Friday, August 27, 2004
What part of your own election don't you understand?
But when pressed repeatedly if he would specifically denounce the advertisements, which Mr. Kerry has said were being run with the tacit approval of the Bush campaign, the president refused to condemn then. Instead, he said he would talk only of the "broader issue'' of the political committees that take to the airwaves with attack advertisements.
"Five twenty-sevens - I think these ought to be outlawed,'' he said. "I think they should have been outlawed a year ago. We have billionaires writing checks, large checks, to influence the outcome of the election.''
Riiight. Cause no rich people are supporting Bush.
posted by chris at 10:15 AM
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Thursday, August 26, 2004
The same ol' game
Any student of Bush family campaigns could have seen the swift boat shiv shining a mile away. This old family has traditions – horseshoes, fishing, bad syntax and having the help do the dirty work in campaigns as well as the kitchen. And they are very good at getting jobs done without leaving fingerprints, without compromising their patrician image and their alleged character.
Even the audaciousness of this year’s episode is not surprising. Who would have believed that George Bush, with all the trouble over his National Guard service, could get John Kerry in hot water for his combat duty and medals in Vietnam? Well, anyone who saw what George Bush did to former POW John McCain in the 2000 primaries, which was even more outrageous.
The ancestral origin of Bush family gut fighting came in George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis in the form of the infamous Willie Horton ad. (Historical footnote: Horton actually went by William, not Willie, and is referred as William in all legal documents; the ad makers thought Willie sounded scarier and blacker.)
That ad was produced by an outfit allegedly independent of the official campaign. It wasn’t aired on TV much but got most of its play in the press. Papa Bush and his official staff maintained they knew nothing about such déclassé skullduggery. There was nothing blatantly untrue about the ad, but it was hugely misleading and subtly racist.
The ad also attacked Dukakis right where he was supposed to be strongest. If the Duke had a strength (a big if), it was as a highly competent government CEO who led the Massachusetts Miracle. The ad gave an emotional snapshot of a guy whose incompetence let a killer out of jail so he could commit assault and rape. It worked.
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In 2000, McCain had George W. on the ropes and South Carolina was the do-or-die state. Flyers appeared from thin air alleging that McCain had a black child (he and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi daughter from an orphanage there). Other fliers said McCain was the "fag candidate." Rumors swirled that McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison camp had left him unstable and downright crazy - again, hitting at the opponent's greatest strength. Other rumors were that his wife was a drug addict. Nice stuff, and none of it had Bush’s inky fingerprints on it.
At an event with Bush, a vet from some fringe group accused McCain of abandoning veterans. That really set McCain off and he demanded an apology from Bush. Bush simply said that he believed McCain "served our country nobly." That’s what he says about Kerry now. Above the fray, clean hands, patrician.
Soon after that, a mysterious group dumped $2 million into ads in more liberal New York attacking McCain’s environmental record and boosting Bush's. Eventually, it turned out the ads were bankrolled by a big Bush donor named Sam Wyly. No Bush fingerprints there either.
More, via TPM
posted by chris at 5:12 PM
A little background for that poverty data down below
Every year, the Census Bureau releases the poverty data in late-September. In election years, that means the public learns about the number of families in poverty about five weeks before going to the polls. This year -- surprise, surprise -- the announcement has been moved up to August, when Congress is out of session, a lot of journalists are on vacation, and the Olympics are on TV.
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Indeed, it's not suspicious at all that the Census Bureau changed the date and the location of the announcement to a harder-to-reach office. Instead of using the traditional National Press Club in downtown DC, where the numbers have been released in years past, the poverty data announcement will be made from Census Bureau offices in Suitland, Md., far from reporters' offices.
These people are unbelivable.
posted by chris at 4:34 PM
Mix-and-match
The cost of Bush's war:
A giant clock ticking the cost of the war in Iraq lit up in Times Square on Wednesday, making its debut by flashing $134.5 billion.
The amount on the clock will grow at a rate of $177 million a day, $7.4 million an hour and $122,820 per minute, said the advocacy group Project Billboard which put it up.
The other cost of Bush's war:
Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 as the ranks of the poor rose 4 percent to 35.9 million, with children and blacks worse off than most, the government said on Thursday in a report that fueled Democratic criticism of President Bush.
Despite the economic recovery, the percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose for the third straight year to 12.5 percent -- the highest since 1998 -- from 12.1 percent in 2002, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report. The widely cited score card on the nation's economy showed one-third of those in poverty were children.
The number of U.S. residents without health-care coverage rose 1.4 million to 45 million last year, while incomes were essentially stagnant, the Census Bureau said.
The poverty line is set at an annual income of $9,573 or less for an individual, or $18,660 for a family of four with two children. Under that measure, a family would spend about a third of its income on food.
