Tell Your Momma The Corporate Media Is Sliming Obama

The Times printed this picture of Obama squinting into the sun, as though he were being grilled about his blind trust. He wasn't.

Robert Sullivan/AFP-Getty Images
Times caption: Barack Obama answering questions last weekend outside a church in Selma, Ala.
Page One news in the New York Times yesterday: In ’05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors

In which we learn that a blind trust to which Obama had entrusted his money invested $50,000 of it in companies owned by friends of his. It was a blind trust, so Obama didn't know about it; when he found out, he sold the shares and terminated the blind trust. (P.S., he lost money.)

Oooh, what double dealing. Oooh, I smell a hint of scandal. Oooh, you know that this really means. The Clinton Rules (as Digby named them) are back. Democrats are scrutinized within an inch of their lives by the rich corporate media; Republicans are given a pass. I mean, really, Rudy Giuliani was giving speeches at $100,000 a pop (and skipping his son's high school graduation, family values party, my ass) and this is a story about $50,000 in a blind trust? Where is the story about how Rudy Giuliani has invested his money? Who was Rudy giving all those speeches too? You don't think those folks are expecting a little homina homina for their Benjamins? You won't find the Giuliani story out there, or the McCain story, or the Romney Bain Capital story either. The corporate media exists to perpetuate the government that gives it the best tax breaks, and that means all Democrats under the microscope, all the time.

And today the Boston Globe (owned by the Times ownership cabal) weighs in with a story about how Obama paid $375 in ancient parking tickets. I kid you not.

Trey Ellis, HuffPo: Obama, the Times and Central Casting

What a curious and misleading headline on the front page of The New York Times:
"Obama, in Brief Investing Foray In '05, Took Same Path as Donors."

The only reason to put on the front page of the paper of record a story about a politician's stock holdings is if there were even a hint of impropriety.
The coy headline slings mud in bold letters and then, only in the fine print of the article, explains that not only was nothing improper done, in fact as soon as there was even the hint of a possible conflict the junior Senator from Illinois divested himself of the holdings.

This is a far different story than that of Senator Bill Frist whose blind trust ended up not being blind at all.

Did the Times editors really feel that this story belonged on page one while, say, "At Least 109 Shiite Pilgrims Killed Across Iraq as Holiday Nears," was banished to page A10?

Boston Globe: Obama paid late parking tickets
Racked up penalties while at Harvard

Total $375; $140 in fines, $235 in late fees. George Bush spends that much on Members Only jackets with the Presidential seal every day.

Frist Has Friends

Check out my post on Bill Frist (Frist!) below.

A purportedly anonymous commenter posted Frist's CYA statement from his blog in full in comments.

Sitemeter is a wonderful thing, because sometimes you're not as anonymous as you seem. The post by 'anonymous', at 10:53:56 a.m., came from

12.150.190.# (AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LIFE INSURERS)

Why is the American Council of Life Insurers trying to save Bill Frist's political bacon?

Frist!

Bill Frist could be the worst politician in the history of politicians. I'm serious. The man has the instincts of an inanimate object. He put a fork in any presidential ambitions last night:

Washington Post (AP): Frist: Taliban Should Be in Afghan Gov't

QALAT, Afghanistan -- U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful."

So, I guess all that rhetoric over the last five years about how 9/11 changed everything, and any group that harbors terrorists will be treated as terrorists, and all that other Bush-neo-con-Rethug bullcrap, has been exposed as utter bullcrap. As you can imagine, the wingnuts are beside themselves. Some have even pledged to vote Democratic in November! Tee hee.

Apparently someone in Frist's camp smelled the defeatism and pulled back; too little, too late:

VOLPAC: America will Never Negotiate with Terrorists or Support their Entry into Afghanistan’s Government

Farewell to Pander-Bears?

Frank Rich thinks the Rovian Era of pandering to 'values voters' may be at an end; all see through the charade now.

Frank Rich, NYTimes: The Rove Da Vinci Code (Walled)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking "work is a four-letter word" and for having TV's in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. "I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts," she said. (She also subsequently apologized, once her daughter complained, joining the general chorus of ridicule.) However "old-fashioned" Mrs. Clinton's thoughts, don't expect her to turn back Mr. Murdoch's campaign cash in protest against his steamy new TV channel.

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[T]hat hypothetical, easily duped voter may no longer exist. Like the Bush era, the cynical Rove strategy of exploiting faith-based voters may be nearing its end. For proof, just take a look at the most craven figure in American politics: the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. To flatter the far right, this Harvard-trained surgeon misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo's vegetative state from the Senate floor, and justified abstinence-only sex education in AIDS prevention by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he didn't know for certain that tears and sweat couldn't transmit H.I.V. But increasingly it's not only liberals who see through him. One of his latest stunts, a proposed $100 gas-tax rebate, provoked Rush Limbaugh to condemn him for "treating us like we're a bunch of whores."

