Category Archives: NADA – New American Dark Ages

New American Dark Ages

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The Favor Factory

The Favor Factory
How a top House Appropriations aide didn’t have to wait to lobby

AS ONE OF THE top appropriations staffers to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), Letitia White made a nice salary. Ms. White, who oversaw the dispensation of earmarks for Mr. Lewis, earned almost $118,000 in 2000 and nearly $125,000 in 2001. But the following year, Ms. White took a hefty pay cut: Her pay dropped to slightly over $113,000. An effort to save the taxpayers money?

Don’t bet on it. The rules — such as they are — that require congressional staff members to wait a single year before lobbying their former committees apply only to those who earn a certain amount — in 2002, $112,500. Even though Ms. White was a bit over that limit, her pay cut, on an annualized basis, put her $80 below the cap — and cleared the way for her to join a lobbying firm and rake in $670,000 in lobbying fees during her first year in business. Why endure a cooling-off period when your former boss makes you a hot commodity?

Ms. White’s lucrative trip through the revolving door was detailed by Paul Kane last week in Roll Call. The story reported how in March 2002, Ms. White and her husband went on a nearly $9,000, nine-day trip to Italy paid for by defense contractor General Atomics. The company received $6.1 million in two separate earmarks in the defense appropriations bill passed that year. Ms. White left the appropriations staff on Jan. 8, 2003; she joined the lobbying firm renamed Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton & White on Jan. 9. Name partner Bill Lowery is a former Republican congressman from California who is one of Mr. Lewis’s closest friends. And guess who Ms. White signed up as a client on her first day? General Atomics.

The company was just one of 16 clients — mostly defense contractors whose interests were overseen by Mr. Lewis as chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee — whom Ms. White secured that year. Those clients received about $22 million in earmarks in the next round of spending bills. That kind of success paid off: By 2004, Ms. White was reporting lobbying fees of almost $1.5 million.

In a statement to Roll Call, Mr. Lewis, who now chairs the appropriations panel, said, ” I have always made every effort to carefully follow the rules of the House of Representatives in all aspects of my Congressional work. I am confident that any review will confirm this.” A spokesman for Ms. White said she consulted the House ethics committee about how to handle job negotiations and “recused herself from any official activity that involved a prospective employer or client.”

This is just a piece of the increasingly disturbing picture emerging about the goings-on at the appropriations panel, which lobbyist Jack Abramoff memorably dubbed the “favor factory.” We’ll examine other aspects of the story in another editorial. Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed a number of Copeland, Lowery clients and examined the financial disclosure forms of Mr. Lewis and his staff. Whether crimes were committed remains to be determined, but this much is clear: There’s quite an odor emanating from the favor factory.

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Utilities giving big bucks to global warming skeptic

Utilities giving big bucks to global warming skeptic
By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press
July 27, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) – Coal-burning utilities are passing the hat for one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels.

Pat Michaels _ Virginia’s state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute _ told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists’ global warming research. So last week, a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign to help him out, raising at least $150,000 in donations and pledges.

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association of Sedalia, Colo., gave Michaels $100,000 and started the fund-raising drive, said Stanley Lewandowski, IREA’s general manager. He said one company planned to give $50,000 and a third plans to give Michaels money next year.

“We cannot allow the discussion to be monopolized by the alarmists,” Lewandowski wrote in a July 17 letter to 50 other utilities. He also called on other electric cooperatives to launch a counterattack on “alarmist” scientists and specifically Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” …

Michaels is best known for his newspaper opinion columns and books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media.” However, he also writes research articles published in scientific journals.
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Progress Report Archives 2006 – American Progress Action Fund

WHO IS PAT MICHAELS?: Pat Michaels is a climate scientist based at the University of Virgina. John P. Holdren, a Harvard scientist, told the Senate Republican Policy Committee that Michaels has “published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” In 2003, Michaels famously “proved” that global warming was mostly hype by mixing up degrees and radians. In 2004, Michaels told Business Week, “We know how much the planet is going to warm. It is a small amount, and we can’t do anything about it.” This year, Michaels completely misrepresented a study by University of Missouri Professor Curt Davis to falsely claim that Antarctica has been gaining ice in recent years. Michaels’ views about climate change are at odds with the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a rigorously peer-reviewed report that involved thousands of scientists from over 100 countries, which concluded, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” and that, absent aggressive mitigation efforts, future warming will be significant and dangerous.
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On the Roof of Peru, Omens in the Ice By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service

[Researchers] have confirmed a rapid recession of glaciers worldwide. Snows on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white,” will be gone within 14 years, Thompson estimates. Glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and throughout the Andes are also shrinking, he and other researchers have found.

The dramatic rise in carbon dioxide that has accompanied the industrial age has brought a spike in global temperatures. Scientists have found that the jump in temperatures is even greater in the upper atmosphere, where the glaciers reign on silent mountain peaks.

Glaciers store an estimated 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Water that falls as snow moves through the slowly churning ice and may emerge from the glacier’s edge thousands of years later as meltwater. Humans have long depended on the gradual and faithful runoff.

The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed seven great Asian rivers, will bring “massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India,” a World Wildlife Fund report concluded last year.

“The repercussions of this are very scary,” agreed Tim Barnett, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Land of the Free, Home of the Military-Industrial Complex

Tiny, touristy, laid-back Santa Fe is armed to the teeth against … whatever. Which were the other 4 towns? Reserve? How many did Wyoming get? mjh

ABQjournal: Santa Fe SWAT Team Unveils Its New Armored Bearcat By Jeremy Pawloski, Journal Staff Report

The Santa Fe Police Department’s SWAT Team has a new toy— a $250,000, armor-plated, bullet-resistant black Bearcat.

The Bearcat is built to intimidate, with gunports on its sides and huge wheels that can take it offroad virtually anywhere.

Primarily, the vehicle will be used in any situation that the SWAT Team needs it— hostage situations, extracting barricaded subjects, serving “high-risk” search warrants in narcotics investigations and protecting visiting dignitaries, according to Santa Fe SWAT Commander Lt. Gary Johnson. …

The five Bearcats distributed to various SWAT teams across New Mexico were paid for with state and federal Homeland Security grant money, according to Santa Fe SWAT Team Leader Officer John Schaerfl.

Schaerfl said the Bearcat has a built-in radiation detector and an “explosive atmosphere detector” that will sound an alarm in the event of a potentially explosive gas leak. A porthole at the top of the Bearcat allows SWAT members to peek outside. The vehicle also has air-conditioning and a CD player.

Gary Johnson said the Bearcat could be utilized in the event of any potential terrorist threats in New Mexico.