With the Bush administration's reshaping of the U.S. Supreme Court, legislators in at least five states are proposing bold anti-abortion measures with a goal of challenging Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that ensured a woman’s right to an abortion.

Despite recent national polls indicating that a majority of Americans do not want abortion to be outlawed, lawmakers in at least five states -- Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee -- have offered bills that seek to ban all abortions, except when the woman’s life is in danger.

[W]e have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.

My husband, Martin Luther King Jr., once said, "We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny…an inescapable network of mutuality. [...] I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be." Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life, morality is never upheld by legalized murder.

Acting in the "immediate aftermath" of the hurricane, [Department of] Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were "immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance," according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other land that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.

Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, teams specially trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.

Ultimately, many Fish and Wildlife teams did travel to the Gulf and assisted in the rescues of more than 4,500 people -- but they were "never formally tasked" for that assignment by FEMA, the document states.

The most interesting Bush family involvement is with Enron. Over the twentieth-century emergence of modern government ethics, no presidential family has had a parallel relationship. [...]However, the only way a chronicler can seriously weigh the Enron-Bush tie is by a yardstick the American press has never really employed: the unseemliness of a sixteen- or seventeen-year interaction by the members of an American political dynasty in promoting and being rewarded by a single U.S. corporation based in its home state. [...]

Most of the Washington press corps has been content to leave alone the much larger story—the apparent seventeen-year connection between the Bush dynasty and Enron. Even without such information, it seems clear, counting campaign contributions, consultancies, joint investments, deals, presidential library and inaugural contributions, speech fees and the like, that the Bush family and entourage collected some $8 million to $10 million from Enron over the years, which is more than changed hands in Harding's Teapot Dome scandal. Depending on some still-unclear relationships, it could be as high as $25 million.

DALLAS - Exxon Mobil Corp. posted record profits for any U.S. company on Monday — $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter and $36.13 billion for the year — as the world's biggest publicly traded oil company benefited from high oil and gas prices and demand for refined products. The results exceeded Wall Street expectations and Exxon shares rose nearly 3 percent in morning trading. (AP, 1/30/06)

DALLAS - Halliburton Co. said Friday it plans to sell a minority stake in its engineering and construction unit KBR, which has generated enormous controversy over how it has become the largest U.S. contractor in Iraq. Halliburton shares rose nearly 5 percent ... The KBR unit posted $3 billion in overall revenue in the fourth quarter. (AP, 1/27/06)

NEW YORK - By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy, according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll this week [...] By 47 percent to 22 percent, the public says the country is worse off economically since Bush became president. [...] The failure of incomes to keep pace with the economy, as well as high energy prices -- especially for gasoline -- also are undermining consumer optimism, said Roger Altman, who was deputy Treasury secretary under Democratic President Bill Clinton. (Bloomberg, 1/27)

WASHINGTON - The economy grew at only a 1.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year, the slowest pace in three years, amid belt-tightening by consumers facing spiraling energy costs. [...] The White House acknowledged the economy's fourth-quarter slowdown was bigger than expected. (CBS/AP, 1/27)

WASHINGTON - A US government audit has found that US-led occupation authorities squandered tens of millions of dollars earmarked for rebuilding Iraq through undocumented spending and outright fraud. Auditors recommend criminal charges in some cases and in others ask the US ambassador to recoup the money. (The Herald, 1/30)

NEW YORK - Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the U.S.-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, according to a U.S. oversight agency. Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraqi water and sanitation will be finished, along with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, according to the report released Thursday. (New York Times, 1/27)

The chief mourners of Enron’s demise — apart from the investors and workers that it deceived — are the legions of lobbyists and politicians whom Enron fed. Enron spent $10.2 million in the last two election cycles (1997 through 2000) influencing Washington politicians. During this period, Enron moved $1,003,273 to Texas PACs and state candidates, as well as spending up to $4.8 million on 89 Texas lobby contracts.

Last year the Center for Public Integrity identified Enron as the single largest patron of George W. Bush’s political career. A frequent flier on Enron corporate jets, Bush received $774,100 from Enron’s PAC and executives — including $312,500 for his two gubernatorial campaigns.³

Bush’s greatest gubernatorial gifts to Enron were:

• Deregulating state electric markets in 1999;
• Indulging “grandfathered air polluters;” and
• Laws protecting businesses from lawsuits.