When senators as different as Mr. Frist and Mrs. Clinton both earn bipartisan ridicule for their pandering, you have to believe that there's a god other than Karl Rove watching over American politics after all.

Middle Earth Journal has the whole article: Frank Rich Today

I Want To Hear What Drinan Has to Say About This

Raw Story: GOP House Speaker taps Cheney, Goss for Congressional Distinguished Service Awards

Poor Father Drinan, on the same award dais as Darth Cheney and Hooker poker Porter Goss. Ewwwwwww.

25,000 Students Walk Out in Los Angeles

Huffington Post: Walkout!

On Monday, thousands of Latino high school students walked out of their classrooms en masse and took to the streets of cities from Detroit to Dallas to Los Angeles to protest the draconian, anti-immigrant "Sensenbrenner bill" (aka. HR 4437). Walkouts in Los Angeles spread east into the Inland Empire and south to Santa Ana, where police provoked a brief scuffle by wading into the protest with full riot gear and batons drawn. 25,000 students from the Los Angeles Unified School District are estimated to have participated in the otherwise peaceful demonstrations.

As was the case during Sunday's mass mobilization, the walkouts' most dramatic moment arrived at the city's main artery: the 101 freeway. There, according to an eyewitness I spoke to last night, 200 jubilant, flag-waving students paraded down the center lane while a cavalcade of LAPD motorcycle cops followed closely behind, ensuring that the backed-up traffic didn't plow them over (sorry, no pictures for now). While the walkouts were planned well in advance, the idea of taking to the freeway seemed to have been devised organically and disseminated through word-of-mouth, text messages and Myspace.

Many people I talked with around the city yesterday questioned whether Edward James Olmos' newly released documentary about mass Chicano student protests against discriminatory educational policies in 1968 East L.A. high schools, "Walkout," influenced yesterday's events. In an interview yesterday with Hoy, an L.A.-based Spanish language paper, Olmos refuted this idea by claiming the conditions that precipitated the protests against HR 4437 were drastically different than those that animated Chicano life in 1968. However, a student demonstrator from Manual Arts told Hoy, "Before I saw the movie, I didn't think we could do something like that. I didn't understand how you could affect change. But after I saw it, I felt in my heart that I could do something."

[]

Though the mobilizations are over, their effect will be felt for generations. Under mounting pressure, the Senate Judiciary Committe overwhelmingly approved a bill providing a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants -- a humiliating blow to Majority Leader Bill Frist and the reactionary forces pulling his strings. A new movement has been galvanized which will not only transform the face of American politics, it will challenge the country to, as one dreamer once put it, rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.

I'm not sure the mobilizations are over. Protest is exhilarating. Coverage is cool, too. Maybe these kids will take on the Iraq War next?

Democracy Now: Between 500,000 and 2 Million Protest Immigration Bill in LA

Other large immigrant-led protests occurred throughout the country. 50,000 people took to the streets in Denver. 20,000 rallied in Phoenix in what may have been the city’s largest protest ever. In Atlanta, 70,000 immigrant workers took part in a work stoppage on Friday. Other protests occurred in New York, Charlotte, Dallas and Sacramento.

Senators Back Guest Workers
Panel's Measure Sides With Bush

A key Senate panel broke with the House's get-tough approach to illegal immigration yesterday and sent to the floor a broad revision of the nation's immigration laws that would provide lawful employment to millions of undocumented workers while offering work visas to hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year.

With bipartisan support, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 6 to side with President Bush's general approach to an immigration issue that is dividing the country, fracturing the Republican Party and ripening into one of the biggest political debates of this election year. Conservatives have loudly demanded that the government tighten control of U.S. borders and begin deporting illegal immigrants. But in recent weeks, the immigrant community has risen up in protest, marching by the hundreds of thousands to denounce what they see as draconian measures under consideration in Washington.

Frist and Asbestos

Is Bill Frist the worst majority leader ever? Who could argue that. His current strategy to get the (bad) asbestos bailout passed? Call out the other senators who didn't show up for his first vote. Earth to Frist, that's your job, to make sure the votes are there. You just f*cked up.

WaPo: No US Senate asbestos bill without 60 votes: Frist

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said on Friday that 60 senators must pledge to help an asbestos bill overcome procedural hurdles before he would bring it up again on the Senate floor for debate.

The bill to create a $140 billion fund to compensate asbestos victims was shelved this week after it failed to get the 60 votes it needed to defeat a senator's objection on the grounds that it violated federal budget rules. The vote was 58-41.

