Object Lesson

On the same day that we find out about George Bush's on-the-way-out-the-door proposed rule preventing federally funded medical facilities from firing or otherwise disciplining employees who refuse to perform the parts of their jobs involving abortion, sterilization, or contraception as long as they play the conscience card--and making de facto reproductive choices for people unlucky enough to be depending on them in the process--a co-worker forwarded this picture taken in Uganda by her international public health worker sister:

This is the Bush reproductive healthcare legacy in action. Good luck with your adult lives, kids. And especially you, little girl.

Shades of Truth

In the end, even Scott McClellan couldn't quite grasp the transitive property within his message that Bush lied his way to assuming the wartime president mantle.

"Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used "innuendo and implication" and "intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary."

Intentionally ignoring intelligence to the contrary of what he trotted out as truth to the public on a daily basis is the very definition of out-and-out deception. That's not shading the truth. That's sealing the truth up in a lead-lined cement vault. The count as of this morning, if you're keeping track, is 4,084 US dead and over 33,000 wounded, over 42,000 officially reported iraqi deaths since 2005, and a new treaty between the Pakistani government and its pro-Taliban, Afghanistan-bordering Waziristan province.

Why this sideways sandpaper fuck and his cronies are still in power in Washington will be the sad mystery schoolkids are forced to write essays on fifty years from now.

Wednesday Roundup

Two oh wow moments upon opening the Trib this morning. First, former administration spokesmodel Scott McClellan has written a book saying yeah, we sort of misled the country into that whole Iraq war thing.

"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided—that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened."

He added that "war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

The president's real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the . . . purpose of transforming the Middle East," McClellan wrote.

The White House has no comment. Will George Bush continue to link Iraq to September 11 with varying directions of causality, as he did in his speech to the 82d Airborne during last week's All American Week festivities? And I almost kept a straight face while asking that rhetorical question.

If that news item left me a bit surprised and shaking my head, even though Scottie's exit interviews suggested he was leaning toward eventually disavowing most of the stuff he'd spewed in his job as the president's mouthpiece, the next one had me hopping up and down for a couple of giddy moments.

Poll: Majority of Californians back gay marriage.

The results mark the first time in over three decades of polling that more California voters have approved of extending marriage to gay couples than have disapproved, said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. The survey of 1,052 registered voters was conducted over the phone.

The poll was conducted from May 17 to May 26 in the days after the California Supreme Court handed down its historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in the nation's most populous state. A smaller percentage of respondents--48 percent -- said they agreed with the court's decision and 46 percent disagreed.

Maybe the pollster inadvertently dialed up more Ellen fans and Star Trek groupies than he thought he would, or maybe--despite the bleatings of religious conservatives that the sky will fall and the cows will be frightened--Californians have noticed that life has carried on as usual in Massachusetts four years into their foray into marriage equality, with no hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or plagues of frogs. Maybe Ellen's artfully simple dismantling of John McCain last week nudged a few fence-sitters into comprehending that our live really is equal to theirs. Ah, or maybe they're finally just sick of it all. Doesn't matter. It's about damn time.

State of the Union Pregame

Eh. In the off chance that we can stand to watch the speech live--although the girlfriend is flatly refusing and I'm wavering in my confidence in being able to listen to either Chimpy's voice or the maniacal yelping from the right side of the aisle--we held a mini-draft of buzzwords likely to slip W's lips. Loser buys lunch on Friday. The girlfriend chose 'Mericun, stimulus, and family, with the super bonus word of freedom, while I went with the unstoppable combination of extremists, children, and security, with the super bonus plotting and planning.

We are still unsure of how the super bonuses will work.

Projected winner: Boltgirl!

In Case Your Right-Wing Relatives Are Having Continuing Reality-Integration Problems

It is official and indisputable (handy thing, that public record): the Bush Administration lied the US into the Iraq War. 935 times. The Center for Public Integrity has produced a searchable database of government false statements about Iraq for your use, should you wish to tell Uncle Ernie exactly how many times a senior official let slip falsehoods about, say, mobile labs (5) or, perhaps, ominous tubes (36). More troubling, the database also tracks the ebb and flow of the tides of false statements within the context of the runup to war, Powell's address to the UN, and the midterm elections. Guess where the spikes fall on the timeline of the past six years. I won't spoil the surprise--just go and see for yourself.

Daily Disconnect: Bush on Fiscal Responsibility

Oh, my. W vetoed the bipartisan-supported health and education bill because $606 billion is more money than he wants to spend on, well, health and education when he could be spending it on wars. That part is at least consistent with what we know of the president's priorities. The reasoning he claims for it, though?

