From The Atlantic
By Garrett Epps

For the past eight years, George W. Bush has treated the White House much as Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad treated a new automobile—like a shiny toy to be wrecked by racing the motor, spinning smoke from the tires, and smashing through farmyards until the wheels come off. Bush got to the Oval Office despite having lost the popular vote, and he governed with a fine disdain for democratic and legal norms—stonewalling congressional oversight; detaining foreigners and U.S. citizens on his “inherent authority”; using the Justice Department as a political cudgel; ordering officials to ignore statutes and treaties that he found inconvenient; and persisting in actions, such as the Iraq War, that had come to be deeply unpopular in Congress and on Main Street.

Understandably, most Americans today are primarily concerned with whether Barack Obama can clean up Bush’s mess. But as Bush leaves the White House, it’s worth asking why he was able to behave so badly for so long without being stopped by the Constitution’s famous “checks and balances.” Some of the problems with the Bush administration, in fact, have their source not in Bush’s leadership style but in the constitutional design of the presidency. Unless these problems are fixed, it will only be a matter of time before another hot-rodder gets hold of the keys and damages the country further.

The historian Jack N. Rakove has written, “The creation of the presidency was [the Framers’] most creative act.” That may be true, but it wasn’t their best work. The Framers were designing something the modern world had never seen—a republican chief executive who would owe his power to the people rather than to heredity or brute force. The wonder is not that they got so much wrong, but that they got anything right at all.

Read more Great Mistake

From The Black Agenda Report
By Margaret Kimberley

The soon to be former first lady, Laura Bush, was ridiculed when she recently asserted that history would judge her husband’s presidency a great success. It is easy to laugh when she claimed that an Iraqi journalist’s shoe attack against George W. Bush was an indication of freedom and happiness resulting from American occupation.

Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe assailant, isn’t free at all. He sits in prison with a badly beaten body but it turns out that Laura Bush was absolutely right. Bush will leave office with an abysmally low approval rating of just 27%, but with a long list of checked off items on his agenda. Bush succeeded in radically changing nearly every facet of government, and always with the help of the Democratic Party. Foolish liberals sneer at Bush and think themselves triumphant when the November 2008 electoral victory is a hollow one at best.

Even as he entered his last few months in office, Bush did not stop to smell the roses and reminisce about the bygone days of 90% approval and an aura of invincibility. The implosion of the financial markets enabled him to strike gold when the Democrats in Congress handed over $700 billion to Wall Street and the financial services industry. The highway robbery was one of the biggest thefts ever committed in history and was carried out without resistance of any kind. Just three months later, half of that money is gone and unaccounted for, making the Bush desire to turn over public funds to wealthy individuals and corporations a dream come true.

Bush has every reason to spend his final days in the White House gloating. He can gloat because his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, will keep his job in the Obama White House. Karl Rove, chief Bush henchman and architect of election theft, declared Obama’s economic team to be “reassuring” while Joe Lieberman called the Obama cabinet “just about perfect.”

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From The Guardian UK
By Oliver Burkeman

The American presidency, it has been said, is the most intimate of offices. In the modern TV era, to elect a president - or even just to observe US politics from overseas - is to invite him and his family into your home for at least four years, and to learn altogether too much information about their lives. Bill Clinton’s sexual activities are only the most lurid example of this; in some ways, revelations of Jimmy Carter’s habit of reading Bible passages to his wife at bedtime were just as personal. Yet as the administration of George Bush reaches its final days, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that even the last eight horribly eventful years haven’t succeeded in revealing the character of the man. You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless biographies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we’re barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly, is going on in there?

During Bush’s first campaign in 2000, the consensus among many liberals was that he was an idiot, a barely literate simpleton in the Chauncey Gardiner mould. Many of the greatest Bushisms date from those early days. “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” a windcheater-clad Bush noted during a campaign stop in South Carolina, a couple of weeks before inviting a New Hampshire audience to imagine themselves in the shoes of a single mother “working hard to put food on your family”.

