Criminal incompetence by BushCo

I'm baaaaaccckkk! I got distracted by the major blogs for a couple days. Truly great blogs........DailyKos, AmericaBlog, Atrios, MyDD, and some others. One of the blogs recommended checking out a blog called AngryBlackBitch, also on BlogSpot Network. ABB is really terrific! And....she is right on the money about everything.

The following article is about Dangerous Incompetence, but I call it Criminal Incompetence. How can you send our troops over to Iraq and Afghanistan without sufficient protection? And all those billions of dollars that are going over there.....I don't see it showing up in more armor-plated vehicles or anything. So....where's the money going? It's looking more like Halliburton and KBR and other contractors are getting the lionshare of the money and not really doing what they are supposed to do with the money. They're just lining their pockets at our troops expense. War profiteering! This is criminal activity. We read stories everyday that these companies are substituting shoddy products for what is really supposed to be supplied.

We are reading stories from vets about out-dated food, rotten food being fed to our troops in Iraq by Halliburton subsideraries. WTF?? Rep. Louis Slaughter is trying to bring all these things to the attention of the American people by demanding an audit, so we know where all this money is going, and are these Halliburton companies really supplieing what they are supposed to supply? WE NEED AN ACCOUNTING of where all these BILLIONS of dollars are really going. If you haven't done so already, please sign the petition at her site: http://www.IraqAudit.com. We need to find out where all this money is going!

June 30, 2005
Dangerous Incompetence
By BOB HERBERT

The president who displayed his contempt for Iraqi militants two years ago with the taunt "bring 'em on" had to go on television Tuesday night to urge Americans not to abandon support for the war that he foolishly started but can't figure out how to win.

The Bush crowd bristles at the use of the "Q-word" - quagmire - to describe American involvement in Iraq. But with our soldiers fighting and dying with no end in sight, who can deny that Mr. Bush has gotten us into "a situation from which extrication is very difficult," which is a standard definition of quagmire?

More than 1,730 American troops have already died in Iraq. Some were little more than children when they signed up for the armed forces, like Ramona Valdez, who grew up in the Bronx and was just 17 when she joined the Marines. She was one of six service members, including four women, who were killed when a suicide bomber struck their convoy in Falluja last week.

Corporal Valdez wasn't even old enough to legally drink in New York. She died four days shy of her 21st birthday.

On July 2, 2003, with evidence mounting that U.S. troop strength in Iraq was inadequate, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House, "There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring 'em on."

It was an immature display of street-corner machismo that appalled people familiar with the agonizing ordeals of combat. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: "I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."

The American death toll in Iraq at that point was about 200, but it was clear that a vicious opposition was developing. Mr. Bush had no coherent strategy for defeating the insurgency then, and now - more than 1,500 additional deaths later - he still doesn't.

The incompetence at the highest levels of government in Washington has undermined the U.S. troops who have fought honorably and bravely in Iraq, which is why the troops are now stuck in a murderous quagmire. If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.

The administration seems to have learned nothing in the past two years. Dick Cheney, who told us the troops would be "greeted as liberators," now assures us that the insurgency is in its last throes. And the president, who never listened to warnings that he was going to war with too few troops, still refuses to acknowledge that there are not enough U.S. forces deployed to pacify Iraq.

The Times's Richard A. Oppel Jr. wrote an article recently about a tragically common occurrence in Iraq: U.S. forces fight to free cities and towns from the grip of insurgents, and then leave. With insufficient forces left behind to secure the liberated areas, the insurgents return.

"We have a finite number of troops," said Maj. Chris Kennedy of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. "But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country."

The latest fantasy out of Washington is that American-trained Iraqi forces will ultimately be able to do what the American forces have not: defeat the insurgency and pacify Iraq.

"We've learned that Iraqis are courageous and that they need additional skills," said Mr. Bush in his television address. "And that is why a major part of our mission is to train them so they can do the fighting, and then our troops can come home."

Don't hold your breath. This is another example of the administration's inability to distinguish between a strategy and a wish.

Whether one agreed with the launch of this war or not - and I did not - the troops doing the fighting deserve to be guided by leaders in Washington who are at least minimally competent at waging war. That has not been the case, which is why we can expect to remain stuck in this tragic quagmire for the foreseeable future.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

David Brooks is on vacation.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Democrats Anti-Christian?

I don't believe that for a minute. Rep. Hostetler is a buffoon, and a troublemaker with a capital "T". What an asshole! This anti-Christian rhetoric is getting rather old, don't you think? I'm going to write to this yahoo and tell him just how big a fool he is. We have to let these people know that they can't keep getting away with this shit.

GOP Congressman Calls Democrats Anti-Christian
Remarks in Floor Debate Stir Protest

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 21, 2005; A04

Business on the floor of the House was halted for 45 minutes yesterday after Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-Ind.) accused Democrats of "denigrating and demonizing Christians," prompting a furious protest from across the aisle.

