In his last full day in office, President Bush has commuted the sentences of two Border Patrol agents jailed for the 2005 shooting of an admitted drug smuggler and illegal alien who was fleeing back to Mexico. Prosecutors said Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean did not report the shooting and removed evidence from the scene when they picked up their shell casings. But their prosecution angered many supporters of tough immigration policies, such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who turned their case into a cause celebre and said their sentences were excessive. Ramos was sentenced to 11 years in jail, and…
Monthly Archives: January, 2009
Change.gov will become WhiteHouse.gov just after noon tomorrow, according to Agence France-Presse. Many believe Change.gov to be emblematic of how President-elect Barack Obama will use the Web to advance his priorities of a more participatory and transparent democracy. Over the next few days other federal Web sites will also start to look a bit different as dozens of familiar names, like Michael Chertoff and Condoleezza Rice, are erased from government Web sites and replaced with the new administration officials, like Janet Napolitano or Hillary Clinton. The process is likely to be quick, said Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the…
On this Inauguration Eve, President-elect Barack Obama has filled in a few more blanks at the Office of Management and Budget. Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor, was named executive associate director for OMB. Steve Kosiak, vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, was named associate director for Defense and International Affairs. Robert Gordon, a senior education policy fellow at American Progress, was named associate director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor. Xavier de Souza Briggs, an associate professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was…
There are 8,600 facilities with at least one set of the official portraits of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and at noon eastern tomorrow the portraits will have to be “removed and respectfully disposed†of, according to a GSA spokeswoman. The spokeswoman didn’t expand on what “respectfully dispose†means, so your guess is as good as ours. The portraits will be replaced by the official photos of President Obama and Vice President Biden as soon as prints become available, which probably means most offices won’t see these smiling faces until March, according to GSA.
If you’re killing time before the inauguration and looking for a laugh, head on over to Nancy Pelosi’s official YouTube page. The highlighted video, which we’ve embedded below, appears to be a parody of the Bush administration’s Barney Cam videos. But this one has a twist that we’re never gonna give up.
Sixty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. federal contractors have subsidiaries in tax havens, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. A tax haven is a country with no or low taxes where companies set up subsidiaries in order to reduce their tax burdens to the United States. Many of the tax havens cited in the GAO report are Caribbean countries, such as Barbados, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. Four contractors had more than half of their foreign subsidiaries in jurisdiction listed as tax havens. One contractor, Proctor and Gamble, has 83 off-shore subsidiaries in tax haven countries.
In case you haven’t heard, Barack Obama will be sworn in Tuesday. With as many as 2 million people expected to descend on Washington and temperatures topping out at a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit, the event will likely be a frozen madhouse. If you’ve decided to stay away from Capitol Hill that day, then well, you’ve got more common sense than us at Federal Times. We’ll have three reporters on the scene. Congressional reporter Rebecca Neal nabbed the official press pass allotted for Fed Times and will be right up front as Obama takes the oath of office. My girlfriend pulled…
No, little green men have not been found on Mars and residents of West Windsor Township, N.J. have nothing to fear. But a team of NASA scientists have discovered something that could prove there is life on the red planet: methane. The gas is a byproduct of biological and geological activity. On Earth, much of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is released by organisms as they digest food. But geological processes, such iron oxidation, also release the gas. NASA observations of the Martian atmosphere over the last several years have shown that methane is being continually released into the air…
img.cabinetpic { float: left; border: 1px inset #aaaaaa; padding: 0; margin-top: 1em } div.cabinetdata { margin: 0 0 2em 200px; padding: 0; } div.cabinetdata h3 { margin: 0; padding: 0; text-indent: 0; } We’re camped out on Capitol Hill all week covering the transition hearings — and we thought you’d like a central place to follow our confirmation coverage. We’ll update this list as the week goes on. The full list is after the jump, and it’s sorted alphabetically by agency.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning approved Hillary Clinton’s nomination to be Secretary of State on a 16 to 1 vote. Clinton must now face a vote before the entire Senate, but she enjoys strong support among her former colleagues and her confirmation is expected.