August 2004 Archives

"The interest in internships is at a fever pitch," Mr. Oldman said. "It used to be that internships used to be a useful enhancement to one's résumé. Now it's universally perceived as an essential stepping stone to career success."

But as internships rise in importance as critical milestones along the path to success, questions are emerging about whether they are creating a class system that discriminates against students from less affluent families who have to turn down unpaid internships to earn money for college expenses.

While half of internships nationwide are paid or have at least a small stipend, according to national surveys conducted by Vault, unpaid internships are concentrated in the most competitive fields, like politics, television and film.

"The more glamorous an internship, the less likely it is paid," Mr. Oldman said. "Washington in general has high-demand internships. In most cases they don't have to pay or they don't have to pay much."

The White House does not pay the hundred-plus interns who work there during the summer. The Supreme Court does not pay its undergraduate interns, who work 12 to 16 weeks, although in some cases it will give a $1,000 scholarship. And a vast majority of Congressional offices do not pay the 4,000 summer interns who pass through Capitol Hill, though a few, mostly on the Senate side, provide a limited stipend. Congressional offices once each received $3,000 to pay summer interns, but the money was eliminated by budget cuts in the 1990's.

And since Washington internships serve as a pipeline that brings policy makers into the nation's capital, some people fear that over the long term, internships will be another means, like the rising costs of college tuition, of squeezing voices from the working class and even the middle class out of high-level policy debates.

Bush also said high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway."

This proposal to lease violates a three-year BLM promise that it would thoroughly consider the best information, including a recent wilderness inventory and two years' of hard work by citizens, before deciding to lease. The agency has released an environmental assessment of the proposal for public comment. The deadline is Thursday, August 12. Please take a moment today to let the agency know that you want this deserving wilderness protected!

You can take immediate action from http://ga1.org/campaign/southshale/w8inxd72hixibx

The Hills also own a 65,000-acre ranch near Trinidad, which abuts one edge of their new holding, according to Bob Greene of the Costilla County Conservancy District.

...The Department of Health and Human Services wants hospitals seeking reimbursement to ask patients these questions, among others:

¶"Are you a United States citizen?''

¶"Are you a lawful permanent resident, an alien with a valid current employment authorization card or other qualified alien?''

¶"Are you in the United States on a nonimmigrant visa'' of the type issued to students, tourists and business travelers?

¶"Are you a foreign citizen who has been admitted to the United States with a 72-hour border crossing card?''

Hospital employees would have to sign forms certifying that the immigration information for each patient was "true and complete'' to the best of their knowledge. Hospital administrators who knowingly submit false information to the government would be subject to civil and criminal penalties.

...In many immigrant households, at least one parent is undocumented, but the children, having been born in the United States, are citizens.

When such families hear about the questions asked by hospital employees, Ms. Urrutia said, "it's likely that the undocumented immigrant parents will be terrified to seek care for their children, let alone themselves.''

Both denied the charges, calling them part of a political conspiracy against the Chalabi family.

No. He's missing in action.

...FasTracks has the most unified business community backing since the airport. And yet, our governor hasn't taken a position.

Dan Hopkins, the governor's spokesman, told me that his boss is busy until at least after the Republican National Convention, where he's serving as co-chair of the platform committee. And, of course, he was a member of the Republican response team at the Democrats' confab in Boston.

...And for Iraqis, it has been more of the same, with hundreds dying at the hands of assassins and suicide bombers in recent weeks. The estimated number of insurgents has jumped from 5,000 to 20,000, while production of crude oil and electric power linger at or below prewar levels.

..."It is great that we're out here doing this," said Dr. Bograd, a co-chairman of the (Kaiser Permanente) health fair. "But it just goes to show that there are too many people who can't afford health insurance. Every year it is getting worse and worse."

...Of the thousands of people streaming in and out of the doors and filling waiting rooms, almost all were Hispanic. Many did not speak English.

Jan Klarich, her friend and another team leader, agreed. "Don't you feel it is a spiritual battle?" she asked to nods around the table.

"Own a part of American history; own the napkin containing sweat from Ambassador Alan Keyes' forehead, immediately following Alan Keyes' historic announcement that he agreed to replace Jack Ryan as the Republican candidate for U. S. Senate in Illinois to take on Democrat Barak Obama.

GOP Senatorial Candidate Keyes was sweating profusely after his stem-winder speech and the sweat was collected from a napkin at approximately 3:02 pm Central Time just outside the Wellington Restaurant in Arlington Heights, Illinois, under the watchful eye of multiple news reporters including multiple television cameras."

They didn't worry too much about who he was or how he spent his time - until they realized a considerable amount of his time was spent in jail.

Now party leaders are scrambling to remove him from the ballot, days after naming him as the Republican choice to oppose Democratic incumbent Brian Sonntag's bid for a fourth term.

"We didn't check him out," state GOP chairman Chris Vance said. "If I could, I would withdraw the letter putting him on the ballot as the Republican candidate - but it's too late."

Baker, a 41-year-old roadside flower salesman and self-styled political activist, has been arrested at least 19 times since 1992, mostly for refusing to stop speaking at Tacoma City Council and Pierce County Council meetings. He was last released from jail less than two months ago...

"It's about exposing hypocrisy, about ending a conspiracy of deceit and silence," Mr Rogers says. "These people work for politicians who are working to discriminate against gays. Then they seek protection from the very people their bosses are trying to hurt. It's surreal."

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death".

Another clause, granting the government authority to go through personal library, business, medical and other personal records, may have been used in another case, though federal documents make it unclear just what the purpose was.

Librarians are so riled about that provision of the Patriot Act - Section 215 - that they plan a nationwide survey to see whether reading and Internet habits have changed because of it. And in Congress, a vote to knock out that section fell one vote short of passage on July 8.

Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help the authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

...."Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."

He immediately radioed for help. Soon after, a team of Oregon Army National Guard soldiers swept into the yard and found dozens of Iraqi detainees who said they had been beaten, starved and deprived of water for three days.

In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices - metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals.

Hendrickson's superior officers told him to return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw. It was June 29 - Iraq's first official day as a sovereign country since the U.S. invasion.

...Even worse for the president, three years of tax cuts and war have left him with virtually no policy tools to counteract economic weakness in the near term. A direct fiscal stimulus is precluded by the staggering $445 billion deficit expected for the year. The White House tried to whitewash the release of that latest estimate last week by noting that the shortfall was lower than its initial (conveniently large) projection, instead of lamenting that it was higher than last year's deficit.

Coffman's proposal would bar lawmakers from resorting to creative accounting to avoid budget problems.

...The plan got a cool reception from the governor's office Friday.

In most cases, the gaps between high-performing low-income students and all other students on the Colorado Student Assessment Program exams were more than 30 percentage points.

More than 228,000 of the 757,000 public school students in the state were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches during the 2003-2004 year.

...The Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which surveyed 2,400 bankruptcy filers in 2001 and 1991, found that on a per capita basis, older people are now the most likely to file. ...Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard University Law School, who co-authored the study, says... "It reflects a more frightening reality for a wide swath of middle-class America."

Many of today's bankrupt baby boomers simply weren't as frugal as their Depression-era parents. But the increase in middle-age people filing for bankruptcy also is attributed to soaring medical costs, an unstable job market and years of aggressive credit-card marketing.

The group's ad campaign, which came at a cost of more than $1 million and hit the airwaves in Denver; Tampa Bay, Fla.; and Lansing and Flint, Mich., has triggered a flurry of calls, letters and e-mails, said Andrea Hart, the manager of the project.

"It's been quite mixed," she said. "We've received a lot of positive comments, from both gay and straight, but there have been a lot of negative comments, too, from people who still hold some fear and ignorance."

The Labor Department also cut its tally of job growth for May and June by a combined 61,000.

Wall Street economists polled last week had looked for a payroll gain of 228,000....

"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

"It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," McCain said in an interview with The Associated Press, referring to his bitter Republican primary fight with President Bush.

The 60-second ad features Vietnam veterans who accuse the Democratic presidential nominee of lying about his decorated Vietnam War record and betraying his fellow veterans by later opposing the conflict.

"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," one of the veterans, Larry Thurlow, says in the ad.

Asked if the White House knew about the ad or helped find financing for it, McCain said, "I hope not, but I don't know. But I think the Bush campaign should specifically condemn the ad."

Later, McCain said the Bush campaign has denied any involvement and added, "I can't believe the president would pull such a cheap stunt."

The White House did not immediately address McCain's call that they repudiate the spot.

Mr. Bolten's argument makes little sense: Economic growth has been no faster than the administration anticipated when it predicted the higher deficit. In any event, $445 billion marks the highest deficit ever (though the administration seems to be setting the stage for a new round of better-than-expected numbers just before Election Day). Only in the administration's upside-down economic world could a deficit $70 billion higher than last year's be hailed as progress.

