Andrew Card Honorary Degree Booed Lustily

From the YouTube poster:

On May 25, 2007 Andrew Card faced hundreds of boos and catcalls as he was given an honorary degree during the graduate school commencement at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Before the commencement, about 200 protesters staged a rally and press conference outside the Mullins Center on the UMass campus. Hundreds more students and faculty who opposed the honorary degree would later protest inside the hall.

Card, former Bush Administration Chief of Staff and chief salesman for the invasion of Iraq as head of the White House Iraq Group, faced signs calling him a war criminal. People are now calling on UMass to rescind the honorary degree.

The protests followed weeks of growing opposition. 400 protested on May 15 (see the rally and march on YouTube at TraprockPeaceTV) and on May 22 protesters marched from the campus to the Amherst common.

After the commencement, activists gathered at the Jones Library for a celebration and speakout. Video of both the pre-commencement rally and post-commencement speakout are coming to TraprockPeaceTV.

Video recorded and edited by Charles Jenks; © 2007 Traprock Peace Center. Websites may embed the video for non-profit use, with attribution. Please let us know if you use the video; email charles@traprockpeace.org

The protest was organized by a large coalition of campus and community organizations, too numerous to list. Traprock was one of many community groups that supported the tremendous efforts by the UMass community of students, faculty and staff, and UMass organizations.

Gonzales Puts The Squeeze on Ashcroft in ICU

The big political news yesterday was James Comey's astonishing testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (watch it on the YouTube video, above), in which he told the incredible story of Abu Gonzales and Andy Card making a late night run to the intensive care unit room of John Ashcroft, trying to get him to do an end-around around Acting US Attorney Comey's refusal to reauthorize the illegal NSA wiretap program. And then Bush went ahead and authorized the program anyway, even though the Justice Department had told him explicitly: IT WAS ILLEGAL. That's called a felony, folks. Probably multiple felonies.

Watch that YouTube video. It's like a scene from a film, except it's real.

Gonzales was White House counsel when he tried to put the squeeze on critically ill Ashcroft. It is incredible that he is now Attorney General. I am amazed that the US now has a worse AG than Witchcroft himself, but clearly that's the case.

I didn't have to time to do this story justice, so read these excellent analyses around blogtopia:

Glenn Greenwald, salon.com: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal

TPMuckraker.com: Comey Details White House Attempt to Force Approval of Secret Program

ThinkProgress: Comey Breaks Silence: White House Tried To Force Incapacitated Ashcroft To Back Spying Program

Front paged here:

WaPo: Gonzales Hospital Episode Detailed
Ailing Ashcroft Pressured on Spy Program, Former Deputy Says

NYTimes: President Intervened in Dispute Over Eavesdropping

Operation Enduring Vacation

Not to be interrupted by bad news.


THIS DID NOT HAPPEN ON AUGUST 29, 2005, OR ON AUGUST 30, 2005. GUY ON THE LEFT? SCARED TO DELIVER THE BAD NEWS. GUY ON THE RIGHT? ON VACATION. ALWAYS ON VACATION.

Brown Blames Superiors For Response to Katrina

Brown said he called and spoke at least twice on Aug. 29 with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin or Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., telling them: "New Orleans is flooding; it's the worst-case scenario." But the message apparently did not get through to Homeland Security officials.

The Incompetence, the Corruption, the Cronyism: Sept. 28, 2005 edition

The Incompetence:

George W. Bush is today's winner. No fuel conservation when you're trying to save a presidency:

Attytood exclusive: Bush wastes roughly $170,000 in jet fuel as he urges nation to conserve

Just one day after President Bush urged Americans to cut back on needless travel and promised that the federal government would do the same, he boarded Air Force One for a trip to inspect hurricane damage that will burn up roughly 11,437 gallons of jet fuel, worth about $24,590 at today's record high fuel prices.

In fact, an investigation by Attytood -- using the best available numbers for Bush's travel since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, for the performance of Air Force One and for jet fuel prices -- estimates that Bush has spent $169,314 on jet fuel alone....

Many of the trips seem targeted towards conveying television images of Bush as an involved leader. In fact, Bush's flight schedule last weekend was rearranged because, according to aides, Hurricane Rita had shifted course and the weather would be sunny in San Antonio. At several of the meetings that Bush has attended other officials have taken part by teleconferencing rather than by attending in person.....

The cost to taxpayers for all of Bush's storm related travel has been much higher. Some studies have placed the total cost of operating Air Force One at at least $56,800 an hour or more, meaning that Bush's hurricane related travel has cost taxpayers somewhere in the range of $2 million or more -- just for the air travel!

A close second? Perennial contender FEMA:

Victims living 'like cavemen' after Rita
Residents still waiting for electricity, gasoline, water

Port Arthur Mayor Oscar Ortiz, whose own home was destroyed by fire after the hurricane, said "we've had 101 promises" for aid, "but it's all bureaucracy." He and other officials gathered at a hotel-turned-command center, where a dirty American flag found among hurricane debris was hung on the wall.

John Owens, emergency management coordinator and deputy police chief in the town of 57,000, said pleas for state and federal relief were met with requests for paperwork.

