(Moved to the top because of the importance of the topic)

If this is true, we’ll need to be sure that Senator “Waste Ted” Stevens of Alaska and other pork abusers are near defibrillators when they find out.
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The Club for Growth Blog refers to a Congressional Records Service report (PDF), and says:

According to a new report ….. 95% of all pork projects are not legally binding. The report concluded that only 543 out of 12,852 earmarks were actually written into the text of last year’s appropriations bills. As for the remaining 12,309 unauthorized pork projects, the report states, “Earmarks that appear in committee reports and the statements of managers do not legally bind agencies…”.

If this is true, I think we will better understand why it’s called “pork” in the days to come, as the SQUEALS in the halls of Congress from the likes of “Waste Ted” and others at the possibility that their beloved earmarked funds may not legally have to be spent grow in volume.
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UPDATE: Fellow S.O.B. Alliance member Porkopolis digs in and verifies DeMint’s work with characteristic thoroughness.

Thomas Lifson and Jack Risko have done a tremendous public service by reviewing the financial statements and public disclosures of The New York Times Company.

The pair have come up with treasure trove of interesting info. The three juiciest tidbits are these:

1. The Times Company’s flagship newspaper, The New York Times, is only third in circulation in the New York Metro area. Its Metro circulation of about 556,000 is well behind that of The New York Post (663,000) and The New York Daily News (689,000), and has dropped 27% since 1993.
2. The growth of its advertising revenues badly trails inflation, and trails the general rise in advertising costs by even more.
3. The Times Company may have hit a wall in its effort to increase The Times’ circulation in the rest of the nation with its national edition.

Not that disgruntled shareholders can do much about it:

Management in a public company spinning such data might face a hostile takeover or shareholder revolt.

Not the New York Times.

The New York Times Company’s common shares are divided into separate classes, with the holdings of the founding Sulzberger clan able to elect a majority of directors, despite accounting for a single digit share of total equity. The family gets to call the shots, and so far they are sticking with Pinch Sulzberger, who dreamed up the national circulation strategy, along with some other growth and diversification moves (buying the Boston Globe and investing in the widely unwatched Discovery Times cable channel) which have not exactly set the world on fire.

The way that the Times reports its numbers – so obliquely as to draw attention away from its decline – shows that it does not run itself for shareholders as a normal public corporation should.

But there are financial consequences (chart is as of the market close on March 7):

Although the stock has gotten up off the floor from its low of about $26, it has a long way to go before it can be pronounced healthy. A declining core newspaper business, a national newpaper business reaching its plateau, questionable investments such as Discovery Times and About.com, and (of course) a stubborn mindset that won’t see the problem of liberal bias in their newsrooms (including at the Boston Globe) that continues to alienate potential readers, all seem to make a full financial recovery unlikely, at least in the near term.
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Other Times-Related Blasts from the Past:

• Jan. 30 — NYT Columnist: Bush Reads “Mao: The Unknown Story,” Confirming That It’s a “Conservative” Book
• Jan. 6 — The NY Times and The AFL-CIO Futilely Attempt to Exploit the Sago 12
• Jan. 5 — The New York Times’ Disgraceful (and Wrong) Opportunism in the West Virginia Coal Mine Deaths
• Jan. 2, 2006 — New York Times: Transparency for Thee, But Not For Me
• Dec. 31, 2005 — Does Paul Krugman of the New York Times Read His Own Newspaper?
• Dec. 6 — Other NY Papers in a Snooze While The New York Daily (Does) News
• Nov. 11 — One More Reason The New York Times Should Be Paying YOU $50 If You Get TimesSelect
• Oct. 22 — Nicholas Kristof and Mao: He Just, Can’t, Let, Go
• Sept. 21 — There May Be More “Black Tuesdays” in The New York Times’ Future
• Sept. 15 — The New York Times-Washington Post Headline-Sharing Conspiracy Vindicates Their Longtime Critics
• Aug. 8 — If It’s Monday, There Must Be At Least Three Obvious New York Times Errors, Omissions, or Hilarities to Report
• July 17 — New York Times Running Out?

….. and they like the debit card program sooooo much they’re going to make it a permanent part of all future disaster-relief efforts!
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A subscription-only article at CardForum.com covers a Red Cross official as he sings the praises of the debit card program the charity used to distribute immediate aid to Hurrican Katrina victims. In the process, it reveals so much of what is wrong in the Big Charity mindset (bolds are min):

No Turning Back For Red Cross Relief Cards

The American Red Cross is brushing aside reports of casino gambling, liquor purchases and luxury shopping sprees using its emergency debit cards. The Red Cross is not going back to the old system of supplying emergency relief via handouts of checks and store vouchers.

Indeed, the relief group intends to make the use of prepaid debit cards the central way to get financial relief to people in times of disasters. However, private insurers, which are less likely to be providing emergency funds, are not necessarily going to follow suit.

Noting reports of Red Cross cards being used for what some considered nonessential purchases, Michael Brackney, manager of client services for the American Red Cross, says, “Occasionally, you hear about somebody who makes a bad decision.” The cards were distributed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.

Brackney told participants at the 2006 Prepaid Card Expo in Orlando, Fla., last week that the Red Cross intends to expand and make permanent the issuance of prepaid debit cards to disaster victims. Although placing restrictions on Red Cross debit card purchases is technically possible, Brackney vowed not to place such restrictions because the recipients, and not the Red Cross, should be making decisions about what they need.

“Those make the news,” Brackney says of some criticized purchases. “But this is about the dignity of the victim. Doing something normal makes you feel normal.”

