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POPSBlackwater:Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable. My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no mo
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POPSLawmakers seek ban on laptops in airliner cockpits This is the mentality of legislators. They approach this isolated situation as if it were a quickly escalating ‘problem’ that must be addressed immediately instead of leaving it to the airline to tighten their own rules of conduct for pilots. Legislators love to jump on stuff like this because it has the appearance, to us lowly tax payers, that they are coming to our rescue to protet us from the evil use of laptops in cockpits. And it makes them feel good about themselves that they are doing something useful. More legislation! More rules! More laws! More oversight! Yeah, that will make us all be more responsible.
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POPSAuditor Faults Work on U.S. Embassy in Iraq Another example of wasted taxpayer money. There once was a time when a man would take pride in producing quality and value in exchange for a paycheck, it seems that time is past. Millions of dollars paid out for what can be equated to theft. When you pay someone for exacting specifications and that someone produces substandard results then that someone ripped you off and that amounts to theft. And the Bureau for Overseas Building Operations is ‘considering’ whether to seek reimburdement? How freaking nice of them to ‘consider’ reimbursement. Isn’t anybody in this government going to be held to account for anything it does? America continues to show the world that we can no longer be counted on to build a soundly constructed building, even with $700 million, how the hell are we going to help reconstruct an entire country? This is embarrassing.
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POPSExcuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals He lost me completely when his Administration declared we were in an economic crisis then he & the Congress proceeded to sink us even deeper with irresponsible spending. The spending is in such huge amounts that there is no accountability or oversight. It's going down a black hole and our Country is going with it.
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POPSScary Skies!, Union and Consumer Group Criticize Airline Maintenance Outsourcing
The mechanics union says major U.S. domestic carriers dramatically increased outsourcing in recent years, and now spend nearly two-thirds of their maintenance dollars on contract repair stations here and abroad, including facilities in operations in China, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Philippines. Foreign repair stations are not required to have the same number of FAA-certificated mechanics, or the same security rules, as airline-owned repair facilities in the U.S., the union noted. While U.S. air carriers have outsourced maintenance for years to both domestic and foreign repair facilities where repairs are cheaper, the practice has grown in recent years. From 1996 to 2006, air carriers continued to increase the percentage of maintenance dollars spend on outsourced maintenance---from 37 percent to 64 percent. In 2006, $3.7 billion of the $5.7 billion spent on maintenance was outsourced, said the DOT IG. Of the heavy maintenance outsourced by nine U.S. airlines in 2006 . . .
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POPSUS Relinquishes Control of the Internet But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens " opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet. Icann chief Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Washington insider who took over running the organisation in July, said there had been legitimate concerns that some countries were developing alternative internets as a way of routing around American control. "It's rumoured that there are multiple experiments going on with countries forking the internet, various countries have discussed this," he said. "This is a very significant shift because it takes the wind out of our opponents."
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POPSBaucus Healthcare Bill True Cost: $2 Trillion None was provided to them to make these estimates, so we still don't even know what's really in the bill! There are a host of other frauds being perpetrated on us right now by our government regarding health care. So let's get something straight about the high percentage of GDP (16-17 percent) devoted to healthcare in this country, because it is widely misunderstood. First, most of the excessive costs of American medical care are the result of government intervention. In fact proponents of socialized medicine anticipated that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid would create a crisis in health care, generating calls for reform. Their ready answer was just more of the same. We would all like to see costs of medical care come down. This country should move to reduce costs by removing the causes: excessive government intervention that distorts the market. The many ways government intervenes and the many solutions are beyond the scope of this essay, but that is the answer.
