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Archive for the 'White House' Category
Anbar, Texas
Posted by Clif on 09/20/07 at 8:56 am
Category: Iraq, Stupid Republicans, White House
Yesterday K-Lo and Kate O’Beirne from National Review were invited to the White House for an on-the-record brown-nosing session with Bush and, of course, they thereafter dutifully provided the sycophantic report that the White House expected. Not surprisingly, Bush served up, and Kate and K-Lo swallowed, a steaming dish about how swimmingly things were going in Iraq.
But the most ridiculous statement about Iraq from the “commanding Commander-in-Chief” — yes, K-Lo actually wrote that — reported by the dynamic duo was this:
President Bush was comforted to notice that his meetings with local leaders in Anbar looked a lot like his meetings with county commissioners when he was governor of Texas.
It’s hard to figure out what on earth Bush means by this. Perhaps he said that because both the local sheiks and the Texas commissioners pack heat. Or because both groups wear silly hats and smell like farm animals. My guess, though, is that it was because both groups are a bunch of religious fanatics who want to blow up people who belong to the wrong religion.
What a SCHIP-Head
Posted by Clif on 07/18/07 at 9:31 pm Category: Loathsome Republicans, Lying Republicans, White House
Who could object to providing health insurance to children? Why, the White House, of course.
Bush today explained why he plans to veto the re-authorization of the S-CHIP program which provides health insurance to children in families not eligible for Medicaid. That’s right — a program that benefits only children. Even assuming that one accepts the notion that poor people are simply lazy slugs who don’t deserve a free ride from the taxpayers, we are talking children here. Children who didn’t choose their parents.
Of course, the reasons that Bush serves up for not insuring children are, quite simply, bull-SCHIP. The chief one seems to be this:
Members of Congress have decided, however, to expand the program to include, in some cases, up to families earning $80,000 a year — which would cause people to drop their private insurance in order to be involved with a government insurance plan.
This is a completely dishonest explanation. What’s going on here (as explained in detail here) is that certain states expanded eligibility for the program to cover families at 200% to 400% of the Federal Poverty Level (”FPL”), i.e., families of four earning between $40,000 and $80,000 per year. The Bush Administration wants now to restrict federal funding to programs that cover only families up to 200% of the FPL So if Bush were honest, what he would have said is not that he objects to insurance for children in families earning “up to” $80,000, but that he objects to programs that provide coverage for children in families of four earning $40,001 or more. Doesn’t sound very compassionate, does it?
But it gets worse. A recent study showed that 30% of children in families earning between $40,000 and $80,000 per year were uninsured and that this number is increasing. Even accepting Bush’s unsupported and improbable assumption that people will drop employer-provided insurance for a government program, Bush is saying that this is reason enough that the 30 percent or more of the children in that income bracket should remain uncovered. So not only should children be uninsured because their own parents are louts, but also children should be uninsured because other parents are louts.
Of course, the real reason for Bush’s position here is, in fact, this:
And when you couple [S-CHIP covering more than 200% FPL] with the idea that some have suggested of reducing the age at which you can be eligible for Medicare, you’re beginning to get a sense of a strategy to grow the government’s role in the provision of health care. I believe government cannot provide affordable health care. I believe it would cause — it would cause the quality of care to diminish. I believe there would be lines and rationing over time.
There it is, the old faithful of why health insurance shouldn’t be expanded — “there would be lines.” Let’s be perfectly blunt about this. What this means is that Bush believes that the way to keep certain people in the front of the line is to kick children out of it.
Snow Job
Posted by Clif on 07/5/07 at 2:39 pm Category: Lying Republicans, White House
One of the occupational hazards of being the press secretary for the Bush White House is that the spokesman has to tell such a massive number of lies to the press corps that he or she loses the ability to distinguish between a plausible fib and an enormous whopper. That’s the only explanation for Tony Snow’s claim today that Bush’s decision to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence “was not motivated by politics.”
