Year: 2005

Bill Nelson vs. Chicken Hawks, Greedy Military Contractors – and Tommy Franks?

Trish

Florida’s non-staff-driven senator, Bill Nelson, continues to demand better protection for our troops. According to the Palm Beach Post:

Nelson, D-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter Monday to Rumsfeld following reports the Marines last week recalled 5,227 defective vests.

“I am very disappointed to learn that defective body armor was accepted by the Department of Defense and then issued to our Marines in Iraq,” Nelson wrote in his letter.

The Marine Corps defended the decision to use the vest, produced by the Pompano Beach-based Point Blank Body Armor Inc., even though they did not fully meet the specifications for blocking bullets.

Although the vests failed a 9mm standard outlined in the contract, they met a lower 7.62mm standard set by the National Institute of Justice, said Marine Corps Capt. Jeff Landis.

Point Blank Body Armor seems to be the Halliburton of bullet-proof vests, and its leader, David H. Brooks, very like a certain Dick. Between insider stock sales and huge bonuses and “reimbursements,” the Defense Dept. might as well deposit the checks to his personal account. The Miami Herald reported on Point Blanks� parent company, DHB (nice personal touch) in April.

DHB’s stock surged to an all-time high of $22.53 on Dec. 23 after announcing it landed a $190 million contract to supply protective vests to the Army�

Within days of the contract’s announcement, company executives began reporting a boatload of stock sales. The biggest seller was Chairman and Chief Executive David Brooks, who sold almost 9.5 million shares worth $185.9 million in December, according to Bloomberg News�

[Independent analyst Dennis Nielsen] said he was more alarmed by disclosures in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month. Brooks, for instance, took home a $2 million bonus last year, double the figure of 2003 and three times his 2004 salary of $675,000.

�DHB charters a jet owned by Brooks’ children to fly company executives and directors. It paid the company and unrelated vendors more than $850,000 for trips last year. The company also pays Brooks $25,000 a month for the cost of his Florida residence�

Just as the company was about to scare off investors permanently, it launched a new strategy: hire retired military.

Newsday for May 4:

In a move aimed at bolstering its image on Wall Street, protective body armor maker DHB Industries Inc. yesterday named as its new president�Larry Ellis, 58, who retired from the Army 10 months ago after a 35-year career that included combat service in Vietnam and the command of some 14,000 Army troops in Bosnia�

His appointment comes one day after Westbury-based DHB announced it had hired another former high-ranking Army officer, Ishmon F. Burks, as the company’s executive vice president for investor and media relations. Burks was a decorated colonel.

Sounds like someone needs to decide where this company is headquartered. Maybe they�ll follow Halliburton�s lead and pick a nice island in the Caribbean next.

But speaking of calling in former military when you need to appear to have integrity, look who the White House, aka Karl Rove, is thinking of running in the 2006 Florida senate race.

Opinion Journal, made available free by Sayfie Review reports:

“General [Tommy] Franks is rumored to be exploring the political terrain for a possible challenge to Florida’s Democratic Senator Bill Nelson…Though a Franks spokesman recently waved off reporters with a “no comment”�

“The White House may be…convinced that General Franks would win by hitting a political sweet spot of his own: thousands of active and retired military personnel who vote in Florida.”

But former astronaut Nelson continues to defy the Republican pigeonhole of Democrats. A poll reported in the Florida Times-Union, commissioned by the Duval County (Jacksonville) Republican Party in January, shows Nelson looking strong.

The poll was taken as Nelson fought to keep the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, based in Jacksonville, from being scuttled, and gave Nelson a favorability rating of 56 percent. When you consider that Jacksonville is what people mean when they say that in Florida, the further north you go the further south you get, that�s pretty good numbers. No wonder Rove is sweating.

A Modest Proposal for the Florida Legislature

Buck Banks

From the “Why I’m Glad They’re Only In Session Two Months of the Year” Department:

Florida, Water and Lobbyists
Toward a New State Capital

By ALAN FARAGO

Church is a good place for Sunday worship, but to contemplate the miracle of Creation, sometimes all you need to do is take a good walk.

The point of a good walk is obvious to anyone who has taken one. You start in one place and end up in another, even though you return where you started.

Which brings me to Tallahassee, a state capital so full of lobbyists you can’t do business without one handing you a towel when you finish.

Once I wrote critically of the pledge by Gov. Jeb Bush to empty Tallahassee of government superfluous to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But I’m coming around to a compromise.

