Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card complains:
I found that Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes treated the Oval Office with tremendous respect. They treated the Office of the Presidency with tremendous respect. And some of that respect was reflected in how they expected people to behave, how they expected them to dress when they walked into the symbol of freedom for the world, the Oval Office. And yes, I’m disappointed to see the casual, laissez faire, short sleeves, no shirt and tie, no jacket, kind of locker room experience that seems to be taking place in this White House and the Oval Office.
Is he kidding?
Actually, one of Bush’s 1st Presidential Acts was to make clothing more formal in the White House. Ahem, that seems so important in retrospect, doesn’t it? NOT.
Bush apparently REALLY LIKED TO DRESS UP.
The US is in the worst recession in its history, brought on by the intellectually challenged president who wore a suit in the Oval Office. Its not the clothes that make the man, Andrew.
While Bush wore that suit, his wealthy base, the ones who want suits and ties in the Oval Office, had their tax rate dropped a THIRD, to 17.2% under Bush’s ‘dress up’ regime.
The 400 richest Americans had their incomes double, under ‘dress up’ Bush.
Meanwhile, the middle class went to work in work clothes and paid regular taxes, not Bush’s ‘lowered taxes for the rich’.
Working middle class incomes did not DOUBLE under eight years of Bush.
So focus on the real issues, Andrew. Your President looked good (to you) in a suit, but he nearly destroyed our country while he was sitting pretty at his desk.
She says, but what really DID make her angry was the implication that President Bush allowed this to happen because these people were black.
Again, really? That’s what made her mad? Not starving people? Not a rape in the Superdome? Not children or disabled elderly frightened and needing rescue? Not dead bodies floating in homes, accidentally marked as ‘empty’ by roving military?
Condi’s answer today on The View included: ‘I don’t think anyone was prepared at any level of government.’
How ridiculous. Post 9/11? No one was prepared? Its well known that the levies had been analyzed and needed repair. Here’s a video from Hardball, in 2002, prior to Katrina, where the environmentalist is treated like a crackpot by a right wing think tank coal advocate and the Hardball moderator, and the scientist specifically mentions danger to New Orleans. In 2002.
In the Washington Post, Condi recently says Iraq is becoming trustworthy because they ‘finally accepted Christmas as a holiday‘! Spoken like a true ‘my way or the highway’ ‘you’re not saved unless you believe what I believe’ Christian American. Condi insinuates that a Muslim country adding a Christian holiday to their official calendar is proof of democracy, but the United States only honors Christian holidays, not Muslim or Jewish or other ethnic holidays.
How hypocritical.
Its a good thing she’s out of a job. She’s as blind as Bush. Which is why he’s accused of not liking black people.
He did not treat them as he would have treated his rich base, the fundamental Christians for whom he left vacation early to sign a document in the Terry Schiavo case. He showed up for one white woman in a vegetative state but not for thousands of low income blacks.
That is why people think George Bush doesn’t like black people.
Honestly, that is not what Condi Rice should be talking about on The View. Didn’t she have a job? Doesn’t she have thoughts about that? Rehabbing Bush’s legacy doesn’t jibe with the facts.
Davos leaders are speechless because they keep thinking of solutions that leave them rich.
They’ve lived off subsidized debt. They’ve gamed the world wide economic system so that they can create whatever money they want, and then they gambled that money on crazy-ass financial instruments.
And when it all implodes, SHOCK AND AWE, they are STUNNED. And want to re-game the system so that they can keep their wealth, their power.
We cannot solve a problem with the same minds, with the same thinking that created the problem.
Its just that simple.
The American worker, the home of the American worker and the American workers savings and retirement accounts have all been flayed, in the interest of greater wealth for a very, very few.
That cannot continue.
We need out of the box thinking. NOW. And not by these guys. Let them wring their hands, but push them offstage.
I suggest:
Van Jones, Michael Pollan, Arianna Huffington, Barry Ritholz and Paul Kedrosky join the Obama Administration. Oh, and add me. You need a pissed off mom to clean house and tell these Davos big boys they can’t have their toys anymore.
Idle question: Given the insolvency of the financial system; the massive interventions into the economy (past, present and future) from government; and the almost certain worse economic data ahead, the current stock market feels like it’s not tied to anything in particular.
So … what would happen if we marked the market to market? One wonders.