Frist said he told the bill's sponsors that "60 members must signify their commitment" to vote to beat that particular budget hurdle as well as end any filibuster of the measure, before he would bring it up for consideration again.

"Once that public assurance is given, I will look to schedule the bill at the earliest possible opportunity," Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said in a statement.

Wah! Wah!

Previous posts: Bad Asbestos Bill Defeated; Another Bad Asbestos Bailout Bill

Bad Asbestos Bill Defeated

A win for asbestos victims, Harry Reid, and small and medium sized asbestos companies. Big loss for Bill Frist and Big Asbestos. I watched the vote on C-Span. Frist had 59 votes but needed 60. As a procedural matter, he changed his vote to "No" so that he can bring it up again.

You could tell who was going to win before the votes were counted. Dick Durbin, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and John Kerry could all be seen smiling broadly on the Senate floor.

One small victory. Hurrah!

Senate vote effectively kills asbestos bill

From tomorrow's WaPo:

Senate Foes Block Proposed Trust Fund For Asbestos Victims
Vote Short Against Budgetary Challenge

Previous post: Another Bad Asbestos Bailout Bill

Another Bad Asbestos Bailout Bill

It's not me who's saying that. It's small and medium-sized asbestos companies. This bill actually cancels their insurance!

Coalition for Asbestos Reform

Myths & Facts

Myth: S.852 will protect businesses by capping payouts for asbestos claims.

Fact: This bill creates a $140 billion trust fund that favors a few large Fortune 100 companies as it shifts the financial burden to ? and threatens the economic viability of ? small and medium-size companies. Large companies which ran out of insurance coverage long ago benefit by provisions capping lawsuit payouts and limiting their financial responsibility to asbestos victims. For smaller companies the story is much different: S.852 actually cancels the insurance coverage they have, which has been bought and fully paid for, leaving them with a new, bank-breaking, multibillion-dollar tab.

Although the bill is ostensibly supposed to prevent bankruptcies, it will inevitably contribute to them. Several companies have testified that they will close their doors on the day S.852 is signed into law. One company, which today has adequate insurance to cover future claims in the court system, would lose its insurance and be required to pay $16.5 million annually into the trust fund. With annual earnings around $1 million, the company would have no choice but to close. As these companies drop out of the pool of contributors, additional financial pressure will be put on the ones that remain, further weakening their ability to meet their increased financial allocations. For these companies, S.852 is a "solution" that is vastly worse than the problem it is meant to fix.

A. W. Chesterton, a small company in Massachusetts, one of the members of the Coalition for Asbestos Reform, outlines its objections to the bill in yesterday's New York Times:

Large and Small Businesses Part Ways on Asbestos Bill

But for A. W. Chesterton, a 122-year-old company based in Stoneham, Mass., that used asbestos fibers in its industrial fluid sealing products, the amount of money it would be responsible for under the bill could destroy it, according to its outside legal counsel, John B. Manning.

"Its assessment under the Fair Act is going to be a minimum of $16.5 million annually for 30 years," Mr. Manning said. "That $16.5 million is more than double a year's profit for this company."

By contrast, large corporations will, at most, be responsible for $27.5 million a year for 30 years. "You've got large companies making billions and billions a year in profits," Mr. Manning said. "Having to come up with $27.5 million is nothing to them."

These people are serious. They have a major campaign to defeat the bill:

Aiming at Asbestos Bill

Nearly 20 corporations have paid a total of about $3 million to defeat the asbestos trust-fund bill, which Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has designated his first priority in 2006, according to a coalition planning document obtained by The Hill.

The Washington Post editorial entitled "Forward on Asbestos" today dismisses these companies and Sen. Harry Reid's actions on their behalf, parroting the RNC talking point: It's all about the trial lawyers.

Unfortunately, the bill's critics are not always so reasonable. Sen. Harry M. Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader, has complained, "One would have to search long and hard to find a bill in my opinion as bad as this." He has even described the legislation as the work of lobbyists hired by corporations to limit asbestos exposure. But the truth is that the bill's main opponents are trial lawyers, who profit mightily from asbestos lawsuits and who constitute a powerful lobby in their own right. Mr. Specter and Mr. Leahy are in fact model resisters of special interests who have spent more than two years crafting legislation that serves the public interest. For Mr. Reid to demean this effort in order to fire off campaign sound bites is reprehensible.

Balderdash. This bill has bipartisan opposition. The opponents are not only trial lawyers, it includes many of the asbestos companies. The bill is not fully funded and will ultimately fail, having achieved its only objective: to keep as much money in the hands of the huge asbestos companies as possible.

Let's hope that saner minds prevail and the latest challenge to the bill, that it will bust the federal budget, succeeds.

