The Bush administration has been unable to muster even half the 2,500 National Guardsmen it planned to have on the Mexican border by the end of June, officials in the border states said.

But the head of the National Guard Bureau disputed that tally and said the goal would be met by today.

As of Thursday, fewer than 1,000 troops were in place, according to military officials in Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona.

President Bush's plan called for all 50 states to send troops. But only 10 states, including the four border states, have signed commitments. Some state officials have argued that they cannot free up Guardsmen because of flooding in the East, wildfires in the West or the prospect of hurricanes in the South.

Texas Icehouses. Part town hall, part tavern, icehouses have been a South Texas tradition since the 1920s. Before refrigeration, icehouses stored and distributed block ice for the neighborhood iceboxes.

Over time, they diversified-- iced beer, a little food, maybe some groceries -- a cool, air-conditioned spot where neighbors and families come to sit, talk, play dominoes, turn up the juke box, maybe eat some chicken wings, dance on the slab outside. No two are alike -- Sanchez', Acapulco, Dos Hermanas, Stanley's, La Tuna, The Beer Depot, The Texan.

Once a vital part of everyday local culture -- a cornerstone of every neighborhood in San Antonio and Houston -- they are rapidly diminishing, an endangered species. The Kitchen Sisters take us on a journey into this Mexican-German-Tejano-Anglo tradition.

Prospects for a swift renewal of the Voting Rights Act faded on Thursday as lawmakers called for new congressional hearings on the landmark civil rights law first approved in 1965.

The House leadership had expected an easy 25-year extension of the act last week but southern Republicans rebelled, objecting that their states would be subjected to special scrutiny based on the legacy of discrimination from the 1960s.

"That is an argument that came out in 1963, 1964, and 1965. If it's good enough for the Southern States, then it's good enough for all 50 states. But all 50 states don't have a problem. In New York, it might be a certain county," but the greatest trends of discrimination persist in the US South, Rep. Lewis said.

"There's a long, rich history of gerrymandering, redistricting mid-census, done primarily for political reasons, to dilute power or influence of African Americans' votes in several Congressional districts," Rep. Lewis said.

Last night, the US House defeated an amendment which would have stripped the VRA of requiring funds for the USDOJ to ensure multilingual ballots and multilingual elections assistance, Rep. Lewis told Atlanta Progressive News.

"I call that a modern day literacy test," Rep. Lewis said, adding it was voted down by all Democrats plus 61 Republicans.

ON MEDIA REACTION: "What do we make of his unmistakable impulse to worry more about injustice to the white boys than to the woman who says they raped her? To imply that rich white athletes are unsafe in the North Carolina legal system is like saying the Pope can't get a fair trial in Vatican City."

ON LESSONS LEARNED BY THE STUDENTS: "One is about transactions involving sex and money, and the stupidity of imagining that the one who sells surrenders more dignity or moral currency than the one who buys. A race factor compounds the bitterness of this lesson, which many men never learn. But the great lesson they should have learned, if they're able to learn at all, is one that might make them better men and better citizens than the ones they would have become if no charges had ever been filed. It's a lesson learned too late by most children of privilege, blinkered well into adulthood by the myth of the affluent middle class--the myth that elite lives proceed smoothly from triumph to triumph with nothing but glory down the road. But the awful, class-blind truth--ask Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler, at the top of his world on Monday, unemployed and invisible on Thursday--is that we live our lives with one foot on the banana peel, on the well-oiled roller skate. How quickly fortunes change, how very quickly it can all slip away."

ON CAMPUS PRIORITIES: "[W]e read that a new contract for the women's basketball coach at Tennessee has pushed UT's budget for two basketball coaches and a football coach past $4 million, enough to hire a whole new faculty and buy half of them new cars. Of course that's chump change to Duke's Coach K--not just a coach, his commercial says, but "a leader." In lieu of leading, the great coach seems to have retreated to an underground bunker with his image engineers, afraid or disinclined to say a word about the scandal that has substantially devalued the turf he rules by divine right, as Duke presidents come and go. ("He's not the power behind the throne; he sits on the only throne there is," said one disenchanted professor.) My god, what if some blue-chip basketball recruit, intimidated by a school so tough that even the lacrosse team commits felonies, should switch to a safer campus like Stanford or Syracuse?"

