B and B

In freeing Libby, Bush sinks lower than even I imagined he could

I've spent much of the last few days in rural Kimble County, escaping the pressures of everyday life and news of our nation's affaris.  But this retreat was rudely interrupted yesterday when I happened to involuntarily glance at the headlines of the San Antonio Express-News inside a vending machine:  President Bush has given his convicted crony Scooter Libby a get-out-of-jail card, before Libby has even gone to jail for the crime of lying to a grand jury.

I know many expected something like this, sooner or later, but for some reason I did not.  Yet I should know by now to never make the mistake of assuming Bush will take a high road, when the low, disgraceful road will make his life easier. 

Sadly, but not surprisingly, there appear to be many defeding this shameful action--the subversion of our system of justice in the name of helping a President cover up actions and potential crimes of those around him.  These people deserve to be pushed to the fringes of public debate in this country.  But with the state of the corporate media in this country, the odds of that are slim to none.

Bush has trashed our public lands and the agencies that administer them

Timothy Egan, author of "The Worst Hard Time," an excellent account of those who lived through the 1930s Dust Bowl which I read last summer, has an essay in The New York Times describing Bush's public lands legacy.  The article--"This Land Was My Land"--is behind the subscription firewall, but here is an excerpt:

“In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote [Gifford] Pinchot [the first head of the Forest Service, back in the early 1900s]. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before.”

A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.

In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.

Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Jimmy Stewart’s character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville?

If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.

In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them — 98 percent opposed to drilling.

Bush and his administration have trashed our public lands in the name of enriching their friends.  How can we ensure that this does not happen again?

Stronger action is needed on Darfur: Bush's sanctions on Sudan are "too late and too little"

President Bush has finally gotten around to strengthening the sanctions against the Sudanese government due to their support for the atrocities in Darfur. 

Deb Reichman of the Associated Press puts it bluntly:

The sanctions target about 30 companies involved in Sudan's oil industry, and three individuals, including a rebel leader suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur.

It has taken President Bush nearly three years to match his impassioned rhetoric about what he decries as genocide in Darfur with tougher U.S. action against some of those blamed for the suffering.

Sean-Paul Kelley at the Agonist thinks these new sanctions are "toothless" due to loopholes that allow Sudan to bring in money for their oil by just shifting how they do business slightly.

The director of the Save Darfur Coalition, David Rubinstein, claims that these sanctions are "too late and too little."  He urges Bush not to dawdle on determining whether the new sanctions are working or not.

President Bush must not give further months to determine whether these outlined measures work -- the Darfuri people don't have that much time.  The president must set a short and firm deadline for fundamental changes in Sudanese behavior, and prepare now to implement immediately further measures should Khartoum continue to stonewall. Further action should include the full range of sanctions authorized in the 2006 Darfur Peace and Accountability Act – including the banning of entry of ships into U.S. ports that have carried Sudanese oil, immediate steps to implement a no-fly zone, and developing contingency plans for any potential security collapse.  Such further measures should also include extending proposed UN sanctions beyond the three currently targeted individuals to encompass all those in the Sudanese regime responsible for this genocide, from President al-Bashir on down.

Some other quotes from Reichman's AP article:

John Prendergast, policy adviser to ENOUGH Project, an advocacy group to prevent genocide and mass atrocities:  "Three people? After four years? And not one of them the real ringleader of the policy to divide and destroy Darfur?  This will not end the crisis in Darfur."

Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee:  "They could have sent a stronger message months ago and saved many lives from being disrupted or lost."

When are we going to get a strong leader in this country?  De we really have to wait until at least January 2009?

Bush passing the buck on action against global warming

Headlines earlier this week suggested that President Bush might finally be acting against global warming.  The Austin American-Statesman had a typical example, with the headline  "Bush orders EPA to craft plan for regulating auto emissions," and the subhead "President sets 2008 deadline for proposals."

But in reality, he is boxed into a corner by public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, and now is trying to run out the clock on his watch, as Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch points out on TomPaine.com:

Several decades ago, a popular strategy emerged in college basketball known as the “four corners” offense.

It was a stall tactic—made famous by the University of North Carolina—used to retain a lead by holding onto the ball until the clock ran out.

President Bush has borrowed this stall-ball strategy as a way to delay efforts by California and other states to reduce global warming pollution from motor vehicles.

The Double-Dribbler-in-Chief rolled out the plan this week, ordering the EPA to pass the ball back and forth with three cabinet departments before settling on any plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The executive order demanded that EPA seek “concurrence” from the other departments, with the White House Office of Management and Budget and the industry-friendly Council on Environmental Quality supervising the game.

In other words, the White House wrapped the EPA in a straitjacket of bureaucratic process designed to prevent fast-break action.

“This is a complicated legal and technical matter, and it's going to take time to fully resolve,” said the president, declaring he wanted some answers by the end of 2008—that is, a few weeks before he leaves office.

