The California state Senate voted 28-8 Wednesday to exempt itself from the pointless gun-control laws that apply to the rest of the populace. Legislators apparently think they alone are worthy to pack heat on the streets for personal protection, and the masses ought to wait until the police arrive.
Limousines, the very symbol of wealth and excess, are usually the domain of corporate executives and the rich. But the number of limos owned by Uncle Sam increased by 73 percent during the first two years of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of records by iWatch News.
Most of the increase was recorded in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Obama administration officials said most of the increase reflects an enhanced effort to protect diplomats and other government officials in a dangerous world. But a watchdog group says the abundance of limos sends the wrong message in the midst of a budget crisis. The increase in limos comes to light on the heels of an executive order from President Obama last week that charges agencies to increase the fuel efficiency of their fleets.
Is all right because Frank's championing of Fannie and Freddie it only cost the taxpayer's a couple of trillion dollarsU.S. Rep. Barney Frank admitted he helped his ex-lover land a lucrative post with Fannie Mae in the early 1990s while the Newton Democrat was on a committee that regulated the lending giant — but he called questions of a potential ethical conflict “nonsense.”
“If it is (a conflict of interest), then much of Washington is involved (in conflicts),” Frank told the Herald last night. “It is a common thing in Washington for members of Congress to have spouses work for the federal government. There is no rule against it at all.”
Frank said he helped his former longtime companion, Herb Moses, land a job at Fannie Mae in 1991 after Moses graduated with a master’s degree in business administration from Dartmouth College. Frank said he was approached by a Fannie Mae executive and vouched for Moses, who formerly worked as an economist in the Department of Agriculture.
It’s no secret that members of Congress qualify as political insiders, but a new report strongly suggests that they also may be insiders when it comes to trading stocks.
An extensive study released Wednesday in the journal Business and Politics found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios.
“We find strong evidence that members of the House have some type of non-public information which they use for personal gain,” according to four academics who authored the study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
To the frustration of open-government advocates, lawmakers and their staff members largely have immunity from laws barring trading on insider knowledge that have sent many a private corporate chieftain to prison.
The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel cleaning woman in New York City is a personal humiliation for the French politician, but it is also a black mark on the International Monetary Fund that chose to overlook his previous sexual behavior. It will be fascinating to see how the grandees of French and international financial politics handle this one.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and his attorney says he will plead not guilty. Some in the French press and even a French government minister are suggesting that the 62-year-old Socialist Party panjandrum may have been set up by his rivals. The charges are stunning enough—and French politics is strange enough—that we suppose anything is possible, but such a conspiracy would have to include a large number of players.
The facts of the case as reported by New York police so far do not look promising for the IMF managing director. The woman who entered to clean the Frenchman's $3,000-a-night Sofitel suite at midday on Saturday reported the incident immediately. She told police that Mr. Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom, pursued her down a hallway and pulled her into the bedroom. She escaped and he then chased her again and dragged her into a bathroom.
Earlier this year, the United Auto Workers decided to sell its money-losing 1,000-acre resort and golf course. Now, while GM files for its IPO, new UAW leadership is pulling the resort off the market. Here's a look inside.Built in 1970, the $33 million retreat located at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula includes the Walther and May Reuther Family Education Center, lodging for 261 people and an eternal flame in memory of Reuther, who died in a plane crash en route to the resort. Used mostly by the UAW for training conferences and family events, several well-appointed cabins dot the well-groomed grounds, including those given to former UAW presidents, and the centrally-located bar only serves beer made in union-represented breweries.
As Jerry Brown grabbed the spotlight with his criticism of Bell city officials and their outrageous pensions, The Watchdog got to wondering: How much will the Democrat for Governor make in retirement?
That, as it turns out, is a very difficult question to answer. After more than a month of investigation, the Watchdog can only say for certain that Brown and a handful of other top officials are eligible for generous benefits under a special pension fund so obscure that few people in government know how it works and many thought it had been eliminated 20 years ago by outraged voters.
Under the law, Brown should have accrued, at most, 16 years of service credit in this special fund, known as the Legislators’ Retirement System, or LRS. Actuarial statements produced by LRS, however, indicate that an unnamed person of Brown’s age and earning Brown’s exact salary has been credited with 25 to 29 years of service. The difference would mean tens of thousands of dollars in additional pension payments for Brown each year.
Brown’s campaign staff acknowledge the unnamed person sure looks like the gubernatorial candidate but have been unable to explain the discrepancy over service.
Officials at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which manages LRS, have similarly refused to cooperate, saying the law forbids them from answering questions about specific individuals. Meanwhile, The Watchdog has sought help from the offices of seven state lawmakers, one constitutional officer and one state department as well three outside pension experts and not one has been able to explain the discrepancy.