I am for letting the whole place go to weeds. Like a flea-ridden mattress, Tallahassee just needs to be abandoned. Let’s start from scratch.

I hear the state’s largest land owner is building new cities in the Panhandle and that it is really sensitive to smart growth.

Let St. Joe build a smart capital in the Panhandle, surrounded by a wider moat and higher walls than Tallahassee.

Then, the governor and legislators shall remand all lobbyists to Georgia or Alabama, with a requirement to wear ankle bracelets for the duration of the session.

But the key to a functional government is not discrimination — but a good walk, without lobbyists, before the legislative session starts.

There is no better place to experience Florida — the thumb of the continent sticking into the ocean’s eye — than from the water.

The day before the session begins, our legislators and governor shall assemble in Key West, the southernmost point of the United States and the very point of the question.

With face masks, snorkels and life vests, they float over the coral reef that has virtually disappeared in the past decade — and now looks like a graveyard strewn with the bones of dead coral.

Treading water, they come up with their own theories and explanations. Before returning, they make a small ritual of throwing away cell phones.

By bus caravan, the government now proceeds northward on U.S. Highway 1 toward the new state capital.

They shall move at a deliberate pace, preferably at rush hour on a bad day, so all may contemplate what rule permitted so many buildings in the Keys and, once they hit Miami, why unbearable traffic is laying family life to waste.

The second stop is the reef tract off Palm Beach. It is blanketed by a nasty carpet of macro-algae and is lifeless except for supersized parrot fish hulking like hundred-pound babies baptized at McDonald’s and left for good by the fryer.

It is the effect, say some scientists — whose careers do not depend on state funding — of an underground flood of nitrogen pollution from Big Sugar — represented now by lobbyists jumping up and down in Georgia. Or Alabama.

What a tangle we have made of Creation, no doubt about it. Our government stares glumly out bus windows motoring across the Everglades, devoid of birds, to the other side of the state.

Now, the persuasions of technology, helicopter rides, Power Point presentations, planning matrixes and a dizzying array of acronyms induce melancholy and pity.

The confusion between smart engineering and intelligent design percolates through the minds of men and women given the consent of the governed.

For a blessed third time, they dip into water at the edge of Rookery Bay in Collier County, a growth-management failure that sticks like an urchin spine in the foot of the governor.

Expecting nothing, they are astonished by a profusion of wildlife around the freshwater spring bubbling from the bottom of Henderson Creek, recently reported by the Naples Daily News.

When all seemed lost, here is Creation firing on all 12 cylinders. Manatees, tarpon and snook crowd around looking sideways at the Legislature as if they only knew.

Humbled in the presence of Creation, with the sound of their breath in their ears, legislators and governor exhale like fish busting the surface at the same time.

But there is news.

Within a mile radius of the spring, Marco Island wants to double its aquifer storage and recovery wells already permitted by the state, injecting up to 6 million gallons per day — with no assurance and no idea whether what is left of God’s original plan can survive contamination through cracks and conduits underground.

This is the end of a good walk.

Once the Legislature arrives at the new capital, the bars and prayer groups, smoke- and lobbyist-free, fill with animated debate — for instance, which political party had more members who forgot to fasten their life vests.

But in all seriousness, were such a walk to take place, our Legislature and governor might resolve that when intelligent design is destroyed by smart engineering, polluters must pay and that, moreover, aquifers for drinking water that nourish Creation must not be violated.

But don’t count on that happening any time soon in Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.

Selling FOX News

Trish

Advertising Age (subscription) takes us behind the scenes during a FOX News presentation to potential advertisers, where the atmosphere is as full of hype as its programming.

Fox and the rest of the cable and broadcast networks are getting ready to sell their advertising space for the new TV season, which traditionally begins in the fall.

The presentation bashes the competition in pursuit of non-news budgets, “A&E, they’ve gone from high brow to unibrow,” jokes Kevin Brown, Fox’s vice president for East Coast sales. “CNN used to be known as the ‘crisis news network.’ We’ve broken that deadlock.” He continues to detail ratings highs on non-political stories such as the Scott Peterson verdict and the Asian tsunami, but adds that the death of Pope John Paul II was an exception.

“And why not the pope story?” Keeshan asks.

“It’s not a fast-moving story,” responds Rittenberg.

No, it fairly crawled, like my skin does when I think of FOX News and all those affluent households with it blaring away in the background.

On one slide, titled “Who’s Hot/Who’s Not for Upscale Delivery,” Fox News claims to be up 85% in households (adults ages 25 to 54) with income of more than $100,000 during prime time. According to the slide, CNN was up 32%, while ESPN and Comedy Central were down 5%, and Discovery and TLC were down 10% and 43%, respectively.

