When I turned on the news this morning, the lead story said a major State Department figure had resigned because of involvment with a prostitution ring in D.C.
Previous studies of Abstinence Only sex-ed programs showed that before breaking their chastity vows and having penis-vagina sex, they were having oral sex and anal sex. They believed that preserved their virgin status. Under that standard, all gay people are virgines.
Yes indeedy. See the previous post.
guizot
April 28, 2007, 5:18pm
24
That’s very wise and somber advice. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Thanks for the additional motivation.
Feds mismanaged international aid given in the wake of Katrina.
Just $40 million of $854 million offered to the United States to help the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina has been used so far, and most of the offered aid was never collected, the Washington Post reported in Sunday’s editions.
Key supplies and services such as mobile telephone systems, medicines and cruise ships to house victims were delayed or refused because the U.S. government could not handle them, the newspaper said.
It cited an exchange of documents in which State Department officials worried over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medical supplies had been left to spoil and were destroyed.
“Tell them we blew it,” one official wrote, according to the newspaper. But then she added: “The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded.”
U.S. officials turned down numerous offers of troops and search and rescue teams, even as New Orleans residents waited to be rescued from rooftops, the newspaper said.
The United States declined 54 of 77 recorded offers of aid from three of its closest allies – Canada, Britain and Israel – according to a State Department table, the newspaper said.
It gets worse, I’m afraid.
Much worse. The Reuters story is an abridged version of this Washington Post story , and the original states that the 854 million was[URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042801113.html?referrer=email ]cash , or in oil to be sold for cash, for the administration to use to buy whatever was needed.
There were “untold millions” of other goods or services that were also offered, but either declined, or accepted and then wasted.
Another one bites the dust.
Randall Tobias, the top foreign aid adviser in the State Department, became the most prominent person on the list to be publicly identified when he resigned after acknowledging to ABC News that he was among Palfrey’s clients. The State Department’s statement on Tobias’s resignation said simply, “He is returning to private life for personal reasons.”
ABC News reported that Tobias told the network Thursday that he had called Pamela Martin & Associates - Palfrey’s business - for massage services, not for sex.
Tobias, who was the director of foreign assistance and the administrator of the Agency for International Development, ran agencies that required foreign recipients of AIDS assistance to explicitly condemn prostitution, a policy that drew protests from some nations and relief organizations.
Two more BIG scandals shaping up in the Justice Department:
Justice Department opens probe of Monica Goodling for inappropriate hires .
What does this REALLY mean? She is under “ongoing investigation”. Oh, gee, the JD cannot agree to the Congressional offer of immunity for her testimony in the US Attorney scandal. And they have some kind of veto. Too bad, so sad for Congress.
Story #2 .
In 2005 Alberto Gonzales wrote to a Federal judge claiming that one of his assistants, William Mercer, also US Attorney for Montana, was acting within the law, even though the law requires a US Attorney to reside in the jurisdication.
The VERY SAME DAY of the Gonzales letter, this very same US Attorney has language added to a draft revision of the Patriot Act, making such absenses legal with the consent of the Attorney General – retroactively to a few months before Mercer was hired.
The revisions are added, the bill passes, and the actions of Mercer become legal. They apparently weren’t, however, on the day Gonzales wrote the letter.
Story here.
Wolfowitz is a goner.
The Bush administration and World Bank directors are negotiating President Paul Wolfowitz’s departure from the world’s biggest aid agency, said two bank officials.
Eli Whitney Debevoise II, who represents the U.S. on the bank’s board, is discussing terms for the resignation with a panel of directors that admonished Wolfowitz for his role in a pay raise for his partner, said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ABC News reported that Wolfowitz may leave today. Debevoise wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Wolfowitz was today told he won’t be welcome in Germany next week for a development conference, while South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said in an interview that there ``should be a parting of the ways.‘’ Wolfowitz made aid for Africa a priority since his term began almost two years ago.
Another Republican calls for Gonzales to go.
Sen. Chuck Hagel on Wednesday became the latest Republican to call for Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, saying revelations about a sick bed visit to his predecessor has undermined his moral authority to lead the Justice Department.
Citing dramatic testimony a day earlier that revealed that Gonzales, then the White House legal counsel, tried to undermine the department he now leads, Hagel demanded the attorney general’s resignation.
“The American people deserve an attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of our country, whose honesty and capability are beyond question,” Hagel, R-Neb., said in a statement. “Attorney General Gonzales can no longer meet this standard. He has failed this country. He has lost the moral authority to lead.”
