Please consider that powerhouse senior adviser Karl Rove continues to strengthen his hand politically -- and that the intelligence reorg just doesn't seem to be on his radar, one way or the other. Instead, Rove is revving up to push a series of audacious plans to fundamentally reconfigure the way the government gets and spends money, in a way intended to strengthen the Republican Party's grip on power for decades to come.
A New Team and a Battle Order
Mike Allen writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush plans to overhaul his economic team for the second time in two years and wants to tap some prominent replacements from outside the administration to help sell rewrites of Social Security and the tax laws to Congress and the country, White House aides and advisers said over the weekend.
"Aides said changing four of the five top economic officials -- including the Treasury and Commerce secretaries, with only budget director Joshua B. Bolten likely to remain -- is part of Bush's preparation for sending Congress an ambitious second-term domestic agenda."
Allen writes that while Bush is considering reaching beyond administration loyalists for his domestic team, he will continue dispatching White House staff members to key jobs. "Aides said many other such moves will be announced, because Bush and senior adviser Karl Rove are determined to 'implant their DNA throughout the government,' as one official put it."
And Allen writes that an order of battle has been established.
"Bush aides, who have been debating what parts of his legislative package to send to Capitol Hill first, will start with measures to restrict medical malpractice claims and other lawsuits. Bush will then try to advance his initiative on Social Security, after which will come proposed changes in the tax laws. In the next month or two, Bush plans to name a commission to make recommendations on the tax code that could eliminate some loopholes and even replace the income tax with a sales tax or value-added tax."
Just this morning, Bush announced that he has chosen Carlos Gutierrez, a refugee from Cuba and currently the chief executive of Kellogg Co., to replace Don Evans as secretary of Commerce. ""
paying off the florida constituency with a cuban exile cereal corp dude... suggesting a highly regressive taxation program--the poorest people pay the highest percentages of sales taxes relative to their incomes, or a value added taxation system increases the price of items that are processed more and more, unlike the custom works and services paid for by the wealthy--and so forth. and then of course, privatize Social Security, which translates directly to using mutual stock funds or bond fund portfolios that are subject to, well, let us really be honest here, the blatant corruption rampant in a deregulated financial markets system. What was that figure of jailed Enron and WorldCom executives who were convicted of fraud and corruption?--five out of 34.
