Why not abolish the Secret Service and let U.A.E. guard the President? Now this would show our Arab allies that we trust them.
I agree. If there’s no problem with letting them hire the longshoremen in our ports, then while we’re at it, let’s put them where they could really do some good.
The White House turned over last week 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Senior aides had sent the emails in the spring of 2003 related to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed during a federal court hearing Friday.
The emails are said to be explosive, and may prove that Cheney played an active role in the effort to discredit Plame Wilson’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence, sources close to the investigation said.
Sources close to the probe said the White House “discovered” the emails two weeks ago and turned them over to Fitzgerald last week. The sources added that the emails could prove that Cheney lied to FBI investigators when he was interviewed about the leak in early 2004. Cheney said that he was unaware of any effort to discredit Wilson or unmask his wife’s undercover status to reporters.
WASHINGTON -- The former chairman of the Sept. 11 commission blasted the offer by a United Arab Emirates company to run operations at six major U.S. seaports, saying it should never have been brokered in the first place.
"It shouldn't have happened, it never should have happened," Thomas Kean said Friday during a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Kean, who also is a past governor of New Jersey, said the quicker the Bush administration can get out of the deal, the better. He also criticized the administration, saying "somebody has a tin ear over there."
"We're in a no-win situation," Kean said, referring to the United Arab Emirates. "There's no question that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from there and money was laundered through there."
WHO could have imagined that, in the post-9/11 world, the United States government would approve a deal giving control over six major American ports to a country with ties to terrorism? But this is exactly what the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has done.
Since 1999, the ports of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities have been operated by a British concern, P & O Ports, which has now been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates. Defenders of the deal are claiming that critics, including the Republican and Democratic leaderships in Congress, are acting reflexively out of some bias against Arabs.
This is simply not true. While the United Arab Emirates is deemed by the Bush administration to be an ally in the war on terrorism, we should all have deep concerns about its links to terrorists. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the emirates, and some of the money for the attacks came from there. It was one of only three countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime. And Dubai was an important transshipment point for the smuggling network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment for making nuclear weapons.
Most terrorism experts agree that the likeliest way for a weapon of mass destruction to be smuggled into our country would be through a port. After all, some 95 percent of all goods from abroad arrive in the United States by sea, and yet only about 6 percent of incoming cargo containers are inspected for security threats.
It is true that at the ports run by the Dubai company, Customs officers would continue to do any inspection of cargo containers and the Coast Guard would remain "in charge" of port security. But, again, very few cargo inspections are conducted. And the Coast Guard merely sets standards that ports are to follow and reviews their security plans. Meeting those standards each day is the job of the port operators: they are responsible for hiring security officers, guarding the cargo and overseeing its unloading.
The administration said the request for U.S. approval of the $6.8 billion ports deal and the UAE contribution were not related.
"There was no connection between the two events," said Adam Ereli, the deputy State Department spokesman.
The U.S. government the money it received from the United Arab Emirates was nearly four times as much as it received from all other countries combined. Other nations, including some in the Middle East, also pledged large contributions but have not yet sent the money.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported.
The Bush administration has approved the takeover of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a deal set to go forward March 2 unless Congress intervenes.
P&O is the parent company of P&O Ports North America, which leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site.
OSHA has not said what the new limit will be. But sources close to the agency have been told to expect a standard that would allow five times more exposure than it had initially proposed -- a shift that would be a victory for the industry, saving it billions of dollars in upgrades and plant closures.
The decades-old "permissible exposure level" is 52 micrograms per cubic meter of air. On the basis of the few large studies done in recent years, advocates sought a new level of 0.25 micrograms. In 2004, OSHA released a proposed limit of 1 microgram.
According to OSHA, the 1 microgram limit would result in two to nine excess deaths in every 1,000 exposed workers over a 45-year lifetime of work. That is more than the one-death-per-1,000 standard the agency aims for but is reasonable, it said, in light of the high costs and technological challenges involved.
