George W. Bush

As Congress desperately tries to pass legislation to bail out Wall Street and restore confidence in the American economy, it is also managing to allow tax credits for renewable energy to expire at the end of the year. According to Robert Pear's recent New York Times article: "The House and the Senate conceded Monday that they were in a stalemate over proposals to provide tax incentives for the production and use of renewable energy, leaving the future of the nascent industry in limbo."

Unfortunately, this tax incentive has gotten caught up in congressional tax policy gridlock - no one thinks this policy is a bad idea, but it's basically the hostage of a broader debate on the budget and tax policy.  read more »

OXFORD, Miss.—Eames Henley, a 20-year-old civil engineering major at Ole Miss, was standing in the University's mall, called "the Grove," listening to bluegrass and wearing a pin that said "I'm Anti-Socialism."

I asked him what he thought of the Bush administration's bailout plan.

"It seems a little socialistic," he said.

So, did he oppose it?

"No, because the economy's about to collapse. Something needs to be done."

Asked whether he thought John McCain, whom he supports, helped or hindered the chances of a plan passing, he said, "It seems like he's doing his job," he said. "Taking care of business."

In May, The Observer's Felix Gillette looked at HBO's hiring of former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown and The New York Times' Frank Rich as "creative consultants."

At the time, he wrote:

Ms. Brown said that since January, she’s pitched two projects—an idea for a series and an idea for a movie—that the HBO executives liked and are in the process of 'taking a little further.'... 'If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them. Sometimes it’s something I’m interested in doing. Sometimes it’s something I think they should know about. Richard wants to encourage people who have good relationships with the creative community to simply be thinking about HBO when they’re out and about.

According to Variety, Ms. Brown is honing in on some of that "interesting material," namely, a series based on Tom Wolfe's four year old novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.  read more »

Debate over how to resolve the nation’s financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700 billion swindle. Before Congress approves such a stunning expenditure to save the undeserving hides of the super-rich, they may at least create provisions for independent oversight, new regulation, public equity and homeowner relief.

There is one more thing that should not be neglected, however. Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute, imprison and ultimately deter the criminals responsible for this disaster.  read more »

Here's a picture, from the official city Web site, of Michael Bloomberg greeting George W. Bush at J.F.K. Airport yesterday.

When Bloomberg greeted Bush last year during a visit to New York, photographs weren't made available.

Anyone want to bet that if Bloomberg pushes back term limits and runs again, this image won't be prominently featured in a Weiner-for-mayor spot?

UPDATE: A reader emailed a link to an AP photograph of Bloomberg greeting Bush when he came to the city on 9/24/07. That photograph isn't on the mayor's web site. But they do have a shot of the mayor and the president at an education event two days later.
 

On Tuesday , I posted a column urging Barack Obama to emphasize John McCain's long history of support for Social Security privatization – a position that looks even more embarrassing today than a few weeks or months ago. For some time, McCain has been trying to revise his own history and pretend that he “never” supported privatization (or what he and other Republicans daintily refer to as “personal accounts”). Obama shouldn't let him get away with it.

Within a day following my post—by pure coincidence, needless to say—the Obama campaign aired an ad on the privatization theme in Michigan, as my former Observer colleague  read more »

GOLDEN, Colo.—After spending most of yesterday on the stump and the airwaves attacking Republican stewardship of the economy and promising more financial heartache under John McCain, Barack Obama today sought to articulate in stark and substantive terms why his proposals would have averted the financial crisis and will return stability to Wall Street.

Speaking in a college gym, Obama said, “Since this turmoil began over a year ago, the housing market has collapsed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to be effectively taken over by the government. Three of America’s five largest investment banks failed or have been sold off in distress.  read more »

CHICAGO--Barack Obama is expected to frame the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch as indicative of the mismanagement of the economy by Republicans over the last eight years at a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colorado today. The remarks are part of a more aggressive stance the Obama campaign is taking this week, with vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden arguing that John McCain has changed for the worse and a new ad calling the McCain campaign dishonorable. Obama's remarks, according to Obama staff on the campaign plane, will seek to make the point that with Wall Street imploding, McCain’s stewardship of the economy will be similar George Bush’s.  read more »

From the Wall Street Journal this morning:

The next U.S. president will be confronted with slow growth, high unemployment and an economy teetering toward recession, say 51 private economists ... The respondents saw a 60% chance of an outright recession, expect the economy to shed 19,000 jobs a month for a year, and say the jobless rate, which jumped in August to 6.1%, will keep rising, to 6.4% by midyear, passing the 6.3% seen after the last recession.

