working hard to get around the rules and keep providing their services in thhe same old way: WashPo
Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone, but lobby groups are plotting all sorts of ways to get around the new ethics rules.
Lobbyists and their lawyers don’t want to talk publicly about these “workarounds,” a.k.a. clever cheating. But privately I’ve collected a few of the likely ways that lobbyists will continue to stay close to lawmakers while not outright breaking the law.
Most of these are still in the planning stages, so consider this an early heads-up.
The new statute bars lobbyists from taking lawmakers on trips. But lobby groups, particularly corporate lobbyists, are checking to see whether they can partner with colleges and nonprofit foundations to provide free travel to lawmakers despite the ban. The rules allow universities and charities greater latitude in providing the benefit.
Along the same lines, lobbyists, who are banned from organizing travel for lawmakers, are thinking about asking their assistants to do it — an action that would skirt the prohibition.
that judges should not be elected to their positions: Phila Daily News
A DEFENDANT accused of forcing a prostitute at gunpoint to have sex with him and three other men got lucky, so to speak, last week.
A Philadelphia judge dropped all sex and assault charges at his preliminary hearing.
Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni instead held the defendant on the bizarre charge of armed robbery for – get this – “theft of services.”
Unbelievable.
Deni told me she based her decision on the fact that the prostitute consented to have sex with the defendant.
“She consented and she didn’t get paid . . . I thought it was a robbery.”
The prostitute, a 20-year-old single mother, agreed to $150 for an hour of oral and vaginal sex on Sept. 20, according to assistant district attorney Rich DeSipio. The arrangements were made through her posting on Craigslist.
She met the defendant, Dominique Gindraw, 19, at what she thought was his house, but which turned out to be an abandoned property in North Philadelphia.
He asked if she’d have sex with his friend, too, and she agreed for another $100.
The friend showed up without money, the gun was pulled and more men arrived.
When a fifth man arrived and was invited to join, DeSipio said, he asked why the girl was crying – and declined. He helped her get dressed so she could leave.
It’s true the prostitute negotiated sex with the defendant – but not unprotected gang sex at gunpoint.
“The Legislature has defined sex by force as rape,” said DeSipio, accusing the judge of “rewriting her own laws.”
And they wonder why gun homicides are so high in Philly…
CNN finally stopped talking about Britney long enough to notice that SoCal is burning: CNN
Fire officials said more than 265,000 people have been evacuated and nearly 4,900 firefighters are battling the fast-moving blazes, which began over the weekend.
By Monday afternoon, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention had reported 13 active wildfires have consumed more than 98,000 acres and destroyed or damaged at least 50 homes and businesses across six counties.
The winds driving the flames are expected to stay strong, coming out of the northeast, at least through Tuesday, according to CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano.
“It’s a tragic time for California,” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said earlier Monday.
He declared a state of emergency in seven counties and asked the National Guard to pull 800 soldiers from patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border to help battle the wildfires.
Monday evening, Schwarzenegger asked U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to order delivery of all available Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS) to help fight the fires.
Interesting that they call on Gates, the SecDef, and there’s not a peep about getting FEMA on the job…
A $1.2bn (£590m) contract for training Iraqi police was so badly managed that auditors do not know how the money was spent, the US state department says.
The programme was run by a private US company, DynCorp. It insists there has been no intentional fraud.
Auditors have stopped trying to audit the programme because all the documents are in disarray and the government is trying to retrieve some of the money.
Training Iraqis to take over security is a key part of US strategy.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq pledged on Tuesday to crack down on Kurdish separatists launching attacks on Turkey from hideouts in northern Iraq, in a bid to avert a Turkish military incursion onto its territory to hit the rebels.
Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said after crisis talks with his Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan in Baghdad that Iraq would restrict the movement of PKK rebels and target their funding. But it was not clear whether this would be enough to placate Turkey, which wants an end to cross-border attacks.
“I assured the minister that the Iraqi government will actively help Turkey to overcome this menace,” Zebari, himself a Kurd, told a news conference. “We will not allow any party, including the PKK, to poison our bilateral relations.”
“We will cooperate with the Turkish government, to solve the border problems and the terrorism that Turkey is facing through direct dialogue,” he added.
PUL-I-ALAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Eleven members of an Afghan family have been killed in an air strike by Western forces near Kabul, the head of a provincial council said on Tuesday.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan fuel resentment of foreign forces and the Western-backed government of Hamid Karzai who has repeatedly beseeched U.S. and NATO troops to do everything they can to stop the accidental deaths of civilians.
The latest incident occurred on Monday in Jalrez, 30 km (20 miles) west of the capital, provincial council leader Haji Janan told a Reuters reporter in the region.
“In the bombardment … 11 people from one family, including women and children were killed,” Janan said.
“The only survivor from the family is a man who is hospitalised and can’t speak,” he said. Eleven of the family’s neighbours were wounded, he said.
NOT: Cellphone applications that tell where you are, all the time: NYT
Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?
Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.
And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.
Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at Stanford.
“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, `Where are you?’ ” he said. “People want to connect.”
But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.
Actually, NYT, obvious drawbacks come to mind. Imagine the fun the telecoms can have giving this sort of information to our government without a warrant or any oversight. And I’m sure the military recruiters would love to be able to track our teenage children down wherever they are, especially if it’s somewhere where there won’t be any meddling parents to shoo them away.
