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Comment, January 2003... Bush War On Environment Continues
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JANUARY COMMENT
BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT: BUSH PLANS TO LEAVE WOMEN BEHIND BY ELIMINATING THEIR EQUAL RIGHTS TO ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS "Colleges and universities would be allowed to limit the number of scholarships awarded to female athletes without regard to enrollment under the most controversial recommendation being considered by a national commission studying reform of Title IX, the landmark law that bans sex discrimination in collegiate sports....The proposals, obtained by The Washington Post, are the first indication of the Bush administration's plans for changing Title IX, which is widely credited with increasing female participation in collegiate sports over the past three decades. " 01.24.03
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WAG THE BUSH Someone went to great lengths to ensure the backdrop for President Bush's sales pitch Wednesday on his economic stimulus plan sent all the right messages -- and none of the wrong. Bush delivered his remarks from a warehouse floor at JS Logistics, a trucking, courier and warehouse business that provided a visual image for his argument that his proposal carries economy-boosting benefits for small businesses. The audience was flanked on all sides by piles of cardboard boxes -- with additional piles in front of and behind his podium. Each one of the hundreds of boxes had a piece of paper obscuring its "Made in China" label....A backdrop made-to-order for the White House filled the space directly behind Bush, which is most likely to show up on TV news clips of the event. Blaring a logo of "Strengthening America's Economy," it exactly mimicked the real-life box piles, down to perfectly aligned shelves. Except the boxes on the backdrop were labeled, "Made in the USA." --AP, 01.22.03
God bless America
Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.
© Harold Pinter, January 2003
ASTROTURF: GOP Fakes Grassroots Letters To Editor In Nation's Newspapers
BUSH: President Bush Honors Kenneth Lay in Church/Bank Service
To Oppose Affirmative Action, Rich, Connected Bush
Sells Social Mobility Myth
In old-fashioned Hollywood movies like ["Maid in Manhattan"], character always transcends class, and class itself is no more than a tiny speed bump that good-hearted people can hop over. What's more surprising is that this backward notion of easy upward mobility — which defies recent socio-economic studies — is so tenacious that it exists even in a far smarter, better, more realistic film like "Real Women Have Curves."...What these movies reveal is not just film's addiction to fantasy, which audiences expect and embrace, but also to the Big Lie that class is meaningless in American life. Beneath the fairy dust of "Maid in Manhattan" and the grittiness of "Real Women Have Curves" is a similar message: not that America is a classless society, but that class is as fluid as water and upward mobility a cinch.
The idea, of course, goes back to the Founding Fathers' egalitarian goals, and quickly became so ingrained in the national mythos that what Tocqueville wrote in 1840 could stand as the motto for the J. Lo movie as well as its ancestors like "Sabrina" and "Working Girl": "At any moment a servant may become a master." The amalgam of American idealism and rags-to-riches dreams is irresistible.
But that persistent idea ignores the realities of today's economy and research about social mobility. The aristocratic politician Ralph Fiennes plays in "Maid in Manhattan" precisely fits the profile described by the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger in a November article in The New York Times, which said that new studies show it takes an average of five or six generations to change a family's economic position, and that wealth tends to linger in families. Such inherited wealth helps create political dynasties like that of the Bushes and of the Fiennes character — an assemblyman, a senator's son running for his father's seat, and not the kind of guy likely to take up with a maid. As Mr. Krueger added in an interview, "Recent trends in income distribution have made upward mobility less likely" than it was even 20 years ago.
And such research isn't brand new. As Kevin Phillips says in "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," published last year, the increasing gap between the median American family income and the richest 1 percent has been "a point of national discussion for over a decade." By the turn of the 21st century, he writes, the United States "had also become the West's citadel of inherited wealth."
Aristocracy," he adds, "[is] a cultural and economic fact."
--Caryn James, 01.12.03
BUSH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION "Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics." --Wash. Post, 07.28.99
MORE BUSH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Ari Fleischer: Terry [Moran, ABC News].
Moran: You said the President is against racial preferences because they're divisive. Is he against other preferences that colleges and universities routinely grant that people see as unfair? Like the one he got?
