I just discovered that the leaders of the union to which I once belonged were indicted under RICO in September and that their trial is underway.
Michael and Robert McKay have been living on borrowed time. Respectively, president and treasurer-secretary of the American Maritime Officers, the McKay brothers, aged 59 and 56, rigged elections, stole funds, obstructed justice, and orchestrated illegal campaign contributions. At least that’s what the Justice Department has been alleging in a criminal racketeering suit against the pair. Belatedly, the trial began on Tuesday, November 21.
The McKays have an unusually difficult hurdle to clear in order to convince the jury of their innocence: testimony by a longtime friend, now ex-friend, David Merriken, who’d run the union’s employee benefit plans during the latter part of the Nineties. Merriken for nearly a year had worn a hidden wire to work at AMO headquarters in the Broward County, Fla. community of Dania Beach. Federal investigators believed the McKays had been stealing from the 4,000-member national union, buying off local politicians in the process. Merriken was the feds’ inside man. With some 200 taped conversations in their possession, prosecutors are confident the charges will stick in what is expected to be a six-week trial.
(South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 11/19/06; McClatchy Tribune-News Service, 11/21/06).
Yes, way back when, I was a member in good standing of the American Maritime Officers union. In particular, I voted in the 1993 election in which Mike McKay took over. Amongst the rank and file there had long been rumors of shenanigans at the top levels and I don’t think that I knew one person who admitted to voting for McKay, but he still won. Now all of the rumors seem to have been proven true.
As a former union member, I appreciate the role they play as a check on corporate America. Within reason. However, I suppose this is enough proof for some as to why I seem to take a generally negative view of unions and am especially distrustful of their leadership. It’s not a good feeling when you know that your mandatory union dues (and pension funds!) go to financing union fat cats and to supporting political candidates with whom you disagree–and you have no say in the matter. Too much centralized, unaccountable power for my taste. Perhaps the McKay-led AMO is an anomaly–and I certainly hope so–but I’m not too confident. That ship has sailed.
Because many estimates concerning the efficiency of ethanol-based fuels put forth in the 1970s and 1980s were based on an assumption that ethanol would be primarily derived from corn, ethanol developed a reputation that has been hard to shake for being inadequate as a gasoline replacement. However, with technological improvements in agricultural and refining techniques, the development of ethanol sources beyond corn and, of course, rising conventional oil prices, ethanol’s reputation as an alternative energy cul-de-sac is no longer warranted. Brazil, for instance, has weaned itself off of foreign oil using ethanol produced from domestic sugar cane.
Here in America, Professor Albert Kausch of the University of Rhode Island’s Cell and Molecular Biology Department is leading research into how to efficiently produce ethanol and transportation fuel from a crop known as switchgrass …
“Switchgrass is a native plant of the tall grass prairies. It grows 12 feet tall in one season and produces 10 tons of plant material an acre, more biomass per year than most other plants,” said Albert Kausch, a University of Rhode Island plant geneticist on the cutting edge of switchgrass research. “I’m confident my lab can make it produce 20 tons an acre using the tools and personnel we have right now”….Kausch is a world leader in developing transgenic grasses, having spent 20 years genetically modifying turf grasses, rice and corn.Here is the proverbial bottom line…
“There are several impediments to the process of converting switchgrass to ethanol that would make unaltered switchgrass commercially unprofitable,” Kausch said. “We are working with professors at Brown University, for instance, to create better enzymes that will degrade cellulose into sugars for a more efficient conversion to ethanol.”
Kausch is now genetically engineering switchgrass that is both sterile and resistant to herbicides, and he has a long list of other traits he hopes to improve as well, including drought tolerance, salt tolerance and cold tolerance. He expects to have test plots of the genetically modified plants on the URI campus within two years, and he hopes the first varieties will be in commercial production by 2011.
