Maybe a group of patriotic Teabagger-Americans
could do it themselves

Glen Beck and Michael Scheuer know that sometimes you have to nuke your nation to save it:

The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.

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http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/07/maybe-group-of-patriotic-teabagger.html

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FAA Is A Very Sick Agency Run By College Drop-Out
Randy Babbitt

July 2, 2009
FAA whistle-blower safety warnings found to have merit
Posted: 12:14 PM ET
American Morning - amFIXFiled under: Airline safety

Tom Devine, legal director of the non-profit Government Accountability Project, tells CNN the FAA is a 'very sick agency.'
By Allan Chernoff
CNN Sr. Correspondent

A federal investigation into Federal Aviation Administration employee whistle-blower safety complaints has found more than two dozen to be on the mark, CNN has learned, potentially putting the public?s safety at risk.

The federal Office of Special Counsel, which investigates allegations of reprisal against whistle-blowers, tells CNN it has made a ?positive determination? that the FAA improperly responded to 27 current cases of FAA employee whistle-blowers warning of safety violations ranging from airline maintenance concerns to runway and air traffic control issues.

?It means that FAA is a very sick agency,? said Tom Devine, legal director of the non-profit Government Accountability Project. ?There?s never been an agency that?s had that large of a surge of whistle-blowers whose concerns were vindicated by the government?s official whistle-blower protection office.?

The Department of Transportation told CNN, ?We acknowledge it?s a large number of cases.?

?We take whistle-blower complaints very seriously and we fully cooperate with all of the investigations,? said FAA spokesperson Laura J. Brown.

Among the warnings found to have merit are those of FAA inspector Christopher Monteleon, who flagged safety problems at Colgan Air for several years before a Colgan plane crashed near Buffalo in February killing 50 people. He told CNN he?s faced retaliation at the FAA for pointing out issues including faulty aircraft manuals and poor cockpit procedures he observed during in-flight aircraft testing.

?My supervisor called me into his office and said, ?Stop your investigation.? He said that these violations never occurred,? said Monteleon.

But Monteleon continued raising safety concerns about the airline. Eventually he was demoted and put on leave of absence.

?I had my aviation inspector credentials taken from me,? Monteleon told CNN. ?It has just been humiliating. It?s been awful.?

The FAA says it does not believe any of Monteleon?s reassignments were retaliatory, and cannot comment further because this is a personnel issue covered by privacy laws.

While the Office of Special Counsel has found merit in Monteleon?s charges of safety violations, the Special Counsel continues to investigate his claim that he was the victim of retaliation for pressing his safety concerns.

Though passenger safety is at stake, the Office of Special Counsel found the FAA has repeatedly deferred to the airlines it regulates.

?That?s shocking, and it?s really unconscionable for a government agency that?s supposed to be about safety, not about witch hunts for those who find safety lacking,? said Mary Schiavo, inspector general of the Department of Transportation from 1990-1996, who is now an attorney representing families of accident victims.

What?s going on at FAA? Critics say it?s the culture.

In 2003, former FAA administrator Marion Blakey established a ?Customer Service Initiative? that defined airlines as customers, rather than the flying public. The current Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovel, found, ?FAA?s definition of its customer has had a pervasively negative, although unintended, impact on its oversight program.?

While there?s no evidence of illegal dealings, the FAA has an active revolving door. Agency managers regularly go on to work in the aviation industry while industry executives take top spots at FAA.

-Former FAA administrator Marion Blakey is now president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association.

-Former FAA chief operating officer Russell Chew moved on to become president of Jet Blue Airways, where he just stepped down and took on the role of Senior Adviser for the company.

-FAA?s chief operating officer of air traffic, Hank Krakowski, came from United Airlines where he held a number of senior management positions, including vice president of flight operations.

-Linda Daschle, wife of the former Senate Democratic leader, was the FAA?s acting administrator, and then became a lobbyist representing the airline industry.

