were set up under the Clinton administration to comply with the federal Hatch Act, which bars the use of federal resources for partisan political activity. Snow said e-mail sent to or from a White House e-mail account was automatically archived.

He said White House officials are willing to cooperate with congressional investigators, but he added, "We have seen a number of times right now where people have been putting together investigations to see what sticks."

"This is an administration that is very careful about obeying the law. We take it seriously. The White House legal counsel's office takes it seriously."

The committee also accused Bush's 2004 re-election campaign of failing to cooperate with the House investigation. Monday's report said the campaign acknowledged that at least 11 White House officials used campaign e-mail accounts, but said the organization refuses to identify all of them or provide "basic statistical information."

"This recalcitrance is an unwarranted obstacle to the committee's inquiry into potential violations of the Presidential Records Act," the report states, warning that it could subpoena campaign officials for the records.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 19 Jun 07 - 10:38 AM

From the Washington Post:

The Runaway Train That Hit Scooter Libby
__

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 19, 2007; Page A17

The attorney general called a meeting. He assembled all the U.S. attorneys in the Great Hall of the Justice Department and told them, in essence, that their chief responsibility was to decide whom not to prosecute. They should limit themselves to cases "in which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest" and play no role in political vendettas. The speaker, of course, was not the lamentable Alberto Gonzales but the estimable Robert H. Jackson, who went on to the Supreme Court. This was 1940, but Jackson could have been talking to Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Whatever the case, the special counsel was not listening.

With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker -- Richard Armitage of the State Department -- but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.

The upshot was a train wreck -- mile after mile of shame, infamy, embarrassment and occasional farce, all of it described in the forthcoming "Off the Record," a vigorously written account of what went wrong, by Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.'s former editor in chief. The special counsel used the immense power of the government to jail Judith Miller and to compel other journalists, including Time's Matt Cooper, to suspend their various and sacred vows of silence just so they could, understandably, avoid jail. The press held itself up to mockery, wantonly promising confidentiality, anonymity -- what's the diff, anyway? -- and virtual life after death to anyone with a piece of gossip to peddle. Much heroic braying turned into cries for mercy as the government bore down. As any prosecutor knows -- and Martha Stewart can attest -- white-collar types tend to have a morbid fear of jail.

As Fitzgerald worked his wonders, threatening jail and going after government gossips with splendid pluck, many opponents of the Iraq war cheered. They thought -- if "thought" can be used in this context -- that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something. For some odd reason, the same people who were so appalled about government snooping, the USA Patriot Act and other such threats to civil liberties cheered as the special prosecutor weed-whacked the press, jailed a reporter and now will send a previously obscure government official to prison for 30 months.

This is precisely the sort of investigation that Jackson was warning about. It would not have been conducted if, say, the Iraq war had ended with 300 deaths and the mission had really been accomplished. An unpopular war produced the popular cry for scalps and, in Libby's case, the additional demand that he express contrition -- a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement. No one has yet explained, though, how Libby can express contrition and still appeal his conviction. No matter. Antiwar sanctimony excuses the inexplicable.

Accountability is one thing. By all means, let Congress investigate and conduct oversight hearings with relish and abandon. But a prosecution is a different matter. It entails the government at its most coercive -- a power so immense and sometimes so secretive that it poses much more of a threat to civil liberties, including freedom of the press, than anything in the interstices of the scary Patriot Act. The mere arrival of a form letter from the IRS will give any sane person a touch of angina.

I don't expect George Bush to appreciate this. He is the privileged son of a privileged son, and he fears nothing except, probably, doubt. But the rest of us ought to consider what Fitzgerald has wrought and whether we are better off for his efforts. I have come to hate the war and I cannot approve of lying under oath -- not by Scooter, not by Bill Clinton, not by anybody. But the underlying crime is absent, the sentence is excessive and the investigation should not have been conducted in the first place. This is a mess. Should Libby be pardoned? Maybe. Should his sentence be commuted? Definitely.

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 12:22 AM

SEATTLE (AP) - Washington's two U.S. senators are criticizing President Bush's veto on Thursday of a bill that would have eased restraints on federally funded research on embryonic stem cells.

Senator Patty Murray said Bush's action "vetoed the hope of millions of Americans" for research that could lead to disease cures.

And Senator Maria Cantwell said she will work with others in Congress to try to override the veto. She said the legislation was passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress.

Both Murray and Cantwell are Democrats.

Bush, a Republican, said he vetoed the stem cell research bill to prevent the country from crossing a moral boundary. He ordered federal health officials to promote other research into cells that could lead to developing cures.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 09:22 AM

A Chinese Cardinal Meets the Real Bush

By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, June 21, 2007; Page A23

On May 31, President Bush met for 35 minutes in the private living quarters of the White House with Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Hong Kong, in an event that was not announced and did not appear on his official schedule. Their meeting did not please the State Department, elements of the Catholic hierarchy and certainly not the Chinese government. But it signifies what George W. Bush is really about.

