[feAilei1]

The Enquirer has more credibility than Bush.

[adesseridopaw]

Clinton had his healthcare reform debacle. Now Bush has his Social Security reform debacle.

It wasn't a debacle for Clinton as much as a right wing smear campaign against his wife, who took the lead on it. In retrospect, she looks brilliant with what she did with her role as First Lady as opposed to Laura Bush who changes George W.'s diapers when he doesn't get his bathroom breaks from Condi Rice.

[leoto5Fm]

Check this out:

http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg....G7aLsST74eYA--



PHOTO CAPTION: U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice

Reuters Explains Photo Of Bush Bathroom Note

September 15, 2005
By Daryl Lang

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswir..._id=1001137642

Don't blame the photographer.

That's the message from Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters, about the photo yesterday that shows President George W. Bush writing an all-too-human note during a UN meeting.

Bush is shown writing: "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible."

The photo, which quickly became fodder for blogs and e-mails among friends, was taken by Rick Wilking, a contract photographer based in Denver who recently covered the flooding in New Orleans.

Hershorn, Reuters' news editor for pictures for the Americas, says he's responsible for zooming in on the note and deciding to transmit the photo to Reuters clients. He says Wilking didn't know what the note said when he shot the picture.

"I'm so adamant that Rick has nothing to do with this. He was just the guy who pushed the button," Hershorn says.

In response to the attention the photo is getting, Reuters' spokeswoman in London released a two-sentence statement about the picture: "The photographer and editors on this story were looking for other angles in their coverage of this event, something that went beyond the stock pictures of talking heads that these kind of forums usually offer. This picture certainly does that."

So how did the picture happen?

According to Hershorn, Wilking was one of several photographers covering the United Nations Security Council meeting between about 11 and noon yesterday. He was part of a pool stationed on a balcony that faced Bush's back; a group of White House photographers was on a balcony facing the president.

Wilking shot about 200 images and sent two memory cards to the press room at the U.N., where Hershorn was working. Hershorn looked at the images on a computer and initially decided not to send any of them.

But a few hours later, he started to wonder about a note that Bush was seen writing in three of the pictures. Out of curiosity, he zoomed in to see if he could read it.

Once he saw what it said, Hershorn decided the note was interesting and worth publishing. The white parts of the picture were overexposed, so a Reuters processor used Photoshop to burn down the note. This is a standard practice for news photos, Hershorn says, and the picture was not manipulated in any other way.

Around 4:30 p.m., Reuters transmitted two versions of the photo, including one that was tightly cropped around the note and Bush's hand.

The caption says that Bush was writing the note to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; Hershorn says Wilking saw Bush write the note and hand the note to Rice.

Hershorn says heads of state seldom attend Security Council meetings, and it's possible that Bush was simply asking his secretary of state what the proper protocol was to be excused.

Online, some accused Reuters, and the media in general, of being insulting or juvenile. A letter writer to Editor & Publisher wrote, "You ought to all be ashamed of yourselves for this stupid trivia and childish focus."

It's unclear how widely the picture was published; Hershorn says The (Toronto) Globe and Mail published it but he wasn't sure of any other outlets. Hershorn says he decided to transmit the picture because it was interesting.

"There was no malicious intent," he says. "That's not what we do."

[Quvwcxqx]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/na...gewanted=print

As he prepares a blueprint to respond to the storm damage and to spend the billions of dollars that doing so will cost, Mr. Bush is confronting the likelihood that the rest of his agenda will have to be put on hold until next year.

A Republican ally of Mr. Bush who has been briefed on the administration's thinking said the White House's hope for the rest of this year was to deal with the hurricane and to win confirmation for Judge John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice of the United States and for a second nominee, not yet selected, to the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Next year, the ally said, Mr. Bush would return to issues like overhauling the tax code and the immigration laws that he had hoped to get a start on this year.

After the outcry over scenes of poor, black victims of the hurricane suffering and dying in New Orleans, White House officials continued on Tuesday to try to shore up support among the president's conservative African-American supporters, who have not all rallied to his side. Bishop Charles E. Blake of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, a major African-American supporter of Mr. Bush, said this week that he had declined an invitation to meet on Sept. 6 at the White House with Mr. Bush, black leaders and charitable organizations because he was too busy.

"It's a four-hour flight, it's a $2,000 ticket, I do have heavy responsibilities here," Bishop Blake said in a telephone interview.

Asked if the government's response to the hurricane had changed the way he felt about Mr. Bush, Bishop Blake responded: "I cannot say at this time. I'm holding the issue open until I can understand the dynamics involved and the delays that have been experienced."

[nannysuetle]

If you're looking for something to do with your time...

Fire George on 9/24www.FireGeorge.org
Spread the word: www.firegeorge.org
Bushville, DCand the 9/24 Marchwill join in a
Massive Act of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience.

This is pure grassroots activism. No leaders, no media or government control.
Let’s take control of the agenda.
Visualize a Fired George

Exercise your rights as an American:

Constititution of the United States: 1st Amendment, Bill of Rights :

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

[escolubtessen]

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/articl...t=type&type=91

[FourEsters]

This is a really funny vid from the "Presidential Speechalist" (satire?? or truth????) ...



http://y.wimp.com/v/presidential.wmv

Featuring Andy Dick, Arianna Huffington, and, of course, George W. Bush.

[Pashtet]

They claim that liberals are conspiracy theorists for believing in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, but if you ever bother to read one of their fundraising letters or websites, they pump up Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore to a status within the Democratic Party, and the left in general, that they do not actually have. "Hillary is planning to take over the party and destroy all dissenters" or "Michael Moore said that the war is just a scheme to help Israel and kill some A-rabs."

[ZIZITOPER]

Not so fast, folks.

September 16, 2005
Seinfeld Who? NBC Pursuing the Heartland

By JACQUES STEINBERG
KENNESAW, Ga., Sept. 12 - The cash register at Goody's clothing store here flashed $106.01 - for a dress shirt and three pairs of Levi's - but as Lori Smith reached for her credit card, a nearby voice brought the transaction to a halt.

"Tell you what, why don't you let me take care of it?" said Scott Evans, his delivery as smooth as a car salesman's as he directed Ms. Smith to a partner brandishing stacks of $1 bills.

Mr. Evans explained that they were there on behalf of NBC, promoting an unscripted show, "Three Wishes," which will have its premiere on the network on Sept. 23. In the series, the singer Amy Grant travels to a different town each week in an effort to fulfill the heart's desire of needy families and community groups.

For a network that dominated the prime-time ratings for a decade with sophisticated urban comedies like "Cheers," "Seinfeld," "Frasier" and "Friends," only to tumble to fourth place last season without them, Ms. Grant's show is a radical departure. "Three Wishes" is aimed, in no small part, at a churchgoing rural and suburban audience. And its marketing plan, evocative of a red-state presidential campaign, bears scant resemblance to any NBC has crafted before.

In advance of the new prime-time television season, NBC sent more than 7,000 DVD's of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Ms. Grant. ("At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action," she tells them.) The network has also booked Ms. Grant - a pop singer who vaulted to fame singing Christian songs, crossed over to mainstream radio and recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages" - for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

And, perhaps most seductively, NBC has been stuffing cash registers at stores here like Goody's and others in or around Nashville, Salt Lake City, Des Moines and Milwaukee with tens of thousands of $1 bills used for groceries and other basics. The dollars are affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, "What's your wish?," and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns.

Though NBC hopes the show will have broad appeal - it also took its dollar bill campaign to New York and Los Angeles - Barbara Blangiardi, the network's vice president of marketing and special projects, said that "absolutely the Christian community was a target audience."

Indeed, Ms. Grant brings an established following to NBC, instantly making her one of its biggest stars. Her show is consistent with other efforts the network has made to reach viewers outside major cities, including its telecasts of Nascar races and periodic visits by the "NBC Nightly News" anchor, Brian Williams, beyond the Northeast.

