Category Archives: Shrub Watch

Daily Show – More On The Shrub’s Trip To Asia and Australia

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This includes footage of Australian Green Party member Bob Brown heckling the Shrub during his speech to the Australian senate (to which the Shrub replied “I love free speech”) and the First Lady waiting obediently for her Manchurian Candidate trigger word.
This is from the October 23, 2003 program.

Daily Show – More On The Shrub’s Trip To Asia (Small – 11 MB)
(Below) A lovely parade float of the Australian Prime Minister nosing up to the Shrub.









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Jon Stewart On The Shrub’s Blaming The Navy For “The Sign”

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This clip from the October 29, 2003 show has the Shrub answering questions at his latest press conference (Oct 28-29, 2003 or so), where he talks rather vaguely about “terrorists” who are responsible for the latest round of suicide bombings in Iraq.
(This clip goes with this clip.)
What the Shrub says, and what his press secretary clarifies later, is that it’s the Navy’s fault for misrepresenting that the war was over with the “Mission Accomplished” sign. (Despite the fact that all the Navy did was put up the sign that the White House printed up and brought to the event.)
Jon Stewart:

“The White House is basically saying they can’t be held responsible for what the Navy does with a sign that they made and brought to the ship.”

Here’s the little clip about “the sign”:
The Shrub Blaming the Navy for “The Sign” (Small – 4 MB)
Here’s the complete clip of this bit:

Jon Stewart On The President’s Latest Press Conference (Small – 11 MB)







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Hullaballo Over “Mission Accomplished” Banner – Shrub Says It Wasn’t His Idea, Sorry For The Miscommunication — White House Press Release Suggests Otherwise

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As if the “Mission Accomplished” banner was the only thing that implied “Mission Accomplished,” during the Shrub’s memorable flight suit May 1 extravaganza.
Oh you thought I meant the mission was accomplished. I just meant a mission was accomplished: The mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, of course… Sorry to give the wrong impression.
Gee, you don’t think anyone got that wrong impression because the White House sent out a press release that said President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended or anything, do you?

Bush Disavows ‘Mission Accomplished’ Link
In The Guardian UK.

When it was brought up again Tuesday at a news conference, Bush said, “The ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished.”
“I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff – they weren’t that ingenious, by the way.”
That explanation hadn’t surfaced during months of questions to White House officials about proclaiming the mission in Iraq successful while violence continued.
After the news conference, a White House spokeswoman said the Lincoln’s crew asked the White House to have the sign made. The White House asked a private vendor to produce the sign, and the crew put it up, said the spokeswoman. She said she did not know who paid for the sign.
Later, a Pentagon spokesman called The Associated Press to reiterate that the banner was the crew’s idea.

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States Rebel Against Shrub Anti-Environment Policies – Sue To Block Changes In Clean Air Act

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States Rebel Against Bush over Pollution Measures
By David Usborne for the Independent UK.

A group of 12 American states has rebelled against President George Bush and his environmental policies by suing to block changes in the Clean Air Act that will make it easier for industrial plants to upgrade their equipment without paying for anti-pollution devices.
The coalition of states, most in the east of the country, downwind of generating plants and refineries in the Midwest, filed the lawsuit in a Washington DC court this week. They were joined by several large cities, including New York, Washington DC and San Francisco. A separate suit was filed by the state of Illinois, and a collection of environmental pressure groups, including the Sierra Club, was expected to file its own legal challenge yesterday.
At issue is a relaxation in regulations put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December and published on Monday. The plaintiffs claim that the amendments will lead to an increase in harmful emissions. “It amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card for some of the nation’s biggest polluters,” said Frank O’Donnell of the Clean Air Trust.
Critics insist that the changes are the most significant made to the 33-year-old Clean Air Act since it was strengthened by Congress in 1990. At the core of the Act were emission ceilings for all big industrial plants. But a “grandfather” clause gave exemptions to facilities built before the Act was introduced. However, even those older plants were to be fitted with scrubbers and other controls if they were modernised or expanded.
It is this stipulation that the EPA wants to relax. During the 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, the EPA strictly enforced the rules. But there was a change of thinking with the arrival of President Bush in Washington. Vice-President Dick Cheney pressed for an easing of the rules to save costs for the energy industry, with which he is closely linked.
The move by Mr Cheney was resisted by the former environment secretary, Christie Whitman. In a memo, which has recently been circulated by environmental lobby groups, she warned that the administration would “pay a terrible political price” if it undercut the rules.
There are more than 500 plants across the US that benefited from the pre-1970 exemptions. Most are power plants, generating about 51 per cent of national electricity.
“We are not going to sit by quietly and allow the energy interests in this country to receive special treatment while so many of our children and elderly are needlessly suffering from respiratory problems,” said Tom Reilly, the Massa-chusetts attorney general.