...As the administration notes, tax cuts account for 29 percent of the deterioration in the budget balance in the past three years. The lesson of the new deficit numbers is that these cuts are a cost the country cannot afford.

Their unusually open complaints reflect broader efforts by social conservatives nationally to nudge the party further to the right.

"Owens has left the conservative team," said Dave Crater, a delegate from El Paso County.

"As an example of a pro-family leader, I think he needs to focus on maintaining the integrity of his marriage," Kendal Unruh, a delegate from Castle Rock, said about Owens' separation from his wife, Frances.

When the Sanyo company told me it was planning to close its television-assembly plant in Forrest City, .... I flew to Osaka, Japan to see Satoshi Iue, the president of Sanyo... I asked him if he would keep the plant open if Wal-Mart would sell Sanyo's televisions. After he agreed, I felw back to Arkansas and asked Wal-Mart to help.... by September, 2003, Wal-Mart had bought more than 20 million of those television sets ...

Mr. Bush should junk the color bars, which are now of use mostly to late-night comedians. Ordinary people have no way of calibrating their lives to the color ladder. It does them no good to be told to be scared, more scared or really scared, especially when they are also being told to act as if nothing's wrong. Unless the government is prepared to tell people to stay home from work, there's no reason to keep lighting the terror lamps. What we need is information that we can use, not another shot of adrenaline.

We would have been happy last weekend if a senior official more adept than Mr. Ridge had called a news conference to say what the government knew and what defensive measures had been taken. Instead, he spoke in apocalyptic terms, then produced an "intelligence official" who offered more detail and more alarming words, anonymously. Later that day, and on the next day and the day after, other officials spoke off the record, providing additional information that made the situation seem much more complicated.

...Finally, there is the matter of politics. The Bush administration expressed outrage at the suggestion that there could be any politics behind any of its warnings, but the president has some history to overcome on this issue. There is nothing more important for Mr. Bush to do every day until Nov. 2 than to make it clear that he would never hype a terror alert to help his re-election chances. It is a challenge complicated by the fact that he is running on his record against terrorism and is using images of 9/11 and the threat of more attacks to promote his candidacy. The president's credibility on national security issues was gravely wounded by the way he misled Americans, intentionally or not, about the reasons for invading Iraq - including the suggestion that the war was part of the campaign against Al Qaeda.

Some of the past terror alerts have seemed aimless and happened when the Bush administration would have benefited from a change in the political conversation. On Sunday, when the administration had grim and specific information to convey, Mr. Ridge did a real disservice to himself, his president and the public by giving what amounted to a campaign pitch for "the president's leadership in the war against terror.''

"The security of the United States and potential terror threats are being perceived by some as a tool to garner political support," said Jonathan Schanzer, a terrorism analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Newark Mayor Sharpe James, quoted in the New York Times, said he only learned that some of the latest intelligence was old from the news.

Other local officials say they are angry because the threat warnings do not come with federal dollars to fund the heightened security posture.

Harris, who was at the center of the political storm over the disputed 2000 presidential election, made the comments about terrorism and the plot on Monday at a rally for President Bush in Venice, Fla., and a subsequent interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

She told the audience that while in the Midwest recently, the mayor of Carmel told her how a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested and hundreds of pounds of explosives were found in his home.

"He had plans to blow up the area's entire power grid," she said, according to the newspaper.

City officials in Carmel said they know of no such plot.

The commission said the accounting change enabled Halliburton, one of the nation's largest energy services companies, to report annual earnings in 1998 that were 46 percent higher than they would have been had the change not been made. It also allowed the company to report a substantially higher profit in 1999, the commission said.

" fifth grade, 59 percent.

" sixth grade, 53 percent.

" seventh grade, 41 percent.

" eighth grade, 41 percent.

" ninth grade, 32 percent.

" 10th grade, 27 percent.

The voter told Carrigan he hadn't asked for an absentee ballot and didn't live at the address where the ballot was sent.

Carrigan said he reported the incident to the Denver Election Commission. He said a commission representative told him that at one address in House District 2, six people applied for absentee ballots but it appeared the same person signed each request.

The commission's executive director, Karon Majeel Hatchett, said she would have to look at voter activity at that address before commenting.

Benavidez said the residents at that address are his neighbors and supporters, but he is not aware of any wrongdoing.

Benavidez said the GOP contributions paid for voter registration and absentee ballot efforts.

Benavidez initially did not make the ballot because some of his petition signatures were ruled invalid. He challenged the decision in court and won. Asked who financed the court battle, he said, "I really don't know who paid for the attorney, but I think it's school-choice people."

