George W. Bush – Page 3

“This is a farewell kiss, you dog”

Shockingly, even in the aftermath of the Great Shoe Attack of 2009, some ungrateful Iraqis aren’t thanking President Bush for putting his life on the line in his unyielding attempts to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East.

Indeed, after six years of war that has killed nearly 100,000 Iraqis and turned some 2 million into refugees, there were few words of thanks or praise directed at President Bush from Iraqi citizens. Instead:

The Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 28, a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station, stood up about 12 feet from Mr. Bush and shouted in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He then threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it.

As stunned security agents and guards, officials and journalists watched, Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” That shoe also narrowly missed Mr. Bush as Prime Minister Maliki stuck a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.

Don’t worry, though; Bush laughed it off. And because U.S.-occupied Iraq is such a free society, the man was beaten, dragged outside, and is currently jailed.

Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.

Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

The Bush Legal Legacy: More Whites, Men, and Conservatives

When we talk about judicial appointments, we usually focus on the Supreme Court — and George W. Bush certainly left his mark there with the appointment of two young, very conservative justices who will shape the decisions of the court for the next few decades. But considering that getting a case up to the Supreme Court is about 10 times harder than getting into Harvard, it’s worth pointing out that other judicial appointments — especially to appeals courts — end up mattering as much or more than who is appointed to the highest bench. And George W’s have not been good.

As a result of Bush’s 311 appointments to federal district courts and the appellate bench, judges across the country are more male, more white and slightly more Hispanic than those in place at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. A third of the nominees during Bush’s first term had “a history of working as lawyers and lobbyists on behalf of the oil, gas and energy industries,” according to a study by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

A University of Houston study of rulings by Bush’s district court appointees through 2004 found that 27 percent of the judges supported what might be considered “liberal” outcomes in litigation related to the Bill of Rights or civil rights — “giving the President the lowest score of any modern chief executive,” according to the author, Robert A. Carp. Bush’s judges also were much less likely to express support for privacy rights.

District and appellate appointments usually fly below the radar, and so presidents with an agenda can easily stack those benches with ideologues who will make law for decades to come. Here’s some of what we can expect from these appointees in the future:

Bush’s appointees nationwide have generally been “less hospitable” to allowing groups without direct financial interests to intervene in court, said University of Pittsburgh law professor Arthur D. Hellman, an expert on federal appellate courts. That viewpoint skews litigation by giving “less attention to values that are not measured in dollars,” he said.

In June, a Republican-appointee majority of the 8th Circuit — with jurisdiction over seven Midwestern and Plains states — lifted an injunction against what is perhaps the most radical anti-abortion law in the country: a South Dakota law requiring that doctors read a five-point tract meant to discourage women from proceeding.

The tract states a view that no court had previously sanctioned, namely that “abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” and that by having an abortion, a woman will sever her “existing relationship with that unborn human being.”

The court’s majority said the will of the state legislature should be respected. But in dissent, Judge Diana E. Murphy, a Clinton appointee, accused the majority of bypassing “important principles of constitutional law.”

Obama can certainly appoint more progressive judges, but he can’t undo this kind of damage.

Good and Bad News on Proposed DHHS Rule

This NY Times article, though unfortunately referring to it as a measure that “protects health providers,” gives us some important updates on Bush’s proposed anti-choice DHHS rule.

Bad News: Bush still looks determined to instate the rule.

Good News: Members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including those appointed by Bush, are voicing protest against the rule, saying it is unnecessary and would “overturn 40 years of civil rights law prohibiting job discrimination based on religion.” In addition, it’s being vocally opposed by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, a bunch of senators and congressional representatives, and the attorney generals of 13 states.

Good News: President-Elect Barack Obama has stated his opposition to the proposal, and the NY Times describes his position as believing it would “raise new hurdles to women seeking reproductive health services, like abortion and some contraceptives.” Obama apparently plans to attempt to rescind the rule if it goes into effect. As I said in my last post on the subject, this is probably the best we can hope for at this point.

Bad News: Rescinding the rule would take three to six months.

To summarize even further, I’m hugely pessimistic for the short-term, but optimistic about where this is going to go come January.

Bush Poised To Implement Dangerous New DHHS Rule

I’ve written before about Bush’s proposed dangerous new DHHS rule, which would prevent publicly funded health clinics from “discriminating” against potential employees on the basis of their opposition to abortion — even when abortion is one of their services, and that employee inaccurately and ludicrously describes birth control as “abortion.” Planned Parenthood just sent out an email with bad news:

This summer, the Bush administration tried to keep secret a proposed federal regulation that would allow health care providers to redefine abortion to include birth control. With your help, we forced Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt to make the plans public.