Though NBC is using more conventional tactics to promote much of its lineup - advertisements for "My Name Is Earl," a comedy about a ne'er-do-well who wins a lottery, have appeared in stadiums and movie theaters - it is taking a grass-roots approach to "Earl" and several other shows in addition to "Three Wishes." These include "The Biggest Loser," a returning reality series about weight loss. Last week, the network sponsored parties for "Loser" in 1,000 homes.

Here in Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta with 22,000 residents and a Civil War battlefield, NBC had little difficulty finding people who had tuned out its prime-time lineup since its glory days.

"I loved 'Seinfeld,' " said Ms. Smith, 40, who works at a Hobby Lobby store. "I watched 'Cheers' and 'Friends,' " said her boyfriend, Paul Perry, 34, who is out of work while recuperating from shoulder surgery.

But when asked to name a show on the network's prime-time schedule last year, neither could.

Instead, they, along with nearly a dozen other recipients of NBC's largess, cited shows they liked on other networks, including "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (which "Three Wishes" resembles) and "Desperate Housewives" on ABC; the "C.S.I." shows on CBS; and "American Chopper," a Discovery Channel series about motorcycles.

NBC executives refused to say how much they were spending to raise the network's profile this fall, other than that it was roughly a third more than what they spent last year at this time. (The popularity of "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" on ABC last fall has been attributed in part to the network's targeted marketing, including dry-cleaning bags with the "Desperate" logo.)

One of the architects of NBC's strategy, John D. Miller, chief marketing officer of the NBC Universal Television Group, said the network had organized its priorities this year into two tiers. The first includes "Earl"; "E-Ring," a Pentagon drama; and "Surface," about organisms rising from the deep, which are each receiving more marketing support than any show last year. The second tier, also the beneficiary of heavy promotion, includes "Three Wishes," "Biggest Loser" and the Martha Stewart "Apprentice" offshoot.

Mr. Miller said he expected that "Three Wishes" (to be broadcast on Fridays at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 8 p.m., Central time) would play a "sleeper" role in helping improve the network's fortunes. But he also said he wanted to help the show because of his emotional reaction to it. Set in Sonora, Calif., the first episode shows Ms. Grant helping a young girl recovering from a car accident, a boy seeking to thank the man filling the void left by his late father and a high school trying to replace its waterlogged football field. And yes, Ms. Grant sings - twice.

"This show makes me feel good," Mr. Miller said.

At the root of NBC's strategy for "Three Wishes" is raising its visibility in smaller counties.

It has bought advertising for the series in Sunday magazine inserts like American Profile, which appears in weekly and biweekly newspapers. The DVD copies of the pilot were distributed to churches, as well as some synagogues and mosques, through a California public relations firm, Grace Hill Media, that specializes in religious audiences. The $1 bill promotion was conceived by another California firm, this one an advocate of promotional stunts, called Impact.

Though the "Wishes" campaign has been in the works for months, the hurricane that displaced tens of thousands of people has put the network in a bit of a bind: will the wishes the show is trying to fulfill pale in comparison? NBC figures that the hurricane, by touching off a national spirit of charity, could actually draw viewers. (One wish will now concern a family devastated by the storm.)

As luck would have it, one of the people randomly picked to have her Goody's order paid by NBC - at an even $80 - was a woman who said she had promised to help about 100 children relocated to Georgia after the storm. She was Catherine Love, 36, a hairstylist, who said she was struggling to fulfill that pledge.

"I would watch 'Three Wishes' because there's so much bad going on in the world," said Ms. Love, who works at a salon, Kids Kuts, in nearby Marietta. "It's refreshing to see good things happen to people who deserve it."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[jgztw2es]

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS





By JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE
September 21, 2005

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

"Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it's such tough going for her husband."

Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.

"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

Age 26 in 1972, he reportedly rounded off a night's boozing with his 16-year-old brother Marvin by challenging his father to a fight.

On November 1, 2000, on the eve of his first presidential election, Bush acknowledged that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Maine. Age 30 at the time, Bush pleaded guilty and paid a $150 fine. His driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine.

