The ugly Bush stain: Gray wolves edition

By GottaLaff

One more time, BushCo sets out to be killers of both the environment and animal life (not to mention human life). Here they go again, squeezing in more destruction before they leave office (in five, count 'em, five days):

Bush administration officials said Wednesday that they would remove gray wolves in the Midwest and the northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list -- the latest, but probably not last, chapter in the wolf's on-again, off-again federal protection.

The Interior Department decision would apply to wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Idaho and Montana. It would maintain protections for wolves in Wyoming, where the department says state officials haven't done enough to ensure the wolves' continued recovery.

An Interior Department official told reporters that the decision represented a victory for conservation efforts.

But the move, less than a week before President Bush leaves office, could be short-lived. Environmental groups hope President-elect Barack Obama will quickly reverse it after his inauguration. If he doesn't, the groups, which have blocked previous efforts to delist the wolf in court, say they'll sue again.

In this case, sue-age is a good thing.

A particularly ugly Bush stain: BushCo to bar autoworkers from striking against GM

By GottaLaff

When Thom Hartmann rants, I listen. Right now, he's ranting... loudly. He's quoting from this Raw Story piece, and when you're done reading, feel free to rant with Thom and me in Comments. The gist: GM says give us the loan money, but make it illegal to strike. A strike would give the government permission to rescind their loan and allow GM to declare bankruptcy:

A little-noticed provision buried in the Bush Administration's $13.4 billion loan package to General Motors will prohibit the United Auto Workers from launching a strike as long as the company receives funds from the federal government.

Not only that, but a strike would give the federal government the power to call in their loan -- putting the loan in default and forcing GM into bankruptcy. The government now has the power to force a bankruptcy if “any labor union or collective bargaining unit shall engage in a strike or other work stoppage.”

Why would he do this? Here's one reason: Break the unions, break the Democratic party.

The terms of GM's loan package were reported last night in the Detroit Free Press. They did not become public until GM filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So the big fat corporate rich guys get their bonuses, but the workers get... screwed.
The US auto workers union is also saddled by another requirement of the loan: the UAW must now accept a plan to lower wages and benefits for GM to match those of other foreign-owned US automakers' plants.

Feel that rant coming on yet?

The ugly Bush stain: Convert forests to housing subdivisions edition

By GottaLaff

This nauseating abomination aka BushCo's New Rule, makes the Healthy Forests Initiative seem environmentally friendly:

In yet another potential last minute rule change, “the Bush administration appears poised to push through a change in U.S. Forest Service agreements that would make it far easier for mountain forests to be converted to housing subdivisions.” Though President-elect Obama has opposed the move, Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, has signaled that he intends to finalize the plan before Obama’s inauguration. [...]

Rey is pushing a technical change that it will have “large implications“:

The shift is technical but with large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads passing through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.

But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company’s 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.

Scenic western Montana, where Plum Creek owns 1.2 million acres, would be most affected, placing fresh burdens on county governments to provide services, and undoing efforts to cluster housing near towns.

[...] The GAO concluded that 900 miles of logging roads could be paved in Montana and that amending the long-held easements “could have a nationwide impact.”

Much more here.

It's heartwarming to witness BushCo's love and loyalty to this majestic land of ours.

Remember this?

“History,” Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

For once, after all these heartburn-inducing, penetrating stains he's leaving, Bush may be right.

"Hard Work" Bush is proud of his accomplishments

By GottaLaff

It's "hard work" screwing up an entire country planet. And the really ironic part is, the Chimpenfuhrer still believes that people trust him:

President Bush in his New Year’s message to the nation vowed to keep working hard in the less than three weeks that he remains in office.

Bush, who has held several interviews in recent weeks that looked back at his presidency, used his last New Year’s message to “thank the American people for trusting me with the honor of serving our great country.

“It has been a tremendous privilege, and together we have accomplished a great deal,” he stated.

