The Republic of T.

Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss.  I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.

Seven years later, it’s no safer to fly than before.

The nation’s top domestic security official says aviation still remains vulnerable to terrorist attack, seven years after 9/11.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says that the al-Qaida terrorist network continues to focus on the aviation system as a target. He also says the Bush administration has made strides in reducing the nation’s vulnerability, but that the risk remains.

Chertoff was speaking at the National Press Club. Thursday is the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which terrorists crashed hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

[Photo via factoid @ Flickr]

It was a jaw-droppingly, mystifyingly obtuse, callous moment in an administration that’s given us enough of them to fill what would have to be the world’s most depressing bloopers reel. It also brilliantly captured a president and an administration who don’t feel American’s pain, but smirk at it instead.

I didn’t think he could top his farewell shout-out to the G8 — “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter” — but he did it.

A while back, I attempted to create a kind of Bush blooper reel.

Now I’ve got something to add to it. You can’t blame the president for wanting the cameras turned off for this.

My first thought was, “Well, who supplied the open bar?” But Jeff Danziger said it best with a political cartoon depicting a passed-out drunk to represent Wall Street, and Bush, dressed as a bartender, leaning against the bar and — with that trademark smirk — claiming ignorance about how the drunk got, well, drunk.

I can’t help wondering what late, great, former-Bush-classmate Molly Ivins would have made of Bush’s most recent stunner. In a 2003 Mother Jones article titled “The Uncompassionate Conservative,” wrote this about her fellow Texan.

In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn’t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow — and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.

I might differ with Ivins’ “perfectly nice fellow” assessment, given all that’s passed since she wrote it. Later on in the piece, she includes a description of a telling moment between Bush and Rev. Jim Wallis — progressive evangelical author of God’s Politics, and editor-in-chief/ CEO of Sojourners.

The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and had described himself as a “white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” What’s annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.

Four years hence, it’s got to be clear enough by now that Bush’s obtuseness — his ignorance of simple every-day-life matters affected by his policies, like the price of gas — is willful. If he “doesn’t get it,” when it come to the economic pain more and more American’s are dealing with, it’s because he doesn’t care to.

And that pain is more and more real each day. Just the headlines from the past week would make that clear to anyone who picked up a newspaper. (Something I suspect the President is still disinclined to do.)Foreclosures are up 120%. Some 220,000 homes were lost to repossession in the last quarter, and another 739,714 entered foreclosure in the first quarter. That’s one in every 171 American homes involved in what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson euphemistically calls the “housing correction”, which he says must go on, even in the midst of a handing some very wealthy people a blank welfare check that I’ll get to in a bit.

Meanwhile, jobless claims pushed past 400,000 for the second time this year. That’s probably related in no small way to the spike in business bankruptcies, which is hitting small business particularly hard as they, struggle with the same things that consumers are struggling with. Like fuel costs driving up electricity bills, and causing an increase in cut-off notices as consumers have trouble keeping up with their bills. In fact, as the price of just about everything is going up, consumers are behind on or have walked away from $800 million in household debt; including mortgages, credit cards, and car loans. (That last one means that when some of them lose their homes they won’t even have cars to live in, because repo is about the only business that’s booming now.) And they can’t borrow against the equity in their homes in order to get caught up, because home values are still falling so hard that people count themselves lucky if they don’t owe more than their house is worth.

Meanwhile, the Fed has not only bailed out Bear Stearns by putting the same taxpayers mentioned above one on the line for $30 billion of Bear’s debts (y’know, the company that had $30 in debt for every $1 it had in assets?), it’s gone one better. The housing bill that passed this weekend included at bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could cost taxpayers anywhere from $25 billion to $100 billion. Despite business decisions that ran both companies into the ground, the housing bill passed this weekend with none of the conditions that both critics and common sense recommended. It amounts to that blank corporate welfare check I mentioned earlier.

The House dealt Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) a “Get Out of Jail Free” card on July 23, passing a bill that authorizes the Treasury Dept. to extend the mortgage-finance giants a lifeline without any of the conditions that the companies’ critics had demanded. The bill now heads to the Senate, where passage is expected within days. President Bush earlier dropped his threat to veto the legislation, so it should be signed into law soon.

…The bill would let the Federal Housing Administration back up to $300 billion in new loans so homeowners who cannot afford their house payments could try to escape foreclosure by refinancing into more affordable mortgages. Lenders would have to agree to take a substantial loss on the existing loans, and in return, they would walk away with at least some payoff and avoid the often-costly foreclosure process.

The plan also includes about $15 billion in housing tax breaks, including a credit of up to $7,500 for first-time buyers, and increases the statutory limit on the national debt by $800 billion, to $10.6 trillion.

Granted, the president finally dropped his threat to veto the bill, but his sticking point was a $4 billion dollar aid package for communities hardest hit by the wave of foreclosures to buy up foreclosed properties that are now part of an epidemic of blight facing urban neighborhoods. (Read, minority communities.)

House Democrats say a new $3.9 billion federal program to help state and local governments buy up foreclosed properties would be part of the solution. The Bush administration has opposed such block grants on the grounds that “the principal beneficiaries of this type of plan would be private lenders – who are now the owners of the vacant or foreclosed properties – instead of struggling homeowners who are working hard to stay in their homes.”

Still, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week she doubts Mr. Bush will veto the housing-rescue package, which contains a separate provision he wants to strengthen the financial positions of faltering mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The disputed funds enable communities to buy up properties once on the revenue rolls that are now “taking the value of their neighbors’ homes,” she said.

Never mind that some of those “homeowners who are working hard to stay in their homes” would also like to protect what remains of the value of their homes and the quality of life in their communities from the consequences of blight caused by boarded up properties.

From Atlanta’s urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm. As the housing dominoes fall far from Wall Street, growing urban “ghost towns” of vacant houses are resulting in a costly crush of weeds, trash, and dereliction on a scale unseen in American cities since the Great Depression, economists say.

As a $4 billion package to help municipalities deal with foreclosure-related blight hangs fire in the US Senate, US mayors met last weekend in Miami to vent about the scourge of abandoned homes. Cash-strapped cities are now scrambling – often using on-the-fly ingenuity – to rescue neighborhoods suddenly vulnerable to crime and stunned by millions of dollars in lost equity wrought by loose credit, opportunistic speculators, and predatory lending.

…Some 44.5 million homes in the US now stand next to an empty house, resulting in a drop of at least $5,000 in property value per house. By that calculation, a total loss of home value of $220 billion across the US can be attributed to the vacancy problem.

“This is a man-made disaster that’s had more dramatic impacts on real estate markets than natural disasters [have],” says Bruce Katz, a housing analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “In a way, we have a lot of mini-Katrinas across the country.”

The cost of helping those communities turns out to be an unconditional bailout for the institutions that helped create the crisis, financed by the very people struggling to stay afloat in its wake, and several times larger than the amount proposed to help those communities.

The unconditional, accountability-free bailout is, according Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, necessary to protect Fannie and Freddie against attacks from short selling speculators. It’s like, he says, a bazooka that scares off would-be attackers even if it’s never used. This from a guy who just a few weeks ago inveighed against helping homeowners in foreclosure because:

Faced with record-high foreclosure rates, the Bush administration has been scrambling to keep people from losing their homes, but many are beyond help, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Tuesday.

Lax lending standards that accompanied the once high-flying housing market allowed people to buy homes they could not afford, Paulson said.

“Many of today’s unusually high number of foreclosures are not preventable,” he said in prepared remarks to a mortgage-lending forum meeting in Arlington, Va. “There is little public policymakers can, or should, do to compensate for untenable financial decisions.”

However, when Lawrence Summers puts the Fannie/Freddie bailout in the context of the Bear Stearns bailout, it seems clear that’s exactly what policymakers are doing: compensating for untenable financial decisions. It’s just that these untenable financial decisions were made by people much higher up on the economic food chain.

This, to put it mildly, is a highly problematic posture for policy. While I strongly supported the Federal Reserve’s policy response to the crisis at Bear Stearns because it was necessary to avoid systemic risk, it is easy to sympathize with those who fear that bailouts inhibit market discipline. Consider how much more problematic the Bear Stearns response would have been had policy-makers signaled their commitment to back the company’s liabilities without limit; left management in place with no change in the business model; and allowed dividends to be paid and shareholders to keep going with hope for a better tomorrow. Yet all of these elements are present in the cases of Fannie and Freddie.

To see the temptation and danger inherent in a situation of this kind, one need only look back to the mismanagement of the savings and loans crisis during the 1980s. Policy-makers protected depositors, allowed institutions to operate even when their fundraising depended on government support, and suspended regular standards in order to attract private capital. With gains privatized and losses socialized, taxpayers ultimately ended up with a $300bn-plus bill measured in today’s dollars.

That’s right. The management stays in place, despite financial decisions that ran the companies aground — helped along by the HUD requiring Fannie and Freddie to purchase subprime mortgage loans and allowing them to count billions invested in subprime loans as a “public good” that would foster affordable housing, while ignoring regulators’ warnings that subprime loans would be detrimental to those receiving them. And, as I mentioned before, the CEOs will probably keep their salaries. They will probably remain among the best paid executives in D.C.. Come next year, they will probably still have ten of the top 100 best paid executives in the country.

And why shouldn’t they? It’s par for the course. Many of us may have ended up about $1.7 trillion poorer in the Bush economy.

Americans saw their net worth decline by $1.7 trillion in the first quarter - the biggest drop since 2002 - as declines in home values and the stock market ravaged their holdings.

Meanwhile, the amount of equity people have in their homes fell to 46.2%, the lowest level on record.

The net worth of U.S. households fell 3% to $56 trillion at the end of March, according to the Federal Reserve’s flow of funds report, which was released Thursday.

The value of real estate assets owned by households and non-profits declined by $305 billion, while financial assets fell by $1.3 trillion, led mainly by a $556 billion drop in stocks and a $400 billion decline in mutual funds.

But the top 1 percent got richer.

In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation’s adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group’s share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income.

The figures are from the IRS’s income-statistics division and were posted on the agency’s Web site last week. The 2006 data are the most recent available.

The figures about the relative income and tax rates of the wealthiest Americans come as the presumptive presidential candidates are in a debate about taxes. Congress and the next president will have to decide whether to extend several Bush-era tax cuts, including the 2003 reduction in tax rates on capital gains and dividends. Experts said those tax cuts in particular are playing a major role in falling tax rates for the very wealthy.

They almost certainly played a major role in creating the record deficit we’ll be facing when Bush finally ends his shift behind the bar. No wonder 85% of us are unhappy with the economy, and 75% of us blame Bush’s policies for its sorry state.

In some places, after all, the bartender who kept pouring drinks for the obvious drunk is liable when that drunk staggers out of the bar, wreaks havoc, and wrecks lives. But in the barroom that is the Bush economy, Wall Street does indeed get drunk, but the rest of us get the hangover and get stuck with the tab.

It’s not the cast I would have chosen, but it’s looking like Oliver Stone’s W. will be worth getting a babysitter for.

What do you think?

Let’s face it, we’ve known for a while now that the president — and most, if not all, of his administration — has a hostile relationship with reality.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

So, while I don’t fully agree with the Dalai Lama’s assessment of Bush’s grasp on reality, I think he’s pretty much on the mark.

The Dalai Lama, in a lecture in Philadelphia today, told a group of about 2,000,

Things are not black and white. Things are relative. Things are interdependent. When we look at a situation we have to consider all the factors.

Many world disasters, including war, including the Iraq war, are due to lack of this holistic nature (looking at all the factors.) Like Saddam Hussein– ending things for him. “Reality is not that simple.

Of course, I have great respect for, in fact, I love President Bus, because he is very frank, very straightforward. His intentions are good, but some of his policy in spite of his sincere motivation and right goal, and some of his method becomes unrealistic because of lack of understanding about reality.

He went on to explain,

“You cannot look in one direction. In order to see reality, (you) have to see in three or four or seven dimensions” and that this applies in the economical field, political field and international relations.”

Bush had good intentions? OK. I guess I’m not feeling quite that generous towards him right now, but I can’t quite convince myself that the man meant well.

The rest? I can’t argue with it.

This has already been covered in numerous other places, so you probably haven’t seen it here first. Nonetheless it reminded me of something a wise lesbian activist said to me when I was newly arrived in D.C.

The gist of it was that it’s incredibly important ­that when policy decisions are being made people from those groups affected at at the table and engaged in making those decisions. It was a statement, at the time, about the importance of getting gays & lesbians elected to public office. It’s not that someone who doesn’t belong to a particular group can’t advocate effectively for that group. But advocacy (and policy) based in the direct experiences of the people who are impacted by can often address more specific needs.

In other words, if you want a voice when it comes to making policy, you gotta get people elected. Because if you got something that looks like this:

You’re a lot more likely to end up with something like this:

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40 percent of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal states,

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term “abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

And you’re liable to have policy made by people who say stuff like this.

Back in 1990, the Republican candidate for Governor of Texas, Clayton Williams, likened rape to bad weather, saying, “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

When that joke came to light in June, John McCain was forced to “postpone” a fundraiser in Midland hosted by Williams. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers called the joke “incredibly offensive.”

But what Williams said in 1990 is not all that different than a joke McCain made about rape in 1986. According to the Tucson Citizen, here’s what McCain, then a two-term Congressman from Mesa, said during his run for the Senate:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’

And people who know who don’t even know stuff like this.

The bus had been rolling for a half-hour and McCain was holding court on everything from Iraq to college basketball. (”Who woulda thought? VCU,” he exclaimed upon boarding.) And then someone asked about public funding for contraception in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS.
“I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it in the past,” he stammered as he looked to his communications director. “I’m sure I’m opposed to government funding.”

Sensing a vulnerable moment, reporters kept the questions coming. What about sex education in the schools? Should it mention contraceptives? Or only abstinence, like President Bush wants?

“I think I support the president’s present policy,” he said, tentatively.

More questions: Do condoms stop sexually transmitted disease?

A long pause.

A stern look.

“I’ve never gotten into these issues or thought much about them,” he said, almost crying uncle.

And who can’t answer questions like this.

So, yeah. Getting the right (or not right, in this case) people elected matters.

Unfortunately, it’s not really Bush. Just the guy who’s playing him in a movie. But it is kinda funny that the lead actor in Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic has been arrested in drunken brawl.

Actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright were arrested during the early hours of Saturday morning after a fight in a bar in a Louisiana city, police said.

Sergeant Willie Lewis said the pair, who star in Oliver Stone’s new film about George W Bush, were held along with five other people in Shreveport.

Officers would not confirm whether Mr Brolin or the others had been released. The Times of Shreveport newspaper said the others arrested were also working on the film, called W.

Filming began in May.

Mr Brolin, who has also starred in American Gangster and No Country for Old Men, plays President Bush.

Wright, best known for playing Felix Leiter in the last two James Bond films, plays former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Brolin has already been accused of method acting, and I suspect the same on Wright’s part. I could understand if Colin Powell wanted to deliver a richly deserved ass-whuppin’ to W, after all.

I only glanced at the headline, because I was up to my ears in work. But what I read was enough to give me a sick feeling; the kind you get when you begin to wonder whether you’ve made a disastrous choice, or cast your lot with exactly the wrong person. (It’s a feeling at least some Bush voters, circa 2004, should be familiar with.) The headline? “Obama to Expand Bush’s Faith Based Programs.”

Reaching out to religious voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for expanding President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — supported some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama unveiled his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothes, youth ministry and other services.

“The challenges we face today … are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Obama said.

Obama’s announcement is part of a series of events leading up to Friday’s Fourth of July holiday that are focused on American values.

Expand them? And here I’d been hoping — but not praying — that maybe getting the next Democrat in the White House would ashcan the whole idea.

No such luck.

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We all know George W. Bush is a big old wuss. He talks big. But that’s about it. Aside from strutting around on air craft carriers, that’s about all there is too him. The man is “all hat and not cattle,” we know. But was the leader of the free world scared of Karl Rove?

It sounds like it.

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I don’t know what’s scarier. This:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

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Remember this guy?

Sometimes, I’d swear I married him. Allow me to explain.

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[Update: Unbelievable. I should have waited a bit to post this. Then I could have included Bush's latest comment: that this is a bill Americans should be happy to pay.]

It’s almost a shame that the subprime mortgage bonanza burned out before the sun finally sets on the George W. Bush administration. After all, they managed to lure Americans into a war we didn’t need and couldn’t afford, then stuck us with a ballooning bill and never ending payments. Reborn as a brokerage firm dealing in subprime mortgages, this administration could have made a killing.

Don’t take my word for it. Just have a look at your bill.

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"I will restore honor and integrity to the White House."

George W. Bush

It’s low-hanging fruit, I know, but after reading yesterday’s news, I had to chuckle to myself. Not necessarily at the misfortunes of the people involved, but at the context.

Three scandals in one day is noteworthy even for the Bush administration. And I know that every White House — Republican and Democratic — has its share of scandals. The mix of money, power, and intrigue in Washington makes it inevitable, especially when you throw in a dash or two of temptation and human fallibility.

But three scandals breaking in one day is big news, or it ought to be, for a president and an administration (and a party, for that matter) pledging to "restore honor and integrity" to the White House, Washington, and government self. And, yes, when you recall that these people were self-appointed exemplars of morality who were going to "show us how it’s done" and set an example for the rest of us, it’s kind of funny.

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Bear Stearns has been rescued, and its shareholders have been placated. Wall Street has several invigorating injections of billions of tax-payer dollars. Now that a great deal of public wealth has gone to prop up private wealth, maybe some of that public wealth can be used to help, well, the public. But only if the free market fundamentalists in the Bush administration stay out of the way, or trip over themselves while hurrying to offer their idea of a remedy.

Clearly something’s up, because both the White House and Congress are racing to present plans to (finally) bail out homeowners stuck between impending forclosure. Congress is considering proposals. The Bush administration has ideas of its own. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to overhaul regulation of Wall Street is coming under particular scrutiny, because of how much it probably won’t accomplish.

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