Gonzales’s former clasmates chastise him publicly.
Fifty-six members of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ graduating class at Harvard Law School signed a quarter-page open letter in yesterday’s Washington Post excoriating their former classmate for his “cavalier handling of our freedoms.”
The letter stops short of calling for Gonzales’s resignation, even as the attorney general comes under rising heat on Capitol Hill. But it is a stinging rebuke to Gonzales, just two weeks after the Law School Class of 1982’s 25th reunion.
“Your country and your President are in dire need of an attorney who will do the tough job of providing independent counsel,” the letter says. It calls on Gonzales to “relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”
Gonzales calls for life in prison for copyright violators.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed legislation that would make the DMCA look almost just. Among other things, the law would make attempted infringement a crime, and send some infringers to jail for life. C|Net’s intrepid Declan McCullagh does a great job calling attention to highlights from the legislation, which Gonzales has dubbed The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 [PDF].
Woof! John Ashcroft is the voice of judicious restraint in the administration of state’s authority. The world is upside-down.
Controversial nominee quits.
President Bush’s pick to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission withdrew his nomination Wednesday amid strong opposition from some Senate Democrats because of his career as a manufacturers’ lobbyist.
The White House said it was reluctantly accepting the decision by Michael Baroody after “some members in the Senate rushed to judgment.”
Baroody is a lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers. His critics on Capitol Hill said he would not provide the leadership the agency needed in order to protect consumers.
Democrats also had raised questions about a $150,000 payment that Baroody would have received from the manufacturers’ lobbying group when he left.
To paraphrase Lewis Black, if you were walking around with $150K of the National Association of Manufacturers money in your pocket, the first time you saw someone using one of their products, you’d probably blow them!
Goodling testifys before Congress.
McNulty’s explanation about the dismissals, on Feb. 6, ``was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects,‘’ Monica Goodling told a packed House Judiciary Committee inquiry into the firings.
She added: ``I believe the deputy was not fully candid.‘’
McNulty disputed her version of events.
I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time,'' he said in a statement. Ms. Goodling’s characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.‘’
Goodling, 33, quit the department last month and initially pleaded the Fifth Amendment on Wednesday. After being granted court-approved immunity, she admitted that in some instances she may have weighed the political views and affiliations of job applicants for jobs as career prosecutors - a violation of federal law.
Judges throw out two Gitmo cases and put the whole situation in doubt.
The Bush administration’s plans to bring detainees at Guantanamo Bay to trial were thrown into chaos Monday when military judges threw out all charges against a detainee held there since he was 15 and dismissed charges against another detainee who chauffeured Osama bin Laden.
In back-to-back arraignments for the Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national, the U.S. military’s cases against the alleged al-Qaeda figures were dismissed because, the judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction.
FBI breaks the law. A lot.
“An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism,” reports The Washington Post.
Whoops!
Dead Eye Dick Cheney seems to be a petty man.
Vice President Dick Cheney blocked the promotion of a Justice Department official involved in a bedside standoff over President Bush’s eavesdropping program, a Senate committee learned Wednesday.
In a written account, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey said Cheney warned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that he would oppose the promotion of a department official who once threatened to resign over the program.
Private contractors handling more intelligence work for the US gov’t.
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms – with zero public accountability.
More than five years into the global “war on terror,” spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
Remember how well that worked at Abu Graib? :rolleyes:
The month’s “WTF are Those Idiots Doing?” prize goes to the NSA.
National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen Keith Alexander has launched a marketing blitz.
His goal: to get his employees on message.
Last month, Alexander launched an “Internal Communications Campaign” to promote “buy-in” among his troops for plans to modernize NSA’s spy capabilities and to generate “positive” news stories, according to planning documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun.
The two-part campaign will employ a set of “cascading messages” repeated down through NSA’s hierarchy, as well as “viral” marketing “to generate excitement and unity enterprise-wide,” one planning document says.
Among the viral marketing strategies is a contest to see which employees can provide the best “transformation success stories,” says the document. And soon NSA employees will see “teaser” posters around the agency’s Ft. Meade headquarters along with internal ads to generate “buzz.”
I’ve got a better idea: There’s this guy, goes by the name “Osama,” he’s of Middle Eastern Descent, about 7 foot tall, thought to be in Pakistan, why don’t you focus more on finding him? It seems there’s about 300 million people who’d like to mash his testicles with a hammer and then force him to eat them.