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WHALE RIDER
2003-06-30 15:07:08
I have to be short (so little time), but I urge that people check out the movie WHALE RIDER. I had the good fortune to see it this weekend. Sadly, I have no time to talk about it.
Check it out if it happens to be in your neck of the woods! -
George the Liar
2003-06-26 11:55:17
Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton was relentlessly accused by both adversaries and allies of reversing solemn commitments, not to mention his sexual dissembling. But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president.
The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric -- about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the "average" American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits -- is simply at odds with what Bush's policies actually do. Last month Bush promised to enhance Medicaid; his actual policy would effectively end it as a federal entitlement program.
More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-9/11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there's more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president's lies?
One thing is clear: If a Democrat, say, Bill Clinton, engaged in Bush-scale dishonesty, the press would be all over him. In the spirit of rekindling public outrage, here are just some of the president's lies.
The Education President
"Every single child in America must be educated, I mean every child.... There's nothing more prejudiced than not educating a child." -- George W. Bush, presidential debate versus Vice President Al Gore, Oct. 11, 2000
Along with tax cuts, education was Bush's top priority when he entered the White House. He charmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in an effort to get his bill passed, a bill that combined greater accountability and testing with increased funding. Then, in what has become a trademark, he pulled the plug on the funding.
Members of Congress had good reason to believe Bush was being sincere. As governor of Texas, he had raised state education spending by 55 percent, tightened curriculum requirements and pushed for more accountability from the schools themselves. Even state test scores shot up -- although that was likely the result of the tendency to "teach to the test" rather than an actual increase in learning or knowledge. (The increase wasn't reflected in national standardized test scores.) Still, Bush was able to persuade the top two education Democrats in Congress, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), to work with him on the No Child Left Behind Act. And when the lawmakers objected to voucher provisions, Bush dropped the vouchers -- and toned down the testing measures to win Congress' approval.
But in his 2003 budget, Bush proposed funding levels far below what the legislation called for, requesting only $22.1 billion of the $29.2 billion that Congress authorized. For the largest program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides support to students in impoverished school districts, Bush asked for $11.35 billion out of the $18.5 billion authorized. His 2004 budget was more than $6 billion short of what Congress authorized. Furious, Kennedy called Bush's proposal a "tin cup budget" that "may provide the resources to test our children, but not enough to teach them."
The result: States already strapped by record deficits are being held responsible for the extra testing and administration mandated by law -- but aren't getting nearly enough money to pay for it. So the number of public schools likely to be labeled "failing" by the law is estimated to be as high as 85 percent. Failing triggers sanctions, from technical assistance to requiring public-school choice to "reconstitution" -- that is, firing the entire school's staff and hiring a new one. And Bush isn't doing much to help. The New Hampshire School Administrators Association calculated that Bush's plan imposed at least $575 per student in new obligations. His budget, however, provides just $77 per student. It's a revolution in education policy, all right, but No Child Left Behind was simply a lie.
Healthy Skepticism
"Our goal is a system in which all Americans have got a good insurance policy, in which all Americans can choose their own doctor, in which seniors and low-income citizens receive the help they need. ... Our Medicare system is a binding commitment of a caring society. We must renew that commitment by providing the seniors of today and tomorrow with preventive care and the new medicines that are transforming health care in our country." -- George W. Bush, Medicare address, March 4, 2003
The man simply has no shame. His program does none of this. What it does is to make dramatic cuts in the benefits for both the poor and the elderly.
Under the current Medicaid program, the federal government matches, on a sliding scale, the money that states put up. The state is required to cover some beneficiaries and services, although others are "optional." But "optional" services include many essential and life-saving treatments. And "optional" beneficiaries are seldom able to pay for private insurance. Bush's plan, in effect, would turn Medicaid into a block grant, capping the federal contribution. Because states are already hard-pressed to keep up with Medicaid costs, services to the poor will simply dwindle. As Leighton Ku, a health-policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, notes, if under the current plan "you wanted to save that much money, you would have to specify which cuts to make, how to make the cuts. But it's much easier to cut the block grant because it's invisible; someone else has to make the decisions."
Bush claims to bring flexibility to Medicaid, and, in a sense, he's right. Under his plan states would have, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson put it, "carte blanche" in dealing with optional benefits and optional recipients. In other words, a mother making more than $9,000 a year would be fair game, as would an 8-year-old child who lives in a family with an income just above the poverty line, or a senior citizen or disabled person living on $7,200 a year.
And there's a whiff of coercion to the way in which the states are offered the option of switching to the Medicaid block grant. The states, which have already started cutting Medicaid on their own, are literally begging for federal fiscal assistance, and none is forthcoming. But if they consent to Bush's Medicaid plan, they'll get not only $3 billion in new federal money next year (a loan they would have to repay) but the ability to save money by trimming their Medicaid rolls. In other words, the president is making them an offer they can't refuse.