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Shrub Administration Officials May Need To Be Subpoenaed In Order To Cooperate With 911 Investigation

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I’m not saying it has anything specific to hide, other than the intelligence incompetence that has already been exposed. But what else is the public supposed to think when it hears about this Administration witholding information?

Administration Faces Subpoenas From 9/11 Panel
By Philip Shenon for the New York Times.

The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.
“Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach,” Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush’s desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I will not stand for it,” Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.
“That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document.”…
Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush received a written intelligence report in August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda might try to hijack American passenger planes.
Ms. Snee, the White House spokeswoman, said, “The president has stated a clear policy of support for the commission’s work and, at the direction of the president, the executive branch has dedicated tremendous resources to support the commission, including providing over two million pages of documents.”
After months of stating that it believed subpoenas to the executive branch would not be necessary, the commission voted unanimously this month to issue its first subpoena to the Federal Aviation Administration after determining that the F.A.A. had withheld dozens of boxes of documents involving the Sept. 11 attacks.
The subpoena appeared to be a turning point for the commission and for Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican known for his independence. In a statement on Oct. 15, the commission said it was re-examining “its general policy of relying on document requests rather than subpoenas” as a result of the issues with the F.A.A…
Mr. Kean’s comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.
“It’s obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here,” he said in an interview in Washington. “It’s Halloween, and we’re still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents

Daily Show On The Shrub’s Trip To Asia

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Highlights include: the Shrub in traditional Thailand attire, the First Lady waiting to hear her Manchurian Candidate trigger word, and Colin Powell informing us all that plutonium is not edible. (Damn. The Manchurian Candidate thing is in a later clip.)
This is from the October 21, 2003 program.

The Shrub’s Trip To Asia (Small – 8 MB)













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FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley Explains How The Shrub Administration’s Intimidation Tactics Erode Our First Amendment Liberties

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Right On Coleen! Thanks for having the guts to publish this article. It means a lot coming from you.
There are a lot of good people working for the government right now that are working for change, but it’s really hard because their hands are tied. Most of them are in Damage Control mode and just trying to make it through their day-to-day activities without having to participate in anything too horrible until this administration can be replaced.

Coleen Rowley: The wrong side of ‘us vs. them’
By Coleen Rowley for the Star Tribune.

