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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even for a party whose president suffers dismal approval ratings, whose legislative wing lost control of Congress and whose presidential nominee trails in the polls, it was a remarkably bad day for Republicans. ... snip ... "This is the president's own party," said Rep. Barney Frank, a top Democratic negotiator who attended both meetings. "I don't think a president has been repudiated so strongly by the congressional wing of his own party in a long time." ... snip ... At one point in the White House meeting, according to two officials, McCain voiced support for Ryan's criticisms...

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today named Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) its August Porkers of the Month for leading a do-nothing Congress into a five week vacation. Congress left for its traditional August recess after accomplishing nothing. Of the 106 bills enacted since January, 94, or 89 percent were to name government buildings or lands, extend or make technical corrections to existing laws, or passed either by unanimous consent or with less than 10 dissenting votes. The accomplishments included “Frank Sinatra Day,” National Plumbing Industry Week,” and “National Day of...

U.S. Rep. Henry Brown on Thursday defended a bill that would help future homeowners on the undeveloped southwestern end of Kiawah Island qualify for federally subsidized flood insurance. Brown, R-S.C., said he introduced the bill last month at the behest of the town of Kiawah Island, and that "I had no idea there was a developer" connected with the legislation.

Liberals often insist on the separation of church and state, but they’d really like to go further to separating the church from everything. That principle oozes into PBS, where a forthcoming Nova documentary insists the Bible is full of fables, not history. Orlando Sentinel TV critic Hal Boedeker reported from a PBS publicity session for TV critics: Abraham didn't exist? The Exodus didn't happen? The Bible's Buried Secrets, a new PBS documentary, is likely to cause a furor. "It challenges the Bible's stories if you want to read them literally, and that will disturb many people," says archaeologist William Dever,...

The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

A compendium of news stories, features, and human rights reports pertaining to genocide and crimes against humanity. Compiled by Adam Jones.

Biologists want island cats killed San Nicolas wildlife imperiled By Scott Hadly Friday, June 6, 2008 Federal wildlife biologists are proposing to kill all wild cats now living on Navy-owned San Nicolas Island to protect endangered species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to use padded leg traps and hunters to eradicate what are believed to be 100 to 200 feral cats. Dogs also would be used to flush out some of the harder-to-catch cats, according to the plan. The wild cats would be shot or given a lethal injection on the spot. "This is the most humane...

Who will be our next president? If you want an accurate guess, don't ask the pundits. Go where people put their money where their mouths are. Intrade.com (www.intrade.com), for example. It's a prediction market, basically a futures market like those where people bet on the future price of oil, gold and pork bellies. But at Intrade, people bet mostly on politics. The prices on Intrade have been highly accurate predictors of the future. On TV, political "experts" make pronouncements on what they think will happen, but crowds of bettors on sites like Intrade are right more often. In 2004, TV...

How many federal employees does it take to waste our tax dollars and push an agenda? The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, is familiar to anyone who flies. They’re the people that make you take off your shoes, your belt, conduct body cavity searches and make grandma get out of the wheel chair because she might be a terrorist. Aside from being worthless and unionized (so they can’t be fired easily, thanks Dems), they are also pushing a PC agenda, at least in Atlanta. One of our contributors flew to Atlanta today and sent back the pictures below of an...

California will establish a high-profile, $600 million research center to devise solutions for global warming, the Public Utilities Commission decided in a 5-0 vote Thursday. The California Institute for Climate Solutions will have a $60 million budget each year for 10 years. The money will come from ratepayers of the state's major utilities, including Pacific Gas & Electric, which serves much of Northern California. The new institute, which will seek matching funds to expand its reach, will administer research grants; work to transfer technologies to commercial businesses; and develop a related workforce for these companies. Undecided is where the new...

Andy Rogers / P-I Justin Hall leaves the automatic public toilet at Hing Hay Park, one of five installed by the city in 2004. Hall, who is homeless and trying to get off the street, uses the toilets regularly. A recently completed report by Seattle Public Utilities recommends that the city cancel its contract for the costly self-cleaning lavatories. Cancel toilet contract, city told By ANGELA GALLOWAY P-I REPORTER The naysayers may have been right: Seattle's multimillion-dollar, high-tech public toilet program looks like a washout.Some city officials, including the city's wastewater utility director, want to remove the five automated,...

