White House admits that they didn't inherit a recession from Clinton

The White House today admitted that they did NOT inherit the recession from Clinton, something they've been claiming for the past 4 years. How did this flip-flop come about? Quite simply.

1. About a million jobs were lost in the last 3 months of 2001. From the Dept of Labor we see the following jobs lost and/or gained monthly, in the thousands:



2. The White House claimed today, repeatedly - spokesman 1 and spokesman 2 - that the 1 million jobs lost at the end of 2001 were ALL due to September 11. (This is an outright lie, but let's go with it for now.)

3. That means the White House is saying that BUT FOR September 11 the economy would not have lost a single job at the end of 2001 (since the White House is claiming all 1m jobs were the fault of 9/11).

4. That means that the White House doesn't believe we were in a recession at the end of 2001 - or at least we would not have been in a recession at the end of 2001 - had Sept. 11 not occurred.

5. But the White House has claimed for years that the Bush recession started on Clinton's watch, and that the job losses were all part of the Clinton recession that began before they seized power. WH spokesman McLellan even claimed this again today when reiterating the lie about Sept. 11 causing 1m jobs lost:

We were in an economic downturn and the President inherited a recession when he came into office.

6. So, how can the White House claim on one hand that the bad economy was due to the Clinton recession that had ALREADY begun in 2001, then on the other hand claim that the economy at the end of 2001 would have been in growth (and not in recession) BUT FOR September 11? Meaning, the recession started AFTER September 11, 2001, thus contradicting what Bush has been saying for 3 years, that it started before he even took office. Read the rest of this post...

Are You Registered To Vote? The Terrorists Are!

No, I'm not referring to Republicans. (I'm one myself.) But you've only got a few more days to register to vote in time for the November election. Did you know that eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked America on 9/11 were registered to vote in the U.S.? If THEY bothered to do so, you should too. (This fun fact comes from "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" by John Fund.)
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Bush Lets Us Down Again

A new study says that fewer death sentences are being imposed in the U.S. A decline in state-sponsored killing? Come on, George! That's no way to fight the war on terror.
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Memo to John Kerry: Ask Bush this question

JOHN KERRY: George Bush has said that if he's re-elected he will cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security by 3% next year. If I am elected president I promise that next year we won't cut one dime from Homeland Security. Mr. Bush, will you admit you made a mistake, and promise the American people that you will NOT cut funding for Homeland Security if you are re-elected? Read the rest of this post...

Will Bush reinstate the Draft?

John Edwards promised today that Kerry/Edwards wouldn't.

"Vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised a West Virginia mother on Wednesday that if the Democratic ticket is elected in November the military draft would not be revived."

Can't wait to see how Bush is going to fudge his response to this one. Read the rest of this post...

We're fucked

"In Washington today there was some depressing news for Iraqis. A State Department official said there that the United States cannot guarantee that Iraqis will have essential services in the next three years, including clean water. That's because the Bush administration wants to shift the bulk of billions of dollars earmarked for reconstruction to military operations." - ABCNews, World News Tonight, 9/15/04

Better not ask the Iraqis if they're better off now than 4 years ago. Read the rest of this post...

When gay Republicans attack

"The Republican Party has a choice: It can be the party of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger or it can be the party of Alan Keyes and Rick Santorum." - Patrick Guerriero, exec. dir. of the Log Cabin Republicans (THE gay Republican group), LA Times, 9/15/04.

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Two lies from the White House in one day

(I suppose that's a record for the MINIMUM number of lies.)

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me address a couple of things. We've overcome many challenges in this country over the last three years. A number of them go back to what occurred on September 11th. When it comes to the economy, let's look at the strains that were placed on our economy. We were in an economic downturn and the President inherited a recession when he came into office. Then you had the September 11th attacks. In the aftermath of September 11th, in the three months after September 11th, we lost a million jobs right there." - White House Daily Briefing, September 15, 2004

Liar liar pants on fire, Scotty.

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We couldn't agree more

From the loony-tune religious right news service. The thing is, if THEY'RE saying this, then this is VERY interesting because it means the religious right is angry about the deficit, and that this is a possible wedge issue:

...A former House Republican is taking his party to task over its response to the budget deficit. Former House member Joe Scarborough of Georgia says this year the federal government will spend in excess of $400 billion more than it takes in. Scarborough thinks that is bad enough -- but he says the Republican response is even worse. "The Congressional Budget Office this past week put out the latest numbers on the deficit. It's now $430 billion," the former lawmaker explains. "It's absolutely shameful that Republicans are [shouting]: 'Hey, that's a lot less than we expected.' Four-hundred-and-thirty billion dollars!" That budget deficit will be tacked onto the current $7.4 trillion national debt.

