Feeding the Beast
In order to weaken federal agencies, the Bush administration has expanded them to the point of collapse

By controlling regulatory officers, the Bush administration has put a ‘political watchdog’ on the inside. With the stroke of a pen, Bush has usurped control of all government rulemaking.Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine When President Bush exits the White House in January, he will leave behind a federal government in shambles.

Policy analysts and legal scholars paint a picture of an executive intent on controlling every aspect of the federal bureaucracy, in particular the agencies tasked with regulating industry and commerce.

Supreme court justices and a crippled government. Ah Bush, your legacy shall endure.

Rosanne Cash says people who ’speak’ for father shouldn’t

When John Rich recently took a Florida stage to support the presidential campaign of John McCain, he said, “Somebody’s got to walk the line in the country. They’ve got to walk it unapologetically,” before singing Johnny’s song, “Walk the Line.”

“I knew my father pretty well, at least better than some of those who entitle themselves to his legacy and his supposed ideals, and even I would not presume to say publicly what I ‘know’ he thought or felt. This is especially dangerous in the case of political affiliation. It is unfair and presumptuous to use him to bolster any platform. I would ask that my father not be co-opted in this election for either side, since he is clearly not here to defend or state his own allegiance.”

Now, I respect Rosanne, and I would never speak for Johnny, but just a hunch, I’m guessing he’d have this to say to McCain:

White House missing as many as 225 days of e-mail

WASHINGTON — The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.

Ever notice how effective these guys are at getting exactly what they want?

Andrew Sullivan nails it:

In all the discussion of John McCain’s recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

That, in a nutshell, shows exactly how far we have fallen. What was accepted as torture around the world has been erased by Orwellian language and blood lust. I’m currently reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side- with clinched teeth, because the story it tells is so revolting, so anti-American, that you must quell the urge to scream with each page. If there is a hell, we know that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are there, but as this book shows, save places for John Yoo and David Addington, who are, ironically, constitutional lawyers. Ironic, because its clear they don’t believe in the Constitution at all. They are the little rats behind the power, scribbling exceptions into the margins of our Bill of Rights, trampling due process and giving legal cover to our breaking of international treaties and obligations. They are below contempt.

But how about McCain?

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

These are the prices people pay for power.

John McCain, who can’t utter a public statement on anything without he or his AARP fan club interjecting “He was a POW for five years”, he doesn’t believe he was tortured either.

So it begs the question: Other than raw power and his wife’s cash, what does John McCain believe in…really?

And why is nobody asking him about it?

Large U.S. Bank Collapse Seen Ahead

19/08/08 “Reuters” — - SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world’s biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.

“We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks,” said Rogoff, who is an economics professor at Harvard University and was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist from 2001 to 2004.

Harriet Miers: Now Lobbying for Pakistan

Former White House chief counsel Harriet Miers is now a lobbyist for the Embassy of Pakistan and the Pakistan Peoples Party. On her foreign agent registration short form for Locke Lord Strategies, a subsidiary of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell, the former Supreme Court nominee cites her work as part and parcel of Locke Lord’s effort to “promote better understanding of the country’s recent political, social, and economic developments” and line up state visits to Washington.

Of course, she might have to take a few days off the job for this…one day.

California rules doctors cannot withhold care to gays.

California’s high court has ruled doctors cannot withhold care to gays or lesbians based on religious beliefs.

A unanimous state Supreme Court said that California’s civil rights law barring sexual orientation discrimination extends to medical care.

Double Standards in the Global War on Terror
Anthrax Department
By Tom Engelhardt

18/08/08 “TomDispatch” — - Oh, the spectacle of it all — and don’t think I’m referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp’s thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo’s one million dollar “bonus,” a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I’m thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

Too many questions, not enough answers.

The Pentagon’s alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine
by F. William Engdahl

There is alarming evidence accumulated by serious scientific sources that the US Government is about to or already has ‘weaponized’ Avian Flu. If the reports are accurate, this could unleash a new pandemic on the planet that could be more devastating than the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 30 million people worldwide before it eventually died out. Pentagon and NIH experiments with remains in frozen state of the 1918 virus are the height of scientific folly. Is the United States about to unleash a new racially selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination with an alleged vaccine “against” Avian Flu?

If true, as Laibow points out, “A basic virological fact that the public has not been told is that it is impossible to make a vaccine against a virus that does not yet exist. Public relations efforts to the contrary, IF a vaccine is being made against the Avian Flu virus in its pandemic form, that means that the pandemic virus must already exist, period, end of discussion.”

Uh, yikes?

How To Conceal Massive Economic Collapse

By Ellen Brown

16/08/08 “ICH” — Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses, and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened?

“I think it’s imperative that the following step be taken. The President should have already and should do so very quickly, convene the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. That’s something that he can ask the Secretary of the Treasury to do. . . . This has to be coordinated across markets with the regulators here and obviously with regulators and central banks around the world.”