Jennifer Harper, Washington Times reporter and friend of Newsbusters, gives us a revealing look at how far left our taxpayer funded National Public Radio network has gotten itself these days. Even when they try to go a little toward the conservative side of the debate, they get lambasted by their audience, angered that they had the temerity to air conservative views. Of course, the only reason they would get such a rude reception from their own audience is because they have garnered only a far left listenership as a result of their far left programming. After all, if they had...

REPORT: Helicopter carrying John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden makes emergency landing in Afghanistan: Developing.

Let us pause to salute the US Congress, whose members have once again shown themselves capable of surmounting partisan friction and institutional gridlock when it comes to serving a group of Americans they care about deeply: themselves. When the 110th Congress returned from its holiday recess two weeks ago, the mountain of unfinished business it had left behind in 2007 was still waiting - everything from judicial nominations to bilateral trade agreements to the terrorist surveillance program to the farm bill. But the gentlemen and gentlewomen of the House and Senate made sure that nothing would impede what has become...

EL CAMPO, Tex. -- Even though Donald R. Matthews put his sprawling new residence in the heart of rice country, he is no farmer. He is a 67-year-old asphalt contractor who wanted to build a dream house for his wife of 40 years. Yet under a federal agriculture program approved by Congress, his 18-acre suburban lot receives about $1,300 in annual "direct payments," because years ago the land was used to grow rice. Matthews is not alone. Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do...

$9,128,000,000,000+. That is what our national debt sits at as I write this article. I can’t put the actual number because it is increasing so fast it would be wrong within minutes. In fact, the debt is increasing at a rate of one million dollars a minute. That’s about $1.36 billion dollars a day, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock. We are spending money like there is no tomorrow. And if we don’t stop, there might not be a tomorrow for our republic. Why are we spending so much money? Our elected leaders have warped the phrase “general welfare”...

Fred Thompson or Ron Paul? Like Perry and some others, I would rather see a big government Democrat elected than a big government Republican. At least that would bring back some opposition. Republicans in Congress have a much better record of reining in the Democrats' presidents than their own. And as I explain later, I think that one of these two is the only Republican candidate capable of winning the national election. Ron Paul answering the What programs? question by naming three cabinet level departments ... Wow. Good answer. If there was no rest-of-the-world, he would possibly have my vote....

Anti-drinking ads which show stupid drunk behaviour inadvertently glamorise Medical Studies/Trials Published: Monday, 10-Dec-2007 . .   Advertising campaigns in Britain meant to discourage young people from drinking to excess have come in for some harsh criticism from researchers and comes at a time when experts are saying alcohol abuse is a widespread problem among the young. The researchers say adverts which focus on the idiotic behaviour carried out when people are drunk may be "catastrophically misconceived" and may backfire by inadvertently glamorising the habit. In a study, led by a research team at the University of Bath, researchers...

As another World AIDS Day dawns this morning, prepare for the usual media blitz of stories designed to promote more spending on failed approaches to HIV/AIDS, and more bashing of the Bush Administration despite increases in spending by the billions each year.  Here are some of the questions that the media probably won’t ask the professional HIV/AIDS lobby, which grows ever fatter while the human tragedy rises: • What have American taxpayers gotten for the $20 billion per year (and rising) government spending on HIV/AIDS? • What has happened to the more than half a billion condoms that the...

Surprise! Congress is larding up the defense budget with miscellaneous taxpayer-funded boondoggles. # $25,000,000 for the Hawaii Federal Health Care Network, added by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). # $23,000,000 for the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), added by Rep. John “Jack” Murtha (D-Pa.). This is the project over which Rep. Murtha threatened a colleague for challenging in the spring. Since 1992, more than $509 million has been used to fund NDIC, which is administered by the Department of Justice (DOJ.). Ironically, DOJ does not want the NDIC and has asked Congress to shut the agency down because the department believes...

Whatever you made of the Chancellor’s various sleights of hand on Tuesday, lurking beneath his Budget plans was one inescapable fact. The hungry maw of the NHS is swallowing more and more resources, at the expense of virtually everything else. The defence budget is at its lowest since 1930, despite our dwindling troops being dotted across three continents. Prison overcrowding is at such record levels that Jack Straw will have to release even more inmates early in a few weeks’ time. But the health service marches relentlessly on, having hoovered up two thirds of the increase in public spending in...

