More Brownies for Bush

You'd think that President Bush would've learned.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster of late-August 2005 will stand in American history as one of our most catastrophic times, worsened by the complete lack of action by presidentially appointed crony Michael Brown, head of FEMA. Brown's exposure led to more discoveries of cronyism taking place in the Bush administration.

This, of course, did not stop the president. He named his crony/counsel Harriet Miers as his pick for the Supreme Court, then allowed her to withdraw once her lack of credentials (see: Brown) became painfully obvious. Brown, meanwhile, has been suffering whiplash from the beating that congressional committees are giving him.

Now, word comes in Newsweek that the President has named nine, count them, nine campaign contributors to the FIAB, the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an advisory panel with oversight on intelligence gathering. Granted, a couple of the appointees, such as retired Adm. David Jeremiah and former congressman Lee Hamilton, have experience, but best buddy Don Evans, oil magnate Ray Hunt, fundraiser Bill DeWitt, economic adviser Steven Friedman, and Netscape's Jim Barksdale simply have no experience in this field, and this is a crucial time in our nation's history. At a time where we need experience, President Bush has once again appointed novices. Is it any wonder his approval rating is at 35%?

You say Alito, I say Scalito

Good God. The President did such a turnaround this morning that it's amazing he isn't suffering from whiplash. Samuel Alito's track record includes such nuggets as rejecting the Congress' use of the Commerce Clause to ban machine guns, his approval of the strip search of a man's wife and his ten-year-old daughter during a warrant that was only written for the man and the house, or there's his revocation (overturned on appeal) of the Family and Medical Leave Act, because God forbid a man or woman be allowed to leave their job for a few weeks to tend to a family emergency without losing their job. He sounds like one of those people who fired reservists and Guardsmen from their jobs after they served in Iraq.

I'm not even going to get into abortion here, because he could be the most rabidly pro-choice person in America and the other rulings he's made would be enough for me to reject him if I were a senator. Face it, he's the red-meat extremist that the far right was calling for, but do these religious conservatives who love his anti-abortion stance realize that he is against anti-discrimination laws, against the Family and Medical Leave Act, and for the open sale of machine guns? Not everything is about abortion. Being pro-life should mean being anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, anti-machine gun/assault rifle sales, pro-Social Security, pro-universal health care. It's not just about abortion, people. If you want to preserve life, you need to support my ability to take time off work to care for my (hypothetically) ailing wife or children, and support restrictions on deadly weapons that can be used by terrorists as well as concern about abortion.

This president came to office promising to "change the tone" and work in a concilatory manner. All he's done is polarize us like no other president and now he's trying to shove a judge onto the high court who has been struck down multiple times by that court for deviating in his opinions from well-established and constitutional laws. I'm calling for a filibuster on Alito, and if the nuclear option gets triggered, payback will be a bitch next year. He shows a depraved indifference to our rights and our safety, and he must be stopped.