In Hong Kong, Zen enjoys more freedom to speak out than do his fellow bishops in China proper, and he has become known as the spiritual voice of China's beleaguered democracy movement. Since Hong Kong was handed over to Beijing by the British government in 1997, he has increasingly called for both religious freedom and democracy in China. Consequently, the China desk at the State Department in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing contended that, for the sake of Sino-American relations, it would be a bad idea for the president to invite the cardinal. So did some of Zen's fellow cardinals.

So, why did the president invite him? The fact that no news of the session leaked out for two weeks indicates that this was no political stunt to revive Bush's anemic poll ratings. The president got divided counsel from his advisers regarding the impact the meeting would have on China's rulers. As he nears the end of a troubled presidency, Bush as a man of faith places the plight of the religious in unfree countries at the top of his agenda.

Pope Benedict's decision last year to place the red hat of a cardinal on Joseph Zen Ze-kiun at age 74 was not popular among advocates of a negotiated settlement between the Vatican and the Chinese government. For the past decade, Zen has been an increasingly vigorous and even strident advocate of democracy for China.

The suggestion that Zen conclude his three-week visit to 14 North American cities with a meeting in the White House came from presidential speechwriter Bill McGurn. One of the most conservative White House aides, McGurn had become acquainted with and impressed by Zen during his time as editorial page editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review.

McGurn's advice did not please the State Department, which contacted the politically well-connected Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington. According to Hong Kong sources, McCarrick advised that it might be better if the U.S. government worked through the regular Vatican diplomatic corps.

Clark T. Randt Jr., the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, also weighed in against a Bush-Zen meeting. Randt is an old China hand who has spent 30 years in Asia as a lawyer-businessman and is fluent in Mandarin. He is referred to as "Ambassador Squish" by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Randt is also a good friend of the president, dating to their days at Yale.

But more important to Bush than advice from a college chum is what he believes, as the difficult days of what has been an unpopular presidency dwindle. He met in Washington last year with dissident "House Christians" from China. Speaking in Prague, a week after his talk with Zen, Bush affirmed his position on the side of religious dissidents everywhere: "Freedom is the design of our Maker, and the longing of every soul."

In a city abounding in leaks, I first learned on June 13 about the cardinal's visit to the White House via a circuitous route, from an American Catholic layman. That same day, Raymond Arroyo of the Eternal Word Television Network, acclaimed reporter of Catholic news, made public that the meeting took place.

Bush asked Zen whether he was the "bishop of all China." Replying that his diocese was just Hong Kong, Zen told Bush of the plight of Catholics in China, including five imprisoned bishops. The cardinal is reported by sources close to him to have left the White House energized and inspired. George W. Bush is at a low point among his fellow citizens, but he is still a major figure for Catholics in China who look to him as a clarion of freedom.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 01:25 PM

Bush lauded for stance on faith, war, stem cells

June 21, 2007

I have written to President Bush not only to express my personal feeling of appreciation for his bold stand of faith in godly values during his presidency, but for his bold stand on the war in Iraq, as well.

My son is about to be deployed to Iraq for the first time as an Army medic. He is currently stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. He will be leaving his wife and 2-year-old son while he serves. His wife will give birth to their second son during his 15-month tour in Iraq.

I am proud of my son's willingness to fight for our country's freedom and to put his life on the line for not only our freedom, but for the freedom of Iraqi people, as well.

The president's recent decision to veto the current bill to legalize the killing of thousands of embryos (babies) for the purpose of stem-cell research was the clearest and boldest stand any president in history has ever taken in support for human life.

I salute Mr. Bush for standing firm in the face of tyranny and evil in this world.

-- Leon R. Wyatt, Salem

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 21 Jun 07 - 05:06 PM

Pity thoser things aren't true -- if they were, I'd be proud of him too. But invading Iraq was not about freedom, and vetoing stem-cells has nothign to do with killing babies. It's really easy to puff up your chest in respose to knee jerk PR, smoke and mirrors. Sometimes the realities don't match up.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 01:35 AM

What is your opinion on stem cell research Amos?

I mean except as a political bludgeon for you to use?

Do embroyonic stem cells do anything that adult stem cells won't do?

Are there any restrictions on embroyonic stem cell research anywhere in the world?

Have any medical treatments been obtained from embroyonic stem cell research?

Have any medical treatments been obtained from adult stem cell research?

Is there any advantage to using embroyonic stem cells when adult stem cells are genetically identical and not rejected by the host.

So which line of research is most likely to produce results and why should the government piss away my money on the less productive line of research?

Here's a hint:

Adult Stem Cell treatments:
        Cancers:
   1. Brain Cancer
   2. Retinoblastoma
   3. Ovarian Cancer
   4. Skin Cancer: Merkel Cell Carcinoma
   5. Testicular Cancer
   6. Tumors abdominal organs Lymphoma
   7. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
   8. Hodgkin's Lymphoma
   9. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia
10. Acute Myelogenous Leukemia
11. Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia
12. Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia
13. Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia
14. Cancer of the lymph nodes: Angioimmunoblastic Lymphadenopathy
15. Multiple Myeloma
16. Myelodysplasia
17. Breast Cancer
18. Neuroblastoma
19. Renal Cell Carcinoma
20. Various Solid Tumors
21. Soft Tissue Sarcoma
22. Ewing's Sarcoma
23. Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia
24. Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis
25. POEMS syndrome
26. Myelofibrosis

