Newsbriefs

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(from January 19, 2006)

Input Extension...
Shandaken Planners have decided to allow an extra 19 days for people to submit written comments about the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for entrepreneur Andrew Poncic’s water harvesting project on Phoenicia’s Woodland Valley Road.
The planning board, which met last Wednesday, has been in the midst of the comment period but the original deadline for comments was January 11th. It has now been pushed to the 30th of this month, one day prior to the planning board workshop when the board will review the comments.
Board Secretary Marie Stutman reports that to date she has received about 26 responses. There have been more, she said, but notes cases where the same letter has been sent three times from the same address, one from each member of one family, so she chooses to count that as a single correspondence.
“We’re getting letters from Key West, from Florida, Georgia and all over,” she said.
Many letters include complaints that the board chose not to have a public hearing on the matter, but Stutman believes such remarks are due to a misunderstanding.
“There will be at least one public hearing on this project,” she said.
That hearing would be during the planning board site plan review, a later stage of the review process that is expected to occur this spring. The public hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact statement was waived, which the board is allowed to do under State environmental laws.
Mike O’Neil of Vernon, Connecticut, who lives part time on Woodland Valley road, said in his letter that it seems restrictive to not hold a hearing since an overwhelming number of people, both Woodland Valley residents and many other citizens of Shandaken, have so firmly opposed Mr. Poncic's plan for the better part of a decade.
“Public opinion is important for you and your board to weigh and should be a very real element in any decision you make regarding this Special Use Permit,” he wrote.
Stutman said so many people wrote in with similar complaints that the board is drafting a response to all who commented, informing them of the plan for a public hearing in the future.
The project calls for using 18 wheel, diesel powered tractor-trailers carry 5800 gallons of water out of the long valley twice a day, five days a week. Valley residents have continually expressed fears that such loads would wreak havoc on the thin roadway and it’s many bridges and also make the road unsafe and noisy. The other primary complaint is that the project may harm the trout population of the woodland valley creek, which O’Neil describes as “a valuable and viable trout fishery.”
In addition to sending written comments to the planning board at Shandaken Planning Board/ Town Hall, P.O. 134 Shandaken, NY 12480, Stutman said e-mail’s will accepted and included as written comments. The e-mail address is planning@shandaken.us.

Settled!!!
A settlement between the Onteora Central School Distroct and the O’Connor family of Olive was reached just before both parties went to trial on January 0 regarding the 2002 death of Brian and Cindy O’Connor’s 15-year old son, Kevin. Neither party would speak about the specifics of the settlement after the fact, and chose to respond to queries from the public in press release form.
Originally, the O’Connors filed a wrongful death suit seeking $6.5 million in damages from Onteora in 2002. Recent reports noted that a previous attempt at settlement had stalled near the $1.2 million mark.
Kevin O’Connor, a member of the high school football team, as well as local Babe Ruth baseball, was struck and killed by a 1990 Chevrolet station wagon owned by the school district and driven by district employee Paul Bresciani, 62 of West Shokan, on June 18, 2002, while working outside his parents’ business, Sheldon Hill Forestry Supplies on Route 28 in Shokan. Bresciani claimed that he blacked out due to a recurring problem caused by dizziness brought on by an irregular heart rhythm, then veered off the road and struck the teenager.
The O’Connor lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court a few months after the accident, alleged the district knew or had notice of the “dangerous (medical) condition ... for a sufficient length of time prior to the accident” and that former district Transportation Superintendent Michael Grehl falsified Bresciani’s certification.
In a press release regarding the settlement Monday, Onteora superintendent Justine Winters noted, “The District is committed to enforce all laws and regulations that govern the administration of its transportation services. The Superintendent of Schools has committed to create regulations that ensure strict compliance with the safety requirements of Onteora students… The Onteora Central School District extends its profound sympathy to the O’Connor family for their losses.”
In their release, Brian and Cindy O’Connor were equally brief.
“By conceding liability in our son’s death, the defendants admitted to non-compliance of multiple New York State DMV Vehicle and Traffic laws, the commissioner’s Article 19A Special Requirements for School Bus Drivers and New York State Education Regulations governing bus drivers.,” they wrote.
Cindy O’Connor was elected to the Onteora School Board last Spring.
Asked whether the insurance settlement amount would be discussed by the board, or eventually made public, Winters wrote in an e-mail accompanying the formal press release that, “The Board does not have to take any action regarding the settlement and no public announcement of the terms of the settlement will be made. Any settlement costs are borne by the insurance company.”
Since the case has been ongoing over the last three and a half years, the insurance company has already raised its premium costs for the district to reflect any possible settlement, it was later noted, although further insurance cost hikes could still occur as a result of Monday’s decision.

