But there’s one thing you’d be hard pressed to find mentioned at a Republican debate.
George W. Bush. (Who?)
You’d think the last Republican president — you know, that two-termer who’s been out of the White House a scant three years — might come up with some frequency.
Not so. In fact, Bush is the invisible man of the GOP race, the all-but-forgotten Ghost of Administrations Past. In Harry Potter parlance, He Who Should Not be Named.
According to a Loop analysis of the Republican debates, George W. Bush’s name has come up a pitiful 56 times. That includes mentions by all the candidates in 16 major debates.
President Obama, on the other hand, got 560 name-drops.
But that’s not to say the candidates didn’t have a Republican president at the tip of their tongues.
Ronald Reagan
, who’s been dead for 71
/
2 years and whose White House tenure ended nearly a quarter-century ago, is a favorite topic — surprise, surprise — of the GOP debaters.
They invoked his name 221 times.
To put things in perspective, the year Reagan left office,
Paula Abdul
was a fresh-faced, chart-topping sensation instead of today’s washed-up former “American Idol” judge.
But in the debates, at least, he’s still in fashion.
Don’t feel too bad for Dubya. At least he got more attention than his father, who came up in the debates a mere two times.
Papers, please
Nouri al-Maliki
’s government in Iraq is flexing a bit more.
Seems U.S. government employees traveling to Iraq are being advised that they’re going to need “valid Iraqi visas” to enter the country.
“With the termination of the security agreement between” the Iraqi government and the U.S. military, the department announced Monday, “passports and valid Iraqi visas are required for all government personnel and contractors,” including TCNs, or third-country nationals.
The TCNs include a security force of about 5,000, and thousands more workers who cook, clean and provide medical care and other support services to the Americans there.
Embassy Air-Iraq, the approximately 46-aircraft air service operated by the State Department, “will only board passengers with valid and current passports and visas on flights from Amman or Kuwait City en route to Baghdad,” the notice said.
“This requirement also applies to any passengers on (U.S.) military flights” to international airports in Baghdad, Basra or Erbil, the department advised. Also, the “DOD Common Access Card,” the Pentagon’s ID card, “is no longer valid for entry into or travel within Iraq.”
Ah, the thanks of a grateful nation.
Expatriates? Ex-patriots?
A tax law passed in 2010 and taking effect next year is supposed to recoup taxes owed by citizens abroad who have offshore accounts.
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires U.S. taxpayers with money outside this country to report those assets to the Internal Revenue Service and pay taxes on the earnings. That’s not particularly new.
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