The Phoenicia Times - NEWSBRIEFS

Newsbriefs

Comp Here?
There’s a comprehensive plan for Shandaken.... or at least that’s the word from comp plan committee chair Chuck Perez, who said this week that the authors of the draft would come to town on January 17th at 7pm to present it.
Since October staffers from the Stantec Corporation, hired by the town to take all the previous efforts at a plan and forge them into one clear draft, have come to town twice to meet with the public. They appear to be right on schedule for having the job done in March.
The third visit on the 17th will be to walk those interested through the elements of the plan, and accept input about any recommended changes.

Development?
The Ulster County Development Corp. has approved a total $50,000 for application to new recommendations from the county’s Special Commission on the Economic Future of Ulster County, which calls for a countywide vision on economic development, a strategic plan for the future, support for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and the backing of shovel-ready site initiatives. But exact uses for the $50,000 investment are still vague, including only the promise of “education for public officials and the general public” on ways to better attract new businesses and community revitalization projects and the need for “more supportive political leadership” in regards to development projects.
“My belief is this really can be the first step toward ... helping us develop a 20-, 30-, 40-year plan for Ulster County,” said Bob Ryan Jr., president of Ryan Insurance, recently elected first vice chairman of the Ulster County Development Corp.’s board of directors for 2005. “The growth is coming, and we need to manage it properly.”

Dollar Swaps
At an afternoon meeting that lasted scarcely a half an hour, the Shandaken town board shuffled thousands of dollars around within the 2004 budget to pay the bills just before the New Year.
Most notable was the to transfer $10,780 to the Police Department.
“There was no provision for buy back time,” explained Supervisor Robert Cross Jr..
According to Cross, the town is obligated to pay officers for any unused sick or vacation time. He said there were other police department expenses covered by the transfer, but the buy back costs were “the majority of it.”
Councilwoman Jane Todd added that the officers ended up not taking much vacation and sick time because they were needed to work shifts when there were no part time officers available.
Cross said after the meeting that the 2005 budget includes funds for buy back time, so this won’t happen next year. In 2004 the department had a budget of $202,673. In 2005 the police budget will be $236,856
Another fiscal bonus is recent word that the State will not usurp $35,000 of town revenue from Justice Court fines. Cross said that when the 2005 was prepared in the fall the town could not include the $35,000, as revenue because the State announced it would take it for State coffers.
“This more than offsets the cost of the new officer and everything else,” Cross said.
Last month the town board Republican majority decided to hire a forth full time officer despite protests from the board Democrats, who claim the hiring was ill advised.
The board also voted to spend an extra $13,810 on gasoline and diesel fuel, gave another $4,560 to the Supervisor’s Secretary/Bookkeeper, and an extra $3,580 for the costs of Elections Personal services.

Bigger Problems
Iraq faces the prospect of civil war as Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s government loses credibility and violence against U.S. forces increases, according to almost a half dozen former and serving administration officials. Upcoming January elections will not improve the deteriorating security situation, these sources said, all speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitiveness of the topic. Plus a new threat has arisen.
“We are starting to play the ethnic card in Iraq, just as the Soviets played it in Afghanistan,” said former CIA chief of Afghanistan operation Milt Bearden. “You only play it when you’re losing and by playing it, you simply speed up the process of losing.”
Phoebe Marr, an analyst who closely follows events in Iraq, told United Press International that “having the U.S. military unleash different historical enemies on each other has become an unspoken U.S. policy.” Bearden, Marr and others also referred to the Pentagon’s tactic of pitting one group of enemies against another in Iraq as being fraught with danger.
According to Marr, Iraq has always been a complicated mosaic of religious and ethnic groups and tribes. The tilt of the Bush administration towards Iraq’s Shiites, who compromise 60 percent of the population, upset the balance of power, she said.
Former Defense Intelligence Agency chief of Middle East operations, Pat Lang, said the key blunder was the disbanding of Iraq’s 400,000-man army. “At a stroke, we went from a liberator to an occupier.”
Another problem is the Iraqi middleclass, many of them Sunni, and almost all of them anti-American, according to Marr. “They disliked us in the past because the U.N. sanctions made them suffer. When the war came, they had expectations that were much too high. Then they became passive and they won’t work with us, and yet this is the only chance they’re going to get… The whole Bush administration policy has been outrageously careless.”
Said former senior CIA Iraqi analyst Judith Yaphe: “Elections will not solve anything — we are grasping for events that will enable us to get out of Iraq, but there are no such thing. Democracy is not an event but a process.”