Eight years ago, when he first sought the presidency, John McCain presented himself to the country much the way he is presenting himself now—as a battle-scarred American hero who had endured unspeakable physical and mental abuse for his country and who had emerged from it to pursue a life of courageous and principled public service.

Only back then, the Republican establishment, which just spent the last three nights in St. Paul feting him as living shrine to all that is righteous and noble about this country, didn't see him in such glowing terms. They called him a Democratic plant, challenged his heroism narrative, and rallied around—like their lives depended on it—a well-connected son of privilege who had shown exactly zero interest in serving his country in Vietnam, preferring the comparative light-lift of the Texas National Guard.  read more »

Since her selection as John McCain's running-mate was announced last Friday, the media has been "on a mission to destroy" Sarah Palin. That's the charge from McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, at least, and it's just one of countless over-the-top characterizations from the McCain campaign and its surrogates of the scrutiny Palin has encountered.

On one level, this is standard fare for a Republican nominee. Ever since Richard Nixon framed his candidacy and his presidency as havens for a "silent majority" of Americans who felt condescended to by media elites, press-bashing has been a staple of the G.O.P. playbook, a way to rally the party base against a common enemy and to convince G.  read more »

ST. PAUL--Last night, George W. Bush spoke via satellite to the Republican convention for eight and a half minutes—with his speech timed to finish just before the broadcast networks began their blanket coverage of the ten o'clock prime-time hour.

This doesn't compare favorably with the treatment that the other two-term presidents of the television age received at their final conventions.

For comparison's sake, eight and a half minutes also happens to be the length of the above video, which was merely the introduction for Bill Clinton's speech at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. When the Clinton video finished, delegates and television viewers (his tribute was carried in the ten o'clock hour) watched footage of the outgoing president making his way through a long hallway to the convention stage, while his various accomplishments scrolled across the bottom of the screen (this particular effect was only for those in convention hall, not on TV).  read more »

Why on earth is George W. Bush speaking to the Republican convention tonight? When Hurricane Gustav prompted John McCain to cancel the opening night festivities in St. Paul, it seemed that he’d engineered an enviable political maneuver: coming up with a justifiable excuse to keep the deeply unpopular president – to whom Democrats are frantically trying to link McCain – away from his convention.

Even Republicans happily admitted to being relieved that Bush wouldn’t be participating.

"It's a good thing," Dick Zimmer, the former New Jersey congressman who is mounting an uphill battle against Senator Frank Lautenberg, told the Los Angeles Times. “The first thing I was asked when I won the primary was whether I planned to ask President Bush to come to New Jersey to campaign for me.  read more »

When the Bush administration brokered JPMorgan's March takeover of Bear Stearns, it stirred many questions, not least: Should the government be in the business of bailing out big business, especially when it involves billions in public money?

Apparently, the Republican Party doesn't think so. Here's an excerpt from the section about housing in the party's platform (PDF), passed on Monday at the start of its convention in St. Paul:

Homeownership remains key to creating an opportunity society. We support timely and carefully targeted aid to those hurt by the housing crisis so that affected individuals can have a chance to trade a burdensome mortgage for a manageable loan that reflects their home’s market value.

 read more »

Former Bush pioneer and Republican fund-raiser Barron Thomas says that the usually luxurious parties at the Republican National Convention “are severely on hold” as attention seems to be turning towards fund-raising for potential victims of Hurricane Gustav.

“I think the idea is to send a lot of that money down to New Orleans,” said Thomas, who is set to arrive later in the week.

On the positive side, Thomas, an Arizona fund-raiser who has been critical of John McCain in the past and was a strong supporter of Rudy Giuliani, said that his phone has not stopped ringing since the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s choice for Vice President.  read more »

Twice in the television era have the pre-scripted proceedings of a national political convention been badly disrupted – and both times it proved catastrophic for the party that put on the show.

In 1968, chaos in the streets and on the floor of the Democrats’ Chicago convention – punctuated by the unforgettable image of Richard Daley shouting epithets at Abraham Ribicoff after the Connecticut senator decried the “Gestapo tactics” of the mayor’s police force – led many Americans to conclude that a party incapable of managing its own affairs shouldn’t be entrusted with the nation’s affairs.

