Have you forgotten?

A Dump Truck of News

The GOP debate from several viewpoints.  Fact checking. Lack of presidential qualities. And how much nuking and bombing do they want?  Because fear works... or at least it did during the Bush era.  Will it work again? Because the GOP really really really wants to start WWIII because that's what they're good at.  War.  Because it's good business.

Tom Tomorrow.

Who let the fascist dogs out?  The GOP thought they could contain them....kept feeding them raw meat... encouraging them to distrust government...

(And why AREN'T we talking about the Saudi role in terrorism?)

If everyone is going to carry a gun, we need this new invention to stop bleeding to be a mandatory item too.

Homes on Mars.

This El Nino seems to be extra special.

Badass women of WWII.

Liberals live in their own bubble too.

George Bush ignored several pre-9/11 warnings to avoid a paper trail... but we knew this.

The melting of the permafrost brings all sorts of things to light.

The Bible?  Or the Koran?

Mr. Rogers was truly an excellent man.

George Takei takes on mayor who thought interment was a good idea.

British Muslims tell off Daesh.

Fukushima'd Monday

The horror of Fukushima keeps on giving.

Immigrant children who were sent back are being killed.

How lizards regenerate their tails: researchers discover genetic 'recipe':

By understanding the secret of how lizards regenerate their tails, researchers may be able to develop ways to stimulate the regeneration of limbs in humans. Now, a team of researchers from Arizona State University is one step closer to solving that mystery. The scientists have discovered the genetic “recipe” for lizard tail regeneration, which may come down to using genetic ingredients in just the right mixture and amounts 

Lizards?... might want to be careful...

George Bush.

Bank of America gets to pay back 17bn over questionable mortgages.  Do they get to go back and help those people they drove out of their houses and into poverty, too?

Bigger spiders a good thing?  I don't think so....

A cop discusses Ferguson and the behavior of the police.

Oh please, let this be true! The Twilight of Antonin Scalia

One half-hour to change a governor's mind about climate change.  And they don't think it worked.

How much you can save when you stop buying shit.

How amazingly transparent the CIA is....

How do you pronounce pecan?

California drought, before and after comparisons.

This should be really interesting...

Bush and Blair's emails and conversations before the Iraq War will be released.

Paul Krugman on George Bush's presidency

Copying his entire article because this needs to be repeated loudly. They are trying to rewrite history. Why should we let them get away with it?

Paul Krugman: 

APRIL 27, 2013, 2:00 PM The Great Degrader 

I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject. 

But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out. 

From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair. 

But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. 

Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies. 

I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where. 

And no, this wasn’t standard practice before. Politics ain’t beanbag and all that, but the president as con man was a new character in American life. 

Even more important, Bush lied us into war. Let’s repeat that: he lied us into war. I know, the apologists will say that “everyone” believed Saddam had WMD, but the truth is that even the category “WMD” was a con game, lumping together chemical weapons with nukes in an illegitimate way. And any appearance of an intelligence consensus before the invasion was manufactured: dissenting voices were suppressed, as anyone who was reading Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) knew at the time. 

Why did the Bush administration want war? There probably wasn’t a single reason, but can we really doubt at this point that it was in part about wagging the dog? And right there you have something that should block Bush from redemption of any kind, ever: he misled us into a war that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, and he did it in part for political reasons. 

There was a time when Americans expected their leaders to be more or less truthful. Nobody expected them to be saints, but we thought we could trust them not to lie about fundamental matters. That time is now behind us — and it was Bush who did it.

Memories...

An old post:

Res ipsa loquitur at Rising Hegemon lays it out for us: 

September 11th. Iraq. Katrina. FEMA. The DOJ. The deficit. Walter Reed. Surging rates of teenage pregnancy, soldier suicides, and income disparity. Lurita Ding Dong Doan and the GSA. Bernie Bada Bing Kerik and the DHS. Heckuva Job Brownie and FEMA. Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld. Condi Ferragamo. Megan O'Sullivan. We scream, "Incompetence!" Still think incompetence across virtually every spectrum of government is an accident? 

You're missing the overall. This is incompetence by design. Disdain as a philosophy. Contempt as a core value. You want the bridge to fail? Let me design it. You want the government to fail? Send a twenty-one-year old whose most meaningful job experience has been driving an ice cream truck to Iraq to rebuild Iraq's interior ministry. Let "The Fucking Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth" formulate defense policy. Put a schmuck with no disaster management experience in charge of FEMA. 

I've said before that we're going to have to fire virtually every person hired into federal government after January 20, 2001. But we need to go farther. Every time a Republican runs, voters need to be reminded that Republicans should never be permitted to run government again. Ever. They don't believe in it.

And today looking back.

Tramping through Tuesday

This week in FAIL.

How to have an argument on Facebook.

How To Spot And Out A Pro-’Lifer’ That Really Just Hates Women And Sex

More about CISPA

The loosey-goosey retirement of Georgie Bush.

BP Gulf disaster... worse than we thought.

Sandy vs Katrina

Krugman states the obvious:

The point is that after Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that’s no accident: the federal government’s ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back. 