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

Of those 380, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports, "33% of the identified victims in the city are white and 67% black."

Study: Katrina hit black areas hardest
Friday, January 27, 2006

By KAREN BROOKS / The Dallas Morning News

The areas of New Orleans that suffered the worst of Hurricane Katrina were home to 80 percent of its black population, university researchers said Thursday – underscoring the difficulties in the city's struggle to rebuild while preserving its cultural and racial heritage. [...]

The study, one of the most concrete profiles of Katrina victims to come out since the storm, cross-referenced the damaged areas with census tracts and found that the damaged areas had higher concentrations of residents who were black, poor, or renting their homes than did the undamaged areas. The results closely match a similar study done recently by the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper.

The outrage of the week comes from a presentation from an executive with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina to a legislative committee studying the cost of health insurance. BCBSNC Vice President John Friesen told the committee that lifestyle is the biggest driver of rising health care costs.

Friesen listed obesity, tobacco use and depression as the major cost items in the lifestyle category and said that 7 of the top ten prescription drugs that Blue Cross pays for are related to lifestyle.

Apparently, Blue Cross believes that mental illness is a lifestyle choice. People can choose to exercise and they can choose not to be mentally ill. That may come as surprising news to individuals and families devastated by mental illness, including depression. Folks should just choose to feel better, just like they should choose not to be poor.

WASHINGTON - Property owners would face higher flood insurance premiums and more of them would have to have the coverage under proposals a congressional committee discussed Wednesday to reform the bankrupt National Flood Insurance Program.

The chairman of the Senate banking committee also said the debt - more than $23 billion - the flood insurance program is expected to rack up because of Hurricane Katrina may never be paid back to the U.S. Treasury, making it a taxpayer bailout.

[..]

The debate is likely to involve arguments over whether higher insurance premiums would sting wealthy owners of beach homes who have not been paying their fair share for flood coverage, and whether higher premiums would be a further burden on working families who live full time in flood-prone areas and can't afford to pay more.

"Should we as public policymakers look at the people who are least likely and able to buy something because of their economic situation, as opposed to some of the very wealthy that have second or third homes and they're getting a ride, so to speak?" Shelby said. "A lot of people are probably getting a free ride.

"Should we continue to subsidize building in hurricane-, flood-prone areas? Should the taxpayers pay for that? That's one of the policy questions we'll have to answer here."

[..]

Historically, the flood insurance program has paid back its loans with interest. Since Katrina, however, Congress has increased its borrowing authority to $18.5 billion and a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official said he expects that money to run out by Feb. 10.

ATLANTA - Data warehouser ChoicePoint Inc. said Thursday it is close to a settlement of a Federal Trade Commission investigation of a major data breach at the company that will include a civil penalty, as it reported a more than 29 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit.

[..]

The Alpharetta, Ga.-based company, which had revealed last year that its massive database of consumer information was accessed by thieves, also said the settlement will include establishment of a fund to be administered by the FTC for consumer redress initiatives and completion of certain customer credentialing activities.

The company, which also is the subject of a pending Securities and Exchange Commission probe, said it does not admit to any wrongdoing in the FTC probe. It did not specify the amount of the penalty, but an FTC announcement could come later Thursday.

[..]

Stock trades by Curling and Derek Smith, ChoicePoint's chief executive officer, are being investigated by the SEC. Curling and Smith made a combined $16.6 million in profit in the months after the company learned of the data breach and before the breach was made public.

[..]

The data breach involved thieves posing as small business customers who gained access to ChoicePoint's database, possibly compromising the personal information of 145,000 Americans. The company discovered the breach more than four months before disclosing it to the public. ChoicePoint has said authorities asked it to keep the information secret initially.

Authorities say at least 750 people were defrauded in the scam that has fueled consumer advocates' calls for federal oversight of the loosely regulated data-brokering business. The company also is a defendant in several lawsuits and complaints arising from the breach, and several government agencies are investigating.

[..]

ChoicePoint collects data on individuals, including Social Security numbers, real estate holdings and current and former addresses. It has about 19 billion records, and its customers include insurance companies, financial institutions and federal, state and local agencies.