If Snow is going to lie so outrageously about Bush’s decision, why stop by saying that the decision wasn’t political? Grab the brass ring, Tony! Tell us that Bush talked with each of the jurors and each and every one of them said they had changed their mind and thought Scooter was innocent. Or claim that the prison sentence was just a typo in Judge Walton’s order. Better yet, what about the evil twin defense? It wasn’t really Scooter who lied but an evil twin who has fled the country and is hiding somewhere in the Alps. I mean if you’re going to lie, Tony, you ought to have the stones to tell the really big ones.
Quote of the Day
Posted by Clif on 03/20/07 at 9:09 am Category: Iraq, Politics, White House
Last week’s issue of The New Yorker finally arrived yesterday, a week late thanks to the ministrations of the District of Columbia employees of the United States Postal Service (a perfect storm of governmental incompetence). Sadly, the long-awaited issue was the annual, and reliably über-boring “fashion” issue, which this year documents the turquoise and taffeta get-ups that Texas “fashion” mavens stuff themselves into as well as what Karl Lagerfeld likes to drink (Coke Zero, in case anyone gives a shit.)
All was not lost, though, because Jeffrey Toobin’s short piece in “The Talk of the Town” has one of the best and pithiest quotes so far about the Scooter Libby affair and the rising right-wing chorus of demands for a pardon:
George Bush shouldn’t be giving pardons; he should be begging the nation’s.
Twelve words worth the entire price of the issue.
Livin’ La Vida Poca
Posted by Clif on 01/6/07 at 1:01 pm Category: White House, Wingnuts
Don “We’re Fighting the Terrrorists in Iraq So We Don’t Have to Fight Them in Poca” Surber, the Poca, West Virginia blogger and Charleston Daily Mail columnist, is picking his nose banjo with delight over figures that he thinks prove that Americans love his hero George Bush so much more than they love that terrorist-appeasing witch from San Francisco Nancy Pelosi:
“Today’s approval numbers via Rasmussen are:
45% approval for Bush
43% approval for PelosiAnother MSM conventional wisdom flushed down the toilet.”
Sadly for Poca’s most famous resident, he apparently isn’t able to read his own links. If he did, he would have noticed that the Bush numbers were 45% approval and 54% disapproval giving him a net rating of -9% while Pelosi’s numbers were 43% approval and 39% disapproval giving her a net rating of +4%. That’s a thirteen percent spread which, of course, completely let’s the gas out of Surber’s post.
As an even greater humiliation, this was pointed out by InstaHayseed Glenn Reynolds, which forced Poca Don to update his post. Being corrected by InstaHayseed must be the ultimate wingnut humiliation. It’s also proof that in the land of the wingnuts, the one-nutted man is king.
UPDATE: As commenter Trilateral pointed out, Jonah the Whale also fell for Surber’s bullshit
(Cross-posted at The American Street.)
“Like a Mafia Funeral”
Posted by Clif on 12/3/06 at 1:52 pm Category: Civil Rights, Loathsome Republicans, Terrorism, White House
There is a great quote in an excellent article in this week’s New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin:
“When Lyndon Johnson became Vice-President, he wasn’t welcome at Senate Democratic caucus meetings anymore, because it was for senators only,” Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me. “But every Tuesday since Bush has been President it’s been like a Mafia funeral around here. There are, like, fifteen cars with lights and sirens, and Cheney and Karl Rove come to the Republican caucus meetings and tell those guys what to do. It’s all ‘Yes, sir, yes, sir.’ I bet there is not a lot of dissent that goes on in that room. In thirty-two years in the Senate, I have never seen a Congress roll over and play dead like this one.”
There’s also a great bit about Specter’s John Kerry moment: “I was for habeas corpus before I was against it.” Read the whole thing.
Snow Job on Global Warming
Posted by Clif on 11/1/06 at 2:40 pm Category: Environment, White House
Didya hear the latest joke about global warming? So, it goes like this. Tony Snow walks into a presser and a reporter asks him about Bush’s position on climate change. Tony says, “The President has, in fact, contrary to stereotype, been actively engaged in trying to fight climate change and will continue to do so.” Except that’s not a joke. Snow actually said that.