Then the administration submitted the proposed rule for public comments. More than 200,000 people — including more than 90,000 Planned Parenthood supporters like you, and more than 150 members of Congress — immediately called on the Bush administration to withdraw this damaging proposal that could keep millions of people from receiving basic health information and necessary medical care.

The Bush administration promised not to release any new regulations after November 1.

Well, it’s now November 14, and guess what? President Bush is poised to implement this disastrous new policy as soon as next week. Tell the Bush administration: Keep your word. Stop the attack on women’s health.

[. . . ]

This new rule could allow almost 600,000 health care entities that receive federal funding to redefine abortion to include the most common forms of birth control — and then refuse to provide these basic services. For any health provider to intentionally withhold information about widely embraced treatment options from a patient — for any health condition — is absolutely unconscionable under any circumstances. The federal government has no business funding providers who do not abide by this most fundamental standard of care.

A woman’s ability to manage her own health care is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology if this regulation goes into effect. We need you to speak out now, before the administration implements this rule. The exam room is no place to play political games. Click here to speak out now.

Again, send your message now.

And because I’m not particularly hopeful . . . does anyone know if this is something that Obama would easily be able to overturn once he takes office?

Ridin’ Dirty

I’m home during a half day — which is lucky because I’ve got a head cold that beats all head colds — catching up on political news. Part of my research includes watching The View, which has gotten consistently more interesting since the addition of Whoopi Goldberg and the sad, plodding political leanings of Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who thinks Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayres is exactly the same as McCain’s relationship to the Keating Five scandal.

Hasselbeck’s is a new GOP talking point (she practically read her defense of McCain-Plain verbatim from a campaign email yesterday), one of the points that Palin has been casually mentioning on the campaign trail by trying to tie Ayres’ activities with The Weathermen to Obama to brand him a domestic terrorist. Although I think Kathy G may be minimizing Obama’s working relationship with Ayres (I don’t know, I’m a layperson), she has two interesting posts on the prevalence of the Ayres family in their Chicago neighborhood, which is to say that if you live there and are even nominally active in Chicago politics, you’ve probably rubbed shoulders with them. All fact-based reporting suggests that they didn’t have much of a relationship at all.

(Apparently that Todd Palin was a card-carrying member of the secessionist AIP, and involved enough that everyone assumed Sarah Palin was a member as well, isn’t an indicator of radical, unpatriotic beliefs.)

The real story, if the story is about character and judgement, as people like my mother assert, is this:

On this day of tit-for-tat politics, the Obama campaign missed the real reason why the Keating Five remain relevant 20 years later. The point lies not in the details of the bygone scandal (trust me, they are complex and murky), but in the way that McCain has abandoned in this presidential campaign all the good-government habits that he adopted after he was chastised by the Ethics Committee. As he recounted in his memoir, “I decided right then that not talking to reporters or sharply denying even the appearance of a problem wasn’t going to do me any good. I would henceforth accept every single request for an interview … and answer every question as completely and straightforwardly as I could.”

McCain, who until the spring was indeed the most accessible major politician in America, has veered completely in the other direction, avoiding reporters at one point for more than a month. As the decider on the Republican ticket, McCain is also responsible for the Arctic-chill media strategy that has almost completely muzzled Sarah Palin since her selection as his running mate.

Far more disturbing is that it has become difficult to believe that John McCain recalls the larger lessons about personal honor that he supposedly carried away from his Keating Five disgrace.

Indeed. Several years back when McCain was at his maverickiest, I remember thinking that he would be the only Republican on the stage that I would ever consider voting for. He was purportedly a man of integrity who, for all his faults, appeared to break from the GOP’s platforms where they made fiscal sense. As a person, McCain vowed never to take the low road. He was different than that, he said, especially during his presidential campaign in 2000, where he was accused by supporters of George W. Bush, and arguably by the Bush campaign itself, of fathering an “illegitimate black child” — Cindy McCain adopted their daughter Bridget from Bangladesh — that his wife Cindy was an drug addict, that he was gay, and that he was a “Manchurian Candidate” who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. But today, members of McCain’s campaign staff include the old guard that once attacked him on these charges. And ironically, although they try to dogwhistle Americans who hold onto racist caricatures when they watch Barack Obama take the national stage, they may be sounding the death toll for the effectiveness of the Southern strategy.

And it’s sad, really sad, that this man whose entire political career was based on the idea of a different, more transparent kind of politics, has fallen to the level where he will sit idly by as he benefits from painting Obama as an untrustworthy, sinister Other. His supporters get it, too:

But it goes further than boos and hyperbole. During this Palin campaign stop in Florida,

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

I wonder if Palin didn’t blink at that brand of domestic terrorism. But that’s me.