Bush hammered Democrats for what he called a tax-and-spend philosophy:

"The Congress now sitting in Washington holds this philosophy," Bush told an audience of business and community leaders. "The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it's acting like a teenager with a new credit card."

Hold the phones, George. Wrong analogy. You see, taxes=income, which gives you the money to spend. That's actually more like a teenager with a new job planning how he's going to spend his first paycheck. Setting $4B a month on fire in Iraq while simultaneously cutting taxes and fighting to make those cuts permanent? Yeah, that's where your credit card analogy comes in, but in this case you're the teenager who doesn't get that the card comes with an insane interest rate and no personal bankruptcy escape hatch.

Good try, Mr. President! You almost have that simile thing down!

Breaking News: 9/11 Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Congress is ready to extend the NSA surveillance program, provided court-issued warrants for wiretapping continue to be required. Dubya has threatened to veto the legislation unless retroactive immunity is guaranteed for telecom companies that turned over customers' phone records to the government in the absence of warrants.

Bush warned that he would not sign the Democratic legislation unless it gives U.S. telecommunications firms retroactive immunity from lawsuits for lending assistance in counterterrorism investigations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

After the September 11 attacks. After. That phrase is going to cause some problems.

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

September 11 changed everything? Not so much. January 20, 2001 changed everything? Much more like it. The government went to the telecoms scarcely a month after Bush took office to enact a spying program the adminstration insists is necessary to prevent another 9/11 attack. Except that the program was in place before 9/11, and 9/11 not only happened anyway, but was immediately thrust forward as the reason why the program is necessary. It's logic, Mobius-strip style. It's one more example of enacting a policy, based on deception, that immediately becomes an inescapable causality loop.

Pelosi, Reid, where are you? How many more times will you allow this administration to go all Uri Geller on our reality, bending the Constitution and our lives in one giant stage show designed only for the perpetuation of its own power?

The Boy in the Bubble is Alive and Well

Since President Bush apparently made it through high school, college, and increasing levels of public service without noticing that pesky First Amendment thing as it applies to speech and peaceable assembly, the White House has an official operations manual explaining how to shield His Nibs from the unpleasant discovery that 70-odd percent of the American public thinks he's a fucktard.

Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should be shouted down by "rally squads" stationed in strategic locations. And if that does not work, they should be thrown out.

But that does not mean the White House is against dissent -- just so long as the president does not see it. In fact, the manual outlines a specific system for those who disagree with the president to voice their views. It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police "to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."

Small detail: all public land in the US is a designated protest area so long as those protests aren't incitements to immediate violence. Hurting Dear Leader's feelings isn't enough of an offense to revoke the First Amendment.

To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create "rally squads" of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with "favorable messages." Squads should be placed in strategic locations and "at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems," the manual says.

"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."

Rally squads! With a chant that serves the dual purpose of drowning out dissent and proving that the orchestrated cheerleaders are the real patriots in the room, since they're the only ones mouthing the holy syllables of the 1980 Olympic hockey team's victory over the Russians, which liberal protestors are obviously incapable of uttering, much less hearing, without bursting into flames.

Control the message, baby, and cover up the evidence of anyone being unhappy with the president. Fucking brilliant.

Wow, Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

Fuck. Me.

The day after President George W. Bush marshaled political forces in Congress to grant him greater authority to engage in counterterrorism-related spying, the president stated that he would seek greater changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when the legislative branch returns to work in September.

What changes would those be? Why immunity for telecom companies that were complicit in the illegal warrantless wiretaps that caused the first FISA firestorm, of course. Oh, wait. I mean allegedly complicit, of course, in the event that their illegal activities are somehow held up as being, yes, illegal.

"When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001," he said.

One constitutional scholar derided Bush's reasoning, particularly the tortuous language in his statement.

"Apparently 'allegedly helped us stay safe' is Bush Administration code for telecom companies and government officials who participated in a conspiracy to perform illegal surveillance," wrote Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin in a Monday morning blog post. "Because what they did is illegal, we do not admit that they actually did it, we only say that they are alleged to have done it."

The 16 Senate and 41 House Dems who voted to take the minimal oversight that existed on this away from the courts and hand it squarely to Alberto "How Can You Tell I'm Lying? Are My Lips Moving?" Gonzales can kiss my ass. At this point we can't keep heaping blame on Bush for continuing to take every treat the Dems eagerly throw him and then demand more like an untrained dog or unruly two-year-old. Your job is to rein this out-of-control bastard in. You have failed.

Breaking News: Senate Dems Give Bush Head, Again

Thank you, Senate Democrats, for reinforcing the worst stereotypes society has to offer. Thanks for demonstrating that "no" really is just a coy "yes." Thanks for being spineless enablers of a hyper-macho bully.

