Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Regulators to Hold Hearings on Retailer’s Proposed Foray

The controversy has put Wal-Mart under so much pressure that several months ago, it scaled back its initial plan for a full-service bank to one that it says will be mostly used to process credit card purchases for its thousands of stores across the county. And last month, in a bid to quell some critics, it withdrew its request to be exempt from rules that require most banks to make some investment in underserved communities.

Because controversy generated by Wal-Mart’s bid to own a bank has been so intense, the FDIC agreed to requests from dozens of members of Congress to hold hearings, the first ever for an insurance applicant in the agency’s 73-year history. Thirty-six witnesses besides Wal-Mart are slated for the first day alone. Many, such as George Hood on behalf of the Salvation Army, are expected to support Wal-Mart. Others, such as former congressman Thomas J. Bliley Jr., are expected to oppose the company’s bid to enter banking.

The criticism that could carry the most weight comes from some members of Congress and from the Federal Reserve officials, who say Wal-Mart — and dozens of other non-banking companies, including Target Corp. and Harley-Davidson Inc. — are using a loophole in banking laws in Utah and a few other states to circumvent a federal ban on commercial firms owning banks. They argue that letting commerce and banking mix would foster unfair concentrations of power, create conflicts of interest in how credit is granted and possibly pose risks to the FDIC insurance fund that could end up requiring a taxpayer bailout.

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In an often testy exchange with the White House media, spokesman Scott McClellan refused to explain the administration’s role in the 2003 disclosure — described in a federal prosecutor’s legal document — of highly sensitive intelligence information about Iraq. The spokesman said it has long been the administration’s policy not to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

McClellan’s heated exchange with the press came a day after Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in a court filing that White House official I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby had told a grand jury that President Bush, acting through Vice President Cheney, directed him to leak information from a classified October 2002 intelligence report to the news media.
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Asked whether Bush was against the practice of leaking, as he has indicated in the past, McClellan said the president opposes the leaking of classified material.

Pressed repeatedly on whether the material was classified at the time it was leaked, McClellan refused to discuss details of the case, saying it was an ongoing legal proceeding.
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He called on the president to “tell the American people whether the Bush Oval Office is the place where the buck stops, or the leaks start.” He added that Bush must address the matter personally. “Not a spokesman. Not a statement. Only him.”

For the time being, however, McClellan was the only White House official talking about it for the record.
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He declined to say precisely when the information in the National Intelligence Estimate was declassified.

“Is the information declassified when the president says it is or when the process is done?” he was asked.

“He can authorize the declassifying of information,” McClellan said. He added that the president “has the authority” to summarily declassify something with immediate effect.

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The longer I stay in hospice, the more mail I get. Here are some of the questions people ask:

Q. Why are you in a hospice?

A. To die with dignity, when I’m supposed to die. When I came here, I was supposed to say goodbye to the world in two or three weeks. But I’m still here after nine weeks.

Q. What went wrong?

A. Nobody knows — not even the doctors. It’s fun to see a doctor who doesn’t know what’s wrong with you.

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Female Eagle Rescued After Attack Near Wilson Bridge

A grim drama is playing out at a longtime bald eagle nest near the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, with an uncertain ending for the chicks that are due to hatch there any day now.

A pair of eagles, nicknamed George and Martha by bridge construction workers, have set up housekeeping in Maryland within earshot of the bridge’s traffic and construction cranes each year since 1999. Last month, the female laid at least two eggs, which the pair has taken turns incubating. If all goes well, the chicks will hatch this week.

But Martha was attacked in midair Wednesday by another eagle, probably a female seeking to take over her turf.

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The April issue of Ballot Access News describes two more advances for Instant Runoff Voting. Both South Carolina and Alabama have passed legislation implementing the use of IRV for overseas absentee voters in primary elections. Since these states require runoff elections in primaries, IRV ballots make it much easier for overseas voters to participate.

It’s a small step, but on top of Vermont and San Francisco, it definitely shows that IRV has made into the public consciousness.

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

These scientists — working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. — say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers — unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters — were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.

“There has been a change in how we’re expected to interact with the press,” said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often “ignores the rules” the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, “some people feel intimidated — I see that.”

Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation’s water supply.

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Prosecutor Says Disclosures on Iraq Were Aimed at War Critic
Gee, Bush II Lieing and/or misleading the Country? Who’dathunkit?

The court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time places Bush and Vice President Cheney at the heart of what Libby testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to buttress the administration’s claim that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. The information was contained in the National Intelligence Estimate, one of the most closely held CIA analyses of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war.

Curiously enough, the authors of the report cannot seem to decide whether or not the N.I.E. has, in fact, been declassified.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence would not comment publicly on the status of the classified NIE yesterday.

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