And then MAYBE Billary doubling my tax burden and forcing socialization upon me! (IF elected)

tax the grandkids... fark it

Ah hell, we don't need the money...give it to the poor, uneducated ILLEGALS!

what money?

Bush: Boost economy in 'period of uncertainty'
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/28/sotu.main/index.html

...duuh... we pushed it over the cliff and we're uncertain about when it'll hit bottom....

The president, speaking about one of his signature programs, urged Congress to continue the No Child Left Behind Act, saying, "no one can deny its results."

Republicans enthusiastically applauded. Several Democrats, who disagree, could be heard laughing at Bush's conclusion.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080129/ap_on_...M.WyMNrq5is0NUE

Here's your question, class:

In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here's your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That's right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12486

Feds let states delay inspections of bad bridges
Loophole allows giving infrequent checkups to spans in poor condition
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22300234/

George W. Bush Is a Criminal, Like His Dad
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12549

Watching Attorney General Michael Mukasey evade the obvious fact that waterboarding is torture – and the reluctance of Democrats to press him – I was reminded of how the first President Bush got away with an earlier batch of national security crimes.

Indeed, one of the common questions I’ve been asked over the years is – if the evidence really does show that the Reagan-Bush crowd was guilty of illegal dealings with Iran, Iraq and the Nicaraguan contras – why didn’t the Democrats hold those Republicans to account?

For people who have posed that question, I would suggest that they watch the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Jan. 30 hearing with Mukasey. Everybody in the room knew what the unspoken reality was, but nobody dared say it: George W. Bush authorized torture, which is a crime under U.S. and international law.

However, if the Attorney General – the highest-ranking law-enforcement officer in the United States – recognized the obvious, he would have to either commence legal action against President Bush or send a referral to Congress for the initiation of impeachment proceedings.

If such a referral were sent to Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have little choice but to permit the start of impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee. A wide range of Bush’s illegal actions would then begin spilling out, provoking a political crisis in the United States.

Not only do Bush’s allies want to avoid that possibility but so do Democratic congressional leaders. They fear an impeachment battle would boomerang, putting them on the spot with both angry Republicans and a hostile Washington news media.

On Dec. 20, 2007, Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now” that impeachment hearings could end up like Watergate in reverse, with today’s careerist press corps treating the notion of accountability for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney like some kind of nutty idea.

“There is a very stark reality that with the corporatization of the media, we could end up with turning people, who should be documented in history as making many profound errors and violating the Constitution, from villains into victims,” the Michigan Democrat said.

So, Democratic senators weren’t all that upset when Mukasey mumbled through a variety of obfuscations.

Orwell Reference

At one point, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, even made a George Orwell reference in noting that Mukasey’s discussion about the criminality of waterboarding had “melted into the abstract.”

Mukasey responded: “We could engage in a discussion. It would not be a concrete and factual discussion because we would be talking about if this, if that, if the other.”

When Whitehouse called Mukasey’s answer “totally not credible” because Bush administration officials already have acknowledged that CIA interrogators did use waterboarding against several terror suspects, Mukasey continued:

“All of that depends on whether certification was given and whether it was permissibly relied on and it should not turn on one person’s current view of what the (anti-torture) statute requires or doesn’t require.”

Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor, rejected that explanation too, noting that “there is no Nuremberg defense built into the criminal statute,” meaning that authorization from President Bush or some other senior official would not make torture legal.

However, Whitehouse, like other Democrats, finished his questioning with praise of Mukasey for taking a variety of steps to shield the Justice Department from the Bush administration’s political pressure.

Still, on the most sensitive issue to Bush – his assertion that he possesses unlimited presidential powers that let him violate criminal laws and ignore constitutional protections – Mukasey was as much in lock step with the administration as his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.

The only significant difference was that the more mature Mukasey, a former federal judge, was less smug in his treatment of the senators than Gonzales had been. For their part, the committee Democrats seemed eager to look to the future.

“So today we continue the restoration of the [Justice] Department,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.

But that “restoration” apparently will not include holding the President and Vice President accountable for authorizing the commission of felonies – in permitting the torture of terror suspects, in ordering warrantless wiretaps of Americans, in exposing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, etc.

