Another Bush Fails To Make It Out Of A GOP Primary, This Time In Texas

In December we looked at Republican congressional candidate Pierce Bush, the grandson of George H.W. Bush who was planning to run against freshman Democratic backbencher Lizzie Fletcher in gramps' old Houston seat, but switched districts when Republican Pete Olson announced he was retiring (TX-22). Despite the lineage, of because of it, and despite the endorsement from Olson, Bush came in third last night.

Tuesday night's no-runoff winner on the Democratic side was Sri Preston Kulkarni, who came close to beating Olson in 2018-- 51.4% to 46.5%, helping persuade Olson that it is time to retire. It's still a red-leaning district in the Houston suburbs (primarily transitioning Fort Bend County) that was once Tom DeLay's base. The PVI is R+10 and Trump beat Hillary there 52.1% to 44.2%.

As of the February 12 FEC filling deadline, 3 candidates had raised over a million dollars-- Kulkarni plus self-funder Kathaleen Wall and Bush. These were the top GOP raisers:

• Kathaleen Wall- $3,257,886 ($3,245,467 self-funded)
• Pierce Bush- $1,088,159
• Green Hill- $395,740
• Troy Nehls- $299,650

The only 6-figure independent spending in the primary was $138,495 to run this pathetically ineffective ad by a Bush family sewer money PAC, Texans Coming Together.





It's worth mentioning that in 2018, Kathaleen Wall spent $6,206,351 of her own money in her losing race in TX-02. She is expected to spend as much in her runoff battle against Nehls. Other dynamics in the race is that Bush didn't live in the district and was successfully labeled a carpetbagger. His competitors turned the primary-- at least in part-- into a referendum of the Bush name, which Trump has basically destroyed.

The Real Bush Legacy: A Marriage Of Greed And Stupidity

Finally... an excuse to run some photos of Christiano Ronaldo

In the new issue of Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi put together an 8-page look at the crisis 8 years of Bush has left us to face: the marriage of greed and stupidity. The problems our society has to face up to go much deeper than AIG taxpayer-subsidized bonuses in the midst of the "largest quarterly loss in American corporate history-- some $61.7 billion." This morning's NY Times published an editorial by former IMF chief economist Sam Johnson in sync not just with what Taibbi found but what most Americans have also concluded: that "AIG can hardly claim that its generous bonuses attract the best and the brightest. So instead, it defends the payments by arguing they’re needed to retain employees who are crucial for winding down transactions that are 'difficult to understand and manage.' In other words, only the people who stuck the knife into the American International Group can neatly extract it for a decent burial. There is no reason to believe this."

Taibbi, of course, goes much further than Johnson. He sees the AIG mess as part of a culture by, for and of "the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream." In Yesterday's Times a timeline made it clear that the Bush Regime was still running the show when the AIG bonuses were agreed to. "In November, when the bailout of A.I.G. was restructured, Treasury and Fed officials negotiated the terms under which A.I.G. could make the retention payments." Even after the irresponsible Grand Obstructionist Party's footdragging in the Senate that held up Geithner's ability to get to work at Treasury, the course of action set by the political elite to save the asses of the Wall Street elite doesn't seem to have changed much-- if at all. Taibbi:

When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck-- bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too."

Before you start feeling sorry for poor AIG, keep in mind that Liddy, a slick, predatory corporate career criminal from way back "conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its 'pneumonia' was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market."

Taibbi's main point, though, ventures into territory the Times will never go: the Wall Street meltdown and ensuing bailout amounted to a coup d'état by a dying regime, not just Bush but of the elite that gave legitimacy to the structures that hold up that conservative vision of the new American plutocracy.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve-- "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron-- a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I linked to Taibbi's story above because I want to recommend that you read the whole thing. Here, let me do it again. He's eloquent and if you weren't paying attention when the AIG crisis started dominating the headlines you may have missed some crucial moments, moments Taibbi recounts with precision and insight. We all heard Orlando Congressman Alan Grayson grilling Liddy to find out who some of the people responsible for the mess AIG's Financial Products division were. Liddy refused to give up the names of any of the crooks-- claiming angry peasants with pitchforks and piano wire would kill their children (which is how the elites think about the rest of us)-- except for one guy: Joseph Cassano. If you've been following this mess closely, you already know who Cassano is. If you haven't... we have Matt Taibbi analytical and poetic prose to describe him-- and the rest of this unfolding tragedy.

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders-- people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground-- and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy-- the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown-- was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists.

Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating-- meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages-- read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down-- to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets -- some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do-- leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

Sounds complicated, right? It does to me. But that's why we have a government. It's supposed to protect us from predators-- not just the Osama bin-Ladens and Kim Jong-il, but also from the Ken Lays, Edward Liddys and Joseph Cassano (who, by the way retired from AIG this month with $315 million, $34 million of it in a sweet bye-bye bonus). The incompetent and self-serving Bush Regime protected us from none of them. In fact, almost our entire political elite let us down. Wednesday, when President Obama compared AIG and the banksters to suicide bombers, he came closer than he may have realized to assessing the greatest threat to our society--a threat that sums up the Bush legacy in its entirety. And he was getting advice about the dangers of AIG even before the election. Still sounds like a good idea half a year later: "Extradite Cassano. Subpoena Greenberg. Prosecute Willumstaad and Allen." He should discuss that advice his grassroots supporters gave him with that Geithner fella he brought in from Wall Street to save us... from Wall Street.

From The Corporate Shame Files

By Noah

While perusing the weekend papers, I found this from the once venerable Washington Post, Saturday edition, an article headlined: "First Lady Opposes 'Sweet Sasha" and 'Marvelous Malia' Dolls."
 
Now, the Washington Post no longer prides itself on uncovering any kind of corporate wrong-doing, so I can only surmise that, to them, this was just a light-hearted bit of filler, but, to me, it is so much more. The article opens with:

"First Lady Michelle Obama, who has described herself "first and foremost... Malia and Sasha's mom," has defended her daughters' likeness, saying that it is not proper for a company that makes the plush "Beanie Babies" to produce dolls called "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia." "We feel it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes," Michelle Obama's press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, said in a statement today."

I couldn't agree more. It's hard enough to raise any kid to be reasonably well adjusted and normal these days. Imagine growing up OK if dad is The President! And, having dolls named after you. It's different if you are an adult, and an adult in politics at that. We've had talking Bush and Clinton dolls. In MY mind, we've even had David Diapers Vitter dolls (He wets), Larry Craig Wide Stance dolls (He cries), even Mitch McConnell and Charlie Crist dress up dolls (Don't ask) with full ensembles, heals included. But, a child's ego is a fragile thing, easily crushed or just as easily over-inflated. I realize that people want a hat just like the one Aretha wore at the inauguration and their kids may want clothes like the ones Sasha and Malia wore, but, in my opinion, going and marketing dolls, use of likeness legal issues aside, is tasteless exploitation for a quick buck. The guilty party? Illinois based TY Inc.; the people responsible for attics, flea markets, and ebay pages full of Beanie Babies.

The Sasha and Malia dolls are described by the Post as having "soft brown skin" and "big eyes". Here's the kicker: Ty Inc.'s NAMELESS and utterly shameless spokescreep says that the dolls are NOT BASED ON THE OBAMA GIRLS! Yeah. I'm sure TY Inc. had these dolls, that just happened to be named the same as the Obama daughters, on the drawing board for, oh, say, 10 years, or even 2 years ago and, imagine the coinkydink: along come two little African-American girls in the White House with those very names! Who knew? This is a prime example of how, thanks to the example of the Bush administration, the "coloration" of spin became outright lies. Our corporations are now so arrogant that they not only try to change the meaning of specific words, they change the meaning of meaning and implication itself and try to coax us into buying into their crap. "Not based on."

Apparently, more and more corporate PR execs are coming into companies directly from the CorporateAssclowns.com placement service (a division of Horseshit Industries and nearly as bad as the GOP version of the same mentality). I next expect some PR flak to tell me that Keith Richards has never tried drugs, that Salt Water Taffy is good for your teeth, and that Britain doesn't have a National Drinking Problem.

The Washington Post continues:

Since Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, arrived in the national spotlight as their father, now President Barack Obama, ran for office, fascination with the Obama girls has grown intense with web sites devoted to photos of the girls, what they are wearing, what they are doing. The girls have become fashion icons. Thousands of people tried ordering the J. Crew coats the girls wore on inauguration day. Malia wore a blue coat with a blue bow and Sasha wore a guava colored coat with a tangerine scarf.

I get that. But, dolls? Fortunately, the President and First Lady give every indication of being great parents, but why make the job harder for any parent? Right now, Michelle Obama is reportedly focusing on getting the girls settled into their new lives in Washington. Isn't just being uprooted because of your dad's job and the magnitude of that job enough of a strain. Yeah, lots of kids go through it, but dolls named after you?
 
