Government, Bad

Sarah Palin was in favor of the Bridge to Nowhere while Alaska had senior members in congress in the majority party who could obtain earmarks.

From Jim Rutenberg's article in Sunday's NY Times:

...in an interview with a book auther in the Oval Office one day last December, [President Bush] daydreamed about the next phase of his life....First, Mr. Bush said,"I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers." With joint assets that have been estimated at as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added,"I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75" thousand dollars a speech, and "Clinton's making a lot of money."

Just another view of the wall between the Two Americas. After working all my life as an academic scientist -10 years at peak of ~ $100,000/yr and generally earning well over the U.S. median income - my Social Security plus pension from my saved, invested money will be less annually than the cool hundred thousand that Curious Jerk can make in a couple of evenings of drivel and lies. No wonder kids don't see the point of working hard and playing by the rules any more.

Yet another industry crony installed in our government to pretend to regulate the industry he came from (Huffington Post):

President George W. Bush resorted to a recess appointment in October 2006 to anoint Richard Stickler as the nation's mine safety czar after it became clear he could not receive enough support even in a GOP-controlled Senate. [...]

The wife and daughter of a miner killed at Sago wrote a letter to lawmakers that same month urging them to reject Stickler's nomination.

"Mr. Stickler is a longtime coal executive and because of his connections with the coal industry, we are concerned that his primary objectives may be solely on compliance and production, not on miners' health and safety," Debbie Hamner and Sara Bailey wrote in a letter quoted by the Gazette. [...]

In August and September of the same year, the Senate twice voted to send the Stickler nomination back to the White House.

In October 2006, Bush used a recess appointment to install Stickler — a decision that was quickly denounced by senators from both sides of the aisle.

Via Richard Warnick at OneUtah. Place your bets — when will Utah finally give up that last 5%?

AP story in the Salt Lake Tribune:

A new video posted on both YouTube and the Internet by Democrats includes a montage of political moments in which Mitt Romney repeatedly downplays his Republican Party affiliation while running for governor of heavily Democratic Massachusetts in 2002. [...]

The montage, posted by the Massachusetts Democratic Party, includes several clips of Romney complaining about the lack of political balance in heavily Republican Utah, where he spent three years while he headed [the] 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Romney often made that point as he argued for equilibrium in Massachusetts, which tilted to the opposite end of the political spectrum.

"I lived in a place that had a one-party state that was primarily Republican. I thought, 'Well, won't that be nice?' The answer is no," Romney told the New Bedford Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 16, 2002.

But now it's 2007, so I'm sure Romney has a different opinion.

Update: The Deseret News finds an even better Romney quote:

I'm not convinced that a state would be better off with all Republicans. As a matter of fact, I've been in a state like that for the past three years. Not a good thing.

It's deja vue all over again at FEMA:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency does not have effective procedures to protect information contained on its laptop computers, according to a new report from Richard Skinner, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general.
...“As a result, sensitive information stored and processed in FEMA’s laptop computers may not be protected properly,” Skinner wrote in the report.

Read the rest of this entry...

Sen. Patrick Leahy:

This is a further shift by the Bush Administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances. This White House cannot have it both ways. They cannot stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses, while claiming nothing improper occurred. [...]

I will look at the President's broad claim of executive privilege. Since we have heard so much testimony that the President did not personally make these decisions on the firings and was not personally involved, it is difficult to imagine that there is much basis to these claims. They cannot have it both ways.

In addition to violating FISA, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and the Geneva Conventions, the Bush Administration may have cheerfully violated the Hatch Act by asking federal employees to do pro-GOP political work:

In a letter to White House political affairs director Karl Rove, the committee chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), asked about the Jan. 26 videoconference by Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings, which was directed to the chief of the GSA [General Services Administration] and as many as 40 agency officials stationed around the country.

Jennings's 28-page presentation included 2006 election results and listed the names of Democratic candidates considered beatable and Republican lawmakers thought to need help. At a hearing Wednesday about the GSA, Waxman said the presentation and follow-up remarks allegedly made by agency chief Lurita Alexis Doan may have violated the Hatch Act, a law that restricts federal agencies and employees from using their positions for political purposes. [...]

Six political appointees at the GSA who participated in the videoconference said Doan asked at the conclusion how the agency could help GOP candidates win in the next elections, according to a letter Waxman sent to Doan.

At some point you start to wonder if anyone in the Bush Administration understands (or cares) what a "law" is. They're completely out of control.