Tag: Docudharma Times

Republicans Begin The Week

Just Wanting To Say No

Even If It Helps A Nation  

To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’



By BILL VLASIC

Published: February 15, 2009

DETROIT – President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful “car czar” to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night.

Mr. Obama is designating the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, to oversee a presidential panel on the auto industry. Mr. Geithner will also supervise the $17.4 billion in loan agreements already in place with G.M. and Chrysler, said the official, who insisted on anonymity.

New world of squalor and exploitation

• Labourers badly paid and work in squalid conditions

• Exploitative middlemen lure poor into huge debts

Tom Phillips in Marabá

The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009

Day and night the men roll up outside the Correntão supermarket, a roaming army of impoverished workers, searching for a better future and for work. Any work.

Wearing rubber flip-flops, ragged T-shirts and carrying their possessions under their arms in plastic bags, they gather at the meeting point on the outskirts of Marabá, a gritty Amazon city, at Kilometre Six of the Trans-Amazonian highway and wait.

Some are picked up almost immediately and transported to remote jungle camps and farms where they are often forced to work by cattle ranchers and illegal loggers in dangerous and squalid conditions for little or no pay.

Others string hammocks up around the local bus station, waiting for a possible employer to arrive. The rest pile into dozens of tatty boarding houses, known in the Amazon as “pioneer hotels”, where they await recruitment.

USA

4 Cases Illustrate Guantanamo Quandaries

Administration Must Decide Fate of Often-Flawed Proceedings, Often-Dangerous Prisoners

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 16, 2009; Page A01

In their summary of evidence against Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, a Somali detained at Guantanamo Bay, military investigators allege that he spent several years at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Sudan. But other military documents place him in Pakistan during the same period.

One hearing at Guantanamo cited his employment for a money-transfer company with links to terrorism financing. Another file drops any mention of such links.

Barre is one of approximately 245 detainees at the military prison in Cuba whose fate the Obama administration must decide in coming months.

What’s More Important?

Party Or Country?

For Republicans Party Comes First  

Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers



By JAMES GLANZ, C.J. CHIVERS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: February 14, 2009

Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.

Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.

Global warming ‘underestimated’

The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.

The BBC

Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted.

Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.

He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.

Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 increased far more rapidly than expected.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said.

Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem.

USA

Geithner Takes Plan To Global Leaders

Secretary Reassures Counterparts About U.S. Rescue Strategy

By David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, February 15, 2009; Page A01

ROME, Feb. 14 — Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner laid out the Obama administration’s financial rescue program for his international counterparts Saturday in an effort to rally a vigorous global response to the worsening crisis and reassured the world’s leading economies that the U.S. plan is more developed than the outline he unveiled publicly last week, officials said.

Senior finance officials from the world’s leading nations spent much of a six-hour meeting discussing how to deal with the problem at the heart of the financial crisis: the toxic assets backed by failing loans that are clogging banks’ books, according to two senior officials at the meeting, which was closed to the news media.

Republicans Vote Against America  

Stimulus Plan Tightens Reins on Wall St. Pay



By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and ERIC DASH

Published: February 13, 2009

WASHINGTON – A provision buried deep inside the $787 billion economic stimulus bill would impose restrictions on executive bonuses at financial institutions that are much tougher than those proposed 10 days ago by the Treasury Department.

The provision, inserted by Senate Democrats over the objections of the Obama administration, is aimed at companies that have received financial bailout funds. It would prohibit cash bonuses and almost all other incentive compensation for the five most senior officers and the 20 highest-paid executives at large companies that receive money under the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

The stimulus package was approved by the House on Friday, then by the Senate in the late evening.

GOP lawmakers tout projects in the stimulus bill they opposed



By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Rep. John Mica was gushing after the House of Representatives voted Friday to pass the big stimulus plan.

“I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future,” the Florida Republican beamed in a press release.

Yet Mica had just joined every other GOP House member in voting against the $787.2 billion economic recovery plan.

Republicans echoed their party line over and over during the debate: “This bill is loaded with wasteful deficit spending on the majority’s favorite government programs,” as Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., put it.

But Mica wasn’t alone in touting what he saw as the bill’s virtues. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, also had nice things to say in a press release.

USA

Buffalo crash claimed Sept. 11 widow, Rwanda advocate

Beverly Eckert, whose husband died at the World Trade Center, helped survivors and pushed to create the 9/11 commission. Alison Des Forges fought for justice after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

By Bob Drogin

February 14, 2009

Reporting from Silver Spring, Md. — If tragedy brings people together, the still-unexplained crash of a Continental Airlines commuter jet Thursday night forever links Beverly Eckert and Alison Des Forges, two extraordinary women who led separate crusades, against seemingly impossible odds.

