Jan 13 2009
On January 12th 2009 President bush gave his final Press Conference to the Nation.
In it he made a number of statements that have been analyzed by many, my take on his answers and spin was his showing how little a man, who is in total denial and lacking any compassion or moral feelings, of how big a failure as a person, and especially as the President, he has been!
In one of his answers he said this:
Dec 31 2008
Since we are nearing the end of a Presidential administration, it behooves us to take stock of what has happened over the past eight years. One of the most important intellectual developments to have accompanied the Bush administration is the significant expansion of the literature on “noble lies,” as promoted by the cabal of neoconservatives in the Bush cabinet through their intellectual mentor, the political philosopher Leo Strauss. This will be a diary exploring Strauss, “noble lies,” and the function such lies supposedly perform in our political culture. I conclude by asking why “noble lies” are really necessary anymore. Do we need them to protect ourselves from the truth about abrupt climate change?
(crossposted at Big Orange)
Dec 18 2008
Santa George WPE Bush has had, we all agree, too long a run at ‘gifting’ the nation with disaster after disaster, bad policy after bad policy.
And, on the eve of the holidays (Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, New Year’s, Obama’s Inauguration),
Santa Bush is working to put coal into as many lumps into coal into our stockings, our rivers, our lungs, our lives as he can.
“I’m dreaming of a polluted Christmas …”
Nov 30 2008
I believe in compassion, mercy and forgiveness…but when great and grievous wrong has been done, you don’t skip straight to forgiveness. No, the first stop on the path to redemption is called justice.
When former governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state of Alabama, Don Siegleman gets thrown in federal prison for 9 months for being a progressive democrat and has to go around the country begging for justice once they finally let him out on appeal bond (fruitlessly I might add – they never did vote contempt for Karl Rove) then something is desperately wrong in this country.
Nov 20 2008
While the Bush administration is certainly in its last throes, their officials still have a significant amount of damage left to inflict on our country.
Furthering the Republicans war against science, the Bush administration is near finalizing a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act that will fundamentally change the way threatened plants and animals have been protected in the U.S. since December 1973.
“The Bush administration wants to make it easier for drilling, mining and major construction projects to go ahead without a full scientific assessment,” BBC news reports. The changes will effect any project a federal agency would fund, build, or authorize that might potentially impact an endangered plant or animal.
For nearly 35 years, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service have reviewed any federal plans that could potentially protect endangered animals or plants. Under the administration’s proposed rule, these independent scientific reviews would no longer be required if the agency in question determined that its activities would not hurt the imperiled species,” the Washington Post reports.
Oct 18 2008
Crossposted from ePluribus Media. Not to be confused with this diary from last year.
| January 20, 2009: The End of an
|
As November 4th approaches and the nation takes stock of the current state of our security, our economy, our infrastructure, our global standing and our fractured Constitution, it’s time to turn and bid adieu to the Administration that has, with the full and complicit knowledge of the GOP, lied, cheated and stole its way through two terms of unadulterated, unapologetic corruption.
So let us all say goodbye to George W. Bush and the elephant he rode in on this November, by voting against the Republican party. In droves.
Make the jump for Obama Pie…
Sep 25 2008
Relatively unnoticed in the MSM has been a sudden, even startling, turnaround in Chinese economic strategy in recent days. The Chinese are making it clear that they must move toward satisfying their domestic market and away from their export-driven growth model.
Here is the op-ed piece in yesterday’s People’s Daily. Note especially the last two paragraphs of the article:
Owing to the sluggish global market, more input in China’s domestic production will also give rise to the glut of goods. Therefore, in order to enable the expanded domestic demand to achieve an anticipated result, it is essential and imperative to input more in such fields as social security, medicare and health work, and education.
In other words, the main purpose of imput is definitely not to turn out more goods or to build more high-rises or skyscrapers, but to bring about more and more consumers with substantial financial strength, so that ordinary citizens in the country are better able to resist and defend against risks. Such an imput will eventually effect the long-term benign growth of Chinese economy, and China will be capable of making even greater contributions to the development of the entire world.
The Chinese Government has also directed Chinese banks not to lend to U.S. financial institutions during this ongoing financial crisis.
The Chinese see that the financial crisis in the U.S. will spread and will make their heavily export-driven growth model unsustainable. Logically enough, they are planning to move quickly toward satisfying their own domestic demand, especially for services and for a better quality of life.