Not Good at Confrontation

The Democrats adopted a similar see-no-evil posture from late 1992 through the Clinton years when evidence surfaced about serious crimes committed by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and some of their subordinates.

Like Marty McFly’s father in “Back to the Future,” the Democrats weren’t very good at “confrontation.”

So, when evidence implicated George H.W. Bush on issues ranging from the Iran-Contra cover-up and secret military support for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to Nicaraguan contra drug trafficking and a politically motivated search of Bill Clinton’s passport files, the Democrats averted their eyes and slinked away from a fight.

In December 1992 and January 1993, for instance, evidence poured in to a House task force that was investigating the so-called October Surprise controversy, whether the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign had gone behind President Jimmy Carter’s back and contacted Iranian mullahs while Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage.

Carter’s failure to resolve that hostage crisis doomed his re-election and touched off Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory. Plus, Iran’s release of the hostages as Reagan was taking the oath of office gave Reagan an aura of heroism that has continued to this day.

In a December 2007 campaign ad, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani cited Reagan’s supposed toughness with terrorists as the reason the Iranians suddenly freed the hostages after a 444-day standoff.

“They released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing” today, Giuliani said. “The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as President of the United States.

“The best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t back down.” [NYT, Dec. 6, 2007]

But the House task force was learning a different reality in December 1992, as witnesses came forth and documents surfaced indicating that Reagan campaign operatives, including then vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, had engaged in their own secret diplomacy in 1980, promising a swap of arms for the hostages.

Among this new evidence:

--Former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr sent the task force a detailed letter describing the Iranian infighting that had occurred around this Republican overture and how Iran’s most radical elements favored a deal with the Reagan-Bush team.

--The biographer for French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches recounted how deMarenches had confessed his role in arranging secret meetings in Paris, a statement that was corroborated by several other French intelligence operatives.

--Former CIA officer Charles Cogan described a meeting in early 1981 at which Joseph Reed, an aide to banker David Rockefeller, boasted to then CIA Director William Casey about their success in thwarting President Carter’s hoped-for October Surprise of a pre-election hostage release.

So Startling

The new evidence was so startling that the task force’s chief counsel Lawrence Barcella approached chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, with a request that the investigation be extended a few months so the new information could be evaluated.

Barcella told me during an interview in 2004 that Hamilton rejected the request for an extension.

The task force then finished up work on a report that reached the opposite conclusion from what the new evidence indicated. The task force report claimed there was no credible evidence to support the long-standing allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign had interfered with the 1980 hostage crisis.

The task force maintained this conclusion by hiding away much of the new evidence. (I discovered some of this evidence in 1994-95 when I gained access to boxes containing the raw files of the task force.)

In January 1993, however, there was one more surprise for the October Surprise task force. After its report was already at the printers, the Russian government responded to an earlier request for information about what its intelligence files showed about secret U.S. contacts with Iran.

On Jan. 11, 1993, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow forwarded to Hamilton a translated version of the Russian report, which stated that Soviet intelligence was aware of secret meetings between Republicans and Iranian officials that had occurred in Madrid and Paris during the 1980 presidential campaign.

Among the Republican operatives menioned by the Russians were George H.W. Bush, William Casey and Robert Gates, who was then a senior CIA official and who is now U.S. Defense Secretary. The Russian report flatly contradicted the findings of the House task force, which were to be released two days later, on Jan. 13, 1993.

Despite this extraordinary example of Russian-U.S. cooperation – and the stunning assertions of Republican guilt – Hamilton’s task force simply stuffed the Russian report into one of the file boxes.

There was no mention of the Russian report or other contradictory evidence when the task force report was issued, or when Hamilton wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “Case Closed,” which relegated the October Surprise suspicions to the loony bin of conspiracy theories.

In 2004, I asked Barcella about the Russian report and why it hadn’t been released. He explained that it was a classified document and that the task force decided not to undertake the necessary steps to arrange for its declassification.

A more likely explanation was that the Democrats wanted to avoid a nasty fight with Republicans over the Reagan-Bush legacy. In early 1993, the Democrats, especially President Bill Clinton, saw a battle over history as a distraction from his domestic priorities. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Clinton adopted a tolerant attitude, too, toward George H.W. Bush’s unprecedented decision on Christmas Eve 1992 to pardon six Iran-Contra defendants (another scandal which implicated Bush and could be viewed as a sequel to the October Surprise case).

