The Nobel Peace Prize was recently and surprisingly awarded to Barack Obama. Everyone has their own opinion on this. Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said it was “extremely well deserved.” I have a different opinion.
I think this year’s award is the Nobel Committee’s attempt to influence American policy on [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘politics’
May 15, 2009
General Mills Slinging Dope?
“Popular cereal is a drug, US food watchdog says”
At first, it sounded ridiculous – the Food and Drug Administration calling Cheerios a drug? That was the headline which caught my attention. I half expected to read about the millions of kids becoming addicted to the little round bits of processed “oats” I should have known [...]
May 2, 2009
The Official White House Photostream
Pete Souza is the chief White House photographer and the guy who takes pictures of the President when all of the other photojournalists are sent out of the room. You can see his work on the official photostream of the White House. Only a fraction of the photographs he takes will make it to this on-line album, but [...]
March 26, 2009
Danish Court Finds T-Shirt Group Guilty of Funding Terrorism
Der Spiegel reported the Danish Supreme Court has ruled six members of Denmark’s tee-shirt producing ‘Fighters+Lovers‘ group are guilty of supporting terrorism — but handed them all suspended sentences.
It started as an experiment in low-end radical chic — a business to “produce funky street wear” and send money to “freedom fighters” in various parts of [...]
March 18, 2009
Eh?
George W. Bush gave his first speech since leaving office. It was in Alberta, Canada, where nearly 2,000 people paid $3,100 per table for ”Conversation with George W. Bush.” If you figure there were ten guests per table, invitees were paying over $300 for dinner with the former President. I don’t know how much Bush was [...]
February 20, 2009
Linda Chatman Thomsen – Call Girl or Fall Girl?
Linda Chatman Thomsen recently resigned as the Director of the Division of Enforcement for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a kind of “Sheriff of Wall Street.” She worked her way up in the division, carving notches in her gun for her part in the Enron and Martha Stewart cases. Wall Street complained Thomsen was too hard [...]
February 16, 2009
The Tiger Team
A quick update on the Tiger Team post from February 7. Quick, because there isn’t anything to say except the good folks over at DOT must be pretty busy “. . . getting ready to distribute funds and developing common reporting standards to track the highway, road, bridge, transit, rail, aviation and other intermodal [sic] investments.” They haven’t had [...]
February 7, 2009
The Tiger Team
I am concerned with how much money the “TIGER team” will keep in the DOT’s budget and how much will actually be sent to the states. When you dump a bunch of money into a government agency and tell them to spend it, there is a temptation to spend on spending. If it takes money [...]
January 24, 2009
The White House – Blog Post – President Obama delivers Your Weekly Address
Here’s one item on the President’s agenda I can check on myself. I can’t really influence spending, but I can see if there is a change in how government employees spend public money. I’ll give it about three months and see if there has been any change in the way our agency spends money.
We’ll launch [...]
January 14, 2009
Inartful Comments
A U.S. Attorney is a political job, appointed by the President and subject to confirmation by the Senate. In March of 2006, President Bush signed into law the Patriot Act, which changed procedures. In effect, his Attorney General could now appoint an interim U.S. Attorney. As long as the President didn’t nominate anyone else for [...]