Four years later, similar chaos reigned in Miami Beach, when an endless parade of procedural motions from the floor forced George McGovern’s acceptance speech – perhaps his best chance to win a reevaluation from the millions of voters who’d come to view him as a fringe figure – out of prime time and into the wee hours of the morning, limiting the television audience to a few hard-core shut-ins and insomniacs who might otherwise have been watching infomercials.  read more »

Suddenly, the decision to anoint former Virginia Governor Mark Warner as this year's keynote speaker doesn't seem that wise.

Warner will address the convention between 9:00 and 10:00 (E.S.T.) tonight, the main non-Hillary Clinton event of the night. On paper, he's a logical pick–a moderate former business executive who won massive popularity in red-state Virginia by shying away from overtly partisan rhetoric and themes, winning many Republican admirers in the process. He's running for the Senate this year against Jim Gilmore, but almost certainly won't even break a sweat; it's probably the least competitive open-seat race in the country.  read more »

Reverend Al Sharpton doesn't only want church-goers to vote, he wants churches to be part of an effort to make sure that every vote is counted.

“Imagine if every pastor had their members sign up so we can check to make sure their vote has not been miscounted," Sharpton said, speaking to reporters during a reception in his honor in Denver yesterday. "We can’t wait till they show up that day and they’re not on the books. We need to do it now.”

Sharpton said he will focus his efforts on seven key states: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama.  read more »

Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that New York City engage in a serious effort to develop alternative energy sources, and in return for his trouble he faced skepticism and even ridicule from a cynical media. Cartoons were drawn with King Kong trying to swat a windmill off the top of the Empire State Building. Still, even the tabloids could not dismiss the idea entirely. Bloomberg commands respect, and $4 a gallon gasoline has everyone looking for alternatives.

New York City has been built by people who dreamed large and were able to project into the future. Imagine the city without Central, Van Cortland or Prospect Parks.  read more »

The Presidential nominating conventions are now approaching, first the Democrats' and then the Republicans'. The President hangs out at the Olympics, stomps his feet over the Russian invasion of Georgia and then makes another pass at gutting the Endangered Species Act by reducing the time and scientific analysis needed to assess the environmental impact of federal projects. The energy and climate issue have provided some environmental content to this campaign, but the folks running the country still don't see the stake we have in environmental sustainability.

What does an extinct frog have to do with human well-being? What does the environment have to do with economic wealth? Can't our technology solve any environmental problem we make? The short answer, as we learned nearly half a century ago from Rachael Carson and Barry Commoner, is that everything is connected to everything else.  read more »

John McCain isn’t the first presumptive presidential nominee to announce ahead of time when he will announce his running-mate.

Just as speculation over Barack Obama’s imminent V.P. selection reached fever pitch yesterday, McCain’s campaign not coincidentally leaked to the Politico news that the G.O.P. candidate will make his own choice public on August 29 – the day after Obama’s acceptance speech (and McCain’s 72nd birthday). The goal is to shift the focus away from Obama as soon as his speech ends, denying him (in theory, anyway) a post-convention bounce.

Actually, the announcement-of-an-announcement strategy has been used before – by Al Gore in 2000. Lagging behind George W.  read more »

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
Harper, 432 pages, $27.95

With little warning and less explanation, Ron Suskind has written the year’s most brazenly experimental novel. It’s not entirely successful, but then the boldest experiments are often inconclusive. Mr. Suskind summons deceased aesthetic forms as an intervention on the now—but he’s not indulging in ironical pastiche. Moving, manipulative, maudlin, The Way of the World reanimates the conventions and contrivances of 19th-century realism with a seriousness too deadly to be a matter of mere style.

It’s all here: a cast of characters that sprawls across class and circumstance to represent the totality of a historical moment; central moral truths restated so often as to be less repetition than incantation; an all-seeing narrator who intrudes at regular intervals to tell the reader what it all means.  read more »

The energy issue has become central in the presidential campaign and we see little to suggest that either candidate will engage in a real discussion about the real choices we have. The fact is that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. There are too many people and too much need for energy for this to continue for very long. How long? More than a decade and less than a century. Why should we care? Because we probably can think of better things to do with petrochemicals than burning them for fuels. Because we shouldn’t be handing this problem to our children to solve.  read more »

The plot of Swing Vote, the new political satire, starring Kevin Costner and Kelsey Grammer, about a lazy dad from New Mexico whose unintentionally-cast ballot ends up being the presidential election’s deciding vote, was stolen, a former Bush aide is claiming.

