Eideard

Even pigs wear boots to a Gingrich press conference

Newt Gingrich made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.

The total amount is significantly larger than the $300,000 payment from Freddie Mac that Gingrich was asked about during a Republican presidential debate on Nov. 9 sponsored by CNBC, and more than was disclosed in the middle of congressional investigations into the housing industry collapse.

Gingrich’s business relationship with Freddie Mac spanned a period of eight years. When asked at the debate what he did to earn a $300,000 payment in 2006…the former speaker lied and said he offered lessons from history.

Gingrich said this morning that the payments were for “strategic advice over a long period of time.” His fees were sent to his consulting firm, The Gingrich Group, not to him personally…well, that’s a big difference, eh?

Gingrich’s first contract with the mortgage lender was in 1999, five months after he resigned from Congress and as House speaker…His primary contact inside the organization was Mitchell Delk, Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist, and he was paid a self- renewing, monthly retainer of $25,000 to $30,000 between May 1999 until 2002, according to three people familiar with aspects of the business agreement.

During that period, Gingrich consulted with Freddie Mac executives on a program to expand home ownership, an idea Delk said he pitched to President George W. Bush’s White House.

“I spent about three hours with him talking about the substance of the issues and the politics of the issues, and he really got it,” said Delk, adding that the two discussed “what the benefits are to communities, what the benefits could be for Republicans and particularly their relationship with Hispanics…”

While campaigning in Iowa this week, Gingrich, 68, was asked about his relationship with Freddie Mac. He said he did no lobbying “of any kind…”

RTFA if you can stand the stink of Gingrich’s lies. I’d recommend wearing rubber boots, as well.

More Gingrich lies, of course. As more comes out into the light of day, Newt has to rearrange his lies to suit the occasion. A reflection of the cesspool that is Congressional ethics.

Pilgrim Chickens on the left – with his favorite chicken plucker

On a July morning in 2008, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and several aides boarded a plane for Washington to lobby on ethanol use, an issue important to corn growers and livestock owners in his state.

The growers favored federal rules requiring the use of the corn-based fuel in gasoline, but beef and chicken suppliers said the rules would raise the price of feed stocks. Mr. Perry was firmly in the livestock camp, and he took his case straight to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, urging him to waive the ethanol mandate to lower the cost of corn.

While executives from the livestock industry did not attend Mr. Perry’s private meeting at the E.P.A., the governor would not have made it there without them — literally. The Hawker 800XP plane that Mr. Perry and his team flew from Austin to Washington and back was provided by Lonnie Pilgrim, one of the world’s largest chicken producers and a leading critic of the ethanol mandate…The poultry magnate also flew the governor to Washington in June to take part in a news conference on the issue.

The two trips, each valued at $9,179, were among more than 200 flights worth a total of $1.3 million that Mr. Perry has accepted — free — from corporate executives and wealthy donors during 11 years as governor, according to an analysis of Texas Ethics Commission records by The New York Times.

Although many of the trips were for political or ceremonial events — not unusual for elected officials — others involved governmental functions, including some that were of interest to the planes’ owners. As a result, a group of well-heeled businessmen has effectively helped underwrite some of Mr. Perry’s activities as governor.

The head of a Texas oil refinery spent almost $20,000 flying Mr. Perry and his staff to a trade meeting in Mexico, where the governor asked Mexican energy officials to consider more joint ventures with Texas oil companies. Other Texas business owners have paid Mr. Perry’s way to Washington to lobby on immigration, testify before Congress and meet with the homeland security secretary.

Mr. Perry’s travels adhere to Texas ethics laws, and he is far from alone in accepting gifts of air travel. But among politicians he stands out for taking private flights for activities that are considered part of his job as governor. That is different from campaign travel or the sort of quasi-official trips for which officeholders normally use private planes, like attending a conference or giving a speech.

Texas ethics laws, of course, is a contradiction in terms. Ethics has little or nothing to do how Rick Perry or pretty much any other Texan governs. Taking care of the Big Boys is what counts. The Texas legislature will make certain laws are bent, broken, or stapled together to allow for as much influence as “grassroots” organization like the Petroleum Club or Chickenpluckers International require.

RTFA for lots of details, anecdotes, the sort of corrupt practices considered trivial in Texas.

While the Bible Belt is known for its devotion to traditional values, Southerners don’t do so well on one key family value: They are more likely to get divorced than people living in the Northeast.