Even worse, while Bush is stalling, he is also trying to tie the hands of others who are trying to act, such as the state of California.  Frank O'Donnell continues:

California applied for permission to enforce the standards [to cut greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles] way back in 2005, but the Bush administration refused to take the request out of the inbox, despite a full-court press by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. An EPA insider confided to me that the administration was hoping the Supreme Court would back the Bush do-nothing stance on global warming, thus giving them an excuse to dismiss the California request.

Having lost at the Supreme Court, Team Bush rebounded with another game plan to run out the clock. It looks pretty predictable: stall for as long as possible, then (after California presses the issue in court) perhaps reject the California plan in favor of a much weaker national approach.

Why doesn't Bush just resign now and save himself the trouble of trying to pass the buck to the next President?

Bush trying again to sell off public lands

Amazingly, after getting thoroughly dumped on when they tried this last year, the Bush administration is once again proposing to sell off substantial amounts of our nation's public lands.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune yesterday:

For the second year in a row, the Bush administration has proposed selling off as much as 300,000 acres of national forests and other public land to help pay for rural schools and roads.

And for the second year, Western lawmakers and environmentalists blasted the plan, saying short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of the land.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the new chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee that oversees environmental spending, pronounced the plan dead on arrival. “They are just not going to do this. It's not going to happen,” Dicks said Monday.

“We're going to find a way to fund the (rural) schools program without selling even one acre of public land,” added Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called the plan a “betrayal,” and said he would “work around the clock ... to convince Congress to act honorably and fulfill the federal obligation to our rural counties.”

Once again, former timber lobbyist, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, is serving as Bush's point man on this plan. Once again, he is lying by claiming that no one has come up with a better idea to fund the rural schools in question.

For some background on last year's proposal, which faded away after receiving essentially no support amongst either the public or Congress, see these old posts of mine:

• New public lands sell-off proposed by GOP: Feb 11, 2006
• The trumped up rationale to privatize public land: Feb 12, 2006
• Point man on Bush's public lands sale beholden to real estate developer: Feb 13, 2006
• Some details on the Bush public land sale emerge: Feb 20, 2006
• GOP Senator vows to kill Bush's public land sell-off: Feb 21, 2006
• Montanans take their public land seriously: Feb 25, 2006
• Ultimate goal of privatizing public lands: Mar 2, 2006
• More opposition to Bush's "sneaker" public lands sale: Mar 22, 2006
• Bush's public land sale sputters along: Mar 30, 2006

Last year's sell-off, clearly on its last legs by the end of March, was officially put out of its misery over the summer. Now, Bush and Rey have brought it back from the dead with a few cosmetic changes.

The rhetoric is unchanged, however. Here is a quote from Mark Rey from the last post above, a post which outlined a specific alternative proposal from Senators Baucus and Wyden for funding rural schools "by withholding taxes from payments by the Federal government for goods and services delivered by public contractors at a rate of three percent of the payment amount" At that time, Rey said, "We're open to alternatives, but nary another alternative has emerged." I asked, rhetorically, "What will his tune be tomorrow?"

Over ten months later, his tune is precisely the same. The Durango Herald reports today: "Rey said he was open to hearing about other funding mechanisms for helping rural communities, but the plan's critics had offered none."

Fortunately, Democrats now control Congress, so we have real hope that an alternative along the lines of the one Baucus and Wyden proposed last year will actually emerge as legislation.

Henry Bonilla's new gig?

While our newly-elected congressman Ciro Rodriguez is busy both in D.C. and in our expansive district (last weekend he was at a community forum in El Paso), the fellow that Rodriguez defeated may be getting a new gig soon.

The Express-News reported on January 25:

Bush administration officials are eyeing former Rep. Henry Bonilla as a possible envoy to the Organization of American States, sources said Thursday.

Bonilla has met with Karl Rove, a senior advisor to Bush, about the post of U.S. permanent representative to the OAS, considered an ambassadorship to the organization that promotes democracy in the Western Hemisphere, a source close to the congressman said.

Reached by telephone in San Antonio, Bonilla would not confirm or deny interest in the OAS position, or whether he was in talks with the Bush administration about a position within the administration.

“I can only say there is nothing official that has been offered,” Bonilla said.

...

The OAS brings together nations of the Western Hemisphere to work on common interest.

It serves as a forum for the advancement of democracy, human rights and confronting problems of poverty, terrorism, drug abuse and trafficking.

Has Bush forgotten all about New Orleans?

A brief observation on the state of the union speech last night: There was at least one glaring omission—any mention of the rebuilding of New Orleans and other areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina less than 18 months ago.  If his lack of words were backed up with action, that could be forgiveable.  Unfortunately, this appears to be a case where Bush's (lack of) words matches up with his (lack of) action.  Our new Democratic-controlled Congress will need to make up for Bush's dismal failure on this front.

Some details on the Bush public land sale emerge

Few specific details are yet available about exactly where the hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands that Bush wants to sell off are located. But in South Carolina, some of it consists of forest land near one of that state's "most visible and popular natural areas", according to The State—land that, if sold, would quickly be developed:

Tourists often drive north on S.C. 107 through the heart of the Sumter National Forest to view the fall colors, visit Oconee State Park or raft on the Chattooga River. The scenery and the accessibility of the land would make the 470 acres of Forest Service land easy to market, real estate agents said Tuesday.