      Auto-Immune Diseases
27. Diabetes Type I (Juvenile)
28. Systemic Lupus
29. Sjogren's Syndrome
30. Myasthenia
31. Autoimmune Cytopenia
32. Scleromyxedema
33. Scleroderma
34. Crohn's Disease
35. Behcet's Disease
36. Rheumatoid Arthritis
37. Juvenile Arthritis
38. Multiple Sclerosis
39. Polychondritis
40. Systemic Vasculitis
41. Alopecia Universalis
42. Buerger's Disease
      Cardiovascular
43. Acute Heart Damage
44. Chronic Coronary Artery Disease
      Ocular
45. Corneal regeneration
      Immunodeficiencies
46. Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome
47. X-linked Lymphoproliferative Syndrome
48. X-linked Hyper immunoglobulin M Syndrome
      Neural Degenerative Diseases and Injuries
49. Parkinson's Disease
50. Spinal Cord Injury
51. Stroke Damage

      Anemias and Other Blood Conditions
52. Sickle Cell Anemia
53. Sideroblastic Anemia
54. Aplastic Anemia
55. Red Cell Aplasia
56. Amegakaryocytic Thrombocytopenia
57. Thalassemia
58. Primary Amyloidosis
59. Diamond Blackfan Anemia
60. Fanconi's Anemia
61. Chronic Epstein-Barr Infection

      Wounds and Injuries
62. Limb Gangrene
63. Surface Wound Healing
64. Jawbone Replacement
65. Skull Bone Repair

      Other Metabolic Disorders
66. Hurler's Syndrome
67. Osteogenesis Imperfecta
68. Krabbe Leukodystrophy
69. Osteopetrosis
70. Cerebral X-Linked Adrenoleukodystrophy

      Liver Disease
71. Chronic Liver Failure
72. Liver Cirrhosis

      Bladder Disease
73. End-Stage Bladder Disease

        
Embryonic Stem Cell treatments: NONE

The only success in embryonic stem cell research turned out to be a fraud.

Go go ahead your PHDship and tell us why Embryonic Stem Cell research is an absolute must rather than a cruel hoax and a political tool.

John Edwards political campaign promise 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 10:55 AM

Interesting logic. By this rationale the steam engine should be heavily invested in, rather than low-temperature fusion,for example, because so much more has been acheived using steam.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 11:12 AM

Don't Veto, Don't Obey
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Published: June 22, 2007
President Bush is notorious for issuing statements taking exception to hundreds of bills as he signs them. This week, we learned that in a shocking number of cases, the Bush administration has refused to enact those laws. Congress should use its powers to insist that its laws are obeyed.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, investigated 19 provisions to which Mr. Bush objected. It found that six of them, or nearly a third, have not been implemented as the law requires. The G.A.O. did not investigate some of the most infamous signing statements, like the challenge to a ban on torture. But the ones it looked into are disturbing enough.

In one case, Congress directed the Pentagon in its 2007 budget request to account separately for the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a perfectly appropriate request, but Mr. Bush issued a signing statement critical of the rule, and the Pentagon withheld the information. In two other cases, federal agencies ignored laws requiring them to get permission from Congressional committees before taking particular actions.

The Bush administration's disregard for these laws is part of its extraordinary theory of the "unitary executive." The administration asserts that the president has the sole authority to supervise and direct executive officers, and that Congress and the courts cannot interfere. This theory, which has no support in American history or the Constitution, is a formula for autocracy.

Other presidents have issued signing statements, but none has issued as many, or done so with the same contemptuous attitude toward the co-equal branches of government. The G.A.O. report makes clear that Mr. Bush's signing statements were virtually written instructions to executive agencies to flout acts of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, has said that the report shows that Mr. Bush "is constantly grabbing for more power" and trying to push Congress "to the sidelines."

Members of Congress have a variety of methods available to make the administration obey the law. They should call the agency heads up to Capitol Hill to explain their intransigence. And they should use the power of the purse, the authority the founders wisely vested in the people's branch, as a check on a runaway executive branch.

When the Bush presidency ends, there will be a great deal of damage to repair, much of it to the Constitutional system. Congress should begin now to restore the principle that even the president and those who work for him are not above the law.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 01:19 PM

Amos:

I see no answers. Just your standard pseudo intellectual denial of facts as if Spock raised his eyebrows and said "fascinating".

Adult stem cell research is not analogous to a steam engine and embryonic stem cell research is not analogous to low-temperature fusion.

There is a world of difference but your vast, feigned, inteligence can bring the two together somehow and claim it is logic.

Which line of research shows the most promise?

What is the advantage, if any, of embryonic over adult stem cell research?

A super logical person like yourself must know the answer.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 01:33 PM

Dickey:

I think you missed the analogy I made completely. The reason for the similarity is that one technology has been extensively researched, the other less so. But I have to be honest with you -- I am not an expert! :D I was, for example, under the impression that adult stem cells, if there is such a thing in humans, do not have the adaptability of pre-natal stem cells to become anything needed. But in any case, mixing it up with baby-life is just melodramatic. There are millions of these cells going down the drain all over the country all the time, just in the ordinary course of life.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 01:59 PM

Amos:

This point up something I have been trying to get across. People foment about something they know nothing about just for political purposes to try to paint the opposition as evil as stupid as possible. They use something they really don't dissagree with or something they really have not examined to see if it is good or bad, as a wedge issue.

