George W. Bush

an election year when the Republican Party and the president are unpopular, and Washington itself has become shorthand for things gone wrong, Representative Randy Kuhl of Rochester is falling back on his state legislature experience, and casting himself a folksy local.

"It's all been about local issues," said Kuhl campaign manager Justin Stokes. "And I think the biggest contrast that we have here is that Congressman Kuhl is a lifelong resident here." Kuhl was born in the town were he now lives, Hammondsport. He also represented the area in the State Assembly for six years, and the State Senate for 17 years, before he was elected to Congress in 2004.  read more »

At a City Council hearing on how Michael Bloomberg’s budget will impact the Health and Human Services agency, its commissioner traded barbs with City Councilman Eric Gioia over the issue of “finger imaging” recipients in order to qualify for benefits.  read more »

“I would not be friends with someone who didn’t feel comfortable sending me offensive things,” wrote a Democratic political staffer, 23, who asked not to be named. In the next email he begged to strike that from the record because it sounded “abrasive,” even though he was being quoted anonymously: “I would be simply embarrassed to see that in there.” (He then insisted that his location within the city remain undisclosed; we will refer to him as the Staten Islander, because it’s remotely possible he is one.)

It’s a familiar dilemma to New York’s ambitious worthies: Perfect manners are suspect in private, but it’s embarrassing to be linked with jokes and ribaldry in public.  read more »

More from the Rather v. CBS docs.

On Tuesday, December 7, 2004, former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh sent an e-mail to Dan Bartlett, then the White House communications director.

At the time, Mr. Thornburgh was heading up an independent panel, established by CBS, to investigate the flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday story about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, which aired on September 8, 2004.

"As I mentioned on the phone, we are in the homestretch of our assignment and would find it very helpful if we could secure written responses from the President to the following questions so that we can tie up a couple of loose ends," wrote Mr. Thornburgh.

Mr. Thornburgh then posed eight questions, after the jump:  read more »

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.

A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.  read more »

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn defended her decision to move forward with legislation extending term limits, saying the three-week process was not rushed.

Quinn also defended her flip-flop on extending term limits - she opposed the idea in December but reversed herself days ago - comparing it with the stubbornness George W. Bush displayed as president.

“Many of us, myself included, have been highly critical of our president. When facts change, he won’t change his position on different matters,” she said.  read more »

Here's yet another anti-Bloomberg web video, this one asking, "What if George W. Bush Wanted a Third Term?"  read more »

For nearly two decades, Colin Powell has been one of the most respected public figures in the United States, a man who very well could have claimed the presidency in 1996 had he wanted it, and whose dramatic (even if it really wasn’t a surprise) endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday just might put this year’s Democratic nominee over the top.

The roots of Powell’s popularity—his inspiring personal story and his highly visible leadership during the 1991 Gulf War—are understandable, but its endurance is somewhat puzzling. This is the same guy who allowed the Bush administration to harness his sterling reputation to sell the Iraq war to the American public.  read more »

On the night of Monday, October 13, Oliver Stone was being chauffeured around downtown Manhattan, looking for the dinner party he was running late for, and talking about what the subject of his new film, W., has in common with the Wizard of Oz. Connecting W., which examines and chronicles the life of George W. Bush leading up to and including his presidency, to the 1939 Judy Garland flying-monkeys extravaganza might not seem all that intuitive. But in conversation about his latest subject, Mr. Stone was drawn back again and again to the moment that Dorothy discovers that the great and most powerful wizard was
really just an ordinary man, hiding behind a curtain, desperately pressing buttons and pulling levers to keep up the illusion of his control.  read more »

W.
Running time 131 minutes
Written by Stanley Weiser
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright

Oliver Stone’s W., from a screenplay by Stanley Weiser, arrives at a strange time in our nation’s history, when even Iraq and Afghanistan have been pushed off the front pages and away from the TV talking heads by our current doomsday financial crisis. Of course, Mr. Stone, Mr. Weiser and their array of gifted collaborators had no way of knowing before they finished work on their production that the darkest days of the Bush presidency would soon dawn with what now seems like a Herbert Hooverian plunge into the abyss of a worldwide economic collapse.  read more »

Sarah Palin may not be the brightest bulb, but she (or her handlers) have fully absorbed a very familiar approach to governance and law.
When you're under investigation for misconduct, stonewall staunchly, refuse to testify, withhold documents under "executive privilege," and make sure your subordinates do likewise. When a report comes out that says you violated ethics, just insist that it said no such thing.