“It would sell overnight,” said Walhalla real estate agent John Powell, who opposes the sale. But “people are not going to drive here to see condominiums or houses or subdivisions.”

Many who live in that area are not pleased about the possibility of their scenic mountains turning into standard-issue exurbia:

Gwen Fowler, a real estate agent whose family has lived in Oconee County for generations, said national forest land boosts the value of that private property.

“This is like selling an heirloom your grandmother gave to you. I’ve had calls from people all day upset about this.”

Once further details of this fire sale of public lands become available, I'm afraid that there will be many similar stories coming out.

Convictions

Cernig at NewsHog thinks that Bush shouldn't fire anyone unless they are convicted of a crime. Convicted. Not accused. Not even indicted. Convicted.

But it has to be said, if the roles were reversed the Democrats would insist on a conviction before firing a high-placed aide too. Not an allegation, however well it was backed by evidence, not a criminal charge even - a conviction.

Recent history, however, demonstrates this charge is utterly wrong. In fact, history shows that administrations of both parties, up until the current one, got rid of problematic aides routinely. Typically, all it took was solid evidence of unethical behavior. Not even indictments.

In the mid-stages of Watergate, Nixon axed numerous White House aides and other political appointees who had not been indicted, including both of his chief advisors, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Early in the last Democratic administration, Clinton's close advisor Web Hubbell resigned from a top Justice Department job while facing a criminal investigation, prior to any indictment or conviction.

It hasn't even taken a major criminal scandal to force the resignation of White House aides. G.H.W. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, was "forced out after he was found to have used a government vehicle to attend a rare-stamp convention."

Furthermore, as far as Democrats go:

In 1993, for example, Roger Altman, the deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, was forced to resign after failing to fully disclose the number of contacts between the White House and Treasury over Whitewater. Shortly thereafter, David Watkins, a White House administrator, resigned a day after it came to light that he had taken a government helicopter to play golf.

And going back a bit further:

[Bert Lance] was one of Jimmy Carter's closest advisers during the 1976 presidential campaign. After the election, Carter appointed him Director of the Office of Management and Budget. However, allegations of financial irregularities in his management of the Calhoun (Ga.) National Bank and another Georgia bank forced his resignation later in 1977.

The idea that only a conviction should be enough to force someone out of public office is completely off-base. It is only the current administration that feels itself so above reproach that the only way anyone will ever be held accountable is if they are convicted in a court of law. The idea that Democrats would act the same way, or even that different Republicans would act the same way, is demonstrably false.

Cernig also thinks the Rove/Wilson/Plame affair is overhyped. I disagree. As others, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich, have pointed out, that the big picture of this issue is not about Rove, Wilson, or Plame. It is about an administration that used deception to lure this country into an "ill-conceived" war and then has relentlessly tried to cover up its deceit by attacking those who attempt to uncover it, possibly even to the exent of breaking the law and endangering national security in the process. That is not hype. That is a big deal.

"Extremism in pursuit of vice"

The coward Karl Rove, chief henchman of the Bush regime, continues the campaign to smear their fellow Americans, while his bosses miserably botch the fight against our true enemies.

I heartily echo Todd Gitlin's words at TPMCafe yesterday:

Karl Rove's thuggery at last night's New York Conservative Party bash has to be smacked down, but for far more than being what Chuck Schumer called "divisive."  We need to "divide" the country against the likes of Rove. 

This is the true face of the Bush crowd:  extremism in pursuit of vice.

No mere apology from Rove can cure the cancer at the heart of the Bush administration.  Bush himself should resign, and take his entire administration with him.  The longer they remain in power, the more dangerous the world becomes, the less safe this country becomes, and the more Americans and others will die.

U.S. General Sees No Ebb in Fight

WASHINGTON, June 23 - The top American commander for the Middle East said Thursday that the insurgency in Iraq had not diminished, seeming to contradict statements by Vice President Dick Cheney in recent days that the insurgents were in their "last throes."

Though he declined during his Congressional testimony to comment directly on Mr. Cheney's statements, the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said that more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq and that the insurgency's "overall strength is about the same" as it was six months ago. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency," he added.

CIA says Iraq is now a terrorist training ground  

WASHINGTON, June 22 (Reuters) - The CIA believes the Iraq insurgency poses an international threat and may produce better-trained Islamic terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a U.S. counterterrorism official said on Wednesday.

A classified report from the U.S. spy agency says Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of deadly skills, from car bombings and assassinations to tightly coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets, the official said.

If ever a President and his entire cabinet deserved to be impeached, it is now.  This goes beyond corruption—all the way to incompetence—and is a true life-and-death matter.

The only conceivable way the Republican Congress would ever consider such an action is with tremendous pressure from the people who voted them into office.  So, until November 2006, this is in in the hands of grassroots Republicans.  Will they hold their leaders accountable?  Or will they join Rove in shifting blame to their fellow Americans?