Yesterday the Senate handed Bush expanded warrantless wiretapping powers, knuckling under and pantingly serving up the authority he requested to listen in on telephone calls and read e-mails without a warrant as long as one of the involved parties is reasonably believed to be outside the US. Even if one of the people is a US citizen. Even if the call or e-mail isn't related to terrorism, but simply has unspecified "intelligence" value.

The elections were truly pointless. The Democrats could have had an ironclad veto-proof majority and they would still be cowed by the slightest hint that a Republican would hang the "soft on terror" label on them come the next election cycle. 65% of the public wants us out of Iraq. Close to 80% think W is a failure as a president. What the fuck will it take for the Democrats to develop spines--hell, at this point I'd be happy with some lumbar vertebrae--and take the bastard on? How hard is it to use what should be the most basic weapon in the arsenal of any reasonable population? You know? The truth?

Every time a Republican or Republican apologist columnist utters "Iraq" and "9/11" in the same sentence, a Democratic senator needs to stand up and speak the truth. Yes, the American public can be staggeringly stupid. But this shit can be boiled down into simple language and repeated until it takes root. Cook up a few simple talking points and make some fucking PowerPoint slides. Iraq<>9/11. Next! Cutting VA funding<>Supporting the Troops. Next! Extending tours to 15 months and allowing as little as 3 months' downtime<>Supporting the Troops. Next! Starting to improve the security situation in Anbar is good but<>Guaranteeing a stable Iraqi government. See? It's not fucking rocket science.

But as much as they bluster and rail against the administration, they're terrified that if they don't hand Dear Leader every fucking unconstitutional power he demands, they'll... they'll what? They'll fall down on their sworn duty to the Constitution and the American people? They'll lead America down the road to ruin? No. It's not even remotely that lofty. They're afraid they'll get voted out of office. Even as the vast majority of the voters are already screaming for their heads for being such abject pussies and continuing to give a reviled president more and more power.

Truth, people. Just use the fucking truth.

Breaking News

Bush to cede power to VP during colonoscopy

‘The president has had no symptoms,’ Snow says before Saturday procedure

Routine colonoscopy will search for precancerous polyps, Snow said. No word on whether Bush's brain is also on the look-for list while doctors have the camera jammed up his ass. Snow was similarly mum on whether Cheney's two-hour stint in the Oval Office will result in the invasion of Iran. Stay tuned.

Friday Linkfest

The monsoon finally showed up in midtown Tucson last night after a few days of circling around the mountains to the north and Phoenix del Sur, er, I mean Vail and the hodgepodge of cookie-cutter developments to the south. Wind! Lightning! Thunder! And buckets of glorious rain. Unfortunately, the beagle mix didn't see it as glorious quite so much as deadly threat to be barked at all fucking night long, so I'm a bit fuzzy this morning and hoping the third cup of coffee jolts the synapses into some coherent firing pattern.

Until then, some required reading to ponder.

Eugene Robinson on Bush's bizarre happyland mindest:

It's almost as if Bush were trying to apply the principles of cognitive therapy, the system psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed in the 1960s. Beck found that getting patients to banish negative thoughts and develop patterns of positive thinking was helpful in pulling them out of depression. However, Beck was trying to get the patients to see themselves and the world realistically, whereas Bush has left realism far behind.

For soccer fans who like pictures of underfed supermodels and their hawt footballer husbands, the Becks-Posh photo spread in W magazine. Beckham: saviour of the MLS, or league-bankrupting boondoggle? I'm not holding my breath. But his tattoos are nice.

Deb Price on recent Supreme Court trends that maybe should be a tad disturbing for us gay folk, now that O'Connor is drawing a pension:

The Roberts court -- whose votes in nongay cases strongly signaled that Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito can be expected to join Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in opposing almost any imaginable gay-rights plea -- is moving frighteningly close to having the five votes it would need to weaken the groundbreaking rulings of 1996 and 2003 acknowledging that gay Americans are protected by the Constitution.

And, finally, I can't decide if I kinda like Rick & Steve, The World's Happiest Gay Couple or kinda hate it. It has moments that go both ways. Maybe I hate it because some of the digs at both dykes and gay guys jump right across that line from spot-on funny to mean-spirited and uncomfortable.

Maybe I like it because it reminds me of the Playmobil sets I always drooled over (with the coolest accessories ever, especially the pirates). South Park pulls the edgy stuff off better, but it's early yet, so maybe Rick & Steve will step it up. Lord knows I don't make a habit of telling people what to think about anything, so look for yourself.