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From uExpress
By Ted Rall

A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So is making the tax code more progressive. Obama’s plan to build new public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don’t come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they’ll come too little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality.

Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000 per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that they’ll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover, millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and thus the movement of capital that might have pulled us out of this tailspin.

“The key is that the consumer is in the worst condition since the Great Depression,” retail consultant Howard Davidowitz told NBC News. Boarded-up shops will abound. Experts expect 73,000 retail locations to close during the first few months of 2009. Between 20 and 40 percent of national retail chains will shut down. This isn’t a recession. It’s a depression, and it could destroy the country.

If broke consumers are the problem, shoveling money into their pockets is the way to get them spending again. Where do get it? The reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, he supposedly said, was because “that’s where the money is.” These days, the money is the hands of corporations and rich individuals.

Read more Soaking

From AlterNet
By Marie Cocco

Of all the ailments sapping the U.S. economy, failure to cut taxes isn’t one of them.

The Bush administration has been an extravagant orgy of tax-cutting. Taxes were cut in 2001 by $1.35 trillion over 10 years. In 2003 they were reduced by $350 billion more. Tax cuts came again in 2004 ($146 billion) and, for good measure, in 2006 ($142 billion).

This tally doesn’t include the one-time tax “rebate” that went to 130 million households last spring, part of a stimulus package that was supposed to keep the economy from falling into a dark pit. The fall came anyway.

The lesson of the Bush era is that relying on tax cuts as the centerpiece—often the only piece—of economic policy is just plain bad policy. Now the candidate of change is about to become president, and he wants to spend a big chunk of his new economic stimulus package on—well, on more of the same.

No doubt Barack Obama eventually will put forth a tax package that is not so heavily skewed toward helping those who are most comfortable and who need money the least, the chief beneficiaries of tax cuts over the past eight years. And there is some merit in the president-elect’s idea of refundable tax credits for the working poor, who would be most likely to quickly spend the few extra bucks in their paychecks.

Read more Tax Cuts

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

As the government contemplates spending very large sums of money, it is reassuring to know that somebody still worries about waste. Or it would be reassuring, if only that somebody were not Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who promises that he and his fellow Republicans will “protect taxpayers against the rush to spend their money.”

This loud pledge of thrift and transparency by the G.O.P. leadership might be more persuasive coming from people who had displayed such inclinations anytime before last year’s election. But these are the same politicians who squandered astronomical amounts when they controlled the federal budget.

And today, at a moment when economists of all stripes agree that we must spend big and spend fast to forestall a depression, the timing of the Republican conversion is as dubious as its credibility. To delay the stimulus spending proposed by President-elect Obama for the sake of partisan posturing is to risk disaster.

The Republicans’ sudden reversion to the solemn frugality of their forebears would be amusing were it not so dangerous. Having established a record over the past decade or so as the wildest wastrels in the nation’s history, they now present themselves as straight-laced accountants who simply cannot abide a misspent dime.

Consider Mr. McConnell, chosen again by his fellow Republican senators to oversee policy and politics for their shrunken caucus. Last year, he barely achieved reelection in Kentucky—and only won after a barrage of television ads touting his mastery of the Congressional pork barrel. He flew frantically from one town to another, boasting that he had brought home more than $500 million in federal discretionary funds during the past fiscal year alone, largely for projects that other states and cities must finance locally.

Read more Hypocrisy

From Tom Dispatch
By Michael T. Klare

Only yesterday, it seems, we were bemoaning the high price of oil. Under the headline “Oil’s Rapid Rise Stirs Talk of $200 a Barrel This Year,” the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal warned that prices that high would put “extreme strains on large sectors of the U.S. economy.” Today, oil, at over $40 a barrel, costs less than one-third what it did in July, and some economists have predicted that it could fall as low as $25 a barrel in 2009.