Fleischer: I understand -- I understand all the interest and the specific questions dealing with the review of the University of Michigan case --
Moran: That is not what I'm asking....When he was 18, he got into Yale University, which had and still has a policy of granting very special preferences to children of graduates, like him. Is that preference okay, to give him a leg up, but other preferences are not? (more)
"In the biggest day of protest the world has yet seen against a war in Iraq, from Washington to Tokyo, Liverpool to Damascus, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across four continents took to the streets yesterday... The US was the scene of the biggest anti-war demonstration of George Bush's presidency, with tens of thousands of people braving freezing weather to join protests in Washington, San Francisco and other cities, despite the near-unanimous support for war on Capitol Hill and in the US media."01.19.03
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world... wp... d.c.... sf... canada... vatican... england... voices... nyt... c-span... npr
"But will we win, Daddy?”
“Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise Mr Bush’s voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him.”
“But will people be killed, Daddy?”
“Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people.”
“Can I watch it on television?”
“Only if Mr Bush says you can.”
“And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?”
“Hush child, and go to sleep.”
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping. --John Le Carre, 01.16.03
MEDIA CONTROL "America stands on the cusp of a sweeping set of shifts in federal media ownership rules that could dramatically alter the nature of what we see, hear and read, warns Federal Commications Commission member Jonathan S. Adelstein. Dialogue and debate about these proposed changes must be ramped up quickly if the public interest is to be protected... But first, how about a harmonica solo?
" 01.16.03
nichols | related stories
WAR PROFITS "Why is our nation preparing to use the most powerful military machine in history to wage an assault against the people of Iraq, to destroy their houses and buildings, to wipe out their water and electric systems and to block their access to food and medical supplies? There is no answer which can separate itself from oil economics, profit requirements of arms trade, or distorted notions of empire-building." 01.15.03
kucinich | related stories
Bush Ratings Only 33% of the respondents in a recent USA Today/CNN poll said they would vote for Bush in the 2004 presidential elections.
CNN | related stories
Yesterday's Two Favorite Stories
Arrest of Canada's Premier of British Columbia for drunk driving reminds us of Bush's similar behavior and his answers to a Dallas reporter and non-answers on a Travis County, Texas juror questionnaire. Stories here.
Bush's brother Marvin has ties to the firm that provided security to the World Trade Center prior to 9/11 and another firm that provided insurance for parts of the same building. Further, the security company provided protection at D.C.'s Dulles airport and for United Airlines. "Two of the hijacked planes were United Airlines planes, and one -- though not one of the same ones -- took off from Dulles Airport." Luckily for those firms, Bush signed the bill providing such companies with "limitations on liability and national-security protections from investigation," according to the reporter of the story. In a previous story, she explains how a company co-partnered by Marvin (with brother Jeb as an investor) has benefited in specific ways from the Bush Patriot Act as well as the Bush Homeland Security Act. Stories here.
Bush's War Against Women
"Running for the White House in the fall of 2000, George W. Bush did not talk about ending the right to abortion. To avoid scaring off moderate voters, he promoted a larger "reverence for life" agenda that also included adoption and tougher drunken driving laws. Voters were encouraged to believe that while Mr. Bush was anti-choice, he was not out to reverse Roe v. Wade. Yet two years into the Bush presidency, it is apparent that reversing or otherwise eviscerating the Supreme Court's momentous 1973 ruling that recognized a woman's fundamental right to make her own childbearing decisions is indeed Mr. Bush's mission. The lengthening string of anti-choice executive orders, regulations, legal briefs, legislative maneuvers and key appointments emanating from his administration suggests that undermining the reproductive freedom essential to women's health, privacy and equality is a major preoccupation of his administration — second only, perhaps, to the war on terrorism." --NYT Editorial, 01.12.03
Michael Lind's book on Bush, MADE IN TEXAS
"[The Texas of Lyndon B. Johnson, Ross Perot and Sam Rayburn is] ''a society eager to embrace the Space Age and the Information Age...led, not by good-old-boy businessmen and political demagogues, but by a visionary and earnest elite of entrepreneurs, engineers, reformist politicians and dedicated civil servants. . . . The preferred society of these Texans is a broadly egalitarian meritocracy, not a traditional social order stratified by caste and class."... [George W. Bush's conservative Texas is] ''a society with a primitive economy based on agriculture, livestock, petroleum and mining, with a poorly educated population of workers lacking health protection and job safety. . . . This Texas is a toxic byproduct of the hierarchical plantation system of the American South, a cruel caste society in which the white, brown and black majority labor for inadequate rewards while a cultivated but callous oligarchy of rich white families and their hirelings in the professions dominate the economy, politics and the rarefied air of academic and museum culture.'' [These folks are attached to] ''military values unknown anywhere else in the English-speaking world, except in other Southern states. The inhabitants of this Texas are deeply localist and tend to view Washington, D.C., as the enemy.''...
