Entries associated with the tag "George W. Bush":

"The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting." So argues Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair, citing

"a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris -- or even the Yukon -- becomes a venture in high finance.

"And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands -- or so he says -- that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both."

Economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes a characteristically even-tempered argument the other way on some of the points in the first paragraph. He doesn't address the second paragraph.

I myself am puzzled why Stiglitz complains about high oil prices, when that is the surest way for us to get weaned from this fuel. The real problem is they're not high enough. We can't expect politicians to tell the truth about this, but economists should.

Rudy "9/11" Giuliani proposes a health care plan like Bush's -- tax deductions for health insurance of up to $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families -- whose flaws are dissected by David Kendall at Ideasprimary.org:

"In short, he would unleash what wonks like me call 'the death spiral in insurance.' He would create an incentive for healthy workers to leave the insurance pools they join through their employer, and purchase insurance at a lower cost on the open market. That would leave sicker workers -- who might be unable to find coverage without the help of their employer -- as the only subscribers to their workplace health plan. And in turn insurers, worried that they would only be insuring workers who would demand a great deal of expensive care, would drive up premiums, eventually forcing employers to stop offering coverage all together."

Former Clinton subcabinet official and professional economist Brad DeLong was asking potential successors a key question in the summer of 2000, seven long years ago:

"I began asking Republicans I know--by and large people who might be natural candidates for short lists for various subcabinet policy positions in a Republican administration--how worried they were that the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, was clearly not up to the job: underbriefed and incurious. They were not worried, they told me. One of President Clinton's problems, they said, was that the ceremonial portions of the job bored him--and thus he got himself into big trouble. Look at how George W. Bush had operated at the Texas Rangers, they said. Bush let the managers manage the team and the financial guys run the business, and spent his time making sure the political coalition to support the Texas Rangers in the style to which it wanted to be accustomed remained stable. Bush knows his strengths and weaknesses, they told me. He will focus on being America's Queen Elizabeth II, and will let people like Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill be America's Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

"By the summer of 2001 it had become clear to me that something had gone very wrong. Rather than following Paul O'Neill and Christine Todd Whitman's advice on environmental policy, George W. Bush had rejected it. Rather than following Alan Greenspan and Paul O'Neill'S advice on fiscal policy, George W. Bush had rejected it. Rather than following Colin Powell and Condi Rice's advice on the importance of pushing forward on negotiations between Israel and Palestine, George W. Bush had rejected it. And--we were all to learn later--rather than following George Tenet and Richard Clarke's advice about the importance of counterterrorism, George W. Bush had rejected it.

"A strange picture of George W. Bush emerged from conversations with subcabinet Bush Administration appointees and their friends and their friends of friends. He was not just underbriefed but lazy: he insisted on remaining underbriefed. He was not just incurious but arrogant: he insisted on making decisions about things he did not know, and hence made decisions that were essentially random. And he was stubborn: once he had made a decision--even or rather especially if it was a howlingly wrong and stupid one--he would never revisit it."

DeLong's point is that the mainstream media failed to tell this story until the last year or so. What strikes me, looking forward to the most open election since 1952, is how difficult it was even for informed people to predict the character-based catastrophe of the Bush presidency before the 2000 election (the 2004 election is another matter altogether; MSM or no, the evidence was clear to those who cared to see). I know enough to vote only for a candidate who repudiates Bush and his policies, but how can I know enough to avoid getting the same empty-suit-takes-charge syndrome from some other quarter?

Did Bush swing states like Missouri to the Democrats? Chuck Todd of the National Journal presents some evidence.  Billmon says, "I thought Shrub would end up about as popular as cholera. But I never thought he'd prove almost as lethal."

Georgia10 at Daily Kos (Reader readers know her from the April 26 cover story) observes that the mainstream media echoed Republican talking points that the Democrats had no positive agenda -- until it became clear that the Dems had won.  "Only now, after most races have been called and it's clear that the Democrats will take power, only now do they report on that which they had suppressed throughout the campaign. Now we get articles detailing the Democrats' tax plan."

Will defeat make Republicans more libertarian? Indiana's Mike Pence is running for Hastert's job on a platform Libertarians like. (Note that in the Montana Senate race the Libertarian candidate's vote total was triple the winning margin.)

If you don't gag at the thought, Mental Floss has a collection of best and worst campaign videos.

The judicious Austin Mayor quotes Mark Evanier:

"I don't know why the Democrats don't just run an ad blitz for the next few days showing Bush's recent statement that he'll keep us in Iraq even if his only support comes from his wife and his dog, followed by the clip of him saying he'll never dump Rumsfeld.