Town Tasting!
The third annual Taste Of The Town will be held at Belleayre Mountain on Monday, January 23rd, when the resort’s Discovery Lodge is transformed from ski lodge to candle lit dining room, featuring twelve of the finest restaurants in the region. Each restaurant will showcase a dish unique to their establishment, and to round out the evening, a DJ will provide dinner music and dancing, and a cash bar will be available.
Taste Of The Town is a fund raising event for the Belleayre Region Lodging and Tourism Association, a not-for-profit group dedicated to the economic development of Belleayre’s surrounding communities. Their mission is to market the entire Route 28 corridor region, bringing in overnight guests who will spend their vacation dollars at local eateries, convenience stores, hotels and tourist attractions.
Restaurants participating this year are the Peekamoose Restaurant of Big Indian, the Andes Hotel of Andes, the Highlands Inn of Fleischmanns, the Cheese Barrel of Margaretville, the Pine Hill Arms of Pine Hill, Shangri-la Restaurant of Big Indian, the Red Rooster of Big Indian, Peggy Bellar Catering of Arkville and the Catamount at Emerson Place in Mt. Tremper.
Seating space is limited for this popular event, so be sure to purchase your tickets in advance from the Lodging and Tourism Bureau by calling 800-431-4555. Tickets are $35 per person or $60 per couple. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

Shifting Budget
The shift from Republican to Democratic leadership in Ulster County government could cost taxpayers after the departing GOP voted in payouts for political appointees and others leaving county government that will put the new year’s budget behind the $350,000 legislators had previously anticipated for such costs.
“It was purposely not put in the budget and creates an automatic shortfall,” Donaldson said of the funds needed to pay outgoing employees for unused vacation, sick, and holiday time.
Actual amounts range from $74.500 for retiring County Attorney Frank Murray, first appointed in 1980, and $41,000 for Tourism Director Peter Carofano, on board since current Shandaken councilman left the position nine years ago.
Payouts are established during bargaining between the county and its labor unions and are therefore established by contracts ultimately approved by the Legislature. Known payouts for six employees this year are expected to total almost $190,000, according to information provided by the Ulster County Treasurer’s Office.
The outgoing Republican Legislature also added $800,000 to the county’s sales tax projection for 2006 and $1.2 million in state Medicaid relief funds that is now known to be unlikely to emerge, creating further shortfalls for their Democratic successors, who solidly took the legislature in a route last November.
“This puts us $2.5 million behind, and going out to bond for a new law enforcement center will put us $9.5 million behind by the end of the year,” new Majority Leader David Donaldson said last week. “Our biggest challenge is going to be the budget, by far. It’s my main concern.”

Goodbye Harry
Longstanding Ulster County Elections Commissioner Harry Castiglione, 73, recently submitted his resignation, effective on April 1, after serving since 1985. His letter of resignation did not cite the Woodstock resident’s recent cancer trouble as a reason, but noted simply that “it was time.” In interviews, Castiglione said partly, he felt that after this past fall’s 21-12 takeover of the legislature after 28 years, his work was done.
The Democratic County Committee will decide on a successor for the $63,500-a-year job. Approval by the Legislature is usually routine. Castiglione’s two-year term expires on Dec. 31.
Democrat Committee Chairman John Parete of Boiceville, father of Legislators Robert Parete and Richard Parete, Olive Dems boss, and owner of the Boiceville Inn, said the committee will meet “as soon as possible” to select a new commissioner. He also said an appreciation dinner for Castiglione will be scheduled.
Asked if he might be a candidate, Parete said he would consider the job if offered it.
Castiglione served as president of the state Association of Election Commissioners and was well respected for his knowledge of election law and procedures.