Clinton was equally disinterested when new evidence emerged in 1996 about Bush’s role in the Iraq-gate arming of Saddam Hussein, and in 1998 when the CIA’s inspector general compiled damning evidence on how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected drug traffickers linked to the Nicaraguan contras.

Instead of demanding the truth about these crimes and holding people accountable, the Clinton administration found it easier to sweep these unpleasant matters under the rug. One of Clinton’s rewards was a cozy relationship with the senior George Bush.

Now, the congressional Democrats seem to taking a similarly permissive approach toward the crimes of the junior George Bush.

so when he came into office, there was too much money, so he had to give a bunch away...

NOW there's not enough, so he has to give a bunch away.

understand?

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/01/news/econo...dex.htm?cnn=yes

remote controlled retards

Bush sends Congress $3.1 trillion budget
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/04/bus...t.ap/index.html

President Bush introduced a $3.1 trillion budget on Monday that supports sizable increases in military spending to fight the war on terrorism and protects his signature tax cuts.

The spending proposal, which shows the government spending $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history, squeezes most of government outside of national security, and also seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Even with those savings, Bush projects that the deficits, which had been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.

The man is just an embarassment. Piss away a trillion dollars rewarding every crooked Republican with a Mercedes full of cash and he's worried about the costs of the book.

Did They Reveal the Absence of Confessions?
Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was commission member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the 9/11 Commission, telling the Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): "This investigation is now compromised." Even former FBI director Louis Freeh wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there are inaccuracies in the commission's report and "questions that need answers."

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly, once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered--or mis-answered--questions.

On the second day of this new year, Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation: "What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the President, to investigate one of the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction."

In their book, Kean and Hamilton wrote that they were unable to obtain "access to star witnesses in custody who were the only possible source for inside information about the 9/11 plot."

The only information the commission was permitted to have about what was learned from interrogations of alleged plot ringleaders, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, came from "thirdhand" sources. The commission was not permitted to question the alleged plotters in custody or even to meet with those who interrogated the alleged plotters. Consequently, write Kean and Hamilton, "We had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information" that was fed to them by third party hands. "How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling us the truth?"

The fact that video tapes of the interrogations existed was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission.

The video tapes have since been destroyed. The destruction of the videos has become an issue because of White House involvement in the decision to destroy the tapes and because the videos are believed to have been destroyed because they reveal methods of torture that the Bush administration denies using.

According to President Bush, the US does not practice torture even though he and his Department of Justice (sic) assert the right to torture.

Is the torture issue a red herring? The 9/11 Commission was not tasked with investigating interrogation methods or detainee treatment. The commission was tasked with investigating al Qaeda's participation in the 9/11 attack and determining the perpetrators of the terrorist event. There was no reason to withhold from the commission video evidence of confessions implicating al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Was the video evidence withheld from the 9/11 Commission because the alleged participants in the plot did not confess, did not implicate al Qaeda, and did not implicate bin Laden?

There is no reason for the Bush administration to fear the torture issue. The Justice Department's memos have legalized the practice, and Congress has passed legislation, signed by President Bush, giving retroactive protection to US interrogators who tortured detainees. The Military Commissions Act passed in September 2006 and signed by Bush in October 2006 strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva Conventions: "No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights." Other provisions of the act strip detainees of speedy trials and of protection against torture and self-incrimination. The law has a provision that retroactively protects torturers against prosecution for war crimes.

Did the Bush administration cleverly take advantage of the torture claims in order to spin the destruction of the CIA video tapes as a "torture story." It is conceivable that the tapes were destroyed because they reveal the absence of confession to the plot. As Kean and Hamilton ask, without evidence how do we know the truth?

All we have is the word of the administration that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that, while sitting on a NIE report that concluded that Iran had terminated its weapons program in 2003, told us that Iran had an ongoing nuclear weapons program and was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02042008.html

hmmm

In Fiscal Year 2006, the U. S. Government spent $406 Billion on interest payments to the holders of the National Debt.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion

Congressional analysis puts cost of Iraq war at $2 billion a week ...Sep 28, 200

Exxon is reporting record profits of more than $40 billion

From a Republic to a Monty Python Parrot: Bush and Congress Transform America

When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, we haven't. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it is an ex-republic. You still get to vote, your elected representatives still get to legislate, at least whenever Senate majority leader Harry Reid gets permission from minority leader Mitch McConnell to pass something other than gas, but the fundamental balance that defines a republic is gone.