The House was debating a Democratic amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill that would have required the Air Force Academy to develop a plan for preventing "coercive and abusive religious proselytizing."

Hostettler, speaking against the amendment, asserted that "the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives" and "continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats."

"Like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians," he said.

Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, protested the statement, saying: "I move that the gentleman's words be taken down."

The incident followed dust-ups between the two parties over the conduct of the war on terrorism. Over the weekend, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) to apologize and withdraw his comments made on the Senate floor comparing U.S. soldiers' handling of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the actions taken years ago by "Nazis and Soviets in their gulags."

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) repeated an assertion yesterday that had drawn heavy Republican criticism, calling the war in Iraq "a grotesque mistake."

Yesterday, Hostettler had a choice: to agree to withdraw his words, or to stick by them and face a ruling from the chair that he had violated rules against disparaging another member on the floor. If the member's words are taken down, it is considered a serious offense and the lawmaker would not be able to speak for the rest of the day.

Eventually, Hostettler rose and read a sentence that had been written out for him in large block letters by a young Republican floor aide: "Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the last sentence I spoke."

Later, the Democratic amendment was defeated, 210 to 198, and on a voice vote the Air Force was required to say how it is promoting religious tolerance before the overall appropriations bill passed, 398 to 19.

Hostettler was in the news last year when he took a registered Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun to Louisville International Airport as he was preparing to board a flight to Washington. The congressman, who said he had forgotten he had placed the gun in the briefcase, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received a suspended sentence.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Ohio is hopeless!!

This is major league corruption. Wow! Unbelievable, just unbelievable. I hope the good people of Ohio do the right thing in the coming years for elections....elect Democrats to clean up that big mess there.



June 17, 2005
What's the Matter With Ohio?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Toledo Blade's reports on Coingate - the unfolding tale of how Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation misused funds - deserve much more national attention than they have received so far. For one thing, it's an entertaining story that seems to get weirder by the week. More important, it's an object lesson in what happens when you have one-party rule untrammeled by any quaint notions of independent oversight.

In April, The Blade reported that the bureau, which provides financial support for workers injured on the job, had invested $50 million in Capital Coin, a rare-coin trading operation run by Tom Noe, an influential Republican fund-raiser.

At first, state officials angrily insisted that this unusual use of state funds was a good investment that had nothing to do with Mr. Noe's political connections. An accounting investigation revealed, however, that Mr. Noe's claims to be running a profitable business were fictitious: he had lost millions, and 121 valuable coins were missing.

On June 3, police raided the Colorado home of Michael Storeim, Mr. Noe's business associate, and seized hundreds of rare coins. After changing the locks, they left 3,500 bottles of wine, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, in the home's basement.

On Monday, Mr. Storeim told police that someone had broken into his house over the weekend and stolen much of the wine, along with artwork, guns, jewelry and cars. As I said, this story keeps getting weirder.

Meanwhile, The Blade uncovered an even bigger story: the Bureau of Workers' Compensation invested $225 million in a hedge fund managed by MDL Capital, whose chairman had strong political connections. When this investment started to go sour, the bureau's chief financial officer told another top agency official that he had been told to "give MDL a break."

By October 2004, state officials knew that MDL had lost almost the entire investment, but they kept the loss hidden until this month.

How could such things happen? The answer, it has become clear, lies in a web of financial connections between state officials and the businessmen who got to play with state funds.

We're not just talking about campaign contributions, although Mr. Noe's contributions ranged so widely that five of the state's seven Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from cases associated with the scandal. (He's also under suspicion of using intermediaries to contribute large sums, illegally, to the Bush campaign.) We're talking about personal payoffs: bargain vacations for the governor's chief of staff at Mr. Noe's Florida home, the fact that MDL Capital employs the daughter of one of the members of the workers' compensation oversight board, and more.

Now, politicians and businessmen are always in a position to do each other lucrative favors. Government is relatively clean when politicians are sufficiently afraid of scandal to resist temptation. But when a political machine controls all branches of government, and those officials charged with oversight are also reliably partisan, politicians feel safe from investigation. Their inhibitions dissolve, and they take full advantage of their position, until the scandals become too big to hide.

In other words, Ohio's state government today is a lot like Boss Tweed's New York. Unfortunately, a lot of other state governments look similar - and so does Washington.

Since their 1994 takeover of Congress, and even more so since the 2000 election, Republican leaders have sought to make their political dominance permanent. They redistricted Texas to lock in their control of the House. Through the "K Street Project" they have put lobbying firms under partisan control, starving the Democrats of campaign funds. And they are, of course, trying to pack the courts with partisan loyalists.

In effect, they're trying to turn America into a giant version of the elder Richard Daley's Chicago.

These efforts have already created an environment in which politicians from the right party and businessmen with the right connections believe, with good reason, that they have immunity.

