From www.americanprogressaction.org

ADMINISTRATION
More Michael Browns

By now, the nation has become familiar with the story of Michael Brown, the inexperienced former head of FEMA who oversaw an agency that was disastrously slow in responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A friend of former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, Brown has spent the previous 11 years as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association,a position from which he was forced to resign after numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization. While Brown has become the familiar face of “Bush administration cronyism,” there are plenty of recent examples of inexperienced personnel filling key posts throughout the Bush administration. Should President Bush fail to take control over this growing problem, he’ll continue to put the health and safety of Americans at risk.

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT NOMINEE LACKS EXPERIENCE IN THE FIELD:
The Bush administration’s choice to head the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is a 36-year old lawyer with “little immigration or customs experience.” ICE is one component that completes Border and Transportation Security underneath the greater jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Michael Chertoff. Julie Myers’ lack of experience led Sen. George Voinovich to state at her confirmation hearing: “I’d really like to have [Chertoff] spend some time with us, telling us personally why he thinks you’re qualified for the job, because based on the résumé, I don’t think you are.” (Voinovich later recanted his objections after talking privately with Myers and Chertoff). To resolve worries about her lack of experience, Myers said that she pledges to “work with those who are more knowledgeable.” Myers retains strong political connections to make up for her lack of professional experience. Her uncle is Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; she is married to John Wood, Chertoff’s current chief of staff; and, she served as an associate under former independent counsel Ken Starr.

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER FALSIFIED CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDENTIALS:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reassigned a high-ranking Medicare officer after it discovered that he “falsified documents concerning his continuing education.” Sean Tunis was formerly the chief medical officer at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a role that placed him in charge of reviewing and implementing all medical issues that arose in the administration of Medicare and Medicaid. Tunis’s medical license was suspended last May for at least a year by the Maryland Board of Physicians, and he had been placed on administrative leave since April. HHS recently reassigned him to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality without discussing why the transfer was made. “I regret having made mistakes in handling my (continuing education) records, but I am now pleased to be moving forward into a new phase of my career,” Tunis said. Tunis has been placed on a list of personnel who are excluded from doing business with federal health programs.

FDA APPOINTED VETERINARIAN TO HEAD OFFICE OF WOMEN’S HEALTH:
The Bush administration recently attempted to appoint an “FDA veteran trained in animal husbandry who spent much of his career in the agency’s Center for Veterinary Medicine” to oversee the Office of Women’s Health. Animal husbandry is the agricultural practice of breeding and raising livestock. The Office of Women’s Health is charged with working to “improve the health and well-being of women and girls in the United States.” Three days after the Food and Drug Administration announced the appointment of Norris Alderson, the FDA press office sent out a new announcement stating another individual, Theresa Toigo, would head the office. The FDA claimed there was “no official decision” made to hire Alderson, the animal husbandrist. But a membership directory on the office’s website listed him as “acting director” (the web page has since been edited).

OTHER INEXPERIENCED BUSH APPOINTEES:
The Bush administration has made a number of other hiring decisions that have raised eyebrows. Jay Hallen, a 24-year old undergraduate who majored in political science and “rarely watched financial news stations and didn’t follow the stock market,” was chosen to rebuild the Iraq Stock Exchange. Gay Hart Gaines, “an interior decorator by training,” was chosen to sit on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Board of Directors. And as the Progress Report previously noted, David Safavian, former White House procurement official who is now under arrest, came to his position with little relevant experience.

The War on America's Future | Comments Off

Past Presidents & Hurricanes

President: Nixon
Danger: Category-5 Hurricane Camille (August 1969)
Area: About the same area as that affected by Katrina

Response: Nixon prepared the National Guard in
advance, ordering rescue ships from Tampa, FL and
Houston, TX to stand waiting along with over a
thousand regular military, 24+ helicopters to assist
the Coast Guard and National Guard about as soon as
the hurricane passed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

President: Bush the Elder
Danger: Hurricane Andrew (August 92)
Area: Florida

Response: In the middle of a re-election campaign,
Bush ceased campaigning the day before the hurricane,
went to Washington, and assembled one of the largest
military forces ever mustered on U.S. soil. Seven
thousand National Guard and 22,000 regular military
were sent in with the necessary equipment shortly
after the hurricane passed through.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
President: Clinton
Danger: Category-3 Hurricane Floyd (September 1999)
Area: Virginia and Carolinas

Response: Meeting with China’s president Jiang in New
Zealand, Clinton immediately declared the
hurricane-affected areas as federal disasters,
allowing the military and National Guard to move in
and help. Clinton flew home immediately, one day
before the hurricane hit, to help coordinate the
rescue.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
President: Bush the Lesser
Danger: Category-5 Hurricane Katrina (August 2005)
Area: Gulf Coast