But wait. There's more:

On Thursday, Jenna and Barbara Bush, daughters of former president George W. Bush, wrote a letter to Sasha and Malia, giving them advice on living as "family members of a President" in the national spotlight.
 
"Sasha and Malia," the Bushes wrote in a letter published in the Wall Street Journal (Who else?), "it is your turn now to fill the White House with laughter... It isn't always easy being a member of the club you are about to join. Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love; a man who always put us first. We still see him now as we did when we were seven: as our loving daddy. Our Dad, who read to us nightly [from an upside down copy of My Pet Goat, no doubt], taught us how to score tedious baseball games. He is our father, not the sketch in a paper or part of a skit on TV. Many people will think they know him, but they have no idea how he felt [neither does he] the day you were born, the pride he felt on your first day of school [he probably doesn't remember], or how much you both love being his daughters [to each her own]. So here is our most important piece of advice: remember who your dad really is."

This note, purportedly from the Bush daughters, is no more than the latest in the Bush propaganda project, or, as they "SPIN" it, the Bush Legacy Project. It reeks of agenda mongering. My favorite line is a blatant attempt to ride on President Obama's coattails "Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love…" but, the rest of it speaks for itself. I just wonder which one of Dubya's speechwriters wrote it. It just doesn't read like it came from anybody's heart but then, that is easily explained when you understand that no one named Bush is born with a heart, or a conscience, for that matter. And, just do the math, the Bush twins were full grown 20 year olds by the time Dubya infested the White House. Please, someone tie their tubes. Another generation of Bushes polluting the world right down to the language itself is more that we can bear. Talk about revisionist history. I think I know what Bush "really is" and I don't need two twins who share one brain amongst them to tell me in the WSJ.

There's one time, and only one time, when it will be appropriate for media talking heads to worry about Chimpy the Prez's feelings

Paul Krugman posted this chart with a Monday blogpost, "A remarkable achievement," in which he wondered: "Why were the last 8 years so bad? Even the good times weren’t all that good: by my quick count there were only 10 months under Bush in which the economy added as many jobs as it did in an average month under Clinton. How did Bush manage that?"

by Ken

I hope things are better where you are, but there's not much cheer in my office. We just had seven people fired. On a Wednesday? Who saw that one coming?

By 3:02 Wednesday an e-mail circulated summoning everyone to a 3:30 meeting. It took only a few minutes. It was stressed that the layoffs were no reflection on the people who had been let go. They were all considered talented, productive employees, but given the present realities, the company saw no alternative. To make up for their loss, we were told, we will all have to pitch in. We will have to find ways, we were told, "to do more with less."

The unspoken message: At least you still have jobs. For now.

Which made me think of a conversation -- including the "moral clarity the other night with The Nation's Washington guy, Chris Hayes. On Monday Rachel had devoted a good part of the show to a "special edition" of her Lame Duck Watch, to deal with the craporama-for-the-ages that was Chimpy the Prez's terminal press conference. After watching the astonishing burst of lying cretinousness in which our Chimpy pondered the decision whether to land his plane in New Orleans or Baton Rouge, an incredulous Rachel did her best to communicate her astonishment:

He thinks the problem with the whole Katrina catastrophe was with the photo op!

(Jon Stewart was great on this amazing moment too. After showing the clip, he did one of his longest-ever extended takes of exasperated, bewildered wordless incredulity.)

Now, though, Rachel was pursuing an interesting question. As the Chimpster continues to break his own world records for quantity and brazenness of lies, who is he trying to persuade?

And Chris had a really interesting answer. The Prez's legacy polishers aren't trying to persuade anyone, he ventured. This whole legacy camouflage job is being done to buck up his Chimpiness's own morale.

Take a moment to let this settle in. Now, are you hearing it? This whole orgy of defecating on history, he suggested, is being orchestrated so Chimpy shouldn't feel bad as he makes his exit from the national stage.

The worst thing about this is that it rings true. These are people, after all, who not only deny reality, they spit on it. Reality, they apparently still believe, is what they say it is. And I guess from inside those gated enclaves where the Bush cronies count their looted gazillions, this seems a reasonable proposition.

Oh, I could rant and rave a little, but could I say anything you don't already know? This is a man who has spent his entire life turning everything he touches to manure. And now that he's performed his one and only trick on the country, we're supposed to worry about hurting his feelings?

