Tag: Bush Administration

A Colorado U.S. District Court judge has granted an extension until Nov. 16 for federal government attorneys trying to reach a settlement with environmental...

An international visa program that for years has allowed ski instructors and other resort workers from Australia, New Zealand, South America and Europe to...

Former Colorado attorney general and Bush administration Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton is being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly brokering a...

Like many in the intelligence community, Tyler Drumheller, a retired chief of CIA operations in Europe, is waiting to see if his former colleagues will be left holding the bag for the Bush administration. As early as Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate acts of torture performed by the CIA as part of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program.

While conservation groups called Wednesday’s federal appeals court decision reinstating the Clinton-era roadless rule a major victory, the state of Colorado contends its own revised rule is still a far more practical way of managing the state’s 4.2 million roadless acres. Mike King, deputy director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, said Wednesday that the 2001 Clinton rule, which provided sweeping protections against road building on nearly 60 million acres of largely undeveloped public lands nationwide, did not take into consideration wildfire mitigation or other critical economic drivers.

Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of murdering abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his Wichita, Kans. church, had a long history of ties to a violent right-wing extremist group, had previously threatened another abortion provider, and had just that week vandalized Tiller’s clinic.
Just as federal law specifically penalizes hate crimes, the law also makes it a federal crime to threaten or commit violence against abortion providers, or to vandalize their clinics. Yet as The Washington Independent revealed last week, the criminal law was not being enforced.

Harris Sherman, director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, is being floated as a possible candidate for a Department of Agriculture undersecretary post that oversees the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources and Conservation Service. But environmental groups are already casting doubt on the possible pick, questioning Sherman’s role in moving Colorado’s controversial roadless rule forward.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Thursday issued a memorandum essentially blocking most development and road building on more than 53 million acres of national forest (4.4 million in Colorado) designated as roadless areas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed an appeal Tuesday in the case of three Denver-area residents who were ejected from a town hall meeting in 2005 by Bush White House staffers and Republican volunteers upset about a "No More Blood For Oil" bumpersticker on their car. A district court judge ruled in November that "the President has a right to exclude from his official, public appearances, all individuals who disagree with his policies," dismissing a lawsuit the ACLU filed on behalf of Leslie Weise and Alex Young, two of The Denver Three.

The New York Times and Sunday morning political talk shows are contorting themselves into linguistically-torturous positions in a feeble attempt to avoid using the word "torture" to describe the immoral and criminal techniques employed at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites against suspected al Qaeda-linked prisoners. Now, Foreign Policy magazine has produced the euphemism-free "ultimate guide to the Bush Administration's journey to the dark side."