If you read up on stem cell research, you might come to the same conclusion as I did, that the newest findings about adult stem cells are just as encouraging as embroyonic stem cells plus they are geneticaly identical to the recipient and will not be rejected.

The destruction of eggs is not of my concern but it is uf concern to others and if possible, we should give consideration to others instead of deliberately creating a battle. Tht is unless a battle is what you want instead of a cure.

It is my opinion the the promotion of embryonic stem cell research is a political tool to divide America into two groups and to try to get one group as large as possible in order to win some election or other. It is not based on trying to find a cure.

The Crips and the Bloods at work.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 05:47 PM

Cheney just declared he is immune from any law to do with executive accountabliity since he presides over the Senate in case of a tie vote...ergo he is in the legislative branch and not the executive.

How cool is that?
Its never been done before in the history of the US.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 07:37 PM

It must take a very special politician indeed to declare with a straight face that the V.P. is not part of the executive branch because he has a secondary role over on the Hill; this is rampant meretricious legalism at its very best, the kind of mind that deserves a well-paid position managing debtor collections for a neighborhood grocery.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Bobert
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 08:53 PM

Well, gol danged, Donuel....

If Cheney had to release what every VP has had to release then we'd know a couple things for sure and they are that:

1.) The 2002 Energy Policy was written buy the oil industry and...

2.) That Cheney spent an inordinate amount of time at the CIA during the mad-dash-to-Iraq...

Now if I were Cheney, given Iraq and $3.00 a gallon gas, I'd be Hell-bent on hiding my contacts, too...

But this idea that the VP isn't part of the executive branch of governemnt is lame, lame, lame...

Maybe Cheney needs to go back and take 11th grade "US Government"... I learned it there, as did most of the folks here and it ain't friggin' rocket surgery...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 22 Jun 07 - 11:35 PM

Bush claims excemption from his oversight order
By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer
7:44 PM PDT, June 22, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is exempt from a presidential order requiring government agencies that handle classified national security information to submit to oversight by an independent federal watchdog.

The executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 covers all government agencies that are part of the executive branch and, although it doesn't specifically say so, was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.

The issue flared up Thursday when Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., criticized Cheney for refusing to file annual reports with the National Archives and Records Administration, spelling out how his office handles classified documents, or to submit to an inspection by the archives' Information Security Oversight Office.

The archives, a federal agency, has been pressing the vice president's office to cooperate with its oversight efforts for the past several years, contending that by not doing so, Cheney and his staff have created a potential national security risk.

Bush issued the directive in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way of ensuring that the nation's secrets would not be mishandled, made public, or improperly declassified.

The order aimed to create a uniform, government-wide security system for classifying, declassifying and safeguarding national security information. It gave the archives' oversight unit responsibility for evaluating the effectiveness of each agency's security classification programs. It applied only to the executive branch of government, mostly agencies led by Bush administration appointees, as opposed to legislative offices such as Congress and judicial offices, including the courts.

In the executive order, Bush stressed the importance of the public's right to know what its government was doing, particularly in the global campaign against terrorism. "Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government," the executive order said.

But from the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in an interview Friday. Cheney's office filed the reports in 2001 and 2002 -- as did his predecessor, Al Gore -- but stopped in 2003.

As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much information the president's and vice president's offices are classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office cannot conduct inspections of the executive offices of the president and vice president to see if they have safeguards in place to protect the classified information they handle and to properly declassify information when required.

Those two offices have access to the most highly classified information in all of government, including intelligence gathered against terrorists and unfriendly foreign countries.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 23 Jun 07 - 12:18 AM

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

    For Immediate Release         
    April 17, 1995

EXECUTIVE ORDER #12958

"Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government. Also, our Nation's progress depends on the free flow of information. Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national interest has required that certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, and our participation within the community of nations. Protecting information critical to our Nation's security remains a priority."

    CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION This order prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information. Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government. Also, our Nation's progress depends on the free flow of information. Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national interest has required that certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, and our participation within the community of nations. Protecting information critical to our Nation's security remains a priority. In recent years, however, dramatic changes have altered, although not eliminated, the national security threats that we confront. These changes provide a greater opportunity to emphasize our commitment to open Government.

    NOW, THEREFORE, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

    PART 1 ORIGINAL CLASSIFICATION
    PART 2 DERIVATIVE CLASSIFICATION
    PART 3 DECLASSIFICATION AND DOWNGRADING
    PART 4 SAFE GUARDING
    PART 5 IMPLEMENTATION AND REVIEW
    PART 6 GENERAL PROVISIONS

    WILLIAM J. CLINTON
    THE WHITE HOUSE
    April 17, 1995

On December 31 at midnight, hundreds of millions of pages of secret government documents were automatically declassified — the result of President Bush's Executive Order on Declassification, which covers all national security documents 25 years old or older.

They included 270 million pages of FBI files, according to the New York Times, covering, among other topics, the civil rights movement, 1960s anti-war protests and organized crime up to 1981. In all of American history, there has never been anything like this avalanche of information.

