The Tuesday ‘BushWhack’ing

• Congress is placing blame on US passport issues squarely on the shoulders of the State Department as they say that State didn’t do enough to intercept an immense backlog of passport applications before this summer's peak travel season began. The state Department was warned, some say as early as November 2006, that demand was running incredibly high and exceeding projections by 250,000 last November and by 600,000 in January, which was (surprise, surprise) the month that the controversial travel rule took effect that requires Americans to present passports when returning by air from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean. (I refuse to believe that the changes in January can account for the entire backlog, there’s something else at play here and the matter DOES need to be investigated to see exactly what happened…)
• This news should NOT come as a surprise to anyone with a brain… a congressional study has found multiple examples in which the Bush(whacked) Administration has not complied with the requirements of a plethora of new statutes that “President” Bush has asserted many times that he is not necessarily bound by, which would be his “signing statements” where he invokes presidential authority to challenge legislation passed by Congress…(Once again, something comes out that shows that this administration doesn’t give a damn about the laws of society… when will it end and when will they be called on it? Yeah… seeing who we have in DC right now, I’m not gonna hold my breath…)
• The Immigration battle still isn’t over...
• More than eight months after “President” Bush signed a bill that authorized the CIA to start using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorism suspects again, the administration has yet been able to agree on what constitutes “humiliating and degrading treatment”… (well… how about making them work in the Bush White House, that would we pretty humiliating and degrading…)
• And have we mentioned? It’s a well-known fact that the US and Russian still have thousands of nuclear weapons aimed “at one another.” But the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START for you acronym-lovers) created an “elaborate scheme of inspections, data sharing, advance missile test notifications and satellite surveillance” to monitor them, but that accord expires in December 2009 and the two sides have been trying to re-vise that program. How’s it going you ask, well, you may want to get that bombshelter built because it IS the Bush(whacked) Administration we’re talking about here and, like everything else they do, are trying to cut corners and make it so the US can make changes to the bombs but the Russians can’t. (Now… where did I put that radiation suit??)