Q&A

Gephardt Defends Election Strategy
Bush's Popularity Overwhelming, Outgoing House Democratic Leader Says

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said yesterday that Democrats would have lost more House seats Tuesday if he and other party leaders had tried to nationalize the election around the future of President Bush's tax cut, and maintained that Bush's post-Sept. 11 popularity and the presidential megaphone simply overwhelmed the Democrats' domestic message.


Election Turnout Rose Slightly, to 39.3%
GOP Mobilization Credited; Participation Was Down in Some Democratic Areas


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Bush Urges Bipartisan Relations

With Republicans poised to control the government, President Bush said during his victory news conference yesterday that he wants "members of both political parties to come together to get things done for the American people."

"I've talked to leaders of both parties and assured them I want to work with them," Bush said.


Bush Turns Up Pressure on Congress
President Cites Judicial Nominees, Homeland Security

By Dana Milbank
[speaking truth to power since some point in the indefinite future]
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 8, 2002; Page A01

A confident President Bush yesterday displayed the power he gained from the Republican midterm election triumph, demanding international action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and congressional action on administration priorities that had been delayed by partisan discord.

The president insisted on immediate action from the current Congress on legislation creating a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Floating an array of policy ideas from tax cuts early next year to the partial privatization of Social Security, he also urged the Senate to reconsider previously rejected judicial nominees.

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Bush was more vague about plans for next year. He confirmed that he plans "new growth and jobs packages early next year" -- measures likely to include a variety of tax cuts. He also mentioned the need for action on energy legislation, a Medicare prescription drug plan and a plan for partial privatization of Social Security.

"I still strongly believe that the best way to achieve security in Social Security for younger workers is to give them the option of managing their own money through a personal savings account," the president said. Though not committing to legislation on the subject, he called it "an important issue as well."

In another challenge to the Senate, of which Democrats lost control on Tuesday, Bush said he wanted new consideration of two judicial nominees, Charles W. Pickering and Priscilla Owens, who had been rejected by the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee because of their conservative views.

"I hope the Judiciary Committee will let their names out and they get a fair hearing," he said.


U.S. May Pull Funding For WHO Program

The Bush administration may withhold funds from a World Health Organization program because it is doing research on the abortion pill mifepristone, also known as RU-486, a spokesman said yesterday.

The United States has contributed to the WHO's Human Reproduction Program for years but funding is now in jeopardy because of the administration's interpretation of the Kemp-Kasten amendment, a law banning federal funds to programs that support or carry out coercive abortions.

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Nine members of Congress wrote to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last month to complain that the State Department has not made the contribution to the WHO research program out of the budget for fiscal 2002, which ended on Sept. 30.

If the administration adopts that interpretation in all cases, the United States might end up withholding all funds from the WHO, UNICEF, the U.N. Development Program and even the World Bank, they wrote.


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cui bono?

Molly

I should really have had faith that there was one person out there who wasn't the least bit resigned

...People, our politics is a pigsty. And why would President Bush and Dick Cheney not want to clean up corporate sleaze? Because they are corporate sleaze. The latest chapter in the unfolding saga of Harken Energy, which is Enron writ small, was unearthed by the Boston Globe. One week before Bush sold $848,000 of his Harken stock, Harken's board members were warned by their lawyers that they would face possible insider-trading charges if they unloaded their shares. The memo was not received by the SEC until the day after the agency (run by a friend of his daddy's) decided not to bring insider-trading charges against Bush.

Let me point something about the state of ethics in this country. Judge William Webster, the man who never should have been named to the accounting oversight board, is by all accounts a man of "unimpeachable integrity," as they always say in Washington when they're being pompous. A man with solid-gold Establishment credentials, known to all the power players and consequently above question.

Above question by whom? I'm sure that when Webster was on the audit committee of U.S. Technologies and decided to fire the accountants who were questioning the books, he did not think to himself, "Holy cow, we've got to cover up dishonest transactions before anyone finds out." He probably thought the auditors were pettifogging about practices "everyone does" and that different auditors, say Arthur Andersen, wouldn't be so picky. After all, "our kind of people" don't do dishonorable things. But the net effect for the company was still disaster and ruin.

Webster may or may not see that he has some responsibility for that -- it is not easy for any of us, especially those with a strong sense of our own rectitude, to acknowledge error, much less base motive. But what kind of blind arrogance does it take to then accept a post overseeing the "reform" of the accounting industry? What kind of blind arrogance does it take for the accounting industry, with its record, to think it has a right to choose its own oversight board? What kind of blind arrogance did it take for Michael Oxley to call Harvey Pitt and pressure him to name Webster?

Another word for all this is denial. GeeDubya Bush to this good day thinks he did nothing wrong by unloading his Harken stock when he knew the company was going under. He's not the kind of guy who would ever swipe five dollars out of a till just because he had the chance. There's a difference, you see, between a business decision and dishonesty. You do see that, don't you?

Granddad guns down terror squirrel

Fuzzy-tailed death rodent meets vigilante justice

As a breathless world awaits, I bring you news that the outlaw squirrel has been brought to bay by a sharpshooting grandparent.

A vicious squirrel which terrorised a Cheshire town has been shot dead by a grandfather seeking vengeance.

The animal had already attacked a man mowing his lawn and woman walking down the street, in Knutsford.

But when it sank its teeth into Kelsi Morley's face, her grandfather Geoff Horth decided to act.

He went out and killed it.

Two-year-old Kelsi was attacked as she took a morning stroll with her mother.

She stopped to admire the squirrel before it pounced on her face and sank its teeth into her forehead.

Kelsi's mother Karen had to pin the girl to the floor and pull the animal off her face.

The youngster was left bleeding heavily from a deep gash.

Mr Horth said he was unrepentant about his vigilante action.

On Thursday his wife said: "When Geoff saw what had happened, he just wanted to put a stop to it.

"He said if it had bitten a child's face this time, what would it do next? He didn't want any more children getting hurt."

She said her husband was sometimes asked by farmers to shoot vermin and was a good shot.

Mrs Horth added: "This squirrel had been terrorising people around here for weeks.

"After the attack on Kelsi, my daughter phoned the environmental health and the RSPCA but they didn't want to know."

It is thought the animal, which had a distinctive bald patch on its tail, may have been taken in as a pet and had lost its fear of people.

A spokeswoman for the RSPCA said it was unable to help "because in this instance it was not an animal which was being harmed, it was a child".

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Let's see. Animal shows totally uncharacteristic behavior, attacks multiple people, stays in the same place afterwards. Since Europe has no history of diseases being transmitted by rodents, I guess they're not concerned.

Hitch your wagon

Now that there are no more partisan election issues in American politics, Christopher Hitchens allows as how the folks who know (I guess he didn't meet them til after the election?) think that all the politically convenient scum we've been lending our support to in the middle east might just have something to do with the fact that people there just plain don't like us.

This as opposed to his earlier view that

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers....Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content."

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Well, he knows his friends better than I do.

via The Road to Surfdom, which has more.

and then The Man made my boyfriend shoot up...

Chrissie Hynde annoys me a really lot. In fairness, I only know her from MTV in the rec room at the dorm, so I don't know if she's worked out since then that Society Stinks/I Date Self-Destructive Drug Addicts are not quite the same issue, but that wasn't entirely accidental, the not watching, 'cause she really annoys me a really lot. (Have you ever seen the video for I'll Stand By You? The one where she wails about being at his side for always and never deserting him while she nurses him through an OD in the bathtub because he might have to deal with the consequences of being a junkie and get clean before he kills himself if she calls EMS?)

Anyway, she annoys the august editor of Rittenhouse as well, but he has more reason than I do.