Think Progress

ETHICS -- ECHOING GONZALES, SARA TAYLOR'S TESTIMONY WAS RIFE WITH 'I DON'T KNOW' AND 'I DON'T RECALL': Yesterday, former White House political director Sara Taylor appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about her involvement in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys last year. Due to the President's assertion of executive privilege, Taylor was blocked from speaking about internal White House deliberations over the firing and could only "respond to other questions from senators that do not breach White House confidentiality." Taylor invoked White House counsel Fred Fielding's name 24 times and his letter asserting executive privilege 35 times during her testimony, using them "like a shield" to resist speaking on certain subjects. On "fact-based" questions, in which she could not refuse to answer without risking a contempt of Congress citation, Taylor repeatedly avoided answering questions by claiming a faulty memory, uttering phrases such as "I don't know" and "I don't recall." When she did answer, Taylor's responses were worrisome to the members of Congress questioning her. "I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously," Taylor said early in the hearing. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) curtly responded to her, "Did you mean, perhaps, you took an oath to the Constitution?" "I know that the president refers to the government being his government -- it's not," he added. At one point in the hearing, Taylor admitted that she "did not speak to the president about removing U.S. attorneys." This admission caused Leahy to remark that her entire testimony "seriously undercuts [the President's] claim of executive privilege if he was not involved." "So I ask again, what is the White House so intent on hiding? If the president didn't make these decisions, well then who did and why did they?" Leahy concluded.

RADICAL RIGHT -- GOVERNMENT WEBSITE: ABORTIONS MAKE WOMEN FEEL 'SAD,' RESORT TO 'DRUGS' AND 'ALCOHOL': Yesterday, NARAL discovered that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had revised a government website, 4parents.gov, with biased, misleading, and ideological claims about abortion. For example, the new website says, "Abortions can have complications. There may be emotional consequences, as well: some women say that they feel sad and some use more alcohol or drugs than before." The American Psychological Association reports that, in fact, "[f]or most women...the time of greatest distress is likely to be before an abortion; after an abortion, women frequently report feeling 'relief and happiness.'" Though the previous version of the site contained factual information about rates of teen pregnancy, this is not the first time 4parents.gov has put forth misleading ideological claims. When the site launched in 2005, it told parents "to convince their teens to stop having sex by telling their children that they are 'worth it.'" But no resources were provided for "parents whose teen remains sexually active, implying that these youth are not 'worth it.'" Additionally, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt a letter with reviews by scientific experts who concluded that 4parents.gov's content appeared "to have been guided by ideology." Waxman also noted that the website was not created by government scientists, as the administration claimed, "but rather through a no-bid contract to the National Physician's Center for Family Resources, an obscure organization that has taken positions against scientific agencies on important matters of public health." Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona's testimony before Congress this week shows that this pattern of manipulating or ignoring science for political reasons is standard practice for the Bush administration. "Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried," said Carmona.  

KATRINA -- TWO YEARS LATER, 'STILL MORE THAN 30,000 FAMILIES DISPLACED BY HURRICANES KATRINA AND RITA': On Sept. 15, 2005 -- nearly two weeks after Hurricane Katrina first made landfall -- President Bush declared, "Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome. We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons -- because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love." Twenty one months later, however, there are still "13,000 families...marooned in trailer or mobile home parks where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears" and there are another "30,000 families...spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency." Despite this, according the the Brookings Institute's Katrina Index, the Road Home program -- designed to provide assistance to residents displaced by the Hurricanes -- "will stop accepting applications after July 31, largely due to the estimated $5 billion shortfall in the program. Neither Congress nor the Louisiana legislature have committed to providing additional funding." Further, "only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits." Consequently, "rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled" -- preventing many of New Orleans's poor residents from returning. Several recent studies further illustrate this pattern of inequity and injustice stemming from the Bush administration's incompetent response to the hurricanes. A Government Accountability Office report found that the Environmental Protection Agency allowed toxic chemicals to harm poor Katrina victims, the Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington found that during Katrina, FEMA ignored its own hurricane response plan, and the Institute for Southern Studies reported that FEMA guaranteed billions in profits for big companies.

Last November, CIA Director Michael Hayden told the Iraq Study Group in a private briefing that the "inability of the [Iraqi] government to govern seems irreversible." In the eight months since, "neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing."

"A previously undisclosed Army investigation into an audacious January attack in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers concludes that Iraqi police working alongside American troops colluded with insurgents."

"Undercover Congressional investigators set up a bogus company and obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March that would have allowed them to buy the radioactive materials needed for a so-called dirty bomb," demonstrating once again that the security measures "to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the wrong hands are insufficient."

Some conservatives are rallying behind a weak amendment offered by Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) to implement the Iraq Study Group recommendations, rather than set a deadline for withdrawal. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) derided the proposal as having "less teeth than a toothless tiger. It won't change one thing the president does." 

The White House is resisting a congressional effort to commission "independent assessments to rival the upcoming Sept. 15 reports by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker." If you had a serious illness, you would want a second opinion. We are at war. You want to have the best minds looking at a problem," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-VA).

For thousands of Gulf Coast evacuees, "going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile. 'We in storage,' said Ann Picard, 49. ... 'We just in storage.'"

Yesterday, former White House political director Sara Taylor used a letter from White House counsel Fred Fielding barring her from speaking about certain White House activities "like a shield." She "invoked Fielding's name 24 times" and mentioned the letter 35 times: "I have a very clear letter from Mr. Fielding. ... Again, I have a letter."

"The political price of sticking by an embattled Alberto Gonzales is getting higher for President Bush." The Wall Street Journal notes new intelligence laws have not been passed because lawmakers believe Gonzales "misled them about a separate surveillance program." Also, "Gonzales was sidelined during the recent immigration debate," and there has been little movement to replace a half-dozen senior Justice Department officials, some of whom need Senate confirmation.

And finally: The ladies who run the exclusive snack bar for the Democratic members of the House have been praised by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) for "their ability to deal with 'some 200 prima donnas.'" For example, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) "quietly holds up one finger or two, depending on how many slices of bread he wants with his peanut butter. 'You never close the bread,'" noted one of the ladies. "We know what kind of day it's going to be by the first order," explained the other.