It’s a mystery as persistent as LRS itself.
Sounds like a chapter straight out of Animal Farm
As a judge weighs whether to halt Arizona's controversial immigration law, hundreds of Los Angeles union members and activists are planning a bus caravan to Phoenix on Thursday — the day the law is set to take effect.
More than 550 people plan to ride on 11 buses to Arizona to stage a protest and launch a partnership with Arizona groups to boost voter registration. During the one-day trip, sponsored by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, participants will meet with Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris, march to the state Capitol and hold a vigil. The participants represent 32 unions.
On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has "provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia." President Obama signed the bill Thursday.The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But for the teachers unions, this just can't happen. The National Education Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.
"Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA," declared the union in a letter sent to every Democrat in the House and Senate in March. "We expect that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program. Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 111th Congress."
Senator Dick Durbin, who heads the subcommittee that oversees funding, has been saying for the better part of a year that he's open to supporting the program's continuation if certain conditions were met. In retrospect, this looks like bad faith.
Earlier this year, Mr. Durbin said the local D.C. Council needed to sign off on the program before Congress could reauthorize it. The council did exactly that, sending Congress a letter expressing solid support for the scholarships. Senator Durbin then said he wants participating schools to administer the same exams to voucher students that D.C. public school students take. Done, said proponents.
The program's supporters now feel they've been had. "Durbin has engaged in that classic game of moving the goal posts," says Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. council member and one of many local Democratic leaders who back school vouchers. "He's just been less than honest. He's made promises to colleagues and school leaders—like Michelle Rhee, our schools Chancellor—saying, 'All I need is this.' But the reality is that they've been finding reasons not to support the program."
The voucher program is closed to new students. "It's duplicitous and shameful," says Mr. Chavous. Strong language. But if you're a kid in D.C. trying to escape its awful schools, maybe not strong enough.
On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.
"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."
The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.
You'd think that these people would be sensitive to the amount of pollution they're spewing.
If you were a skeptic, you might think they really don't believe in this stuff.
Just call them Snowball and Napolean
Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.
Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Barack Obama has been in office seven months, and he's off to Martha's Vineyard? Some 70 millions Americans voted for President Obama, and I bet 60 million of them condemned his predecessor for taking too much down time at his ranch in Texas. George W. Bush set a record for presidential vacationing; he was the laziest commander-in-chief ever.snip
But here's the new man, supposedly with a wholly different work ethic and intellectual rigor, off to a similar start - and in the midst of a recession, with millions of Americans out of work and many millions more so stressed about money, they decided to either stay home or pass vacation up altogether.
I acknowledge the following:
1. Vacation is a good thing; everyone needs it. But Americans do not get enough; we have annually far less vacation than our peers in Europe and Canada. And few Americans get any vacation at all before they've worked on a new job for at least a year.
2. Being president of the United States is the toughest job in the whole wide world.
3. Barack Obama was handed a mountain of problems when he took office, and he's taken on the immense challenge of reforming health care.
But that doesn't mean he gets to take 10 days off after seven months on the job.
But let me point out a couple of things to those who think Barack Obama has worked up a sweat during his first seven months: He pretty much passed the buck on health care to Congress and allowed his administration's message on the need for reform - specifically, the need for a public option in health insurance plans - to become muddled. He allowed the right wing to steal the show and infest the debate with "death panel" myths and other lies. The discipline of message that helped Mr. Obama win election has been sorely lacking in the campaign to resolve the nation's costly health care crisis.
Plus, there's the escalating war in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration still does not have an Army secretary. Also missing, according to the Times: the top civilian in charge of military readiness at the Pentagon.
Sorry, but you don't get to put in for vacation with that much work unfinished, and a major national issue to settle, and two wars, and a recession with long-term unemployment. Not if, from the start, you want people to believe you really represent change.
I read the various articles and blogs concerning the Obama administration seemingly backing off the public option requirement under proposed healthcare legislation. I was reminded of one particular scene from George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which Squealer (think White House spokesman Robert Gibbs) explains to the animals (the White House press pool) why Napoleon (President Obama) pulled a 180 on the building of the windmill originally proposed by the banished Snowball:
“That evening Squealer [Gibbs] explained privately to the other animals that Napoleon [Obama] had never in reality been opposed to the windmill. On the contrary, it was he who had advocated it in the beginning, and the plan which Snowball had drawn on the floor of the incubator shed had actually been stolen from among Napoleon’s [Obama’s] papers. The windmill was, in fact, Napoleon’s [Obama’s] own creation. Why, then, asked somebody, had he spoken so strongly against it? Here Squealer [Gibbs] looked very sly. That, he said, was Comrade Napoleon’s [Obama’s] cunning. He had SEEMED to oppose the windmill, simply as a maneuver to get rid of Snowball, who was a dangerous character and a bad influence. Now that Snowball was out of the way, the plan could go forward without his interference. This, said Squealer, was something called tactics. He repeated a number of times, “Tactics, comrades, tactics!” skipping round and whisking his tail with a merry laugh. The animals were not certain what the word meant, but Squealer [Gibbs] spoke so persuasively, and the three dogs who happened to be with him growled so threateningly, that they accepted his explanation without further questions.”
