By DAVID IVANOVICH

WASHINGTON - Iraq needed fuel. Halliburton Co. was ordered to get it there � quick. So the Houston-based contractor charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel... read on Pentagon auditors combing through the company's books were mystified by this charge. It is illogical that it would cost $27,514,833 to deliver $82,100 in LPG fuel," officials from the Defense Contract Audit Agency noted in the report.

Just a day's work for Haliburton.

It looks like Gibbons has taken another page out of Bush’s playbook by trying to buy positive media coverage.

The Las Vegas Review Journal is reporting this morning that Jim Gibbons paid $8,000 to a Reno radio reporter on November 30 for “post election analysis”. Just like they did when Gibbons was exposed for plagiarizing a speech two weeks ago, Gibbons’ office is, once again, pleading ignorance by claiming they didn’t know Andrea Engleman was reporting while being paid by the Congressman. Gibbons is planning to run for Governor in 2006.

Engleman defended the payoff as a favor, saying that Gibbons gave her the $8,000 “to get through Christmas” after she was fired from her political reporting job at KRNV as co-host of “Nevada Newsmakers”. Engleman is still covering Gibbons and other Nevada politics for KKOH radio, including a speech delivered by Gibbons at the Nevada Legislature last month.

While Engleman describes the $8,000 as a one-time favor, Gibbons’ office says they are considering Engleman for future work. You will remember GIbbon's for his communist remark, and his plagerized speech, and of course Hannity getting nailed, trying to bail him out.

Krugman on Social Security, Bush and Lieberman.

Nuff' said.

I saw this earlier today and didn't have a chance to post it. Apparently Mike Nagel, Good Morning America booker was upset over losing an exclusive interview with Ashley Smith.

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You can hear him yelling in the background. Nagel had to be pulled away by a police officer during the live interview.

I searched and found more info from Derek Rose and MediaBistro

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress will pass a Social Security bill, and Democrats who stand in the way will be considered obstructionists by voters, the head of the Republican Party said Monday in an Associated Press interview...read on

That means a lot coming from the head of the RNC. I guess that's why you are spending so much money to change public opinion. He is also taking a much different stance on gay marriage. "Certainly our platform states that the party is committed to ensuring that there is traditional marriage," he said, but he didn't think the party should take a position on state initiatives.

TIME Mar. 21, 2005

The G.O.P. leader's troubles mount, with new questions about his dealings with the former aide who helped build his political machine. Read on...

Just as new scandals concerning alleged ethical violations by DeLay (R-TX) and other Members have erupted in recent days, the House Ethics Committee has become virtually powerless. The reason? Rules passed by the GOP congress at the beginning of 2005 make it virtually impossible for the Committee to launch any investigation of unethical conduct. But you can help to resolve the gridlock in the Ethics Committee: click here     [thnx to Dabobbo

Oy... Matthew Yglesias

As I just IMed to a colleague, someday when I'm powerful and important, I'll write my chilling expose about how little journalists understand about the issues they write about. Until then, you'll have to read U.S. News and World Report's thoughts on the labor market:

Breathe easy, workers: The jobless recovery is indisputably over. Some 262,000 new jobs were created last month, with almost every sector of the economy contributing, including manufacturing. That's icing on the cake after January, when the U.S. labor market at long last recouped all of its losses from the 2001 recession. There are now about 300,000 more people working than in February 2001, the pre-recession peak.

spin" a report

On The O'Reilly Factor today, according to Bill, the new survey from Journalism.org suggests that FNC is fair and balanced.

However, O'Reilly only reported to his viewers the segment titled Tone of Coverage about the Iraq War"

Fox again looked different from the others by being distinctly more positive than negative. Fully 38% of Fox segments were overwhelmingly positive in tone, more than double the 14% of segments that were negative. Still, stories were as likely to be neutral as positive (39%) and another 9% were multi-subject stories for which tone did not apply.

On CNN, in contrast, 41% of stories were neutral in tone on the 20 days studied, and positive and negative stories were almost equally likely -- 20% positive, 23% negative. Some 15% were multi-faceted and not coded for tone.

MSNBC's stories about the war were most likely to include several issues or subjects, so that no one area could be coded for tone. Fully four in ten stories were of this nature. Otherwise, the network's coverage, like CNN's, was more neutral (28%) with positive and negative stories almost equally prevalent, (16% positive and 17%

What the report actually also says Differences Among Cable Channels

Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air...

In the degree to which journalists are allowed to offer their own opinions, Fox stands out. Across the programs studied, nearly seven out of ten stories (68%) included personal opinions from Fox's reporters -- the highest of any outlet studied by far.

Just 4% of CNN segments included journalistic opinion, and 27% on MSNBC.

Fox journalists were even more prone to offer their own opinions in the channel's coverage of the war in Iraq. There 73% of the stories included such personal judgments. On CNN the figure was 2%, and on MSNBC, 29%.

The same was true in coverage of the Presidential election, where 82% of Fox stories included journalist opinions, compared to 7% on CNN and 27% on MSNBC.

Those findings seem to challenge Fox's promotional marketing, particularly its slogan, "We Report. You Decide."

Also : Nearly every story on Fox's O'Reilly Factor (97%) contained O'Reilly's opinions, even his quick news briefs. CNN's Larry King was nearly the reverse, with only 2% of segments including his opinions. And despite to his reputation for dominating the guests, Chris Matthews on Hardball offered his opinion just 24% of the time.

In O'Reilly's mind the fact that FOX had 38% positive stories about Iraq when everyone one else had almost half that amount seems to justify that FNC is fair and balanced. One could argue that the problem with the Iraq war coverage was that there weren't actuallty 38% worth of positive stories at all.

Conservative Democratic Lawmakers, Citing Deficits,Oppose Plan for Private Accounts

via WSJ (reg req)

...That opposition was expected. What has surprised the White House and Republican congressional leaders are the yelps from the Capitol's small pack of conservative House Democrats -- the self-named Blue Dogs -- and a few like-minded senators. A source of support for Mr. Bush in the past, these Democrats so far sound unyielding in their opposition to his private accounts plan. The explanation lies in both deficit politics, and in resentments over past grievances. "It's a trust issue," says Blue Dog Rep. Allen Boyd of Florida, "because of the lack of bipartisan cooperation in the last four years."

The 35 Blue Dogs, mostly from the South, took their name in the mid-1990s when a former member said he felt "choked blue" by the party's liberals. Along with several Democratic senators, some were ready to back a Social Security overhaul when Mr. Bush took office and the government was running surpluses. But the president focused instead on cutting taxes repeatedly while spending grew.

The result was a ballooning deficit -- and the Blue Dogs are defined by their hostility to deficits. Mr. Bush's private Social Security accounts would require trillions of dollars of borrowing to cover long-term transition costs at a time when government debt is piling up. "That's ludicrous," says Rep. John Tanner of Tennessee.

More problems for Bush on Social Security. TPM discusses if the Dems should be involved in a solution here

MSNBC's Connected played a clip of Ashley talking about her abduction.

She is a brave women, and it's an amazing story.

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I know they are playing up the spiritual aspect of her release, but to be honest with you and being a spiritual person, I'm not so sure the judge and court reporter and the the effected families who were killed have the same take.

via Vanity Fair

Halliburton subsidiary KBR got $12 billion worth of exclusive contracts for work in Iraq. But even more shocking is how KBR spent some of the money. Former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official Bunnatine Greenhouse is blowing the whistle on the Dick Cheney–linked company's profits of war...read on

Another title could be: "How I sucked the money out of Iraq before I rebuilt it.