Kausch has launched Project Golden Switchgrass at the University of Rhode Island, which he hopes will develop “the variety of enhanced switchgrass that everyone needs.” He said that native switchgrass grown commercially today could produce ethanol for approximately $2.70 per gallon, but by genetically improving a number of plant traits he believes the production price could get as low as $1 per gallon.I’m not sure that it is from the same analysis that Professor Kausch cites, but an article from the Winter 2001 edition of Issues in Science and Technology (a journal published by the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) broke down a $2.70 price for ethanol in detail and compared it to the cost of gasoline, adjusting for the fact that ethanol is not quite as efficient as gas. The $1.50 per-gallon price for gasoline used in the analysis seems almost quaint by today’s standards…
The refinery gate price of gasoline is about $0.80 per gallon; transportation, storage, and retailing add about $0.40 per gallon; and taxes raise the price at the pump to roughly $1.50 per gallon. Producing cellulosic ethanol costs about $1.20 per gallon (1.80 per gallon, gasoline equivalent, since ethanol has two-thirds of the energy of a gallon of gasoline). Assuming that the per-gallon distribution costs are the same for ethanol and holding total tax revenue constant, ethanol would sell for $1.80 per gallon at the pump. However, this is equivalent to $2.70 per gallon in order to get as much energy as in a gallon of gasoline.Conspiracy theorists should now convene with free-marketers to ponder this question: If $2.70 per gallon is the price where conventionally produced gasoline loses its economic advantage over ethanol, is it mere coincidence that gas prices have settled down into a range just below that? [Open full post]
The U.N. insiders who organized Stopbolton.org are pretty happy that their target has resigned. As Jim Barron’s indicates, there can be little doubt that Senator Chafee’s refusal to support the nomination of John Bolton to the U.N. was the unsurmountable hurdle. And that is something of which Chafee is quite proud:
Chafee’s opposition to Bolton as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “was what made it not happen,” said Chafee spokesman Steven Hourahan. “Without his vote in committee, it wasn’t going to go.”
Hourahan said Chafee was “very comfortable” with his decision to effectively remove Bolton as ambassador. He said it was “clear that the the American people sent a message,” in the November election that they were unhappy with Bolton’s confrontational style and the Bush administration’s foreign policy…
“Mr. Bolton did not demonstrate the kind of collaborative approach that I believe will be called for if we are to restore the United States’ position as the strongest country in a peaceful world,” the senator said. “This would be an appropriate time to choose a nominee who has a proven ability to work with both sides of the political aisle, a history of building strong international relationships and a reputation of respect for the institution of the United Nations.”
Of course, others disagree and Bolton did accomplish a few things over his short tenure. Even the anti-Bolton folks admit that Bolton was effective in the Security Council. But it was his work in the General Assembly that raised so many hackles inside the U.N., especially Bolton’s “incendiary rhetoric.”
[Open full post]Here is Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, not really making a whole lot of sense as he discusses how he interprets the Constitution, on Fox News Sunday…
If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn’t clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.This is a flawed example of whatever point Justice Breyer is trying to make, since there is nothing unclear about applying the principle of freedom of speech to the Internet. Written articles are speech, whether they are distributed on newsprint or via the Internet. Video and audio recordings are speech, whether they are transmitted over a broadcast network or over the Internet. And Congress is Congress, whether it is trying to regulate a newspaper, a television station, or the Internet. Ergo, Congress should pass no law abridging the freedom of speech on the Internet.
The freedom of speech. Do you know what it means? Basically. But you don’t know its entire content, and it doesn’t tell you itself. Those words, “the freedom of speech,” “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Neither they, the founders, nor those words tell you how to apply it to the Internet.
So on what basis does Judge Breyer believe that the rules for the Internet should be different from the rules for any other speech-transmission medium? [Open full post]
John J. Miller provides a very early take on the 2008 Senate Races in today’s National Review Online. Here’s what he says about Rhode Island…
“Bring back Linc!” It’s a slogan that precisely nobody is chanting, though someone is sure to suggest that senator Lincoln Chafee, allegedly a Republican, try to rebound from his defeat last month. Those within earshot should yawn. Democratic senator Jack Reed is safe.Though it is too early right now to be talking about the public phase of a political campaign, a serious Republican party would be starting its candidate recruitment and fundraising activities for the 2008 Federal races very soon. However, recruiting candidates has not been something that the state party has shown much recent interest in (see the 2nd Congressional district this past year for an example). Anyone running for state Republican chair needs to answer the question of how they intend to change this. [Open full post]
Heritage of Rhode Island has overcome intitial objections put forward by the RI Dep’t of Education and has received approval to implement it’s “Right Time, Right Place” abstinence education program in RI’s schools. The key concession seems to be that the “only” of the heretofore proposed “Abstinence-only” program has been dropped.
“Heritage’s ‘Right-Time, Right-Place’ curriculum offers positive information that will empower our teens to take control of their lives,” [Lidia] Goodinson said at the event that Heritage sponsored to commemorate World AIDS Day yesterday.
“This abstinence program can only help our present situation and help brighten our children’s futures,” she said.
Heritage says its program is intended to supplement, rather than supplant, current HIV/AIDS instruction in the public school system. Heritage instructors provide abstinence-only sex education only in the presence of regular classroom teachers responsible for teaching the broader curriculum required of local schools.
The group operates on an invitation-only basis, offering about 5 hours of instruction, down from the 6½ hours that the instruction lasted when the program was first introduced. {Unfortunately, the Journal’s story, despite this clarification, referred to it as an “abstinence-only” program later in the piece.}
This study shows that abstinence education works, while this study disputes the effectiveness of abstinence only. (Again, note the difference). Given that Heritage’s program is only part of a broader sex-ed program, protestations from the ACLU ring a little hollow:
But the Heritage program still emphasizes marriage as the only safe setting for sex, and that tends to marginalize not only gay and lesbian students but also children being raised by gay and lesbian parents, Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said.
The Heritage program also tends to understate the effectiveness of condoms as a form of contraception and means of protection against sexually transmitted diseases, Brown said.
For both reasons, Brown said, the ACLU is drafting a letter to McWalters expressing concern that the program has been approved.
This seems like carping to me. The ACLU was initially concerned that this would be an abstinence only program, and now their moving the goalposts. Besides, it seems a bit ironic that the ACLU is arguing that Heritage’s program discriminates against Gays and Lesbians because it emphasizes that marriage is the only safe setting for sex when the ACLU is also arguing that Gays and Lesbians should be allowed to marry. So where does their objection go if their latter goal is accomplished?
Regardless, it seems like the program will go forward and all options will be put on the table for our kids. So, through compromise, RI students will have it reinforced that abstinence is the only method of pregnancy prevention that “works every time it’s been tried.”
I post to defend the honor of Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association’s Executive Director Robert Walsh. This is the headline of his op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s Projo…
Robert A. Walsh Jr.: Straight-party option serves R.I.Yet beneath the headline, the op-ed makes no claim of the sort…
Second, [Edward Achorn] implied that public-employee unions encouraged people to vote a straight Democratic ticket. This, too, is inaccurate, as almost every Rhode Island union that represents public employees, including the National Education Association Rhode Island, supported candidates from both parties, and often took positions in non-partisan local races, which would not be included when voters “pulled the lever” for one party or another.The second excerpt almost certainly represents Mr. Walsh’s actual view, the discrepancy resulting from the journalistic practice of having someone different from an article’s author write its headline.
Therefore, encouraging straight-party ballot voting would have been counter-productive to the expressed views of these organizations.
However, it may be possible to blame Mr. Walsh just a wee bit for the fact that Projo staffers apparently assume that NEA officers will automatically be advocates for straight-ticket voting. [Open full post]
Somehow the fact that Illinois Senator and potential 2008 Presidential contender Barrack Obama’s middle name is “Hussein” became a minor story this weekend. (I think Maureen Dowd is to blame).
In the spirit of bi-partisanship, let me state that I believe that worrying about whether someone’s middle, first, or last names fits into certain transient social conventions is the height of narrow-mindedness and a symptom of a culture, perhaps an entire society, in decline.
Recent days have brought a series of powerful editorials on the Iraq Study Group. This post presents 5 of them, none of which looks favorably on the Group’s report. Be sure to read McCarthy’s piece at the end.
John Podhoretz on Witless Wisdom: Baker’s Worthless Iraq Advice
[Open full post]Yes, it’s been quite a week for the 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, the committee formed last spring to offer recommendations on a path forward in Iraq.
They had a wonderfully invigorating leak session the other day with The New York Times, which was the first recipient of the group’s key top-level save-America recommendation. Co-chairmen James…Baker and Lee…Hamilton didn’t even bother to pretend to brief the president or key lawmakers first.
The president could wait his turn. After all, this is the Iraq Study Group we’re talking about here, buddy. Even the mighty Times was probably kept waiting for its leak, since the only person who could not be kept waiting was Annie Leibovitz, celebrity photographer nonpareil.
As Dana Milbank reports in The Washington Post, on Monday the group’s “co-chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, found time . . . to pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Men’s Vogue.”
