Attn: Business desks

     A government database that’s loaded with financial and other information about U.S. export activity has just been updated through mid-2007, but so far it’s been one of Washington’s best-kept secrets.

     Assembled by the International Trade Administration’s Office of Trade and Industry Information, the database provides export data for 2005, 2006 and now through the first six months of 2007. The information is broken down by dollar value and category of goods sold for 369 U.S. metropolitan areas.

    The updating received mere mention in a press release that accompanied Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez’s appearance several days ago (July 14) at the Detroit Economic Club. Gutierrez didn’t travel to Detroit to boast about a government database but, rather, to generate political support for free trade agreements that have stalled in Congress.

     Gutierrez’s speech gained brief mention in a few local newspapers and trade journals, referring mostly to his claim that 77 U.S. cities had exported $1 billion or more worth of goods during the first six months of 2007, and that Detroit was the country’s 5th busiest market with mid-year export sales of $24.3 billion.

    The new trade data, Gutierrez said, “shows the benefits of dynamic and open trade with global partners to regional economies, and our more current national export data indicates that exports continue to support American jobs and stimulate our economy in communities across the country.”

     But the news coverage didn’t draw much attention to the fact that the newly updated database contains valuable and possibly newsworthy information about export activity in 369 metropolitan areas.

     For example, the database reveals that exports from the Hagerstown-Martinsburg (Md. and W.Va.) metropolitan statistical area totaled $105.3 million during the first half of 2007, and was proceeding at a pace that should easily surpass the previous year’s total exports of $171.6 million. Drilling further into the data, it was learned that the area’s printing industry, which is dominated by a Quad/Graphics plant in Martinsburg and the Seventh Day Adventist-run Review & Herald Publishing Co. in Hagerstown, account for approximately 25% of the area’s exports.

     The database also provides the dollar value of exports to specific countries, but only for the Top 50 metropolitan areas.

The following highlights several press releases that are featured in today’s (July 16) edition of Government Policy Newslinks:

Nutrient-rich waters create large “dead zone”
From the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
     Scientists are forecasting that this summer’s “dead zone” off the Louisiana-Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico could be the largest ever, covering about 8,800 square miles, an area that is roughly the size of New Jersey. A “dead zone” occurs when seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life. The Gulf “dead zone” is caused by farmland runoff of chemical fertilizer that flows through the Mississipp Basin.

Research uncovers little-known impact of smell and taste on health
From the National Institute of Health
     Scientists who study smell and taste are uncovering evidence that these senses make surprising contributions to our overall health. Genetic variations and smell-taste disorders may underlie dietary habits and have an impact on weight, blood pressure, and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

Donors to the party conventions have spent over $1 billion on federal lobbying since 2005
From the Campaign Finance Institute
     So far, 146 corporations, trade associations, labor unions and other interest groups have made contributions to the host committees for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominating conventions being held next month in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The donors, CFI found, have spent about $1.1 billion on federal lobbying activity since 2005.

Attn: Energy, political editors

     Even cave dwellers know by now that President Bush issued an executive order yesterday (July 14, observed in France as Bastille Day) to allow oil and gas drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, a vast expanse which stretches out for approximately 200 miles along the Atlantic, Pacific, Alaskan and Gulf of Mexico coasts.

     Bush’s announcement was meant to spur bipartisan cooperation on legislation that’s needed to rescind federal laws that restrict oil and gas activity on the OCS. But the message didn’t get through. Democrats dug in harder against lifting the OCS ban, and Republicans became more strident in their criticism of Democratic opposition.

     Our Government Policy Newslinks editors found reaction statements on the websites of 16 senators and 39 congressmen. It didn’t matter too much where a lawmaker came from; partisan differences were just as likely whether a lawmaker came from an inland state or a coastal state.

     The lone exception, at least among the statements in the GPN report, was Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) who announced her support for lifting OCS drilling restrictions. When it came down to a question of protecting the environment or protecting energy industry profits, it was the cash register that did most of the talking. In her statement, Landrieu said that any legislation to remove the ban on offshore drilling “must include a minimum of a 37.5% revenue share of lease royalties with the host states and host coastal communities that support this exploration.”

     It was a clumsy construction. Surely, Sen. Landrieu didn’t mean to say that opponents of OCS drilling should get a lesser royalty or none at all. And if given its fullest meaning, wouldn’t landlocked states that support OCS drilling deserve a share of the loot? These are, after all, public lands that belong to all 50 states, not just those states that happen to be near them.

