Convicting Bush and Cheney, How To

The Last Word For 2008

Bush Giveth And Then Taketh Away

How very awkward. And how very typical. On December 24, Preznit Bush suddenly became concerned about appearances and revoked a pardon he gave New York real estate developer Isaac Toussie the day before, after reports surfaced that Toussie’s family gave almost $40,000 to Republicans.

Of course, the White House mouthpiece immediately took the story through a muddy spin cycle:

White House press secretary Dana Perino said neither Bush nor counsel Fred Fielding was aware of the GOP contributions from the father of Isaac Robert Toussie, who had been convicted of mail fraud and of making false statements to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Perino said Bush had also been unaware of other aspects of the Toussie case that were revealed in news reports yesterday.

"Looking at the totality of the case, more could have been described to the president," Perino said. "The political contributions certainly were not known. It raises the appearance of impropriety, so the president prudently decided not to go through with the pardon."

Now that is one gigantic humdinger for those with short memories. "More could have been described to the president." This is the man, you will recall, who as Governor decided to reject Texas death row pleas for clemency on extremely short, incomplete, flawed memos from Alberto Gonzalez that routinely omitted information about possible innocence or rehabilitation while incarcerated. As The Atlantic wrote in 2003,

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales—now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee—prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand.

So, yeah, the Preznit could have known more about Toussie. But it didn't matter before that the Preznit (as governor) regularly denied clemency on inaccurate and incomplete information, not when 152 people's actual lives were on the line, and that "more could have been described to the Preznit" when he made those decisions. Those denials of clemency (and the resulting 152 executions) somehow didn't have an "appearance of impropriety." To the contrary, appearances didn't matter at all to George W. Bush. Take Karla Fay Tucker as an example:

In the year following her execution, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson questioned Governor Bush about how the Board of Pardons and Parole had arrived at the determination on her clemency plea. Carlson alleged that Bush, alluding to a televised interview which Karla Faye Tucker had given to talk show host Larry King, smirked and spoke mockingly about her:

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, "A number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker." "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them", he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, 'What would you say to Governor Bush?'" "What was her answer?" I wonder. "'Please,'" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'" I must have looked shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.

That wasn't an "appearance of impropriety."

And then we have the question whether the Preznit can revoke a pardon once he's actually granted it. I have seen no precedent that a pardon once granted can be revoked:

Under the Constitution, the president's power to issue pardons is absolute and cannot be overruled — meaning he can forgive anyone he wants, at any time.

Perino said she did not know of another instance of a pardon reversal in "recent memory," but that the White House couldn't say for sure it never had happened before.

Source. In other words, once again Bush has taken the executive branch into legal areas it's never blundered into before.

There is, of course a reason why the White House spin cycle waffles around on the topic of revoking the pardon, claiming instead that "the president decided not to go through with the pardon." Perino would have you believe that the pardon was still in process, that it hadn't actually been granted yet. But that apparently is not the case. Counsel for Toussie, who knows the process and was remarkably successful at it, apparently thought the pardon was a done deal:

Berenson said in a statement that Toussie "is deeply grateful that both the Counsel to the President and the President himself found Mr. Toussie's pardon application to have sufficient merit to be granted."

And obviously, the Preznit doesn't have to revoke a pardon if he hasn't granted one. Ooops.

Why does that matter? It's a matter of due process of law. When the government has given somebody something, whether that something is a right or a privilege, if taking it away imposes a grievous loss, there has to be procedural due process involved in the taking. Examples abound. If someone receives certain government benefits, s/he is entitled to a hearing before those benefits can be taken away. If someone is on parole, s/he is entitled to a hearing before parole can be revoked and taken away. The same for probation. Once a conditional liberty has been granted, it requires procedural process of some kind to end it. On the other hand, if the decision to grant parole has not actually been made, and the process of evaluation is continuing, no procedural due process may be required. So, if the Preznit actually issued a pardon, the recipient is entitled to a hearing before it can be taken away. Did the Preznit actually grant the pardon? Apparently he did.

How ugly. This preznit has been an expert at exercising powers he doesn't actually have (examples include torture, signing statements, domestic surveillance, illegal extraditions, etc). Here's a power he actually has, the pardon power, an unreviewable power of the executive, and he cannot exercise it properly. He grants it, he illegally revokes it. He giveth, he taketh away.

Failure, thy name is Bush.

OMG! Bush Isn't A Bible Literalist

Well you sure could have fooled me. And a million Bible Thumpers. And probably most of the Republican Party. And certainly all of the so-called "social conservatives." Raw Story reports (with video in the story):

George W. Bush's recent statement that he believes the Bible is "probably not" literally true has apparently left many Christian conservatives reeling in shock.

