Re: * * * * * BUSH'S devaSTATE OF THE UNION EEECH KICKS ASS!! * * * * *

"Jim E" <YD639275@SVN.net> wrote in message

news:607qhjF1pstjcU1@mid.individual.net...

>

> "Repukelickcan Shame" <j.wuest@comcast.net> wrote in message

> news:z9ydnd7oubpsAwPanZ2dnUVZ8sfinZ2d@giganews.com...

>>>

>>> "theloneranger100@aol.com" <ScreenRanger100@aol.com> wrote in message

>>> news:96736c48-e722-4ca0-8a40-726582f3f5f4@e4g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

>>>> Yup.........President Bush has Kicked The republicans Mizerable Asses

>>>> for 7 YEARS now.........And he WILL Continue to Kick Ass for

>>>> 2008..........Donchaknow..........Heehee...........

>>

>> You say he has ANOTHER Bush-gate SCANDAL left in him? lol I do believe he

>> does too, no IDIOT can go a whole year without a major fuck-up along the

>> way...I lost track at 40 scandals, what's it up to now out of Curious

>> Georgosity?

>>

>>> Goodbye Chimpy.

>>>

>>

>

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> The Clinton Legacy

The Bush Legacy:

http://www.netrootsmass.net/Hugh/Bush_list.html

Bush Scandals List:

updated 1/29/08, recent changes in red. please contact us with corrections

and additions.

INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from

Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great

stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have

long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple

sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice know that once he has

consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So

whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn't like

to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The

Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic,

reason, and facts have little or no role.

.....Bush's Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen

election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and

unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and

essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed

to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not

govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty.

A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the

perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and

would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In

the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it

was catastrophic.

.....At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an

adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of

flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we

got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway,

regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just

with opponents but with reality.

.....What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become

our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could

have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many

Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even

after 6 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the

tragedy and crime of our times.

1. Walter Reed outpatient treatment, poor living conditions, undelivered

mail, lack of caseworkers to oversee and facilitate patient care for

amputees, brain injured, and psychologically disabled veterans; Walter Reed

is not the only military hospital about which questions have been raised;

also out there the underfunding of the VA.

.....The problems at Walter Reed came to the public's attention through a

series of articles by Dana Priest beginning February 18, 2007. Following

them, Gen. George Weightman who ran Walter Reed for 6 months resigned March

1, followed by the forced resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis

Harvey the next day. Weightman's boss Army Surgeon General Gen. Kevin "I

don't do barracks inspections at Walter Reed" Kiley who lived across from

the notorious Building 18 and who had run the hospital from 2002-2004 lasted

one day as the new head of Walter Reed before he was removed. He resigned

from the Army on March 12.

.....One source of the difficulties at Walter Reed was the Base Realignment

and Closure Commission (BRAC) decision on August 25, 2005 to close Walter

Reed. Planned renovations were canceled. Another was the privatizing of

support services at the hospital. The workforce dropped from 350 experienced

professionals to 50 who were not and the contract was given to IAP. IAP

began work at Walter Reed in 2003. In 2004, IAP lobbied successfully against

an Army recommendation not to privatize the workforce. The OMB reversed the

Army finding and the services contract was given to IAP in January 2006

although its implementation was delayed a year. IAP is run by two former KBR

executives and had a well connected board of directors as well as being

owned by a powerful holding company the Cerberus hedge fund.

.....However, the generally low priority given to ongoing patient care for

wounded soldiers was probably the single greatest reason for the woes at

Walter Reed. It bears remembering that there were problems noted as early as

2004 and certainly by 2005 and that Walter Reed is located in the nation's

capital minutes from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of major

media outlets. Washington didn't know about Walter Reed because it didn't

want to know.

2. Firing of US attorneys. Most of the country's 93 US attorneys are usually

replaced within the first 2 years of a new administration and this is what

happened when Bush came into office in 2001. US attorneys are political

appointees and are chosen to reflect the policy priorities of a President.

Still their primary job is to uphold the law, and the law is not supposed to

be partisan. Karl Rove, of course, had other ideas. He believes that

government should be politicized and populated with compliant partisan hacks

loyal to him and his.

.....The plan was to create a list of political hires and fires of US

attorneys under the direction of the White House (i.e. Rove and Harriet

Miers) which Gonzales (and Bush) would then dutifully sign off on. There

were two components. First, on February 7, 2006, regulations were published

giving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the power to hire and fire all

non-civil service employees of the Justice Department (DOJ). On March 1,

2006, Gonzales signed an order delegating this power (subject to his nominal

final approval) to two fairly junior and inexperienced staffers: Monica

"Loyalty oaths" Goodling his senior counselor and liaison with the White

House and his Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson. Second, sometime late in 2005

(shortly before the conference report for the Patriot Act Extension was

filed on December 8, 2005), language originating at the DOJ was

surreptitiously inserted into the act by Brett Tolman which allowed Gonzales

to make indefinite interim US attorney appointments without Senate approval.

The conference report was passed and became law on March 9, 2006. So again,

the two parts were first to set up a system where Rove could control the

hiring and firing of US attorneys and second to bypass the Senate

confirmation process which might interfere with the first part.

.....On December 7, 2006, eight US attorneys were notified that they would be

fired. Most came from swing states. Most were considered not to have

aggressively enough prosecuted Democrats or voter fraud cases in the run up

to November 2006 elections, the idea being that such prosecutions would have

helped Republicans in close elections. Worse some were investigating and had

even prosecuted prominent Republicans. And then there were those partisan

hacks waiting in the wings to replace them.

1. Carol Lam, Southern California, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and

indicted the former No. 3 at the CIA Dusty Foggo.

2. H. E. Cummins III, Eastern Arkansas, had been asked to investigate the

Republican Governor in the neighboring state of Missouri. He announced the

investigation finished in October 2006 a month before the election but was

fired anyway to make way for Timothy Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove who had

been the principal opposition researcher in the Bush 2004 campaign.

3. David Iglesias, New Mexico, angered Republican Senator Pete Domenici

and Representative Heather Wilson when he refused to push for indictments of

Democratic officials before the election after they inappropriately

contacted him.

4. Daniel Bogden, Nevada, similarly was replaced by Brett Tolman who was

crucial to bypassing Senate scrutiny of these appointments.

5. Paul K. Charlton, Arizona, was investigating Republican Representative

Rick Renzi for corruption.

6. John McKay, Western Washington, angered state Republicans for not

creating voter fraud cases in the 2004 Governor's race which Democrat

Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.

7. Margaret Chiara, Western Michigan. It is not clear why she was fired.

She was on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) of US attorneys.

It may have been to make way for Russell Stoddard who had been languishing

out in Guam as First Assistant Attorney after Frederick Black got demoted

for investigating Abramoff's activities in the North Marianas.

8. Kevin V. Ryan, Northern California, is the only one of the 8 who

deserved to be on the list because he did run his office poorly. DOJ

actually wanted to keep him on but a federal judge forced the issue and his

name was added to the list.

.....As they say, it is not the crime but the coverup. Gonzales has given so

many different and contradictory stories about the firings that it is hard

to keep up and then there is his memory. In his Senate testimony of April

19, 2007, he answered he couldn't remember by some counts 71 times. He

didn't know who had called for such a list. He couldn't remember having been

very involved in the process. He even forgot to mention the March 1, 2006

order in his testimony. In fact, he knew very little about what were major

decisions at the department he supposedly ran but, despite this, he did know

there was nothing improper in any of it. Testifying in the House on May 10,

2007, his memory and his believability were little improved. Kyle Sampson

too had memory problems but did contradict Gonzales' claim that he had not

been involved. For his part, Sampson described himself as just the guy that

others dropped their files off to and his contribution to the process was to

keep them in his desk drawer. Initially, Monica Goodling took an indefinite

leave of absence, then resigned, then said she would take the 5th in any

Congressional testimony. On May 23, 2007, after a grant of immunity she

testified that Paul McNulty the Deputy Attorney General was more aware of

events surrounding the firings (although this is far from clear), that she

had crossed the line (i.e. broken the law) in asking career DOJ hires about

their political affiliations, that Gonzales' statements were inaccurate

(i.e. he lied), and that Gonzales had sought to harmonize their stories

(i.e. obstruct justice). Goodling, like Sampson, tried to portray herself as

a bit player despite Gonzales' extraordinary grant of authority to them

both. On June 21, 2007, Paul McNulty testified before the Congress and

basically stonewalled, saying that he was out of the loop, that he didn't

know who created the firing list, that there was no problem at the DOJ, and

that there was no contradiction between his testimony and that of anyone

else, including Monica Goodling. On July 11, 2007, Sara Taylor who left her

post of White House political director in May randomly invoked Executive

privilege and otherwise and like so many others had a bad memory. She did

state that she had had no dealings with Bush concerning the firings. Along

with her selective use of Executive privilege, this contention further

undermined the claim that an Executive privilege was involved and left the

possibility of a contempt citation. On July 12, 2007, former White House

counsel Harriet Miers refused to appear pursuant to a House Judiciary

Committee subpoena, leaving her open to contempt proceedings as well.

.....From this use of Executive privilege, it is clear that the White House,

and more specifically Karl Rove, was involved in the firings and was, in

fact, calling the shots in this affair, and that those at Justice, including

the Attorney General, were just the eager, if dim, facilitators of it.

.....In addition to the Sampson and Goodling resignations, Michael Battle

Director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA) who informed the

US attorneys of their firing left the DOJ on March 16, 2007. Paul McNulty

the No. 2 at the DOJ and Deputy Attorney General announced his resignation

on May 14, 2007 to become effective later in the summer. Although left out

of the loop on the details of the firings and giving false Congressional as

a result for which he apologized, McNulty did approve the firings and

through his Chief of Staff Michael Elston warned several of those fired to

stay quiet about them. Elston announced his resignation on June 15, 2007. On

June 22, 2007, Bill Mercer who was Acting Associate Attorney General (the

No. 3 spot at the DOJ) withdrew his nomination for the permanent position.

On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney

General effective September 17, 2007.

.....The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) informed the

Senate in June 2007 that it was investigating Goodling's claim that Gonzales

had tried to tamper with her testimony.

.....Congress intervened and changed the relevant provision of the Patriot

Act to re-instate the Senate's role in confirming US attorneys (May 22,

2007). This was signed into law June 14, 2007. Provocatively, Attorney

General Alberto Gonzales continued to make interim appointments right up to

the Presidential signing.

3. Plamegate. Scooter Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President was

convicted on March 6, 2007 on two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury

and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements to

the FBI. Placing political payback (against an individual and an agency)

above national security, the Vice President's office orchestrated the outing

of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, her cover company Brewster Jennings,

other agents which had used this same cover, and her contacts. All this was

done in retaliation for an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003

written by her husband ambassador Joe Wilson. In it, he publicly debunked

the "16 words" in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union which claimed

that Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain uranium from Africa (Niger). This

undercut the argument that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and showed

that the Bush Administration had known this was so in advance of the war.

Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate this charge in February 2002 at

the request of the CIA and had reported nearly a year before its use in the

SOTU that it was false. After several attempts by among others Karl Rove to

pitch Plame's identity to the media, on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame was

outed in a column by Robert Novak In his closing argument at the Libby

trial, Patrick Fitzgerald detailed Cheney's guiding hand in the conspiracy

behind the outing and spoke of a "cloud" over the Vice President. That cloud

remains.

.....On June 5, 2007, Scooter Libby received a preliminary sentence of

30-month term in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release

following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a

requirement of 400 hours of community service. This was confirmed June 14

and bail during appeal was denied. Scooter's defense solicited letters on

his behalf from Washington's conservative elite. These praised his legal

expertise and national security credentials and were likely

counterproductive since they made clear he was well aware of the legal

ramifications of lying to a grand jury and the security implications of

outing a CIA agent. A group of conservative attorneys led by Robert Bork

also filed an unsuccessful, last minute amicus brief questioning the

legitimacy of Patrick Fitzgerald's appointment as prosecutor. It called the

appointment a "close" question although its rationale depended upon a lone

Supreme Court dissent in a case that was not closely decided and its effect

would be to prevent independent investigations of high US officials. On July

2, 2007, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit

unanimously denied Libby's appeal. Hours later George Bush commuted Libby's

sentence eliminating any jail time. This is an Administration that believes

it is outside the law and acts accordingly. It is not so much that they have

contempt for the law. Rather they have contempt for us. The cloud that was

over Cheney now covers Bush as well.

.....A civil suit filed by Valerie Plame was dismissed on July 19, 2007 by

judge John D. Bates who ruled that, while Plame's complaint had merit, the

court did not have jurisdiction.

.....On December 10, 2007, Libby's lawyers announced that they were dropping

his appeal. This is all part of a legal strategy to stonewall and run out

the clock. Since Libby had his sentence commuted rather than receiving a

pardon, he could continue to assert a 5th Amendment privilege if he were

summoned to give testimony before Congress. Beginning an appeal gave a

patina of credence to such a contention. However, to go forward with the

appeal once this point had been made would have been expensive and

unnecessary. The last thing Scooter wanted was a successful appeal since

this could have resulted in a retrial and another conviction, very likely

after Bush had left office. At that point Scooter would have no one to

commute his sentence or pardon him and he could have faced real jail time.

This was not the object of the exercise.

4. Iraq: axis of evil, lack of preparation for occupation, looting,

including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of

equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi

army, banning the Baathists, the CPA, cronyism, Paul Bremer, losing tons of

money literally, lack of international inclusion in reconstruction and

security, weak Constitution, formation of sectarian parties, weak

government, denial of actual conditions in Iraq, for example, its civil war,

ignoring 4 years of failed policies and the basic proposal of the Iraq Study

Group to withdraw, escalating instead, continuing lack of any discernible

mission. A brief analysis of casualty figures can be found here and here.

5. Afghanistan, transferring resources to Iraq before the job was finished,

the results: a resurgent Taliban, continuing warlordism, and exploding opium

production

6. Iran and saber rattling, axis of evil, lack of engagement, refusal to

talk to, addressing the nuclear issue through threats, clumsy attempts to

blame Iran for the debacle in Iraq and a failure to recognize their very

real interests there.

7. North Korea, axis of evil, ditching the 1994 agreement and freezing of

bank accounts because of dubious uranium program, the plutonium program

which led to a fizzled first nuclear test, and something like a return to

the 1994 agreement

8. Osama bin Laden, where are you? The blown opportunity at Tora Bora. Al

Qaeda, the Taliban, and the roles of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in terrorism.

Pakistan's intelligence service the ISI created the Taliban. Despite $11

billion in US aid from 2001 through 2007, the government of Pervez Musharraf

continues to give it safe haven in Pakistan. As for al Qaeda, those efforts

which do occur are limited and often timed to the visits of American

dignitaries. In addition, Bush's oft stated policy of spreading democracy

was dealt a blow when Musharraf fearing a Supreme Court decision preventing

him from holding the Presidency and remaining Chief of Staff of the armed

forces declared a state of emergency and instituted martial law on November

3, 2007.

.....The Saudis for their part fund radical madrassas throughout the Moslem

world and have a domestic educational system run by the most extreme of

their homegrown extremists. Saudi and Gulf oil dollars find their way to

many terrorist groups as well as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

9. Civilian contractors; also no bid contracts; in Iraq Halliburton tainted

food and water, overpriced gas; Blackwater use of private security

contractors, what used to be called mercenaries, with little or no

accountability

10. The Military Commissions Act: torture, indefinite detention, the end of

habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts. One of the last acts of the Congress

before the November 2006 elections, it passed the Senate on September 28 and

the House the next day and was signed into law by Bush on October 17. The

short story on this is that, pre-election, the Republicans pushed it and the

Democrats caved on it. As bad as the military commissions envisioned in the

act are, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) which designate who

is to be tried are even worse. They were complete shams. Decisions were made

on the flimsiest and most general information without challenge or taking

into account the methods (torture) used to obtain it. Detainees lacked

effective legal representation, and the CSRTs did not come close to meeting

minimal standards of judicial process, even a preliminary one. To top it

off, as later military judges have found, the CSRTs designated detainees

"enemy combatants" which does not meet the Military Commissions Act standard

of "unlawful enemy combatants" vitiating their findings to date. Even when

they make up the rules they can't get it right.

.....The case of Murat Kurnaz shows how flawed the CSRTs are. He was a

Turkish citizen who had lived his entire life in Germany. On October 3,

2001, at the point of getting his German citizenship, he traveled to

Pakistan to visit religious sites. In December 2001, he was removed from the

group he was traveling with, arrested by Pakistani police, and flown to

Guantanamo 4 weeks later. In September 2002, he was interrogated by American

and German intelligence officers who concluded that he had no links to

terrorism and should be freed. This view was repeated in a memo dated May

19, 2003 from the commanding general of the Criminal Investigation Task

Force, the Pentagon unit responsible for interrogating detainees. Against

this was a memo dated June 25, 2004 by Brigadier General David Lacquement,

then head of the US Southern Command's intelligence unit, who said Kurnaz

was a danger because he had among other things prayed during the national

anthem, asked how high the basketball rim was in the prison yard (which in

Lacquement-speak indicated a desire to escape), and enquired about guard

schedules and detainee transfers. There was also the accusation that Kurnaz

knew someone who knew a suicide bomber (except this was later shown to be

untrue) and had stayed at a hostel in Pakistan run by a religious group

linked to terrorism (the group's link was also untrue). Kurnaz's CSRT was

held on October 4, 2004 where he was determined to be an enemy combatant.

His lawyers challenged this in a DC District Court. (This was before the

Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.) In a January 2005 opinion, Judge Joyce

Green found that the CSRT process had been biased and was contrary to US and

international law. This opinion became public on March 25, 2005 when it was

inadvertently released by court officials. Nevertheless, Kurnaz continued to

be held. In January 2006, a yearly Review Board hearing reconfirmed.that

Kurnaz was an enemy combatant. Meanwhile Kurnaz's detention and German

participation in his interrogation was giving the story legs in Germany.

Also in January 2006, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up the

case with Bush. On May 31, 2006, the FBI weighed in indicating that it had

no interest in Kurnaz. In July 2006, a special Review Board met and

determined that he was no longer an enemy combatant. The reasons for this

change of status remain classified. Kurnaz was flown back to Germany goggled

and shackled where he was released on August 24, 2006. Despite repeated

findings by the intelligence community that Kurnaz was innocent of any links

to terrorism, flimsy, false, and easily refutable evidence allowed by the

CSRTs resulted in his detention without any formal charge for more than 4

1/2 years, a detention that would have continued if it had not been for the

accidental leak of details of his case by a DC court and the personal

intervention of the head of the German government.

.....On July 20, 2007, a three judge panel of the DC Circuit in Boumediene v.

Bush and Al Odah v. US rejected parts of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of

2005 asserting that it will expect to examine all information bearing on a

detainee's case and not just what the government used in deciding to hold a

detainee. SCOTUS on June 29, 2007 changed its mind and decided to take a

look at these cases in the fall, especially in light of what the Circuit

Court might decide.

.....On September 24, 2007 in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found

that on hearing more evidence a military judge had the power to determine

that an alien enemy combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this

could clear the way for trials under the MCA. On November 8, 2007, the

government informed Khadr's defense that it had an exculpatory eyewitness

which it had known about from the beginning but only chose to tell the

defense about several years into Khadr's detention.

.....On October 5, 2007, the chief Guantanamo prosecutor career Air Force

Colonel Morris Davis resigned in a dispute with reserve Air Force Brigadier

General Thomas Hartmann (until recently a corporate lawyer now legal adviser

to the convening authority for the Military Commissions Susan Crawford). The

function of the convening authority is to approve or reduce charges against

the accused or make plea agreements with them. It is supposed to be an

arbiter, but in a clear conflict of interest, Crawford and Hartmann pressed

the prosecutor's office to file the most serious charges possible in an

attempt to drum up publicity and support for the military commissions

process. Davis has since said another reason for his departure was the

placement of his office under that of the Department of Defense's General

Counsel. The DOD GC is William Haynes (See item 194) who signed off on the

torture memos prepared by John Yoo for the Department of Defense. No matter

how rank and foul this travesty of American justice is, it seems to have a

never-ending capacity to get worse.

.....In Congressional testimony on December 11, 2007, Hartman refused to say

whether waterboarding was torture or whether waterboarding of an American

soldier by a foreign government would be considered torture. He did suggest

that he had no problem with evidence gained by torture being admitted into

court proceedings.

11. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, FEMA and

"Heck of a job, Brownie," lack of preparation, lack of emergency aid,

slowness of reconstruction, Bush ignores for days then gives address from

Jackson Square in New Orleans promising aid which never comes or much of

which goes to politically connected outstate no bid contractors, disparity

between response to Louisiana and Republican Trent Lott's Mississippi; Bush

refuses to waive 10% state match for federal funds (waived in many previous

disasters) increasing the bureaucratic paperwork, reducing aid to affected

areas, and further slowing and complicating rebuilding.

12. Bush authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001. However,

Joseph Nacchio former CEO of Qwest convicted April 19, 2007 of insider

trading reported that the NSA in a meeting on February 27, 2001 (1 month

after Bush became President and 6 1/2 months before 9/11) tried to sign

Qwest up to a warrantless surveillance program and that when Nacchio refused

the NSA pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts from the

company.

.....Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) a warrant

would be needed from the FISA court (federal judges entrusted with these

decisions in addition to their regular jobs) for domestic to international

telephone or internet communication. The bar for such a warrant is

extraordinarily low, has almost never been denied, and can be granted up to

3 days after the surveillance as begun (in order to give maximum flexibility

in emergency situations). This is in contrast to international to

international communications which have always been considered legitimate

targets for US intelligence organizations and require no warrant.

.....The post-9/11 Bush program acquired its legal basis from a John Yoo memo

originating in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It went much further

than cutting FISA out of the loop and probably included surveillance of not

just domestic to international communication but also domestic to domestic

surveillance of any communication with the original domestic participant. It

is conceivable that this continued to those domestic contacts and then to

their contacts in ever expanding (and less relevant) circles of

surveillance. Data mining may have been used to winnow down the number of

contacts.

.....Alternately, the Administration may have been exploiting the 1994

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This act required

telecoms to configure their equipment to facilitate governmental

wiretapping. While the act was not envisioned as a means of large scale

warrantless wiretapping, it could with the help of service providers like

the telecoms be turned into one. Supporting this view is that on March 10,

2004, the DOJ, FBI, and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) petitioned the

FCC to extend CALEA to the internet (see item 252). This action coming as it

did on the same day as the Ashcroft hospital visit (described below) may

have been an effort to expand or acquire additional cover for a data mining

program that was already in operation. It may have been the warrantless

hoovering of domestic communications that troubled some at the DOJ.

.....In any case in March 2004, the OLC under its new head Jack Goldsmith a

defense oriented conservative rejected Yoo's reasoning and reversed its

position on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General John

Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey both conservatives and Bush

appointees accepted this finding. Then Ashcroft came down with acute

gallstone pancreatitis and transferred his powers to his deputy Comey who

became Acting Attorney General. In a scheme apparently orchestrated by Vice

President Cheney, Bush called Mrs. Ashcroft and Cheney "on the President's

behalf" ordered then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff

Andrew Card to go to the hospital and get the ailing and doped up Ashcroft

to sign off on the surveillance program. Mrs. Ashcroft informed her

husband's Chief of Staff David Ayers about the impending visit and he

contacted Comey. Comey in turn contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to

order the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft to remain in his room (as witnesses)

and raced to the hospital and Ashcroft's room in the ICU. This set the scene

for the now famous March 10, 2004 hospital room confrontation where Gonzales

and Card ignoring Comey tried to get Ashcroft's signature. Ashcroft was,

however, lucid enough to refuse to sign and to point out the obvious: that

he did not have the power to do so since Comey was the Acting Attorney

General. Despite the refusal by the DOJ to vouch for the program's legality,

Bush re-authorized it anyway. A threat by Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller to

resign did, however, result in changes to the program. The OLC came up with

a narrower justification under the AUMF for a more limited program which

became the TSP (Terrorist Surveillance Program). It should be noted that

this program in all of its manifestations and despite its various

justifications has been illegal on its face since its inception.

.....The program became public when the New York Times reported on it in

December 2005. In 2006 various unsuccessful attempts were made to

accommodate the program. This included the infamous attempted "compromise"

by Arlen Specter to legalize its worst excesses and retroactively amnesty

any illegalities. Under mounting pressure and with a new Democratic

Congress, Alberto Gonzales announced on January 18, 2007, a "deal" with the

FISA court which would put the program under its supervision. Gonzales

maintained, however, that Bush still had Article II power to go outside the

court if he wanted to.

.....On July 24, 2007, Gonzales testified under oath before Senate Judiciary

Committee that before going to the hospital to see Ashcroft he had met with

a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders overseeing intelligence matters

(the Gang of 8) and that they had approved the predecessor to the TSP.

Several of the Democratic members of the Gang of 8 denied that such approval

was ever given. Additionally, Gonzales asserted that the program discussed

was not the TSP but another program. Both General Hayden then head of the

NSA and John Negroponte then DNI have indicated that this was precisely the

program discussed albeit in its unmodified form. Finally, Gonzales

maintained in his testimony that there had been no serious disagreement

about the program despite the objections from the DOJ. Along with his

constantly changing testimony concerning the US Attorney firings, this

discrepancy led four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on

July 26, 2007 to ask Solicitor General Paul Clement (in his role of Acting

Attorney General for matters in which Gonzales has recused himself) to name

a special prosecutor to determine whether Gonzales has obstructed justice,

perjured himself, and made false statements.

.....Despite previous abuses, April 10, 2007 intelligence czar DNI John

"Mike" McConnell (not to be confused with Senate Minority leader Mitch

McConnell) proposes allowing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of foreign

nationals completely outside of FISA, extend from 3 days to one week

surveillance without seeking FISA permission "in emergency situations,"

immunize telecoms, and extend FISA warrants from 120 days to one year.

McConnell has a large conflict of interest in the immunization of telecoms

issue. Like too many others, McConnell has benefited from the revolving door

between government and private enterprise. He has been director of defense

programs at Booz Allen Hamilton a large defense and intelligence firm with

CIA and NSA consulting contracts and chairman of the Intelligence and

National Security Alliance, the primary business association for NSA and CIA

contractors. In short, he has intimate connections to precisely those

corporate players most closely involved in promoting the use of telecoms in

intelligence gathering and with the greatest vested interest in keeping this

arrangement going .

.....On August 5, 2007, Bush signed into law a 6 month revision of FISA which

would allow warrantless wiretapping of non-American individuals "reasonably"

thought to be outside the US and incidentally of US citizens as long as

these are not the primary targets of surveillance. The Attorney General (at

the time of the bill's signing this was still the eminently untrustworthy

Alberto Gonzales) and the DNI (the as we will soon see truth challenged Mike

McConnell) alone and without any outside judicial review would see the

program was properly carried out. In effect, this was a backdoor way to

surveil Americans without a warrant. It also granted telecommunication

companies prospective immunity for aiding the government in these activities

during this 6 month period but not retroactively for their past actions.

.....The need for such a bill was raised at the last minute as lawmakers were

on their way out of town for the August recess. Although it only became

public later, the ostensible reason for modifying FISA at this particular

juncture was an unspecified terrorist threat to the Capitol (which DNI

McConnell knew at the time was based on an unreliable source). Mike

McConnell then negotiated with Democratic Congressional leaders on a

Democratic bill to address perceived shortcomings in the FISA law. The White

House, however, wanted FISA gutted, and McConnell reneged on his deal with

the Democrats. With the Congressional vacation coming on and members eager

to leave, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority

Leader Harry Reid caved. Through their parliamentary machinations, the

Democratic bill was defeated and the Republican version endorsed by the

White House passed. The end result was, abetted by a dishonest DNI, another

power grab by the Bush Administration and the failure of the Democrats to

stand up to it.

.....On September 10, 2007, DNI McConnell testified before a Senate committee

that the newly gutted FISA law the Protect America Act resulted in the

arrest of 3 Germans planning to attack Americans in Germany. When German

authorities pointed out that the Germans in question had come to their

attention through US surveillance initiated under the old FISA statute,

McConnell retracted his statement without apologizing for it.

.....On September 20, 2007, McConnell testified falsely again that

surveillance of Iraqi insurgents holding American troops had been held up

for 12 hours due to FISA court restrictions. The delay, however, occurred

because of the initial weakness of the request submitted by the NSA to the

DOJ (which given the low threshold for FISA warrants is telling) and

subsequent foul ups in finding a senior official to sign off on it. Since

the old FISA law allowed surveillance to begin up to 72 hours before the

granting of a warrant, it is unclear why this was even an issue.

.....Because the Protect America Act (PAA) was set to expire after 180 days,

in December 2007, an attempt was made in the Senate to pass a permanent

extension. There were two principal versions of this bill, the Intel version

from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) chaired by the

conservative Democrat Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and another a revision of the

Intel version that came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The

Intel version was Republican friendly and was chosen by Senate Majority

Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as the base or favored version. It granted the

retroactive immunity the telecoms had been lobbying for (not in the SJC

bill), allowed basket warrants for the surveillance, not of individuals, but

of classes of persons, had weak minimization (i.e. disposal of information

on Americans incidentally obtained) requirements and oversight, and gave

only vague assurances that the program would not be used for reverse

targeting (using a foreign national as an excuse to surveil an American). In

the face of a personal filibuster by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), Reid pulled

consideration of the bill on December 17, 2007.

.....In January 2008, with the PAA due to expire on February 1, Reid made a

second attempt to pass the Intel version. This time he was blindsided by

Bush and the Republicans. Senate Republicans played politics. They refused

to allow any face-saving amendments (all of which were likely to be defeated

anyway) to be brought up and were willing to see the PAA expire instead.

Bush for his part announced he would veto even a short extension of the PAA

to give the Senate time to act. So on the one hand Bush and the Republicans

argued that the PAA was absolutely necessary and if it was not passed the

terrorists would win and we would all die. On the other, they were perfectly

ready to see it expire just so they could stick it to Senate Democrats.

.....On January 28, 2008, with the SOTU scheduled for later that evening,

that is what happened. In a near party line vote, Democrats defeated the

Republican move (48-45 with 60 votes needed) for cloture on the Intel

version of the PAA with no amendments. The Republicans then defeated a

similar motion for a 30 day extension of the PAA on a straight party line

vote.

.....So to recap briefly, Senate Democrats were ready to pass a bad bill, but

the Republicans who supported the bad bill wanted to rub the Democrats'

faces in it first. As a result, everything fell apart, and the upshot was

everyone could and did blame everyone else. High school was not this bad.

13. SWIFT surveillance of international financial transactions

14. Black prisons and extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by

torture

.....Khalid El-Masri a German citizen was detained by Macedonian police in

late 2003. His name was similar to the alleged mentor of the al Qaeda

Hamburg cell (of which two of the 911 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan

al-Shehhi as well as Ramzi Binalshibh were members). He was held for 3 weeks

and then released. Although the CIA knew that this El-Masri was not the one

they were looking for, they kidnapped him and took him to Afghanistan where

he was interrogated and beaten for months. Eventually, on May 28, 2004,

after two orders from then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and

being made to promise never to talk about what happened, El-Masri was dumped

at night on a road in Albania. On December 6, 2005, the ACLU filed suit on

his behalf in federal court. On May 18, 2006, Federal District Judge T.S.

Ellis III dismissed the case accepting the government's contention that a

suit into Masri's illegal detention would compromise national security. The

dismissal was upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 2, 2007.

On January 31, 2007, a German prosecutor issued warrants for 13 people

suspected of participation in the kidnapping. For his part, since his

release, El-Masri has had a troubled history. On May 17, 2007, after an

argument with clerks about a defective iPod, he set fire to the store and

burned it down. On October 9, 2007, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to a

suit by El-Masri and let stand a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion

accepting the government's state secrets argument and dismissing the case.

.....Meanwhile on February 17, 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric Abu Omar in

Milan and rendered him to Egypt where he was held and tortured. In December

2005, an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents. Abu Omar

was released early in 2007.

.....Several European countries are looking into the rendition programs.

These efforts are complicated by US stonewalling and the complicity of their

own intelligence services.

.....Something similar happened to Maher Arar. A Canadian resident with dual

Canadian/Syrian citizenship was detained at JFK in New York on September 26,

2002 because he knew someone who knew someone who knew Osama bin Laden. He

was held in US custody for 2 weeks without access to a lawyer. Then because

the Canadian government falsely declared he was no longer a resident and

with the knowledge of their intelligence services, he was rendered to Syria

where he was held for a year and tortured. He was released October 5, 2003

and returned to Canada. The Canadian government eventually exonerated Arar

and paid a $10.5 million settlement. A suit entered by Arar in US federal

court was dismissed on February 16, 2006 on national security grounds. The

US government has never admitted any wrongdoing and Arar continues to be on

the US No-Fly list.