Create your own reality, so to speak, and always feel confident that the national media will refrain from calling you the liar that you most certainly are -- and that the faithful base and Fox News will always be on your side. As I mention in this column, this is not exactly an enormous change from the status quo in the White House.

For anyone who followed the story of how and why Sarah Palin fired her state’s public safety commissioner, last week’s release of a legislative investigation that found she had violated state ethics statutes was anticlimatic. After all, everyone knows that she and her husband Todd tried to push Walt Monegan, then Alaska’s public safety commissioner, to fire a state trooper named Mike Wooten, who was involved in a bitter divorce from Ms. Palin’s sister – and that after Mr. Monegan refused, he lost his job.

But while the state probe’s conclusions were unsurprising, there is still something to be learned from its findings and the McCain-Palin campaign’s response.  read more »

As Congress desperately tries to pass legislation to bail out Wall Street and restore confidence in the American economy, it is also managing to allow tax credits for renewable energy to expire at the end of the year. According to Robert Pear's recent New York Times article: "The House and the Senate conceded Monday that they were in a stalemate over proposals to provide tax incentives for the production and use of renewable energy, leaving the future of the nascent industry in limbo."

Unfortunately, this tax incentive has gotten caught up in congressional tax policy gridlock - no one thinks this policy is a bad idea, but it's basically the hostage of a broader debate on the budget and tax policy.  read more »

OXFORD, Miss.—Eames Henley, a 20-year-old civil engineering major at Ole Miss, was standing in the University's mall, called "the Grove," listening to bluegrass and wearing a pin that said "I'm Anti-Socialism."

I asked him what he thought of the Bush administration's bailout plan.

"It seems a little socialistic," he said.

So, did he oppose it?

"No, because the economy's about to collapse. Something needs to be done."

Asked whether he thought John McCain, whom he supports, helped or hindered the chances of a plan passing, he said, "It seems like he's doing his job," he said. "Taking care of business."

In May, The Observer's Felix Gillette looked at HBO's hiring of former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown and The New York Times' Frank Rich as "creative consultants."

At the time, he wrote:

Ms. Brown said that since January, she’s pitched two projects—an idea for a series and an idea for a movie—that the HBO executives liked and are in the process of 'taking a little further.'... 'If I collide with some interesting material, I’ll call or e-mail them. Sometimes it’s something I’m interested in doing. Sometimes it’s something I think they should know about. Richard wants to encourage people who have good relationships with the creative community to simply be thinking about HBO when they’re out and about.

According to Variety, Ms. Brown is honing in on some of that "interesting material," namely, a series based on Tom Wolfe's four year old novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.  read more »

Debate over how to resolve the nation’s financial emergency is taking a salutary direction for the moment, as politicians of both parties refuse to be herded by the Bush White House into a ridiculous $700 billion swindle. Before Congress approves such a stunning expenditure to save the undeserving hides of the super-rich, they may at least create provisions for independent oversight, new regulation, public equity and homeowner relief.

There is one more thing that should not be neglected, however. Before this is over, we will need a special prosecutor with an ample budget to find, prosecute, imprison and ultimately deter the criminals responsible for this disaster.  read more »

Here's a picture, from the official city Web site, of Michael Bloomberg greeting George W. Bush at J.F.K. Airport yesterday.

When Bloomberg greeted Bush last year during a visit to New York, photographs weren't made available.

Anyone want to bet that if Bloomberg pushes back term limits and runs again, this image won't be prominently featured in a Weiner-for-mayor spot?

UPDATE: A reader emailed a link to an AP photograph of Bloomberg greeting Bush when he came to the city on 9/24/07. That photograph isn't on the mayor's web site. But they do have a shot of the mayor and the president at an education event two days later.
 

On Tuesday , I posted a column urging Barack Obama to emphasize John McCain's long history of support for Social Security privatization – a position that looks even more embarrassing today than a few weeks or months ago. For some time, McCain has been trying to revise his own history and pretend that he “never” supported privatization (or what he and other Republicans daintily refer to as “personal accounts”). Obama shouldn't let him get away with it.

Within a day following my post—by pure coincidence, needless to say—the Obama campaign aired an ad on the privatization theme in Michigan, as my former Observer colleague  read more »

GOLDEN, Colo.—After spending most of yesterday on the stump and the airwaves attacking Republican stewardship of the economy and promising more financial heartache under John McCain, Barack Obama today sought to articulate in stark and substantive terms why his proposals would have averted the financial crisis and will return stability to Wall Street.

