By Robert Parry
February 28, 2009

In a startling ambitious budget message, President Barack Obama has thrown down the gauntlet to the American Right not only by tying the current economic crisis to the recklessness of the past eight years under George W. Bush but by tracing it back further to the anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-government policies of Ronald Reagan.

“For the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy,” the 142-page budget message states. “Technological advances and growing global competition, while transforming whole industries -- and birthing new ones – has accentuated the trend toward rising inequality.”

Obama even made a glancing reference to that formulation in his preamble to the budget message. “We need to put tired ideologies aside, and ask not whether our government is too big or too small, or whether it is the problem or the solution, but whether it is working for the American people,” Obama said.

To the American Right, those are fighting words, and leading right-wingers have already trotted out their curious charge of “class warfare,” an ironic message given the fact that the growing disparity in American wealth reveals that “class warfare” has long been at the heart of Reagan-Bush policies – and the rich are winning.

Yet, while it may be audacious for the young President to take on the well-entrenched forces of reaction in Washington, there is another reason for Obama and his supporters to worry. The national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades.

In both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush (not to mention the iconic Reagan).

Look for example at the lead stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Saturday. Both describe the stomach-turning 6.2 percent drop in the gross domestic product during the last quarter of 2008. Though that was the last economic quarter of the Bush administration, the stories instead were framed around Obama’s failures.

The New York Times cites “a sense of disconnect between the projections of the [Obama] White House and the grim realities of everyday American life.” The Washington Post says “the worse-than-expected data fueled doubts about whether the Obama administration had adequately sized up the challenges it faces.”

What is remarkable about the two stories – and similar ones at other leading newspapers – is that the name “Bush” is nowhere to be found. Instead of a negative slant against Obama, the stories might reasonably have read that George W. Bush left behind an even worse economic mess than previously understood.

The newspapers could have explained how Bush’s policy prescriptions – such as large tax cuts for the wealthy, a neglect of regulation and the declining living standards of the middle class – had pushed the United States to the brink of economic catastrophe. There might have been at least one reference to how Bush contributed to “the grim realities of everyday American life.”

Or some of the commentators who have been criticizing Obama’s dire warnings about the state of the U.S. economy – accusing him of “talking down” the economy – might have extended an apology, admitting that the President was more correct than they were. They might even have noted that Bush actually had “taken down” the economy.

But that would require a break from the media paradigm of the past few decades – and there is no sign that the powerful right-wing news media has any intention of changing its ideological ways, nor that the mainstream news media will stop its endless attempts to prove it’s not “liberal.”

The only times Bush gets mentioned these days, it seems to be in the most favorable light.

For instance, while forgetting to mention that the fourth quarter of 2008 fell during Bush’s presidency, the U.S. news media gave Bush lots of credit for Obama’s announcement that he will withdraw all U.S. combat forces by Aug. 31, 2010. CNN and other news outlets cited Bush’s Iraq War “surge” as the reason Obama could pull out troops.

In other words, Bush gets credit for Obama ending an unnecessary war that Bush launched almost six years ago, while Obama is faulted for the 6.2 percent drop in the GDP under Bush.

As Obama sets off on a hazardous political journey – seeking national health insurance, a “greener” economy, educational and infrastructure investments, and higher taxes on the rich – he can expect continued hostility from most of the American news media, both on the right and in the mainstream.

That may be a structural problem that could prove fatal for the President’s goals.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Legendary California chef Alice Waters, who is a jury member at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, talks to SPIEGEL ONLINE about why we need to change the way we eat, Obama's support for the food movement and how to forage in Switzerland in the winter.

The "eat local" movement has become a force to be reckoned with in the United States in recent years, going from the fringes to the mainstream as more and more people become interested in eating better and minimizing their carbon footprint. The kind of locally grown, sustainable organic food that was once a California phenomenon can now be found at stores and farmers markets across the country.

More than 30 years later, Waters is promoting sustainable agriculture as tirelessly as ever. She is now vice president of the international Slow Food movement, which promotes regionally grown goods and local culinary traditions. In November, Waters wrote an open letter to then President-elect Barack Obama, offering her services as an adviser and urging him to plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn.

This February she enjoys another distinction: The self-confessed movie buff is a member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival. This year's festival features a number of films relating to the new food movement, including the documentary "Food, Inc.," which is highly critical of industrial food production, and the Slow Food portrait "Terra Madre."

SPIEGEL ONLINE talked to Alice Waters about the rise of the Slow Food movement and why the fight for real food needs to be taken to Washington.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What's wrong with the food we eat today?

Alice Waters: Most of it is not real food, in my opinion. Real food is grown by people who take care of the land, who refrain from herbicides and pesticides and everything that chemical agribusiness is putting into the food. It's food that's grown for taste, and it's grown in a way that pays people a good wage for their work -- it's not grown at somebody else's expense. As the Slow Food folks say, it's good, clean and fair. Generally we're supporting a system that is not.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You've been promoting the use of locally grown ingredients since the 1970s. Do you feel things are getting better?

