Corruption at Public Broadcasting—The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is the administrative funnel through which congressional appropriations are doled out to PBS, the Public Broadcasting System’s television outlet, and NPR, National Public Radio. The CPB received about $378 million from Congress for the 2004 fiscal year, representing about 15 percent of public broadcasting’s revenues. Some […]

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The next time you see one of those yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons on a passing car think about what happens after the soldiers come home from war. They become veterans, and supporting veterans usually costs more money than a supposedly grateful nation cares to spend. This seems to happen after every war, but now […]

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An Enron Echo—According to the Wall Street Journal the federal tax collectors at the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) have belatedly learned enough about corporate tax chiseling from the infamous Enron Corporation big wigs that they are now cracking down on other “highly compensated executives.” The Journal says that what’s at stake is “a range of executive compensation issues, including […]

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The Senior Senator—At the age of 87, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is reported to be preparing for election to his ninth six-year term in what its members like to call the “upper body.” Byrd began his Congressional career in 1952 with four years in the “lower body” and moved from the House of Representatives to […]

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We were not alone in finding that the extravagant, massively policed, $40-million presidential inauguration parade and the chief executive’s wimpy acceptance speech, followed by the 10 expensive ballroom galas, were bad news. A headline in the New York Times Week in Review section called the Bush oration “A Speech About Nothing, Something, Everything.” In his 21-minute inaugural […]

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