Speaking in a college gym, Obama said, “Since this turmoil began over a year ago, the housing market has collapsed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to be effectively taken over by the government. Three of America’s five largest investment banks failed or have been sold off in distress.  read more »

CHICAGO--Barack Obama is expected to frame the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch as indicative of the mismanagement of the economy by Republicans over the last eight years at a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colorado today. The remarks are part of a more aggressive stance the Obama campaign is taking this week, with vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden arguing that John McCain has changed for the worse and a new ad calling the McCain campaign dishonorable. Obama's remarks, according to Obama staff on the campaign plane, will seek to make the point that with Wall Street imploding, McCain’s stewardship of the economy will be similar George Bush’s.  read more »

From the Wall Street Journal this morning:

The next U.S. president will be confronted with slow growth, high unemployment and an economy teetering toward recession, say 51 private economists ... The respondents saw a 60% chance of an outright recession, expect the economy to shed 19,000 jobs a month for a year, and say the jobless rate, which jumped in August to 6.1%, will keep rising, to 6.4% by midyear, passing the 6.3% seen after the last recession.

Eight years ago, when he first sought the presidency, John McCain presented himself to the country much the way he is presenting himself now—as a battle-scarred American hero who had endured unspeakable physical and mental abuse for his country and who had emerged from it to pursue a life of courageous and principled public service.

Only back then, the Republican establishment, which just spent the last three nights in St. Paul feting him as living shrine to all that is righteous and noble about this country, didn't see him in such glowing terms. They called him a Democratic plant, challenged his heroism narrative, and rallied around—like their lives depended on it—a well-connected son of privilege who had shown exactly zero interest in serving his country in Vietnam, preferring the comparative light-lift of the Texas National Guard.  read more »

Since her selection as John McCain's running-mate was announced last Friday, the media has been "on a mission to destroy" Sarah Palin. That's the charge from McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, at least, and it's just one of countless over-the-top characterizations from the McCain campaign and its surrogates of the scrutiny Palin has encountered.

On one level, this is standard fare for a Republican nominee. Ever since Richard Nixon framed his candidacy and his presidency as havens for a "silent majority" of Americans who felt condescended to by media elites, press-bashing has been a staple of the G.O.P. playbook, a way to rally the party base against a common enemy and to convince G.  read more »

ST. PAUL--Last night, George W. Bush spoke via satellite to the Republican convention for eight and a half minutes—with his speech timed to finish just before the broadcast networks began their blanket coverage of the ten o'clock prime-time hour.

This doesn't compare favorably with the treatment that the other two-term presidents of the television age received at their final conventions.

For comparison's sake, eight and a half minutes also happens to be the length of the above video, which was merely the introduction for Bill Clinton's speech at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. When the Clinton video finished, delegates and television viewers (his tribute was carried in the ten o'clock hour) watched footage of the outgoing president making his way through a long hallway to the convention stage, while his various accomplishments scrolled across the bottom of the screen (this particular effect was only for those in convention hall, not on TV).  read more »

Why on earth is George W. Bush speaking to the Republican convention tonight? When Hurricane Gustav prompted John McCain to cancel the opening night festivities in St. Paul, it seemed that he’d engineered an enviable political maneuver: coming up with a justifiable excuse to keep the deeply unpopular president – to whom Democrats are frantically trying to link McCain – away from his convention.

Even Republicans happily admitted to being relieved that Bush wouldn’t be participating.

"It's a good thing," Dick Zimmer, the former New Jersey congressman who is mounting an uphill battle against Senator Frank Lautenberg, told the Los Angeles Times. “The first thing I was asked when I won the primary was whether I planned to ask President Bush to come to New Jersey to campaign for me.  read more »

When the Bush administration brokered JPMorgan's March takeover of Bear Stearns, it stirred many questions, not least: Should the government be in the business of bailing out big business, especially when it involves billions in public money?

Apparently, the Republican Party doesn't think so. Here's an excerpt from the section about housing in the party's platform (PDF), passed on Monday at the start of its convention in St. Paul:

Homeownership remains key to creating an opportunity society. We support timely and carefully targeted aid to those hurt by the housing crisis so that affected individuals can have a chance to trade a burdensome mortgage for a manageable loan that reflects their home’s market value.

 read more »

Former Bush pioneer and Republican fund-raiser Barron Thomas says that the usually luxurious parties at the Republican National Convention “are severely on hold” as attention seems to be turning towards fund-raising for potential victims of Hurricane Gustav.

“I think the idea is to send a lot of that money down to New Orleans,” said Thomas, who is set to arrive later in the week.