The only time I want to hear about his feelings is after the judges at his war-crimes trial pronounce sentence following his conviction. Then it will be fair game for the CNN and Fox Noise clowns to shove microphones in his face and ask the man whose favorite hobby is presiding over lethal injections, "How does it feel, waiting for that final needle?"

#

Absolutely Delusional

Click photo to help gage the popularity of the Bush Regime in Africa

I guess the same way Bush has avoided reading newspapers that involve anything he's involved with, I've gone to great lengths to avoid watching Bush when he's on TV. His moron's voice is like fingernails on a blackboard to me and usually, if I wander into a room with a TV that he's on, I turn and walk away. This morning I didn't turn; I was too aghast. I only watched 10 minutes or so but I was flabbergasted at what I heard. Has he fallen off the wagon again? This guy is utterly delusional-- with the kind of 50 foot steel perimeter around him that xenophobes and racists would like at the Mexican border-- or his handlers have been really successful at keeping reality completely at bay. Turns out, the brief part of his press conference I watched-- a question from the Washington Post's Michael Abramowitz and the ensuing rambling, self-justifying rant-- was the highlight of the event. Watch the segment for yourself. The part I'm referring to starts at 1:32:



I left home at an early age-- hitchhiked to California from New York when I was 15, stowed away on a ship and continued traveling-- and living-- all over the globe. (The motto at my travel blog is from Herman Melville: "I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.") I have watched over the past 8 years as the high esteem and prestige with which my country-- and it's citizens-- were held by people in every corner of the world, has plummeted-- in some cases plummeted to such an extend that it had become dangerous for Americans. I just came back from Mali and while I was there I ran into some Peace Corp volunteers who told me that two-thirds of the country-- including Timbuktu-- was deemed too dangerous for Americans to visit. I visited and they wanted to but couldn't.

Today Dan Froomkin pointed to a survey from Pew on global attitudes about America in answer to Bush's delusional raving. Despite his sociopathic remark that positive feelings for America have only fallen among some elites-- "It may be damaged amongst some of the elite, but people still understand America stands for freedom; that America is a country that provides such great hope"-- the kind of hard data that the Bush Regime has always feared and discounted proves that since Bush took over the White House, favorability ratings across the globe have plunged for our country. Examples from Bush's first year to his last year:

Britain- 83% to 53%
France- 62% to 42%
Spain- 50% to 33%
Germany- 78% to 31%
Poland- 86% to 68%
Turkey- 52% to 12%
Japan- 77% to 50%
Indonesia- 75% to 37%
Brazil- 56% to 47%
Mexico- 68% to 47%
Argentina- 50% to 22%


Two countries where the favorability rating has increased should give scant joy to anyone paying attention. Fascist-trending dystopias Russia (37% to 46%) and Nigeria (46% to 64%) feel relatively comfortable with George W. Bush and what he's peddling. Bush made a point about how loved he is in India and Africa. The Indian elite is pretty pro-American and likes Bush-- after all, he gave them nuclear technology that a more level headed leader would never have agreed to-- and African elites may like him too, although I just came back from Mali (see photo) and whatever people thought of Bush, they were over the moon about Obama. Virtually every bus, taxi and truck in Bamako, Mali's capital city, had a U.S. decal on it and even in remote villages far from roads people were positively reverent about Obama. I swear I saw more Obama/Biden stickers in Mali than I did in Los Angeles! In the photo above we had just given a 4 pound container of GNC Pro Performance Weight Gainer 1850 to all the women in a small village way off the beaten track (we were lost). We showed them how to prepare it and told them it was a gift to their village from Obama. They seemed shocked, then overjoyed-- and sent runners to the surrounding villages to come have a look.

With the exception of a few countries ruled by renegade regimes like Sudan, Iraq, Algeria and Cuba, the overwhelming majority of people from every nation in the world were rooting for Obama, primarily because they believed that McCain would mean 4 more years of Bush policies-- and 4 more years of lies and distortions from the White House. Let's hope Obama can live up to the hopes the whole country and the whole world have for him.

Would You Buy Stock In Bush, Inc?

In yesterday's Daily Beast Ben Sarlin asked a question that some people may soon have to deal with, How Much Is A Bush Speech Worth? Bush himself, seems to have a view in direct contrast with the rest of the world's. When Robert Draper interviewed him for Dead Certain, The Presidency of George W. Bush, he reported that was optimistic about his value in the free market of ideas.