“The Same”

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the newest attack ad from the Obama campaign:

watch?v=8xukbiS8q9s

The Obama campaign has been hammering pretty hard on McCain=Bush theme for awhile now, but I think this is the first time they’ve explicitly made the connection using pictures and video (a video I didn’t even know existed!). Honestly, if the Obama campaign keeps this up, I don’t see how McCain can recover, absent some major gaffe from Obama or Biden. The national mood may not be completely against Republicans, but it certainly is against Bush, and if voters begin to instinctually associate McCain with Bush, then it’s game over for the Republicans.

cross-posted at The United States of Jamerica

Bush to Veto Equal Pay for Women

This week, the House passed the Paycheck Fairness act, legislation that sets precedents to close the wage gap between working men and women and attempts to close the loopholes that allow employers to get away with discriminatory pay practices. However, according to an official statement, the White House fully intends to veto the bill, saying,

The bill would unjustifiably amend the Equal Pay Act (EPA) to allow for, among other things, unlimited compensatory and punitive damages, even when a disparity in pay was unintentional. It also would encourage discrimination claims to be made based on factors unrelated to actual pay discrimination by allowing pay comparisons between potentially different labor markets. In addition, it would require the Department of Labor (DOL) to replace its successful approach to detecting pay discrimination with a failed methodology that was abandoned because it had a 93 percent false positive rate. Thus, if H.R. 1338 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

Now be a good girl and make me a sandwich.

Via Think Progress

Clinton Fights On

No doubt Clinton’s relatively new vocalization in favor of reproductive health rights has something to do with her massive campaign debt*, but I don’t care. I’ll take it.

Today Clinton made two gutsy press releases via blog in order to take a stand against the Bush administration’s latest attempt** to put common forms of contraception like birth control pills and IUDs in the same category as abortion.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them “abortion.” These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it. We can’t let them get away with this underhanded move to undermine women’s health and that’s why I am sounding the alarm.

These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. They could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They’ll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.

The regulations could even invalidate state laws that currently ensure access to contraception for many Americans. In fact, they describe New York and California’s laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to provide coverage for contraceptives as part of “the problem.” These rules would even interfere with New York State law that ensures survivors of sexual assault and rape receive emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.

The only thing abortive about birth control is that it messes with God’s will, God’s will to permanently relieve me from cat litter duty. Because God has nothing better to do.

On the other hand, you, dear reader, with a few flicks of your delicate wrist, can join Sen. Clinton’s call to action here.

And in related reading, Marcella wrote about another offense by the Bush administration earlier this week in which they want special protection for anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive medical providers who refuse treatment to patients. Senators Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray jointly released a statement in protest on this proposal as well.

____________
* To be fair, Clinton’s record on reproductive rights is as good as, if not better than, Obama’s, but I can’t recall her being this outspoken on the issues in recent history.
** Some of Bush’s recent attempts of wrestling media glory away from Obama and McCain appear to be pretty transparent attempts at reclaiming his legacy. It’s way better for the future of his vainglorious presidential library if he can be remembered as an evangelical, lady-killing rock star by his base, instead of being remembered as the man who wiped his ass on the Constitution, abandoned thousands of citizens in crisis, abused the good faith and young bodies of his troops, and waged an unnecessary war to avenge the name of his father.

Bush Administration Promotes Discriminatory Practices Related To Birth Control

From the New York Times:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. […]

The proposal, which circulated in the department on Monday, says the new requirement is needed to ensure that federal money does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or policies in violation of federal law.” The administration said Congress had passed a number of laws to ensure that doctors, hospitals and health plans would not be forced to perform abortions.

This reference to not supporting coercive or discriminatory practices is interesting since the proposed change would explicitly allow medical providers to morally coerce patients and to discriminate against girls and women who want or need a service or a prescription which they are allowed to have by law.

I don’t believe the Bush administration truly believes in their rationale for this proposed change. If they did then employment rules would apply to all areas where people don’t want to perform certain tasks for moral reasons.

Think about the government contractors who have faced allegations of taking actions which show no respect for human life.

Impeach Bush?

I’ll admit that I’m skeptical about the “Impeach Bush” crowd, mostly because impeachment seems to have become a talking point of people who tend to come across as slightly crazy. And no matter how much I like many of the policies promoted by Dennis Kucinich, he falls into the same trap: He seems slightly crazy. But Marie Coco is right: There is quite a detailed case for impeaching Bush. I haven’t read through the whole thing — and let’s be honest, I am not going to until after the Bar, if ever — but in skimming it, it seems like an interesting combination of solid accusations and few stretches. It would be nice if it were ever actually dealt with.

That said, I doubt anything will come of it, because (a) Democrats are weenies; (b) it would probably be framed by Republicans as a colossal waste of time; and (c) it might actually be a colossal waste of time and a general impossibility in the current political climate. But I am also happy to admit that I know almost nothing about this. So what do you all think?