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Rusty is a homosexual

Just read it.

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The Grand Nagus weighs in

Who'd have thunk it? Email from Ferenginar. And I thought foreigners couldn't vote.

From: nagus@charter.net
Subject: Thank you!
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:27:57 -0500

I just stumbled upon your site via a news item I found on the internet. I just wanted to thank you for the most entertaining reading I've ever experienced. I was an undecided voter until I visited your site and now I am certain of my vote this year!

Thank you for showing the world how out of touch the Democratic party is with mainstream America! Of the articles I did read, all I could find were half-truths, unsubstantiated speculations and flat-out misleading and non-factual "truths" published in your blog. At first I thought Senator Kerry didn't have a clue as to what was really happening in this country... I'm glad to discover he's in good company!

See ya in November!

And here's my reply:

Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:41:14 -0400
To: nagus@charter.net
Subject: Re: Thank you!

Honey, give me a break. You were an undecided voter? Yeah right. If you decided your vote by simply spending 5 minutes on a Web log then you're more pitiful than the usual Bush voter. Also, you need to hone up on your email hate-mail a bit. You can't just write someone and say "it's all lies" without giving any proof. That's the clearest mark of all of a Bush die-hard. Casting aspersions but offering no proof. You'll note that every post on my site has proof. The least you could do is humor me by at least offering some honest, intellectual, factual critique of what I wrote. I know Bushies aren't used to dealing in that milieu - honesty, intelligence, and facts - but focusing on such arcane things is a fault we lefties have. Humor us.

JOHN

PS By the way "Nagus," say hi to Quark for me.

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BREAKING NEWS: Bush adviser lies to CNN by blaming 9/11 for loss of 1 million jobs

A Bush White House spokesperson went on CNN today and tried to again use 9/11 to justify yet another mess created by the Bush presidency. The thing is, this time I caught them in their lie:

"We had an attack on 9/11 where we lost over a million jobs in just about 3 months." - Suzy DeFrancis, White House Deputy Assistant for Communications

Hmmm... hadn't heard that excuse before for Bush having lost over a million jobs over his presidency, so I decided to check the official US government stats on job losses following September 11.

In a document entitled "Impact of the Events of September 11, 2001, on the Mass Layoff Statistics Data Series," the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics says that only 125,637 jobs were reported lost as a direct or indirect result of the attacks.

In the 18 weeks following the September 11 attacks (the weeks ending September 15 through January 12), employers reported 430 events involving 125,637 workers separated as a direct or indirect effect of the attacks. A majority of the layoff events took place in the weeks immediately following the attacks, and the number of new events has tapered off since then.

Yep, companies reported laying off only 125,000 people as a result of September 11, but now the White House is claiming it's 1 million.

The Department of Labor goes on to note that it really isn't possibly anyway to separate out how many people were unemployed as a result of September 11 versus how many were unemployed as a result of the ever-worsening economy before September 11 - but hey, that didn't stop this White House from doing it anyway!

It is not possible to separate overall job losses for October 2001 and subsequent months into the effects from the September 11 events and the effects from a generally weakening employment trend that had been evident for several months prior....

[I]t is not possible to quantify the effects of the terrorist attacks on overall unemployment....

It is not possible, however, to separate the job-market effects of the terrorist attacks from the underlying economic weakness.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting the sense it is not possible.

So the federal government's own Web site says you simply can't make any firm conclusions about how many people were unemployed by September 11, but the Bush Administration does it anyway. Bush is gonna milk those 3,000 deaths for everything they're worth. Read the rest of this post...

Bush talking about CUTTING Homeland Security budget next year

UPDATE: An AP story from earlier this year shows Bush already warned Homeland Security, among other agencies, to expect a 3% cut next year!

The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include $2.3 billion in spending cuts from virtually all domestic programs not mandated by law, including education, homeland security and others central to Bush's campaign. - Wash Post

How did this get missed in the news cycle? I only just caught it myself, buried as a blurb in an article in yesterday's Wash Post that Chris in Paris posted on this site. The war in Iraq has cost so much that NOW BUSH MAY HAVE TO CUT HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING. How in the name of God can this man say this war has HELPED make us safer? Outrageous. This is a campaign ad in and of itself. Especially coming from the man who objected to creating the Dept. of Homeland Security in the first place.

Oh, but it gets better. The cost of all Bush's promises at the GOP convention could reach $4 trillion dollars. This, at the same time he talks about CUTTING HOMELAND SECURITY BECAUSE WE HAVE NO MONEY. Of course we have no money, because Bush has been spending like a drunken sailor. And now he plans to spend even more, AT THE EXPENSE OF THE WAR ON TERROR.

A number of Bush's initiatives could have a big price tag. An estimate from the Social Security actuary's office, included in the 2001 report of a Social Security commission appointed by Bush, put the cost of adding private accounts to the government retirement program at $1.5 trillion over 10 years. With inflation, the figure would now be about $2 trillion. Much of the expense comes from continuing to pay most retirees at current benefit levels, at the same time that some payroll taxes are being diverted to the stock and bond market.

Although advocates of partial privatization contend that the transition can be financed without cutting benefits or raising taxes, the estimates mean the president's agenda could cost even more than the Bush projections of Kerry's proposal. Hassett, the AEI economist, said private accounts would lower the long-term cost of Social Security. "If you pay a few trillion in transition costs over a decade, then maybe the system doesn't go bankrupt," he said.

Bush also called for making permanent his tax cuts, which the administration has estimated at $936.2 billion to $989.75 billion over 10 years. The tax cuts include elimination of the inheritance tax, reductions in the top four income tax rates, an increase in the child tax credit, reduction in the marriage penalty, and cuts to the capital gains and dividend tax rates.

Robert Greenstein of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put the figure for extending the tax cuts at $2 trillion over 10 years and said other tax breaks Bush mentioned in his speech -- mostly related to health care -- would likely cost $50 billion to $100 billion over the next decade.

Another expensive part of Bush's agenda is the expansion of health savings accounts and creation of lifetime and retirement savings accounts. The new accounts are designed to have minimal cost in the first 10 years but have very large costs in the long run because they provide tax breaks when the money is withdrawn rather than up front.

The Congressional Research Service has estimated those two types of accounts would eventually cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year.

Peter R. Orszag, a senior fellow in economic policy at the Brookings Institution, said a conservative estimate for the cost of Bush's permanent tax cuts and Social Security accounts would be about $4 trillion over 10 years.

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Top Republicans Say We're Losing in Iraq

The Bush administration has spent a pitiful $1 billion out of the $18 billion set aside for desperately needed reconstruction in Iraq. Now it wants Congress to approve shifting more than $3 billion of that towards security measures.

Top Republicans - like Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- are pointing out the obvious: that this is a sign of a failed policy in Iraq. We're going nowhere fast.

[Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE)] said the State Department request was "a clear acknowledgment that we are not holding ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning."

Mr. Hagel went on to say that the request for reprogramming the money "does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this, an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."

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From chickenhawk to chickenshit

From Dan Froomkin in today's Wash Post:

And don't bother trying to ask the president a question -- unless of course you're part of a pre-screened audience at a campaign event.

As far as I can tell, Bush hasn't actually answered a single questions from a reporter since the several interviews he did in late August, just before the Republican National Convention. That's more than two weeks ago.

At least twice in the past week, reporters have resorted to shouting questions, and he's ignored them.

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Since Memorial Day, Bush spent only 10 entire days in DC

We seem to do just fine with Bush never being in the White House, so why do we need him at all? These guys claim to be afraid of an imminent terror attack before the elections and Bush has spent just 10 days entirely in Washington, DC since Memorial Day? Sounds like he's more worried about a Kerry attack.

From AP via the Wash Post:

"If you're looking for President Bush, don't bother searching the White House. Bush has not spent a full day in Washington since Aug. 2 -- roaming the country rather than staying in the Oval Office as he seeks a second term."

Bush today breaks his "44-day, outside-the-Beltway streak to host a concert and reception at the White House in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. But not for long." He's back on the road tomorrow.

Loven notes that Bush has spent only a handful of days entirely in Washington all summer long: Just 10 since Memorial Day.

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I just spoke with Lynne Gobbell, the Kerry sticker woman

I finally got a hold of Lynne Gobbell, the woman who was fired from her factory job in Alabama simply because she put a Kerry sticker on her car. As you know, Kerry has now offered her a job with his campaign, which she accepted. I let Lynne know that you folks had now donated over $2000 to help her out, and she was VERY appreciative.