OSHA calculated that a less stringent limit of 5 micrograms per cubic meter would result in 10 to 45 excess deaths per 1,000 workers.
[T]he industry conducted a pivotal study that found a fivefold increase in lung cancer deaths from moderate exposures to chromium but never published the results or gave them to OSHA. Company-sponsored scientists later reworked the data in a way that made the risk disappear.
Scientists working for the chromium industry withheld data about the metal's health risks while the industry campaigned to block strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemical, according to a scientific journal report published yesterday.
In 1966, refined sugar, also known as sucrose, held the No. 1 slot, accounting for 86 percent of sweeteners used, according to the USDA. Today, sweeteners made from corn are the leader, racking up $4.5 billion in annual sales and accounting for 55 percent of the sweetener market. That switch largely reflects the steady growth of high-fructose corn syrup, which climbed from zero consumption in 1966 to 62.6 pounds per person in 2001.
Bolstered by government subsidies that have averaged about $4 billion annually since 1995, U.S. production accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's corn output. Every year, the USDA reports, corn farmers dump more than 10 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer onto their fields -- a heavier dose than for any other crop by a factor of nearly three. (Source: Download table 2 from this USDA/Economic Research page.)
This annual cascade of "artificial fertility" (as the farmer and activist Jason McKenney calls it) parches soil of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It crushes biodiversity and makes soils reliant on more fertilizer. According to McKenney, less than a fifth of that nitrogen makes it into corn plants.
The rest leeches into groundwater, feeding algae blooms that smother water-borne life from the northern reaches of the Mississippi River clear down to the Gulf of Mexico, where a dead zone about the size of New Jersey emerges each year, blotting out what was once a robust source of food and jobs, to say nothing of an important marine habitat. As Richard Manning puts it in the winter 2004 American Scholar (unavailable online):
Already, the Dead Zone has seriously damaged what was once a productive fishery, meaning that a high-quality source of low-cost protein is being sacrificed so that a source of low-quality, high-input subsidized protein can blanket the Upper Midwest.
In a sense, by ending up in the Gulf, that fertilizer is coming home: nitrogen-based fertilizer derives from natural gas.
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The real beneficiaries of this twisted system aren't most corn growers; it's the buyers, processing giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. That one-billion-bushel surplus of corn in 2004 exerted enormous downward pressure on corn prices. In 2004, a bushel -- 56 pounds -- of corn brought in $1.95 to the farmer. That's about 3 cents a pound. At that rate, the only way a farm can make any money at all is to scale up as much as possible and then hope for a government check. No wonder mid-sized farms are rapidly going extinct.
Archer Daniels Midland makes a killing off of our cheap-food system; a few mega-farms in the Midwest do OK as well. But for most people, and for the environment, what we get is a government-underwritten disaster.
I can't imagine a better place for greens, social-justice activists, and real-food enthusiasts to unite for change.
Facing unrelenting political and national security concerns, an Arab maritime company offered late last night to delay part of its $6.8 billion deal to take over significant operations at six U.S. ports, after White House aide Karl Rove suggested that President Bush could accept some delay of the deal.
From my friend Norma: With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week.
Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey," died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started.
Shut up. You know it's funny.
Under fire from U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Romney administration yesterday defended its policy of outsourcing state jobs, saying that Massachusetts work formerly done in India is now handled in the United States - albeit in Utah.
Kennedy ripped Romney yesterday for “jumping on the offshoring bandwagon,” while a Romney administration official retorted that only a small number of foreign data entry workers were still crunching Medicaid numbers in India.
“This bandwagon holds a total of 18 people,” said state Health and Human Services spokesman Dick Powers. “And there have been talks about the possibility of moving it back to this country.”
But Powers acknowledged that a larger contract for employees at a food stamp call center has been farmed out to Utah since September. He did not know how many Bay State jobs were being performed in Utah.
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Romney, who is gearing up for a likely presidential run, appears to be backtracking on an earlier push to ship Bay State government work to companies that work overseas. He vetoed in June 2004 a bill that would have blocked outsourcing state jobs.
