House Speaker Pelosi calls Bush 'a total failure' By LAURIE KELLMAN, WASHINGTON - President Bush has been a "total failure" in everything from the economy to the war to energy policy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. In an interview on CNN, the California Democrat was asked to respond to video of the president criticizing the Democratic-led Congress for heading into the final 26 days of the legislative session without having passed a single government spending bill. Pelosi shot back in unusually personal terms. "You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject," Pelosi replied. She then tsk-tsked Bush for "challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again." [SINCE WHEN HAS IT BEEN THE JOB OF CONGRESS TO "CLEAN UP" AFTER A PRESIDENT LIKE HE WAS A TODDLER WITH CHRONIC DIARRHEA!] White House spokeswoman Dana Perino defended Bush. "What the president said is a fact — this is the longest a Congress has gone in 20 years without passing a single spending bill, so it's clear that the speaker is feeling some frustration at their inability to do so." Pelosi's outburst was a departure. Her usual practice in public has been to call Bush's policies a failure — not his presidency or him, personally. Pelosi's remarks are the latest evidence of the Democrats' throw-caution-to-the-wind approach to Bush in the waning days of a presidency weighed down by an unpopular war and soaring gasoline prices. Election Day, after all, is just over four months away; Bush's successor takes his seat on Jan. 20. Pelosi's counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, long ago took off the rhetorical gloves. Last month, he ridiculed Republicans who sided with Bush on a Medicare bill. "Who would be afraid of him?" Reid, D-Nev., said as many senators looked on. "He's got a 29 percent approval rating." The public's view of Congress is even worse. Its approval rating has hit a new low of just 18 percent, down from 23 percent last month, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. Bush's approval is at 28 percent, about even with the 29 percent rating last month. Only 16 percent of those surveyed thought the country was moving in the right direction, a new low as well, although statistically the same as last month's 17 percent. Last week Reid and other Democrats dropped any pretense of trying to fight the president on battles they were likely to lose — even on the most important part of their jobs, which is passing spending bills that keep the government running. Of the 12 annual appropriations bills, Congress is likely to pass one or two and send Bush a temporary spending fix for the rest. That would have to suffice until a new president takes office, Reid told reporters. Privately, Democrats have said that either candidate for president — Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain — would be easier to make laws with than Bush. But Reid made clear which he'd prefer. "I would hope that before we would leave here this year that we would do a continuing resolution that would get us (through) until after Senator Obama becomes president," he said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080717/ap_on_go_pr_wh/pelosi_bush

Bush Homeland Security Aide Caught On Tape Offering High-Level Access For Donations To Bush Library The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.” In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that”:

PAYNE: The exact budget I will come up with. But it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library. […] 200, 250, something like that. That’s gonna be a show of “we’re interested, we’re your friends, we’re still friends.”

Watch the startling video here.   The Times reports, “The revelation confirms long-held suspicions that favours are being offered in return for donations to the libraries which outgoing presidents set up to house their archives and safeguard their political legacies.” Bush loyalists previously said they had “identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential ‘mega’ donors” to the Bush library.The Department of Homeland Security website reports that the “Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) provides advice and recommendations to the Secretary on matters related to homeland security.” Payne has been a member of the council since August 2007. In Jan. 2008, Payne — an early supporter of Rudy Giuliani — said he would throw his support to John McCain if Giuliani dropped out. A personal friend of Bush, Payne has helped clear brush on the Crawford Ranch with the President (see the picture on the right). 

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Update  Payne is President of Worldwide Strategic Partners. His bio on a cached version of the consulting firm's site says Payne served as "George W. Bush's personal travel aide during his father’s 1988 Presidential campaign." It adds, "Currently, Mr. Payne assists the White House as a Senior Advance Representative traveling internationally in advance of and with President Bush and Vice President Cheney."    http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/12/bush-library-donation-scandal/

 

Plenty of Pith, Punch and Pop for Potted Palookas, Peeved Prognosticators and Potent Portside Political Pundits

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"I've gone into hundreds of [fortune teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her."
-- A New York City bunco detective. [And what about the winning lottery numbers?]

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
-- Ernest Hemingway [Bush reversed the formula, but it's still true today.]

"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
-- Sir Francis Bacon ["Paging Mr. Rove, paging Mr. Rove…"]

"Karl Rove deserves to be remembered as the man who thought Americans should have enough education to understand his fables but not enough to doubt them."
-- Eric Rauchway

"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?"
-- Mark Twain in "Huckleberry Finn."

"A supporter once called out, 'Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!' And Adlai Stevenson answered, 'That's not enough. I need a majority.'"
-- Scott Simon

"If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?"
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge."
-- Daniel J. Boorstin

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease."
-- R. D. Laing

"Management works within the system. Leadership works on the system."
-- Author Unknown

"Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it."
-- Alan Kay

"The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."
-- Joseph Priestley

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."
-- Robert Wilensky

"A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine."
-- Murphy's Law of Computing

"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'"
-- Don Marquis

"Money doesn't always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars."
-- Hobart Brown

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
-- Thomas Paine

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth."
-- Benjamin Disraeli

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."
-- Mark Twain

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
-- David Brin

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
-- Emma Goldman

"Once the game is over, the King and the Pawn go back in the same box."
-- Italian Proverb

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."
-- Alfred Adler

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
-- Oscar Wilde

"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
-- Joe Ancis

"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager."
-- William S. Burroughs

"One dog barks at something; a hundred dogs bark at the sound."
-- Chinese Proverb

"The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know -- the less you know, the more you think you know."
-- David T. Freeman

"To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail."
-- Abraham Maslow

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him while the unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"Honorable, adj.: In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, 'the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.'"
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary."

"I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me."
-- George Carlin

"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."
-- George Carlin bonus quote.

"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money."
-- George Carlin triple play.

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
-- H. L. Mencken

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."
-- Edith Sitwell

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
-- Lily Tomlin