     In announcing his decision, President Bush suggested that developing offshore energy sources would help reduce the $4-plus per gallon cost of gasoline that Americans are now paying. But when? By most estimates, it would take years for expanded offshore oil production to materialize, and U.S. oil refineries that are now operating at near-capacity would have to be expanded.

     Because of inherent delays, congressional objections notwithstanding, any move toward developing U.S. offshore oil deposits would have a more immediate geopolitical impact than an economic one. Obviously, bringing more oil into the U.S. from domestic sources would replace oil that’s coming from–and dollars that are going to–unfriendly regimes such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. But the idea of shifting U.S. oil dependence back to domestic supply sources didn’t impress several key coastal state Democrats.

     The President’s announcement, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in a statement, “is something you’d expect from an oil company CEO, not the President of the United States. The President is taking special-interest government to a new level and threatening our thriving coastal economy, worth $70 billion and almost 2 million jobs.”

     Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that offshore drilling “which I wholly and resolutely oppose” won’t produce oil in time to solve the gas price emergency. “For one thing,” she said, “there’s a global shortage of drilling rigs. There’s already a five-year waiting list for existing drilling rigs, and the vast majority of the new rigs currently in production are already committed through 2012.”

     Sen. Feinstein’s statement listed several other factors that would seem to lessen OCS drilling as a short-term energy solution. But to suggest that U.S. oil deposits shouldn’t be opened to exploration because all of the oil rigs are being built for installation elsewhere in the world is hardly a legitimate argument. Of course, all oil rigs are being built for use elsewhere, but isn’t that because OCS was not a possible destination at the time they were bought?

     Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) whose homestate is the only one with hundreds of miles of coastline along both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico said in his statement that the legislation pending in Congress would allow each state to make their own offshore drilling decisions. The legislation, he said, “should respect the wishes of states like Florida that wish to keep drilling at a distance that doesn’t impact our environment, our economy, or the missions of the U.S. military.”

     Sen. Martinez noted that a 2006 law opened 8.3 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling activities at locations that were at least 125 miles from the shore, far enough over the horizon so that even the tallest drilling rig could not be seen from the top of the tallest oceanside condominium.

     Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.), in a fairly typical GOP statement, accused Democrats for “not looking after this nation’s interest.” He said there are 175 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.1 trillion barrels of oil available from public lands that are now excluded from leasing and development.

     Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), in his statement, called President Bush’s announcement “a step in the right direction for American consumers and our economy, but a defeat for the environmental lobby that has spent tens of millions of dollars in Washington over the years to put our nation’s energy reserves off-limits. The decision between using America’s own energy reserves and continuing to send our dollars to Venezuela and the Middle East now rests squarely on the shoulders of (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic congressional leadership.”

–EZ

Attn: Health & medicine editors

     We see the guy on television all the time, promising in a commercial that if Medicare won’t pay for a mobile wheelchair his company will pick up the tab. Turns out the company could well afford it. For years, it had been selling $2,000 wheelchairs to the government for as much as $7,000.

     More profitable than selling, say, watermelons. At least until federal agents unraveled the scam. Last year, The Scooter Store Inc. of San Antonio, Tex., paid a $4 million fine to resolve False Claims Act charges. And, even more costly, the company had to forego $43 million in Medicare reimbursements that were pending at the time.

     The May 2007 announcement by the Justice Department’s Civil Division exposed a small tip of a very large iceberg. Medicare fraud is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, and the federal government is moving on several fronts to try to shut it down.

     And it’s blatant. In a Senate speech last week, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said the panel uncovered evidence of the worst imaginable abuse.

     “From 2000 to 2007, we estimate that nearly 500,000 payments totaling about $76 million went to durable medical equipment suppliers that had submitted claims using the identification numbers of 17,000 deceased doctors,” Levin said. “We found, for example, a physician in Florida who died in 1999…from November 2005 through November 2006, Medicare paid out over $544,000 worth of durable medical equipment claims supposedly ordered by this physician.”

     Southern Florida and southern California are hotbeds of Medicare abuse and fraud. A year ago, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced the start of a two-year program to expose Medicare scams in the two regions. It followed a pilot project, called Operation Whack-a-Mole, that resulted in the indictments of 56 individuals for bilking $258 million from Medicare by submitted phony billings.

