Quote:

---

President Bush's senior political adviser Karl Rove said in an interview this week he is proud that the United States used waterboarding in its efforts to prevent terrorist attacks and that the extreme interrogation method is not torture. Speaking to the BBC, Rove also said, however, that reasonable people may disagree about whether it is torture.

"I'm proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying airplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an airplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots," Rove said. "Yes, I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with U.S. law."

When pressed on whether waterboarding is torture, Rove said unequivocally, "No, it's not." He added that "reasonable people can disagree... This isn't something about which we can argue. It is not a situation of black and white."

The BBC asked Rove about an assertion from the former head of MI5, the Britain intelligence service, who said that former President Bush and his advisers were inspired by the Fox television show "24" to pursue a "war on terror."

"That's laughable," Rove said. "I know President Bush, he doesn't watch television much except for sporting events; same with Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld. While Vice President Cheney was a fan of '24,' he is fully capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction."

Rove has made media appearances recently to promote his new book.

---

Quote:

---

torture is either never acceptable, or always acceptable

---

Quote:

---

You're playin his game. He just says more inflammatory things when he's not getting enough attention.

---

Quote:

---

Europe for the most part is becoming very critical on US foreign policy

---

Quote:

---

The Quiet Revolution

There is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for--but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama’s revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

The regulatory agencies, most of which date from one of the three great reform periods (1901–1914, 1932–1938, and 1961–1972) of the last century, were intended to smooth out the rough edges (the “externalities,” in economic jargon) of modern capitalism--from dirty air to dangerous workplaces to defective merchandise to financial corruption. With wide latitude in writing and enforcing regulations, they have been described as a “fourth branch of government.”

That wide latitude could invite abuses of power, but the old-time progressives who fashioned the regulatory state rested their hopes on what could be called “scientific administration.” the agencies, staffed by experts schooled in social and natural science and employing the scientific method in their decision-making, could rise above partisanship and interest-group pressure. Brandeis’s famous concept of states as “laboratories of democracy” comes out of his defense of state regulation of industry and was meant to conjure an image of states basing their regulatory activities on the scientific method. For his part, Croly often made the progressive case for disinterested expertise. The success of the regulatory agencies, he wrote, depended upon “a sufficient popular confidence in the ability of enlightened and trained individuals … and the actual existence for their use of a body of sufficiently authentic social knowledge.”

Many of the last century’s presidents--from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton--subscribed to this progressive ideal of regulation based on expertise. But, beginning in the 1980s and culminating in the presidency of George W. Bush, the notion of scientific administration came under attack from Republicans and their allies. They began to subvert the agencies by bringing in business executives, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists--the very opposite of the impartial experts envisioned by Brandeis and Croly.

Reagan chose Thorne Auchter, the vice president of a construction firm, to head OSHA. Bush appointed a mining company executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and a trucking company executive to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. To lead OSHA, he named Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a longtime foe of the agency who had advised companies on how to block union organization.

Some of the Republican appointees weren’t business types, but ideologues or hacks who were utterly unqualified for their positions. Anne Gorsuch, whom Reagan nominated to head the EPA, was a rising member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was part of a conservative group known as the “House crazies.” Michael Brown, whom Bush appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), had previously been commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

Obama’s regulatory appointments could not be more different--no surprise given that he is the son of two social scientists (one of whom attempted to introduce scientific administration to Kenya) and that he once worked in academia himself. Indeed, the flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal.

For instance, as a replacement for Foulke at OSHA, Obama chose David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University. In 2008, Michaels published a book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, detailing how businesses had delayed regulations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about scientific findings.
To manage the EPA, Obama appointed a slew of highly experienced state environmental officials. (As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies explains, state officials are ideally suited for the EPA because they have firsthand experience in how regulations are enforced and how they work.) Obama’s choice to run the agency was Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Her deputies include the former secretary of the environment in Maryland, as well as the former heads of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Massachusetts Bureau of Resource Protection, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

Meanwhile, Obama chose as his Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Margaret Hamburg, who achieved renown during the 1990s as health commissioner of New York City, where she developed a program for controlling tuberculosis that led to a sharp decline in the disease. Her number two is a former Baltimore health commissioner who, in 2008, was named a public official of the year by Governing magazine. Obama’s director of the National Park Service is a 30-year veteran of the agency--and the first biologist to lead it. And his new director of FEMA is W. Craig Fugate, who performed outstandingly as Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist’s head of emergency management in Florida. Fugate may not know anything about Arabian stallions--but he does know a thing or two about hurricanes.