In 2004, the last go-round at deleting the racist provisions from the Constitution went by the extremely pedestrian name of Amendment 2. After it lost by 1,846 votes, a better handle would have been The Tennessee-Florida-Georgia-Mississippi Tourism Improvement Act.

Perhaps whether a national organization books a convention in Alabama does not hinge on the state’s inability to remove the hate speech from its Constitution, but it most certainly cannot help.

Yet, what we’re hearing from Montgomery is the same tired arguments that confused the debate last time. Removing a 1956 amendment, opponents say, would allow a judge to unilaterally raise taxes to better fund Alabama schools.

Do we really want to go here again?

The 1956 amendment, records and media accounts from the time show, was written as a reaction to the 1954 Supreme Court order to integrate public schools. Alabamians riled by the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision approved an amendment telling any public school that the Legislature reserved the right to pull government funding if it got the notion to obey the high court’s order.

[..]

It’s way past time for the state to remove this foul-smelling dead letter from its governing document. Both the Democrats who don’t want to talk about it this session and the Republicans who want to only partially edit racist language owe Alabamians an explanation. Either put forth the amendment as offered in 2004 or explain why you won’t.

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. [...]

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office.

Revelations this week that House Speaker Jim Black slipped a provision into the state budget last session to pay for a road project in Mecklenburg County are troubling, but not surprising.

The provision called for $6 million to widen a road to encourage development of a controversial shopping center. The road was not requested by local officials and did not come out of any transportation planning process. No legislative committee debated the proposal. It was simply inserted into the 300-page budget bill at the last minute.

Black admits that he put the road project in the budget after discussions with the developer of the shopping center and a lawyer for Belk, the large retain chain based in Charlotte that will have a store at the new complex.

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response. [...]

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. [...]

[E]ven Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, objected when administration officials who were not part of the president's staff said they could not testify about communications with the White House.

"I completely disagree with that practice," Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview Tuesday.

The slow repopulation of the city picked up speed after the holidays as more schools reopened and, in the words of one emergency room doctor, the sicker people began to return. But only seven of what had been 15 adult acute-care facilities in the city and three surrounding parishes are open, and only one-third of the acute-care beds.

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of doctors and nurses never returned to New Orleans after the flood; long-term and psychiatric hospitals, not to mention hospices and rehabilitation centers, are now almost nonexistent in and around the city.

As a result, the returning residents have filled the functioning hospitals in and immediately around the city to capacity and beyond. Waiting times in emergency rooms have extended to as much as six hours, medical personnel at three hospitals reported.

Early one recent morning, doctors and nurses at East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie, just outside of New Orleans, were already caring for five seriously ill or injured patients in the emergency room - because the hospital had no more beds to admit them to - while still managing a full load of incoming emergency patients near the entrance. Then two trauma victims from a car accident were brought in, followed by someone showing signs of appendicitis.

Housing has been an issue throughout New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane and its subsequent flooding. The sorts of housing that one finds in New Orleans run the breadth of American urban housing spectrum in terms of wealth from antebellum mansions to middle-class bungalows, from public housing to shotgun houses, from modern high rises to the oldest of Creole townhouses. The very fact that these houses exist is a testament that memory and cultural traditions are important to New Orleans residents, but also as a testament that poverty shapes a cultural landscape as readily as wealth. Therefore the sort of housing that the poor or those who remember poverty occupy might only be the sorriest of public housing projects, or, in the case of New Orleans, important vernacular [ed. note: "folk architecture"] houses that provide shelter and act as markers of identity on that cultural landscape.

Under the pall of a disaster, these houses do not serve to insulate their residents from the dissonance and disorder that follows. These houses ability to beam their cultural significance out to the world fails as quickly as their forms that do not protect them from flooding fail. The everyday quality of their existence is not enough to insulate them from their vulnerability. What is readily known about them becomes ambiguous. They become ‘death traps’ not shelters. They become ‘rooftops’ not ‘double galleries.’ They become ‘shells’ not structures. When their everyday, practical reality becomes ambiguous and (dis)order becomes the reality of a flooded neighborhood, how that (dis)order and its attendant reordering of the landscape plays out might be the subject of reinterpreting and recasting what that everyday life was like.