?There?s a very cozy relationship between the lobbyists for the industry and the Department of Transportation and the FAA,? said Schiavo.

As in all federal agencies, senior executives leaving the FAA are subject to a one-year ?cooling off? period that forbids them from representing a client before the FAA.

The new transportation secretary Ray LaHood and FAA administrator Randy Babbitt, who took office June 1, say they will make sure whistle-blowers are heard.

?We will pay attention to any kind of complaint or accusation or any concern expressed by an employee of FAA. It?s a new day at the FAA and at DOT,? LaHood told CNN.

FAA last year established a Safety Issues Reporting System for employees to raise safety concerns. FAA also tracks employee hotline complaints in its General Counsel Office.

But, the agency has resisted calls to establish an independent office to investigate whistle-blower safety claims. The pending House bill to reauthorize FAA would require the agency to establish such an office. The Senate still has to write its version of the bill.

The Office of Special Counsel has referred all 27 cases to the transportation secretary who is investigating and must tell the Special Counsel what steps will be taken to fix the safety problems.

Read The Full Article:
http://ejectsturgell.blogspot.com/2009/07/faa-is-very-sick-agency-run-by-college.
html

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Post Layoff: Seven Ways to Get Back on Your Feet

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jutiagroup/~3/F7G2RczuImI/

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TPMDC Morning Roundup

Who says no second acts in politics? Norm Coleman is serious about running for governor of Minnesota next year. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/g_FMswZdhho/tpmdc_morning_r
oundup_113.php

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Hannity ignores CBO to attack cap and trade as
regressive

During the July 1 edition of Fox News' Hannity, Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, stated that "[t]here's a new study from the Tax Foundation that shows, by a margin of 5-to-1, the cap-and-tax burden falls heaviest on the poor and the lower middle class." Host Sean Hannity added: "Poor, elderly, farmers." But the Tax Foundation's study did not consider the effect of the government's distribution of revenue generated by a cap-and-trade system to lower-income households. Additionally, Hannity and Reed ignored the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) June 19 analysis of the version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which found that households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 per year.

The Tax Foundation's most recent analysis of a cap-and-trade system, a March 2009 "Working Paper No. 6," which the Tax Foundation described as a "new study" in its Summer 2009 newsletter, considered "a typical cap-and-trade system," not the system detailed in the House committee's version of the energy bill. The study found that the lowest income quintile would bear a burden of $617, or 6.2 percent of income under a typical cap-and-trade system, while the top quintile would bear a burden of $2,091 or 1.4 percent of income. But the Tax Foundation analysis specifically stated that it did not consider how the revenue generated by a cap-and-trade program "may be disposed by lawmakers in various ways that may affect these household burdens":

In this analysis we focus primarily on the burden of cap and trade to households in the form of higher consumer prices. As noted above, cap and trade also generates government revenue that may be disposed of by lawmakers in various ways that may affect these household burdens. Because of uncertainty about how lawmakers may or may not dispose of future cap-and-trade revenue, we present only household burdens from higher consumer prices throughout the body of the study. 

According to the CBO analysis, the "net impact" of the energy act's cap-and-trade system "would reflect both the added costs that households experienced because of higher prices and the share of the allowance value that they received in the form of benefit payments, rebates, tax decreases or credits, wages, and returns on their investments." CBO also stated that the distribution of revenue under the legislation would offset much of the cost of the bill to households. In its June 19 analysis of the energy act, CBO stated that "[i]n the aggregate, most of these [higher consumer] costs would be offset by income or other benefits provided to households as a result of the distribution of the value of the emission allowances."

From the CBO analysis:

The GHG cap-and-trade program established under H.R. 2454 would impose costs on U.S. households and provide some financial benefits, as well as the benefits associated with any changes in the climate that would be avoided as a result of the legislation. (This analysis addresses only those financial benefits.) The costs would be incurred through higher prices for the goods and services that households consumed, and the incidence of those costs would be determined primarily by households' consumption patterns. In the aggregate, most of those costs would be offset by income or other benefits provided to households as a result of the distribution of the value of the emission allowances.

