Eeyore's News and view

Mar. 05, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Four valley men arrested in weapons, tax evasion case
By ADRIENNE PACKER
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Four Las Vegas residents were arrested Thursday on charges that include possession of weapons and tax evasion in a raid conducted by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
JanLindsey was arrested on tax evasion charges. Harold Call faces a possession of a machine gun charge. Samuel Davis and Shawn Rice were charged with conspiracy and money laundering.
Authorities did not explain why the Joint Terrorism Task Force was involved.
Lindsey appeared in federal court Thursday afternoon and refused to allow a federal public defender to represent him during the hearing. When U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen granted prosecutors’ request to keep Lindsey in custody, he shouted: “I object, your honor.”
All four men are scheduled to enter pleas on the charges today.
According to the indictment, Lindsey either failed to pay his income tax or filed false tax forms from 1999 through 2006. He also attempted to fool the government by “concealing and attempting to conceal from the Internal Revenue Service the nature, extent and location of his assets by various methods, including placing funds and property in the names of nominee third party entities,” the indictment states.
According to court records, a Lindsey filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2002 after his property was seized because he failed to pay taxes. In court documents, Lindsey quotes books related to taxpayers rights. In transcripts of various hearings, Lindsey frequently asked procedural questions and challenged the law.
In court on Thursday, Lindsey repeatedly interrupted Leen to ask questions until the judge told him, “This isn’t 20 questions.”
Undercover FBI agents approached Davis and Rice last year and informed the men that they had stolen blank checks from Wachovia Bank. The agents said they needed assistance to launder the money from the checks and Davis said he had experience in money laundering, according to the indictment.
Davis planned to pass the money through the financial accounts of several trusts and corporations that he controlled, then return the money to the undercover agents, the indictment states. Davis said he would also conceal the proceeds as loans.
Davis “explained that the money would not be subject to tax liability, and that the loans would be concealed by having all parties involved sign nondisclosure agreements,” the indictment states.
Between March 2008 and September 2008, agents wired about $585,000 to Davis and he returned $540,000, keeping the balance as payment for his services, according to the indictment.
Rice signed on as Davis’ associate to help with the money laundering.
Call was found in possession of an unregistered machine gun, according to the indictment. The gun is a combination of parts commonly known as “lightning link,” which is designed to shoot multiple shots without reloading.
Agents searched Call’s home at 8208 Gunther Circle, near Alta and Buffalo drives, on Thursday. In the garage was a small canister of black powder and two ammunition reloading machines. A bumper sticker on a vehicle read: “My president is Charlton Heston.” Heston was not only known for his acting, but as a strong advocate for gun rights.
Neighbors said dozens of federal agents arrived outside the home about 8 a.m. Dave Beyl, 26, said he saw a Humvee and people in camouflage uniforms shouting over a megaphone for Call to leave the house.
Call was known in the neighborhood for not being fond of the government, said Mike Mulligan, who moved away from the neighborhood in August.
“He definitely believed in the right to bear arms, we knew that,” Mulligan said.
But Call never showed his weapons to Mulligan. Call, who Mulligan believed is 67, was a kind old man who would try to keep the neighborhood in order, he said.
He also had a tendency to write letters to everybody, from neighbors who would have loud parties to the government, Mulligan said.
“He was a wonderful guy,” he said. “And to everybody there, Harold was always a good neighbor. He was friendly as hell.”
Review-Journal writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report. Contact reporter Adrienne Packer at apacker@reviewjournal.com or 702-384-8710.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/40808932.html

CHAVEZ CALLS ON OBAMA TO FOLLOW PATH OF SOCIALISM
Fri Mar 06 2009 17:13:48 ET
Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday called upon US President Barack Obama to follow the path to socialism, which he termed as the "only" way out of the global recession. "Come with us, align yourself, come with us on the road to socialism. This is the only path. Imagine a socialist revolution in the United States," Chavez told a group of workers in the southern Venezuelan state of Bolivar.
The controversial Venezuelan leader, who taunted the United States as a source of capitalistic evil under former president George W Bush, added that the United States needs a leader who can take it to a "higher" destiny and bring it out of "the sad role that it has been given, as a murderous, attacking power that is hated all around the world."
Chavez said that people are calling Obama a "socialist" for the measures of state intervention he is taking to counter the crisis, so it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that he might join the project of "21st century socialism" that the Venezuelan leader is heading.
"Nothing is impossible. Who would have thought in the 1980s that the Soviet Union would disappear? No one," he said.