The Chinese must also be having their doubts about investing in distressed U.S. companies or showing up with open checkbook at coming U.S. T-bill auctions. The prospect of an accelerating decline in the U.S. dollar will impel them to look for better places to distribute portions of their Sovereign Wealth Fund or surprlus Yuan.
More below the break….
Sep 04 2008
At the end of June, North Korea destroyed a 60-foot cooling tower at its main nuclear power plant. The tower’s destruction was seen as a positive sign of international diplomatic progress of North Korea halting its nuclear weapon program.
The news was hailed as “A Diplomatic Success That Defies the Critics” by The New York Times in June.
North Korea’s declaration of its nuclear activities is a triumph of the sort of diplomacy – complicated, plodding, often frustrating – that President Bush and his aides once eschewed as American weakness.
A little more than two months later that “diplomatic success” of Bush is on the verge of collapsing in a “heap of shattered concrete and twisted steel” like the cooling tower in June. At the time of the tower’s demolition, the NY Times dubiously noted “the tower is a technically insignificant structure, relatively easy to rebuild.”
Now The Guardian and others reports North Korea is rebuilding its reactor. “North Korea has begun rebuilding a nuclear reactor it recently knocked down as part of a disarmament agreement, in an apparent reprisal for delays in the delivery of Washington’s end of the deal.”
Jul 11 2008
Your Government is at work. It’s HARD WORK to put a value on an American life, but by gosh, Your Government is willing to do it. Not only are they willing to do it, but in the past five years, Your Government has downgraded the WORTH of your life by $900,000.00.
Let’s take a peek into this piece of unsavory news.
From AP:
It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t worth what it used to be.
The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May – a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.
The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.
Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.
When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.
Jul 09 2008
As we wait for the many coming books, I’m sure more will be surfacing, as many try to cleanse their souls, of these last eight years plus, in seeking their higher kingdom, we might have the time to take this seemingly telling descriptive tale into the fold of good reading. We could even make the copies a collective item reminding us, in a comfortable way, of what we’ve been put through, us and the rest of the world. Comfortable because it might not enrage as we read and study the pictures, like the hard reality of the history will.
Jul 09 2008
Scooter Libby.
We all know the name. (BTW, a grown man named Scooter really is kinda creepy, don’t you think)? Anyway. Ol’ Scooter stepped on his crank pretty good when he deliberatly outed a CIA covert agent, Valarie Plame-Wilson on what we expect were orders from Vlad Cheney when Ms. Plame-Wilson’s husband, Joe Wilson, told everyone that the Niger – Iraqi “Yellow Cake” nuclear weapons-of-mass-destruction information that the Bush Administration was throwing around was bunk. After Mr. Wilson published his article “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” in the New York Times, BushCo went after Wilson and his wife with a full court press.
Well, Scooter was tried and convicted of lying to the Fed’s about his and the Bush Administrations role in all of this, and subsequently had his sentence commuted by Presnit-wit Bush for his troubles.
It looks as though V.P. Vlad was at it once again when it came to altering evidence in another case where the Administration didn’t like the scientific answers
that were forthcoming and they once again tried to alter the scientific reality into a corporate-friendly reality.
Jul 02 2008
On June 14th, President Bush while discussing a “status of forces” agreement said that he is confident the United States can reach a long term security agreement with Iraq, one that will not establish permanent U.S. bases there.
That is the first step in understanding that Bushie and his neo-con minions are sweating the Security Pact agreement with Iraq that they SO want completed in the very near future. Prior to June 14, there was no real substantive information from the administration regarding NOT having permanent U.S. Military bases in Iraq via this agreement.
In Bush’s exact words: “Whatever we agree to, it will not commit future presidents to troop levels, nor will it establish permanent bases.”
The second reason to believe Bush and Company are getting nervous is on that same date, an aide for Iraqi P.M. Al-Malaki said that Iraqi officials are frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations, so they are contemplating developing legislation to dictate the shape of the American military presence in Iraq. Al-Malaki himself stated that the first drafts of the agreement that were proposed had reached a deadlock in negotiations.
Again, ol’ never-give-in-never-say-you-were-wrong-never-take-NO-for-an-answer Bushie is giving up something that originally was very important to him (permanent bases) because the Iraqi’s aren’t rolling over and playing dead for him (unlike a certain group of Congressional Democrats who will remain nameless….)