Yesterday's News

No time to post yesterday. Here's the news of the day (besides those mysteriously disappearing hawk's nests in Boston):

Novel defense: My boss said it was OK! Even though it broke several federal laws! That's what Scooter Libby is peddling. Looks like he got himself Oliver North's old lawyer, and they're going to play hide the salami by asking for classified documents which BushCo will then refuse to turn over:

Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

[]

If Libby's defense adopts strategies used by North, it might be in part because the strategies largely worked for North and in part because Libby's defense team has quietly retained John D. Cline, who was a defense attorney for North. Cline, a San-Francisco partner at the Jones Day law firm, has specialized in the use of classified information in defending clients charged with wrongdoing in national security cases.

Among his detractors, Cline is what is known as a "graymail" specialist-an attorney who, critics say, purposely makes onerous demands on the federal government to disclose classified information in the course of defending his clients, in an effort to force the government to dismiss the charges. Although Cline declined to be interviewed for this story, he has said that the use of classified information is necessary in assuring that defendants are accorded due process and receive fair trials.

Remember Bamboozlepalooza, where George Bush spent months barnstorming the country trying to get us to gut Social Security? Never one to give up on a horrible idea, Georgie "LaLaLa I Can't Hear You" Peorgie Bush wrote his entire insane Social Security privatization plan into this year's proposed federal budget. Like the rest of that fictional document, it is dead on arrival:

Bush's Social Security Sleight of Hand

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

And, as we all knew deep in our hearts, Bush knew Jack:

EXCLUSIVE EMAILS: Jack Abramoff Describes Relationship With President Bush

EXCLUSIVE: Abramoff Photos of President Bush, First Lady ‘Just Sitting In His Office’


Rethugs Frist & Hastert duped fellow members of Congress into giving Big Pharma immunity from lawsuits:

Hastert, Frist said to rig bill for drug firms
Frist denies protection was added in secret


That dumb kid who resigned from NASA still thinks he has a right to stifle science: Ex-Press Aide for NASA Offers Defense

Speaking to a Texas radio station and then to The New York Times, Mr. Deutsch said the scientist, James E. Hansen, exaggerated the threat of [global] warming and tried to cast the Bush administration's response to it as inadequate.

Fax Every Senator Through This Link

The Dean People

Be sure to mark the button to the left for "ALL RECIPIENTS" and the mark the bullet "Fax" to the right of all recipients. Makes much more of an impact than emails.

Make sure to ask them to FILIBUSTER Alito, and if they won't do that, to ABSTAIN from the cloture vote. Frist needs 60 votes to WIN cloture, no matter how many votes against cloture there are. An abstention is as good as a no vote on cloture.

Call Senators, Save the Constitution

My brother and I went to Florida in 2004, monitored a polling place. That didn't work out. Spending a few hours calling a few senators is child's play in comparison.

Please call your own senators, if you don't have time to call the rest. I've read on other blogs that senators are taking and counting calls from outside their states in support of filibuster. Strip Search Sammy is a Borklette. Even the right knows this. They love him. We can stop him.

From Democrats.com: WE CAN STOP ALITO THIS WEEKEND

The last two days have been amazing.

Early Thursday afternoon, we broke the news that Senator John Kerry would lead a filibuster against Judge Sam Alito if he could get 41 Senators to sustain the filibuster. Three hours later, CNN confirmed our story.

Naturally, the White House freaked out and told Senator Bill Frist to schedule a cloture vote as quickly as possible - Monday at 4:30 p.m. - to prevent Democrats from uniting behind Kerry.

[]

At the start of the day, only Dick Durbin and Debbie Stabenow supported Kerry and Kennedy. Just before noon, Hillary Clinton's office called to say she supported us. Then Harry Reid came on board, along with Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Ron Wyden, Chris Dodd, and (I think) Chuck Schumer.

Most importantly, we even picked up Dianne Feinstein, who just yesterday said she opposed a filibuster.

That's 12 votes for a filibuster - and exactly 12 more votes than we had two days ago!

I believe we really can stop Alito by Monday at 4:30 p.m. - but here's what we must do.

[]

2. Keep calling the Senators who are undecided or opposed to a filibuster. You can call their DC office all weekend and leave polite but firm voicemails urging the Senators to support Kerry's filibuster. When offices open on Monday 9 a.m. ET, make another round of calls. Let's shut down the Capitol switchboard on Monday!

http://democrats.com/alito-48

3. Call the DNC (202-863-8000) and the DSCC (202-224-2447) and tell them your 2006 contributions will depend on the success of the Alito filibuster. Tell them they need to get every Democratic Senator on board.