Bush relentlessly invokes a rhetoric of choice on Medicare. But the Republican proposal pushes seniors toward heavily managed private plans that offer partial drug benefits but limit choice of treatment and doctor. If you stayed with traditional Medicare (which does offer free choice of doctor and hospital), you'd only get minimal prescription-drug benefits. The plan would spend some $400 billion over 10 years, a sum that provides coverage worth 40 percent less than that enjoyed by members of Congress under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, which Bush repeatedly invokes as a model.
And while the plan allows House Republicans to avoid making politically unpopular cuts to Medicare, it requires Congress to cut $169 billion over 10 years from programs they oversee. So in the end, Medicare cuts may end up paying for prescription-drug benefits.
Despite rhetoric promising to increase other health spending, a close reading of the House Republican budget proposal shows $2.4 billion in cuts for programs -- such as the National Institutes of Health, Community Health Centers and the Ryan White AIDS program -- that Bush has pledged to support. Even though Bush vowed in his State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over the next five years to provide AIDS relief to Africa, much of that money won't be available until at least 2006. [See Garance Franke-Ruta, "The Fakeout," TAP, April 2003.]
A Paler Shade of Green
"Clear Skies legislation, when passed by Congress, will significantly reduce smog and mercury emissions, as well as stop acid rain. It will put more money directly into programs to reduce pollution, so as to meet firm national air-quality goals. ..." -- George W. Bush, Earth Day speech, April 22, 2002
Actually, the Clear Skies law doesn't do any of this. The act, in fact, delays required emission cuts by as much as 10 years, usurps the states' power to address interstate pollution problems and allows outdated industrial facilities to skirt costly pollution-control upgrades. The Environmental Protection Agency ensured that few people would notice this last regulation by announcing the change on the Friday before Thanksgiving and publishing it in the Federal Register on New Year's Eve. Still, nine northeastern states immediately filed suit against the administration; their case is pending. Meanwhile, Bush's commitment to clean water is just as murky. Despite saying last October that he wanted to "renew our commitment" to building on the Clean Water Act, he's instead decided to "update" it by removing protections for "isolated" waters and weakening sewage-overflow rules, which could significantly increase the potential for waterborne illnesses.
It's hardly surprising to learn that big business is behind a lot of these changes. The Washington Post recounted a meeting between Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator John Graham and industry lobbyists during which the latter were encouraged to identify particularly onerous rules -- and ultimately created a regulatory "hit list." "There is a stealth campaign that's going on behind closed doors to twist the anti-regulatory process into a pretzel so that the public will be unaware that they are bottling up these protections," says Wesley Warren, the National Resources Defense Council's senior fellow for environmental economics. A good chunk of the 57-item list fell under the EPA's jurisdiction. One by one these rules have been submitted to OIRA under the Paperwork Reduction Act for cost-benefit analysis, a regulatory accounting technique that often ends up justifying watered-down rules.
Even as EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced that global warming is a "real phenomenon," Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. His decision weakened the treaty's effectiveness because the United States produces 25 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.
The former Texas oilman, who made one environmental promise after another on the campaign trail, has slashed the EPA's budget by half a billion dollars over two years, cut 100 employees and rolled back regulations on a near-weekly basis. "There has never been anything to compare this to," says Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy at the National Resources Defense Council. "Even in the days of Reagan, there was never an administration so willfully and almost obsessively concerned with finding ways to really undermine the environmental infrastructure."
Whitman, the administration's supposed environmental champion, is also contributing to the weakening of protections. Although she said the administration was working to put in place a standard to "dramatically reduce" levels of arsenic in drinking water, she later tried to lower the existing regulation, saying that even the 10-part-per-billion federal benchmark was too tough. The EPA rolled back the standard until a report warning of health risks (and public outcry) forced the agency to reinstate the old limit.
Here's another classic Bush whopper: In his State of the Union address, the president proposed $1.2 billion in research funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, in part to make the United States less reliant on foreign oil. What he didn't say is that the technology and infrastructure needed to mass produce such cars won't be available until at least 2020. If Bush truly cared about immediate relief, he might start by acknowledging existing hybrid vehicles or supporting more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for light trucks and SUVs. Neither is likely to be part of a Republican energy package this year.
Democrats in the Senate dealt Bush a rare blow when they voted down his proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in March, although House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) plans to bring the issue back. Still, many lawmakers, especially in the House, feel they can do little except try to fend off the administration's attacks on the environment. "There is an absolute hostility toward any positive strengthening of environmental law," says Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. "It is a wholesale turning over to corporate America the governing of this country."
Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. George W. Bush lied about all these policies because the programs he pretends to favor are far more popular than the ones he puts into effect. But unless the voters and the press start paying attention, all the president's lies will have little political consequence -- except to certify that we have become something less than a democracy.
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Article
2003-06-26 11:51:37
Like a band of street hustlers hawking their three-card monte, Bush officials have been changing their reasoning for going to war with Iraq. As the days pass, and U.S. occupation forces continue to turn up little evidence of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Americans are beginning to realize they have been duped by a president in whom they have instilled immense trust.
The administration's cleverness would be fascinating were it not so insidious, not so destructive of America's position in the world. In rapid succession we were told that: U.S. inspectors cannot find the weapons because looters carried away the evidence; Saddam had too long to hide them; that we never expected to find evidence; that the administration never claimed Iraq actually had such weapons. First it was supposed to be just a matter of time, then it was maybe because Saddam destroyed them.
Most recently, President Bush told us they had found the weapons after all! End of story? Is this the smoking gun the administration so desperately needs? Nope. Bush was referring to several trailers found in different parts of Iraq. Before the war, officials filled the airwaves with lurid claims of fleets of Winnebagos cruising Iraq's superhighways spewing out toxic chemicals or biological toxins. Colin Powell described such a trailer-based system in his February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council.
A couple of the trailers seemed identical to the units Powell described, and indeed the CIA issued a May 28 report on "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants" that served as the basis for the latest assertions.
Now it appears those claims too are unraveling. The CIA report found that the trailers were second- or possibly third-generation designs and that biological weapons production "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles."
U.S. officials rejected Iraqi descriptions of the trailers as labs for producing hydrogen gas for weather balloons or as mobile units used to produce pesticides. Yet the captured trailers contained features suited to extracting gas (as in the balloon theory) and lacked equipment necessary for biological fermentation. Other technologies -- which have yet to be found -- would be necessary to convert the low-grade sludge obtained from some of these trailers into lethal toxins. Such facilities do exist elsewhere -- including in the United States and Poland -- and are marketed commercially. These facts have, as The New York Times reported on June 7, led some intelligence analysts to dispute the conclusions in the CIA report.
While analysis of old trailers may be tedious, it's what's necessary to figure out if the war was justified. When a coalition of nations claims a country must be invaded because it is a threat to humanity, that coalition must prove its claim.
Yet, the opposite is happening. In the most recent chapter of this unraveling, a leaked passage of a September 2002 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) -- the kind of report used to plan military operations -- conceded that there was "no reliable information" on either the location of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons facilities or "on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" at all.
The DIA, which works for the Pentagon, usually takes a more extreme view of foreign military threats than CIA. So, if there was evidence of an Iraqi weapons infrastructure it would certainly have been articulated in a DIA document.
This is especially true since Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were -- by the time the report came out -- already making claims about Iraqi weapons. Cheney declared, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" on Aug. 26, 2002 and Bush made claims regarding expansion of Iraqi weapons labs on Sept. 12, 2002.
Instead, the DIA information is consistent with the CIA's reports to Congress (up until September of 2001) which outlined Iraq's desire to reconstitute a weapons infrastructure but did not declare there was a clear and present threat.
The extensive record of declassified CIA reports from the '90s portrays a decayed and destroyed Iraqi weapons-production infrastructure. So does the account Iraqi weapons manager Hussein Kamel issued to U.N. inspectors (his CIA debriefings have also been declassified), as do U.N. and media reports.
Yet none of this information stopped the administration from hyping its crusade. Remember when Condoleezza Rice scared Americans by invoking an Iraqi mushroom cloud (where there was even less evidence for an active nuclear weapons program)? Or when Ari Fleischer confidently asserted, "We know for a fact that there are weapons in there?" Or how President Bush made the Iraqi threat the centerpiece of his 2003 State of the Union address? By the way, in that address Bush relied on specific evidence about an Iraqi uranium ore deal with Niger that has now been proven to be fabricated -- and Rice has since conceded that "somebody" in the Bush administration may have known of the fabrication before the speech. Then there was Colin Powell's extensive bill of particulars before the United Nations n Feb. 5, 2003.
Intelligence analysts, whether at CIA, DIA or elsewhere, were certainly aware of what the Bush White House wanted to hear on these matters. In private, Cheney or members of his staff visited the CIA a half-dozen times or more to demand additional intelligence. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld created a special staff to tease out the kind of intelligence he needed on alleged Iraqi links with Al Qaeda (it now appears that two of the most senior Al Qaeda figures captured since 9/11 have told their CIA interrogators there were no such links). Their testimony, though, is reflected nowhere in what the American people were told before the war, because it was important to the Bush administration that it not be. Arm-twisting efforts like these have prompted the CIA ombudsman to investigate several formal complaints from analysts.