On the positive side, Thomas, an Arizona fund-raiser who has been critical of John McCain in the past and was a strong supporter of Rudy Giuliani, said that his phone has not stopped ringing since the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s choice for Vice President.  read more »

Twice in the television era have the pre-scripted proceedings of a national political convention been badly disrupted – and both times it proved catastrophic for the party that put on the show.

In 1968, chaos in the streets and on the floor of the Democrats’ Chicago convention – punctuated by the unforgettable image of Richard Daley shouting epithets at Abraham Ribicoff after the Connecticut senator decried the “Gestapo tactics” of the mayor’s police force – led many Americans to conclude that a party incapable of managing its own affairs shouldn’t be entrusted with the nation’s affairs.

Four years later, similar chaos reigned in Miami Beach, when an endless parade of procedural motions from the floor forced George McGovern’s acceptance speech – perhaps his best chance to win a reevaluation from the millions of voters who’d come to view him as a fringe figure – out of prime time and into the wee hours of the morning, limiting the television audience to a few hard-core shut-ins and insomniacs who might otherwise have been watching infomercials.  read more »

Suddenly, the decision to anoint former Virginia Governor Mark Warner as this year's keynote speaker doesn't seem that wise.

Warner will address the convention between 9:00 and 10:00 (E.S.T.) tonight, the main non-Hillary Clinton event of the night. On paper, he's a logical pick–a moderate former business executive who won massive popularity in red-state Virginia by shying away from overtly partisan rhetoric and themes, winning many Republican admirers in the process. He's running for the Senate this year against Jim Gilmore, but almost certainly won't even break a sweat; it's probably the least competitive open-seat race in the country.  read more »

Reverend Al Sharpton doesn't only want church-goers to vote, he wants churches to be part of an effort to make sure that every vote is counted.

“Imagine if every pastor had their members sign up so we can check to make sure their vote has not been miscounted," Sharpton said, speaking to reporters during a reception in his honor in Denver yesterday. "We can’t wait till they show up that day and they’re not on the books. We need to do it now.”

Sharpton said he will focus his efforts on seven key states: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama.  read more »

Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that New York City engage in a serious effort to develop alternative energy sources, and in return for his trouble he faced skepticism and even ridicule from a cynical media. Cartoons were drawn with King Kong trying to swat a windmill off the top of the Empire State Building. Still, even the tabloids could not dismiss the idea entirely. Bloomberg commands respect, and $4 a gallon gasoline has everyone looking for alternatives.

New York City has been built by people who dreamed large and were able to project into the future. Imagine the city without Central, Van Cortland or Prospect Parks.  read more »

The Presidential nominating conventions are now approaching, first the Democrats' and then the Republicans'. The President hangs out at the Olympics, stomps his feet over the Russian invasion of Georgia and then makes another pass at gutting the Endangered Species Act by reducing the time and scientific analysis needed to assess the environmental impact of federal projects. The energy and climate issue have provided some environmental content to this campaign, but the folks running the country still don't see the stake we have in environmental sustainability.

What does an extinct frog have to do with human well-being? What does the environment have to do with economic wealth? Can't our technology solve any environmental problem we make? The short answer, as we learned nearly half a century ago from Rachael Carson and Barry Commoner, is that everything is connected to everything else.  read more »

John McCain isn’t the first presumptive presidential nominee to announce ahead of time when he will announce his running-mate.

Just as speculation over Barack Obama’s imminent V.P. selection reached fever pitch yesterday, McCain’s campaign not coincidentally leaked to the Politico news that the G.O.P. candidate will make his own choice public on August 29 – the day after Obama’s acceptance speech (and McCain’s 72nd birthday). The goal is to shift the focus away from Obama as soon as his speech ends, denying him (in theory, anyway) a post-convention bounce.

Actually, the announcement-of-an-announcement strategy has been used before – by Al Gore in 2000. Lagging behind George W.  read more »

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
Harper, 432 pages, $27.95

With little warning and less explanation, Ron Suskind has written the year’s most brazenly experimental novel. It’s not entirely successful, but then the boldest experiments are often inconclusive. Mr. Suskind summons deceased aesthetic forms as an intervention on the now—but he’s not indulging in ironical pastiche. Moving, manipulative, maudlin, The Way of the World reanimates the conventions and contrivances of 19th-century realism with a seriousness too deadly to be a matter of mere style.

It’s all here: a cast of characters that sprawls across class and circumstance to represent the totality of a historical moment; central moral truths restated so often as to be less repetition than incantation; an all-seeing narrator who intrudes at regular intervals to tell the reader what it all means.  read more »