administration officials

The First Cabinet Resignation

Peter Orszag will become the first member of President Obama’s cabinet to leave:

White House budget director Peter Orszag plans to leave government in July, becoming the first member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet to depart, administration officials said Monday. Orszag is likely to join a think tank, colleagues said.

Presidential advisers say a possible successor as director of the Office of Management and Budget is Rob Nabors, who was Orszag's deputy and went over to the Chief of Staff’s office to be a senior adviser to Rahm Emanuel. Nabors now he attends the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting and insiders say his stock never dropped, but only gained in value.

Two other possible replacements each served as chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton: Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, named by Obama as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; and Gene Sperling, now a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

What we really need is a new thinker in there – someone along the lines of a Paul Krugman. Everyone agrees that things like the stimulus was never enough, and the President never pushed for more. He needs advisers that will push him to really get this economy under control.

Politics

Obama Proposes A Spending Freeze

This really seems like a game of politics to me:

resident Barack Obama will call in his State of the Union address for a three-year freeze on spending for many domestic programs as part of his strategy to rein in the deficit, administration officials said.

The proposal, which wouldn’t affect spending on national security, would save an estimated $250 billion over a decade and reduce the deficit by $10 billion to $15 billion in 2011, according to the two officials, who briefed reporters on the plan. Last year’s budget shortfall was a record $1.4 trillion.

Obama will unveil the plan in his address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow night and include it in the fiscal year 2011 budget he’s set to deliver to lawmakers Feb. 1, the officials said.

Then you got the Republicans questioning the move:

Society

Obama Administration Suspends Deportation Of Haitians

This is some good news, but I’m sure the wingnuts will explode over it:

Responding to the devastation from the Haiti earthquake, Obama administration officials on Wednesday temporarily suspended deportations of illegal immigrants from that country.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Haitian deportations would be halted “for the time being,” without specifying a time period. Immigration officials said it was clear they could be putting Haitians’ safety at risk by sending them back to a country staggering from the vast destruction of the quake. About 30,000 Haitians in the United States are facing deportation orders, immigration officials said.

Lawmakers and immigrant advocacy groups renewed calls for the administration to grant Haiti a special status that would shield Haitian immigrants in this country from deportation for an extended period and allow them to work legally. The Haitian government and advocates here have been asking Washington to grant the status, known as temporary protected status, since late 2008.

Science

Health Care After SOTU?

It’s looking like the health care bill may not hit the President’s desk until after the State of the Union address:

The White House privately anticipates health care talks to slip into February — past President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address — and then plans to make a “very hard pivot” to a new jobs bill, according to senior administration officials.

Obama has been told that disputes over abortion and the tight schedule are highly likely to delay a final deal, a blow to the president, who had hoped to trumpet a health care victory in his big speech to the nation. But he has also been told that House Democratic leaders seem inclined, at least for now, to largely accept the compromise worked out in the Senate, virtually ensuring he will eventually get a deal.

If they are planning on conference to take this long, then there must be some serious differences anticipated between the House and Senate. All I can say is “Go House!”

Hoekstra Accuses White House Of “Hiding” Information On Ft. Hood

Wow it didn’t even take a week for this to happen:

The ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee on Tuesday night accused the White House of withholding information on the Fort Hood attack.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) said administration officials delayed briefing members of Congress about the alleged gunman, raising "red flags" about what the White House was hiding.

"When they withhold information, you always start asking questions," Hoekstra told Fox News. "That's what raises red flags. What do they know that they don't want us to know?"

Maybe we should all take some time and tell Hoekstra that the politicizing of the horror that happened at Ft. Hood won’t be tolerated.

[congress]H000676[/congress]

Being Presidential

Needless to say, President Obama is coming under fire for his trip to Asia this weekend. The right really hates seeing a President travel, well unless that President is going for months on end to play cowboy in Texas.

While Obama has traveled a lot, he has also used those trips to help strengthen U.S. relations around the world. This is something really important given the question of; “what to do in Afgranistan?”

President Obama’s trip this weekend also includes some heavy reading material:

As Mr. Obama left Thursday for a weeklong trip to Asia, he took his Afghanistan review with him. The president asked his military and civilian advisers not to present entirely new options, administration officials said, but rather to help choose from what he believes are the most promising elements. The discussions are not fixed on troop numbers alone, the officials said, but on underlying strategy and performance measures.

So the President isn’t going on some little leisure trip. Instead he is working to strengthen our ties with Japan and contemplate Afghanistan in his extra time.

Andrew Sullivan points out that this is what it’s like having an adult President:

What we are seeing here, I suspect, is what we see everywhere with Obama: a relentless empiricism in pursuit of a particular objective and a willingness to let the process take its time. The very process itself can reveal - not just to Obama, but to everyone - what exactly the precise options are. Instead of engaging in adolescent tests of whether a president is "tough" or "weak", we actually have an adult prepared to allow the various choices in front of us be fully explored.

Lou Dobbs Suicide Watch

President Obama has decided to take up immigration, so we all need to keep an eye on Lou:

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Barack Obama plans to begin addressing America's immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as "policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system," said the official, Cecilia Munoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration organizations, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

There could be something hidden in doing this right now – the fact that immigration is a much more divisive issue on the right than on the left. Let the debate go on for a few months, really heating up, and then all those Democrats running in the midterms will get some great ammo from the Republicans that can’t help but sound like racists.