Oh-h yeah, he's responsible for a "great deal", alright. Among those accomplishments:

• Patient neglect at Walter Reed Army Hospital
• US Attorney firings
• Outing a CIA agent
• Iraq war (occupation)
• Iran saber rattling
• The War on Terror (failure to capture Osama bin Laden, dubious allies)
• Military Commissions Act (torture, kangaroo courts, indefinite detention, and loss of habeas corpus)
• Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans
• NSA warrantless wiretapping
• Black sites and rendition
• Cheney Energy Task Force (and hiding info about it)
• Tax cuts for the richest of the rich, Subprime mortgage bubble
• Global warming (denial and stalling)
• Budget deficits and a greatly increased national debt
• Stacking of the Supreme Court (Roberts and Alito)
• Healthcare general mess
• Preventive war doctrine
• Loss of US prestige
• Karl Rove
• No Child Left Behind (an uneducated President’s predictable approach to education)
• White House email on RNC servers (in contravention of White House Records Act)
• Inaction on Israeli-Palestinian peace process
• Signing statements
• Unilateral Executive
• Abuse of the National Guard, Breaking the Army
• Patriot Act and its Extension
• War on Science, Vetoing stem cell research
• False military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch)

Many, many more here. That's some big ol' legacy.

“Among other things, we have advanced the cause of human freedom; we have strengthened our military and our Nation's security; we have empowered parents to demand educational excellence for their children; and we have revolutionized the fight against poverty, corruption, and the scourge of disease around the world.”

Bush also stressed that he was not yet done working.

Good for him! Keep up that momentum! Nose to that environmentally-destroyed grindstone! Continue your great work! It's not as if you haven't already indelibly and malodorously stained everyone and everything with your stench-laden, toxic Bush-infested waste matter.

Be proud.

The ugly Bush stain: OSHA's "dismal inaction" edition

By GottaLaff

Once again, Bush leaves behind a malodorous, toxic stainy mess that has resulted in even more lost lives and further erosion of formerly high standards:

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

White House officials have dismissed such tallies, emphasizing in recent regulatory overviews that their "objective is quality, not quantity," and that heavy restrictions on corporations harm economic performance. [...]

"The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction," said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been "like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out," Harrison said.

More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency's strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees "shut us out," a longtime senior career official said.

Among the regulations proposed by OSHA's staff but scuttled by political appointees was one meant to protect health workers from tuberculosis. Although OSHA concluded in 1997 that the regulation could avert as many as 32,700 infections and 190 deaths annually and save $115 million, it was blocked by opposition from large hospitals.

In the summer, the agency decided against moving further toward the regulation of crystalline silica, the tiny fibrous material in cement and stone dust that causes lung disease or cancer. OSHA promised a scientific peer review of the health risks by early 2005 and then by early 2007, but it never acted. Regulating silica exposures would have prevented an estimated 41 silicosis deaths and 20 to 40 lung cancers annually, according to OSHA.

In the spring, political appointees quietly scrapped work on another long-pending regulation of hazardous exposure to ionizing radiation in mailrooms, food warehouses, and hospitals and airports. It cited "resource constraints and other priorities" -- the same reason officials gave for withdrawing more than a dozen regulatory proposals in 2001.

With BushCo, economic considerations (their own and their cronies') always trump the physical well-being of the U.S. population (actually, that of the entire planet), the health of the U.S. economy, morale, and/or the environment.

What's so disturbing is that their filthy, self-serving, homicidal policies will have exponential repercussions, but of course, none of those will be legal ones. Those responsible will skate.

Many more details can be found here, if you can stomach them.

Eradicating the ugly Bush stain: Obama Planning To Reverse New Rules On Abortion, Birth Control

By GottaLaff

Remember that post about that horrid new Bush rule about the "right of conscience"? It was one of the very first ugly Bush stains. Well, thanks to president-elect Obama, we may very well be able to Shout it out!

The outgoing Bush administration this week will finalize a regulation establishing a "right of conscience" allowing medical staff to refuse to participate in any practice they object to on moral grounds, including abortion but possibly birth control and other health care as well.

In transition offices across town, officials in the incoming Obama administration have begun considering how and when to undo it.

The regulation is one of a swath of abortion and other reproductive-health issues under review by the Obama team, which is preparing to reverse a variety of Bush measures, according to officials close to the transition. The review is part of a sweeping scrutiny of Bush-era legislation and regulation on issues across the federal government, from environmental and labor rules to defense spending.

On abortion and related matters, action is expected early on executive, regulatory, budgetary and legislative fronts.

Decisions that the new administration will weigh include: whether to cut funding for sexual abstinence programs; whether to increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include discussion of birth control; whether to allow federal health plans to pay for abortions; and whether to overturn regulations such as one that makes fetuses eligible for health-care coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Women's health advocates are also pushing for a change in rules that would lower the cost of birth control at college health clinics.