ON THE DEFENSE SPIN: "Compassion begins with the woman who says she was raped. The shock-and-awe media campaign against her credibility, like those attacks on the district attorney for election-year grandstanding, is the handiwork of defense attorneys on fat retainers. (As were those pro-Duke columns by David Brooks and his Times colleague Nicholas Kristof, which recycled stale spin the defense ladled up two months ago.) They're just doing their job, which isn't always a pretty one. If you feel a compulsion to believe them, you're the one who might catch a glimpse of your inner racist in the mirror."

ON VALUES: "The 18-to-34-year-olds, who made a megamillionaire of the creepy sex ghoul Howard Stern--so much for respecting women--grew up with Jerry Springer, shock jocks, the World Wrestling Federation, Paris Hilton and Ann Coulter. Archaic nouns like shame, dignity and integrity make rare appearances in their vocabulary. Their appetite for "reality" television embraces the most repugnant role models: even Donald Trump, without an atom of shame or a single glowing neuron in his baroquely thatched head, glaring truculently from the duck blind of his personal foliage like a silly crib toy that thinks it's a wolverine. (Do young people understand that all the money in the world doesn't make a jackass less laughable?) But the values these shows advertise -- a feral Darwinian struggle to prevail, to exploit any advantage and vault gleefully over the bodies of the fallen -- are values common to Enron and Al Qaeda."

Stuck with roughly 650 aging laptops and PCs, Publix Super Markets Inc. wasn't eager to toss them in the landfill or dump them on just any unsuspecting charity.

With the help of United Way and Microsoft, the machines have been refurbished, loaded with new software and distributed in recent months to dozens of Central Florida nonprofit groups with limited means.

Twenty-five PCs went to Girls Inc. of Lakeland, where the machines were instantly put to use for summer computer camps.

[..]

Other machines went to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Central Florida Speech and Hearing Center, the Learning Resource Center, Volunteers in Service to the Elderly and other Polk nonprofits.

Outdated computers often aren't worth the hassle or expense of having them upgraded, which is what made the Publix and Microsoft partnership so special, said Kay Fields, executive director of Girls Inc.

"It's better than what we had," she said. "It's a win-win situation for everybody."

Employees of Lakeland-based Publix spent months installing the software and delivering and setting up the computers on their own time, said company spokeswoman Shannon Patten.

"There's such a spirit of giving within Publix. It's part of our culture," she said. "This is the first time we've partnered with someone like Microsoft to make the contribution so much more impactful."

The values of this supermarket chain, which operates more than 800 stories in five southeastern states, were shaped by its founder, George W. Jenkins, who began with a single store in Winter Haven, Fla., in 1930. Jenkins, known as "Mr. George" until his death in 1996, believed in customer service, charitable giving and sharing the wealth of his business with his workers, known as associates.

With more than $19 billion in revenues last year, Publix is one of the largest and fastest-growing employee-owned businesses in the nation. "This is a company where cashiers can retire as millionaires," says spokeswoman Maria Brous. The company gives generously to local nonprofits, and organizes its associates and customers to donate to national charities such as the Special Olympics.

I was asked this afternoon by a large body of media: Is this the most important thing the Senate could be doing at this time? I can tell you: You’re darned right it is.

Today, the United States Senate - supposedly the greatest deliberative body in the greatest representative democracy on the planet - spent its precious time having a heated debate over whether to amend the Constitution for the first time in a generation so as to ban flag burning. The U.S. House last year spent its precious time on the same issue.

Regardless of how one feels about this issue, the admission of irresponsibility inherent in Congress spending time on this issue is truly historic ... The U.S. Congress and cynical pundits and political operatives in Washington are polluting our country's political discourse with a debate over flag burning at the very same time that:

- The American Journal of Public Health reports more than 1,700 African Americans die each week because they don't have the same access to health care as other Americans.

- The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 110 workers die each week in workplace fatalities - many of which could be prevented by better enforcement of basic workplace laws by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (which is being gutted by budget cuts).

- The Pentagon reports roughly 15 American soldiers die each week in Iraq.

- The Institute of Medicine reports 346 Americans die each week because they lack health insurance.

- The Environmental Working Group reports that 192 Americans die each week because of exposure to asbestos.

Pending Double-Execution Reveals Inherent Flaws in Tennessee's Death Penalty System
by Anna Thompson

Nashville: In the past forty-six years, the state of Tennessee has executed only one man. Now, in one day, it plans to execute two. Both Sedley Alley and Paul Dennis Reid are scheduled to die in the early morning of June 28th and both cases reveal critical flaws in Tennessee’s broken death penalty system.