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POPSFighting Fraud
To put it into perspective, ACORN received about $53 million of federal funding over the past 15 years. Meanwhile, Blackwater, the private military contractor to which the U.S. government has farmed out security duties, may owe the government as much as $55 million for allegedly failing to fulfill the terms of one of its federal contracts. Yet Blackwater (now known as Xe), a company that has five of its employees facing murder charges in a massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007, got a $217 million contract from the Obama administration to provide security in Iraq. The former Haliburton subsidiary, KBR, got $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq -- wiring that has fatally electrocuted 16 soldiers and two contractors. They haven’t been defunded by Congress. According to the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, the biggest three defense contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman -- have been cited 109 times for misconduct since 199
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POPSPatriot Act Excesses What the NY TIMES also says in this editorial is that "The issue has never been whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists;no responsible person is suggesting that.The question is what powers the government really needs and how best to balance them with the rights and liberties on which this nation was founded."
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POPS"Chrysler is Going Out of Business. The Company Just Hasn’t Made It Official." Taxpayers are likely to lose most of the $81 billion that Congress and the administration sunk into the two companies, according to the Congressional Oversight Panel. Chrysler is expected to lose all $14.3 billion of the taxpayers' money. The daily management of Chrysler is controlled by Fiat which owns 20% of the U.S. company with options which could take that amount to 35%. Fiat has not put any money into Chrysler, so if the American firm becomes a significant operational or management burden there are very few reason for the Italian company, which has sales troubles of its own in Europe, to stay long term. Fiat lost $254 million in the second quarter, so its board may eventually believe that Chrysler is a distraction and one without a future. What Chrysler needs most from Fiat is money. If Fiat's own bleed continues, there will remain only one choice for management. In the mean time, the traditional competitors like Toyota, Honda and Nissan aren't Chrysler's . . .
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POPSShould We Audit The Federal Reserve? I certainly think so. I mean, why not? We get audited all the time. Why not do the turn about thing, and make them accountable for their issues? http://www.campaignforliberty.com/ Please go to this site as well for a deeper insigh into Ron Paul's agenda.
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POPSSenate panel rejects health 'public option' Thank goodness. More work needs to be done to see that private insurance companies meet the needs of their policy holders while still being able to have the money to PAY for the costs. In my opinion, the answer lies in tort reform, independent oversight, freedom to choose, and no federal interference in how my doctor & I negotiate my healthcare.
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POPSMutating vaccine causes polio outbreak in Nigeria The agency discussed the first 16 cases it knew of at meetings early this year and posted information on its Web site in April, "but only in places where lab people would look," he said. Outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio are unusual but not unheard of. Individual cases have been known for years. For example, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia was partly paralyzed in 1973, apparently after changing the diapers of his son, who had received an oral vaccine. The first spreading outbreak of a vaccine-derived strain, in which 22 children were paralyzed, was detected in 2001 in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Experts now believe that another took place in Egypt in the late 1980s but went unnoticed amid the much larger numbers of wild-type infections. There have been others in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia.
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POPS(satire) 10 things I'd rather do than get a Swine Flu vaccine shot #5) Base jump off a tall building with nothing more than a parachute made under the same quality control oversight as FDA-approved swine flu vaccines. #6) Be subjected to forced chemotherapy at gunpoint, just like all the other U.S. teens who are kidnapped by state authorities and forcibly injected with chemo. #7) Have all the superfoods in my pantry secretly replaced with MSG-laced processed food products made by Frito-Lay. #8) Work as a biological hazards disposal volunteer in the "superbug ward" of a local hospital. #9) Drink diet soda until my brain explodes from the aspartame exposure. #10) Get a public relations job at the White House where my sole responsibility is to show the brain-numbed masses how to stupidly sneeze into their own shirt sleeves.
