London's Daily Telegraph was horrified by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's action last week to partly nationalize British banks. The action may have calmed global markets, but not the conservative Telegraph. In a piece Friday headlined "We're all socialists now, comrade," the Telegraph's Simon Heffer pondered the risks of socialism and called Brown's move "the Sovietisation of Britain." He predicted that, like all government intervention into free markets, it would inevitably lead to "sclerosis, the suppression of enterprise, the raising of taxes, starvation of investment, lack of innovation, technological retardation and the rise of the power of organized labor."
But Bush didn't sound much more comfortable with the idea than the Telegraph's Heffer. In remarks today in the Rose Garden, Bush, who likes to call himself a free-trader, went out of his way to emphasize that the unprecedented government intervention was temporary.
In fact, during his six-minute speech, the president used the word "temporary" or "short-term" five times.
He praised European leaders for a coordinated plan to provide "temporary government guarantees for bank loans." He called the injection of capital into U.S. banks by purchasing equity shares "an essential short-term measure." He promised that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would "temporarily guarantee most new debt" and "immediately and temporarily expand government insurance." Finally, he said Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and his team would detail the moves, promising:
They will make clear that the government's role will be limited and temporary. And they will make clear that these measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.
Presidential transitions are always momentous. The pagentry is magnificent -- bands play, supporters cheer, Americans look forward in hope. Presidents often leave a note to their successor in the top drawer of the Oval Office desk.
Now President Bush has signed an executive order creating a Presidential Transition Coordinating Council to smooth the transition. He proposes to coordinate with both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain until the election, then work with the winner. As White House press secretary Dana Perino explained, after eight eventful years in office, "Our nation is at war, we are dealing with a financial crisis and we are trying to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks."
The Bush administration had such a reputation for secrecy and self- promotion that I don’t know if they’ll use the Council and these guidelines to control the incoming administration.
Noting that Bill Clinton also ordered up a transition council on Nov. 27, 2000, Light called his "similar but without all the bells and whistles." Among other things, the Bush executive order could keep agencies busy preparing briefing materials and a Transition Directory to include "federal publications and other materials that provide information on each executive department and agency."
Cynics might wonder if the Bush team wants to keep its hands in before the order expires on Feb. 20, 2009, one month after the new president takes office.
Whatever the motives, said Light, one of the presidential candidates will need the help more than the other. "McCain has done almost nothing about the transition," he said, except to criticize Obama for saying in mid-summer that he was appointing a team to begin contingency planning.
McCain accused Obama of being so presumptuous he was picking the curtains in the White House. But Obama was already late. Reagan started in the early spring of 1980, and was up and running for six months before then. It's the responsible thing to do.
He's an American kid from Stow, Ohio, son of immigrants from India, and he started out in life to be an engineer.
Now the 35-year-old Neel Kashkari, assistant secretary of Treasury for international economics and development, has been named to oversee the Bush administration's $700-billion effort to rescue the U.S. financial services sector and oh yeah the rest of the global economy. His official title: Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability. His nickname: bailout czar.
Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker in San Francisco, is by his own description a "free-market Republican." Before his career in finance, Kashkari developed technology for NASA space missions while at TRW in Redondo Beach. Seen here juggling coat jacket, soda can and memo pad as he shuttles to the Dirksen Senate Office Building to win congressional support for the rescue plan, Kashkari was one of the original architects of the bailout plan.
There's no one tool that's going to solve all of our problems. ... We need to enable the necessary correction to move forward as quickly as possible. We're having a necessary correction, and we don't want to do anything to slow it down. We need to get through it.
Just six years from getting his MBA at the Wharton School of Economics, Kashkari is by all accounts a fast learner.
"He's a thoughtful leader," said Steve O'Connor, a vice president at the Mortgage Bankers Assn. In an interview with politico.com, O'Connor added: "I'll say this: when we went to meet with him, we needed to be prepared."
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo credit: Lauren Victoria Burke / Associated Press
The House Natural Resources Committee has just announced hearings next week into the latest scandal to grip a federal agency under the Bush administration. Turns out an Interior Department agency in charge of collecting oil and natural gas royalties was compromised for years, investigators said, alleging that employees improperly accepted gifts from oil companies, handed out sweetheart deals, had sex with subordinates and used illegal drugs.
As the Los Angeles Times described it, investigators spent two years examining the cozy relationship between the energy industry and the Minerals Management Service, an obscure Interior Department agency that issues lucrative drilling leases to energy companies and then collects royalties from leases of the land, which is owned by taxpayers.
