Posts tagged George W. Bush

The Cost of Opposing Reform

45
6 days ago
by dcpetterson in

20130131_Immigration-ReformWith immi­gra­tion reform nearer to real­ity than it has been in decades, voices on many sides of this issue have been speak­ing up. Bear in mind that the bill being con­sid­ered in Con­gress is pretty weak tea. It allows a path to cit­i­zen­ship for immi­grants who are in the coun­try ille­gally, but places tremen­dous bar­ri­ers in their way, and requires more strin­gent enforce­ment of exist­ing laws. Nev­er­the­less, anti-​​immigrant forces have been arrayed to oppose even this step, label­ing it with their pre­ferred trigger-​​word, “amnesty.”

On both human­i­tar­ian and prac­ti­cal polit­i­cal grounds, the pro-​​reform move­ment has the bet­ter hand. In human terms, it’s hard to deny that Amer­ica is an attrac­tive place to live, and peo­ple come to this coun­try — legally or not — because it is an improve­ment over where they were. As a prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tion, no major polit­i­cal party can afford to anger vot­ers (pri­mar­ily Latino and His­panic, but also black and Asian) who iden­tify with the eleven mil­lion or so undoc­u­mented immi­grants in the coun­try today. It is widely thought that Repub­li­cans can­not win the White House with less than 40 per­cent of the His­panic vote, and immi­gra­tion reform may be an impor­tant key to help­ing GOP can­di­dates move toward that mark.

Just imag­ine how it could play out. Imag­ine the Repub­li­can Party, which des­per­ately needs His­panic votes, sud­denly came to sup­port a plan to grant full Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship to all cur­rent undoc­u­mented immi­grants, on the two sim­ple con­di­tions that they not be guilty of any felonies, and they pass the stan­dard cit­i­zen­ship test. Repub­li­cans would win the next dozen elec­tion cycles in a series of unprece­dented landslides.

Aside from these eth­i­cal and polit­i­cal rea­sons to pass immi­gra­tion reform, there is another com­pelling jus­ti­fi­ca­tion — eco­nomic. Immi­grants, legal or not, are good for the econ­omy. (more…)

The Hatter Resolution

17
2 months ago
by dcpetterson in

“If I had a world of my own,” said Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hat­ter, “every­thing would be non­sense.” It would seem House Repub­li­cans are tak­ing this thought to heart, and using it as advice for the future of Amer­ica. We may be on the verge of see­ing an evo­lu­tion of the Tea Party, from tri­corn hats to Alice in Won­der­land. It may be an inten­tional change.

Start­ing today, House Repub­li­cans will unveil the CR or “Con­tin­u­ing Res­o­lu­tion,” their threat­ened spend­ing plans for the remain­der of the fis­cal year. After the eco­nomic debates of the 2012 cam­paign, one might think the pri­or­i­ties of the win­ning party would receive some con­sid­er­a­tion. Yet it doesn’t appear so. As details of Repub­li­cans plans leak out, we’re see­ing a move even far­ther toward aus­ter­ity and puni­tive spend­ing cuts than any­thing envi­sioned in the Ryan bud­gets of past years.

The impend­ing bud­get plan is so far afield, so divorced from real­ity, that it actu­ally includes a ban on fed­eral fund­ing for the anti-​​poverty group Alliance of Com­mu­nity Orga­ni­za­tions for Reform Now or ACORN — even though ACORN was dis­banded three years ago, and hasn’t existed since 2010. (You can read the cur­rent pro­posal for the Con­tin­u­ing Res­o­lu­tion here. Check out page 221.)

That’s not the only bit of non­sense in this Repub­li­can plan. The bill includes fewer real dis­cre­tionary dol­lars than were avail­able to George W. Bush in FY 2008. This is more an ide­o­log­i­cal man­i­festo than a seri­ous pro­posal.
(more…)

A Change in the Weather

57
3 months ago
by dcpetterson in

Pres­i­dent Obama’s sec­ond term begins on Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 20, 2013.  That is the day he will be offi­cially sworn in, as required by the Con­sti­tu­tion. The pub­lic cer­e­mony, the pomp and cir­cum­stance, will hap­pen the fol­low­ing day, Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 21.

This time series, based on satellite data, sho...

