Bad Deeds for 2-05-2008

Bill Kristol Says White Women Are a Problem – From the February 3 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday:

BILL KRISTOL: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.

[laughter]
JUAN WILLIAMS (National Public Radio correspondent and Fox News contributor): Not me!
HUME: Bill, for the record, I like white women.
KRISTOL: I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

People Continue to Put Garbage in the Oceans – A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said. The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Scandal in the Department of Housing and Urban Development – Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a developer at a substantial discount, then retaliated against the housing authority when it refused to do so, a recent court filing alleges.

The authority’s director, Carl Greene, contends in a court affidavit that Jackson called Philadelphia’s mayor in 2006 to demand the transfer to the developer, Kenny Gamble, a former soul-music songwriter who is a business friend of Jackson’s. Jackson’s aides followed up with “menacing” threats about the property and other housing programs in at least a dozen letters and phone calls over an 11-month period, Greene said in an interview.

Greene and his colleagues have alleged in the court filing that Philadelphia is now paying a severe price for disobeying a Bush Cabinet official. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently vowed to strip the city’s housing authority of its ability to spend some federal funds, a move that the authority said could raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people. […]

“The secretary was determined that we turn over this land to this specific developer,” Greene said in an interview. “I refused. . . . He didn’t have the ability to remove me. So he resorted to these extraordinary measures to extract what he wanted.”

Mark Kleiman notes that Bush and Jackson have effectively turned the Department of Housing and Urban Development into “an extortion racket,” which, under the circumstances, sounds about right.

 

Regards,

Jim