Obama aides will have to settle many of these questions in issuing their first budget in February.

Every time I read about Obama's plans, I have to pinch myself. Eight years of abuse tends to result in reflexive wincing, even after the bad guy has left and the good guy has swooped in to save the day.

The ugly Bush stain: Interior Dep't. tainted nearly every decision on endangered species

By GottaLaff

This ugly Bush stain isn't from one of his New Rules. No, this one has some major history and is one of the biggest, ugliest, most horrendous stains imaginable:

A high-ranking Interior Department official tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species over five years, a new inspector general report finds, concluding she exerted improper political interference on many more rulings than previously thought.

Julie MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service, did pervasive harm to the department's morale and integrity and may have risked the well-being of species with her agenda, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney said in his report out Monday.

Okay, stop right there. "May have risked the well-being of species with her agenda". Species. In other words, she played god. But her god isn't kind and loving. Her god kills in huge numbers. How's that for compassion?

The Interior Department last year reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found that MacDonald had applied political pressure in those cases. The new report looked at nearly two dozen other endangered species decisions not examined in the earlier report. It found MacDonald directly interfered with at least 13 decisions and indirectly affected at least two more.

MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, resigned in May 2007. Department employees reported that they used her name as a verb — encountering political interference from senior managers was called "getting MacDonalded."

I'd like to tell her to get Cheney'd.

She resigned weeks after the report by Devaney last year found that she broke federal rules and should face punishment for leaking information about endangered species to private groups. That report also said MacDonald censored science and mistreated staff.

What a perfect person to have been given unlimited power over living beings, including her own staff.

The new investigation reaffirmed those findings and said MacDonald's influence was even more far-reaching. It also faulted her boss, former Assistant Secretary Craig Manson, as well as several other high-ranking Interior officials, including Randal Bowman, a special assistant to Manson, and Thomas Graf, a department lawyer. [...]

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said the findings "paint a picture of something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that was colluding to undermine the protection of endangered wildlife and covering for one another's misdeeds."

She should be dropped off at the North Pole. Let's see if she does as well as the polar bears.

The ugly Bush stain: Hazardous waste edition

By GottaLaff

Hey kids! Time for your daily dose of sewage! Here's the latest from our Excrement in Chief:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new regulation yesterday exempting an estimated 118,500 tons of hazardous waste annually from strict federal incineration controls, and it separately exempted factory farms from a requirement to report hazardous air pollution to the federal government.

Gee, this isn't stressful at all. Deeeeep breath. ::cough! hack! wheeze!:: Never mind.

It allows companies that create hazardous chemical wastes in industrial processes to burn them as fuel in their own incinerators, instead of paying highly regulated incineration firms to destroy them.

Well now, that's forward-thinking. I hope Jenna and Not-Jenna's future kids appreciate the gifts from Grandpa George.

But Ben Dunham, associate legislative counsel for the nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice, said that "everything about this rulemaking was flawed," including "the logic that says, 'If you can burn it, it's not a hazardous waste.' " He said it would allow firms with poor environmental records "to simply throw their hazardous waste in the company boiler" and burn it without strict monitoring, sometimes in populated areas.

Mmmm, there's nothing like the smell of smoldering toxic waste in the morning.

The ugly Bush stain: Endangered Species Act edition

By GottaLaff

I guess using Shout didn't work on this one yet. What passes for New Rules are nothing more than toxic tailpipe emissions billowing from multiple Bush orifices, including the hole in his tiny little head:

The Bush administration on Thursday eliminated 35-year-old regulations in the Endangered Species Act that required an independent scientific review of proposed federal projects to determine whether they imperil protected plants and animals.

Instead, federal agencies undertaking projects like road and power plant construction or oil and gas drilling will make their own assessment. Without the independent reviews, such projects could be accelerated.

As part of the changes announced by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in the final days of the Bush administration, the department finalized an interim rule that allows oil and gas drilling in polar bear habitat off Alaska's coast. The rule change is designed to prevent the Endangered Species Act from being used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, essentially making climate change policy. [...]

H. Dale Hall, director of Fish and Wildlife, said he had concerns about how fast the estimated 235,000 public comments were processed. Staff assigned to the job spent eight hours a day tabulating the comments. Working under strict time restraints, agency employees had nine seconds to read each letter, according to one calculation.