Automatic declassification is a wonderful idea. "Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government" — that's what President Clinton wrote when he ordered 25-year automatic declassification in 1995. The target date for compliance was extended several times, but then, in 2003, Bush surprised his critics by setting a firm deadline. Over the years, some documents were released in anticipation of the deadline.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 23 Jun 07 - 12:22 AM

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release
March 25, 2003

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13292

- - - - - - -

FURTHER AMENDMENT TO EXECUTIVE ORDER 12958, AS AMENDED,
CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY INFORMATION
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to further amend Executive Order 12958, as amended, it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12958 is amended to read as follows:

Classified National Security Information

This order prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information, including information relating to defense against transnational terrorism. Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government. Also, our Nations progress depends on the free flow of information. Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national defense has required that certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, our homeland security, and our interactions with foreign nations. Protecting information critical to our Nations security remains a priority.

NOW, THEREFORE, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: (b) Under the direction of the Archivist, acting in consultation with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office shall:

      (1) develop directives for the implementation of this order;

      (2) oversee agency actions to ensure compliance with this order and its implementing directives;

      (3) review and approve agency implementing regulations and agency guides for systematic declassification review prior to their issuance by the agency;

      (4) have the authority to conduct on-site reviews of each agencys program established under this order, and to require of each agency those reports, information, and other cooperation that may be necessary to fulfill its responsibilities. If granting access to specific categories of classified information would pose an exceptional national security risk, the affected agency head or the senior agency official shall submit a written justification recommending the denial of access to the President through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs within 60 days of the request for access. Access shall be denied pending the response;

      (5) review requests for original classification authority from agencies or officials not granted original classification authority and, if deemed appropriate, recommend Presidential approval through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs;

      (6) consider and take action on complaints and suggestions from persons within or outside the Government with respect to the administration of the program established under this order;

      (7) have the authority to prescribe, after consultation with affected agencies, standardization of forms or procedures that will promote the implementation of the program established under this order;

      (8) report at least annually to the President on the implementation of this order; and

      (9) convene and chair interagency meetings to discuss matters pertaining to the program established by this order.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 23 Jun 07 - 08:59 AM

This Land Was My Land, in the New York Times, discusses the Bush administrations raping of the national forests and parks.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 07 - 12:40 AM

ASHINGTON, June 21—In an open letter to Vice President Cheney, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today revealed that the vice president is seeking to close down a branch of the National Archives charged with oversight of executive branch secrecy, The New York Times reports.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Ca.) posted his letter on the committee's website. The eight-page letter, accompanied by supporting documentation, described the vice president's resistance to routine oversight of his office over the last four years. According to the letter, the vice president first refused the Information Security Oversight Office's annual request for data regarding his staff's document-classification procedures in 2003. The following year, Mr. Cheney's office refused to allow regular on-site inspection of its records by the oversight office. Other executive branch agencies routinely submit to such inspections, whose purpose is simply to ensure that classified documents are properly labeled and stored.

The I.S.O.O. took issue with the vice president's secrecy and has appealed the matter to the Justice Department, where it is now pending. The Justice Department has confirmed the authenticity of the letter's allegations, according to The Times.

Executive Order 12958 assigns the National Archives to monitor documents classified by the executive branch. Mr. Cheney's office has attempted to circumvent the oversight process by noting that the Constitution vests the vice president with legislative duties in addition to his executive role. The vice president is president of the Senate.

Rep. Waxman rejected that argument as pretext. "He doesn't have classified information because of his legislative function," which is minimal, Mr. Waxman said. The vice president presides over impeachment trials and casts tiebreaking votes.

The letter added that the vice president's office has been responsible for several leaks of classified documents and "should take the efforts of the National Archives especially seriously." Mr. Waxman was alluding in particular to the now-infamous disclosure of undercover C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame's identity by several of Mr. Cheney's top aides. I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's former chief of staff, was recently convicted of federal crimes relating to the leak and is scheduled to begin serving a 30-month prison sentence soon.

Administration critics have long held that Plame's identity was revealed as retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a retired diplomat who debunked Bush administration assertions that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger. Strong circumstantial evidence, particularly the timing of the Plame leak, seem to support this interpretation.

That's why when Mr. Cheney—who already has a reputation for vindictive retaliation and a demonstrated aversion to governmental transparency—requested that the I.S.O.O. be stripped of its right to appeal to the attorney general, Rep. Waxman raised the alarm. The vice president's office has also reportedly suggested that the oversight unit be abolished altogether.

Of course, as the recent U.S. attorney scandal highlights, the Justice Department has become more politicized than ever under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and there is no guarantee that a censure will come of the allegations. "This matter is currently under review in the department," said a Department of Justice spokesman.

The routine nature of the document review refused by the vice president's office has led some observers to speculate that Mr. Cheney "doth protest too much" and may be stonewalling investigators. The vice president's office complied with similar requests in 2001 and 2002 before first refusing to cooperate in 2003, the year the United States invaded Iraq.

Vice President Cheney has a history of extreme secrecy dating back to the earliest days of the administration, when he drew fire for refusing to reveal the names of the energy industry executives with whom he consulted in drafting a federal energy policy. He later refused to testify under oath before the 9/11 Commission.

