george bush

One important fact about the 60 Plus Association’s move into the health care debate is that from 1995 through really the end of the Bush administration, its big cause was support for Social Security privatization. It did a lot of blocking and tackling when President Bush pushed for privatization in 2005, and it kept on [...]

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush after the departure of Jack Goldsmith, said this morning that “I personally am not opposed to criminal investigation of my conduct and others during the period in question.” Levin was referring to the period [...]

Among the cases the Supreme Court will consider reviewing in its private meeting tomorrow are two controversial cases arising out of the war on terror. Both question whether the president’s authority over detainees and information about their treatment is absolute, or reviewable by the federal courts.
The first and better-known case involves whether the executive branch [...]

Buried in a profile of the controversial former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo in today’s Washington Post is the casual mention that the Justice Department is no longer representing Yoo to fight a lawsuit filed against him by Jose Padilla. Instead, GOP-connected lawyer and former Bush appellate court nominee Miguel Estrada has stepped into the [...]

In an exclusive interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News, Lakhdar Boumediene said he was “tortured” while wrongly imprisoned for seven and a half years at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial, deprived of sleep for 16 days at a time and physically abused. He eventually went on a hunger strike and was physically force-fed.
While [...]

Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement to a bunch of Stanford students Monday that “by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture” — much repeated, analyzed and discussed all yesterday afternoon, and for good reason (it’s worth watching [...]

On Monday night, the Senate confirmed three nominees to lead key divisions at the Justice Department: Lanny Breuer to lead the Criminal Division; Christine Varney to lead the Antitrust Division, and Tony West to lead the Civil Division. All were confirmed with overwhelming support.
Although the Senate has now confirmed eight of President Obama’s Justice Department [...]

Reports that the Obama administration will appoint the assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Bush administration, Daniel Fried, as a special envoy on the Guantanamo Bay prison suggest the Obama administration is at least trying to deal with the question of what to do with many of the detainees who are not [...]

Following up on my earlier post about whether the Obama Justice Department really ought to be representing John Yoo — the notorious former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer during the Bush administration — Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a professor at Columbia Law School, pointed out to me today that [...]

I’d like to know what Kyle Smith thinks of Will Ferrell’s one-man play about former President George W. Bush. Instead, the New York Post’s writer spends eight of 11 paragraphs moaning about a joke in which Bush/Ferrell’s “moment of silence for the troops” is interrupted by a fake phone ringing.
The problem is, during what turned [...]