Outrage Central
by Steve
To go along with your morning caffeine, here are some Bush Administration outrages to elevate your blood pressure.
Karl Rove said he was concerned about voting fraud in numerous battleground states. Yet the federal prosecutor in Nevada had no cases to prosecute, and was canned anyway. The only case of voting fraud that arose in recent years was a 2004 incident where the GOP shredded the voter registration cards of Democrats, yet the FBI mysteriously didn’t forward that case to the federal prosecutor for follow-up.
You’ve heard this one before. The man Bush nominated to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission is the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers, the chief nemesis for the Commission. While at the Commission, he will get a $150,000 severance payment from his former (and some would say current) employer. I’m sure the cracker jack White House vetting operation knew all about this arrangement when they decided that a gunslinger from the NAM was the best qualified person to destroy the CPSC these last two years.
Consumers Union reports that since Bush has been president, households are spending $1,000 a year more for gasoline, an 85% increase. Big Oil has pocketed another $200 billion in what the association calls excess profits these last five years.
Even though the Department of Veterans Affairs is run by a GOP hack and doesn’t seem concerned with providing our veterans with the health care they deserve, it didn’t stop nearly two dozen senior managers at the department with recommending a half million dollars in bonuses for themselves. Maybe they felt they deserved the money for converting our veterans hospitals into religious centers where evangelical Christians try and convert the sick and wounded while they await care.
I think we know now that Bush’s education “accomplishments” are really nothing more than opportunities for his campaign contributors to make out like bandits through a contracting process that has been found to be rife with conflicts of interest and which puts private gain and profits ahead of our schoolchildren.
Despite Bush claims to the contrary, Afghanistan is once again producing over 90 percent of the world’s opium, money that is financing the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Bush’s war in Afghanistan has failed because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly refused to force the CIA and Pentagon to fight and eliminate the problem early on after they let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora.
The average food stamp recipient in this country receives only $21 a week in federal assistance, yet Bush is opposed to an increase in food stamp funds.
While the Bush Administration touts Medicare Advantage plans as an efficient way for the private sector to improve upon Medicare, recent studies have shown that these plans cost 12 percent more than what Medicare would charge for the same services, and they engage in fraudulent and criminal sales practices as well. But I’m sure most of these plans are Bush campaign contributors, and remember, the GOP tells us that the private sector can do a better job managing health care than the government can.
After seven years of concerns about the lack of FDA oversight of the food we buy, the Bush Administration still is doing virtually nothing to improve food safety while people are dying from food borne illnesses. Of course, most of the food processors are Bush campaign contributors. Hillary Clinton is the first presidential candidate to make food safety and the FDA a campaign issue.
Keep in mind this is just one day's worth of stories about the administration's negligence, indifference, and sacrificing of the public interest for private gain. And the GOP congress has enabled all of it.