Bush said that he planned to “replenish the ol' coffers” on the lecture circuit, where he could make “ridiculous money.”

“I don’t know what my dad gets. But it’s more than fifty, seventy-five [thousand],” Bush told Draper.

But Bush isn't his dad-- or any other president. He's hated and reviled to the point of being toxic and is unlikely to earn as much as former Fug Tuli Kupferberg-- or even Bob Dole, let alone top draw speakers like Lance Armstrong, Magic Johnson, Chaka Khan or Richard Simmons. President Clinton brought in over $50 million in speaking fees from the end of his presidency until 2007. Bush isn't expected to do quite as well-- and it's not just because God dealt him a bad hand with that Katrina thing..

“I imagine people will not pay the same dollars that a compelling speaker like Bill Clinton could command,” says speechwriter Mark Katz, a former Clinton speechwriter who heads a consulting company, the Soundbite Institute. “The George W. Bush years are going to be like our collective junior high school years, something we had to endure but engenders little or no nostalgia.”

...My feeling is that for the first year there probably will be minimal interest in him,” said one agent who works in the public speaking business. “There have been other former presidents who've been unpopular leaving office, but nobody's ever been this unpopular. After a year, though, people forget and then he'll have a very lucrative career.”

And although it is generally agreed that even though Bush is considered an abysmally bad speaker, that handicap won't matter once the market warms up to him. Still, as the BBC pointed out yesterday, Bush's "slips of the tongue," his Bushisms, have made him... quite memorable. Here are some (chronologically), that could go into a routine:

"Reading is the basics for all learning."

"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?"

"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."

"As governor of Texas, I have set high standards for our public schools, and I have met those standards."

"I do remain confident in Linda. She'll make a fine Labour Secretary. From what I've read in the press accounts, she's perfectly qualified."

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''

"They misunderestimated me."

"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead."

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorise himself."

"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."

"The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the - the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."

"I want to thank my friend, Senator Bill Frist, for joining us today. He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."

"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three - three or four books about him last year. Isn't that interesting?"

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."

Maybe not-- although no one seems to think that his disastrous two terms will have any kind of longterm impact on his ability to cash in. People have short attention spans and what they will eventually want-- not for a year or so, of course-- is a photo-op with the ex-president, unless he falls off the wagon and makes a public spectacle of himself a few times. But his legacy of failure? No one will mind-- even though currently Bush is admired by only 17% of Americans and inspires feelings of no confidence in 80%. Of course, videos like this probably aren't going to make him any more popular any faster than it has done for Herbert Hoover. And Bush insists he has "a great sense of accomplishment, and I am going home with my head held high."

I'll say it again: I think most of the former Bush "faithful" have forgotten even the bum's name. Meanwhile, what IS going on in Blair House?

SEE UPDATE BELOW


by Ken

A listserv colleague had just stressed the need to keep hammering home the disaster of the eight-year Bush spending binge -- to force it on the awareness of people, "many of whom want to forget Bush." Since Bush amnesia is kind of a hobby horse of mine (I've written about it here a number of times already), I chimed in:

I don't think enough note has been taken of this phenomenon of Bush-forgetting, the -- to me, anyway -- totally unexpected successor to "Bush-basher"-bashing.

I think for most of the former Bush faithful this is already a done deal. It's like they don't even recognize the NAME. George WHO? Sorry, doesn't ring a bell. At a guess the long, energy-sapping election season provided cover for this amazing disappearing act. Remember how what's-his-name seemed to disappear completely from the GOP nomination battle? (From the Dem one too for the most part, come to think of it.) At the time it seemed like just politics. I think the guy was already making his Great Escape from public consciousness, not to mention accountability.

I used to wonder if it would ever be possible for Bush supporters, both professional and electoral (you know, like the people who voted for the guy twice), including those swell folks who used to scream in outrage at the slightest whisper of what to them was "Bush-bashing," to face up to the reality of who and what their hero was. While some of them have indeed turned on him by claiming that he wasn't a "real conservative," by and large -- and I never saw this one coming! -- the strategy seems to have been to FORGET THAT THERE EVER WAS SUCH A PERSON. Yes, even while the bum is still in the White House and, you know, the one and only president of these United States!

Already the years 2001-08 have metamorphosed into a hazy time when the Democrats were plotting with Fannie and Freddie, taking cash and gifts from them while getting them to make all those bad loans to "those people" who shoulda never got 'em, with the goal of causing Wall Street to explode. During that same time, of course, the ultra-liberal, Islamofascist-loving Dems were also at work failing to support Our Brave Troops and doing everything they could to prevent OBT from achieving the glorious victory General Petraeus eventually won -- over the godless Democrats, I believe.