Reviewer Robert Dallek notes, "Lind does not paint a pretty picture: an illegitimate president whom the conservative faction of the Supreme Court installed in the White House after a majority of American voters rejected his candidacy, Bush has ''used the power of the presidency to promote the economic and foreign policy agenda of the Southern far right.'' Its principal features are a regressive tax cut, ''the plundering of nonrenewable natural resources'' and the substitution of a '' 'faith-based' religious charity'' for the New Deal-Great Society social safety net at home. Lind hopes that ''for the sake of America as well as the world'' the advocates of this ''bizarre strategy'' will be defeated in 2004. This ''aberrant president,'' Lind asserts, is 'one of the worst in American history.'" --01.12.03
"Bush has put back his State of the Union Message by a week so it comes a day after Mr Blix’s first full-scale assessment of Saddam’s programme to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons due on January 27. Speculation in Washington is that this would allow the President to use his highest profile national speech to make his intentions clear." --Edinburgh News, 01.10.03
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.
Andrew Motion, Britain's Poet Laureate
NEW BUSH TAX CUT WOULD PAD POCKETS OF BUSH FAMILY "Based on 2001 tax returns, the president would have saved about $17,000 on the $43,805 in dividends he received for the year, had they been tax-free. With accelerated income-tax cuts, the president would have saved another $27,500, based on his $711,453 in taxable income. [Bush's combined tax cut savings of $44,000 would be higher than the average yearly wage of the American worker.] Bush said he didn't know the details of his finances when asked what he'd do with the cash. "My money is in a blind trust," he said Monday. "I don't know if I've got any dividends." Vice President Dick Cheney, who reported $278,103 in dividends on his 2001 return, would have saved about $107,000 in federal taxes that year. Cheney, the former chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., the world's second-largest oilfield-services company, would have saved about $220,000 on $4.3 million in reported income that year. His spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise, declined to comment....Bush and Cheney "are making more in tax savings than 95 percent of people are going to be making in a year," said Joel Friedman, a senior fellow of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities." --Bloomberg News, 01.08.03
BUSH SAYS HE WANTS TO GIVE TAX CUTS TO THE RICH BECAUSE THEY'RE OLD. WHAT'S NEXT? BECAUSE THEY'RE OVERWEIGHT? Three years ago, when George W. Bush ran for president, he popularized a new name for the estate tax.... The calculation was simple. Every rich person who died was a dead person. If you thought of him as rich, you envied him. If you thought of him as dead, you pitied him. The estate tax sounded good. The death tax sounded bad. Bad enough, it turned out, to get Congress to phase out the tax as part of Bush's 2001 tax-cut package....Now [he's] taking the technique one step further. You don't have to die to shed the stigma of wealth. You just have to age. Rich people have become "senior citizens." Outlining his plan in Chicago Tuesday, Bush milked the old-folks theme. "About half of all dividend income goes to America's seniors, and they often rely on those checks for a steady source of income in their retirement," said the president. "For the good of our senior citizens … I'm asking the United States Congress to abolish the double taxation of dividends."...The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that under Bush's plan "nearly 40 percent of the benefits of the tax cut that would accrue to elderly individuals would flow to the 2.5 percent of elderly people with incomes exceeding $200,000. Nearly three-quarters of the benefits that would go to the elderly would flow to the 19 percent of elderly with incomes above $75,000." Citizens for Tax Justice calculates that most of the benefits received by old folks would go to those making more than $200,000....Inventing euphemisms for the rich never gets old." --William Saletan, 01.07.03
News Being Replaced By Bush Ministry Of Propaganda "Without much notice, the federal government is moving toward the most sweeping change ever in the rules that govern ownership of the American news media. This shift could reduce the independence of the news media and the ability of Americans to take part in public debate. Yet because of meager press coverage and steps taken by the Federal Communications Commission in its policy-making process, most people probably have no idea that it is taking place. " 01.07.03 www.bushwatch.com
Here's an example of the above...
