2centsworth.info

It’s hard to decide which Federal agency is the most corrupt these days but Interior is certainly in the running for that prize.

Today’s New York Times (24 March 2007) has a front page article Ex-Interior Aide is Guilty of Lying in Lobbying Case. The second highest official in the Dept. of Interior, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty to lying before a Senate committee about his ties to Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who is now in prison.

According to the article, Mr. Griles told the Senate committee he had “no special relationship” with Jack Abramoff even though Abramoff routinely sought and received advice from Mr. Griles. He also failed to mention that he had a sexual relationship with one Italia Federici. Ms. Federici is the president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy which received $500,000 from Mr. Abramoff. As Mr. Giles may have said, “Advocate this, honey!”…

The article also mentions that Mr. Griles had teamed up with a top ConocoPhillips lobbyist to buy a $980,000 vacation home. This purchase was approved by Sue Ellen Wooldridge, a top official in the Dept. of the Interior at the time. She also ended up as a co-owner of the vacation home. Conflict of Interest? What conflict of interest? Ms. Wooldridge is now, erh, “living in sin” with Mr. Griles in Falls Church, VA. (I know, I know… nobody gets married these days but heck, these are Republicans! Where’s their family values!?)

Ms. Wooldridge a former solicitor (No, not that kind!… a lawyer!) and senior aide to Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, ended up as a lawyer at the Justice Dept. prosecuting environmental cases… Including one against Conoco Phillips which she, erh, dropped.

Just how does the Food and Drug Administration decide what drugs or devices to approve for use by the public?

These decisions are made by FDA Advisory Committees made up of experts in the field.

Today’s New York Times (22 March, 2007) has an article F.D.A. Rule Limits Role of Advisors Tied to Industry which says that advisory committee members will (for the first time) be barred from voting on approval for a company’s product if they have received money from that company or a competitor. And if they have received more than $50,000 from that company or a competitor within the last 12 months then they cannot serve on a committee judging that company’s products (less than $50k is just hunky dory ).

FDA Acting Deputy Commissioner Randall W. Lutter stated that a “signficant number” of the agency’s current advisers would be affected by this policy.

What that means, of course, is that up until now, many of the people responsible for approving drugs and medical devices have been routinely accepting tens of thousands of dollars a year from the company’s whose products they were approving. Smells a just a bit, don’t you think?

The article describes a situation in 2005 where 10 of the advisers who voted for Bextra to remain on the market and Vioxx to return to the market had accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the manufacturers. If the tainted advisors had not been allowed to vote, the products would not have been allowed back on the market since the majority of advisers who had not accepted money had voted against approval.

Other little tidbits from the article; under FDA rules an adviser cannot vote if they hold more than $100,000 in stock in the manufacturer (but holding $99,000 or less is hunky dory ).

One needs to remember that the previous FDA Commissioner, Lester Crawford, recently pleaded guilty to charges of filing false financial disclosure forms and conflicts of interest. The government had charged that Crawford and his wife owned stock in several companies that fell under FDA regulation, and failed to fully disclose that information as required by federal law. The court papers also charge that Crawford assured federal ethics officers that he and his wife had sold stock in those companies, when they had not.

Crawford’s attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, said that under a plea agreement, her client would not dispute the government’s charges, and would likely face fines and a possible prison term of up to two years.

Click here to read the Department of Justice news release on the case’s outcome.

Today’s NY Times has an article (A Health Care Plan So Simple, Even Stephen Colbert Couldn’t Simplify It by Robert H. Frank an economics professor at Cornell – New York Times, February 15, 2007; page C3) which is worth reading.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed tax cuts to make health insurance more affordable to the uninsured. Apparently Stephen Colbert (of Comedy Central) had this comment on the President’s plan:

“It’s so simple. Most people who can’t afford health insurance also are too poor to owe taxes. But if you give them a deduction from the taxes they don’t owe, they can use the money they’re not getting back from what they haven’t given to buy the health care they can’t afford.”

Which does cast GW’s plan in its proper light… as a cruel joke similar to the rest of his policies.

But Professor Frank goes on to give a very well reasoned case for why a single-payer healthplan makes sense for people at all income levels and why it should save everyone money. He also outlines the underlying motivations for the forces opposing a single-payer system.

Rather than cut and paste a bunch of quotes from the article, I will post a link to the NYTimes copy of the article here.

So much for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 100 hour blitzkrieg to return Capitol Hill to a higher ethical standard. Not only is she weakening her message by demanding that the Pentagon fly her around in a personal 757… But it is already evident that her new rules designed to curb the influence of lobbyists is an abject failure.

