“If These Items Are Truly Worth Funding,…”

"…the Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote." GW Bush, State of the Union Address, January 28,2008

Those of us opposed to earmarks, or as it used to be known, pork barrel spending, got a partial victory tonight. President Bush will issue an executive order for department heads to ignore earmarks that are air dropped into conference bills issued from Congress. Only those earmarks that have been specifically voted on will be allowed. The order does not apply to the latest spending frenzy that Congress issued, but a half a loaf is better than none.

The people's trust in their Government is undermined by congressional earmarks — special interest projects that are often snuck in at the last minute, without discussion or debate. Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. I also asked you to stop slipping earmarks into committee reports that never even come to a vote. Unfortunately, neither goal was met. So this time, if you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I will send it back to you with my veto. And tomorrow, I will issue an Executive Order that directs Federal agencies to ignore any future earmark that is not voted on by the Congress. If these items are truly worth funding, the Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote.

As are all executive orders, this is binding on future administrations unless and until the order is replaced, changed or discarded. But the sitting President must do so by issuing another order. Bush just blocked a lot of future bad behavior by Congress with the stroke of a pen. It is a lot better than what was in place up until now. Not perfect, but a darn good start.

UN Springs Into Action On Darfur

To mark the fifth anniversary of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the United Nations has announced that it will not be deploying any meaningful numbers of "peacekeepers" until the end of this year.

The UN-African Union peacekeeping force proposed for Sudan's Darfur region will take most of 2008 to deploy fully, the UN's head of peacekeeping has said.
 
Jean-Marie Guehenno said not enough troops had been contributed to the force. Only 9,000 of 26,000 planned troops have been deployed so far.

It is the first time the UN has said there could be such a long delay.

About 200,000 people have been killed and two million displaced in five years of conflict in the western province.

The mission - United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid) - has been delayed by obstacles imposed by the Sudanese government, including restrictions on the force's communications and a ban on night flights.

The conflict began in February of 2003 and the UN has, so far, achieved a spiffy acronym for their nonexistent peacekeeping force. Thank heavens the UN has its priorities straight. After all, the Year of the Potato is a much more pressing concern than a bunch of people threatened with something as unimportant as imminent death.

Seriously, why in the world is there any thinking human being who believes the UN is good for anything at all?

Kosovo. Rwanda. Darfur. Burma. Kenya. God help them all. The UN hasn't.

How Much Is Free Health Care Worth?

The true believers in socialized medicine in this country like to hold the British National Health Service up as a role model. Health care, they say, should be "universal" and "free." But what if the universal part applies to the quality of the health care? As in universally bad.

For nine years, Jerome Bartens had to cope with the handicap of being half deaf.

Ever since he was a toddler, the 11-year-old had been unable to hear anything on his right side and doctors said they were unable to help.

Then suddenly the reason for his problems became clear - when the end of a cotton bud popped out of his ear.

His family believe that he must have poked the bud in the ear at the age of two and the tip must have broken off the plastic stem.

The result was that he has always struggled at school, was constantly forced to turn up the volume of the television and music, and became used to everyone shouting at him.

But now he is waking up to a whole world of noise - while his father Carsten is demanding to know why medical experts failed to identify the problem for so long.

This boy was seen by doctors and hearing specialists for years. They never once saw a thing, despite the end of a cotton swab stuck in the boy's ear canal.

So, still think socialized medicine is a great idea? We now have another measure of how much "free" health care is worth.

Not much.

Fly The Friendly Unencumbered Skies

A German travel agency is proudly offering charter flights for a select group of people. The passengers will, as the company puts it, fly "The way God intends it." That would be soaring in the buff.

BERLIN (AFP) - German holidaymakers will be able to indulge their love of naturism by taking to the skies nude on special flights being launched this year, a travel company said on Monday.
 
"In the former East Germany, naturist holidays were a much-loved way of spending the best weeks of the year," said the founder of OssiUrlaub.de, Enrico Hess.

"We want to make that freedom possible above the clouds too."

The flights are aimed specifically at former East Germans, nicknamed "Ossis" in German, who feel nostalgic for the naturism that was authorised and extremely popular under communist rule.

The first nude flights will be a day-trip on July 5 between Erfurt in southeast Germany and the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, which is fringed by white sand beaches.

One hopes the tour operator screens the clientèle carefully. Some unencumbered folks from Southern Illinois might better be avoided. And for heavens sake, don't let any Australians on the plane. Also hope for a lack of turbulence for the flight. One shudders to think of the potential damage a cup of hot coffee could do if the air gets rough.

On a side note, my wife and I went on a cruise a number of years ago and wandered up onto the "clothing optional" sun deck of the ship just to see what was up there. What we found was not exactly anything we would have intentionally sought to view, I can assure you. (I have written once about Europeans at a resort in Florida.) I do not know what language the folks were speaking, it was not English. But an international incident was probably averted when my wife restrained me from pushing them back into the water.

Kenya Deteriorating Rapidly

Murderous violence continues to escalate in Kenya. Tribe on tribe and gang on gang, day by day the death toll is rising.

NAIVASHA, Kenya — Hundreds of Kikuyus wielding stones, sticks, machetes, and wooden planks studded with nails confronted rival tribes Monday on a main road, whooping and wailing for blood as violence from last month's disputed election raged in Kenya's Rift Valley .
 
Having borne the brunt of the violence since the election, Kenya's dominant tribe, the Kikuyu, is fighting back with ferocity.

"I wish they give us just one Luo. I will skin him alive," said a 22-year-old named Edwin, referring to a rival group. He was carrying a two-by-four with nails sticking out, and didn't want to give his last name in case he made good on his threat.

Kenyan police, who've been unable— many Kenyans say unwilling— to calm the tribal tensions in much of the country, fired shots into the air, scattering the mob. But it was clear that the post-election violence has entered a grim new phase of tit-for-tat attacks.

On Sunday, a Kikuyu mob burned several people alive in a home in Naivasha. On Monday, police reported finding another 14 bodies, bringing the two-day death toll to 28, according to Kenyan news reports.

As word of the Naivasha killings spread to the Luo stronghold of Kisumu, 130 miles west, gangs of youths rampaged through the streets Monday, blocking roads with flaming barricades and beating up any Kikuyus they could find. Police shot one man dead, residents said, and news reports said police had killed another in the town of Eldoret.

By nightfall, young Luo men in Kisumu were said to be going door to door in the slums looking to flush out Kikuyus.

"They're going to be doing that all night, terrorizing people," said Hezron McObewa, a doctor. "This is all because of what happened in Naivasha. . . . We're not going to have any Kikuyus left in this town."

Not a good situation. It is made worse by the fact that the incompetent Kofi Annan is supposedly mediating things. Given Annan's track record in Rwanda, that is a world class bad choice.

Hold The Lungs

Unless you happen to be of Scots descent, you may have missed the vast sound of wailing and lamentation on Friday. That was the annual wailing of the haggis, or what some people call "Burns Night." Now the annual celebration of the birth of Robert Burns has been going on for many years but the wailing about the haggis began in 1971. That's when the USDA banned the use of sheep lungs in food.

Thousands of Americans had to make do without the real thing Friday night when they sat down to what should have been a filling meal of boiled sheep's stomach stuffed with minced sheep lung, heart, liver and oatmeal.

Jan. 25 was the 248th anniversary of the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns. (He wrote Auld Lang Syne, among other things.)

It's also the high holy day of haggis-eating worldwide. Thousands of "Burns Night" dinners are held wherever people of Scottish ancestry have landed. These evenings of food, whiskey and song traditionally reach their high point with the ceremonial carrying in of the haggis — preceded by a recitation of Burns' Ode to a Haggis and a bagpiper, if at all possible.

But American lovers of Burns and all things Scottish have had to make do with home-grown approximations for more than 30 years. True Scottish haggis, sheep lungs and all, hasn't been legal to import since 1971, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned the use of lungs in food.

Researchers found "stomach contents, lesions and bacteria" in lungs, says Amanda Eamich of the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service. Since then, the USDA has considered them an adulterated food item.

The mad-cow disease outbreak in the United Kingdom in the 1980s put sheep stomach on the "out" list as well, because sheep get a form of mad cow called scrapie.

Sounds yummy. now you know why all Scots cuisine has the reputation of being based on a dare. But fear not, haggis lovers! USA Today reports that help is on the way!

Until then, they'll have to settle for other versions that are available in the USA. Some butchers make haggis, especially around Burns Night. And the folks at Caledonian Kitchen, a producer of all things Celtic in Lewisville, Texas, are "up to our eyeballs in haggis right now," says manager Jason Summerlin.

