Retirement Fund Tapped to Avoid National Debt Limit By Stephen Barr

The Treasury Department has started drawing from the civil service pension fund to avoid hitting the $8.2 trillion national debt limit. The move to tap the pension fund follows last month’s decision to suspend investments in a retirement savings plan held by government employees.

Federal report predicted cataclysm By Bill Walsh

Bush’s front-line disaster agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was predicting the worst. In a Power Point slide show dated Aug. 27 and obtained by The Times-Picayune, the agency spelled out the death and destruction anticipated by Hurricane Pam and warned that Katrina was likely to be worse. …

“Overall the impacts described herein are conservative,” the report said.

The report focuses on the disastrous results of levee failure.

“The potential for severe storm surge to overwhelm Lake Pontchartrain levees is the greatest concern for New Orleans,” it said. “Any storm rated Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson (hurricane) scale will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching. This could leave the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months.”

Four days later, President Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

It’s not a lie if he can’t remember the truth. mjh

Post-9/11 Drive by Republicans To Attract Jewish Voters Stalls By Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post Staff Writer

DeLay’s problems, likewise, have set back GOP efforts in cultivating Jewish supporters. He has been one of Congress’s most aggressive and outspoken backers of Israel’s Likud government, and sponsored resolutions of support that were often so strongly worded that some Democrats — including those who had supported Israel’s Labor Party — abstained or voted no. Republicans cited these votes in arguing that the Democratic Party could not be counted as a reliable ally of the Jewish state.

Notice DeLay used partisanship within another country to advance his cause of founding the 1000 Year Reich for the Christian Right. What an evil genius. mjh

Media Notes from the Washington Post

A new U.S. Central Command team, according to a news release, “contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. . . . The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information.”

While that may sound ominous, the release says the unit works with more than 250 bloggers “to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror.” This, says Army Reserve Maj. Richard Norton, has a “viral effect” that drives Web users to CentCom’s Web site. The team’s motto: “Engage.”

NOW. Transcript. February 17, 2006 | PBS

MARIA HINOJOSA: Jim Dyer, a Republican, served 24 years on the staff of the House Appropriations Committee. Dyer says most earmarks have been a force for good. …

Dyer concedes though, and most everyone agrees, that the number of earmarks has skyrocketed. In 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress there were 1,300 earmarks in appropriations bills. Last year,that number had jumped to 14,000. The total cost to taxpayers? $27 billion dollars.

Dyer was one of the players when Newt Gingrich took control of the Republican leadership and earmarking became more of a political tool.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Wasn’t it true that Newt Gingrich in 1994 told the appropriations chairs to give more earmarks to Republicans in vulnerable districts in order to help them stay in office and get them reelected?

JIM DYER: Yes, that is absolutely true. And one of the– one of the items that has probably led to a proliferation of earmarks has been the determination on the part of the leadership to protect its own.

Texas Nonprofit Is Cleared After GOP-Prompted Audit
Group Says Probe Was ‘Political Retaliation’ by DeLay Allies
By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Internal Revenue Service recently audited the books of a Texas nonprofit group that was critical of campaign spending by former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) after receiving a request for the audit from one of DeLay’s political allies in the House.

The lawmaker, House Ways and Means Committee member Sam Johnson (R-Tex.), was in turn responding to a complaint about the group, Texans for Public Justice, from Barnaby W. Zall, a Washington lawyer close to DeLay and his fundraising apparatus, according to IRS documents. …

“This audit was political retaliation by Tom DeLay’s cronies to intimidate us for blowing the whistle on DeLay’s abuses,” [the group’s director and founder, Craig L.] McDonald said. “Enlisting the IRS to intimidate critics is a dirty trick reminiscent of Richard Nixon. . . . It is not a crime to report a crime, as we did with DeLay.”

No wonder New Mexican Republicans assume a recent audit of the state GOP was political — they assume everyone acts as they do. mjh

Daytona Beach News-Journal Online — Opinion
Endangered lands

From almost any public-minded perspective, President Bush’s plan to sell off up to 300,000 acres in the national forest system and 500,000 acres within the Bureau of Land Management is a mistake. From some vantage points, it looks like an outright scam.

Once this land falls into the hands of developers, it can never be reclaimed. And the Bush administration’s excuse — that it would use the money from the sale of forest land to temporarily fund a federal rural-school program — doesn’t hold water. …

That fiscal reality undercuts the administration’s position that the parcels proposed for sale amount to rag-ends, isolated and relatively useless to “meeting Forest Service needs,” as Forest Service head (and former timber-company lobbyist) Mark Rey describes the land. Even if that were true, a sale this huge sets a lamentable precedent. …

A more responsible approach would look at the many companies drilling oil, logging, herding cattle or making other profitable use of public land. In many cases, the levies those corporations pay are criminally low. Asking them to pay a fair share of their profits constitutes a far better solution than selling off chunks of the nation’s heritage.