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All the entries posted on November 03, 2006.
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Home > Window on Washington > Archives > 2006 > November > 03
Friday, November 3, 2006
Mr. Considerate
President Bush told folks at a GOP rally in Le Mars, Iowa today that there will be a birthday party for wife Laura on Saturday at the ranch in Crawford.
“I’m not going to tell you her age, but we were born in the same year and I turned 60 this year,” Bush told the crowded gym at Le Mars High School.
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Would Your Great-Grandfather Agree?
The past and future sometimes bump into each other in Washington, where as former House Speaker Sam Rayburn once said, “What goes around, comes around.�
In a blistering letter to ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson, two members of the Senate recently criticized the company for spending millions of dollars supporting groups that oppose government action to curtail global warming.
”It is absolutely irresponsible for any entity to try to influence our government’s involvement in such an important debate in any way that is not scrupulously accurate and honest,” the two senators wrote.
”The institutions that ExxonMobil is supporting are producing very questionable data,” they said. ”The company’s support for a small, but influential, group of climate skeptics has damaged the United States’ reputation by making our government appear to ignore conclusive data on climate change and the disastrous effects climate change could have.”
The letter was signed by Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
The latter, sometimes known as John D. Rockefeller IV, is the great-grandson of the founder of Standard Oil, the corporate ancestor of ExxonMobil.
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Slow Going With Senate Campaign Reports
There is open government and then there is the United States Senate.
While all political candidates are required to file a list of their campaign contributors with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), that does not mean the public will get to see these lists in a timely fashion.
The House of Representatives, for example, requires that campaign reports be filed electronically. That means the public gets to see the information almost immediately. But the Senate has never updated its procedures which means it takes months for their reports to appear on the Internet.
“The Senate candidates are the lone holdouts,� explained Kent Cooper, who once worked for the FEC and now runs FECinfo.com, a web site which tracks campaign finances.
Because Senate candidates file by paper, government clerks must retype all the information into a Web-accessible database. It is a process that can take months.
“You have third quarter reports that came in on Oct 15th,” Cooper said, “and those will not get done before election day.”
It was the cost of this data entry that spurred electronic filing, Cooper said.
The House of Representatives was looking for ways to cut costs and electronic filing saves both time and money.
However, the public can still get paper copies of the Senate campaign finance reports as they come through the door. But it is not cheap.
It costs less than a penny to make paper copies.
But the Senate charges 20 cents per page.
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Tacos To Go
Sign greeting President Bush today in Le Mars, Iowa
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Countdown to Bush Goodbye
January 20, 2009, may not mean much to most people, but it marks the end of an era — and an administration — for President George W. Bush.
Bush’s detractors are eagerly anticipating that moment in time, and a number of technical devices are on the market to help.
Computer countdown clocks, screensavers and even key chains are available for those who want to time Bush’s departure to the second.
“Dubya’s Days Are Numbered� is a free countdown clock for Macintosh computers that features a picture of Bush and says, “Hang in there, America� above a counter. Screensavers, countdown clocks and key chains are available at www.backwardsbush.com which proclaims “Because counting backwards makes the time go faster.�
Bush countdown products can also be found at www.nationalnightmare.com.
The president is not the only target of such web clocks, Hilary Clinton’s current term in the U.S. Senate can also be tracked down to the second.
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