PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag bush

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.” He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg.”

On March 16, Iraqi insurgents fired a mortar shell into the U.S. army base in Tikrit, landing near two members of the 101st Airborne Division, reportedly as they stood waiting for a bus. The explosion killed Sgt. Amanda Pinson of St. Louis, Mo., making her the 2,315th U.S. soldier killed in Iraq since the war began three years ago. She was 21. A few hours later in Washington, the U.S. Senate voted 52-48 to increase the ceiling on the national debt, by $781 billion, to $9 trillion (all figures US$) -- or roughly $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country -- thus avoiding the first-ever default on U.S. debt. The House of Representatives then approved another $92 billion in federal spending to support the war effort in the Middle East. That night, Gallup wrapped up its latest opinion poll on Americans' attitudes toward the White House, showing just 37 per cent approve of the President's performance, versus 59 per cent who disapprove -- a drop of five percentage points in a month -- one of the worst scores of any president in the modern era.

Bush at 53% disapproval in the latest FoxNews poll. That's a 36% approval, tying his lowest Fox rating. He's even losing Republicans, from above 80% down to 74% approval (a mind-boggling number, when you think about it). Approval among Democrats: 8%.

In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush told us that it was time to get serious about America's addiction to foreign oil. The next day, we found out that his idea didn't sit too well with the Saudi Royal Family. A few hours later, Energy Secretary Bodman backtracked and assured the world that even though the President said he planned to reduce the amount of oil we import from the Middle East, he actually didn't mean that literally. If there's a single example out there that encapsulates the ability of unstable, undemocratic governments to wield undue influence over America's national security just because of our dependence on oil, this is it.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

War has this nasty habit of being unpredictable. Those who start it invariably do so with optimism, but a full measure of unanticipated heartbreak then accompanies victory, to say nothing of defeat. Even allowing for the inevitability of the unexpected, there cannot have been many wars when the victor was so ill-prepared for triumph as the Americans in Iraq. As George Packer demonstrates in The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, his splendid and detailed account of life in Iraq under the occupation, just about every assumption the Bush administration made about the country was wrong.

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Feb 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches condemned the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Saturday for "raining down terror" on helpless Iraqis, and criticized Washington's policies on the environment and poverty. "We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," the Conference said in an emotional letter released during the World Council of Churches Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The World Council of Churches represents Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and other Christian churches in more than 100 countries. The statement from the U.S. group accused the Bush administration of "raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors," saying the United States "has done much in these years to endanger the human family." It said the U.S. government turned a deaf ear to the voice of the church in the country and in the world, using God's name instead "in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."

They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it.

Media Matters presents the top 12 myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on President Bush's spying scandal stemming from the recent revelation in The New York Times that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on domestic communications without the required approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.

President Bush continued on Sunday to defend both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order.

President Bush today mounted his third defense in two weeks of his secret domestic spying program, calling his order authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens a limited, legal program that Americans understand is protecting their security.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States -- without getting search warrants -- following the Sept. 11 attacks, The New York Times reports.

He has a tight circle of trust, and he likes it that way. But members of both parties are urging Bush to reach beyond the White House walls.

In a political about-face, George W. Bush has bowed to the inevitable, agreeing to a blanket U.S. ban on torture and ceding the moral high ground to long-time rival John McCain. Bush had threatened to use his presidential veto for the first time to block McCain's measures and Dick Cheney lobbied Republicans to give U.S. intelligence agents immunity, earning him the moniker "Vice-President for Torture." After a Wednesday congressional vote, in which 121 Republicans bucked Bush, the U.S. president sat in the Oval Office with McCain yesterday, praising the Arizona senator he had beaten for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. "Senator McCain has been a leader to make sure that the United States of America upholds the values of America as we fight and win this war on terror," Bush said.

In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain's measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

Torture's Terrible Toll Abusive interrogation tactics produce bad intel, and undermine the values we hold dear. Why we must, as a nation, do better. By Sen. John McCain

As news analyst Michael Gawenda, writing in the Australian daily the Age, noted incredulously, "When the president of the United States, under repeated questioning and under pressure, has to declare, as he did [during a stop in Panama], 'We do not torture,' you know that even his allies in Congress no longer believe him."

It isn't easy picking George Bush's worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring? Was it when he said that he didn't "think anybody expected" the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association? "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said the President. Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's house--a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans. "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house," cracked Bush, "there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs. You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago. But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor. Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale. That contempt, as I've said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.

On the third day of hell, the president gets tough: “I have zero tolerance for lawlessness.” With all undue respect, Mr. President, you have a great deal of tolerance for a vast array of lawlessness. You tolerate corporate crime: fraud, tax evasion, no-bid contracts and cooking the books. You tolerate political crime: disenfranchisement, election fraud, slander and outing intelligence agents for political revenge. You tolerate international crime: overthrowing democratic governments, torture, attacks on journalists, the Geneva conventions and wars of aggression. You tolerate the pharmaceutical industry’s malfeasance, trading thousands of lives for arthritis relief. You tolerate intolerable labor standards both here and abroad. You tolerate industrial waste, poisoning the air, land and water, and contributing far more than your fair share to the problem that precipitated this “act of god.” In many ways, yours is the most tolerant administration in history.

When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These represent, he said, ''two solid issues in which there is a real difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the response of the administration to that consensus.'' Both issues have in fact riled scientists since the early days of the administration, and both continue to have broad repercussions. In March 2001, the White House abruptly withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the U.S. withdrawal was still a locus of debate at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. And the administration's decision to limit federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research four years ago -- a move that many scientists worry has severely hampered one of the most fruitful avenues of biomedical inquiry to come along in decades -- resulted in a shift in the dynamics of financing, from the federal government to the states and private institutions. In November 2004, Californians voted to allocate $3 billion for stem-cell research in what was widely characterized as a ''scientific secession.''

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues—stem cell research, climate change, abstinence education, mercury pollution, and many others—the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus.