bush Slipping in Polls
Bilmon has a bunch of poll results lined up at the Whiskey Bar. They paint a pretty picture for those who think bush is a Crawford cedar that needs to be weeded.
bush
w Funds Effective Reading
In today’s weekly radio address w tells us about his admin’s record in supporting the No Child Left Behind Act. Next year’s budget proposes a cool $1.1 billion for effective reading programs. That seem like a pretty large sum at first glance but then reality sets in.
In 2001 there were 46,906,607 students in public schools. So that $1.1 billion works out to a little over $23/student. Perhaps enough to buy 1/3 of a textbook each. I’ll bet, though, that the money comes with the usual federal hooks: do it this way or you will not get the money.
The Next Revision
Well, I just needed to read for a bit more and one answer to the last post’s question pops right up. Per US Arms Control Chief John Bolton:
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part because Saddam Hussein retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons, Washington’s top arms control official said Thursday.
Atrios interprets it this way:
Now, it appears that the real danger wasn’t that Iraq had WMDs or that they had WMD programs it’s that the sought to have WMD programs.
Bolton presented this revision yesterday. I presume the administration wants to see how this flies before determining how much emphasis to put on this in the Sunday speach.
This may also mean that the expected Kay report looks weak even to the bushies.
Someone Will Pay the Price
Pessimist does not think bush has been doing too well and believes that the US will pay dearly:
George W. Bush has been suckered in the most complete way one can be suckered, and we the American People are going to pay for his stupidity – and pay dearly.
Read the whole article. There is a lot of very interesting stuff about what other countries are doing about oil while bush screws around in Iraq and Afghanistan all the while waving a finger at the rest of the world. You should be worried.
Oh, and be happy with the $2/gallon gas prices. They might look real good not far down the timeline.
presidential Prevarication
Josh Marshall in his article The Post-Modern President, Washington Monthly September 2003, discusses presidential deception and has this to say about the bush administration:
Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion.
They may be slipping though. Rice and Rumsfeld have been arguing that our occupation experience in Iraq is similar to post war Germany. Their problem, though, is that the post war Germany experience is verifiable and as this Slate article asks:
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford’s Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.
I think the pressure getting to be too much for them and we are starting to see major cracks in the administration facade. If this is indeed the case we are likely to see increasingly drastic and dangerous maneuvers on the part of the bushies as they struggle to maintain power.
Via Walter at idols of the marketplace.