Has the Bush administration denied reality on so many subjects — including global warming — that the American public is hungry for some old-fashioned facts? Here’s Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby’s take on how the GOP may unintentionally be helping Al Gore and his global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”:
“Ordinarily this film would never have been made, let alone scheduled for release in hundreds of theaters. But President Bush and the congressional Republicans have created a Ross Perot moment: a hunger for a leader with diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out basic facts ignored by blinkered government. By their contempt for expert opinion on everything from Iraqi reconstruction to the cost of their tax cuts, Republicans have turned Diagram Gore into a hero.”
Meanwhile, Bush said Monday that he doubted that he would see Gore’s film.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
How shocking to learn that the personal information of 26.5 million military veterans was stolen in a Maryland burglary, after an employee recklessly took the information home. And as long as the data remains unrecovered, how can there be, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, “no reason to believe at this time that the identities of these veterans have been compromised”? At least the government bothered to let the public know of this alarming security breach (albeit 19 days later). Of course, that also means that if the burglars didn’t realize what they had before, they do now.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Boeing chairman and CEO James McNerney (in photo) talks about the importance of ethical behavior to a company’s bottom line. So the Chicago Tribune recounted in an editorial last week how much unethical behavior has cost Boeing in recent years. Included in that calculation were Boeing’s tentative agreement to pay $615 million to settle two federal criminal investigations; the four-month prison sentence for Michael Sears, Boeing’s former chief financial officer; the resignations of former CEO Phil Condit and his successor, Harry Stonecipher; and Boeing being banned for a year from bidding on $1 billion worth of government rocket-launch contracts. “The new leadership vows that those days are over at Boeing,” the editorial said, noting that the company has “learned winning at any cost can carry a very high price.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast looks the same as it did right after Hurricane Katrina — that is, devastated and uninhabitable. More than half of New Orleans residents have not returned.
And they won’t likely come back soon, especially if they read a report released this week by a team of scientists from the University of California-Berkeley, who blasted the city’s hurricane protection system as sacrificing the safety of residents for cost concerns. Even after $3 billion in repairs is completed, said the team, the city’s levees will still be vulnerable to Katrina-force hurricanes because of design flaws and poor maintenance. “The entire system needs a serious re-evaluation and study.”
Meanwhile, the hurricane season begins in June, and climate experts predict another very active season with several major storms in the Gulf Coast and Atlantic region.
Are federal officials counting on luck to get them through this season?
Posted by Randy Scholfield
Long a conservative’s conservative, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., has become a divisive figure among his political base on immigration. On the roundtable on "Fox News Sunday," Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard felt moved to defend Brownback, saying the senator “courageously has voted his conscience, which is for reasonably liberal immigration bill.” Kristol added: “It’s not a matter of racism or nativism. It’s a matter of dealing with this problem, and I think Bush deserves credit, McCain deserves credit, Brownback deserves credit for stepping up to the plate.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
For what it’s worth — which isn’t much — Hillary Clinton’s iPod includes Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Take it to the Limit” by the Eagles. “I’m a child of the ’60s and ’70s,” she told the New York Post. Meanwhile, President Bush’s iPod includes the Knack’s “My Sharona,” John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” along with country songs by George Jones and Alan Jackson, the Post reported, and Vice President Dick Cheney sticks with country musicians such as Johnny Cash.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee