George W Bush

Re "Let's take the plunge," Opinion, Dec. 5 Jack Shakely misrepresents the effects of George W. Bush's tax cuts by choosing a questionable ending date for his analysis. His starting point was the date of tax-cut implementation, 2003, and his ending date was late 2012, a period that included the Great Recession that began in 2007. Had Shakely looked at the effects of the tax cuts between 2003 and 2008, he would have found that this period was characterized mostly by economic growth, increases in tax revenue and decreasing budget deficits.

WASHINGTON -- The House has voted to give lifelong Secret Service protection to former presidents and their wives, due to increased national security threats posed post-Sept. 11. The bill passed Wednesday morning by voice vote. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), said in a statement that “the increased mobility and youth” of still-living former presidents added to the necessity of the extension. The measure, which now goes to the Senate, would reverse a 1994 law limiting Secret Service protection to 10 years after a president leaves office.

Just weeks after the election, President Obama has launched a campaign-style drive to gain the upper hand in budget talks with Republicans. How the negotiations play out will provide a much clearer measure of exactly how much clout he gained in winning re-election. Obama's success at the polls was due in no small part to his campaign organization, which is getting well-deserved attention for its sophisticated use of analytics .  (The famously data-driven Mitt Romney, on the other hand, may have been misled by faulty internal numbers, as a recent New Republic article illustrated.)

With the 2012 presidential election over, attention nows turns to the inevitable shuffling of personnel in the Obama administration. Chief among the vacancies will be at the helm of the State Department, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has indicated her intent to retire. After heavy media coverage speculating on the appointment of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, rumors have more recently coalesced around U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the position. Rice's qualifications are difficult to contest.

Former President George H.W. Bush is being treated for bronchitis in Houston's Methodist Hospital, officials there confirmed Thursday. Bush, 88, has been in and out of the Texas Medical Center for treatment and is scheduled to be released within the next 72 hours, his representatives said in a statement. The 41st president is listed in stable condition. The Houston Chronicle reported Bush has been in the hospital for about a week. The former director of the CIA has been known for his vitality in spite of his advanced age. He celebrated his 75th, 80th, and 85th birthdays by going skydiving and joined President Clinton on a humanitarian trip overseas after the 2004 tsunami and visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Second terms have rarely been kind to American presidents. Our last two-term leader, George W. Bush, ended his tenure with a financial crash so disastrous that his own party has tried to erase him from memory. Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, was more successful, but he still spent much of his second term enmeshed in a sex scandal and battling impeachment. Even our greatest modern presidents had rocky second terms: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan are all revered more for what they accomplished in their first four years than for their later acts.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - George W. Bush has been virtually silent during the 2012 election. He offered a public endorsement of Mitt Romney only after being caught by a reporter heading into an elevator, and has been silent about the reams of criticism lobbed his way by Democrats for the economic collapse of 2008. But his brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, wasn't silent on that question Wednesday as he campaigned with Gov. Mitt Romney on Wednesday. “Our country has huge problems, huge problems, structural problems that require people that actually solve problems rather than just talk about it or excuse away why it is that things aren't working,” Jeb Bush said during a rally in Jacksonville on Wednesday evening.

CLEVELAND - President Obama's reelection campaign is invoking Al Gore's narrow loss to George W. Bush in the Florida recount of 2000 to spur voters in battleground states to the polls in a White House race that either side could lose if even a small band of supporters fails to cast ballots. In an ad that began airing in Ohio on Wednesday, Obama's campaign reminds television viewers of the 32-day drama that unfolded when the 2000 presidential election in Florida finished in a near tie. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling stopped the recount, effectively naming Bush the winner of Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.

If you start watching "American Night" at the beginning, or come in somewhere midstream, you might mistake Julian Rosefeldt's film installation for a technically deft piece of collage, a patchwork of snippets appropriated from the cinematic canon. On each of five screens, arranged in a semi-circle at Young Projects, scenes unfurl that look utterly familiar, as if lifted from any number of classic American westerns. There's a lone cowboy on a horse, a tumbleweed rolling through a deserted town, boisterous carousing in a saloon.

Re "Quit blaming Bush," Opinion, Oct. 9 At the end of President George W. Bush's eight-year administration, our economy was in shambles. We were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, the banking system was failing and the automobile industry was collapsing. President Obama was left with huge deficits thanks to the Bush tax cuts, two wars and a new Medicare drug benefit. Though conservatives say the Bush tax cuts boosted economic growth, the under-regulated banks were handing out billions in bad loans.