CBO provided the following chart breaking down the cost of the bill by income quintile:

From the July 1 edition of Fox News' Hannity:

RALPH REED (chairman of the Faith And Freedom Coalition): Yeah, look, the fact of the matter is the Democratic brand is starting to lose a lot of its shine, because this is a president who ran promising hope and change, saying he wouldn't be an old-style Democrat, saying we weren't going to re-fight the battles of the 1990s, saying he didn't have, you know, a stake in the fight in the 60s in the culture wars.

And what we've gotten, Sean, is classic liberal, big bureaucracy, big government, massive tax increases. Under cap and tax, electric utility bills are going to go up 90 percent --

HANNITY: Nationalized health care.

REED: -- the price of a gallon of gas is going to go up 74 percent.

And here's the tragedy. He promised that no one making less than $200,000 a year would see a dime in a tax increase. And --

HANNITY: And he said it over and over again.

REED: -- and let me finish this point. There's a new study from the Tax Foundation that shows, by a margin of 5-to-1, the cap-and-tax burden falls heaviest on the poor and the lower middle class.

HANNITY: Poor, elderly, farmers.

REED: It's a highly regressive tax that falls hardest and punishes those least able to pay.

HANNITY: All right. Here's --

POWERS: Can we just get back --

HANNITY: Go ahead.

POWERS: -- to this idea, though, that the Democrats are unhappy with Obama? I mean, that's just not reality.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.mediamatters.org/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/mSjU11idtyQ/200907020005

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Quick Cute Clip to Brighten Your Thursday

To pay the bills between blog posts, The Green Miles works at the National Wildlife Federation. NWF's Reston office sits next to Lake Fairfax Park, so we get everything from deer to groundhogs to snakes in our backyard. During these hot summer months, every once in a while an all-staff email will go out saying, "There are turtles keeping cool in the shade under cars in the parking lot, check under your car before you go home!"

Here's the latest wildlife sighting -- a family of raccoons living in a dead tree out back:


video details and more



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http://thegreenmiles.blogspot.com/2009/07/quick-cute-clip-to-brighten-your.html

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Cup O' Jolt, Or, How Americans are Tightening
Those Belts

Many Americans are in dire economic straits: they lost their jobs, their homes have been foreclosed, their health care bills are skyrocketing, and creditors are hassling them. But even many of those Americans for whom none of the above apply are tightening their belts, as I discussed in a post earlier this week based on a recent Harris poll on how Americans are managing their assets.

Starbucks Store Closures, 2008

















Now comes Harris with the release of other results from this survey, pertaining to consumption patterns. Not surprisingly, people are cutting back on, if not foregoing altogether, many non-essential items. What sorts of non-essentials?

In their write-up, Harris reports that Americans say they cut back or altered their consumer behaviors during the past six months in the following ways:

*Three in five adults (62%) say they are purchasing more generic brands while another 14% are considering it. Just under half (47%) of Americans are brownbagging lunch instead of purchasing it with 8% considering it;

*Slightly over one-third (36%) are going to the hairdresser or barber less often, while one-third (33%) are switching to refillable water bottles instead of purchasing bottles of water;

*People are also cancelling one or more magazine subscriptions (29% done, 7% considered) and cancelling a newspaper subscription (15% done, 9% considered); and,

*One in five Americans have cut down on dry cleaning (20%) and stopped purchasing coffee in the morning (19%) while 14% have begun carpooling or taking mass transit.

These findings conform with news that, beginning last year and depicted geographically above, Starbucks has been forced to close hundreds of stores; generic brand sales have jumped dramatically; and drycleaning sales have dropped off, as depicted in terms of regional sales declines, below. (Courtesy of AmericanDrycleaner.com.)