I agree with you. The problem is 99% of Americans still think there is an underlying ‘value’ to the businesses in the stock market, that they are buying shares in those businesses like in the old days.
Personally, I disagree with them.
I believe that the excess under-capitalization of financial assets sold in the last ten years have literally wiped away much of the value of corporate America and we are left with the equivalent of depreciated assets whose values can’t grow until we accept the real numbers for losses. And we’re not doing that, instead we’re sending more cash into hemorrhaging incompetent companies. I think also that if most Americans would agree to value, in their heads and on paper, their homes at 40% off the high they think it is at, we’d have a quick recovery in the housing market.
I only say that because I did it. I put my house on the market in March 2008 at 10% off a realistic price (about 30% off what would have been a high price) and sold my house in a day with two offers, one for a bit more than asking. It was the last quick sale in that town, because homeowners after me wanted to recapture the higher price they had in their head. So I got out of my adjustable mortgage before it became a problem. When I look at property now, I see homes that are still marked up to prices paid TWO YEARS AGO. And they are not selling.
My niaive question is: why don’t we just mark to market?
Its an ego thing, I believe.
Then there is the next, more inflammatory question.
If a worker agrees to change his thoughts and accept his home at 65% of the price he had in his head, and he does the same for his retirement account and any savings he had, and he’s willing to go to work the next day, where is the culpability of the government who has now blown his taxes on loser bailouts?
Why should regular Americans take the brunt of what is a government sanctioned greed-a-thon? When Lehman Bros head sells his Florida mansion to his wife for $100, without repercussions? Its a one-sided acceptance of reality.
“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Something to think about when there were 50,000 layoffs today, from companies including Home Depot, Caterpillar, ING, GM, Sprint Nextel and Pfizer…
Do you think regular working Americans are okay with Citigroup taking $45 billion in bailout money and using part of it to purchase a new $50 million corporate jet (which seats 12) after the banking giant announced cutting up to 50,000 more jobs? Citibank recently posted an abysmal $8.29 billion loss, as regular working Americans are struggling to keep credit cards paid, home mortgages paid, businesses open without a bailout.
Sounds like the makings of a revolution… Thankfully, Obama’s election shows regular Americans trust he will intercede in these corporate shenanigans.
Its not how I run my household or my friendships or my work relationships.
So why does my government allow it?
Bush’s senior Climate Change Denier, Kathie Olsen, gamed the system to quit her political appointment job and to move into a Civil Service position from which she cannot be fired.
Yuck. Especially when Bush was looking for any way to support the oil industry.
I hate when political appointees abuse the protections of the the Civil Service union in order to save their own asses.
Remember Phil Cooney, the once and future oil industry representative who habitually erased from government documents any evidence that fossil fuels cause global warming? It was Olsen who first handed Cooney a debunked, Big-Oil-underwritten study that purported to disprove the existence of climate change. As Rolling Stonereported in 2007:
“It was sham science,” says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. “It’s almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record.”But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great excitement in the White House. When Kathie Olsen of the Office of Science and Technology Policy forwarded the study to Cooney, he responded with an enthusiastic, “Thanks, Kathie!” Six minutes later, according to internal e-mails, the study was in the hands of Kevin O’Donovan, who served as Cheney’s point man on climate. The study also grabbed President Bush’s attention …
Its bad enough that she made it easy for Bush to deny that human activities contribute to global warming, but she also stood by the flawed arguments and then hid in the refuge of what Republicans HATE, a union that is meant to protect its workers from REAL inequality. She now has a safe job, while hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost theirs and endangered species and the environment have suffered from her covert actions.
My dad used to tell me that it didn’t matter how many of life’s potholes I fell into, that it only mattered that I chose to get myself out of the most recent one.
Wise.
On the 1st day of a new Presidency, let’s not look to blame someone.
After 9/11, George Bush suggested we protect our economy by shopping.
A heartless, thoughtless comment on the value of 4,000 American lives, at the time.
Since Americans were at that time already spending beyond their means, any shopping they did was funded by credit card debt AND, we now know, refinanced mortgages and home equity lines of credit…
It turns out our illustrious President (he’s not industrious, but that’s another blog post) has paid for the War in Iraq thru the same type of debt
that now has Americans teetering on a Depression greater than we’ve ever seen.
the Bush administration’s paying for the wars through borrowing, rather than tax increases and spending cuts. That approach, it concluded, will lead to interest costs through 2018 that range from about $70 billion to as high as about $700 billion, depending on how much of the war funding came through bond sales.