This time series, based on satel­lite data, shows the annual Arc­tic sea ice min­i­mum since 1979. The Sep­tem­ber 2010 extent was the third low­est in the satel­lite record. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Much of the first term agenda remains undone, or at least incom­plete. Amer­i­cans should expect Pres­i­dent Obama to move aggres­sively on a num­ber of fronts. We need to make our tax sys­tem far more pro­gres­sive. We need com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform, includ­ing a path to full cit­i­zen­ship for all undoc­u­mented immi­grants. We need to vastly reduce America’s bloated mil­i­tary spend­ing. We need to fully and aggres­sively imple­ment Oba­macare. We need stronger con­sumer finan­cial pro­tec­tions and much stricter indus­try reg­u­la­tion. We need to get firm con­trol of gun vio­lence. We need to repeal DOMA. We need to improve edu­ca­tion and reduce unem­ploy­ment. We need to stem global cli­mate change.

In many of these areas, progress for the last four years was ago­niz­ingly slow, often impeded or even stopped by oppo­si­tion in Con­gress from the other party. An effort to act on cli­mate change is one exam­ple, as Cap and Trade leg­is­la­tion passed in the House in June of 2009 but died in the Senate.

Last Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 11, the United States Global Change Research Pro­gram (USGCRP) released the 2013 draft of its third qua­dren­nial National Cli­mate Assess­ment (NCA). It’s an enor­mous doc­u­ment, and it’s a sober­ing doc­u­ment, under­lin­ing the dan­gers we face and high­light­ing the need for imme­di­ate and bold action. Below are some high­lights. (more…)

Democratic Convention: Day 2

265
8 months ago
by dcpetterson in

From a New York Times article:

Wednes­day night is attack night. Eliz­a­beth War­ren, who is try­ing to unseat Sen­a­tor Scott P. Brown of Mass­a­chu­setts, will offer up her par­tic­u­lar brand of Democratic-​​base appeal, while for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton will play the part of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Paul Ryan, the Repub­li­can vice-​​presidential can­di­date who slammed Mr. Obama in Tampa, Fla., on Wednes­day night. Expect to hear a broad take­down of the Repub­li­can agenda.

Last week, we heard Repub­li­cans repeat­edly ask­ing the ques­tion Rea­gan posed in 1980: Are you bet­ter off today than you were four years ago? In prepa­ra­tion for tonight’s fes­tiv­i­ties, let’s take a look at where we were in Sep­tem­ber of 2008. (more…)

War is Political Hell

29
1 year ago
by dcpetterson in

Today marks a year since the death of Osama bin Laden, the patron and leader behind the attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. At the risk of politi­ciz­ing those events, let’s look into how those events have been, well, politicized.

From the begin­ning, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, and the Repub­li­can Party in gen­eral, have used the al Qaeda attacks for polit­i­cal advan­tage. On May 1, 2003, Pres­i­dent Bush took a vic­tory lap, in an immense staged event on an air­craft car­rier, pro­claim­ing that “Major com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq have ended.” Of course, they hadn’t ended, and things went so badly so quickly that in 2007 the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion had to engage in a mas­sive “surge” to make up for the dis­as­ter of the Iraq war. It was not until August 31, 2010, that a dif­fer­ent pres­i­dent, Barack Obama, could hon­estly declare an end to com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq.

There is a pat­tern here, not only of Repub­li­cans politi­ciz­ing national secu­rity issues, but of Pres­i­dent Obama clean­ing up for­eign pol­icy messes left by Pres­i­dent Bush. The response of the Repub­li­can Party has been to fur­ther politi­cize these events, and attempt to min­i­mize the suc­cesses that Obama had but that Bush couldn’t achieve. (more…)

Torture

12
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

The United States did it. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush knew about it. And he lied about it to all of us.

This is all infor­ma­tion that can be gleaned by the roughly 140,000 for­merly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments obtained by the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU) via Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act requests. ACLU researcher Larry Siems then got the unen­vi­able task of read­ing through all of those documents.

It took him two years.

As part of the project, he started The Tor­ture Report, a web­site devoted to the research. More recently, with the com­ple­tion of his research, he pub­lished The Tor­ture Report: What the Doc­u­ments say about America’s Post 9⁄11 Tor­ture Pro­gram.

Here are some of the low­lights con­tained in the moun­tain of doc­u­ments. (more…)

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