Republican presidents didn’t just undermine scientific administration by making poor appointments; they also slashed or held down the regulatory agencies’ budgets, forcing them to cut personnel. This was a particular problem in the all-important area of enforcement: If regulatory agencies can’t conduct inspections and enforce rules, it doesn’t matter how tough those rules are. OSHA’s budget fell 13.1 percent in constant dollars during the Reagan years and 6.8 percent during the administration of George W. Bush. As a result, an agency that had employed 2,950 people in 1980 employed just 2,089 in 2008--and the number of compliance officers had declined 35 percent. According to Michael Silverstein of the University of Washington School of Public Health, this meant that a workplace could expect an inspection only once every 88 years.

The story was similar elsewhere. Under George W. Bush, the EPA’s funding dropped 27 percent, while personnel fell 4.2 percent from 2000 to 2008. Personnel at the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for enforcing labor laws, has fallen 41.8 percent over the last 30 years. At the Mine Safety and Health Administration, funding had fallen 5.3 percent and personnel 43.8 percent from 1980 to 2006--when the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia suddenly awakened Congress to the way the Bush administration had crippled the agency.

Now Obama is reversing these trends. Even in the face of the recession, he proposed and got funding increases for numerous regulatory agencies--some of them dramatic. He asked for $10.5 billion for the EPA for 2010--a 34 percent jump over 2009, and the first time in eight years that the budget had increased. He also requested a 19 percent increase in the FDA’s budget, the largest in its history; a 10 percent increase for OSHA, which will allow it to hire 130 new inspectors; and increases of 5 percent, 7 percent, and 9 percent for the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

As Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore argue in a recent book, Retaking Rationality, there is nothing intrinsically illiberal about cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, it can be quite consistent with a progressive faith in social science. In 1973, for instance, a Ralph Nader Study Group used cost-benefit analysis to oppose dam-building in the West. But, in the late ’70s, conservative intellectuals, working through business-funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), promoted cost-benefit analysis as an instrument of deregulation. (The co-editor of the AEI journal Regulation was a law professor named Antonin Scalia.) Nader made a brief attempt to fight back--a Nader Study Group argued in 1979 that the benefits of regulation outweighed the costs--but most defenders of regulation simply condemned cost-benefit analysis outright, leaving the field of battle to the conservatives.

The conservative version of cost-benefit analysis stressed costs rather than benefits and subjected only regulation--not deregulation--to cost-benefit scrutiny. Conservatives also sometimes adopted bizarre formulas for assessing costs and benefits. They assigned less monetary value to improvements or protections in poor communities because the residents were willing (that is, able) to pay less for them, and they used a spurious correlation between a society’s wealth and the health of its citizens to argue that the costs of regulation outweighed the benefits. Under George H.W. Bush, for example, OIRA argued that OSHA regulations on chemical contaminants would end up harming workers more than exposure to chemicals. Wrote James McRae, the acting head of OIRA, “If government regulations force firms out of business or into overseas production, employment of American workers will be reduced, making workers less healthy by reducing their income.”

The upshot of all this--appointing the right people, giving them enough funding, and signaling that the conservative version of cost-benefit analysis will not stand in their way--is that the regulatory agencies are once again able to serve their intended purpose. Already, it is possible to discern signs of progress. In her first year at the EPA, Jackson granted California a waiver to impose tougher greenhouse-gas standards for new automobiles, which the Bush administration had denied. She declared that the EPA would set standards for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. (This means that, if Congress fails to pass cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA could act on its own to regulate carbon emissions.) And she accepted the EPA staff’s recommendations for tougher smog standards--recommendations that had been rebuffed by the previous EPA head. Science, it seems clear, is back in command at the EPA.

At OSHA, the Bush administration, with the support of Republicans in Congress, had repealed the rules governing ergonomic injuries (which account for 30 percent of compensation claims filed by workers). OSHA even eliminated the column in the reports that companies file where such injuries were supposed to be listed. Obama’s OSHA immediately restored the column and is working on a new national regulatory standard for these injuries.

During the Bush years, there was growing evidence that diacetyl, an artificial flavoring used in making popcorn and other food, was causing severe lung illness among workers exposed to it. Foulke refused to take action, declaring the extensive science documenting the link to be “murky.” Moreover, Foulke failed to develop standards governing silica dust--which has also been linked to lung ailments. Obama’s OSHA is moving ahead on both fronts. In October, OSHA also levied its largest fine ever, requiring BP to pay $87 million for a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers in Texas.

