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govtoversight:

That’s when you know spending is truly out of control. From the article,

In both the House and Senate versions of the legislation, defense lawmakers have inserted $74 billion toward a number of weapons programs “those that have outlived their usefulness” to the department, Panetta said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

sinidentidades:

The banking giant  HSBC has escaped indictment for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda. Despite evidence of wrongdoing, the U.S. Department of Justice has allowed the bank to avoid prosecution and pay a $1.9 billion fine. No top HSBC officials will face charges, either. We’re joined by Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, author of “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.” “You can do real time in jail in America for all kinds of ridiculous offenses,” Taibbi says. “Here we have a bank that laundered $800 million of drug money, and they can’t find a way to put anybody in jail for that. That sends an incredible message, not just to the financial sector but to everybody. It’s an obvious, clear double standard, where one set of people gets to break the rules as much as they want and another set of people can’t break any rules at all without going to jail.”

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govtoversight:

Last night, the Senate unanimously passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) and sent it to the President for his signature. The Project On Government Oversight has been working on this for years, and we thank everyone who helped us with this fight. The WPEA will help protect workers who risk their careers to report fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government. That means fewer of the good guys will get punished for speaking up, and taxpayers will save as more people are empowered to step up and fix what is wrong with government. Read more about the WPEA at POGO.org.

enlightened-despot:

I remember, back in the start of the last elections, reading on the Internet about citizens of the United States being in disbelief at finding out that Puerto Rico is a colony. Crazy questions popped up, such as “Since when?!” “Are they going to be a state?!” “Where’s Puerto Rico located?!” I did…

Please click the link and take some time to read this post. Very good information regarding the colonization process in Puerto Rico and the atrocities committed by the United States government against the people of Puerto Rico.

govtoversight:

From POGO’s Director of Public Policy Angela Canterbury

President Obama picked up the whistleblower protections Congress had left by the wayside, finally providing intelligence community workers with specific free speech rights and some protections against retaliation when they legally report waste, fraud, and abuse.

…

We have raised concerns about the possible infringement of rights and the chilling effect on would-be whistleblowers of the aggressive prosecutions and certain post-WikiLeaks policies. We have repeatedly urged that anti-leak efforts include authentic protections for those who make lawful disclosures of wrongdoing in the intelligence community. With the stroke of his pen today, President Obama did just that and took unparalleled action to protect whistleblowers, for which we are truly gratified and grateful.

While this directive is not a panacea, it begins to fill a large void in whistleblower protections and lays the framework for more government accountability where it is sorely needed.

Read the full statement at POGO.org.

sinidentidades:

Over the past several years, we’ve reported extensively on the big banks’ foreclosure failings. As a result of banks’ disorganization and understaffing — particularly at the peak of the crisis in 2009 and 2010 — homeowners were often forced to run a gauntlet of confusion, delays, and errors when seeking a mortgage modification.

But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration’s mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?

A thorough study released last week provides one number, and it’s a big one: about 800,000 homeowners.

The study’s authors — from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the government’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Ohio State University, Columbia Business School, and the University of Chicago — arrived at this conclusion by analyzing a vast data set available to the OCC. They wanted to measure the impact of HAMP, the government’s main foreclosure prevention program.

What they found was that certain banks were far better at modifying loans than others. The reasons for the difference, they established, were pretty predictable: The banks that were better at helping homeowners avoid foreclosure had staff who were both more numerous and better trained.

Unfortunately for homeowners, most mortgages are handled by banks that haven’t been properly staffed and thus have modified far fewer loans. If these worse-performing banks had simply modified loans at the same pace as their better performing peers, then HAMP would have produced about 800,000 more modifications. Instead of about 1.2 million modifications by the end of this year, HAMP would have resulted in about 2 million.

sinidentidades:

Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer dropped a bombshell this morning that may have obliterated Republican Clark Durant’s campaign for Senate.

Brewer alleges that he has uncovered documents that show a charity run by Durant funnels 95 percent of its funds – more than $600,000 a year – to the Durant family, particularly the candidate’s daughter, Hope Durant Loomis.

Brewer is calling for an IRS investigation into the Genesis Foundation, a nonprofit Durant formed in 1991 to help Detroit children secure a private school education. The charity is connected to Detroit’s Cornerstone Schools, a charter school group which Durant founded.

“Clark Durant claims to be a ‘rebel with a cause,’ but it turns out he’s siphoned off almost $1.4 million from a charity originally created to help Detroit kids afford school. It’s clear the only cause Durant cares about is his own,” Brewer said.

“A man who unlawfully abuses charities and foundations for personal gain is not the kind of ‘rebel’ Michigan families need.”

Brewer’s own political investigation was sparked by a recent story in the Detroit Free Press that found Durant’s $500,000 salary at Cornerstone, a relatively small organization that educates 1,500 students, exceeded the pay received by many university presidents and CEOs of national charter school networks.

sinidentidades:

Chick-fil-A’s anti-gay marriage stance has gotten some high-profile support by way of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and other conservative lawmakers. But among their longtime customers, it’s a much different story.

Polling organization YouGov found that the Atlanta-based chain’s brand approval ratings have plummeted in the wake of Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy’s controversial remarks earlier this month. YouGov also reports that the company’s overall consumer brand health among fast food eaters has dropped to its lowest levels since mid-August 2010 in the wake of the media firestorm.

Just before Cathy’s interview was published, Chick-fil-A’s Index score was 65, well above the Top National Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) Sector average score of 46. Just four days later, however, Chick-fil-A’s score had fallen to 47, while last week, the chain had a score of 39, compared to the Top National QSR Sector average score of 43.

And evangelicals will cry that the public outrage is some kind of free speech issue.

sinidentidades:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has debated, sniped and voted on the politically fraught issue of tax cuts, and next week the House is likely to do it all over again. Still, Americans won’t know until after the November elections how much more of their paychecks will go to the government next year.

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that his Republican-led chamber is “more than willing” to make Democrats vote on the President Barack Obama’s plan to extend former president George W. Bush’s tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. He also is bringing up the GOP’s proposal to extend the tax cuts for everyone.

The outcome is almost certainly stalemated until the November elections, so leaders of both houses of Congress are turning the House and Senate into campaign stages on one of the defining issues of the presidential and congressional races.

Obama signaled on Thursday he’s ready to do his part to light a fire under lawmakers. “I would urge the House of Representatives to do the right thing,” he told reporters during a Cabinet meeting. He said he and top aides will “amplify that message” in the days to come.

Obama said the one-year extension would provide “certainty and security to families who are already feeling pinched” and reassure businesses by taking “a whole bunch of uncertainty out of the economy” at a time of global economic worries.

The Senate opened the drama Wednesday with surprise debates and passage of a Democratic bill fashioned on President Barack Obama’s proposal to extend the income tax cuts to all but the wealthiest Americans through 2013. It passed even though the measure stands no chance of surviving the Republican-led House. Meanwhile, the Senate rejected a GOP amendment to extend the cuts to all taxpayers. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, intends to bring up that measure in his chamber next week.

sinidentidades:

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said on Sunday the Aurora shooter is a “terrorist.”

“I think the political will come, but at this point, you know, in a funny way this guy is a terrorist, right,” Hickenlooper said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He wasn’t a terrorist in the sense of politics, but for whatever twisted reasons that we can barely even imagine, he wanted to create terror, he wanted to put fear in people’s lives.”

“For so many of us, movies are one of the places we find solace,” Hickenlooper added. “… We can’t let him take that away from us.”

The governor told host Candy Crowley “there is no easy answer” as those in the state ask how they could prevent something like this.

“How do we preserve our freedoms, right, and all those things that define this country and yet try and prevent something like this from happening? There is no easy answer,” he said.

sinidentidades:

Just in time for the holy month of Ramadan, a federal judge has ruled that Tennessee county officials need to stop blocking worshipers from occupying their newly-built mosque, overruling a county judge’s order that was preventing the mosque from opening.

The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro sued Rutherford County, TN yesterday, asking the district judge for an emergency order to allow the mosque to open its doors to worshipers before Ramadan begins at sundown today. Federal prosecutors also filed a similar lawsuit in Nashville, alleging violations of the federal law that guarantees freedom of religion and equal protection under the Constitution.

The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty and a local civil rights attorney represented the congregation’s case. More than 100 religious leaders from varying faith traditions also signed onto a letter drafted by the Beckett Fund to support the mosque . A statement to the federal court explained that Rutherford County’s discrimination against the Muslim community is both hypocritical and harmful:

If [the mosque] were a Christian church, it would have been granted a certificate of occupancy and would be worshipping in its new facility today…The discriminatory treatment of the mosque also sends a powerful message to the Muslim community that they are second-class citizens, not worthy of the same rights or protection as Christian churches.

The Islamic center’s legal troubles first began in 2010, when Rutherford County residents filed a lawsuit alleging that Islam was not a real religion, but rather a “seditious cult” that intended to impose Islamic religious law on the U.S. government. Although that case was thrown out, a local judge picked the fight up again this May and ruled that the mosque’s building permits were invalid because the congregation had not provided “adequate public notice” of the construction. But thanks to U.S. Attorney Jerry Martin’s ruling yesterday in favor of the Murfreesboro congregation’s emergency petition — ultimately determining that the local judge could not hold the Murfreesboro mosque to the separate standard he had created in his May ruling — congregants will be able to worship in their newly-constructed mosque beginning today.

The resistance to the Murfreesboro mosque is not the only recent example of Islamophobia in the state of Tennessee. Tennessee Republicans are currently circulating a petition condemning their governor for hiring Muslim employees, and the Rutherford County sheriff’s office brought in an anti-Muslim speaker to train police officers about Muslim culture earlier this year.

sinidentidades:

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), chairman of the House Labor, Health and Human Service and Education Committee, has proposed a far-reaching anti-choice bill that boasts $6.2 billion in spending cuts, many of which are achieved through attacks on services for women’s reproductive health.

Rehberg’s bill (PDF), which has yet to undergo a committee vote, proposes cuts to various women’s health services, including cutting funding for Planned Parenthood. It also allows employers to opt out of insuring women employees’ contraception coverage for ‘moral reasons’ and authorizes spending on abstinence-only education, which is widely deemed ineffective at reducing teen pregnancy, STIs or the onset of sexual activity.

Planned Parenthood issued a statement objecting to the cuts, calling the bill an “unprecedented suite of attacks on women’s health.”