Q. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have presided over a vast expansion of Presidential powers. Do you agree or disagree with that expansion and why?
Q. What should be done with the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?
According to the most recent ARG poll, a plurality of Republicans believe that President Bush is doing a good job.
The Bush Administration detains and abuses terrorism suspects, claiming they are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. The ACLU sues under the Freedom of Information Act to release photos of the abuse. Bush Administration lawyers refuse to release the photos, claiming that doing so would violate privacy rights guaranteed the terrorism suspects by the Geneva Conventions. Here.
Pretend you're a pharmacist. You don't like birth control. Someone comes in with a birth control prescription and you refuse to fill it, so the customer goes somewhere else. The owner of the pharmacy finds out that you do this kind of thing all the time, that you're costing him tens of thousands of dollars in business because those customers never come back and the word-of-mouth on the pharmacy is terrible. The owner suggests that maybe you should seek another line of work. Or, if not another line of work, at least another place to work.
President Bush is on the verge of issuing a fiat protecting those who refuse to do their jobs and screwing those who pay them to do their jobs.
The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.
This is an old argument, usually framed as an issue of patient rights. It plays out most dramatically in small towns across the heartland, from whence emerge horror stories of raped women seeking morning-after birth control and being denied by religious zealots with gleaming eyes.
But this is a broader issue as well: are we going to establish the principle that people can refuse to do their jobs because of their religious beliefs and still retain those jobs? And are we going to allow the President, alone, to make decisions about what beliefs and actions are protected?
One of the blind spots of conservatives during the Bush Administration has been an understanding that people like them aren't going to hold power forever. George W. Bush, whose boundless wisdom protects us without the restraint of pesky things like laws, will be gone. A mere mortal will occupy the seat of limitless power. The ability to negate laws with signing statements, arrest and hold "enemy combatants" without legal recourse, and the broad interpretation of executive privilege that Republicans have argued in favor of are one day going to be in the hands of people Republicans loathe.
And, eventually, someone's going to occupy the Oval Office who thinks it's a good idea to give vegetarians the right to work as grocery store checkers without having to handle meat, or protect worshipers of Gaia who shut down the ski lifts of the resorts where they work to prevent skiers from violating the mountain spirit.
If you empower government to protect people who refuse to do their jobs, more people are going to refuse to do their jobs. That may be great for those people, but it's bad for anybody with a customer to take care of. It's particularly bad for the small businesses that employ most of us, who need people to do the job in front of them and don't have a lot of other jobs and people to shuffle around to accommodate random religious beliefs.
This is not, as it's being postured from the right, a matter of religious discrimination -- except that President Bush wants to protect people who hold the same religious beliefs he does at the expense of people who don't. This is a fundamental question of government intrusion and Presidential power.
People are entitled to believe whatever they want to believe, but they aren't entitled to take whatever actions they want to take in the name of those beliefs. Every advocate of small government should object to the President's notion that he can do this kind of thing all on his own.
A good measure of how badly the Bush Administration has screwed up almost everything, it's worth noting that pending record federal deficits aren't even a campaign issue. Remember when deficits used to be important? Now they don't make it onto anyone's radar. Too many other things to worry about.
Still, after inflating the deficit to record levels early in his term and promising to cut it in half before he leaves, President Bush has apparently changed his mind. He's going to leave record deficits for the next guy to clean up: $490 billion.
This does not include, of course, the cost of the war, which is apparently not paid in real money.
If this is accurate, it's the most stunning example of the depravity of American politics and our culture of consumption I've seen:
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
So, to recap, a program designed to lower fuel prices so that rich people can continue to drive at discount prices wherever they damned well please in huge, mobile living rooms is raising the price of food so high that poor people can no longer afford to eat. The effect of that program is demonstrated in a report, but the report is not published because the powers-that-be would rather let poor people continue to starve than embarrass the the leading proponent of the program.
And here we are: we'd rather starve poor people than give up our big cars. Remind me again about what a good country the United States is.
I believe that when history writes the story of the Bush Administration, it's greatest failure will be it's obstinate unwillingness to confront the pathologies of petroleum dependence and the looming end of inexpensive oil. The President's utter obliviousness to that huge, underlying reality is going to set future historians to muttering, "How could he have been so stupid?" The poignant moment -- the scene that will be Page 1 of innumerable history books -- will be the moment after 9/11 when he stood up and told us all to go shopping.