…Some PHD executives are reluctant to accept some of the arguments made, particularly since figures are from the fourth quarter 2004, which included the presidential election, a particularly good time for the channel…

Rittenberg disputes spinning the numbers. “We’re fortunate that most of the information shows us in a good light. No one’s saying our numbers suck,” he says, adding that first quarter 2005 also compares favorably with first quarter 2004.

Maybe your numbers don’t suck FOX, but your so-called news really blows.

Another Paid Bush Propagandist Revealed at Ag Dept.

Jon Ponder

USA Today:

A third federal agency has admitted it paid a journalist to write favorable stories about its work.

Documents released by the Agriculture Department show it paid a freelance writer $9,375 in 2003 to “research and write articles for hunting and fishing magazines describing the benefits of NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) programs.”

Three articles by the writer, Dave Smith, appeared late last year in two magazines aimed at hunting and fishing enthusiasts: Outdoor Oklahoma, published by that state’s Department of Wildlife Conservation, and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish, published by Primedia.

Neither identified Smith as having been paid by the government. The stories focused on how money from a 2002 agricultural subsidy bill had been used to help preserve wetlands that hunting and fishing enthusiasts enjoy in Oklahoma and the Northwest.

Schwarzenegger Considers Unleashing the Whirlwind

Jon Ponder

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s minions have collected enough signatures to put three of his initiatives on the ballot of the special election he has threatened to call this November. The three propositions would place (yet more) arbitrary controls on spending, do a “DeLay” (which in Texas they’re calling “Tommymandering”) on California’s electoral districting and delay tenure for public school teachers.

During the Recall election, Arnold undertook not a single serious interview with the media. He assumes he can win any political battle by doing what he did then – going on Oprah, “Entertainment Tonight” and Jay Leno’s show, flashing his fake teeth and doing his lame-ass “Everything is terrific” portrayal of Reagan.

Last week, Das Guber did two softball interviews on Fox News, the new last refuge of scoundrels. If he decides to hold the election in this off-year, not only will it cost a minimum of $70 million in state election funding, it will expose our pampered movie star governor to something I’m not sure he’s tough enough to take: Hardball questions from the state’s hard news media – and the unmitigated anger and disdain of millions of voters.

One Party Rule: Court Dismisses Cheney Task Force Charges

Jon Ponder

This is why the Republicans are doing everything in their power to pack the courts with rightwing judges:

A US appeals court has thrown out a lawsuit that sought details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force that critics say secretly formed policy favourable to the industry.

The unanimous ruling ordered a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit by the Sierra Club environmental group and the watchdog group Judicial Watch that sought to learn about contacts between task force members and industry executives.

“We hold that plaintiffs have failed to establish any duty, let alone a clear and indisputable duty, owed to them by the federal government” under the law in question, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, Judge A Raymond Randolph wrote in the 13-page ruling.

All eight judges on the appeals court sided with the Bush administration and agreed the lawsuit must be dismissed.

Whining and Dining for DeLay

Trish

Are you going to the “Keep Tom DeLay Out of Jail” dinner tonight in Orlando? All you need is $250 and you can join the other 1,000 devoted followers.

Orlando Sentinel

It’s too early to know whether the dinner is the beginning of the end for DeLay or part of a comeback against the allegations.

“It’s usually a sign you’re in deep trouble,” scholar Norm Ornstein of the think tank American Enterprise Institute said of the dinner. “They wouldn’t do this if it was just a few pebbles.”

Of course, most of tonight’s diners have gotten much more than $250 from DeLay over the years. This is just a pittance, as paybacks go.

Florida Republican lawmakers have benefited from thousands of dollars in campaign donations from DeLay and his political-action committee, often just when some of them needed it most during tight races.

[Rep. Tom] Feeney, for instance, received $10,000 from DeLay’s political-action committee in his first congressional campaign. Rep. Ric Keller of Orlando got $21,000 from DeLay and his PAC in his first two elections. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Crystal River, received $20,000 in her first two elections.

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fort Lauderdale, who is in a swing district, has received more than $31,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics…

Shaw said the donations from leaders such as DeLay, which are common, are for the purpose of “maintaining the majority.”

“He is our leader, and in my opinion he will remain that leader,” Shaw said.

Funny they should mention Clay Shaw. He has own “DeLay Problem” at the moment. Read on.

Different Day, Same Republican Hypocrisy

Trish

U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, Florida, has a Delay Problem. While he claims a trip to Ireland was not paid for by lobbyists, he also says it doesn’t matter because the House ethics committee approved the trip. Is that like saying your dog never bit your neighbor and the neighbor had it coming anyway?

Palm Beach Post

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. is one of five members of Congress who reported taking a 2003 trip to Ireland paid by a lobbying organization in violation of House ethics rules…

He said he originally misidentified the sponsor of the trip and plans to file an amended report naming the lobbying firm’s parent company — which is not a lobbying organization — as the actual sponsor.

In any event, he noted, the House ethics committee “signed off” on the trip in advance…

Small wonder that Shaw is doing the DeLay Waltz. The two are pretty tight.

Shaw has received $30,000 from Armpac, a political action committee run by DeLay, during the past three elections, and last fall gave $5,000 to DeLay’s legal fund.

Shaw and four other members of the House and Senate made the trip. Back then, they said it was paid by registered lobbyists Kessler & Associates, which represents Microsoft, Delta, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and other Big Pharma manufacturers.

The lawmakers and several of their wives stayed at the 13th century Ashford Castle, converted into a luxury hotel on 350 acres on the banks of Lough Corrib…

Shaw said he did not know at the time that Kessler was a registered lobbying firm. He listed Kessler as the sponsor because the trip itinerary was on Kessler letterhead stationery, he said.

Shaw said he now believes the sponsor was Century Business Strategies, a Cleveland accounting and consulting firm that is Kessler’s parent company.

All of this might not be so bad, except for the egregious hypocrisy involved. Shaw, after all, is the guy waging war on 527s, which, like the Internets, Democrats figured out how to use first.

An earlier story in the Palm Beach Post reported on Shaw’s full-disclosure initiative.

Shaw and his fellow sponsors of a new bill — Reps. Mark Foley, R-Fla., and Phil English, R-Pa. — said their 527 Transparency Act of 2005 would let Americans know who is behind the political ads on their televisions…

The bill would also provide information to politicians about their supporters, Foley said…

“Let’s find out who is writing the checks.”

Yes, let’s. Especially before we fly off to Ireland with our palms extended.

Huffington Blog Launch

Jon Ponder

LA.com

Arianna Huffington’s blog lives up to its hype. All the blogs that poked fun of it as it was gestating have stopped, in part because a lot of them are featured on the blogroll and will enjoy higher traffic because of it. Interesting to note that yesterday’s New York Times printed comments by Gawker Empire’s Nick Denton to the effect that blogging isn’t really the revolution it’s purported to be. The Huffington Post, which went live today, indicates that it is; its starpower and wealth of material push the genre forward a few steps. Blogging can no longer be thought of as the realm of snarky geeks and crackpots.

This post from Brad Hall and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is pretty funny:

Like most Americans, I had hoped that the Defense of Marriage Act would do just that: defend my marriage. Apparently not. Look around and you’ll see the gays getting gay-married all over the place, and, to quote, well, everyone: gay marriage destroys real marriage. Now, when I come home to my wife, I feel nothing. How could I? SHE COULD BE A MAN. Thanks a lot, gays. Thanks for rendering our vows obsolete. Thanks for illegitimizing our sons. Thanks for tearing asunder a great institution that has heretofore withstood Las Vegas, Elizabeth Taylor, Larry King and Britney Spears combined.

It is pretty interesting. Lots of short tasty bits. I understand why she’s positioning it as a blog but it’s really an online magazine like Slate or Salon.

The Microsoft Evangelist and His Ministry of Hate

Jon Ponder

Ken Hutcherson, right, is the former pro football player turned religious extremist who put Microsoft in a spin, reversing itself and then re-reversing itself, regarding legislation to ban discrimination against gays in the workplace. I happened to see him interviewed last week and I agree with this assessment of him by Connie Shultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Here’s what I find so scary about the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the latest gay-bashing preacher in the news.

It’s not the clever way the Seattle-area minister bends the Bible to berate an entire group of his fellow human beings. He’s got plenty of company on that one.

It’s not his threat to start a national boycott against Microsoft if the company supported an anti-discrimination bill that included gays and lesbians. That was a boycott that would have failed if only Bill Gates and Co. hadn’t crumbled.

What I find most troubling about Hutcherson is the charm he brings with every blow to civil liberties. His wit and self-deprecatory humor make for real entertainment, and laughter is a great way to disguise the hate he’s peddling.

JUMP: Read the rest of the article.