From here.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 07 - 12:22 PM

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do.

Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush's team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark.

That applies to big issues — like the C.I.A.'s secret prisons — and to things that would seem too small-bore to order up a cover-up.

Vice President Dick Cheney sets the gold standard, placing himself not just above Congress and the courts but above Mr. Bush himself. For the last four years, he has been defying a presidential order requiring executive branch agencies to account for the classified information they handle. When the agency that enforces this rule tried to do its job, Mr. Cheney proposed abolishing the agency.

Mr. Cheney, who has been at the heart of the administration's darkest episodes, has bizarre reasons for doing that. The Times reported that the vice president does not consider himself a mere member of the executive branch. No, he decided the vice president is also a lawmaker — because he is titular president of the Senate — and does not have to answer to the executive branch. That is absurd, but if that's how he wants it, we presume Mr. Cheney will stop claiming executive privilege to withhold information from his fellow congressmen.

...On June 14, The Washington Post reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation potentially broke the law or its own rules several thousand times over the past five years when it used the Patriot Act to snoop on domestic phone calls, e-mail and financial transactions of ordinary Americans.

We knew that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was not protecting anybody's rights or America's reputation. It turns out that John Rizzo, the man charged with safeguarding the Constitution at the Central Intelligence Agency, isn't either. After serving as the C.I.A.'s deputy general counsel or acting general counsel for the entire Bush administration, he was nominated as general counsel more than a year ago. But the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, would not schedule even a pro forma confirmation hearing because the Democrats wanted documents that the C.I.A. wanted to keep, well, secret.

Last week, the committee held that hearing under Democratic leadership, and Mr. Rizzo kept insisting that he shouldn't, couldn't, wouldn't give away any secrets. But he was still illuminating — in a scary way.

When he was asked his view of the administration's infamous decision to define torture so narrowly that it allowed widespread abuse of prisoners, he merely said the policy was "overbroad" for the circumstances, raising the troubling question of when he thinks it would not be overbroad to torture prisoners. Mr. Rizzo also refused to say whether the United States had ever sent a prisoner to another country knowing he would be tortured. He made it sound like he was safeguarding secrets, but we suspect the real reason was that the answer is "yes."

Meanwhile, Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and the rest of the administration are still stonewalling about the existence of C.I.A. prisons. Earlier this month, the Council of Europe, a 46-nation human rights group, provided new, persuasive evidence of secret American prisons in Eastern Europe where prisoners were kept naked in cramped cells, subjected to hot or freezing blasts of air and subjected to water-boarding, or simulated drowning. American rights groups released a list of 39 men they say disappeared into secret prisons.

Incredibly, the lies and secrecy shrouding this administration are not enough for Mr. Rizzo. Sounding an awful lot like Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, he told the senators, "Far too many people know far too much."

Governments have to keep secrets. But this administration has grossly abused that trust, routinely using claims of national security to hide policies that are immoral and almost certainly illegal, to avoid embarrassment, and to pursue Mr. Bush's dreams of an imperial presidency.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 07 - 12:27 PM

Y this late date we should know the fix is in when the White House's top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam's aluminum tubes. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq — the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America — had officially begun.


Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
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Barry Blitt
America wasn't paying close enough attention then. We can't afford to repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest custodians of the fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and our new ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two messages we'd be wise to heed.

The first was a confirmation of recent White House hints that the long-promised September pivot point for judging the success of the "surge" was inoperative. That deadline had been asserted as recently as April 24 by President Bush, who told Charlie Rose that September was when we'd have "a pretty good feel" whether his policy "made sense." On Sunday General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker each downgraded September to merely a "snapshot" of progress in Iraq. "Snapshot," of course, means "Never mind!"

The second message was more encoded and more ominous. Again using similar language, the two men said that in September they would explain what Mr. Crocker called "the consequences" and General Petraeus "the implications" of any alternative "courses of action" to their own course in Iraq. What this means in English is that when the September "snapshot" of the surge shows little change in the overall picture, the White House will say that "the consequences" of winding down the war would be even more disastrous: surrender, defeat, apocalypse now. So we must stay the surge. Like the war's rollout in 2002, the new propaganda offensive to extend and escalate the war will be exquisitely timed to both the anniversary of 9/11 and a high-stakes Congressional vote (the Pentagon appropriations bill).

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker wouldn't be sounding like the Bobbsey Twins and laying out this coordinated rhetorical groundwork were they not already anticipating the surge's failure. Both spoke on Sunday of how (in General Petraeus's variation on the theme) they had to "show that the Baghdad clock can indeed move a bit faster, so that you can put a bit of time back on the Washington clock." The very premise is nonsense. Yes, there is a Washington clock, tied to Republicans' desire to avoid another Democratic surge on Election Day 2008. But there is no Baghdad clock. It was blown up long ago and is being no more successfully reconstructed than anything else in Iraq.