Now There's a Surprise

Oh, fuck me.

Cave-in on Aisle 7

So midterm elections are pointless unless the opposition party gains a bombproof veto-override majority.

Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package yesterday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

Full funding, no demand for a withdrawal timetable, no requirement of progress reports, no accountability for the Iraqi government or military. But hey, at least the Dems managed to sneak the minimum wage hike in there among the $20B of non-war-related spending provisions (along with increased healthcare funding for both currently enlisted personnel and veterans).

That last little ray of sunshine, however, does nothing to mitigate the capitulation to a lame-duck president with a 28% approval rating. W gets clear sailing to continue dumping money and American lives into Iraq with, four years after the start of the war, absolutely no plan for achieving either a victory in World War II terms or a favorable outcome in the complex language of the modern Middle East.

The administration this week also quietly implemented plans to increase troop levels in Iraq far beyond the numbers initially reported as "the surge," possibly putting 200,000 boots on the ground by extending combat tours an additional three months and falling back on the tried-and-true tactic of rotating combat brigades back into the theater far more rapidly than standard guidelines allow, ensuring troop and equipment fatigue by shortening the recovery periods needed for rest, repair, additional training, and physical and mental recuperation.

So the plan it for additional security and just a little more patience and just a little more time for the Iraqi government to get on its feet and the Iraqi security forces to decide to show up for work and the Iraqi people to choose democracy over tribal and religious sectarianism. In other words, the plan is for more of the same, to keep throwing cash and bodies at the wall hoping something eventually sticks, and the Democrats are terrified of looking like they don't support the troops. Instead of forcing Bush to take the onus of continually vetoing bills designed to take our guys out the the fire and force the Iraqi government to stand on its own feet, two goals the majority of Americans support, they bluster and bark and then skitter out of the way, tails between legs. And today more soldiers and marines will be blown to kingdom come, advancing nothing but death.

Is Someone Gravely Ill? Is It Late at Night? Here Come the Bushies!

Well, at least this time the subject of the middle-of-the-night signature quest wasn't Terri Schiavo. But when John Ashcroft comes off as a paragon of virtue, you know it's bad news anyway.

Back in 2004, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card paid a late-night visit to AG Ashcroft to try to persuade him to sign off on the warrantless wiretapping program. When he was in a hospital bed. Barely conscious. To his credit, Ashcroft told them to piss off and threatened to resign (as did Deputy AG James Comey, who broke this story to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, his entire staff, and possibly FBI Director Robert Mueller as well) if they managed to ram the program through as it was presented to him.

So we got the current version, and if that one was watered down enough for Ashcroft to approve, I really don't want to know the rack-and thumbscrews details of the original.

Gonzo and Card, pushing a gravely ill man to sign off on the White House's end run around the Constitution and general rule of law, and then pressuring the acting AG to do so against Ashcroft's clearly stated objections.

Later, Card ordered an 11 p.m. meeting at the White House. But Comey said he told Card that he would not go on his own, pulling then-Solicitor General Theodore Olson from a dinner party to serve as witness to anything Card or Gonzales told him. "After the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present," Comey testified. "He replied, 'What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.'"

The next day, as terrorist bombs killed more than 200 commuters on rail lines in Madrid, the White House approved the executive order without any signature from the Justice Department certifying its legality.

This was the administration that went to great pains to assert it was going to restore dignity to the White House. Instead, it has demonstrated utter contempt for any pesky laws standing between it and its empire. It's the fucking X-Files, but the malevolent force being served by government officials is not alien. It's the enormous collective neocon ego.

Connect the Dots

Please go to Salon right now and read Glenn Greenwald's latest, on the disturbing trend of right-wingers and members of the executive branch to transform the presidency into an unlimited monarchy. Which would be the D-word, now, wouldn't it?

I like to think I am not given to histrionics, at least where Notre Dame football and Cubs baseball are not concerned. I like to think Greenwald isn't, either. His article is a response to a Wall Street Journal piece written by Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield, arguing for the president's inherent power to operate above the rule of law (emphases Greenwald's):

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

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

The kicker, in my view, is this:

In the course of explaining how the rule of law applies only in "quiet times," Mansfield also argues that "civil liberties are subject to circumstances," not inalienable, and that "in time of war the greater dangers may be to the majority from a minority." Thus, he explains --in what might be my favorite sentence -- "A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away."

Mr Orwell to the white courtesy phone, please.

Meanwhile, President Bush reminded us yesterday that he is more than just the decider.

By the way, in the report it said, it is -- the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that's what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm the commander guy.

His position is as clear and simple as his grasp of his job description. Fuck Congress. He's the commander. He is America. And he's surrounded by people who believe that too.

