Back in January, when I saw Daniel Ellsberg speak , one of the things he noted was how much more aggressive the Obama administration appeared to be in going after leakers than any previous administration. Ellsberg’s theory — which he admitted was based on just his intuition — was that President Obama is actually quite embarrassed by some of the things he’s doing and is, thus, more aggressive in trying to stop leaks, knowing that his actions are damaging his reputation. I don’t know if that’s true, but there is growing evidence of the level of questionable activities from the Obama administration even in going after leakers. Ellsberg noted at the time that the Obama administration has brought more indictments for leaking than all other presidents combined before him. The latest is the report that came out late last week that the government, in going after leakers, got access to reporter James Risen’s phone records, bank details and credit card statements . As the report notes, this is pretty extreme: Although there have been other public controversies over subpoenas — real and threatened — to reporters in recent years, there have been few, if any, cases in which it has been documented that federal prosecutors obtained the bank records and credit reports of journalists. It’s not entirely clear if all of these activities took place under the Obama administration or previous administrations, but multiple people quoted in the article say this kind of activity has been much more common in the Obama Justice Department. For a President who has positioned himself as being a big supporter of press freedoms, this looks really hypocritical. Spying on reporters is bad . As the report notes, Risen was subpoenaed directly twice, but both times a judge reasonably quashed the subpoenas. So, for the administration to basically go around all that and get records from others is pretty bad. Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

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Madison, WI, United States (AHN) – The protest in the Wisconsin capitol continued into its third week Monday as Gov. Scott Walker remained firm in his push to pass a budget bill that would curtail collective bargaining.

Democratic state senators have no plans to return from Illinois, where they had fled to prevent a quorum in their chamber. The lawmakers, who hold a minority in the state Senate, argue that Walker and Republicans have been unwilling to negotiate the bill.

Republicans need only one Democrat to establish a quorum of 20 senators and pass the bill.

To block the bill, Democrats need three members of the GOP caucus to join them in the opposition. Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz said Sunday night he would not support the governor’s measure.

More than 70,000 people gathered in and around the capitol over the weekend, responding to a vote in the state Assembly on Friday.

But despite the lightning-quick, midnight-hour passage in the Assembly that left dozens of lawmakers unable to cast their vote, four Republicans voted against the bill.

The governor’s budget proposal seeks to close a $137 million deficit this year, and a $3.6 billion shortfall in 2013, without tax increases. The measure increases the payments of public workers for their health care premiums to 12 percent, and for their pensions to 5.8 percent.

It limits the collective bargaining ability of employees to discussions about base pay, which means workers would no longer be able to negotiate their benefits. Under the legislation, employees can opt out of paying dues to unions, which would also be required to conduct yearly certification.

Local police, fire and state patrol are exempted from the collective bargaining reforms.

Schultz, the sole Republican who plans to vote against the bill in the Senate, had been seeking an amendment ensuring workers would regain their bargaining rights in 2013.

Democrats vehemently oppose stripping public workers of their ability to collectively negotiate terms of their employment. They also cite Walker’s refusal to try to reach a compromise despite the offer from workers to agree to pay more for their health care and pensions.

“All they have asked for in return is to maintain the rights they have had for over 50 years,” state Sen. Mark Miller, the Democratic minority leader, said last week.

Walker has warned that layoffs could begin among teachers if the standoff continues.

Miller has dismissed this, saying in a statement after the Assembly vote, “Republicans’ action to prevent most Democrats from being able to vote while the governor flew around the state threatening layoffs has once again exposed the Republicans’ tactics to ram the bill through the legislature.”

The governor said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “If we fail to pass this bill by Tuesday, we lose $165 million worth of savings. If we continue down that path, we start seeing layoffs… I would go to almost any ends to avoid that. My hope is at least one of those 14 state senators feels the same way.”

But workers and unions have argued the governor is cracking down on unions in favor of corporate ties.

Walker’s budget proposal allows the sale of state-owned power plants without a bidding process. The governor was also caught on tape speaking to a blogger posing as campaign donor and billionaire industrialist David Koch about having considered planting troublemakers among protesters, and of refusing to negotiate with Senate Democrats.

Asked on “Meet the Press” why he refused to accept a deal from workers to increase pension and healthcare payments, Walker said, “Time and time again because of collective bargaining when we had tough budgets in the past… one year I literally tried to do a 35-hour work week to try and avoid massive layoffs and furloughs, and the union said, forget it… Emboldened by the fact that they had collective bargaining agreements, they said, go ahead, literally lay off 400 or 500 people.”

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February 28, 2011, Alexandria, Va. – National Credit Union Administration Chairman Debbie Matz today said that strong NCUA oversight, combined with industry resilience, has saved credit unions over $1 billion in potential losses.

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Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (AHN) – Corrects Clark’s party membership

The Liberal party of British Columbia selected Christy Clark on Saturday as the party’s leader. With her selection, Clark will become the province’s 35th premier and BC’s second female head.

Clark will replace Gordon Campbell, who resigned in November over the unpopular harmonized sales tax.

Clark got 4,420 points through telephone ballots cast on the third round of voting. She beat former Health Minister Kevin Falcon, who got 4,080 points on the third round. Clark won over former Attorney General Mike de Jong and former Education Minister George Abbott in the first and second rounds.