Obviously, these changes in consumer behavior ramify across the economy, costing jobs in these sectors, worsening the recession and exacerbating the financial woes of, say, Americans who worked as baristas or wholesalers of drycleaning plastic wrap. But the downturn seems to be providing a different and arguably long overdue jolt for Americans, as they begin to reassess how and on what they spend their disposable income now that they have less of it to dispose.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/cup-o-jolt-or-how-americans-are.html

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Jawad, Ghailani Cases Challenge US Torture Under
Rule of Law

Muhammed Jawad's legal battles have stretched on for the last 7 years. For a boy who may have been as young as 12 when he was picked up on an Afghan battlefield, that must feel like an eternity in custody. He has grown up at Gitmo. ACLU had another[...]

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http://christyhardinsmith.firedoglake.com/2009/07/02/tortured-logic-jawad-and-gha
ilani-cases-challenge-us-torture-under-rule-of-law/

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ThinkFast: July 2, 2009

The U.S. economy lost a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, according to a new Labor Department report out this morning. Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent, the highest rate in 26 years.

“Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years,” according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.” This travel spending “is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001.”

In the first major push in the U.S. military’s new counteroffensive strategy, “[t]housands of Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops moved into Taliban-infested villages with armor and helicopters early today” in Helmand province. The goal “is to clear insurgents there before the nation’s Aug. 20 presidential election.”

The U.S. military is reporting that “insurgents have captured an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan.” The soldier, missing since Tuesday, “wasn’t taking part in the major military operation launched in the southern Taliban stronghold of the Helmand River Valley.” Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the military is using “all our resources to find him and provide for his safe return.”

Last night on MSNBC?s Countdown, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) urged the 60 members of the Democratic Caucus to support cloture on legislation that would reform the nation’s health care system. ?I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster,? he said.

Much of South Carolina’s Republican establishment is now seeking Gov. Mark Sanford’s resignation. Fourteen GOP state senators have called for him to step down, joining a list that includes 11 Republican members of the state House and six big state newspapers. Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Gresham Barrett spoke frankly with Sanford yesterday. Barrett asked him to resign.

Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA), an Iraq war veteran, will take the legislative lead in the congressional effort to reverse the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays and lesbians in the military. Murphy will take over from former Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), who retired last week to take a job at the State Department. Tauscher proposed legislation repealing the policy earlier this year.

Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have teamed up to place a hold on President Barack Obama?s first appointment to the Federal Election Commission in an effort to shake up the FEC. ?[T]he lawmakers signaled they would release the hold only if Obama taps two additional nominees to fill expired seats on the six-member independent panel.?

The Obama administration “launched investigations of hundreds of businesses around the country” yesterday “as part of its strategy to focus immigration enforcement on the employers who hire illegal workers.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun notifying more than 600 businesses of “plans to audit employment eligibility documents that employers fill out for every worker.”

And finally: Meghan McCain hasn’t released a memoir yet (it’s due next spring), but as the New York Daily News notes, “she’s already planning the movie version.” “I want Hilary Duff to play me. I think she’s really hot — hotter than me — but I’d still want her to play me,” McCain said. “Really, I’d take anyone who’s blond,” she added. She also said that she thinks “Bradley Cooper is so hot” and would love him to be in her film too.

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Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/02/thinkfast-july-2-2009/

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Reuters: Amnesty says Israel "wantonly" destroyed
Gaza

Reuters:

Amnesty International said on Thursday Israel inflicted "wanton destruction" in the Gaza Strip in attacks that often targeted Palestinian civilians during an offensive in December and January in the Hamas-run enclave.

The London-based rights group, in a 117-page report on the 22 days of fighting, also criticized the Islamist movement Hamas for rocket attacks on Israel, which it called "war crimes."

Among other conclusions, Amnesty said it found no evidence to support Israeli claims that Gaza guerrillas deliberately used civilians as "human shields," but it did, however, cite evidence that Israeli troops put children and other civilians in harm's way by forcing them to remain in homes taken over by soldiers.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/PEeBcLarIQA/reuters-amnesty-says-is
rael-wantonly.html

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