"Cheney seemed not to know basic safety rule"

If Vice President Dick Cheney had followed the protocols taught 12-year-olds in hunter education programs, he never would have shot his pal last weekend while quail hunting, according to hunting safety experts.

To make matters worse, it turns out that Cheney wasn't even licensed to hunt quail in Texas. But no one, not even Dick Cheney, is above the law, right?

The arrogance of Cheney and Bush is galling even to the most jaded political observer. Even when they make a colossal mistake, often breaking the law in the process, they never admit that they're wrong. I suppose some Americans view this as a virtue, but not me.

"Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter"

From The Washington Post:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Cheney turned to shoot a bird and accidentally hit Whittington. She said Whittington was taken to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital by ambulance.

Bush Knew About Hurricane Katrina

Is anyone surprised by this news?

Michael Brown, who was forced out as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the botched response to Katrina, told senators yesterday that he had spoken to a top White House official at Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., at least twice on Monday, Aug. 29, and told him that New Orleans was filling up with water.

The Bush administration maintains it only learned of the unfolding disaster in the city the next day. In fact, Mr. Bush later said he felt relieved on Tuesday morning that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet.”

Mr. Brown testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he had called Joe Hagin, Mr. Bush's deputy chief of staff, and told him that “we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about . . . for 10 years was coming true” and that New Orleans was flooding.

The testimony confirmed a New York Times report that both the Department of Homeland Security and the White House were sent an e-mail Monday night that included a first-person report from a FEMA official who confirmed the flooding during a tour of New Orleans that day.

Katrina killed more than 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast and displaced hundreds of thousands more, leaving swaths of Louisiana and Mississippi still uninhabitable.

In a sometimes testy exchange with the senators, Mr. Brown said he had kept other officials informed of the flooding and it was “just baloney” for the Department of Homeland Security to claim it didn't know of the catastrophic flood until the next day.

Then again, this testimony comes from the man George Bush called "Brownie." ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.")

And Brownie, like all of the crooks and cronies in the Bush administration, wailed and moaned when he got caught, and did his darnedest to blame others for his mistakes. I've got no sympathy for him, Chertoff or George Bush, whose collective incompetence made a natural disaster unnaturally more disastrous.

In case anyone has forgotten, Brownie was the guy who sent email messages like these:

• "Can I quit now? Can I come home?"
  
• "I'm trapped now, please rescue me."
  
• "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?"
  
• "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."

And how do we know about these emails, ie who turned them over to Congress? Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

A Sorry State of the Union

For those who missed President Bush's State of the Union address last Tuesday, you have only to read the analysis of Paul Krugman ("State of Delusion") and E.J. Dionne ("Another Bush Deficit: Ideas") to get the gist of it.

Krugman writes in the New York Times:

The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration's achievements. But what's a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush's largest domestic initiative to date. It's also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we've "changed our approach to reconstruction."

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

So now, having squandered billions in Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayer dollars, we've told the Iraqis that from now on it's their problem. America's would-be Marshall Plan in Iraq, reports The Los Angeles Times, "is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding." I guess you can call that a change in approach.

There's a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. ... I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues."

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

E.J. Dionne draws attention to Bush's deficiencies regarding healthcare in the Washington Post:

Bush endorsed "wider use of electronic records and other health information technology," promised to "strengthen health savings accounts," pledged to make insurance more portable, and issued yet another of his standard attacks on medical malpractice lawsuits.

Hurray for electronic records and portability. But this list does little to help either the uninsured or those who fear losing their coverage. And health savings accounts aren't really health plans. They're tax-avoidance investment vehicles -- Wall Street can't wait -- that will mostly help the healthy and the wealthy while raising costs for the sick. That's not wise.

Here is Opportunity No. 1 for a smart opposition. It's time for aggressive approaches to expanding the number of Americans with insurance. The government should commit itself to making sure that all children under 18 are covered, and workers between the ages of 55 and 65 should be able to buy into Medicare, with subsidies if they need them, because many approaching retirement have a hard time buying private policies.

And it's time to open what might be thought of as both a dialogue and a negotiation with the business community on what the split between public and private spending on health care should be. Businesses that provide broad health coverage are indirectly subsidizing businesses that don't. Businesses that fail to provide coverage, especially for low-paid workers, often count on public programs, i.e., the taxpayers, to pay their employees' health bills.

The system is bad for capitalism, for social justice and for taxpayers. Employers who now pay nothing for health care should kick in to help pay the bills. Businesses being strangled by health costs deserve some relief. And, yes, the government will need to fill in the gaps.

When Bush got around to calling for a bipartisan commission "to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," Democrats chuckled. This from a president who tried to ram through the partial privatization of Social Security last year on the basis of the political "capital" he said he had earned. That capital is gone. The commission is his bailout.