Free Republic

McCain, Bayh Seek Americorps Growth Updated: Wed, Nov 07 5:03 PM EST By ROBERT GEHRKE, Associated Press Writer By ROBERT GEHRKE, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - AmeriCorps, set up eight years ago to encourage young people to do public service, should be expanded to include work on homeland defense, Sens. John McCain and Evan Bayh said Wednesday. The senators are seeking a fivefold increase in the program, bringing the number of volunteers to 250,000 by 2010, with 100,000 of the new volunteers devoted to security needs, such as public health programs and disaster relief. "No one argues there is ...

Just hours before a Sunday New York Times report detailing new Pardongate allegations against Roger Clinton is set to hit newsstands, key witnesses who have helped federal prosecutors build a case against the former first brother will give their first broadcast interviews to WABC New York radio hosts John Batchelor and Paul Alexander, NewsMax.com has learned. Scheduled guests for the radio duo's four-hour exploration of the case include Guy Lincecum and his mother Alberta, who paid a company owned in part by Roger Clinton over $200,000 in exchange for a promised presidential pardon for Guy's brother Garland. Also on hand ...

Rep. Shadegg can hold his own on with Wexler and Richardson

Because ballots can be bought, stolen, miscounted, lost, thrown out or sent to Denmark, nobody knows with any precision how many votes go uncounted in U.S. elections. For weeks, Florida has riveted the nation with a mind-numbing array of failures: misleading ballots, contradictory counting standards, discarded votes - 19,000 in one county alone. But an examination by the Los Angeles Times in a dozen states shows that Florida is not the exception. It is the rule. Elections across the country are underfunded, badly managed, ill equipped and poorly staffed. Election workers are temporaries, pay is a pittance, training is brief ...

11/06/2000 Why Is $59 Billion Missing From HUD? By Kelly Patricia O’Meara omeara@insightmag.com Billions of dollars are missing from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s books. Some HUD officials blame computer glitches; others allege widespread graft. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has earned a failing grade from the House Government Reform subcommittee on Government Management for the way the agency manages taxpayers’ money. Subcommittee chairman Stephen Horn, R-Calif., is said to be furious that HUD’s most recent financial report shows the agency is unable to balance its checkbook and cannot account for $59 billion. For ...

President Clinton plans to visit Seattle today, despite the tense situation in the Middle East that had forced him to cancel the first day of a multistate fund-raising trip, White House officials said last night. White House spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said Clinton made the decision to travel after a full day of telephone diplomacy and a two-hour meeting with his national-security team. "At this point, the president believes that he can continue with his schedule as planned," Chitre said. Today is the Jewish sabbath, limiting the possibilities for diplomatic contacts. The president, who is expected to arrive at Boeing ...

OLYMPIA -- Ten protesters from the Rainforest Action Network were arrested yesterday when they refused to leave Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's campaign office. They and more than 100 other protesters were demonstrating against Gore family ownership of stock in Occidental Petroleum. Colombia's government last September granted Occidental the right to conduct exploratory drilling a few miles outside the legal boundaries of the U'wa Indian reserve. The U'wa believe oil exploration would bring violence and destroy their culture. The protesters showed up yesterday afternoon, Gore campaign spokeswoman Tovah Ravitz said. Ten had been arrested by 7 p.m., said Olympia police ...

Quinn: Bill touted as break for farmer, small businesses I'M TRYING REALLY hard to feel sorry for the rich. When they die, their estates have to pay a "death" tax, which means less for their heirs. Poor kids. All that heavy lifting in the stock market by mom and dad, and the kids don't get to keep it all. Where's the justice? Who will stand up for the rights of the descendants of multimillionaires? As it turns out, Congress will. Compassionately, conservatives voted en masse to phase out the tax on all estates, even those of billionaires. The hearts of ...

'Charlie Two-Shoes' finally is a U.S. citizen by Paul Nowell The Associated Press CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - As a boy in a mud-hut village in China, he befriended a company of U.S. Marines and later suffered under the Communists because of it. After a 55-year odyssey, "Charlie Two Shoes," as the Marines called him, is about to become a U.S. citizen. "I always believed this day would come," Tsui Chi Hsii, 66, said at the Chapel Hill restaurant he owns. "No matter how many hurdles I had to cross, I always believed victory was possible." Sixty of Tsui's Marine buddies ...

Gore: Mountaintop Moment April 10, 2000 11:15 am EST Says 2000 Election Is A Big Deal GLEN COVE, N.Y. (CBS News) - Al Gore has gone back on the offensive against his presumptive November rival, saying the upcoming election against George W. Bush presents voters with "as stark and clear and sharp a contrast as in any election in American history." In a speech to party donors Tuesday in Glen Cove, N.Y., he criticized the Texas governor's policies and said this period in time could be described as a "mountaintop moment." At a time of continued economic growth, Gore said ...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel and Palestine have launched talks aimed at forging a draft permanent peace treaty, amid fears that a domestic political scandal could weaken Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's bargaining position. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, meeting at an undisclosed location, launched 10 days of intensive talks aimed at reaching agreement on the draft of a U.S.-brokered treaty, senior Israeli negotiator Oded Eran said. The sides have pledged to nail down a framework accord by February 13. A permanent peace deal, covering such core issues as the fate of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and Jewish settlers, is to be ...