The company makes a popular canned haggis. But for this year's Burns Night, it sold 2,000 pounds of haggis in the past three weeks, says owner Jim Walters. Their frozen, 8-pound "presentation haggis" runs $85 plus up to $55 for shipping.

But it's not quite the real thing. Attuned to American tastes, the haggis is stuffed with 100% USDA Choice sirloin beef and beef liver, along with oats and beef suet. The closest they come to a "warm-reekin' rich" haggis, to use Burns' words, is a do-it-yourself haggis stuffing kit — cans of lamb haggis, a casing and instructions on how to steam it yourself. No lungs, though.

Canned, counterfeit haggis? A do-it-yourself haggis kit? What's the world of dare-based cuisine coming to? We here at Blue Crab Boulevard believe we have a solution: gamma radiation! If the haggis is irradiated, it won't matter what's in it! Now, some people will be frightened by the thought of a giant, glowing, radioactive haggis loping about the banquet room in search of a victim. But if enough good Scots whisky is applied beforehand, nobody will notice! Or they'll blame the whisky.

Red Market

Indian Police are working to arrest as many suspects in an illegal kidney transplant ring as they can. Unfortunately, the ringleader, Dr. Amit Kumar, appears to have escaped, possibly by bribing police officials. The police have arrested the doctor at least four times since 1994 when his black market kidney operation was first exposed.

GURGAON/LUCKNOW: Investigators believe that since Dr Amit Kumar had earlier been arrested four times — twice by Mumbai police, once in Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) and once by Delhi Police — he is well aware of the law and if he has fled, arresting him will prove much more difficult this time. "We do not have an extradition treaty with Nepal — hence we cannot directly ask it to hand over an accused wanted by the Indian police. For a person like that to be brought here, there is a lot of paperwork required," said a senior officer.

Twelve teams of Gurgaon police, meanwhile, continued raids across Gurgaon, Faridabad and other adjoining areas which are believed to have been used by the accused doctors. "From the documents we have recovered and from the interrogation of the arrested men it seems that at least 50 more medical and paramedical people might have been involved in the racket," Moradabad SSP Prem Prakash said. A team of Moradabad police has already left for Gurgaon.

Two more people, including the driver of Dr Upender, was detained on Sunday and an Indica car was recovered. Prakash said they were now on the lookout for two more doctors — Satprakash Gupta and Rajesh Gupta — who have been accused once before in a similar racket unearthed at Nizamuddin railway station. The other doctors on the run include Dr Jeevan and Dr Saraj Kumar, who operates an anaesthesia service in east Delhi.

Reuters reports that officials believe the racketeers performed at least 400-500 illegal operations - sometimes taking the kidneys from poor Indians at gunpoint. The "donors" never made more than about $1,200 from the sale of their kidneys, while the doctors made a fortune.

"We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years," Mohinder Lal, Gurgaon's police chief, told the Hindustan Times.

Several people have been arrested, including some doctors, police said.

The case, one of the largest transplant rackets reported in India in recent years, has dominated the country's headlines and sparked calls for the government to tighten regulation of kidney transplants to stop backstreet operations as global demand rises.

"Dr Horror" was how India's Mail Today described the ringleader of the racket in a front-page headline on Monday.

The doctor accused of heading the group may have fled the country, according to police, quoted as saying he appeared to have been tipped off. As many as 50 medical officials may have been involved in the racket.

At least five foreigners — two U.S. and three Greek citizens — were found in a luxury guesthouse operated by the doctor running the racket, Lal was quoted as saying by local media.

Police said they have since been allowed to leave India.

Many victims complained they were taken to the house with promises of a job, and then duped or forced at gunpoint to sell their kidneys.

Laborers, many who gathered every day in parts of Gurgaon to look for any kind of job, were offered around 50,000 rupees ($1,250) for their kidneys. They were sold to wealthy clients for 10 times as much.

I honestly don't know who is more contemptible here. The doctors who victimized the poor or the rich people who bought the stolen kidneys. Both are sickening excuses for human beings.

China In Chaos Due To Snow And Ice

The Chinese government is issuing "red alerts" (ironic, isn't it?) to large areas of the country over expected heavy snowfalls.  (Questionable link broken).