"This double execution unquestionably reveals more flaws with Tennessee’s administration of the death penalty," said Randy Tatel, Executive Director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK). "In the Alley case, we have a 20-year old unreliable conviction where the state is so afraid of the truth that it refuses to release physical evidence for DNA testing. In the case of Paul Reid, we are preparing to execute a severely mentally ill, delusional individual. It shows, yet again, that Tennessee’s death penalty system is broken."

In an annual report on child well-being issued today, North Carolina ranks 41st among the 50 states. In 10 key indicators, the state did not break into the top half of the rankings.

The report, the 2006 Kids Count Data Book, issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, looks at a number of health and welfare categories, including number of children in poverty; single-parent homes, without health insurance; infant, child and teen death rates; and the number of low-birthweight babies.

[..]

North Carolina, which was 40th in the 2005 report, improved in five of the 10 key indicators: infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen birth rate, percent of teens (ages 16 to 19) who are high school dropouts and percent of teens who are not in school and not working. Still, all were in the bottom half of the national rankings.

Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi ranked worse than North Carolina in today’s report, which is based on data from 2003 and 2004.

The state’s teen death rate got worse, as did the percentage of children in single-parent families and the percentage of children in poverty. The percentage of children whose parents don’t have secure employment remained steady at 35.

[..]

Advocates agree that poverty is at the root of the problem — 22 percent of the state’s children lived in poverty in 2004, up 16 percent from 2000.

After years of hovering among the bottom two or three states, the latest statistics from the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual survey show Alabama jumping from 48th place among the 50 states to No. 43.

The state improved in the four areas: high school dropout rate; number of idle teens; number of teens having babies; and infant mortality rate. The high school dropout rate improved by 46 percent. Alabama moved from 40th to 20th in the nation from 2000 to 2004, the latest year for which statistics are available. The number of teens not in school or working fell from 13 to 8 percent.

The teen birth rate improved by 15 percent, with 52 out of every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 giving birth in 2003 compared to 61 births per 1,000 girls in 2000. That places Alabama 40th in the nation compared to 44th in 2000. The infant mortality rate improved by 7 percent, with 8.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2003 as opposed to 9.4 in 2000.

[..]

Despite the good news, Alabama's children are poorer, with 23 percent living in poverty in 2004. That's 10 percent worse than in 2000, reflecting a national trend in which more people are living below the poverty line. The national average of children living in poverty in 2004 was 18 percent, up from 17 percent in 2000.

Children in Tennessee are more likely to die, drop out of school and live in poverty than kids living almost anywhere else in the country, according to an annual report released today on the health of the nation's youth.

Tennessee was ranked 46th for the overall well-being of its children by the nonprofit Kids Count project. The findings are based on how each state performs in 10 categories that reflect health, social, education and economic welfare.

[..]

Tennessee did not perform better than the national average in any of the 10 categories on which it was judged. And it dropped three slots in the overall rankings this year — from 43rd to 46th.

[..]

Still, the state performed worse than at least 40 others in five of the 10 areas. Its best rating — 29th — was for the percentage of parents who work full time. Yet, the state ranked 36th for the percentage of children living in poverty.

"What that tells me is that even though there are a lot of parents in the work force, they are not necessarily making enough to support their families," Brown said. "There are a lot of working poor in the state."

Tennessee continues to have its worst showing in the area of infant mortality. The state ranks 47th in that category, tied with Louisiana and surpassing only Mississippi and Delaware.

[..]

Kids Count rated New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut as the top performers in the nation. The only states ranked below Tennessee were South Carolina, New Mexico, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Georgia has slipped in a national ranking of child well-being.

The state ranked 44th in the nation this year, compared to 39th last year in the Kids Count Data Book, which is produced by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

[..]

…Georgia reported a 17 percent increase from 2000 to 2004 in the number of children under 18 living in poverty. The number of children in Georgia living in families where neither parent has full-time, year-round employment also increased.

A new report paints a dismal picture of children's well-being in Mississippi.

The 2006 KidsCount Databook, an annual report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, ranks Mississippi at the bottom or close to the bottom in comparison to the rest of the country in 10 different indicators of child well-being.

Those indicators are: low-birthweight babies, infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate, teen birth rate, high school dropout rate, percent of teens not working or attending school, percent of children living in homes where parent has no regular employment, children in poverty and children in single-parent families.