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting and a written report outlining details of the incident has been destroyed, sources tell Capitol Hill Blue.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with agents and others present at the outing, Cheney appeared drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
BAGHDAD: At least 138 Iraqis, most of them Sunni Arabs, including a number of clerics, were killed in central Iraq on Wednesday and Thursday in the maelstrom of sectarian violence that followed the bombing of one of the country's most sacred Shiite shrines, Iraqi officials said.
Seven American soldiers also died in bombings, the U.S. military said Thursday.
Sunni Arab politicians broke off talks with Shiite and Kurdish leaders over the formation of a new government, saying that the Shiites were encouraging reprisals against Sunnis.
Across Iraq, thousands of Shiites took to the streets in a second day of protests against the attack in Samarra, 95 kilometers, or 60 miles, north of Baghdad, which destroyed the dome of Al Askariya, also known as the Golden Mosque because of its color.
The protests Thursday were mostly peaceful, though Shiites raided several Sunni mosques in Baghdad and set fire to at least two.
In the deadliest attack in the past two days, 47 people returning from a protest on Wednesday were pulled off buses south of Baghdad and shot in their heads, an Interior Ministry official said Thursday.
Tuesday was an apocalyptic day in Iraq. I am not normally exactly sanguine about the situation there. But the atmospherics are very, very bad, in a way that most Western observers will miss.
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.
As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about "foreign operational direction" of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.
The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.
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Under the deal, the government asked Dubai Ports to operate American seaports with existing U.S. managers "to the extent possible." It promised to take "all reasonable steps" to assist the Homeland Security Department, and it pledged to continue participating in security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials.
The administration required Dubai Ports to designate an executive to handle requests from the U.S. government, but it did not specify this person's citizenship.
It said Dubai Ports must retain paperwork "in the normal course of business" but did not specify a time period or require corporate records to be housed in the United States. Outside experts familiar with such agreements said such provisions are routine in other cases.
I don't give shit about the nuances here, nor do most New Yorkers.
To let the UAE run American ports is simply unacceptable.
Why?
Because Bush fucked up airport security on 9/11. His promises to protect the ports are useless.
We'll just get some more excuses when an LNG tanker takes out Baltimore. Ooops my bad isn't really an explanation.
Most New Yorkers don't dwell on 9/11, but when I heard this deal, I said I just don't want to take a chance.
On 9/11, I woke up and was listening to Howard Stern when the first plane hit. I saw the second plane hit live on TV and instantly knew it was Bin Laden.
When I went out later that day, I saw an F-15 flying over Central Park at 2000 feet, armed.
Jen woke up to ashes flooding her then Brooklyn Heights apartment.
So forgive me when I don't take Bush at his word on this. If he's wrong, his cowardly ass is going to fly on Air Force One and Cheney is going to a bunker. We're the ones who live with the mistake.
The UAE has too many links with terror, and I don't give a flying fuck how many white men in suits they send to cover for them. Because these people got the Bin Laden family out of the US when no one else could fly, asking a question about Uncle Osama was too much for them to bear.
If this pisses off Arabs, well, yeah, I guess they're pissed, although I think they have far more compelling reasons to be pissed at us.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. --Three former makers of lead paint created a public nuisance that continues to poison children, a jury decided Wednesday in the state's landmark lawsuit against the companies.
The verdict means the companies that once made lead paint and pigment could be held responsible for millions of dollars in cleanup and mitigation costs, though the state never put a dollar value on its lawsuit.
Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein will decide later how much, if anything, the companies must pay.
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The first trial ended in 2002 with a hung jury. The jury in the latest trial began deliberating Feb. 13 following more than three months of trial.
Jurors Wednesday found one of the four companies named in the suit, Atlantic Richfield Co., was not responsible. But it [] found the three others were: Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc. and Millennium Holdings.
The state argued that lead paint created a sweeping public nuisance that has poisoned tens of thousands of children since the early 1990s and contaminated hundreds of thousands of homes.
The state brought in doctors, who described how low levels of lead can be dangerous to a child and how lead-poisoned children can suffer behavioral disorders, gastrointestinal pain, brain damage and even death.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.
Ominous news from Iraq -- the "golden mosque" in Samarra has been destroyed. By men dressed as Iraqi commandos. Ten men have been captured and arrested.
As if sectarian tensions weren't already high."The crime that has taken place in Samarra is against Iraq, is against one of the holiest places in the country and the whole population is extremely hurt by what they have heard."
The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party called the attack "an extreme crime" and called for an investigation into who was responsible. Later, its office in Baghdad and two local Sunni mosques were attacked, police said.
Gunmen stormed the Iraqi Islamic Party's office, evacuated its employees and torched the place. The main entrance to Al Hamza mosque, which escaped damage, came under machine-gun fire and was burned. A rocket-propelled grenade caused damage to the entrance of the Mustafa mosque."
The law [] makes the 45-day investigation mandatory in cases like the Dubai World Ports transfer.
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Yet, the investigation never happened. Bush administration officials “could not say why a 45-day investigation did not occur.”
From March, 2004:The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.
Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.
I don't see how it's a good idea to hand over ports to Bin Laden's pals.
Again, this is not about an "Arab company," this is a company owned and controlled by the hereditary oligarchy of the UAE, many of whom, apparently, were Bin Laden's jolly old pals.
[A] growing proportion of prepackaged meats in the United States are spiked with carbon monoxide -- a gas that keeps even rotten meat looking red and fresh.
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On Monday, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would introduce legislation to ban carbon monoxide use in packaged meats if the FDA does not immediately revoke its earlier decision.
How do you tell if meat is fresh? Smell? Colour? Date stamp? You just lost one test- The Food and Drug Admin in the US allows supermarkets to pack red meat in carbon monoxide gas- just as your lips get a lovely shade of red when you leave the car running in the garage, the meat stays red and fresh looking for weeks. (the two pieces shown are both two weeks old, guess which one got the suicide treatment).
WASHINGTON -- Shoppers who judge the freshness of meat by its pink color may be deceived by a relatively new industry practice of treating meat with carbon monoxide, critics say.
The meat industry defends the use of carbon monoxide to help meat retain its pink hue, saying large sums of money are wasted when sellers throw away meat that is still safe to eat but is not as attractive because it is slightly brown.
"Color is the number one indicator that's used" in selecting meat, said Don Berdahl, vice president of Kalsec Inc., a maker of natural food extracts in Kalamazoo, Mich. Last November Kalsec filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration seeking a ban on the use of carbon monoxide in meat packaging.
Berdahl said Tuesday that carbon monoxide-treated meat could be left on the kitchen counter for five days and would still look bright red and fresh. Carbon monoxide "also suppresses bad odors and the presence of slime, other telltale signs that meat is spoiled," Kalsec's petition said.
The petition said treated meat could hide the growth of pathogens such as Clostridium botulinum, Salmonella and E. coli.
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide whether a 2003 federal ban on the procedure that critics call "partial birth" abortion is constitutional, setting the stage for its most significant ruling on abortion rights in almost 15 years.
Without comment or recorded dissent, the court granted the Bush administration's request to review a lower court's ruling striking down the law, which passed Congress overwhelmingly but has yet to be enforced.
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The federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 was Congress's answer to that ruling. It banned the procedure except when necessary to save the life of the woman. And it deliberately omitted an exception to protect the woman's health. Indeed, as drafted by its Republican sponsors, the law formally declared, based on expert testimony, that such an abortion could never be necessary to preserve health.
Late-Term Abortions Save Women's Lives
If the ban were in place in 1995, Tammy Watts would likely be dead, she says.
In March of that year, Watts was in the eighth month of a much-wanted pregnancy and was eagerly anticipating the birth of her first child. During a routine ultrasound (the only way to detect abnormalities that require late-term abortion), she discovered her baby had Trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that causes severe deformities and carries no hope of survival.
Because her baby was already dying and because this put her own life at stake, Watts had an intact dilation and extraction (D and X), the procedure that Bush condemns as "brutal."
"Losing my baby at the end of my pregnancy was agonizing," says Watts. "But the way the right deals with this issue makes it even worse. When I heard Bush mention 'partial birth abortion' during the debates, I thought 'How dare you stand there and tell flat-out lies?' There is no such thing as this procedure! Why won't the politicians listen to us?"
PINEDALE, Wyo. -- The Bureau of Land Management, caretaker of more land and wildlife than any federal agency, routinely restricts the ability of its own biologists to monitor wildlife damage caused by surging energy drilling on federal land, according to BLM officials and bureau documents.
The officials and documents say that by keeping many wildlife biologists out of the field doing paperwork on new drilling permits and that by diverting agency money intended for wildlife conservation to energy programs, the BLM has compromised its ability to deal with the environmental consequences of the drilling boom it is encouraging on public lands.
Here on the high sage plains of western Wyoming, often called the Serengeti of the West because of large migratory herds of deer and antelope, the Pinedale region has become one of the most productive and profitable natural gas fields on federal land in the Rockies. With the aggressive backing of the Bush administration, many members of Congress and the energy industry, at least a sixfold expansion in drilling is likely here in the coming decade.
Recent studies of mule deer and sage grouse, however, show steep declines in their numbers since the gas boom began here about five years ago: a 46 percent decline for mule deer and a 51 percent decline for breeding male sage grouse. Early results from a study of pronghorn antelope show that they, too, avoid the gas fields.
Yet as these findings have come in, the wildlife biologists in the Pinedale office of the BLM have rarely gone into the field to monitor harm to wildlife.
"The BLM is pushing the biologists to be what I call 'biostitutes,' rather than allow them to be experts in the wildlife they are supposed to be managing," said Steve Belinda, 37, who last week quit his job as one of three wildlife biologists in the BLM's Pinedale office because he said he was required to spend nearly all his time working on drilling requests. "They are telling us that if it is not energy-related, you are not working on it."
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In the Pinedale BLM office, as in agency offices across the West, monitoring and research on the impact of drilling on wildlife are almost never done by staff biologists, according to Roger L. Bankert, associate field manager for lands and minerals.
"This is an energy office, and our biologists don't have time to do the monitoring," Bankert said. He said it is "done by private consultants who are hired by the energy companies," with BLM approval.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said disgraced U.S. lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to organize a meeting between him and President Bush in 2002, but denied the money came from the Malaysian government.
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In a report last week, The Los Angeles Times said that Abramoff received $1.2 million from the Malaysian government for his lobbying services in 2001 and 2002.
According to the Times, which cited an unnamed former Abramoff associate who attended meetings with the Malaysian ambassador and the lobbyist, Abramoff allegedly contacted presidential adviser Karl Rove at least four times to help arrange a meeting between Mahathir and Bush, which took place in May 2002 in the Oval Office.
Mahathir visited the White House at a time when Malaysia had emerged as a key U.S. ally in the war on terror, following Mahathir's crackdown on suspected Islamic militants. However, Mahathir had been consistently critical of Bush's foreign policies, and chastised by the West for his anti-Semitic comments and human rights record.
Sometimes it i’s the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists, lawyers, and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution that officials miss or ignore.
In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to create a vast database of vital records to be centralized in Washington, and details measures that states must implement–and pay millions for—before next year’s scheduled implementation.
The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates, and in some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative; and legitimate research institutions may be able to access files. But reporters and activists won't be allowed to fish through records; many family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck; and people wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless and need your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no service.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Energy Department said it has come up with $5 million to immediately restore jobs cut at a renewable energy laboratory President George W. Bush will visit on Tuesday, avoiding a potentially embarrassing moment as the president promotes his energy plan.
There is bipartisan concern about the Bush administration’s decision to outsource the operation of six of the nation’s largest ports to a company controlled by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) because of that nation’s troubling ties to international terrorism. The sale of P&O to Dubai World Ports would give the state-owned company control of “the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.”