And politicians who feel that they can exploit their position tend to do just that. It's a likely bet that the scandals we already know about, from Coingate to Tom DeLay's dealings with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The message from Ohio is that long-term dominance by a political machine leads to corruption, regardless of the policies that machine follows or the ideology it claims to represent.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Embedded Lobbyists....to me this is criminal!

The whole GOP is a bunch of crooks. Yes, I said crooks, guided by the 2 biggest crooks of all.....Bush and Cheney. It's going to take a decade or more just to undo all the terrible and unjust things they have done so far. I'm glad that the American people are starting to wake up to what's going on, albeit a little late. The thing that really gets me is this....they (the GOP) are getting bolder and bolder in what they are doing. The GOP thugs think they can get away with it all, so why hide it? Where are these so-called Christians in all this? Thou shalt not steal, isn't that one of the 10 Commandments? It was the last time I looked. So where are these Religious Right Christians? I'll tell you....some of them are right there participating in all this immoral and possibly illegal activity. Christians helping Christians....right? I guess that's the way they look at it.

It's time to take America back!! Howard.....let's get to work!

Editorial
June 17, 2005
Lobbying From Within

It was no surprise to learn that Philip Cooney, who resigned last week as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will soon take a job at Exxon Mobil. His yeoman work in fighting against limits on greenhouse gas emissions, first as a lawyer for the oil industry's main lobbying group and then at the White House, where he sanitized reports to play down the link between emissions and global warming, clearly earned the reward of a cushy job with Exxon, a leading opponent of curbs on emissions.

Yet it is surely a cause for dismay that the Bush administration has seen fit to embed so many former lobbyists in key policy or regulatory jobs where they can carry out their industry's agenda from within. Whereas the word lobbyist once connoted those who hung around in lobbies to buttonhole powerful politicians when they emerged from the inner sanctums, these modern-day lobbyists occupy the inner sanctums themselves.

Take William Myers III, another former lobbyist who is now being promoted for a high-level judicial post by President Bush. Mr. Myers, a longtime lobbyist for the mining and cattle industries, served as the top lawyer at the Interior Department in Mr. Bush's first administration. In that job, he issued an opinion opening Indian lands to mining degradation and was criticized by his hometown newspaper for acting as an apologist for the cattle industry. Now he has been rewarded with the president's nomination for a seat on a federal appeals court that has a major voice in environmental law in Western states.

Still deeply entrenched is Mark Rey, the under secretary for natural resources and environment in the Agriculture Department, a longtime lobbyist for forest-related industries who has used his post to weaken protections for the national forests. In the past four years, the administration has undercut agreements to preserve old-growth trees and wildlife in major West Coast forests, overturned a roadless rule protecting the most remote areas of forests and announced an overhaul of planning rules governing all national forests. Based on the Myers precedent, it looks as if Mr. Rey may be campaigning for a Supreme Court nomination.

A slightly different, but equally worrisome, kind of conflict emerged last week when the Justice Department prematurely scuttled much of its own case in the final rounds of a civil racketeering trial against the tobacco industry. The decision to reduce the amount of money demanded of the industry from an expected $130 billion to a mere $10 billion was made by Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. over the strenuous objections of the career lawyers running the case.

Mr. McCallum, a close friend of President Bush from their days as Skull & Bones members at Yale, had not been a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, but he was a partner in a law firm that did legal work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and his own legal work included medical malpractice defense, among other specialties. As Eric Lichtblau showed in yesterday's Times, the career lawyers complained in a memo that Mr. McCallum had made a preliminary decision without even reviewing their evidence. They suggested that the department's cave-in stemmed from "sticker shock" over the amount the industry might have to pay.

The "revolving door" in which people shuttle back and forth between jobs in government and industry is a sad fixture of Washington life. There are rules, albeit weak ones, that seek to limit what government officials can do when they first return to the private sector. But the public has little protection against the machinations of lobbyists who are invited into government and given the levers of power. In an administration that saw fit to put Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oil industry executive, in charge of drafting its closed-door energy policy, there is little prospect for reining in the special interests. The public will be the loser.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The Greed Factor at Work.....

Banks now want to enter the real estate transaction business to get that all-important 6% commission like realtors get. Greed, greed, greed! Remember when banks wanted to be able to buy and sell stocks like the big brokerage houses quite a few years ago, and then they got the legislation that allowed them to do so?

So what's next for the banks? They'll find something else I'm sure....

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 16, 2005; D02

Two profitable industries enriched by the housing boom -- banking and real estate -- went head to head on Capitol Hill yesterday, quarreling over how best to split the pie.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Bankers Association clashed over whether banks should be permitted to enter the real estate business, allowing them to expand from providing mortgages to actually conducting the transactions themselves. That would give them a shot at a share of the coveted 6 percent sales commissions many traditional real estate agents receive.