Eckert was a Sept. 11 widow who turned her grief into powerful advocacy. She helped force a reluctant Bush White House to create the 9/11 Commission to investigate the attacks, and then helped push Congress to pass sweeping reforms of America’s secret intelligence agencies. “She really redefined for America how to be an effective activist and a committed citizen,” said Tim Roemer, a member of the 9/11 commission and liaison to the victims’ families. “That’s an extraordinary achievement.”

Des Forges led a tireless, often dangerous campaign to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and other massacres. She appeared as an expert witness at scores of war crimes trials and other judicial proceedings around the world.

Republicans Hide In The Shadows

Hoping For Failure

While Americans Work For Success  

Gregg Withdraws As Commerce Pick

Republican Senator Cites Policy Disagreements As Congress Prepares to Vote on Stimulus Plan

By Anne E. Kornblut and Michael D. Shear

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, February 13, 2009; Page A01

Saying he “made a mistake,” Republican  Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew yesterday as the nominee for commerce secretary, dealing a fresh blow to President Obama’s quest to fill out his Cabinet and dramatically undercutting his efforts to forge a new bipartisanship in the capital.Gregg said that he had simply lacked foresight and that he shouldered the burden of the decision entirely. “I should have focused sooner and more effectively on the implications of being in the Cabinet versus myself as an individual doing my job,” he said at a news conference on Capitol Hill.

Barbed wire villages raise fears of refugee concentration camps

From The Times

February 13, 2009

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

Sri Lanka was accused yesterday of planning concentration camps to hold 200,000 ethnic Tamil refugees from its northeastern conflict zone for up to three years – and seeking funding for the project from Britain.

The Sri Lankan Government says that it will open five “welfare villages” to house Tamils fleeing the 67 sq mile patch of jungle where the army has pinned down the Tamil Tiger rebels.

The ministry in charge says that the camps, in Vavuniya and Mannar districts, will have schools, banks, parks and vocational centres to help to rehabilitate up to 200,000 displaced Tamils after a 25-year civil war.

USA

Ailing Banks May Require More Aid to Keep Solvent

NEWS ANALYSIS

By STEVE LOHR

Published: February 12, 2009

Some of the nation’s large banks, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.

A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today’s marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks’ assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent.

None of the experts’ research focuses on individual banks, and there are certainly exceptions among the 50 largest banks in the country. Nor do consumers and businesses need to fret about their deposits, which are federally insured. And even banks that might technically be insolvent can continue operating for a long time, and could recover their financial health when the economy improves.

Bankers Need Bribes To Work    

Obama’s Battle on Stimulus Shows Threats to His Agenda

NEWS ANALYSIS

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: February 11, 2009

WASHINGTON – It is a quick, sweet victory for the new president, and potentially a historic one. The question now is whether the $789 billion economic stimulus plan agreed to by Congressional leaders on Wednesday is the opening act for a more ambitious domestic agenda from President Obama or a harbinger of reduced expectations.

Both the substance of his first big legislative accomplishment and the way he achieved it underscored the scale of the challenges facing the nation and how different a political climate this is from the early stages of recent administrations.

While it hammered home the reality of bigger, more activist government, the economic package was not the culmination of a hard-fought ideological drive, like Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society programs, or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, but rather a necessary and hastily patched-together response to an immediate and increasingly dire situation.

FBI expects number of major financial bailout fraud cases to rise

Investigations will focus on big-name companies and the cases are likely to be similar in scope and complexity to that of failed energy giant Enron, Deputy Director John Pistole tells a Senate panel.

By Josh Meyer

7:50 PM PST, February 11, 2009

Reporting from Washington — Despite an expected wave of fraud in the trillion-dollar bailout that aims to stop the ongoing financial meltdown, federal law enforcement officials told Congress on Wednesday that they have nowhere near the level of resources to combat it.

Top FBI and Justice Department officials said they believed mortgage fraud and other types of corporate criminal behavior has contributed to the economic tailspin. And they said they already have more than 2,300 open investigations into suspected illegal financial activity — including 38 probes specifically linked to the crisis.

Those investigations are already straining the resources of the FBI and the Justice Department, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole and Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. Rita Glavin said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the problems will worsen exponentially as the economy plunges, and as the Obama administration and Congress spend more than $1 trillion in various bailout and stimulus packages in an effort to forestall foreclosures, corporate bankruptcies and a prolonged economic depression, they said.

USA

Out of Work and Challenged on Benefits, Too

In Record Numbers, Employers Move to Block Unemployment Payouts

By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page A01

It’s hard enough to lose a job. But for a growing proportion of U.S. workers, the troubles really set in when they apply for unemployment benefits.