.....As for black prisons, these were created to hold high value ghost

detainees up to one hundred in number beyond the oversight of the judiciary

and Congress, essentially so that they could be tortured. 14 of these,

including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were eventually

transferred to Guantanamo. In Europe, Poland and Romania were rumored to be

sites of the prisons. US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan held others. The

remainder were scattered throughout the world in complicit countries and on

other US bases. Although there had been previous revelations, the story

broke officially in a Dana Priest Washington Post report of November 2,

2005. President Bush acknowledged their existence nearly a year later on

September 6, 2006.

.....The purpose of both rendition and black prisons was to gain actionable

intelligence, an obsession in the Bush Administration. In its pursuit, they

stooped to torture and bartered our image as a champion of human rights for

a stack of unreliable information. It is an exchange that is impossible to

justify.

15. Homeland Security: white elephant (organization), black hole (money),

Tom Ridge and threat levels, Michael Chertoff and general incompetence.

.....As of May 1, 2007 at DHS, under Chertoff's direction, there were 138

vacancies and another 92 currently being recruited among the department's

top 575 positions. Most of these were in the department's policy, legal and

intelligence sections, immigration agencies, FEMA, and the Coast Guard.

Luckily, nothing important.

16. K Street Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, North Marianas, removal of

investigating US attorney Frederick Black (Guam), Gale Norton and Steven

Griles at Interior, go betweens Italia Federici for Norton and Susan Ralston

for Rove, tribal casinos; conviction of Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney (R-OH)

for conspiracy and false statements re Abramoff's Indian casinos scam

17. Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, No. 3 at the CIA under Porter Goss, tied to the Duke

Cunningham scandal, and poker "read money laundering" parties with limos and

hookers for government officials and representatives. Foggo was indicted for

fraud February 13, 2007 by fired US attorney for Southern California Carol

Lam two days before she left office. On May 10, 2007, an expanded,

superseding indictment was filed against Foggo, and Cunningham associate and

co-conspirator Brent Wilkes.

18. Duke Cunningham convicted of receiving $2.4 million in bribes from

defense contractors and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire

fraud, and tax evasion, the MZM connection. Mitchell Wade the founder of the

defense contracting firm MZM purchased Cunningham's Del Mar home for

$1,675,000 then put it back on the market a month later for $975,000.

Cunningham lived in Washington on a yacht owned by Wade. In exchange for

these kinds of bribes and favors, Cunningham steered contracts to MZM. One

of the first in July 2002 was for $140,000 for computers and office

furniture for Vice President Cheney which turned out in actuality to be for

anthrax screening (for which MZM had zero expertise). Another in September

2002 was for a data storage system for CIFA (see item 158 on CIFA's domestic

spying). $5.4 million of the $6.3 million contract was profit. As it turned

out the system was incompatible with CIFA's and was never installed. As

often happens in these kinds of arrangements, Lt. Gen. James C. King who

helped set up CIFA went to work at MZM and became its President in June 2005

replacing Wade. By the time that Cunningham pled guilty on November 28,

2005, he had managed to steer $150 million in contracts to MZM, a firm which

before Cunningham and Wade hooked up received no important government

contracts.

.....Another player in the Cunningham scandals was Brent Wilkes who founded

ADCS a data conversion firm. He too won contracts through Cunningham and

according to Wade set up a prostitution ring for the benefit of Cunningham

and other legislators at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels. On November

5, 2007, Wilkes was convicted in federal court on all 13 felony counts he

was charged with. These included conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and

wire fraud. In addition to paying for flings in Hawaii and Las Vegas for

Cunningham, Wilkes was accused of giving Cunningham $100,000. Wilkes said it

was to buy Cunningham's boat although the deal never went through and Wilkes

never asked for the money back. Wilkes also passed along $525,000 to help

cover a mortgage for a house in Santa Fe for Cunningham. In exchange for

these bribes, Wilkes' company received about $80 million dollars in

contracts.

19. Tom Delay, creator of the K Street Project, squeezing lobbyists to

finance Republicans only, indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign

finance laws (money laundering) in Texas, also connections to the Abramoff

scandal. Major figure in Washington culture of corruption

20. Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited

Children, resigned over the House page scandal: sending sexually explicit

messages to pages

21. Cheney's Energy Policy, Big Oil's writing of it, and refusal to divulge

that participation

22. Tax cuts for the wealthiest, corporations and on capital gains;

retention of the AMT.

HR 1836 the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed

into law June 7, 2001. It was projected to reduce total surpluses by

approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. Its principal

feature was a reduction spaced over the 2001 to 2006 period in the 4 highest

tax brackets.

HR 2 the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law

May 28, 2003. It increased the exemption amount for the individual

alternative minimum tax (AMT), decreased the tax rates for income from

dividends and capital gains, modified tax law relating to bonus depreciation

and expensing, and allowed certain 2003 corporate estimated tax payments to

be shifted into 2004. Its principal effects would occur in its first 5 years

from 2003-2008 and would cost $342.9 billion in this period.

HR 1308 the curiously named Working Families Tax Relief Act was signed

into law October 4, 2004. Its main feature involved extensions and changes

in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Its principal costs occurred over the

2005-2009 period and were estimated to be $122 billion.

In 2005, there was an attempt at another tax cut bill which failed. In

2006, the Republicans broke their tax cuts up into a couple of bills .

HR 4297 was signed into law May 17, 2006. It was to cost about $70

billion, split roughly between cuts on dividends and capital gains on the

one hand and cuts in the Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) on the other.

HR 6111 was signed into law December 20, 2006. It was a minor catchall

bill extending and modifying some expiring tax provisions and was projected

to cost $40 billion over the period from 2007 to 2016.

Looking over the various bills, it is likely they became increasing hard to

sell over time. They certainly became smaller. Still a billion here, a

billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. It's just that

after Bush got a trillion dollars for the rich in his first bill, everything

else seemed small by comparison.

23. Global warming: denial of manmade origin, followed by minimization of

the effects of the manmade contribution, continued reliance on fossil and

carbon based fuels, little movement on CAFE standards and conservation, and

political interference in scientific reports.

March 13, 2001, Bush rejects Kyoto Protocols (finished December 1997 but

never ratified by the US Senate) and casts doubt on the causes of climate

change.

June 11, 2001, in reference to a report by the National Academy of

Sciences, Bush questions both the extent of global warming, its impact, and

the manmade contribution to it.

February 14, 2002, Bush announces his Clear Skies Initiatives which lacks

any limits on CO2.

April 2002, at the urging of ExxonMobil Bush blocks reelection of Robert

Watson, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC) and advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

June 3, 2002, an EPA report to the UN admits global warming largely due to

human activities.

June 4, 2002, Bush dismisses the report as "put out by the bureaucracy"

and reiterates his opposition to Kyoto.

August 19, 2002, White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) chief

of staff Philip Cooney a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum

Institute (API) and a non scientist questions why climate change is

mentioned at all. In September 2002, for the first time in six years, the

annual EPA report on air pollution "Latest Findings on National Air Quality:

2001 Status and Trends" omits the section on global warming.

November 2002, Our Changing Planet, an annual report to Congress on the

Climate Change Science Program for oversight and budget purposes is heavily

edited by Philip Cooney.

April-May 2003, CEQ Chairman Jim Connaughton edits the draft of what will

be the August 2003 "Fabricant" opinion.

June 23, 2003, the EPA issues "Draft Report on the Environment 2003" in

which the section on global warming was pulled after Philip Cooney sought to

replace data showing sharp increases in global temperatures with references

to a study funded by the API questioning the evidence for global warming.

July 2003, the Administration releases its Strategic Plan for the Climate

Change Science Program. Philip Cooney along with other CEQ officials made at

least 181 edits emphasizing the uncertainty of global warming and 113

de-emphasizing the human contribution to it. The CEQ also inserted language

about the possible benefits of global warming and removed recommendations to

do something about it.

August 28, 2003, in response to a petition by environmental groups to

regulate greenhouse gas emissions on new cars (based upon an April 10, 1998

opinion by then EPA General Counsel Jonathan Cannon which found that carbon

dioxide and greenhouse gases were air pollutants), the EPA denied the

petition. The General Counsel at the time Robert Fabricant reversed what was

known as the Cannon memo and declared that greenhouse gases were not air

pollutants.

Early 2005, Bush meets with author, non scientist, and global warming

skeptic Michael Crichton. Bush had read his novel "State of Fear" which

depicts global warming as a conspiracy.

June 1, 2005, Rick Peltz a scientist at the U.S. Climate Change Science

Program (USCCSP) resigns and accuses Phillip Cooney, the then chief of staff

of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of editing

scientific papers so that they would agree with Administration policies on

climate change.

June 10, 2005, Cooney resigns

June 13, 2005, Cooney is hired by ExxonMobil

September 21, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Max Mayfield, the

Director of the National Hurricane Center in testimony before the Commerce

Committee denied a connection between Katrina and global warming, ascribing

an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes to natural

fluctuations. Mayfield was a popular and respected media figure whose

thinking on this was out of the mainstream. His testimony, however, was

carefully worked out between committee staff and the Office of Legislative

Affairs at NOAA to in the words of one staffer Tom Jones smack "the shit out

of this issue."

December 2005, NASA climatologist James Hansen reported his work was being

monitored and his access to the press limited by a 24 year old Bush

political appointee in NASA's PR department George C. Deutsch. Deutsch also

tried to qualify references to the Big Bang as this conflicted with his

fundamentalist beliefs.

February 7, 2006, Deutsch resigns after it becomes known that he lied on

his resume about having a college degree.

April-November 2006, the Smithsonian (almost all of whose $1.1 billion

budget comes from the government) self censors an exhibit on climate change

in the Arctic which it had delayed six months while trying to tone it down.

July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data

Center at NOAA had his Congressional testimony on global warming modified

and weakened by political appointees at the White House Council of

Environmental Quality, the OMB, the Commerce Department, and NOAA.

January 30, 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists releases a report

indicating that 150 climate scientists from 8 federal agencies had

personally experienced at least one instance of interference in their work

in the previous 5 years (for a total of 435 incidents).

April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA rejects the

Fabricant opinion and requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The

commonwealth of Massachusetts argued successfully that it and its citizens

had suffered and would suffer ecological damage, including loss of coastal

lands, due to global warming.

May 2007, Bush continues to use the mantra of short term, unsustainable

"economic growth" to oppose meaningful international (G-8) approaches, such

as carbon trading and emission caps.

May 31, 2007, in an NPR interview, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin

admits that global warming exists but doubts that it is a problem "to be

wrestled with".

September 28, 2007, Bush at a meeting held in competition with a UN

conference on global warming called on those countries which emit the most

greenhouse gases to set voluntary caps but did not say what those should be,

even for the US.

October 23, 2007, the White House cut written testimony of Julie Geberding

director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 14 pages to 6

removing references to specific diseases, health problems, and global

warming as "a serious public health concern."

December 3-15, 2007, at the UN's Bali conference on moving beyond the

Kyoto Accords, the Bush Administration continued to refuse binding

commitments for reduction in carbon emissions. Instead there will be two

more years of negotiations effectively punting any real decisions to the

next Administration. Unfortunately, the effects of global warming are

unlikely to wait on this further bout of procrastination.

(see also item 42)

24. Terri Schiavo (family and privacy rights in end of life cases); Senate

Majority leader Bill Frist making his famous (and erroneous) video

diagnosis; the memo written by Brian Darling, the legal counsel for Senator

Mel Martinez (R-FL) that the Schiavo case was a great political issue which

could be used against the Democratic Senator from Florida Bill Nelson.

Republicans who had cast the Schiavo case as a "moral" issue initially

declared the memo a Democratic plant and dirty trick before the real source

came out.

25. Big budget deficits and vastly increased national debt; the national

debt as of the date of Bush's 2001 inauguration was $5.7 trillion. In

January 2008, it was $9.2 trillion, an increase of 61%.

26. The stacking of SCOTUS with right wing conservatives Roberts and Alito;

the threat to Roe v. Wade; April 18, 2007 in a 5-4 decision in Gonzales v.

Carhart SCOTUS upholds a ban on "partial birth" abortions (intact dilation

and extraction). The procedure is rare and performed for medical reasons.

Such a ban has been a goal of abortion foes who see it both as a step in a

direct overturning of Roe and as part of an indirect approach to place so

many restrictions on abortions as to effectively eliminate them

.....The opinion written by Kennedy is remarkable for its inflammatory use of

language (partial birth abortion, abortion doctors, killing the fetus, etc.)

and example (an account of the procedure by an anti-abortion nurse). Kennedy

manages to condescend not only to women but to their physicians as well. He

essentially gives them both his considered medical opinion, as a lawyer, and

orders them to follow it. The word hubris comes to mind.

27. Medicare: a bigger time bomb than Social Security left unaddressed

28. Medicare Part D: In an effort to spike a Democratic issue and protect

the interests of drug and insurance companies, Republicans came up with

their version of a Medicare drug prescription bill (Medicare Part D). The

fix as they say was very much in. Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA)

Chairman of the Commerce Committee was listed as the principal "author" of

the bill which was largely written by industry lobbyists. Shortly after its

passage, Tauzin announced his retirement and swung a deal to become a

lobbyist at $2.5 million/year with the Pharmaceutical Research and

Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Big Pharma's trade group. Thomas Scully

who headed Medicare at the time lied to Congress about the program's

expected costs, understating them by $134 billion, and then threatened the

program's chief actuary Richard Foster with firing if he told Congress the

truth. He too quickly returned to the private sector and a law firm lobbying

for the healthcare industry.

.....The bill came up for a vote in the House at about 3 AM on November 22,

2003. Votes are usually held open for 15 minutes. After 45 minutes, the bill

was failing 215-219. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and House Majority

Leader Tom Delay spent the next few hours engaged in arm twisting and, in

the case of Nick Smith (R-MI), bribery. They were successful. The vote was

closed at 5:53 AM after nearly 3 hours, and the bill passed the House

220-215. It passed 54-44 in the Senate 3 days later on November 25, was

signed into law December 8, 2003, and, after a signup period, went into

effect January 1, 2006.

.....The bill prohibited Medicare from using its market share to negotiate

with drug companies for lower prices and forced enrolling seniors into

private insurance plans. It presented them with multiple and confusing plans

which might cover some but not other of their prescriptions. On top of this,

most plans had various co-pays and deductibles further complicating the

situation. And it had its famous donut-hole, which was introduced to meet

the Administration's fake cost estimates. Prescriptions would be covered up

to a certain amount and then not covered until a higher threshold had been

reached. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) described the program succinctly as

"somewhere between a bureaucratic nightmare and elder abuse."

29. Healthcare (in general)

30. Cooked intelligence and the Office of Strategic Plans/ Doug Feith;

stovepiping and Cheney's alternate intel operation; pitching stories to

credulous compliant reporters like Judy Miller then citing these stories as

independent evidence; Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress feeding

fake stories and dubious sources like "Curveball" into the mix; the

subsequent coverup and Republican delayed and deep sixed Congressional

investigations into the politicization of intelligence; an Inspector

General's report of February 9, 2007 declared Feith's activities

inappropriate but stopped short of calling them illegal. The IG's rationale

seemed more political than legal since Feith was running an intelligence

operation which would be illegal.

31. 2000 Presidential election; voter suppression and cooked felons list,

Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Governor Jeb Bush, Bush consigliere Jim

Baker oversaw the recount, Theodore Olson argued Bush v. Gore: SCOTUS

decided 7-2 to stop recounts because of inconsistent procedures and 5-4

insufficient time to begin new recount, giving Bush the election

32. 2004 Presidential election; Ohio voter irregularities that consistently

favored Bush; Ken Blackwell was the Republican Secretary of State and

honorary co chair of the Bush campaign who oversaw the election in Ohio. He

opted for touch screen voting machines which left no paper trail and were

sold by Diebold whose CEO Walden O'Dell was a Republican fundraiser. Long

lines and too few machines in traditionally Democratic and minority areas

also occurred.

.....The Ohio Republican Party was unusually corrupt and was largely voted

out in the November 2006 elections. It was epitomized by Tom Noe a Bush

Pioneer who made illegal contributions to the Bush campaign at the same time

he was looting millions from the state's workers comp program in a kooky

coin investment scheme. He's currently serving ~20 years on state and

federal charges.

33. Attempts to torpedo the 911 Commission. Although now largely forgotten,

the Bush Administration fought the 9/11 Commission every step of the way and

it was only pressure from the American public and most especially from the

families of the victims of 9/11 that the commission was formed and was able

to come up with some kind of a report however flawed and incomplete.

.....Bush and Cheney resisted calls for such a bipartisan commission for over

a year arguing that the matter was best left to Republican controlled

intelligence committees in the Congress. It was not until November 27, 2002

that Bush announced the commission's formation. He did his best to see that

it went nowhere. Members were to be chosen by both Congress and the White

House raising questions about the commission's independence. Democratic

co-chair George Mitchell on December 11, 2002 and Republican chair Henry

Kissinger (whom the White House had insisted on appointing) on December 13,

2007 resigned due to conflicts of interest. Kissinger did not want to make

public the financial records (and connections) of his security consulting

company Kissinger Associates. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton were named to

replace them. The specter of conflicts of interest remained. Through their

careers in government and on corporate boards, essentially all of the

commission members had such conflicts. Perhaps the most egregious of these

was Philip Zelikow the commission's executive staff director who had worked

closely with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the first

Bush Administration and co-written a book with her.

.....Bush also tried to limit the commission's activities by giving it a

budget of only $3 million to investigate the biggest terrorist attack in the

country's history. The Challenger investigation cost $50 million by

comparison. Later Kean and Hamilton asked for a further $11 million to be

included in the $75 billion supplemental slated to fund the invasion of

Iraq. The White House initially refused the funds before reversing itself.

.....The White House also placed many roadblocks in the commission's path

slowing its work. The commission was originally given 18 months or to the

end of May 2004 to make its report. When a 60 day extension was requested,

this too was initially denied. The commission report was eventually released

on July 22, 2004.

.....The White House sought both to shape and limit testimony. Before former

counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke testified, then White House counsel

Alberto Gonzales contacted two commission members Fred Fielding and James

Thompson with information to discredit Clarke which they duly presented.

.....On Presidential Daily Briefs, after dragging its heels for months, the

White House allowed them to be viewed by only 4 of the 10 commissioners who

were to report back to the others. However, the White House denied the full

commission access to the notes made by the 4 approved commissioners.

Moreover, of 360 PDBs requested, only 24 were made available by White House

counsel Alberto Gonzales. On March 14, 2004, the White House finally

responded to the commission by releasing a 17 page summary of PDBs related

to al Qaeda from the Bush and Clinton Administrations.

.....The White House refused requests for National Security Adviser

Condoleezza Rice to testify. The rationale given was that historically

National Security Advisers had not testified before Congress. This was

completely untrue, and Rice finally testified on April 8, 2004. Rice's

testimony, however, came with the price that no other White House aides were

to be called.

.....Bush initially placed a one hour limit on his testimony before the

commission. This was rejected. But his testimony was highly conditioned. On

April 29, 2004, he and Dick Cheney together met with the commission in

private with no oath or transcript and only one staffer to take notes which

were not to be made public.

.....In an op-ed in the New York Times on January 2, 2008, chairmen Kean and

Hamilton accused the CIA and the Bush Administration of obstruction by

withholding information about taped interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd

al Rahim al-Nashiri (see item 288).

.....Finally, it should be remembered the 9/11 Commission was bipartisan.

This does not mean the same thing as non-partisan. In order to achieve

consensus, there was a deliberate decision not to assign personal blame.

This was a critical shortcoming. Because as the Bush Administration's

repeated obstruction of the investigation into its complacency and inaction

before 9/11 showed, it had much to hide.

34. Failure to implement the 911 Commission recommendations. The Commission

report was released on July 22, 2004 with its recommendations. A Republican

President and Republican controlled Congress stalled and delayed them for 3

years. It was not until Democrats regained control of the Congress that

anything was done. HR 1 on implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations

passed the Congress on July 27, 2007 and was signed into law on August 3,

2007.

35. Marginalization of the UN. Neocons hate the UN.

A) It doesn't do what neocons tell it to do.

B) It is multilateral and neocons think only unilateral action by the US

is effective.

C) It does not opt for military force as a first resort.

So, of course, on August 1, 2005, Bush named UN hating neocon John Bolton as

UN Ambassador in a recess appointment. Bolton famously stated in a 1994

speech that "If the U.N. building in New York lost its top 10 stories it

wouldn't make a bit of difference." The top floors are where highest ranking

UN officials have their offices. His thinking has not moderated since.

.....Of course, the Administration has not hesitated to use the UN when it

has suited its purposes. It cited Security Council resolutions from the

First Gulf War in its AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Force against Iraq)

(see item 128). It would have gone for a Chapter 7 UN resolution authorizing

military force for the 2003 invasion of Iraq if it thought it could get one.

That wasn't in the cards. This explains why, despite the incongruity,

resolutions from the First Gulf War were used to give a patina of

international legitimacy to the Second Gulf War. Later on June 8, 2004 as

the CPA was coming to a close, the Administration sought and obtained

Security Council Resolution 1546 which sanctioned the presence of American

forces in Iraq for a limited time subject to update. This permission was

most recently updated in Resolution 1790 on December 18, 2006 which extends

the American mandate in Iraq to December 31, 2008.

36. Preventive war doctrine, aka Cheney's one percent doctrine and the Bush

doctrine. Bush first enunciated it at a speech at West Point on June 1,

2002. Preventive war is different from pre-emptive war. In preventive war,

there is no imminent threat and this type of war is considered a war crime.

(Think of Hitler attacking Poland.) In pre-emptive war, there is an imminent

threat and this type of war is sanctioned by international law. (Think of

the Israelis striking the Egyptian army in the Sinai in 1967) After the

failure to find WMD in Iraq, the Administration dropped any pretense of

imminence and overtly embraced the preventive war doctrine, asserting the

right to eliminate threats before they develop.

.....In a curious and very late attempt at revisionist history, on December

11, 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that Iraq, the

preeminent example of the Bush Doctrine, was about pre-emption, i.e.

prevention.

QUESTION: After 9/11, the President declared policy of preempting threats

to the nation before they fully manifested themselves. Yet we've seen some

of the intelligence about those threats is often flawed, significantly. Can

a preemption policy coexist with imperfect intelligence?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would argue with you -- I don't think I would

argue with you, I would argue that we have -- I don't think we've yet

employed preemption. I would -- we could have a discussion about Iraq,

continuing state of war since '91, shooting at our airplanes, almost a half

dozen or more resolutions on this issue. I mean I think this was a long,

long buildup. And I think it was a case in which you implement it or you had

pretty much exhausted diplomatic options with Iraq.

Problem, as Ross Perot used to say, solved.

37. Loss of US reputation internationally after massive post-911 world

support. Here are some percentage US approval ratings pre-Bush and current.

From here and here.

38. No serious attempt to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would charitably be

described as hands off and disengaged. On June 24, 2002, Bush did for the

first time seem to support the creation of a Palestinian state:

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new

security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America

will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain

aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a

final settlement in the Middle East.

But as can be seen this declaration was highly conditioned and even then it

would result initially in only "provisional" sovereignty for Palestinians.

From this, it took almost a year for the Administration to come up with a

more detailed plan. On April 30, 2003, it announced its Roadmap:

The following is a performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear

phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through

reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic,

humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the

Quartet [the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia]. The

destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the

Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush's speech

of 24 June . . .

A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence

of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by

side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.

The plan if not a quid pro quo for British participation in the invasion of

Iraq was at least at the very strong suggestion of the British. The message

was, however, stepped on by Bush as it came out just one day before his well

known Mission Accomplished speech where he effectively and inaccurately

declared victory in Iraq. After this, nothing happened except for the

occasional vague pronouncement of even vaguer talks. The epitome of this was

Condoleezza Rice's announcement in Luxor on January 15, 2007 of talks on

talks to develop a "political horizon" for a return to the "Roadmap" leading

to a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

.....As the Bush Administration approached the end of its seventh year and

the question of her legacy occupied Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, she

arranged with Bush's general support the Annapolis peace conference. The

conference was attended by representatives of more than 40 countries,

including the Saudis and Syrians but not the Iranians (who were not invited)

and the Iraqis (who were invited but declined). It lasted a grand total of

one day (November 27, 2007) and ended not with a commitment to act but as on

all previous occasions a commitment to talk. This was not surprising given

the political weakness of the three primary participants Bush, Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Olemrt and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush's

detachment was exemplified by his inability to pronounce the names of either

of his two guests of honor referring to them as "Ehud Elmo" and "Mahoomed

Abbas" and his own rapid departure after his speech.

.....Shortly before a week long trip (January 8-16, 2008) to the Middle East

where he was to visit Israel for the first time, Bush philosophized in a

January 6, 2008 interview for al Arabiya about his Administration's record

on Israel-Palestine:

for the couple of years of my administration. It took a while to convince

people that the two-state solution was in the security interests of both

parties. And plus, there was a couple of difficult -- there was a difficult

situation, the truth be known. One was the intifada, which made it awfully

hard to discuss peace at that time. The other was the Iraq invasion. It

just -- it created the conditions that made it more difficult to get

people's minds in the right place to begin the process. And so now I think

we've got the stars lined up, and I think we got a shot, and I'm going for

it.

Of course, he really isn't going for it. After having criticized Clinton's

efforts as belated and incrementalist, Bush thinks he can achieve a deal by

coming even later to the problem and solving it while being less involved.

This is not serious.

39. Underfunding of basic research. The federal budget for R&D in 2006 (the

last year that Republicans held a majority in the Congress) was $132.3

billion. In constant FY 2005 dollars (used hereafter), this broke down to

around $73 billion in defense related R&D and $56 billion in non-defense

R&D.

.....Defense R&D increased 2001-2006 from $50 billion to $73 billion. Most of

this increase came from weapons development, not basic science. From

2001-2005, defense spending on science and technology (basic research) rose

from slightly more than $10 billion to about $13 billion before being cut

back to 2001 levels in 2006.

.....Non-defense R&D initially increased due to a 5 year initiative 1998-2003

(begun during the Clinton years) to double funding for the NIH from approx.

$14 billion to $28 billion. After this point NIH funding (which accounts for

half of non-defense R&D) stagnated. Non-defense non-NIH funding has remained

essentially unchanged since 1992 (or for about 15 years).

.....While Bush has greatly increased the size of the federal budget, during

his tenure funding for basic research which has been the foundation of our

technological preeminence has languished or been cut. Democrats since taking

control of the Congress have made some moves to increase funding in the 2008

budget.

40. Alberto Gonzales: politicization of the department, even down to the

intern program, decimation of career lawyers and evisceration of divisions,

like civil rights. The US attorney firings and the use of political litmus

tests in hiring. The use of corruption, voter suppression, and voter fraud

cases to influence elections.

.....Gonzales was counsel to the President before becoming Attorney General.

This should have meant that he moved from being the President's lawyer to

the people's lawyer but it is clear that he continues to see his main client

as the President. Some think that he is dishonest; others say he is

incompetent. He is both.

.....On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as

Attorney General effective September 17, 2007. While numerous scandals and

investigations have swirled around him, it is not yet known what reason

precisely forced him out or why this happened now.

41. FDA: drug testing; food safety: underfunding, cutback in inspections and

inspection staff (a decrease of 12% between 2003 and 2006), reliance on

self-policing, lack of inspection of imported foods, and inability to force

recalls.

42. EPA: mercury levels for coal plants, delay in release of climate change

reports; failure to address CO2 levels in global warming: Massachusetts v.

EPA April 2007. On May 14, 2007, Bush asked government agencies to come up

with a plan and submit it to him 3 weeks before he leaves office. The

stalling continued on May 31, 2007, when Bush called for what was termed an

aspirational goal of coming up with voluntary limits to greenhouse gases in

the next 18 months (or again just before he leaves office) to go into effect

after Kyoto expires in 2012. The number of civil cases brought against

polluters decreased 70% between 2002 and 2006 compared to the rate in the

1990s.

.....December 19, 2007, going against the unanimous recommendation of his

legal and technical staff, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson refused to

grant California a waiver so that it could enforce stricter than federal

emissions guidelines. The state along with 16 others sought to force

automakers to cut emissions in all their vehicles by 30% by 2016. On January

2, 2008, California sued the EPA to force a reversal of its decision.

.....On January 18, 2008, Johnson sent heavily redacted documents to the

Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works investigating his decision.

In the accompanying letter, Associate Administrator Christopher Bliley in

explaining the redactions cited executive privilege (even though none of the

decision making involved Bush), a "chilling effect" upon his staff (even

though he ignored them), confusion the public might have in understanding

"the Agency's full and complete thinking on the matter" (even though it's

clear what Johnson was up to), and the lawsuits by the states challenging

Johnson's decision (which would not have been filed if Johnson had not made

such an unjustifiable decision).

43. Porter Goss and the gutting of the CIA: Goss a conservative Republican

Congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee was chosen to

replace George Tenet in 2004. He promised to be non-partisan in his new

role, a promise he did not keep and which it is difficult to imagine anyone

took seriously at the time. He brought with him some of his House staff, the

"goslings". Their doctrinaire style produced confusion, demoralization,

resignations, and not much else. Having done what damage he could and being

largely isolated, he resigned suddenly on May 5, 2006, achieving the

distinction of being one of the few people who was too big an embarrassment

even for the Bush Administration, well that and that he was outmaneuvered

and marginalized by the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

44. Militarization of intelligence: Rumsfeld perhaps out of pique that the

Afghanistan operation was largely a CIA affair and conceiving the world as

one big turf battle pressed to put all special operations under Pentagon

control. The vast majority of intelligence funding is already funneled

through the Defense Department. In addition to this, the current

intelligence czar the Director of National Intelligence John Michael

McConnell is a retired vice admiral. The CIA is currently headed by an

active duty general Michael Hayden (USAF). The top man at the NSA (formerly

headed by Hayden) is Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander (Army). General James R.

Clapper Jr. is Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lt. Gen. William

J. (Jerry) Boykin is Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence, Marine Corps

Maj. Gen. Michael Ennis is Deputy Director for Human Intelligence at the

CIA. Retiring Army Lt. General Dell Dailey, formerly Director of the Center

for Special Operations at the Pentagon which runs black ops, was nominated

to head the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism (S/CT) at the

State Department. He was confirmed June 22, 2007.

.....National Counterterrorism Center was headed by another retired vice

admiral John Scott Redd from August 1, 2005 to November 10, 2007. He left

after making remarks that Iraq had made the country less safe and had helped

in the recruitment of terrorists. The current acting head of the NCTC is its

principal deputy director Michael Leiter, a civilian.

45. Rampant cronyism

46. Signing statements: As of late 2007, there have been 156 signing

statements challenging about 1,100 provisions in about 155 federal bills. In

the past signing statements were used to establish grounds for a possible

future challenge by the Executive branch or to assert that signing a

specific bill did not imply a surrender of an underlying Presidential power.

Bush has used them to maintain that he will only obey a law or a part of a

law when it suits him.

47. Unilateral (aka Unitary) Executive doctrine: the brainchild of John Yoo

and David Addington which seeks to establish a legal framework through

misreading the Constitution for a Presidential dictatorship

.....On December 7, 2007, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released parts of

Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions that he got declassified concerning

Bush's warrantless wiretapping programs:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional

requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he

wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than

violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article

II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's

authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President's legal

determinations.

What this says is that the President under his Article II powers as

Commander in Chief can do whatever he wants and that he is the sole arbiter

of whether what he does is legal. This echoes Richard Nixon famous dictum:

'Well, when the President does it that means it is not illegal." And we saw

how well that turned out.

48. Overuse and abuse of the National Guard and Reserves; posse comitatus;

decreased ability to deal with natural disasters; also much National Guard

equipment is now in Iraq and there is currently a $24 billion shortfall in

equiping National Guard units in this country. In a sign of how the National

Guard are treated, in a story reported October 3, 2007, the Pentagon wrote

orders for 1,162 members of the Minnesota National Guard who served the

longest tour of any ground unit in Iraq: 22 months for 729 days to avoid

giving them GI Bill education benefits which they would have been entitled

to if they had served one single day more.

