Trump knows how to do bankruptcy!

 

Trump is number one!

 

Will we learn?

A one-ply president

I’ve realized something while sheltering in place: Trump is just like one-ply toilet paper. 

He may look like he can do the job but it’s all a facade, his lies are transparent and thin, and when it comes to dealing with shit, he’s totally useless. 

Hopefully, when he's flushed, he'll disappear into the rest of the sewage.

Facebook banned this. Apparently this is spreading incorrect information?

Never forget

Republican wishes:

And after that, purging voter rolls, tax cuts for the rich, not having to talk to constituents, becoming rich.....

Do NOT let the Republicans whitewash the Bush presidency.

The eight years we had to live through while Georgie was at the helm should never be forgotten.  And the Republicans are trying to do just that.  Talking Points Memo's Aurin Squire:

Memories...

Memories...

An old post:

Res ipsa loquitur at Rising Hegemon lays it out for us: 

September 11th. Iraq. Katrina. FEMA. The DOJ. The deficit. Walter Reed. Surging rates of teenage pregnancy, soldier suicides, and income disparity. Lurita Ding Dong Doan and the GSA. Bernie Bada Bing Kerik and the DHS. Heckuva Job Brownie and FEMA. Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld. Condi Ferragamo. Megan O'Sullivan. We scream, "Incompetence!" Still think incompetence across virtually every spectrum of government is an accident? 

You're missing the overall. This is incompetence by design. Disdain as a philosophy. Contempt as a core value. You want the bridge to fail? Let me design it. You want the government to fail? Send a twenty-one-year old whose most meaningful job experience has been driving an ice cream truck to Iraq to rebuild Iraq's interior ministry. Let "The Fucking Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth" formulate defense policy. Put a schmuck with no disaster management experience in charge of FEMA. 

I've said before that we're going to have to fire virtually every person hired into federal government after January 20, 2001. But we need to go farther. Every time a Republican runs, voters need to be reminded that Republicans should never be permitted to run government again. Ever. They don't believe in it.

And today looking back.

Well, we're certainly NOT.

George W. Bush: 'I'm Comfortable With What I Did'

I agree with Michele Bachmann!

People in her district should follow Texas' lead and absolutely NOT fill out their census forms!

The Houston Chronicle's report looks specifically at Texas, which is counting on the census to gain additional House seats, electoral votes, and federal funding relating to transportation, agriculture, health, education, and housing

But some anti-government types are shooting themselves in the foot.

The national average on the return rate for census forms is 34%. In much of Texas, the more Republican the area, the lower the return rate. In Briscoe County in the Panhandle, McCain/Palin won nearly 75% of the vote -- and 8% of locals are sending in their census materials. In King County, near Lubbock, McCain/Palin won nearly 93% of the vote -- and only 5% of locals are answering the census.

They apparently have no idea that they're acting against their own interests.

Rove says Bush is smart

Oh really?









Ok... I've just nauseated myself looking through all these videos. God, it really feels like we suffered through decades with this man rather than only EIGHT horrible fucking years. Rove is trying to rewrite history, has been since the beginning of his reign of terror. Question is, will we let him?

I think they forgot Poland...

Paul Krugman explains.

Justice Warren Burger

"Ours is a sick profession. [A profession marked by] incompetence, lack of training, misconduct, and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day."

When those who hate government

Try to run government:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

From the Census Bureau:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008, from $52,163 to $50,303. This breaks a string of three years of annual income increases and coincides with the recession that started in December 2007.

The nation’s official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. There were 39.8 million people in poverty in 2008, up from 37.3 million in 2007.

Meanwhile, the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008, while the percentage remained unchanged at 15.4 percent.

On the Eschaton threads...

Do you hope for republicans to fail?

Republicans HAVE failed. It was Harding-Hoover that pushed tax cuts and deregulation leading to 2 stock market crashes in 1929 and 1931, collapse of the banking system, and the great depression.

It was Reagan-Bush that pushed tax cuts and deregulation that led to 2 stock market crashes in 1987 and 1989, the S&L meltdown and the ensuing recession.

It was Gramm-Bush-Cheney that pushed tax cuts and deregulation that to the stock market crash in 2008 and ????, the banking system collapse and the global depression we are now in.

An honest look at history reveals that the idiot republicans have pushed the same failed policies over and over, and have gotten the same results every time.

And now you fucking morons are pushing the exact same bullshit again, hoping the results will be different. Wishful thinking IS NOT A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS!!! Deal with it.
left field, barack the house | 03.06.09 - 4:24 pm

Explains why Blackwater / Xe is getting out of the business

The taps are being shut off and people are demanding to see the paperwork:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the way the U.S. government awards contracts for private sector work, reversing a Bush administration policy that in some cases led to federal investigations of procurement practices and no-bid contracts.

Obama joined Republican Sen. John McCain, his presidential campaign rival, and other congressional figures to announce an executive memorandum that commits his administration to a new set of marching orders for awarding contracts. Obama said "the days of giving government contractors a blank check are over" and said changes could save up to $40 billion a year.

One area in particular that is targeted is no-bid contracts, which the administration is seeking to change so that there will be more competition for government-paid work.

The article continues: [my bold]

The new administration argued that its Republican predecessor's contract spending had doubled to more than $500 billion over the last eight years.

"Far too often, the spending is plagued by massive cost overruns, outright fraud, and the absence of oversight and accountability," Obama said. "In some cases, contracts are awarded without competition; in others, contractors actually oversee other contractors."

Dozens of people have been charged with bribery and other contract fraud crimes as part of a Justice Department crackdown on contract and procurement fraud. Fraud has been particularly prevalent following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where billions of dollars was spent quickly and often with little oversight.

More than 140 investigations are under way into allegations of contract fraud in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

Oh no!! Does this mean the end to the development of the Puke Ray?

"In Iraq, too much money has been paid out for services that were never performed, buildings that were never completed, companies that skimmed off the top," Obama said. "At home, too many contractors have been allowed to get away with delay after delay after delay in developing unproven weapons systems."

"It's time for this waste and inefficiency to end," the president said.

Things are really going to change now. Waste and inefficiency were the two most favorite words in the Bush administration.

Republican't

They don't like to govern, don't want you to see a government that can actually work, and want Obama to fail.



Why on earth are they running for office? Why are they getting elected?

What deregulation brings

Is not freedom nor open healthy markets nor sensitive-to-the-consumer corporations, but this:

RALEIGH -- Federal authorities are hunting the mastermind behind a "horrific case" in which bacteria-laden syringes shipped from an Angier plant sickened at least a hundred people and killed five.

Two men pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh for their roles in ignoring sterility standards at the former AM2PAT Inc. plant. Conditions there appeared more consistent with a textile factory than a pharmaceutical facility.

The men -- plant manager Aniruddha Patel and quality control director Ravindra Kumar Sharma -- were each sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison for fraud and allowing tainted drugs into the marketplace.

And this:

Washington — Even after Peanut Corp. of America learned its products were tainted with salmonella, it kept shipping them to unsuspecting customers, apparently putting profits ahead of public safety, according to documents and testimony presented at a congressional subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Company president Stewart Parnell and Sammy Lightsey, manger of the Blakely plant at the center of one of the biggest food poisoning cases in recent history, refused to answer questions from a House panel, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to present self-incriminating evidence.

[snip]

Even in the heat of the nationwide outbreak, Parnell seemed more worried about his company’s profits than with food safety, according to regulators and congressional investigators.

On Jan. 19, Parnell sent an e-mail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pleading with the agency to let it continue its business. He wrote that company executives “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money.”

U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, (R-Gainesville), said the company’s actions not only hurt consumers and revealed problems with food safety, but also decimated the peanut industry that is central to Georgia’s economy.

We will always need regulation because hardwired into the human DNA is short term greed and selfishness. How many times have we been persuaded by eager corporations that we should just let them do what they do best... and then we die from their products?

Incompetence? During the Bush administration?

Do tell:

Complaints are beginning to pile up against the U.S. Interior Department. And they're coming not just from outside critics but also from people in the agency. The problems surfacing are serious: managerial incompetence, bureaucratic snafus that are costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and a pervasive forgive-and-forget attitude toward senior department officials who cross ethical lines.

The Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group, released a study this week charging that Interior's Minerals and Management Service (MMS) has become far more lax the past four years in collecting unpaid royalties from the land it leases to oil and natural gas companies. From 2002 to 2005, MMS's auditing and compliance division collected $48 million not paid on mineral leases, which is "less than half the average $115 million collected annually in the division's first 20 years," according to Beth Daley, the watchdog organization's director of investigations. The drop in collections, Daley says, came after the auditing and compliance division cut its staff by 26% and began relying more on a computerized checking system of the leases "based upon information provided from the industry."

But the watchdog group's beef with Interior is tepid compared with the blast delivered a day earlier by the department's own inspector general, Earl Devaney. In scorching testimony before a House Government Reform subcommittee the no-nonsense Devaney charged that during his seven years as Interior's IG his revelations of misdeeds and foul-ups have been routinely "disregarded by the department." Numerous IG reports on regulations circumvented, procurement irregularities, project failures and bureaucrats being awarded bonuses despite their failures have been met with "vehement challenges" by Interior officials "to the quality of our audits, evaluations and investigations," he told lawmakers.

Amazing what is coming out now about the Bush years... I guess someone unclicked the mute button.