Category: Politics

Lawmaker’s Use of Corporate Jets

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

Senator Barack Obama flew at least nine times on corporate jets last year, traveling to fund-raisers in New York and San Francisco, home to Chicago and to Rosa Parks’s funeral in Detroit. Each time, he reimbursed the plane’s owners at first-class rates, as Senate rules require.

But Mr. Obama, freshman Democrat from Illinois, felt queasy about this perk of Senate life, so he said he gave it up.

“It’s not only a perk,” Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said, “but a serious abuse that should be stopped.”

Mr. Feingold said he always flew on commercial planes.

Details on Wisconsin’s corporate travel list is Wisconsin’s own Jim Sensenbrenner. Others flying via corporate jet include:

  • David Obey #73: $73,299
  • Paul Ryan: #136 $48,295
  • Tammy Baldwin #137 $48,173
  • Ron Kind: #249 $27,906

Pricing Politicians

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Alex Tabarrok:

Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he provided.

Prices came in the form of a “bribe menu” that detailed how much it would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar government contracts…the California Republican’s “bribery menu”… shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

Bad News: AT&T / BellSouth Proposed Merger

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Via Dave Farber:

It will be interesting to see what happens when the FCC begins reviewing thereported and alleged merger of the AT&T/BellSouth deal. As it may be a much different Commission body with the hopes of Robert McDowell’s confirmation by the Senate.

Mr. McDowell is a telecom lawyer who currently serves as
assistant general counsel at Comptel and opponent of the AT&T and Verizon
mergers last year. Mr. McDowell is scheduled to appear before a Senate
committee on Thursday for his confirmation and is likely to be asked about
the merger.

I can’t imagine this will be, in any way positive for our lagging broadband services. Read “We thought you said spend the $200 billion on dark fiber” for more on this mess.

Apathy, The Downside of Everything

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Ed Wallace:

No, instead I’m concerned about our country’s lack of vision for the future and the can-do attitude that we seem somehow to have lost — at least, it’s missing from most discussions on issues facing us today. In a nutshell, I’m lamenting the apparent mortal illness of optimism and ingenuity — the kind of spirit and drive that ignores all the negative issues in the news, the naysayers and the partisans and simply presses forward, driving toward solutions that benefit all of society.

I know we had that once, because the car industry as we know it today was not the invention of large and well-funded corporations. It was created and delivered by men who, though they often worked against the most incredible odds, never lost sight of their dreams and visions. With that focus — which often earned them scorn and insults — they changed the world for the better in a way that centuries of innovation hadn’t. And they did it in mere decades.

Political Observations From Michael Powell

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via David Isenberg:

The Washington DC political process is more broken now than at any other time I’ve seen in my life. It has collapsed in on itself. I went home and asked my father [Colin Powell] if I was missing something, and he agreed with me that the process has collapsed into pure partisanship. The power of the incumbency has grown. People are not concerned with what’s right or what’s in the nations interest, they are purely interested in killing their opponents.

DRM Based Trusted Computing – Why We Should Care…

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Slashdot:

“We’ve always know that Trusted Computing is really about DRM, but computer makers always denied it. Now that their Trusted Computing chips are standard on most new PCs, they’ve decided to come clean. According to Information Week, Lenovo has demonstrated a Thinkpad with built-in Microsoft and Adobe DRM that uses a Trusted Computing chip with a fingerprint sensor. Even worse: ‘The system is also aimed at tracking who reads a document and when, because the chip can report back every access attempt. If you access the file, your fingerprint is recorded.'”