"No business should be immune from competition," Betsy Duke, executive vice president of Wachovia Bank and chairman of the bankers' group, said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. Permitting banks to get into real estate brokerage business would "invigorate" the business, she said, and give consumers "new choices and products at competitive prices."

Al Mansell, president of the National Association of Realtors, said the real estate business is already competitive and scoffed at Duke's claims that bankers would better protect consumers than real estate brokers. Mansell said that bankers are endangering consumers with risky new mortgage products, such as interest-only loans, as well as those with adjustable rates, prepayment penalties, balloon payments and high interest rates. Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said these "exotic forms" of mortgages were raising "particular concern" for consumers and lenders.

"All the firewalls in the world won't cool off the zeal of the money-center lenders trying to sell their most profitable loans to people who should not be taking such risks," said Mansell, chief executive of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Salt Lake City. "If lenders were to become real estate brokers, nothing would stand in their way."

The debate unfolded at a hearing over a measure proposed last month by Reps. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio), committee chairman, and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that would permit bank affiliates to enter the real estate business. A competing bill authored by Reps. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) and Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), which would bar bank affiliates from entering the real estate brokerage business, has 240 co-sponsors.

At issue is 1999 federal legislation that permitted banks to enter the insurance and securities businesses, industries that had been generally off limits. Banks also wanted to enter real estate, but legislators punted the decision to federal banking regulators. About a year later, regulators announced a proposed rule that would allow banks to enter real estate brokerage and management -- and were deluged with 50,000 comments criticizing the idea, almost all from real estate agents. Each year since, the real estate industry has gotten the appropriation for the proposal blocked, so there has been no money to implement it.

At the hearing, Oxley said he had written his legislation partly out of ire over the use of the appropriations process to block regulatory action. He also noted that federal antitrust regulators have questioned other efforts taken by real estate groups to block online competition.

Duke, of the banking association, said that if banks were permitted to enter the real estate brokerage business, state laws would still protect consumers.

Mansell countered that bankers have managed to get around state consumer-protection laws, particularly laws limiting predatory lending, by getting federal regulators to issue a blanket exemption from state law for nationally chartered banks, which includes most of the nation's largest banks.

"You've got a pretty lopsided regulator," Mansell said. "You could raise the question of whether it is a regulator or a permitter."

Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) also urged the two sides to work together, noting that the debate was "exposing their own vulnerabilities."

He said, "It's hard for banks to say they will be regulated by state laws when federal regulators have preempted banks from regulating on the state level." And, he said, "it's hard for Realtors to say . . . with a straight face" that they support competition when they are also having "issues" in opposing online real estate competition.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Senator MBNA.....

It's time for you to go back to resign from the US Senate and go home to Delaware. You're not a Democrat......you're a closet Republican. You are part of the problem in America today, you self-serving pompous ass! How do you sleep at night Joe? You sold your soul to MBNA. You have forsaken the PEOPLE that sent you to the US Senate.

To the good people of Delaware: it's time for Joe to go. Any Democrat that wants to run against Joe the next time he's up for re-election.....I'll come down to Delaware and help you in any way I can. Joe's got to go!

Follow the links to read more about Joe and what he's up to:

http://www.davidsirota.com/2005/06/lets-make-deal-with-sen-joe-biden.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/15/11522/3301

Give Senator MBNA a call and let him know that HE does not speak for us!
Biden's DC office---202-224-5042

Forgive them Father.......

for they know not what they do. Well, it looks like the Nazi Party (GOP) will succeed this time around. We need PBS and all the good things they do, but the Nazis can't tolerate free thinking, or independence in television or radio programming.

We've got to fight these Nazis and keep our freedoms, and to right the wrongs they have wrought upon us. We must rise up and take them to task!

June 15, 2005
Squelching Public Broadcasting

Do little boys and girls out there know how to spell "spite"? For those who don't, the House Republicans who voted last week to gut federal support of public broadcasting - from "Sesame Street" to well beyond - are offering a graphic demonstration as they attack one of the nation's more valued institutions. The Appropriations Committee voted not only to end taxpayers' support for next year's children's shows on public radio and television (yes, "Clifford the Big Red Dog" and "Postcards from Buster," too), but also to close out entirely the $400 million in federal support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - the aid funnel to local stations - across the next two years.

A decade ago, Newt Gingrich tried a similar stratagem to "zero out" public broadcasting as Republicans claimed there was liberal bias in programming. The attempt failed in the face of cooler legislative heads and the proven indispensability of public broadcasting. This time, the Republicans' campaign is more threatening since it amounts to a second front in the culture war agenda identified with Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican who is now chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Mr. Tomlinson is intent on ramming partisan "balance" on the airwaves - read that as dragging public broadcasting over to the right - by stocking the corporation with G.O.P. loyalists. In the next few weeks, the corporation's Republican-dominated board is expected to choose a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee as president of the corporation.