Has Fred Thompson's entry into the presidential race got you wondering what a Thompson administration might look like? From a federal management perspective, it's an interesting question. Thompson would come into the job with a relatively large amount of experience in overseeing government operations, since he chaired the committee formerly known as Senate Governmental Affairs. In an Aug. 2001 column in Government Executive, Paul Light, now a New York University professor and then a vice president at the Brookings Institution, took a look at Thompson's tenure, taking note of his presidential prospects. At that point, the senator was weighing whether...

There has been a void in the Republican presidential race. The party's candidates have spoken about immigration, taxes, social issues and the war in Iraq. Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain have also spoken frequently about Ronald Reagan in order to position themselves as the political heirs to the great president. The candidates, however, have overlooked a central idea that animated Mr. Reagan's view of government. That was federalism, the constitutional principle that the federal government's responsibilities are "few and defined" as James Madison put it. Mr. Reagan believed the federal government had grown too big and swallowed up...

So, President and Mrs. Bush went down to New Orleans to commemorate the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina...Here's a pop quiz: How much money has Uncle Sam spent...since Hurricane Katrina ripped the place apart? The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief). That's right: a monstrous $127 billion. Of course, not a single media story has highlighted this gargantuan government-spending figure. But that number came straight from the White House... This is an outrage. The entire GDP of the state of Louisiana is only $141 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. So the cash spent there nearly matches...

We in the Land of Lincoln have many matters about which to fret. Will the budget impasse between the Democratic governor and the Democratic General Assembly get resolved? Will Illinois ever join the 48 states that permit concealed carrying of weapons, thereby giving law-abiding citizens a fighting chance against the bad guys? What week of September (or possibly August) will the Cubs choke this year? Will Gov. Milorad Blagojevich try sticking taxpayers with another $600 makeup bill? There’s so very much for us to ponder. Happily, we don’t have to worry if our fair state is getting its “fair share”...

In a verdict that could chill lonely inmates everywhere, a jury today convicted a Florida inmate for masturbating in the privacy of his Ft. Lauderdale cell...

There's a job opening in Santa Cruz for the newly created position of global warming czar. The pay: $80,000 a year. The global warming coordinator will help prevent climate change, guide the city in transportation and land-use decisions and get the community involved in the effort. "We think this position will help address possible sea level rise, whether that's at our bluffs, at our beaches or maybe even in our downtown," city planning director Greg Larson said. The City Council approved the Planning Department position for one year. "The preponderance of scientific evidence globally and locally shows that global warming...

US State Department officials, looking to shift US Security Coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton's work with Palestinian forces to the West Bank, have begun holding discussions with Congressional staff on how to restructure an $86 million funding program previously allocated to bolster Dayton's Gaza activities. The earlier package was whittled down to $59m. before Congress signed off on it and would have gone largely to non-lethal equipment and training for the presidential guard to secure the Gaza border crossings and help Fatah leaders and institutions there. Now the US, caught off-guard by Hamas's speedy defeat of Fatah forces in Gaza, is...

RAF MILDENHALL, England — Allegations of staggering levels of fraud and corruption in Iraq have prompted the Pentagon to form a task force comprised of military and federal law enforcement agencies.The announcement of the new International Contract Corruption Task Force was part of the latest Department of Defense Inspector General’s report to Congress.“As a result of the magnitude of alleged criminal activity within the Iraqi theater, a group of federal agencies has formalized their partnership to investigate contract fraud and public corruption related to Iraq reconstruction,� the report states.The task force will be made up of agents from the FBI,...

For nearly $7 million a year, taxpayers are leasing three private jets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use in case of emergency. But they're rarely used, according to records and interviews. CDC officials say the jets are critical to their mission, giving the Atlanta-based agency the ability to mobilize disease fighters across the country or around the globe at any time of the day or night. In the past year, the three jets have been used for a combined total of nine emergency flights. Even so, CDC officials say they need all of them and their...

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers returns his series "Bill Moyers Journal" to taxpayer-funded PBS stations on Wednesday night. On Monday, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross offered Moyers a very favorable interview to promote the show. Near the end, Gross asked Moyers about charges of liberal bias bandied about when Kenneth Tomlinson headed the board at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers said "He singled out Now with Bill Moyers for a bias that didn’t exist." Moyers didn’t try in this comfortable liberal forum to pretend completely that he was non-ideological or a "Thomas Paine radical." He proclaimed "There's...

