From Senate job to nuclear lobbyist — twice 




From Senate job to nuclear lobbyist — twice
In a move that appears to flout the U.S. Senate’s Ethics Manual, a former Senate staff member has repeatedly passed through Capitol Hill’s so-called “revolving door,” moving between public jobs intended to help oversee and regulate U.S. nuclear firms and lobbying posts in which he pushes the industry’s interests.

Most recently, Flint left his job as majority staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he was a key player in legislation that provided billions in subsidies to the nuclear industry, to become the chief lobbyist for the industry’s largest trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Flint was hired for the Senate post in 2003 after spending several years as a lobbyist representing a number of large firms with deep interests in the nuclear power field, as well as the NEI. Flint’s boss on the committee was Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an unabashed booster of the nuclear power industry who has received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from employees of the companies that Flint represents.

  • The Joy of Being Blameless
    The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.

    We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic, and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.

  • Spending Measure Not a Law, Suit Says
    Last month, Washington threw all that old-fashioned civics stuff into a tizzy, when President Bush signed into law a bill that actually never passed the House. Bill -- in this case, a major budget-cutting measure that will affect millions of Americans -- became a law because it was "certified" by the leaders of the House and Senate.

    After stewing for weeks, Public Citizen, a legislative watchdog group, sued yesterday to block the budget-cutting law, charging that Bush and Republican leaders of Congress flagrantly violated the Constitution when the president signed it into law knowing that the version that cleared the House was substantively different from the Senate's version.



  • NYT's Herbert: George Bush's trillion dollar war
    "Call it the trillion dollar war," writes Bob Herbert in his New York Times column scheduled for Thursday's edition.

    Herbert cites a recent study entitled "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War" undertaken by a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Harvard University budget expert which suggested that, in all, the total may end up between one and two trillion dollars.

  • Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited to Lower Ranks
    With the conviction on Tuesday of an Army dog handler, the military has now tried and found guilty another low-ranking soldier in connection with the pattern of abuses that first surfaced two years ago at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

    But once again, an attempt by defense lawyers to point a finger of responsibility at higher-ranking officers failed in the latest case to convince a military jury that ultimate responsibility for the abuses lay farther up the chain of command.

  • Outrage in Afghanistan
    What's the point of the United States' propping up the government of Afghanistan if it's not even going to pretend to respect basic human rights? President Bush himself said it was "deeply troubling" that an Afghan man is facing the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity.

    In fact, the case is more than deeply troubling; it's barbaric, and we were glad that Mr. Bush promised yesterday to press for religious freedom in Afghanistan. The Afghan man, Abdul Rahman, was arrested two weeks ago. His parents reported him to the police for converting to Christianity 16 years earlier while working for a Christian aid organization in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was hauled before a judge, where he said he had no regrets. "If he doesn't revert back to Islam, he's going to receive the death penalty, according to the law," an Afghan Supreme Court judge told Agence France-Presse.

  • Names of the Dead
    The Department of Defense has identified 2,312 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American yesterday:

    DUERKSEN, Amy A., 19, Pfc., Army; Maryland; Fourth Infantry Division.
 

Posted: Thu - March 23, 2006 at 10:13 AM           |

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