“If you want to go to war . . . we should probably pay for more of that war upfront rather than borrowing for it,” Kosiak said, because the public feels more of the war’s real burden through tax increases and spending cuts.
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments blamed the ballooning budgets on the Bush administration’s unprecedented decision to fund the wars through giant emergency spending measures rather than through appropriations requests.
“The process has reduced the ability of Congress to exercise effective oversight. It has also tended to obscure the long-term costs and budgetary consequences of ongoing military operations,” the report says. It also warns that such emergency bills have included “substantial amounts of funding for programs unrelated to the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Ahhhhhhhh, its as if I walked out of Target with what I needed, household supplies, but also threw in a bunch of things I did not need, like a pair of men’s Simpsons boxer shorts that say ‘D’oh’, a beach towel with the lead singers of High School Musical on it, and a garden gnome. And I paid for it all on credit, which ensures that I’ll end up paying twice as much for the garden gnome in interest payments. Bush threw in some extra items at the counter, so to speak, and we’re going to pay for them, plus interest.
Hey, if you want to learn something about yourself, listen to your critics… They are seeing your world in a way that you are not.
George W. Bush, in his closing press conference, says adamantly “look at all the criticism, I had people asking ‘how could you not connect the dots’, but i don’t listen to the press, and i don’t listen to my critics”.
He’s not listening to the media (probably because he realizes how easily manipulated old fashioned mainstream media is, because he and Rove manipulated it themselves!), and he’s not listening to ‘his critics’, which at the end of his term is the 75% of Americans who think he’s:
done a terrible job, ruined the US and global economy
bankrupted future generations in order to fight in Iraq to secure oil supply lines,
enriched his corporate friends with Iraqi and Afghani reconstruction projects that have only provided reliable water, heat and electricity and safe buildings to – wait for it – US military bases and prisons, but not to the Iraq and Afghani communities within which these new US infrastructures now sit
Richard Wolffe noticed that Bush had a lack of self-awareness, seemed traumatized in the press conference.
I think these appalling statements by Bush show that Bush is essentially two-faced, schizophrenic.
He harps on rescuing so many people from rooftops after Katrina hit the Southern coastline, but somehow can’t be bothered to think about how law and order fell apart, how communications were so lacking that he didn’t know for two days that thousands of people were in the Superdome, how thousands of survivors didn’t quickly get adequate food or water, or transportation out of the flooded area.
He doesn’t understand why we’ve lost our moral standing in the world. Because he doesn’t listen to the press or his critics. He listens to his ‘yes’ people, apparently. And his ‘yes’ people have now abandoned him to carry on this painful press conference by himself, a shell of a man.
The Washington Note, a blog by Steve Clemons, brings up the same point I brought up this morning:
Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior member of Hamas exiled in Damascus, has another opinion piece out, this one, naturally, regarding the Israeli incursion into Gaza.
“American bombs, American planes, and American idleness, all lead rage in the Muslim world to be directed at the far enemy in addition to Israel. As Lawrence Wright oftenremarks, “if the Israeli-Palestinian crisis were resolved tomorrow,” bin Laden “would be heartbroken.” The conflict remains his bread and butter.
It’s difficult to think about this bitter fight without pondering the role of American war machines, and thus the American military complex.
Later, in the article in the LA Times today, Mazook echoes my view that we need to BE with the people who are suffering after effects of our bombs and planes:
No American leader has ever visited a Palestinian refugee camp anywhere, much less in Gaza — a startling fact, considering the central role America has played in our people’s narrative. None has dared to look our refugees in their faces and experience their suffering directly.
This Israeli-Palestinian war is so ugly. There is little humanity in the anger between sides.
I suggest Israeli soldiers and politicians live in Gaza for a month, before they put their uniforms on or show up to work in their government offices.
I suggest that Hamas soldiers work in Israeli hospitals, giving care to civilians wounded by their rockets.
I suggest that US leaders do both.
Someone has to have the balls to call this war over and enforce peace, for the benefit of generations of Palestinian and Israeli children, who deserve to grow up without the fear that they, their families and their homes will be bombed to bloody smithereens.
And, since many of the weapons being tossed about have the imprint of the US military industrial complex, their blood is on our hands.
