Bush Says He’ll Press

Ahead With Broad Political Agenda – New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
Published: October 5, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4

– President Bush said Tuesday that he still had “plenty” of political capital and that he intended to spend it on

battles over government spending, energy policy, Social Security and other issues that have so far proven difficult for him. …

“I’m still a conservative, proudly so, proudly so,” Mr. Bush said in response to a question about whether he could

still claim that identity after presiding over a rapid increase in the size and cost of the government.

The

Right’s Dissed Intellectuals By Harold Meyerson

You could cut the disappointment with a knife. “This is the moment for which

the conservative legal movement has been waiting for two decades,” David Frum, the right-wing activist and former Bush speechwriter,

wrote on his blog a few moments after the president dashed conservative hopes by nominating Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor

on the Supreme Court. …

In one fell swoop, Bush flouted both his supporters’ ideology and their sense of

meritocracy.

Worse, he bypassed the opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual seriousness — conservatism’s

intellectual seriousness. …

But the conservative intellectuals have misread their president and misread their country. Four and

a half years into the presidency of George W. Bush, how could they still entertain the idea that the president takes merit, much

less intellectual seriousness, seriously? The one in-house White House intellectual, John DiIulio, ran screaming from the

premises after a few months on the job. Bush has long since banished all those, such as Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who

accurately predicted the price of taking over Iraq. Yet Donald Rumsfeld — with Bush, the author of the Iraqi disaster — remains, as do

scores of lesser lights whose sole virtue has been a dogged loyalty to Bush and his blunders. Loyalty

and familiarity count for more with this president than brilliance (or even competence) and conviction.

Cynical

Conservatism By Robert J. Samuelson

George W. Bush entered the White House preaching “compassionate conservatism,” but he may

leave known for cynical conservatism. … In practice, Bush has taken the most self-serving aspect of modern liberalism

(its instinct to buy public support with massive government handouts) and fused it with the most self-serving aspect of modern

conservatism (its instinct to buy support with massive tax cuts). …

Spend more, tax less. That’s a brazen political strategy,

not a serious governing philosophy. …

The outlook is for tokenism. Just what conservative values Bush’s approach embodies is

unclear. He has not tried to purge government of ineffective or unneeded programs. He has not laid a foundation for permanent tax

reductions. He has not been straightforward with the public. He has not shown a true regard for the future. He has mostly been expedient

or, more pointedly, cynical.

CNN.com – Bush military bird flu role slammed – Oct 5,

2005

A call by President George W. Bush for Congress to give him the power to use the military in law enforcement roles in the

event of a bird flu pandemic has been criticized as akin to introducing martial law….

Gene Healy, a senior

editor at the conservative Cato Institute, said Bush would risk undermining “a fundamental principle of American law” by

tinkering with the act, which does not hinder the military’s ability to respond to a crisis. …

Bush began discussing the

possibility of changing the law banning the military from participating in police-type activity last month, in the aftermath of the

government’s sluggish response to civil unrest following Hurricane Katrina.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush ally stung

by new charge and questions on favours for lobbyist

The new charge came as it became clear that Mr DeLay was being

investigated in a separate scandal, in which politicians are under scrutiny for doing legislative favours for a powerful lobbyist, Jack

Abramoff, in return for expensive gifts such as golfing trips to Scotland – a possible violation of federal anti-bribery laws.

Lady Thatcher’s office confirmed that it had been contacted by police to “clarify” details of a meeting the former prime minister held

with Mr DeLay in May 2000. Mr DeLay went golfing at St Andrews during the same visit, but has said he was unaware Mr Abramoff paid for

the trip, and that it was made for professional reasons, such as the meeting with the retired leader. Lady Thatcher had described the

meeting as a “courtesy call”. …

If the bribery inquiry into Mr Abramoff also reaches Mr DeLay, who once numbered the lobbyist

among his “closest and dearest friends”, the consequences for the Republicans could be even more serious.

Mr DeLay has said he

thought his British trip was paid for by a thinktank, the National Centre for Public Policy Research, of which Mr Abramoff was a board

member. But there is evidence the lobbyist reimbursed the centre for some expenses and paid others directly.

Gov.

Vetoes Same-Sex Marriage Bill – Los Angeles Times
By Nancy Vogel and Jordan Rau, Times Staff Writers

SACRAMENTO — Gov.

Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to legalize same-sex marriage or raise the minimum wage in a flurry of vetoes Thursday that killed a spate

of Democratic-backed labor and consumer protection bills.

On a day when the governor rejected 52 bills, he discarded proposals

that would have helped consumers buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. He refused to expand punishments for employers that flout

minimum wage laws, pay women less than men or resist paying workers’ compensation claims.

He declined to protect nurses from

being required to work overtime or having to lift patients on their own. And he vetoed legislation to allow workers locked out by

employees during pay disputes to collect unemployment benefits.

Pursuing a Fast Track To Party

Leadership

Some of Blunt’s activities have prompted criticism, for instance an unsuccessful 2002 maneuver to attach a

provision banning tobacco sales on the Internet to the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Blunt did not succeed,

but the effort struck many of his colleagues as an overreach, given that his son was a lobbyist for Philip Morris in Missouri, Blunt

himself was dating a Philip Morris lobbyist whom he later married, and the congressman had received more than $150,000 in contributions

from the company and subsidiaries.

Buying of News

by Bush’s Aides Is Ruled Illegal – New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 –

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s

education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to

analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability

Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

Contract Killers – New York Times
It’s quite a

fall, no doubt about it: from agile insurgency to bloated establishment in just over a decade. So what went wrong? The 1994 Republicans

understood that power in Washington was not simply a matter of who controlled the White House and Congress. Passing legislation also

required the support of powerful unelected business interests and their representatives on K Street, the historic home of the lobbying

trade.

Led by Mr. DeLay in the House, Rick Santorum in the Senate and Grover Norquist downtown, Republicans worked not just toward

the partisan realignment of the country, but of the influence industry, too. They tracked which lobbyists were Democrats and which

Republicans, refused to meet with the Democrats and pressured business groups and law firms to hire the conservatives. Their strenuous

efforts to blur the boundaries between corporate America and the Republican Party came to be known as the K Street Project.

It was

an incredible success. By 2002, if you look at numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, industries that had long made bipartisan

campaign contributions largely abandoned the Democrats, leaving Republicans with an overwhelming edge in corporate donations. By 2004,

the lobbyists themselves gave the Republicans $1 million more than they gave Democrats. The number of Republican lobbyists grew. And so

did the number of lobbyists, period – from about 9,000 when the Republicans took power to more than 34,000 today.

You remember the Honorable Wm. Bennett. In the 80’s and 90’s, Bennett was an icon of the Culture Wars. Starry-eyed fans

carried his book like Mao’s followers used to carry his. Wm knew just what was wrong with America and he had no hesitation to tell

everyone what they were doing wrong — loudly and endlessly.

Wm’s star began to set before it was revealed he is an unrepentant

compulsive gambler. Hey, everyone has a right to piss away all the money they have, right? Sure, but if your hobbies are so off-center,

maybe you should keep your mouth shut about other people’s behavior. Oh, but the Radical, Religious Wrong aren’t perfect — just

forgiven. (How convenient for them.)

Now, Bennett says something almost incomprehensible and complains bitterly that anyone would

complain. It was just an intellectual exercise, like suggesting that gassing Jews isn’t all bad, or that rape has its pleasures. What’s

everyone so upset about? Mind you, he’s not simply defensive, but in Tom Delay-fashion, his pissed anyone would dare question him. The

best defense is to kill your opponents, it seems. So much for lost civility. (This technique ultimately failed Agnew and Nixon, but it

has worked for many pissants since them, so Conservatives aren’t about to change.)

I have a simple explanation for Bennett’s

lunacy: he’s been stealing pills from Lush Limbaugh. mjh

The Seattle Times: Politics: Bennett defends remarks on

blacks, abortion and crime rates

Surely,

innocent people can’t object to the government spying on them — what do you have to hide? Lost freedoms mean little if the government

can’t keep us completely safe from those who hate freedom. Double-plus good. mjh

FBI says it sometimes taps wrong

phone lines

The FBI says it sometimes gets the wrong number when it intercepts conversations in terrorism

investigations, an admission critics say underscores a need to revise the Patriot Act’s wiretap provisions.

The FBI would

not say how often these mistakes happen. And, though any incriminating evidence mistakenly collected is not legally admissible

in a criminal case, there is no way of knowing whether it is used to begin an investigation.