"At the end, just have an announcer come on and say, 'Somebody's got to stop him . . . vote for the Democrat.'"

When the ship of state is headed at top speed for the iceberg -- a whole field of icebergs -- it's not time to worry about making nice or crafting detailed policy proposals. That can come later.

Tom Roeser is sticking with George W. Bush, even after conservative hacks like Peggy Noonan and George Will have figured out that Bush is to limited government as Dracula is to garlic.

I first encountered Roeser years ago, when I wrote about Bruce DuMont's free-for-all radio show, "Inside Politics," then on WBEZ. Roeser was the conservative sidekick. An accomplished curmudgeon, he was always willing to go one step farther than his liberal counterparts and (much to my disappointment) usually besting them.  (The story appeared in the October 9, 1987, Reader ; colleague Robert McClory wrote up Roeser and conservative Catholicism May 6, 1988.)

Like all good insults, Roeser's carried a message as well. As far as I know he coined the parodic usage of "saddened," as in, "I'm sure all good public radio listeners will be saddened by [the outrage du jour]." What could I say? He had us nailed. And the sly truth was that those who are merely saddened by, say, racist attack ads and falsifications of science are not about to fight back.

His opinions are often repugnant, but he doesn't trim them. At a panel discussion downtown, I once heard him advocate stigmatizing children born to unmarried parents. One of his fellow panelists -- a woman who probably knew more young people Roeser would call bastards than he knows Quaker Oats executives -- just hung her head and sighed. Few secularists would agree that his end (reducing births out of wedlock) justifies such cruel means, but that just shows how far gone we are in depravity.

But now Roeser's the voluntary victim, like the man prepared to bet his bus fare home on a three-card monte game that everyone else knows is rigged. He just can't bear to admit that he was taken in, that what he calls Bush's Eisenhower-like "resolute firmness" is the bluster of a bully who, unlike Ike, seeks an endless war and unlimited presidential powers.

Some opportunistic candidate -- John McCain, say -- will no doubt hire wordsmith Noonan again, and perhaps that candidate will also have Will first prepare him for a debate on the QT and then pose as a journalist to praise his performance afterwards. Will and Noonan will be fine. They're in on the con. Roeser, in a way, is more honest than they are, and paradoxically that's why he's staying the course with the worst president in American history, and one of the least conservative.

Why did a baby-boomer emeritus prof tell the Illinois Times that the reason students at the University of Illinois at Springfield don't protest the war much is lack of faculty leadership?

How could the Notebaert Nature Museum design a comfortable, spacious lecture hall without curtains -- so that no one can see slides or PowerPoint presentations on sunny days?  [This one's been answered by spokesperson Heidi Kise. Most of the events in the South Gallery are in the evening, she says; Saturday was the first daytime lecture usage, and they'll need to devise a fix for future daytime events.]

(After having belatedly viewed An Inconvenient Truth) How do you suppose George W. Bush would have spent the last six years if he had lost the closest presidential election in American history?

If low taxes go with more liberty, how is it that the slaveholding South had lower taxes than the free-labor North? (Historian Robin Einhorn has some ideas.)

What does Lynn Becker know that you don't, and why is he warning about "the effective end of landmark protection in the city of Chicago"?

If the Republicans are the party of ideas, why are they running more than 90 percent negative ads, most attacking opponents' character, rather than advocating privatizing Social Security and sending more troops to Iraq?

Why did the Tribune's otherwise admirable Thursday editorial, "If the bosses get away with this," fail to mention Richard M. Daley? Do the editors imagine that Cook County dauphin Todd Stroger was crowned against Daley's will?

Just remember these before you say, "I can't do this on a bike!"  (Hat tip to Mental Floss.)

Somewhere George Orwell is gagging. The "stay the course" president is now denying he ever said it, and major media let him get by with rewriting history. A summary.

CTA Tattler is about Frank Kruesi's duchy, and sometimes it's about us: "In the two years I have been riding the train with my daughter every Monday-Friday, only three times has a gentleman offered me a seat. All other times it has been a woman."

Treehugger and its commenters have suggestions for some ways in which air travel might become a little bit more green.

Lileks is always good for a cheap shot: "School was adjourned for teacher training. (You know, just like the newspaper doesn’t arrive some days because everyone’s in Newspaper training, or the electricity cuts out because they’re all getting lessons in power generation.)"

Do lighter-skinned immigrants get a 10 percent pay boost?  Some research says so.  Links and discussion here.

"[D]emocracies have historically been created by elites when the threat of social unrest and violence cannot be defused in any other way." Read the review of this new book here.