My friends and associates, Denny Hatch and Jim Overly, have been sending me links to articles about the “information wants to be free” mindset that’s been spawned by the Internet.

             Jim, a retired member of the State Department’s Foreign Service, helps monitor websites for the daily Government Policy Newslinks report. Denny is a direct marketing industry guru who writes Denny Hatch’s Business Common Sense, a webpage that’s read by an ever-widening circle of appreciative readers.

             One of the articles they sent to me, from Wired.com, seemed to hit the nail on the head. See Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business (Feb. 25, 2008). But see also the Los Angeles Times’ Free news online will cost journalism dearly (Dec. 26, 2007) and The New York Times’ Why you should pay to read this newspaper (Oct. 24, 2005).

             I re-read those articles yesterday (April 15) after a group of self-described “good government” groups sent letters that asked the House and Senate leaders to start posting committee votes on various congressional committee websites. They noted that roll call votes occurring in the House and Senate are published in the Congressional Record which is posted the following day on Thomas, the Library of Congress website that’s been operating since 1995.

             But getting information about votes cast in committees is a different—and very expensive—matter, they said.

             “Currently, other than visiting a committee’s office, timely information regarding recorded votes is available only for a fee by a few providers. Congressional Quarterly, for example, posts to a website available to subscribers the votes recorded during committee mark-ups within 24 hours after they are cast along with a synopsis of the mark-up at a cost of $4,215 per year. National Journal subscribers pay $2,000 to review votes and synopses of ‘key’ mark-ups and Gallery Watch emails its clients and posts to its site customized information about committee votes and proceedings within 48 hours at a cost of approximately $5,000 per year,” they said.

             The letter’s signatories included some major lobbying organizations with multi-million dollar operating budgets and can easily pay, and probably do pay, the subscription fees.

             They assured the congressional leaders who received their letter—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)—that they were only interested in sticking up for the “individuals, nonprofit organizations and small businesses whose interests might be affected by committee votes—who cannot visit committee offices and do not have the financial resources to pay private organizations to track this information.”

            We are drowned by the tears from these crocodiles. When news-gathering organizations like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal lose subscription revenue, they stop gathering news, they stop adding value to the information they collect with their analysis and interpretation, and ultimately they leave the news-gathering field altogether and create a vacuum that will be eagerly filled by “good government” lobbies. Do you really want your news about congressional voting behavior dished up by the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, the National Organization for Women, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the letter’s other signatories?

             If they were really interested in protecting the interests of the little guy, they would simply dip into their multi-million dollar treasuries and contribute a few dollars to gather information about congressional committee votes and post it on their own website. Their brethren elsewhere in the “good government” industry, with the help of a few sympathetic congressmen, are already doing this with the Open CRS website that exposes and distributes thousands of Congressional Research Service reports which are not otherwise available for public distribution.

Your tax dollars at work on the U.S.-Mexico border

            Millions of taxpayer dollars are allocated each year to help Mexico train and equip its military for drug enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the training (reportedly at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga.) and equipment, including assault weapons and night vision devices, has wound up in the hands of paramilitary groups that protect drug traffickers and engages in kidnappings on both sides of the border.

            The migration of U.S. funding from drug interdiction to drug smuggler protection is so bold, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) said in a press release yesterday (April 15), that a paramilitary group called Los Zetas advertised its recruiting phone number on a publicly displayed banner that was hung from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Attn: Criminal justice reporters 

            Ordinarily, criminal aliens are deported to their native countries after completing their prison sentences. But what happens if their native countries won’t take them back? It turns out that, with no place to go, they are simply turned loose on the streets of America.

            An estimated 139,000 criminal aliens from eight countries—Laos, Iran, Eritrea, Vietnam, Jamaica, China, India and Ethiopia—are subject to deportation, but their countries won’t let them come home.

            Yesterday (April 10), U.S. Reps. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) and Mike Castle (R-Del.) introduced legislation to impose sanctions against countries that refuse to take back their citizens who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S.

            Under their legislation, which copies a bill introduced by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), visa applications from those countries would not be approved and all foreign assistance funds would be withheld.

            “There must be consequences for not respecting our rule of law. America is a land of opportunity, but it’s not a dumping ground for lawbreakers,” Rep. Dent said in a press release.

            The criminal alien population in U.S. prisons is thought to be substantial, possibly more than 8%. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported there were a total of 1,570,861 prisoners being held in state and federal prisons at the end of 2006.