* Government employees routinely socialized with industry representatives, having drinks and meals and attending golf outings, a ski trip, a Toby Keith concert and other excursions.
* Two employees engaged in "brief sexual relationships" with customers but didn't recuse themselves from handling work involving those companies and officials. One employee said she didn't disclose the contact or consider it improper because "she did not consider a 'one-night stand' to be a personal relationship."
* A former program director with Denver-based Royalty in Kind received more than $30,000 from an industry consulting firm in return for marketing the company to various oil and gas companies doing business with the government agency.
* Royalty in Kind employees routinely allowed energy companies to revise their bids for oil or natural gas after the sale had been awarded to the company. Of 121 amendments reviewed, only three favored the government. The amendments favoring industry were worth about $4.4 million.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said he was "outraged by the immoral behavior, illegal activities and appalling misconduct" and promised "swift action to restore the public trust."
Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, called for the hearings. He called the employees' reported actions "so outlandish that this whole IG report reads like a script from a television miniseries -- and one that cannot air during family viewing time."
With the Bush administration moving the federal government into a multibillion-dollar rescue of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, this question comes up: How does this jibe with President Bush's philosophy of limited government?
"This is not exactly limited government, this takeover," observed CBS News' Jim Axelrod, at White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's daily news briefing today. "....Just in terms of conservative political ideology, how concerned was he about doing something that seems to be sort of the opposite of all of that?"
Well, if Congress had just followed the president's advice back in 2002 or so....
Or, as Perino put it in not-quite-so-blunt a manner, it didn't have to come to this:
President Bush initiated a call years ago to try to reform this system because he did not want the status quo to continue. Unfortunately, Congress didn't act on that. And the systemic risk that was posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to our entire economy was one that the president felt it was more important to deal with now, and start to work on now, so that the next administration would be able to work with the Congress and figure out a way to make sure that this would not be allowed to happen again.
So now it turns out that Alberto R. Gonzales, while attorney general, took home some top secret documents, in violation of Justice Department regs.
Two violations. First, Gonzales kept the documents in a safe in the fifth-floor attorney general's suite, where employees without proper clearances got a chance to look at them. Second, he took some documents -- including handwritten notes about the administration's sensitive surveillance and detainee programs -- to his home in Virginia. There he kept them in his briefcase because he could not remember the combination to his safe, which was not secure enough for the docs anyway.
In fact, in a report issued today, the Justice Department's inspector general said the former attorney general, President Bush's pal, could remember very little:
Gonzales also said he did not recall whether Department or FBI security personnel were unable to open the safe, nor did he recall being asked by anyone for the combination to it. Gonzales also said he did not recall being asked for the combination by his assistant, but stated that he had no reason to dispute that the assistant had indicated that Gonzales did not know the combination. He said it was possible he had forgotten the combination to the safe.
His attorney, George Terwilliger, responded to the inspector general by saying, "Judge Gonzales regrets this lapse." The department decided to scold the former attorney general, not to punish him. And, to be fair, who among us hasn't forgotten the combination to our top secret home safe?
But our question is: What is it with these former officials who think they can just stick things in their briefcase -- or in the case of former Clinton administration national security advisor Sandy Berger, in his socks -- and take them home?
The Bush administration proposed new rules today that critics say would make it more difficult for women to obtain abortions, and for men and women to obtain contraceptives.
After more than a month of internal -- and eventually public -- debate, the administration unveiled regulations that, if enacted, would provide stronger protections for doctors and other healthcare providers to refuse to perform medical procedures -- or, possibly, sell contraceptives -- if such steps violate their religious beliefs.
Jill Morrison, the senior counsel of the National Women's Law Center, told Countdown to Crawford when we reported on the draft regulation in July that it was "essentially a hit list against anything that protects a patient's rights to get access to legal and needed health services" in the area of reproduction.
Publication of the rule in the Federal Register triggered a 30-day public comment period, after which the Bush administration could implement a final rule.
Announcing the proposed regulation today, Mike Leavitt, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said it was "about the legal right of a healthcare professional to practice according to their conscience."
He said:
Doctors and other healthcare providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience. Freedom of expression and action should not be surrendered upon the issuance of a health care degree.
The department said the rule would make it clear that protections against discrimination "apply to institutional healthcare providers as well as to individual employees" whose offices receive certain federal funds.
The department argued that the regulation "would in no way restrict healthcare providers from performing any legal service or procedure" and that patients would be able to obtain the procedure -- an abortion, for example -- from someone who did not assert "a conflict of conscience."