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POPSBreaking: Treasury I-G Agrees to Probe ACORN those dollars were misused in anyway." "I am heartened by the agreement of the Treasury Department's Inspector General to examine the troubling financial questions that have been raised about ACORN," said Senator Collins. "This is the first step in the right direction toward much-needed transparency. As I've noted before, at a time when so many American families are facing difficult economic situations, it is completely unacceptable that even one penny of taxpayer money be misused. We must bring all agencies and groups that use taxpayer funds into the spotlight of accountability." Last week, Senator Collins and Rep. Issa made a formal joint request that seven Offices of Inspectors General, including Treasury, probe the activities of ACORN, a community advocacy organization. By Matthew Vadum
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POPSTop 100 Thieves of our tax and private dollars
Good source to find out who really are the biggest thieves from us/US. No ACORNs here, just mighty Oaks: Selling nuclear technology to Libya a few years back - Halliburton pled guilty to additional criminal charges and accepted “a criminal penalty of $1,200,000 for three violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in connection with the export of the pulse neutron generators to Libya.” A Denver federal court ordered Boeing and Dow Chemical Company to pay 12,000 homeowners $926 million for contaminating their property with radioactive waste from the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation ordered Humana Insurance Co. to pay a $500,000 fine to resolve complaints that Humana enrolled Illinois citizens into more expensive and/or duplicative health plans. GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay approximately $3.4 billion to settle charges by the IRS that the company under-reporte
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POPSEnterprise Seo at re1y.com This site discussing how achieving high level enterprise SEO is incredibly beneficial to your site, but can also be incredibly difficult to achieve
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POPSIn Denial About Financial Reform Also see Dan Indiviglio over at The Atlantic: http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/09/why_is_washington_ignoring_the_real_causes_of_the_crisis.php The danger of putting a lawyer in charge of something like this is, in my opinion, best exemplified by Neil Barofsky, the attorney they put in front of TARP oversight. Barofsky has used his pulpit to put out some really meaningless and misleading numbers. We need real information from these guys, not noisy innumerate numbers. See: http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/27/bailout-bad-math-business-washington-barofsky.html
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POPS Obama Push For 'World' Regulation Obama said lobbyists for financial institutions are already fighting against new regulations. “We cannot let the narrow interests of a few come before the interests of all of us,” Obama said. “We cannot forget how close we came to the brink, and perpetuate the broken system and breakdown of responsibility that made it possible.” In the Republican address, North Carolina Representative Sue Myrick focused on Obama’s health-care proposals, which are being debated in Congress. She said the plan being offered by Obama and congressional Democrats would lead to government-run insurance and that would mean delays in care. Access to Care “Every family that confronts a serious illness should have access to the highest-quality care at the lowest possible cost, with no delays,” Myrick said. Obama has said he favors a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. While he has suggested he wouldn’t make it a requirement as part of final legislation,
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POPSRep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. Resolution Seeks Details on 'Czars' "Over the past several weeks, we've seen with increasing frequency and volume issues raised around the use of 'czars' by this administration," Dunn wrote. "Although some members have asked serious questions around the makeup of the White House staff, the bulk of the noise you hear began first with partisan commentators suggesting that this is somehow a new and sinister development that threatens our democracy. This is, of course, ridiculous." In a statement, Blackburn said her concern is "when a president shifts duties away from officials who are subject to Congressional oversight to those on his personal staff who are not." She endorsed the use of the kind of questionnaire that nominees seeking confirmation by the Senate Armed Services Committee are are required to complete.
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POPSACORN Comes Under Closer Scrutiny In New York or loan counseling services. That may be where you would hope the money goes, but they don't specifically set out how monies should be spent when dividing up member items in the state budget. The New York Times finally ran one of its reporters out to discuss the developing situation with ACORN, but he focuses on the partisanship of those pushing the videos and avoids serious scrutiny of the discussion of illegal activities on the videos. The fact is that ACORN hires people with a certain moral and ethical flexibility that allows them to slip right into these kinds of conversations with the greatest of ease. They had no problem discussing how to avoid legal entanglements for running child prostitution rings, brothels, and other illegal activities out of properties purchased with ACORN's assistance. What that suggests is that ACORN training is far from okay. It suggests a serious breakdown of procedures, and a failure of oversight. It also suggests that the organization . . .
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POPSLies, and The pee-Resident Who Tells Them The deceased’s sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother’s coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week “window of opportunity” from “one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine,” that the procedure “was extremely successful,” and that “it extended his life nearly three and a half years.” That’s just one of them. There are more. With this Pinocchio-nose piece of shit, there always is. Fact-Checking the President http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574409501904118682.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
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