BEIJING, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) — The China Meteorological Administration (CMA) early Monday issued a red alert for severe snowstorms forecast for central and eastern China.

Heavy snow is set to blanket northern Hunan, eastern Hubei, southeastern Henan, northwestern Zhejiang as well as most areas of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces on Monday, while some of these areas will expect snowstorms, according to the CMA.

Meanwhile, freezing rain will pound some parts of Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang.

This is on top of the already existing chaotic conditions caused by the past few weeks of brutal winter weather:

BEIJING, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) — Prolonged snow, rain and cold weather has led to train delays in central and south China and stranded tens of thousands of passengers, in addition to expressway closures, flight cancellations and relocations of people.

A total of 136 electric passenger trains came to a standstill on an artery railway in Hunan Province after the local power supply system was damaged by continuous snow and icy rain.

Technicians and workers with the Guangzhou Railway Group Corp., the operating company, were using more than 100 diesel locomotives to pull the electric locomotives carrying tens of thousands of passengers from a section that suffered a sudden drop in power, a company spokesman said.

About 40,000 passengers were stranded at different stations along the trunk line linking Beijing and Guangzhou in south China, he said. Another 50,000 passengers were delayed at Guangzhou Railway Station.

"We will do our best to resume traffic as soon as possible," he said.

The company had dispatched more than 10,000 technical workers to repair the damaged power lines, and cancelled trains scheduled to depart from Guangzhou Railway Station, especially those bound for Hunan, he said.

It had also ordered the transfer of some trains to other lines and refunds to passengers reduce number of stranded people, he said.

Meanwhile, the company had dispatched workers with almost 10,000 kg of rice, vegetables, meat, edible oil, and 20,000 boxes of instant noodles and drinking water to serve passengers aboard the stranded trains, he said.

There are reports that the Chinese government is deploying riot troops to try to control crowds of stranded passengers in some areas. It's bad over there right now, folks. People are being killed when their houses collapse under the weight of the snow and ice and electricity supplies are severely limited or gone altogether in some areas.

Before that, six people were confirmed dead in buildings that collapsed under the weight of the snow in Hubei and Anhui provinces and nine others died in weather-related traffic accidents in Hubei.

In southwestern Guizhou, power has been cut off in nine counties because of grid damage caused by the freezing rain.

By midday Tuesday, three 500-kV transmission trunk cables and 25 smaller lines were out of operation with serious damage, according to the Guizhou Power Grid Company.

The company had stopped supplying electricity to seven high energy-consuming industries and had imposed limits on other industries to ensure power for homes, government buildings and hospitals, said Chao Jian, deputy general manager of the company.

One hopes Al Gore stays away from China. They can't take much more of this.

Fan Mail From Some Flounder

Life imitates Bullwinkle and Rocky. A letter written 15 years ago by a Japanese schoolgirl has just turned up. Or been pulled up, as the case may be. The letter was found attached to a fish caught by a Japanese fisherman.

TOKYO (AFP) - A letter that a young girl in Japan sent into the sky in a balloon some 15 years ago has been found on a fish hauled from 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) below the Pacific.
 
A fisherman found the still legible piece of paper sitting on a sticky flatfish in his catch on Thursday, along with a torn-off string and the fragment of a red balloon.

He opened the folded paper, discovering it was a handwritten letter from a six-year-old girl at an elementary school in Kawasaki, 150 kilometres (93 miles) away from where the fish was caught off Choshi port.

The sender, Natsumi Shirahige, and her friends released letters as part of events to mark the school's 120th anniversary, which was in 1993.

"Our school is 120 years old… If you pick up this letter, please write to me," the letter reads, listing the school's address.

Obviously, the Animal Uprising™ is sending fishy letter thieves to steal our mail. Oh sure, it could be some finned entrepreneur trying to set up a trout mail system, but we suspect it is just the animal overlords. On the bright side, people who are behind on their bills now have a fresh, new excuse! "The check's in the mahi mahi."

Bush To Hit Earmarks With Executive Order

The wording of this story does not make it completely clear, but it appears that President Bush will issue an executive order directing Federal agencies to ignore earmarks that are air dropped into a conference bill and not explicitly voted on. The muddy part is whether it applies to the just-passed porkathon spending bills. It does not appear to.