Alice Waters: It's kind of incredible -- the globalization of food is, of course, omnipresent now, but there's also been this counter movement of organic and sustainable food that is rising up in countries around the world. I never knew, way back then, that so many other people in the US were doing the same thing -- we didn't know each other. But now we have met, and we've met globally through Slow Food. And it's very, very good this meeting, because we feel empowered.

SPIEGEL ONLINE In which places is the use of sustainable local food particularly well developed?

Alice Waters: There are a lot of places where things are pretty far along in the US -- Northern California is one of those places, Vermont is another. But I think it's very important that we bring this movement together in a very public way. We need to gather our forces together. And it seems to me right now that Washington, DC is the place we need to go.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you hope Obama will do to promote good food?

Alice Waters: He's already done one remarkable thing in relation to food. He hired as his private chef a young person from Chicago (editor's note: Sam Kass) who is extremely outspoken, both about sustainable food and also about food in schools. He has actually been out talking to people about it and it's all over the newspapers now, which is a really good thing. Plus Obama is sending his children to a school in Washington (editor's note: Sidwell Friends), which I have visited, that is very interested in eco-gastronomy. They're interested in sourcing their food and they have built a green cafeteria.

SPIEGEL ONLINE What should we do as consumers in order to eat better?
Waters: We have to uncover. We have to forage. I talk about foragers -- that's what I call the person who goes out in the woods or out in the neighborhood and starts finding food, like a mushroom forager. The first thing we have to look for is grass-fed beef (Ed's note: Food activists oppose the production of corn-fed beef because it helps to spread E. coli infections and the transport of corn comes with a massive carbon footprint). That alone could change the climate on the planet. The production of beef is one of the biggest problems we have.

SPIEGEL ONLINE Eating local is fine if you live in California or Italy, where there is a large selection of locally grown produce. But what happens if you live in a region like northern Europe, with its long, cold winters and short growing seasons?

Alice Waters: That's what everyone always says. But no matter where you are, you can find things. Every region has its own products. For example, I went to Davos in Switzerland and I cooked a dinner in the mountains in the snow on Jan. 20, using only things from that region. We just don't think that there is anything there, but we eat differently in the winter than in the summer -- it's just different food. We had a forager out there in Davos. First of all, he found this beautiful red polenta that's only from that place, ground from a special red corn. Then we had cured meats that were exceptional -- little dried sausages unusually spiced with herbs from the mountains. We had lovely cheeses. We toasted nuts and seasoned them with spices. We found wholegrain bread cooked in a wood oven. We found kale down in the valley. We found baby mountain goat and we braised it. We found the best apples I've ever tasted and we made an apple tart. It's just endless.

Interview conducted by David Gordon Smith.

The Reserve Chair's Philosophy Differs Little From His Ayn Rand Days
by Ralph Nader

Published on Tuesday, April 18, 2000 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

Last year Congress made Federal Reserve Board chair Alan Greenspan a virtual regulatory czar over financial services corporations. Considering the waves of adulation that have been sweeping over Greenspan, the anointment was not a surprise.
It would be reasonable to assume that before placing this important regulatory power under the Federal Reserve, Congress undertook a careful review of Greenspan's regulatory philosophy and record. You can toss that assumption in the nearest trash can.

A causal observer of Senate confirmation hearings would be led to believe that financial regulation has nothing to do with the job of Federal Reserve chair. The issue never comes up. It is the rarest of occurrences when a congressional oversight hearing places a Federal Reserve official in the dock over financial regulatory shortcomings.

Yet Congress, with only half-hearted opposition from the Clinton administration's Treasury Department, handed Greenspan and the Federal Reserve the regulatory plums when it authorized the merger of banks, securities firms, and insurance companies under common ownership in giant conglomerates. The safety and soundness of the nation's financial system will rest heavily on how vigorously the Federal Reserve carries out its responsibility.

For longtime watchers of Greenspan the move was incongruous, if not outright risky. As a disciple of Ayn Rand, later as an economic guru for the Republican Party, and still later as a lobbyist for financial corporations, Greenspan has disagreed with regulation as a tool to protect consumers and the well-being of a free enterprise economy. Greenspan has argued that the self-interest of the corporations – the desire of corporations to protect their reputation – was all that was necessary for consumer protection.

In an article published in 1963 as part of Ayn Rand's book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Greenspan declared that protection of the consumer against "dishonest and unscrupulous business was the cardinal ingredient of welfare statism."

"Regulation which is based on force and fear undermines the moral base of business dealings," he wrote. "Protection of the consumer by regulation ... is illusory."

Some may well argue that these diatribes against regulation were part of a passing phase in Greenspan's career. Perhaps, but this philosophy was alive and well when Greenspan, as a consultant-lobbyist, badgered federal regulators. In one case, Greenspan intervened directly with the principal regulator of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings in an attempt to gain special exemptions from regulations for the institution. Risky investments ultimately brought Lincoln Savings down, sent Keating to jail, and cost the taxpayers $2.5 billion. Greenspan became chair of the Federal Reserve.

Greenspan's antiregulation philosophy continues to crop up at the Federal Reserve. Not only has the General Accounting Office raised questions about the efficacy of the Federal Reserve's regulation of bank holding companies, but Greenspan has erected roadblocks to the collection of data important to consumer protection and fair lending as well.