Southern men and women had higher rates of divorce in 2009 than their counterparts in other parts of the country: 10.2 per 1,000 for men and 11.1 per 1,000 for women, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

By comparison, men and women in the Northeast had the lowest rates of divorce, 7.2 and 7.5 per 1,000, which is also lower than the national divorce rate of 9.2 for men and 9.7 for women…

Youth and lack of education can lead to higher divorce rates, said D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center..”There tend to be higher divorce rates in states where women marry young,” Cohn said. “Education also may play a role. In general, less educated women marry at younger ages than college-educated women, and less educated couples have higher divorce rates.”

Values about premarital sex associated with the Bible Belt and rural America may be encouraging people to marry early, at ages when they are likely to have less education and less income to support a long-lasting marriage, according to Naomi Cahn, law professor at The George Washington University Law School…”There’s a moral crisis in red states that’s produced by higher divorce rates and the disparity between parental values and behavior of young adults,” said Cahn. “There is enormous tension between moral values and actual practices…”

“The very fact that people feel less pressure to get married (in the Northeast) means they can be more selective about who they marry and take their time, ” Coontz said. “They don’t have to rush into it to please parents or avoid stigma of premarital sex…”

Meanwhile, divorce still pushes more women into poverty than men and affects their children, since children are still more likely to live with their mothers than their fathers, according to the same U.S. Census report.

Bible Belt and fundamentalist Christians have a built-in acceptance for hypocrisy. Lying about ethical standards – building rationales acceptable to your peers to justify just about anything is part of the whole equation of being “forgiven”. You can build your life on superstition and guesswork – and watch it fall apart – because you have someone waiting for you, next Sunday, who will tell you, “It’s OK. You gave it a try. God loves you anyway.”

Even if you don’t make your child support payments.

“Suppose you were an idiot.
And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.”

Americans’ evaluation of the job Congress is doing is the worst Gallup has ever measured, with 13% approving, tying the all-time low measured in December 2010. Disapproval of Congress is at 84%, a percentage point higher than last December’s previous high rating.

These results are based on an Aug. 11-14 Gallup poll, which includes the first update on Congress’ job approval rating since the government reached agreement on a deal to raise the debt ceiling after contentious and protracted negotiations between President Obama and congressional leaders. Standard & Poor’s subsequently downgraded the United States’ credit rating, in part citing the current political environment in Washington. That sparked a week of intense volatility in the stock market, with days of sharp losses and large gains.

Frustration with Congress was evident immediately after the debt ceiling agreement, with a record-low 21% of registered voters in an Aug. 4-7 USA Today/Gallup poll saying most members of Congress deserve re-election.

President Obama’s job approval rating has also declined in recent days, reaching a low of 39% in Aug. 11-13 Gallup Daily tracking…

Gallup has measured Americans’ approval rating of Congress since 1974…

Independents are currently the most critical of Congress, with 9% approving and 86% disapproving. Republicans and Democrats give Congress slightly higher, but still overwhelmingly negative, marks.

Frankly, I think we’re too kind at evaluating this lot. Sam Clemens got it right when he said there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. Corruption, payoffs, credits and favors via all the methods made especially popular since the days of Newt Gingrich’s contract on America characterize the day-to-day operations of one of the least functional legislatures in the history of democracy.

Les Hinton, Rupert Murdoch

Les Hinton, the head of News Corp’s flagship American newspaper and a trusted, long-serving executive, resigned on Friday over his role in the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s global media company.

He became the first high profile casualty of the controversy in the United States, where he had been chief executive of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, a financial news service, since Mr Murdoch’s takeover in late 2007.

In his resignation letter, Mr Hinton, 67, apologised for the “pain caused to innocent people” by repeated illegal intrusions by News of the World reporters and private detectives.

Mr Hinton was in charge of News International, Mr Murdoch’s British newspaper division, from 1997 to 2007, when most of the egregious cases of phone tampering that have come to light occurred…

He continued: “When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated, that important lessons had been learned and that journalistic integrity was restored.

Sounds as if his departure was the event that removed the rotten element at the News of the World.

Mr Hinton had worked continuously for Mr Murdoch since joining one of the Australian newspapers that were the foundation of the News Corps operation as at the age of 15.

Few people were closer to the tycoon, and he held a variety of senior posts, including leading the Fox television station network and the American newspaper division, which includes The New York Post, before the highly prized capture of the Wall Street Journal.

