Monthly Archives: July 2006

Dump Duhbya

Jeffrey S. Shockey, the Two Million Dollar Man

$2 Million Payment to Former Lobbyist Raises Eyebrows By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

You’ve probably never heard of Jeffrey S. Shockey. So, for simplicity’s sake, think of him as the Two Million Dollar Man.

The 40-year-old congressional staffer last year collected nearly $2 million in severance payments from his former employer, a lobbying firm that specializes in winning benefits from the committee he now serves. Many longtime Washingtonians are shaking their heads in disbelief over the payout’s enormous size, its ad hoc method of calculation and the fact that Shockey received it while working as a senior congressional aide. …

Federal employees are prohibited from supplementing their incomes with money from private sources, especially from lobbyists who have business before the government. Shockey says his payment was justified and within the rules. But experienced lobbyists around town question both its economics and its propriety.

The situation is an example of a common occurrence — the spinning of the “revolving door” between the public and private sectors. Shockey is deputy chief of staff of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Before that he was a partner for five years in a lobbying firm that made its living extracting goodies from the same committee. And before that he worked for Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), who was then a member of the committee and is now its chairman. …

Lobby shops often give parting gifts to colleagues who go into public service as a way to maintain strong relations. But the amount tends to be nominal and strictly tied to past performance to avoid even the appearance of paying a federal official in exchange for favorable treatment — an exchange that would be illegal.

Why, then, would Shockey’s former firm pay him so much? The reason, several seasoned lobbyists speculated, must have been the firm’s desire to keep its communications with Shockey and the appropriations panel absolutely seamless. “There would be no need to pay out that amount of money unless you needed to maintain a superlative relationship with that person after he leaves,” one veteran lobbyist said. …

Congressional appropriators like Lewis were once hesitant to explicitly fund pet projects for fear of being accused of playing favorites and of micromanaging the government. But that was a long time ago. The Republican Revolution of 1994 ushered in a new congressional majority that professed to be distrustful of government but also worked overtime to maintain its control by directing federal aid into popular programs that would help reelect GOP members. …

Publicity over the investigation has broken up the partnership. The firm’s two Democratic partners, James M. Copeland and Lynnette R. Jacquez, told their Republican colleagues last month that they were leaving. The reason, they said, was that ethical and legal questions threatened to destroy their professional reputations and ruin their commercial prospects.

Dump Duhbya

U.S. Cybersecurity Chief May Have a Conflict of Interest

U.S. Cybersecurity Chief May Have a Conflict of Interest Associated Press

The Bush administration’s cybersecurity chief is a contract employee who earns $577,000 under an agreement with a private university that does extensive business with the federal office he manages.

Donald “Andy” Purdy Jr. has been acting director of the Homeland Security Department’s National Cyber Security Division for 21 months. His two-year contract with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has drawn attention from members of Congress. By comparison, the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, is paid $175,000 annually.

Purdy is on loan from the school to the government, which is paying nearly all his salary. Meanwhile, Purdy’s cybersecurity division has paid Carnegie Mellon $19 million in contracts this year, almost one-fifth of the unit’s total budget.

Purdy said he has not been involved in discussions of his office’s business deals with the school. “I’m very sensitive to those kinds of requirements,” Purdy said. “It’s not like Carnegie Mellon has ever said to me, ‘We want to do this or that. We want more money.’ ” …

Purdy, a longtime lawyer, has held a number of state and federal legal and managerial jobs. He has no formal technical background in computer security.

Dump Duhbya

War of Words on Bank Story

War of Words on Bank Story By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer

For the Wall Street Journal editorial page, there may be no more juicy target than the liberal press appearing to undermine the Bush administration’s war on terror. …

The problem: The Journal itself had published a front-page story about the classified program on June 23, the same day as the Times.

The Journal’s conservative editorial page weighed in yesterday by arguing that what the two newspapers had done was very different….

The editorial makes clear that the administration handed the Journal the same information that President Bush and Vice President Cheney, among others, have been denouncing the Times for publishing. …

In a Fox News poll released yesterday, 60 percent of those surveyed said the Times did more to help terrorist groups by publishing the information, while 27 percent said the story did more to help the public. Forty-three percent called what the newspapers did treason.

House GOP Chastises Media By Charles Babington, Washington Post Staff Writer

The GOP-crafted resolution, approved 227 to 183, also condemned the unidentified sources who leaked information of the program. It said the House “expects the cooperation of all news media organizations” in protecting the government’s capability “to identify, disrupt, and capture terrorists.” …

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) continued to gather signatures on a letter urging House leaders to revoke the credentials that allow New York Times reporters to move about the Capitol. …

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.) chastised the Republicans. “You know better than to seek to amend the First Amendment,” which protects a free press, he said. He noted that Republicans have vilified the Times, which has a liberal editorial page, but barely mentioned the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is conservative.

Uncategorized

More Rock, Less Talk

Stars & Stripes
Future military radio menu could be more pop, less talk
Hip-hop-heavy content recommended for stations around the world

By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, June 3, 2006

WASHINGTON – Military radio stations around the globe soon could be playing more hip-hop, more pop hits, less country music and no sports or political chat shows.

The biggest change proposed in the review would be centralizing most programming decisions in the United States, and creating a pair of music stations for broadcast worldwide.

The first station would feature hip-hop, rap, pop music and other similar formats. A second station would have classic rock, alternative bands and a mix of other Top 40 songs.

Popular talk radio programs such as Rush Limbaugh and those from National Public Radio, as well as country music, would be relegated to a third station, broadcast only in a few select areas with three military radio frequencies.

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=36735&archive=true

http://www.stripes.com/06/jun06/afrts.jpg

The Radio Equalizer: Brian Maloney: Limbaugh, Hannity, AFRTS
“if both liberal and conservative programming are dealt the same blow, where’s the bias?

Because conservative talkers are many times more popular with the troops than their liberal counterparts, the right will suffer greatly, while “progressives” have much less to lose. That’s because very few stationed overseas are listening to the lefties.”

With this kind of data, how could anyone determine that nearly all political talk radio should be eliminated from the two proposed primary worldwide broadcast stations? Why not remove the unpopular liberal shows and keep the rest?

http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2006/06/limbaugh-hannity-afrts.html

GOP takes aim at PBS funding – The Boston Globe
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | June 8, 2006

WASHINGTON — House Republicans yesterday revived their efforts to slash funding for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.

On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It would reduce the corporation’s budget by 23 percent next year, to $380 million, in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending. …

The same appropriations subcommittee called last year for an even more drastic cut of $223 million from public broadcasting programs. At the time, Republicans attacked the PBS for programming they said represented out-of-the-mainstream viewpoints, highlighting in particular a “Postcards From Buster” episode that featured lesbian couples and their children in Vermont.

But, in a defeat for House leaders, 87 Republicans joined unanimous Democrats in bucking an attempt to cut funding from the stations.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/06/08/gop_takes_aim_at_pbs_funding/

Uncategorized

A Single Person Could Swing an Election

A Single Person Could Swing an Election By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Special to The Washington Post

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It’s the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams’s conspirators thought, “How easily can we manipulate the election results?”

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. …

Voting machine vendors have dismissed many of the concerns, saying they are theoretical and do not reflect the real-life experience of running elections, such as how machines are kept in a secure environment. …

“This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election,” said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors’ trade group. …

“It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’ ” [Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee] said of an attempt to manipulate election results. [mjh: Like Ohio in 2004?]