Political Pitch
Across the country, governors and other elected officials often double as pitchmen: They appear in publicly funded commercials meant to promote their states, their agencies or a particular initiative they are spearheading.
But each time their faces show up in such ads, critics - usually from the opposing political party - question whether these “goodwill” commercials aren’t also meant to feed their political ambitions by boosting their name recognition.
In their defense, the politicians claim they are just doing their jobs because they’re considered the public face of the state or an agency and, therefore, are the best spokesmen for an ad campaign.
“It’s a slippery slope between promoting a service and promoting the brand that is them,” said Martin Kaplan, who studies political ads at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.
In New York, Governor George Pataki has been accused of abusing a $5 million, national ad campaign to sell himself for a future run for public office. The campaign shows scenes of rebirth in New York City’s financial district in lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center stood before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Pataki speaks about “the heart of commerce, culture and community.”
After the ad started running in the country’s largest media markets and on national cable news networks, Democrats and other critics charged it was a campaign spot for Pataki. It was launched a month after the Nov. 2 elections, and around the time Pataki’s name surfaced as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2008.
Evan Tracey, president of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, an ad tracking company in Arlington, Va., said advertising right now makes sense for public officials with political aspirations.
“They have a sort of forum that’s all to themselves,” he said. “They’re not competing with a lot of political ads. There’s no downside to getting out there right now.”
That is except, of course, the onslaught of criticism that doing so invites.

Sewer Changes
With little fanfare or advance notice, the Shandaken town board agreed to accept a revised agreement for the construction of a wastewater treatment for the hamlet of Phoenicia. The project location has not yet been disclosed.
According to Councilman Joe Munster, the 104 page amended agreement amounts to the town agreeing to re route various documents. Calling the agreement “complicated and confusing,” Munster said he felt that the amended agreement does not alter the project.
Councilwoman Jane Todd said the amendments were necessary conditions of a grant for the project.
Phoenicia is next in line to get millions of dollars from the City of New York to build a sewer plant to service the hamlet. The funds are a part of the 1997 watershed deal reached between local authorities and the City, which taps the streams and brooks in the Catskills for the drinking water of 9 million downstaters.
To keep it clean, the City has been funding treatment plants in places like Andes, Hunter, and soon Fleischmanns and Phoenicia to get rid of potentially polluting septics and cesspools that line the backyards in these locales. The cost for each plant is several million dollars. Phoenicia is slated to spend about $11 million.
But what will be built, and where, remain closely guarded secrets of the committee assembled to put the deal together. The Committee has settled on a location, but there are differing accounts of where in the purchasing process the town is, and so far no one will say where that site is. However, the committee has made a request for proposals from engineering firms to build the system on the site, and they have reportedly received some proposals back for review.
The “amended Identified Community Agreement” provides for detailed design and contemplated construction of the plant and a collection system to get the waste to it, as outlined by the project engineer during the project study period.
According to a resolution passed this week by the Shandaken town board, the town has already conducted an environmental review of the project and has satisfied the environmental review responsibilities under state law.

What Torture?
The Justice Department has released a rewritten legal memo on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve “excruciating and agonizing pain.” The new 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases. The new document said torture violates U.S. and international law.
Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement document.
The Justice Department memo was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to consider Bush’s nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general. Democrats have said they would question Gonzales closely on memos he wrote that were similar to the now-disavowed Justice Department documents that critics said appeared to justify torture.
The release also coincided with continuing revelations of possible detainee abuse, most recently a series of memos from FBI agents uncovered in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging instances of Defense Department wrongdoing during a variety of interrogations.
The Pentagon, Justice Department and CIA have opened numerous investigations into allegations of prisoner abuse and some detainee deaths stemming from the war on terror and in Iraq. Several U.S. soldiers have also been subjected to court-martial proceedings for their roles in the alleged abuse, some of which was documented in photographs from Abu Ghraib circulated worldwide earlier in 2004.