for more on Bush's "muddy" N.Korea policy, click here
"Bush has put back his State of the Union Message by a week so it comes a day after Mr Blix’s first full-scale assessment of Saddam’s programme to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons due on January 27. Speculation in Washington is that this would allow the President to use his highest profile national speech to make his intentions clear." --Edinburgh News, 01.10.03
TOTO, WE'RE NOT AT STARBUCKS ANYMORE "For the past couple of weeks, those wags at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in Dupont Circle have been marketing a beverage called the "Trent Lotte." The menu describes the $3.25 item as "separate but equal parts of coffee and milk" – a not too veiled reference to Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's career-damaging 100th-birthday praise of fellow Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond's segregationist 1948 presidential campaign. Yesterday bartender Mark Kutcher told us that the coffee and steamed milk are served in two different containers, and it's up to customers to integrate them. "We think it's really funny," Kutcher said. "That's why we do it." But we seriously doubt if Lott is laughing. Our call to the deposed Senate Republican leader's press office yesterday was greeted by grim silence." --Lloyd Grove, 01.09.03
NYT ED Bush Continues To Want It Both Ways On Race. "The nation didn't have to wait long to find out if President Bush's impassioned denunciation of Trent Lott's racial views last month presaged a new approach to the selection of federal judges. It didn't. That became clear on Tuesday evening when the White House decided to renominate Charles Pickering, who failed to win confirmation from the Democratic-controlled Senate last year. Judge Pickering, a Mississippi trial judge and a protégé of Mr. Lott, was rejected largely because of his insensitive handling of civil rights cases. The Senate should once again refuse to confirm Judge Pickering, and should carefully scrutinize the 30 other nominees the administration is putting forth." 01.09.03
Daily Mirror (UK) Editorial "[Bush] is out to protect and control the planet's oil supplies because without them America would grind to a halt. Many wars have been fought for the flimsiest and falsest of reasons. But that is no reason for the United Kingdom to attach itself to the coat-tails of the most right-wing and dangerous US administration in history." --01.06.03
News Being Replaced By Bush Ministry Of Propaganda "Without much notice, the federal government is moving toward the most sweeping change ever in the rules that govern ownership of the American news media. This shift could reduce the independence of the news media and the ability of Americans to take part in public debate. Yet because of meager press coverage and steps taken by the Federal Communications Commission in its policy-making process, most people probably have no idea that it is taking place. " 01.07.03 www.bushwatch.com
Here's an example of the above...
DOBBS "Soon after rolling out a new post-Cold War foreign policy doctrine, the Bush administration is scrambling to explain why "preemption" may be appropriate for dealing with Iraq, but not such a good idea in defusing the threat from fellow "axis of evil" member North Korea. " 01.06.03 www.bushwatch.com
What's Wrong With This Picture? Past Senate majority leader Tom Daschle is called an enemy of bipartisanship by the Repub spin machine; yet, he only voted for the Dems 80% of the time. And he wants to run for President as the Dem candidate with that sorry leadership record? Meanwhile, new Senate majority leader Bill Frist is called a bipartisan "healer" by those same spinners, even though he has voted Repub 97% of the time, just like Trent Lott. Physician, heal thyself. Look for the conservative media majority to back this distortion of reality to give the Repub Congress a running start into its reactionary January session. --Politex, 01.05.02
NEED TO KNOW. "A coalition of Canadian peace groups announced that it will send weapons inspectors to the United States....Iraq shot down an American Predator drone, and allied jets bombed a command-and-control post near Tallil....The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency announced that it will solicit proposals for a device to identify people by means of smell; the scheme is based on a theory, so far unproven, that every person has a unique, genetically determined odor....The American Peace Corps was told that it is no longer welcome in Russia. --01.02.03 (more)
Thanks, Bush Watchers! We Win 2002 Award (click)
Merry Christmas: 750,000 Americans Lose Jobless Benefits Due To Bush Inaction, GOP House --NYT, 12.28.02
It has been a jobless, joyless recovery. Payrolls have continued to shrink. The number of people who have been unemployed for more than six months — an indicator of families facing severe distress — has risen 55 percent over the past year. And thanks to inaction by Congress and the [Bush] administration, 800,000 of those long-term unemployed will lose their benefits [Saturday]....The administration clearly still believes that [economic] problems aren't challenges to be met, they're opportunities to push a pre-existing agenda.... This doesn't look like a happy new year. --Paul Krugman
This Administration's idea of economic policy is to go from table to table at the Four Seasons discreetly asking patrons if they need help with the check. --Malcolm Gladwell
Bush Blew Up Frogs As A Kid, Frist Killed Cats As An Adult
Frist earned his medical degree from Harvard. As a student, he adopted stray cats from Boston-area shelters -- and then dissected them. He later confessed that it had been "a heinous and dishonest thing to do." --12.23.02
Previously Anti-Civil Rights, Lott Has Now Promised Nation He Will Personally Fight For Civil Rights. Let's Hold Him To It. "We hope the [Senator Lott's] decision [to step down] does not interfere with his announced plans to turn this unpleasant episode into something positive. He should pursue his idea, first unveiled on Black Entertainment Television, of a task force on reconciliation, developed on a bipartisan, bicameral and multiracial basis. His commitment to "move an agenda that would have things that would be helpful to African Americans and minorities of all kinds and all Americans" was also a welcome announcement that we hope the senator seeks to fulfill, even if not as majority leader. A Trent Lott-led legislative effort based on substance would perhaps burnish the GOP's minority outreach efforts and the racial reconciliation said to be sought by President Bush." --WP, 12.22.02
***
there's a whole Lotta' Racism goin' on!