A major part of the story, however, has been mostly overlooked. The company, Dubai Ports World, would also control the movement of military equipment on behalf of the U.S. Army through two other ports. From today’s edition of the British paper Lloyd’s List:
[P&O] has just renewed a contract with the United States Surface Deployment and Distribution Command to provide stevedoring [loading and unloading] of military equipment at the Texan ports of Beaumont and Corpus Christi through 2010.
According to the journal Army Logistician “Almost 40 percent of the Army cargo deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom flows through these two ports.”
Thus, the sale would give a country that has been “a key transfer point for illegal shipments of nuclear components to Iran, North Korea and Lybia” direct control over substantial quantities U.S. military equipment.
The estates at Shenstone Farm sprawl over 500 acres of steeply rolling, barren hillside, at the point where northern Virginia’s traffic-clogged suburbs finally surrender to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On an unseasonably warm January day, this former horse farm is shrouded in fog so dense that a visitor could imagine a band of gray-clad rebel soldiers emerging from these hilltops in the heart of Civil War country.
Instead, what slowly takes shape from the gloaming are well over 100 McMansions, with more on the way -- massive brick structures jutting out like solitary fortresses, each surrounded by roughly four acres of treeless, lunar-like landscape, with three-car garages and sconce-topped brick monument pillars at the foot of each long driveway. Most sport pricey wood playsets in the backyard.
It is here, some 43 miles by car and a world away from Capitol Hill, that Pennsylvania’s junior U.S. senator, Rick Santorum, and his wife, Karen, bought a home on November 14, 2001, for $643,361 (now assessed by Loudoun County at $757,000). It is here that the most outspoken social conservative in the Senate is raising his six children in the manner he described in his book last year, which caused so much controversy back in the state where he is seeking a third term this fall. And it is here that Santorum departs most mornings for his newest mission: crafting a package of Senate ethics reforms aimed at removing the stain of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
The Santorums bought their oversized Shenstone “estate” even though his financial disclosure forms since 2001 have shown little family income beyond his Senate salary, now $162,100, and he admits that life hasn’t been financially easy. The senator made a startling remark to The New York Times Magazine last spring: “We live paycheck to paycheck, absolutely.” But he explained that his parents help out. “They’re by no means wealthy -- they’re two retired VA [Veterans Administration] employees -- but they’ll send a check every now and then,” he said.
The Prospect decided to heed Santorum’s advice by taking “an honest look at the family budget” -- his family budget. What we found is that Santorum’s exurban lifestyle is financed in ways that aren’t available to the average voter back home in Pennsylvania -- namely a political action committee that lists payments for such unorthodox items as dozens of trips to the Starbucks in Leesburg, a number of stops at fast-food joints, and purchases at Target, Wal-Mart, and a Giant supermarket in northern Virginia. Although a Santorum aide defends those charges as legitimate political costs, good-government experts say the expenditures are at best unconventional, and at worst a possible violation of Senate rules, and the purchases appear to be unorthodox when compared with other senators’ filings. Santorum’s PAC -- a “leadership PAC,” whose purpose is to dispense money to other Republican candidates -- used just 18.1 percent of its money to that end over a recent five-year period, a lower number than other leadership PACs of top senators from both parties.
These facts may well raise questions in Pennsylvanians’ minds about how the senator is conducting their business in Washington. But it is Santorum’s Virginia home that raises the hardest questions for the third-ranking Senate Republican.
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Initially, according to Loudoun County property records, the purchase was financed with a $405,000 mortgage from a conventional lender, Westminster Mortgage Company. But a year later, the couple refinanced for $500,000. That was not unusual in the fall of 2002, when many homeowners were refinancing to take advantage of plunging interest rates, while also cashing in on the rising equity in their homes. What was curious was the source of the increased mortgage. It was a new private bank catering to “affluent investors and institutions” -- whose officers have contributed $24,000 to Santorum’s political action committees and re-election campaign -- called Philadelphia Trust Company.
