Despite a growing corruption investigation, the Navy has allowed a defense contractor in the middle of a federal contracts-for-cash probe to keep working with the government, the company says.
Under an agreement between the Navy and Kuchera Defense Systems of Windber, Pa., the company has made changes in its accounting practices in exchange for authority to seek government contracts again, Kuchera's lawyer said Thursday night.
The Navy alleged fraud when it suspended the company, which has grown in recent years because of millions of dollars in congressional earmarks sponsored by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/15/2009 00:00 ||
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Between Murtha and Specter, they are running a close race to depose Pelosi and Reid as the most corrupt, unethical and ignorant people in Congress.
THE best moment of almost every YouTube video of the raucous town-hall meetings on health care is the same: It's the nonplussed look on the face of the senators and congressmen who have rarely suffered such indignity. Be assured: No one talks to them that way in the "members only" elevators in the US Capitol.
Nancy Pelosi and Co. insist that the town-hall protesters are the tools of special interests. Not likely. Almost all of the special interests have been enticed or bullied into cooperating with ObamaCare.
President Obama and the Democrats may still imagine themselves insurgents storming the gates, but that self-image should have expired last November. On health care, they have played a brilliant inside game.
They have used their sheer power to cut deals with craven lobbyists seeking to limit damage to their clients. Everything was set for a cram-down of sweeping legislation -- with special interests uttering hardly a peep -- before August in a well-executed power play.
Then, public opinion intervened.
Obama is now on the wrong side of a genuine grass-roots revolt by people who feel ignored by everyone who is supposed to be representing them. Consider the AARP.
It has all but endorsed a plan to slash several hundred billion dollars over 10 years from Medicare. It is providing cover for the creation of a new system that, if it ever succeeds in "bending the cost curve," will have to scrimp on expensive end-of-life care.
The AARP is overwhelmingly favorable to a plan opposed by the elderly more than any other age group. Who is the more authentic voice of seniors -- the AARP playing along with its Democratic allies, or the elderly at town-hall meetings wondering what the Medicare cuts will mean for them?
The inside-Washington players are easily co-opted and cowed. The American Medical Association came out in opposition to a public option in June, and then -- after a stern talking-to by Washington's political barons -- immediately backtracked.
It ended up endorsing the House bill, even though by one estimate it will cost doctors almost $19,000 annually by its third year. Even the vilified insurers have been running gauzy TV ads in favor of reform (although they oppose the public option).
Aggrieved voters don't co-opt or cow so easily. When one angry man stood toe-to-toe with Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and condemned his "damn cronies," he was the outraged voice of American populism.
His beef probably wasn't with Specter or his associates exactly, but with the entire panoply of interests battening on the new era of corporatism and hulking government, from Goldman Sachs to the United Auto Workers to the lobbyists gaming the stimulus and cap-and-trade bills. Like it or not (and it always has its unfortunate excesses), this kind of populism is part of the idiom of American politics.
The same distrust of power that had left-wing activists spinning feverish theories about George W. Bush's eavesdropping has the right agitated about Obama's "death panels."
Liberal intellectuals hail populism when the likes of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Obama direct it against "the malefactors of great wealth."
They are appalled when it is turned against the grand schemes of Washington itself. But they should listen.
"It's been a mistake for anyone to say that this has been a manufactured effort," Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said after her own rollicking town hall. "This is real. It's grass-roots."
Despite all the media tsk-tsking about the tenor of the meetings, a USA Today poll found that independents, by a 2-to-1 margin, say the protests have made them more sympathetic to the protesters, rather than less.
Still controlling the inside game, Democrats will be tempted to steamroll their opponents anyway. In which case, the populist revolt will have just begun.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/15/2009 00:00 ||
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OTOH STARS-N-STRIPES > RISE IN MILITIA GROUPS ACROSS USA REPORTED.
Numbers and armaments on the rise, just waiting for a spark(s) to peeve 'em off???
#2
If I understand correctly, JosephM, it's one gentleman at the Southern something-or-other, one of those pro bono law groups -- like the ACLU -- that goes back to the civil rights fights of the 1950s but now has no real reason to exist. Apparently the gentleman has no actual evidence to support his terribly frightening claims about radical right activity.