Officials said that more than 200,000 of the comments opposed the rule change. [...]

President-elect Barack Obama said he would reverse the rule changes, as have some members of Congress. But that requires a lengthy rule-making process. In the House, members can invoke the rarely used Congressional Review Act to overturn the regulations.

I'm sure Also Palin is thrilled. She was never a big fan of polar bears.

The ugly Bush stain, eradicated: Coal and power plant edition

By GottaLaff

Got a stain? Shout it out!

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday abandoned its push to revise two air pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.

One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park.

The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would have resulted in fewer such cleanups.

EPA officials had been trying to complete both before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But an agency spokesman said Wednesday they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters.

Shout!

The ugly Bush stain: Fishing industry edition

By GottaLaff

Bush's latest New Rule smells worse than dead fish:

Sen. Ted Stevens may be leaving a final holiday gift behind for one of his most loyal constituencies: the Alaska commercial fishing industry. Using loopholes in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the outgoing Bush administration is looking to allow fishery management councils, dominated by fishing interests, to determine whether new policies would harm the environment.

I'd have used the "something's fishy" line, but this isn't funny.

A bipartisan alliance of more than 75 lawmakers and dozens of interest groups are protesting the proposed rule change, saying it lessens protections that keep U.S. fisheries from harming the environment. [...]

The Joint Ocean Commission, Greenpeace and other environmental groups say that up until now, the environmental law has helped protect endangered sea turtles and rebuild shrinking fish populations.

But Bush’s proposed changes would significantly weaken those protections, they say, by allowing the interest-group-heavy councils to be in charge of the environmental compliance.

Currently, the commerce secretary has the final say on proposed fishery management activities. But the National Marine Fisheries Service is responsible for ensuring the environmental reviews are done properly and the councils provide recommendations.

This proposed rule would instead allow the councils to ensure the review is done fairly.

“It doesn’t take much to decide how the fishing industry is going to review their own fishing activities and decide whether they’re environmentally friendly,” said Lee Crockett, fisheries policy director for the Pew Environment Group. “They’ll do a full NEPA analysis and then promote alternatives that they want to do.”

Environmentalists argue that this could weaken the environmental regulatory process in the Interior Department and other agencies.

For instance, greens say it would allow special interests to decide whether fishing-related activity would threaten wildlife protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The only thing Bush wants to keep alive is profit.

The ugly Bush stain: Watchdog group's List of Bush Failures edition

By GottaLaff

This list is of Bush failures is astounding, but not unexpected. Here's the background:

The most comprehensive guide to these and other Bush administration failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently "set out to document just how off-track things have gone," assigning thirteen reporters to document the worst failures of the last eight years.

Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 "that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans."

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI's PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

Here's the list, in part. No amount of scouring, scrubbing, detoxifying, or sanitizing can compensate for the following:

• 730,000 backlogged patent applications
• 760,000 Social Security disability claims
• 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims
• A recurrence of recent losses of hundreds of laptops containing sensitive law enforcement information
• The decision to keep plowing $12.5 billion into a joint civilian-military weather satellite system that is still incomplete and may leave gaps in crucial climate monitoring as older satellites fail
• $300 billion over budget for Defense Department weapons acquisitions
• $100 billion lost every year to corporate offshore tax shelters
• Faulty National Security Administration computer system, which carries a price tag of $4 billion
• The complete failure of a $100 million attempt to create a new system of internal information-sharing for the FBI in the wake of 9/11
• The record $9.91 billion spent on government secrecy in 2007
• The dismissal of all but 17 out of the 1273 whistleblower complaints filed from 2002 to 2008
• Pollution that causes 20,000 deaths a year
• Pollution that puts 60,000 newborns at risk of neurological problems
• A two-thirds dropoff in the cleanup of toxic waste sites
• 2.5 million toxic toys recalled in the summer of 2007

This isn't a stain, it's a cancer.

The ugly Bush stain: Nuclear waste edition

By GottaLaff

Get out the Shout, Bush is splattering us with another despicable blot on his already-miserable legacy. Mother Earth is being raped... again:

NEVADA

End of nuclear waste limit urged

The Bush administration said there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site near Las Vegas, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there.

