Blog Archive: March, 2007

Do you ever find yourself watching the Sunday morning talk shows, tearing your hair out because the host isn't asking the most pertinent questions?

Let's see what we can do about that.

Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, Common Sense will post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

Then on Monday, we'll circle back and see if our questions were asked, and if they were answered. Let's take back our media!

For Sen. Orrin Hatch (NBC's Meet The Press): You said on CNN Friday that "there was absolutely no evidence at all that the Justice Department was trying to interfere with ongoing intervention in their cases ... Just conjecture on the part of Democrats."

But don't the allegations of interference come directly from the purged prosecutors such as David Iglesias and John McKay, as well as former tobacco case prosecutor Sharon Eubanks?

For Sen. Pat Leahy (NBC's Meet The Press): You now have the authority from the Senate Judiciary Committee to issue subpoenas for White House officials including Karl Rove.

If the White House is still refusing to voluntarily testify under oath about the Prosecutor Purge, why are you waiting to issue any subpoenas?

For White House spokesperson Dan Bartlett (ABC's This Week, CBS' Face The Nation): The President says he'll veto either version of the Iraq-Afghanistan supplemental funding bill, because it includes non-germane spending, fails to "fund our troops on the front lines," and makes "political statements."

But the last two supplemental funding bills signed by President Bush also included non-germane spending. The bills passed by the House and Senate do fund troops currently on the front lines.

Why can't the White House acknowledge that the dispute is not about that, or mere "political statements," but about a public policy matter whether combat troops should remain in Iraq beyond next year?

***

Please add your own questions in the comments, and here's how you can contact the main Sunday shows.

Click here for NBC's Meet The Press

Click here for ABC's This Week

Email CBS' Face The Nation at ftn@cbsnews.com

Remember: always be brief, polite and respectful when contacting the media, so our voices will be taken seriously.

The conservative movement has long been split on immigration. Nativist conservatives fear diversity and want to keep immigrants out. Corporate conservatives fear paying fair wages and want cheap immigrant labor.

As neither camp cares about the well-being of workers on either side of the border, neither bothers to propose comprehensive, workable solutions to our broken immigration system.

The Bush Administration is in the corporate camp, promoting temporary guest worker programs intended to keep wages down.

This week, the White House floated its latest proposal, making it very clear that's still all about the cheap labor. The LA Times reports:

A White House proposal for overhauling immigration laws would abandon the long-standing practice of admitting immigrants seeking to reunite with their families, instead giving preference to applicants based on the nation's employment needs.

Cheapr labor first. Keeping families together last.

The proposal includes disincentives for illegal immigrants to exit the underground economy, with much steeper fines than last year's Senate bill, and a requirement to leave the country before getting a green card.

And it also denies workers the money they have already paid into the Social Security system.

Like all of Bush's past proposals, it doesn't impress the nativist conservatives, who don't want any path to citizenship. And it doesn't impress immigrant advocates either.

To see what comprehensive reform of our broken immigrant system really looks like --reasonable path to citizenship, strong border enforcement, and job creation south of the border -- check out Straight Talk from Campaign for America's Future.

Another Bush administration official has been caught fixing scientific reports for the benefit of White House cronies and ideological soul mates. The culprit this time is one Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Department of the Interior.

This is no surprise except in the brazenness of her behavior, as documented in a report released by the Interior Department’s inspector general. As noted in The Washington Post, in 2004 MacDonald sent a confidential report on the department’s habitat policies to a lawyer she later identified as “a personal friend” at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-wing group that bills itself as a “foe” of “government regulators and environmental extremists.” The e-mail message to the friend that accompanied the report stressed that the report was a draft subject to revision but “the fundamental legal/policy approach will not change. Does that work for you?”

That was one of several violations listed in the inspector general’s report of federal statutes that prohibit federal employees from giving “preferential treatment of any private organization or individual” and allowing the “improper use of nonpublic information” for the benefit of a private entity.

The Fish and Wildlife Service under MacDonald’s leadership certainly was working hard for friends of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which, as the Environment News Service reports, is a “self-proclaimed "national leader" in the effort to reform the Endangered Species Act [that] has successfully mounted a number of legal challenges to critical habitat reviews on behalf of their clients such as the California Farm Bureau, the Washington Farm Bureau, and the Arizona Cattle Growers' Association.”

MacDonald was “heavily involved in editing, commenting on and reshaping” many of the Endangered Species Act-related scientific reports that were generated by Fish and Wildlife field scientists, the inspector general found. It quotes one high-ranking agency official as saying that MacDonald “is more interested in political views than in getting it ‘right.’”

The report is being forwarded to MacDonald’s boss at the Fish and Wildlife Service, but don’t hold your breath waiting for MacDonald to lose her job over this. Many of the allegations in the inspector general’s report have been public since October, when The Post published a front-page article on MacDonald’s manipulation of agency findings to benefit private landowners. From the standpoint of the property owners who help bankroll the Bush administration and its Republican enablers in Congress, MacDonald is doing what she was put there to do—not let any efforts to protect the environment and its fragile ecosystems get in the way of a handful of selfish zealots who want to make a short-term buck at the expense of the long-term public good.

Does that work for you? Absolutely not. That is why MacDonald, and those like her who are evangelists for the fix-the-facts-to-fit-the-conservatism way of running government, must go.

It's a tough question for this White House: which scandal to focus on today?

Today, they're going for Walter Reed, as President Bush is slated to tour the military hospital.

With the Prosecutor Purge scandal getting hotter and hotter, the ploy is to shift attention to the relatively better-managed scandal.

But while Bush has sought to delay making any real reforms by kicking the problems to various commissions, it's the House that has taken the lead, unanimously passing on Wednesday a series of reforms in the Wounded Warrior Assistance Act.

The bill includes a one-year moratorium on privatizing key functions at military medical facilities.

The White House response? From the AP:

The White House, in a statement, said that while those goals were commendable, the legislation is premature.

It suggested that Congress wait for a report from a presidential commission and a task force on the war-wounded created after the exposure of poor outpatient living conditions and treatment at Walter Reed. Those findings are expected by the end of July.

Clearly, we need some more photo ops before taking any substantive action.

Much of the focus of the Senate's questioning of Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, is on how Sampson's story squares with other Justice Depart more »

Much of the focus of the Senate's questioning of Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, is on how Sampson's story squares with other Justice Department and White House officials, especially because Sampson and others risk being busted for misleading Congress, and folks are looking to save themselves and shift blame.

But beyond the possibility of crimes regarding a cover-up, there's a bigger issue in this scandal—the fundamental nature of conservative government.

As I've blogged before, the Bush Administration has been governing under the guidance of the Heritage Foundation paper, "Taking Charge of Federal Personnel," issued just as Bush was assuming the presidency.

It sniffed at the "Public Administration Model" of government as "emphasiz[ing] the Progressive ideal--a value-free 'scientific' program of government administration." Instead, it preferred the "Political Administration Model" which it defined as "providing presidential leadership to committed top political officials...holding them and their subordinates personally accountable for achievement of the President's election-endorsed and value-defined program."

And it explicitly called for "appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second."

We have seen this conservative governing philosophy in action in the Bush Era, as political hacks have been empowered to undermine civil servants faithful to the law and the facts.

The pressure on CIA analysts to cook Iraq intelligence. The threatening of the chief Medicare actuary to clam up on the cost of the prescription drug bill. The misinformation pumped out of the Social Security Administration. The muzzling of our scientists regarding global warming.

And now the Prosecutor Purge, an attempt to pack our Justice Department with "loyal Bushies" and turn it into a partisan weapon. And thus today Sampson explained to the Senate Judiciary Commnittee that in regards to the administration's reasons for purging eight U.S. attorneys, "the distinction between political and performance-related reasons … is in my view largely artificial."

This is not unique to the Bush Era. As Robert Borosage laid out recently in "Alberto Gonzales: Why Conservatives Can't Govern":

Conservative presidents--from Nixon to Reagan to Bush--believe in the imperial presidency. They assume that in the area of the national security, the president operates above the law, or as Nixon put it, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." They operate routinely behind the shield of secrecy and executive privilege, with utter disdain for the law.

Sampson — like Gonzales, like the White House —does not apologize for the Purge itself. He said today the decision was "properly made but poorly explained." Purging a independent prosecutor for political reasons, in the conservative view, is proper.

Certainly, there are individuals in this scandal who need to be held accountable.

But until the conservative approach to government is excised from the Oval Office, we will not have a government that follows the law, delivers the facts and truly serves the public.

More on the Sampson testimony is on the new Common Sense blog at the Campaign For America's Future website.

After the first round of Kyle Sampson's testimony, what's the news so far?

ThinkProgress finds Kyle Sampson making Attorney General Gonzales appear to be a liar.

Gonzales had claimed Sampson didn't share key information about the Prosecutor Purge to him and his deputies. But Samspon says he did.

TPMmuckraker sees news in Sampson's exchange with Sen. Dianne Feinstein regarding the purge of Carol Lam, who successfully convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham and was continuing her investigation:

Two big things came out of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) questioning of Kyle Sampson.

The first was a glowing letter about Lam that Feinstein presented from the Director of Field Operations for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. Lam was supposedly fired, remember, because she performed poorly on immigration prosecutions...

The second was the revelation that after the FBI bureau chief in San Diego complained to the press about Lam's firing, Sampson called FBI headquarters to complain.

Feinstein quoted from a San Diego Union-Tribune report: "Lam's continued employment as U.S. attorney is crucial to the success of multiple ongoing investigations, the FBI chief said."

Sampson admitted calling to complain. But his empty explanation, failing to address what Lam was working on, speaks volumes:

I asked ... why an FBI employee was commenting on that issue ... I understood that Carol Lam was a political appointee, and a decision had been made in the executive branch to ask her to resign so that others could serve.

Politics trumps upholding the law. Conservative governing in action.

Finally, relating to the purge of David Iglesias, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff yesterday flagged a suspicious email exchange between between top White House aide Karl Rove and Senator Pete Domenici's chief of staff.

Today on MSNBC, Isikoff sees more to explore after Sampson's testimony:

[Iglesias] is not originally on the list to be fired.

Then after those phone calls Domenici makes -- [he] had complained to Gonzales already, also [he] complains to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. And then [Iglesias] is put on the list.

What was interesting is: Sampson did qualify some of his answers today.

When asked about if anybody was put on the list for a political reason, [he] says, not to my knowledge.

He didn't get those phone calls, but the natural follow-up is: did others tell him to put Iglesias on the list? And if so, why?

UPDATE: Per Talking Points Memo, Sampson managed to avoid answering Isikoff's question -- not just on how Iglesias got on the purge list, but any of them.

There is more evidence today that the Bush administration’s economic policies are widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

University of California at Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty of the Paris School of Economics released two studies this week, one looking at income and another looking at tax policy. The bottom line: Under Bush, the rich aren’t just getting richer. They’re making a killing.

How much so? As The New York Times reported Thursday, the nation’s richest 300,000 Americans make as much money as the bottom 150 million. Calculations based on 2005 tax data, the latest available, average incomes for people among the bottom 90 percent of Americans that year declined 0.6 percent, while the incomes of those in the top 10 percent increased about 14 percent.

And that is not just a one-year blip. Since 1970, based on data posted on Saez’ website, while the annual average wage, adjusted for inflation, increased 15.2 percent between 1970 and 2005, the average wage for the nation’s top 100 CEOs in that period increased a whopping 2,193 percent.

Meanwhile, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities released a study based on the research of Saez and Picketty that shows the extent to which the wealthiest Americans benefited greatly from conservative tax policy while the pocketbooks of average Americans remain significantly unchanged. “Large reductions in tax progressivity since the 1960s took place primarily during two periods: the Reagan presidency in the 1980s and the Bush administration in the early 2000s,” Piketty and Saez say in the Center’s study.