Mr. Tomlinson has said he is concerned about the cuts and will "make the case" for federal support. But he is in an awkward position, with his own objectivity more in question than Big Bird's or Buster's. Federal money amounts to 15 percent of public broadcasting's budget revenues, but it plays a larger and particularly crucial role for smaller rural stations. More than government support, the public's faith and donations could be threatened if audiences sense the Republicans are succeeding with an ideological putsch.

Republican lawmakers insist that the budget cuts are only one of many sacrifices required for fiscal discipline - a truly laughable contention from a Congress that has broken all records for deficit spending and borrowing. The pending highway bill alone has 3,800 pet projects (cue Porky Pig, not Oscar the Grouch). These include $2 billion-plus for two ludicrous "bridges to nowhere" in rural Alaska, where, incidentally, station officials say public broadcasting may fade from the air unless the Senate blocks the House's spiteful cuts.

Editorial
Courtesy NY Times

Go Howard!!

YEEEEAAAAAA!!! Howard Dean speaks for me!!

Biden, Polosi, and you other establishment Democrats.......GET WITH THE PROGRAM!!! Biden and Polosi show what is wrong with our party........they apparently are ok with the status quo. Well, I'm not! It's time to make changes in our party, MAJOR changes. You go Howard!!

The pain of pension defaults

Something must be done to prevent more companies from shirking from their pension obligations. Wii the current Congress really do anything about it? I really and truly doubt it. Why should they? It is so much easier to dump their responsibilities on the American taxpayer. This is morally wrong and we must tell them that! We must send a message to these companies and to our irresponsible Congress about how wrong this is.

Human Toll of a Pension Default

By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 13, 2005; A01

Ellen Saracini lost her husband, United Airlines Capt. Victor J. Saracini, when his Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Now she stands to lose more than half of her widow's pension in a very different kind of crash -- United's default of its $9 billion pension obligations.

The scale of the default, the largest in U.S. history, has received more attention than the toll on the lives of the bankrupt airline's 120,000 employees and pensioners. Saracini discussed its impact on her and her two daughters in an interview yesterday, saying she hopes her story will help shift the focus to the laws and policies that allow such defaults.

"My own situation is not a crisis -- I have my husband's life insurance to keep us secure in our house," she said from her home in Yardley, Pa. "But a lot of other people have real hardship -- medical costs they won't be able to afford, houses they won't be able to keep. If I can help draw attention to them, I'll do it in a heartbeat."

Saracini was among about 2,000 United pensioners and employees who e-mailed their stories to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) in recent days for what he called an online hearing on the human impact of the default. "We have been overwhelmed -- both numerically and emotionally -- by the response," said Miller, one of several politicians in both parties warning that a wider crisis will loom if the nation's pension security laws are not revised.

More than 20 other companies have defaulted on pension funds of more than $100 million in the past three years, and last week, executives of troubled Delta and Northwest airlines said they may be next. Miller has proposed a six-month moratorium on defaults, as Congress debates how to fix what many lawmakers call "broken" pension protection laws.

"Like Enron, workers' lives and retirements have been ruined," Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said last week. "But unfortunately, this time it's perfectly legal."

In e-mails to Miller that his staff is posting online, and in interviews, United retirees recounted stories of job-hunting in their sixties and seventies, facing medical costs they no longer can afford, uprooting families to move to lower-cost communities, selling dream retirement homes and losing money they had counted on to support elderly parents.

The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. (PBGC), the federal insurance program that faces its own solvency crisis and is to take over the United pensions, ensures a maximum of $45,000 a year in benefits for those who retired at 65, but considerably less for those who retired younger -- much as Social Security pays less to early retirees. This particularly hurts pilots, whom the law requires to retire from major airlines at 60 and who now collect as much as $125,000 a year in pensions, depending on length of service. The PBGC's maximum coverage for those who retire at 60 is $28,000 -- a cut of 50 to 75 percent for pilots. Saracini will receive even less because her husband was 51 when he was killed.

The PBGC limits cover full pensions for most United retirees, but those still working will have their pensions frozen, meaning they will accrue no more benefits and will have less money for retirement than they had counted on -- in some cases, much less.

Dale Cassady, a flight attendant for 32 years who lives in Arlington, wrote to Miller that she exhausted most of her savings putting her daughter through college and now will have to take in a boarder to be able to pay her mortgage and property taxes. Floyd Channell, 72, a retired United ramp worker at Dulles International Airport, said he worries how today's workers will fare in old age with even smaller pensions than his. Although PBGC probably will protect his full benefit, he said he needs one-third of it just to pay medical costs -- beyond what Medicare covers -- for his wife, who has disabling back pain. He has taken a part-time job at a church, "but when you're 72, you can't get much," he said.

For pilots, the six-figure drop in pension benefits follows losses of tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in United stock they received in the 1990s in exchange for major pay and benefit concessions -- and were required to hold until retirement, as the stock plummeted in value. Other employees lost stock as well, but had less to lose.