In a report to Congress, the Energy Department asked that the current capacity limit of 77,000 tons of waste be removed to accommodate all of the waste expected to be generated at commercial power plants, many of which are likely to operate for at least four decades.

No further comment. I'm running out of acceptable language.

The ugly Bush stain: Burrowing edition

By GottaLaff

I hadn't planned on posting about another sulferous BushCo stinkbomb so soon, but it was unavoidable. Put on your gas masks:

With only 44 days left in office, President Bush continues to “burrow” people into government positions that will continue long after President-elect Obama is sworn in. “All told, Mr. Bush has made roughly 30 personnel moves since the November election, some in nominations that will require Senate approval, and others in direct appointments that will last well into President-elect Barack Obama’s term and beyond.” The New York Times reports that on Tuesday of last week alone, Bush hired 18 people for administration jobs.

On Tuesday. He hired 18 additional skunks to stink up our country in just one day.

Yet, unlike some of the contentious, late regulatory moves by the president, none of the appointments, and reappointments, have raised a peep of protest from the Democrats, Mr. Obama, or even the liberal interest groups that have so closely monitored his personnel decisions. [...]

For the last year or so, the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, has sought to keep the Senate in session to prevent such appointments. [...] But there are some areas of cooperation that would preclude the need for recess appointments. [For example, if the Dems support them] [...]

There are also appointments that require no Congressional approval but have terms that run for years. None of those have created much of a stir, either. [They may be bipartisan, or may not be binding] [...]

Mr. Fratto [Bush spokesperson] pointed out that Mr. Bush’s term is a full four years — not 3 years, 10 months and 4 days — and the president will not pull punches as he makes potentially still more appointments. “We actually do have not just the authority,” he said, “we have an obligation to do what we think is best for the country up until 11:59 a.m. on January 20.”

These are the kinds of noxious odors that nobody can blame on the First Dogs.

The ugly Bush stain: Comprehensive list edition

By GottaLaff

I've been posting about the malodorous BushCo's intentional, last-minute ambush, using an onslaught of New Rules as their most recent, desperate weapon against their own "homeland" (let's lose that word forever, please). The residual effects will leave a stubborn stain on this country, but hopefully, not an indelible one. However, some of the stench emanating from this bunch of thugs may be harder to eradicate than we think.

Here's a partial list, via Huffington Post:

• EPA would not regulate a contaminant in drinking water (Kool-Aid from our government to us)
• Mining permits near Grand Canyon and other national parks (blasts from the past)
• Gut the Endangered Species Act (the hell with biodiversity or consideration for creation's creatures. Shoot 'em.)
• Power plants could be exempted from installing pollution controls, allowing an added 70 million tons to be released into our air (what's a little cough among friends and who needs to see anyway?)
• EPA narrows the definition of solid waste (now there is a regulation to savor)
• Less reporting on animal pollution proposed
• Rules for dumping mine debris erased
• EPA lowers air quality standards for lead
• Fisheries rule calls for less public input (the czars had a way with public input, too.)
• Loaded guns possible in National Parks( not if the Park rangers have anything to say about it)
• Public lands may be leased for the development of oil shale (public, not to be confused with proprietary)
• Interior Department rules could limit public environmental comments (so much for the First Amendment)
• EPA lets factory farms decide if they need a permit to discharge animal waste into waterways (or large concentrations of dung dumped into our rivers and streams) [...]

It is hard to imagine the state of mind in our officials that produces this kind of malice. [...]

There are remedies. One, of course, is the will of the new administration to override this treachery and destructiveness. The other is the Congressional Review Act. Items published in the Federal Register before Nov 21st take effect 60 days from that date.
House and Senate leadership has already stipulated that they will use the Review Act in a similar way that a Bush administration action used it to undo a Clinton regulation in 2001. Reversal probably cannot take place without scrupulous effort, but we should all encourage the new administration and Congress to do everything they can to defeat these ruinous regulations. [...]

To write midnight regulations that sabotage human health is to see Charles Dickens scribing away by candlelight, as one of his most rapacious and vile villains rises from the candle flame and defiles humanity and its landscape.

Sanitizing sewage of this magnitude won't be easy. Thank you, BushCo, for relieving yourselves publicly all over a country that has tried to maintain some sense of cleanliness, beauty, and pride, despite your relentless maneuvers. You've done your level best to vulgarize it.

We will now unite to collectively scrub America clean until it sparkles again.

H/t: Chris