Bush

Call it a Christmas present for gay and lesbian couples. President Bush signed the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008 (WRERA) two days before Christmas. The new law makes it mandatory for businesses to roll over retirement benefits to a same-sex partner in the event of the employee’s death.

As candidates for the 6th Congressional District squared off in St. Cloud on Thursday, Rep. Michele Bachmann tried the John McCain defense — trying to position herself as a maverick who’s bucked the Bush administration. She charged Democratic challenger El Tinklenberg “is more in line with President Bush’s policies than I am,” adding that if Barack Obama is elected president, she’d welcome him to the district. But, look out, Barack: “As a matter of fact, I would put my hand on his shoulder and give him a kiss if he wanted to.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its final report (PDF) today on misstatements by President Bush and members of his administration in the lead up to the Iraq War. The committee contrasted statements by the Bush administration with the intelligence reports at the time. The report’s finding square with what the American public has [...]

It was way back in 1976 — just as Gerald Ford was leaving office and and waves of Republican scandal still lingered, the Cold War was peaking, KISS was still wearing make-up, and Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! was released — that Americans felt this dismal about their own situations, according to a recent Gallup [...]

President Bush must be thanking his dim stars that the Democratic election has become so heated it’s taken precedence over any news about the ongoing Iraq quagmire. In fact, one the biggest Iraq stories in the news this week came only when Bush told reporters he gave up golf because of the Iraq War. [...]

After pursuing Dow Chemical for dioxin contamination near its Michigan-based headquarters, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional administrator for the Midwest has resigned after EPA officials stripped her of her powers and told her to quit or be fired.

Mary Gade became administrator of EPA Region 5, which covers Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and [...]

Today, citizens across the nation will pause in recognition of the five-year anniversary of President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech and then slap their foreheads or simply try to think about something else. Locally, we can reflect on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s address before the conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment’s [...]

During a press conference Tuesday, President Bush once again called on Congress to allow exploratory drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to help reduce gasoline prices and ease America’s dependence of foreign oil. It’s an idea that has been promoted by the president and the oil industry throughout his administration, and continually rejected [...]

In an excellent letter to the editor of the New York Times, Sen. John Edwards calls the paper to task for failing to report on the real human impact of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He takes issue with writer Lawrence Downes for not detailing the real number of casualties. And he rebukes the media [...]

The world’s largest database on reproductive health, Popline, a search engine run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocked any searches for the term “abortion” in response to pressure from Bush administration officials.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” database [...]