"Health comes first, and I don't want to risk health," Totti told Italian news agency ANSA on Monday. "I strongly want (to play in) the World Cup ... but this is a hope more than a promise. I'll go only if I'm fully recovered."
Ghana's midfield did suffer a severe blow, however, when Laryea Kingston clashed – rather innocuously it must be said – with Senegal's Habib Beye in their group clash on Jan 27th and both players were sent off.
Kingston, a dynamo who plays his football in Russia for Lokomotiv Moscow and is one of Ghana's most potent attacking aces, received a stinging four-match ban which means he will miss their group games in Germany and can only return for the knockout stages.
The Bush administration's FY 2007 is a trainwreck for nearly every domestic program in America. While continuing to lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans, Bush plans to increase the defense budget to record heights before even counting the costs of War in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means that, in order to claim fiscal responsibility, Bush wants to decimate domestic programs (Read here for a more comprehensive look).
In the case of the Amendment to Extend the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, Bush is hiding a selloff of American public lands behind the desperate state of rural education. The plan is to sell about 300,000 acres of National parklands to private interests and then to use that money to fund rural schools for five years. The current SRSCSDA funds rural schools by logging federal land, but the trees just ain't what used to be. So it's time to start logging the public lands, the national parks forests.
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As soon as the public comment period begins, it will up to citizens to contest each and every sale. Until the public commment period begins, it is up to citizens to demand their representatives oppose this senseless move. This is part of an ongoing Bush administration effort to privatize public lands, expand logging, and starve the public education system.
We can fund education and preserve our national forests for our grandchildren. It just means that Dick Cheney loses his tax cut.
Smith said: "I felt my leg go from under me as I went to block a free-kick. When I looked down, the leg was lying one way and my ankle was pointing towards Hong Kong so I knew I was in serious trouble.
"But the doctors are being very positive, I've had the operation and now it's a question of starting on the road back."
After reading An Exhaltation of Larks, by James Lipton, in which he compiles an extraordinary list of "nouns of assemblage," or, as he calls them, "venereal terms," as in "the hunt" - a murder of crows, an ostentation of peacocks, a peep of chickens, an unkindness of ravens, a bouquet of pheasants - I came up with the following :
a scribble of writers
a storm of sneezes
a ladder of braids
a smudge of bifocals
an unraveling of sweaters
a squiggle of infants
a mischief of monkeys
a stat of numbers
a loosening of buttons
a snaggle of zippers
a dizziness of quilts
a frustration of dictionaries
a tease of masks
an insult of cell phones
a confusion of schedules
a tardiness of clocks
a mirage of dollars
a chaos of bills
a meanness of gossips
a dryness of crackers
a sturdiness of shoes
a flicker of shadows
a drift of dreams
a stutter of doubts
a flowering of bonnets
an order of plaids
a breathing of African violets
an inhalation of spices
a comfort of teas
a grit of sands
a tickle of feathers
a knot of noodles
a sliver of splinters
a comfort of snores
a collapse of bridges
a disappointment of locked doors
an embarking of train stations
a lightness of wallets
a deficit of compliments
a twitch of whiskers
a robbery of taxes
a bouquet of kisses
an avalanche of e-mails
a scrabble of vowels
a temptation of transgressions
a snivel of pities
a drizzle of sadness
a dismay of dentists
an indignity of betrayals
a brevity of snapshots
a breath of haiku
an indulgence of complaints
a satisfaction of soups
a taunt of Aprils
an embarrassment of typos
a blizzard of second thoughts
an illusion of failures
a deception of tofus
a promise of vitamins
a persistence of memories
a tearing of onions
a snuggle of kittens
a surprise of mornings
an appearance of mirrors
an awakening of bells
a relief of naps
a potential of buds
a burden of laundry
a gauze of clouds
a shame of dust balls
a luck of bamboo
a vagary of forgetfulness
a dylan of harmonicas
a pillow of laps
a justification of excuses
a clutch of pocketbooks
a skip of crocuses
a squirm of itches
an erasure of unworthiness
a blunting of pencils
a dreariness of regrets
an invitation of tambourines
a pucker of crab apples