According to today’s New York Times article (Congress Finds Ways of Avoiding Lobbyist Limits by David Kirkpatrick, Sunday February 11, 2007), it has taken congressmen on both sides of the aisle only a few weeks to figure out how to get around the new ethics rules. (Actually, I am sure they knew how to get around them in advance… After all it was the lawmakers who wrote the rules and they were written to have loopholes a mile wide.)

Pelosi’s new rules prohibit lobbyists from treating lawmakers to meals, trips, stadium box seats, or discounted use of private jets. However, according to the article, within the last two months, lawmakers have invited lobbyists to help pay for lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker’s honor ($1,000 per lobbyist), margaritas and martinis at Washington area restaurants ($1,000), a California wine-tasting tour, hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up)… The list goes on and on…

The trick is that the lobbyists don’t pay the lawmaker directly. Instead the lobbyists pay a political fund-raising committee…which then pays for the lawmaker’s party, trip, etc. Apparently nothing in Nancy Pelosi’s new rules prohibits this… Is she a naive fool or “one of them”?

The New York Times article has the following table:

Join Your Favorite Lawmaker For… (for a “small” contribution)
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee	Weekend at the Harbor House resort on Nantucket	$25,000
Senator Max Baucus (Dem. Montana)	Skiing or snowmobiling in February or golfing or fly-fishing in the summer	$5,000
Senator Tom Carper (Dem. Delaware)	Skiing weekend at the Ritz-Carleton Bachelor Gulch in Colorado	$5,000
Senator Bill Nelson (Dem. Florida)	Super Bowl Party in Miami	$5,000
Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (Dem. Ohio)	“Manicures and Muffins” at Capitol Nails in Washington	$2,500
Senator Mel Martinez (Rep. Florida)	Presidents’ Day Weekend at Disneyland	$5,000
Rep. Eric Cantor (Rep. Virginia)	Coffee at Starbucks (four mornings this Spring)	$2,500
Rep. Ron Manzullo (Rep. Illinois)	Valentine’s Day Reception at Landini Brothers in Alexandria, VA	$1,500
Rep. Mary Bono (Rep. California)	Concert by The Who	$2,500 for two
Rep. Vito Fossella (Rep. New York)	Performance of “Mary Poppins” on Broadway	$2,500 for two
Rep. Kay Granger (Rep. Texas)	“Grangertinis” birthday party at a Washington Steakhouse	$1,000

I really like the sound of the “Manicures and Muffins”, myself. For $2,500, I am sure those are really good muffins.

There are a lot of differences between Iraq and Vietnam but it’s probably worth looking back on Vietnam as we consider what course to take in Iraq.

Should we “cut and run” or should we keep sending soldiers and marines over there to secure “peace with honor.”

When our political and military leadership have no clear plan or objective, does it make any sense, and is it morally defensible, to keep on wasting the lives of our rank and file military.

The Bush administration says that if we simply withdraw that it will be disastrous; that Iraq will be a haven for terrorists. Yet I don’t think anyone outside of the White House believes that sending another 20,000 troops to Baghdad for a couple of months is going magically stabilize Iraq. If we’d followed General Shinseki’s advice in 2003 and sent in 300,000 troops and had a less corrupt and incompetent reconstruction effort things might have turned out better. But we didn’t and it’s three years later and it’s really too late now.

Let’s get the troops out before any more are wasted. It’s worth remembering that we lost in Vietnam… The bad guys ended up in control of both North and South Vietnam. And what harm has come of it? It’s thirty years down the road from the fall of South Vietnam and we are now trading partners with Vietnam.

There is no doubt that the Middle East is very different from South East Asia and the mindset and cultural and religious issues are enormously different. It is ironic, about 2 million Vietnamese and over 50,000 Americans died during the war there and yet an American traveler today is probably safer in Hanoi today than he would be anywhere else in the world. That isn’t going to be true in the Middle East; not now, not in thirty years, and probably not ever. Muslim fundamentalism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are not going to away and we will have to figure out political and military responses to them all.

But the invasion of Iraq was ill-conceived from the beginning and hopelessly bungled in its execution. It’s time to get our guys out of there and leave the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to sort it out among themselves. We won’t be able to just walk away and forget about it… But we need to back off and find another approach, wait two years until GW and his gang of fools are gone and have a more intelligent and less corrupt President try to sort this out.

Update 31JAN09: Well, we now have a more intelligent, less corrupt President. And a combination of the troop surge and the new policy of reaching out to the Sunni militants has resulted in a much more stable Iraq. Both thanks to General Petraeus and getting rid of Rumsfeld. Now we can, one hopes, get out of Iraq and attend to our unfinished business in Afghanistan and Pakistan.