Here are the "Filibuster 48" with their direct phone numbers. You can also use these toll-free numbers (and ask for the Senators by name): 888-355-3588 or 888-818-6641.

Blanche Lambert Lincoln (D- AR), 202-224-4843
Joseph I. Lieberman (D- CT), 202-224-4041
Thomas R. Carper (D- DE), 202-224-2441
Daniel K. Inouye (D- HI), 202-224-3934
Tom Harkin (D- IA), 202-224-3254
Barack Obama (D- IL), 202-224-2854
Evan Bayh (D- IN), 202-224-5623
Barbara A. Mikulski (D- MD), 202-224-4654
Paul S. Sarbanes (D- MD), 202-224-4524
Carl Levin (D- MI), 202-224-6221
Mark Dayton (D- MN), 202-224-3244
Max Baucus (D- MT), 202-224-2651
Frank Lautenberg (D- NJ), 202-224-3224
Robert Menendez (D- NJ), 202-224-4744
Jeff Bingaman (D- NM), 202-224-5521
Jack Reed (D- RI), 202-224-4642
Lincoln D. Chafee (R- RI), 202-224-2921
Patrick J. Leahy (D- VT), 202-224-4242
Maria Cantwell (D- WA), 202-224-3441
Patty Murray (D- WA), 202-224-2621
Herb Kohl (D- WI), 202-224-5653
John D. Rockefeller, IV (D- WV), 202-224-6472
James M. Jeffords (I- VT), 202-224-5141

Mark Pryor (D- AR), 202-224-2353
Ken Salazar (D- CO) , 202-224-5852
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D- DE) , 202-224-5042
Bill Nelson (D- FL), 202-224-5274
Daniel K. Akaka (D- HI) (1,), 202-224-6361
Mary Landrieu (D- LA) (1,), 202-224-5824
Byron L. Dorgan (D- ND) (1,), 202-224-2551
Kent Conrad (D- ND) (1,), 202-224-2043
Olympia Snowe (R- ME) (1,), 202-224-5344

Ben Nelson (D-NE) 202-224-6551
Tim Johnson (D- SD) , 202-224-5842
Robert C. Byrd (D- WV) , 202-224-3954
Ted Stevens (R- AK) , 202-224-3004

A Drop of Good News

Senate Blocks Alaska Refuge Drilling

WASHINGTON - The Senate blocked oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge Wednesday, rejecting a must-pass defense spending bill where supporters positioned the quarter-century-old environmental issue to garner broader support.

Drilling backers fell four votes short of getting the required 60 votes to avoid a threatened filibuster of the defense measure over the oil drilling issue. Senate leaders were expected to withdraw the legislation so it could be reworked without the refuge language. The vote was 56-44.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was among those who for procedural reasons cast a "no" vote, so that he could bring the drilling issue up for another vote.

The vote was a stinging defeat for Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, who for years has waged an intense fight to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He had thought this time he would finally get his wish.

The Incompetence, The Corruption, The Cronyism: October 13, 2005 edition

The Incompetence:

We could make this all FEMA, all the time:

DIY Disaster Relief

Don’t let anybody kid you. The government response to Hurricane Katrina was not only a disaster when the storm first hit. It’s still a disaster now.

I’ve been talking to medical professionals who have been to the Gulf Coast in the past couple of weeks, and this is what they have told me.

First, FEMA continues to be next to useless. It is not providing relief workers with the access they need to areas crying out for their help. It is not keeping up with bills for the emergency work it has authorized so far. A shockingly large number of doctors and nurses are being told that their services are not needed. Those with the guts and the initiative to go ahead regardless are finding that the exact opposite is true – thousands upon thousands of storm evacuees who have run out of their prescription medications, or require new prescriptions, or need help with a panoply of storm-induced problems, from simple cuts and bruises to infections and depression and suicidal feelings.

Secondly, FEMA and the Red Cross are not talking to each other to sort it all out. At the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana – home to more than 5,000 evacuees – there was, as of a few days ago, no formal on-site medical care. That meant people had the unenviable choice of going to the emergency room of a Lafayette hospital, waiting in line for hours and hoping for the best, or somehow fending for themselves.

Thirdly, the failures of the first six weeks or so since Katrina struck are likely only to compound the problems down the road. Sanitation in the shelters is a nightmare. Some professionals don’t exclude outbreaks of tuberculosis or other diseases one might have associated, pre-Katrina, with an earlier, more backward era.

Mobile Homes, Campers Wait at FEMA Sites

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- More than 9,000 mobile homes and campers meant for the victims of Hurricane Katrina are sitting unused at government staging areas while displaced families continue to live out of tents and shelters.

$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.