Brackney notes that such uses of emergency cards as liquor purchases have likely been made in the past using Red Cross checks. But purchases made using cashed checks are not traceable, as are electronic purchases using a debit card, he notes.

The Red Cross distributed 600,000 prepaid cards, issued by its contractor, JP Morgan Chase & Co., after Katrina and Rita. The cards were distributed in 47 states to evacuees who lost their homes.
The Red Cross placed a total of $1.6 billion in assistance on the cards, each of which were worth from $360 to $1,565.

Brackney says the Red Cross cards, which have both signature-based and PIN-debit functions on them, are a superior way of delivering relief during a disaster the size of Katrina, which left hundreds of thousands of victims without access to bank accounts, paychecks or even mail delivery.

The Red Cross plans to enable 600 of its 894 U.S. offices to issue cards on the spot by July. After Katrina, only about 250 Red Cross offices had the instant-issue capability, Brackney says. “This is the biggest change in the Red Cross in the past 90 years,” he says of the adoption of prepaid cards.

Brackney says the Red Cross estimates that it saved about $2 million from not having to cut relief checks or issue paper vouchers.

Chase has set up an emergency issuing system that allows instant-issue capability in Red Cross offices, says Gregory Kerwick, vice president of emerging payment channels for Chase. The system allows Red Cross workers to set up an “account” with Chase through the Web for those applying for relief.

A few key pieces of identification, such as a Social Security number and current address, allow Red Cross workers to give debit cards out instantly, says Kerwick.

Kerwick describes fraud on the cards as “minimal.” However, both Kerwick and Brackney say Katrina exposed a logistical problem in using debit cards for immediate relief. In order to issue the cards on a timely basis, there must be cards available to distribute.

In the days following Katrina, the Red Cross had only a few hundred thousand cards available, and Chase had to scramble to get more manufactured, says Kerwick. In one evening, Chase hired a private jet to deliver 30,000 cards to one location, he says.

As such, the Red Cross now has one million prepaid debit cards positioned around the country, ready to be issued for both large and small emergencies, says Brackney.

Quick points:

• It would not be that difficult to place restrictions on debit card use (e.g., no ATM transactions over $50, no liquor, etc.); the fact that The Red Cross refuses to do so is an abdication of its stewardship responsibility over donor funds and its responsibility to ensure that recipients are working towards recovery and not beginning a cycle of dependency.
• I hate to break it to whoever wrote this piece, who is not identified, but the card math is all wrong. $1.6 billion divided by 600,000 cards is $2,667 per card, not “$360 to $1,565.” Early reports indicated that the typical value placed on an issued card was $2,000. I e-mailed the publisher of the magazine that carried this piece about the discrepancy on Monday, and have not received a response.
• I maintain, as does the government, that much of the money placed on cards was wasted, and that the amounts squandered are far in excess of the $2 million saved through reduced paperwork. Heck, it was so bad that The Smoking Gun even covered what it would normally consider a pretty dull story. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found major problems with the very program the debit cards were part of:
  

  The examination of the so-called Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to ….. “significant fraud and abuse,” the Government Accountability Office intends to report.
  ….. But the report says that FEMA itself had found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”

After reading such delusional and self-congratulatory pap, I don’t know what else can be said, except that if you don’t think passing out debit cards like candy with no accountability is a good idea, you should stop giving to The Red Cross.
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Selected Katrina Debit Card and Fraud Posts:

• Dec. 13, 2005 — Porkopolis: “The second wave of Katrina’s disaster–Waste, Fraud and Corruption”
• Sept. 29 — Hurricane Relief Debit (and Other) Cards Update
• Sept. 19 — Katrina Debit-Card Abuse Update: Some Merchants Refuse Cards
• Sept. 17 — This Weekend’s Unanswered Questions (091705): Special Katrina Debit-Card Abuse Edition
• Sept. 7 — Thoughts and Concerns on Katrina Charity

Free Links:

• Google Says “Never Mind” — Yesterday, it advised investors to disregard an internal financial forecast it “mistakenly posted.” What was posted included a reference to “management’s concerns about the online search engine leader’s profits narrowing amid tougher competition.”It seems to me that the concerns may be justified:

  

• It isn’t true that half of us are head cases — Okay, that’s not exactly what the article says. What it DOES say is that “alarming statistics about depression, sexual dysfunction, anxiety disorders or drug and alcohol abuse are exaggerations,” and that (I am so NOT surprised) “Pharmaceutical companies have capitalized on the fuzzy statistics, with commercials that focus on sadness, loneliness, exhaustion and anxiety that are common among normal people.’”There’s more:
  

  The two researchers also faulted the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other groups for benefiting from survey statistics, with “belief that if they can convince politicians that mental illnesses are widespread, they can gain more funding for mental health services.” Allocating resources to the “distressed but not disordered” could backfire, however. “Erasing the distinction between normal and disordered conditions and calling both mental disorders may harm the truly disabled,” the authors concluded.

  I feel better already.

• GM announced pension reductions for salaried employees, and a move away from defined-benefit formulas (”traditional” pensions, where you get a fixed benefit per month after retirement) towards defined-contribution arrangements (where you accumulate a balance, but it’s up to you to make it last after you retire). USA Today calls it a “freeze” (perhaps inaccurately), and notes that it will save the company $420 million in 2007, and reduce its long-term pension liability by $1.6 billion. Although the move was undoubtedly necessary at this point, it continues the unfortunate tradition in Detroit of sticking it to salaried workers in lieu of getting real with the UAW. Then management will wonder why the talent pool is so thin.
• In contrast to much of the rest of the world, productivity is chugging along nicely in the US. Willisms has the details, and as usual they are presented in a graphically pleasing style.

In Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Danielle Walker saved her father’s life:

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