David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network told CNN"s John Roberts on Thursday, "I think a lot of social conservative evangelicals were surprised -- probably grabbing the smelling salts as we speak."

Bush made the controversial statement during a Monday interview on ABC's Nightline. When asked whether he thinks the Bible is literally true, he replied, "Probably not. No, I'm not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it." ...snip

Bush further stated in the interview, "I think that God created the Earth ... and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution."

Woah. Just hold on there, Nellie. You have to wonder whether he's drinking. I don't know how you can square Genesis with evolution. Genesis says the world and all of its creatures were created in a week. That's why dinosaurs and cavemen romped together. Evolution takes a little longer. So there's a small problem. Call it a contradiction between the two.

So how, you might ask, can Commander Codpiece tell us the two aren't "incompatible?" I'll tell you. In Bush world, there's no logic. There's just repetition and saying what, you know, his gut tells him, after looking somebody in the eye, tells him to say.

I cannot wait for January 20. What's more, the nation can't either.

My Computer Speaks To Me

h/t to Edger

Let The Games Begin!

Lost in the July 3 rush to start July 4th partying is the Commander Athlete in Chief's announcement that he will support the athletes by attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. This direct, single digit salute to people who care about human rights in China and who are concerned about the continuing genocide in Darfur, was delivered to avoid outcry. Put another way, it reeks of cowardice.

The New York Times reports:

The White House said Thursday that President Bush would attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics next month, a decision fraught with international political symbolism that quickly drew criticism from advocates for human rights.

The advocates have been pressing world leaders to boycott the Olympics or at least skip the opening ceremonies to protest China’s violent crackdown after riots in Tibet and its support for the government of Sudan, whose Darfur region remains enmeshed in violence.

The leaders of Britain and Germany have said they will skip the opening ceremonies. For some time, the White House has said that Mr. Bush will attend the Games, but has refused to provide further details.

That changed late on Thursday afternoon. With most of official Washington already gone for the Fourth of July holiday, the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, issued a simple statement outlining Mr. Bush’s August travel schedule, including the notation that he would go to the opening ceremonies.

The president's press secretary mouthpiece, who gives frequent evidence of being both utterly tone deaf and unable to distinguish facts from opinions, explained in an interview:

“This is a decision by the president that he really wanted to go in support of our athletes,” Ms. Perino said in an interview. Asked if Mr. Bush was making a political statement, she said, “He does not look at it that way, but we recognize that others may.”

Support? At the opening ceremony? The opening ceremony is just a parade dressed up like a Super Bowl Halftime.

And he doesn't look at it as a political statement? I know the administration considers bike riding and brush cutting more important than foreign policy and genocide, but come on. This isn't an athletic event; it's a propaganda display. Someone more talented than I in inventing fiction should have a go at explaining this. Personally, I think it heralds a proliferation of magnetic ribbons in red, white and blue saying, "Support Our Troops Athletes." Were there huge, unsold surpluses? But I digress.

Other world leaders, of course, aren't attending. Gordon Brown of the UK will attend the closing ceremony to pick up the torch, which is headed next for London. Germany's Angela Merkel will not attend. France's Nicolas Sarkozy was thinking about it, until China told him not to bother. It goes without saying that the Dalai Lama isn't attending.

The reaction to the announcement, to no one's surprise, was negative:

The White House announcement drew a rebuke from officials at Save Darfur, a nonprofit organization that accuses China, Sudan’s biggest trading partner, of failing to use its influence to stop fighting between rebels and militias in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have been killed, according to published mortality surveys, and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in what the White House terms a genocide.

“We are deeply disappointed,” the coalition’s president, Jerry Fowler, said.

On Capitol Hill, some lawmakers, led by two representatives — Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii, and Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California — have urged a boycott of the Games. In a telephone interview from California, Mr. Rohrabacher accused the president of timing the announcement so that reaction from members of Congress would be muted.

“I think that a president who has said we are conducting warfare in different parts of the world in order to promote democracy and human rights loses credibility when he announces that he is going to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in a country that is the world’s worst human rights abuser,” Mr. Rohrabacher said.

And what, you might want to ask, is attendance by the Athlete in Chief designed to tell the world? That the US is a wholly owned, corporate subsidiary of Wal-mart Beijing? That Disney-ification is more important than human suffering? That Human Rights is a meme the US will claim to invade and kill for, but only when there's oil or some other economic reason? That the Athlete in Chief remains a petulant fratboy who wants to go to the party, and that's all there is to it?