[]

The American Red Cross started the hotel program days after Hurricane Katrina struck, when it became clear that the shelters it had opened were not adequate to deal with the 600,000 to 700,000 families displaced by the storm, a spokeswoman, Carrie Martin, said.

The hotel program was intended to last a couple of weeks but has twice been extended by FEMA. Now Red Cross officials are saying there is no end to the initiative, which pays for 192,424 rooms in 9,606 hotels across the United States, in a range of cities as diverse as Casper, Wyo., and Anchorage, Alaska.

Congress last month appropriated a $62.3 billion for the relief effort, most of it designated for FEMA. The agency had told Congress that it expected to spend more than $2 billion to buy up to 300,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to house displaced residents. The agency also planned to give out $23.2 billion in assistance to victims for emergency needs and for temporary housing and housing repairs.

But the temporary housing program has been troubled since the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as 30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940 occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.

The Corruption:

The law may be catching up with Senator Frist:

SEC Issues Subpoena To Frist, Sources Say
Records Sought On Sale of Stock

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed to turn over personal records and documents as federal authorities step up a probe of his July sales of HCA Inc. stock, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

[]

The formal request for documents usually presages an acceleration of a federal probe. In Frist's case, regulators had to proceed with caution due to his status in Congress and their mutual desire to avoid triggering constitutional objections to the release of documents. The disclosure of the subpoena comes as Democrats blasted Frist anew for his financial and personal ties to Hospital Corporation of America, a Nashville chain founded in 1968 by his father and his brother, Thomas Frist Jr. Critics yesterday seized on a report that Frist held a substantial amount of his family's hospital stock outside of blind trusts between 1998 and 2002 -- a time when he asserted he did not know how much of the stock he owned.
The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Frist earned tens of thousands of dollars from HCA stock in a partnership controlled by his brother, outside of the blind trusts he created to avoid a conflict of interest.

"It seems that for years, Frist may have misled his constituents and the American people about his health care industry stock holdings and the conflict of interest they created as he drafted our nation's health care policy," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney. "This deal raises even more questions about the Republican culture of corruption in Washington, D.C."

The Cronyism:

Great article in the New Republic, outlining the 15 worst hacks in the Bush Administration. Here's just one:

Welcome to the Hackocracy

11: Patrick Rhode
Acting Deputy Director Federal Emergency Management Agency

As acting deputy director of FEMA, 36-year-old Patrick Rhode had, until recently, the unenviable job of backstopping the hapless Michael Brown, a man who needed much backstopping. Unfortunately, it's not clear that Rhode is much more qualified than Brown to be managing the nation's worst disasters. Before joining FEMA, the biggest disaster he had helped manage was the Small Business Administration (see Hector Barreto)--and even that was something of a stretch. Rhode entered federal government in 2001 as deputy director of advance operations for the Bush White House, a job he had also held for Bush's 2000 campaign. Never fear, though: Rhode has covered disasters--as a TV anchor for local network affiliates in Alabama and Arkansas, in which capacity he developed "an acute interest in what responders do in times of crises." Perhaps not acute enough. He recently said that FEMA's response to Katrina was "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history."

The Incompetence, the Corruption, the Cronyism: Sept. 24th, 2005 edition

The Incompetence:

FDA head steps down abruptly

Washington -- Lester Crawford, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, resigned abruptly Friday, causing further upheaval at an agency that has been in turmoil for over a year.

Crawford, who was confirmed just two months ago, on July 18, did not say why he was stepping down....

On Thursday, a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "A Sad Day for Science at the FDA" said that "recent actions of the FDA leadership have made a mockery of the process of evaluating scientific evidence," disillusioned many scientists, "squandered the public trust and tarnished the agency's image."...

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said the agency had been "politicized and degraded" under Crawford, whose leadership she described as "tepid and passive."

At the FDA, as at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mikulski said, the Bush administration had brought "incompetent leaders into critical positions."

The Corruption:

Frist Knew About Blind Trust Investments

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., was updated several times about his investments in blind trusts during 2002, the last time two weeks before he publicly denied any knowledge of what was in the accounts, documents show.

The updates included stock transactions involving HCA Inc., the hospital operating company founded by Frist's family.

Frist's sale of HCA stock is under scrutiny by the federal government. Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA said Friday it had received a subpoena from prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, asking for documents the company believes are related to Frist's sale of company stock this past summer.

The Cronyism:

Amid Many Fights Over Qualifications, a Bush Nomination Stalls in the Senate

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Faced with accusations that the Bush administration is stocking the government with unqualified cronies, the Republican chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is holding up the nomination of a lawyer [Julie L. Myers] with little background in immigration or customs to head the law enforcement agency in charge of those issues.

