I’m running out of “witty” titles for these things and since it seems like there’s a couple of new ones every day, I figure it’ll be easier for all of us, if we just lump them all together into one thread.
Trouble brewing at the World Bank.
For a mild-mannered and scrupulously polite man, Paul Wolfowitz has a remarkable knack of attracting controversy. There are the minuscule controversies - such as when, in his current incarnation as President of the World Bank, he was seen to have holes in his socks when he took off the mandatory slippers after a visit to a mosque in Turkey earlier this year. Was this handsomely paid international civil servant such a cheapskate that he wouldn’t shell out a few dollars for some new socks?
And now he is in yet more trouble, this time over the promotion and lavish pay rises accorded to his partner, a former senior employee of the Bank. Shaha Riza is a British national of Libyan ancestry who grew up in Saudi Arabia. She and Wolfowitz have been together since his previous marriage broke down in 2001. Indeed, her strong belief in bringing democracy to the Arab world is said to have only strengthened her partner’s determination to confer that boon on Iraq.
Their relationship became public when Wolfowitz succeeded James Wolfensohn at the helm of the Bank in mid-2005. At first he attempted to keep her in her job as communications adviser at the Bank’s Middle East department, even though that was flatly against the ethics rules of the organisation. In the end she was sent to the State Department, but stayed on the World Bank’s payroll. She was promoted and given two rises well above staff norms, bringing her salary to $193,000 (£98,000) - more than Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State.
I’m also starting a pool to see how many pages this thread will grow to until either it gets locked or Bush leaves office, as well as how many scandals will be in it by then. The Doper who comes closest to the actual number without going over wins.
I’m confused already. Is the Bush administration ever-expanding and the scandal imploding, or is the scandal expanding while causing the Bush administration to implode? Or is there an scandal involving implosion within the organization that administers the progress of Bush himself expanding? Because I’m not sure it’s possible for Bush to expand and implode simultaneously.
In any case, put me down for 8 pages and 14 scandals.
Terrifel:
I’m confused already. Is the Bush administration ever-expanding and the scandal imploding, or is the scandal expanding while causing the Bush administration to implode? Or is there an scandal involving implosion within the organization that administers the progress of Bush himself expanding? Because I’m not sure it’s possible for Bush to expand and implode simultaneously.
Actually, the thread’s expanding with the ever growing scandals which show that the Bush Administration’s imploding . Does that make any less sense? Or do you need me to obfuscate it some more for you?
But… wait. If scandals are expanding, as the Administration’s imploding, then couldn’t the expansion cancel out the implosion?
And for the purposes of the pool, which scandals will count toward the total? Do they have to be new ones, as opposed to the ones already circulating?
Yes, but the amount of Hawking radiation released in such a situation would kill us all.
Anything that hits the news from this week on and has been posted to this thread.
White House employees used RNC email accounts to conduct government business.
Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday.
Of the 1,000 White House officials with political duties, 22 - including Karl Rove, the chief political strategist - have Republican National Committee accounts that are supposed to be used only for campaign-related work, but recent revelations that some officials have used those accounts for Bush administration business, including discussions of a plan to dismiss United States attorneys,has prompted a Congressional investigation.
On Wednesday, Scott Stanzel, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration had recently begun its own inquiry, and had concluded that its policy governing political e-mail accounts was unclear, that the White House was not aggressive enough in monitoring political e-mail and that some people who had the accounts did not follow the policy closely enough.
Be fair. There are days when no scandals come out. Think about those days. They are getting rarer.
Abstinence only edumacation doesn’t work.
Students who participated in sexual-abstinence education programs partially funded by the federal government were just as likely to have sex, and had the same number of sexual partners, as those who did not take part in the programs, a federally mandated report said today.
Both groups of youths—those who participated in abstinence education, and those who participated in other health education programs available in their areas—had a median age of first intercourse of 14 years and 9 months.
However, those students who participated in the abstinence programs were just as likely to use contraception as those who did not. Some critics of abstinence education programs have argued that they reduce rates of contraception usage.
The Administration has had a big push for abstinence only programs, which most folks thought were worthless and now we have proof.
Well, I don’t think Saturdays and Sundays should count.
guizot
April 13, 2007, 9:26pm
11
There are the minuscule controversies - such as when, in his current incarnation as President of the World Bank, he was seen to have holes in his socks when he took off the mandatory slippers after a visit to a mosque in Turkey earlier this year. Was this handsomely paid international civil servant such a cheapskate that he wouldn’t shell out a few dollars for some new socks?
