Bivens's Outrage

(Subscribe to this RSS feed)Welcome to "The Daily Outrage," your last best hope to keep up with the blizzard of Bush-era bad news. Whether they're cutting down your forests, raiding your retirement funds, reading your email or shrinking your constitutional rights, the Republican (sometimes it's bipartisan) assault advances by the hour. The outrages come so fast that it's hard for even well-read citizens to stay abreast. So this column will provide you with a regular update on their doings. Pass it on.

  • When Life is Cheap

    By Matt Bivens

    Here's a blast from the past: Dick Cheney in 2000, accepting his party's nomination as candidate for vice president:

    For eight years, Clinton and Gore have extended our military commitments while depleting our military power. Rarely has so much been demanded of our armed forces and so little given to them in return.

    George W. Bush and I are going to change that too. I have seen our military -- I have seen our military at its finest, with the best equipment, the best training and the best leadership.

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    April 28, 2004

  • Three-Dollar Diplomacy

    By Matt Bivens

    Our Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, recently gave a speech to Moscow foreign affairs students he titled "Taking Relations to a Higher Level." It was full of obvious sentiment about how Americans and Russians ought to be good-faith partners.

    So how do we practice that good faith we preach?

    Naturally, by refusing to pay the rent.

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    April 27, 2004

  • White GOP Elephant

    By Matt Bivens

    The General Accounting Office, a non-partisan investigative arm of Congress, has come out with its latest look at the Reagan-era brain-wave now known as National Missile Defense.

    The Bush Administration insists that it will deploy some form of missile defense system by, believe it or not, September. This is one of those odd deadlines -- like the hand-over of "sovereignty" to Iraq by July -- driven by politics regardless of reality.

    So consider some key findings from the GAO report, teased out by the Council for a Livable World. (You can see the report itself, in all of its 145-page glory, as a PDF file here):

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    April 26, 2004

  • Feed the Rich

    By Matt Bivens

    The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has come out with the most comprehensive study to date of three years of George W. Bush's tax policies. Highlights put together by CBPP can be found here, but I'll cherry pick a few of the more telling:

    * Families making more than $1 million a year will enjoy 2004 tax cuts, on average, of $123,600 each.

    * Middle-class families will enjoy 2004 tax cuts, on average, of $647.

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    April 23, 2004

  • 'Workers Win'?

    By Matt Bivens

    "Today, workers win. The department's new rules guarantee and strengthen overtime rights for more American workers than ever before." -- Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, announcing the latest White House reform: New rules for who can and can't get overtime pay.

    * * *

    It's easy to say "workers win" -- and the short Labor Department press release does so again and again, in a shrill effort to convince someone.

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    April 22, 2004

  • The Most Wanted

    By Matt Bivens

    Borrowing a page from Beijing's book, the Pentagon has released an altered transcript of an interview between the Defense Secretary and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. According to The Post, The Pentagon's version deletes passages where Donald Rumsfeld lets the cat out of the bag about how Saudi Arabia got a heads-up -- two months before the rest of us -- that we would invade Iraq.

    We'll talk another day about this Administration's many disquieting connections to the Saudi dictatorship.

    Today, I commend to you instead a new coalition of the willing -- one that is pushing for less secrecy and more openness in government.

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    April 21, 2004

  • White House Brat

    By Matt Bivens

    The core conservative value I admire most is a respect for the past -- and for one's elders.

    So I was startled to hear that George W. Bush never sought his father's advice before deciding to invade Iraq -- and, what's more, he then went and basically bragged about it, speaking to a journalist about his own father with something bordering on contempt.

    Bob Woodward, who interviewed the President for his new book, says he asked him whether, in pondering a war with Iraq, he'd ever asked his father's advice.

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    April 20, 2004

  • Talking Turkey

    By Matt Bivens

    At last week's rare press conference, George W. Bush argued that a bonus of his Iraqi invasion was that it frightened Libya into giving up weapons of mass destruction.

    "Take Libya, for example. Libya was a nation that had -- we viewed as a terrorist -- a nation that sponsored terror, a nation that was dangerous because of weapons," he said. "And Colonel Gadhafi made the decision, and rightly so, to disclose and disarm, for the good of the world. By the way, they found, I think, 50 tons of mustard gas, I believe it was, in a turkey farm, only because he was willing to disclose where the mustard gas was. But that made the world safer."

    Later, asked to muse upon mistakes he'd made and lessons he'd learned from them, the President was famously stumped -- he couldn't think of a single mistake -- he joked forlornly that he wished he'd have had that question in writing beforehand "so I could plan for it" -- and then he meandered into those chimerical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: "See, I happen to believe that we'll find out the truth on the weapons," he said. "I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm."

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    April 19, 2004

  • Suppress That!

    By Matt Bivens

    Eye-witness accounts from Fallujah -- for example, "Sarajevo on the Euphrates" just published by The Nation -- make clear what's incredibly obvious: It's intense urban combat, which means all sorts of collateral damage -- mosques, hospitals, ambulances, women, children.

    A Fallujah hospital director told The Associated Press most of the 600 dead recorded so far were civilians. But most American media have glossed quickly over that -- just as they on other days when the brunt of the war fell on civilians.

    One of the only news networks that's been broadcasting from the heart of the violence has been Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.

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    April 16, 2004

  • Bush's Non-Proliferation Drive

    By Matt Bivens

    The White House got some mildly good press back in February for the President's pledge to work, "with open eyes and unbending purpose," to stop the spread worldwide of materials for mass destruction weapons. Among other things, his plan involved working with the UN to gather up all the weapons-grade nuclear material spread across the globe before it could be used in bombs. The President called that danger "the greatest threat before humanity today."

    Now comes a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council into what the Bush Administration does, as opposed to what it says. And it turns out it has been spending "12 times more on nuclear weapons research and production than on nonproliferation efforts to retrieve, secure and dispose of nuclear weapons materials worldwide."

    The good news is that soon a vast high-tech shield will reliably protect our nation from external nuclear attack. Or not. As Reuters reports, "The Bush Administration and the Pentagon are already under fire for seeking $10.2 billion in fiscal 2005 to deploy a missile defense before making sure it would work."

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    April 15, 2004

Matt Bivens

Welcome to "The Daily Outrage," your last best hope to keep up with the blizzard of Bush-era bad news. Whether they're cutting down your forests, raiding your retirement funds, reading your email or shrinking your constitutional rights, the Republican (sometimes it's bipartisan) assault advances by the hour. The outrages come so fast that it's hard for even well-read citizens to stay abreast. So this column will provide you with a regular update on their doings. Pass it on.

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