"I call it legalized crime," said United pilot Klaus Meyer, 47, of Bethlehem, Pa. "I lost almost all my United stock value in the bankruptcy, and here's another part of the retirement I was promised that is gone. And now my Social Security is at risk. Where does it all end? You feel brutalized by the system."

Meyer agreed to be interviewed despite warnings from the pilots' union that United may penalize employees who talk to reporters. "What are they going to do to me -- cut my pension in half?" he said.

Retired pilots nationwide who spent their work lives expecting six-figure pensions told of scrambling to downsize as fast as possible. "The last thing I thought was that I would depend on Social Security as the cornerstone of my retirement," John J. Pinto, 60, of Annapolis, wrote to Miller. Pinto said he is job-hunting, and has found that he and his wife, a schoolteacher, probably will earn together less than a fourth of his pay as a pilot.

In the late 1990s, United pilot Gerald Innella had $500,000 in United stock and a promised $110,000 pension for life. His children grown, he and his wife built a "dream home" on a golf course in Somerset County, N.J. His stock sold at $10,000 in the bankruptcy, and his pension stands to drop almost $80,000 a year. Innella, now 60, and his wife recently sold the dream home, moving in first with their son and now a niece. Interviewed at his niece's home in Glen Gardner, N.J., Innella was preparing for a pre-dawn flight to Antigua; he is back at work as a full-time charter pilot at one-third of his former salary.

Last week, United Chief Executive Officer Glenn Tilton testified to the Senate Finance Committee about $4.5 million he is receiving from United to replace benefits he had accrued over a 32-year career at Texaco, his previous employer. Tilton said that the default will not affect the payment, and that he has $1.5 million left to collect. He said this does not represent a double standard because United promised him the money in his contract.

"He is saying, 'United guaranteed that to me,' " said retired pilot John D. Clark of Charlottesville, who flew United planes for 36 years out of Dulles and whose $125,000 annual pension is to be reduced by more than 70 percent. "Why is the promise made to him understandable, and the one made to me can go by the wayside?"

Clark said he is more enraged at the injustice of the pension default than at his own situation. "The company is at fault, the Congress is at fault, the president is at fault, past presidents are at fault. There's plenty of fault to go around, but we live in a time when nobody takes responsibility," he said.

Tilton testified to the Senate last week that despite the catastrophic condition of its pension fund, United met all federal funding requirements until filing for bankruptcy in 2002. Defaulting now is the only way to save the jobs of existing employees, he said; otherwise, the company would have to fold, and pensions still would be terminated.

PBGC Executive Director Bradley D. Belt said in an interview that United is only the latest -- and largest -- illustration of what ails the federal pension protection system: It allows companies to drastically underfund pensions, and even to disguise the problem. Defaults have so escalated in troubled sectors of the economy, Belt said, that the PBGC now is on the hook for $450 billion in pension obligations, compared with $50 billion only three or four years ago. In three years, it has gone from having a $7 billion surplus to a $23 billion deficit. Without changes to the 30-year-old pension protection system, he said, the PBGC could itself become insolvent.

As such, Belt said he sees a grim upside to the tide of financial problems United retirees are now bringing to the public's attention.

"If there's a silver lining on that very dark cloud, it's a wake-up call to policymakers that this problem has a very human dimension and very human costs, and it's critically important to change the rules so we don't have future Uniteds," Belt said.

The family of Victor Saracini is a case in point, Belt said. Bankruptcies and pension defaults make no exceptions, even for widows and children of pilots who were killed on Sept. 11. Although Ellen Saracini said she will not face undue hardship, she said that PBGC officials estimated she is likely to lose 50 to 70 percent of her widow's pension -- money she had counted on to send her daughters to college and pay for assisted living for her parents. News of the default also came too late for Saracini to appeal her settlement from the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund. In what she now sees as "double jeopardy," her settlement from the fund deducted the full value of her pension -- including the part she will never see.

"Everyone was affected by September 11, just to different degrees, and now everyone is affected by this decision of United and our government, just to different degrees," she said. "Each one is drastic in the eyes of the person it touches."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

The Bush Economy - sub-title: How Bush helps the super-rich get richer

Do the super-rich really need help in making more wealth from good 'ol Georgey-boy? I think not! And the vast majority of us can just forget about upward mobility, 'cause it ain't gonna happen. Well, that's another American dream down the drain. Bush and Co. have forgotten what has made America great through the years. To me that is un-American!




June 7, 2005
The Bush Economy

With all of the debate about taxes, the economy and domestic spending, it is hard to imagine anyone supporting the notion of taking money from programs like Medicaid and college-tuition assistance, increasing the tax burden of the vast majority of working Americans, sending the country into crushing debt - and giving the proceeds to people who are so fantastically rich that they don't know what to do with the money they already have. Yet that is just what is happening under the Bush administration. Forget the middle class and the upper-middle class. Even the merely wealthy are being left behind in the dust by the small slice of super-rich Americans.