When Mr. Bush announced his "new way forward" in January, he offered a bouquet of promises, all unfulfilled today. "Let the Iraqis lead" was the policy's first bullet point, but in the initial assault on insurgents now playing out so lethally in Diyala Province, Iraqi forces were kept out of the fighting altogether. They were added on Thursday: 500 Iraqis, following 2,500 Americans. The notion that these Shiite troops might "hold" this Sunni area once the Americans leave is an opium dream. We're already back fighting in Maysan, a province whose security was officially turned over to Iraqi authorities in April.

In his January prime-time speech announcing the surge, Mr. Bush also said that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced." More fiction. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's own political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, says it would take "a miracle" to pass the legislation America wants. Asked on Monday whether the Iraqi Parliament would stay in Baghdad this summer rather than hightail it to vacation, Tony Snow was stumped.

Like Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus, Mr. Snow is on script for trivializing September as judgment day for the surge, saying that by then we'll only "have a little bit of metric" to measure success. This administration has a peculiar metric system. On Thursday, Peter Pace, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the spike in American troop deaths last week the "wrong metric" for assessing the surge's progress. No doubt other metrics in official reports this month are worthless too, as far as the non-reality-based White House is concerned. The civilian casualty rate is at an all-time high; the April-May American death toll is a new two-month record; overall violence in Iraq is up; only 146 out of 457 Baghdad neighborhoods are secure; the number of internally displaced Iraqis has quadrupled since January.

Last week Iraq rose to No. 2 in Foreign Policy magazine's Failed State Index, barely nosing out Sudan. It might have made No. 1 if the Iraqi health ministry had not stopped providing a count of civilian casualties. Or if the Pentagon were not withholding statistics on the increase of attacks on the Green Zone. Apparently the White House is working overtime to ensure that the September "snapshot" of Iraq will be an underexposed blur. David Carr of The Times discovered that the severe Pentagon blackout on images of casualties now extends to memorials for the fallen in Iraq, even when a unit invites press coverage.

Americans and Iraqis know the truth anyway. The question now is: What will be the new new way forward? For the administration, the way forward will include, as always, attacks on its critics' patriotism. We got a particularly absurd taste of that this month when Harry Reid was slammed for calling General Pace incompetent and accusing General Petraeus of exaggerating progress on the ground.

General Pace's record speaks for itself; the administration declined to go to the mat in the Senate for his reappointment. As for General Petraeus, who recently spoke of "astonishing signs of normalcy" in Baghdad, he is nothing if not consistent. He first hyped "optimism" and "momentum" in Iraq in an op-ed article in September 2004.

Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false choices. We must either stay his disastrous course in eternal pursuit of "victory" or retreat to the apocalypse of "precipitous withdrawal." But by the latest of the president's ever-shifting definitions of victory, we've already lost. "Victory will come," he says, when Iraq "is stable enough to be able to be an ally in the war on terror and to govern itself and defend itself." The surge, which he advertised as providing "breathing space" for the Iraqi "unity" government to get its act together, is tipping that government into collapse. As Vali Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival," has said, the new American strategy of arming Sunni tribes is tantamount to saying the Iraqi government is irrelevant.

For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become "anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat," said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.

Precipitous withdrawal is also a chimera, since American manpower, materiel and bases, not to mention our new Vatican City-sized embassy, can't be drawn down overnight. The only real choice, as everyone knows, is an orderly plan for withdrawal that will best serve American interests. The real debate must be over what that plan is. That debate can't happen as long as the White House gets away with falsifying reality, sliming its opponents and sowing hyped fears of Armageddon. The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq will follow us home if we leave is as bogus as Saddam's mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that actually attacked us on 9/11 still remains under the tacit protection of our ally, Pakistan.

As General Odom says, the endgame will start "when a senior senator from the president's party says no," much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That's why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they're forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was "drifting sideways" and that action would have to be taken "if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function."...

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Uncle Boko
Date: 24 Jun 07 - 12:38 PM

I heard that bush sits on his watch so that he's always on time!

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 25 Jun 07 - 03:52 PM

Voting Rights Section, called the Ohio scheme "vote caging."

Acosta declined during the weekend to say whether Hans von Spakovsky, the division's voting counsel at the time, had any role in writing the letter. Von Spakovsky has been besieged with allegations of partisanship as he tries to win Senate confirmation to a full term on the Federal Election Commission.

Federal courts and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ultimately barred Republicans from posing the challenges in a frenzied legal battle that ran up to election eve.

The House Judiciary Committee plans soon to begin examining whether the Civil Rights Division took positions in support of a Republican agenda to suppress the votes of poor and elderly minorities who tend to vote for Democrats, said an aide to the panel who requested anonymity because the new line of inquiry has yet to be announced officially. It's not yet clear whether the examination will include vote caging.

The tactic entails sending mail stamped "do not forward" to voters' homes and requiring a return receipt. Voters who do not sign for the letters or postcards can then be challenged at the polls or in pre-election hearings on grounds such as whether they meet legal residency or age requirements.

J. Gerald Hebert, a head of the Voting Rights Section in the early 1990s and now executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, says the tactic is unfair for multiple reasons: it is often racially motivated; voters may be out of town or refuse to sign return receipts on letters from the GOP, and addresses may be inaccurate.

Rich said that challenges of caged voters have been stopped when brought to light before an election. The question is, he said, whether caging and subsequent challenges have occurred "and somebody didn't bring it to light."