Lynne sounds like a very nice woman, and of course has a very sweet southern accent. She was able to give me the latest update on her new job situation.

She just got off the phone with the Kerry campaign and she just learned they're sending her to Albuquerque, New Mexico TOMORROW. Damn, they work fast. Lynne said she called her husband immediately after hearing about the Albuquerque trip because "I need someone to go with me," she told me. "I ain't never been on a plane!"

Of course, the campaign made clear to her that the job is only until the election, as the campaign won't exist after that.

"I never dreamed of all this," she said. Lynne mentioned that she's gotten a lot of phone calls from folks around the country, as has her ex-employer. "Of course, their calls haven't been as good as mine," she said.

Lynne says that her old boss has now apologized and offered her old job back. When I mentioned that it might be a bit late for an apology, Lynne replied:

"It was a lot late. I called and said 'I don't need my job back, I'm gonna work for my John Kerry.' " Read the rest of this post...

It's a dead heat according to new poll

It's not quite as exciting as "11% lead" but the polls seem to be showing the close race that we've always expected. Sorry, the world isn't coming to and end just yet. I guess we'll all have to wait for the debates to get back into that mode.
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John Kerry, Unplugged

From Reuters:

"His is the excuse presidency -- never wrong, never responsible, never to blame ... no, it's not our fault; no, there's nothing wrong; no, we can't do better; no, we haven't made a single mistake," Kerry said....

"He chose and he chose and he chose and every single time it was middle-class Americans who paid the price," Kerry said. "George Bush (news - web sites) accomplished all this in only four years. Imagine what he could do in another four years."

Kerry cited a litany of statistics -- job losses, 8 million Americans looking for work, 45 million without health insurance, 4.3 million more at the poverty level, 220,000 who could not afford to go to college last year, and a $1,500 decline in the average family's income.

"We know the truth," he said. "Nearly every choice has made it worse. You can even say that George Bush is proud of the fact that not even failure can cause him to change his mind."

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Congress approves themselves a new pay raise

Can you believe this one? They're doing such a great job, they're not patting themselves on the back for a job well done. While regular Americans are looking for work and dreaming of insurance benefits such as the benefits that our members of Congress have, these bastards are rubbing it in. Remember, these guys are supposed to be the fiscally conservative party. This is a party that is completely out of touch and out of their minds. Kerry ought to blast the GOP with this disgusting legislation and use it to show the public a serious trend of irresponsible behaviour.
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Meanwhile, Americans can't afford college

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education issued the results of a study and concluded -- not shockingly -- that it's much harder to afford a college education today.

The study looked at costs of tuition and compared it to income in the 50 states. A college education is now the one thing you can't do without if you want to make it into that ever-shrinking "middle class." The report examined a new trend -- people who went to four-year colleges were now only able to afford two-year community colleges. Those who went to community colleges weren't going at all.

This administration's policies -- increasing the relative tax burden on the middle class, spending hundreds of billions in Iraq, all while cutting funding for higher education and placing greater burdens on states to make up the difference -- have already widened the income gap between rich and poor. Now we know these policies will keep this gap as wide as possible for the forseeable future.
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Pension agency wants change in law to protect pensions

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is asking for a change in the law that will allow them to place liens on businesses that fail to pay into their pension programs. Considering the excessive executive salaries and bonuses (in excess of $2M/year despite government handouts and two Chapter 11's in two years) for failing businesses such as US Air, they are able to balk at pension payments without question. United management is also doing well for such a failure of a company.

US Airways told a bankruptcy court in Alexandria on Monday that it doesn't plan to make a $110 million payment due today to pension plans covering its mechanics and flight attendants. The airline said its pension obligations total $531 million over the next five years.

In July, United Airlines refused to make a $72.4 million payment to four of its pension plans, and said it would not make $500 million in payments due this year.

"Failure to act will increase the risk that participants will lose promised benefits and that the pension insurance program will suffer larger losses. We need to make clear that pension contributions are required whether a company is in bankruptcy or not," Executive Director Bradley D. Belt said in a written statement yesterday.

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Osama Bin Forgotten, CIA search team under staffed

Who can forget those classic High Noon, macho man boasts of Dubya?

