Seems like this administration is breaking new ground everywhere.
I’ve posted this under disloyalty because these people aren’t helping President Bush. I only wish that he could see what the people around him are doing.

White House aides have conducted at least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush administration’s top diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008 and a “general political briefing” at the Peace Corps headquarters after the 2002 midterm elections.

The briefings, mostly run by Rove’s deputies at the White House political affairs office, began in early 2001 and included detailed analyses for senior officials of the political landscape surrounding critical congressional and gubernatorial races, according to documents obtained by the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
The documents show for the first time how the White House sought to ensure that even its appointees involved in foreign policy were kept attuned to the administration’s election goals. Such briefings occurred semi-regularly over the past six years for staffers dealing with domestic policy, White House officials have previously acknowledged.

In one instance, State Department aides attended a White House meeting at which political officials examined the 55 most critical House races for 2002 and the media markets most critical to battleground states for President Bush’s reelection fight in 2004, according to documents the department provided to the Senate committee.

On Jan. 4, just after the 2006 elections tossed the Republicans out of congressional power, Rove met at the White House with six U.S. ambassadors to key European missions and the consul general to Bermuda while the diplomats were in Washington for a State Department conference.

According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on “corrupt” GOP lawmakers and “complacent incumbents.” One chart in Taylor’s presentation highlighted the GOP’s top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.

Story

Instead of doing the Constitutional thing and voting to defund the war Congress has decided to let our soldiers die by a thousand cuts.

The Democrats still want to tie supplemental funding to withdrawal dates while knowing the president will veto it. This time we have waivable timelines, whatever their definition of “waivable” is.

We are over 100 days from the president’s request for supplemental funding and we haven’t made any progress on it whatsoever.

We are way past the critical point and I feel so bad for the soldiers who put their lives at risk every day and this is the thanks they get.

Negotiations for emergency war funds stalled as soon as they began yesterday, with both the White House and the Democrat-led Congress immediately rejecting the other’s modest concessions.

After emerging from an hourlong Capitol Hill meeting, President Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, said the Democrats’ offer of waivable timelines for withdrawing troops from Iraq were unacceptable.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the White House’s proposal of policy benchmarks, backed up by the threat of cutting off aid to Iraq, was too weak.

The Democratic leaders, who say they will continue to push for an end to the war in Iraq, plan to draft a funding bill over the weekend and pass it by the end of next week, before Congress takes a weeklong Memorial Day break beginning May 28.

“Whether [the president] vetoes the bill or not is up to him,” said Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat. “We have a responsibility to the American people, and we’re going to live up to that every minute of the next week.”

Mr. Bush vetoed the $124 billion bill Congress sent him last month because it included a pullout timetable, and he has made it clear he will veto any measure that restricts funds or dictates military strategy.

“Whether waivable or not, timelines send exactly the wrong signal to our adversaries, to our allies and, most importantly, to the troops in the field,” Mr. Bolten said. “The president is the one who has the authority to act as commander in chief. He needs to be the one making those decisions.”

The Republican National Committee released internal poll results yesterday that showed the majority of voters siding with Mr. Bush in the funding standoff, though the country remains deeply divided over the war.

About 60 percent say war funds should not come with a pullout timetable, and 32 percent say Congress should withhold funds until the president agrees to a withdrawal schedule, according to the poll. It also showed that 56 percent of voters say that setting a withdrawal date lets the enemy know when they can win.

But both sides vowed to stand firm in the tussle over $100 billion to pay for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan until the end of the fiscal year.

I’m tired of the same old rhetoric and I’m sick of our soldiers having to bend over and get a kick in the pants from their own government.

This is not a large blog and probably never will be, but we have many people who visit every day and don’t make comments.

I’m asking you to contact your Congressman on Monday and tell him or her it’s time to get a bill through that can be passed for the sake of our troops who didn’t ask to be in this situation.

If you don’t know the name or telephone number of your Congressman go here.

You can find information on how to contact your senators here, and you can find contact information for the White House switchboard here.

Everyone claims to support the troops. Now let’s see some action and stop with the lip service.

And if you want to show some personal support for the troops go here and give a couple of $25 donations to make a soldier’s life a little more pleasant. So you give up a couple of meals out. It will be worth it.

If you give to the USO you probably will want to know what your gift will do. Check the FAQs as the link I gave you is only from the receipt of what I sent and not the original information.

One question you will probably have is asked and answered here:

What items are included in the packages?

Generally, the care package contains, at a minimum, one prepaid international calling card, a disposable camera, toiletries, sunscreen and a generic message of support from the sender. Other items that are donated from manufacturers are included so that the maximum weight of each package is approximately 2 lbs. The retail value of each package generally is between $50 and $75.

When the whole story of Wolfowitz and his girlfriend came up he said he had run it by the powers that be and no one objected.

Even if that’s true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, he let down the president he serves by not resigning immediately and waiting until he could get a monetary deal to leave.

Now Mr. Wolfowitz has has made his deal to leave by June 30 and who knows how much the pie had to be sweetened to get him out of there?

President Bush is loyal to a fault and Wolfowitz and others have taken advantage of that loyalty. The problem is they don’t show that loyalty to the president in return.

Look at Gonzales. If he had any loyalty to the president he would have resigned instead of making up more and more stories about the US Attorney firings, dripping pieces of information like a leaky water faucet at each hearing.

There’s no crime in firing the US Attorneys for any reason, but Gonzales wouldn’t come out and tell the whole truth at one time, but instead stonewalled, and has made this story have legs when it never should have.

He has also not served the president well by pushing for prosecutions of border patrol agents doing their jobs instead of prosecuting the law-breakers.

President Bush kept George Tenet in as CIA chief as a holdover from the Clinton Administration. Tenet, by his own admission, had more access to President Bush than he ever had with President Clinton, but as soon as he left he started turning the knife in the back of the president. The knife he had obviously already used to stab him.

He won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and gladly accepted it, while he now goes around trying to discredit everything to make it look as though the president were just itching to go to war with Iraq and used Tenet as the excuse.

Loyalty is our president’s biggest problem. He’s loyal to a fault, but those who work for him are looking for ways to disparage him and make a few dollars while they’re at it.

Good riddence to Mr. Wolfowitz, and hopefully the president will tell Mr. Gonzales good-bye too. He’s an embarrassment.