Now Its Getting Ridiculous

It looks like all the talk Obama did about AIG yesterday was nothing but a smoke-screen:

President Barack Obama said Monday that he would "pursue every single legal avenue to block" $165 million in bonuses to American International Group Inc. employees who were in part responsible for the insurance giant's near collapse. But hours later, administration officials said the payouts made Friday couldn't be extracted from their recipients without a legal fight that would cost the taxpayers even more.

Instead, officials said the White House will focus on ensuring taxpayers recoup the cost of the bonuses and, going forward, executive compensation at AIG would be on a much tighter leash. As leverage, the government said it would apply new rules to the next round of AIG bailout funds, a $30 billion infusion pledged earlier this month.

Does the administration even know what in the hell they are doing? This is beyond the pale, and it looks like the other financial giants are looking for ways to get into this game:

Anticipating restrictions on bonuses, officials at Citigroup Inc and Morgan Stanley are exploring ways to sidestep tough new federal caps on compensation, the Wall Street Journal said.

Executives at these banks and other financial institutions that received government aid are discussing increasing base salaries for some executives and other top-producing employees, the paper said, citing people familiar with the situation.

Speaking Of Peanuts

It turns out that peanut company has a history of problems, but see if you can notice something interesting here:

As far back as 2007, salmonella-laced products were shipped by a Georgia peanut company that knew the peanuts probably were tainted and sometimes after tests confirmed that contamination, inspection records show.

Federal law forbids producing or shipping foods under conditions that could make it harmful to consumers' health.

Food and Drug Administration officials earlier had said Peanut Corp. of America waited for a second test to clear peanut butter and peanuts that initially were positive for salmonella. But the agency amended its report Friday, saying that the Blakely, Ga., plant actually shipped some products before receiving the second test and sold others after confirming salmonella.

In 2007, the company shipped chopped peanuts on July 18 and 24 after salmonella was confirmed by private lab tests, the FDA report said. Peanut Corp. sold products "on or after the positive salmonella results were obtained."

[SNIP]

Problems at the plant are not new. FDA inspectors found in 2001 that products potentially were exposed to insecticides, one of several violations uncovered during the last visit federal officials made before the current food-poisoning scare, according to a report obtained by The Associated Press.

So they had problems in 2001, Bush’s first year in office (and we don’t know exactly when, so it could have been when Clinton was President), but then the government didn’t check up on them again. They had problems in 2007, but it seems as though the government acted out of some sort of good faith. Now Bush is out of office and we find out this place is killing people.

Now We Got A Witness

This is a Bush administration official with direct knowledge admitting that we torture detainees:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Surgeon General Gupta?

Wow – never saw this coming:

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer.{[}]lt;/p>

I wonder what CNN will do without their doctor?

Oh Those Earmarks

We hear Bush saying how he will get rid of earmarks all the time. Well that doesn't look like the case so much:

But Bush hesitates to exercise his authority. Surely he doesn’t fear challenging a Congress that trails him in public approval surveys. House Republican Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., has reportedly warned administration officials that meddling with earmarks will anger GOP members who are responsible for 40 percent of those in the 2008 spending bills. But what about angry taxpayers who see their hard-earned tax dollars being shoveled out the back door, and who correctly view earmarks as politically corrupting payoffs?

935 Lies To War

So seven years later and the media finally decides to take a look into what the administration was telling us about Iraq.

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

On the web: Check out
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The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

While a lot of people focus on the administrations role in this report, I can't help but put a lot of blame on the media. The media is the delivery method of these lies, and they delivered them without any challenge.

The report also breaks down who told how many lies:

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.

I heard Colin Powell give a speech last night at Miami University. At the end there was a question and answer segment. The first question was about the intelligence and the use of hardball as their source of information. Powell quickly dismissed the question stating that it was the intelligence that was wrong - not them. This is kind of an about face from a year ago when Powell was saying that he shouldn't have given that speech and knew it was wrong to the point that he told George Tenet that he would be sitting behind him at the U.N. presentation.

I left that event wondering if Powell basis what he says upon where he speaks. Miami University is a very conservative university. When the first student asked that question he was met with numerous boos from the audience. For me it was great to see a young person versed enough in the events that lead us into war, instead of believing what they been spoon fed by the lies of the administration.

Overall this gives us a perfect opening for more series investigations into what lead our nation into this endless war. It's time for Congress to ask serious questions to members of the administration - past and present. The lives of almost 4,000 soldiers deserve that little bit of sacrifice from our leaders.

On the web: Check out The War Card. A searchable database of lies this administration told in order to get us into war.

Now They Are Waking Up?

This is politics at it's worse. While the GOP has accused Democrats of playing politics with the lives of soldiers, it is evident they are the ones who were playing the games:

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bushâ€™s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bushâ€™s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the warâ€™s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bushâ€™s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

Oh Rudy!

Looks like you may have some questions to answer to:

Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty today to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller OxyContin.

Federal officials say the company, Purdue Frederick, helped to trigger a nationwide epidemic of addiction to the time-release painkiller by failing to give early warnings that it could be abused.

Prosecutors say "in the process scores died."

Drug Enforcement Administration officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com Giuliani personally met with the head of the DEA when the DEA's drug diversion office began a criminal investigation into the company.

According to the book "Painkiller," by New York Times reporter Barry Meier, both Giuliani and his then-partner Bernard Kerik "were in direct contact with Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of DEA."

He is a typical Republican. And notice his "then-partner" who is listed - Bernard Kerik. There is another crooked person. You think things are bad with the Bush cartel - just pray Rudy don't get elected.