Prozac Nation
A British medical journal has confessed that it gave U.S. regulators confidential drug company documents that suggest a link between the popular anti-depressant Prozac and a heightened risk of suicide attempts and violence.
The British Medical Journal reported in its Jan. 1 issue that documents it received from an anonymous source indicated that Prozac’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Co., was aware in the 1980s that the drug could have potentially troubling side-effects. The journal said the documents, reportedly missing for a decade, had formed part of a 1994 lawsuit against Eli Lilly on behalf of victims of a workplace shooting in Louisville, Kentucky. Joseph Wesbecker, the gunman who killed eight people and himself in 1989, had been prescribed Prozac a month before the shootings. Eli Lilly won the case, but later disclosed it had settled with the plaintiffs during the trial.
The journal said one of the records reported that fluoxetine, the generic name for Prozac, had caused “behavioral disturbances” in clinical trials. The journal said it had turned the documents over to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which had agreed to review them.
The journal said the office of U.S. Congressman Maurice Hinchey also was examining the documents to determine whether Eli Lilly had withheld data from the public and the FDA.
“This is an alarming study that should have been shared with the public and the FDA from the get-go, not 16 years later,” Hinchey said.
In a statement to the journal, Eli Lilly said Prozac “has helped to significantly improve millions of lives… It is one of the most studied drugs in the history of medicine, and has been prescribed for more than 50 million people worldwide. The safety and efficacy of Prozac is well studied, well documented and well established.”
In October, FDA ordered that all antidepressants carry warnings that they “increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior” in children.

Home Funding...
Ulster County has been awarded $600,000 for its Home Ownership Program. Funding was provided by a Community Development Block Grant through the Governor’s Office of Small Cities. The 2004 Program Application closely mirrors a recently completed County home ownership program. It is designed to provide down payment and closing cost assistance to low and moderate-income households to enable them to purchase a home. The program also has educational components that include budgeting and maintenance skills to insure buyers build the necessary equity and learn about upkeep on their homes. The $600,000 is expected to leverage at least an additional $3.6 million in private mortgages and homeowner equity. Program delivery will be the responsibility of Rural Ulster Preservation Company (RUPCO), as well as Shandaken Area Revitalization Project (SHARP). Additional support came from the Resource Center for Accessible Living. For further information please contact Dennis Doyle, Planning Director at 340-3339.

Press Plays
Recent court developments have been grim for those who cherish a free press.
On Dec. 9, a television reporter in Providence, R.I., Jim Taricani, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for refusing to reveal who gave him an F.B.I. videotape showing a local official taking a bribe. Furthermore, a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington is considering maintaining a lower court’s sentences of up to 18 months in prison to Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine for refusing to disclose their sources in connection with the investigation that the United States attorney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is leading into the leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the columnist Robert Novak.
Among the strange wrinkles in this case is that Novak, who first published Plame’s name, seems to be in no jeopardy, while Mr. Cooper faces jail time stemming from an article he wrote exposing the administration’s motive of retaliation against Plame’s husband, ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing Iraq policy… and Miller never wrote about the case.
The appellate panel has expressed hostility to the notion that the First Amendment provides any protection for journalists subpoenaed to reveal their confidential sources to a grand jury.
Cooper and Miller have written about the Bush administration’s use of questionable legal means to silence its critics.