As the debate in Congress over supplemental funding for the war in Iraq heats up, the Department of Defense still cannot adequately account for billions of dollars, according to the Government Accountability Office. "For the past 10 consecutive years, we have been unable to certify the Financial Report of the U.S., which is prepared annually by the Treasury Department," Gary Engle, director of Financial Management and Assurance at the GAO, told WND. "Many of the material weaknesses that we found relate to the Department of Defense and their financial management problems." Engle explained that the Defense Department problems had not...

Our young liberal friends seem to divide into two camps. There is the camp of enlightened progressives like Jacob Aronson that is dedicated to "Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition" and reforming government "along private-sector lines." Then there is the angry left of Markos Moulitsas. In "The Case for the Libertarian Democrat." Kos sees real danger ahead as corporations become more powerful than governments. It is fine for these enthusiasts to propose, on the margin, what benevolent government should do next, but they completely miss the elephant in the room. There is one thing and one thing only for...

For more than 160 years the Smithsonian Institution made America's remarkable history available to one and all. In keeping with founder James Smithson's benevolent vision of "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," the institution's taxpayer-subsidized museums, exhibits and archives used to be open to the general public, students and legitimate researchers. But not anymore -- and it's an outrage that I'm taking personally. My "War Stories" producers and I asked for access to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington's Dulles International Airport. We were commencing production of a...

Only 137 more days until the National Provider Identifier (NPI) compliance date! Do you have your NPI? NPI Tip When applying for your NPI, CMS urges you to include your legacy identifiers, not only for Medicare but for all payors. If reporting a Medicaid number, include the associated State name. This information is critical for payors in the development of crosswalks to aid in the transition to the NPI. Get It. Share It. Use It. If you are a health care provider who bills for services, you probably need an NPI. If you bill Medicare for services, you definitely need...

The $13 per person "high tea" service and $12 bagel breaks will be gone from the January directors meeting of the government's legal aid program for the poor. And the meeting will be held at the headquarters conference room rather than the upscale hotel used in the past. After severe criticism from Congress, stinging reports from a financial watchdog and several articles by The Associated Press, the Legal Services Corp. has decided to temper the expensive tastes of its top officials while poor clients are turned away for lack of program funds. Internal memos, provided to the AP voluntarily by...

U.S. funds intended to promote democracy in Cuba have been used to buy crab meat, cashmere sweaters, computer games and chocolates, according to a U.S. congressional audit published on Wednesday. The survey by the Government Accountability Office found little oversight and accountability in the program, which paid out $76 million

Food stamp recipients and retail stores illegally exchange hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits for cash instead of food, congressional investigators said Friday. Known as trafficking, the practice has dropped sharply since the government switched from paper coupons to cards that work like debit cards. But trafficking still consumes $240 million a year, the Government Accountability Office said. The study shows major progress, said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, senior Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. "Shifting from paper coupons to electronic delivery, which I've advocated for, means trafficking is at minimal levels," Harkin said. "But we must continue to...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Federal court interpreter Teresa Thorpe spoke Spanish softly into a microphone as one Hispanic defendant after another stepped forward. The scene was typical of U.S. courts that are struggling to break down the language barrier between an English-speaking legal system and the growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants. What was unusual was Thorpe's commute to work: She had to be flown to Birmingham from Kentucky because of a shortage of qualified interpreters in the Southeast. Alabama is among 20 states with two or fewer people who are legally certified to act as Spanish-language interpreters in federal courts. The...

I just returned from an extended trip on Amtrak, Houston to Anaheim Ca. .. I wanted to take a slow boat to China, in order to extend the time I had to spend with my son before dropping him off at college, sniff (but as they say, that is another story).. Slow boats weren't available so I took the next slowest form of transportation, a train, and we loved every minute.. It has been years since I took a real train ride, my son had never had the pleasure.. I thought it would be a great time to slow down...

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and fellow reformers on Capitol Hill have so far met with limited success in their efforts to cut government waste, but they have garnered a lot of attention from popular websites and blogs. And that's about to become the basis of their strategy. Mr. Coburn has proposed a bill to create an Internet database that would track hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, and other payments.