Prices that low — and their equivalents at the gas pump — will no doubt be viewed as a godsend by many hard-hit American consumers, even if they ensure severe economic hardship in oil-producing countries like Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela that depend on energy exports for a large share of their national income. Here, however, is a simple but crucial reality to keep in mind: No matter how much it costs, whether it’s rising or falling, oil has a profound impact on the world we inhabit — and this will be no less true in 2009 than in 2008.

The main reason? In good times and bad, oil will continue to supply the largest share of the world’s energy supply. For all the talk of alternatives, petroleum will remain the number one source of energy for at least the next several decades. According to December 2008 projections from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), petroleum products will still make up 38% of America’s total energy supply in 2015; natural gas and coal only 23% each. Oil’s overall share is expected to decline slightly as biofuels (and other alternatives) take on a larger percentage of the total, but even in 2030 — the furthest the DoE is currently willing to project — it will still remain the dominant fuel.

A similar pattern holds for the planet as a whole: Although biofuels and other renewable sources of energy are expected to play a growing role in the global energy equation, don’t expect oil to be anything but the world’s leading source of fuel for decades to come.

Read more Cheap Oil

From True Blue Liberal
By William John Cox and Coleen Rowley

Among the wars currently being fought by the American government is one in which there can be no winners. Our prior law enforcement experiences warn us that the “war on terrorism” has spawned an internal “war on dissent” in which everyone loses.

Author William John Cox’s law enforcement career spanned 40 years, the early part of which was spent as a Los Angeles police officer and which included direct policing of both the riots and terrorist incidents in that city in the late 60’s to early 70’s. One of the first assignments given to author Coleen Rowley as a new FBI agent was to help in the processing and releasing of the numerous files improperly gathered by J. Edgar Hoover after the National Lawyer’s Guild won its FOIA lawsuits against the FBI in the early 1980’s.

The Church Committee unearthed evidence in 1976 that the Viet Nam War had provided cover for the domestic infiltration and wiretapping of civil rights and anti-war groups and resulted in legislation and regulations against the worst abuses. However, the history of government repression and spying on those who dissent against its policies and practices seems to be repeating itself.

Following 9-11, the Bush Administration erased or circumvented many of these hard-won legal restraints. Warrantless searches under the PATRIOT Act and illegal electronic surveillance swept up more than terrorist threats as the government increasingly confused dissent, which builds up a free and democratic society, with terrorism, which seeks to tear it down. Read the rest of this entry »

From Information Clearing House
By John Pilger

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist.” They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing.” Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled.”

Read more Silence

From The LA Times
By Rosa Brooks

How to be stupid . . .

. . . Hamas style

Refuse to recognize Israel. Remind the world that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the often violent displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, but ignore the fact that more than 60 years have gone by, making it a bit late for a do-over. Ignore the fact that most Israelis weren’t even born in 1948, and that Israel is recognized as legitimate by an overwhelming majority of the world’s states. Keep insisting on its destruction.

Use suicide bombings and rocket attacks on civilian targets as a method of warfare. Don’t stick to military targets. Instead, blow up civilians on buses and in cafes. Adopting a deliberate policy of war crimes and crimes against humanity helps ensure that few of the world’s governments will want to go anywhere near you.

Get into vicious factional battles with fellow Palestinians. Why present a united front when you can fight with each other? Constant infighting gives the Israelis yet another reason to consider you a worthless interlocutor. And by driving rival party Fatah out of town, you can drive a wedge between Palestinians and give many Arab governments another reason to hope you fail.

Keep that cycle of violence going! The Israelis killed a Palestinian? Quick, fire a barrage of rockets toward Israel. You know they’ll respond with even greater force. Be stubborn and keep up those rocket attacks! Israeli bombs can’t tell the difference between your fighters and Gaza’s schoolchildren. Let the civilians pay the price for your “brave” resistance.

Read more Blame Game