In last Sunday's Times, David Cay Johnston reported that from 1980 to 2002, the latest year of available data, the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent of earners more than doubled, while the share earned by everyone else in the top 10 percent rose far less. The share of the bottom 90 percent declined.

President Bush did not create the income gap. But the unheralded effect of his tax policy is its unequal impact on the modestly well to do. By 2015, those making between $80,000 and $400,000 will pay as much as 13.9 percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $400,000, assuming the tax cuts are made permanent. Below $80,000, most taxpayers will see their share of taxes rise slightly or stay the same.

Mr. Johnston's article quotes a prominent economist who argues that people care more about the chance to move from one income class to another (upward, of course) than about income distribution. But during the Bush years, the two main sources of class mobility - a good job and money for higher education - have increasingly failed to materialize for those who most need them. Last week's jobs report from the Labor Department confirmed that a strong labor market recovery has not taken hold. Wages for most working people failed even to outpace inflation in the past year.

That might be more bearable if things were rough all over. But the share of economic growth that is going toward corporate profits, which flow to stockholders and bondholders who are concentrated at the top of the income scale, is at historic highs.

Which brings us back to the super wealthy and the merely rich. The divide between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story, but income-class warfare among the top 20 percent of the scale is a newer phenomenon. One cause is that the further up the scale one goes, the more of one's income comes from investments, which under the Bush tax cuts enjoy about the lowest rates in the tax code. But many families making between $100,000 and $200,000 are not exactly on easy street. They don't face choices anywhere near as stark as those encountered further down the income ladder, but they face serious tradeoffs not experienced by the uppermost crust, particularly when hit with the triple whammy of college for the children, care for aging parents and preparing for their own retirement.

There is something deeply wrong about a system that calls into question a comfortable retirement or a top-notch education for people who have broken into the top 20 percent of income earners. It starts to seem politically explosive when you consider that in a decade, those making between $100,000 and $200,000 will pay about five to nine percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $1 million, assuming the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

This is not about giving wealthy people more money to invest back into the economy. At this level, it's really about giving more money to those who have nothing to do with it except amass enormous estates for their heirs. Fixing the problem will require members of Congress to summon the courage to say no to a president who wants more for the richest of the rich at the expense of everyone else. We're not holding our breath.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Disney Boycott by AFA over

I found an interesting story on www.americablog.org today. I really like it. Check it out for yourself!

Religious Right Folds on Disney Boycott After Nine Fruitless Years
by Michael in New York - 6/3/2005 05:26:00 PM

In classic Orwellian fashion, the far right hate group American Family Association is ending its boycott of Disney and declaring success just a few days before the 15th Annual Gay Day pumps millions into Disney's theme parks. AFA president Tim Wildmon said the boycott had been a huge success.

Oh, of course it has. Disney sent the career of out lesbian Ellen Degeneres soaring with its massive popular hit Finding Nemo. Now Ellen is a daytime talk show fixture and Emmy winner beloved by moms and kids everywhere. Disney's family friendly summer movie "Herbie: Fully Loaded" was directed by another out lesbian. And ABC is reaping the rewards of TV's biggest new hit "Desperate Housewives," which has given a huge boost to its ratings thanks to its out creator Marc Cherry and steamy storylines about moms sleeping with (very hot) teenage gardeners and other high school guys who are gay and/or experimenting just to drive their moms crazy. Yep, that boycott is going swimmingly -- they've certainly changed Disney's behavior.

Why don't they just boycott America and be done with it?

Viagra Politics

Hmmmm. This one will really make you think about the BIG picture. The Democrats will have to radically shift their focus, and they should. They really have to. No ifs, ands or butts. We can't continue with the tired politics of the past, we have to focus on things that really matter today, tomorrow, and the future.



June 1, 2005
Beyond Viagra Politics
By MATT MILLER

In recent days, governors of both parties have swung into action to deny state-subsidized Viagra to known sexual offenders. Who says our leaders aren't taking on the tough issues and speaking truth to power?

Still, it does get you thinking. What if leaders in each party actually did tell their supporters some truths they needed to hear - and thereby exposed the charades each side relies on to wangle the support of half of the half of Americans who bother to vote? Take a dose of truth serum and fantasize with me.

Our Republican truth-teller would start by admitting what President Bush was still denying in his press conference yesterday: that the G.O.P.'s perennial attack on "big government" is a con. Republicans know that just seven programs make up 75 percent of federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, civil service pensions, defense and interest on the debt. That's "big government." Republicans aren't cutting a dime of it. In fact, under Bush, they've called for big increases. Interest on the debt alone will double under Bush's plan (and on Social Security, recall, he's trying only to slow its growth).