Sneak Peek
After almost two years of renovations, Husband and wife Restaurateurs Devon and Marybeth Mills are ready to open the doors of the Peekamoose Restaurant in Big Indian. The couple have worked feverishly to restore the landmark structure that was once the famous Rudi’s Big Indian Country kitchen and more recently, the eatery known as Jake Moon’s.
Originally a farmhouse at the turn of the century, this property was most widely known as Rudi’s Big Indian Country Kitchen, a part of the Ashram community and a favorite place among locals and visitors alike. Rudi’s was home to not only a restaurant, but also a greenhouse, bakery, bar, antique shop, as well as, a location for special events. It has enjoyed a rich history of success for more than 25 years.
Marybeth quickly discovered that many folks have fond memories of dining at Rudi’s, even to the point that they hope the Mill’s mimic the menu.
“We are competing with a very strong memory of Rudi’s, but we’re not trying to reproduce what that was…we’re not going to be Rudi’s Two,” she said.
They will pay homage to Rudi’s though. They possess the recipe for Rudi’s famous Coffee Toffee Pie, and plan to include it in the menu soon.
But with Devon being a Chef, and both finally fulfilling lifelong dreams of having their own place, the Peekamoose menu promises to be all their own.
A glance at the menu, which will change seasonally, boasts specialties like orrechiette with roasted garlic and broccolini, roasted cod with brandade & chive gremolata, rabbit loin with calamata olives & soppresatta with a baby carrot souffle and pan seared skate, savoy cabbage and mustard. The menu includes lunch as well, although the Peekamoose will start out as a place that’s strictly for dinner.
And don’t look for any muti colored banners flapping away in bright spotlights. The Mills don’t believe in holding some huge event to celebrate the opening. Their approach, Marybeth said, will be a soft opening where people can come and receive the quality of food and service they will always get at Peekamoose. A big grand opening with people waiting out in the cold for a chance to get served is not the atmosphere they want.
“We’re not flash over substance people,” she said.
For more information call 845-254-6500.

Drug Imports
Rhode Island has become the first state in the nation to approve regulations that allow its residents to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. The state Health Department’s new regulations will take effect in mid-January, permitting residents to import through the mail or by private shipper prescription medications from Canada.
The Health Department was forced to amend the rules after the Legislature passed a law this summer allowing the licensing of Canadian pharmacies.
Rhode Island’s new law conflicts with the federal ban on drug importation, but it is unclear whether the Food and Drug Administration will take action against the state. The FDA says it cannot guarantee the safety of medicines sold through foreign pharmacies, but has not stopped states from setting up Internet sites to help consumers buy drugs through Canadian pharmacies and it has not gone after cities and towns, including Boston and Springfield, Mass., that have been purchasing drugs from Canada for their employees and retirees.
Prescriptions drugs are often cheaper in Canada and other countries because of government price controls. Congress has considered legalizing the import of prescription drugs but has met strong opposition from the administration and the pharmaceutical industry. Opponents, including representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, maintain that the new law will lead to unsafe drugs, job losses and a breakdown in patients’ relationships with their medication provider.

Infant Fat
The obesity epidemic is reaching down to the sandbox: More than 10 percent of U.S. children ages 2 to 5 are overweight, the American Heart Association has reported, up from 7 percent in 1994.
The prevalence of obesity among adults is well-known, with an increase of 75 percent since 1991. So is the problem with school-age children, reaffirmed by new statistics showing that nearly 4 million children ages 6 to 11 and 5.3 million young people ages 12 to 19 were overweight or obese in 2002.
But the findings among preschoolers are a strong indication that kids’ weight problems are beginning even earlier.
Experts blame the prevalence of junk food marketed to children, too much TV, and the decline in the number of families who sit down together to eat.
Dr. Sarah Blumenschein, an assistant professor of pediatric cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, said doctors and parents need to watch the weight of even very young children.
“We have a lot of people that think that their kids look cute plump: `Look at her - she has all those bracelets of fat,”’ she said.
Dr. William Cochran, a pediatric gastroenterologist and nutritionist for the Geisinger Clinic in Danville, Pa., said he sees many youngsters in his weight management clinic who weigh 300 to 400 pounds. He is also seeing more and more children with diabetes, high blood pressure, even liver disease.
“Some kids are drinking a liter or two liters of soda a day,” said Cochran, a member of the task force on obesity for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “In 10 to 30 years, the incidence of heart disease and stroke and diabetes are just going to be astronomical.”
Other highlights of the report:
About 1 million youths ages 12 to 19 in the United States - or 4.2 percent of the age group - have metabolic syndrome, defined as three or more of the following five factors: high triglycerides; low “good” cholesterol; high blood sugar; high blood pressure; and a big waistline. These factors raise the risk of heart disease.

