Abercrombie said the matter is worthy of federal review because college football is big business with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
"It's money. That's what this is all about," he said.
But it's no coincidence that all three lawmakers have home-state schools with recent beefs against the bowl system.
The University of Hawaii and Boise State University in Idaho each had an undefeated season in recent years, but were denied a shot at the championship. And Westmoreland said he is still smarting about his University of Georgia Bulldogs being passed over for the national championship game last year.
Georgia instead was matched up against undefeated Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl, winning 41-10.
He was criticized for using city funds to lease a car for use by his family and using his city issued credit card to charge thousands of dollars worth of spa massages, extravagant dining, and expensive Moët et Chandon champagne. Kilpatrick would later pay back $9000 of the $210,000 credit card charges.[5]
By April 2005, Kilpatrick's approval rating in Detroit was sharply declining due to the scandals and a perceived lack of improvement in the city. As a result, the April 17, 2005 issue of Time Magazine listed him as one of the three worst big-city mayors in the United States.
In 2005, WXYZ-TV reporter Steve Wilson reported that the city had entered an expensive one year lease for a luxury SUV. It was to be used to chauffeur the mayor's family. The lease was for $24,995; five dollars under the amount that would have required the approval of city council. Kilpatrick, chief of staff Christine Beatty, police chief Ella Bully-Cummings, and other members of the mayor's staff all denied that the red Lincoln Navigator was intended to be used by the mayor's wife and children. Eventually, Kilpatrick admitted the Navigator was for his family, claiming he had told the police chief that it was "too much" and to take it back.[57] Media coverage of this story was best known for a situation involving the mayor and his security team. Wilson had tracked Kilpatrick down in Washington, D.C., where he was attending a mayor's conference. When Wilson tried to question Kilpatrick about the Navigator lease, a member of the mayor's security team is seen on camera shoving Wilson against a wall.[58]
Since 2002, the Washington D.C. police will only offer professional courtesy protection to Kilpatrick while he is conducting official business in the nation's capital. Washington police no longer provide after-hours police protection to Kilpatrick because of his inappropriate partying during past visits. Sergeant Tyrone Dodson of Washington explained by saying "we arrived at this decision because we felt that the late evening partying on the part of Mayor Kilpatrick would leave our officers stretched too thin and might result in an incident at one of the clubs." The Kilpatrick administration allege that the statements and actions of the Washington police are part a political conspiracy to ruin the mayor.[59]
On May 8, 2007, WXYZ reported that Kilpatrick used $8,600 from his secret Kilpatrick Civic Fund to take his wife, three sons and babysitter on a week long vacation to a five-star California resort, the La Costa Resort and Spa.[60] The fund, controlled by Kilpatrick's sister and friends, was created to improve the city of Detroit through voter education, economic empowerment and crime prevention. Tax and accounting experts said Kilpatrick's use of the fund was a violation of IRS regulations.[61] The story was also compounded after WXYZ's cameras caught Kilpatrick in a fit of rage grabbing the microphone out of the hand of reporter Ray Sayah and throwing it hard across the room such that it hit a wall, while Sayah tried to question him about the situation.
About 60 Detroit ministers pledged their unwavering support for embattled Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick this afternoon.
Pastors representing multiple denominations, gathered at Corinthian Baptist Church in Hamtramck to publicize their belief that Kilpatrick deserves forgiveness and compassion.
“The mayor is not standing alone,” said the Rev. E.L. Branch, pastor of Third New Hope Baptist Church in Detroit. “We’re holding him up in prayer all the way through.”
Moments before the ministers convened, Kilpatrick was arraigned in 36th District Court on eight felony counts, including perjury. The Free Press published text messages shared between Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff Christine Beatty that revealed the two lied under oath about a extramarital affair and the firing of former Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown.
“We’re called to stand with him at a time of trial in his life,” said the Rev. Skip Wachsman, pastor of Genesis Lutheran Church in Detroit. “He’s not guilty of anything; he has been charged.”
Two weeks ago, the pastors' council voted 34-24 not to issue a letter calling for Kilpatrick to resign over the scandal. The council, which represents 400 clergy members, endorsed Kilpatrick's policies in his 2005 re-election bid.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau. The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Carribean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
Here’s what Mr. Young, who is black and a former ambassador to the United Nations, had to say last month in an interview posted online: “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”
He then went on to make disgusting comments about the way that Bill and Hillary Clinton defended themselves years ago against the fallout from the former president’s womanizing. That’s coming from the Clinton camp!
Bad Bill had been roughing up Obama so much that Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina suggested that he might want to “chill.” On a conference call with reporters yesterday, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, tut-tutted that the “incredible distortions” of the political beast were “not keeping with the image of a former president.”
Jonathan Alter reported in Newsweek that Senator Edward Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and former Clinton aide, have heatedly told Bill “that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Senator Barack Obama.”
Obama votes with Bush constantly funding this terrible endless war.
Oprah, you play the race card and the gender card too.
You are a closeted republican and chose Barak Obama because you do not like other women who actually stand for something to working American Women besides glamour, angels, hollywood and dieting!
When Americans find out that Obama backs right wing corporate racist anti worker bullshit, they will not vote for him, and the victory will go to the most racist right wing republican ever.... Mccain, who is a fascist!
The phrase "shuck and jive" refers to mischievous blacks behaving innocently in the presence of an authority figure, so as to lie and get out of trouble.
Little Rock, Ark -- As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee aggressively pushed for the early release of a convicted rapist despite being warned by numerous women that the convict had sexually assaulted them or their family members, and would likely strike again. The convict went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.
Confidential Arkansas state government records, including letters from these women, obtained by the Huffington Post and revealed publicly for the first time, directly contradict the version of events now being put forward by Huckabee.
While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public. Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.
"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's release. "None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out."
You know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased.
At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out in '98, this is the proper language: there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that's all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity.
After 9/11, let's be fair here, if you had been President, you'd think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that.
That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, "Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process." You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.
http://hillaryattacks.barackobama.com/
- Obama did coke
- Obama's a secret Muslim terrorist
- Obama wanted to be president his whole life
But Buffett, the second-richest man in America after Bill Gates, according to Forbes magazine, said recent tax law changes have tended to benefit people like him.
"Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline," Buffett said. "A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."
Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway questioned any effort to further cut taxes for the wealthy.
"Further shifting of this burden away from the super-rich is not the way to go," he said.
"In a country that prides itself on equality of opportunity, it's becoming anything but that as the gap between the super-rich and the middle class is widening."
So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as The New York Times reported,
The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.
PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement - it was just an innocent mistake.
P.P.S.: More on the Philadelphia story.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.
That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.
Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.
He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.
And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
Congress overrode the veto.
Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.
Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.
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