a plodding of footsteps
an approximation of absolutes
a refreshment of mints
a humbling of apologies
an attentiveness of ears
a euphoria of euphoniums
an opportunity of Saturdays
a frivolity of sermons
a contradiction of proofs
a guess of jelly beans
a shyness of toes
a surprise of merry pranksters
a discomfort of parties
an excess of lists
a yawn of cats
an Everest of worries
a spite of grievances
a withholding of judgments
an oblivion of yesterdays
an indiscretion of parrots
a party of balloons
an abandonment of rules
a muffling of scarves
a formality of bow-ties
a parlor of tea pots
an abundance of apologies
a familiarity of sneakers
a return of pennies
a snickering of moustaches
a hopelessness of goldfish
a subjectivity of beauties
a farce of clowns
a practicality of jeans
a panic of tests
a nagging of grievances
a disappearance of mittens
a mending of socks
a delicacy of negotiations
an innuendo of malice
a celebration of bellies
a necessity of books
a whisper of snowflakes
a reach of starfish
an ecstasy of massages
an irritation of pearls
a derailment of plans
a regret of bad news
a letdown of expectations
a stretch of kites
a wave of goodbyes
a restlessness of crowds
a derangement of hormones
a consumption of jealousies
a tension of headaches
an avoidance of gurus
an expansion of hearts
a blessing of friends
Irene Zahava - February 10, 2006
The idea that the Skilling/Lay trial in Houston is the peak of the most recent "wave" of corporate crime is a fantasy.
The wave has not peaked.
And so we update that scene from the movie The Graduate where the older guy whispers into a young Dustin Hoffman the one word he believes is the future -- "plastics."
We look into our crystal ball and whisper into the ears of all young reporters, prosecutors, investors, and lawyers -- "corporate crime."
A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.
Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.
[T]hrough arcane regulatory actions and legal opinions, the Bush administration is providing industries with an unprecedented degree of protection at the expense of an individual's right to sue and a state's right to regulate.
In other moves by the administration:
• The highway safety agency, a branch of the Department of Transportation, is backing auto industry efforts to stop California and other states from regulating tailpipe emissions they link to global warming. The agency said last summer that any such rule would be a backdoor attempt by states to encroach on federal authority to set mileage standards, and should be preempted.
• The Justice Department helped industry groups overturn a pollution-control rule in Southern California that would have required cleaner-running buses, garbage trucks and other fleet vehicles.
• The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has repeatedly sided with national banks to fend off enforcement of consumer protection laws passed by California, New York and other states. The agency argued that it had sole authority to regulate national banks, preempting state restrictions.
• The Food and Drug Administration issued a legal opinion last month asserting that FDA-approved labels should give pharmaceutical firms broad immunity from most types of lawsuits. The agency previously had filed briefs seeking dismissal of various cases against drug companies and medical-device manufacturers.
In a letter to President Bush on Thursday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said, "It appears that there may have been an administration-wide directive for agencies … to limit corporate liability through the rule-making process and without the consent of Congress."
BARELY 24 HOURS AFTER suffering a terrible leg injury, Alan Smith was sitting up in his hospital bed yesterday afternoon telling his doctors and Manchester United team-mates that he will be back on a football pitch sooner than they think. No guarantees can be given at this stage, but the hope at Old Trafford is that the Yorkshireman’s spirit and bloody-mindedness will help him to make a full recovery.
While Cheney pays any hunting fees or lodging expenses if charged, taxpayers invariably pick up much of the cost of Cheney's hunting hobby. As with his predecessors, the government pays for Secret Service agents, military aides and the rest of the entourage that travels with vice presidents wherever they go, as well as the expense of Air Force Two. But it is not clear how much that costs. The budget lists $1 million for the vice president's annual travel, including his official duties, but the figure is rounded to the nearest million, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
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