Personally, I'm ever so slightly outraged. I don't have to stand for this. Nor do you. The Fourth of July isn't about hiding and being sneeky. It's about independence and, dare I say it, human rights. Let's celebrate. Let's get out those credit cards and make lots and lots of small donations to organizations who really need our help to respond to this embarrassing set back:

Save Darfur

International Campaign For Tibet

Human Rights Watch

El Presidente Repeals Law Of Supply And Demand

This past week we were all treated to a proposed executive repeal of the venerable Law of Supply and Demand by McCain and Clinton. Today, not to be undone, El Presidente made it clear that they were too late, he had already issued an executive order nullifying the Law of Supply and Demand. And by golly, he was going to take credit for that.

According to Bloomberg:

Hillary Clinton and John McCain are both pushing a ``gas-tax holiday'' to give consumers an 18.4- cent-a-gallon price break. Clinton says the plan will take excess profits from oil companies. McCain says it will help families buy school supplies.

Economists have a different take: They say the oil companies may end up the biggest beneficiaries, while the aid to families wouldn't be enough to buy a $35 backpack.

The trouble with the plan, they say, is that oil prices are rising because of low supplies, and companies will continue to charge the average $3.60 a gallon and just pocket the money that would have gone to federal taxes.

And this doesn't even mention that old bugaboo, the Law of Supply and Demand, which holds that decreasing price usually stimulates consumption. This is that Law: If a bottle of beer was $2 and now it's $1, wouldn't you consider having 2 instead of one? So the proposal, supposedly decreasing the price, would lead to greater oil consumption and then, uh oh, higher prices.

Fortunately, Barack Obama called bullshit on the proposal:

Slamming Clinton’s support for the gas tax holiday, [Obama] accused her of pandering to voters instead of offering a real solution to the energy problem.

“In a moment of candor, her advisers actually admitted that it wouldn’t have much of an effect on gas prices. But, they said, it’s a great political issue for Senator Clinton. So this is not about getting you through the summer, it’s about getting elected,” Obama argued. “This is what passes for leadership in Washington, phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.”

Obama said that a Clinton has deployed a surrogate, who is also lobbyist for Shell Oil, to pitch the gas tax holiday to voters. “It’s a shell game, literally,” Obama said. Some economists have said that the gas tax holiday may increase profits for the oil companies, as demand may rise with the reduction in price. The campaign said Obama was referring to Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist for Shell Oil and a Clinton supporter.

2 points for a pun to Obama. And this doesn't even begin to touch the repeated calls on Righwing Talk Radio for a reduction not only of the federal gas tax, but also the state gas taxes. This might add up in New York to the munificent sum of $40 cents per gallon, enough to reduce the price of regular gas from $3.65 to $3.20, reducing the price of a usual 15 gallon fill up from about $54.75 to $48.00, a saving of precisely $6.75 per fill up. Whoop de F*ckin doo. I bet that will buy a lot of stuff. I bet that will really relieve your budget pressure. And let's completely omit that the Treasury needs the money from these taxes to build highways and roads. Where is that going to come from?

Not to be undone by the arrant stupidity of the gas tax proposals, the MBA-in-chief today pointed out in his weekly radio address that the candidates were too late to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand. Way too late. El Presidente had already done it by fiat, and he intended to take full credit for it and its consequences. In his weekly massage El Presidente explained:

U.S. President George W. Bush sought to assure Americans on Saturday that federal checks en route to them as part of a stimulus plan will help spur the ailing economy and pay for soaring gas and food prices.

"These rebates will deliver up to $600 per person, $1,200 per couple, and $300 per child," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"This package will help American families increase their purchasing power and help offset the high prices that we're seeing at the gas pump and the grocery store," Bush said, adding it would also provide tax incentives for business to invest and create jobs.

First, when a plunderer Rethuglican says "for business to invest and create jobs" you can invariably translate that language as "increase profits." It's only if the shareholders aren't too demanding for cash that there's going to be any investment, and only if there's investment can there be job creation. This is Rethuglican talk, after all. It means the money might trickle down. But not necessarily. Don't hold your breath.

"Offset" is the term El Presidente used that's most intriguing, most worth thinking about. "Offset" is maybe an accounting term, but, alas, it's not an economics term. There is no such thing as "offset." If I receive $600 from El Presidente, and I spend it on gasoline this increases demand for gasoline, and voila! eventually increases prices. If I receive $600 from El Presidente, and I spent it at Wal-mart, that increases revenues to Wal-mart, which will use the increased funds to hoard profits or maybe stimulate production of junky plastic things in China. The money will flow to shareholders' pockets or maybe to China.

How, you might wish to ask, does increasing gas consumption and driving prices higher "offset" anything? Doesn't that, in fact, make things worse? A whole lot worse by fueling and continuing the current spiral?

Now you're getting it. If somebody arrived from another planet and looked at what's going on with these proposals, s/he would think, "Oh, they're just finding ways of putting more dollars in the pockets of the big capitalists. And they're marketing that to the plebians as if it were a balm for their economic woes." That would be about right.