Though the state did experience some improvement in five of the 10 categories, in only two categories -decreases in the high school dropout rate and in the child death rate -did Mississippi outstrip the national average, still placing well behind most states in the country.

And in the percentage of children living in poverty, the number of low-birthweight babies born and the infant mortality rate, Mississippi ranked dead last.

Kentucky has a poor ranking in an annual survey of children's well-being and experts said it's because of pervasive childhood poverty and a chronic high-school dropout problem.

Kentucky ranked 42nd among the 50 states in the 2006 Kids Count report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Kentucky also ranked 42nd last year.

The state's rankings for 2005 and this year are the worst overall showings for the state in the 17 years the analysis has been published.

[..]

Kentucky improved in four areas - infant mortality, teen death rate, teen birth rate and the percent of teens not in school and not working, according to the report, which used state data from 2003 and 2004.

Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn't there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn't have failed if he bore no responsibility.

The response to Hurricane Katrina -- rather, the lack of response -- was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen's lives. This response was not about Bush's incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.

Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives' golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes -- based on recognizing global warming -- were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.

Eastern and western North Carolina would benefit the most from a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage. About 5% of workers in eastern North Carolina and 4% of workers in the far western part of the state would see a bump up in wages, compared to about 3% of workers in most of the piedmont.

Predatory lenders are targeting young military families, entrapping them in lending schemes that strip them of their hard-earned pay at annual interest rates of 400 percent and higher. One in five active-duty military personnel were payday borrowers last year. Predatory payday lending costs these military families over $80 million in abusive lending fees every year.

At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.

The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

In the same period, at least 2,520 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

US bosses earn an average $11m per year, representing a salary 262 times the average worker's.

The average worker's annual earning was just below $42,000, showed findings from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think-tank.

Chief executives made more money in one working day than an average worker made in a year, the research showed.

The gap is the second biggest in 40 years. In 1965 bosses were earning just 24 times the average worker's pay.

The only time this year's figure was beaten was in 2000, when the ratio hit 300.

Back in 1965, the heads of major US firms earned 24 times more than the average worker.

Buoyed by the success of a program for appellate court candidates, campaign reform advocates urged lawmakers Wednesday to approve a similar voluntary public finance pilot for four legislative races in 2008.

Under the bill recommended by the House, candidates in the races who agree to fundraising restrictions from outside contributors would qualify to receive $50,000 to run for a House seat and $75,000 for a Senate seat. Additional "rescue funds" would be available to a qualifying candidate when an outside group or nonparticipating candidate start outspending the candidate.

Twelve of the 16 candidates for the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals qualified for the voluntary public financing program in 2004. Now it's time to try the concept in legislative elections to attempt to reduce the costs of election campaigns and the influence of special interests, according to speakers at a news conference.

"We believe or campaign finance system is fundamentally flawed," said Beth Messersmith, president of N.C. Voters for Clean Elections. The bill, she added, is "small next step just to see that it works in North Carolina."

77% said that special interests would not receive as many favors, tax breaks and deals from politicians [under public financing of elections] ...

Public financing of elections are NOT a policy that will increase government spending; in fact, it's almost guaranteed to pay for itself many times over with less tax and government contract giveaways and more honest, cheaper services. 77% of the public recognize that our present system of legalized bribery costs the public every day, so replacing it with public financing will be a cost-saver.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that "unions are making inroads in some parts of the historically nonunion South -- organizing call-center workers, janitors, sanitation workers and school-bus drivers -- by tapping frustrations over low wages and benefits and developing new organizing strategies to battle employer opposition." Specifically, "several individual Southern states saw increases in union membership...In Mississippi, the percentage of workers who belonged to a union increased to 7.1% last year from 4.7% a year earlier, while membership grew to 5.3% from 5.1% in Texas and to 10.2% from 9.7% in Alabama."

"I don't think we have racial bias in Texas anymore," said Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock.

Delay's plan scattered the minority voters of District 24 into five Anglo-dominated, Republican districts in which they lacked opportunities even to influence the outcomes of elections. The DeLay plan deliberately assured that these voters will be represented by members of Congress who do not share their priorities and interests.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram noted on 10 October 2003, "East and southeast Fort Worth (in Tarrant County) are shoved into a district dominated by affluent suburbs and Denton County and extending to the Oklahoma border. This abuse of low-income, minority voters alone should cause courts to reject the map."

