NewsTrust - Bush Legacy - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

ACORN and Accountability

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget. The votes came just a few days after the release of a series of (now infamous) videos in which young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles pose as a pimp and a prostitute. They take a hidden camera to a number of ACORN tax preparation offices around the country seeking tax and business advice. (Why a pimp and prostitute? Who the hell knows. Neither answered my request for an interview.) The undercover duo provoked responses from ACORN staff that ranged from the unconscionable (an employee in Baltimore reacting to O'Keefe's plan to bring in thirteen Salvadoran girls as prostitutes with the suggestion he claim some as dependents) to the obviously sketchy (a Brooklyn tax adviser suggesting the couple put their cash profits in a can and bury it in the backyard) to the praiseworthy (the ACORN offices in Philadelphia called the cops and filed a police report)--O'Keefe and Giles haven't seen fit to post that tape. Mostly, though, the tapes are a testament to what might be called the Borat Effect: human beings' intense socialization to be helpful and not rock the boat, even when confronted with someone doing something objectionable, outrageous or preposterous.

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Sam Stein Discusses Cheney 2012, Condoleeza Rice's Afghanistan Comments On Rachel Maddow Show (VIDEO)

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Huff TV - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein weighed in on Condoleeza Rice's comments on Afghanistan during his appearance Tuesday evening on The Rachel Maddow Show.

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Flushing Blackwater

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Aug. 26 (Investigative Report) - Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations--made under oath by former Blackwater employees--that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

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t r u t h o u t | Supreme Court Opens Door to Possibility of Corporate Political Spending

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Reid Wilson - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - Campaign finance watchdogs are concerned that a little-seen order issued on the Supreme Court's final day could lead to tens of millions of corporate dollars being spent on television advertising - an ad blitz candidates would have difficulty countering.

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Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Clive Hamilton - May. 25 (News Analysis) - The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means? The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

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Obama's Transparency Promise: We're Still Waiting | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By David L. Sobel - Apr. 19 (Special Report) - When President Obama – in one of his first official acts – committed his new administration to an "unprecedented" level of transparency, EFF applauded the change in policy. Likewise, when Attorney General Holder, at the President's direction, issued new guidelines liberalizing agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we welcomed it as a "particularly promising development." But we also noted that it remained to be seen whether reality would match the rhetoric as the new policy was applied, particularly in the context of pending lawsuits – several of which EFF is pursuing – that challenge Bush-era decisions to withhold requested information. Unfortunately, the early indicators are not encouraging. Last week, the Justice Department told a federal judge (PDF) in Washington that the FBI – despite the new Holder FOIA guidelines – will not be altering its previous decision to withhold a substantial amount of information concerning its massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), which the Bureau describes as "the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information." The database contains hundreds of millions of records and has been characterized as an "uber-Google."

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The $4.7 trillion pyramid

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - Social Security, formerly the “third rail” of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems. Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first—that Social Security is “in crisis”—is easily dismissed. Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of the recent tax cuts for the rich. Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.

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How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system (Harper's Magazine)

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - If the financial debacles of the past decade—the enormous bubbles, the credit collapse and its trillion-dollar consequences—have taught us anything about the American economy, it is that capitalists have done a remarkably poor job of safeguarding the future of capitalism. Our system became so dominated by finance, insurance, and real estate, and by the complex derivative securities these industries engendered, that the most eminent financiers (and their unsleeping computers) were unable to protect us from economic shocks. For a number of years, farsighted commentators—including in this magazine—warned of the looming credit collapse, and yet the masters of our economy took no action until the crisis was already upon us. Now we must not only repair our tenuous financial system but shore it up to withstand two great, gathering storms: dwindling energy supplies and accelerating climate change. To this end, Harper’s Magazine asked a group of leading economic thinkers to offer sweeping but concrete proposals for the rescue of capitalism, and capitalists, from doom.

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Exclusive: Leahy Talks To White House About Investigating Bush

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Feb. 10 (News Report) - Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator's proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration. "I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I'm talking about," Leahy told the Huffington Post. "And we just agreed to talk further."

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More Pressure for Bush Torture Probe

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Jason Leopold - Feb. 02 (News Report) - “We need to follow this thing into those dense weeds and shine a bright light into what was done,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, said in a speech at Brown University on Saturday. “We can paper it over if we choose, but the blueprint is still lying there for others to do it all over again. It’s important that we not let this moment pass.” Whitehouse’s remarks were made at two-day medical conference sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has called for an investigation into the Bush administration’s use of interrogation techniques that have been widely regarded as torture.

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Bush's War Totals

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Nation - By John Tirman - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - The mortality caused by the war is also high. Several household surveys were conducted between 2004 and 2007. While there are differences among them, the range suggests a congruence of estimates. But none have been conducted for eighteen months, and the two most reliable surveys were completed in mid-2006. The higher of those found 650,000 "excess deaths" (mortality attributable to war); the other yielded 400,000.

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NSA Spied on Journalists? Whistleblower Reveals Surveillance Target

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Olbermann, Russell Tice - Jan. 22 (News Report) - In an exclusive interview tonight on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," former NSA analyst Russell Tice says that the agency under the Bush administration secretly collected communications data on civilians, including journalists.

