Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Now that we have further proof that Monica Goodling, Alberto Gonzelez's aide, subverted the civil service laws designed to protect the jobs of career government workers from political interference, I have a few questions:

1. Will Goodling and the other guilty parties be punished? Is there any doubt that what they did (perverting the hiring process in the Justice Department such that non-partisan or Democratic leaning candidates could not be hired or promoted) was worse for the country than, say, some crackhead robbing a liquor store? At the very least, these people ought to be disbarred, convicted in court, and run out of Washington D.C. on a rail.
   
2. What about the political hacks they hired? Do the civil service laws that Goodling ignored now protect these incompetents from a thorough house-cleaning after the election?

This is most assuredly NOT an isolated incident. The Republican Party has gone beyond mere disagreement with the laws and regulations it dislikes. Instead, under President Bush, the GOP has been relentless in subverting the power and credibility of those parts of the Executive Branch tasked with enforcing rules it finds disagreeable, the Justice Department being just one example.

We Americans have endured the consequences in ways large and small: the response to Katrina by the cronies running FEMA, the bungling of the Iraq occupation after the Administration transferred authority from the "unfriendly" State Department to the more pliable Defense Department, the lack of enforcement of voting rights protections for minorities during recent elections by the Voting Rights office of the Justice Deparment, and the un-ending stream of recalls of unsafe food and toys by the under-staffed and under-funded FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection (whose Bush-appointed leader actually testified to Congress that she did not want more power and money to police toy companies), to name a few.

These were not accidents. They were the foreseeable outcomes of policies cooked up by an Administration staffed by people who believe that government, all government, is bad.

Labels: Bush, Monica Goodling, Republicans

From the Times:
"As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.

Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.

“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances."

Exactly.

Labels: Bush, pardons

Watching our esteemed president further tarnish his legacy is usually humorous in a morbid sort of way. I secretly enjoy opening the newspaper to discover whatever fresh outrage against decency and sound policy has been cooked up in the West Wing today for sale to the public. Here is a perfect example:

"President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling and open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration, asserting that those steps and others would lower gasoline prices and “strengthen our national security.”"

It would take years for any oil discovered in these places to come on-stream, making the claim about current, high gasoline prices ludicrous on its face. This is another in a long list of blatantly outrageous claims that the Bush Administration knows it can foist on an American public that is insufficiently well-informed to understand and disbelieve them (kind of like the subtle and not-so-subtle linking of Iraq to 9/11).

The claim about national security is also meaningless. Oil is a commodity traded around the world. From the perspective of American consumers, it doesn't matter very much where supply is located, just that it exists (if it's not near us, consumption of it by the people it is near will displace their consumption of oil that is closer to us). The real question is whether the modest amount of oil that drilling in ANWAR and off our coasts would produce would have any more than a marginal effect on the world price of oil. And the answer is: No.

Our problem is our total dependence upon a non-renewable, dirty form of energy that is controlled by screwed up countries. (I was going to write "happens to be controlled", but having oil actually positively causes countries to be screwed up. This is not just coincidence or correlation, but causation.)

Sucking up a bit more oil from our parks and shorelines in a vain effort to decrease the world price by a few pennies is not the answer. Investing in technology and infrastructure to get us off oil once and for all IS the answer.

Labels: ANWAR, Bush, oil

"Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring,” Mr. McCain said at a wind power plant in Oregon, a state that is expected to be a political battleground in the general election and where the environment is a central issue for voters. “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great." - NY Times

Here's a link to an NPR report showing his predecessor's position(s) on the issues:
Candidate Bush on global warming

Are Republicans credible on this issue?

Labels: Bush, global warming, McCain

Let's get this out of the way first: I think McCain is a decent human being, which makes him some kind of moral superman compared to most politicians.

McCain is undeniably physically courageous. He mostly behaves with an admirable level of personal integrity (at least, excluding the Keating Five scandal and his recently exposed relationships with, respectively, a female lobbyist and an Arizona property developer). He is very pro-Israel, which I think most Jews appreciate.

Despite all of the above, I think his administration would be awful for America, and here's why: Just because McCain is decent and moral and willing to buck the (occasionally insane) orthodoxy of his party doesn't mean his staffers will be.

Let me give you an example that makes me worry. I worked on one of Gov. George Pataki's reelection campaigns in New York some years ago. As most will remember, Pataki was (is?) a moderate, at least as far as Republicans go. So you'd think that Pataki's staffers would be middle-of-the-road, New England, moderate Republicans.

Not so. One of them, having moved to New York from the Upper Midwest to work on the campaign, actually advised his wife not to leave the apartment. He also made sure to bring his and her pistols when he moved east of the Hudson River. You can imagine his views on things like abortion, etc.

What does this have to do with McCain? A lot.

A McCain Administration would be staffed by Republicans. Most of them would, of course, be alumni of the Bush Administration. The Deputy Under-Secretary for Housing and Urban Development under Bush would probably be the Under-Secretary under McCain, and so on up and down the line.

Why is this a problem? Because the Bush Administration has broken all previous records for managerial incompetence and corruption. In every department, from Homeland Security (remember FEMA during Katrina?) to Justice (waterboarding, anybody?) to, wait for it, Housing and Urban Development (the secretary just resigned in disgrace), the Bushies have combined ideological extremism with managerial mediocrity or worse.

So you may think that, in voting for McCain, you'd get a nice, center-right administration. But you'd likely be getting the same kind of losers, morons, and crooks who staff the present, soon-to-be-not-widely-missed Bush Administration.

Labels: Bush, McCain, politics

Here's the story.

It's like he's a WWE heal really trying to drum up the boos from the crowd.

Labels: Bush, Health care