"I'm not proud of that," he said. "I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson." In another interview around that time, he said: "Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom (to start) going to AA. I don't think that was my case."

During his 2000 presidential campaign, there were also persistent questions about past cocaine use. Eventually Bush denied using cocaine after 1992, then quickly extended the cocaine-free period back to 1974, when he was 28.

Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great.

"I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."

(It sure as hell is)

[Ingeborga]

September 16, 2005

http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/000251.htm

The Bush Speech in Black and White

One of the more transparent aspects of President Bush's speech from New Orleans last night was its cynical outreach to African-Americans. Trying to break the stereotype of his administration and his party as modern day Confederates, Bush spoke eloquently of race and poverty in the Katrina disaster. Unfortunately, Bush's makeover as born-again racial healer simply isn’t credible, given his own penchant for racial stereotypes.

Returning to the formula of his 2005 State of the Union address, President Bush sought to repair the broken relationship between the Party of Lincoln and black Americans over his administration’s calamitous response in New Orleans' hour of need:




"As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets."Media reaction to the Bush address seemed to take the President at his word. Even a New York Times editorial noted that, "He spoke clearly and candidly about race and poverty...Mr. Bush's words could begin a much-needed healing process."


Sadly, Bush's introduction to the language of racial harmony can't mask his own and his party’s recent history of stereotyping and insensitivity. Mississippi Governor and former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour referred to looters as "subhuman." Just weeks ago, the current RNC chairman Ken Mehlman misidentified Texan James Byrd as the perpetrator, not the victim, of one of the worst hate crimes in recent memory. (Bush's own discussion of the Byrd case during the second debate with Al Gore was one of the more disturbing moments of the 2000 campaign.) And President Bush himself, during a January forum seemed quite comfortable using racial caricatures while pushing his Social Security privatization plan to an African-American audience:



"Another interesting idea...is a personal savings account...which can't be used to bet on the lottery, or a dice game, or the track. "Secondly, the interesting -- there's a -- African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people."


Unfortunately for President Bush, New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina is not New York after 9/11. This time, the color of suffering – and heroism – is black. There is no Lisa Beamer for Bush and his amen corner to appropriate as the face of their compassion. As the New York Times concluded in its editorial, real racial healing in the wake of Katrina "will happen only if they are followed by deeds that are as principled, disciplined and ambitious as Mr. Bush's speech."

[Goseciwx]

http://www.mattbors.com/shirts.html

[ricochettty]

Clinton had his healthcare reform debacle. Now Bush has his Social Security reform debacle.

It will only be one if people remember it. By November 2006, many voters will be forgetful enough to give Bush a pass, vote Republican again, and in 2007 Bush will, suprise, bring back the phasing-out of Social Security. I would suggest to Democrats in Congress to beat the GOP over the head with this so voters remember the fact that they want to gut the New Deal and anything that resembles an activist government (just look at how Bush cut FEMA for two years in a row and allowed his college buddies patronage jobs.)

[Lillie_Steins]

I am looking forward to reading about when the Bush "error" is over.

[Wetekemieluth]

September 18, 2005

Message: I Care About the Black Folks

By FRANK RICH

ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.

This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.

But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.

The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.

WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.

It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Grzqbmhy]

End of the Bush Era

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Washington Post - Page A27

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...091201433.html

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat. Very nearly all of us rallied behind him.

If Bush had understood that his central task was to forge national unity, as he seemed to shortly after Sept. 11, the country would never have become so polarized. Instead, Bush put patriotism to the service of narrowly ideological policies and an extreme partisanship. He pushed for more tax cuts for his wealthiest supporters and shamelessly used relatively modest details in the bill creating a Department of Homeland Security as partisan cudgels in the 2002 elections.

He invoked our national anger over terrorism to win support for a war in Iraq. But he failed to pay heed to those who warned that the United States would need many more troops and careful planning to see the job through. The president assumed things would turn out fine, on the basis of wildly optimistic assumptions. Careful policymaking and thinking through potential flaws in your approach are not his administration's strong suits.

And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country's consciousness. Yesterday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown put an exclamation point on the failure.

The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans. Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.

But the first intimations of the end of the Bush Era came months ago. The president's post-election fixation on privatizing part of Social Security showed how out of touch he was. The more Bush discussed this boutique idea cooked up in conservative think tanks and Wall Street imaginations, the less the public liked it. The situation in Iraq deteriorated. The glorious economy Bush kept touting turned out not to be glorious for many Americans. The Census Bureau's annual economic report, released in the midst of the Gulf disaster, found that an additional 4.1 million Americans had slipped into poverty between 2001 and 2004.

The breaking of the Bush spell opens the way for leaders of both parties to declare their independence from the recent past. It gives forces outside the White House the opportunity to shape a more appropriate national agenda -- for competence and innovation in rebuilding the Katrina region and for new approaches to the problems created over the past 4 1/2 years.

The federal budget, already a mess before Katrina, is now a laughable document. Those who call for yet more tax cuts risk sounding like robots droning automated talking points programmed inside them long ago. Katrina has forced the issue of deep poverty back onto the national agenda after a long absence. Finding a way forward in -- and eventually out of -- Iraq will require creativity from those not implicated in the administration's mistakes. And if ever the phrase "reinventing government" had relevance, it is now that we have observed the performance of a government that allows political hacks to push aside the professionals.

And what of Bush, who has more than three years left in his term? Paradoxically, his best hope lies in recognizing that the Bush Era, as he and we have known it, really is gone. He can decide to help us in the transition to what comes next. Or he can cling stubbornly to his past and thereby doom himself to frustrating irrelevance.

[JohnVK]

Regarding that Reuters photo of the Presidential Note:

When I first saw it, I thought it was some joke from a blog. Junior high - although I don't remember any of the notes I passed to girls having anything to do with peeing.

This morning, Imus asked NBC news anchor Brian Williams a few questions about Bush's location in New Orleans as the backdrop of his speech last night, and Williams responded, "We were wondering what he was doing behind the statue of Andrew Jackson."

[RaicickKida]

Well, this country got what it voted for.

[Soassesaisp]

http://www.demockratees.com/manifestdensity.htm

[Pataacculako]

Disney on Parade

By MAUREEN DOWD
September 17, 2005
NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/op...rticle_popular

WASHINGTON

The president, as he fondly recalled the other day, used to get well lit in New Orleans. Not any more.

On Thursday night, Mr. Bush wanted to appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of a eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney World. (Must be Sleeping Beauty's Castle, given the somnambulant pace of W.'s response to Katrina.)

All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting - the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for "Monday Night Football" and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.

Before the presidential address, Mr. DeServi was surveying his handiwork in Jackson Square, crowing to reporters about his cathedral: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud."

As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.

The president is still looking for a tiny spot of unreality in New Orleans - and in Iraq, where a violent rampage has spiked the three-day death tally to over 200.

The Oedipal loop-de-loop of W. and Poppy grows ever loopier.

With Karl Rove's help, Junior designed his presidency as a reverse of his father's. W. would succeed by studying Dad's failures and doing the opposite. But in a bizarre twist of filial fate, the son has stumbled so badly in areas where he tried to one-up Dad that he has ended up giving Dad a leg up in the history books.

As Mark Twain said: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Of course, it's taken Junior only five years to learn how smart his old man was.

His father made the "mistake" of not conquering and occupying Iraq because he had the silly idea that Iraqis would resent it. His father made the "mistake" of raising taxes, not cutting them, and overly obsessing about the federal deficit. And his father made the "mistake" of hewing to the center, making his base mad and losing his bid for re-election.

Bush père did make a real mistake in responding slowly to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but that blunder has been dwarfed by what the slothful son hath wrought. Because of his fatal tardiness, W. now has to literally promise the moon to fix New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, driving up the federal deficit and embarking on the biggest spending bonanza and government public works program since F.D.R.

In his address from the French Quarter, the president sounded like such a spendthrift bleeding heart that he is terrifying the right more than his father ever did.

Read my lips: By the time all this is over, people will be saying that Poppy was the true conservative in the family.