I didn’t attend Attorney General John Ashcroft’s speech last month in Minneapolis, but newspapers have quoted him as saying that Americans are “freer today than at any time in the history of human freedom.”
Well, this American disagrees! And I would venture to say that many others feel the same way — those who have been put on the “them” side of the “us vs. them” equation in the context of the administration’s “you’re either with us or against us” mentality.
It didn’t matter whether you were a career FBI agent, a decorated war veteran, a duly elected congressman or senator, a military general or even a former president, you were labeled a traitor for voicing any criticism of administration policies. You were accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, called a friend of Osama bin Laden and thrown to the wolves (or more accurately, the FOXes).
The intimidation in this country that’s been whipped up by this official fear and warmongering has been far more effective than any Patriot Act in whittling away our civil liberties…
It’s also no secret that this administration has used its considerable power to fight giving any real legal protection to government whistle-blowers and even attempted to water down the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s protections recently enacted for corporate whistle-blowers.
Of course, no “whistle-blower protection” exists for public disclosures or articles such as this one. But even without it, the First Amendment should suffice and is what I rely on. However, the official warnings along these lines that I’ve repeatedly received in the course of my attempts to speak on issues of public importance seem little more than veiled threats; or are they perhaps a warning that the First Amendment is not as robust as it used to be?
There’s another large segment of our citizenry who have found themselves cast as “thems” by this “war” mentality. Complaints of discrimination against Muslim workers and reports of hate crimes against people believed to be of Middle Eastern descent have at least doubled…
Although it must be recognized that the origin of this problem was in the horror of the violent attacks themselves and that certain government leaders, such as FBI Director Robert Mueller, have undertaken efforts to reach out to affected Arab groups, the social scientists point to other government actions following 9/11 (including the government’s roundup and detention of illegal immigrants, the special registration requirements that single out students and visitors from Muslim nations, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) as sending “social signals” that are worsening these biases.
A specialist in the issues of prejudice and stereotyping has noted that people who perceive themselves under threat naturally tend to think of “who’s with me” and “who’s against me.” In any event, I doubt that many in the Arab-American segment of the populace feel “freer today,” as Ashcroft’s generality suggests.

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Walter Cronkite On Ashcroft’s New Inquisition

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Cronkite: The new Inquisition
By Walter Cronkite for the Denver Post.

In his 2 1/2 years in office, Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada was the 15th century Dominican friar who became the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He was largely responsible for its methods, including torture and the burning of heretics – Muslims in particular.
Now, of course, I am not accusing the attorney general of pulling out anyone’s fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don’t know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard’s spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft’s Department of Justice.
The Patriot Act is much in the news, as Ashcroft and his minions seek both to justify its excesses and strengthen them, thus intensifying its dangerous infringements on the Bill of Rights.
There was something almost medieval in the treatment of Muslim suspects in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Many were held incommunicado, without effective counsel and without ever being charged, not for days or weeks, but for months or longer, some under harsh conditions designed for the most dangerous criminals.
It was in the spirit of the Inquisition that the Justice Department announced recently that it would begin gathering data on judges who give sentences lighter than called for by legislative guidelines.
Nothing so clearly evokes Torquemada’s spirit as Ashcroft’s penchant for overruling U.S. attorneys who have sought lesser penalties in capital cases. The attorney general has done this at least 30 times since he took office, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel. In several cases, Ashcroft actually has overturned plea bargains negotiated by those government prosecutors.
The New York Times editorialized that the attorney general seems to want the death penalty used more often.
Ashcroft is not alone in this. His boss, while governor of Texas, seemed never to have met a death sentence he didn’t like. The two of them represent a subdivision of the Republican Party known as the “social conservatives,” who often have favored the use of government power to police moral issues they view as modern heresies, such as abortion, homosexuality and obscenity. They contrast with those Republicans who tend to resist such uses of federal power and can generally be counted on to defend individual rights.
What makes this administration’s legal bloodthirstiness particularly alarming is the almost religious zeal that seems to drive it. So, what we are seeing now is a confluence of two streams of American thought. One of those streams represents those who believe security must have priority over civil rights. The other stream represents those who believe that civil rights must be preserved even as we prosecute to the hilt the war on terrorism.
Our liberty could drown in the resultant turbulence of these colliding currents.

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State Of Illinois Challenges Shrub Environmental Policy

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State to Challenge Bush Pollution Rules
By the Associated Press.
Here’s the whole article. It’s a little one.

State to Challenge Bush Pollution Rules
Sep 22, 2003 1:38 pm US/Central
SPRINGFIELD (AP) Illinois officials are planning a legal challenge to President Bush’s change in anti-pollution rules.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the state attorney general said today they will file a petition to block the rule change.
State EPA Director Renee Cipriano says the new rules would threaten air quality.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Lisa Madigan calls the rules “an all-out assault on public health.”
The Bush administration last month announced it was making it easier for power plants and factories to make large upgrades without having to install anti-pollution technology.
The new rules would allow improvements worth up to 20-percent of a plant’s total value before pollution-fighting devices are required.