Attn: Government reporters 

            Washington-based lobbying was a $2.79 billion industry in 2007, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog organization which calculated the amount from more than 42,000 disclosure reports that were filed for last year with the House and Senate. The amount was declared a “record,” surpassing the previous year’s lobbying expenditures of $2.59 billion by 7.7%.

            CRP executive director Sheila Krumholz described Washington’s lobbying industry—comprised of corporations, labor unions, trade associations and an endless array of advocacy groups—as “recession-proof.” At a time when the national economy is restricting, the lobbying industry is booming, she noted.  

            Meanwhile, six other watchdog groups led by the Campaign Legal Center urged U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn (D-Md.) to immediately relinquish his seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Wynn, after failing to win his party’s nomination to seek re-election to his House seat, announced he would leave Congress to join the lobbying law firm of Dickstein Shapiro LLC.

            In their letter, the six groups listed several dozen of Dickstein Shapiro’s lobbying clients that have a direct interest in legislation falling under the committee’s jurisdiction. To avoid conflicts, Wynn would have to recuse himself from any matters relating to energy, telecommunications, tobacco, construction, higher education, information technology, gambling, environmental issues, and pharmaceuticals. “It is difficult to believe that any direct or indirect action you might take in an official capacity as a member of this committee, especially as chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials, would not affect the interests of clients Dickstein Shapiro represents.”

Attn: Assignment editors

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
U.S. offshore leasing is premised on a future of $30-a-barrel oil

U.S. Geological Survey
Holy cow! Where did all that oil come from? There’s 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana

Federal Trade Commission
Do Not Call Registry is made permanent, telemarketers to pay $54 per area code for list of telephone numbers that cannot be called

Government Accountability Office
Undercover purchases on eBay and Craigslist reveal a market for sensitive and stolen U.S. military items  Full report (35 pages)

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
Calls on National Archives and Records Administration to waive $50 fee charged to veterans who seek access to their own military files

Attn: Washington correspondents 

            A Government Accountability Office report released yesterday (April 9) says that federal workers sometimes use their government-issued credit cards a little bit too liberally. In as many as 41% of the transactions involving purchases of goods and services below $2,500, basic internal control standards were not followed. And in as many as 48% of the transactions above $2,500, the agencies could not verify the purchases were properly authorized. 

            It would have taken a herculean effort to review every government credit card transaction during the 12-month period from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, when over $17 billion worth of goods and services were charged by federal workers.  

            GAO auditors went to the five banks that process government credit card transactions—Bank of America, Citibank, Mellon Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and U.S. Bank—and applied data mining technology to select a statistical sample.  

            The agencies were asked to provide documentation for the selected transactions to prove that the purchases had been properly authorized, and that the delivery of the goods or services went to an individual other than the cardholder who signed for it.  

            In their limited review, GAO investigators uncovered numerous examples of fraud and abuse. Government credit cards, GAO said in its report, were used to “subscribe to Internet dating services, buy video iPods for personal use, and pay for lavish dinners that included top-shelf liquor.” They even found a U.S. Forest Service employee who used a government-issued credit card to embezzle $642,000 over a six-year period, leading to an arrest and a 21-month prison sentence. 

            Much of the fraud and abuse is preventable, GAO said, but the General Services Administration which administers the credit card program claims it lacks the authority “to issue guidance and reminders encouraging agencies to document independent receipt and acceptance of items purchased with a government purchase card.”  

Synopsis * Full report (61 pages)

Old, broken down football players

Attn: Sports writers 

            The Congressional Research Service, in a report released yesterday (April 9) by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), says Congress needs to enact legislation to help retired National Football League players cope with injuries and disabilities that follow them into retirement. 

            The 144-page report examines the types and severities of injuries and health problems suffered by current and past NFL players, and concludes that their injuries are often ignored while they are playing and their disabilities are unacknowledged when they are retired. 

            The NFL and the NFL Players Association do not even collect data on the number or percentage of players who retire because of injury, the CRS report said. 

            According to the report, 1,052 players applied for “line of duty” or “total and permanent” disability benefits between 1993 and mid-2007. Of them, 428 were approved, 576 were denied, and 48 are pending. The approval rate for the decided applications is just 42%. 

            Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who requested the CRS study with Conyers, said the report “clearly demonstrates that the NFL and NFLPA need to make serious efforts to collect data on player injuries, and eliminate the conflict of interest by team doctors who place the financial interests of their teams ahead of players’ health.”