The Bush administration steered clear of antitrust prosecution for eight years. Already, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, has sued Intel for restraining trade by attempting to prevent computer makers from using non-Intel chips. At the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Obama-appointed chair, Inez Tenenbaum, has sent a signal that a new day is at hand by fining Mattel $2.3 million for selling toys containing lead and Mega Brands America $1.1 million for improperly reporting a fatality caused by one of its children’s building sets.

Of course, there have been shortcomings in Obama’s approach. Some of his appointments have been less than stellar. Mary Schapiro, selected to head the SEC, was formerly CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which was set up and funded by the investment industry--and she appears at least initially reluctant to challenge the Wall Street culture. After boldly proposing last May to conduct 10,000 unannounced inspections of money managers, she eventually settled in December for only 1,600 inspections.

Yet history rarely moves in leaps and bounds, and, by just about any reasonable standard, Obama’s approach to regulation has been extremely impressive. More worrisome than the criticisms of activists is the possibility that politics may soon intrude. In 1993, Clinton, too, attempted to revive the regulatory agencies by appointing well-qualified personnel and increasing funding. But, after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they managed to cut Clinton’s budget proposals and delay or block the implementation of regulations. If Democrats lose Congress this November, the same thing could happen again. In that case, what has been Obama’s most significant achievement to date would come to naught--and liberals would have yet another reason to despair.

---

Quote:

---

President Obama signed his first bill into law on Thursday, approving equal-pay legislation that he said would “send a clear message that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody.” He affixed his signature to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law named for an Alabama woman who at the end of a 19-year career as a supervisor in a tire factory complained that she had been paid less than men. After a Supreme Court ruling against her, Congress approved the legislation that expands workers’ rights to sue in this kind of case, relaxing the statute of limitations.

“It is fitting that with the very first bill I sign — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — we are upholding one of this nation’s first principles: that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness,” the president said.

He said was signing the bill not only in honor of Ms. Ledbetter — who stood behind him, shaking her head and clasping her hands in seeming disbelief — but in honor of his own grandmother, “who worked in a bank all her life, and even after she hit that glass ceiling, kept getting up again” and for his daughters, “because I want them to grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams.”

---

Quote:

---

Obama signs bill extending kids' health insurance "President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed a bill extending health coverage to 4 million uninsured children, a move he called a first step toward fulfilling a campaign pledge to provide insurance for all Americans."

"'...I refuse to accept that millions of our children fail to reach their full potential because we fail to meet their basic needs. In a decent society, there are certain obligations that are not subject to trade-offs or negotiations, and health care for our children is one of those obligations,' Obama said, signaling he was readying for a fight."

---

Quote:

---

Obama to Rescind Bush Abortion Rule

"...In the final days of the prior administration, President Bush pushed through a rule designed to give health care workers the freedom to refuse to provide services deemed morally repugnant -- possibly including abortion counseling, birth control and sterilization.

"Today, the new management at the Department of Health and Human Services sent the Office of Management and Budget a proposal that would rescind that Bush rule..."

---

Quote:

---

White House Plan Would End Subsidies to Student Lenders

"...The proposal...would end a program that pays government subsidies to private student loan companies. The administration said the shift, which would mean that all federal loans would come directly through the government, would save $4 billion annually and $47.5 billion over the next decade…"

"'...Rather than continuing to subsidize banks, we want to help dramatically more students get more access to more aid,' [Education Secretary] Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. 'Big picture . . . We're going to save about $24 billion dollars over the next five years, and we want to actively invest that money in our students.'"

---

Quote:

---

Obama Takes Aim at Costly Defense Contracts- President Barack Obama said on Wednesday the U.S. government was paying too much for things it did not need and ordered a crackdown on spending "plagued by massive cost overruns and outright fraud."

The Democrat, under fire from Republicans for the $3.5 trillion price tag for his 2010 budget plan, also took aim at predecessor George W. Bush and noted the cost of government contracts had doubled to more than half a trillion dollars over the past eight years.

Obama, who inherited a $1.3 trillion budget deficit when he took office on January 20, said wasteful spending was a problem across the government, but he zeroed in on the defense industry and costly weapons projects hit by "delay after delay."

"The days of giving defense contractors a blank check are over," Obama told reporters in a briefing on his reforms.

He has singled out the ballooning costs of a Lockheed Martin Corp project to build a new presidential helicopter fleet as an example of the procurement process "gone amok."

---