49. Increasing unpreparedness of US ground forces (Army and Marines): too

many tours, extended tours, too little rest between tours, insufficient

training

50. US balance of trade deficit. This is a measure both of our general

indebtedness and our competitiveness. In 2001 it was $385 billion. In 2006

it was $811 billion, a 111% increase. The deficit in goods (as opposed to

services) accounts for almost all of this.

51. 2005 Grassley Bankruptcy bill heavily favoring lenders

52. Mexican cross border trucking and safety concerns

53. Karl Rove did not lose his security clearance after his participation in

the Valerie Plame case. Instead it was quietly renewed in late 2006. Henry

Waxman would like to know why.

54. Detention of families for immigration violations; large ICE raids which

leave children of detainees unaccounted for; immigrant detentions for long

periods in a hodgepodge of facilities without adequate medical care

(resulting in deaths), suicide prevention, or legal representation.

55. Dubai Ports deal

56. The Patriot Act that no one had time to read and passed anyway; the

Patriot Act extension that people had the time to read and passed anyway.

57. Attempts to privatize Social Security dating all the way back to a

stacked commission report of December 11, 2001; Andrew Biggs who favors

privatization made deputy director of Social Security in a recess

appointment after the Senate made it clear it would not take up his

nomination because of his privatization views.

58. The War on Science: stem cell research, global warming, evolution,

research funding, energy, abstinence programs, AIDS prevention.

59. Conviction of David Safavian for lying and obstruction June 20, 2006 re

his dealings with Jack Abramoff. In the 1990s, Safavian was a business

partner of Grover Norquist. In 2002, he was named Senior Advisor and Acting

Deputy Chief of Staff at the GSA and in November 2003 was made head of the

Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the OMB in the White House

60. Presidential adviser Claude Allen stealing from Target

61. Bush casually admits to lying about decision to fire Rumsfeld

62. Armstrong Williams and paid propagandists

63. Decimation of the Labor Department presided over by Elaine Chao, married

to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; job safety, job creation, wage

increases, unions, and workers' rights have languished under her

stewardship. Edwin Foulke who heads OSHA continues the Administration policy

of trusting to self-regulation of industry, by industry, for industry.

64. Net neutrality and media content and ownership policies

65. Backing Israel while it destroyed Lebanon July 12, 2006-August 14, 2006

66. Presidential Daily Brief August 6, 2001: Bin Laden determined to attack

in US

67. EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman declares toxic filled Ground Zero safe

for cleanup. On August 9, 2003 the EPA Inspector General finds differently.

In Congressional testimony June 25, 2007, Whitman states that it was not her

fault and blames the terrorists for the site being toxic.

68. Sago mining disaster hearings and MHSA's David Dye who walked out of the

hearings; Bush push for reduction in fines for safety violations and

non-collection of them since 2001.

69. Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court on October 3, 2005.

She was serving as White House counsel after Alberto Gonzales went to the

DOJ. A typical Bush crony appointment, nevertheless it quickly runs into

problems. Miers has little knowledge of Constitutional law, but what dooms

her nomination is that conservatives don't think she is conservative enough.

Think Roe v. Wade. The nomination is withdrawn October 27, 2005. A few

months later Miers' involvement in the firings of the US attorneys begins.

70. Bush vetoes a stem cell research bill July 19, 2006 (Bush's first veto).

Bush vetoes a second stem cell research bill June 20, 2007 (Bush's third

veto).

71. Attack on Plan B contraception, staffing Women's Health positions with

religious conservatives: Dr. Eric Keroack at Health and Human Services who

thought birth control demeaning to women and Dr. David Hager at FDA who

tried to keep Plan B prescription only. His wife contended in divorce

proceedings that he had repeatedly sod mized her without her consent. On

October 15, 2007, Bush appointed Susan Orr as Acting Deputy Assistant

Secretary for Population Affairs (Keroack's position). Orr who currently

heads child welfare programs at HHS is a virulent opponent of birth control

considering it part of a "culture of death". This is another example of an

upside down appointment: choosing someone whose positions are the very

antithesis of their job's mission.

72. Clear Skies Act of February 14, 2002 a failed attempt to weaken the

Clean Air Act. Bush reacted by changing standards on nitrogen oxide, SO2,

and mercury through the EPA. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003

based on bad science in how to protect communities from forest fires and on

the effects of "thinning" forests, i.e disrupting ecosystems. The real aim

was to remove public scrutiny on sweetheart deals with logging companies by

claiming such deals were to protect communities even when there were no

communities in the vicinity.

.....On December 5, 2007, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2003

US Forest Service rule, part of the Healthy Forests Initiative, which

exempted cuts up to 1,000 acres and burns up to 4,500 acres in national

forests from environmental review. The rule allowed about 1.2 million acres

to be cut or burned each year without studying the environmental impact of

these activities.

73. Missile defense shield that doesn't work. So far the only tangible

result is that Vladimir Putin has used it as an excuse to introduce a new

class of MIRVed (multiple warhead) ICBMs and threaten the Europeans. This is

payback for the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty announced December 12,

2001 and entered into effect June 13, 2002. On June 14, Russia announced

that it was pulling out of START II (negotiated in the 1990s) which covered

the de-MIRVing of ICBMs and which Russia had never gotten around to

ratifying anyway. Putin knows that Russia is not threatened by such an

ineffective system and that Russia has plenty of conventional ICBMs to

overwhelm it even if it did work. As for targeting Europe, although it

sounds scary, this represents little change from current policy. De-targeted

Russian (and US) missiles can be re-targeted in a matter of seconds to

minutes. On July 14, 2007, Putin suspended Russia's participation in the

Conventional Forces in Europe treaty. The Bush missile shield is providing

an excellent excuse for Russia to detach itself from the security framework

put in place at the end of the Cold War.

74. Leandro Aragoncillo naturalized Filipino-American in Cheney's office

(previously Gore's) accused of spying for the Philippines and possibly

France, pled guilty to unlawfully possessing secret US government documents.

He was sentenced to 10 years on July 18, 2007.

75. Defunding overseas AIDS programs that promoted condom use for

prevention; ineffective abstinence only programs. With these should be

mentioned domestic abstinence only programs directed at teens which have

proven to be abysmal failures.

76. Call for a constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be between one

man and one woman.

77. Opening up Bristol Bay, the last pristine large-scale salmon fishery in

the world, to oil drilling. Congress has also sanctioned further drilling in

the Gulf of Mexico including off the coast of Florida. Interior has proposed

drilling off the coast of Virginia which would need Congressional approval

which isn't likely.

78. Accusation that Clintons trashed the White House before leaving,

including stealing the Ws from keyboards

79. James Guckert aka Jeff Gannon had a series of websites 1999-2002 where

he advertised his services as a male "escort" or prostitute. In November

2002, Guckert began posting and publishing conservative pieces under the

name Jeff Gannon. Although he had no journalistic experience, Gannon was

soon accredited to the White House press corps where between February 25,

2003 and early 2005 he appeared over 200 times. During this period he

represented Talon News and GOPUSA, websites owned by Robert Eberle a

Republican operative from Texas. Several of Gannon's visits did not

correspond to press events and has led to speculation about which of his

trades he was practicing during them. Gannon was known for lobbing softball

questions and writing stories from press releases. On January 26, 2005 this

led to his undoing when he asked at a Presidential press conference a

question that appeared too friendly even by Washington standards,

Q Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture

of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary

Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet,

in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there's

no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're going to reach

out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to

have divorced themselves from reality?

It is important to point out that Gannon was exposed by the liberal blogs

dailykos and Americablog. Although Gannon had been engaged in these antics

for two years under the nose of the White House corps, steely-eyed reporters

that they were, they never noticed.

80. Native American trust funds. In 1887 the Dawes Act allotted individual

Native Americans plots out of trust lands amounting to about 139 million

acres. The federal government was to administer and manage these lands for

the benefit of Native peoples. In 1889, however, lands not already allotted

were made available to non-Native people. The trust lands rapidly shrank,

profits from their sale and use were diverted, and the government's

accounting procedures were so bad it will never be known how much money was

lost. In June 1996, a class action lawsuit was filed in DC federal district

court with Judge Royce Lamberth presiding: Cobell v. Secretary of the

Interior (Babbitt, Norton, Kempthorne) over the Department's management of

the trust known as the Individual Indian Money program or IIM.

.....The Cobell case spans both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Both

saw Interior Secretaries and others cited for contempt. Both saw government

offices destroy relevant evidence. The government has yet to address

seriously the two issues of the case, compensation and reform of the trust.

Instead it has engaged in a stalling strategy which so enraged Judge Lambert

that "intemperate" remarks he made in July 2005 led to his eventual

replacement in July 2006. That same month Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

proposed an $8 billion settlement. This is a far lower figure than what the

government owes the trust but illustrates the reality that the government

has no intention of paying fair compensation or even making a real effort to

find out what such compensation would be. On March 1, 2007, Attorney General

Alberto Gonzales added insult to injury by suggesting an even lower all

inclusive settlement number of $7 billion. The case drags on with the

government trying to "right" one historic wrong by committing another.

81. Selling creationist materials at the Grand Canyon gift shop claiming it

was 6000 years old

82. In March 2003, the Pentagon announced a ban on photographs of coffins of

slain American soldiers as they are returned to this country at Dover AFB.

On June 21, 2004, the Republican led Senate defeated an attempt to allow

such coverage. On November 11, 2004, the Pentagon announced restrictions

that kept reporters at least 50 yards from any funeral. In the past, they

have been allowed at the rear of them. This is not about privacy but about

hiding the realities of war.

.....Although an accepted practice of previous Presidents and with Arlington

National Cemetery only a few miles from the White House, Bush has not

attended a single funeral for any serviceperson killed in his wars. His

stated rationale? "Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I

think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not

another?" Bush's answer is apparently as Commander in Chief to honor none of

them.

83. False military reporting: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman was an

NFL player who post-911 joined the Army and was killed in Afghanistan April

22, 2004. He was immediately mythologized John Wayne-style by the military.

On May 28, 2004, it came out that he died in a friendly fire incident.

Details of Tillman's death and the coverup surrounding it continue to

dribble out. On July 13, 2007, the Bush White House invoked Executive

privilege on its communications with the Pentagon concerning the story

pursuant to requests from the House Oversight and Government Reform

Committee. It is likely that Bush knew within a week of Tillman's death that

the initial accounts of it were false. Executive privilege has become an

indispensable tool in the stonewall this Administration has constructed

around itself.

.....On July 31, 2007, retired Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger who headed Army

special forces received a letter of reprimand from Army Secretary Pete Geren

for his role in the affair and may lose a star and a tenth of his retirement

pay. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal who heads the Special Operations (black

ops) Command approved Tillman's Silver Star citation on April 28, 2004 in

which Tillman is described as being killed by devastating enemy fire. The

next day he sent a back channel memo saying he thought Tillman may have been

the victim of friendly fire. McChrystal remains on active duty and has never

been punished although a Pentagon Inspector General's report recommended

that action be taken against him for misleading and inaccurate statements.

84. AIPAC espionage scandal; former DOD employee Lawrence Franklin pled

guilty to passing information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees

85. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram; the Marine massacre of 24 Iraqi

civilians at Haditha and its coverup. A few cases:

Rasul: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS in a 6-3 decision ruled that the US court

system had jurisdiction over non US nationals held at Guantanamo. Rasul had

been released to the UK before the ruling on March 29, 2004.

Hamdi: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS 8-1 ruled that U.S. citizens can not be

detained indefinitely as enemy combatants without due process. Hamdi was

released to Saudi Arabia on October 9, 2004 on condition that he give up his

US citizenship.

Hamdan: On June 29, 2006, SCOTUS in a 5-3 decision ruled that Bush's

military tribunals were illegal under the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions

and needed Congressional authorization (which was supplied by the Military

Commissions Act or MCA of September 2006)

Khadr/Hamdan: On June 4, 2007, a military court dismissed charges against

them because their Combat Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) had designated

them enemy combatants. The MCA authorizes trials for "unlawful" enemy

combatants only, which they had not been designated. On September 24, 2007

in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found that on hearing more

evidence a military judge had the power to determine that an alien enemy

combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this could clear the way

for trials under the MCA.

al Marri: On June 11, 2007, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1

that a legal US resident (similar to Hamdi) can not be denied due process

and held indefinitely as an enemy combatant outside the purview of the US

judicial system.

86. Asserted right to open US mail made on December 20, 2006 in a signing

statement to HR 6407 the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act:

The executive branch shall construe subsection 404© of title 39, as

enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an

item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner

consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct

searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety

against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically

authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.

87. The housing bubble, its collapse, subprime mortgage crisis. Since about

1998, subprime mortgage loans have accounted for about 1/4 of US home sales.

Such mortgages allowed people with low or bad credit ratings to purchase

homes. Easy credit resulted in a housing boom/bubble between 2000 and 2005

and was touted as a major plank of Bush's "ownership society". The problem

was people were sold too much house financed by loans that they could

initially, if marginally, afford but which they could not after a few years

as the terms on their loans changed and monthly payments greatly increased.

The effects of this nonsensical lending and speculation were delayed for

awhile as the housing market was on the way up and the value of homes

(including those financed by subprime loans) steadily increased, but in late

2006 the bubble became unsustainable and burst. Ameriquest the largest

subprime lender went belly up after a $325 million settlement with 30 state

Attorney Generals for deceptive lending and marketing practices. (Its former

CEO Robert Arnell was appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands by George

Bush.) It was not alone. Other subprime lenders like Mortgage Lenders

Network USA and Ownit followed suit. Market analysts try to downplay the

significance of the subprime disaster but its effects continue to ripple

through financial markets. For one thing most of the mortgage loans were not

held by the original lenders but sold to investors and hedge funds. As a

result two Bear Stearns funds failed and on August 9, 2007 the French bank

BNP Paribas froze withdrawals from 3 of its funds due to subprime losses

sparking a major sell off in stock markets and forcing central banks to

inject ~$180 billion into markets over a 24 hour period to avoid a credit

crunch. The fallout from this housing bubble collapse will be with us for

years and is going to be very, very expensive.

.....On December 6, 2007, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented the

Administration's much awaited plan to help homeowners with subprime

mortgages. The program called for a voluntary 5 year freeze on rates due to

reset between January 1, 2008 and July 31, 2010. It was available only to

those who were not delinquent in their payments and delays but does not do

away with interest rate resets at the end of this period. Finally, it would

affect at most 20% of such loans and probably far fewer (~12%). All in all,

the Paulson plan does little to help homeowners but then it was never meant

to. The real reason for the plan was to support housing prices which could

fall 20% to 30% due to the subprime bubble and so thereby minimize losses to

investors.

.....On December 11, 2007, the Fed cut short term interest rates down to

4.25%. This is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans. It

was the third rate cut since September 2007 bringing the total decrease to a

full percentage point. While this could fuel inflation, it is unclear that

it will have any effect on the underlying fundamentals of the liquidity

crisis brought on by the subprime bubble.

.....On December 18, 2007 European central banks created a $500 billion fund

to provide two week loans to commercial banks at 4.21% interest. The problem

with most banks is not that they lack money on hand but that they are leery

of lending it.

88. Bush connections to Enron and Ken Lay. Lay was connected to the elder

Bush but helped finance the younger Bush's gubernatorial campaign. In 2000

he was a Bush Pioneer, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the

Republican convention and the Bush inaugural celebration. Through Enron, he

also contributed more than a million dollars in soft money to the Republican

party. In exchange, Bush stayed out of the California energy crisis and Lay

participated in Cheney's Energy Task Force which wrote Bush's business

friendly energy policy. When Enron collapsed, Bush could barely remember

ever having met the man.

89. Refusing to intervene in the California electricity crisis in early

2001. On January 29, 2001, in remarks Bush said, "the situation is going to

be best remedied in California, by Californians." He maintained that the

crisis occurred because demand outstripped supply but, in fact, the crisis

was the result of unscrupulous speculators like Enron producing unnecessary

shortages and then capitalizing on them.

90. Lack of action on Darfur despite Congress declaring it genocide in a

resolution (H.Con.Res. 467; Sen.Con.Res. 133) of July 22, 2004 and Bush's

own Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 9, 2004 in testimony before

the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

91. Failure to adequately fund programs to reduce poorly secured nuclear

material in Russia

92. Refusal to grant security clearances to OPR (Office of Public

Responsibility) lawyers investigating the role of Gonzales both as WH

counsel and later as AG in authorizing warrantless NSA wiretapping thus

quashing the investigation

93. Political interference in the Justice Department lawsuit against Big

Tobacco. 3 then DOJ officials Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum

(No.3 at the DOJ), head of the Civil Division Assistant Attorney General

Peter Keisler and his deputy, Dan Meronin intervened in June 2005 at the

last minute in the government's case. They torpedoed a provision which would

have removed corporate officers shown to have engaged in fraud. They asked

that some witnesses weaken their testimony. They also reduced a government

demand for an industry funded smoking cessation program from $130 billion to

$10 billion. Later, the presiding federal judge Gladys Kessler ruled that a

prior appellate court decision precluded such a program. Of course, this was

not the argument which the DOJ officials were making. Their interest was in

keeping Big Tobacco from taking a Big Hit.

94. White House involvement in election day phone jamming of Democrats in

New Hampshire November 5, 2002; Charles McGee, former executive director of

the New Hampshire Republican Party pled guilty to conspiracy on July 28,

2004 and was later sentenced to 7 months in prison; James Tobin New England

head of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee made two dozen

calls to the White House over a three day period during this time. He was

convicted for his participation on December 15, 2005. This was reversed on

appeal March 21, 2007. His case was sent back to the district court and will

be retried in December 2007. A major reason for the slow progress of the

Tobin case to trial (3 years) was that the FBI assigned only a single agent

part time to it.

95. Sweetheart plea deal for Steven Griles former No. 2 at the Interior

Department. Griles and his then girlfriend Italia Federici worked with Jack

Abramoff and later lied to Congress about it. The proposed deal by the

government: no cooperation demand, the minimum 10 months, 5 to be served at

the home of his now wife Sue Ellen Wooldridge who had just left Justice

where she was an assistant attorney general heading the environment

division. She signed a generous consent decree with ConocoPhillips despite

being friends with a Conoco vice president and despite the fact that Conoco

was being represented by Griles.

.....On June 26, 2007, US District Judge Ellen Huvelle sentenced Griles.

Griles asked for probation and blamed the Senate for his lying. The judge

didn't buy this or the government's deal and doubled his prison time to the

full 10 months. He was also fined $30,000 and given 3 years probation.

96. The unfired (Bush appointed) US attorneys who targeted 80% of their

political corruption cases against Democrats

97. Insertion into the Patriot Act extension of language allowing US

attorneys to be named without Senate approval. This provision originated

with Daniel Collins a former Associate Deputy AG back in 2003 but was taken

by then Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs (now Principal Associate Deputy

AG) William Moschella in 2005 and forwarded to Brett Tolman, a protege of

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch on Arlen Specter's staff who snuck it into the

bill. Specter denied knowledge of the insertion and said he had not read the

bill. He admitted, however, that his chief of staff Michael O'Neil did know.

As a reward, Tolman was nominated US attorney for Utah and confirmed by the

Senate July 21, 2006 in the usual way and not the one he slipped into the

Patriot Act. Gonzales approved but maintained he didn't know how it

happened.

98. Massive and illegal abuse by FBI of National Security Letters

(administrative warrants) or NSLs. A report by DOJ Inspector General Glenn

Fine of March 2007 estimated that 143,000 NSLs had been issued between 2003

and 2005. An exact number was not possible because recordkeeping was so bad

that an unknown number were never properly recorded. In response to the IG's

findings, Alberto Gonzales stated that he was unaware of abuses in the

program although he had begun receiving reports about them beginning in

2005. On June 15, 2007, DC federal district court judge John Bates ordered

the FBI to begin producing documents related to NSL abuse pursuant to a FOIA

request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by July 5. On July 13, 2007,

Attorney General Gonzales and FBI Director Mueller announced that a new

office would be formed within DOJ's National Security Division to oversee

the program and prevent abuses. Of course, these were the same people who

promised that there would be no abuses in the first place.

99. Attempted use of GSA to promote Republican candidates; presentation by

Scott Jennings deputy political director to Karl Rove at a video conference

of 40 political appointees hosted by GSA head Lurita Doan in violation of

the Hatch Act. Later, Doan testifying before Congress had severe memory

loss. Doan at GSA has been involved in various contract irregularities. In a

letter to Bush on June 8, 2007, the Office of Special Counsel which

investigates this kind of thing called for Doan to be punished to the

fullest extent for violations of the Hatch Act and obstructing its

investigation.

.....At least 20 other meetings involving senior officials from 15 government

agencies and the White House discussing political prospects were held before

the 2006 elections also in violation of the Hatch Act. The Office of Special

Counsel (OSC) has begun investigations into these.

100. Karl Rove and the culture of corruption. What did Karl Rove see in

George Bush that he tied his fortunes to Bush's political star? Rove saw

Bush as inhabiting the intersection of often disparate and conflicting

elements of the Republican Party. Bush came from a powerful Texas family.

His father had been President and that meant not only name recognition but

contacts to the Republican Establishment. Bush Senior was also tightly

connected to the conservative monied classes in Texas, the Northeast, and

the country more generally. Despite this, Bush Junior assiduously cultivated

and exploited a "good ole boy" image so at odds with his family's wealth and

power. Although born in Connecticut and schooled in the Northeast, as a

Texan and with the Everyman shtik, Bush could also lay claim to being both a

Southerner and a Westerner and so tap into two important bastions of the

Republican Party. As a recovering alcoholic turned to religion, Bush Junior

added in another part of the Republican base the religious Right,

evangelical and family values vote. With this and a smattering of Spanish,

Rove saw Bush could court the Hispanic vote as well. In other words, from

Rove's point of view Bush was a political goldmine.

.....Here were two men with little knowledge of or curiosity about the world,

motivated by no great philosophy but with a great thirst for power and a

willingness to do anything no matter how sleazy or dirty to win it. This was

not about consensus building. It was about 50% plus 1 or close enough for a

court to decide in their favor. Rove probably would have sought to

politicize the federal government in favor of the Republican Party anyway

but the disputed nature of the 2000 vote gave him an added incentive and 911

supplied him with a golden opportunity. The result has been the most

thoroughgoing politicization, often in contravention of the law, of all

aspects of government in our lifetimes.

.....The goal was to carve out a permanent majority using the 50% plus one

philosophy, but there were two problems. First, while Bush personified the

many facets of the modern Republican Party, neither he nor Rove ever unified

them. The conflicts between social conservatives, libertarians, and the

wealthy remained. The wealthy got their tax cuts but the financial situation

of Nascar dads became more precarious. Social issues got two Supreme Court

justices but no real money, and to date little change in the law. Nativist

types clashed with pro-business ones over immigration. Rove's outreach to

the expanding numbers of minorities in the country came crashing down. The

result was a peeling off not a building up until Bush and Rove were left

with only their hardcore base of 25-30%. Second, placing political loyalty

above professionalism and experience in government did not strengthen the

Republican Party or the conservative cause. It created instead an

environment of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, and failure. Examples of

this can be found everywhere in this Administration and form much of the

content of this list, but the epitome of this collision between ideology and

the real world is Iraq. The practical problem with politicization of

government is that it doesn't work and produces bad results of which Iraq is

the most obvious and worse.

.....On August 13, 2007, Karl Rove Bush's chief political adviser throughout

his entire political career announced his resignation to become effective on

August 31, 2007. From his 5 appearances before the grand jury in the Valerie

Plame/outing of a CIA agent case, to violations of the Hatch Act and the

Presidential Records Act, the US Attorney firings, and lobbyist Jack

Abramoff's influence peddling schemes, investigations have swirled around

Rove. Bush has invoked Executive Privilege to protect him. It may not have

been enough. In Washington's culture of corruption, all roads lead to Rove.

101. Voter suppression, voter ID laws, exaggerating the problem of voter

fraud, attempts to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act on its renewal; Hans von

Spakovsky, a Republican volunteer in the Florida recount, was Counsel to the

Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ's Civil Rights division where he

signed off on Tom Delay's 2003 Texas redistricting plan and a 2005 Georgia

voter ID law overruling staff recommendations that they were discriminatory.

Both were struck down in the courts. In the Georgia case, a federal appeals

judge compared the ID system to Jim Crow poll taxes. In April 2005, on his

own and without consulting voting rights attorneys, Spakovsky incorrectly

advised the Arizona Secretary of State that provisional ballots should not

be given to voters who lacked proper ID. Spakovsky went on to be a

Commissioner at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) in a January 6, 2006

recess appointment. In October 2007, Spakovsky's nomination to a regular

appointment was bundled with that of other FEC nominees but instead of

ensuring his confirmation it caused all the nominations to languish. On

December 18, 2007, a federal district judge in Florida Stephan Mickle

granted a preliminary injunction against a Spakovsky backed plan that would

have rejected voter applications if information on them differed from that

on their driver's license or Social Security records. The judge stated that

such requirements made it harder to vote and so undermined the intent of the

Help America Vote Act (HAVA). On December 31, 2007, Spakovsky announced in

an email that day was his last at the FEC.

.....The head of the Civil Rights Division during this period was Bradley

Schlozman. Schlozman was highly political. He wanted to know if prospective

hires were Republicans and forced out employees who committed the sin of not

agreeing with him. Although having no prosecutorial experience, Schlozman

was named US attorney for Western Missouri on March 23, 2006. In a blatant

attempt at voter suppression and in contravention of DOJ guidelines, he

filed voter fraud cases days before the November elections. His was one of

the first of the "interim" appointments made under the revised provisions

snuck into the Patriot Act and there have been suggestions that his

predecessor Todd Graves was forced out to make way for him. He left in April

2007 to work at the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA). Schlozman

testified about his activities before the Senate on June 5, 2007. Like most

recent DOJ witnesses, he suffered from extreme memory loss. He testified

that Craig Donsanto OK'ed the pre-election Missouri cases although Donsanto

is the one who wrote the DOJ guidelines. A May 2007 update to these

guidelines weakens or eliminates the prohibition on bringing politically

sensitive cases near to an election. Schlozman quietly left the DOJ sometime

mid-August 2007.

.....John Tanner has been head of the Voting Rights Section since 2005. He

precleared the Georgia ID program going against the recommendation of 4 out

of 5 of the section's career attorneys. The one dissenting attorney was new

and was apparently one of the political hires to a career position made by

Schlozman. Tanner also changed guidelines so that staff could not recommend

an objection to a state voting law. In June 2005, he wrote a preemptive

letter to election officials in Franklin County, Ohio assuring them that the

lack of sufficient voting machines in minority areas during the 2004

election did not amount to discrimination. Finally, in October 2007, Tanner

was still defending the Georgia ID law asserting that its negative effects

fell primarily on the elderly and so by extension on whites because

"minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first."

.....In addition, although Tanner's productivity has been minimal his travel

at taxpayer's expense has been maximal. In 2003-2004, he racked up 206 days

of travel during 46 trips. From May 2005 (after becoming head of the

section) to the end of 2006, he took 36 trips accounting for 97 travel days.

This is widely at variance with his predecessors. It also included 3 trips

to Hawaii one each year although the section had no lawsuits ongoing or in

preparation. One of these was taken with his deputy Susana Lorenzo-Giguere

who is herself being investigated for filing motions so that she could

charge per diem expenses while on summer vacation with her family in Cape

Cod.

.....On January 11, 2008, Tanner's replacement Christopher Coates demoted

Lorenzo-Giguere and another Tanner deputy Yvette Rivera. Rivera had been

accused of discriminating against African American employees.

.....John Tanner announce his resignation on December 14, 2007 to be

effective immediately. He is not, however, gone. He transferred to the

Office of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment

Practices.

.....Wan J. Kim who headed the Civil Rights Division after Bradley

Schlozman's departure is an Orrin Hatch protege. Kim announced his

resignation effective August 31, 2007.

102. Campaign finance and political corruption

103. Swift boating of John Kerry (2004); push polling and McCain's black

baby in the South Carolina primary (2000); on April 4, 2007, Sam Fox made

Ambassador to Belgium in a recess appointment. Fox's nomination was

withdrawn in the Senate where it faced certain defeat. Fox was controversial

because he had given $50,000 to the anti-Kerry smear campaign of the Swift

Boat Veterans for Truth

104. No Child Left Behind, based on flawed and false data, chronically

underfunded, capricious in its evaluations, places test scores above

knowledge; allegations have arisen that people at the Department of

Education pushed reading programs as part of NCLB that they had financial

interests in.

105. Susan E. Dudley made administrator of the Office of Information and

Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. Dudley who

doesn't believe in regulation except in extreme cases when the "market

fails" was named to this powerful regulatory post in a recess appointment on

April 4, 2007.

106. Paul Wolfowitz, after his disastrous hyping of the Iraq war, did a

McNamara and went to the World Bank to do good. He brought his neocon

values, a doctrinaire, secretive management style, and a real gift for poor

leadership to rail against corruption in 3rd world countries while

practicing some of it himself closer to home. Prohibited from supervising

his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a senior communications officer at the bank, he

detailed her to the Department of State, gave her a raise of $47,340 twice

what was permitted, and then a further raise of $13,000 bringing her salary

to $193,000 tax free and making her the highest paid official in the State

Department and that includes Condoleezza Rice. Wolfowitz's eventual defense

of the raise was that Riza was very angry at leaving the Bank and might have

sued although as the Bank later pointed out she did not have grounds to do

so. Her initial boss at state was none other than Liz Cheney. Her job

through State was to set up the Foundation for the Future to promote civil

society in the Middle East. After 1 1/2 years there, it still has no

permanent office, executive officers, or staff and has yet to disperse a

grant. There is also the matter of a security clearance that Riza, a

non-citizen unaffiliated with an allied government, would need to work at

Defense (through an earlier contract with the defense contractor SAIC

arranged by Wolfowitz through Doug Feith) or more recently at State and

which would be extremely unusual to give to someone in her situation.

.....Wolfowitz dragged out his departure from the Bank for nearly a month

doing serious damage to the institution. He was eventually forced to

announce his resignation on May 17, 2007 effective June 30, 2007. In keeping

with his double standard on corruption and despite his disastrous

stewardship at the Bank, he will not go cheaply into the night. His

severance package will be in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The

poor should get such deals. On June 25, 2007, pro-business, free trader (and

like Wolfowitz) neocon Robert Zoellick was approved as the World Bank's new

president.

.....In December 2007, Wolfowitz doing a stint at that den of current and

washed up neoconservatives the American Enterprise Institute accepted an

offer from Condoleezza Rice to take on the part time position of chairman of

the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. The post was

last held by the somnolent and Presidential candidate Fred Thompson. The

Board's current 18 members are members in good standing of the nation's

military industrial complex with ties to Lawrence Livermore, Boeing,

Lockheed Martin, and Bechtel and with a heavy concentration on nuclear

weaponry.

107. Kenneth Tomlinson chairman of the CPB politicized public broadcasting,

commissioned a biased study to monitor liberalism on Bill Moyer's show NOW,

resigned after an IG report alleged political tests and inappropriate

dealings in the creating of a new show; later he was put on the board of

governors for the Voice of America where there were further allegations of

hiring a friend, misuse of staff, improper billing, and use of his office to

run a horse racing operation

108. Matteo Fontana, a general manager in the Office of Federal Student Aid

in the Education Department held and sold shares worth at least $100,000 in

Student Loan Xpress whose activities he was ostensibly overseeing. He was

placed on paid leave. Fontana's boss who oversees the student loan program

Theresa Shaw resigned on May 8, 2007 a few days before Education Secretary

Margaret Spellings was to testify before Congress. The official reason given

for Shaw's leaving was that she had "plans to take some time off." This is

part of the larger scandal of sweetheart deals between universities and

companies making loans to students to the detriment of students. On June 1,

2007, the Department of Education came out with new rules to regulate the

$85 billion student lending business.

109. A 9th US prosecutor Tom Heffelfinger in Minnesota was replaced by

Rachel Paulose. Paulose at age 33 joined the DOJ and after less than 2

months as a senior counsel to deputy attorney general Paul McNulty she was

named to the USA position in Minnesota. She was also reputed to be good

friends with Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling and had a reputation for

quoting the bible and dressing down staff. As a result on April 5, 2007,

three of her top assistants, career prosecutors, resigned their

administrative positions and voluntarily demoted themselves rather than work

with her in a sign of their complete lack of faith in her abilities

.....The push to oust Heffelfinger appears to have resulted from an attempt

to suppress the Native American vote in 2004. In Minnesota, many Native

Americans vote Democratic, live off reservation, and have tribal IDs as

their principal source of identification. The Republican Secretary of State

Mary Kiffmeyer refused to accept these for voting purposes. An assistant US

attorney in Heffelfinger's office Rob Lewis contacted Joseph Rich a career

prosecutor and the head of the voting section of the DOJ's Civil Rights

Division. Rich recommended an investigation which was vetoed by Bradley

Schlozman. Attempts to gather further information were effectively derailed

by Hans von Spakovsky. Shortly before the November election, federal

District Judge James Rosenbaum ruled that tribal IDs could be used.