"We have been living like cavemen, sleeping in cars, doing bodily functions outside," he said.

Temperatures climbed into the upper 90s, and officials worried that swarms of mosquitoes might spread disease.

The Corruption:

If you give enough money to the GOP, you can take the "public" out of "public broadcasting" and substitute "GOP".

Gingrich-izing Public Broadcasting

On September 26, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting elected its new chairperson and vice-chairperson, and the eight-member board--which contains only two Democrats--selected two conservative Republican funders for these posts. Cheryl Halpern will succeed the embattled liberal-hunter Kenneth Tomlinson as chair. Gay Hart Gaines will be vice-chair. The board chose Gaines over an independent.

As press accounts have noted, Gaines, who was first appointed by George W. Bush to the CPB board in 2003, is an interior decorator by training. But she and her husband have contributed at least half a million dollars to GOP causes since 1998. Notably, Gaines was a charter member and chairman of GOPAC, a political action committee headed in the 1980s and 1990s by Newt Gingrich. During that period, GOPAC attracted much attention for dodgy practices (which drew a Federal Elections Commission investigation) and for its harsh partisan practices. So now it's an appropriate time to revisit one of GOPAC's most notorious actions....

This is to say that Gay Hart Gaines, the number two on the CPB's board as of this week, was a leading official of an outfit that advised Republican candidates to brand Democrats "traitors." She now is in a position to search for bias in public radio and public television programming.

The Cronyism:

This one clerked for Clarence Thomas and the world opened up for her. Her qualifications? Wide-eyed wingnuttism. (Tip o' the cap to BTC News)

Kristen Silverberg

Kristen Silverberg has seen it all.

She was one of the wide-eyed conservatives who trekked to Austin in 2000 to get the George W. Bush for President train rolling. The former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was in the White House policy shop in the pre-9/11 days helping to dream up a health care plan, big tax cuts and "compassionate conservative" policies.

In 2003, she shipped out to Baghdad to advise L. Paul Bremer on the creation of an elected Iraqi government. Then it was back to the White House to help develop Bush's second-term agenda. She went to work for Andrew H. Card Jr. and Karl Rove, the president's two most powerful aides, on domestic, economic and foreign affairs....

Now, Silverberg, 34, is part of the exodus of powerful White House women to Foggy Bottom. The recently confirmed assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs joins some of her closest friends and mentors in a place where, one official jokes, "girl power" rules.

Blame FEMA

Remember all the shots of the buses in New Orleans under water? All the conservative commentators criticizing Louisiana Governor Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Nagin for not deploying their own buses to evacuate the Superdome and the Convention Center?

Blanco says feds pledged buses

Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes.

On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.....

The state had sent 68 school buses into the city on Monday.

Blanco took over more buses from Louisiana school systems and sent them in on Wednesday, two days after the storm. She tapped the National Guard to drive them. Each time the buses emptied an area, more people would appear, she said.

The buses took 15,728 people to safety, a Blanco aide said. But the state's fleet of school buses wasn't enough. On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.

"I said, 'Even if we had 500 buses, they've underestimated the magnitude of this situation, and I think I need 5,000 buses, not 500,'" Blanco recounted.

"'But, Andy, those 500 are not here,'" the governor said.

Card promised to get Blanco more buses.

Later Wednesday night, Blanco walked into the State Police Communications Center and asked if anyone knew anything about the buses.

An officer told her the buses were just entering the state.

"I said, 'Do you mean as in North Louisiana, which is another six hours from New Orleans?,'" Blanco recalled in the interview. "He said, 'Yes, m'am.'"

It was at that point, Blanco said, that she realized she had made a critical error.

"I assumed that FEMA had staged their buses in near proximity," she said. "I expected them to be out of the storm's way but accessible in one day's time."

It was late Wednesday. The buses wouldn't get to New Orleans until Thursday. By then, many of the sickest and the weakest were dead or dying.

FEMA: Fumbling Essentially Moronic Assholes

United States of Shame

United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

Bush White House Delusional - FDA-Approved Drug Use Suspected

FDA doing 'spectacular job,' White House chief says

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration and some of its critics squared off yesterday over whether the Food and Drug Administration is doing an adequate job overseeing drug safety and whether the agency needs major reforms.

In a preview of the debate to come, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said the agency is doing a "spectacular" job and should "continue to do the job they do."

**********

Card made his comments about the FDA during ABC's "This Week," when he was asked whether he supported last week's call by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, for an investigation of the federal drug agency similar in scale to the 9/11 commission.

Card responded that "I don't know that we need a commission" and that "I've got great confidence in the FDA." He said news coming out about previously unaddressed safety risks associated with popular drugs on the market is "a testament to the FDA in how they do their job."

Yes, Andy Card actually said this. Do you think the estimated 100,000 people who've had heart attacks while taking Vioxx for their arthritis agree?

Debate questions

Daily Kos asked his readers to come up with debate questions. This one is my favorite of their suggestions:

"If Andrew Card came to you in that Florida classroom and told you that your family had been carjacked on September 11, would you still have sat there for seven minutes and done nothing?"

Personally, I think we should plant Kristen Breitweiser in the audience & let her ask ALL the questions.