In addition to the questions about Ms. Myers, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has objected to the nomination of Stewart Baker to be assistant secretary of homeland security for policy. Mr. Baker, who won committee approval despite Mr. Levin's opposition, is an accomplished technology lawyer, but he has little experience in disaster management.

At the same time, the Center for American Progress, a research institute for out-of-office Democratic policy experts, has questioned whether Andrew B. Maner is qualified for his position as chief financial officer of the Homeland Security Department, which has a budget of about $35 billion and more than 180,000 employees. Mr. Maner's main government experience before joining this administration was a job in the White House press office under the first President Bush.

The questions of credentials are not limited to homeland security. For example, the main experience of Brian D. Montgomery, who in June became assistant secretary for housing and federal housing commissioner, was performing advance work in the Bush presidential campaign of 2000 and in the current administration's first term.

Mr. Montgomery's responsibilities now include overseeing the $500 billion Federal Housing Administration insurance portfolio. His background in housing is limited to a few years as communications director of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

The Incompetence, the Corruption, the Cronyism: Sept. 22nd, 2005 edition*

The Incompetence:

Ice for the Big Easy goes a long way
Trucks haul excess to Gloucester storage (Boston Globe)

GLOUCESTER -- First, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent them to the Gulf Coast, a rumbling, rolling convoy of tractor-trailers hauling 170 million pounds of ice bound for victims of Hurricane Katrina, whose food and medicine supplies were rapidly spoiling in the relentless sun.

No sooner had they arrived, when FEMA handed down another order: Never mind. It turns out that most of the victims had already been brought to shelters in Texas and other states with working refrigerators and freezers.

Now, 114 of the big rigs have ended up here, 1,000 miles north of the hurricane zone, on the briny, ocean-cooled shores of Cape Ann in Gloucester.

The Corruption:

Frist Stock Sale Raises Questions on Timing (Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even received two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts.

So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time?

Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold [by Frist], its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.

The Cronyism:

W Marks the Spot
Bait and Switch in the Bitterroot (From counterpunch.com, via cursor.org)

Like Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the Forest Service under George W. Bush runs on pr, corporate cronyism, an obsession with secrecy and the rapid-fire deployment of fabricated justifications for cutting down old-growth forests.

*The title of this post comes from skippy: framed

MSM Picks Up Red Cross Story

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food

As the National Guard delivered food to the New Orleans convention center yesterday, American Red Cross officials said that federal emergency management authorities would not allow them to do the same.

Other relief agencies say the area is so damaged and dangerous that they doubted they could conduct mass feeding there now.

"The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans," said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.

"Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders."

Calls to the Department of Homeland Security and its subagency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were not returned yesterday.

wkyc.com (Northeast Ohio): Few answers for thirsty, hungry in New Orleans

The American Red Cross, Salvation Army and other charitable organizations that typically are the first to respond to disaster sites with food and water have been kept out of the city.

“Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities,” said Gregg Tubbs, a spokesman for the American Red Cross. “The Red Cross can’t get in there. We can’t enter New Orleans against their orders.”

By LARRY WHEELER, Gannett News Service

(Contributing: GNS reporter Raju Chebium, in Metarie, La., and Dan Turner, The (Shreveport, La.) Times, in Baton Rouge, La.)

KCBI-TV (Idaho): Doctor says Red Cross should have been there

September 3, 2005 12:56 PM

The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS "Where is the Red Cross?"

A doctor at the airport in New Orleans posed that question today to an Associated Press reporter. The doctor, one of the first to set up a triage center at the airport, says he wishes the Red Cross had been there, since the organization has the expertise to set up that kind of facility. He said he hasn't seen any Red Cross presence there.

And the picture that emerges is a bleak one. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon who visted the airport today, says the hallways and floors are "filled," and that people are dying because the resources aren't there to treat them.

Donations pour in to aid groups for Katrina relief

By ADAM GELLER, The Associated Press

Published: Saturday, Sep. 3, 2005

But aid groups said their efforts were limited in important ways.

“We are not in New Orleans,” the Red Cross’ Dodge said. The federal Department of “Homeland Security has basically told us they don’t want us, our Red Cross folks, in New Orleans because our presence would keep people from evacuating.”

A spokesman for the federal agency said Friday that there is not an absolute policy barring relief groups from the entire city, but that its own efforts were taking precedence there.

“There may well be situations where it merits the Red Cross holding back while our personnel go in first,” said the spokesman, Russ Knocke. “But our priority is meeting the immediate life-saving and life-sustaining needs of those who’ve gone through a nightmare.”

Other groups also reported that they were not being allowed into the city. MAP International said it was working to send medical supplies to a New Orleans hospital, but that the shipment was being held up by a difficulty in getting the credentials needed for drivers to get through roadblocks set up by the National Guard.

