HOUSTON - A judge ordered DNA testing to determine whether President Bush's brother Neil fathered a child with another woman while he was married.
Neil Bush's ex-wife, Sharon, requested the tests to defend herself against a defamation lawsuit filed by the other woman's ex-husband.
Sharon Bush testified during the couple's contentious divorce that she heard rumors that her husband had an affair with Maria Andrews and is the father of her 3-year-old son. Andrews and Neil Bush are now engaged.
Andrews' ex-husband, Robert, filed a defamation lawsuit against Sharon Bush in September, saying he is the boy's father.
The DNA testing was ordered by the court on Friday.
Dale Jefferson, Robert Andrews' attorney, said the child will submit a swab in March and he is confident it will prove Robert Andrews' paternity.
Similar testing requested by Sharon Bush during her divorce case was denied because Robert Andrews was not a party to that case.
With such a supremely lousy example of heterosexual marriage as Neil Bush's, it will be difficult for George to argue for anti-homosexual constitutional amendments — with a straight face.
A record-high 375,000 jobless workers will exhaust their unemployment insurance this month and an estimated 2 million workers will find themselves in the same predicament during the first half of the year, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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Congress voted in 2002 to give unemployed workers an additional 13 weeks of benefits and extended the program twice. But it expired just before Christmas. Congressional Republicans said another extension wasn't necessary because the economy was gaining strength and job growth was near at hand.
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The center's report said the 375,000 workers who will draw their last jobless check this month is the highest number for January in the three decades that the statistics have been tracked.
The expiration of jobless benefits "just before Christmas" reveals the moral quality of Republicans who wear their Christianity like a Halloween mask. "Trick and treat," they think to themselves as they redistribute all the candy from those who have less to those who have more.
Bush-haters must remember one thing: it's not just the boy emperor who deserves our wrath. He's just a pretzel-eating, nuclear-mispronouncing symptom. It's his whole party, their congressional toadies, and their ugly-is-pretty financiers that are the cancer.
Regarding that fiscal sucking sound, Nick Confessore at TAPPED makes a related point about Givers and Takers — and the candidates they supported.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States, administration officials said on Wednesday.
The proposal is part of a turnaround for the agency, which was once fighting for its life, attacked by some Republicans as a threat to the nation's moral standards.
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The agency has a budget of $121 million this year, 31 percent lower than its peak of $176 million in 1992. After Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, they cut the agency's budget to slightly less than $100 million, and the budget was essentially flat for five years.
Bush has much interest in the arts as he does in NASA or Mars or AIDS in Africa. None at all.
Rove evidently found a poll saying that people seem to like art ("can you believe what people are actually interested in?" he must be thinking) and he simultaneously learned that Robert Mapplethorpe is dead. Voila! A politically expedient, meaningless presidential pronouncement is born.
No need to think too hard about Bush and the courage of his convictions — he has neither.
Halliburton posted earnings from continuing operations [revenue jumped 63% due to the government-related business in the Middle East], which exclude the asbestos-related items, of $146 million, or 34 cents a share. A year earlier, the company reported a loss from continuing operations of $132 million, or 30 cents a share.
A loss of $132 million transforms into positive earnings of $146 million in just a year. How? One little war is all it took.
Of course, the company still managed to lose nearly a billion dollars anyway because of asbestos-related litigation and the "prepackaged bankruptcy of its DII Industries and Kellogg Brown & Root units."
All of which begs the question — was the war fought not only to restore George H. W. Bush's faulty legacy with respect to Gulf War I, but also Dick Cheney's faulty legacy with respect to his mismanagement of Halliburton?
As we've noted before, Halliburton's and therefore Cheney's financial secrets are safe now that its auditor Arthur Andersen was obliterated under the cover of the Enron scandal.
The Iraqi invasion killed two birds — Hussein ("he tried to kill my dad") and Halliburton's greedy missteps — with one stone, as it were, the stone being the fiscal health of the USA and the lives of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians.
In Bush's and Cheney's minds that's a small price to pay for the ultimate historical legacy of a couple of privileged, secretive, deceitful, incompetent, useless men.
The best story of the night? The one that should unite us all? From the Republican primary results:
Bush 57,670 Kerry 835 Dean 633 Clark 545 Edwards 541
That's over 2,500 registered Republicans who wrote in a Democrat in their ballot.
That's got to scare the shit out of Rove.
There's no hanging-chad ambiguity about it — four percent deliberate write-in votes for Democrats in a Republican primary is a slap in the smirk of the boy emperor.
According to an Associated Press wire story from last November, at least 17 U.S. troops have committed suicide in Iraq, and the actual number is almost certainly higher, prompting demands for answers from family members.
[U.S. activist Carl] Rising-Moore suspects the suicides are the result of the pressures of combat, and lack of control of the situation in the embattled country, where U.S. soldiers have been targeted virtually daily in bomb attacks-deaths have already topped 500.
"For every death you've got 10 times as many injuries," says Rising-Moore. "I've heard 11,000 have been evacuated from illnesses or injuries due to combat."
The French weekly magazine Le Canard Enchaine reports that 1,700 U.S. soldiers have deserted their posts in Iraq, many of them failing to return to military duty after getting permission to go back to the United States. They simply disappear off the radar, and some of them may well be in Canada.