"That murderous, genocidal empire has to end, and some day there has to come a leader ... who interprets the best of a people who also include human beings who suffer, endure, weep and laugh," the outspoken Chavez said.
http://www.drudgereport.com/flashco.htm

Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow
A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.
It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
Martin KozlowskiThe illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.
To be fair, specific parts of the president's budget are admirable and deserve support: increased means-testing in agriculture and medical payments; permanent indexing of the alternative minimum tax and other tax reductions; recognizing the need for further financial rescue and likely losses thereon; and bringing spending into the budget that was previously in supplemental appropriations, such as funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The specific problems, however, far outweigh the positives. First are the quite optimistic forecasts, despite the higher taxes and government micromanagement that will harm the economy. The budget projects a much shallower recession and stronger recovery than private forecasters or the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are projecting. It implies a vast amount of additional spending and higher taxes, above and beyond even these record levels. For example, it calls for a down payment on universal health care, with the additional "resources" needed "TBD" (to be determined).
Mr. Obama has bravely said he will deal with the projected deficits in Medicare and Social Security. While reform of these programs is vital, the president has shown little interest in reining in the growth of real spending per beneficiary, and he has rejected increasing the retirement age. Instead, he's proposed additional taxes on earnings above the current payroll tax cap of $106,800 -- a bad policy that would raise marginal tax rates still further and barely dent the long-run deficit.
Increasing the top tax rates on earnings to 39.6% and on capital gains and dividends to 20% will reduce incentives for our most productive citizens and small businesses to work, save and invest -- with effective rates higher still because of restrictions on itemized deductions and raising the Social Security cap. As every economics student learns, high marginal rates distort economic decisions, the damage from which rises with the square of the rates (doubling the rates quadruples the harm). The president claims he is only hitting 2% of the population, but many more will at some point be in these brackets.
As for energy policy, the president's cap-and-trade plan for CO2 would ensnare a vast network of covered sources, opening up countless opportunities for political manipulation, bureaucracy, or worse. It would likely exacerbate volatility in energy prices, as permit prices soar in booms and collapse in busts. The European emissions trading system has been a dismal failure. A direct, transparent carbon tax would be far better.
Moreover, the president's energy proposals radically underestimate the time frame for bringing alternatives plausibly to scale. His own Energy Department estimates we will need a lot more oil and gas in the meantime, necessitating $11 trillion in capital investment to avoid permanently higher prices.
The president proposes a large defense drawdown to pay for exploding nondefense outlays -- similar to those of Presidents Carter and Clinton -- which were widely perceived by both Republicans and Democrats as having gone too far, leaving large holes in our military. We paid a high price for those mistakes and should not repeat them.
The president's proposed limitations on the value of itemized deductions for those in the top tax brackets would clobber itemized charitable contributions, half of which are by those at the top. This change effectively increases the cost to the donor by roughly 20% (to just over 72 cents from 60 cents per dollar donated). Estimates of the responsiveness of giving to after-tax prices range from a bit above to a little below proportionate, so reductions in giving will be large and permanent, even after the recession ends and the financial markets rebound.
A similar effect will exacerbate tax flight from states like California and New York, which rely on steeply progressive income taxes collecting a large fraction of revenue from a small fraction of their residents. This attack on decentralization permeates the budget -- e.g., killing the private fee-for-service Medicare option -- and will curtail the experimentation, innovation and competition that provide a road map to greater effectiveness.
The pervasive government subsidies and mandates -- in health, pharmaceuticals, energy and the like -- will do a poor job of picking winners and losers (ask the Japanese or Europeans) and will be difficult to unwind as recipients lobby for continuation and expansion. Expanding the scale and scope of government largess means that more and more of our best entrepreneurs, managers and workers will spend their time and talent chasing handouts subject to bureaucratic diktats, not the marketplace needs and wants of consumers.
Our competitors have lower corporate tax rates and tax only domestic earnings, yet the budget seeks to restrict deferral of taxes on overseas earnings, arguing it drives jobs overseas. But the academic research (most notably by Mihir Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James Hines Jr.) reveals the opposite: American firms' overseas investments strengthen their domestic operations and employee compensation.
New and expanded refundable tax credits would raise the fraction of taxpayers paying no income taxes to almost 50% from 38%. This is potentially the most pernicious feature of the president's budget, because it would cement a permanent voting majority with no stake in controlling the cost of general government.
From the poorly designed stimulus bill and vague new financial rescue plan, to the enormous expansion of government spending, taxes and debt somehow permanently strengthening economic growth, the assumptions underlying the president's economic program seem bereft of rigorous analysis and a careful reading of history.
