recent news round-up

There has been a lot going on in the past few days, and I've been bookmarking articles left and right to remind myself to post about them. But, since I'll probably never get a chance to go as in-depth as I like with analysis and commentary, I'll just stick them all up here for you to peruse at your leisure, highlighting my favorite parts. It's all over the place, but interesting (at least to my mind) nonetheless.


Flak Over 'Fast Food Nation': US food manufacturers rally to oppose a film and book that blame them for obesity

More than a dozen trade groups representing producers of beef, potatoes, milk and snacks, along with restaurant groups, are fighting back with a media campaign to counter what one groups contends is the "indigestible propaganda" Mr. Schlosser [author of Fast Food Nation] is spreading. They've launched a Web site called Best Food Nation that quotes employees from Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Inc. and other food concerns praising the quality and safety of the food supply...

The Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Va., organization that says its mission is to further conservative causes, recently sent a letter to the headmaster of a California school before Mr. Schlosser was scheduled to appear there, warning that his message would "be harmful to your school and to your children," and that the author "undermines and assaults American businessmen."


Egypt continues down the "road toward democracy"

Riot police beat and arrested hundreds of demonstrators today who had gathered to support two judges facing disciplinary charge for charging publicly that parliamentary elections were fixed.

Egypt's treatment of the judges and the demonstrators, its reauthorization of an emergency law and its decision to postpone local elections for two years all threaten to take attention away from [the World Economic Forum, which began on Saturday], that officials hoped would highlight this country's efforts at economic reform. Recent decisions in Egypt, from arresting a popular blogger to postponing local elections, present a problem for the White House. Not only do they contradict President Bush's call for spreading democracy, but they complicate the administration's effort to maintain the nearly $2 billion a year that Egypt receives in military and development aid in the face of some calls from Congress to re-evaluate the package.

An appeals court on Thursday upheld the fraud conviction of Ayman Nour, the candidate who challenged President Hosni Mubarak and his 25 years of one-man rule in elections last year, effectively consigning the fiery lawyer to five years in prison. Nour was convicted in December of forging documents needed to legalize his Tomorrow Party, even though a government commission had approved the papers in October 2004 and a witness at his trial said he was tortured into testifying against Nour.

Nour finished a distant second in Egypt's first multiparty presidential election last September and incurred the wrath of officials by claiming fraud. His campaign, though it attracted only about 7 percent of the vote, was notable for its energetic effort to reach large numbers of Egyptians. The government occasionally sent out police and provocateurs to block Nour from reaching rallies in the countryside.

During the presidential vote, members of Mubarak's National Democratic Party openly recruited voters at polling places. During the parliamentary rounds, police kept voters away from several polling stations and killed 11 people who tried to reach the ballot boxes. There has been no judicial inquiry into the deaths.

Protesters accused the United States of being soft on Mubarak. Last week, a day after Cairo police beat scores of demonstrators during a march in support of the judges, Gamal Mubarak, the president's son, secretly visited the White House. He was greeted by President Bush and met with Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The meeting became public only because a reporter for al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite television news channel, observed Mubarak entering the White House.


Language in leases to oil companies for off-shore drilling "mistakenly" did not include a price cap for royalty incentives

In an attempt to revoke billions of dollars worth of government incentives to oil and gas producers, the House on Thursday approved a measure that would pressure companies to renegotiate more than 1,000 leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The measure, approved 252 to 165 over the objections of many Republican leaders, is intended to prevent companies from avoiding at least $7 billion in payments to the government over the next five years for oil and gas they produce in publicly owned waters.

Democrats argued that energy companies were shortchanging taxpayers at the same time that soaring prices for crude oil and natural gas had pushed industry profits to record highs. Republican leaders, who had hoped to avoid a vote on the issue, agreed that companies should not be getting lucrative incentives in times of high prices. But they insisted that the government had no right to reopen valid leases that it signed years ago with offshore drillers.

The lopsided vote to rescind royalty incentives came three months after The New York Times disclosed that companies drilling in publicly-owned waters of the Gulf of Mexico were set to escape royalties on about $65 billion worth of oil and gas over the next five years. The windfall stemmed in large part from a major error in leases that the Clinton administration signed with energy companies.