WASHINGTON - Houston divorce lawyer Mark Lipkin says he can't recall anyone paying for his services with a FEMA debit card, but congressional investigators say one of his clients did just that. ADVERTISEMENT The $1,000 payment was just one example cited in an audit that concluded that up to $1.4 billion — perhaps as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in assistance expended after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — was spent for bogus reasons. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also was hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a sex change operation, the...

Feds: "Skin tone filtering system" helped nab space agency executive MARCH 31--The Washington headquarters of NASA was raided this week as part of a kiddie porn probe targeting an executive with the space agency, The Smoking Gun has learned. On Wednesday morning, federal investigators seized a laptop computer, a hard drive, CDs, and other material from the office of James Robinson, who was present when agents with NASA's inspector general executed a search warrant at his E Street office. According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Robinson, 42, used his office computer (and another in his Virginia home)...

The future of Social Security is indeed going to be a burden on future generations, but what about the national debt? Maybe it's time to start vetoing spending bills full of unnecessary earmarks. See the cartoon: http://cartoons.blog.com

WA the heck was tourism office thinking? King County Journal, March 14, 2006 SayWA? Whaddup widdat? We dunno, but the Washington State Tourism Office is spending more than $400,000 on a campaign to entice folks to visit us using the slogan "SayWA." Related Articles: Actually, I'd rather not 'SayWA,' thanks, Spokesman Review'Say WA' kicks off Washington tourism campaign, KING 5 News Sex changes through the state a go again after policy reversal Seattle PI, March 14, 2006 The Legislature is having trouble coming to terms with its feelings about taxpayer-financed sex-change operations. Related Article: U.S. senator wants to know why...

CORALVILLE, Iowa--Iowans are a proud and famously practical people. So when Des Moines millionaire Ted Townsend, heir to a fortune earned manufacturing meat-processing equipment (a practical endeavor), proposed creating a man-made, indoor, 4.5 acre "rain forest" in the heart of corn country (a somewhat impractical endeavor), many Iowans scoffed. Despite an initial $10 million donation by Mr. Townsend and his Iowa Center for Health in a Loving Democracy (Child) Institute, what is now called the Environmental Project bounced around the state for years without gaining much traction, let alone financial backing. That all changed in 2003, however, when Chuck Grassley,...

   Have You Been To the Post Office Lately? March 9, 2006 The only certain path to victory for the US in the War On Terrorism is to immediately: (1) admit defeat; (2) resurrect the Neutron Bomb and drop them throughout the Middle East; (3) wait a few weeks for the residual radiation to subside; (4) take control of the oil fields; and (5) declare victory by having first admitted defeat.  Oh yeah...just one more thing.  Prior to the bombing, there should be a “Peace Conference” planned at ground zero that will be attended by all members of Amnesty International,...

Archaeology paper reports meaning of Indian river names ERNEST HERNDON Associated Press McCOMB, Miss. - The Chickasawhay, one of the finest rivers in the state, also has one of the prettiest-sounding names - Chick-a-sah-HAY. The Choctaw meaning: "Place Where Martins Dance." The name probably referred to a long bluff on the river known as King's Bluff where martins built nests in the bank. That tidbit is in a research paper by University of Southern Mississippi anthropology student Chris McPhail: "Mississippi Rivers: A Study of Choctaw Indian Place-Names of the Streams and Rivers of the State of Mississippi." McPhail pored over...

In my article in Frontpagemag the other day concerning slush money for Islamo-fascism from the faculty union at CUNY I raise the question of the need to reform New York's badly designed and poorly administered Taylor Law. The New York State agency in charge of administering the Taylor Law is the Public Employment Relations Board whose Chair is Michael Cuevas and whose Executive Director is James Edgar. Appointed by Governor Pataki, these guys are union stooges. I have repeatedly inquired with Messrs. Cuevas and Edgar, and with the PERB staff, about (a) Taylor Law's prohibition on management-dominated unions and (b)...

ATF Director Is Linked to Cost Overruns For New Building By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 6, 2006; Page A01 The new headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the District is at least $19 million over budget at a time when the agency is considering sharp cuts in the number of new cars, bulletproof vests and other basics it provides agents. The Justice Department inspector general's office recently received a complaint alleging that ATF Director Carl J. Truscott put through or proposed unnecessary plan changes and upgrades to the 438,000-square-foot building in...