The past few decades have witnessed the number of major corporations that dominate television, movies, music, radio, cable, publishing and the Internet has gone from over 50 to a situation where the major concentration of media power, viv-a-vis, outlets, is in the hands 10 huge conglomerates. with such stalwart supporters o the freedom of the press as rupert murdoch leading the pack, one would think that it would be a high priority to limit further consolidation…one would be wrong:
“Bush’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has initiated a scheme to radically rewrite media ownership rules so that one corporation can own the daily newspapers, the weekly ‘alternative’ newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in even the largest American city.”
Essentially, Martin wants to get rid of the cross-ownership ban, which has been on the books in this country since 1975. It’s a rule that prevents any one company from owning and operating both a newspaper and a broadcast television station in the same town. The idea that we’ve had in this country for thirty-some years, informed by the ideas of the Founding Fathers, is that it would be unhealthy for one corporation to control all of the most popular outlets for news and information in a given area. That would be bad for democracy. Apparently Kevin Martin doesn’t think that way.
.
. the nation
for more detailed info re: ownership, see freepress.net: who owns the media?
remember the chaser’s who nearly crashed the aipac summit in sydney with a fake motorcade with an actor dressed as OBL?
well they went after australian pm john howard friday:
Australian PM ambushed by bunnies Published: Friday October 19, 2007
Embattled Australian Prime Minister John Howard was accosted on Friday by comedians dressed as giant bunnies who encouraged him to “pull a rabbit out of his hat” to save himself from electoral disaster.
Howard, who in May warned his cabinet they risked being “annihilated” at this year’s polls and that he had no political rabbit to pull out of his hat to save them, was unimpressed by the interruption to his morning walk.
The prime minister was in Sydney when he was heckled by three comedians from “The Chaser’s War on Everything” television program who were dressed as white rabbits and carrying signs that read ‘economy’ and ‘interest rates’.
.
. link
downloads of their program from the australian abc tv &abc2 are available here for your amusement. they’re a cheeky lot.
The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world’s oceans has reduced, scientists have said.
University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments.
Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.
Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.
Researchers said the findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, were surprising and worrying because there were grounds for believing that, in time, the ocean might become saturated with our emissions.
this time it’s obey, chairman of the appropriations committee, responding to chimpy’s $200b iraq war funds request, and tying it to the schip veto and funding differentials in the others:
October 22nd, 2007
“It’s amazing to me that the President expects to be taken seriously when he says we cannot afford $20 billion in investments in education, health, law enforcement and science, which will make this country stronger over the long term, but he doesn’t blink an eye at asking to borrow $200 billion for a policy in Iraq that leaves us six months from now exactly where we were six months ago.
“Only this White House would call this progress.
“The President needs to rethink his position on both fronts.”
working hard to get around the rules and keep providing their services in thhe same old way: WashPo
Did anyone really NOT see this coming?
that judges should not be elected to their positions: Phila Daily News
And they wonder why gun homicides are so high in Philly…
CNN finally stopped talking about Britney long enough to notice that SoCal is burning: CNN
Interesting that they call on Gates, the SecDef, and there’s not a peep about getting FEMA on the job…
given fema’s performance in NOLA, and the gulf coast in general, l suspect arnold doesn’t want them in the way and underfoot.
lTMF’sA
Randall Terry of Operation Rescue endorses Hilary over Guiliani
US-Iraqi contract ‘in disarray’
DynCorp to Iraqis: “Really, it was just an accident that we stole all your money…honest.”
so that is good enough. Now pat them on the head & give them a lollipop.
Accountability, only for teachers and students.
Iraq promises Turkey it will crack down on rebels
Afghan family killed in Western raid
Still winning hearts and minds over there, I see.
NOT: Cellphone applications that tell where you are, all the time: NYT
Actually, NYT, obvious drawbacks come to mind. Imagine the fun the telecoms can have giving this sort of information to our government without a warrant or any oversight. And I’m sure the military recruiters would love to be able to track our teenage children down wherever they are, especially if it’s somewhere where there won’t be any meddling parents to shoo them away.
on the FBI, confessions, mistakes, legal opinions, redactions, and the War on Terror
The past few decades have witnessed the number of major corporations that dominate television, movies, music, radio, cable, publishing and the Internet has gone from over 50 to a situation where the major concentration of media power, viv-a-vis, outlets, is in the hands 10 huge conglomerates. with such stalwart supporters o the freedom of the press as rupert murdoch leading the pack, one would think that it would be a high priority to limit further consolidation…one would be wrong:
for more detailed info re: ownership, see freepress.net: who owns the media?
lTMF’sA
remember the chaser’s who nearly crashed the aipac summit in sydney with a fake motorcade with an actor dressed as OBL?
well they went after australian pm john howard friday:
downloads of their program from the australian abc tv &abc2 are available here for your amusement. they’re a cheeky lot.
lTMF’sA
‘Unexpected growth’ in CO2 found
In case you missed it last WEEK:
Oceans are ‘soaking up less CO2’
this time it’s obey, chairman of the appropriations committee, responding to chimpy’s $200b iraq war funds request, and tying it to the schip veto and funding differentials in the others:
if he’s not carefull, boehners’ [pronounced: bone– er] going to cry…we shall see if the committee and the d house can walk the talk.
lTMF’sA