To encourage drilling and exploration in water thousands of feet deep, the government offered to let companies avoid the standard royalties, usually 12 percent or 16 percent of sales, for large quantities of the oil and gas they produced. But the incentives, which have been expanded in recent years by the Bush administration and by Congress, were supposed to stop as soon as prices for oil climbed above $34 a barrel and prices for natural gas climbed above $4 per thousand cubic feet. For reasons that are now being investigated, the Interior Department omitted the restriction in 1,000 leases it signed in 1998 and 1999. In addition, the Bush administration offered extra "royalty relief" to companies that drilled very deep wells in very shallow water. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimated in March that the royalty incentives could cost the government $20 billion over the next 25 years.

Ed: this does raise some contract law issues. a bigger question is: oil has been WAY over $34/barrell for quite a while now. when was this first caught, and where was the news when it was??


Receiving and distributing information that was obtained by illegal means (leaks of classified information, tapping into cellphone signals) by a third party might be a crime in itself.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales raised the possibility yesterday that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information based on the outcome of the criminal investigation underway into leaks to the Times of data about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between the United States and abroad.

Yesterday, Gonzales said, "I understand very much the role that the press plays in our society, the protection under the First Amendment we want to promote and respect . . . but it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity."

Related:

Rep. Jim McDermott tells the story of how Rep. John Boehner came to be his political nemesis. The story has its roots in a previous Republican ethics scandal in Congress, but at its core it is about take-no-prisoners politics and a challenge to First Amendment freedoms—a challenge that has alarmed free-speech advocates.

A Florida couple, John and Alice Martin, were messing around with their police radio scanner and happened to pick up the call [between Boehner, Newt Gingrich, and other Republicans] as the Republicans were talking about how to spin Gingrich's ethics charge. [A condition of Gingrich's settlement for his ethics violation was that no "spinning" would be done.] Being Democrats who followed politics, they realized whom they were hearing and decided to make a tape for posterity. Their congresswoman, Karen L. Thurman, encouraged them to give the tape to McDermott because of his position on the ethics committee.

What the Martins had done—recording a private cell-phone conversation and distributing it to others—was illegal. (Indeed, they were later prosecuted by the Justice Department, pleaded guilty to intercepting private electronic communications, and paid a $500 fine.) But the Martins' illegal behavior had produced information that was of public importance: a recording of congressmen plotting to get around an agreement with the House ethics committee. To get it out to the public, they turned to their representatives in Congress, and in that sense, this was not all that different a scenario than the common one in which a whistleblower, in violation of the law, makes a copy of a secret government or corporate record and then provides that record to another person, often a journalist, who has the power to make sure the document is widely read.

The story of the tape, which hit the front page of the New York Times on January 10, 1997, proved to be a political sensation, and when it came out that McDermott was behind the leak, Republicans reacted with fury. McDermott, however, believed he had a First Amendment right to leak the contents of the tape, just like the journalists who wrote about it had a right to quote from it; none of them, after all, had participated in the illegal behavior that led to the creation of the tape in the first place. Republicans begged to differ, demanding an investigation by Janet Reno's Justice Department. When that produced no criminal charges against McDermott, Boehner decided, in March of 1998, to file a civil suit against McDermott seeking $10,000 in damages for the disclosure of his private phone call.

It was the first time one congressman had sued another in civil court, and it marked the beginning of a draining legal fight that has gone up and down the federal court system for the last eight years, costing each side well over half a million dollars. "This is the modern-day duel," McDermott says.

Another battle of process vs content:

An unusual FBI raid of a Democratic congressman's office over the weekend prompted complaints yesterday from leaders in both parties, who said the tactic was unduly aggressive and may have breached the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government. Rep. William J. Jefferson (La.), who is at the center of a 14-month investigation for allegedly accepting bribes for promoting business ventures in Africa, also held a news conference in which he denied any wrongdoing and denounced the raid on his office as an "outrageous intrusion."

The Saturday raid of Jefferson's quarters in the Rayburn House Office Building posed a new political dilemma for the leaders of both parties, who felt compelled to protest his treatment while condemning any wrongdoing by the lawmaker. The dilemma was complicated by new details contained in an 83-page affidavit unsealed on Sunday, including allegations that the FBI had videotaped Jefferson taking $100,000 in bribe money and then found $90,000 of that cash stuffed inside his apartment freezer.

Ed: the normal investigative route involves months of subpoenas, congressional interviews, and media spin cycles. One issue to consider is the fact that this wasn't done for our favorite Congressman, Randy Cunningham, or Tom "the Hammer" DeLay. However, I'm inclined to think that search warrants should be issued to investigate ALL cases of potential criminal misconduct by lawmakers, rather than NONE of them (which is what's being advocated by vocal members of Congress on both sides of the aisle).