There is no justification of such fragmentation ñ not geography, preservation of whole counties or cities, preservation of senior incumbents, unification of communities of interest or retention of the cores of previous districts. To the contrary, the fragmentation of African-Americans in DeLay's plan subverts rather than advances these criteria, demonstrating the racial intent of DeLay's plan.

The Fed has far more direct impact on the U.S. economy than any other agency of the government. It can control how many people in the United States have jobs. While the media tend to speak of the Fed's actions in euphemisms, when the Fed raises or lowers interest rates (its main policy tools) it is deciding whether the economy should create more or fewer jobs.

Cuts in interest rates are intended to boost the economy. Lower interest rates make it easier for families to buy cars and homes and for businesses to invest. If more cars and homes are sold and more factories or offices are built, then more people are employed. In the opposite case, if the Fed raises interest rates, it makes it harder to buy cars and homes and for businesses to invest. This means that fewer people will be employed.

It is important to understand that this method of restraining inflation does not affect everyone equally. The people who lose their job when the Fed raises interest rates tend to be factory workers, retail clerks, and custodians, not doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. In other words, the Fed controls inflation by forcing the middle class and poor to face higher unemployment and take pay cuts.

There is also an important racial component to the Fed's inflation fighting. As a rule of thumb, the unemployment rate for African Americans tends to be twice the overall unemployment rate, while the unemployment rate for African American teens is typically six times the overall average. This means that if the Fed pushes up the overall unemployment rate from 4.5 percent to 6.5 percent, it will raise the unemployment rate for African Americans from roughly 9.0 percent to 13.0 percent. It will raise the unemployment for African American teens from roughly 27
percent to 39 percent.

The Senator from North Dakota.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Virginia for his courtesy.

This is a vote that we had before in the Senate. It is a vote on the establishment of a type of committee called a Truman Committee. The Truman Committee was established in the early 1940s to try to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting. That was done when there was a Democrat in the White House, a Democratically controlled Senate, and a Democratic Senator named Harry Truman. He decided there ought to be a special investigation of waste, fraud, and abuse with respect to military contracting. They established a bipartisan committee to do that. They found a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I think it is clear that perhaps the most significant amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that has ever occurred in this country is occurring right now. I think the American taxpayers are being fleeced. I don't think the Congress is doing nearly enough about it.

More below ...

Let me go through a couple of charts that I have shown before on the floor of the Senate. This is from the highest ranking procurement official in the Corps of Engineers, which does all the procurement for the Department of Defense. She lost her job. She was demoted for being honest.

She said:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to the contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.

This from the top civilian contracting official in our Government at the Corps of Engineers. She is being demoted for being honest. She was always given the best recommendations, the highest performance evaluations, and when they saw that the ``old boy'' network decided to give big sole-source contracts, no-bid contracts and do it in a way that violated procurement rules, she spoke out. ``The most blatant and improper contract abuse'' she has ever seen.

Let me describe one contract--the Custer Battles contract. Two guys--Custer Battles--show up in Iraq. They know there is a lot of money. The American taxpayers are funding not only reconstruction of Iraq but also funding Army contracts. Two guys show up in Iraq with nothing. And $100 million later, they got $100 million of the taxpayers' money for contracts. The first contract was to provide security at the Baghdad Airport. There is a criminal inquiry as a result of that.

Here is what Bagdad Airport security said about this company, Custer Battles--Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles.

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative war profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows.

They received 100 million in American taxpayer dollars.

By the way, they took the forklift trucks off the Baghdad Airport and put them in a warehouse. They painted them blue and then sold them back to the Coalition Provisional Authority--forklift trucks which didn't belong to them. There are now criminal proceedings about this contract. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to show an item on the floor of the Senate.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so

ordered.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, a man named Henry Bunting worked for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, in the area of Kuwait where Henry Bunting was in charge of procurement. He had to buy things.

Let me show the Senate what he bought. He brought this to a hearing we held. This is a hand towel. He was charged, on behalf of Halliburton's KBR subsidiary, to buy hand towels. He would order a hand towel for the American troops at a certain price, but his company said: Don't do that. We want you to have a hand towel that has the embroidered logo on it, the name of our company. So double the price to the American taxpayer for hand towels for the troops. So you have KBR embroidered on the hand towel.

He says: Why should we do that? It doesn't matter. It is cost-plus. The American taxpayer is paying the bill. Don't worry about the cost.