Given the industrial scale of phone-tapping, bribery and other misconduct now acknowledged by the company, media experts questioned how Mr Hinton did not know what was going on…

No less culpable than Nixon or Bush – or Conrad Black and Bernie Madoff – of the crimes they committed.

Germany’s parliament agreed in a conscience vote on Thursday to allow the limited use of genetic testing of human embryos.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) — in which a cell or two are extracted from a developing embryo to test for genetic disorders — has divided governments around the world, with many people opposing it on religious and ethical grounds, or arguing that it would let parents choose a “designer baby.”

The new law will allow screening embryos of parents who have a predisposition to severe genetic disorders, where a pregnancy would be likely to result in either stillbirth or miscarriage.

Existing German law did not fully regulate PGD and the German high court last year ruled that parliament should take up the issue with respect to serious genetic defects…

Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen, from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party, told ARD television before the vote that concern over the issue of “designer babies” was unfounded.

“So-called ‘designer babies’, which would be musically gifted or athletic or have blue eyes, are a fantasy,” said von der Leyen, a physician and mother of seven. “It’s about severe illness of individual cases…”

Kerstin Janich, a woman from near Munich whose four-year-old son Louis died of a genetic disease, told Reuters Television in a recent interview there was little public understanding of why some parents who struggle to have children go through screening.

“It’s not about allowing a ‘designer baby’ with blond hair and blue eyes or a sick child not deserving to live,” she said. “It’s about the suffering of an entire family, for siblings and relatives and friends.”

Under the new law, parents will have to undergo counseling and an ethics panel must approve the procedure to select a developing embryo that tests negative for certain anomalies before it is implanted in the womb.

Overdue.

Once again, the political nannies camp on the Right Bank of the river of life no matter how loud they may declaim their commitment to liberty. The only surprise – for an American looking over the pond – is witnessing a broad coalition from Liberal to Libertarian willing to take leadership.

Does it matter who’s in the White House?

WASHINGTON — in this covetous town, the delicacies of the Georgetown Cupcake shop stand alone as symbols of wish fulfillment — heaping swirls of luscious confection atop rich, creamy pastry.

Therefore: Operation Cupcake. As the Federal Communications Commission debated final rules last December on how Internet service providers should manage their traffic, AT&T delivered 1,500 of these opulent desserts to the F.C.C.’s headquarters here.

Like many other big corporations, AT&T annually blankets power brokers with token holiday gifts, but the cupcake campaign was notable for its military precision. A three-page spreadsheet, stamped “AT&T Proprietary (Internal Use Only),” detailed how the desserts were to be deployed to each of the 63 commission offices: four dozen were assigned to the enforcement bureau, 10 dozen to the wireless divisions, 12 cupcakes to each of four commissioners, and 18 to the chairman, and so on.

As it turns out, AT&T had begun its $39 billion courting of T-Mobile about the same time. The resulting deal, announced a week ago, would transform the industry if approved. It would narrow the field of major wireless providers to three and vault AT&T into the No. 1 spot, ahead of Verizon; consumer advocates say the combination will lead to higher prices.

As interested parties lobby for and against the merger, one person will be pulling at the levers of power more often and with more influence than anyone else, according to both friends and foes: AT&T’s chief lobbyist, James W. Cicconi. A master strategist, Mr. Cicconi internalizes the art of regulatory and legislative war — and Operation Cupcake is but one of the efforts to come out of his shop…

In 13 years at AT&T, Mr. Cicconi has helped guide the company through roughly a dozen mergers, large and small, and he has made his share of enemies in Washington. As a testament to his power, however, few of them will criticize him on the record…

Nor is Mr. Cicconi’s lobbying effort a one-man show. He oversees a division that spent $115 million on lobbying over the last six years, putting it among the top five corporate spenders in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying and campaign spending.

AT&T employs an army of outside lobbyists, including at least six prominent former members of Congress, including the former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and former Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat.

Two of the sleaziest politicians who ever lived.

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A senior Pentagon official broke Defense Department rules and “deliberately misled” senior generals when he set up a network of private contractors to spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning last year, according to the results of an internal government investigation.

The Pentagon investigation concluded that the official, Michael D. Furlong, set up an “unauthorized” intelligence network to collect information in both countries — some of which was fed to senior generals and used for strikes against militant groups — while masking the entire operation as a more benign information operations campaign.