Closed Care…
The state Attorney General’s Office has filed a lawsuit to prevent Healthcare Associates, the company that runs the Northeast Center for Special Care in Lake Katrine, from furnishing health services under the state’s Medicaid program. The lawsuit was filed in state Supreme Court in Albany in connection with an investigation into allegations of patient neglect at two nursing homes, one of which is provided health services by Healthcare Associates. The company’s president, Anthony Salerno, is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
In a press release, state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a Democratic candidate for governor, said his investigation led to the arrests of employees at the two homes, including the Jennifer Matthew Nursing Home in Rochester, where Healthcare Associates provided services. The lawsuit seeks to “enjoin the defendants from providing health care services in New York state under the Medicaid program.”
The bulk of the Northeast Center’s public aid, about $27 million in Medicaid funding, comes from both the state and federal governments, and is administered by the state.
David Lenefsky, the attorney for Healthcare Associates, said negotiations are under way with the Attorney General’s Office for an out-of-court settlement.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had warned the Northeast Center about a possible loss of government aid in March 2004, when inspectors found violations at the Lake Katrine facility. An 11th-hour state inspection gave the facility a clean bill of health and the state-administered payments were no longer in jeopardy.
The Northeast Center for Special Care operates in a 209,000-square-foot former IBM building on Grant Avenue in Lake Katrine, and has about 240 patients. When the center opened in 1999, it was touted by Gov. George Pataki and local officials as a boon to the region’s economy and a health-care facility unlike any other in the region.

Caught Us…
Postage rates went up on January 8 for the first time since 2002, raising the price of mailing a first-class letter by two cents to 39 cents. The increases affected all types of mail and packages, including postcards, which will go up by a penny to 24 cents.
The increases of around 5 percent will help build a congressionally mandated reserve fund. According to a 2003 law, the U.S. Postal Service must put $3.1 billion into an ‘’escrow account’’ by September 30, 2006.
Postal spokesman Jim Quirk said Congress was to decide within 180 days after passage of the law what the money would be used for, but that has not happened. ‘’Two years have passed, and that determination has not yet been put into law.’’
Without the reserve requirement, the service could have avoided a rate increase this year, Quirk said. The postal service ended its 2005 fiscal year on Sept. 30 with $1.4 billion in net income on operating revenues of $69.9 billion.
The cost to mail an item weighing up to half of a pound via Express Mail, the postal service’s fastest delivery method, rose to $14.40 from $13.65. Priority Mail, which delivers packages in an average of two to three days, now costs $4.05 for packages up to one pound, up from $3.85. International rates will rise by similar amounts.

IBM Probed
Federal investigators have racheted up their probe of how International Business Machines Corp. advised Wall Street about stock option expenses in the first quarter of 2005, with the Securities and Exchange Commission opening an informal investigation of the matter last June, but Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM saying this week that the agency had informed the company the probe is now formal, meaning the SEC can issue subpoenas for documents rather than just requesting them.
The investigation surrounds the guidance IBM gave before its first-quarter earnings, which were released last April 14. At the time, the company said stock options cut into earnings by 10 cents per share. But analysts had been expecting 14 cents a share, a figure that Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge gave in a chart accompanying an April 5 conference call. Loughridge was disclosing what options costs would have been a year earlier if IBM had been expensing stock compensation at the time. He indicated that the first quarter of 2005 would yield a similar result.
IBM went on to post a disappointing first quarter, missing analysts’ expectations by six cents per share. Some analysts complained that IBM led them to believe the options-expensing costs would be higher so as to keep analysts’ overall expectations down and thus cushion the poor results.
IBM spokesman Ed Barbini would not comment on that claim. But he said IBM is cooperating with the SEC, and noted that the agency has informed the company that the investigation should not be construed as an indication the law was broken.

Bio Fuel?
Cornell Cooperative Extension will be hosting an interactive videoconference on energy issues on February 10 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Dutchess County Extension office in Millbrook and the Agroforestry Resource Center in Greene County. “De-Mystifying Bio Fuels, Opportunities, Challenges and Uncertainties for Economic Development and Sustainable Energy Use in the Hudson Valley,” will provide basic information regarding the growing interest in bio fuels. The potential for expansion and application of the technology in the Hudson/Catskill region will also be explored. Speakers from Cornell University, Cornell Cooperative Extension, NYS Agriculture and Markets and others will discuss the major categories of bio fuels and their potential applications. These areas of focus will include research being conducted on plant oil based technology using rapeseed, utilization of willow biomass, waste wood as a bio fuel and grass based bio fuel/ethanol production potential.
The workshop is targeted at decision makers, economic developers, agencies, farmers and interested citizens. The fee is $10 payable at the door. For more information, or to register, please call Cornell Cooperative Extension in Greene County, 518-622-9820 or Dutchess County, 845-677-8223 x130.
Also coming up of interest, the 2006 Hudson Valley Nursery and Greenhouse Growers School will be presented by Cornell Cooperative Extension of the Hudson Valley on Wednesday, February 8, 2006 at the Ulster County Fairgrounds in New Paltz, featuring a full day of educational classes for commercial greenhouse growers, landscapers and others in the commercial horticulture industry. Topics include effective methods for growing perennials, mixed container plants, cut flowers and woody plants and the latest, most effective way to treat pests and diseases of bedding plants, perennials and landscape ornamentals. The program is from 9 am to 4 pm. The fee is $40 if registered by Jan. 31 and includes a continental breakfast, lunch, all conference material and a mini trade show; $50 after or at the door subject to availability. To register or to receive more information, please contact Teresa Rusinek, Commercial Horticulture Extension Educator, at 845-340-3990.

