Voter Political Blog

(CNN)  A new national poll suggests that three out of four Americans feel President Bush’s departure from office is coming not a moment too soon.

Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Friday said they’re glad Bush is going; 23 percent indicated they’ll miss him.

“Earlier this year, Bush scored some of the lowest presidential approval ratings we’ve seen in half a century, so it’s understandable that the public is eager for a new president to step in,” said Keating Holland, CNN polling director.

CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider added, “As President Bush prepares to leave office, the American public has a parting thought: Good riddance. At least that’s the way three-quarters feel.”

The portion who say they won’t miss Bush is 24 percentage points higher than the 51 percent who said they wouldn’t miss President Bill Clinton when he left office in January 2001. Forty-five percent of those questioned at that time said they would miss Clinton.

The poll indicates that Bush compares poorly with his presidential predecessors, with 28 percent saying that he’s the worst ever. Forty percent rate Bush’s presidency as poor, and 31 percent say he’s been a good president.

Only a third of those polled said they want Bush to remain active in public life after he leaves the White House. That 33 percent figure is 22 points lower than those in 2001 who wanted Bill Clinton to retain a public role.

“It’s been like a failed marriage,” Schneider said.

Complete article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/26/bush.poll/index.html

Vice President-elect Joe Biden is worried about the “exceedingly high expectations” the world community has for Barack Obama’s presidency.

He believes he and Obama must follow through with action to show how they’re different than George W. Bush, Biden told CNN’s Larry King Monday.

“I have been contacted by so many world leaders. Their expectation for Barack’s presidency is overwhelming,” Biden said. “They are so hungry to have an American leader who they think has a policy that reflects our stated values as well as one they can talk to.”

At the same time, Biden expressed sympathy for Bush over the Baghdad shoe-throwing incident — a day after Biden and Vice President Dick Cheney traded shots on the Sunday shows. “I feel somewhat badly for him,” Biden said. “I think the incident in Iraq was — was unfortunate, that guy throwing the shoes. It was just uncalled for … and I think that President Bush and, unlike Vice President Cheney, is, upon reflection, beginning to acknowledge some of the serious, if not mistakes, misjudgments that he made.”

Still, Biden made clear Obama must make a clean break with Bush polices past, starting with shutting down the U.S. camp at Guantanamo Bay, Biden said. He said Greg Craig, Obama’s incoming White House counsel, and other members of Obama’s team are working on a strategy for closing Gitmo.

“We’re in the process of drawing up plans right now,” Biden said. “It’s going to be complicated to do it. It’s going to take more than a few months. But close it we must.”

But Biden also signaled that there might be some flexibility in another key Obama campaign promise that world leaders are watching closely: bringing home troops from Iraq. Biden said troops would be out “within the next two years” — longer than President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign promise of within 16 months but “in the same ballpark,” Biden said.

He said Obama would have troops out more quickly than the Bush administration’s agreement with the Iraqi government, which calls for troop withdrawal by 2011.

In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate—nearly a quarter of those polled in this week’s CNN poll rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and 41 percent as “poor”—Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all.

And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold the economic meltdown, or his office’s fabrication of the false reasons for invading Iraq, has ever been seriously investigated, because of White House stonewalling. Nor will the new president, committed as he is to nonpartisanship, be likely to open up Cheney’s can of worms.

Cheney has even had a pass on torture, the “enhanced interrogation” policy that he initiated in his first months in office. “Was it torture? I don’t believe it was torture,” he told The Washington Times on Monday, a week after the release of a unanimous Senate report concluding that the policies Cheney initiated indeed were responsible for torture. In fact, the Senate committee concluded that the model for the Cheney-Bush interrogation policy was the torture practices of the Chinese communists during the Korean War. But it’s not torture when the U.S. president does it, according to the legal judgments that Cheney’s chief counsel, David Addington, pushed through the administration.

Fortunately, Cheney’s view of the unquestioned unitary power of the presidency was scorned by Vice President-elect Joe Biden: “His notion of a unitary executive” Biden said, “meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power, you know, goes to the executive I think is dead wrong.”

With Biden occupying Cheney’s old office and presumably his secret bunkers as well, maybe we will, at last, learn a bit more of the nefarious truth about the man. One place to start is with the statement of retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff and who stated unequivocally that Cheney was the primary author of the torture policy: “There’s no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated—in the vice president of the United States’ office.”

That lame-duck Cheney was bellowing his claim of innocence in a series of friendly interviews should have been expected. For he, like the president he served, can use the self-proclaimed “global war on terror” as a convenient cover for eight years of treachery on all fronts: “If you think about what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, what FDR did during World War II; they went far beyond anything we’ve done in a global war on terror.”

Actually, neither of those presidents authorized the waterboarding of prisoners or the other explicit acts of torture approved by this administration largely under the vice president’s direction. But the true absurdity of Cheney’s self-defense is in placing the nebulous war on terror at the same level of threat as the civil war that tore apart this country or the Nazi military machine that rumbled unstoppable across most of Europe, augmented by the military might of Japan.

The invocation of a “global war on terror” is a big-lie propaganda device that has no grounding in reality. The proof that “terrorism” does not exist as an enemy identifiable by commonality of structure, purpose and leadership comparable to the World War II Axis or the Confederacy can be found in its use as a target to justify the invasion of Iraq. An invasion billed as a response to the 9/11 attacks, which had nothing to do with Iraq.

The Bush administration, with Cheney in the lead, did not so much fight the danger of terrorism as exploit it for partisan political purpose. The record is quite clear that the administration was asleep at the switch before 9/11, blithely ignoring stark warnings of an impending attack. But the hoary warmongering after 9/11 afforded a convenient distraction from the economic problems at home. As I asked in a column on June 26, 2002: “Has the war on terrorism become the modern equivalent of the Roman circus, drawing the people’s attention away from the failures of those who rule them? Corporate America is a shambles because deregulation, the mantra of our president and his party, has proved to be a license to steal.”

That is the true legacy of Dick Cheney and the president he ill-served.

Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig and author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

Source: http://sudhan.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/7504/

President Bush yanked back his pardon of convicted Brooklyn housing scammer Isaac Toussie on Wednesday after red-faced White House officials said it was approved too fast.

The stunning about-face came after the Daily News reported that Toussie’s father, Robert, gave $28,500 to the Republican National Committee earlier this year - and recounted the outrage and pain of homebuyers who said they were fleeced by the father-and-son developers.

The News also learned that Toussie’s bid got help from a politically wired former Bear Stearns executive - and asked the White House to explain why the pardon process bypassed the usual Justice Department vetting channels.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Bush’s change of heart was “based on information that has subsequently come to light,” including the extent and nature of Toussie’s crimes.

She added that neither White House counsel Fred Fielding - who approved the pardon - nor Bush had known about the RNC donation by Robert Toussie and admitted that it “might create an appearance of impropriety.”

A source who was ­closely involv­ed in pardons for two administra­tions said Bush’s flip-flop was unprecedented.

“I don’t know of any case in which the President said, ‘Oops, I changed my mind,’” the lawyer said.

The pardon request has been shuffled off to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney for review, where the chances of it being reinstated seem doubtful.

Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said earlier that Toussie was ineligible for review there because “under DOJ clemency requirements, five years had not expired since his imprisonment had ended.”

A Toussie lawyer, Bradford Beren­son, said his client “remains confident that the pardon attorney will agree with the President and the White House counsel.” Berenson formerly served in the counsel’s office.

Peter Seidman, a Milberg LLP lawyer who represents 460 victims who filed a federal lawsuit against the developer, hailed Bush’s change of heart.

“I’m glad someone woke up and saw that a pardon of Isaac Toussie would be a travesty of justice,” he said.

Toussie, 36, pleaded guilty to mail fraud and lying to the Department of Housing and ­Urban Development, falsifying the finances of prospective homebuyers seeking HUD mortgages. He served five months in prison, and his supervised probation ended early in 2006.

Stymied at the Justice Department, Toussie’s lawyers from the Washington power law firm Sidley Austin moved on to the White House counsel’s office. The approval bypassed Attorney General Michael Mukasey and U.S. Pardon Attorney Ronald Rod­gers, who would normally sign off.

Bush’s staff lawyers said they didn’t know about the RNC donation, or that Toussie had duped hundreds of struggling blacks and Latinos into buying overpriced dumps on Long Island.

“The real question is how did his name end up on the pardon list in the first place?” snapped Naomi Seligman, deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Word of Bush’s reversal came late in the day as The News was set to report that three Toussie family friends were “affiants” who vouched for him in writing, including GOP donor Robert Steinberg of Greenwich, Conn.

Steinberg was a senior managing director at Bear Stearns before it collapsed in March.

The same page of campaign finance records that lists Robert Toussie’s dona­tion also show a Robert Steinberg giving $30,800 to the RNC and the John McCain campaign on the same day.

Steinberg and his wife, Suzanne, also gave a total of $9,200 to Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

“I don’t know why [the pardon] would be controversial,” Steinberg scoffed in a call from his oceanfront winter retreat in Highland Beach, Fla.

Steinberg is a “good friend of the family” and was Robert Toussie’s college roommate, said Isaac Toussie lawyer Henry Mazurek.

Source: http://gangbox.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/long-island-real-estate-scammer-buys-then-loses-presidential-pardonissac-toussie-was-one-of-the-worst-sub-prime-mortgage-hustlers-in-the-new-york-city-area/

WASHINGTON — A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. It’s the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.
President Bush falls to a distant second after seven years as the most-admired man.

Hillary Rodham Clinton leads the list of most-admired woman, a spot she’s held for 13 of the past 16 years — as first lady, then New York senator and now Obama’s designate for secretary of State. A newcomer is second: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who wasn’t well-known nationally until Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose her as his running mate in August.

The findings, a snapshot of public opinion at the end of a tumultuous year, reflect soaring expectations for an incoming president who will take over daunting economic challenges on Jan. 20.

“Things are down so much at the end of 2008 and the end of Bush’s administration … and Obama represents a new beginning and some hope and anticipation that things can get better,” says James McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and editor of ‘To the Best of My Ability:’ The American Presidents.

That could be a “two-edged sword,” McPherson adds. “High hopes are bound to be disappointed in some degree,” he says, “but it also gives him a honeymoon period which is one of real opportunity for him to try to get things done because he’ll have a lot of support and a lot of good will.”

One-third of Americans call Obama their first or second choice for most-admired man. The only higher support for a man in the history of the survey was Bush’s 39% rating in 2001, months after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The survey of 1,008 adults, taken by landline and cellphone Dec. 12-14, has an error margin of +/—3 percentage points.

Among women, Michelle Obama is rated fifth, following talk-show host Oprah Winfrey at third and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at fourth.

Among men, McCain is ranked third and three others tie for fourth: Pope Benedict XVI, the Rev. Billy Graham and former president Bill Clinton.

Obama’s rise is matched by Bush’s decline. The president’s support has ebbed nearly every year since 2001, falling to 5% this year.

That matches the presidential low point reached by Harry Truman in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower scored first that year, the only other time a president-elect has led the list since Gallup began asking the question in 1948.

Source: http://www.modernghana.com/news/196505/1/obama-is-man-americans-admire-most.html