The proposal is certain to face challenge from abortion rights supporters.
Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said: “Women’s ability to manage their own healthcare is at risk of being compromised by politics and ideology."
She said, the Associated Press reported, that the organization was concerned that the regulation posed "a serious threat to women’s healthcare by limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate health information and services."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo of Mike Leavitt in 2006: Kevin Wolf / Associated Press
From his post in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, F. Chase Hutto III has had his hands in a variety of issues.
There was the debate over clean air and global warming. By all accounts, he helped scuttle the course favored by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency for stronger regulations intended to fight emissions of greenhouse gases, as Countdown to Crawford reported a month ago.
There was the time the administration was considering greater restrictions on smog-forming ozone; he opposed them. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rule to protect North Atlantic right whales? The Bush administration is reportedly about to scale it back. Hutto was in deep on that one, too.
His role was tracked by the Washington Post, which reports today that the administration has a new job in mind for him: He will be promoted, the Post reports, from his staff position in Cheney's office to assistant secretary of energy.
The result: One of the most ardent opponents of government regulation within the government would be put in a key decision-making position where global warming policies are set.
Said Jason K. Burnett, who as a deputy associate administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency tangled with Hutto over global warming until leaving the government: "I can't think of a case where Chase advocated more environmental or health protections."
As for placing Hutto in the Energy Department at this late date, the Post, quoting Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes: "In coming months, Hutto could make policy decisions that the next administration would find difficult to reverse quickly."
The proposed rule change was first set out for public comment on July 31, and drew little attention:
As law enforcement agencies, including local and state units, watch for signs of terrorist activity, they could target groups as well as individuals, and begin criminal intelligence investigations "based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists." And they could spread around the law enforcement world the fruits of the investigation.
In short, it would move local police forces into the realm of intelligence-gathering that had been the work of the FBI and other federal agencies.
The proposed shift was noticed by the Washington Post, which reported Saturday that the Justice Department's proposal "would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years."
The newspaper noted that the administration was in the process of revising domestic intelligence-gathering in its waning months in office, and would lock in policies for President Bush's successor, completing the greatest expansion of executive branch authority since the Watergate era.
Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, was quoted by the Post as saying the changes would "catch up with reality," updating rules from the early 1990s to the post-9/11 world.
He said police agencies would still have to demonstrate a "reasonable suspicion" that a target was involved in a crime before collecting intelligence, the paper said.
But, it noted, Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a 16-year veteran of the FBI, said police agencies could misunderstand it as allowing them to collect intelligence "even when no underlying crime is suspected."
He cited as an example an investigation into a charitable donation to a group later designated as a terrorist organization.
It risks turning police officers into "spies on behalf of the federal government," he said.
Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, said he never meant to create a stir over birth control. In proposing a new HHS regulation last month, he said, he only meant to protect the "right of conscience" of federally funded healthcare providers whom he wants spared dismissal because of their objections to birth control or abortion. In a new post on his blog, the secretary said:
An early draft of the regulations found its way into public circulation before it had reached my review. It contained words that lead some to conclude my intent is to deal with the subject of contraceptives, somehow defining them as abortion. Not true.
The Bush administration has consistently supported the unborn. However the issue I asked to be addressed in this regulation is not abortion or contraceptives but the legal right medical practitioners have to practice according to their conscience and patients should be able to choose a doctor who has beliefs like his or hers."
Leavitt added that if the department does now issue a regulation, "it will be focused on the protection of practitioner conscience."
Pro-choice groups weren't buying it.
"Secretary Leavitt's vague comments on the draft HHS rule do nothing to reassure Americans that the administration is not considering redefining abortion to include forms of contraception, thereby jeopardizing women's access to basic healthcare," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The administration needs to stop playing word games with women's health and state clearly they will reject any regulations that will undermine women's access to basic healthcare."
"Bush and his political appointees have a long, long record of attacks on contraception," agreed NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan. "So Secretary Leavitt's claim that the department never intended to target birth control isn't believable."
As Countdown to Crawford and others reported, the proposed regulation stirred up a furious debate, with more than 20,000 letters sent to Congress in opposition. And Keenan promised more to come.
"We will continue to engage our activists and work with leaders in Congress to stop this administration from pushing a last-ditch attack on birth control as Bush prepares to leave the White House," she said, adding, "In the face of growing public outrage over
this attack on birth control, the Bush administration is trying to backtrack."
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