News tips: 

Global Exchange:
Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland lobbyists oppose farm bill provision that would ban importation of slave labor or child labor products 

Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW):
FEC complaint filed against U.S. Term Limits for sponsoring ad in support of a U.S. Senate candidate 

American Academy of Neurology:
Diabetes in mid-life is linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease

Newspaper Association of America:
Newspaper-owned websites earned more than $2 billion in online advertising in 2007 

National Security Archive:
Air Force finally releases documents in 18-year-long FOIA legal struggle; report provides more evidence that nuclear weapons use was considered during Vietnam War 

U.S. Food & Drug Administration:
Hazardous levels of selenium found in samples of “Total Body Formula” and “Total Body Mega Formula”

Attn: Food editors

            A report released yesterday (April 3) by a Washington-based consumer watchdog group provides fresh details about a food industry practice that extends the fresh appearance of raw meat and fish long after they’ve turned rotten.

            Meat and fish generally keep their fresh appearance for about 10 to 12 days before they start changing to a brown color, and shoppers often rely on color to judge the freshness of meat and fish packages they select from their grocer’s refrigeration cases. But a blast of carbon monoxide will arrest the oxidation process and keep the fresh appearance of meat and fish for several extra weeks. The practice helps the meat and fish packing industries reduce their losses from spoilage, but it leaves consumers exposed to possibly dangerously contaminated foods.

            Injecting carbon monoxide into meat and fish packages is legal and the industry is not required to warn consumers about the practice. At least four times in recent years, reports Food & Water Watch in Carbon Monoxide: Masking the truth about meat, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has granted GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) status to the practice.

            GRAS rulings, the report says, have been issued to Hawaii International Seafood Inc. (for raw tuna); Pactiv Corp., a $3.3 billion company that manufactures meat and fish packaging containers and packaging machinery; Precept Foods LLC, a joint venture between Hormel Foods Corp. and Cargill Meat Solutions Corp.; and Tyson Foods Inc., the Little Rock, Ark.-based food conglomerate.

            Cargill CEO Gregory Page defended the practice to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, saying it would be confusing and pointless to put a warning label on meat and fish packages that have been treated with carbon monoxide. “I don’t think people want to be distracted by information that’s not helpful to their purchasing decisions,” he said.

            But at a congressional hearing last November, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said “the sole purpose of carbon monoxide packaging is to fool consumers into believing that the meat and fish they buy is fresh, no matter how old it is and no matter  how decayed it might be.”

            GRAS rulings are issued through a regulatory procedure that was proposed by the FDA in 1997 but was never formally promulgated. Companies seek GRAS designations under the proposed regulation that makes no provision for public notices, hearings or comments. Thus, there is no opportunity for public participation—or even notice—in the process.

– Edward Zuckerman, Editor

Attn: Education reporters

            Writing skills among 8th and 12th graders have improved, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said yesterday (April 3), announcing the latest No Child Left Behind report card.

            Average writing test scores were higher in 2007 than they were in the previous 2002 and 1998 assessments, leading Secy. Spellings to state: “Writing scores for 8th and 12th graders are at historic highs.”  See press release. See full report.

            But the report card didn’t impress the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education whose president, ex-West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, noted that 68% of the 12th grade students did not write at their grade level. It means, Wise said, “they don’t have the writing skills they need to succeed.” See press release.

Attn: Assignment Editors

Center for Political Accountability: Shareholders call information giant McGraw-Hill “hypocritical” for blocking political disclosure resolution

The Campaign Finance Institute: Section 527 political committees are getting a fast start on raising funds for the 2008 elections

Attn: Assignment editors

            Today’s editions of many newspapers include articles about the annual appearance of the “Pig Book,” a compendium of pork-barrel spending provisions which congressmen attach to appropriations bills in a manner that guarantees government funds for projects without subjecting them to normal bureaucratic review procedures. Often, even the Congress is kept in the dark as more and more so-called “earmarks” are slipped into bills without hearings, sometimes even after the House or Senate has already finished their work on them.

            Mostly, today’s reporting will focus on the national crime—this really is a theft of taxpayer’s money. Despite tough talk last year about “earmark reform,” Congress did not curb its appetite for pork-barrel spending. Lawmakers crammed over 11,000 projects into the 12 appropriations bills that are funding the federal government’s operations during the current 2008 fiscal year. Altogether, these earmarks skimmed $17.2 billion from the U.S. Treasury.

            That was a whopping 337% increase over the 2,658 projects totaling $13.2 billion that were packed into the previous year’s collection of appropriations bills.