Heffelfinger who was cited in testimony by Monica Goodling as spending too

much time on Native American issues (He headed the US attorneys subcommittee

on Native American issues) resigned effective February 28, 2006. As one of

her first acts, interim USA Paulose got rid of Rob Lewis.

.....On November 19, 2007, Paulose's resignation as USA was confirmed. It had

been reported in September 2007 that she was the subject of an Office of

Special Counsel investigation enquiring into her conduct as USA in

Minnesota. She will return to main DOJ where she will serve as the counsel

to the Rachel Brand Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal

Policy.

110. The lost White House emails: not an accident but a policy.

The official White House email system:

February 26, 2001 White House counsel Alberto Gonzales informs White House

staff they must preserve their email in conformance with the Presidential

Records Act.

June 4, 2001 Bush announces plan to name a special assistant to the

President to act as Chief Information Officer for the White House and

"improve" electronic records keeping.

Late 2001 or early 2002 the White House deactivates the Automated Records

Management System (ARMS) for archiving emails. Instead the White House

begins transferring emails from its EOP server to a file server. The system

is not secure or complete and emails can be deleted from it. On top of this,

back up tapes which might capture and preserve some of these deletions are

regularly wiped and recycled. Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton says

this was in keeping with "industry best practices". The problem is that

these "practices" violate federal law, i.e. the Presidential Records Act and

the duties and responsibilities of her position.

March 2003-October 2003 marks the period in which backup tapes were not

retained. It encompasses the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame

coverup, and discussions concerning the destruction of the torture tapes.

October 2003-October 2005 emails continue to be lost. Despite daily

audits, no one notices for 2 years

In October 2005, someone does finally gasp notice. The Office of

Administration does a study which finds hundreds of days (473) between March

2003 and October 2005 where various components of the White House system

contained few if any emails. The OA estimates 5 million emails were lost

during this time.

The unofficial system:

Beginning in 2001, Karl Rove and about 35 other White House officials used

Republican National Committee (RNC) GWB43.com and other email accounts for

government business circumventing and violating the Presidential Records

Act. Per a letter of Henry Waxman to Alberto Gonzales, it has been reported

that Karl Rove used RNC accounts for 95% of his communications.

2001-August 2004, the RNC purged its email accounts every 30 days. After

this time, it suspended purges on White House accounts. However, it

continued to allow White House officials to delete their emails.

Beginning in 2005, the RNC singled out Karl Rove. His emails were

automatically archived and he was no longer allowed to delete them. That he

had been doing this is obvious since although he used his RNC email account

heavily, he has no emails from the time the RNC suspended its email purges

in August 2004 to the beginning of 2005 when it began archiving his emails.

Up to the time of Waxman's letter in April 2007, White House officials

other than Karl Rove retained the use of their RNC accounts and the ability

to delete email from them.

To recap, the White House had two email systems, not one. It lost or

destroyed many emails from both in deliberate and knowing violation of the

Presidential Records Act. As a result, the Congress and the people's right

to know what their government is doing and to hold it to account has been

irretrievably damaged.

111. Georgia Thompson a purchasing agent in Wisconsin was convicted of

steering a contract to a company in which 2 executives had contributed the

maximum to Democratic Governor Jim Doyle's re-election campaign. Thompson

had been a hire of the previous Republican governor and no evidence was

produced at trial that she knew of the contributions. Remanded by the

Republican judge who heard the case, she served 4 months of an 18 month

sentence before an appeals court overturned her conviction after oral

arguments where one judge typified the government's case as "beyond thin"

and ordered her freed the same day. The case was brought by Bush appointed

US attorney Steven Biskupic during the campaign and was used in Republican

campaign ads to accuse Doyle of corruption

112. US attorney for New Jersey and former Bush "Pioneer" Chris Christie

issued subpoenas in a corruption probe of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez

two months before the Nov. 2006 elections. Menendez was in a tight race with

Tom Keane. After Menendez won, the investigation went away

113. Kay Coles James, dean of Pat Robertson's Regent's government school,

made director of the Office of Personnel Management in 2001. In 2002, John

Ashcroft eases qualifications for DOJ hiring. The influx into the DOJ of

young, poorly qualified lawyers on a conservative religious mission begins

114. In a rushed process, Bernard B. Kerik, a Rudy Giuliani protege and

former New York City Police Commissioner, was nominated to be Secretary of

Homeland Security December 3, 2004. He withdrew his name a week later

ostensibly because of his employment of an undocumented immigrant as a

nanny. However, it quickly came out that Kerik was also involved in a

dubious stock sale of stun gun manufacturer Taser International shortly

before a critical report by Amnesty International, a sexual harassment suit,

connections to a construction company Interstate Industrial Corporation tied

to the Gambino organized crime family, use of an apartment donated for 911

relief as a love nest where he could meet his girlfriends, including Judith

Regan, and accepting gifts in contravention of ethics rules (for which he

paid a $221,000 fine). Kerik was also the inept Interim Minister of the

Interior in Iraq under Paul Bremer's CPA in 2003. On November 9, 2007, Kerik

was indicted on 14 federal counts including certifying that Interstate

Industrial Corporation was mob-free in exchange for $255,000 in renovations

for his apartment, accepting $200,000 in rent off the books, bribery, tax

fraud, theft of honest services, and making false statements to government

officials.

115. The Bush back story: The time in the TANG, the transfer to the Alabama

National Guard, the lost years, the 1976 DUI in Maine, the business

bailouts, the governorship, hardline on drug crimes despite his own past

history and a fast and loose approach to the death penalty

.....In the run up to the Presidential elections, Dan Rather presented a

piece on Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard on CBS, 60 Minutes II

on September 8, 2004. The segment noted that Bush had received preferential

treatment in being admitted to what was called the Champagne Unit comprised

of the scions of well to do Texans wishing to avoid service in Vietnam. He

then cited critical memos purportedly written by Bush's squadron leader

Colonel Jerry Killian. The authenticity of these was rapidly brought into

question by conservative bloggers and their doubts were quickly echoed in

the mainstream media. While controversy continues to this day about whether

the memos were real or fakes, their content that Bush performed his duties

poorly or not at all remains largely uncontested. On September 20, CBS

President for News Andrew Heyward issued an apology and Rather a kind of

one. An internal commission was organized headed by two men, one at least

with a very definite connection to the Bush family: Richard Thornburgh, Bush

I's Attorney General and Louis Boccardi, former head of the AP. That the fix

was in was hardly surprising since Sumner Redstone who headed Viacom CBS,

parent company had declared himself (and Viacom) for Bush Junior. On

September 19, 2007, Dan Rather now retired filed a $70 million civil suit

against his former employers for scapegoating him. Now what is curious about

all this and qualifies it as a scandal is that no major outlet of the

mainstream press rushed in before the election or after to investigate the

Bush TANG story and verify or debunk its content. The attack on Rather (and

his producer Mary Mapes) effectively inoculated Bush against any further

charge or investigation on this subject. Quite simply the media didn't care

whether it was true or not. Just as they didn't care if the swiftboating of

John Kerry's war record was factual or not. This disparate treatment coupled

with a studied lack of interest is emblematic of the media's coverage of the

Bush years.

116. As of February 2006, the terrorist watchlist of the National

Counterterrorism Center: the bizarrely named Terrorists Identity Datamart

Environment (TIDE) has 400,000 names representing 300,000 people. The

Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list had 44,000 names on it

as of October 2006. 75,000 others are on an extra screening list (CBS). The

FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) keeps the government's consolidated

master watchlist which it makes available to other government agencies. Its

list has grown from 158,374 names in June 2004 to 754,960 names in May 2007,

an increase of about 200,000 a year. The size of the lists, that they

contain numerous errors, that it is difficult or impossible to remove names

or correct errors, the presence of common names, and the ease with which

these lists can be subverted by real terrorists raise questions why such

large, sloppy lists exist at all.

117. Insta-declassification in contravention of Bush's own Executive order

13292 and without consultation with the original classifying agency. Also

abusive and indiscriminate classification (secrecy for secrecy's sake) of

government documents

118. Vice President Cheney shoots 78 year old lawyer Harry Whittington Feb.

11, 2006 during a quail hunt at the Armstrong ranch in Texas. The shooting

is not reported until the next day and then by the ranch owner to a Corpus

Christi reporter. Under pressure and despite his disdain for the press,

Cheney finally breaks his silence Feb. 15 on Fox News. Any real

investigation is smothered by the powerful Armstrong family (who by the way

are the ones who set Cheney up in his job at Halliburton) and the story

remains incomplete

119. Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System (ATS) database which

makes a terrorist risk assessment on anyone traveling to or from the US by

any means and keeps it for 40 years

120. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refuses to recuse himself from

Cheney's appeal of a Sierra Club lawsuit to keep records of his 2001 Energy

Task Force secret. Shortly after SCOTUS agreed to take up the case, Scalia

flew with Cheney on Jan. 5, 2004 on Air Force Two to Louisiana for a duck

hunting trip. Cheney stayed two days and Scalia four. June 24, 2004, SCOTUS

decides 7-2 to send the case back to the district court for reconsideration

of the government's separation of powers argument. Scalia and Thomas going

further concurred and dissented thinking that the appellate court should

have been the one to deny the Sierra Club's discovery request. May 1, 2005,

the DC Court of Appeals dismisses the Sierra Club case holding that Cheney

could keep the participation of oil companies in his Energy Task Force

secret.

121. The Election Assistance Commission which was created to do election

research after the 2000 election debacle issued a December 2006 report which

changed the conclusions of its experts and exaggerated the problem of voter

fraud. Previously, the Commission released a report only under Congressional

pressure that indicated that voter ID programs suppressed voter turnout

among minorities. The EAC also has oversight of voting machines and voting

software in which it has failed.

122. Bush tried unsuccessfully to kill the confirmation of Mohammed

ElBaradei to a third term as head of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy

Agency). ElBaradei and the IAEA had stated in the runup to the Iraq war that

the famous aluminum tubes were for rockets not centrifuges, that the Niger

documents were fakes, that there was no evidence that Iraq was trying to

reconstitute a nuclear program, and that the Iraqis had been cooperative

with IAEA inspections. As part of the Bush campaign in 2005 to oust him, the

NSA tapped his phones in an unsuccessful attempt to show he was being soft

on Iran. John Bolton unsuccessfully lobbied for more aggressive surveillance

of him. ElBaradei was reconfirmed and later that same year won the Nobel

Peace Prize

123. Alice Fisher named to head the Criminal Division at the DOJ in a recess

appointment, later confirmed September 19, 2006 (just before the Nov. 2006

elections). A protegee of Michael Chertoff, she worked under him as deputy

head of the Criminal Division but has no experience as a criminal

prosecutor. She also worked on the Senate investigation into the Clinton era

Whitewater scandal and was a lobbyist of HCA the healthcare company

controlled by the family of the recent Republican Majority Leader Bill

Frist. She has opposed rescinding the more gratuitous aspects of the Patriot

Act, favored its extension unchanged, participated in discussions of abusive

interrogation methods at Guantanamo, and reportedly has social ties to Tom

Delay's defense team. Under her leadership, the investigation into

Abramoff's many connections (some of which go back to Delay) has gone

nowhere.

124. After being admonished 3 times by the House Ethics Committee in 2004,

Tom Delay through Dennis Hastert had the Republican head of the committee

replaced and staff fired. Ethics rules were also changed making it easier to

kill ethics investigations. An initial provision to allow an indicted member

of the House leadership to continue to hold his position was rescinded after

negative publicity.

125. Collusion of the media: the NYT, WaPo, Time, Newsweek, cable and

network news in the Bush disasters through silence, lack of investigation,

and above all accepting uncritically whatever spin came out of the White

House on anything

126. Failure of the Democratic Party to act as an opposition party for

nearly 5 years

127. A supreme lack of oversight by a rubberstamping Republican Congress

over the same 5 years

128. The use of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq to justify the Bush invasion and

an ongoing US military presence there. The UN Resolutions it cites,

including those sanctioning military force, are from the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

The UN never passed a resolution that authorized the use of military force

in the Second Gulf War. On June 28, 2004, the US returned sovereignty to the

reconstituted state of Iraq and in doing so acknowledged that the Iraq

referenced in the AUMF as well as the legal rationale for a US presence in

(and occupation of) the country no longer existed.

.....The AUMF placed Democrats in a political bind. Despite later

protestations, they knew it meant war. Knowing this, they were faced with

the following calculus. They could vote against the AUMF, but since Bush was

going to war anyway they would be portrayed as unpatriotic and not

supporting the troops. If the war was quick and successful, regardless of

the merits of the case, they would be portrayed as weak and wrong. If they

voted for, they might not get credit but they would avoid blame. Still some

did vote no.

.....The AUMF passed in the House October 10, 2002 by a vote of 296-133 with

3 not voting. 81 Democrats voted for the AUMF. 126 voted against it (with 1

not voting). Only 6 Republicans voted against. It passed the Senate the next

day with a vote of 77-23. 27 Democrats voted for it. 22 Democrats voted

against, including Jeffords (I-VT). Only one Republican Lincoln Chafee

(R-RI) voted against. Bush signed the AUMF into law on October 16, 2002.

.....These are the Senate Democrats who voted for the AUMF:

Baucus (D-MT)..................Edwards (D-NC)...................Nelson

(D-NE)

Bayh (D-IN)....................Feinstein (D-CA).................Reid

(D-NV)

Breaux (D-LA)..................Harkin

(D-IA)....................Rockefeller (D-WV)

Cantwell (D-WA)................Hollings (D-SC)..................Schumer

(D-NY)

Carnahan (D-MO)................Johnson (D-SD)...................Torricelli

(D-NJ)

Carper (D-DE)..................Kerry (D-MA)

Cleland (D-GA).................Kohl (D-WI)

Clinton (D-NY).................Lieberman (D-CT)

Daschle (D-SD).................Lincoln (D-AR)

Dodd (D-CT)....................Miller (D-GA)

Dorgan (D-ND)..................Nelson (D-FL)

129. On December 14, 2004, President Bush awards the Medal of Freedom, the

highest civilian honor, to General Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul

Bremer for their efforts to create the disaster that Iraq has become.

Richard Myers the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 2001-2005 received his for

his part in this catastrophe on November 9, 2005 shortly after his

retirement.

130. Real ID Act of 2005 mandates essentially a national identity card by

forcing states to have nationally compatible driver's licenses. The program

has multiple goals: facilitate surveillance and data mining and make it

harder for illegal aliens to get jobs and for the poor to vote. On January

11, 2008, DHS head Michael Chertoff announced a deadline of May 2008 for

states to seek a waiver for more time to comply or driver licenses from

those states would not be accepted as evidence of identity for the purposes

of air travel. The ACLU (for privacy reasons) and 17 states (for cost) have

objected to the program.

131. Jose Padilla. This is not about a bad and deluded man, but rather that

an American citizen held in the United States could be held for 3 1/2 years

(May 8, 2002-January 3, 2006) outside the purview of American courts and

tortured. He was transferred to the regular US legal system only because his

case challenging Bush's power to declare him an illegal enemy combatant was

wending its way to the Supreme Court. The transfer successfully pre-empted

this when the Court declined April 3, 2006 to hear the case. The lack of a

Supreme Court determination and passage of the Military Commissions Act mean

that any American can still be declared an illegal enemy combatant and held

indefinitely without charge, and if the MCA is to be believed (and unlike

the Padilla case) without any right to habeas corpus.

.....On May 14, 2007, Padilla who was initially accused of being a terrorist

mastermind behind a plot to detonate a dirty bomb inside the US was put on

trial for being a minor member of a conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim

outside the US. Among the many dubious and disturbing aspects of this case:

the length and nature of detention, his mental fitness to stand trial, the

change in jurisdiction from military to civilian, and the major reduction in

the scope of the charges and Padilla's role in them, the government claims

it "lost" evidence, specifically a DVD of Padilla's last interrogation as an

enemy combatant from March 2, 2004. On August 16, 2007, he and his

codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi were found guilty on

all counts. Despite virtually no concrete evidence against them, on August

16, 2007, he and his codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi

were found guilty on all counts. On January 22, 2008, Padilla was sentenced

to 17 years 4 months, Hassoun to 15 years and 8 months, and Jayyoussi to 12

years 8 months.

132. National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005.

This sets up a state by state but nationally compatible data base of

prescribed controlled substances available to many agencies. The substances

include not only painkillers taken for more than a couple days but also

tranquillizers and sleeping pills.

133. Jean-Bertrand Aristide the President of Haiti who was certainly no Boy

Scout was flown out of the country on February 29, 2004 in the midst of an

insurrection that was not exactly opposed by the Bush Administration

"willingly" according to American authorities, "kidnapped" according to

Aristide.

134. Hugo Chavez the controversial President of Venezuela was briefly

deposed in a military coup April 11, 2002. The Bush Administration initially

recognized the interim government of Pedro Carmona the head of the national

business federation and said that Chavez had brought the coup on himself.

The coup collapsed and Chavez resumed power two days later on April 13,

2002. Later the Bush Administration condemned the coup.

135. Bush's ethanol program will not solve America's energy problems. It is

a boon to corn state farmers and the politicians who represent them but

depletes soil that would be better reserved for food production. Ethanol is

also a carbon based fuel and contributes to global warming directly through

its burning and indirectly through its production.

136. Post the November 2006 elections, the Senate Minority Leader Mitch

McConnell has repeatedly used the filibuster to obstruct Congressional

action. This has happened so far on Iraq resolutions (even some co-sponsored

by Republicans), an intelligence bill requiring greater accountability, and

a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This is

especially egregious in light of the last Congress where then Republican

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist repeatedly threatened Democratic Senators

contemplating a filibuster with the "nuclear option" of doing away with it

by changing Senate rules.

137. The stacking of the federal judiciary with unqualified rightwing hacks.

A bipartisan group of Senators known as the Gang of 14 (7 Democrats and 7

Republicans) came together to avoid the nuclear option (the elimination of

the Senate filibuster) and pushed through hyper-conservative judicial

choices: Priscilla Owen to the 5th Circuit on May 25, 2005 (55-43), Janice

Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit on June 8, 2005 (56-43), and William Pryor to

the 11th Circuit on June 9, 2005 (53-45). No agreement could be made on two

others: William Myers and Henry Saad. Their names were eventually withdrawn.

.....The Gang of 14 was also responsible for the confirmation of Brett

Kavanaugh (again to the important DC Circuit) on May 26, 2006 by a vote of

57-36. Kavanaugh was the most inexperienced candidate to the circuit in its

more than 100 year history. He had no trial experience but had worked for

essentially partisan causes: Kenneth Starr's investigations into Bill

Clinton for 5 years, the 2000 Florida recount, and and the nomination and

confirmation of unqualified, radically conservative candidates rather like

himself as Associate Counsel in the Bush White House.

.....On June 27, 2007, Senator Patrick Leahy sent a letter to Alberto

Gonzales referring Kavanaugh to the DOJ for possible prosecution for a false

statement he made during his confirmation hearings (still waiting for a

response on that one, surprise). In his responding to a question by Senator

Durbin (D-IL), Kavanaugh said he had taken no part in developing the

Administration's policy with regard to enemy combatants. A June 25, 2007

article in the Washington Post and an NPR report the following day indicated

that he had taken part in at least one meeting on this subject in 2002.

138. Ralph "I need to start humping in corporate accounts" Reed led the

Christian Coalition in the 1990s and was an associate of both Jack Abramoff

and Grover Norquist. Abramoff funneled millions in 1999 and 2000 to Reed in

exchange for Reed's mobilizing evangelicals in support of Abramoff's various

schemes. These included: spiking an Alabama law which would have allowed

gaming at dog tracks in competition with Choctaw casinos which were Abramoff

clients; similar opposition to an Alabama state lottery; opposition to the

Internet Gambling Prohibition Act (the rationale, a major stretch, was that

it didn't go far enough) for his client eLottery; opposition to a Tigua

casino in Texas to the benefit of his clients the Lousiana Coushatta; and

then in 2002 persuading the Tigua that he Abramoff could use his connection

to Reed to help them get back their casino. Reed was an indispensable cog in

the Abramoff machine.

139. Aggressive proselytizing by Christian evangelical faculty and cadets at

the US Air Force Academy. A report was issued June 2005 but it is not clear

if much has changed. The USAF Academy also has a recurrent history of

cheating and sexual assault.

140. The Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, an idea for those

who don't believe in the separation of church and state or the Establishment

Clause in the Constitution (First Amendment). A political and financial sop

to rightwing Christians, the program has given no money to non-Christian

groups. It is unclear how much money has actually gone through the program.

The real problem is that any money should be distributed in this way.

.....On June 25, 2007, SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in Hein, Director, White House Office

of Faith Based and Community Initiatives et al v. Freedom from Religion

Foundation, Inc. et al that taxpayers do not have standing to contest this

spending in violation of the Establishment clause A) because they can not

show direct harm and B) because Establishment challenges under Flast v.

Cohen are only allowed if a specific Congressional statute is at issue.

SCOTUS held that the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives had

been created wholly within the Executive Branch and that no specific monies

had been appropriated to it by Congressional statute so no challenge could

be made. This is fairly squirrely reasoning (increasingly typical of the

Roberts Court) because the money didn't just appear out of nowhere and what

money the Congress does appropriate and how it is spent by the Executive

must meet Constitutional requirements such as the Establishment Clause. In

any case, the bottom line is that in the view of SCOTUS the Congress and/or

another President are the ones to change this. Ordinary Americans need not

apply.

141. Military disability ratings: A 30% rating is the cutoff between

receiving payments, staying within the military healthcare system, and

eligibility for family coverage and is now given out more rarely than before

the beginning of the Iraq war, despite the large number of soldiers with

severe injuries.

142. Earmarks: Special interest funding directed to a specific project by an

individual legislator. The most famous example was Republican Senator Ted

Stevens' $223 million for a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Earmarks exploded

in number and expense under the Republicans. Bush only decided that there

was something bad about them (nearly 6 years into his Presidency) when

Democrats won control of the Congress.

143. Medicare privatization. This began in 1982 and grew throughout the

1990s with 17.3% of Medicare recipients enrolled in 1999 in private plans

when it went into decline. Since the start of Medicare Part D (passed 2003,

went into effect January 1, 2006), numbers have begun to rise again. One of

the reasons for this increase is that they are being aggressively, and often

unscrupulously, marketed to unsuspecting elders. In addition, private plans

receive government subsidies to make them competitive with Medicare itself.

This is money that could go to reducing Medicare premiums generally but

instead goes to higher overhead and profits for private providers.

144. Signing of a nuclear cooperation deal with India December 18, 2006.

This is another example of the Bush Administration and Congress's selective

approach to nuclear non-proliferation. Israel's nuclear program is ignored.

Iraq is, in part, invaded for a mythical program that existed only in the

fevered imaginations of Cheney, Feith, Bush, and Rice. At the same time,

nuclear moves in North Korea and Iran are opposed. Meanwhile the deal with

India will allow it to dedicate some of its facilities completely to nuclear

arms production.

145. Julie MacDonald, who has a degree in civil engineering and no

background in the natural sciences, was named the Deputy Assistant Secretary

for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Interior Department on May 2004. She

altered and reversed conclusions in scientific reports to prevent species

from being protected. The Bush Administration to date has listed 58 species

(54 as the result of litigation) as endangered as opposed to 512 in the

Clinton years and 234 by the first President Bush. MacDonald also hired Todd

Willens who worked with the former Republican Representative and

anti-environmentalist Richard Pombo. According to a March 2007 Inspector

General report, she also passed on internal department documents to the oil

industry and land developers in contravention of federal rules and to aid

filing of lawsuits against the department. In one instance she pushed to

have an endangered species which lived on her farm in California's Central

Valley (the Sacramento splittail fish) delisted. Facing oversight hearings,

she resigned April 30, 2007.

.....The endangered species program has been without a director for a year

and, as of July 2007, 30% of its positions are unfilled. On July 20, 2007,

H. Dale Hall the current director of the Fish and Wildlife Service announced

that 8 decisions made by MacDonald concerning species protection and land

use would be reviewed and likely reversed. On November 27, 2007, it was

announced that seven of them would be.

146. From tales of the revolving door. Darleen Druyun was a principal deputy

assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management where

she negotiated a sweetheart deal worth $23 billion for leasing air tankers

from Boeing. She was also negotiating at the same time for an executive

position at Boeing. The deal was made. She left the Air Force and took up

her new position at Boeing. In a 2004 plea agreement, Druyun pled guilty to

fraud and was sentenced to 9 months in a minimum security prison, 7 months

of home detention, 150 hours of community service, and required to pay a

$5,000 fine.

.....In addition, Air Force Secretary James Roche and the Air Force's top

acquisition officer, Marvin Sambur resigned at the end of 2004 due to their

roles in pushing the tanker deal.

147. Luis Posada Carriles is an anti-Castro terrorist who masterminded the

October 6, 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner killing 73. He had worked

before this with the CIA and after the Cubana bombing during the Reagan

Administration helped funnel aid to the Contras. In 1997, he directed a

series of bombings in Cuba against the growing tourist industry there. In

April 2005, running out of places to hide, he requested asylum in the US but

the following month was detained for entering the country illegally. Despite

his terrorist past, he was released on bond to home detention on April 19,

2007. On May 8, 2007, a federal judge in Texas dismissed the case against

him for lying to immigration authorities. Contrast his treatment to that of

terrorists like the "waterboarded" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Apparently it is

not what you bomb but who you bomb that counts.

.....In a somewhat similar case, Vang Pao, a leader of the American Hmong

community who led Hmong forces in Laos against Communist troops during the

Vietnam War, was arrested on June 4, 2007 for violation of the Neutrality

Act and weapons charges as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government

of Laos. Despite the gravity of the allegations against him and the national

security aspects, he was nevertheless ordered released on $1.5 million bail

on July 12, 2007.

148. James Knodell, Director of the Office of Security at the White House,

in testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform chaired by

Henry Waxman said that no internal White House investigation was ever

initiated (contrary to Executive order 12958 requiring one) in the period

between July 14, 2003 when Valerie Plame a covert CIA agent was outed in a

column by Robert Novak and September 29, 2003 when the Department of Justice

asked the FBI to investigate pursuant to a request from the CIA of September

16, 2003.

149. Robert Cobb, NASA's tame Inspector General since 2002, tipped off

former NASA head Sean O'Keefe to audits he would be performing and search

warrants the FBI would be executing. O'Keefe, primarily known for his

forceful dealing with the 1991 Tailhook scandal, was an accountant by

training without a scientific or engineering background whose tenure at NASA

was marked by drift. He got the top NASA job in December 2002 through his

connection with Dick Cheney and, while still NASA administrator, campaigned

for Bush in 2004 as a "private citizen". He left in February 2005. The

inappropriate contact between NASA administrators and the NASA Inspector

General continues as well as its coverup. The NASA General Counsel Mike

Wholley illegally destroyed a tape of a meeting (between the current NASA

head Michael Griffin and Cobb and his staff) to avoid it ever becoming

public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

150. Evangelos Dimitros Soukas a convicted felon serving 8 years for tax

fraud was scheduled to testify on April 12, 2007 before the Senate Finance

Committee on identity theft and filing false tax returns. The Department of

Justice challenged the right of the Congress to order a prisoner in federal

custody to appear before it, even though this has happened numerous times in

the past. A federal district judge did not agree with the DOJ and Soukas

testified. The DOJ move appeared baffling, an empty assertion of Executive

power, but, may have been pre-emptive to prevent more controversial

prisoners from testifying in the future.

151. Excessive corporate pay, retirement, and severance packages in the Bush

era. Even post-Enron, control over executive compensation still rests

largely in the hands of the executives themselves and the compliant boards

of directors they often select. Pay is still not coupled to performance and

stock options still encourage executives to manipulate stock prices (which

is very much not the same thing as performance as the Enron case showed) for

their own benefit. Reporting the cost of stock options was not mandated by

the SEC until August 2006. The total cost of multi-year options is still not

reported fully but treated as a year by year expense making the true cost

look smaller. Back dating of options so they could be purchased at a lower

price was also fairly common until somebody noticed it constituted fraud.

Spring loading, a variant of insider trading, i.e. exercising an option and

buying just before news that will drive up the stock price, still occurs.

152. Eliot Spitzer the then New York State Attorney General (and not the SEC

or the Bush Administration) announced on May 21, 2002 that Merrill Lynch had

agreed to sever contacts between its analysis and investment divisions and

to pay a $100 million fine. The lack of such separation was behind a lot of

the dot com bubble in the 1990s as well as propping up Enron and

facilitating its scams. It is a recognition of sorts of a systemic problem,

although the fine was a tiny fraction of what investors lost and it is

unclear how "objective" analysts are going to be even with the supposed wall

to the investment side.

153. Scott Bloch initially deputy director for the Task Force for Faith

Based and Community Initiatives became the head of the Office of Special

Counsel (whose function is to protect whistleblowers) on January 5, 2004.

Once there he summarily closed hundreds of ongoing cases, decried cases that

had a "homosexual agenda", tried to use the office to protect a

non-governmental employee who was a defender of Intelligent Design, gave 12

of his in-office critics the choice of immediate re-assignment to field

offices or be fired, and was the subject of complaints filed with his own

office. In April 2007, Bloch announced an investigation into Karl Rove's

political machinations. The real aims of such an investigation probably do

not include carrying out a real probe but are more likely an attempt by

Bloch to hold on to his job, derail efforts to remove the OSC from the

purview of the White House, stymie other investigations into Karl Rove,

conduct a whitewash, and/or run out the clock.

.....On December 18 and 21, 2006, Bloch had a private service Geeks on Call

come in to scrub the drive on his personal office computer. He kept a back

up on a thumb drive which he has refused to surrender to the Office of

Personnel Management (OPM) currently investigating him.

154. Lax security at US nuclear facilities and airports exposed by

whistleblowers Richard Levernier and Bogdan Dzakovic for which they were

punished.

155. The 120,000 hours of counter terrorism related recordings that the FBI

had not translated by September 2004; related to this is the case of Sibel

Edmonds. She blew the whistle on the backlog and the dubious skills and

allegiances of some of the translators the FBI was employing. For this she

was rewarded by being fired.

156. Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling comes up again in an investigation of

the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) into whether she used

party affiliation in determining hires of entry level prosecutors. Did she?

Given Gonzales, March 1, 2006 order delegating hiring authority to her and

her role in the US attorney hiring and firing scandal, the answer is

obvious.

157. Michael Baroody who was Executive Vice President of the National

Association of Manufacturers a powerful K Street lobbying group was

nominated by Bush on March 1, 2007 to head the Consumer Products Safety

Commission. NAM has sought to limit or even eliminate corporate liability

for unsafe products and environmental practices. NAM decided to give Baroody

a $150,000 extraordinary payment on his way out the door. It is hard to say

whether this is simply a further conflict of interest or just

straightforward bribery. On May 23, 2007, Baroody withdrew his nomination,

one day before the beginning of hearings.

158. The Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) created

February 19, 2002 created a database the Joint Protection Enterprise Network

(JPEN) [sorry for the acronym gobbledygook] composed of TALONs Threat and

Local Observation Notices. These are basically raw unvalidated reports of

threats posed by dangerous civilian group like the Quakers. The idea of the

military spying on civilians is unsettling. The Founding Fathers after all

fought a revolution over such abuses and in the 4th Amendment enunciated:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and

effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Beyond this, CIFA did

not follow its own guidelines in how it managed the material it obtained.

The story does not end there. Duke Cunningham swung CIFA work to Mitchell J.

Wade's company MZM in exchange for bribes. He was aided in this by CIFA

Director David A. Burtt II and his top deputy Joseph Hefferon. In August

2006, Burtt resigned and Hefferon retired when the Cunningham-MZM connection

was made public.

.....On November 30, 2005, two days after Duke Cunningham enters into a plea

agreement, all TALON reports were deleted from the JPEN database. However,

the TALON program continues. (These programs never really die.) In keeping

with the DOD (Department of Defense) Inspector General's usual lackluster

performance, a report requested by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo in January 2006

and released June 27, 2007 on TALON failed to address who was responsible

for violations in following the program's guidelines or why they occurred.

