Obama reverses Bush administration on mercury pollution standards. With all the focus understandably being on the global financial crisis lately, it can be easy to forget that President Obama has other problems to contend with. But then, as other's are quick to point out, the unfortunate thing is it's all interrelated. (Newsfilter) [more inside]
posted by saulgoodman on Feb 6, 2009 - 13 comments

Julie Louise Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H., first female director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is resigning her post effective January 20th. While subject to criticism for her management of the agency and failure to mollify the autism community over issues of vaccine safety, she was a straight (if silenced) shooter on global warming and her efforts to restructure the CDC as a prevention-oriented agency are to be commended.
posted by The White Hat on Jan 10, 2009 - 27 comments

Farewell to All That An illuminating and depressing Oral History of the Bush White House from Vanity Fair
posted by CunningLinguist on Dec 30, 2008 - 88 comments

Teapot Dome 2008 -- "The report also detailed cozy relationships between energy companies and other officials in the royalty-in-kind program office. Some 19 officials — a third of the staff — took gifts from oil and gas executives, some with “prodigious frequency,” it said." [more inside]
posted by vhsiv on Sep 10, 2008 - 27 comments

In his new book, 'The Way of the World' "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind claims that, after the Iraq war began, the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks."^* Suskind writes: "'It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq' and that Iraq bought yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al Qaeda. Suskind also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official "that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion." After the fake letter was released in late 2003, press outlets reported it as evidence of a Saddam/al Qaeda link. "Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam," said Bill O’Reilly at the time. [more inside]
posted by ericb on Aug 5, 2008 - 127 comments

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice surprised New Zealand during her visit by calling us allies, despite our long history of disagreement over certain issues. The Auckland Student Association's shameless plug for self promotion has prompted a response.
posted by Samuel Farrow on Jul 26, 2008 - 51 comments

"It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. The Environmental Protection Agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be. The value of a statistical life is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the [EPA] reckoned in May -- a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago." [more inside]
posted by ericb on Jul 10, 2008 - 31 comments

Newsfilter: Attorney General Gonzales resigns
posted by rxrfrx on Aug 27, 2007 - 214 comments

The US pays Pakistan $1 billion a year to fight al Qaeda, but Pakistan doesn't do much fighting. Iraq is a "a big moneymaker" for al Qaeda, and al Qaeda's leadership may be stronger than ever.
[more War on Terror inside]
posted by kirkaracha on May 21, 2007 - 76 comments

You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales." "This administration," Bob Graham, the former Senator and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, "does not seek the truth as a basis for its judgments, but tries to use intelligence to validate judgments it has already made."

"I spent 30 years at the CIA," said one former official, "and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests."
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket on May 18, 2006 - 40 comments

Former White House Aide Arrested on Theft Charges: Claude Alexander Allen was Bush's Assistant for Domestic Policy until he announced his resignation last month, reportedly because he wanted to spend more time with his family. Previously, he had been a controversial Bush nominee to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Allen was also once the subject of controversy for a homosexual slur he had made while working for Sen Jesse Helms. Now, a few weeks after his resignation, he's been arrested for a retail theft scheme that allegedly netted him more than $5000, still small change for a man that was being paid the same six-figure salary as Karl Rove. Bush has said he is shocked and saddened by the arrest of his former aide (via Think Progress).
posted by bcveen on Mar 11, 2006 - 67 comments

Mr. Gonzales + Future Lawyers = Crazy Delicious Civil Disobedience
posted by shoepal on Jan 25, 2006 - 103 comments

Robert McNamara is worried.
posted by threehundredandsixty on May 10, 2005 - 43 comments

The Condi Conflict: Finally, here is a compelling list of reasons why Bush was forced to give Condoleezza Rice the position of Secretary of State. This makes it absolutely clear: On the left... On the right...
posted by jb_thms on Jan 20, 2005 - 37 comments

DOJ coup d'etat. Ashcroft is gone. Now, six days before the confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales, the acting Attorney General, Daniel Levin, issues a new official memo (pdf)on torture, reversing and specifically repudiating the definitions of torture from the August 2002 memo addressed to Gonzales. The new memo states, among other things,

'we disagree with statements in the August 2002 Memorandum limiting "severe" pain under the statute to "excruciating and agonizing" pain [...] or to pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death'

posted by boo on Dec 31, 2004 - 18 comments

“If You Harbor Terrorists, You Are a Terrorist” While delegates to the GOP convention were congratulating themselves for their candidate’s tough stand against terrorism, the Bush administration was creating an international incident—little publicized in the United States—by harboring a notorious group of international terrorists on U.S. soil.
posted by Postroad on Sep 22, 2004 - 34 comments

Kerry Calls on Rice to Testify "John Kerry said Saturday the White House is committing character assassination with its treatment of former counterterror chief Richard Clarke to avoid responding to questions about national security. Kerry also said Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, should testify in public before the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. "If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do '60 Minutes' on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath," Kerry told reporters. "We're talking about the security of our country."...
posted by Postroad on Mar 28, 2004 - 26 comments

Iraq on the Record A full compilation of the Bush administration's misleading statements on Iraq was comissioned by rep. Henry Waxman. It is now available as a pdf report and as a database searchable by name of speaker or keyword. Did this sort of framework for accountability exist before the Web, and can it be effective now?
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly on Mar 16, 2004 - 20 comments

POWER RANGERS: Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old one? The left's favorite blogger, Talking Points Memo's Joshua Michah Marshall has been published in this week's New Yorker.
posted by jpoulos on Jan 26, 2004 - 29 comments