Being Prepared…
Many physicians are complaining that much of this year’s flu vaccine has gone to supermarket and discount chains instead of medical clinics, creating problems for those people who are most at risk of life-threatening flu complications but aren’t always healthy enough to wait in store lines.
For thousands of Americans, especially those who are healthy, a flu clinic at the local drugstore or discount chain is easier and faster than making an appointment to see the doctor. However, doctors say chain stores don’t necessarily give priority to the nearly 90 million Americans considered at high risk of flu complications. They also say it’s often better for those patients to see their doctor, who can check their blood pressure, medications and other concerns. A survey by the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians found two-thirds who responded had received little or no vaccine by December, but 90 percent saw local stores giving shots. Frustrated, 10 percent said they’ll stop giving flu shots altogether and 35 percent are considering it.
According to the government, flu shot production was late and about several million doses short this year. Medical groups and public health officials are so concerned about distribution problems they have made it a prime topic for their annual flu vaccine summit set for later this month.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that despite the billions of dollars spent every year in this country on over-the-counter cough syrups, most such medicines do little if anything to relieve coughs. Over-the-counter cough syrups generally contain drugs in too low a dose to be effective, or contain combinations of drugs that have never been proven to treat coughs, said a new report from the American College of Chest Physicians.
The group’s new cough treatment guidelines discourage use of over-the-counter cough medicines. Irwin said that not only are such medicines ineffective at treating coughs due to colds - the most common cause of coughs - they can also can lead patients to delay seeking treatment for more serious coughs, including whooping cough.
Coughs can have numerous underlying causes, including asthma, allergies, severe heartburn, postnasal drip and bronchitis. The American Thoracic Society suggests patients should see their doctors for coughs that linger longer than three weeks or are accompanied by shortness of breath, which could indicate pneumonia or other serious conditions.
Coughs due to colds usually last less than three weeks. Drinking lots of fluids can help relieve these coughs, and so can chicken soup, the reports say.