In 1996 Greenspan was urged to help in the enforcement of fair lending laws by collecting data on the race and gender of applicants for small business and consumer loans. Despite pleas from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, Greenspan and his fellow governors blocked the proposal.

This year Greenspan decided to end the collection of nationwide data on bank fees. The survey, which was authorized as part of the financial reforms adopted in 1989, has proven an excellent tool that consumer groups have used to highlight and battle the excessive fees that banks impose on consumers.

Similarly, the Federal Reserve is dropping its "Functional Cost Analysis" study, which has provided important data on how much it costs banks to provide services. This has been a great tool for measuring the validity of bank charges. Credit unions, particularly, have made good use of this data to dramatize fee and interest rate gouging by banks.

But if we believe the words of Greenspan during his Ayn Rand period, he probably doesn't see any need for such data, much less regulation.

And if anyone complains about the loss of such consumer and fair-lending information, Greenspan could send them this excerpt from his writings with Ayn Rand: "Government regulation is not an alternative means of protecting the consumer. It does not build quality into goods, or accuracy into information. Its sole contribution is to substitute force and fear for incentive as the 'protector' of the consumer. The euphemisms of government press releases to the contrary notwithstanding, the basis of regulation is armed force. At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun."

And this is the Alan Greenspan who Congress believes should protect the public interest in the regulation of the new financial conglomerates?

By E. J. LEVY
Published: February 12, 2009

THE Georgia peanut company at the center of one of our nation’s worst food-contamination scares has officially reached a revolting new low: a recent inspection by the Food and Drug Administration discovered that the salmonella-tainted plant was also home to mold and roaches.

You may be grossed out, but insects and mold in our food are not new. The F.D.A. actually condones a certain percentage of “natural contaminants” in our food supply — meaning, among other things, bugs, mold, rodent hairs and maggots.

Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).

Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.

The sauerkraut on your hot dog may average up to 50 thrips. And when washing down those tiny, slender, winged bugs with a sip of beer, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice. Yum.

Giving new meaning to the idea of spicing up one’s food, curry powder is allowed 100 or more bug bits per 25 grams; ground thyme up to 925 insect fragments per 10 grams; ground pepper up to 475 insect parts per 50 grams. One small shaker of cinnamon could have more than 20 rodent hairs before being considered defective.

Peanut butter — that culinary cause célèbre — may contain approximately 145 bug parts for an 18-ounce jar; or five or more rodent hairs for that same jar; or more than 125 milligrams of grit.

In case you’re curious: you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites each year without knowing it, a quantity of insects that clearly does not cut the mustard, even as insects may well be in the mustard.

The F.D.A. considers the significance of these defects to be “aesthetic” or “offensive to the senses,” which is to say, merely icky as opposed to the “mouth/tooth injury” one risks with, for example, insufficiently pitted prunes. This policy is justified on economic grounds, stating that it is “impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.”

The most recent edition of the booklet (it has been revised and edited six times since first being issued in May 1995) states that “the defect levels do not represent an average of the defects that occur in any of the products — the averages are actually much lower.” Instead, it says, “The levels represent limits at which F.D.A. will regard the food product ‘adulterated’ and subject to enforcement action.”

Bugs in our food may not be so bad — many people in the world practice entomophagy — but these harmless hazards are a reminder of the less harmless risks we run with casual regulation of our food supply. For good reason, the F.D.A. is focused on peanut butter, which the agency is considering reclassifying as high risk, like seafood, and subjecting it to special safety regulations. But the unsettling reality is that despite food’s cheery packaging and nutritional labeling, we don’t really know what we’re putting into our mouths.

Soup merits little mention among the products listed in the F.D.A.’s booklet. But, given the acceptable levels for contaminants in other foods, one imagines that the disgruntled diner’s cri de coeur — “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!” — would be, to the F.D.A., no cause for complaint.

E. J. Levy is a professor of creative writing at the University of Missouri.

By ROGER ALFORD
Associated Press

MAYFIELD, Ky. (AP) -- When the wind died down and the ice storm had passed, Joe Stutzman gathered his spare lanterns and stepped out of his Amish farmhouse to lend them to his modern-living neighbors.

"I feel sorry for my neighbors who were used to electricity and all of a sudden didn't have it," Stutzman said. "I know that must be hard for them."

But Kentucky's Amish have been living that way all their lives. And when the disaster struck, they generously lent a hand to their non-Amish neighbors and showed them how it's done.

"Those folks are very good at sustaining themselves," said Master Sgt. Paul Mouilleseaux, a National Guard spokesman.

The Stutzman family and the roughly 8,500 other Amish in the state were essentially unaffected by the storm that knocked out power to more than 1.3 million customers last week, about half of them in Kentucky.

Stutzman, his wife and their seven children were secure in their toasty, two-story home amid corn and soybean fields and swampy stands of cypress in western Kentucky.

"We paid it no attention," Stutzman said Tuesday, relaxing in a handmade rocker as a wood stove across the room radiated heat on a windy morning with temperatures in the low 20s.

He grabbed a log, taken from a big pile out back, threw it on the fire and lit a kerosene lamp. The cellar was stocked with canned goods, the milk cow safe in the barn. Stutzman's wife and two of their daughters used the wood-fired oven in the kitchen to do their baking.