Well, I’ve never admitted it, but I have been know to wear a sock with a hole or two. I’m not handsomely paid, but that’s not why. Buying socks is just not a top priority to me, even when I obviously need new ones. I sometimes just choose the only two that match. If I were President of the World Bank, I’d probably be thinking of something else as I put my shoes on in the morning. (Though I wonder exactly what he thinks.)
RE: implosion/expansion … does this have anything to do with the GQ thread about red/blue shifts?
Wile_E
April 13, 2007, 9:58pm
13
Well …
Hate and intolerance never gets anyone anywhere. You end of imploding in it.
guizot:
Well, I’ve never admitted it, but I have been know to wear a sock with a hole or two. I’m not handsomely paid, but that’s not why. Buying socks is just not a top priority to me, even when I obviously need new ones. I sometimes just choose the only two that match. If I were President of the World Bank, I’d probably be thinking of something else as I put my shoes on in the morning. (Though I wonder exactly what he thinks.)
Buy your socks in quantity and all the same color. A bunch of black socks and the white for athletic. Matching should not be a prob.
LouisB
April 14, 2007, 4:28pm
15
I think this is at least the second such study although I can’t provide a cite for it. It is money down the rat hole and it is just one more illustration that this administration is completely hypocritical and inept.
Actually, it’s completely hypo-thetical and inept.
They operate entirely on a whole bunch of whacko political and religious beliefs that have virtually no contact with reality.
5 million “official” administration emails are now “missing”. For two years, the technical staff somehow didn’t notice that email messages which, by law, must be preserved, weren’t.
Karl “the Puppet Master” Rove under investigation.
But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.
The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.
Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman’s family rip the spin machine a new one while testifying before Congress.
Tillman’s mother, Mary, and brother Kevin charged that the administration misused Tillman’s death for political purposes. They asked Congress to help them prove it.
Kevin Tillman, sniffling, told the panel that he believes the military knowingly spread a false story of heroism to counter the political heat the administration faced over the Abu Ghraib scandal at roughly the same time.
“Revealing that Pat’s death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster,” Kevin Tillman said. “This freshly manufactured narrative . . . shifted the focus.”
Lynch, who was captured by enemy forces and rescued by U.S. soldiers, said Tuesday that the Pentagon initially described her inaccurately as a “girl Rambo.” In fact, military and Bush administration officials falsified a dramatic version of her battlefield capture and subsequent rescue when the facts were much more mundane, according to her memoir published late in 2003. While officials had portrayed her as fighting hard until her capture, she said she never fired a shot.
Congress supoena’s Condi Rice.
U.S. Democratic lawmakers voted on Wednesday to subpoena Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about administration justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
On a party-line vote of 21-10, the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee directed Rice to appear before the panel next month.
Republicans accused Democrats of a “fishing expedition.” But Democrats said they want Rice to explain what she knew about administration’s warnings, later proven false, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms.
“There was one person in the White House who had primary responsibility to get the intelligence about Iraq right – and that was Secretary Rice who was then President George W. Bush’s national security adviser,” said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat.
George Tenet invokes the “Lee Harvey Oswald” defense in regards to the Iraq war.
Tenet complains that his now-infamous slam dunk'' phrase, used at a 2002 White House meeting, has been misrepresented and used to shift blame to him. Explaining his remark for the first time in an interview taped to air Sunday on CBS' 60 Minutes,‘’ Tenet said he was referring broadly to the case that could be made against Saddam - not the presence of his alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Tenet said the administration misrepresented his comment and used it to shift blame as the debate heated up about the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion. Tenet, who served as CIA chief from 1997 to 2004, called the leak of the remark to journalist Bob Woodward ``the most despicable thing that ever happened’’ to him.
He’s not happy about it, either.
Tenet said the hardest part has been listening to Cheney and others repeat the phrase. “I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. ‘Look at the idiot (who) told us and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous,” he said.
However, he thinks that he’s done a good job.
During the interview, set to air Sunday night, Tenet defends the CIA’s interrogation of high-level terrorists at secret prisons around the world.
“Here’s what I would say to you, to the Congress, to the American people, to the president of the United States: I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots,” he says. “I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us.”