The inquiry concluded that “further investigation is warranted of the misleading and incorrect statements the individual made” about the legality of the program, according to Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman…

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ordered the investigation after The New York Times reported on the existence of the network in March. The inquiry was carried out by Michael Decker, a top aide to Mr. Gates for intelligence issues…

Mr. Furlong, a senior Air Force civilian official, has been barred from his office in San Antonio for several months. The Air Force inspector general is conducting a separate investigation into the matter, to determine whether Mr. Furlong broke any laws or committed contract fraud.

Pentagon rules forbid the hiring of contractors as spies.

Mr. Furlong’s network, composed of a group of small companies that used agents deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan to collect intelligence on militant groups, operated under a $22 million contract run by Lockheed Martin.

Furlong continues to have a successul career in what are termed “military-friendly” corporations and contractors.

In other words, that portion of the military-industrial complex that does the grunt work that leads to fatter contracts for corporations that profit the most from death and destruction.

He is an idle, pea-brained glutton with a permanent craving for doughnuts and Duff beer, but Homer Simpson has been declared a true Catholic by the Vatican’s official newspaper.

The long-running cartoon series explores issues such as family, community, education and religion in a way that few other popular television programmes can match, according to L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily broadsheet.

The newspaper acknowledged that Homer snores through the sermons of the Reverend Lovejoy and inflicts “never-ending humiliation” on his evangelical neighbour, Ned Flanders. But in an article headlined “Homer and Bart are Catholics”, the newspaper said: “The Simpsons are among the few TV programmes for children in which Christian faith, religion, and questions about God are recurrent themes…”

The level of hypocrisy exposed often in the characters may certainly approach Catholic ethics. But, I think the Pope’s newspaper got some bad translations.

It quoted an analysis by a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco Occhetta, of a 2005 episode of The Simpsons, The Father, the Son and the Holy Guest Star, which revolved around Catholicism and was aired a few weeks after the death of Pope John Paul II…The episode touches on issues such as religious conflict, interfaith dialogue, homosexuality and stem cell research.

“Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J Simpson is a Catholic,” insists L’Osservatore Romano.

Har!

In addition to ingrained hypocrisy, it looks like opportunism is becoming recognized as an invaluable tactic by the Vatican. Let’s go ahead and claim that someone or something that’s popular – is actually a Catholic invention.

July 2008, Robert Edwards, Lesley Brown, Louise Brown and her son, Cameron
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for 2010 has been awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure that has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown in 1978…

Edwards developed the IVF technique in a research career that started in 1958 at the National Institute for Medical Research in London and continued at the world’s first IVF centre, the Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, founded with the English surgeon, Patrick Steptoe…

Robert Edward’s wife, Ruth, and his family said in a statement today that they were “thrilled and delighted” at the award of the Nobel Prize. “The success of this research has touched the lives of millions of people worldwide. His dedication and single-minded determination, despite opposition from many quarters, has led to the successful application of his pioneering research…”

“Opposition from many quarters” means the same religious fanatics, political opportunists and cowards who have always rallied together in vain attempts to halt human knowledge and application. Whatever the science, the fearful, the indoctrinated, those afraid to venture out into this good night try their best to stop progress, censor understanding, disallow choice.

Speaking in 2008, Edwards recalled the moment he first created a fertilised human embryo in 1968. “I’ll never get forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures. I looked down the microscope and what I saw was a human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought: ‘We’ve done it.’”

“The most important thing in life is having a child,” he said. “Nothing is more special than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of critics but we fought like hell for our patients…”

Three decades on, IVF is an established technique to help infertile couples have children. There have been many advances on Edwards’ initial research: a single sperm can now be injected directly into an egg and the extraction of eggs from ovaries has been improved so that it causes less trauma. IVF is also at the centre of a technique, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), that screens fertilised embryos for genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease…

Martin Johnson, professor of reproductive sciences at the University of Cambridge, said he was delighted. “This is long overdue…Bob’s work has always been controversial but he has never shrunk from confronting that controversy. He was a real visionary, and always ahead of his time on so many issues – not just IVF – but also on PGD in the 60s, stem cells in the 70s, and the whole process of thinking ethically.”

Bravo! The world has moved ahead another few steps because of Doctor Edwards. Modern medicine casts aside the curses of priests and pundits like the dust mites they imitate.