Category: Issues of the Day

First published here a year ago today. He’s still driving.

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson in Dallas April 28:

“He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years,” Jackson said of the prospective contractor. “He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something … he said, ‘I have a problem with your president.’

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t like President Bush.’ I thought to myself, ‘Brother, you have a disconnect — the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn’t be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don’t tell the secretary.’

“He didn’t get the contract,” Jackson continued. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”

Dallas Business Journal

In case you don’t know, that kind of political favoritism in contracting is in fact illegal. And Secretary Jackson is bragging about it.

see how three presidents answered the question “what was the best moment of your presidency?”

to summarize:

carter: the camp david negotiations

clinton: the resolution of the kosovo crisis

bush: that time i caught a big fish on my ranch

y’know, as richard cranium says, bush is probably right. catching that fish probably was the best thing he’s done since he entered the oval office.

rubber hose: great moments in history

U.S. President George W. Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake.

“You know, I’ve experienced many great moments and it’s hard to name the best,” Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.

“I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake,” he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Bush said the worst moment was September 11 when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Reuters via Yahoo! News

Headline in The Washington Post:

Bush Calls U.S. a Nation of Prayer.

Well, he’s given us plenty to pray about.

If Americans are famous for our get up and go, that cannot be unconnected with the fact that we all descend from people who got up and came. Whether it was on a leaky, perpetually damp, terribly crowded little cockleshell of a ship like the Mayflower or in steerage in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century passenger ship, our ancestors decided to take control of their lives by taking a tremendous gamble: They gave up all they had ever known and loved in hopes of making a better life in the New World. Even the slaves, who of course had no choice in the matter, survived an ordeal that is quite beyond modern comprehension and passed that strength on to their descendants.

Historian John Steele Gordon

The right wing is up in arms over a new version of the Star-Spangled Banner written in Spanish. Last week President Bush stated that “the national anthem ought to be sung in English.” Yesterday Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a resolution requiring the Star-Spangled banner to be sung only in English:

That flag and that song are a part of our history and our national identity. … That’s why in 1931 Congress declared the Star-Spangled Banner our national anthem. That’s why we should always sing it in our common language, English.

In his press release, Alexander said the Star-Spangled Banner has “never before…been rendered in another language.”

But in 1919, the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned a Spanish-language version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The State Department’s website also features four-separate versions of the anthem in Spanish.

Think Progress

Being ignorant themselves, the xenophobes would rather argue about “an official language” than encourage a translation that might assist newcomers in learning the ideas as well as the music (?) of the Star Spangled Banner.

Update: Though Bush says he is opposed to Spanish now, according to Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty, during the 2000 presidential campaign “… When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, he would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parties, sometimes joining in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish….”

Out of many, one.

Photo by Nam Y. Huh / AP

The Boston Globe has a lengthy report on the President’s claiming “the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ”signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Owning marijuana, cocaine and even heroin will no longer be a crime in Mexico if the drugs are carried in small amounts for personal use, under legislation passed by the Congress.

Police will not penalise people for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin or 500 milligrams of cocaine, under a bill passed by senators late on Thursday and earlier approved by the lower house.

Yahoo! News

As ranked by a panel of 38 “distinguished public policy experts” for Human Events.

1. Social Security
2. Medicare
3. Income Tax Withholding
4. McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform)
5. Contraceptive Funding (tie)
6. Farm Subsidies (tie)
7. Medicaid
8. Affirmative Action
9. Earmarking (program funds for specific Congressional districts)
10. Davis-Bacon (prevailing wage for federal contracts)

NewMexiKen is considering a survey to identify the “10 Most Harmful Public Policy Experts.”

After discussing The Crony Fairy “who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees,” Paul Krugman concludes:

So what’s the point of creating a new agency to replace FEMA? The history of FEMA and other agencies during the Clinton years shows that a president who is serious about governing can rebuild effective government without renaming the boxes on the organizational chart.

On the other hand, the history of the Bush administration, from the botched reconstruction of Iraq to the botched start-up of the prescription drug program, shows that a president who isn’t serious about governing, who prizes loyalty and personal connections over competence, can quickly reduce the government of the world’s most powerful nation to third-world levels of ineffectiveness.

And bear in mind that Mr. Bush’s pattern of cronyism didn’t change after Katrina. For example, he appointed Julie Myers, the inexperienced niece of Gen. Richard Myers, to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an agency that, like FEMA, is supposed to protect us against terrorism as well as other threats. Even at the C.I.A., the administration seems more interested in purging Democrats than in improving the quality of intelligence.

So let’s skip the name change for FEMA, O.K.? The United States will regain effective government if and when it gets a president who cares more about serving the nation than about rewarding his friends and scoring political points. That’s at least a thousand days away. Meanwhile, don’t count on FEMA, or on any other government agency, to do its job

NewMexiKen — who proudly served the American people as a federal public servant for more than 30 years — can only say thank you Mr. Krugman. The professionals don’t make the laws, don’t make the appropriations and don’t appoint our bosses. But most of us do try and do care and do succeed.

A must read essay by Digby includes this:

I’m not naive about American history. I know that the last two hundred plus years are rife with examples of our government failing to live up to its ideals. But for many of us who have grown up in the post World War II world of American dominance, watching our country casually discard its hard-won moral authority in favor of a childish insistence on “might makes right” is beyond disturbing. It hurts.

This is an issue with which every American, regardless of party, should be concerned. The founders knew that relying on the good will of men in power is stupid and we are seeing their predictions come true before our very eyes. The modern Republican leadership may currently have a monopoly on authoritarian impulses, but they are by no means the only people in this country who could be seduced by this Republican notion of executive authority. The constitution is what protects all Americans from the dark side of human nature when it has power over others, regardless of party or political philosophy. Those of us who worry about this usurpation of the constitution and degradation of the Bill of Rights know that this is not a passing fashion that will easily be tucked back into its former shape. Once you allow powerful men to seize power it’s awfully hard to persuade their successors to give it back.

Digby urges us to read How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, by Glenn Greenwald, out May 15.

Via law professor Michael Froomkin’s Discourse.net:

The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax.

It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.

The report, available at www.citizen.org, profiles the families and their businesses, which include the families behind Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell’s soup, and Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms. Collectively, the list includes the first- and third-largest privately held companies in the United States, the richest family in Alabama and the world’s largest retailer.

These families have sought to keep their activities anonymous by using associations to represent them and by forming a massive coalition of business and trade associations dedicated to pushing for estate tax repeal. The report details the groups they have hidden behind — the trade associations they have used, the lobbyists they have hired, and the anti-estate tax political action committees, 527s and organizations to which they have donated heavily.

But is this a great country or not? The list includes both the Waltons and the Nordstroms.

Those wishing to abolish the estate tax call it the “death tax.” Those thinking it should remain as is, think of it as the “Paris Hilton tax.”

From Rolling Stone by Princeton professor Sean Wilentz. He begins: “George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace.”

Further along:

How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation, by the way.

George W. Bush
Press Conference
April 10, 2006

Question: Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike?

The President: All options are on the table.

George W. Bush
Press Conference
April 18, 2006

Whiskey Bar