More than a quarter of people applying for such claims have their rights to the benefit challenged as employers increasingly act to block payouts to former workers.

The proportion of claims disputed by former employers and state agencies has reached record levels in recent years, according to the Labor Department numbers tallied by the Urban Institute.

John Cornyn Stimulus Hater

Avoids  The Cloture Vote To:

Spend Time In New York Looking

For Money To Further His Political Fortunes      

Obama Says Failing to Act Could Lead to a ‘Catastrophe’



By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and HELENE COOPER

Published: February 9, 2009

WASHINGTON – President Obama took his case for his $800 billion economic recovery package to the American people on Monday, as the Senate cleared the way for passage of the bill and the White House prepared for its next major hurdle: selling Congress and the public on a fresh plan to bail out the nation’s banks.

Warning that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe,” Mr. Obama used his presidential platform – a prime-time news conference, the first of his presidency, in the grand setting of the White House East Room – to address head on the concerns about his approach, which has by and large failed to win the Republican support he sought.

Australian bushfires: arsonists could face murder charges

Police close in on culprits of deadliest blazes in country’s history

Ellen Connolly in Sydney

guardian.co.uk,

Australian towns devastated in the country’s worst bushfires were declared crime scenes tonight as forensic investigators began combing the charred landscape for evidence of how the infernos started, and who may have ignited them.

Police indicated that they were closing in on arsonists believed to be responsible for lighting some of the 400 blazes that have killed at least 170 people, left 5,000 homeless and destroyed a 350,000 hectare area north of Melbourne in the past three days.

As firefighters continued to battle raging fires that threaten a further six towns north of Melbourne, the attorney general, Robert McClelland, told parliament that those responsible for lighting them could be charged with murder. Senior police confirmed they are preparing photofits of suspected firebugs.

USA

Where’d all that money go? Bank execs testify Wednesday



By Lisa Zagaroli | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The nation’s largest banks, battling an image of jet-setting executives with multimillion-dollar salaries, will face tough scrutiny Wednesday from lawmakers who are struggling to understand the financial health of the institutions and the impact of a $700 billion taxpayer bailout.

Eight chief executive officers, including Bank of America’s Ken Lewis and Wells Fargo & Co.’s John Stumpf, are scheduled to testify at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

Lawmakers are hoping for a comprehensive accounting of what the banking giants did with the money they got from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and whether it appears to be stabilizing the rocky financial services industry.

Republicans Turn Their

Back On Americans Across The

Economic Spectrum  

If Spending Is Swift, Oversight May Suffer

Plan’s Pace Could Leave Billions Wasted

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 9, 2009; Page A01

The Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan could end up wasting billions of dollars by attempting to spend money faster than an overburdened government acquisition system can manage and oversee it, according to documents and interviews with contracting specialists.

The $827 billion stimulus legislation under debate in Congress includes provisions aimed at ensuring oversight of the massive infusion of contracts, state grants and other measures. At the urging of the administration, those provisions call for transparency, bid competition, and new auditing resources and oversight boards.

‘We’re still in the pool – we can smell the fire’

• Final death toll may reach hundreds, say authorities

• Arsonists blamed as army called in to quell flames

Ellen Connolly in Sydney

The Guardian, Monday 9 February 2009

The death toll from the deadliest bushfires in Australia’s history could reach into the hundreds as the devastation is uncovered in the burning and blackened ruins of towns, the authorities warned last night.

Described as “hell on earth”, the fires left at least 108 dead, but police in Victoria said the final death toll would be much greater.

“I think it [the body count] will be up into the 100s … 200,” acting Sergeant Scott Melville, who has the job of dragging bodies out of charred vehicles and homes, told the Melbourne Age. “It’s like a friggin’ war zone up here, it’s like a movie scene.”

The army has been called in to help the thousands of exhausted firefighters who, for the third consecutive day, will try to put out 26 fires threatening suburbs near Melbourne.

USA

Unemployment benefits safety net is fraying

As payments dry up, almost half of  11.6 million jobless don’t receive help

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The government safety net designed to protect laid-off workers from financial catastrophe is falling short, leaving nearly half the 11.6 million jobless Americans without unemployment benefits.

The shortcomings are fueling the recession as an increasing number of workers fall through the cracks and curtail spending. The trend highlights what economists say is a growing need for a 21st century makeover of a program started in the depths of the Great Depression.

Among the key problem areas:

There are many more part-time workers now than in 1935, but the program only covers those looking for full-time work.

