Tag: George W. Bush

Kennedy is also one of the "Felonious Five" who installed George W. Bush in the White House. They got the nickname "Felonious Five" from Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Charles Manson away for life. See his essay None Dare Call It Treason in The Nation, January 18, 2001. It begins: In the December 12 [2000] ruling by the US Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law. If you doubt this, try to imagine Al Gore's and George Bush's roles being reversed and ask yourself if you can conceive of Justice Antonin Scalia and his four conservative brethren issuing an emergency order on December 9 stopping the counting of ballots (at a time when Gore's lead had shrunk to 154 votes) on the grounds that if it continued, Gore could suffer "irreparable harm," and then subsequently, on December 12, bequeathing the election to Gore on equal protection grounds. If you can, then I suppose you can also imagine seeing a man jumping away from his own shadow, Frenchmen no longer drinking wine. This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 63%. (I'm a bot) Donald Trump spoke those words to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, shortly after ending his first speech to a joint session of Congress in February of 2017 according to a New York Times report that was published on Thursday evening. The connections between Kennedy and Trump, per the New York Times report are surprisingly deep, given the president's general lack of DC experience-and Trump and his allies exploited them to perfection, encouraging the swing justice to retire before the 2018 midterms, which could return control of the Senate back to Democrats. As this new report details, these ties coincided with "a quiet campaign" to ensure Kennedy's retirement and give Trump a chance to fill a spot on the Supreme Court.

While the president has falsely claimed that he has no choice on breaking up families because of a law passed by Democrats, Bush laid the blame squarely on the president's policies — namely, the Department of Justice’s "zero tolerance" policy with which it began. On Friday, Department of Homeland Security officials told reporters that 1,995 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period, from April 19 to May 31. In her op-ed article, Bush appealed to Americans’ sense of morality and painted the policy as a dark stain on the nation’s history that she compared to the HIV/AIDS crisis and Japanese internment. "These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned," she wrote. Rosalynn Carter called the policy of separating families "disgraceful and a shame to our country." Michelle Obama also weighed in to support Bush. The current first lady, Melania Trump, commented over the weekend on what's happening at the border, pushing for bipartisan cooperation to end the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border. "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform," according to a statement from her spokeswoman. "She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart."

So it kills me when scientists and science journalists fret that science is “broken.” I’m not disputing that science has its troubles. Science is a learning machine. There, at a conference session on gene editing and a luncheon hosted by the AAAS program on science, ethics, and religion, I reconnected with ethicists I’d met during the stem-cell wars of the George W. Bush years. But science had. In a session on “generation of human organs in livestock animals,” researchers described their work on “human-porcine chimeric embryos.” Yes, that’s a cross between a human and a pig—though the human cells, when properly controlled, form just one nonbrain organ or another. But Rogalski questioned whether women were more likely to be high-functioning or just more likely to volunteer for the study. Evolution also turns out to be complex in other ways: Animals can switch from predator to prey mode, depending on environmental cues, and this gear-shifting can be chemically triggered in the lab. But many solutions to what’s wrong in science, and in the rest of the world, can also be found in basic scientific principles. If you increase mental plasticity, one speaker observed, you can destabilize the brain. At lunch in Austin, I found myself sitting across from Nicanor Austriaco, a bioethicist I had met 13 years ago at a Vatican conference in Rome.

A photo taken at the funeral showed George W. Bush with one arm around his wife Laura, and his other arm around Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama stood next to Melania Trump, with a beaming Barack Obama next to his wife. [T]he funeral was a welcome respite from the current alley cat brawl.” Brokaw’s words about Mrs. Bush are welcome and empathetic. Donald Trump has championed a particularly toxic brand of bullying masquerading as politics, and most Republicans — especially those in elected office — have signed on for the ride. A 2017 Trump campaign ad used precisely that word to describe Democrats and others who don’t agree with the president. When Democrats didn’t stand and applaud Trump during his State of the Union address earlier this year, Trump denounced them as “un-American” and even “treasonous.” This is not part of the ordinary business of American politics. As Greg Sargent notes, “Republicans embroiled in tough primaries are increasingly emulating President Trump” — including by calling for “imprisoning [Trump’s] political opponents.” For example, Don Blankenship, a Republican senate hopeful in West Virginia and former CEO of Massey Energy, has a campaign ad declaring that “We don’t need to investigate our president. What if he stood with Obama, Colin Powell, Madeline Albright, and other prominent Republicans and Democrats to reject Trump’s bullying, authoritarian tactics? Americans may well be hungry for bipartisanship. Seeing Bush, Obama, and others jointly denounce the idea of calling for the jailing of political opponents could be a great way to respond.

