August 19, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


DESERTING LIKE RATS

Prominent members of the Bush administration have been leaving in droves. It's a little like Indiana Jones being chased by the big boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They're fleeing from the scandals about to overtake them. The Republican party is a party of white bread elitists, racists, homophobes, sexists, anti-life, anti-earth, corrupt to its core, warmongers, and incompetent to boot. Karl Rove and Tony Snow are just the latest two miscreants to flee the sinking Bush administration. This article by Frank Rich is at www.welcometopottersville.com:

BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president's chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn't yet arrived. "You don't introduce new products in August," he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you're Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove's departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic "for the sake of my family" rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

CONSERVATIVE MALPRACTICE

After seeing the horrendous results of conservative governance, with its concomitant lack of regulation of big business, you'd have to conclude that conservative politicians would lose their licenses if they were doctors or be disbarred if they were lawyers. It's a combination of adherence to a ridiculous idea about "free markets" and greed. This article by Robert Borosage is at www.tompaine.com:

Three lives are lost and counting in the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah. The flamboyant, camera-hogging mine owner, Bob Murray, has called this a "once in a lifetime" accident, like a car crushed by a boulder suddenly dislodged. These horrors happen.

Yes, but when we add one plus one plus one, we don't call three an accident. We call it a product, a sum, the result. And the Utah disaster wasn't random; it is the product of conditions just waiting to be added up.

Murray, a self-made millionaire, owns companies producing more than 20 million tons of coal annually. He's known as a hard-driving executive who pushes the limits in his mines, seeking to extract the last dime from the coal.

At Crandall Canyon, the miners were working at depths that test the limits of safety. Although Murray denies it, federal regulatory officials say that retreat mining was being practiced. Retreat mining is a perilous technique in which pillars of coal hold up portions of the roof, and when the area is mined, the pillars are pulled down, capturing the useful coal and collapsing the roof.