Second Harvest said it had secured a warehouse between New Orleans and Baton Rogue, because its workers can’t get to their facility in New Orleans. But setting up operations was being complicated by shifting demands. “At this point we don’t know how many people are in need and where they are. Evacuees arrive at different places everyday,” Daly said.

Republicans National Disaster Plan: Repeal the Estate Tax and Cut Medicaid

Because we need fewer resources in times of national crisis.

My dad, the original congenital Democrat, was fond of this quote:

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H. L. Mencken

Because Republicans do and say things like this:

Priorities Posted by Matthew Yglesias Sept. 2, 2005

Yes it's despicable that faced with utter disaster George W. Bush's first impulse was to stay on vacation. But compare that to Pete Domenici who worries that with all this death and destruction it'll be hard to eliminate health care for poor people:

"This is a serious matter that calls into question all sorts of things," said Steve Bell, chief of staff to Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of a subcommittee that will handle much of the relief funding. "Do you think we're going to be able to pass substantial Medicaid cuts and Social Security reform in the middle of this? You can't put that much on the plate."

Poor baby. Bill Frist assures us later in the same article that estate tax repeal is still on the agenda. After all, it's not like anyone's foreseeing the need for spending on foreign wars or domestic disaster relief or anything like that in the near future.

Despite Katrina, Frist Will Call Vote on Estate Tax Repeal

Senate Finance Committee members were informed this morning that Sen. Bill Frist will move forward with a vote to permanently repeal the estate tax next week, likely on Tuesday, ThinkProgress has learned.

One stands in awe of Sen. Frist’s timing. Permanently repealing the estate tax would be a major blow to the nation’s charities. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has “found that the estate tax encourages wealthy individuals to donate considerably more to charity, since estate tax liability is reduced through donations made both during life and at death.” If there were no estate tax in 2000, for example, “charitable donations would have been between $13 billion to $25 billion lower than they actually were.”

As they did after 9/11 and during the lead-up to the Iraq war, conservatives have placed tax cuts for the most wealthy and well-off over the spirit of shared national sacrifice. What a stark contrast to the outpouring of generosity being shown by the American people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Fun with David Brooks

What Makes Bill Frist Run?

Another coup for mainstream journalism, here.

David Brooks writes a column outlining how much he likes the "real" Bill Frist, but how he has strayed from his roots.

This part made me laugh out loud.

....These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role. And because he is behaving in ways that don't seem entirely authentic, he is often trying just a bit too hard, striking the notes more forcefully than they need to be struck.

That is what happened during the Terri Schiavo affair. It's not quite fair to say that Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a TV screen, but he did put himself on the wrong side of the autopsy that came out last week. He did betray his medical training, which is the core of his being, to please a key constituency group.

Of course, he DID diagnose her from a TV screen:

"I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

Which we know definitively was bullshit (most of us knew it was bullshit at that time, but now we have a pathological diagnosis, the medical gold standard):

An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners said on Wednesday . . . The autopsy also found that the brain deterioration had left her blind.
The New York Times
Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain, Withered, Was Untreatable
June 15, 2005

(via Billmon)

Then I read TBogg, and he had me laughing out loud about this:

Bill Frist: Cheating, two-timing man-slut

David Brooks finds honor in sleeping around on your fiancé:

Bill Frist was his high school's class president. He was a quarterback on the football team and a member of the honor society, and lived amid the upper crust of Nashville society. He dated the head cheerleader, and while he was in med school they were engaged to be married.

But while interning in Boston, he met another woman, spent a dinner and a night with her, and fell in love. Two days before his wedding, he flew back to Nashville and broke off his engagement. "Everyone listened carefully to what I said, all the lame explanations I had that were and were not the truth," Frist later wrote, "and they nodded and dealt with it and I went on my way."

I've always admired that anecdote. It took guts to break off the grand wedding that was in the works - to risk alienating everyone he had grown up with for the sake of the woman he had suddenly come to love. Furthermore here was a Bill Frist who knew his own heart.

.......and makes a man who cheats on his fiancé the Senate Majority Leader.

Bobo's World: Where your wedding is only a dinner and a blow job away from collapsing like a Papier Mâchè submarine.

Not only is Brooks column incredibly lame, it's also recycled from a column he wrote in 2003 for the Weekly Standard, his last MSM outpost. The 2003 piece contains the "Mom motored me around" story, the broken engagement story (if he were a white woman, would the Times have put "Runaway Bride" in the header?), and the same "everyone who knows him loves him" crap.

David Brooks, real (crappy) journalist.

Government Colludes with Big Pharma to Make Kids Sick

Read the entire article. It's chilling.

Deadly Immunity

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.

**********

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

**********

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

**********

Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin.