Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [139]
* For the complete story, see Pamela Colloff’s “Remembering the Christian Alamo” in the December 2001 Texas Monthly and Chris Womack’s “Taking Deregulation on Faith” in the September 28, 2001, issue of The Texas Observer. The Washington Post’s exceptional religion reporter, Hanna Rosin, also has been following this story since faith-based de-reg got under way in Texas in 1997.
* Readers should know that the late Brother Roloff sued one of the authors of this book for libel in 1975.
* Although President Jimmy Carter was a born-again Christian, who often displayed his faith, he did not base public policy on it. Unless you count emphasizing human rights as specifically Christian.
* There are literal smell tests in Texas courts. In 2001 a federal judge appointed to the bench by the more reasonable George H. W. Bush ruled that a meatpacker’s failure to pass the USDA’s new scientific tests for Salmonella is not a justification to close down the plant—a decision upheld by the Fifth Circuit bench to which George W. Bush named Owen. As federal judge Joe Fish and the Fifth Circuit see it, USDA inspectors can “poke and sniff” to determine if meat is safe to eat. By the time the second Bush administration was up and running, federal case law in Texas had spread to Nebraska. Bush’s USDA was embarrassed by record meat recalls in 2001–2002 and threatened to withdraw government inspectors from an Omaha slaughterhouse that repeatedly failed to meet new standards to protect against bacterial contamination of ground meat. Hamburger meat contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 had been traced to the plant, but a federal judge in Nebraska ruled that the company’s economic interests outweighed the government’s attempts to clean up the plant. Unfortunately that means their economic interests also outweigh the lives of their customers.
* In the name of fair disclosure, readers should know that at the time of writing, one of the two authors of this book has a pending open-records case that has been directly and adversely affected by the opinion Justice Owen wrote in re Georgetown. The district-court judge in the case has cited both Justice Owen’s opinion and the dissent of former Justice Greg Abbott.
* No more of this Bill Clinton/Janet Reno drivel about “openness in government is essential to accountability,” as the president wrote in a 1992 policy statement on the federal Freedom of Information Act. Forget Reno’s October 4, 1992, Freedom of Information Act implementation directive, and her coddling the public with lines like “We must ensure the principle of open government is applied in each and every disclosure and nondisclosure.” And “In determining whether or not to defend a nondisclosure decision, we will apply a presumption of disclosure.”
That soft-headed, open-government sentiment doesn’t stick with hard-asses like Bush, Cheney, and attorney general John Ashcroft. When Ashcroft rescinded Reno’s October 4, 1992, order, he warned the heads of all federal agencies that “any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information. . . . When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records.
* The Pentagon lists one American soldier killed by hostile fire in the eight years of Clinton’s presidency, but another seventy-six are listed as killed by terrorists, presumably including the eighteen who were killed in Somalia.
* Barry Bearak’s famous lede in The New York Times was: “If there