Same guy, $7,500 a month for an SUV; $45, $43 for a case of Coca Cola. He said: Don't worry, be happy. The taxpayer is going to pay for all of this. Don't worry about the cost.

Yes, I know this towel is one small issue. But when you buy thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of towels and double the price so you can put the logo of the contractor on it because it is a cost-plus contract, that relates to $100 million contracts, and it relates, in my judgment, to billions of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Regrettably, the Congress doesn't care enough.

I suggest we remedy this by creating a Truman-type committee. It worked, it was bipartisan, and it began to root out the waste, fraud, and abuse that is so prevalent.

I am not going to go through the whole list again. But let me describe it. If you are in the right place of the country of Iraq, you can stumble onto 50,000 pounds of nails, 25 tons of nails, lying in the sand. Why? Because somebody ordered the wrong size nails. So you throw them out in the sand. Doesn't matter, the American taxpayer is going to pay for that.

Or you can see a brandnew $75,000 truck that was set on fire because it had a flat tire, and they run it off the road. They didn't have the capability to fix it and just left the truck. Doesn't matter, the American taxpayer is going to pay the bill.

I think this is unbelievable. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars at this point.

I understand that our responsibility is to do everything we should do, and must do, to support the troops who are fighting in Iraq.

We cannot send American men and women abroad wearing our country's uniform and not do everything that is humanly possible to provide all of their needs, equipment needs, weapons needs, and so on. I understand that. That is a responsibility we have. I believe the chairman of this committee and the ranking member of this committee have done a great job. I am impressed with that.

The one area where all of us have failed in this Congress, however, is oversight. We have not done the oversight. I think part of it is because we have one-party rule in this town--the White House and the House and Senate. Nobody wants to embarrass anybody. But the fact is there is such massive amount of money that is going out the door in support of these contracts--sole-source, no-bid contracts that have promoted waste. And nobody wants to take a second look at it. Nobody wants to see what is going on.

There are whistleblowers coming forward saying this money is being spent. It is being spent in an unbelievable way.

This is a slightly different picture. By the way, this is $2 million in $100 bills wrapped in Saran Wrap. This money actually belongs to the Iraqi people that was spent by us in something called the Coalition Provisional Authority. That was our responsibility to spend this appropriately. This money went to Custer Battles and is the subject of a criminal inquiry. This $2 million wrapped in Saran Wrap in $100 bills was a part of a substantial stash of cash in the basement of a building where they were standing.

This particular fellow came and testified. He said: We used to throw these around as footballs. We wrapped up $100 bills in Saran Wrap and threw them as footballs in the office because the message in this office was this:

You bring a bag because we pay in cash. Bring a sack. If you want some money, bring a sack, we pay in cash.

The stories are unbelievable.

The American taxpayer is going to pay to air condition a building. It went to a subcontractor, to another subcontractor, and then to another subcontractor, and pretty soon we pay the bill. The American taxpayer paid the bill, and that building now has a ceiling fan--not an air conditioner.

What is going on is unbelievable. Yet nobody seems to care very much. Nobody seems to be willing to do anything. I suggest, given the unprecedented amount of waste, fraud, and abuse, that now is the time for us to decide we are going to take action. We will create a Truman Committee, bipartisan, and sink our teeth into this and investigate on behalf of the American taxpayer--investigate and expose the waste, fraud, and abuse.

The fact is we turned down, regrettably, a bill which I offered previously that would have prevented the no-bid, sole-source, huge contracts going to just a couple of companies. That is one way to solve this problem. We should have accepted that. But notwithstanding the decision by the Senate to turn down that amendment, this amendment stands on its own.

Are we going to decide that when the highest civilian procurement official in the Corps of Engineers responsible for all these contracts says that she can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse she has witnessed during the course of her professional career, are we going to decide that is serious? We are going to do something about it?

I know people will say we have done this or that. The fact is we haven't scratched the surface--not a bit.

It is time for the Senate to ask itself whether it is serious about oversight and doing the job.

I am not standing here trying to pull the ground out from under this committee--or any committee. I am saying we have never spent this much money so quickly, never given the kind of sole-source, no-bid contracts that we have offered. We have never shoved money out the door as quickly as we have for procurement and in support of contracts for the troops.

Again, let me show this towel as a small hand-towel symbol of a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that I believe we ought to correct, and we ought to begin today by approving my amendment.