UPDATE: Two other costs of Bush's war can be found here and here. (Also here.)
posted by chris at 4:07 PM
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Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Oil, sweet oil
Placing a heavy emphasis on energy production in the American West, the Bush administration has moved aggressively to open up broad areas of largely unspoiled federal land to oil and gas exploration.
The administration has pressed for approval of new drilling permits across the Rocky Mountains and lifted protections on hundreds of thousands of acres with gas and oil reserves in Utah and Colorado. In the process, it has targeted a number of places prized for their scenery, abundant wildlife and clean water, natural assets increasingly valuable to the region's changing economy.
Soon after taking office in 2001, the Bush White House set up a little-known task force that acts as a complaint desk for industry, passing energy company concerns directly to federal land management employees in the field. Although the creation of White House task forces is commonplace, experts on the executive branch say it is unusual to have one primarily serving the interests of a single industry.
In addition, the Bureau of Land Management has been pushed to issue drilling permits at a record pace for three of the last four years, an increase of 70% since the Clinton administration.
Internal memos and interviews show senior administration officials have directed federal employees to be responsive to industry, commended offices that approved large numbers of drilling permits and chastised those that were slow.
The effort is so intense in the oil- and gas-rich Rockies that some Bureau of Land Management employees there have taken to calling the region "the OPEC states."
The Administration says that this is an effort to reduce dependence of foreign oil. I guess no one thought about trying to actually reduce dependence on the finite supply of fossil fuels. Now who could be behind all this?
posted by chris at 4:45 PM
GOP still pushing anti-gay marriage amendment
These people are obsessed:
Republican leaders are pushing for a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the GOP platform, opening a new point of contention between social conservatives and outnumbered but vocal factions fighting to give the party's statement of principles a more moderate tone.
I'm not so sure the Vice President would agree, though.
Vice President Cheney spelled out his differences with President Bush on the volatile issue of gay marriage Tuesday while making his most revealing public comments so far about the sexual orientation of his gay daughter.
Asked his position on the subject at a town hall meeting here, Cheney replied: "Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue that our family is very familiar with. . . . With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People . . . ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to."
Cheney went on to reiterate the position he first outlined in the 2000 campaign -- that same-sex marriage should be left to the states to decide. He noted, however, that Bush has endorsed a constitutional amendment preventing the states from recognizing such marriages.
posted by chris at 10:57 AM
Have a Coke and some weight gain
Women who drink non-diet soda or fruit punch every day gain weight quickly and face a sharply elevated risk of diabetes, according to a major study released yesterday.
The study of more than 50,000 U.S. nurses found that those who drank just one serving of soda or fruit punch a day tended to gain much more weight than those who drank less than one a month, and had more than an 80 percent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease. The risk pertained to drinks sweetened with either sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.
Although previous studies have linked such drinks to obesity and diabetes, the association has been the subject of intense debate as health activists have fought to ban soda vending machines from schools and the sugar industry has lobbied against dietary guidelines that discourage sugar consumption by children and adults. The new study is by far the largest and best-designed and one of the first to examine the issue in adults.
Story.
posted by chris at 10:49 AM
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Tuesday, August 24, 2004
All the way to the top
Top Pentagon officials and the military command in Iraq contributed to an environment in which prisoners were abused at Abu Ghraib prison, according to a report released Tuesday by high-level panel investigating the military detentions.
The outside four-member panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff failed to exercise proper oversight over confusing detention policies at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Command failures were compounded by poor advice provided by staff officers with responsibility for overseeing battlefield functions related to detention and interrogation operations," the report said. "Military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon share this burden of responsibility."
The panel did not find that Rumsfeld or military leaders directly ordered abuse such as stripping prisoners naked and sexually humiliating them. It said, however, that the abuses were not carried out by just a few individuals, as the Bush administration has consistently maintained.
Story.
posted by chris at 4:29 PM
More from Abu Ghraib
An Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has found that military police dogs were used to frighten detained Iraqi teenagers as part of a sadistic game, one of many details in the forthcoming report that were provoking expressions of concern and disgust among Army officers briefed on the findings.
Earlier reports and photographs from the prison have indicated that unmuzzled military police dogs were used to intimidate detainees at Abu Ghraib, something the dog handlers have told investigators was sanctioned by top military intelligence officers there. But the new report, according to Pentagon sources, will show that MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition.
"There were two MP dog handlers who did use dogs to threaten kids detained at Abu Ghraib," said an Army officer familiar with the report, one of two investigations on detainee abuse scheduled for release this week. "It has nothing to do with interrogation. It was just them on their own being weird."
Speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released, other officials at the Pentagon said the investigation also acknowledges that military intelligence soldiers kept multiple detainees off the record books and hid them from international humanitarian organizations. The report also mentions substantiated claims that at least one male detainee was sodomized by one of his captors at Abu Ghraib, sources said.
More.
posted by chris at 8:10 AM
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