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Obama: Highest Initial Approval For Elected President?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FiveThirtyEight - By Nate Silver - Jan. 19 (Poll) - Barack Obama's favorability ratings have continued to improve as we approach Tuesday's inauguration. But how do they compare to those of his predecessors? The two highest initial, post-inauguration approval ratings as measured by Gallup belong to presidents who took over for others whose terms ended prematurely. About 86 percent of Americans approved of Harry Truman when he took over for FDR. And 77 percent approved Lyndon Johnson when he took over for JFK. The highest initial approval rating for a newly elected president, on the other hand, appears to belong to Kennedy, whom Gallup pegged at 72 percent approval shortly after his inauguration in 1961.

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Bush's Only Gift to America

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Jan. 17 (Investigative Report) - George W. Bush’s gift to the American Republic may be that he has discredited a host of right-wing theories and practices – “trickle-down economics”; “self-regulating markets”; “tough-guy” foreign policy; the “imperial presidency”; and the notion that “government is the problem.”

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Bush Years: 8 in 8 Minutes

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

scribd.com - By Keith Olbermann - Jan. 16 (News Analysis) - 43rd president of the United States. first ever with a criminal record. our third story tonight, his presidency: eight years in eight minutes.

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Conyers: Bush/Cheney 'Most Impeachable'

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

pubrecord.org - By Jason Leopold - Jan. 14 (News Report) - "The Bush Administration’s approach to power is, at its core, little more than a restatement of Mr. Nixon’s famous rationalization of presidential misdeeds: ‘When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,’” Conyers said in a foreword to a 487-page report entitled "Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush." “Under this view, laws that forbid torturing or degrading prisoners cannot constrain the President because, if the President ordered such acts as Commander in Chief, ‘that means it’s not illegal.’” Conyers continued. “Under this view, it is not the courts that decide the reach of the law – it is the President – and neither the Judiciary nor Congress can constrain him.”

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Bush’s final days fraught with Israel-related developments

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Jewish Telegraphic Agency - Jan. 13 (News Analysis) - Ehud Olmert was shocked: Condoleezza Rice wasn't doing what she was told. The U.S. secretary of state was going to vote in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire to the Gaza war. So Olmert called Rice's boss. "'You can’t vote for this,’" the Israeli prime minister quoted himself as telling the leader of the free world. "And he gave an order to the secretary of state, and she didn’t vote for it. The resolution that she cooked up, she drafted, she organized, she manipulated, the whole thing, and she's left pretty embarrassed!" Israeli officials resolutely refused on Tuesday to comment on Olmert's braggadocio-infused account of his conversation with President Bush, delivered to an audience in Ashkelon, a city that has been hit by rockets several times since the outbreak last month of Israel's war with Hamas.

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The bill for the Bush administration

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier, Gabriel Winant - Jan. 09 (Special Report) - To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.

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Bush’s mate Howard back in Washington

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Voices without Votes - By Kevin Rennie - Jan. 08 (News Analysis) - The upcoming inauguration has taken an Aussie turn. Barack Obama's displacement from Blair House was caused by former Australian Prime Minister John Howard who is to receive the US Medal of Freedom from his mate George W. Bush.

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Fishermen relieved at monument

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Pacific Daily News - By Agnes Donato - Jan. 07 (News Report) - "We're proud that the president recognizes the conservation efforts we have been doing, and we're glad that the final measure will not threaten our livelihood," Duenas said.

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Lawsuit presses for Bay cleanup

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Fredericksburg Freelance-Star - By Rusty Dennen - Jan. 06 (News Report) - "Over the past eight years" under President Bush, "the EPA, which has the responsibility to lead the effort to enforce the Clean Water Act, has abdicated leadership and weakened regulations that would have reduced pollution," Baker said.

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Shoe Adieu: The Bush Legacy

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Global Pulse - By Evelyn Messenger, Erin Coker - Dec. 18 (News Analysis) - Over the past year, (Bush's) legacy has been under sharp review in the international media. From the Iraq War and accusations of torture, to Katrina, the economic crisis, and the Axis of Evil, their coverage paints an unflattering image of the Bush administration's tenure

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Airbrushing History, American Style

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

clinecenter.uiuc.edu - By Scott Althaus, Kalev Leetaru - Nov. 27 (Investigative Report) - Legacies are in the air as President Bush prepares to leave the White House. How future historians will judge the president remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: future historians won't have all the facts needed to make that judgment. One legacy at risk of being forgotten is the way the Bush White House has quietly deleted or modified key documents in the public record that are maintained under its direct control. Remember the "Coalition of the Willing" that sided with the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq? If you search the White House web site today you'll find a press release dated March 27, 2003 listing 49 countries forming the coalition. A key piece of evidence in the historical record, but also a troubling one. It is an impostor.

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Rolling Blunder

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0700

democraticunderground.com - By Fred Kaplan - Oct. 10 (Special Report) - The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle--as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events--will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it.

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THE $4.7 TRILLION PYRAMID

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0700

Michael-Hudson.com - By Dr. Michael Hudson - Apr. 05 (Special Report) - Social Security, formerly the "third rail" of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems. Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first-that Social Security is "in crisis"-is easily dismissed. Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of the recent tax cuts for the rich. Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.1 The way the system works now, the government withholds 12.4 percent of your paycheck, up to $90,000 in annual income. In return, it promises to provide you a monthly payment-a pension-from the time you turn sixty-two until the time you die. As of this writing, the administration's alternative remains somewhat nebulous, but what is clear in all of the variations presented thus far is that you will be able to put some of your paycheck into the stock market. Bush calls these stock purchases "personal savings accounts."

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