House Republican leaders on Wednesday postponed a vote on renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act after GOP lawmakers complained it unfairly singles out nine Southern states for federal oversight.

The four-decade-old law enfranchised millions of black voters by ending poll taxes and literacy tests during the height of the civil rights struggle. A vote on renewing it for another 25 years had been scheduled for Wednesday, with both Republican and Democratic leaders behind it.

The dramatic shift came after a private caucus meeting earlier Wednesday in which several Republicans also balked at extending provisions in the law that require ballots to be printed in more than one language in neighborhoods where there are large numbers of immigrants, said several participants.

After all the reports of corporate crimes and contract abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan -- including the recent revelation by Halliburton Watch that Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary knowingly exposed thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq to hazardous levels of unhealthy water from the Euphrates River, including human fecal matter -- the Senate was offered an opportunity on Tuesday to restore a measure of Congressional oversight to the process by which tax dollars are distributed to private corporations and the activities of those corporations in regions of the world that are supposed to be of critical importance to the United States.

As part of the Senate debate over the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 -- the Pentagon budget -- North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan proposed a simple amendment "to establish a special committee of the Senate to investigate the awarding and carrying out of contracts to conduct activities in Afghanistan and Iraq and to fight the war on terrorism."

The amendment was rejected.

Fifty-two senators voted "no" -- all of them Republicans, including supposed "straight-shooters" such as Arizona's John McCain and Nebraska's Chuck Hagel.

Forty-four senators voted "yes" -- all of them Democrats, except Rhode Island Republican Lincoln Chafee.

Despite promises that rising medical malpractice insurance rates would be suppressed under new state laws, many of Georgia's insurers have hiked their premiums since the sweeping reforms took effect last year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state insurance records.

Six of the state's top insurers of doctors and dentists have increased their liability rates -- in some cases, by more than a third -- since new restrictions on malpractice cases became law in February 2005, according to state Department of Insurance records obtained by the AP through an open records request.

The reforms passed by the Georgia Legislature last year included a $350,000 limit on jury awards for malpractice victims' pain and suffering, tougher standards for expert witnesses in malpractice trials, and new incentives for patients to settle out of court.

Doctors and hospitals contended the measures, dubbed "civil justice reform," would curb malpractice insurance rates and help lure more doctors to Georgia. Business lobbies, too, threw their weight behind the legislation because it encourages speedy out-of-court settlements and penalizes parties who make frivolous claims.

But trial lawyers and patient advocacy groups argued that limiting damage awards puts an arbitrary price on a victim's life, and that the state's medical insurers have fostered a false crisis by driving up premiums in a market with little competition.

"Our worst fears have come true," said Allie Wall, the director of consumer group Georgia Watch, which vigorously opposed the new laws. "More than a year has gone by, yet Georgia doctors have not saved a penny on their insurance, as promised, and the insurance companies still raking in record profits."

WASHINGTON -- Democrats aim to make the minimum wage a maximum political problem for Republicans this election year.

The minority party fired the first shot last week, when the House Appropriations Committee broke with its Republican leadership and approved a $2.10-an-hour increase as part of a spending bill for labor, health and education programs. Speaker Dennis Hastert responded by putting the measure on hold -- possibly until after the election.

But Democrats are poised to come back this morning and offer the same wage amendment as part of a second appropriations bill funding science and law-enforcement agencies.

"I gave the Republicans fair notice that we will attach it to anything we can," said Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the committee's ranking Democrat. [...]

Efforts to raise the minimum wage since 1997 have failed under Republican control of Congress, as business groups oppose the measure and lobbied against it. A group of more than 20 business organizations are fighting an increase this year, as part of the "Coalition for Job Opportunities." [...]

Despite business opposition, however, 21 states have enacted minimum wages above the $5.15 federal level, and roughly half the population lives in a state that already mandates higher hourly pay.

While other students learn how to conjugate French verbs or navigate a musical scale, nearly 6,500 S.C. students a year leave campus and learn about the Bible and its Ten Commandments.

Now South Carolina has became the second state to allow schools to give students academic credit for that instruction.

The South Carolina Released Time Credit Act, signed into law June 2 by Gov. Mark Sanford, permits schools to give students an elective credit for participating in the religion class.

Throughout the hour-long program, viewers will see the result of that struggle: schools without an adequate fire alarm system; schools where raw sewage seeps into hallways following rainstorms; schools where students are forced to wear their winter coats to stay warm in frigid classrooms.