Consider, in particular, the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Under President George H. W. Bush, FEMA became a dumping ground for unqualified political hacks. Faced with a major test in the form of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the agency failed completely. 

Then Bill Clinton came in, put FEMA under professional management, and saw the agency’s reputation restored. Given this experience, you might have expected George W. Bush to preserve Mr. Clinton’s gains. But no: he appointed his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to head the agency, and Mr. Allbaugh immediately signaled his intention both to devolve disaster relief to the state and local level and to downgrade the whole effort, declaring, “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” After Mr. Allbaugh left for the private sector, he was replaced with Michael “heckuva job” Brown, and the rest is history. 

Like Mr. Clinton, President Obama restored FEMA’s professionalism, effectiveness, and reputation. But would Mitt Romney destroy the agency again? Yes, he would. As everyone now knows — despite the Romney campaign’s efforts to Etch A Sketch the issue away — during the primary Mr. Romney used language almost identical to Mr. Allbaugh’s, declaring that disaster relief should be turned back to the states and to the private sector. 

The best line on this, I have to admit, comes from Stephen Colbert: “Who better to respond to what’s going on inside its own borders than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea?” 

Look, Republicans love to quote Ronald Reagan’s old joke that the most dangerous words you can hear are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Of course they’ll do their best, whenever they’re in power, to destroy an agency whose job is to say exactly that. And yes, it’s hypocritical that the right-wing news media are now attacking Mr. Obama for, they say, not helping enough people.

Friday

Are you being persecuted because of your faith?  Because claiming you are persecuted is cool and makes people bond together against the bad guys and give money to churches and stuff.

We knew this when it happened.  It was obvious to those who could watch the news and think for themselves.  Bush and Cheney knew a lot more than they shared with us about Bin Laden and 9/11.  So when's the war crimes tribunal?

Jupiter saves Earth ... again.

If You Plan On Ever Getting Old And/Or Sick, You Need To See This

When the buffaloes roamed the prairies... and then when they didn't.

Should women be criminalized for having abortions?  Are we that close to losing the right to choose?  On the edge.

Scott Walker has a goon squad because 8x11 1/2 signs are a threat.  And being a mayor means you can do what you want.

Elizabeth Warren:



Rachel Maddow:  (sorry for the ads)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Romney is Bush

Nobody has learned anything.  And the neocons need jobs.  Because somebody needs to attack Iran.  It's on the to-do list that didn't get completed during Georgie's time.

Remind you of anyone?

Romney as a high school bully.... is like George Bush and his ... issues.








And what it means that Romney "can't remember".

Food stamp president

Posted this three years ago....

And we're still paying for his eight year reign of incompetence

Reminding people constantly

Because it's so nice to try and forget it:

Stating the obvious

Bush Policies Dominant Cause Of National Debt

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated and refined a widely cited chart, laying out the origins of the country's current fiscal trajectory. And as before, the lion's share of the problem comes from ongoing George W. Bush-era policies -- particularly deficit-financed tax cuts, which eliminated Clinton-era surpluses and left the Treasury poised for a huge hit when the financial crisis and economic downturn further eroded federal revenues.

By the end of the decade, CBPP projects that, on the current trajectory, the Bush tax cuts, exacerbated by the economic downturn, combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for the significant majority of public debt as a share of GDP.

Without those factors, and without the need for stimulus measures under President Obama, CBPP projects that the debt-to-GDP ratio would have dropped under both Presidents Bush and Obama.

Speaking of emissions

Having Palin talk about loving the smell of exhaust reminded me of this story....

Georgie wants some credit?

Bush Reportedly Declined Invite Because He’s Peeved He Hasn’t Gotten Enough Credit For Bin Laden Killing

I'll give him credit... for ignoring Bin Laden



and starting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq.

I think he really doesn't want to be upstaged by President Obama's talent for multi-syllabic complex sentences and the ability to talk intelligently off the cuff about many subjects....

Read to the end...

Looks Like Trump's Right: How the Hell Did This President Get Into Those Ivy League Schools?

We were always going to go to war with Iraq

But we knew this the minute Georgie was selected to be president in 2000:

In his evidence Mr Blair said he had always made clear to US president George Bush that he would be "up for" regime change in Iraq if it was the only way of dealing with Saddam Hussein.

He acknowledged that he had discussed ousting Saddam with Mr Bush as early as December 2001 - even though it was not then British policy.

The inquiry released a newly declassified document from March 2002 - a year before the invasion - in which Mr Blair said the UK should be "gung ho" about the prospect of getting rid of the Iraqi dictator.

Dechision points

Bring 'em on...

Bush ends “Decision Points” with the sanguine thought that history’s verdict on his Presidency will come only after his death. During his years in office, two wars turned into needless disasters, and the freedom agenda created such deep cynicism around the world that the word itself was spoiled. In America, the gap between the rich few and the vast majority widened dramatically, contributing to a historic financial crisis and an ongoing recession; the poisoning of the atmosphere continued unabated; and the Constitution had less and less say over the exercise of executive power. Whatever the judgments of historians, these will remain foregone conclusions.

Talk about a book critique!