When the geography of a place is known so well, it is easily assumed that order can return in a fairly well understood and normal way. The people who remain or return would easily recognize the everyday aspects of the place they call home, but the wholly ambiguous nature of a disaster combined with the subjectivity of its victims can render this view of a place not so much impossible, but so utterly changed that what is similar to what existed before might not be so easily seen. The point here is that no place where people live goes unchanged by a disaster. The everyday cannot return to way it was ever. But, in the case of New Orleans, everyday life can be recapture to re-empower people who have been rendered subject to the haze of the disaster.

Recent scholarship directly calls for the wealth of materialist feminist knowledge to start speaking directly to women in everyday situations using language that facilitates and eases the communication between subjects (Pratt 2004). This is not expressly a talking down to people who are not trained feminist scholars, but a talking across to people who share uncertainties about the world and are ill served by power/knowledge relationships guided by masculinist agendas.

If a subversion of how reconstruction occurs in New Orleans using an optic guided by feminist approaches to knowledge then a clearer portrait of what is at stake for the very landscape itself. If only the measured and presumed rational voices that make plans and govern accordingly are only heard then the reality for the vernacular landscape is this: a reordering where those whose identities are bound up in that vernacular landscape by virtue of the houses through which they speak will cleave to those whose intent is to speak not of cultural process but of cultural desire. The African-American landscape of New Orleans will disappear into the well-appointed pied-a-terres of well heeled interlopers. The ground gained and so tentatively held in these neighborhoods and the markers of that territory will be lost to a reterritorialization by those who don’t desire their culture, but desire their beauty. Possibly this optic of everyday life guided by feminist voices could offer a way to keep some measure of the past in the hands of those
who wrought it.

A mass migration to higher ground would appear to make sense—and not just because nobody wants a repeat of last summer's disaster. For the foreseeable future, New Orleans will be a smaller city. The city's population, which rose above 600,000 in the mid-1960s, had declined to about 462,000 before Katrina emptied the town. The mayor's commission puts the current figure at 144,000, but expects the population to be only 247,000 by 2008.

Even before the hurricane, city agencies struggled to fight crime, mow grass and keep streets and waterpipes in working order. After losing much of its tax base, New Orleans may be too broke to provide services over the same geographical area. The cost of subsidising services for a few foolhardy souls could be better spent in potentially viable neighbourhoods. Most urban planners insist that the city must write off some areas for the rest to survive.

Here, however, logic runs into principle and racial politics. Many politicians feel queasy about violating the property rights of individual householders, some of whom are determined to return to their homes come what may. There are also accusations of racism. Most of the city's highest neighbourhoods are also its oldest, wealthiest and whitest. There are some exceptions—Lakeview, a rich white area, and Eastover, a rich black one, were both hit hard—but, in general, plans to shrink the city's size could mean the end of a lot of poor black neighbourhoods.

At the halfway mark between the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina last year and the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season on June 1, the Army Corps of Engineers has completed only 16 percent of its planned repairs to New Orleans's battered flood protection system, according to corps representatives.

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. [...]

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"- tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering
operation code-named TALON - short for Threat and Local Observation Notice - that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." [...]

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the
Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why
the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention [...]

[T]here are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

With Congress in recess, a steady procession of federal lawmakers has toured the Gulf Coast over the last two weeks.

But the recent rash of visits isn't good enough for members of the Mississippi and Louisiana delegations, who say their colleagues can't fathom the scope of the devastation unless they see it for themselves.

Thirty senators have visited New Orleans since the storm, according to a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. A tally this week by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans found that 44 of 435 House members had been to the city.

That's a far cry from the number that visited New York after the Sept. 11 attacks, said U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.

"When 9/11 happened, you had to beat members of Congress off with a stick from going to New York City," Melancon said. "What's the difference (with New Orleans? It's a major city we need to save."

U.S. regulators will likely hold a public hearing on Wal-Mart's controversial application to open a bank before a final decision is made, the supervisory agency told lawmakers in a letter this week.

The application drew more than 1,500 comments from the public and more than 90 requests for hearings, Gruenberg said in the letter.

The heightened interest in Wal-Mart's bank application should come as no surprise given the opposition the retail giant has attracted in recent years, some Washington lobbyists and congressional sources say.

The company faces increasing opposition from labor groups, environmentalists and others who accuse it of paying poor wages and benefits, gobbling up green space and pressuring suppliers to lower prices.