In fact, the wealthier the individual, the greater the magnitude of the tax benefit: The average tax rate declined by a larger amount for households in the top one hundredth of 1 percent of the income scale (where incomes in 2004 averaged about $15 million) than for households in the top tenth of 1 percent (where incomes averaged above $3.7 million) or for households in the top 1 percent (where incomes averaged about $850,000).

“During a period in which economic forces have been generating increased pre-tax inequality, changes in the tax system have exacerbated rather than mitigated the widening of the income gap,” the Center concludes.

The Bush administration and congressional Republicans, not surprisingly, are trying to change the subject. As Democrats unveiled their admittedly imperfect and incomplete plans to balance the budget by 2012—a vote on the budget resolution is expected this afternoon—the Republicans have settled on a mantra: that Democrats will enact “the largest tax increase in American history.” They will try to persuade working-class Americans that the Democrats will dip into their pockets.

Democrats and progressives do not have to fall into that rhetorical trap. The evidence is on their side. It is the Republicans who have been playing reverse Robin Hood, robbing lower- and middle-income Americans by rigging tax and economic policies to benefit the rich. In an honest moment, a few Republicans will acknowledge the truth. But as we see over and over again, honesty and economic fairness are not high on the agenda of the conservative ideologues still trying to call the shots.

There is more evidence today that the Bush administration’s economic policies are widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

more »

There is more evidence today that the Bush administration’s economic policies are widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

University of California at Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty of the Paris School of Economics released two studies this week, one looking at income and another looking at tax policy. The bottom line: Under Bush, the rich aren’t just getting richer. They’re making a killing.

How much so? As The New York Times reported Thursday, the nation’s richest 300,000 Americans make as much money as the bottom 150 million. Calculations based on 2005 tax data, the latest available, average incomes for people among the bottom 90 percent of Americans that year declined 0.6 percent, while the incomes of those in the top 10 percent increased about 14 percent.

And that is not just a one-year blip. Since 1970, based on data posted on Saez’ website, while the annual average wage, adjusted for inflation, increased 15.2 percent  between 1970 and 2005, the average wage for the nation’s top 100 CEOs in that period increased a whopping 2,193 percent.

Meanwhile, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities released a study based on the research of Saez and Picketty that shows the extent to which the wealthiest Americans benefited greatly from conservative tax policy while the pocketbooks of average Americans remain significantly unchanged. “Large reductions in tax progressivity since the 1960s took place primarily during two periods:  the Reagan presidency in the 1980s and the Bush administration in the early 2000s,” Piketty and Saez say in the Center’s study.

In fact, the wealthier the individual, the greater the magnitude of the tax benefit: The average tax rate declined by a larger amount for households in the top one hundredth of 1 percent of the income scale (where incomes in 2004 averaged about $15 million) than for households in the top tenth of 1 percent (where incomes averaged above $3.7 million) or for households in the top 1 percent (where incomes averaged about $850,000). 

“During a period in which economic forces have been generating increased pre-tax inequality, changes in the tax system have exacerbated rather than mitigated the widening of the income gap,” the Center concludes.

The Bush administration and congressional Republicans, not surprisingly, are trying to change the subject. As Democrats unveiled their admittedly imperfect and incomplete plans to balance the budget by 2012—a vote on the budget resolution will come Thursday afternoon—the Republicans have settled on a mantra: that Democrats will enact “the largest tax increase in American history.” They will try to persuade working-class Americans that the Democrats will dip into their pockets.

Democrats and progressives do not have to fall into that rhetorical trap. The evidence is on their side. It is the Republicans who have been playing reverse Robin Hood, robbing lower- and middle-income Americans by rigging tax and economic policies to benefit the rich. In an honest moment, a few Republicans will acknowledge the truth. But as we see over and over again, honesty and economic fairness are not high on the agenda of the conservative ideologues still trying to call the shots.