#3
I think you are referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center, tw. They did some valuable work against the KKK back in the day, but now they basically have to find some way to justify their large endowment/fundraising efforts among the guilty white liberal market.
#4
Poverty pays: the Southern Poverty Law Center is worth nearly a quarter BILLION dollars.
Posted by: Grenter, Protector of the Geats ||
08/15/2009 8:36 Comments ||
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Mary Bauer Named SPLC's New Legal Director
Mary Bauer, who has directed the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project since its inception in 2004, has been named as the SPLC's new legal director, effective Aug. 1.
Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. This hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here you can build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me. What we're fighting for, in the end, is each other. Sorry. Didn't mean to preach.
The Beltway has its special interest groups and lobbyists who fight for loot and other people's property. Those showing up at these Town Halls are fighting for 'the idea that we all have value, you and me.' There is no ruled and ruling class. No one is better than the other, 'Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was.' It's incomprehensible to the self appointed betters, 'No man has to bow, no man born to royalty' whether in formal title or behavior.
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.
"The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift," Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. "I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem."
The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama's effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.
"Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation," said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. "In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done."
The House passed cap-and-trade legislation in June.
Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Senate say they are sticking with their plan to combine a version of that bill with a separate measure mandating energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources such as solar and wind power. The legislation also provides for an extension of offshore oil and gas drilling in certain areas, broadening its support.
Reid's Comment
"I don't think we are going to take to the Senate floor a bill stripped of climate provisions," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, told reporters in Las Vegas on Aug. 11.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed the renewable-energy legislation, 15-8, in June. Reid has set a deadline of Sept 28 for committees to complete work on climate- change provisions.
Ben Nelson of Nebraska and North Dakota Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan joined Lincoln in suggesting that the climate measure be put off.
"We should separate the energy bill from the climate bill," Conrad told reporters this month. 'It needs to be done as soon as we can get it done," he said, referring to the energy legislation.
Climate legislation would require 60 votes in the Senate. Most Republicans have said they oppose the cap-and-trade measure, and at least 15 of the Senate's 60-member Democratic majority have said the House-passed version would hurt the economy and needs to be revamped to win their support.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/15/2009 00:00 ||
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Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. "I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem."
How did you vote last June?
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/15/2009 2:07 Comments ||
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She hasn't: Cap and Tax passed the House, and it's under consideration in the Senate.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/15/2009 9:52 Comments ||
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There are two battles coming up soon:
Cap and Trade bill
So-called health care reform bill
Health care reform bill politicos have dropped the section on aging. They are on the defensive. Seize the battle space.
Both these bills are just a scam by those in congress and their friends to rip off the taxpayer and the country, just like TARP. If we the people can kill these two bills, then the Big O machine will have suffered two major defeats. That should be enough to shut them down, and congresspeople that voted for them could go down in 2010.
This is a watershed moment in US history, and action by the taxpaying public must be taken.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
08/15/2009 18:24 Comments ||
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When it comes to civil liberties, liberals are often distrustful of government power. But, for reasons that baffle me, they are quite comfortable with Uncle Sam getting into the business of deciding, or providing "guidance" on, which lives are more valuable than others. A government charged with extending life expectancy must meddle not just with our health care, but with what we eat, how we drive, how we live. A government determined to cut costs must meddle not just with how we live, but how we die.
That sounds scary and un-American to me. And if that makes me paranoid and unpatriotic, then I am what I am.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/15/2009 00:00 ||
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Ain't it the cotton-pickin' truth.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/15/2009 21:41 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Despite a growing corruption investigation, the Navy has allowed a defense contractor in the middle of a federal contracts-for-cash probe to keep working with the government, the company says. 
THE best moment of almost every YouTube video of the raucous town-hall meetings on health care is the same: It's the nonplussed look on the face of the senators and congressmen who have rarely suffered such indignity. Be assured: No one talks to them that way in the "members only" elevators in the US Capitol. 
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.