Adjusted for inflation, spending tumbled 0.9%.

By both measures, it was the biggest drop in consumer spending since September 2001, when shoppers retrenched in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington.

Moreover, if other retailers cut their wages and benefits to the levels offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the cost to California's public-assistance programs would rise by $410 million annually, the study said.

In their report, Berkeley researchers Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs contend that more than other retail workers, Wal-Mart employees rely on a variety of public-aid programs, including food stamps, Medicare and subsidized housing.

"In effect, Wal-Mart is shifting part of its labor costs onto the public," the researchers wrote. "Wal-Mart's long-term impact on compensation in the retail industry has the potential to place a significant strain on the state's already heavily burdened social safety net."

But some believe Keyes could be just the antidote to Obama.

"I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism," he told CNN. "His whole campaign is based on the notion that 'I can keep you safe, therefore, at times of difficulty for America, stick with me' and then out comes Tom Ridge. It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."

For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist. Much of Iraq has fallen outside the control of America's puppet government in Baghdad but we are not told. Hundreds of attacks are made against US troops every month. But unless an American dies, we are not told. This month's death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 - the worst month since the invasion ended. But we are not told.

But don't think we're going to learn much more about Saddam's future court appearances. Salem Chalabi, the brother of convicted fraudster Ahmad and the man entrusted by the Americans with the tribunal, told the Iraqi press two weeks ago that all media would be excluded from future court hearings. And I can see why. Because if Saddam does a Milosevic, he'll want to talk about the real intelligence and military connections of his regime - which were primarily with the United States.

What, indeed, are we to make of a war which is turned into a fantasy by those who started it? As foreign workers pour out of Iraq for fear of their lives, US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells a press conference that hostage-taking is having an "effect" on reconstruction. Effect! Oil pipeline explosions are now as regular as power cuts. In parts of Baghdad now, they have only four hours of electricity a day; the streets swarm with foreign mercenaries, guns poking from windows, shouting abusively at Iraqis who don't clear the way for them. This is the "safer" Iraq which Mr Blair was boasting of the other day.

Unless the legislature refers a measure of its own to the voters this fall, we will be forced to slash more than $215 million from next year's budget.  An additional $155 million in cuts are projected for the year after that.  Colorado's public colleges and universities will likely suffer the bulk of these cuts.

Time is running out for the legislature to act.  We have roughly a month left to reach consensus and call ourselves -- or be called by the governor -- into special session.  The November ballot must be certified on September 8.

Referring a constitutional amendment to the ballot requires the support of two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate.  That means getting 44 representatives and 24 senators -- a steep hurdle in either chamber -- to agree.  (Think of it like ordering pizza with 99 of your closest friends; except that half are vegetarians and the other half don't even like pizza).

Crafting such a compromise has been the focus of negotiations among legislative leaders for the last three months.  Our talks have stalled on a couple of key points: namely, how much to change TABOR and how much to change Amendment 23.  Aside from that, we're good to go.

There is another option, though (you didn't really think the story would end on such a grim note, did you?).  We could, by a majority vote, refer a 'de-Brucing' measure to the ballot.  That term is a misnomer; this provision is actually part of Doug Bruce's handiwork.  TABOR allows the government to ask voters for permission to retain and spend all or part of the surplus.

Such proposals have a strong track record at the local level.  The only such measure to emerge from the state legislature reached the ballot in 1998.  Referendum B would have allowed the state to spend an extra $200 million per year for five years on capital construction projects in transportation, K-12, and higher education.  It was defeated by a vote of 61.5 percent to 38.5 percent.

Have the political winds shifted in the six years since then?  I'm polling my colleagues and should know more (or less) by the end of the week.

...the largest item is a credit for business property tax payments that is estimated to reach $140 million in 2008.

It's all part of the nation's war on terror.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a flood of federal dollars was sent out to first-responders - the nation's initial line of defense against terrorists.

...In its final report, the independent commission charged with investigating the attacks and the nation's response criticized the "pork barrel" use of anti-terror funds and other enhancements by Congress.

...without a subpoena, even the commissioners wouldn't be able to tell whether $122 million in anti-terrorism money was spent wisely in Colorado.

State officials say the public has no right to know what Colorado's first-responders buy with the bulk of those dollars, despite the fact that researchers in other states that do make the records public have found glaring examples of abuse.

The state's denial has drawn sharp criticism from legal scholars, open-government advocates and some in Congress, who are pressing for greater oversight of Homeland Security grants.