Stutzman, a sturdy 40-year-old with a traditional Amish beard and a black-brimmed hat, said he would not have even known the storm was coming if one of his neighbors had not told him about the forecast. He is a member of the Old Order Amish, a sect that shuns modern conveniences such as radios and televisions.

James and Beverly Hutchins, a non-Amish couple who sheltered nine relatives in their home, said they don't know what they would have done without the Amish family across the road from them, not far from the Stutzmans.

The neighbors brought over hot coffee every morning during the week the power was out, ("Best coffee I ever drank," James Hutchins said), provided well water, cooked a meal for them, lent them a kerosene lantern and fixed the one lantern the Hutchinses had.

"Best neighbors we've ever had, and we've been around a few places," 76-year-old James Hutchins said.

Beverly Hutchins said she told the Amish family that she would turn her porch light on when the power came back on as a signal so they would know they didn't need to bring over coffee. That finally happened Tuesday night.

Mayfield Mayor Arthur Byrn said many in his town of about 10,000 will live without modern conveniences for some time. Nearly half the town and most of the outlying areas remained without power, though utility crews were working around the clock to repair transmission lines.

In the meantime, many residents will depend on the kindness of the neighbors whose way of life they probably appreciate a little more now.

The Hutchinses said their week without electricity gave them a glimpse into how their neighbors live.

"I said I didn't know how they could do it," Beverly Hutchins said.

---

Associated Press writers Bruce Schreiner in Wingo, Ky., and Jeffrey McMurray in Lexington, Ky., contributed to this report.

With four days to go until president-elect Barack Obama takes is inaugurated, history is documenting George Bush's environmental record at home and abroad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk
Suzanne Goldenberg

The document released by the White House to commemorate George Bush's exit from the most powerful job on the planet describes a president who spent much of the last eight years as a careful steward of the planet. "Throughout his administration, President Bush made protecting the environment for future generations a top priority," says the booklet, Highlights of Accomplishments and Results.

"If only" – went the near-universal response from green organisations. They see the Bush years as a concerted assault, from the administration's undermining of the science on climate change to its dismantling of environmental safeguards to its support for mining and oil interests.

"He has undone decades if not a century of progress on the environment," said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, one of America's largest environmental groups.

"The Bush administration has introduced this pervasive rot into the federal government which has undermined the rule of law, undermined science, undermined basic competence and rendered government agencies unable to do their most basic function even if they wanted to. We're excited just to push the reset button."

The two moves at the time were seen as a sign of surrender from Bush, a former oil man, to America's coal and oil industries.

Christine Todd Whitman, who was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, later described the exit of Kyoto as "the equivalent to 'flipping the bird,' frankly, to the rest of the world".

But it was the manner of Bush's exit from Kyoto that provided the most sustained damage, say environmentalists, with the administration injecting doubt on the science that demonstrated an urgent need to deal with climate change.

"The idea of a head of state putting the science question on the table in the way that he did was horrifying to most of the rest of the world," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.

The disinformation campaign became a defining element of the Bush era – and was perhaps the most damaging.

"Certainly the most destructive part of the Bush environmental legacy is not only his failure to act on global climate change, but his administration's covert attempt to silence the science alerting us to the urgency of the problem," said Jonathan Dorn of the Earth Policy Institute (EPA) in Washington.

The campaign to keep the public unaware of the evidence on climate change came to light in October 2004 when the Nasa scientist, James Hansen, accused the Bush administration of trying to block data showing an acceleration in global warming.

The full extent of the White House efforts to downplay, distort and outright censor the science on climate change remains unclear – but such efforts continued even after Hansen accused the Bush administration of censorship.

In July 2008, Jason Burnett, a former official at the EPA, wrote a letter to the Senate describing efforts by the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality to censor discussion of the consequences of climate change.

Burnett said the White House tried to circumvent a 2007 Supreme Court decision compelling the EPA to regulate car emissions by doctoring scientific findings on the costs of fuel-efficiency standards. The White House objected to a study showing the benefits of raising fuel standards outweighed the costs.

In 2008, officials from Cheney's office sought to doctor testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on California's efforts to impose stricter fuel efficiency requirements than the national standard.

Meanwhile, Bush officials began a concerted effort to strip away a regulatory regime that had been decades in the making.

"Every effort has been made to weaken existing law and there has been no effort to advance regulatory solutions to the most important issue we face, which is climate change," said Frances Beinecke, president of the National Resources Defence Council.

A particular target of the Bush administration's project of deregulation was the Endangered Species Act. The campaign was driven in part by the administration's concern that the act – with its protections for polar bears – could be used to force limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

As with the science on climate change, the Bush Administration has been accused of interfering with scientific findings on wildlife protection for political reasons.

An official report last month found widespread political interference in the management of endangered species. The inspector general's report said that the deputy secretary of the interior, Julie MacDonald, intervened repeatedly to prevent new additions to the endangered species list.

The report said MacDonald, who headed the endangered species protection programme at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, intervened improperly in 13 of the 20 cases under investigation, overruling the recommendations of field biologists that species be protected.

It described MacDonald's dealings with the field biologists as "abrupt and abrasive if not abusive".

MacDonald resigned in 2007. Dale Hall, a biologist who headed the service, called MacDonald's conduct "a blemish on the scientific integrity of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior".

Other controversial actions included:

• Gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts

• Dismantling the protections of the Endangered Species Act

• Opening millions of acres of wilderness to mining, oil and gas drilling, and logging

• Defunding programmes charged with the clean-up of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead and mercury

• Reducing the enforcement effort in the Environmental Protection Agency

• Removing grizzly bears and wolves from the endangered species list

• Endorsing commercial whaling

• Approving mountain-top removal for coal mining

Bush pursued the grand plan of deregulation to his last days in the White House, with a series of last-minute rule changes. Under the new rules, oil companies will be able to drill within sight of the Arches national park in Utah. Federal agencies will no longer be compelled to consult with government wildlife experts when they open up new areas for logging or road construction, and he also barred the EPA from looking at the effects of global warming on protected species.

Some positive changes in the past eight years were inadvertent. The Bush administration's refusal to cap carbon dioxide emissions acted as a catalyst, with 24 states acting on their own to put in place regional cap and trade networks. Some 27 states enacted renewable portfolios, mandating local power companies to produce more of their electricity from sun, wind and solar power. "A lot of things happened because the Bush Administration was so negative about a lot of things," said Claussen.

Bush expanded on a programme launched by Bill Clinton to reduce diesel exhaust, extending the rules to tractors, trains and small ships.

The administration did have one last-minute surprise in store for the green lobby though, by demonstrating a late commitment to ocean conservation. Just two weeks before leaving office, Bush designated nearly 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as national monuments.

"We and others in the environmental community have been at odds with this administration on lots of things, but if one looks at this one event it is a significant conservation event," said Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group.

(CBS) President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent.

Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

Mr. Bush's final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.

Recent one term presidents also had higher ratings than Mr. Bush. His father George H.W. Bush had an end-of-term rating of 54 percent, while Jimmy Carter's rating was 44 percent.

Harry Truman had previously had the lowest end-of-term approval at 32 percent, as measured by Gallup.

Views of Mr. Bush's popularity are highly partisan. Only 6 percent of Democrats approve of the job he has done as president, while 57 percent of Republicans approve. Eighteen percent of independents approve.

Interestingly, Mr. Bush also has the distinction of having the highest approval rating for a president, as well as the lowest.

In November 2008, just before the presidential election, only 20 percent approved of the job he was doing as president - the lowest of any president since Gallup began asking the question in 1938.

But Mr. Bush enjoyed a high approval rating of 90 percent -- the highest of any president -- following the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Mr. Bush edged out his father for that highest rating. George H.W. Bush received an 88 percent approval rating in 1991 amid the success of the first Gulf War.

Truman comes closest to Mr. Bush's record low approval rating of 20 percent. In February 1952, just 22 percent of Americans approved of the job Truman was doing as president.

Evaluations Of The President

Half of all Americans, when they look back on Mr. Bush's eight years in office, believe he has been a poor president. Thirty-three percent think he has been an average president. Twelve percent say he has been a good president, and only 5 percent say he has been a very good president.

This evaluation is more negative than the ones Americans gave both the current president’s predecessor, Mr. Clinton, and the president’s father.

The president has also fallen short of expectations: As Mr. Bush was preparing to enter the White House in January 2001, 43 percent thought he would be a very good or good president. Only 12 percent thought he would be a poor one.

As for the incoming president, the CBS News poll also asked about expectations of President-elect Barack Obama. Sixty-eight percent think Mr. Obama will be a good or very good president - 25 points higher than expectations for Mr. Bush.

Nine in 10 Democrats expect Mr. Obama to be a good president, including 48 percent who think he will be a "very good" one. Republicans are less hopeful, but 38 percent still say Mr. Obama will be a good president.

By Mark Bentley

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled “Model 271” may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush,” Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”

Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi hurled a pair at Bush at a news conference in Baghdad on Dec. 14. Both shoes missed the president after he ducked. The journalist was jailed and is seeking a pardon from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

“Model 271” is exported to markets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Customers in Iraq ordered 120,000 pairs this week and some Iraqis offered to set up distribution companies for the shoe, Baydan said.

Baydan has received a request for 4,000 pairs from a company called Davidson, based in Maryland. He declined to provide further details.

The American Conservative-What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can’t take the swagger out of a fool.

We’ll never know how far W. would have gone to find himself a war because he had all he needed delivered by air on Sept. 11, 2001. Remember how people felt in those days? A friend of mine said, “It was like the aliens had invaded.”

We needed our president to be a hero and made him into one, even though it was obvious he wasn’t up to the job. He didn’t take the first plane to Manhattan, stand there and say, “We’re coming for you bastards!” Instead he sat in a roomful of children, reading The Pet Goat, then dropped off the radar for hours before his handlers got him ready.

Maybe there’s a lesson here: if the president doesn’t cut it in a crisis, we’re better off admitting that to ourselves and telling him so instead of pretending he’s a great leader. When you make a weakling into a hero, you give him a lot of power. If we’d kept our eyes open and faced the fact that Bush reacted badly to 9/11, we might have been able to ask for a little more detail about his big plans.

Those came courtesy of Cheney and his neocon punks. What a crew these guys were! Like their boss, they were also woofers, boasters—but of a different variety. Dubya was your standard frat boy loudmouth, but Cheney, with his talk about “working the dark side,” was more like the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons nerd. And you couldn’t ask Hollywood to serve up a goofier selection of dorks than his neocon staffers, who drifted from the universities to D.C. the way has-been pop singers switch to country and western to leech off a new bunch of suckers.

On the one hand, they were scared to death of Arabs and hated all Muslims. On the other, they were convinced that every Muslim on the planet really wanted, deep in his heart, to be magically turned into an Ohio Republican. That was their theory: take an anti-American Arab country, add an invading army, and voila! a nice fluffy democracy soufflé.

So we poured American blood and treasure into the Iraqi dust to prove the half-baked theories of a bunch of tenth-rate professors. The most expensive experiment in the history of the world, all to learn something any 10-year-old could have told them: people don’t take to foreign troops on their streets, and not everybody wants to be like us. You know those Ig-Nobel awards they hand out to the dumbest science projects of the year? The Iraq invasion is the all-time winner. Retire the trophy with the names of the winning team: Bush, Cheney, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith.

But first came Afghanistan—“the graveyard of empires.” Every military-history wannabe was conjuring the ghosts of that Victorian British army slaughtered by the Afghans, along with all the propaganda we’d been pushing about the invincible mujahedeen who’d driven out the Soviets. Looking back, what they had routed was a dying Soviet state, and they didn’t even manage to do that until we took the risk of giving them Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. But all the pundits’ knees were shaking about going into the Afghan haunted house.

We started slow, the way American armies tend to do, taking a while to limber up. There were weeks of bombing the Shomali Plain to no visible effect and a Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar’s compound that was more “Naked Gun” than “Top Gun.” Then Mazar-i-Sharif in the north fell suddenly, and it turned into the kind of war that Northern Alliance fighters and fighter-bomber pilots both love: hunting down a fleeing enemy.

The campaign went so well, so fast, that it taught Bush and Cheney the wrong lessons. They started exporting democracy to Afghanistan, even hiring a local Pashtun girl to read the Kabul evening news. When you tell a big, backwards tribe like the Pashtun that you’re going to turn their whole world upside down for them, you shouldn’t expect them to be grateful. But we did, setting ourselves up for a whole lot of trouble later on.

Worse yet, Bush’s people figured that since Afghanistan, the tough nut, cracked so easily, their pet project, a second Iraq invasion, would be a cakewalk. This time they would do it right, occupying the Iraqi cities instead of just crushing Saddam’s army and withdrawing like Bush senior did.

Nobody wants to recall what Americans believed back then. That’s OK: I’ll remember it. People thought that Saddam was “connected to” 9/11, and his agents were going to poison our water, nuke our cities, and gas our subways. At least they claimed to believe all that unlikely James Bond stuff. I don’t think they really did. There was just so much revenge momentum after 9/11 that it had to burst out somewhere. Everybody wanted payback. It’s natural. But most of the time, in your average democracy, cooler heads are in charge. Not this time. Bush and his team were foaming at the mouth far more than the average citizen. It was like a crazed sheriff trying to talk a lukewarm mob into a lynching frenzy. With the help of people who should have known better—I’m looking at you, Colin Powell—he got his way.

That, in the short version, is why George W. Bush is about to leave office the most unpopular American president in history. You can spin Iraq a hundred different ways, but it still comes up bad news because once the dust settles, the Iranians are in control of the whole region, and they didn’t have to fire a shot. We destroyed their old rival for them.

It’s a simple story: we crushed Saddam’s army, occupied the cities, and then acted like the whole country would turn itself into a neocon fantasyland. Paul Bremer’s cult kids were talking tax reform while the Iraqi army they had sent home unemployed was busy digging up the weapons they had buried in their yards. Bush’s counterinsurgency policy was pretending there was no insurgency then pretending it was just Saddam’s “deadenders.” When Saddam’s capture at the end of 2003 didn’t slow the insurgency, Bush’s defenders stopped acting like they knew what was going on and just settled for blaming the Iranians—as if it was a nasty surprise that Iran, the country that openly hates America most in the whole world, might get involved in anti-American operations when we occupied Iraq right next door.

People ask what our counterinsurgency strategy was before the surge. Easy: we had none. We were doing nothing but offering the insurgents moving targets. A standard operation for the occupation force in those dark days was patrolling through an alien Sunni neighborhood, waiting for an IED to go off under the lead vehicle or for an RPG or small-arms ambush. When that happens, conventional forces have a grim choice: do nothing, withdrawing while the locals snicker at your dead and wounded, or open fire on everyone in sight. Either way, the insurgents win. If you withdraw, they’ve hit you with impunity and gained respect in the neighborhood. If you open fire on the slums, you kill civilians and make enemies.

Effective counterinsurgency means not relying on massive firepower the way conventional forces are trained to do. The idea is not to fire until you know exactly who you’re up against. It’s the opposite of shock and awe. It’s discipline and patience. Gen. David Petraeus implemented a set of reforms usually called the surge, though they were about tactics more than reinforcements. All he really did was initiate overdue standard counterinsurgency doctrine. He integrated U.S. units with Iraqi forces then sent them out into the neighborhoods. You can’t run any kind of counterinsurgency plan without good street-level intelligence, but Bush’s people wouldn’t admit that there was an insurgency, so they wouldn’t commit to learning about it. Their style was to ignore it and hope it would go away.

That’s why Afghanistan went well in the early stages: we didn’t go in trying to turn the Afghans into democrats, but trying to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In Iraq, Bush was dreaming from the start, so the whole effort was doomed.

The surge worked about as well as any good counterinsurgency effort could. We know a little about the enemy now, and there’s less violence because all the neighborhoods had already been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is now a Shi’ite city. There are a few Sunni enclaves, but the Shia rule the city and the country, with the Kurds fortifying themselves up north and wishing they could saw their territory off and relocate it somewhere in mid-ocean.

That’s what Bush’s trillion-dollar investment in Iraq has bought. Meanwhile, if you look at the rest of the world map, you get a real shock. Regions like Latin America and Central Asia that eight years ago were American protectorates in all but name have turned against us while we were distracted with Iraq. Many times, the real winners are countries that manage to stay out of a war, the way England benefited by not getting sucked into the Thirty Years’ War. Iran is much stronger now, and so is Russia. The Russians, who seemed to be in their “throes” when Clinton left office, just slapped down Georgia, one of our few remaining allies among the old Soviet states, and there wasn’t a thing we could do but grumble.

It’s no puzzle: we pretended a goon was a hero, let him play out his foolish fantasies about remaking the Middle East, and wasted our strength on a losing effort while the rest of the world drifted out of our power. Our leader was a laughingstock around globe, and he made America the butt of the world’s contempt. But Bush got his wish—he was a war president and then some. The rest of us were the casualties.

Julian Borger, diplomatic correspondent

George Bush didn't need a primer on Middle Eastern culture to know he was being insulted. Having a pair of shoes lobbed at you and having to cower behind a lectern does not look particularly presidential anywhere.

Bush's humiliation was all the greater because his fellow VIP, Nuri al-Maliki, looked entirely nonchalant, smiling wryly as the Great Decider ducked. If Maliki were not such a staunch ally, you might have thought he had been in on it.

And in case there was any room for doubt, the assailant, an Iraqi television journalist called Muntadar al-Zeidi, shouted: "This is a farewell kiss, you dog." His shoes have been confiscated but he is fast becoming a hero of the Arab world and beyond. A crowd gathered in Saddam City to shout: "Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head." After eight years of careful stage management by the White House press staff, this will be how Bush is remembered in many parts of the world.

The shoe man showed a keen sense of historical irony. When Saddam's statue came down in Baghdad more than five years ago the crowd took off their shoes to slap it in a memorable display of utter contempt. It meant Saddam was not deserving of normal human dignity. In Bush's case, the shoes have come flying even before he leaves office.

There are now serious implications for security at future press conferences and public events, as copy-cat attacks are almost inevitable. Will the press and public now have to hand in their shoes before being allowed in the presence of a visiting dignitary? Will there be socks-only photo-opps? As he approaches his last month in office, George Bush is once more taking us into uncharted territory.

A few parting words for the senators who squashed the auto rescue

By MITCH ALBOM • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • December 13, 2008

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Suddenly, the worker is the problem? Suddenly, unless union members, overnight, drastically slash their wages with a hard deadline, you pull the plug on an industry?

Suddenly, Detroit is the symbol of economic dysfunction? Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately, Washington?

In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that you failed to regulate, how on earth do we need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms — who created the problem in the first place — why do need to be schooled on how to run a business?

Who is more dysfunctional in business than you? Who blows more money? Who fashions and molds its work based on favors and pork and traded compromises?

At least in the auto industry, if folks don’t like what you make, they don’t have to buy it. In government, even your worst mistakes, we have to live with.

And now Detroit should die with this?

In bed with the foreign automakers

Kill the car, kill the country. Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Bob Corker, your names will not be forgotten. It’s amazing how you pretend to speak for America when you are only watching out for your political party, which would love to cripple unions, and your states, which house foreign auto plants.

Corker, you’ve got Nissan there and Volkswagen coming. Shelby, you’ve got Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota. Oh, don’t kid yourself. They didn’t come because you earned their business, a subject on which you enjoy lecturing the Detroit Big Three. No, they came because you threw billions in state tax breaks to lure them.

And now — this is rich — you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over the failure of his policies?
Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?

More money for the lords of Wall Street

There ought to be a law — against the selfishness and hypocrisy our government has demonstrated. The speed with which wheelbarrows of money were dumped at the feet of Wall Street versus the slow noose hung on the auto companies is reprehensible. Some of those same banks we bailed out are now saying they won’t extend credit to auto dealers. Wasn’t that why we gave them the money? To loosen credit?

Where’s your tight grip on those funds, senators? Or do you just enjoy having your hands around blue-collared throats?

No matter what the president does, history will not forget this: At our nation’s most uncertain hour, you stood ready to plunge tens of thousands of families into oblivion. Push them onto public payrolls, unemployment, no health insurance. And you were willing to put our nation’s security at risk — by squashing the American manufacturing we most rely on in times of war.

And why? So you could stand on some phony principle? Crush a union? Play to your base? How is our nation better off today now that you kept $14 billion in the treasury? Are you going to balance the budget with that?

Don’t make us laugh.

Kill the car, kill the country. You tried to slam a stake into the chest of this business, and you don’t even realize how close to the nation’s heart you’re coming. Shame on your pettiness. Shame on your hypocrisy. This is how we behave two weeks before Christmas? Honestly. What has become of this country?

PARADISE VALLEY - Pro golfer Billy Mayfair and his bride, former ASU golfer Tami Proctor, weren't the only couple getting guests' attention at their weekend wedding.

While the 300 guests were scrambling Saturday to snap pictures of the newlyweds, they also couldn't get enough of "Homer Simpson" and his $50,000 date.

Guests were awed by Mayfair and Proctor's elaborately produced dramatic tango performance in sparkling custom outfits, the InterContinental Montelucia Resort & Spa's five-course meal with a tableside choice of gourmet entrees and that other pair in attendance, wedding cakes.

The other, was a 100-pound chocolate delight of more than 40 layers in the likeness of Homer Simpson, one of Mayfair's favorite characters. Not even Homer, or wedding planner Karen Doan of Karen Doan Events is saying how much the second cake, or the entire wedding cost.

Tami, like many brides, wanted her cake to reflect the joy of their union. And for Mayfair, the fancy affair was symbolic of sorts also to celebrate his surviving testicular cancer after his surgery at Scottsdale Healthcare Shea in 2006.

"This guy saved my life," he shouted as he embraced Dr. Gil Brito just before the much anticipated cutting of the cake.

After the bride and groom carefully cut the ceremonial first piece, a pastry chef team, using a 12-foot ladder, dismantled the sweet piece of art.

Julia Baker of Julia Baker Confections is still nursing the blisters on her hand from cutting the cake.

"We didn't begin with a budget of $50,000 for the cake," the confectionary artist said. "It just grew after we sketched several designs and redesigned the Styrofoam models."

Baker says much of the cost is because of the labor and the hours she and a crew of five spent on the smallest of details.

Edible sugar flowers with more than a thousand leaves and petals were painstakingly hand-crafted. Several specialists, including electricians, were hired to light up the crystal globes on the cake with LED lights.

Baker also designed the 55-by-55-inch wooden baseboard with experts from Home Depot. A huge hole in the middle accommodated electrical cords running to the cake lights. Steel legs withstood the cake's weight, which was never exactly determined. The cake magnetlike drew guests with cameras all night. And golfing well-knowns such as John Solheim and family (chairman and CEO of Ping) agreed the entire wedding was more than up to par.

Big Three CEOs Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds

Auto Industry Close to Bankruptcy But They Get Pricey Perk

By BRIAN ROSS and JOSEPH RHEE
ABC News November 19, 2008

The CEOs of the big three automakers flew to the nation's capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy.

The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.

All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM's $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.

"We want to continue the vital role we've played for Americans for the past 100 years, but we can't do it alone," Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee.

While Wagoner testified, his G4 private jet was parked at Dulles airport. It is just one of a fleet of luxury jets owned by GM that continues to ferry executives around the world despite the company's dire financial straits.

"This is a slap in the face of taxpayers," said Tom Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste. "To come to Washington on a corporate jet, and asking for a hand out is outrageous."

Wagoner's private jet trip to Washington cost his ailing company an estimated $20,000 roundtrip. In comparison, seats on Northwest Airlines flight 2364 from Detroit to Washington were going online for $288 coach and $837 first class.

After the hearing, Wagoner declined to answer questions about his travel.

Ford CEO Mulally's corporate jet is a perk included for both he and his wife as part of his employment contract along with a $28 million salary last year. Mulally actually lives in Seattle, not Detroit. The company jet takes him home and back on weekends.

Plants Closed, Company Jets Stay

Mulally made his case Tuesday before the committee saying he's cut expenses, laid-off workers and closed 17 plants.

"We have also reduced our work force by 51,000 employees in the past three years," Mulally said.

Yet Ford continues to operate a fleet of eight private jets for its executives. Just Tuesday, one jet was taking Ford brass to Los Angeles, another on a trip to Nebraska, and of course Mulally needed to fly to Washington to testify. He did not address questions following the hearing.

"Now's not the time to do that sort of thing," said John McElroy of the television program "Autoline Detroit."

"Now's the time to be humble and show that you're sharing equally in the sacrifice," McElroy said.

GM and Ford say that it is a corporate decision to have their CEOs fly on private jets and that is non-negotiable, even as the companies say they are running out of cash.

Private jet travel is perhaps the greatest perk of all for CEOs, who say it allows them to travel more efficiently and safely, even in a recession.

AIG, despite the $150 billion bailout, still operates a fleet of corporate jets. The company says it has put two out of its seven jets up for sale and is reviewing the use of others. Though there are no such plans by GM or Ford.

"It appears that the senior management of the automakers simply don't get it," said Schatz.