Julian was the one who pointed out to me that, thanks to 2000 and 2004, Ralph Nader’s legacy has turned from “admirable consumer advocate” to “horse-blindered egomaniac who got Bush elected”.

Sigh.

What if FEMA gave a news conference and nobody came? They’d just make up fake reporters.

The NY Times reports on how the Bush administration violated the Geneva Convention, then changed the rules so they could say they weren’t. Warning: take your anti-nausea medication now.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum…

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

President Bush on Wednesday vetoed legislation expanding a children’s health insurance program by $35 billion over five years.

Bush exercised the veto at 10 a.m. ET before leaving the White House for a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to discuss the federal budget and taxes.

Democrats quickly took to the floor of the House of Representatives to condemn the veto of the bill that received bipartisan support.

“The president has rediscovered his long lost inner fiscally conservative self,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon, in a mocking tone. “After an orgy of borrowing, spending and misspending on many dubious things, his target? Ten million low-income kids.”

…The veto is the fourth of Bush’s presidency. After not using his veto power at all during his first four years, the president has vetoed three other bills in his second term: two on stem-cell research legislation and one on a war funding bill with a Democratic timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Read on at CNN.