In his State of the Union address tonight, Bush will promise to “veto any spending bill that does not succeed in cutting earmarks in half from 2008 levels,'' deputy press secretary Ton Fratto said in an e-mail.

Bush will issue an executive order tomorrow directing federal agencies to ignore any future earmarks included only in committee reports, not in the text of legislation.

Bush will say that if spending for such projects is warranted, then “Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote,'' Fratto said.

The wording makes it appear to be a half a loaf victory for those of us against earmarks. But even if it only applies to future spending, it is certainly better than what has been going on in recent years.

From Asset To Liability

Even the Guardian isn't impressed with Bill Clinton at the moment. Their American editor, Michael Tomasky, thinks the Clintons have some explaining to do in the next few days.

Think about it. A former president, who knows the inner workings of government intimately, would be back in the White House. He may have no official title or role. Yet he would, it's fair to assume, be deeply enmeshed in both politics and policy.

To what extent would this constitute a co-presidency? Writing in the New York Times on Saturday, Garry Wills noted that America's founders had wrestled with just this question and decided executive power had to be invested in one person for the sake of holding that person accountable. Wills - who has written glowingly about Hillary in the past - directly compared Bill's possible role to the one being played now by Dick Cheney and concluded that "it does not seem to be a good idea to put another co-president in the White House".

It has long been assumed - more conventional wisdom - that Bill as co-president was another huge plus, especially for Democratic voters. But suddenly even sympathetic observers like Wills are exploring the darker penumbras of that question. And with Bill having raised millions of dollars for his library from undisclosed donors - some of whom would surely have business with the federal government, as Frank Rich noted in his Sunday New York Times column - these explorations are likely to mount over the next 10 days.

It leaves me very curious not only as to how Hillary Clinton will address her husband's role in the coming days, but how Obama will as well.

While Tomasky isn't sure whether Obama or the media will begin asking the tough questions, he is pretty sure someone will. Where did Bill Clinton get money for his library from? Who made donations? Which of those donors does business with the Federal government? And what access or favors are expected in return? What is Bill's role in the White House going to be should Hillary win?

Important questions, indeed. Ones you can expect to be asked if Clinton gets the nod. If not sooner.

Money For Nothing

It really isn't surprising that the House of Representatives manages to throw away taxpayer's money buying nothing at all. What is unusual is that even the Washington Post isn't buying the explanation of what was "purchased" with the money. They point out that the "carbon offsets" the Democratic leadership of the House purchased bought nothing at all.

The House of Representatives has presumably learned that money cannot buy love or happiness. Now, it turns out it's not a sure solution to climate guilt, either.

In November, the Democratic-led House spent about $89,000 on so-called carbon offsets. This purchase was supposed to cancel out greenhouse-gas emissions from House buildings — including half of the U.S. Capitol — by triggering an equal reduction in emissions elsewhere.

Some of the money went to farmers in North Dakota, for tilling practices that keep carbon buried in the soil. But some farmers were already doing this, for other reasons, before the House paid a cent.

Other funds went to Iowa, where a power plant had been temporarily rejiggered to burn more cleanly. But that test project had ended more than a year before the money arrived.

The House's purchase provides a view into the confusing world of carbon offsets, a newly popular commodity with few rules. Analysts say some offsets really do cause new reductions in pollution. But others seem to change very little.

To environmentalists, the House's experience is a powerful lesson about a market where pure intentions can produce murky results.

"It didn't change much behavior that wasn't going to happen anyway," said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who writes a blog calling for more aggressive action on climate change. "It just, I think, demonstrated why offsets are controversial and possibly pointless. . . . This is a waste of taxpayer money."

The farmers in question were already using no-till farming techniques because of other factors:

About $14,500 of the House's money went to the North Dakota Farmers Union, some to pay farmers to do "no-till" farming. The farmers stopped using conventional plows and instead make tiny slits to plant their seeds. The practice increases the amount of carbon, a component in heat-trapping carbon dioxide, kept in the soil. But organizers said that some farmers had started the practice before the offset money came in because it saves fuel, brings in federal soil-conservation funds and could increase crop yields.

Even environmentalists are crying foul on this, you'll notice. So are some members of the House. Had the money been spent on additional energy efficiency improvements, there would have been real results from the expenditures. Instead, they spent money and got nothing in return.

And, of course, the money they spent happens to be ours, not their own.