            One reason for the increase may be a testimonial to the ability of watchdog organizations, in this case Citizens Against Government Waste, to analyze the mind-numbing legislative language of appropriations bills that run to thousands of pages and pluck out these obscure provisions for public scrutiny.

            Today’s spate of news stories will focus on some of the most egregious examples of wasteful earmarks, such as $3 million to teach poor children how to play golf, or $460,000 to help Anheuser Busch and Coors Brewing Co. develop a better beermaking hop, or $211,000 for olive fruit fly research being conducted in France.

            It’s not that these aren’t worthwhile endeavors. It’s just that the money to pay for them really shouldn’t come from U.S. taxpayers. Certainly, the multi-billion dollar beer industry giants can scrape two or three seconds off of a Super Bowl commercial to find a better hop, and France can finance its own fruit fly research. And if it makes good sense to teach poor children how to play golf, then municipal golf courses—and not federal taxpayers’ wallets—should be opened to them.

            So who’s worse? Liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans? Surprisingly, the worst offenders are Republicans who serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

            CAGW’s 2008 edition shines the spotlight on Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) as the top porkers in Congress. Apparently, they’ve hung a sign in the appropriations committee’s room that says: “Will work for pork.”

            More than 1,100 pork-barrel projects are described in a 59-page summary of the “pig book.” A quick scan uncovered these among hundreds of examples which are not mentioned in today’s spate of news stories (all gist for the local reporting mill):

            * $1.6 million for the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, even though the facility has over 2 million visitors per year, 36 corporate benefactors, and a fund with over $200 million in assets.

            * $1.3 million for the Abyssinian Development Corp., New York City, to support various housing and social welfare programs in Harlem.

            * $3.0 million to build a conference center in Santee, S.C., defended as a legitimate federal expense because the facility will also be used as a hurricane evacuation center.

            * $393,000 to help finance the renovation of the privately-owned building in Iowa, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, into a 26-room hotel.

            CAGW’s website features a gateway to its database of earmarks. Just click to select a lawmaker by name or state and the program will display each selected lawmaker’s list of earmark spending projects (and the amounts of taxpayer funds appropriated for them).

–Edward Zuckerman, Editor

Attn: Immigration law reporters

            Why would the University of Illinois (Chicago campus) and the Prince George’s County (Maryland) Public Schools be among the nation’s top beneficiaries of a program that allows U.S. companies to import foreign workers with special skills that are not easily found among American workers?

            The two academic institutions appear on a list of the nation’s top recipients of visas that are made available through the H-1B program for highly skilled workers, such as scientific researchers and computer programmers.

            Expectedly, major U.S. corporations in the high-tech industry—such as Infosys Technologies Ltd., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc. and Motorola Inc.—are on the list that was recently compiled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Dept. of Homeland Security that administers the special visa program.

            So, too, were major accounting and financial consulting firms: Accenture LLP,  Ernst & Young LLP, Deloitte & Touche LLP, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

            The Top 25 were responsible for approximately 20,000 of the special visas that were handed out last year. This year, USCIS will distribute 65,000 visas so overseas workers can occupy jobs that, theoretically at least, cannot be filled by American workers. Another 20,000 visas are allocated for foreign nationals who have earned advance degrees at a U.S. college, in effect allowing them to trade in their student visas for a visa that allows them to work.

            H-1B visas are in short supply and demand for them is great. To handle the crush of applications, USCIS opened the applications window on April 1 and will close it on April 7. Then, it will conduct a lottery to select the 85,000 recipients of the visas that will be issued in 2008. The visas are good for a three-year period, with an opportunity to apply for a three-year extension.

            The annual scramble for H-1B visas also renewed a debate. U.S. employers want the limit to be increased, but some policymakers question whether some U.S. companies are gaming the system to replace expensive American workers with cheap foreign labor.

            Yesterday (April 1), the American Immigration Lawyers Association, whose members earn fees by helping their clients resolve their visa difficulties, called the limit on H-1B visas “a poor April Fool’s Day joke.”

            “Our history shows that immigrants have long contributed to rising U.S. standards of living, and recent studies reflect a direct correlation between the use of skilled foreign workers and the creation of jobs for Americans,” AILA President Kathleen Walker said. Her comments didn’t specify what she meant by “our history,” nor did it give any examples where an H-1B visa holder created a job for an American.

            At the same time, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) co-wrote a letter to the 25 top H-1B visa recipients with a list of questions about their practices. The employers—including the University of Illinois (Chicago campus) and the Prince Georges County Public Schools—were asked, among other things, to provide job descriptions that are filled by H-1B visa holders and to report the number of American employees who were terminated and replaced by H-1B visa holders during the past five years.

            Durbin and Grassley acknowledged in their letters that the H-1B visas are in short supply, but “the program can’t be allowed to become a job-killer in America. We need to ensure that firms are not misusing these visas, causing American workers to be unfairly deprived of good high-skill jobs here at home.”

Edward Zuckerman, Editor

The country’s biggest and wealthiest news media corporations are paying hefty legal fees to participate in a court drama that literally puts American journalism on trial. Yet, inexplicably, their news and editorial pages and programs have reported scant little about it to their readers and viewers.

There’s hardly a person in America who doesn’t know last summer’s story about a judge in the District of Columbia who claimed he was owed $54 million in damages because a drycleaning establishment lost a pair of  trousers.

But how many know that another judge in the nation’s capital has ordered a former newspaper reporter to pay a $5,000 per day fine—and the order stipulates that the money must come only from personal resources—until she divulges the identities of confidential sources who supplied information for articles she wrote as a USA Today staff reporter that included FBI and CIA anti-terror and counter-terror activities.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a Bush appointee who also sits on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that approves FBI wiretapping warrants, ordered the fine last month after Toni Locy claimed she could not remember the source for a story that identified Army germ warfare scientist Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed 5 persons. Locy, now a journalism professor at West Virginia University, further claimed that she routinely discarded her notepads.

Judge Walton’s demand goes beyond the case pending in his court, a claim by Hatfill that he is owed damages because the government violated his privacy rights. Even Hatfill’s own lawyers have acknowledged that the identity of Locy’s sources is not central to their case. And, they certainly have no interest in learning the identity of sources who were not involved in the anthrax stories.

Locy hasn’t been forced to pay the fine, at least not yet. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suspended its collection pending the outcome of an appeal to Judge Walton’s order.

Late last week (March 28), a team of lawyers filed an amicus brief with the appeals court, arguing that Judge Walton’s contempt order against Ms. Locy is unprecedentedly harsh and disregards the Circuit Court’s own recognition of a constitutionally protected First Amendment privilege for journalists.

In their brief, 18 news organizations and 14 professional societies and trade associations argue that Hatfill’s interest in obtaining additional evidence to buttress his damages claim “cannot outweigh the public’s interest in protecting journalists’ abilities to report on matters as consequential as that at issue here: one of the largest, if not the largest, still-unsolved investigations in recent history into murders that terrified a nation.”

And, it adds:

“The compelled disclosure here is not even narrowly tailored to sources about Hatfill, but includes sources who all concede supplied no information about Hatfill, and thereby jeopardizes a lifetime of sources (which Locy) cultivated as a beat reporter. Stories like the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning reports exposing the black sites where the CIA detained high-value targets or the careless disregard of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital only saw the light of day because the reporter spent years building credibility and confidence with sources.”

Judge Walton’s order that Locy use only personal funds to pay the daily fine is “nightmarish” and “utterly without precedent,” the amici argued.

If allowed to stand, the “personal funds only” order would “wreak substantial havoc in newsrooms, driving a wedge between reporters and their employers, and leaving reporters in fear of personal bankruptcy whenever they write stories requiring information from confidential sources.”

–Edward Zuckerman, Editor

Attn: Health & medicine writers, City Desk Editors, et.al.

CDC and CMS have combined their resources to produce county-level statistics for stroke hospitalizations for blacks, Hispanics and whites who are age 65 and older.

Data for hospitals in each of the country’s 3,151 counties is accessed by clicking on a state (or drop-down menu of the states) that appears in an interactive map of the U.S., then clicking on the desired counties.

This is an opportunity to remind readers and viewers that stroke is the third-leading cause of death for men and women, and a major cause of serious, long-term disability.

Closer to home, the database shows which (if any) hospitals in your county provide emergency room services and/or treatment for stroke.

The CMS data show that approximately 21% of U.S. counties do not have a hospital that’s equipped for stroke treatment, 31% do not have hospitals that can provide emergency room treatment for stroke victims, and 77% counties do not have a hospital that provides neurology services.

NOTE: The CDC press release cited here is among more than 100 press releases from government agencies, congressional offices and advocacy groups which are featured in today’s edition of Government Policy Newslinks. Sign-up today for a no-obligation trial subscription.