KBR’s Shoddy Workmenship In Iraq

18 U.S. Service Members Electrocuted

Rewarded With New $35 Million Contract

In Iraq  

Obama’s NSC Will Get New Power

Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body

By Karen DeYoung

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. “The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful,” he said.

No crisis yet, but Obama finding world won’t wait for him



By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – In the midst of the presidential campaign last October, Barack Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, warned that within six months of Obama’s election, “We’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

The prediction hasn’t come true yet, but unfriendly nations and international competitors already are stepping up their efforts to challenge the young new president or at the very least get his attention.

USA

The next president of America?

He’s a non-drinking, non-smoking vegetarian, who went from a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford to being the charismatic mayor of the “worst city in America”. Here, Gaby Wood talks to Cory Booker about chasing robbers, saving Newark and turning down Obama

Gaby Wood

The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009

Martin Luther King weekend, 2009. In a beautiful 19th-century church in Newark, New Jersey a young jazz musician has just performed a dizzying solo. Two days from now, the first African American president of the United States will take over the White House, and Newark – a city that has been predominantly black since the 1960s – is celebrating. Dr King’s dream has, the church service programme declares, “become reality”. As the applause mounts, a figure familiar to the assembled citizens hops into the pulpit.

“Oh!” he shouts in praise of the pianist, closing his eyes to emphasise the collective ecstasy. The congregation cheers. “Ohhhhh!” he repeats. More noise from the pews. “Can I get a witness!” he calls out, using the motivational cadences of a preacher to ride the natural rhythms of the crowd.

The 42%  Tax Cut Stimulus

How Lucky for The Rich

Senators Reach Accord on Stimulus Plan as Jobs Vanish



By CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: February 6, 2009

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats reached an agreement with Republican moderates on Friday to pare a huge economic recovery measure, clearing the way for approval of a package that President Obama said was urgently needed in light of mounting job losses.

The deal, announced on the Senate floor, was a result of two days of tense negotiations and political theater. Mr. Obama dispatched his chief of staff to Capitol Hill to help conclude the talks and reassure senators in his own party, and he called three key Republicans to applaud them for their patriotism.

Earlier, when it looked as if a vote might take place Friday night, officials said, a government plane was dispatched to Florida to bring back Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who has brain cancer.

A Lebanese Political Satirist With Hezbollah Among His Targets

THE SATURDAY PROFILE

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: February 6, 2009

BEIRUT, Lebanon

EVERY weekday, Lebanon’s large and fractious cast of politicians appears on television in news conferences and speeches. And every night at 7:45 they appear all over again – only this time as rubber puppets who sing, dance and babble their way through the day’s news.

The wizard behind this nightly transformation is Charbel Khalil, a small, round-faced and very brave man of 41. His new show, “Democracy,” which first went on the air in September, is the latest in a career-long series of comedic broadsides aimed at the vanities of Lebanese politics and society.

It is not an easy profession. Mr. Khalil has been threatened more times than he can count, briefly driven into exile and forced to sit waiting for hours in the offices of offended Syrian commanders.

USA

Ginsburg’s Illness Puts Focus on Choices Ahead for Obama



By Carrie Johnson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, February 7, 2009; Page A02

The announcement this week that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer served as an early reminder of the weighty judicial choices ahead for President Obama, who must fill urgent vacancies on appeals courts and federal trial courts as well as potential seats on the nation’s highest court.

Ginsburg, 75, had surgery Thursday at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to remove a small cancerous tumor from the center of her pancreas. Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said yesterday that Ginsburg intends to come back to the court in time for three days of oral arguments beginning Feb. 23

How Stupid

Can You Be Gate

See Republican Party  

Bipartisan Push to Trim Size of Stimulus Plan



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: February 5, 2009

WASHINGTON – A bipartisan group of senators worked furiously in backroom negotiations on Thursday to cut the cost of the more than $920 billion economic stimulus plan. Senate Democratic leaders said they would await the outcome of those talks before calling for a final vote on the measure, perhaps on Friday.

Members of the bipartisan group, led by Senators Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said they wanted to trim provisions that would not quickly create jobs or encourage spending by consumers and businesses. They spent much of the day scrutinizing the 736-page bill and wrangling over what to cut.

Japan’s Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson for U.S.



By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: February 5, 2009

HAMADA, Japan – The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.

And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a two-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children’s art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing Beluga whales.