Two recent executive actions against the Constitution highlight the situation. The first was the president's use of his signing statement on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 to flatly deny the Congressional power of the purse, refusing to acknowledge the authority of Congress to prohibit him from using money for purposes other than specified in the appropriation, in this instance building permanent bases in Iraq or controlling Iraq's oil. The second was the declaration by CIA director Michael Hayden that the US has used waterboarding against terrorism suspects and reserves the right to do so again.

The Constitution is explicit on the matter of money: "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law." But Congress declined to challenge the president's reservation of authority to do just that. The strongest response from Democratic leaders was Nancy Pelosi's statement that "I reject the notion in his signing statement that he can pick and choose which provisions of this law to execute. His job, under the Constitution, is to faithfully execute the law - every part of it - and I expect him to do just that."

Or?

Waterboarding is often described as "simulated drowning", but there's nothing simulated about it. If you keep pouring water into someone's lungs, they will drown. Interrupting and restarting the process doesn't make it "simulated;" only incomplete. Waterboarding is torture. Torture is illegal under US and international law. The director of the CIA has just told Congress that yes, the US does torture and will again if the president thinks doing so is appropriate.

The reaction from Congress? Republican Kit Bond said he would strip a provision from pending legislation that would limit legal interrogation techniques to those described in the Army field manual, which don't include waterboarding. Among Democrats, the strongest response came from Senator Dick Durbin, who demanded that Attorney general Michael Mukasey "investigate the instances in which the Administration has used waterboarding to determine whether any laws were violated," a demand that tactily accepts Mukasey's contention that the practice is legal under some circumstances and that Mukasey has now summarily rejected on the basis that his predecessor already established that it was legal.

You tell 'em, Senator.

There cannot be more than a handful of people in Congress who genuinely believe waterboarding isn't torture. The rest either support the use of torture or are afraid to take the actions necessary to put that genie back in the bottle. But make no mistake: at least 400 members of Congress know that president Bush and other high-ranking administration officials are legitimate, documented, self-confessed war criminals, and they're not going to do a damned thing about it.

So that's the situation: the administration commit war crimes with impunity (and immunity), and Congress does nothing. The administration repeatedly reserves the right to break the law, and Congress does nothing. The administration asserts the right to misappropriate federal funds, and Congress does nothing. This is not a republic. Congress has voluntarily surrended to the president something that doesn't belong to them: our franchise.

Life hasn't changed overnight. What has changed is that responsibility for decisions on the disposition and treatment of enemies of the state, as defined by the state in the person of the president, has been transfered from the legal system to the personal discretion of a small group of players. What has changed is that Congress has abdicated the power to legislate in the arena of national security. What has changed is that the law is no longer the defining characteristic of this country.

Maybe that's no big deal. Sure seems as though it ought to be.

http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1833

http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegro...e_of_the_U5.jpg

that's a keeper.

No Funds in Bush Budget For Troop-Benefits Plan
He Made Proposal in January Speech
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews

President Bush drew great applause during his State of the Union address last month when he called on Congress to allow U.S. troops to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. "Our military families serve our nation, they inspire our nation, and tonight our nation honors them," he said.

A week later, however, when Bush submitted his $3.1 trillion federal budget to Congress, he included no funding for such an initiative, which government analysts calculate could cost $1 billion to $2 billion annually.

Boulder weighs 'impeach Bush'
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008...s-impeach-bush/

Boulder's elected leaders are expected to decide next week whether to draft and vote on a resolution calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

For the past few weeks, activists have been showing up at Boulder City Council meetings, carrying signs, handing out "impeach" pins and asking City Council members to take up such a resolution. Similar measures have passed in cities across the country, including Detroit and Telluride.

Liz Robinson, one of the organizers of the effort, said people hoping to see impeachment proceedings have given congressional Democrats — who won a majority in the fall of 2006 — plenty of time to act.