Unfortunately, our history suggests new government programs, however noble the intent, more often wind up delivering less, more slowly, at far higher cost than projected, with potentially damaging unintended consequences. The most recent case, of course, was the government's meddling in the housing market to bring home ownership to low-income families, which became a prime cause of the current economic and financial disaster.
On the growth effects of a large expansion of government, the European social welfare states present a window on our potential future: standards of living permanently 30% lower than ours. Rounding off perceived rough edges of our economic system may well be called for, but a major, perhaps irreversible, step toward a European-style social welfare state with its concomitant long-run economic stagnation is not.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html

When food illnesses spread, Minnesota team gets the call
ST. PAUL — Three days before Christmas, a call to Minnesota's food-borne illness hotline set off bells: A nursing home had three residents sickened by salmonella.
Salmonella cases had been bubbling up in Minnesota for a month, longer in other states. Here was a potential cluster. Minnesota's food-borne illness team sprang into action. State workers pored over the nursing home's menus, looking for clues. Another case popped up at a different nursing home, then two at a school. More menus were compared.
FOOD PROBES: Salmonella victim's mom seeks reform
Within three weeks, Minnesota identified King Nut peanut butter as the culprit, and Peanut Corp. of America as the producer. It was the first big break in a case that has sickened more than 677 nationwide, might have led to nine deaths and has caused one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history, affecting more than 3,000 products.
Without the Minnesota break — and the presence of a cluster of cases from a confined population such as the nursing home's — the outbreak "could have dragged on for who knows how long," says Tom Safranek, state epidemiologist in Nebraska.
Minnesota's prowess in investigating food-borne illness outbreaks — in contrast to less successful efforts by other states — exposes weaknesses in the nation's ability to quickly track and contain outbreaks, food safety specialists say.
That's because the national system for identifying food-borne illnesses relies on the efforts of hundreds of local, regional and state health departments, all with differing capabilities, budgets, priorities and procedures. If an outbreak starts in a region ill-prepared to investigate cases, it may not be stopped as quickly as if it had started elsewhere, food safety officials say.
"People die who don't need to die. It happens all the time in food-borne illness outbreaks," says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota, who testified last year before Congress on the issue. "If each state was as effective as Minnesota, more of these could be detected."
Minnesota's fast work has protected the public from contaminated food before. Last year, its team was among the first to blame hot peppers — not tomatoes, the initial suspect — for the largest salmonella outbreak in a decade. In 2007, the team found pot pies to be the source of another salmonella outbreak. In both cases, Minnesota took less than a month to find what turned out to be a confirmed culprit when people had been falling ill in other states for months.
When it comes to food-borne illness investigation, "Minnesota is leap years ahead of … most of the rest of the nation," says James Phillips, head of infectious diseases for the Arkansas Department of Health.
'Team Diarrhea'
Food-borne illness investigations start after someone gets sick, goes to a doctor and submits a stool sample. If that sample comes up positive for potential food-borne illness, such as E.coli or salmonella, state investigators go to work.
In about three-quarters of the states, patient interviews are done by workers in hundreds of local or regional health departments. In other states, work is centralized at the state level.
In Minnesota, things happen that don't always happen elsewhere. Every salmonella or E.coli victim is interviewed by a state health worker. A standardized form, which takes 25 to 30 minutes to fill out, collects data on activities such as what the person ate during the past seven days, where they bought groceries, traveled or came in contact with animals.
"We assume that every potential case is the first of an outbreak we haven't identified yet," says Carlota Medus, Minnesota state epidemiologist.
In other places, officials won't get deep histories until an outbreak is suspected.
"If somebody calls and says, 'I got sick, and I think it was McDonald's,' nothing happens," says Chris LeFevre, environmental director for Ohio's Carroll County Health Department, which investigates food-borne illnesses. "You need at least two people to start an investigation."
Even with three calls in an afternoon, "Good luck solving that mystery," he says.
By law, Minnesota requires that salmonella samples collected by hospital and clinic laboratories be sent to the state lab for further testing to see if they match other cases nationwide. That's not true for 40% of states, says the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Minnesota's lab turns test results in one or two days, says Kirk Smith, supervisor of the Foodborne Diseases Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health.
Some state labs batch samples, meaning officials wait for several before they run tests. That saves money, but samples can sit for days, says Ali Khan, assistant surgeon general at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitor such illnesses.
Every day, Minnesota's lab issues a report to the state's epidemiologists about new cases, and how they match with older and national ones. That gives a quick read on connections, Medus says.