By contrast, U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq for four months prior to the start of the war found no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program and refused to certify U.S. claims that Iraq had other kinds of weapons of mass destruction underway. This was not sufficient for Bush, who actually sent Condoleezza Rice to New York to pressure U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix (unsuccessfully) into making his report conform to the White House.
This nasty mess of hyped claims was recently described by German U.N. Inspector Peter Franck as "a big bluff." The White House is obviously sensing the onslaught. Bush officials have gone into full damage control to muzzle the charges that Bush was hoodwinking the public.
On May 30, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued a public statement which insisted, "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." One June 4 Department of Defense policy chief Douglas J. Feith held a news conference. "I know nobody who pressured anybody," he said. And both Condi Rice and Colin Powell went on the Sunday morning news shows on June 8 to make similar denials, even as the administration is said to be considering declassifying more of the suddenly-notorious DIA report to demonstrate it did not mean what the leak seemed to indicate. Rice called the charges of intelligence manipulations "revisionist history." True enough, history is being revised before our eyes -- to reflect the facts.
The wise old Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, during the bad old days of the Vietnam War, once tried to warn President Lyndon B. Johnson that a colleague was about to come out against the war. Fulbright said, through a Johnson aide, "I don't know anyone who can turn on a dime quicker" than the senator in question. Government lying was a major issue during the Vietnam era and a big reason why that senator changed his stance on the war. The Bush people are trying to turn just as quickly. Trouble is, they're turning on themselves and are bound to slip.
The Senate intelligence and armed services committees, the House intelligence committee and a special panel of retired CIA officers are all now set to investigate the Iraq intelligence question.
It's getting hot in Washington.
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Yay!
2003-06-25 13:28:12
Well... I just saw that TWO of my AMVs are now in the top 10%. I know that the top 10% really doesn't mean much... but still... it's nice to see them on the list.
Fanime was a heap of fun, but I wasn't able to go to many of the things I wanted to go to because they were in conflict with my schedule.
Still... I got to meet some great people and just had a damn good time.
Also got interviewed by Animerica...so I hope that went well! -
News Article
2003-06-18 17:12:56
Ex-CIA director says administration stretched facts on Iraq
WASHINGTON -- Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of ''overstretching the facts'' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.
Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq.
Turner, who headed the CIA under President Carter, paused for a long moment when asked by reporters whether current CIA Director George Tenet should resign. ''That's a tough one,'' Turner said. The problem did not appear to lie with the CIA, he said, but Tenet should consider resigning if he lost the confidence of President Bush or the American people. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Turner suggested Tenet should tread cautiously because CIA directors ''can be made the fall guy'' by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong.
Turner said, ''There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it.''
Public criticism of an administration's handling of intelligence is rare from former CIA directors, who typically give the benefit of the doubt to those with full access to classified information.
President Bush has given no indication he is having second thoughts about his decision to invade Iraq.
''We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm,'' Bush said in a speech Tuesday at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. ''He chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world.''
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was known to have chemical and biological weapons in the early and mid-1990s. Late last year, Iraq claimed to have none left, though it offered no proof of having disposed of them. At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer called it ''fanciful'' and ''a fit of imagination'' to believe that Saddam would have destroyed his arsenal but neglected to tell the world. Seeking to counter partisan criticism about the intelligence used to justify war, Fleischer said Democrats, including President Clinton, flatly asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the late 1990s.
''The president has every confidence in the intelligence and that weapons will be found,'' Fleischer said. ''The president has full faith in Director Tenet.''
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been battling similar criticism about alleged misuse of intelligence. Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's Cabinet on the eve of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, said Tuesday that searchers in Iraq had found no sign either of equipment or a workforce for making weapons of mass destruction.
''It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq,'' Cook told a parliamentary inquiry into Iraq intelligence matters.
Turner's comments come a month after a group of retired U.S. intelligence officers wrote President Bush to ''express deep concern'' over alleged misuse of intelligence to justify the war.
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Hey... if people were so gung ho about trying to impeach Clinton over his dishonesty connected wiuth a sexual infidelity with an intern...
then people should be chomping at the bit to impeach a liar who has cost the lives of US Soldiers and thousands of innocent citizens of a foriegn nation.
The world opinion has shifted so badly against us because of the incompitence of this President want-to-be. Our country shouldn't suffer this badly all because a couple of rich conservatives want to be richer.
Economy is screwed up
Unemployment rising steadily
The world opinion against us
The middle east utterly destabalized and a bigger mess then before
GET THIS BUM OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!
JOURNAL: UncleMilo (Jonathan Osborne)
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