But since they haven't, she said, locally elected officials should take up the slack.

There were a coupla lib ladies gathered around the tv in anticipation...best get some popcorn and join 'em.

It's great Boulder has a national policy, because it must mean all their local problems have been solved.

Maybe his name really is Orville Reddenbacher.

Have some popcorn.

Ah yes The People's Republic of Boulder. Colorado's version of "Bezerkley".

They solve their local problems the old fashioned way - they legislate against change. They were concerned about dealing with the problems of growth in the city of Boulder. So they passed a law - no more new buildings within the city limits. Towns around them grew up to their borders, and property there is affordable. In Boulder what exists just gets more and more expensive - and a few folks can no longer afford to live there. So they move out and the property goes to seed - because you can't re-build it. No tenancy - no taxes. Hmmmmm....

They once declared themselves a Nuclear Free Zone. (Ignoring the Boeing facility there that supports various defense programs - they need the tax base) Never did address the problems of dental and hospital X-ray machines. Hmmmm....

Or as one local satirical columnist put it envisioning a Boulder in the next century (and this guy's a full blown liberal, self-professed), they would still be in their 132nd year of trying to disassociate themselves with Ward Churchill and failing. Hmmmm....

Other than that "The Hill" is a neat sort of place as is the 16th Street Mall - great to visit. To live there? Hmmmm....

It's funny how many leftwing cities aren't affordable for the common peeps that lefties are always pretending to help.





Berkely did a little soul searching when there started to be talk of taking federal funds away.

FEMA Trailers are Toxic, CDC Says Residents Must be Moved
http://www.newsinferno.com/archives/2572

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers are indeed toxic, and Gulf Coast hurricane victims still living in the formaldehyde-filled FEMA trailers should be moved out of the structures as soon as possible, federal health officials said yesterday. The urgent plea came from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) after tests it conducted revealed that residents of the toxic FEMA trailers were being exposed to at least five times the level of formaldehyde found in typical homes. In the worst FEMA trailers, formaldehyde levels were nearly 40 times customary exposure levels, raising fears that residents could contract respiratory problems.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, thousands of those made homeless moved into FEMA trailers, and thousands of people continue to live in the temporary housing. By 2006 FEMA was getting reports from field workers that residents where getting sick from the air in the toxic trailers. The first suspect was formaldehyde, which is used in the manufacture of the trailers. But FEMA tried to ignore the problem. E-mails uncovered last summer during a congressional investigation into the trailers showed that FEMA lawyers told the agency to drag its feet on air quality testing. FEMA’s Office of General Council also advised the agency not to test the trailers because doing so “would imply FEMA’s ownership of the issue”.

Rapid FEMA Trailer Evacuations Urged
U.S. Health Officials Say Toxic Levels Of Formaldehyde Found In Trailers
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/...in3830408.shtml




rapid? pssst!! ITS 2008!! how long these people been in them?

trapped like rats by heckofajob bush FEMA

file under WTF

FEMA to Continue Trailer Distribution
http://buzzflash.net/story.php?id=40752

This morning, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that FEMA trailers were found to contain formaldehyde, and in levels 40 times higher than customary exposure levels. Due to the risks of exposure to this poisonous substance, CDC urged all disaster victims living in one of those trailers to move out immediately. However, shortly after and on this same day, FEMA announced it was sending the same formaldehyde-laden trailers for recent tornado victims to reside in.

heckofajob

You have chosen to ignore all posts from: inyerface.

Doesn't this guy ever shut up?

http://www.allhatnocattle.net/2-26-08_carrying_water.htm

featuring inyer

Pakistani military 'misspent up to 70% of American aid'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/pakistan.usa

...American officials processing the payments at the US embassy in Islamabad have concluded that the Pakistani expense claims have been vastly inflated, two western military officials have told the Guardian. "My back of envelope guesstimate is that 30% of the money they requested to be reimbursed was legitimate costs they had expended," said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said that the US did not know what had happened to the remaining 70% of the funds - amounting to approximately $3.8bn....




plenty more where that came from

Bush finds out about $4 gas forecasts
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/28/news/econo...dex.htm?cnn=yes



d'oh!

Democrats and their formulations, at fault yet again.