Response: National Guard troops are down about 8,000
members because they are in Iraq with much of the
necessary rescue equipment needed. Bush was on
vacation, riding his bike for two hours the day before
the hurricane lands. On the day Katrina landed, Bush
attended a birthday party for John McCain. The levees
began to crack. While emergency 1.5-ton sandbags were
ready to be placed to steady the levee and absorb
water, there were insufficient numbers of helicopters
and pilots to set them before the levees break.
Nagin,the mayor of NO, pleaded for federal-level assistance
and got none.
Bush went to San Diego to play guitar
with a country singer and end his vacation early –
but not until the next day, because he had tickets to
a San Diego Padres game.

The War on America's Future | Comments Off

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I’m just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That’s right. Horse shows.

I really want to know — and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect — how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C’mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don’t start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-gain/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation’s debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn’t he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That’s not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read “My Pet Goat” to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying “Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you’re doing a heck of a job!”

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can’t string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can’t pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you’ve sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn’t up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren’t up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn’t a horse show.

Yours,

Michael Moore

The War on America's Future | Comments Off

Alan Dershowitz: Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist

Alan Dershowitz Mon Sep 5, 1:16 AM ET

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not
say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires
truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental
figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history. So here’s the truth
about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won’t hear on Fox News or from
politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality,
and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this
generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current
state of American values.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Rehnquist bragged about being first in
his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law
school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities,
both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty.
Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford’s
history: “When my father was at Stanford, he could not join
any of the social organizations because he was Jewish,
and those organizations, at that time, did not accept Jews.”
Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this
discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he
was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned
from several sources who had known him as a student that
he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and
heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory
that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was
infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.

As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson
while the court was considering several school desegregation cases,
including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo, entitled
“A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases,” defended the
separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court
case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was
right and should be reaffirmed.” When questioned about the memos
by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986,
Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice,
stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the
views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear [sic] the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.

The young Rehnquist began his legal career as a Republican
functionary by obstructing African-American and Hispanic voting
at Phoenix polling locations (”Operation Eagle Eye”). As Richard
Cohen of The Washington Post wrote, “[H]e helped challenge the
voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was
entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass
potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle
partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens
for trivial political reasons — and who made his selection on
the basis of race or ethnicity.” In a word, he started out his
political career as a Republican thug.

Rehnquist later bought a home in Vermont with a restrictive
covenant that barred sale of the property to ”any member
of the Hebrew race.”

Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and
authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or
pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted
based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened
to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks,
aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations,
polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists,
homophobes, and other bigots.

Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and
as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be
remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the
outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he
accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with
his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a
Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the
judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise
regressive career.

Within moments of Rehnquist’s death, Fox News called and asked
for my comments, presumably aware that I was a longtime critic
of the late Chief Justice. After making several of these points to
Alan Colmes (who was supposed to be interviewing me), Sean
Hannity intruded, and when he didn’t like my answers, he cut
me off and terminated the interview. Only after I was off the
air and could not respond did the attack against me begin, which
is typical of Hannity’s bullying ambush style. He is afraid to attack
when there’s someone there to respond. Since the interview, I’ve
received dozens of e-mail hate messages, some of which are
overtly anti-Semitic. One writer called me “a jew prick that takes
it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].” Another said I am “an
ignorant socialist left-wing political hack….You’re like a little
Heinrich Himmler! (even the resemblance is uncanny!).” Yet
another informed me that I “personally make us all lament the defeat of the Nazis!” A more restrained viewer found me to be “a disgrace to the Law, to Harvard, and to humanity.”

All this, for refusing to put a deceptive gloss on a man who made his
career undermining the rights and liberties of American citizens.

My mother would want me to remain silent, but I think my father
would have wanted me to tell the truth. My father was right.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is
The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved (Wiley, 2005).

The War on America's Future | Comments Off

Gov. Blanco’s request to the Bush adminisatration. Lets get back to the CIA leak crap. At least that put Rove on the defensive. The repug spin machine is in high gear. Man I can’t believe that my stupid fucking family in California actually believes this shit. I am not shutting up with them though. I remember my sister railing against Pres. Clinton. I just let her say what she would. Didn’t call her stupid or talk over her or anything like that. Now if I try to talk about Bush I can’t get two words out and she is yelling at me, thats right yelling….. So I guess that free speech is only for the supporters of the mega asshole bush. They are all fucking lairs. What are we going to do? How are we going to get control of the country’s perception of reality? Because that is what will drive the country to oust this criminal.

The War on America's Future | Comments Off