On my way home yesterday, I saw that the semi-regular pro-war protestors had set up shop again in front of the neighborhood recruiting center, although the anti-war contingent that usually assembles across the street was absent. The centerpiece, in a sea of flags, was a large sign proclaiming

WE SUPPORT
* The troops
* The mission
* The president
AMERICA

I wasn't even tempted to stop and offer my views, which would be yes on one, so long as they're not committing war crimes or raping their female colleagues, no on three, and please explain two to me in fifty words or less. It's too difficult to debate when no shades of gray are permitted. The military, the desire to dominate the Middle East, and the Supreme Executive are all rolled into one conflated ball labeled "America," all necessary components of a single mindset, simultaneously (if paradoxically) interchangeable and inseparable.

Decider, commander guy, emperor. Take your pick. Single branch of tripartite government, equal to and checked by the other two? That's so pre-9/11.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Plot, Plan, Attack [bzzt] Plot, Plan, Attack [bzzt] Plot...

Another Bush press conference. He couldn't cram more old cliches in this thing if he tried. He threatened to veto any spending bill that includes a withdrawal date, claiming it would hamstring his vaunted "commanders on the ground," failing to mention his need to repeatedly replace those generals when reality finally broke through and they could no longer agree with the need for a continuing flow of warm bodies into the meat grinder.

When David Gregory asked him if the Congress isn't, in fact, simpy doing what the American voters elected them to do, Bush insisted that the voters actually want a Congress that will support the troops. Unfortunately, Bush's vision of supporting the troops involves keeping them in the middle of a religious civil war where both sides are shooting at them, in a country whose civilian government is teetering on the brink of disintegration, on rotations so tight they're being sent back into battle unrested, untrained, and unrecovered, their numbers increasingly supplemented by grievously injured men, mentally ill men, and felons. My vision of supporting the troops involves getting them the hell out of there while there are still one or two left standing, unscathed. Apparently my vision is one of failure and weakness:

The way to fail would be to leave before the job is done... Failure in Iraq would embolden the extremists... We have to defeat them there so we don't have to face them here... A failed state would be a safe haven from which to plot, plan, and attack. That's one of the major lessons of September 11th.

Another reporter--didn't catch the name--followed that up with, "Are they really going to follow us home?"

Yes, just like on September 11th. They plotted, planned, and attacked.

Oh. Okay. One more time, say in the span of less than twenty seconds?

Because that's the lesson of September the 11th. If there's a safe haven, the enemies will plot, plan, and attack.

I didn't catch the beginning, so I don't have an accurate September the 11th count, or safe haven count, or extremist count, or any of the other words that show up on the word dice he must roll on the lectern before he starts each press conference. But there was nothing new here. Nothing less than blind acceptance of a war without end will be accepted.

Farther Down the Rabbit Hole

Here we go again, Chapter Umpteen in the Bush Build Your Own Soviet-Style Totalitarianism manual. No longer content to merely appoint agency heads sympathetic to his own causes, W has now decided to require all agency business be vetted by an apparatchik for doctrinal adherence.

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

Unsurprisingly, the primary targets are the EPA and OSHA. Even less surprising is that the oil industry is foremost among those that would benefit from regulatory relaxation in the environmental and worker safety arenas.

What additional power grabs lie in the next two years? We are all a-twitter.

Decider in Action

Asked why he was going ahead with his plan without congressional
support, Bush said, "One of the things I've found in Congress is that
most people recognize that failure would be a disaster for the United
States. And, in that I'm the decision-maker, I had to come up with a
way forward that precluded disaster."

Oh, what the fuck ever.



Failure would be a disaster! I'm the Decider! Way forward!



Mr. Bush was unclear on how his plan precludes disaster, according to sources at the scene.

State of the Union

The fawning aisle-sitters falling over themselves to grasp Chimpy as he made his entrance really made me cringe. The Republicans on the left side of the aisle and Lieberman on the right jumping to their feet to cheer made me cringe. The part I liked? Admitting that it's long past the time to start looking at alternative fuels. Grassley's look of adoration at that--the corn, think of the corn!--was priceless.

The surge? Hate it. The smokescreen of tax breaks tied to self-insurance? Really hate it. The lie that Iraq was rosy and the civil war sectarian violence didn't start until the Golden Mosque went kablooey last year? Really, really hate it.

Was Cheney chewing gum? Or just munching on tidbits he sucked out of his teeth? Why did he look like he was trying not to crack up when W was talking about energy policy?

Peace march tomorrow in Tucson, Catalina Park to the federal building, 4 pm. Be there.