Bush Rhetoric
President Bush, searching for a way to ease Americans’ anxiety about the economy and to respond to business and consumer alarm over health costs, is gearing up to focus on health care as a centerpiece of his 2006 domestic agenda. And instead of proposing major new federal spending, the White House is considering expansions of several earlier proposals aimed at using market forces to improve the quality and restrain the rapidly rising cost of health care.
Mr. Bush has recently called health care “an unmanageable cost” for businesses. Rejecting government-directed care as a solution, he said the ideal health system “is one in which there is a direct connect between provider and customer, [and] where there’s transparency in the pricing system.” In a likely signal of what is to come, the president urged Congress to expand health savings accounts, or HSAs. Created in 2003, HSAs allow Americans to set aside money tax-free to pay health costs if they choose high-deductible health insurance.
Among the proposals Mr. Bush is considering are: • Providing bigger tax breaks for Americans who buy their own health insurance to balance tax breaks available to workers who get health insurance through employers. • Encouraging broader use of HSAs in the hope that giving consumers more control over their health-care spending will make them more cost-conscious. • Helping consumers get more information about health-care providers’ prices and performance to make them better shoppers.
Building on past Bush proposals, the new White House focus on health — beyond the government’s Medicare program — is intended to give Republicans an election-year answer to many of the worries that voters have about the fast-changing economy. In many voters’ minds, those worries appear to be overshadowing the good economic news about the pace of growth and falling unemployment.
Analysts on both sides express skepticism that Mr. Bush, unable to persuade Congress to embrace his Social Security proposals, can make much headway this year.
Meanwhile, pharmacists are struggling with billing glitches and missing drug cards as they tried to fill prescriptions under Medicare’s new drug benefit.
On the first full business day the benefit was available, pharmacists said some customers came in without cards or letters showing their eligibility and others were surprised that they had to pay full cost until meeting a deductible.
“We’re trying everything we can to help, but people are confused,” said Samuel Mogbo, a CVS drugstore pharmacist in Chicago. He said some customers hadn’t received their cards and others had lost them.
About 21 million senior and disabled Americans have some kind of prescription-drug benefit. The majority either kept coverage from former employers or stayed in a Medicare Advantage plan they had previously joined. About 6.2 million people were automatically enrolled in the new Medicare program because they had been in state programs for low-income people. About 1 million joined on their own.
Those eligible have until May 15 to sign up without penalty. They can choose from an array of plans.
“People are falling through the holes,” he said. “They need their medicine.”
Also on the “Challenging” front is the fact that deficit spending in the 2006 budget is now likely to soar above $400 billion, well over last summer’s White House forecast, with the “election-year jolt” being blamed largely on Hurricane Katrina costs.
The new deficit projection was likely to further intensify a debate leading up to mid-term elections in November on whether to renew President George W. Bush’s tax cuts that he says are essential for economic growth but which Democrats say are a drain on the budget.
The deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Joel Kaplan, said White House officials believed that by sticking to Bush’s economic policies and spending restraint “we will return to our downward trajectory and remain on (a) path to cut the deficit in half by 2009.”
A July forecast had projected the 2006 budget deficit at $341 billion. Kaplan said preliminary calculations indicate the deficit will exceed $400 billion, or 3.1 percent of gross domestic product. Kaplan said the costs of recovering from Katrina, which ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in late summer, represented a “temporary event.” A more precise deficit projection is expected in the proposed federal budget for the 2007 fiscal year — starting next October — that Bush will submit to Congress in early February.

The Alter-Kyoto
The inaugural two-day summit of what many see as an American-led alternative to the Kyoto climate treaty convened last week in Sydney. Formed this past July, the new bloc brings together the US, China, India, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. These six nations are responsible for more than 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, which many scientists say cause global warming.
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which sets emissions targets for nations, the new Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate aims to reduce emissions voluntarily through the transfer of emerging technologies - including “clean coal,” burial of carbon dioxide, and next-generation nuclear power - from industrialized nations to the developing world. The pact’s advocates argue it is a more realistic approach than Kyoto, and commits many of the major nations not yet bound by Kyoto quotas to at least the principle of reducing emissions.
The effectiveness of this effort, however, may ride on whether the high-tech systems can be developed fast enough and made commercially enticing for businesses not otherwise compelled to adopt greener methods.
Experts say that most technology transfers under consideration are not yet commercially viable, and will require millions of dollars in subsidies or investment. Some are still in the research phase. This first meeting will be an attempt by all the six countries to come up with plans and ideas that can be put in motion.
Many scientists say the emission of CO2 and five other gases are responsible for rising temperatures on the earth. The average global temperature rose around one degree centigrade in the 20th century. Both the US and Australia had earlier refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it cost jobs - about 5 million in the US alone. They also said that it was too lenient on developing nations such as China and India.
At the same time, attorneys general in 12 states said last week that the Bush administration’s plan to ease rules on reporting legal toxin releases would compromise the public’s right to know about possible health risks in their neighborhoods. In a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state officials say the proposals, which include raising some reporting thresholds and moving from annual to biennial reports, would have the greatest harm in low-income neighborhoods where polluting facilities are often located. The Bush administration proposed the changes in September as a way to reduce the regulatory burden on companies by allowing some to use a short form when they report their pollution to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory Program.
“This EPA move appears to be yet another poorly considered notion to appease a few polluting constituents at the expense of a valuable program,” New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said.
Also signing the letter were the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont and Wisconsin. All are Democrats except Republican Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.
The proposed changes, which require congressional approval, would exempt companies from disclosing their toxic pollution if they claim to release fewer than 5,000 pounds of a specific chemical - the current limit is 500 pounds - or if they store it onsite but claim to release “zero” amounts of the worst pollutants. The chemicals involved include mercury, DDT, PCBs and other chemicals that persist in the environment and work up the food chain. Companies must report any storage of dioxin or dioxin-like compounds, even if none are released.