Rising-Moore believes the numbers of suicides will rise as U.S. soldiers returning to the States choose to take their own lives rather than face another tour of duty in Iraq. The so-called "stop-loss" orders to U.S. army duty, extending a soldier's tour beyond his or her contractual agreement, are expected to be expanded to greater numbers of troops. According to reports in the U.S. press, more soldiers due to return from Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several months will not be allowed to retire or otherwise leave the service for 90 days after they return to their home bases, while it's decided whether they'll be reassigned.
Link via xymphora who says, "Bush must be the first American President who served in the military who made a big thing about trying to hide his military records."
As the two couples sat down to dinner, with the officials no longer there, Mrs Blair could not resist an argument. She is a human rights lawyer and turned to the death penalty, a subject on which she has blunt views.
Judicial executions were an immoral violation of human rights, an affront under the US Constitution as much as under European laws to the fundamental principles of justice, she said. This opinion was delivered to a man who as Governor of Texas signed warrants for more than 150 executions.
Mr Blair was reported to have “squirmed”, even though he shares her opposition to the death penalty. The author says that when he asked Mr Blair about the incident during research for the book he looked uncomfortable — all he would say was that Cherie had raised the issue but as far as he was concerned the United States and Britain simply had different systems.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “She has always had a good relationship with President Bush and has of course discussed many issues with him, including capital punishment. The discussions have always been good-natured.”
Stephens also states that later in the evening Mr Bush had been embarrassed by his wife. Laura Bush had made it clear that her views on abortion were a great deal more liberal than his.
Moral indignation; arrogant, rude hypocrite; a known thief; an abusive husband; incapable of loving own wife and own children; incapable of raising own kids. How many times have you heard about him? How many times have you heard about millions like him, who determine how others live, who mold the thoughts others must think, who enact the laws under which others must live? Henry Hyde, Bill Clinton, Gary Bauer, Dan Burton, Tom Delay, Bob Livinston, Bobb Barr, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Baker, Philip Marquardt; purveyors of Christian/American/white morality.
Because not publicized, you are led to believe that they and their depraved ways do not exist.
But of course Neil Bush and his adulterous fiancee Maria Andrews do exist, cavorting in France ("Old Europe," according to Donald Rumsfeld). Presidential brother Neil spends his time in Paris avoiding his wife Sharon Bush and their children when he isn't in Asia sucking stock options and fucking pre-paid prostitutes.
Vice President Dick Cheney defended the U.S.-led Iraq war Monday but did not address mounting criticism over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and his own part in U.S. charges that Iraq had stockpiled them.
"Today the former dictator (of Iraq) sits in captivity; he can no longer harbor and support terrorists, and his long efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction are at an end," Cheney told Italian political and business leaders.
But in his speech in the Italian Senate, he made no mention of earlier U.S. charges that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons -- the heart of the U.S. case for invading the country last March.
At a photo-call later with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Cheney did not answer a reporter who asked whether U.S. intelligence problems were behind the administration's argument that Iraq had unconventional weapons stockpiles.
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Cheney's spokesman declined to comment. Cheney said in a National Public Radio interview last week: "I believe they (the Iraqis) had programs designed to produce weapons of mass destruction. We still don't know the whole extent of what they did have ... it's a tough intelligence problem."
Cheney's sudden silence is quite a contrast with his belligerence a year ago.
Shame about the 519 dead Americans, thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, and hundred of billions of dollars gone from the US Treasury.
The federal deficit will hit a record $477 billion this year and get worse if lawmakers cut taxes or increase spending, the Congressional Budget Office projected Monday in a report sure to become ammunition in the election-year fight over red ink.
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The budget office also estimated that deficits for the decade ending in 2013 would total nearly $2.4 trillion. The August report foresaw deficits totaling $1.4 trillion over 10 years. The added red ink was due in part new costs, such as the prescription-drug benefit created last year.
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The deficit hit $375 billion in 2003, the highest-ever in dollar terms. The previous record was $290 billion in 1992.
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Many analysts say the budget office's deficit projections will probably prove too low -- especially in the long-term -- because they omit expenses the president and Congress are likely to approve.
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The two parties are already fighting over the red ink that has materialized during the Bush years.
The budget's health has taken an abrupt nosedive after four straight years of annual surpluses that ran through 2001. Only last January, the budget office estimated 10-year surpluses -- not deficits -- of $1.3 trillion. And in January 2001, when Mr. Bush took office, the projection was for a decade of black ink totaling $5.6 trillion.
Republicans say Mr. Bush isn't to blame for the turnabout. Analysts say the surpluses have dissolved due to the recession, the tax cuts Mr. Bush pushed through Congress and growing spending for defense, Medicare and other programs.
From a surplus of $5.6 trillion to a deficit of $2.4 trillion. $8 trillion vanished from the US Treasury into thin air entirely on George W. Bush's watch.
The previous record deficit was in 1992 back when his daddy was president, protecting Neil Bush from the S&L regulators.
It's all Barbara's fault — her and her entire family of leeches. Barbara is the matriarch of a dynasty raised to destroy America by fiscal bleeding.