Bin Laden Reportedly Hid Behind Relief Organization January 23, 2000 1:08 am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors say Osama bin Laden used international companies and a relief organization as covers for what they describe as a worldwide terrorist conspiracy, The New York Times reported on Sunday. Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi financier, is charged along with 16 others of conspiring to attack Americans in the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. In court papers obtained by the Times, U.S. prosecutors say bin Laden's organization obtained blank passports from ...

by Roberto Sanchez and Sally Macdonald Seattle Times staff reporters Former South African President Nelson Mandela and his wife, Graca Machel, arrived in Seattle this morning for a whirlwind three-day tour of the city, aimed at raising money for their charities, building bridges between Africa and Seattle's high-tech community and spending time with students and community groups. Mandela and Machel were greeted by the rousing cheers of about 800 schoolchildren, whom he encouraged to pay attention to their teachers, do their homework and stay away from drugs and alcohol. "If you do that you will be members of Congress. ...

Initiative Includes Plans Covering 94 Million Americans By Jeff Levine WebMD Washington Bureau Chief Dec. 7, 1999 (Washington) -- In an effort to make the American medical system less prone to dangerous or deadly error, President Clinton announced a series of measures Tuesday that is aimed at encouraging a culture of openness and accountability among health providers. "Too many families have been the victims of medical errors that are avoidable, mistakes that are preventable, tragedies, therefore, that are unacceptable. Everyone here agrees that our health care system does wonders, but first must do no harm," said Clinton, flanked by ...

Say you're sorry, Mr. President This past weekend in Bulgaria, President Clinton said, "I am very proud to be the first president to visit Bulgaria, a free Bulgaria." He should have added, "thanks to our great president, Ronald Reagan." I dare say that if Clinton had been our Commander in Chief during the Decade of Greed, or even earlier, today's president wouldn't be addressing a free Bulgaria. Clinton would have been busy unilaterally disarming the United States and apologizing for America's anti-Communist imperialism. Just look at what he said in Greece last Saturday. He told business leaders in Athens that ...

Trade is hard sell for Commerce Secretary William Daley by David Postman Seattle Times Olympia bureau LOS ANGELES - U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley is frustrated as he completes the last leg of a 20-city tour to sell benefits of free trade to a skeptical American public. Daley wasn't bothered by protesters who followed his "Trade Globally, Prosper Locally" bus tour around L.A. with their "Pillage Globally, Lay-off Locally" van. He didn't raise his voice when a protester debated him through a small bullhorn two feet away. And he laughed off a protester's "Capitalism Sucks" sign. But eight months ...

Guest columnist Fix trade, don't trash it by Mark Van Putten Special to The Times THE center ground is ceasing to hold in a trade debate increasingly dominated by extremes. Public confidence in the international trade system continues to erode because average Americans increasingly believe trade institutions do not share their values, including respect for the environment. The World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting to begin in Seattle later this month is veering toward a debacle that could leave lasting perceptions damaging to the cause both of the environment and of trade liberalization. It need not be so. It is ...

Guest columnist WTO is dismantling democracy by Sally Soriano Special to The Times THE World Trade Organization (WTO) ministers are meeting in Seattle at the end of November to decide how to further extend their organization's power. In the media, the WTO's five-year record is usually portrayed as benign. The record, in fact, is alarming, showing that the U.S. Congress and other national governments have turned over many of the decisions that affect people's daily lives to unelected trade bureaucrats. The WTO's panels of "judges," who have presided over 100 cases to date, have always decided in favor of profit ...

Recipients at 4 PlansTo Pay More on Jan. 1 Health care costs will rise dramatically next year for tens of thousands of elderly and disabled Washington area residents enrolled in Medicare HMOs. The four area HMOs serving Medicare recipients will increase premiums or co-payments beginning Jan. 1, further evidence that managed care is not as much of a bargain as policymakers had hoped it would be. For years HMOs have been wooing senior citizens away from standard Medicare coverage with promises of lower out-of-pocket expenses and extra benefits, such as prescription drugs. Now those advantages are eroding. Kaiser Permanente's ...

When young Germans danced through the final breach in the Berlin Wall 10 years ago Tuesday, American thinkers great and small tried to make sense of the Wall's fall. Many tried to forecast what would happen next. The predicting proved perilous. Looking back at them now, those prognostications share a certain quaintness. They were nearly all rooted in the Cold War realities that had created the American frame of reference for nearly half a century. But the prognosticators could not grasp the fact that this frame of reference was as doomed as the Wall itself. Many of the forecasters ...