Bush Replaces Loud Anti-Civil Rights Senate Leader With Quiet Anti-Civil Rights Senate Leader
Now that we know Lott's Senate majority leader job will go to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee (NYT, 12.21.02) and now that we know that Bush orchestrated it (NYT, 12.21.02), let's remove the GOP spin before it gets started. Based on Frist's Senate voting record, the main difference between Lott and Frist on civil rights and minorities in general is that Lott talks about his negative views in public and Frist does not.
As political observer Nathan Newman has expressed it, "Frist is a hard-line rightwinger, voting against labor rights, civil rights, women's rights and the environment at almost every opportunity." The NAACP gave Frist a rating of 15% out of %100 in 2002, the National Hispanic Leadership Conference gave him an 18%, and the Leadership Conference On Civil Rights gave him a big fat zero for his votes on a wide range of relevant cival rights issues. Frist was no better on other issues: 3% lifetime on labor and two more big fat goose eggs on protecting the environment and supporting abortion rights. On the other hand, Frist ranks at or near the top in getting campaign money from health insurance companies, drug companies, health professionals, hospitals, and medical suppliers. To that record, the NYT adds that Frist had been a long-time member of an all-white golf club, had never voted prior to his active involvement in politics, and had played the race card and had apologized to African-Americans for questionable remarks in his first Senate campaign in 1994. Frist, one of the wealthiest members of Congress with a blind-trust fortune of $20 million, retains close ties with his family's hospital chain, which "has agreed to pay cumulative fines or penalties totaling $1.7 billion to settle accusations of health care fraud that included overbilling Medicare and kickbacks to physicians."
Most folks probably have seen Frist in action as the TV networks' favorite Republican Senator to come before the cameras and talk about Anthrax, Smallpox, or AIDS. As such, he was calm, reasonable, and professional. However, given his voting record, it appears that Frist is only a more polished, more circumspect representative of that side of Republicanism that sank Trent Lott and got Bush in trouble during his presidential campaign when he discussed with his aides, then agreed to speak at Bob Jones University, and said zip about its well-known, decades-long racist policies, explicitly identifying his brand of conservatism as being theirs. --Jerry Politex, 12.21.02
***
FRIDAY SNEAK: AS PREDICTED, LOTT'S GONE "Wounded by the controversy over his comments criticized by many as racially divisive, Sen. Trent Lott announced Friday he was stepping down as Republican leader in the Senate." --CNN, 12:42 PM, 12.20.02 (Previous Friday Sneaks)
Last week we said it would take two Republicans to remove Lott from Senate majority leadership, one to call for a revote and another to run against him. Nickles of Oklahoma came along and asked for the revote; now, Bush favorite Bill Frist of Tennessee has announced he will run against Lott for the leadership position. That's it. Uh-uh. End of story. Good-by. And the Repub long knives may not even give the chastened man from Mississippi a chairmanship to cushion the bumps on the way down.
But who is Bill Frist? According to Joe Conason, "The White House and congressional Republicans might be better off if Bill Frist replaced Trent Lott, but would anyone else? As bloggers Nathan Newman and Hesiod have pointed out, the Tennessee Republican is essentially a representative of the health insurance, HMO and pharmaceutical industries, which already exercise far too much control over the legislative process. Was Frist responsible for sneaking the notorious Thimerosal provision into the homeland security bill? His office has denied it, but I don't believe their alibi. With any luck, someone on the Hill will snitch to collect the $10,000 reward offered by TomPaine.com for proof of the true identity of the "Eli Lilly Bandit" behind that amendment. " --Politex, 12.20.02, 1:00 AM
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