Clark once served as deputy premier and shifted to a radio career as broadcaster for CKNW radio.

With her victory, Clark became the second person in BC’s history to become premier without being a current member of the legislative assembly. The first was Bill Vander Zalm, who led the campaign against the HST.

As premier, Clark said her first priority will be to put families first, and then job creation and battling poverty. She also plans to call for a provincial election earlier than the original schedule of 2013.

The first female premier was Rita Johnston, who held briefly the leader’s post of the Social Credit party in 1991.

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Near-record ROA. Loan growth. Addition of services. What the industry can learn from a Midwestern credit union….[ Read Article ]

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New Market, Virginia, United States (AHN) – New Market Poultry, a New Market, Va., establishment, is recalling approximately 3,339 pounds of ice-packed, whole chicken products that may be adulterated due to leaking cooler condensate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.

The problem was identified Feb. 24, 2011 when the company discovered product under USDA retention had been shipped.

On Feb. 23, 2011 FSIS personnel observed standing water with unidentified black specks pooling on the box lids of the packed chickens stored in a company cooler. The palletized boxes, which contain drainage holes, were retained by FSIS and should not have been shipped.

The products subject to recall include:

Approx. 60-pound boxes of “New Market Poultry 2007, LLC, EVISCERATED POULTRY, For Further Processing Only, Some Parts Missing” bearing case code of “05412.”

Each box bears the establishment number “P-4602A” inside the USDA mark of inspection.

The chicken products were produced on Feb. 23, 2011 and inadvertently shipped the same day to six distribution centers in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Farmington, N.Y.

FSIS has not received any consumer complaints or reports of illness at this time. Anyone concerned about an illness from consumption of this product should contact a healthcare provider.

FSIS routinely conducts recall effectiveness checks to verify recalling firms notify their customers of the recall and that steps are taken to make certain that the product is no longer available to consumers.

Consumers and media with questions about the recall should contact the company’s General Manager, David Whitehouse at (540) 740-4260.

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Criminals can now steal your credit card information without ever laying hand on your purse or wallet. The crime is known as “electronic pickpocketing” and it’s made possible by a computer chip the credit card companies are imbedding in most new cards, called radio frequency identification, or RFID.

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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – British ministers said that the United Kingdom is set to seize the assets of embattled Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi in Britain in the coming days.

The minister said the Treasury had established a unit that traced the Libyan dictator’s assets made up of billions of dollars in bank accounts, commercial property and a $15 billion (GBP 10 billion) mansion in London.

The Treasury estimated Gaddafi’s total liquid assets in Britain at $30 billion (GBP 20 billion), mostly in London.

The assets will be frozen as part of a global effort to unseat Gaddafi from his grip on power for decades.

Whitehall, however, emphasized that the ongoing identification and subsequent seizure of the dictators’s assets is secondary to getting Britons out of Libya where the civil unrest keeps building up.

Libyans have taken their cue from Egyptians, who successfully ousted President Hosni Mubarak from power.

On Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron – who is in Muscat, Oman for a British Petroleum event – apologized for the problems related to the evacuation of British nationals in Libya. The BP plane that the coalition government borrowed turned out to have mechanical problems and was delayed by at least 10 hours before it could fly out of Gatwick Airport.

While Cameron was in the Middle East, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was on a family holiday at a ski resort in Davos, Switzerland, causing a vacuum in political leadership in 10 Downing Street.

Clegg had to cut short his vacation and admitted he “forgot” he was supposed to run Britain while Cameron was on an overseas official trip.

Despite the blunders in the evacuation effort, Britons stranded in Libya were finally able to leave the country aboard military planes and a Royal Navy warship.

Cameron said he was disappointed with the decision of British Airways and BMI to cancel scheduled flights out of Tripoli because the government initially held back chartering aircraft so as not to disrupt the scheduled flights of the two commercial air carriers.

Shadow Foreign Affairs Secretary Douglas Alexander, who used to hold the transportation portfolio under the Labour government, said the Tories should have recognized as early as Monday that BA and BMI would likely not fly into a war zone and chartering planes became more difficult because of the high cost of insurance for planes flying into Libya.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Existing home sales rose in January for the third consecutive month, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Sales increased 2.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.36 million in January. That was up from a downwardly revised 5.22 million units sold in December. In addition, the January sales figures are 5.3 percent higher than the 5.09 million sold in January 2010.

Existing home sales figures cover single-family homes, as well as townhomes, condominiums and co-ops.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said that although the sales figures showed improvement things could still be better.

“The uptrend in home sales is consistent with improvements in the economy and jobs, which are helping boost consumer confidence,” Yun said. “The extremely favorable housing affordability conditions are a big factor, but buyers have been constrained by unnecessarily tight credit. As a result, there are abnormally high levels of all-cash purchases, along with rising investor activity.”

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While raising concerns about how the current interchange system affects consumers and supporting the general intent of legislation passed last year, the Consumer Federation of America also urged the Federal Reserve Board to “pay close attention to the effect” that parts of its implementation plan could have “on smaller depository institutions, especially credit unions.”

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