Payback? How did Bush officials get back at Ambassador Joseph Wilson for talking publicly two weeks ago about his trip to Niger to investigate claims of an Iraqi uranium deal? By outing his wife as an undercover CIA operative. As David Corn of The Nation says, "...the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it..... a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as 'nonofficial cover' and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson's wife is such a person--and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her--her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration." The exposure of an undercover CIA agent is in fact a federal crime.
posted by Artifice_Eternity on Jul 17, 2003 - 159 comments

The First Casualty. The New Republic is one of the few left-leaning political journals who supported the war on Iraq. Now it seems like they've come to their senses and have written a very exhaustive story on how exactly Team Bush manipulated evidence to support the war on Iraq: "Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war."
posted by owillis on Jun 19, 2003 - 11 comments

Fleecing The Family. According to the article, the Bush administration is leading the charge with proposed new rules that will erode the 40-hour workweek and affect more than 80 million workers now protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. It could mean the end of overtime pay. Sure hope you don't rely on overtime to pay that mortgage. "Everybody gets screwed on this one, except the bosses. Isn't it lovely?"
posted by archimago on May 2, 2003 - 79 comments

Oh, God! Under the Bush administration there were a lot of things we had to forget, things like how democratic presidents get elected, how to sell democracy to undemocratic peoples, how to be free, patriotic, etc. Now, it seems, is the time to forget all about this menace to mankind: SCIENCE.
posted by acrobat on Apr 23, 2003 - 35 comments

Maybe there are no weapons, after all... "On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims...." This is the same defector cited by the Bush administration numerous times as a reliable informant on the scope of Saddam's long-term WMD plans.
posted by Artifice_Eternity on Feb 28, 2003 - 49 comments

Paging Winston Smith... Not content with mere cynical doublespeak, the Bush Administration is now trying to shape government reports and research to agree with the President's beliefs: an EPA report omits a section on global warming for the first time in six years; the Department of Health and Human Services is being "restructured," eliminating committees that were coming to conclusions at odds with the president's views; and at the Department of Education, old studies that contradict the current administration's policies are being removed from the agency's web site. When you add this trend to the administration's "permanent war," I suspect George Orwell is smiling somewhere...
posted by mattpusateri on Sep 18, 2002 - 42 comments

The Associated Press has written a summary of the Bush Administration's curtailment of civil liberties. This appears to an unbiased and factual catalog of the changes 9/11 has wrought on our justice system. It would appear that the Law and Order wing of the GOP has spanked the Libertarian wing but good. Let the Eagle Soar!
posted by pejamo on Sep 6, 2002 - 54 comments

Colin Powell: Planning for an exit Plans to leave but claims he will wait out the Bush first term. Is this good or bad new for administration?
posted by Postroad on Sep 1, 2002 - 52 comments

Is this a legitmate criticism.... or just complaining that the Administration has lost its aura of invincibility? From the Daily Standard, an opinion piece stating that former Clinton administration officials are unfairly criticizing the Bush administration. A short, interesting read. What's your opinion? Should former officials criticize their new leaders?
posted by pjgulliver on Aug 16, 2002 - 20 comments

Medical Records Confidentiality - An End to Privacy? "The Bush Administration yesterday proposed changing some of the federal rules designed to protect the confidentiality of Americans' medical records, including the ability of patients to decide in advance who should be able to use their personal health information."

The Day After 9-11, the debate started. "People would probably not protest FBI snooping so much if we did not need to guard our privacy so tightly, if we did not have to worry about medical records being used against us by employers or insurance companies ... (More info: EFF: Privacy - Medical & Psychiatric Records and Drug Testing, Privacy2000.org, The Search and Seizure of Electronic Information.)

You have ONE MONTH to give your comments on Medical Records Confidentiality. Congressional approval is not required.
posted by sheauga on Mar 22, 2002 - 12 comments

Brand USA Naomi ('No Logo') Klein on Charlotte Beers' work to manage the US 'brand'. Sitting outside the US, a lot of what Klein says about external perception of the 'brand' (and of Beers' actions) seems quite believable to me, but I'd be interested in hearing an insider view.
Klein's assertion that "...America's problem is not with its brand-- which could scarcely be stronger--but with its product" seems relatively solid, and if it is, it seems that Ms Beers' mission is all-but-impossible, or at the very least misdirected.
That said, the thrust of Klein's argument is the assertion that the US's values are basically incompatible with the whole idea of branding, and I'd suggest that the same could be said of many countries. I suppose the point here is that this specific exercise is rooted in the US's positioning of itself in the world at this point in time.
[Via abraxas]
posted by jonpollard on Mar 18, 2002 - 4 comments

Register as a Patriot! Quote: As part of the Bush Administration's ongoing efforts to obliterate all traces of terrorism in the United States, the Department of Justice has commenced registration* of each and every American Patriot. By registering all non-terrorists within our borders, it is our intention to make use of the process of elimination to identify the evil ones who walk among us. If you are a non-terrorist (American Patriot), your participation is required. " (It's a joke kids, John Ashcroft doesn't really expect you to register...yet.)
posted by dejah420 on Jan 12, 2002 - 0 comments

Bush: Drug users=terrorist lackeys George W. Bush says if you just quit drugs, terrorism will go away.
posted by brookish on Dec 14, 2001 - 37 comments

got repetitive stress disorder? no you don't.

could the Bush administration piss me off any more? (more inside)

via Signal vs. Noise
posted by o2b on Aug 29, 2001 - 31 comments

More on Ashcroft (via Salon) Supported a law that makes it OK to kill abortion providers. This is not a "political difference of opinion." The man is dangerous.
posted by jpoulos on Jan 18, 2001 - 18 comments