The new Ohio law permitted challenges in 2004 but required political parties to list targeted voters in advance of the election. The Ohio Republican Party notified election authorities in the fall of 2004 that it planned to challenge more than 35,000 voters at the polls, a figure it later trimmed to 23,000.

Democrats sued in Cincinnati to block the challenges and before U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise in Newark, N.J., who had issued a consent decree barring the tactic in 1982 after finding the GOP illegally targeted minority voters in the state's gubernatorial race the previous year.

The Justice Department was not a party to either case. Nor did Judge Dlott solicit the federal government's views. But Acosta weighed in anyway.

Challenges, he wrote, "help strike a balance between ballot access and ballot integrity."

Republicans' use of caging has been a contentious issue ever since Debevoise's ruling 26 years ago. In 1986, the judge found that Louisiana Republicans had violated the consent decree. In 1990, another consent decree was issued after the Republican Party of North Carolina and the re-election campaign of Republican Sen. Jesse Helms sent 125,000 postcards to mostly black voters to compile a list of voters to challenge.

Nor was Ohio the only scene of an alleged GOP caging scheme in 2004. Former Republican National Committee and White House operative Tim Griffin has been dogged by allegations that he tried to cage mostly African-American voters in Jacksonville, Fla. Rich said that scheme became public before the election and Republicans did not pursue challenges.

Last week, Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island sought an internal Justice Department investigation into whether department officials knew about Griffin's alleged caging before he was named interim U.S. attorney for Arkansas. Griffin, who has denied any impropriety, resigned that post earlier this month.

....(From here).


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 26 Jun 07 - 07:07 AM

How the GOP Could Win

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; Page A21

There are two ways to predict the winner of the 2008 presidential race: Check the polls or read some history. The polls tell you that with George Bush's approval ratings abysmally low; with the war in Iraq becoming increasingly unpopular; with the GOP lacking a dominant candidate; and with the party divided over immigration, social issues and even religion ( Mitt Romney's Mormonism), the next president is bound to be a Democrat. History begs to differ.

The history I have in mind is 1972. By the end of that year, 56,844 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, a war that almost no one thought could still be won and that no one could quite figure out how to end. Nevertheless, the winner in that year's presidential election was Richard M. Nixon. He won 49 of 50 states -- and the war, of course, went on. Just as it is hard to understand how the British ousted Winston Churchill after he had led them to victory in Europe in World War II, so it may be hard now to appreciate how Nixon won such a landslide while presiding over such a dismal war. In the first place, he was the incumbent, with all its advantages and with enormous amounts of money at his disposal. In the second place, back then the Vietnam War was not as unpopular as you might think -- or, for that matter, as the Iraq war is now. In 1972, almost 60 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war.

Maybe more to the point, most Americans did not endorse the way the Democrats would handle the war -- nor the way the antiwar movement was behaving. Nixon seized on those sentiments and, in a feat that historians will be challenged to explain, characterized George McGovern as something of a sissy. In fact, the Democratic presidential nominee was a genuine World War II hero, a B-24 pilot with 35 combat missions under his belt and a Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest. Nixon, in contrast, had served during the war but never saw combat. He had, however, seen the polls.

This is similar to what happened in the 2004 campaign. The Bush-Cheney ticket consisted of two Vietnam slackers. George W. Bush had served in the Air National Guard, and Dick Cheney had obtained five draft deferments. Their opponent was the much-decorated John Kerry-- Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Yet during the campaign, the Republican ticket and its allies in the Swift boat veterans movement managed to paint Kerry as a quivering liar. The character attack was so bold, so outrageous, that it of course worked.

Now we come to the current race. The war in Iraq is not -- or not yet -- an issue for Republicans. With the exception of Ron Paul and, more recently, Jim Gilmore, they all more or less support the president. It is among the Democrats that the war is a divisive issue -- John Edwards sniping at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Obama sniping at Edwards and Clinton. Everyone now opposes the war, but the issue is not so much their positions as the intensity of their feelings. Antiwar Democrats in key primary and caucus states, particularly New Hampshire and Iowa, will not vote for a lukewarm antiwar candidate. This explains why Clinton recently reversed herself and voted to end funding for the war. The one Democratic presidential candidate from the Senate who did not was Joseph Biden. He said he opposed the war but saw no choice but to fund the troops.

Precisely right, Joe. But more than right, prescient as well. As if to suggest what an issue this will become, Rudolph Giuliani called Clinton and Obama's vote a "significant flip-flop." Since then the Republicans have mostly trained their fire on each other. You can bet, though, that if either candidate gets the nomination, this vote will be hung around Clinton or Obama's neck, and the hoariest of cliches will be trotted out: weak on defense. It will have added resonance for Clinton because she is a woman.

This is where history raises its ugly head. The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security. It is equally adept at saying so in the most scurrilous way. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001 -- the entirety of Giuliani's case for the presidency, after all.

Will history trump the polls? It will if, as in the past, the Democratic Party so wounds itself fighting the war against the war, it nominates a candidate beloved by a minority but mistrusted by a majority. It has happened before.

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 26 Jun 07 - 10:48 AM

Amos:

Are you so self righteous that you have immunity to the one screen rule?