    In December 2006, federal agents made unannounced visits to 1,472 durable medical equipment suppliers in southern Florida, and about 2,000 suppliers in Los Angeles. It resulted in the revocation of billing identification numbers of 634 suppliers in Florida and 770 suppliers in Los Angeles.

     Last week, in a report measuring progress in a three-year demonstration project, HHS said it already recovered more than $1 billion worth of improper Medicare payments. The project, which is intended to determine the efficiency of using “recovery audit contractors” to review Medicare billings, was initially limited to New York, Florida and California and was last year expanded to include Massachusetts, South Carolina and Arizona. The recovery of payments for false billings has been so impressive and cost-effective (about 20-cents for each $1 collected) that Congress has given HHS authority to expand the program to all 50 states by 2010.

–EZ

Attn: Political/government editors; editorial writers

     Is it undignified or improper for a House member to post information on a social networking website that might also contain commercial advertising or political information or, much worse, a link to a pornographic website?

     If your answer to that question is “yes,” then what would you say about lawmakers who grant interviews or send press releases to newspapers or magazines, only to have their remarks or opinions appear alongside ads for condoms and escort services, or alongside editorials that espouse the election or defeat of a political officeseeker?

     The question arises in the context of an effort by the House Administration Committee to revise the congressional franking rules which prescribe the content of materials that lawmakers can send postage-free to their constituents. It’s not widely known, but the franking rules also regulate how lawmakers can use the Internet, and restricts them to websites that operate within the House.gov domain. Some lawmakers have ignored the restriction to post videos of House speeches and text articles on such other sites as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

     Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), chairman of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (the so-called “Franking Commission”) that is reviewing the current rule, said there is support for revising the rule so that Members could post articles and videos on other Internet sites. However, there remains a need to ensure that the external sites meet “acceptable standards that reflect favorably on the dignity, propriety, and decorum of the House.”

     In a June 24 letter to Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Administration Committee, Capuano recommended that “official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information that is not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.”

     Copies of Capuano’s letter have been circulating on Capitol Hill in recent days, even showing up on the website of Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.)

     “If this rule is adopted,” Bachmann said in a press release, “the free flow of information from Members to constituents and vice versa would be significantly stunted.”

     Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) greeted the proposed rule with indignation, calling it “ridiculous” and “borderline criminal.”

     “The First Amendment is one of the cornerstones of our democracy and now the Democratic leadership of the House Administration Committee wants to censor how Members of Congress use the Internet to express their opinions and interact with their constituents,” Burton said in a press release.

     Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation which has made a multi-million dollar investment in Internet projects that are aimed at increasing political and governmental transparency, agreed that House rules need to be revised, but not along the lines suggested by Capuano. Rather than restricting lawmakers to using Internet sites that meet Capuano’s standards of “dignity, propriety, and decorum,” Miller said the present limitation to the House.gov domain should be rescinded.

     “Congressional rules should not prevent lawmakers from joining us in online conversations,” Miller said in a Foundation press release. “Under the current system, members of Congress are forced to break rules to use new technologies and services to do what their constituents ask of them: connect, listen and be held accountable.”

     In a letter sent yesterday (July 10) to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that she has used such external sites as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg to communicate with her constituents, and that any revision to the rules would be an accommodation to reality. “I can assure you that it is not the intention, nor will it be the result, of the final regulations to stifle, censor, or deprive Members of communicating effectively and in real-time with their constituents. I am confident that the Committee on House Administration will develop these final rules on a bipartisan basis, recognizing that we have a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used for political or commercial purposes.”

     Capuano, too, sought to dispel the burgeoning controversy as “laughably inaccurate assertions being spread by some Republicans in Congress.”

     “The only item we seek to address is loosening existing rules to allow Members to post videos as a first step toward making the rules meet our constituents’ expectations regarding how they communicate with us in the 21st Century,” Capuano said.

     “Our only concern is commercialization,” he added in a press release. “Apparently, the Republicans spreading these lies would rather operate without rules and open the House to commercialism. Maybe they don’t care if an official video appears next to a political advertisement for Barack Obama or John McCain, creating the appearance of an endorsement. And I guess they don’t care if constituents clicking on their videos will be treated to commercials for anything you can imagine, from the latest Hollywood blockbuster to Viagra.

     “Certainly, advertisements are a reality in today’s world and most people can distinguish. However, it is also a reality that Members of Congress who use taxpayer’s money to communicate with constituents should be held to the highest possible standard of independence,” Capuano added.

–EZ