Bush's Fidel, Fidel's Bush

cross posted at daily Kos


This past Thursday, October 24, George W Bush again made it abundantly clear that he has no concept of recent history or of the present circumstances in Cuba.

In a speech Bush called on the Cuban Army, that's right, the Cuban Army to overthrow the Cuban government. London Times reported:

President Bush yesterday called on Cuba’s army to overthrow the “dying” regime of Fidel Castro and side with the forces of democracy, the latest attempt by a US president to end Havana’s half century of Communist rule.

Mr Bush, in his first major address on Cuba since Mr Castro fell ill and handed power to his brother Raul last July, laid out new steps to encourage democracy on the island. They included an international “freedom fund” funded by US allies to reconstruct Cuba if it ended one-party rule.

And that wasn't an isolated statement. Not by a long shot:

In a direct message to the Cuban military and police, Mr Bush said “when Cubans rise up to demand the liberty they deserve, you can defend a dying order by using force against your own people” or, he said, the military can embrace democracy.

“There’s a place for you in a free Cuba,” Mr Bush said.

A free Cuba. One hardly knows what Bush's conception of that place would be like. Would Cubans have to give up their free health care so they could have a system like ours? Would they have to give up their research into stem cells so that they could uphold fundamentalist values? Would they have to repatriate those who fled their prisons during the Mariel escapes? Would they continue to have to be spied upon, wiretapped, surveilled, data-mined without court supervision? Would they have to institute a regressive tax structure so that the poor supported the rich? Would they have to return to the US industries they nationalized? Would they have to return land that the Revolution distributed? Bush isn't saying.

The specifics be damned, Bush was full of tough talk:

In a reference to Raul Castro, Mr Bush said the US “will not support the old way with new faces.” He predicted that democracy was coming to Cuba, and that the people of Cuba can “hear the dying gasps of a dying regime.” Mr Bush is the tenth US president to call for the overthrow of Castro, who seized power in 1959. The policy of successive US governments, including Mr Bush’s, has been to isolate Cuba economically and diplomatically with the goal of undermining Castro’s rule.

That approach has yet to succeed, however. In recent years Castro has received significant economic aid from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and China.

Bush also offered internet access to Cubans and a scholarship program for Cuban youth if Havana moved toward democracy. But that's already coming from Venezuela and Beijing.

And when Bush says that democracy is coming, the usual comparison is to that bastion of recently overthrown dictatorship and instantly imposed democracy, Iraq.

Bush ended his speech by proclaiming, "Viva Cuba Libre!"

Immediately after the speech, Cuba, of course, accused Bush of encouraging violent uprisings against the government. That's no surprise. And it seems justifiable. After all, the US has encouraged uprisings in one way or another, ranging from overflights, and outright invasions, to exploding cigars, and attempted poisonings for almost 50 years. It's nothing new.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters today Fidel weighed in on the Bush speech.

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro poked fun at President George W. Bush [today] for proclaiming "Long Live Free Cuba," likening it to Spain's king saying the same during his colonial rule over the island. /snip

The slogan was first used by Cuban independence fighters, known as Mambisis, in 1868 as they began their decades-long war against Spain's colonial rule. It was also the battle cry of Fidel Castro's guerrilla fighters in the late 1950s.

Raul Castro often ends speeches with the slogan instead of Fidel Castro's "Motherland or Death."

"I never imagined I would hear the words coming from the mouth of a U.S. president 139 years later," Castro said in an essay titled "Bush, Mambi?" carried by the official media.

"It's as if a king in those times, or his governor, proclaimed 'Viva Cuba Libre,'" Castro said.

According to Reuters, in his speech

Castro compared the Mambisis, who freed their slaves, with President Abraham Lincoln's abolition of slavery, then quoted Lincoln's famous words in reference to the Bush speech.

"You can fool some of the people all of the time or all of the people part of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time," Castro said.

Cuba on Sunday marked the 48th anniversary of the death of revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos, who disappeared in a plane crash, and earlier this month that of Guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara.

"For what their names symbolize, we respond to the false Mambi: Viva Lincoln! Viva Che! Viva Camilo!" Castro concluded.

So, here we go again. A war of words. A show. The Republican politics of stupidity. Didn't anyone understand the origin of the quote? Has Republican cronyism displaced every government functionary with even moderate intelligence?

If Bush were serious about fostering democracy in Cuba, it would be irresistible in Cuba if he simply took down the blockade. That would allow trade and it would permit US citizens to visit. That would immediately move Cuba toward democracy. But fostering democracy isn't what this latest dust up is about. No. It's just Neanderthal politics. It's about Bush, Mr. 24%, hanging on to the last vestige of his dying support in South Florida, in the Cuban expat community.

It's nothing new. And, of course, it's just not helpful to US interests.