RACHEL MADDOW WANTS TO KNOW: WHAT
THE HECK IS GOING ON IN BLAIR HOUSE NOW?

Chimpy the Prez may have all but disappeared, but that hasn't stopped him from worsening the economic mess and the Israeli-Palestinian mess. And you'll recall that the White House vetoed the Obama request to move into Blair House on January 5, when the Obama girls were scheduled to begin school, rather than the 15th (the customary date for incoming presidents) -- on the ground that the mammoth building was "booked."

"Booked?" Rachel Maddow asked incredulously last night on her MSBNC show. All 119 rooms and 70,000 square feet, booked? As we all know, the Obama family has now made the move to Washington -- into a hotel. The White House Office of Protocol refused to provide the Maddow people with an agenda for Blair House, but the First Lady's spokesperson did graciously point out that they had "graciously" invited the Obamas to move in on the 15th! "Yes," Rachel noted, "they actually used the word 'graciously.'"

This has all served to make Rachel that much more curious to know what exactly is going on in Blair House which made it impossible to accommodate the president-elect's family.

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If you're a D.C. insider type and have an invitation to an event taking place in Blair House during this 10-day period, Rachel is begging you to e-mail it to her -- just so she can find out what's going on there. (She's also got a Twitter query out to this effect.)

Note that the clip, last night's "Ms. Information" segment, also includes hilarious coverage of Grover Norquist's grand summit of the hopefuls for the Republic National Committee chairmanship, which we've been covering avidly.


TUESDAY NIGHT UPDATE -- WE HAVE OUR ANSWER!

Rachel, it turns out, was flooded with e-mails, but there's only one piece of information about plans for Blair House between th 5th and 15th of January: On the 13th, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is scheduled to stay over!

Even apart from the question of whether there really isn't enough space among those 119 rooms (and 35 bathrooms!) for the four Obamas as well as Mr. Howard that night, or whether it really wasn't possible to put him up somewhere else (where the security costs would certainly have been the tiniest fraction of what it's costing to secure the president-elect's family at the Hay-Adams Hotel (Blair House, of course, comes equipped with security), it turns out that the former prime minister's visit is a red herring, that in fact he was booked after the Obama request to take up residence on the 5th was turned down, presumably so there would be at least the one booking.

Bloomberg News's Margaret Carlson reported exclusively tonight that in fact the Bush turndown was wholly unrelated to occupancy of Blair House. The Bushes just didn't wanna, end of story. And apparently the useless scumbags didn't give a flying fig either about the inconvenience to the Obamas or the cost to U.S. taxpayers.

In other words, the shithead was saying just what he's said with every breath he's drawn since he was installed in the White House:

"Fuck you, America! Eat shit!"

Class all the way. Every cell in his worthless carcass is toxic waste, always has been, and you'd have to be pretty much brain-dead not to have noticed it.

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Not All Bush Cronies And Associates Are As Enthusiastic About Him As Karl Rove

Allawi & Bush... That was then

It won't be the whitewash by hacks like Karl Rove and Ben Feller that determine how history looks at George Bush. Frank Rich says that "even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for" Bush. This morning Reuters carried a report of an interview with former Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi-- it wasn't an elected prime minister, not even in a rigged election like Nuri al-Maliki; Allawi was just declared prime minister by the occupation forces. Apparently, apart from having given him the opportunity to enjoy the P.M. job, Allawi doesn't think quite as highly of what Bush has done for his country as Karl Rove does.

Former U.S.-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has denounced the policies of President George W. Bush as an "utter failure" that gave rise to the sectarian venom that ravaged his country.

In an interview published on Saturday in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, Allawi found fault with American management of Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 as well as the government of present Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

..."Yes, Bush's policies failed utterly," said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. "Utter failure. Failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy."

"His insistence on names like 'democracy' and 'open elections', without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt, and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush's policy," he said.

I doubt anything will rehabilitate Bush... ever. Although if the Democrats keep up the shenanigans they will certainly prove to Americans that it is politicians, rather than just Bush and the Republicans who are the bane of society. The real Bush legacy is cheap and tawdry and the tragedy is one we took onto ourselves.

As Chimpy the Prez and his White House team of legacy-polishers put the finishing touches on the job . . .

Via David Horsey in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
[click to enlarge]

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