The epidemiologists direct "Team Diarrhea," a team of seven to nine graduate students. They work afternoons, evenings and Sundays — when consumers are more reachable — to interview victims. They work the phones from one large cubicle in the state's health department headquarters. Snippets of conversation bounce around as they build patient histories.
"Did you vomit?"
"Did you have any diarrhea?"
"Wow. That's a lot."
"Where would you have purchased chicken?"
"What else do you put on the turkey sandwich?"
Often, victims are interviewed twice as patterns emerge. In last year's pepper salmonella outbreak, one of Minnesota's first victims didn't recall eating at a restaurant that eventually pointed to peppers until he was asked about it after other victims mentioned it.
Minnesota "has a lot of best practices … to get to people quickly to find out what they ate," the CDC's Khan says.
Dangerous delays
Investigation delays can have national implications.
Last year, the pepper salmonella outbreak sickened 1,442. Some states took weeks to interview victims and fully test their stool samples, says Osterholm. In Minnesota, that process typically takes days, Medus says.
Texas accounted for more than one-third of reported cases in that outbreak, the CDC says. In Texas, hospital and clinic laboratories aren't required by law to send salmonella samples to the state lab for testing to see if they match other cases nationwide. Instead, Texas only requests that labs send samples to the state lab, and they're not always sent.
As the pepper outbreak spread, Texas officials e-mailed local health departments and asked them to contact labs to make sure samples were sent to the state. That resulted in a surge of cases that the state had been unaware of, says Susan Neill, state lab director.
Nationwide, almost 10% of outbreak cases took more than a month from when the people fell ill to when they were in a national database, the CDC says. "Faster transfer of bacterial strains to public health laboratories and faster subtyping in those laboratories would result in more timely investigation," the CDC wrote in its report on the outbreak.
The outbreak cost the U.S. tomato industry more than $100 million, according to industry estimates. It wasn't until late July that the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers nationwide not to eat fresh jalapeño peppers. Tomatoes may have caused illnesses early in the outbreak, the CDC maintains.
Many outbreaks are missed
Minnesota also has good resources for tracking outbreaks.
It's one of 10 states that won federal contracts to get extra funds to track food-borne diseases and do related studies. That totals about $500,000 a year per state, the CDC says. In Minnesota, some of that pays for workers who help in outbreak probes. The state spends about $1 million a year to look for and investigate food-borne illnesses, Smith says.
But nationwide, nearly 30% of states in fiscal 2008 had smaller health department budgets than in 2007, and most expected more cuts, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials reported.
In Columbus, Ohio, public health recently lost 60 of 230 positions, says Teresa Long, health commissioner. During last year's salmonella outbreak, workers were diverted from checking restaurants for compliance with FDA warnings to avoid tomatoes to focus on a diarrheal disease outbreak in the city's pools, she says.
In Kansas, a local health worker might be assigned to interview a potential food-borne illness victim while facing a whooping cough outbreak at a school, says Charles Hunt, interim state epidemiologist. "They (local health departments) have to balance out their priorities," Hunt says. As a result, "I'm sure we do miss some outbreaks," he says.
Nationwide, the CDC estimates U.S. consumers suffer 76 million food-borne illnesses a year. Most aren't reported, the CDC says. For every reported illness, dozens go unreported because people don't see doctors, or doctors don't test for them, the agency says.
Even when outbreaks are noticed, they're not always figured out. Of 1,247 food-borne illness outbreaks tracked by the CDC in 2006, investigators pinpointed a specific food and pathogen in only one-third of the cases, says the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, which tracks outbreaks. "This is only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of cases," says CSPI's food safety director, Caroline Smith DeWaal. She says most states don't have resources to fully investigate.
If cases aren't fully investigated, outbreaks may be missed. Texas, with 22 million people, reported four food-borne outbreaks to the CDC in 2006. Wyoming, population 500,000, also reported four. Minnesota, with less than one-fourth the population of Texas, reported 79.
"Food safety is about the same everywhere," says Tim Jones, epidemiologist for the Tennessee Department of Health, which reported 30 outbreaks in 2006. "Some states don't have the capacity to look for (outbreaks) and don't recognize them," he says.
Osterholm says more money for food-borne illness detection would pay for itself. For one E.coli case in which someone suffers severe kidney damage, medical costs often top $500,000, he says. He says regional "Team Ds" or a national "Team D" could support local health departments.
The CDC's Khan says more "boots on the ground" are needed to interview victims. State labs need more tools, and states need more databases, he says.
"Unless we make it easier for states to investigate these outbreaks, we won't see an improvement in their ability to prevent and contain them," he says.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-03-04-food-illness-detection_N.htm