• "We're going to smoke 'em out of their caves"
• "Dead or Alive"
• "Either with us or against us"

Does this mean that Dubya is against us? The Scheuer allegations are being smeared already but the guy seems to want to get the program on the right track. Considering what little we as outsiders actually know besides what the liars of the Administration tell us, I tend to believe him. Why does Bush hate America so much?

Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks, despite repeated pleas from the unit's leaders for reinforcements, a senior C.I.A. officer with extensive counterterrorism experience has told Congress.

There has been no systematic effort to groom Al Qaeda expertise" among C.I.A. officers since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the letter, written by Michael F. Scheuer, the former chief of the agency's bin Laden unit...

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Secretary says documents are fake, but story is accurate

The secretary for Bush's commanding officer says that there was a problem with Bush. It's about time that he comes clean with what exactly did happen back then but he seems to be enjoying this swirling, muddy debate and will only give an inch once something is in black and white and shoved in his face. Now let's see how long it takes the Rep's to smear an 86 year old granny.

Someone in the know had told me a few years ago that photocopy machines could be traced (and thus find the owner) by looking at the photocopies but I don't know if it goes back more than one photocopy. Maybe that ought to be looked at as well to figure out where the copies were made which might shed some light on the matter as well. Just a thought.

"The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home here. "But I doubt,'' she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together."

"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Mrs. Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done."

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"We've lost this war"

Blogger Kos, a former military man, nails it:

"We've lost this war. We've literally lost entire swaths of Iraqi territory to the insurgents. We've empowered Al Qaida and Islamist militants with new recruits and pictures of prison torture and rape to fuel their cause. We''ve stretched our military thin, hurt recruitment, made it impossible to respond to actual threats.

In short, this is the biggest political and military blunder this country has faced since -- I'll let the historians decide when. But as things are going, this is going to have worse repercussions for our nation than Vietnam ever did."

I fear he's right. I was watching ABC News tonight and they were showing pictures of Iraqi cities that have been utterly destroyed. I mean, at the bottom of the frame you see little people scampering back and forth like mice and around them is this enormous pock-marked shell of what was once their city. As the ABC reporter said, for most of these people life is NOT better today than it was before the US invaded. Read the rest of this post...

$50,000 bucks says Bush is a liar

The Wash Post reports, in the front section, no less, about Texans for Truth and the reward money they're offering to anyone who can prove Bush performed his National Guard duties. Great idea. And it got the publicity it wanted. Read the rest of this post...

Nicholas Kristoff nails Bush

Damn good commentary by Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times:

President Bush's paramount problem with his National Guard years is not that he took shortcuts in 1972. The problem is that he still refuses to come clean about it....

One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Mr. Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.

"He said his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Professor Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Professor Tsurumi says he next asked Mr. Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Professor Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?' "

"He said, oh, his daddy had a good friend," Mr. Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."

Professor Tsurumi says he remembers Mr. Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the S.E.C. an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist" and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy." (Dan Bartlett, an aide to Mr. Bush, denies that the president ever made these statements.)

....What worries me more is the lack of honesty today about that past - and the way Mr. Bush is hurling stones without the self-awareness to realize that he's living in a glass house.

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Latest Casualty In War On Terror: Democracy In Russia

Russian President-for-Life Vladimir Putin continues his stranglehold on power in the former (and future?) U.S.S. He's using that horrific attack on schoolchildren as an excuse to seize even more power - basically by massively overhauling the political systems and ending local elections for key officials throughout his empire.

The reaction of the duly elected people he's usurping? "Thank you, President Putin."

Putin claims the rebels/terrorists/insurgents are bent on the destruction of Mother Russia, though of course the truth is that the predominantly Muslim people of Chechnya have never called for any such thing -- they have repeatedly and consistently called for the removal of Russian troops that took over that land again after nominally declaring it independent.

You just know Bush wishes he were heading Russia instead of America. But he'd never get away with that sort of usurpation of power here, right? We'd never stand for a President who declared an indefinite state of emergency with expanding powers for the federal government, would we? We'd never allow Soviet-style powers where the government could grab American citizens off the street and lock them up forever and refuse to even acknowledge that they were holding anyone or even identify them to the press, would we? We'd never countenance the government making plans to "postpone" the election" if they thought necessary, would we? We'd never allow the US government to break every international treaty in sight and make a mockery of our values, would we? We'd never allow our men and women in uniform to be enouraged at every level to rape, beat and kill men, women and children in order to make ourselves safer, would we? So we have nothing to worry about here. What's happening in Russia could never happen here.
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