The Obama administration won’t initiate Executive Branch investigations of the Bush administration officials in order to prosecute them; but that hardly precludes some sort of lustration process—say, in Congress, with grants of immunity—that documents their misdeeds and leads to prosecutions outside the US.
FT (van Duyn/Bullock, “New York Governor Urges State Spending Cut,” 28 Oct ’08):
Mr Bloomberg, addressing a securities industry gathering, said he was already seeing a direct impact of the financial crisis. He said he had dinner on Monday night in a usually full Italian restaurant in Brooklyn in which only three tables were being used. [...]
Dan Froomkin (White House Watch column, “Bush Just Makes It Worse,” WP, 10 Oct ’08)
Although Bush didn’t announce it this morning, there are signs that he will eventually sign off on a radical, but at least theoretically effective, next move—even though it violates his core political principles and is exactly the approach his administration rejected [...]
It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ [...]
It’s morning in America.
When was the last time GWB gave a press conference in light like that? Desperate times call for desperate measures.
NYT, Myers+ Shanker, “U.S. Ties With Russia Being Reassessed, Bush Aides Say” (14 Aug ’08):
Russia’s military offensive into Georgia has jolted the Bush administration’s relationship with Moscow, senior officials said Thursday, forcing a wholesale reassessment of American dealings with Russia and jeopardizing talks on everything from halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions to reducing strategic arsenals to [...]
Lederman at Balkinization pulls this quote from US District Judge John Bates’s 93-page opinion in what he calls the “Miers/Bolton contempt case”:
There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress’s [...]
Wald, “Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund,” NYT (29 July ’08):
Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday. The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would [...]
The LA Times’s “L.A. Land” weblog quotes President George W. Bush from his 15 July press conference:
If your question is, should the government bail out private enterprise, the answer is, no, it shouldn’t. And by the way, the decisions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—I hear some say ”bailout”—I don’t think it’s a bailout. The [...]
US, 2008:
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
Sri Lanka, 2003:
Constitutional crisis grips Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s efforts [...]