Memnison Journal

I’m just so looking forward to a grownup in the White House.  I think most of us are.

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

Under Bush, OSHA backed off regulating business in a major way, because business might not like for them to support worker safety…and OSHA paid more  GOP-related consultants for doing little.
In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA [...]

From Dick Meyer at NPR on Blago and Made-off:
As audacious as Blagojevich’s political gluttony is, it is easy to find far worse political corruption, much of it perfectly legal: Distorting intelligence to invade Iraq, torturing prisoners, failure to regulate Wall Street, and systematic pork-barrel boondoggling come quickly to mind. If you’re feeling expansive, how about [...]

Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government policies [...]

A commercial real estate attorney speaks up:
Suddenly, and coinciding with the Lehman/Goldman fiasco, the commercial lending markets completely disappeared. Not just a slow down, but a complete and total shut down. Loans for which there were commitments were suddenly pulled. Term loans (most in the development world are for 1-2 years at a time) were [...]

John and Mere were working on the tree on Friday night, with help from Kurt, me and Susan, and  got it up in record time.  A full run of the photos is here, and two of the best are below:

Rumors about a new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
A typical approach has been playing out at the Environmental Protection Agency, where the Obama team is led by Lisa Jackson, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, and Robert Sussman, a former Clinton official and now a lawyer and fellow at the Center [...]

WaPo:
Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration’s most intense scientific and environmental controversies.
The agencies have different mandates — the EPA holds sway over air and water [...]

Joe Klein in Time on Bush’s last months in office:
This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.
The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush’s economic team, but we have [...]

How the Office of Thrift Supervision was gamed by businesses into being a see-no-evil non-regulator of mortgage outfits, and Citigroup got seriously stupid about its operations.  Short version: it didn’t happen overnight, and nobody in management at these companies wanted to deal with anything resembling regulations or reality.   Nobody at the oversight end wanted to [...]

Being a student of American History and Political Science, I’ve noticed something since - oh, 1930.  When some Republicans, the more wingnut sorts, are behind the eight-ball and trying to stir things up, they call the Democrats commies, socialists or commie sympathizers.  And traitors to the realm.
Go back and check out the commentary about FDR, [...]

Political post on McCain’s campaign’s decline; more after the cut.

When was the last time the Republicans won the White House without a candidate named Bush or Nixon on the ticket?  (nod to LJ: gridlore)

Details after the cut.