The Associated Press is reporting that Bradley Blakeman, a political commentator and one-time deputy-assistant to president Bush, has filed a lawsuit claiming that, in 2006, he gave Mr. Grammer a copyrighted screenplay called Go November, and that Mr. Grammer had agreed not only to develop the project, but also to star in the film as an incumbent Republican president, similar to the role he plays in Swing Vote.  read more »

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Metropolitan Books, 224 pages, $24

Although John McCain wants U.S. forces to stay in Iraq until the mission really has been accomplished, an army of conservatives remains implacably opposed to the war and the occupation. Andrew Bacevich is among the most outspoken of them. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who became a professor of history and international relations at Boston University after he retired from the Army, Mr. Bacevich warned back in March 2003 that if the United States encountered greater resistance than the architects of the Iraq invasion had promised, the nation would be tested "in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history.  read more »

Over the past weekend we got to hear President Bush, Senator McCain and then Senator Obama all supporting drilling for oil off our coasts. Both Bush and McCain maintain that the way to reduce gasoline prices is to develop more supplies of oil. They argue, and polling shows people believe, that drilling for more oil will lower prices. Although Obama is not crazy about drilling in fragile environments, he's willing to allow some drilling in exchange for a bill that would promote alternative energy.

For a brief moment I admired the artfulness and subtly of Obama's perspective-a little carefully controlled drilling can't do much harm, as long as our policy encourages renewable energy.  read more »

"I like President Bush," radio host and cigar (et cetera) aficionado Rush Limbaugh wrote in an email to The New York Times Magazine's Zev Chafets in a profile earlier this month. "[B]ut he is not a conservative. He is conservative on some things, but he has not led a movement as Reagan did every day of his career. Bush’s unpopularity is due primarily to his reluctance to publicly defend himself and his administration against attacks from the left."

Luckily for Mr. Bush, Mr. Limbaugh has his back, as this informal chat with the president from his broadcast today shows.

With Mr. Bush's approval ratings at 30 percent (fair-and-balanced footnote: it's nearly as bad for the Democrat-controlled Congress), it seems that Mr. Limbaugh, his radio crew, and perhaps the staff of his reported five-home compound make up the majority of that figure, as this transcript shows:  read more »

"There may be somebody special here today," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama's sister, upon observing the large audience in the Hilton ballroom this morning. Then she abruptly added, "Two somebodies."

It seems the Obama family is having a hard time remembering Hillary Clinton this week. Last night, Obama painfully forgot to make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt to his supporters at a fund-raiser that was billed as a unity event in which he would make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt. This morning, in front of roughly 2,000 donors, mostly women, who had donated between $200 and $23,000 to a variety of Obama-related funds, the two former rivals appeared together to argue that equal pay and rights for women was a crucial aspect of any plan for American progress, and that party unity was a critical step to winning in November.  read more »

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Michelle Obama did her part for Democratic unity here today, referring to Hillary Clinton as an "extraordinary woman" at a round-table event with former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

"Because of Hillary Clinton's work, the issues of importance to women and working families are more at the forefront than ever before," Obama said, the day before Barack Obama will appear with Clinton for the first time since the primary ended.

Naturally enough, she sought to portray herself and her husband as closely in tune with female concerns.

One of the first rounds of applause during her brief speech came when she paid tribute to her mother for resourcefulness.  read more »

Earlier today the Bush administration made clear they don't intend to intervene in the negotiations between the Iraqi government and several large oil companies.

Chuck Schumer, along with Claire McCaskill and John Kerry, responded quickly with a letter to Condoleezza Rice asking her to prevent the deals from going forward until there is an oil-revenue sharing law.

Both Schumer and Kerry are on the Senate Finance Committee; Kerry and McCaskill are both surrogates for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been going after John McCain for McCain's new, oil company-friendly position on offshore drilling.

Here's the release along with the letter (which, weirdly, doesn't include McCaskill's name at the end of it).  read more »

GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 244 pages, $23.95

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.  read more »

At an education forum in Florida, Michael Bloomberg praised John McCain for defending President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, and praised McCain and Barack Obama for supporting merit pay for teachers.

The legislation, which Ted Kennedy also worked on, has faced criticism. 

The mayor's office sent over a copy of the prepared remarks Bloomberg was set to give to the Excellence in Action National Education Summit at Disney World. The mayor said:

"Instituting accountability standards is central to the reforms embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act. And it says a lot about the independence and integrity of Senator John McCain that at a time when the allies of the status quo have made NCLB a political punching bag, he continues to express his support for those accountability standards.  read more »

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