So what’s Tony Snowjob’s evidence for this? Well, it’s a little piece of legerdemain that Bush trotted out in 2002 called “Greenhouse Gas Intensity,” which sounds like an accepted environmental measure but is instead something the White House completely made up to obfuscate global warming issues. GGI is defined as the output of greenhouse gases as a percentage of GDP.
So here’s how Tony uses it in order to claim that Bush is “actively engaged” in trying to fight climate change:
In 2002, in February, the President committed to cutting greenhouse gas intensity, how much we emit per unit of economy [sic] activity by 18 percent. Well, guess what. The intensity declined 2 percent in 2003, and another 2.5 percent in 2004. They’re ahead of goals. We’re cutting back.
To say that this shows that we’re cutting back is, not surprisingly, another joke but not one that is even vaguely funny.
Bush’s proposal was to cut back greenhouse gas intensity by 18 percent over ten years. That would only mean a reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions only if the GDP grew less than 1.8 percent per year for the next ten years, something which, needless to say, is a quite a bit less than the White House’s own projections of more than 3 percent increase per year.
Tony says that we’re cutting back because greenhouse gas intensity decreased 2 percent in 2003 and 2.5 percent in 2004. Problem is that according to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis GDP increased by 2.5 percent in 2003 and 3.4 percent in 2004. Which mean that in both years the actual volume of greenhouse gases increased. To say that we’re cutting back is, to put it mildly, a whopper.
But, here, I have a new idea of how we can use this method of statistical argument. Perhaps we should apply the same intensity argument to something Bush doesn’t like — gay marriage, for example — rather than to something he does, i.e. global warming. Now we can argue that there is no problem with gay marriage because Gay Marriage Intensity — the number of gay marriages each year as a percentage of GDP — is decreasing. In fact, let’s commit to reducing Gay Marriage Intensity by 10 percent over the next ten years. Ya think that would float with the White House?
No Sympathy for the Dybul
Posted by Clif on 10/18/06 at 11:05 pm Category: Gay Issues, White House
When openly gay Mark Dybul was sworn in as U.S. Global Aids Coordinator, a number of blogs were atwitter that Her Condi-ness acknowledged that Dybul had a male partner. Others swooned that Condi referred to the mother of Dybul’s partner as his “mother-in-law.”
As a result, Dybul became a momentary gay folk hero without anyone wondering what on earth a gay man like Dybul did to be invited to come up and sit on the front porch of the GOP plantation with all the straight folks. Well, let me tell you, just like all other gay Republicans, what Dybul did to be accepted by the straight Republicans is not pretty.
Dybul made his way from Deputy Coordinator to Coordinator by supporting the abstinence nonsense that’s being pushed by the Bush White House in contravention to both science and common sense as an AIDS prevention policy. Consider this:
In a decision that has alarmed many public health researchers and AIDS advocates, the Bush administration is increasing the amount of HIV money that must be used to promote abstinence, while at the same time limiting funds for condoms. Opponents see the move as the latest attempt by the White House and religious conservatives to expand what they view as an unscientific and ineffective HIV prevention strategy. Critics say the approach could cost lives in the developing world. . . .
Dr. Mark Dybul, the deputy U.S. global AIDS coordinator, acknowledged the change but said it was based on good science and would rectify a strategic disparity. “For years, the approach was condoms only,” he said. “That needs to change.”
This is all part of the ABC program (”Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms”) that Bush, with Dybul’s complicity, has been pushing in the Third World. And, of course, the emphasis is on A for abstinence with only a slight little nod to C for condoms, and then mainly for married couples when one of the couple has AIDS.
The Bushies and the Fundies try to justify all this by saying that abstinence is the only way to avoid AIDS, that condoms don’t work and just encourage unnecessary sex. A simple analogy shows how stupid this is. Obviously the only way to avoid dying in a car accident is not to drive. So the equivalent program to minimize traffic deaths is this: “Don’t drive. If you must drive, don’t drive much. If you must drive a lot, use seat belts.”
But Dybul doesn’t really care about whether pushing abstinence works or not. He just wants a promotion from the Bushies. And a nice little ersatz marriage ceremony with Condi as the Priest and Laura as the Acolyte. And the cucumber sandwiches and chardonnay at the reception.