The unionized workers on the Teamsters Washington-based national staff are locked in a contract dispute with their own labor organization, and Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa is warning local officials of, as he puts it, the embarrassing prospect of a strike.
And if his own workers do walk out, Hoffa wrote in a letter to Teamster "principal officers" around the country late last month obtained by POLITICO, the national union or International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) will be forced to "make contingency plans to operate."
Continuing operations while its workers are on strike would cause severe public image problems for the Teamsters and place other unions in a difficult position. By tradition, unions keep solidarity by not crossing the picket lines of other unions.
But in his letter, dated July 29 and co-signed by the Teamsters' No. 2 official, Hoffa stated bluntly that "negotiations are not going well" with what he termed "the building workforce."
While praising the Teamster headquarters workers, he wrote that their union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), "refuses to acknowledge the current economic conditions and the impact on per capita revenues at the IBT."
Asked about the letter, Teamsters spokesman Bret Caldwell, who is not an OPEIU member, cited the effects of the recession on the national union's treasury.
"In these difficult times and as always, we must remain good stewards of our members’ hard-earned dues money," Caldwell said.
The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully cultivated image as a defender of the poor.
That's because the group has become the leading cheerleader for a controversial real estate development that is slated to use eminent domain to remove the poor people it claims to represent.
ACORN, which has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move, has also taken money from the project's developer and signed a binding agreement forcing it to stand behind the project no matter what.
In the world of corporate shakedowns it is commonplace for liberal activist groups to use the money they extract from a supposed "donor" to fund operations, but it is very unusual for a group to take money in exchange for betraying those it is supposed to represent.
The Internal Revenue Service has filed a tax lien seeking more than $800,000 from Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, escalating a dispute over payroll taxes that the lawmaker's office blames on faulty government paperwork.
The episode has left a candidate who fell just a few percentage points short of winning the White House trying to convince the government's tax collector that his campaign already paid the taxes and doesn't owe any more.
The IRS filed the lien in the District of Columbia earlier this year, claiming that a previous attempt to collect the money was unsuccessful. "We have made a demand for payment of this liability, but it remains unpaid," the tax filing stated.
The IRS is taking action more than a year after the campaign closed its books and sent nearly $200,000 in leftover presidential campaign money to Mr. Kerry's Senate election fund.
Sometimes even unions have union problems.
Dozens of employees of the Service Employees International Union picketed their own union Friday over its decision to lay off about 75 workers.
The staffers marched outside SEIU headquarters in Washington as they yelled into bullhorns, passed out fliers and chanted, "Justice for all, not just some."
"This union is supposed to be at the forefront of the progressive movement, but it can't seem to follow its own ideology," said Malcolm Harris, president of the Union of Union Representatives, which represents 210 SEIU organizers and field staff around the country.
The UUR has filed unfair labor practice charges and age and race discrimination claims against SEIU. Harris called SEIU leaders "hypocrites" for calling out corporations that shed workers, yet moving to lay off their own employees.
It takes a certain amount of nerve to have an event at the National Press Club and then ban the press from covering it.It takes another level of chutzpah entirely to admit members of the general public to your event at the National Press Club, recruit a news organization as the co-sponsor and then tell the press they can't cover it.
But that's exactly what former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and Georgetown University did yesterday.
Plouffe was listed as the keynote speaker at the luncheon yesterday for "Transition 2009," sponsored by Georgetown University and Politico. The public was invited to the event -- students free of charge and everybody else for a fee. But at the last minute, Georgetown announced that Plouffe's speech would be "closed press," even though the speech was being given in the National Press Club ballroom, described on a plaque at the door as "the sanctum sanctorum of American journalists."
National Press Club President Donna Leinwand fired off an e-mail to Plouffe and his agents stating her "strong opposition" to the press banishment from its own club. "If Mr. Plouffe wants to keep secrets," she said, "Mr. Plouffe should stay at home."
The Christmas ornaments for sale at the Miller Park Zoo's gift shop are partly manufactured by reindeer. Honest!