The report also didn't examine if current safeguards were adequate or if the

program should continue. The Department of Defense (DOD) announced that it

will close the TALON system on September 17, 2007. Per the press release,

the Pentagon "is working to develop a new reporting system to replace Talon,

but in the interim, all information concerning force protection threats will

go to the FBI's Guardian reporting system." It has also been reported that

CIFA will keep a copy of record as evidence that the program was properly

administered (or if they want to start it up again as some point). As for

impropriety, yes, this occurred, but the real problem with the program is

that it is and was blatantly unconstitutional. Nor as I pointed out earlier

do these programs ever die. So is TALON really gone? No. Names are changed

but functions remain and the data are never destroyed.

159. Bush's March 6, 2003 news conference. Less than two weeks before the

start of the Iraq War, the "independent" press willingly play-acted

spontaneity in what was a heavily scripted propaganda piece promoting the

war.

160. An investigation into Bill Frist former Senate Majority Leader was

closed on April 27, 2007. He was not indicted for insider trading in selling

his stock in the family's large healthcare company HCA shortly before a

major fall in its stock price. It was all just a coincidence, a very

profitable coincidence.

161. Julie Myers was made Assistant Secretary of DHS to head Immigration and

Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a recess appointment on January 4, 2006 after

the Senate failed to vote on her nomination. Bush re-nominated her January

9, 2007. She was confirmed by voice vote on December 19, 2007. Myers is

another Bush hire whose lack of experience is overshadowed by who she is

related to. She is the niece of former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air

Force General Richard Myers. She is a prot

I should have it finished by the time Dumbya is gone ; )

>>> "Repukelickcan Shame" <j.wuest@comcast.net> wrote in message

>>> You say he has ANOTHER Bush-gate SCANDAL left in him? lol I do believe he

>>> does too, no IDIOT can go a whole year without a major fuck-up along the

>>> way...I lost track at 40 scandals, what's it up to now out of Curious

>>> Georgosity?

> The Bush Legacy:

> http://www.netrootsmass.net/Hugh/Bush_list.html

> Bush Scandals List:

> updated 1/29/08, recent changes in red. please contact us with corrections

> and additions.

Astounding, Bush is INFINITELY worse than WILDLY imagineable...anyone seeking

a political science degree should be required to do a BOOK REPORT on "W's"

(unmatched/unsurpassed scandal-ridden) BOWLEGGITCY - rofl.

> INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from

> Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great

> stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have

> long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple

> sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice know that once he has

> consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So

> whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn't like

> to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The

> Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic,

> reason, and facts have little or no role.

> ....Bush's Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen

> election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and

> unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and

> essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed

> to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not

> govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty.

> A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the

> perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and

> would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In

> the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it

> was catastrophic.

> ....At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an

> adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of

> flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we

> got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway,

> regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just

> with opponents but with reality.

> ....What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become

> our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could

> have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many

> Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even

> after 6 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the

> tragedy and crime of our times.

>

> 1. Walter Reed outpatient treatment, poor living conditions, undelivered

> mail, lack of caseworkers to oversee and facilitate patient care for

> amputees, brain injured, and psychologically disabled veterans; Walter Reed

> is not the only military hospital about which questions have been raised;

> also out there the underfunding of the VA.

> ....The problems at Walter Reed came to the public's attention through a

> series of articles by Dana Priest beginning February 18, 2007. Following

> them, Gen. George Weightman who ran Walter Reed for 6 months resigned March

> 1, followed by the forced resignation of Secretary of the Army Francis

> Harvey the next day. Weightman's boss Army Surgeon General Gen. Kevin "I

> don't do barracks inspections at Walter Reed" Kiley who lived across from

> the notorious Building 18 and who had run the hospital from 2002-2004 lasted

> one day as the new head of Walter Reed before he was removed. He resigned

> from the Army on March 12.

> ....One source of the difficulties at Walter Reed was the Base Realignment

> and Closure Commission (BRAC) decision on August 25, 2005 to close Walter

> Reed. Planned renovations were canceled. Another was the privatizing of

> support services at the hospital. The workforce dropped from 350 experienced

> professionals to 50 who were not and the contract was given to IAP. IAP

> began work at Walter Reed in 2003. In 2004, IAP lobbied successfully against

> an Army recommendation not to privatize the workforce. The OMB reversed the

> Army finding and the services contract was given to IAP in January 2006

> although its implementation was delayed a year. IAP is run by two former KBR

> executives and had a well connected board of directors as well as being

> owned by a powerful holding company the Cerberus hedge fund.

> ....However, the generally low priority given to ongoing patient care for

> wounded soldiers was probably the single greatest reason for the woes at

> Walter Reed. It bears remembering that there were problems noted as early as

> 2004 and certainly by 2005 and that Walter Reed is located in the nation's

> capital minutes from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of major

> media outlets. Washington didn't know about Walter Reed because it didn't

> want to know.

>

>

> 2. Firing of US attorneys. Most of the country's 93 US attorneys are usually

> replaced within the first 2 years of a new administration and this is what

> happened when Bush came into office in 2001. US attorneys are political

> appointees and are chosen to reflect the policy priorities of a President.

> Still their primary job is to uphold the law, and the law is not supposed to

> be partisan. Karl Rove, of course, had other ideas. He believes that

> government should be politicized and populated with compliant partisan hacks

> loyal to him and his.

> ....The plan was to create a list of political hires and fires of US

> attorneys under the direction of the White House (i.e. Rove and Harriet

> Miers) which Gonzales (and Bush) would then dutifully sign off on. There

> were two components. First, on February 7, 2006, regulations were published

> giving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the power to hire and fire all

> non-civil service employees of the Justice Department (DOJ). On March 1,

> 2006, Gonzales signed an order delegating this power (subject to his nominal

> final approval) to two fairly junior and inexperienced staffers: Monica

> "Loyalty oaths" Goodling his senior counselor and liaison with the White

> House and his Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson. Second, sometime late in 2005

> (shortly before the conference report for the Patriot Act Extension was

> filed on December 8, 2005), language originating at the DOJ was

> surreptitiously inserted into the act by Brett Tolman which allowed Gonzales

> to make indefinite interim US attorney appointments without Senate approval.

> The conference report was passed and became law on March 9, 2006. So again,

> the two parts were first to set up a system where Rove could control the

> hiring and firing of US attorneys and second to bypass the Senate

> confirmation process which might interfere with the first part.

> ....On December 7, 2006, eight US attorneys were notified that they would be

> fired. Most came from swing states. Most were considered not to have

> aggressively enough prosecuted Democrats or voter fraud cases in the run up

> to November 2006 elections, the idea being that such prosecutions would have

> helped Republicans in close elections. Worse some were investigating and had

> even prosecuted prominent Republicans. And then there were those partisan

> hacks waiting in the wings to replace them.

> 1. Carol Lam, Southern California, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and

> indicted the former No. 3 at the CIA Dusty Foggo.

> 2. H. E. Cummins III, Eastern Arkansas, had been asked to investigate the

> Republican Governor in the neighboring state of Missouri. He announced the

> investigation finished in October 2006 a month before the election but was

> fired anyway to make way for Timothy Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove who had

> been the principal opposition researcher in the Bush 2004 campaign.

> 3. David Iglesias, New Mexico, angered Republican Senator Pete Domenici

> and Representative Heather Wilson when he refused to push for indictments of

> Democratic officials before the election after they inappropriately

> contacted him.

> 4. Daniel Bogden, Nevada, similarly was replaced by Brett Tolman who was

> crucial to bypassing Senate scrutiny of these appointments.

> 5. Paul K. Charlton, Arizona, was investigating Republican Representative

> Rick Renzi for corruption.

> 6. John McKay, Western Washington, angered state Republicans for not

> creating voter fraud cases in the 2004 Governor's race which Democrat

> Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.

> 7. Margaret Chiara, Western Michigan. It is not clear why she was fired.

> She was on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) of US attorneys.

> It may have been to make way for Russell Stoddard who had been languishing

> out in Guam as First Assistant Attorney after Frederick Black got demoted

> for investigating Abramoff's activities in the North Marianas.

> 8. Kevin V. Ryan, Northern California, is the only one of the 8 who

> deserved to be on the list because he did run his office poorly. DOJ

> actually wanted to keep him on but a federal judge forced the issue and his

> name was added to the list.

> ....As they say, it is not the crime but the coverup. Gonzales has given so

> many different and contradictory stories about the firings that it is hard

> to keep up and then there is his memory. In his Senate testimony of April

> 19, 2007, he answered he couldn't remember by some counts 71 times. He

> didn't know who had called for such a list. He couldn't remember having been

> very involved in the process. He even forgot to mention the March 1, 2006

> order in his testimony. In fact, he knew very little about what were major

> decisions at the department he supposedly ran but, despite this, he did know

> there was nothing improper in any of it. Testifying in the House on May 10,

> 2007, his memory and his believability were little improved. Kyle Sampson

> too had memory problems but did contradict Gonzales' claim that he had not

> been involved. For his part, Sampson described himself as just the guy that

> others dropped their files off to and his contribution to the process was to

> keep them in his desk drawer. Initially, Monica Goodling took an indefinite

> leave of absence, then resigned, then said she would take the 5th in any

> Congressional testimony. On May 23, 2007, after a grant of immunity she

> testified that Paul McNulty the Deputy Attorney General was more aware of

> events surrounding the firings (although this is far from clear), that she

> had crossed the line (i.e. broken the law) in asking career DOJ hires about

> their political affiliations, that Gonzales' statements were inaccurate

> (i.e. he lied), and that Gonzales had sought to harmonize their stories

> (i.e. obstruct justice). Goodling, like Sampson, tried to portray herself as

> a bit player despite Gonzales' extraordinary grant of authority to them

> both. On June 21, 2007, Paul McNulty testified before the Congress and

> basically stonewalled, saying that he was out of the loop, that he didn't

> know who created the firing list, that there was no problem at the DOJ, and

> that there was no contradiction between his testimony and that of anyone

> else, including Monica Goodling. On July 11, 2007, Sara Taylor who left her

> post of White House political director in May randomly invoked Executive

> privilege and otherwise and like so many others had a bad memory. She did

> state that she had had no dealings with Bush concerning the firings. Along

> with her selective use of Executive privilege, this contention further

> undermined the claim that an Executive privilege was involved and left the

> possibility of a contempt citation. On July 12, 2007, former White House

> counsel Harriet Miers refused to appear pursuant to a House Judiciary

> Committee subpoena, leaving her open to contempt proceedings as well.

> ....From this use of Executive privilege, it is clear that the White House,

> and more specifically Karl Rove, was involved in the firings and was, in

> fact, calling the shots in this affair, and that those at Justice, including

> the Attorney General, were just the eager, if dim, facilitators of it.

> ....In addition to the Sampson and Goodling resignations, Michael Battle

> Director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA) who informed the

> US attorneys of their firing left the DOJ on March 16, 2007. Paul McNulty

> the No. 2 at the DOJ and Deputy Attorney General announced his resignation

> on May 14, 2007 to become effective later in the summer. Although left out

> of the loop on the details of the firings and giving false Congressional as

> a result for which he apologized, McNulty did approve the firings and

> through his Chief of Staff Michael Elston warned several of those fired to

> stay quiet about them. Elston announced his resignation on June 15, 2007. On

> June 22, 2007, Bill Mercer who was Acting Associate Attorney General (the

> No. 3 spot at the DOJ) withdrew his nomination for the permanent position.

> On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney

> General effective September 17, 2007.

> ....The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) informed the

> Senate in June 2007 that it was investigating Goodling's claim that Gonzales

> had tried to tamper with her testimony.

> ....Congress intervened and changed the relevant provision of the Patriot

> Act to re-instate the Senate's role in confirming US attorneys (May 22,

> 2007). This was signed into law June 14, 2007. Provocatively, Attorney

> General Alberto Gonzales continued to make interim appointments right up to

> the Presidential signing.

>

>

> 3. Plamegate. Scooter Libby Chief of Staff to the Vice President was

> convicted on March 6, 2007 on two counts of perjury before the Grand Jury

> and one count each of obstruction of justice and making false statements to

> the FBI. Placing political payback (against an individual and an agency)

> above national security, the Vice President's office orchestrated the outing

> of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame, her cover company Brewster Jennings,

> other agents which had used this same cover, and her contacts. All this was

> done in retaliation for an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003

> written by her husband ambassador Joe Wilson. In it, he publicly debunked

> the "16 words" in Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union which claimed

> that Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain uranium from Africa (Niger). This

> undercut the argument that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and showed

> that the Bush Administration had known this was so in advance of the war.

> Wilson had been sent to Niger to investigate this charge in February 2002 at

> the request of the CIA and had reported nearly a year before its use in the

> SOTU that it was false. After several attempts by among others Karl Rove to

> pitch Plame's identity to the media, on July 14, 2003, Valerie Plame was

> outed in a column by Robert Novak In his closing argument at the Libby

> trial, Patrick Fitzgerald detailed Cheney's guiding hand in the conspiracy

> behind the outing and spoke of a "cloud" over the Vice President. That cloud

> remains.

> ....On June 5, 2007, Scooter Libby received a preliminary sentence of

> 30-month term in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release

> following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a

> requirement of 400 hours of community service. This was confirmed June 14

> and bail during appeal was denied. Scooter's defense solicited letters on

> his behalf from Washington's conservative elite. These praised his legal

> expertise and national security credentials and were likely

> counterproductive since they made clear he was well aware of the legal

> ramifications of lying to a grand jury and the security implications of

> outing a CIA agent. A group of conservative attorneys led by Robert Bork

> also filed an unsuccessful, last minute amicus brief questioning the

> legitimacy of Patrick Fitzgerald's appointment as prosecutor. It called the

> appointment a "close" question although its rationale depended upon a lone

> Supreme Court dissent in a case that was not closely decided and its effect

> would be to prevent independent investigations of high US officials. On July

> 2, 2007, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit

> unanimously denied Libby's appeal. Hours later George Bush commuted Libby's

> sentence eliminating any jail time. This is an Administration that believes

> it is outside the law and acts accordingly. It is not so much that they have

> contempt for the law. Rather they have contempt for us. The cloud that was

> over Cheney now covers Bush as well.

> ....A civil suit filed by Valerie Plame was dismissed on July 19, 2007 by

> judge John D. Bates who ruled that, while Plame's complaint had merit, the

> court did not have jurisdiction.

> ....On December 10, 2007, Libby's lawyers announced that they were dropping

> his appeal. This is all part of a legal strategy to stonewall and run out

> the clock. Since Libby had his sentence commuted rather than receiving a

> pardon, he could continue to assert a 5th Amendment privilege if he were

> summoned to give testimony before Congress. Beginning an appeal gave a

> patina of credence to such a contention. However, to go forward with the

> appeal once this point had been made would have been expensive and

> unnecessary. The last thing Scooter wanted was a successful appeal since

> this could have resulted in a retrial and another conviction, very likely

> after Bush had left office. At that point Scooter would have no one to

> commute his sentence or pardon him and he could have faced real jail time.

> This was not the object of the exercise.

>

> 4. Iraq: axis of evil, lack of preparation for occupation, looting,

> including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of

> equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi

> army, banning the Baathists, the CPA, cronyism, Paul Bremer, losing tons of

> money literally, lack of international inclusion in reconstruction and

> security, weak Constitution, formation of sectarian parties, weak

> government, denial of actual conditions in Iraq, for example, its civil war,

> ignoring 4 years of failed policies and the basic proposal of the Iraq Study

> Group to withdraw, escalating instead, continuing lack of any discernible

> mission. A brief analysis of casualty figures can be found here and here.

>

> 5. Afghanistan, transferring resources to Iraq before the job was finished,

> the results: a resurgent Taliban, continuing warlordism, and exploding opium

> production

>

> 6. Iran and saber rattling, axis of evil, lack of engagement, refusal to

> talk to, addressing the nuclear issue through threats, clumsy attempts to

> blame Iran for the debacle in Iraq and a failure to recognize their very

> real interests there.

>

> 7. North Korea, axis of evil, ditching the 1994 agreement and freezing of

> bank accounts because of dubious uranium program, the plutonium program

> which led to a fizzled first nuclear test, and something like a return to

> the 1994 agreement

>

> 8. Osama bin Laden, where are you? The blown opportunity at Tora Bora. Al

> Qaeda, the Taliban, and the roles of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in terrorism.

> Pakistan's intelligence service the ISI created the Taliban. Despite $11

> billion in US aid from 2001 through 2007, the government of Pervez Musharraf

> continues to give it safe haven in Pakistan. As for al Qaeda, those efforts

> which do occur are limited and often timed to the visits of American

> dignitaries. In addition, Bush's oft stated policy of spreading democracy

> was dealt a blow when Musharraf fearing a Supreme Court decision preventing

> him from holding the Presidency and remaining Chief of Staff of the armed

> forces declared a state of emergency and instituted martial law on November

> 3, 2007.

> ....The Saudis for their part fund radical madrassas throughout the Moslem

> world and have a domestic educational system run by the most extreme of

> their homegrown extremists. Saudi and Gulf oil dollars find their way to

> many terrorist groups as well as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

>

> 9. Civilian contractors; also no bid contracts; in Iraq Halliburton tainted

> food and water, overpriced gas; Blackwater use of private security

> contractors, what used to be called mercenaries, with little or no

> accountability

>

> 10. The Military Commissions Act: torture, indefinite detention, the end of

> habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts. One of the last acts of the Congress

> before the November 2006 elections, it passed the Senate on September 28 and

> the House the next day and was signed into law by Bush on October 17. The

> short story on this is that, pre-election, the Republicans pushed it and the

> Democrats caved on it. As bad as the military commissions envisioned in the

> act are, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) which designate who

> is to be tried are even worse. They were complete shams. Decisions were made

> on the flimsiest and most general information without challenge or taking

> into account the methods (torture) used to obtain it. Detainees lacked

> effective legal representation, and the CSRTs did not come close to meeting

> minimal standards of judicial process, even a preliminary one. To top it

> off, as later military judges have found, the CSRTs designated detainees

> "enemy combatants" which does not meet the Military Commissions Act standard

> of "unlawful enemy combatants" vitiating their findings to date. Even when

> they make up the rules they can't get it right.

> ....The case of Murat Kurnaz shows how flawed the CSRTs are. He was a

> Turkish citizen who had lived his entire life in Germany. On October 3,

> 2001, at the point of getting his German citizenship, he traveled to

> Pakistan to visit religious sites. In December 2001, he was removed from the

> group he was traveling with, arrested by Pakistani police, and flown to

> Guantanamo 4 weeks later. In September 2002, he was interrogated by American

> and German intelligence officers who concluded that he had no links to

> terrorism and should be freed. This view was repeated in a memo dated May

> 19, 2003 from the commanding general of the Criminal Investigation Task

> Force, the Pentagon unit responsible for interrogating detainees. Against

> this was a memo dated June 25, 2004 by Brigadier General David Lacquement,

> then head of the US Southern Command's intelligence unit, who said Kurnaz

> was a danger because he had among other things prayed during the national

> anthem, asked how high the basketball rim was in the prison yard (which in

> Lacquement-speak indicated a desire to escape), and enquired about guard

> schedules and detainee transfers. There was also the accusation that Kurnaz

> knew someone who knew a suicide bomber (except this was later shown to be

> untrue) and had stayed at a hostel in Pakistan run by a religious group

> linked to terrorism (the group's link was also untrue). Kurnaz's CSRT was

> held on October 4, 2004 where he was determined to be an enemy combatant.

> His lawyers challenged this in a DC District Court. (This was before the

> Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.) In a January 2005 opinion, Judge Joyce

> Green found that the CSRT process had been biased and was contrary to US and

> international law. This opinion became public on March 25, 2005 when it was

> inadvertently released by court officials. Nevertheless, Kurnaz continued to

> be held. In January 2006, a yearly Review Board hearing reconfirmed.that

> Kurnaz was an enemy combatant. Meanwhile Kurnaz's detention and German

> participation in his interrogation was giving the story legs in Germany.

> Also in January 2006, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up the

> case with Bush. On May 31, 2006, the FBI weighed in indicating that it had

> no interest in Kurnaz. In July 2006, a special Review Board met and

> determined that he was no longer an enemy combatant. The reasons for this

> change of status remain classified. Kurnaz was flown back to Germany goggled

> and shackled where he was released on August 24, 2006. Despite repeated

> findings by the intelligence community that Kurnaz was innocent of any links

> to terrorism, flimsy, false, and easily refutable evidence allowed by the

> CSRTs resulted in his detention without any formal charge for more than 4

> 1/2 years, a detention that would have continued if it had not been for the

> accidental leak of details of his case by a DC court and the personal

> intervention of the head of the German government.

> ....On July 20, 2007, a three judge panel of the DC Circuit in Boumediene v.

> Bush and Al Odah v. US rejected parts of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) of

> 2005 asserting that it will expect to examine all information bearing on a

> detainee's case and not just what the government used in deciding to hold a

> detainee. SCOTUS on June 29, 2007 changed its mind and decided to take a

> look at these cases in the fall, especially in light of what the Circuit

> Court might decide.

> ....On September 24, 2007 in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found

> that on hearing more evidence a military judge had the power to determine

> that an alien enemy combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this

> could clear the way for trials under the MCA. On November 8, 2007, the

> government informed Khadr's defense that it had an exculpatory eyewitness

> which it had known about from the beginning but only chose to tell the

> defense about several years into Khadr's detention.

> ....On October 5, 2007, the chief Guantanamo prosecutor career Air Force

> Colonel Morris Davis resigned in a dispute with reserve Air Force Brigadier

> General Thomas Hartmann (until recently a corporate lawyer now legal adviser

> to the convening authority for the Military Commissions Susan Crawford). The

> function of the convening authority is to approve or reduce charges against

> the accused or make plea agreements with them. It is supposed to be an

> arbiter, but in a clear conflict of interest, Crawford and Hartmann pressed

> the prosecutor's office to file the most serious charges possible in an

> attempt to drum up publicity and support for the military commissions

> process. Davis has since said another reason for his departure was the

> placement of his office under that of the Department of Defense's General

> Counsel. The DOD GC is William Haynes (See item 194) who signed off on the

> torture memos prepared by John Yoo for the Department of Defense. No matter

> how rank and foul this travesty of American justice is, it seems to have a

> never-ending capacity to get worse.

> ....In Congressional testimony on December 11, 2007, Hartman refused to say

> whether waterboarding was torture or whether waterboarding of an American

> soldier by a foreign government would be considered torture. He did suggest

> that he had no problem with evidence gained by torture being admitted into

> court proceedings.

>

> 11. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, FEMA and

> "Heck of a job, Brownie," lack of preparation, lack of emergency aid,

> slowness of reconstruction, Bush ignores for days then gives address from

> Jackson Square in New Orleans promising aid which never comes or much of

> which goes to politically connected outstate no bid contractors, disparity

> between response to Louisiana and Republican Trent Lott's Mississippi; Bush

> refuses to waive 10% state match for federal funds (waived in many previous

> disasters) increasing the bureaucratic paperwork, reducing aid to affected

> areas, and further slowing and complicating rebuilding.

>

> 12. Bush authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001. However,

> Joseph Nacchio former CEO of Qwest convicted April 19, 2007 of insider

> trading reported that the NSA in a meeting on February 27, 2001 (1 month

> after Bush became President and 6 1/2 months before 9/11) tried to sign

> Qwest up to a warrantless surveillance program and that when Nacchio refused

> the NSA pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts from the

> company.

> ....Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) a warrant

> would be needed from the FISA court (federal judges entrusted with these

> decisions in addition to their regular jobs) for domestic to international

> telephone or internet communication. The bar for such a warrant is

> extraordinarily low, has almost never been denied, and can be granted up to

> 3 days after the surveillance as begun (in order to give maximum flexibility

> in emergency situations). This is in contrast to international to

> international communications which have always been considered legitimate

> targets for US intelligence organizations and require no warrant.

> ....The post-9/11 Bush program acquired its legal basis from a John Yoo memo

> originating in the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It went much further

> than cutting FISA out of the loop and probably included surveillance of not

> just domestic to international communication but also domestic to domestic

> surveillance of any communication with the original domestic participant. It

> is conceivable that this continued to those domestic contacts and then to

> their contacts in ever expanding (and less relevant) circles of

> surveillance. Data mining may have been used to winnow down the number of

> contacts.

> ....Alternately, the Administration may have been exploiting the 1994

> Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This act required

> telecoms to configure their equipment to facilitate governmental

> wiretapping. While the act was not envisioned as a means of large scale

> warrantless wiretapping, it could with the help of service providers like

> the telecoms be turned into one. Supporting this view is that on March 10,

> 2004, the DOJ, FBI, and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) petitioned the

> FCC to extend CALEA to the internet (see item 252). This action coming as it

> did on the same day as the Ashcroft hospital visit (described below) may

> have been an effort to expand or acquire additional cover for a data mining

> program that was already in operation. It may have been the warrantless

> hoovering of domestic communications that troubled some at the DOJ.

> ....In any case in March 2004, the OLC under its new head Jack Goldsmith a

> defense oriented conservative rejected Yoo's reasoning and reversed its

> position on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General John

> Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey both conservatives and Bush

> appointees accepted this finding. Then Ashcroft came down with acute

> gallstone pancreatitis and transferred his powers to his deputy Comey who

> became Acting Attorney General. In a scheme apparently orchestrated by Vice

> President Cheney, Bush called Mrs. Ashcroft and Cheney "on the President's

> behalf" ordered then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff

> Andrew Card to go to the hospital and get the ailing and doped up Ashcroft

> to sign off on the surveillance program. Mrs. Ashcroft informed her

> husband's Chief of Staff David Ayers about the impending visit and he

> contacted Comey. Comey in turn contacted FBI Director Robert Mueller to

> order the FBI agents guarding Ashcroft to remain in his room (as witnesses)

> and raced to the hospital and Ashcroft's room in the ICU. This set the scene

> for the now famous March 10, 2004 hospital room confrontation where Gonzales

> and Card ignoring Comey tried to get Ashcroft's signature. Ashcroft was,

> however, lucid enough to refuse to sign and to point out the obvious: that

> he did not have the power to do so since Comey was the Acting Attorney

> General. Despite the refusal by the DOJ to vouch for the program's legality,

> Bush re-authorized it anyway. A threat by Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller to

> resign did, however, result in changes to the program. The OLC came up with

> a narrower justification under the AUMF for a more limited program which

> became the TSP (Terrorist Surveillance Program). It should be noted that

> this program in all of its manifestations and despite its various

> justifications has been illegal on its face since its inception.

> ....The program became public when the New York Times reported on it in

> December 2005. In 2006 various unsuccessful attempts were made to

> accommodate the program. This included the infamous attempted "compromise"

> by Arlen Specter to legalize its worst excesses and retroactively amnesty

> any illegalities. Under mounting pressure and with a new Democratic

> Congress, Alberto Gonzales announced on January 18, 2007, a "deal" with the

> FISA court which would put the program under its supervision. Gonzales

> maintained, however, that Bush still had Article II power to go outside the

> court if he wanted to.

> ....On July 24, 2007, Gonzales testified under oath before Senate Judiciary

> Committee that before going to the hospital to see Ashcroft he had met with

> a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders overseeing intelligence matters

> (the Gang of 8) and that they had approved the predecessor to the TSP.

> Several of the Democratic members of the Gang of 8 denied that such approval

> was ever given. Additionally, Gonzales asserted that the program discussed

> was not the TSP but another program. Both General Hayden then head of the

> NSA and John Negroponte then DNI have indicated that this was precisely the

> program discussed albeit in its unmodified form. Finally, Gonzales

> maintained in his testimony that there had been no serious disagreement

> about the program despite the objections from the DOJ. Along with his

> constantly changing testimony concerning the US Attorney firings, this

> discrepancy led four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on

> July 26, 2007 to ask Solicitor General Paul Clement (in his role of Acting

> Attorney General for matters in which Gonzales has recused himself) to name

> a special prosecutor to determine whether Gonzales has obstructed justice,

> perjured himself, and made false statements.

> ....Despite previous abuses, April 10, 2007 intelligence czar DNI John

> "Mike" McConnell (not to be confused with Senate Minority leader Mitch

> McConnell) proposes allowing NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of foreign

> nationals completely outside of FISA, extend from 3 days to one week

> surveillance without seeking FISA permission "in emergency situations,"

> immunize telecoms, and extend FISA warrants from 120 days to one year.

> McConnell has a large conflict of interest in the immunization of telecoms

> issue. Like too many others, McConnell has benefited from the revolving door

> between government and private enterprise. He has been director of defense

> programs at Booz Allen Hamilton a large defense and intelligence firm with

> CIA and NSA consulting contracts and chairman of the Intelligence and

> National Security Alliance, the primary business association for NSA and CIA

> contractors. In short, he has intimate connections to precisely those

> corporate players most closely involved in promoting the use of telecoms in

> intelligence gathering and with the greatest vested interest in keeping this

> arrangement going .

> ....On August 5, 2007, Bush signed into law a 6 month revision of FISA which

> would allow warrantless wiretapping of non-American individuals "reasonably"

> thought to be outside the US and incidentally of US citizens as long as

> these are not the primary targets of surveillance. The Attorney General (at

> the time of the bill's signing this was still the eminently untrustworthy

> Alberto Gonzales) and the DNI (the as we will soon see truth challenged Mike

> McConnell) alone and without any outside judicial review would see the

> program was properly carried out. In effect, this was a backdoor way to

> surveil Americans without a warrant. It also granted telecommunication

> companies prospective immunity for aiding the government in these activities

> during this 6 month period but not retroactively for their past actions.

> ....The need for such a bill was raised at the last minute as lawmakers were

> on their way out of town for the August recess. Although it only became

> public later, the ostensible reason for modifying FISA at this particular

> juncture was an unspecified terrorist threat to the Capitol (which DNI

> McConnell knew at the time was based on an unreliable source). Mike

> McConnell then negotiated with Democratic Congressional leaders on a

> Democratic bill to address perceived shortcomings in the FISA law. The White

> House, however, wanted FISA gutted, and McConnell reneged on his deal with

> the Democrats. With the Congressional vacation coming on and members eager

> to leave, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority

> Leader Harry Reid caved. Through their parliamentary machinations, the

> Democratic bill was defeated and the Republican version endorsed by the

> White House passed. The end result was, abetted by a dishonest DNI, another

> power grab by the Bush Administration and the failure of the Democrats to

> stand up to it.

> ....On September 10, 2007, DNI McConnell testified before a Senate committee

> that the newly gutted FISA law the Protect America Act resulted in the

> arrest of 3 Germans planning to attack Americans in Germany. When German

> authorities pointed out that the Germans in question had come to their

> attention through US surveillance initiated under the old FISA statute,

> McConnell retracted his statement without apologizing for it.

> ....On September 20, 2007, McConnell testified falsely again that

> surveillance of Iraqi insurgents holding American troops had been held up

> for 12 hours due to FISA court restrictions. The delay, however, occurred

> because of the initial weakness of the request submitted by the NSA to the

> DOJ (which given the low threshold for FISA warrants is telling) and

> subsequent foul ups in finding a senior official to sign off on it. Since

> the old FISA law allowed surveillance to begin up to 72 hours before the

> granting of a warrant, it is unclear why this was even an issue.

> ....Because the Protect America Act (PAA) was set to expire after 180 days,

> in December 2007, an attempt was made in the Senate to pass a permanent

> extension. There were two principal versions of this bill, the Intel version

> from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) chaired by the

> conservative Democrat Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and another a revision of the

> Intel version that came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The

> Intel version was Republican friendly and was chosen by Senate Majority

> Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as the base or favored version. It granted the

> retroactive immunity the telecoms had been lobbying for (not in the SJC

> bill), allowed basket warrants for the surveillance, not of individuals, but

> of classes of persons, had weak minimization (i.e. disposal of information

> on Americans incidentally obtained) requirements and oversight, and gave

> only vague assurances that the program would not be used for reverse

> targeting (using a foreign national as an excuse to surveil an American). In

> the face of a personal filibuster by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), Reid pulled

> consideration of the bill on December 17, 2007.

> ....In January 2008, with the PAA due to expire on February 1, Reid made a

> second attempt to pass the Intel version. This time he was blindsided by

> Bush and the Republicans. Senate Republicans played politics. They refused

> to allow any face-saving amendments (all of which were likely to be defeated

> anyway) to be brought up and were willing to see the PAA expire instead.

> Bush for his part announced he would veto even a short extension of the PAA

> to give the Senate time to act. So on the one hand Bush and the Republicans

> argued that the PAA was absolutely necessary and if it was not passed the

> terrorists would win and we would all die. On the other, they were perfectly

> ready to see it expire just so they could stick it to Senate Democrats.

> ....On January 28, 2008, with the SOTU scheduled for later that evening,

> that is what happened. In a near party line vote, Democrats defeated the

> Republican move (48-45 with 60 votes needed) for cloture on the Intel

> version of the PAA with no amendments. The Republicans then defeated a

> similar motion for a 30 day extension of the PAA on a straight party line

> vote.

> ....So to recap briefly, Senate Democrats were ready to pass a bad bill, but

> the Republicans who supported the bad bill wanted to rub the Democrats'

> faces in it first. As a result, everything fell apart, and the upshot was

> everyone could and did blame everyone else. High school was not this bad.

>

> 13. SWIFT surveillance of international financial transactions

>

> 14. Black prisons and extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by

> torture

> ....Khalid El-Masri a German citizen was detained by Macedonian police in

> late 2003. His name was similar to the alleged mentor of the al Qaeda

> Hamburg cell (of which two of the 911 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan

> al-Shehhi as well as Ramzi Binalshibh were members). He was held for 3 weeks

> and then released. Although the CIA knew that this El-Masri was not the one

> they were looking for, they kidnapped him and took him to Afghanistan where

> he was interrogated and beaten for months. Eventually, on May 28, 2004,

> after two orders from then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and

> being made to promise never to talk about what happened, El-Masri was dumped

> at night on a road in Albania. On December 6, 2005, the ACLU filed suit on

> his behalf in federal court. On May 18, 2006, Federal District Judge T.S.

> Ellis III dismissed the case accepting the government's contention that a

> suit into Masri's illegal detention would compromise national security. The

> dismissal was upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 2, 2007.

> On January 31, 2007, a German prosecutor issued warrants for 13 people

> suspected of participation in the kidnapping. For his part, since his

> release, El-Masri has had a troubled history. On May 17, 2007, after an

> argument with clerks about a defective iPod, he set fire to the store and

> burned it down. On October 9, 2007, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to a

> suit by El-Masri and let stand a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion

> accepting the government's state secrets argument and dismissing the case.

> ....Meanwhile on February 17, 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric Abu Omar in

> Milan and rendered him to Egypt where he was held and tortured. In December

> 2005, an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents. Abu Omar

> was released early in 2007.

> ....Several European countries are looking into the rendition programs.

> These efforts are complicated by US stonewalling and the complicity of their

> own intelligence services.

> ....Something similar happened to Maher Arar. A Canadian resident with dual

> Canadian/Syrian citizenship was detained at JFK in New York on September 26,

> 2002 because he knew someone who knew someone who knew Osama bin Laden. He

> was held in US custody for 2 weeks without access to a lawyer. Then because

> the Canadian government falsely declared he was no longer a resident and

> with the knowledge of their intelligence services, he was rendered to Syria

> where he was held for a year and tortured. He was released October 5, 2003

> and returned to Canada. The Canadian government eventually exonerated Arar

> and paid a $10.5 million settlement. A suit entered by Arar in US federal

> court was dismissed on February 16, 2006 on national security grounds. The

> US government has never admitted any wrongdoing and Arar continues to be on

> the US No-Fly list.

> ....As for black prisons, these were created to hold high value ghost

> detainees up to one hundred in number beyond the oversight of the judiciary

> and Congress, essentially so that they could be tortured. 14 of these,

> including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were eventually

> transferred to Guantanamo. In Europe, Poland and Romania were rumored to be

> sites of the prisons. US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan held others. The

> remainder were scattered throughout the world in complicit countries and on

> other US bases. Although there had been previous revelations, the story

> broke officially in a Dana Priest Washington Post report of November 2,

> 2005. President Bush acknowledged their existence nearly a year later on

> September 6, 2006.

> ....The purpose of both rendition and black prisons was to gain actionable

> intelligence, an obsession in the Bush Administration. In its pursuit, they

> stooped to torture and bartered our image as a champion of human rights for

> a stack of unreliable information. It is an exchange that is impossible to

> justify.

>

> 15. Homeland Security: white elephant (organization), black hole (money),

> Tom Ridge and threat levels, Michael Chertoff and general incompetence.

> ....As of May 1, 2007 at DHS, under Chertoff's direction, there were 138

> vacancies and another 92 currently being recruited among the department's

> top 575 positions. Most of these were in the department's policy, legal and

> intelligence sections, immigration agencies, FEMA, and the Coast Guard.

> Luckily, nothing important.

>

> 16. K Street Lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, North Marianas, removal of

> investigating US attorney Frederick Black (Guam), Gale Norton and Steven

> Griles at Interior, go betweens Italia Federici for Norton and Susan Ralston

> for Rove, tribal casinos; conviction of Rep. Bob "Freedom Fries" Ney (R-OH)

> for conspiracy and false statements re Abramoff's Indian casinos scam

>

> 17. Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, No. 3 at the CIA under Porter Goss, tied to the Duke

> Cunningham scandal, and poker "read money laundering" parties with limos and

> hookers for government officials and representatives. Foggo was indicted for

> fraud February 13, 2007 by fired US attorney for Southern California Carol

> Lam two days before she left office. On May 10, 2007, an expanded,

> superseding indictment was filed against Foggo, and Cunningham associate and

> co-conspirator Brent Wilkes.

>

> 18. Duke Cunningham convicted of receiving $2.4 million in bribes from

> defense contractors and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire

> fraud, and tax evasion, the MZM connection. Mitchell Wade the founder of the

> defense contracting firm MZM purchased Cunningham's Del Mar home for

> $1,675,000 then put it back on the market a month later for $975,000.

> Cunningham lived in Washington on a yacht owned by Wade. In exchange for

> these kinds of bribes and favors, Cunningham steered contracts to MZM. One

> of the first in July 2002 was for $140,000 for computers and office

> furniture for Vice President Cheney which turned out in actuality to be for

> anthrax screening (for which MZM had zero expertise). Another in September

> 2002 was for a data storage system for CIFA (see item 158 on CIFA's domestic

> spying). $5.4 million of the $6.3 million contract was profit. As it turned

> out the system was incompatible with CIFA's and was never installed. As

> often happens in these kinds of arrangements, Lt. Gen. James C. King who

> helped set up CIFA went to work at MZM and became its President in June 2005

> replacing Wade. By the time that Cunningham pled guilty on November 28,

> 2005, he had managed to steer $150 million in contracts to MZM, a firm which

> before Cunningham and Wade hooked up received no important government

> contracts.

> ....Another player in the Cunningham scandals was Brent Wilkes who founded

> ADCS a data conversion firm. He too won contracts through Cunningham and

> according to Wade set up a prostitution ring for the benefit of Cunningham

> and other legislators at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels. On November

> 5, 2007, Wilkes was convicted in federal court on all 13 felony counts he

> was charged with. These included conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and

> wire fraud. In addition to paying for flings in Hawaii and Las Vegas for

> Cunningham, Wilkes was accused of giving Cunningham $100,000. Wilkes said it

> was to buy Cunningham's boat although the deal never went through and Wilkes

> never asked for the money back. Wilkes also passed along $525,000 to help

> cover a mortgage for a house in Santa Fe for Cunningham. In exchange for

> these bribes, Wilkes' company received about $80 million dollars in

> contracts.

>

> 19. Tom Delay, creator of the K Street Project, squeezing lobbyists to

> finance Republicans only, indicted for conspiracy to violate campaign

> finance laws (money laundering) in Texas, also connections to the Abramoff

> scandal. Major figure in Washington culture of corruption

>

> 20. Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited

> Children, resigned over the House page scandal: sending sexually explicit

> messages to pages

>

> 21. Cheney's Energy Policy, Big Oil's writing of it, and refusal to divulge

> that participation

>

> 22. Tax cuts for the wealthiest, corporations and on capital gains;

> retention of the AMT.

> HR 1836 the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed

> into law June 7, 2001. It was projected to reduce total surpluses by

> approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period. Its principal

> feature was a reduction spaced over the 2001 to 2006 period in the 4 highest

> tax brackets.

>

> HR 2 the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act was signed into law

> May 28, 2003. It increased the exemption amount for the individual

> alternative minimum tax (AMT), decreased the tax rates for income from

> dividends and capital gains, modified tax law relating to bonus depreciation

> and expensing, and allowed certain 2003 corporate estimated tax payments to

> be shifted into 2004. Its principal effects would occur in its first 5 years

> from 2003-2008 and would cost $342.9 billion in this period.

>

> HR 1308 the curiously named Working Families Tax Relief Act was signed

> into law October 4, 2004. Its main feature involved extensions and changes

> in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Its principal costs occurred over the

> 2005-2009 period and were estimated to be $122 billion.

>

> In 2005, there was an attempt at another tax cut bill which failed. In

> 2006, the Republicans broke their tax cuts up into a couple of bills .

>

> HR 4297 was signed into law May 17, 2006. It was to cost about $70

> billion, split roughly between cuts on dividends and capital gains on the

> one hand and cuts in the Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) on the other.

>

> HR 6111 was signed into law December 20, 2006. It was a minor catchall

> bill extending and modifying some expiring tax provisions and was projected

> to cost $40 billion over the period from 2007 to 2016.

> Looking over the various bills, it is likely they became increasing hard to

> sell over time. They certainly became smaller. Still a billion here, a

> billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. It's just that

> after Bush got a trillion dollars for the rich in his first bill, everything

> else seemed small by comparison.

>

>

> 23. Global warming: denial of manmade origin, followed by minimization of

> the effects of the manmade contribution, continued reliance on fossil and

> carbon based fuels, little movement on CAFE standards and conservation, and

> political interference in scientific reports.

> March 13, 2001, Bush rejects Kyoto Protocols (finished December 1997 but

> never ratified by the US Senate) and casts doubt on the causes of climate

> change.

>

> June 11, 2001, in reference to a report by the National Academy of

> Sciences, Bush questions both the extent of global warming, its impact, and

> the manmade contribution to it.

>

> February 14, 2002, Bush announces his Clear Skies Initiatives which lacks

> any limits on CO2.

>

> April 2002, at the urging of ExxonMobil Bush blocks reelection of Robert

> Watson, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

> (IPCC) and advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

>

> June 3, 2002, an EPA report to the UN admits global warming largely due to

> human activities.

>

> June 4, 2002, Bush dismisses the report as "put out by the bureaucracy"

> and reiterates his opposition to Kyoto.

>

> August 19, 2002, White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) chief

> of staff Philip Cooney a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum

> Institute (API) and a non scientist questions why climate change is

> mentioned at all. In September 2002, for the first time in six years, the

> annual EPA report on air pollution "Latest Findings on National Air Quality:

> 2001 Status and Trends" omits the section on global warming.

>

> November 2002, Our Changing Planet, an annual report to Congress on the

> Climate Change Science Program for oversight and budget purposes is heavily

> edited by Philip Cooney.

>

> April-May 2003, CEQ Chairman Jim Connaughton edits the draft of what will

> be the August 2003 "Fabricant" opinion.

>

> June 23, 2003, the EPA issues "Draft Report on the Environment 2003" in

> which the section on global warming was pulled after Philip Cooney sought to

> replace data showing sharp increases in global temperatures with references

> to a study funded by the API questioning the evidence for global warming.

>

> July 2003, the Administration releases its Strategic Plan for the Climate

> Change Science Program. Philip Cooney along with other CEQ officials made at

> least 181 edits emphasizing the uncertainty of global warming and 113

> de-emphasizing the human contribution to it. The CEQ also inserted language

> about the possible benefits of global warming and removed recommendations to

> do something about it.

>

> August 28, 2003, in response to a petition by environmental groups to

> regulate greenhouse gas emissions on new cars (based upon an April 10, 1998

> opinion by then EPA General Counsel Jonathan Cannon which found that carbon

> dioxide and greenhouse gases were air pollutants), the EPA denied the

> petition. The General Counsel at the time Robert Fabricant reversed what was

> known as the Cannon memo and declared that greenhouse gases were not air

> pollutants.

>

> Early 2005, Bush meets with author, non scientist, and global warming

> skeptic Michael Crichton. Bush had read his novel "State of Fear" which

> depicts global warming as a conspiracy.

>

> June 1, 2005, Rick Peltz a scientist at the U.S. Climate Change Science

> Program (USCCSP) resigns and accuses Phillip Cooney, the then chief of staff

> of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of editing

> scientific papers so that they would agree with Administration policies on

> climate change.

>

> June 10, 2005, Cooney resigns

>

> June 13, 2005, Cooney is hired by ExxonMobil

>

> September 21, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Max Mayfield, the

> Director of the National Hurricane Center in testimony before the Commerce

> Committee denied a connection between Katrina and global warming, ascribing

> an increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes to natural

> fluctuations. Mayfield was a popular and respected media figure whose

> thinking on this was out of the mainstream. His testimony, however, was

> carefully worked out between committee staff and the Office of Legislative

> Affairs at NOAA to in the words of one staffer Tom Jones smack "the shit out

> of this issue."

>

> December 2005, NASA climatologist James Hansen reported his work was being

> monitored and his access to the press limited by a 24 year old Bush

> political appointee in NASA's PR department George C. Deutsch. Deutsch also

> tried to qualify references to the Big Bang as this conflicted with his

> fundamentalist beliefs.

>

> February 7, 2006, Deutsch resigns after it becomes known that he lied on

> his resume about having a college degree.

>

> April-November 2006, the Smithsonian (almost all of whose $1.1 billion

> budget comes from the government) self censors an exhibit on climate change

> in the Arctic which it had delayed six months while trying to tone it down.

>

> July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data

> Center at NOAA had his Congressional testimony on global warming modified

> and weakened by political appointees at the White House Council of

> Environmental Quality, the OMB, the Commerce Department, and NOAA.

>

> January 30, 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists releases a report

> indicating that 150 climate scientists from 8 federal agencies had

> personally experienced at least one instance of interference in their work

> in the previous 5 years (for a total of 435 incidents).

>

> April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA rejects the

> Fabricant opinion and requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The

> commonwealth of Massachusetts argued successfully that it and its citizens

> had suffered and would suffer ecological damage, including loss of coastal

> lands, due to global warming.

>

> May 2007, Bush continues to use the mantra of short term, unsustainable

> "economic growth" to oppose meaningful international (G-8) approaches, such

> as carbon trading and emission caps.

>

> May 31, 2007, in an NPR interview, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin

> admits that global warming exists but doubts that it is a problem "to be

> wrestled with".

>

> September 28, 2007, Bush at a meeting held in competition with a UN

> conference on global warming called on those countries which emit the most

> greenhouse gases to set voluntary caps but did not say what those should be,

> even for the US.

>

> October 23, 2007, the White House cut written testimony of Julie Geberding

> director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 14 pages to 6

> removing references to specific diseases, health problems, and global

> warming as "a serious public health concern."

>

> December 3-15, 2007, at the UN's Bali conference on moving beyond the

> Kyoto Accords, the Bush Administration continued to refuse binding

> commitments for reduction in carbon emissions. Instead there will be two

> more years of negotiations effectively punting any real decisions to the

> next Administration. Unfortunately, the effects of global warming are

> unlikely to wait on this further bout of procrastination.

> (see also item 42)

>

>

> 24. Terri Schiavo (family and privacy rights in end of life cases); Senate

> Majority leader Bill Frist making his famous (and erroneous) video

> diagnosis; the memo written by Brian Darling, the legal counsel for Senator

> Mel Martinez (R-FL) that the Schiavo case was a great political issue which

> could be used against the Democratic Senator from Florida Bill Nelson.

> Republicans who had cast the Schiavo case as a "moral" issue initially

> declared the memo a Democratic plant and dirty trick before the real source

> came out.

>

> 25. Big budget deficits and vastly increased national debt; the national

> debt as of the date of Bush's 2001 inauguration was $5.7 trillion. In

> January 2008, it was $9.2 trillion, an increase of 61%.

>

> 26. The stacking of SCOTUS with right wing conservatives Roberts and Alito;

> the threat to Roe v. Wade; April 18, 2007 in a 5-4 decision in Gonzales v.

> Carhart SCOTUS upholds a ban on "partial birth" abortions (intact dilation

> and extraction). The procedure is rare and performed for medical reasons.

> Such a ban has been a goal of abortion foes who see it both as a step in a

> direct overturning of Roe and as part of an indirect approach to place so

> many restrictions on abortions as to effectively eliminate them

> ....The opinion written by Kennedy is remarkable for its inflammatory use of

> language (partial birth abortion, abortion doctors, killing the fetus, etc.)

> and example (an account of the procedure by an anti-abortion nurse). Kennedy

> manages to condescend not only to women but to their physicians as well. He

> essentially gives them both his considered medical opinion, as a lawyer, and

> orders them to follow it. The word hubris comes to mind.

>

> 27. Medicare: a bigger time bomb than Social Security left unaddressed

>

> 28. Medicare Part D: In an effort to spike a Democratic issue and protect

> the interests of drug and insurance companies, Republicans came up with

> their version of a Medicare drug prescription bill (Medicare Part D). The

> fix as they say was very much in. Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA)

> Chairman of the Commerce Committee was listed as the principal "author" of

> the bill which was largely written by industry lobbyists. Shortly after its

> passage, Tauzin announced his retirement and swung a deal to become a

> lobbyist at $2.5 million/year with the Pharmaceutical Research and

> Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Big Pharma's trade group. Thomas Scully

> who headed Medicare at the time lied to Congress about the program's

> expected costs, understating them by $134 billion, and then threatened the

> program's chief actuary Richard Foster with firing if he told Congress the

> truth. He too quickly returned to the private sector and a law firm lobbying

> for the healthcare industry.

> ....The bill came up for a vote in the House at about 3 AM on November 22,

> 2003. Votes are usually held open for 15 minutes. After 45 minutes, the bill

> was failing 215-219. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and House Majority

> Leader Tom Delay spent the next few hours engaged in arm twisting and, in

> the case of Nick Smith (R-MI), bribery. They were successful. The vote was

> closed at 5:53 AM after nearly 3 hours, and the bill passed the House

> 220-215. It passed 54-44 in the Senate 3 days later on November 25, was

> signed into law December 8, 2003, and, after a signup period, went into

> effect January 1, 2006.

> ....The bill prohibited Medicare from using its market share to negotiate

> with drug companies for lower prices and forced enrolling seniors into

> private insurance plans. It presented them with multiple and confusing plans

> which might cover some but not other of their prescriptions. On top of this,

> most plans had various co-pays and deductibles further complicating the

> situation. And it had its famous donut-hole, which was introduced to meet

> the Administration's fake cost estimates. Prescriptions would be covered up

> to a certain amount and then not covered until a higher threshold had been

> reached. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) described the program succinctly as

> "somewhere between a bureaucratic nightmare and elder abuse."

>

> 29. Healthcare (in general)

>

> 30. Cooked intelligence and the Office of Strategic Plans/ Doug Feith;

> stovepiping and Cheney's alternate intel operation; pitching stories to

> credulous compliant reporters like Judy Miller then citing these stories as

> independent evidence; Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress feeding

> fake stories and dubious sources like "Curveball" into the mix; the

> subsequent coverup and Republican delayed and deep sixed Congressional

> investigations into the politicization of intelligence; an Inspector

> General's report of February 9, 2007 declared Feith's activities

> inappropriate but stopped short of calling them illegal. The IG's rationale

> seemed more political than legal since Feith was running an intelligence

> operation which would be illegal.

>

> 31. 2000 Presidential election; voter suppression and cooked felons list,

> Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Governor Jeb Bush, Bush consigliere Jim

> Baker oversaw the recount, Theodore Olson argued Bush v. Gore: SCOTUS

> decided 7-2 to stop recounts because of inconsistent procedures and 5-4

> insufficient time to begin new recount, giving Bush the election

>

> 32. 2004 Presidential election; Ohio voter irregularities that consistently

> favored Bush; Ken Blackwell was the Republican Secretary of State and

> honorary co chair of the Bush campaign who oversaw the election in Ohio. He

> opted for touch screen voting machines which left no paper trail and were

> sold by Diebold whose CEO Walden O'Dell was a Republican fundraiser. Long

> lines and too few machines in traditionally Democratic and minority areas

> also occurred.

> ....The Ohio Republican Party was unusually corrupt and was largely voted

> out in the November 2006 elections. It was epitomized by Tom Noe a Bush

> Pioneer who made illegal contributions to the Bush campaign at the same time

> he was looting millions from the state's workers comp program in a kooky

> coin investment scheme. He's currently serving ~20 years on state and

> federal charges.

>

> 33. Attempts to torpedo the 911 Commission. Although now largely forgotten,

> the Bush Administration fought the 9/11 Commission every step of the way and

> it was only pressure from the American public and most especially from the

> families of the victims of 9/11 that the commission was formed and was able

> to come up with some kind of a report however flawed and incomplete.

> ....Bush and Cheney resisted calls for such a bipartisan commission for over

> a year arguing that the matter was best left to Republican controlled

> intelligence committees in the Congress. It was not until November 27, 2002

> that Bush announced the commission's formation. He did his best to see that

> it went nowhere. Members were to be chosen by both Congress and the White

> House raising questions about the commission's independence. Democratic

> co-chair George Mitchell on December 11, 2002 and Republican chair Henry

> Kissinger (whom the White House had insisted on appointing) on December 13,

> 2007 resigned due to conflicts of interest. Kissinger did not want to make

> public the financial records (and connections) of his security consulting

> company Kissinger Associates. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton were named to

> replace them. The specter of conflicts of interest remained. Through their

> careers in government and on corporate boards, essentially all of the

> commission members had such conflicts. Perhaps the most egregious of these

> was Philip Zelikow the commission's executive staff director who had worked

> closely with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the first

> Bush Administration and co-written a book with her.

> ....Bush also tried to limit the commission's activities by giving it a

> budget of only $3 million to investigate the biggest terrorist attack in the

> country's history. The Challenger investigation cost $50 million by

> comparison. Later Kean and Hamilton asked for a further $11 million to be

> included in the $75 billion supplemental slated to fund the invasion of

> Iraq. The White House initially refused the funds before reversing itself.

> ....The White House also placed many roadblocks in the commission's path

> slowing its work. The commission was originally given 18 months or to the

> end of May 2004 to make its report. When a 60 day extension was requested,

> this too was initially denied. The commission report was eventually released

> on July 22, 2004.

> ....The White House sought both to shape and limit testimony. Before former

> counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke testified, then White House counsel

> Alberto Gonzales contacted two commission members Fred Fielding and James

> Thompson with information to discredit Clarke which they duly presented.

> ....On Presidential Daily Briefs, after dragging its heels for months, the

> White House allowed them to be viewed by only 4 of the 10 commissioners who

> were to report back to the others. However, the White House denied the full

> commission access to the notes made by the 4 approved commissioners.

> Moreover, of 360 PDBs requested, only 24 were made available by White House

> counsel Alberto Gonzales. On March 14, 2004, the White House finally

> responded to the commission by releasing a 17 page summary of PDBs related

> to al Qaeda from the Bush and Clinton Administrations.

> ....The White House refused requests for National Security Adviser

> Condoleezza Rice to testify. The rationale given was that historically

> National Security Advisers had not testified before Congress. This was

> completely untrue, and Rice finally testified on April 8, 2004. Rice's

> testimony, however, came with the price that no other White House aides were

> to be called.

> ....Bush initially placed a one hour limit on his testimony before the

> commission. This was rejected. But his testimony was highly conditioned. On

> April 29, 2004, he and Dick Cheney together met with the commission in

> private with no oath or transcript and only one staffer to take notes which

> were not to be made public.

> ....In an op-ed in the New York Times on January 2, 2008, chairmen Kean and

> Hamilton accused the CIA and the Bush Administration of obstruction by

> withholding information about taped interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd

> al Rahim al-Nashiri (see item 288).

> ....Finally, it should be remembered the 9/11 Commission was bipartisan.

> This does not mean the same thing as non-partisan. In order to achieve

> consensus, there was a deliberate decision not to assign personal blame.

> This was a critical shortcoming. Because as the Bush Administration's

> repeated obstruction of the investigation into its complacency and inaction

> before 9/11 showed, it had much to hide.

>

> 34. Failure to implement the 911 Commission recommendations. The Commission

> report was released on July 22, 2004 with its recommendations. A Republican

> President and Republican controlled Congress stalled and delayed them for 3

> years. It was not until Democrats regained control of the Congress that

> anything was done. HR 1 on implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations

> passed the Congress on July 27, 2007 and was signed into law on August 3,

> 2007.

>

> 35. Marginalization of the UN. Neocons hate the UN.

> A) It doesn't do what neocons tell it to do.

> B) It is multilateral and neocons think only unilateral action by the US

> is effective.

> C) It does not opt for military force as a first resort.

> So, of course, on August 1, 2005, Bush named UN hating neocon John Bolton as

> UN Ambassador in a recess appointment. Bolton famously stated in a 1994

> speech that "If the U.N. building in New York lost its top 10 stories it

> wouldn't make a bit of difference." The top floors are where highest ranking

> UN officials have their offices. His thinking has not moderated since.

> ....Of course, the Administration has not hesitated to use the UN when it

> has suited its purposes. It cited Security Council resolutions from the

> First Gulf War in its AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Force against Iraq)

> (see item 128). It would have gone for a Chapter 7 UN resolution authorizing

> military force for the 2003 invasion of Iraq if it thought it could get one.

> That wasn't in the cards. This explains why, despite the incongruity,

> resolutions from the First Gulf War were used to give a patina of

> international legitimacy to the Second Gulf War. Later on June 8, 2004 as

> the CPA was coming to a close, the Administration sought and obtained

> Security Council Resolution 1546 which sanctioned the presence of American

> forces in Iraq for a limited time subject to update. This permission was

> most recently updated in Resolution 1790 on December 18, 2006 which extends

> the American mandate in Iraq to December 31, 2008.

>

> 36. Preventive war doctrine, aka Cheney's one percent doctrine and the Bush

> doctrine. Bush first enunciated it at a speech at West Point on June 1,

> 2002. Preventive war is different from pre-emptive war. In preventive war,

> there is no imminent threat and this type of war is considered a war crime.

> (Think of Hitler attacking Poland.) In pre-emptive war, there is an imminent

> threat and this type of war is sanctioned by international law. (Think of

> the Israelis striking the Egyptian army in the Sinai in 1967) After the

> failure to find WMD in Iraq, the Administration dropped any pretense of

> imminence and overtly embraced the preventive war doctrine, asserting the

> right to eliminate threats before they develop.

> ....In a curious and very late attempt at revisionist history, on December

> 11, 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that Iraq, the

> preeminent example of the Bush Doctrine, was about pre-emption, i.e.

> prevention.

> QUESTION: After 9/11, the President declared policy of preempting threats

> to the nation before they fully manifested themselves. Yet we've seen some

> of the intelligence about those threats is often flawed, significantly. Can

> a preemption policy coexist with imperfect intelligence?

>

> SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would argue with you -- I don't think I would

> argue with you, I would argue that we have -- I don't think we've yet

> employed preemption. I would -- we could have a discussion about Iraq,

> continuing state of war since '91, shooting at our airplanes, almost a half

> dozen or more resolutions on this issue. I mean I think this was a long,

> long buildup. And I think it was a case in which you implement it or you had

> pretty much exhausted diplomatic options with Iraq.

> Problem, as Ross Perot used to say, solved.

>

> 37. Loss of US reputation internationally after massive post-911 world

> support. Here are some percentage US approval ratings pre-Bush and current.

> From here and here.

>

>

>

> 38. No serious attempt to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

> Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would charitably be

> described as hands off and disengaged. On June 24, 2002, Bush did for the

> first time seem to support the creation of a Palestinian state:

> And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new

> security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America

> will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain

> aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a

> final settlement in the Middle East.

> But as can be seen this declaration was highly conditioned and even then it

> would result initially in only "provisional" sovereignty for Palestinians.

> From this, it took almost a year for the Administration to come up with a

> more detailed plan. On April 30, 2003, it announced its Roadmap:

> The following is a performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear

> phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through

> reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic,

> humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the

> Quartet [the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia]. The

> destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the

> Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush's speech

> of 24 June . . .

>

> A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence

> of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by

> side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.

> The plan if not a quid pro quo for British participation in the invasion of

> Iraq was at least at the very strong suggestion of the British. The message

> was, however, stepped on by Bush as it came out just one day before his well

> known Mission Accomplished speech where he effectively and inaccurately

> declared victory in Iraq. After this, nothing happened except for the

> occasional vague pronouncement of even vaguer talks. The epitome of this was

> Condoleezza Rice's announcement in Luxor on January 15, 2007 of talks on

> talks to develop a "political horizon" for a return to the "Roadmap" leading

> to a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

> ....As the Bush Administration approached the end of its seventh year and

> the question of her legacy occupied Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, she

> arranged with Bush's general support the Annapolis peace conference. The

> conference was attended by representatives of more than 40 countries,

> including the Saudis and Syrians but not the Iranians (who were not invited)

> and the Iraqis (who were invited but declined). It lasted a grand total of

> one day (November 27, 2007) and ended not with a commitment to act but as on

> all previous occasions a commitment to talk. This was not surprising given

> the political weakness of the three primary participants Bush, Israeli Prime

> Minister Ehud Olemrt and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush's

> detachment was exemplified by his inability to pronounce the names of either

> of his two guests of honor referring to them as "Ehud Elmo" and "Mahoomed

> Abbas" and his own rapid departure after his speech.

> ....Shortly before a week long trip (January 8-16, 2008) to the Middle East

> where he was to visit Israel for the first time, Bush philosophized in a

> January 6, 2008 interview for al Arabiya about his Administration's record

> on Israel-Palestine:

> for the couple of years of my administration. It took a while to convince

> people that the two-state solution was in the security interests of both

> parties. And plus, there was a couple of difficult -- there was a difficult

> situation, the truth be known. One was the intifada, which made it awfully

> hard to discuss peace at that time. The other was the Iraq invasion. It

> just -- it created the conditions that made it more difficult to get

> people's minds in the right place to begin the process. And so now I think

> we've got the stars lined up, and I think we got a shot, and I'm going for

> it.

> Of course, he really isn't going for it. After having criticized Clinton's

> efforts as belated and incrementalist, Bush thinks he can achieve a deal by

> coming even later to the problem and solving it while being less involved.

> This is not serious.

>

> 39. Underfunding of basic research. The federal budget for R&D in 2006 (the

> last year that Republicans held a majority in the Congress) was $132.3

> billion. In constant FY 2005 dollars (used hereafter), this broke down to

> around $73 billion in defense related R&D and $56 billion in non-defense

> R&D.

> ....Defense R&D increased 2001-2006 from $50 billion to $73 billion. Most of

> this increase came from weapons development, not basic science. From

> 2001-2005, defense spending on science and technology (basic research) rose

> from slightly more than $10 billion to about $13 billion before being cut

> back to 2001 levels in 2006.

> ....Non-defense R&D initially increased due to a 5 year initiative 1998-2003

> (begun during the Clinton years) to double funding for the NIH from approx.

> $14 billion to $28 billion. After this point NIH funding (which accounts for

> half of non-defense R&D) stagnated. Non-defense non-NIH funding has remained

> essentially unchanged since 1992 (or for about 15 years).

> ....While Bush has greatly increased the size of the federal budget, during

> his tenure funding for basic research which has been the foundation of our

> technological preeminence has languished or been cut. Democrats since taking

> control of the Congress have made some moves to increase funding in the 2008

> budget.

>

> 40. Alberto Gonzales: politicization of the department, even down to the

> intern program, decimation of career lawyers and evisceration of divisions,

> like civil rights. The US attorney firings and the use of political litmus

> tests in hiring. The use of corruption, voter suppression, and voter fraud

> cases to influence elections.

> ....Gonzales was counsel to the President before becoming Attorney General.

> This should have meant that he moved from being the President's lawyer to

> the people's lawyer but it is clear that he continues to see his main client

> as the President. Some think that he is dishonest; others say he is

> incompetent. He is both.

> ....On August 27, 2007, Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation as

> Attorney General effective September 17, 2007. While numerous scandals and

> investigations have swirled around him, it is not yet known what reason

> precisely forced him out or why this happened now.

>

> 41. FDA: drug testing; food safety: underfunding, cutback in inspections and

> inspection staff (a decrease of 12% between 2003 and 2006), reliance on

> self-policing, lack of inspection of imported foods, and inability to force

> recalls.

>

> 42. EPA: mercury levels for coal plants, delay in release of climate change

> reports; failure to address CO2 levels in global warming: Massachusetts v.

> EPA April 2007. On May 14, 2007, Bush asked government agencies to come up

> with a plan and submit it to him 3 weeks before he leaves office. The

> stalling continued on May 31, 2007, when Bush called for what was termed an

> aspirational goal of coming up with voluntary limits to greenhouse gases in

> the next 18 months (or again just before he leaves office) to go into effect

> after Kyoto expires in 2012. The number of civil cases brought against

> polluters decreased 70% between 2002 and 2006 compared to the rate in the

> 1990s.

> ....December 19, 2007, going against the unanimous recommendation of his

> legal and technical staff, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson refused to

> grant California a waiver so that it could enforce stricter than federal

> emissions guidelines. The state along with 16 others sought to force

> automakers to cut emissions in all their vehicles by 30% by 2016. On January

> 2, 2008, California sued the EPA to force a reversal of its decision.

> ....On January 18, 2008, Johnson sent heavily redacted documents to the

> Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works investigating his decision.

> In the accompanying letter, Associate Administrator Christopher Bliley in

> explaining the redactions cited executive privilege (even though none of the

> decision making involved Bush), a "chilling effect" upon his staff (even

> though he ignored them), confusion the public might have in understanding

> "the Agency's full and complete thinking on the matter" (even though it's

> clear what Johnson was up to), and the lawsuits by the states challenging

> Johnson's decision (which would not have been filed if Johnson had not made

> such an unjustifiable decision).

>

> 43. Porter Goss and the gutting of the CIA: Goss a conservative Republican

> Congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee was chosen to

> replace George Tenet in 2004. He promised to be non-partisan in his new

> role, a promise he did not keep and which it is difficult to imagine anyone

> took seriously at the time. He brought with him some of his House staff, the

> "goslings". Their doctrinaire style produced confusion, demoralization,

> resignations, and not much else. Having done what damage he could and being

> largely isolated, he resigned suddenly on May 5, 2006, achieving the

> distinction of being one of the few people who was too big an embarrassment

> even for the Bush Administration, well that and that he was outmaneuvered

> and marginalized by the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

>

> 44. Militarization of intelligence: Rumsfeld perhaps out of pique that the

> Afghanistan operation was largely a CIA affair and conceiving the world as

> one big turf battle pressed to put all special operations under Pentagon

> control. The vast majority of intelligence funding is already funneled

> through the Defense Department. In addition to this, the current

> intelligence czar the Director of National Intelligence John Michael

> McConnell is a retired vice admiral. The CIA is currently headed by an

> active duty general Michael Hayden (USAF). The top man at the NSA (formerly

> headed by Hayden) is Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander (Army). General James R.

> Clapper Jr. is Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lt. Gen. William

> J. (Jerry) Boykin is Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence, Marine Corps

> Maj. Gen. Michael Ennis is Deputy Director for Human Intelligence at the

> CIA. Retiring Army Lt. General Dell Dailey, formerly Director of the Center

> for Special Operations at the Pentagon which runs black ops, was nominated

> to head the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism (S/CT) at the

> State Department. He was confirmed June 22, 2007.

> ....National Counterterrorism Center was headed by another retired vice

> admiral John Scott Redd from August 1, 2005 to November 10, 2007. He left

> after making remarks that Iraq had made the country less safe and had helped

> in the recruitment of terrorists. The current acting head of the NCTC is its

> principal deputy director Michael Leiter, a civilian.

>

> 45. Rampant cronyism

>

> 46. Signing statements: As of late 2007, there have been 156 signing

> statements challenging about 1,100 provisions in about 155 federal bills. In

> the past signing statements were used to establish grounds for a possible

> future challenge by the Executive branch or to assert that signing a

> specific bill did not imply a surrender of an underlying Presidential power.

> Bush has used them to maintain that he will only obey a law or a part of a

> law when it suits him.

>

> 47. Unilateral (aka Unitary) Executive doctrine: the brainchild of John Yoo

> and David Addington which seeks to establish a legal framework through

> misreading the Constitution for a Presidential dictatorship

> ....On December 7, 2007, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released parts of

> Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions that he got declassified concerning

> Bush's warrantless wiretapping programs:

> 1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional

> requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he

> wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than

> violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

> 2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article

> II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President's

> authority under Article II.

> 3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President's legal

> determinations.

> What this says is that the President under his Article II powers as

> Commander in Chief can do whatever he wants and that he is the sole arbiter

> of whether what he does is legal. This echoes Richard Nixon famous dictum:

> 'Well, when the President does it that means it is not illegal." And we saw

> how well that turned out.

>

> 48. Overuse and abuse of the National Guard and Reserves; posse comitatus;

> decreased ability to deal with natural disasters; also much National Guard

> equipment is now in Iraq and there is currently a $24 billion shortfall in

> equiping National Guard units in this country. In a sign of how the National

> Guard are treated, in a story reported October 3, 2007, the Pentagon wrote

> orders for 1,162 members of the Minnesota National Guard who served the

> longest tour of any ground unit in Iraq: 22 months for 729 days to avoid

> giving them GI Bill education benefits which they would have been entitled

> to if they had served one single day more.

>

> 49. Increasing unpreparedness of US ground forces (Army and Marines): too

> many tours, extended tours, too little rest between tours, insufficient

> training

>

> 50. US balance of trade deficit. This is a measure both of our general

> indebtedness and our competitiveness. In 2001 it was $385 billion. In 2006

> it was $811 billion, a 111% increase. The deficit in goods (as opposed to

> services) accounts for almost all of this.

>

> 51. 2005 Grassley Bankruptcy bill heavily favoring lenders

>

> 52. Mexican cross border trucking and safety concerns

>

> 53. Karl Rove did not lose his security clearance after his participation in

> the Valerie Plame case. Instead it was quietly renewed in late 2006. Henry

> Waxman would like to know why.

>

> 54. Detention of families for immigration violations; large ICE raids which

> leave children of detainees unaccounted for; immigrant detentions for long

> periods in a hodgepodge of facilities without adequate medical care

> (resulting in deaths), suicide prevention, or legal representation.

>

> 55. Dubai Ports deal

>

> 56. The Patriot Act that no one had time to read and passed anyway; the

> Patriot Act extension that people had the time to read and passed anyway.

>

> 57. Attempts to privatize Social Security dating all the way back to a

> stacked commission report of December 11, 2001; Andrew Biggs who favors

> privatization made deputy director of Social Security in a recess

> appointment after the Senate made it clear it would not take up his

> nomination because of his privatization views.

>

> 58. The War on Science: stem cell research, global warming, evolution,

> research funding, energy, abstinence programs, AIDS prevention.

>

> 59. Conviction of David Safavian for lying and obstruction June 20, 2006 re

> his dealings with Jack Abramoff. In the 1990s, Safavian was a business

> partner of Grover Norquist. In 2002, he was named Senior Advisor and Acting

> Deputy Chief of Staff at the GSA and in November 2003 was made head of the

> Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the OMB in the White House

>

> 60. Presidential adviser Claude Allen stealing from Target

>

> 61. Bush casually admits to lying about decision to fire Rumsfeld

>

> 62. Armstrong Williams and paid propagandists

>

> 63. Decimation of the Labor Department presided over by Elaine Chao, married

> to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; job safety, job creation, wage

> increases, unions, and workers' rights have languished under her

> stewardship. Edwin Foulke who heads OSHA continues the Administration policy

> of trusting to self-regulation of industry, by industry, for industry.

>

> 64. Net neutrality and media content and ownership policies

>

> 65. Backing Israel while it destroyed Lebanon July 12, 2006-August 14, 2006

>

> 66. Presidential Daily Brief August 6, 2001: Bin Laden determined to attack

> in US

>

> 67. EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman declares toxic filled Ground Zero safe

> for cleanup. On August 9, 2003 the EPA Inspector General finds differently.

> In Congressional testimony June 25, 2007, Whitman states that it was not her

> fault and blames the terrorists for the site being toxic.

>

> 68. Sago mining disaster hearings and MHSA's David Dye who walked out of the

> hearings; Bush push for reduction in fines for safety violations and

> non-collection of them since 2001.

>

> 69. Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court on October 3, 2005.

> She was serving as White House counsel after Alberto Gonzales went to the

> DOJ. A typical Bush crony appointment, nevertheless it quickly runs into

> problems. Miers has little knowledge of Constitutional law, but what dooms

> her nomination is that conservatives don't think she is conservative enough.

> Think Roe v. Wade. The nomination is withdrawn October 27, 2005. A few

> months later Miers' involvement in the firings of the US attorneys begins.

>

> 70. Bush vetoes a stem cell research bill July 19, 2006 (Bush's first veto).

> Bush vetoes a second stem cell research bill June 20, 2007 (Bush's third

> veto).

>

> 71. Attack on Plan B contraception, staffing Women's Health positions with

> religious conservatives: Dr. Eric Keroack at Health and Human Services who

> thought birth control demeaning to women and Dr. David Hager at FDA who

> tried to keep Plan B prescription only. His wife contended in divorce

> proceedings that he had repeatedly sod mized her without her consent. On

> October 15, 2007, Bush appointed Susan Orr as Acting Deputy Assistant

> Secretary for Population Affairs (Keroack's position). Orr who currently

> heads child welfare programs at HHS is a virulent opponent of birth control

> considering it part of a "culture of death". This is another example of an

> upside down appointment: choosing someone whose positions are the very

> antithesis of their job's mission.

>

> 72. Clear Skies Act of February 14, 2002 a failed attempt to weaken the

> Clean Air Act. Bush reacted by changing standards on nitrogen oxide, SO2,

> and mercury through the EPA. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003

> based on bad science in how to protect communities from forest fires and on

> the effects of "thinning" forests, i.e disrupting ecosystems. The real aim

> was to remove public scrutiny on sweetheart deals with logging companies by

> claiming such deals were to protect communities even when there were no

> communities in the vicinity.

> ....On December 5, 2007, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2003

> US Forest Service rule, part of the Healthy Forests Initiative, which

> exempted cuts up to 1,000 acres and burns up to 4,500 acres in national

> forests from environmental review. The rule allowed about 1.2 million acres

> to be cut or burned each year without studying the environmental impact of

> these activities.

>

> 73. Missile defense shield that doesn't work. So far the only tangible

> result is that Vladimir Putin has used it as an excuse to introduce a new

> class of MIRVed (multiple warhead) ICBMs and threaten the Europeans. This is

> payback for the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty announced December 12,

> 2001 and entered into effect June 13, 2002. On June 14, Russia announced

> that it was pulling out of START II (negotiated in the 1990s) which covered

> the de-MIRVing of ICBMs and which Russia had never gotten around to

> ratifying anyway. Putin knows that Russia is not threatened by such an

> ineffective system and that Russia has plenty of conventional ICBMs to

> overwhelm it even if it did work. As for targeting Europe, although it

> sounds scary, this represents little change from current policy. De-targeted

> Russian (and US) missiles can be re-targeted in a matter of seconds to

> minutes. On July 14, 2007, Putin suspended Russia's participation in the

> Conventional Forces in Europe treaty. The Bush missile shield is providing

> an excellent excuse for Russia to detach itself from the security framework

> put in place at the end of the Cold War.

>

> 74. Leandro Aragoncillo naturalized Filipino-American in Cheney's office

> (previously Gore's) accused of spying for the Philippines and possibly

> France, pled guilty to unlawfully possessing secret US government documents.

> He was sentenced to 10 years on July 18, 2007.

>

> 75. Defunding overseas AIDS programs that promoted condom use for

> prevention; ineffective abstinence only programs. With these should be

> mentioned domestic abstinence only programs directed at teens which have

> proven to be abysmal failures.

>

> 76. Call for a constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be between one

> man and one woman.

>

> 77. Opening up Bristol Bay, the last pristine large-scale salmon fishery in

> the world, to oil drilling. Congress has also sanctioned further drilling in

> the Gulf of Mexico including off the coast of Florida. Interior has proposed

> drilling off the coast of Virginia which would need Congressional approval

> which isn't likely.

>

> 78. Accusation that Clintons trashed the White House before leaving,

> including stealing the Ws from keyboards

>

> 79. James Guckert aka Jeff Gannon had a series of websites 1999-2002 where

> he advertised his services as a male "escort" or prostitute. In November

> 2002, Guckert began posting and publishing conservative pieces under the

> name Jeff Gannon. Although he had no journalistic experience, Gannon was

> soon accredited to the White House press corps where between February 25,

> 2003 and early 2005 he appeared over 200 times. During this period he

> represented Talon News and GOPUSA, websites owned by Robert Eberle a

> Republican operative from Texas. Several of Gannon's visits did not

> correspond to press events and has led to speculation about which of his

> trades he was practicing during them. Gannon was known for lobbing softball

> questions and writing stories from press releases. On January 26, 2005 this

> led to his undoing when he asked at a Presidential press conference a

> question that appeared too friendly even by Washington standards,

> Q Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture

> of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary

> Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet,

> in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there's

> no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're going to reach

> out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to

> have divorced themselves from reality?

> It is important to point out that Gannon was exposed by the liberal blogs

> dailykos and Americablog. Although Gannon had been engaged in these antics

> for two years under the nose of the White House corps, steely-eyed reporters

> that they were, they never noticed.

>

>

> 80. Native American trust funds. In 1887 the Dawes Act allotted individual

> Native Americans plots out of trust lands amounting to about 139 million

> acres. The federal government was to administer and manage these lands for

> the benefit of Native peoples. In 1889, however, lands not already allotted

> were made available to non-Native people. The trust lands rapidly shrank,

> profits from their sale and use were diverted, and the government's

> accounting procedures were so bad it will never be known how much money was

> lost. In June 1996, a class action lawsuit was filed in DC federal district

> court with Judge Royce Lamberth presiding: Cobell v. Secretary of the

> Interior (Babbitt, Norton, Kempthorne) over the Department's management of

> the trust known as the Individual Indian Money program or IIM.

> ....The Cobell case spans both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Both

> saw Interior Secretaries and others cited for contempt. Both saw government

> offices destroy relevant evidence. The government has yet to address

> seriously the two issues of the case, compensation and reform of the trust.

> Instead it has engaged in a stalling strategy which so enraged Judge Lambert

> that "intemperate" remarks he made in July 2005 led to his eventual

> replacement in July 2006. That same month Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

> proposed an $8 billion settlement. This is a far lower figure than what the

> government owes the trust but illustrates the reality that the government

> has no intention of paying fair compensation or even making a real effort to

> find out what such compensation would be. On March 1, 2007, Attorney General

> Alberto Gonzales added insult to injury by suggesting an even lower all

> inclusive settlement number of $7 billion. The case drags on with the

> government trying to "right" one historic wrong by committing another.

>

> 81. Selling creationist materials at the Grand Canyon gift shop claiming it

> was 6000 years old

>

> 82. In March 2003, the Pentagon announced a ban on photographs of coffins of

> slain American soldiers as they are returned to this country at Dover AFB.

> On June 21, 2004, the Republican led Senate defeated an attempt to allow

> such coverage. On November 11, 2004, the Pentagon announced restrictions

> that kept reporters at least 50 yards from any funeral. In the past, they

> have been allowed at the rear of them. This is not about privacy but about

> hiding the realities of war.

> ....Although an accepted practice of previous Presidents and with Arlington

> National Cemetery only a few miles from the White House, Bush has not

> attended a single funeral for any serviceperson killed in his wars. His

> stated rationale? "Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I

> think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not

> another?" Bush's answer is apparently as Commander in Chief to honor none of

> them.

>

> 83. False military reporting: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman was an

> NFL player who post-911 joined the Army and was killed in Afghanistan April

> 22, 2004. He was immediately mythologized John Wayne-style by the military.

> On May 28, 2004, it came out that he died in a friendly fire incident.

> Details of Tillman's death and the coverup surrounding it continue to

> dribble out. On July 13, 2007, the Bush White House invoked Executive

> privilege on its communications with the Pentagon concerning the story

> pursuant to requests from the House Oversight and Government Reform

> Committee. It is likely that Bush knew within a week of Tillman's death that

> the initial accounts of it were false. Executive privilege has become an

> indispensable tool in the stonewall this Administration has constructed

> around itself.

> ....On July 31, 2007, retired Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger who headed Army

> special forces received a letter of reprimand from Army Secretary Pete Geren

> for his role in the affair and may lose a star and a tenth of his retirement

> pay. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal who heads the Special Operations (black

> ops) Command approved Tillman's Silver Star citation on April 28, 2004 in

> which Tillman is described as being killed by devastating enemy fire. The

> next day he sent a back channel memo saying he thought Tillman may have been

> the victim of friendly fire. McChrystal remains on active duty and has never

> been punished although a Pentagon Inspector General's report recommended

> that action be taken against him for misleading and inaccurate statements.

>

> 84. AIPAC espionage scandal; former DOD employee Lawrence Franklin pled

> guilty to passing information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees

>

> 85. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram; the Marine massacre of 24 Iraqi

> civilians at Haditha and its coverup. A few cases:

> Rasul: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS in a 6-3 decision ruled that the US court

> system had jurisdiction over non US nationals held at Guantanamo. Rasul had

> been released to the UK before the ruling on March 29, 2004.

>

> Hamdi: On June 28, 2004 SCOTUS 8-1 ruled that U.S. citizens can not be

> detained indefinitely as enemy combatants without due process. Hamdi was

> released to Saudi Arabia on October 9, 2004 on condition that he give up his

> US citizenship.

>

> Hamdan: On June 29, 2006, SCOTUS in a 5-3 decision ruled that Bush's

> military tribunals were illegal under the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions

> and needed Congressional authorization (which was supplied by the Military

> Commissions Act or MCA of September 2006)

>

> Khadr/Hamdan: On June 4, 2007, a military court dismissed charges against

> them because their Combat Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) had designated

> them enemy combatants. The MCA authorizes trials for "unlawful" enemy

> combatants only, which they had not been designated. On September 24, 2007

> in the Khadr case, a military appeals court found that on hearing more

> evidence a military judge had the power to determine that an alien enemy

> combatant was also an "unlawful" one. If upheld, this could clear the way

> for trials under the MCA.

>

> al Marri: On June 11, 2007, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1

> that a legal US resident (similar to Hamdi) can not be denied due process

> and held indefinitely as an enemy combatant outside the purview of the US

> judicial system.

>

>

> 86. Asserted right to open US mail made on December 20, 2006 in a signing

> statement to HR 6407 the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act:

> The executive branch shall construe subsection 404© of title 39, as

> enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an

> item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner

> consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct

> searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety

> against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically

> authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.

>

>

> 87. The housing bubble, its collapse, subprime mortgage crisis. Since about

> 1998, subprime mortgage loans have accounted for about 1/4 of US home sales.

> Such mortgages allowed people with low or bad credit ratings to purchase

> homes. Easy credit resulted in a housing boom/bubble between 2000 and 2005

> and was touted as a major plank of Bush's "ownership society". The problem

> was people were sold too much house financed by loans that they could

> initially, if marginally, afford but which they could not after a few years

> as the terms on their loans changed and monthly payments greatly increased.

> The effects of this nonsensical lending and speculation were delayed for

> awhile as the housing market was on the way up and the value of homes

> (including those financed by subprime loans) steadily increased, but in late

> 2006 the bubble became unsustainable and burst. Ameriquest the largest

> subprime lender went belly up after a $325 million settlement with 30 state

> Attorney Generals for deceptive lending and marketing practices. (Its former

> CEO Robert Arnell was appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands by George

> Bush.) It was not alone. Other subprime lenders like Mortgage Lenders

> Network USA and Ownit followed suit. Market analysts try to downplay the

> significance of the subprime disaster but its effects continue to ripple

> through financial markets. For one thing most of the mortgage loans were not

> held by the original lenders but sold to investors and hedge funds. As a

> result two Bear Stearns funds failed and on August 9, 2007 the French bank

> BNP Paribas froze withdrawals from 3 of its funds due to subprime losses

> sparking a major sell off in stock markets and forcing central banks to

> inject ~$180 billion into markets over a 24 hour period to avoid a credit

> crunch. The fallout from this housing bubble collapse will be with us for

> years and is going to be very, very expensive.

> ....On December 6, 2007, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented the

> Administration's much awaited plan to help homeowners with subprime

> mortgages. The program called for a voluntary 5 year freeze on rates due to

> reset between January 1, 2008 and July 31, 2010. It was available only to

> those who were not delinquent in their payments and delays but does not do

> away with interest rate resets at the end of this period. Finally, it would

> affect at most 20% of such loans and probably far fewer (~12%). All in all,

> the Paulson plan does little to help homeowners but then it was never meant

> to. The real reason for the plan was to support housing prices which could

> fall 20% to 30% due to the subprime bubble and so thereby minimize losses to

> investors.

> ....On December 11, 2007, the Fed cut short term interest rates down to

> 4.25%. This is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans. It

> was the third rate cut since September 2007 bringing the total decrease to a

> full percentage point. While this could fuel inflation, it is unclear that

> it will have any effect on the underlying fundamentals of the liquidity

> crisis brought on by the subprime bubble.

> ....On December 18, 2007 European central banks created a $500 billion fund

> to provide two week loans to commercial banks at 4.21% interest. The problem

> with most banks is not that they lack money on hand but that they are leery

> of lending it.

>

> 88. Bush connections to Enron and Ken Lay. Lay was connected to the elder

> Bush but helped finance the younger Bush's gubernatorial campaign. In 2000

> he was a Bush Pioneer, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the

> Republican convention and the Bush inaugural celebration. Through Enron, he

> also contributed more than a million dollars in soft money to the Republican

> party. In exchange, Bush stayed out of the California energy crisis and Lay

> participated in Cheney's Energy Task Force which wrote Bush's business

> friendly energy policy. When Enron collapsed, Bush could barely remember

> ever having met the man.

>

> 89. Refusing to intervene in the California electricity crisis in early

> 2001. On January 29, 2001, in remarks Bush said, "the situation is going to

> be best remedied in California, by Californians." He maintained that the

> crisis occurred because demand outstripped supply but, in fact, the crisis

> was the result of unscrupulous speculators like Enron producing unnecessary

> shortages and then capitalizing on them.

>

> 90. Lack of action on Darfur despite Congress declaring it genocide in a

> resolution (H.Con.Res. 467; Sen.Con.Res. 133) of July 22, 2004 and Bush's

> own Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 9, 2004 in testimony before

> the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

>

> 91. Failure to adequately fund programs to reduce poorly secured nuclear

> material in Russia

>

> 92. Refusal to grant security clearances to OPR (Office of Public

> Responsibility) lawyers investigating the role of Gonzales both as WH

> counsel and later as AG in authorizing warrantless NSA wiretapping thus

> quashing the investigation

>

> 93. Political interference in the Justice Department lawsuit against Big

> Tobacco. 3 then DOJ officials Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum

> (No.3 at the DOJ), head of the Civil Division Assistant Attorney General

> Peter Keisler and his deputy, Dan Meronin intervened in June 2005 at the

> last minute in the government's case. They torpedoed a provision which would

> have removed corporate officers shown to have engaged in fraud. They asked

> that some witnesses weaken their testimony. They also reduced a government

> demand for an industry funded smoking cessation program from $130 billion to

> $10 billion. Later, the presiding federal judge Gladys Kessler ruled that a

> prior appellate court decision precluded such a program. Of course, this was

> not the argument which the DOJ officials were making. Their interest was in

> keeping Big Tobacco from taking a Big Hit.

>

> 94. White House involvement in election day phone jamming of Democrats in

> New Hampshire November 5, 2002; Charles McGee, former executive director of

> the New Hampshire Republican Party pled guilty to conspiracy on July 28,

> 2004 and was later sentenced to 7 months in prison; James Tobin New England

> head of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee made two dozen

> calls to the White House over a three day period during this time. He was

> convicted for his participation on December 15, 2005. This was reversed on

> appeal March 21, 2007. His case was sent back to the district court and will

> be retried in December 2007. A major reason for the slow progress of the

> Tobin case to trial (3 years) was that the FBI assigned only a single agent

> part time to it.

>

> 95. Sweetheart plea deal for Steven Griles former No. 2 at the Interior

> Department. Griles and his then girlfriend Italia Federici worked with Jack

> Abramoff and later lied to Congress about it. The proposed deal by the

> government: no cooperation demand, the minimum 10 months, 5 to be served at

> the home of his now wife Sue Ellen Wooldridge who had just left Justice

> where she was an assistant attorney general heading the environment

> division. She signed a generous consent decree with ConocoPhillips despite

> being friends with a Conoco vice president and despite the fact that Conoco

> was being represented by Griles.

> ....On June 26, 2007, US District Judge Ellen Huvelle sentenced Griles.

> Griles asked for probation and blamed the Senate for his lying. The judge

> didn't buy this or the government's deal and doubled his prison time to the

> full 10 months. He was also fined $30,000 and given 3 years probation.

>

> 96. The unfired (Bush appointed) US attorneys who targeted 80% of their

> political corruption cases against Democrats

>

> 97. Insertion into the Patriot Act extension of language allowing US

> attorneys to be named without Senate approval. This provision originated

> with Daniel Collins a former Associate Deputy AG back in 2003 but was taken

> by then Assistant AG for Legislative Affairs (now Principal Associate Deputy

> AG) William Moschella in 2005 and forwarded to Brett Tolman, a protege of

> Utah Senator Orrin Hatch on Arlen Specter's staff who snuck it into the

> bill. Specter denied knowledge of the insertion and said he had not read the

> bill. He admitted, however, that his chief of staff Michael O'Neil did know.

> As a reward, Tolman was nominated US attorney for Utah and confirmed by the

> Senate July 21, 2006 in the usual way and not the one he slipped into the

> Patriot Act. Gonzales approved but maintained he didn't know how it

> happened.

>

> 98. Massive and illegal abuse by FBI of National Security Letters

> (administrative warrants) or NSLs. A report by DOJ Inspector General Glenn

> Fine of March 2007 estimated that 143,000 NSLs had been issued between 2003

> and 2005. An exact number was not possible because recordkeeping was so bad

> that an unknown number were never properly recorded. In response to the IG's

> findings, Alberto Gonzales stated that he was unaware of abuses in the

> program although he had begun receiving reports about them beginning in

> 2005. On June 15, 2007, DC federal district court judge John Bates ordered

> the FBI to begin producing documents related to NSL abuse pursuant to a FOIA

> request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by July 5. On July 13, 2007,

> Attorney General Gonzales and FBI Director Mueller announced that a new

> office would be formed within DOJ's National Security Division to oversee

> the program and prevent abuses. Of course, these were the same people who

> promised that there would be no abuses in the first place.

>

> 99. Attempted use of GSA to promote Republican candidates; presentation by

> Scott Jennings deputy political director to Karl Rove at a video conference

> of 40 political appointees hosted by GSA head Lurita Doan in violation of

> the Hatch Act. Later, Doan testifying before Congress had severe memory

> loss. Doan at GSA has been involved in various contract irregularities. In a

> letter to Bush on June 8, 2007, the Office of Special Counsel which

> investigates this kind of thing called for Doan to be punished to the

> fullest extent for violations of the Hatch Act and obstructing its

> investigation.

> ....At least 20 other meetings involving senior officials from 15 government

> agencies and the White House discussing political prospects were held before

> the 2006 elections also in violation of the Hatch Act. The Office of Special

> Counsel (OSC) has begun investigations into these.

>

> 100. Karl Rove and the culture of corruption. What did Karl Rove see in

> George Bush that he tied his fortunes to Bush's political star? Rove saw

> Bush as inhabiting the intersection of often disparate and conflicting

> elements of the Republican Party. Bush came from a powerful Texas family.

> His father had been President and that meant not only name recognition but

> contacts to the Republican Establishment. Bush Senior was also tightly

> connected to the conservative monied classes in Texas, the Northeast, and

> the country more generally. Despite this, Bush Junior assiduously cultivated

> and exploited a "good ole boy" image so at odds with his family's wealth and

> power. Although born in Connecticut and schooled in the Northeast, as a

> Texan and with the Everyman shtik, Bush could also lay claim to being both a

> Southerner and a Westerner and so tap into two important bastions of the

> Republican Party. As a recovering alcoholic turned to religion, Bush Junior

> added in another part of the Republican base the religious Right,

> evangelical and family values vote. With this and a smattering of Spanish,

> Rove saw Bush could court the Hispanic vote as well. In other words, from

> Rove's point of view Bush was a political goldmine.

> ....Here were two men with little knowledge of or curiosity about the world,

> motivated by no great philosophy but with a great thirst for power and a

> willingness to do anything no matter how sleazy or dirty to win it. This was

> not about consensus building. It was about 50% plus 1 or close enough for a

> court to decide in their favor. Rove probably would have sought to

> politicize the federal government in favor of the Republican Party anyway

> but the disputed nature of the 2000 vote gave him an added incentive and 911

> supplied him with a golden opportunity. The result has been the most

> thoroughgoing politicization, often in contravention of the law, of all

> aspects of government in our lifetimes.

> ....The goal was to carve out a permanent majority using the 50% plus one

> philosophy, but there were two problems. First, while Bush personified the

> many facets of the modern Republican Party, neither he nor Rove ever unified

> them. The conflicts between social conservatives, libertarians, and the

> wealthy remained. The wealthy got their tax cuts but the financial situation

> of Nascar dads became more precarious. Social issues got two Supreme Court

> justices but no real money, and to date little change in the law. Nativist

> types clashed with pro-business ones over immigration. Rove's outreach to

> the expanding numbers of minorities in the country came crashing down. The

> result was a peeling off not a building up until Bush and Rove were left

> with only their hardcore base of 25-30%. Second, placing political loyalty

> above professionalism and experience in government did not strengthen the

> Republican Party or the conservative cause. It created instead an

> environment of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, and failure. Examples of

> this can be found everywhere in this Administration and form much of the

> content of this list, but the epitome of this collision between ideology and

> the real world is Iraq. The practical problem with politicization of

> government is that it doesn't work and produces bad results of which Iraq is

> the most obvious and worse.

> ....On August 13, 2007, Karl Rove Bush's chief political adviser throughout

> his entire political career announced his resignation to become effective on

> August 31, 2007. From his 5 appearances before the grand jury in the Valerie

> Plame/outing of a CIA agent case, to violations of the Hatch Act and the

> Presidential Records Act, the US Attorney firings, and lobbyist Jack

> Abramoff's influence peddling schemes, investigations have swirled around

> Rove. Bush has invoked Executive Privilege to protect him. It may not have

> been enough. In Washington's culture of corruption, all roads lead to Rove.

>

> 101. Voter suppression, voter ID laws, exaggerating the problem of voter

> fraud, attempts to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act on its renewal; Hans von

> Spakovsky, a Republican volunteer in the Florida recount, was Counsel to the

> Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ's Civil Rights division where he

> signed off on Tom Delay's 2003 Texas redistricting plan and a 2005 Georgia

> voter ID law overruling staff recommendations that they were discriminatory.

> Both were struck down in the courts. In the Georgia case, a federal appeals

> judge compared the ID system to Jim Crow poll taxes. In April 2005, on his

> own and without consulting voting rights attorneys, Spakovsky incorrectly

> advised the Arizona Secretary of State that provisional ballots should not

> be given to voters who lacked proper ID. Spakovsky went on to be a

> Commissioner at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) in a January 6, 2006

> recess appointment. In October 2007, Spakovsky's nomination to a regular

> appointment was bundled with that of other FEC nominees but instead of

> ensuring his confirmation it caused all the nominations to languish. On

> December 18, 2007, a federal district judge in Florida Stephan Mickle

> granted a preliminary injunction against a Spakovsky backed plan that would

> have rejected voter applications if information on them differed from that

> on their driver's license or Social Security records. The judge stated that

> such requirements made it harder to vote and so undermined the intent of the

> Help America Vote Act (HAVA). On December 31, 2007, Spakovsky announced in

> an email that day was his last at the FEC.

> ....The head of the Civil Rights Division during this period was Bradley

> Schlozman. Schlozman was highly political. He wanted to know if prospective

> hires were Republicans and forced out employees who committed the sin of not

> agreeing with him. Although having no prosecutorial experience, Schlozman

> was named US attorney for Western Missouri on March 23, 2006. In a blatant

> attempt at voter suppression and in contravention of DOJ guidelines, he

> filed voter fraud cases days before the November elections. His was one of

> the first of the "interim" appointments made under the revised provisions

> snuck into the Patriot Act and there have been suggestions that his

> predecessor Todd Graves was forced out to make way for him. He left in April

> 2007 to work at the Executive Office for US Attorneys (EOUSA). Schlozman

> testified about his activities before the Senate on June 5, 2007. Like most

> recent DOJ witnesses, he suffered from extreme memory loss. He testified

> that Craig Donsanto OK'ed the pre-election Missouri cases although Donsanto

> is the one who wrote the DOJ guidelines. A May 2007 update to these

> guidelines weakens or eliminates the prohibition on bringing politically

> sensitive cases near to an election. Schlozman quietly left the DOJ sometime

> mid-August 2007.

> ....John Tanner has been head of the Voting Rights Section since 2005. He

> precleared the Georgia ID program going against the recommendation of 4 out

> of 5 of the section's career attorneys. The one dissenting attorney was new

> and was apparently one of the political hires to a career position made by

> Schlozman. Tanner also changed guidelines so that staff could not recommend

> an objection to a state voting law. In June 2005, he wrote a preemptive

> letter to election officials in Franklin County, Ohio assuring them that the

> lack of sufficient voting machines in minority areas during the 2004

> election did not amount to discrimination. Finally, in October 2007, Tanner

> was still defending the Georgia ID law asserting that its negative effects

> fell primarily on the elderly and so by extension on whites because

> "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first."

> ....In addition, although Tanner's productivity has been minimal his travel

> at taxpayer's expense has been maximal. In 2003-2004, he racked up 206 days

> of travel during 46 trips. From May 2005 (after becoming head of the

> section) to the end of 2006, he took 36 trips accounting for 97 travel days.

> This is widely at variance with his predecessors. It also included 3 trips

> to Hawaii one each year although the section had no lawsuits ongoing or in

> preparation. One of these was taken with his deputy Susana Lorenzo-Giguere

> who is herself being investigated for filing motions so that she could

> charge per diem expenses while on summer vacation with her family in Cape

> Cod.

> ....On January 11, 2008, Tanner's replacement Christopher Coates demoted

> Lorenzo-Giguere and another Tanner deputy Yvette Rivera. Rivera had been

> accused of discriminating against African American employees.

> ....John Tanner announce his resignation on December 14, 2007 to be

> effective immediately. He is not, however, gone. He transferred to the

> Office of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment

> Practices.

> ....Wan J. Kim who headed the Civil Rights Division after Bradley

> Schlozman's departure is an Orrin Hatch protege. Kim announced his

> resignation effective August 31, 2007.

>

> 102. Campaign finance and political corruption

>

> 103. Swift boating of John Kerry (2004); push polling and McCain's black

> baby in the South Carolina primary (2000); on April 4, 2007, Sam Fox made

> Ambassador to Belgium in a recess appointment. Fox's nomination was

> withdrawn in the Senate where it faced certain defeat. Fox was controversial

> because he had given $50,000 to the anti-Kerry smear campaign of the Swift

> Boat Veterans for Truth

>

> 104. No Child Left Behind, based on flawed and false data, chronically

> underfunded, capricious in its evaluations, places test scores above

> knowledge; allegations have arisen that people at the Department of

> Education pushed reading programs as part of NCLB that they had financial

> interests in.

>

> 105. Susan E. Dudley made administrator of the Office of Information and

> Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. Dudley who

> doesn't believe in regulation except in extreme cases when the "market

> fails" was named to this powerful regulatory post in a recess appointment on

> April 4, 2007.

>

> 106. Paul Wolfowitz, after his disastrous hyping of the Iraq war, did a

> McNamara and went to the World Bank to do good. He brought his neocon

> values, a doctrinaire, secretive management style, and a real gift for poor

> leadership to rail against corruption in 3rd world countries while

> practicing some of it himself closer to home. Prohibited from supervising

> his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a senior communications officer at the bank, he

> detailed her to the Department of State, gave her a raise of $47,340 twice

> what was permitted, and then a further raise of $13,000 bringing her salary

> to $193,000 tax free and making her the highest paid official in the State

> Department and that includes Condoleezza Rice. Wolfowitz's eventual defense

> of the raise was that Riza was very angry at leaving the Bank and might have

> sued although as the Bank later pointed out she did not have grounds to do

> so. Her initial boss at state was none other than Liz Cheney. Her job

> through State was to set up the Foundation for the Future to promote civil

> society in the Middle East. After 1 1/2 years there, it still has no

> permanent office, executive officers, or staff and has yet to disperse a

> grant. There is also the matter of a security clearance that Riza, a

> non-citizen unaffiliated with an allied government, would need to work at

> Defense (through an earlier contract with the defense contractor SAIC

> arranged by Wolfowitz through Doug Feith) or more recently at State and

> which would be extremely unusual to give to someone in her situation.

> ....Wolfowitz dragged out his departure from the Bank for nearly a month

> doing serious damage to the institution. He was eventually forced to

> announce his resignation on May 17, 2007 effective June 30, 2007. In keeping

> with his double standard on corruption and despite his disastrous

> stewardship at the Bank, he will not go cheaply into the night. His

> severance package will be in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. The

> poor should get such deals. On June 25, 2007, pro-business, free trader (and

> like Wolfowitz) neocon Robert Zoellick was approved as the World Bank's new

> president.

> ....In December 2007, Wolfowitz doing a stint at that den of current and

> washed up neoconservatives the American Enterprise Institute accepted an

> offer from Condoleezza Rice to take on the part time position of chairman of

> the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. The post was

> last held by the somnolent and Presidential candidate Fred Thompson. The

> Board's current 18 members are members in good standing of the nation's

> military industrial complex with ties to Lawrence Livermore, Boeing,

> Lockheed Martin, and Bechtel and with a heavy concentration on nuclear

> weaponry.

>

> 107. Kenneth Tomlinson chairman of the CPB politicized public broadcasting,

> commissioned a biased study to monitor liberalism on Bill Moyer's show NOW,

> resigned after an IG report alleged political tests and inappropriate

> dealings in the creating of a new show; later he was put on the board of

> governors for the Voice of America where there were further allegations of

> hiring a friend, misuse of staff, improper billing, and use of his office to

> run a horse racing operation

>

> 108. Matteo Fontana, a general manager in the Office of Federal Student Aid

> in the Education Department held and sold shares worth at least $100,000 in

> Student Loan Xpress whose activities he was ostensibly overseeing. He was

> placed on paid leave. Fontana's boss who oversees the student loan program

> Theresa Shaw resigned on May 8, 2007 a few days before Education Secretary

> Margaret Spellings was to testify before Congress. The official reason given

> for Shaw's leaving was that she had "plans to take some time off." This is

> part of the larger scandal of sweetheart deals between universities and

> companies making loans to students to the detriment of students. On June 1,

> 2007, the Department of Education came out with new rules to regulate the

> $85 billion student lending business.

>

> 109. A 9th US prosecutor Tom Heffelfinger in Minnesota was replaced by

> Rachel Paulose. Paulose at age 33 joined the DOJ and after less than 2

> months as a senior counsel to deputy attorney general Paul McNulty she was

> named to the USA position in Minnesota. She was also reputed to be good

> friends with Monica "Loyalty oaths" Goodling and had a reputation for

> quoting the bible and dressing down staff. As a result on April 5, 2007,

> three of her top assistants, career prosecutors, resigned their

> administrative positions and voluntarily demoted themselves rather than work

> with her in a sign of their complete lack of faith in her abilities

> ....The push to oust Heffelfinger appears to have resulted from an attempt

> to suppress the Native American vote in 2004. In Minnesota, many Native

> Americans vote Democratic, live off reservation, and have tribal IDs as

> their principal source of identification. The Republican Secretary of State

> Mary Kiffmeyer refused to accept these for voting purposes. An assistant US

> attorney in Heffelfinger's office Rob Lewis contacted Joseph Rich a career

> prosecutor and the head of the voting section of the DOJ's Civil Rights

> Division. Rich recommended an investigation which was vetoed by Bradley

> Schlozman. Attempts to gather further information were effectively derailed

> by Hans von Spakovsky. Shortly before the November election, federal

> District Judge James Rosenbaum ruled that tribal IDs could be used.

> Heffelfinger who was cited in testimony by Monica Goodling as spending too

> much time on Native American issues (He headed the US attorneys subcommittee

> on Native American issues) resigned effective February 28, 2006. As one of

> her first acts, interim USA Paulose got rid of Rob Lewis.

> ....On November 19, 2007, Paulose's resignation as USA was confirmed. It had

> been reported in September 2007 that she was the subject of an Office of

> Special Counsel investigation enquiring into her conduct as USA in

> Minnesota. She will return to main DOJ where she will serve as the counsel

> to the Rachel Brand Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal

> Policy.

>

> 110. The lost White House emails: not an accident but a policy.

>

> The official White House email system:

> February 26, 2001 White House counsel Alberto Gonzales informs White House

> staff they must preserve their email in conformance with the Presidential

> Records Act.

>

> June 4, 2001 Bush announces plan to name a special assistant to the

> President to act as Chief Information Officer for the White House and

> "improve" electronic records keeping.

>

> Late 2001 or early 2002 the White House deactivates the Automated Records

> Management System (ARMS) for archiving emails. Instead the White House

> begins transferring emails from its EOP server to a file server. The system

> is not secure or complete and emails can be deleted from it. On top of this,

> back up tapes which might capture and preserve some of these deletions are

> regularly wiped and recycled. Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton says

> this was in keeping with "industry best practices". The problem is that

> these "practices" violate federal law, i.e. the Presidential Records Act and

> the duties and responsibilities of her position.

>

> March 2003-October 2003 marks the period in which backup tapes were not

> retained. It encompasses the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame

> coverup, and discussions concerning the destruction of the torture tapes.

>

> October 2003-October 2005 emails continue to be lost. Despite daily

> audits, no one notices for 2 years

>

> In October 2005, someone does finally gasp notice. The Office of

> Administration does a study which finds hundreds of days (473) between March

> 2003 and October 2005 where various components of the White House system

> contained few if any emails. The OA estimates 5 million emails were lost

> during this time.

> The unofficial system:

> Beginning in 2001, Karl Rove and about 35 other White House officials used

> Republican National Committee (RNC) GWB43.com and other email accounts for

> government business circumventing and violating the Presidential Records

> Act. Per a letter of Henry Waxman to Alberto Gonzales, it has been reported

> that Karl Rove used RNC accounts for 95% of his communications.

>

> 2001-August 2004, the RNC purged its email accounts every 30 days. After

> this time, it suspended purges on White House accounts. However, it

> continued to allow White House officials to delete their emails.

>

> Beginning in 2005, the RNC singled out Karl Rove. His emails were

> automatically archived and he was no longer allowed to delete them. That he

> had been doing this is obvious since although he used his RNC email account

> heavily, he has no emails from the time the RNC suspended its email purges

> in August 2004 to the beginning of 2005 when it began archiving his emails.

>

> Up to the time of Waxman's letter in April 2007, White House officials

> other than Karl Rove retained the use of their RNC accounts and the ability

> to delete email from them.

> To recap, the White House had two email systems, not one. It lost or

> destroyed many emails from both in deliberate and knowing violation of the

> Presidential Records Act. As a result, the Congress and the people's right

> to know what their government is doing and to hold it to account has been

> irretrievably damaged.

>

> 111. Georgia Thompson a purchasing agent in Wisconsin was convicted of

> steering a contract to a company in which 2 executives had contributed the

> maximum to Democratic Governor Jim Doyle's re-election campaign. Thompson

> had been a hire of the previous Republican governor and no evidence was

> produced at trial that she knew of the contributions. Remanded by the

> Republican judge who heard the case, she served 4 months of an 18 month

> sentence before an appeals court overturned her conviction after oral

> arguments where one judge typified the government's case as "beyond thin"

> and ordered her freed the same day. The case was brought by Bush appointed

> US attorney Steven Biskupic during the campaign and was used in Republican

> campaign ads to accuse Doyle of corruption

>

> 112. US attorney for New Jersey and former Bush "Pioneer" Chris Christie

> issued subpoenas in a corruption probe of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez

> two months before the Nov. 2006 elections. Menendez was in a tight race with

> Tom Keane. After Menendez won, the investigation went away

>

> 113. Kay Coles James, dean of Pat Robertson's Regent's government school,

> made director of the Office of Personnel Management in 2001. In 2002, John

> Ashcroft eases qualifications for DOJ hiring. The influx into the DOJ of

> young, poorly qualified lawyers on a conservative religious mission begins

>

> 114. In a rushed process, Bernard B. Kerik, a Rudy Giuliani protege and

> former New York City Police Commissioner, was nominated to be Secretary of

> Homeland Security December 3, 2004. He withdrew his name a week later

> ostensibly because of his employment of an undocumented immigrant as a

> nanny. However, it quickly came out that Kerik was also involved in a

> dubious stock sale of stun gun manufacturer Taser International shortly

> before a critical report by Amnesty International, a sexual harassment suit,

> connections to a construction company Interstate Industrial Corporation tied

> to the Gambino organized crime family, use of an apartment donated for 911

> relief as a love nest where he could meet his girlfriends, including Judith

> Regan, and accepting gifts in contravention of ethics rules (for which he

> paid a $221,000 fine). Kerik was also the inept Interim Minister of the

> Interior in Iraq under Paul Bremer's CPA in 2003. On November 9, 2007, Kerik

> was indicted on 14 federal counts including certifying that Interstate

> Industrial Corporation was mob-free in exchange for $255,000 in renovations

> for his apartment, accepting $200,000 in rent off the books, bribery, tax

> fraud, theft of honest services, and making false statements to government

> officials.

>

> 115. The Bush back story: The time in the TANG, the transfer to the Alabama

> National Guard, the lost years, the 1976 DUI in Maine, the business

> bailouts, the governorship, hardline on drug crimes despite his own past

> history and a fast and loose approach to the death penalty

> ....In the run up to the Presidential elections, Dan Rather presented a

> piece on Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard on CBS, 60 Minutes II

> on September 8, 2004. The segment noted that Bush had received preferential

> treatment in being admitted to what was called the Champagne Unit comprised

> of the scions of well to do Texans wishing to avoid service in Vietnam. He

> then cited critical memos purportedly written by Bush's squadron leader

> Colonel Jerry Killian. The authenticity of these was rapidly brought into

> question by conservative bloggers and their doubts were quickly echoed in

> the mainstream media. While controversy continues to this day about whether

> the memos were real or fakes, their content that Bush performed his duties

> poorly or not at all remains largely uncontested. On September 20, CBS

> President for News Andrew Heyward issued an apology and Rather a kind of

> one. An internal commission was organized headed by two men, one at least

> with a very definite connection to the Bush family: Richard Thornburgh, Bush

> I's Attorney General and Louis Boccardi, former head of the AP. That the fix

> was in was hardly surprising since Sumner Redstone who headed Viacom CBS,

> parent company had declared himself (and Viacom) for Bush Junior. On

> September 19, 2007, Dan Rather now retired filed a $70 million civil suit

> against his former employers for scapegoating him. Now what is curious about

> all this and qualifies it as a scandal is that no major outlet of the

> mainstream press rushed in before the election or after to investigate the

> Bush TANG story and verify or debunk its content. The attack on Rather (and

> his producer Mary Mapes) effectively inoculated Bush against any further

> charge or investigation on this subject. Quite simply the media didn't care

> whether it was true or not. Just as they didn't care if the swiftboating of

> John Kerry's war record was factual or not. This disparate treatment coupled

> with a studied lack of interest is emblematic of the media's coverage of the

> Bush years.

>

> 116. As of February 2006, the terrorist watchlist of the National

> Counterterrorism Center: the bizarrely named Terrorists Identity Datamart

> Environment (TIDE) has 400,000 names representing 300,000 people. The

> Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list had 44,000 names on it

> as of October 2006. 75,000 others are on an extra screening list (CBS). The

> FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) keeps the government's consolidated

> master watchlist which it makes available to other government agencies. Its

> list has grown from 158,374 names in June 2004 to 754,960 names in May 2007,

> an increase of about 200,000 a year. The size of the lists, that they

> contain numerous errors, that it is difficult or impossible to remove names

> or correct errors, the presence of common names, and the ease with which

> these lists can be subverted by real terrorists raise questions why such

> large, sloppy lists exist at all.

>

> 117. Insta-declassification in contravention of Bush's own Executive order

> 13292 and without consultation with the original classifying agency. Also

> abusive and indiscriminate classification (secrecy for secrecy's sake) of

> government documents

>

> 118. Vice President Cheney shoots 78 year old lawyer Harry Whittington Feb.

> 11, 2006 during a quail hunt at the Armstrong ranch in Texas. The shooting

> is not reported until the next day and then by the ranch owner to a Corpus

> Christi reporter. Under pressure and despite his disdain for the press,

> Cheney finally breaks his silence Feb. 15 on Fox News. Any real

> investigation is smothered by the powerful Armstrong family (who by the way

> are the ones who set Cheney up in his job at Halliburton) and the story

> remains incomplete

>

> 119. Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System (ATS) database which

> makes a terrorist risk assessment on anyone traveling to or from the US by

> any means and keeps it for 40 years

>

> 120. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refuses to recuse himself from

> Cheney's appeal of a Sierra Club lawsuit to keep records of his 2001 Energy

> Task Force secret. Shortly after SCOTUS agreed to take up the case, Scalia

> flew with Cheney on Jan. 5, 2004 on Air Force Two to Louisiana for a duck

> hunting trip. Cheney stayed two days and Scalia four. June 24, 2004, SCOTUS

> decides 7-2 to send the case back to the district court for reconsideration

> of the government's separation of powers argument. Scalia and Thomas going

> further concurred and dissented thinking that the appellate court should

> have been the one to deny the Sierra Club's discovery request. May 1, 2005,

> the DC Court of Appeals dismisses the Sierra Club case holding that Cheney

> could keep the participation of oil companies in his Energy Task Force

> secret.

>

> 121. The Election Assistance Commission which was created to do election

> research after the 2000 election debacle issued a December 2006 report which

> changed the conclusions of its experts and exaggerated the problem of voter

> fraud. Previously, the Commission released a report only under Congressional

> pressure that indicated that voter ID programs suppressed voter turnout

> among minorities. The EAC also has oversight of voting machines and voting

> software in which it has failed.

>

> 122. Bush tried unsuccessfully to kill the confirmation of Mohammed

> ElBaradei to a third term as head of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy

> Agency). ElBaradei and the IAEA had stated in the runup to the Iraq war that

> the famous aluminum tubes were for rockets not centrifuges, that the Niger

> documents were fakes, that there was no evidence that Iraq was trying to

> reconstitute a nuclear program, and that the Iraqis had been cooperative

> with IAEA inspections. As part of the Bush campaign in 2005 to oust him, the

> NSA tapped his phones in an unsuccessful attempt to show he was being soft

> on Iran. John Bolton unsuccessfully lobbied for more aggressive surveillance

> of him. ElBaradei was reconfirmed and later that same year won the Nobel

> Peace Prize

>

> 123. Alice Fisher named to head the Criminal Division at the DOJ in a recess

> appointment, later confirmed September 19, 2006 (just before the Nov. 2006

> elections). A protegee of Michael Chertoff, she worked under him as deputy

> head of the Criminal Division but has no experience as a criminal

> prosecutor. She also worked on the Senate investigation into the Clinton era

> Whitewater scandal and was a lobbyist of HCA the healthcare company

> controlled by the family of the recent Republican Majority Leader Bill

> Frist. She has opposed rescinding the more gratuitous aspects of the Patriot

> Act, favored its extension unchanged, participated in discussions of abusive

> interrogation methods at Guantanamo, and reportedly has social ties to Tom

> Delay's defense team. Under her leadership, the investigation into

> Abramoff's many connections (some of which go back to Delay) has gone

> nowhere.

>

> 124. After being admonished 3 times by the House Ethics Committee in 2004,

> Tom Delay through Dennis Hastert had the Republican head of the committee

> replaced and staff fired. Ethics rules were also changed making it easier to

> kill ethics investigations. An initial provision to allow an indicted member

> of the House leadership to continue to hold his position was rescinded after

> negative publicity.

>

> 125. Collusion of the media: the NYT, WaPo, Time, Newsweek, cable and

> network news in the Bush disasters through silence, lack of investigation,

> and above all accepting uncritically whatever spin came out of the White

> House on anything

>

> 126. Failure of the Democratic Party to act as an opposition party for

> nearly 5 years

>

> 127. A supreme lack of oversight by a rubberstamping Republican Congress

> over the same 5 years

>

> 128. The use of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq to justify the Bush invasion and

> an ongoing US military presence there. The UN Resolutions it cites,

> including those sanctioning military force, are from the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

> The UN never passed a resolution that authorized the use of military force

> in the Second Gulf War. On June 28, 2004, the US returned sovereignty to the

> reconstituted state of Iraq and in doing so acknowledged that the Iraq

> referenced in the AUMF as well as the legal rationale for a US presence in

> (and occupation of) the country no longer existed.

> ....The AUMF placed Democrats in a political bind. Despite later

> protestations, they knew it meant war. Knowing this, they were faced with

> the following calculus. They could vote against the AUMF, but since Bush was

> going to war anyway they would be portrayed as unpatriotic and not

> supporting the troops. If the war was quick and successful, regardless of

> the merits of the case, they would be portrayed as weak and wrong. If they

> voted for, they might not get credit but they would avoid blame. Still some

> did vote no.

> ....The AUMF passed in the House October 10, 2002 by a vote of 296-133 with

> 3 not voting. 81 Democrats voted for the AUMF. 126 voted against it (with 1

> not voting). Only 6 Republicans voted against. It passed the Senate the next

> day with a vote of 77-23. 27 Democrats voted for it. 22 Democrats voted

> against, including Jeffords (I-VT). Only one Republican Lincoln Chafee

> (R-RI) voted against. Bush signed the AUMF into law on October 16, 2002.

> ....These are the Senate Democrats who voted for the AUMF:

> Baucus (D-MT)..................Edwards (D-NC)...................Nelson

> (D-NE)

> Bayh (D-IN)....................Feinstein (D-CA).................Reid

> (D-NV)

> Breaux (D-LA)..................Harkin

> (D-IA)....................Rockefeller (D-WV)

> Cantwell (D-WA)................Hollings (D-SC)..................Schumer

> (D-NY)

> Carnahan (D-MO)................Johnson (D-SD)...................Torricelli

> (D-NJ)

> Carper (D-DE)..................Kerry (D-MA)

> Cleland (D-GA).................Kohl (D-WI)

> Clinton (D-NY).................Lieberman (D-CT)

> Daschle (D-SD).................Lincoln (D-AR)

> Dodd (D-CT)....................Miller (D-GA)

> Dorgan (D-ND)..................Nelson (D-FL)

>

>

> 129. On December 14, 2004, President Bush awards the Medal of Freedom, the

> highest civilian honor, to General Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul

> Bremer for their efforts to create the disaster that Iraq has become.

> Richard Myers the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 2001-2005 received his for

> his part in this catastrophe on November 9, 2005 shortly after his

> retirement.

>

> 130. Real ID Act of 2005 mandates essentially a national identity card by

> forcing states to have nationally compatible driver's licenses. The program

> has multiple goals: facilitate surveillance and data mining and make it

> harder for illegal aliens to get jobs and for the poor to vote. On January

> 11, 2008, DHS head Michael Chertoff announced a deadline of May 2008 for

> states to seek a waiver for more time to comply or driver licenses from

> those states would not be accepted as evidence of identity for the purposes

> of air travel. The ACLU (for privacy reasons) and 17 states (for cost) have

> objected to the program.

>

> 131. Jose Padilla. This is not about a bad and deluded man, but rather that

> an American citizen held in the United States could be held for 3 1/2 years

> (May 8, 2002-January 3, 2006) outside the purview of American courts and

> tortured. He was transferred to the regular US legal system only because his

> case challenging Bush's power to declare him an illegal enemy combatant was

> wending its way to the Supreme Court. The transfer successfully pre-empted

> this when the Court declined April 3, 2006 to hear the case. The lack of a

> Supreme Court determination and passage of the Military Commissions Act mean

> that any American can still be declared an illegal enemy combatant and held

> indefinitely without charge, and if the MCA is to be believed (and unlike

> the Padilla case) without any right to habeas corpus.

> ....On May 14, 2007, Padilla who was initially accused of being a terrorist

> mastermind behind a plot to detonate a dirty bomb inside the US was put on

> trial for being a minor member of a conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim

> outside the US. Among the many dubious and disturbing aspects of this case:

> the length and nature of detention, his mental fitness to stand trial, the

> change in jurisdiction from military to civilian, and the major reduction in

> the scope of the charges and Padilla's role in them, the government claims

> it "lost" evidence, specifically a DVD of Padilla's last interrogation as an

> enemy combatant from March 2, 2004. On August 16, 2007, he and his

> codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi were found guilty on

> all counts. Despite virtually no concrete evidence against them, on August

> 16, 2007, he and his codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi

> were found guilty on all counts. On January 22, 2008, Padilla was sentenced

> to 17 years 4 months, Hassoun to 15 years and 8 months, and Jayyoussi to 12

> years 8 months.

>

> 132. National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005.

> This sets up a state by state but nationally compatible data base of

> prescribed controlled substances available to many agencies. The substances

> include not only painkillers taken for more than a couple days but also

> tranquillizers and sleeping pills.

>

> 133. Jean-Bertrand Aristide the President of Haiti who was certainly no Boy

> Scout was flown out of the country on February 29, 2004 in the midst of an

> insurrection that was not exactly opposed by the Bush Administration

> "willingly" according to American authorities, "kidnapped" according to

> Aristide.

>

> 134. Hugo Chavez the controversial President of Venezuela was briefly

> deposed in a military coup April 11, 2002. The Bush Administration initially

> recognized the interim government of Pedro Carmona the head of the national

> business federation and said that Chavez had brought the coup on himself.

> The coup collapsed and Chavez resumed power two days later on April 13,

> 2002. Later the Bush Administration condemned the coup.

>

> 135. Bush's ethanol program will not solve America's energy problems. It is

> a boon to corn state farmers and the politicians who represent them but

> depletes soil that would be better reserved for food production. Ethanol is

> also a carbon based fuel and contributes to global warming directly through

> its burning and indirectly through its production.

>

> 136. Post the November 2006 elections, the Senate Minority Leader Mitch

> McConnell has repeatedly used the filibuster to obstruct Congressional

> action. This has happened so far on Iraq resolutions (even some co-sponsored

> by Republicans), an intelligence bill requiring greater accountability, and

> a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This is

> especially egregious in light of the last Congress where then Republican

> Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist repeatedly threatened Democratic Senators

> contemplating a filibuster with the "nuclear option" of doing away with it

> by changing Senate rules.

>

> 137. The stacking of the federal judiciary with unqualified rightwing hacks.

> A bipartisan group of Senators known as the Gang of 14 (7 Democrats and 7

> Republicans) came together to avoid the nuclear option (the elimination of

> the Senate filibuster) and pushed through hyper-conservative judicial

> choices: Priscilla Owen to the 5th Circuit on May 25, 2005 (55-43), Janice

> Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit on June 8, 2005 (56-43), and William Pryor to

> the 11th Circuit on June 9, 2005 (53-45). No agreement could be made on two

> others: William Myers and Henry Saad. Their names were eventually withdrawn.

> ....The Gang of 14 was also responsible for the confirmation of Brett

> Kavanaugh (again to the important DC Circuit) on May 26, 2006 by a vote of

> 57-36. Kavanaugh was the most inexperienced candidate to the circuit in its

> more than 100 year history. He had no trial experience but had worked for

> essentially partisan causes: Kenneth Starr's investigations into Bill

> Clinton for 5 years, the 2000 Florida recount, and and the nomination and

> confirmation of unqualified, radically conservative candidates rather like

> himself as Associate Counsel in the Bush White House.

> ....On June 27, 2007, Senator Patrick Leahy sent a letter to Alberto

> Gonzales referring Kavanaugh to the DOJ for possible prosecution for a false

> statement he made during his confirmation hearings (still waiting for a

> response on that one, surprise). In his responding to a question by Senator

> Durbin (D-IL), Kavanaugh said he had taken no part in developing the

> Administration's policy with regard to enemy combatants. A June 25, 2007

> article in the Washington Post and an NPR report the following day indicated

> that he had taken part in at least one meeting on this subject in 2002.

>

> 138. Ralph "I need to start humping in corporate accounts" Reed led the

> Christian Coalition in the 1990s and was an associate of both Jack Abramoff

> and Grover Norquist. Abramoff funneled millions in 1999 and 2000 to Reed in

> exchange for Reed's mobilizing evangelicals in support of Abramoff's various

> schemes. These included: spiking an Alabama law which would have allowed

> gaming at dog tracks in competition with Choctaw casinos which were Abramoff

> clients; similar opposition to an Alabama state lottery; opposition to the

> Internet Gambling Prohibition Act (the rationale, a major stretch, was that

> it didn't go far enough) for his client eLottery; opposition to a Tigua

> casino in Texas to the benefit of his clients the Lousiana Coushatta; and

> then in 2002 persuading the Tigua that he Abramoff could use his connection

> to Reed to help them get back their casino. Reed was an indispensable cog in

> the Abramoff machine.

>

> 139. Aggressive proselytizing by Christian evangelical faculty and cadets at

> the US Air Force Academy. A report was issued June 2005 but it is not clear

> if much has changed. The USAF Academy also has a recurrent history of

> cheating and sexual assault.

>

> 140. The Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, an idea for those

> who don't believe in the separation of church and state or the Establishment

> Clause in the Constitution (First Amendment). A political and financial sop

> to rightwing Christians, the program has given no money to non-Christian

> groups. It is unclear how much money has actually gone through the program.

> The real problem is that any money should be distributed in this way.

> ....On June 25, 2007, SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in Hein, Director, White House Office

> of Faith Based and Community Initiatives et al v. Freedom from Religion

> Foundation, Inc. et al that taxpayers do not have standing to contest this

> spending in violation of the Establishment clause A) because they can not

> show direct harm and B) because Establishment challenges under Flast v.

> Cohen are only allowed if a specific Congressional statute is at issue.

> SCOTUS held that the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives had

> been created wholly within the Executive Branch and that no specific monies

> had been appropriated to it by Congressional statute so no challenge could

> be made. This is fairly squirrely reasoning (increasingly typical of the

> Roberts Court) because the money didn't just appear out of nowhere and what

> money the Congress does appropriate and how it is spent by the Executive

> must meet Constitutional requirements such as the Establishment Clause. In

> any case, the bottom line is that in the view of SCOTUS the Congress and/or

> another President are the ones to change this. Ordinary Americans need not

> apply.

>

> 141. Military disability ratings: A 30% rating is the cutoff between

> receiving payments, staying within the military healthcare system, and

> eligibility for family coverage and is now given out more rarely than before

> the beginning of the Iraq war, despite the large number of soldiers with

> severe injuries.

>

> 142. Earmarks: Special interest funding directed to a specific project by an

> individual legislator. The most famous example was Republican Senator Ted

> Stevens' $223 million for a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Earmarks exploded

> in number and expense under the Republicans. Bush only decided that there

> was something bad about them (nearly 6 years into his Presidency) when

> Democrats won control of the Congress.

>

> 143. Medicare privatization. This began in 1982 and grew throughout the

> 1990s with 17.3% of Medicare recipients enrolled in 1999 in private plans

> when it went into decline. Since the start of Medicare Part D (passed 2003,

> went into effect January 1, 2006), numbers have begun to rise again. One of

> the reasons for this increase is that they are being aggressively, and often

> unscrupulously, marketed to unsuspecting elders. In addition, private plans

> receive government subsidies to make them competitive with Medicare itself.

> This is money that could go to reducing Medicare premiums generally but

> instead goes to higher overhead and profits for private providers.

>

> 144. Signing of a nuclear cooperation deal with India December 18, 2006.

> This is another example of the Bush Administration and Congress's selective

> approach to nuclear non-proliferation. Israel's nuclear program is ignored.

> Iraq is, in part, invaded for a mythical program that existed only in the

> fevered imaginations of Cheney, Feith, Bush, and Rice. At the same time,

> nuclear moves in North Korea and Iran are opposed. Meanwhile the deal with

> India will allow it to dedicate some of its facilities completely to nuclear

> arms production.

>

> 145. Julie MacDonald, who has a degree in civil engineering and no

> background in the natural sciences, was named the Deputy Assistant Secretary

> for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the Interior Department on May 2004. She

> altered and reversed conclusions in scientific reports to prevent species

> from being protected. The Bush Administration to date has listed 58 species

> (54 as the result of litigation) as endangered as opposed to 512 in the

> Clinton years and 234 by the first President Bush. MacDonald also hired Todd

> Willens who worked with the former Republican Representative and

> anti-environmentalist Richard Pombo. According to a March 2007 Inspector

> General report, she also passed on internal department documents to the oil

> industry and land developers in contravention of federal rules and to aid

> filing of lawsuits against the department. In one instance she pushed to

> have an endangered species which lived on her farm in California's Central

> Valley (the Sacramento splittail fish) delisted. Facing oversight hearings,

> she resigned April 30, 2007.