The value of Annie Leibovitz’s pictorial scoop might have been reduced somewhat when the president scornfully consigned the Iraq Study Group to the ash-heap of history yesterday with a single dismissive sentence during his press conference in Jordan: “This business about ‘graceful exit’ just simply has no realism to it whatsoever.”
Baker, Hamilton and their crew of old Washington hands…are recommending a “gradual pullback” of American troops but without a timetable. That basically translates into a nice, long, slow defeat…
As one of the study group’s members told the Times yesterday, “We had to move the national debate from ‘whether to stay the course’ to ‘how do we start down the path out’.”
This is the consensus view of the Iraq Study Group, which is very proud that it reached consensus.
Its members also reached a consensus view that Depends is a really fine brand of adult diaper, and that they love reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.”
You perhaps note that I am writing with extreme disrespect toward the Iraq Study Group. That’s because its report is a scandal and an embarrassment; it’s flatly immoral to seek to make or guide policy in this fashion.
Look, if its members believe the war is lost, they should say so. They should bite the bullet and advocate a pullout of American forces sooner rather than later.
If its members could not actually achieve consensus on that point…then it was simple vanity on the part of the Gang of 10 that led to the creation of a “consensus” document that split the difference.
There’s no way to split the difference, unless you’re hurrying off to have your mug immortalized by Annie Leibovitz and want to bang down the gavel so you can get plenty of time to get hair and makeup done.
America and its allies are either going to win this war or we’re going to lose. We will either conclude our military actions in Iraq with terrorists and insurgents dead or fled and an imposition of civil order in the country by its elected government, or we will turn tail and leave the place in chaos and ruins.
What’s even more appalling, if true, is the group’s other key recommendation – which is that America should try to find answers to its problems through an international conference that would include Syria and Iran.
What do Syria and Iran want more than anything else in the world? To see an American defeat in Iraq. To see an America so crippled that they can work their will in the Middle East without fear of retribution…
…that’s Baker for you. Give him a problem and he’ll tell you your best hope of solving it can be found in sucking up to an Arab dictator…
…there’s not much that even James Baker can demand of Israel that Israel’s not already willing to give. Except maybe Jerusalem. Yeah: Israel can give up Jerusalem, and in exchange, Iran and Syria will leave Iraq alone.
Please stop laughing at the doddering old fools now. It’s disrespectful.
This is an extremely dire situation. Half-measures will be disastrous, whatever form they take – and that’s not true only of the Baker-Hamilton “graceful exit” disaster. Continuing as we’re going would also constitute a half-measure with disastrous results as well.
The president treated the Baker half-measures with the contempt they deserved. But he will deserve precisely the same level of contempt if he doesn’t champion a plan for victory immediately.
As occurred last February during a previous cleanup, another cleanup now allows me to pass along an excerpt from an article and two other quotes which I discovered during tonight’s effort:
Patti Davis, President Reagan’s daughter, wrote A Daughter’s Remembrance: The Gemstones of Our Years on the occasion of his death in 2004:
…My father was always more accessible when he was teaching his children through stories…
My father was a shy man; he wasn’t demonstrative with his children. His affection didn’t announce itself with strong embraces of dramatic declaration. We had to interpret it. Like delicate calligraphy, it required patience and a keen eye, attributes I had to acquire. I was not born with them.
Eventually, I grew beyond the girl who wanted more from her father than he was able to give. I began to focus on the gifts he gave me…You content yourself with moments; you gather them, treasure them. They are the gemstones of the years you shared…
…My father belonged to the country. I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him. America was the important child in the family, the one who got the most attention. It’s strange, but now I find comfort in sharing him with an entire nation. There is some solace in knowing that others were also mystified by him; his elusiveness was endearing, but puzzling. He left all of us with the same question: who was he? People ask me to unravel him for them, as if I have secrets I haven’t shared. But I have none, nothing that you don’t already know. He was a man guided by internal faith. He knew our time on this earth is brief, yet he cared deeply about making his time here count. He was comfortable in his own skin. A disarmingly sunny man, he remained partially in shadow; no one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more…
Francine Klagsbrun wrote these words in Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce:
Acceptance is a prerequisite for intimacy, and from acceptance grows trust. You trust another to accept you for yourself and, once accepting, not to betray that trust.
And, finally, there is this quote from the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship:
[Open full post]Costly grace is the gospel which might be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it cost a man his life, and it is grace, because it gives us the only true life…
[Cheap grace] is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate….