And this is before you toss in everything from NASA to the national parks to the National Institutes of Health, not to mention student loans, farm subsidies and homeland security. These things take up a good chunk of the quarter of the federal dollar that's left, and Republicans vote for them every day.

The "big government" hoax would become even clearer if Republicans admitted a related truth: today's epic budget deficits are caused mostly by Bush's tax cuts, not, as the president insisted again yesterday, by some spending binge. Here's how we know. Federal spending under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush averaged 22 percent of G.D.P. Under Bill Clinton it averaged 20 percent. Bush's plan (despite his spending increases) would keep spending around 20 percent in the years ahead.

As you may have noticed, 20 is less than 22. Bush is operating government at a smaller level than did previous Republican presidents. Today's historic red ink is due to the fact that revenues have dropped from over 20 percent of G.D.P. when Bush took office to under 17 percent today.

Wouldn't it be nice if elected Republicans would say out loud what one told me privately: that it's lunacy to think we can keep revenue this low as we start to double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare in a few years? Truth-serum Republicans would explain that talk of endless tax cuts in this context amounts to a shocking case of collective denial.

Truth-telling Democrats would come clean on their own charades. Imagine a Democrat declaring that the party must stop pretending that mandates on business (for health coverage, say) are "free" ways to get social results Democrats like - when such mandates impose costs ultimately borne by workers or consumers.

And imagine if Democrats said it was time to stop scaring seniors about the G.O.P.'s nefarious plans for Medicare. Truly "new" Democrats would instead teach party activists something different: that the enemy of liberal causes a decade from now will not be the evil heirs of Newt Gingrich, but Medicare itself. That's because every dollar spent on soaring Medicare bills that isn't needed for quality care (in our wasteful health system) is a dollar that liberals won't be able to spend on a poor child.

Imagine a Democrat who explained that this is what the trade-offs will sound like before long - by way of urging Democrats to take the lead on slowing the growth of these programs, rather than condemning Republican efforts to do so.

There's more, of course, but this gives you a feel for how different our politics would sound if we moved beyond Viagra politics and got serious about our problems. All it would take is enough of us rebelling against a perverse culture in which "political courage" is oddly defined as "telling the truth." After all, if we don't make the world safe for our leaders to do the right thing, who will?

"I like a look of agony, because I know it's true," wrote Emily Dickinson. It may not be agony citizens are looking for, but common sense tells them that the ratio of fact to flimflam has reached depressing lows. It may take a jolt to the system more powerful than the one Viagra delivers to rouse us from the torpor of charades-as-usual. Then again, now that Deep Throat has been unveiled, maybe anything is possible.

E-mail: mattmiller@nytimes.com; Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Maureen Dowd is on book leave.

Republican Assholes

What are these assholes doing? They will try to stick it to us any way they can. I betcha Santorum is in the middle of this one somewhere. I just hope the American people wake the hell up on this one, this is really getting bad.


June 1, 2005
Patriot Act Redux, and in the Dark

The Patriot Act was passed in haste, in the angst-filled days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with some lawmakers candidly admitting they never read the details. That was one of the reasons key sections included expiration dates, so calmer heads of the future would have an opportunity to fix mistakes. Now that opportunity is here, and far from removing obvious threats to civil liberties in the law, the White House and eager Senate Republicans seem bent on making it worse.

Citizens who want to keep an eye on the process will have no easy task. The most crucial debates of the Senate Intelligence Committee are being kept closed to the public.

This is a terrible idea that gives credence to the worst fears of opponents of Patriot Act I. When the committee resumes its work next week, its leaders should rethink their policy and open their deliberations to the light of day. Accommodations can be made for legitimate security concerns without keeping such a bedrock issue under wraps.

One of the most common complaints about the Patriot Act is that rather than addressing the real but narrow problems with existing law, it was a wish list of powers law enforcement officials had yearned for over the years that Congress had rightly resisted conferring. Now the Bush administration and its Senate allies have come up with another: a proposal to let F.B.I. agents write their own "administrative subpoenas," without the need to consult prosecutors or judges, in demand of all manner of records, from business to medical and tax data. There is no serious evidence that agents have been hamstrung by the lack of such wide authority.

Freeing agents from getting a judge's sign-off is an invitation to overreaching and abuse, as is a proposal to let the F.B.I. ignore postal law restraints when antiterrorism agents choose to monitor someone's letter envelopes and package covers.

Parts of the existing Patriot Act are reasonable law enforcement measures, but other sections should be repealed. Chief among these is the so-called library provision that lets the government seize entire databases at libraries, hospitals and other institutions when just one person is under investigation. Another part of the law makes it a crime for record holders to let the public know when a government data sweep has occurred.

Legitimate complaints that the existing law is overbearing have been heard from hundreds of state and local officials and from civil liberty and libertarian groups. Rather than addressing these flaws, Senate Republicans seem to be planning to compound them, under cover of closed hearings.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company