Percentage of Bush’s first 189 appointees who also served in his father’s administration: 42
Minimum number of Bush appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists: 98
Years before becoming energy secretary that Spencer Abraham cosponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy: 2
Estimated total calories members of Congress burned giving Bush’s 2002 State of the Union standing ovations: 22,000
Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50
Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069
Estimated number of U.S. intelligence reports on Iraq that were based on information from a single defector: 100
Number of times the defector had ever been interviewed by U.S. intelligence agents: 0
Factor by which an Iraqi in 2006 was more likely to die than in the last year of the Saddam regime: 3.6
Factor by which the cause of death was more likely to be violence: 120
Chance that an Iraqi has fled his or her home since the beginning of the war: 1 in 6
Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003: 3/4
Percentage of U.S. veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have filed for disability with the VA: 35
Chance that an Iraq war veteran who has served two or more tours now has post-traumatic stress disorder: 1 in 4
Number of all U.S. war veterans who have been denied Veterans Administration health care since 2003: 452,677
Date on which the White House announced it had stopped looking for WMDs in Iraq: 1/12/05Number of vehicles in the motorcade that transports Bush to his regular bike ride in Maryland: 6
Estimated total miles he has ridden his bike as president: 5,400
Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3
Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home: 25
Estimated number of juveniles whom the United States has detained as enemy combatants since 2002: 2,500
Minimum number of detainees who were tortured to death in U.S. custody: 8
Seconds it took a Maryland consultant in 2004 to pick a Diebold voting machine’s lock and remove its memory card: 10
Number of states John Kerry would have won in 2004 if votes by poor Americans were the only ones counted: 40
Number if votes by rich Americans were the only ones counted: 4
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4
Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000
Percentage change since 2002 in the number of U.S. teens using illegal drugs: –9
Percentage change in the number of adults in their fifties doing so: +121
Number of times FDA officials met with consumer and patient groups as they revised drug-review policy in 2006: 5
Number of times they met with industry representatives: 113
Number of White House officials in 2006 and 2007 authorized to discuss pending criminal cases with the DOJ: 711
Number of Clinton officials ever authorized to do so: 4
Years since a White House official as senior as I. Lewis Libby had been indicted while in office: 130
Number of U.S. cities and towns that have passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of President Bush: 92
Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines: 1
Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans: 4
Estimated amount Bush-era policies will cost the U.S. in new debt and accrued obligations: $10,350,000,000,000 (see page 31)
Percentage change in U.S. discretionary spending during Bush’s presidency: +31
Percentage change during Reagan’s and Clinton’s, respectively: +16, +0.3
Ratio in 1999 of the number of U.S. federal employees to the number of private employees on government contracts: 15:6
Ratio in 2006: 14:15
Total value of U.S. government contracts in 2000 that were awarded without competitive bidding: $73,000,000,000
Total in 2007: $146,000,000,000
Number of the five directors of the No Child Left Behind reading program with financial ties to a curriculum they developed: 4
Amount by which the federal government has underfunded its estimated cost to implement NCLB: $71,000,000,000
Rank of Bush among U.S. presidents with the highest disapproval rating: 1
Average percentage of Americans who approved of the job Bush was doing during his second term: 37
Percentage of Russians today who approve of the direction their country took under Stalin: 37
2 comments:
After reading that does anyone wonder why we will never have another Bush in the White House. Unfortunately too many Americans have a short memory so maybe we are not protected from another trip to the alter of greed and war.
Unfortunately "short memory" may be the least of our problems. We all have our biases and delusions and Democrats are probably no different than Republicans.
What riles is the hypocrisy and deceit, and again it may apply to both parties, but since I lean more toward the Democrats than the Republicans, I'll lambaste them here.
P.J. O'Rourke once said, "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."
Thomas Frank is but one writer who has attempted to explain Republican success. A review of "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" says:
The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker. According to Frank, the conservative establishment has tricked Kansans, playing up the emotional touchstones of conservatism and perpetuating a sense of a vast liberal empire out to crush traditional values while barely ever discussing the Republicans' actual economic policies and what they mean to the working class. Thus the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh will repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, less likely to protect his job, and less likely to benefit him economically.
And yet another review says:
Kansas, once home to farmers who marched against "money power," is now solidly Republican. In Frank's scathing and high-spirited polemic, this fact is not just "the mystery of Kansas" but "the mystery of America." Dismissing much of the received punditry about the red-blue divide, Frank argues that the problem is the "systematic erasure of the economic" from discussions of class and its replacement with a notion of "authenticity," whereby "there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer." The leaders of this backlash, by focusing on cultural issues in which victory is probably impossible (abortion, "filth" on TV), feed their base's sense of grievance, abetted, Frank believes, by a "criminally stupid" Democratic strategy of triangulation. Liberals do not need to know more about NASCAR; they need to talk more about money and class.
Thank you, Karl Rove.
BTW, this isn't Clifford Andrew T., is it? Since you're the first person to ever comment on my blog other than my friends, may I ask how you ended up here?
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