True War Costs?
Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes have estimated that the true cost of the Iraq War is between $1-2 trillion, far higher than earlier estimates of $100-200 billion. In a paper presented to the Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting in Boston MA., the two calculated costs by including such things as lifetime disability and health care for the over16,000 injured, one fifth of whom have serious brain or spinal injuries. They then went on to analyze the costs to the economy, including the economic value of lives lost and the impact of factors such as higher oil prices that can be partly attributed to the conflict in Iraq. The paper also calculates the impact on the economy if a proportion of the money spent on the Iraq war were spent in other ways, including on investments in the United States
The Allied Social Sciences Association meeting is attended by the nation’s leading economists and social scientists. It is sponsored jointly by the American Economic Association and the Economists for Peace and Security.

Easy Spying…
Anyone can buy a list of your incoming and outgoing phone calls, cell or land-line, for $110 online. And the best part? Congress and the Executive branch have known about this problem for half a year or more and no one did a damn thing to fix it.
It was recently reported that the Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.
Some online services might be skirting the law to obtain these phone lists, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use. In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers’ phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer. And some online brokers have used deception to get the lists from the phone companies, he said.
“Though this problem is all too common, federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime,” Schumer said last year in a prepared statement.
To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to buy the records for an agent’s cell phone and received the list within three hours, the police bulletin said. Representatives of Data Find Solutions Inc., the Tennessee-based operator of Locatecell.com, could not be reached for comment.
Schumer has called for legislation to criminalize the “stealing and selling” of cell phone logs. He also urged the Federal Trade Commission to set up a unit to stop it. He said a common method for obtaining cell phone records is “pretexting,” involving a data broker pretending to be a phone’s owner and duping the phone company into providing the information.
As for the front-page authorized spying controversy now enveloping the nation, it was revealed this past week that the National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document. The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.
At the time, the NSA wrote the White House that, “senior leadership must understand that the NSA’s mission will demand a ‘powerful, permanent presence’ on global telecommunications networks that host both ‘protected’ communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target.”
A list of all Americans caught in the web of spying, the new documents reveal, were regularly made available to top White House officials. W such information was used has not yet been disclosed.
The NSA’s domestic surveillance activities began in early 2001 after the administration change to the Bush presidency, under orders from the White House, according to new accounts. The NSA, however, destroyed its accounts of Americans caught in its spying activities rather than turn them over, according to new news accounts, thus leading to increasing acrimony between the various levels of government.
Also recently revealed was the fact that at least 66 politicians in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are setting permanent Web cookies on those who access their websites, even though at least 23 of them promised never to use the online tracking technique. And the Internal Revenue Service, saying it was tracking scofflaws who owed on past taxes, have been busy collecting information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility.
IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.
According to Murray’s office, the 20 states in which the IRS collected party affiliation information were Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.

More Alienation
Americans feel significantly more alienated this year, according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, with three-quarters of U.S. adults saying they feel the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” up from 68% in 2004.
The poll, which at this time each year since 1966 has been tracking replies to five questions designed to measure feelings of powerlessness and isolation in the U.S., also shows an increase in other measures of alienation.
About 60% of those surveyed in the nationwide telephone poll of 1,011 adults believe that “most people with power try to take advantage of people like you,” up sharply from 53% in 2004. More than half of those polled say they tend to feel “people running the country don’t really care what happens” to them, up from 44% last year.
Additionally, 74% feel that “the people in Washington are out of touch with the rest of the country,” up from 67% in 2004 and at its highest level since 1998.
The level of alienation varies greatly in different segments of the population. The highest levels of alienation are found among people with household incomes of $15,000 or less, Democrats and African Americans.
The lowest levels of alienation are found among Republicans, college graduates and people with incomes over $75,000.
Meanwhile, there’s also more misery in people’s lives today than a decade ago - at least among those who will tell you their troubles. Or so says a new study on life’s negatives from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which conducts social science research for government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations and private corporations.
The researchers surveyed 1,340 people about negative life events and found that the 2004 respondents had more troubles than those who were surveyed in 1991, the last time the study was done.
Overall, the percentage who reported at least one significant negative life event increased from 88% to 92%. Most of the problems were related to increased incidents of illness and the inability to afford medical care; mounting bills; unemployment; and troubled romantic relationships.
On a more positive note, fewer of those surveyed reported having trouble with crime or the law.