USA

Suspect Peanuts Sent to Schools

Despite Salmonella, Firm Sold to USDA

By Lyndsey Layton

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, February 6, 2009; Page A01

Peanut Corporation of America sold 32 truckloads of roasted peanuts and peanut butter to the federal government for a free-lunch program for poor children even as the company’s internal tests showed that its products were contaminated with salmonella bacteria.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture abruptly suspended its contract with the company, which is at the center of an outbreak of salmonella illness that has killed eight people, sickened 575 and triggered one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

Gonzales Claims U.S. Attorneys Were Not ‘Fired for Political Reasons

Of Course They Weren’t

They Were Fired For Failing To Attend

Pat Robertson’s Law School

Obama puts the heat on Republicans

He says the ‘half steps’ now urged by the GOP for the stimulus bill are the same ideas that led to the financial crisis.

By Peter Nicholas

February 5, 2009

Reporting from Washington — President Obama abruptly changed tactics Wednesday in his bid to revive the economy, setting aside his bipartisan stance and pointedly blaming Republicans for demanding what he cast as discredited “piecemeal measures.”

Obama’s comments were a marked departure from the conciliatory tone he has maintained as he courted Republican votes for his stimulus package through compromise. Against the wishes of his own party, Obama crafted a plan that relied heavily on tax cuts rooted in Republican economic doctrine.

But in an unusual opinion piece in today’s Washington Post, and in remarks he made at two White House appearances, the president seemed to acknowledge that his approach wasn’t working.

Evidence of torture ‘buried by ministers’

Judges condemn secrecy over files detailing treatment of suspect by CIA

Richard Norton-Taylor

The Guardian, Thursday 5 February 2009

The government was accused last night of hiding behind claims of a threat to national security to suppress evidence of torture by the CIA on a prisoner still held in Guantánamo Bay.

An unprecedented high court ruling yesterday blamed the US, with British connivance, for keeping the “powerful evidence” secret, sparking criticism from lawyers, campaigners and MPs, who claimed the government had capitulated to American bullying.

Two senior judges said they were powerless to reveal the information about the torture of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, because David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had warned the court the US was threatening to stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK.

USA

Senate Advances Tax Break for Homebuyers



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: February 4, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Senate on Wednesday voted to expand the economic stimulus package with a tax credit for homebuyers of up to $15,000, a provision championed by Republicans as addressing a root cause of the recession.

The vote to add the tax credit, at a cost of about $18.5 billion, came as Senate leaders seemed to be nearing completion of negotiations. The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, suggested that a final vote on the stimulus plan could come on Thursday.

Moderate lawmakers in both parties are pushing to reduce the overall cost of the measure and to focus it more tightly on provisions that will quickly spur spending and create jobs. The vote came as President Obama met with centrist lawmakers to address concerns about the package.

Scorn? Why Shouldn’t We

Heap Scorn Upon Wall Street?

Maliki Supporters Post Election Gains

Preliminary Results Show Iraq Leaning Toward a Strong Central Government

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Anthony Shadid and Ernesto Londoño

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, February 3, 2009; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Feb. 2 — Iraq appears headed toward a reapportionment of power that favors the emergence of a strong central government, with supporters of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki showing strong returns in Saturday’s elections, according to early tallies seen by election and party officials.

Preliminary results from provincial elections, the first national balloting in four years, are not expected for several days, but election and party officials across Iraq said that politicians allied with Maliki have posted large gains in the capital, Baghdad, and in southern Iraq, the country’s Shiite heartland. Such results would strengthen Maliki’s standing and that of his Dawa party ahead of parliamentary elections set for this year.

Qaddafi will seek single state as African Union head



By Lydia Polgreen Published: February 3, 2009

DAKAR, Senegal: President Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya was named chairman of the African Union on Monday, wresting control of a body he helped found and has long wanted to remake in his pan-African image.

His installation as the new head of the 53-member body resembled more of a coronation than a democratic transfer of power. Qaddafi was dressed in flowing gold robes and surrounded by traditional African leaders who hailed him as the “king of kings.”

The choice of Qaddafi was not a surprise – he was the leading candidate – but the prospect of his election to lead the African Union caused some unease among some of the group’s member nations, who were meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as among diplomats and analysts. Qaddafi, who has ruled Libya with an iron hand for decades, is a stark change from the succession of recent leaders from democratic countries like Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria.

USA

Obama’s Ethics Reform Promise Faces Early Test



By PETER BAKER

Published: February 2, 2009

WASHINGTON – During almost two years on the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to slay the demons of Washington, bar lobbyists from his administration and usher in what he would later call in his Inaugural Address a “new era of responsibility.” What he did not talk much about were the asterisks.

The exceptions that went unmentioned now include a pair of cabinet nominees who did not pay all of their taxes. Then there is the lobbyist for a military contractor who is now slated to become the No. 2 official in the Pentagon. And there are the others brought into government from the influence industry even if not formally registered as lobbyists.