State Scandal?
A trove of interoffice documents from top aides to New York Governor George Pataki have revealed his administration’s response to a potential scandal, with one frustrated adviser even referring to Controller Alan Hevesi, who is leading the investigation into misuse of Erie Canal development funds, as “an asshole.”
Six-hundred pages of memos and E-mails pertaining to a real estate deal involving the state Canal Corp. were released this week, charting a “sweetheart deal” that the Canal Corp., an arm of the state Thruway Authority, had cut with businessman Thomas Hutchens, who paid just $30,000 for the rights to develop homes along the 500-mile Erie Canal. The contract was ultimately nixed by Hevesi.
After citing as precedent court cases in which President Nixon tried to suppress release of the Watergate tapes, attorneys for Pataki gave up on Dec. 30 and are now complying with a state Supreme Court order to releasethe records the Governor claimed were privileged. The governor’s lawyers argued that their release would paralyze the executive branch’s ability to perform its duties.
The state’s contract with Buffalo developer Richard Hutchens was awarded after extensive communication between Hutchens and state officials,. His bid had been placed in response to a notice on page 62 of a booklet available to state vendors for $175 a year, right below the notices seeking bids for mops, shop towels, and coveralls.
According to state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, Pataki’s administration lied to both he and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office about the deal, both of whom would have had to sign off on it. Hevesi’s office initially did, then rescinded the approval, an unprecedented step. Spitzer’s office investigated at the request of the state Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions. The Attorney General concluded “This is a morality tale that weaves together all the failures of state government,” citing a pattern of political favoritism and ethical lapses. The deal is now under investigation by the state’s Inspector General. According to Pataki’s office, if fraud is uncovered the contract will be voided and criminal charges could follow.
Pataki’s communications director, Lisa Stoll, wrote the “asshole” comment in an E-mail to another administration official after she was informed Hevesi planned to scrap the deal. Stoll left her post last month.
Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who fought for the release of the notes, called them “tawdry.”
“These documents establish the governor as the puppet master for the state authorities,” Brodsky, who is running for state attorney general in 2006, told reporters.

Secure?
Critics of President Bush’s plan to create personal investment accounts in Social Security say he is exaggerating the program’s funding problems to boost public support for his idea.
“Social Security is like a car with a flat tire,” said Peter Orszag, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “There is a problem. We need to fix the flat tire. But we don’t need to replace the car.”
But David John, a senior analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the funding problem is real, especially for younger workers. “Every day we delay raises the cost of a repair to Social Security,” he said.
The retirement system faces a projected $3.7 trillion, 75-year shortfall. Bush wants to overhaul the program to let younger workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes to personal accounts. But that alone won’t fix the problem and could require upfront costs of $1 trillion to $2 trillion over 10 years.
Bush regularly claims Social Security faces a shortfall of nearly $11 trillion, which, Orszag said, is a misleading figure because it makes the system appear to be in worse shape than it is.
The figure - $10.4 trillion to be precise - is the shortfall over the “infinite horizon,” as measured by Social Security’s Board of Trustees. The calculation was included for the first time in the trustees’ 2003 report, along with the required 75-year measure. The American Academy of Actuaries criticized the use of the $10.4 trillion figure in the report, saying it was likely to mislead the public.
Orszag said Medicare’s dwindling finances are more urgent than Social Security’s. Medicare began dipping into its trust fund this year, and it is expected to be exhausted in 2019, trustees said.
Social Security’s financial picture was little changed from last year. The system is expected to begin paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes starting in 2018, with the trust fund money the government owes depleted by 2042.
In a recent story, the Christian Science Monitor followed one man’s payment into the SSI system over 45 years. After recording all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), and tracking down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends), it was found that Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873.
Although most financial leaders support the idea and industry groups (plus armies of lobbyists) are working behind the scenes in Washington to make a case for private accounts, no CEO of a major financial firm has gone public with their support yet. Pundits are saying that is because Wall Street has learnt from the past two times the idea of legislating trillions of dollars into its hands came up, in the late 1990s and again in 2001.
Both times private accounts were advocated as a means of repairing social security - the politically sacred but creaky pay-as-you-go retirement scheme projected to run into increasing financial trouble over the next 50 years as the US’s population ages. And both times the financial sector came out as a vociferous supporter, only to be accused by opponents of having little interest in reform of social security, and simply wanting to line its pockets with management fees.
One of the most prominent critics of the president’s concept, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, estimates the net present value of management fees that Wall Street would collect over the next 75 years from partial privatization of social security as somewhere between $424 billion and $1.1 trillion. That compares with a net present value of about $US3.3 trillion for the projected fees Wall Street firms will generate from all other activities over the same period.