Trump has engaged his power three times already. The lawyer for recently pardoned Scooter Libby said pardons like the one for her client make the President happy and give him "a thrill." Pardon 1: Joe Arpaio, controversial sheriff, immigration hardliner, birther Trump rewarded a political backer and criticized the justice system as making a mistake when he pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in August, sparing his longtime supporter a jail sentence for criminal contempt during Arpaio's time in office. Arpaio's specific crime was ignoring a court order to stop profiling Latinos. Trump spent much of 2016 saying Hillary Clinton should be in jail, but he gave Kristian Saucier a free pass. Trump has specifically used the case of Saucier, as recently as January, to call on his own Justice Department to go after Clinton. What might have further thrilled Trump about pardoning Libby is that he did it just days before James Comey's book was released -- the former FBI director was the man who authorized the special counsel in that case. Beyond breaking the seal on the pardon power much earlier in his presidency, publicly teasing them before carrying through, and so far using them for very political ends, Trump's pardons are also different because they have occurred one at a time. The idea of Trump doing something that neither Bush nor Obama would and being on the right side of a horrible law can't hurt Johnson's prospects. Political pardons are nothing new.

We look back at the life of former first lady Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush: What’s the matter with Americans? President George W. Bush: Yes. There was a lot of psychobabble about my relationship with my parents during the presidency, and it’s natural, because people haven’t had a chance to ask many presidents, what it’s like to be president with your father being a former president and mother a former first lady? President George W. Bush: I did, yes. I look out in the pews, and there is the president’s parents, you know, President George Bush, Barbara Bush. Judy Woodruff: And you have told us that you went on to have a great friendship with them. Bonnie Steinroeder: It was a huge part of her life and of President Bush’s life as well. You could see it in the motivation that they felt to help other people, to be good people, to be kind, to be generous. And I do think that’s probably what helped her at the end of her life to have that sense of peace, because we had talked a long, long time ago about her beliefs that she knew she would be reunited with the people she loved who had gone before her.

The Story:  On April 13, 2018, President Donald Trump pardoned I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, a man convicted in 2007 in connection with the leak of...

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum led tributes to former first lady Barbara Bush Sunday after a spokesman announced the 92-year-old was in "failing health." The official @GOP Twitter account tweeted: "Our entire RNC family offers prayers of comfort and peace for Barbara Bush and the entire Bush family." White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, "The President's and First Lady's prayers are with all of the Bush Family during this time." Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tweeted Sunday that Bush is "a woman of great faith, great strength, and an unwavering love of country. "Our country is better because of former First Lady Barbara Bush," Haley added. Former Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, now the permanent U.S. representative to NATO, described Bush as "one of America's most-loved women." "Barbara Bush has a character that is as big, inspiring and iconic as Texas," the state's governor, Greg Abbott, said in a statement. Rep. Sean Maloney, D-N.Y., paid tribute to Bush as "a graceful First Lady who has dedicated her life to improving education and promoting literacy", while Maryland Gov. Ohio Gov. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said he was "praying" for Bush and her family and called her "a special woman, whose great faith and love for her country inspires us all."

Former first lady Barbara Bush is in failing health, a source close to the Bush family tells CNN's Jamie Gangel. At 92 years old, Bush has been suffering for some time and has been in and out of the hospital…

President Donald Trump on Friday pardoned former Vice President Dick Cheney’s onetime Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. President George W. Bush had already been accused of showing favoritism to someone within his administration when he commuted Libby’s sentence, which saved Libby from serving two-and-a-half-years in jail. But pardons go further, restoring some rights that are usually revoked for those with criminal convictions as well as reducing the stigma that comes with the offense. That’s what Cheney wanted for his former aide. But Bush thought Libby didn’t deserve a pardon, and Cheney never forgave him. Here’s why, as TIME explained in its Aug. 3, 2009, cover story on the feud: Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by senior White House officials. A top adviser to Bush says he had never seen the Vice President focused so single-mindedly on anything over two terms. It reveals how one question–whether to grant a presidential pardon to a top vice-presidential aide–strained the bonds between Bush and his deputy and closest counselor. As a Cheney confidant puts it, the Vice President believed he and the President could claim the war on terrorism as his greatest legacy only if they defended at all costs the men and women who fought in the trenches.