We had just been attacked by people whose only power derived from the money we paid for the oil they sold us. Whatever response we made to the attack had to be tempered by our continuing to placate those people, to keep the oil flowing because the fashion of the day was outrageously large vehicles and cities constructed as if public transportation, walking and proximity were insults to God. President Bush could, in that moment, have launched a radical energy independence plan and every single one of us would have marched in lock-step toward the goal he set. He could have noted the obvious: that we need to liberate ourselves from the oil economy and it's pathologies, that we should lead the world away from the punk dictators and sheiks and mullahs and the vile Islamists we empower every time we pull up to the pump. If he'd have seized that moment we'd be seven years further down that inevitable road than we are now: nuclear plants would be coming on-line, millions of high-consumption vehicles would never have been bought, millions of McMansions wouldn't have been built, rail lines would be in place, wind farms and solar plants and new technology would be hooking up to the grid. We'd be consuming less and getting more for it, and our President wouldn't have to go to our enemies to beg for relief.
Instead, we got "go shopping" and a hallucinatory hydrogen economy and biofuels. Self-indulgence was what we wanted and self-indulgence is what our President gave us.
President Bush reminds me of the guy at the frat party who won't go sleep. Most everyone has left. The keg is empty. The last die-hards are staggering up to bed and there's the President, running around, gathering up the butt-ends of bottles and calling everyone else a lightweight and shouting that the party needs to go on.
And now, to protect the President from political embarrassment, someone has decided to bury a report that his policies are starving poor people to death. I honestly don't know how he can live with himself. If he were any kind of decent Christian he'd release the report himself, apologize for the unintended consequences of his policies, and do everything he could to help those in need. He won't do that, of course, but he should.
During the period when the Bush Administration abandoned America's more than 200 year policy of treating prisoners with decency, lawyers wrote briefs justifying activities that had been previously defined as war crimes. Viewing the evidence of that period now, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says:
"The guidance that was provided during this period of time, I think, will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities."
President Bush, in the days after 9/11, called upon his nation to fight terrorism by going shopping. Now, after all these years, he reveals that he, too, has sacrificed for the war:
“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
In 2005, Free Republic asked breathlessly:
President Bush is riding high and has secured at the very least his place in history as a great President. The only question remaining is will he leap ahead of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan in his remaining three years in office.
I'm thinking the answer is pretty safely "no".
One of the problems in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was Michael Brown, head of FEMA, whose pre-Bush Administration career had largely consisted of putting on horse shows. That background proved to not be great preparation for the management of the federal response to a huge natural disaster, but I guess you could let President Bush off the hook for that mistake by noting that there was no way to predict that Hurricane Katrina was going to hit. Still, lesson learned, right?
Wrong. This is the Bush Administration we're talking about here. These guys are lesson-immune.
With the economy teetering on the brink largely as a result of housing-related economic problems, President Bush's nominee to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development has a deep background in: lawn care and pest control. In other words, in the midst of a crisis in housing, he nominates to head a highly relevant cabinet department a guy with no experience whatsoever in housing.
Do you get the feeling President Bush isn't even trying anymore?
Recent revelations that the torture of prisoners was approved by, among others, the Vice President and National Security Adviser, imply a couple of interesting things about the Bush Administration.
First, it's clear that everyone involved knew that what they were doing was illegal. They went to great pains to insulate the President from the decision-making process. You'd have to be a fool to believe he didn't know about it, but they built plausible deniability into the process from the outset so that, if word got out, the President couldn't be impeached or charged with war crimes. They used the same basic structure as the Mafia: everything flowed through a consiglieri who could be thrown overboard to protect the don.
Attempting to hide actions is, in the law, taken as evidence that those involved in the actions knew what they were doing was illegal. They knew.
Secondly, they didn't care. They didn't make a public case that their actions were necessary; they didn't try to change the law. They didn't give a damn about the law. They just went ahead and authorized the committing of various crimes. They applied some cartoonish legal logic to the situation, generating a paper trail of their justification that the Commander-in-Chief had the power to do whatever he wanted -- ignore laws, abrogate treaties, toss out the Constitution -- even as they constructed a system in which the Commander-in-Chief was uninvolved.
There is a pattern of behavior over on the far right of seeing the public and the Congress as the enemies of the state. Certain terrible things must be done to sustain the Republic, things the public hasn't the courage to bear and that Congress would meddle in and ruin. That was Ollie North's justification for lying and destroying evidence of Reagan Administration crimes, and the belief is apparently alive and well in the Bush White House: the nation needs an elite, operating in secret, empowered to do whatever it thinks necessary to protect we, the people, from our own decent and humane tendencies.
This is the country that the Bush Administration will leave behind: a former shining city on a hill now committed to torture and dismissive of the rule of law as a weakness. This is the country that every single one of the Republican Presidential candidates argued in favor of. This is not an aberration; it's the fulfillment of the Republican vision. This is the country Republicans think we should be.
