FormerJustice Promotes Web-Based Civics Lessons

http://www.ourcourts.org/

This is a sticky issue…if the retreat was for corp exec’s than it is wasteful but if is for promotion, advertising or sales incentives than it may be money well spent to crawl out of the mess.

Also the money spent on those things stimulates the economy for the local economy of the region where it is held!

Some things are not as BLACK and WHITE and they seem and those firms have employees and overhead costs as well.

Educap is a multibillion-dollar student loan charity run by CEO Catherine Reynolds. As CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reported Monday night, Educap is under investigation by the IRS and Congress for alleged abuse of its tax-exempt status because it charges high interest on charitable student loans, and provides lavish perks with millions in compensation for Reynolds and her husband.

CBS News has obtained exclusive details of what may have been the biggest charity perk: use of Educap’s $31 million luxury jet, which costs thousands of dollars an hour to operate.

Investigators say for five years, Reynolds jetted friends, family and luminaries to faraway and exotic destinations that sometimes had little to do with the charity’s mission.

CBS News has learned that high-profile names on the Educap flight list include CIA Director Leon Panetta, former Sens. Tom Daschle and Ted Stevens, former FBI Director William Sessions and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

According to flight records, Panetta and Daschle, while not in public office, accompanied Educap’s Catherine Reynolds on flights to private business meetings not related to the charity…And records show Reynolds took Chicago’s Daley and his wife on 58 flights including ones to Turkey, Asia and Sweden.  (MM)

well—lets be clear about all of this…aig shouldn’t be given any more of our childrens and grandchildrens cash.

 and another thing…

 When will Obama ‘get it’ on earmarks?
By Examiner Editorial
- 3/3/09

As the nation faces its most severe recession since 1982, President Barack Obama apparently wants the American people to forget that he promised he would give them earmark reform if they elected him president, even if he had to go “line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.” It’s time for Obama to keep his promise.
However, administration officials - including Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag and White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel �" have been calling the earmark-laden spending bill needed to keep the federal government operating through September “last year’s business.” Only in Washington can a spending bill that requires the president’s signature today be yesterday’s business. Although the $410 billion bill contains nearly 8,600 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion, White House officials say President Obama will sign it anyway. Americans, Orszag says, should just “move on.”

But embattled taxpayers will not soon forget this latest illustration of Washington double-talk. Even Time Magazine, whose coverage of Obama’s campaign verged on rapturous, finally had to ask: “Does Obama have a double standard on earmarks?” The fact that the president bragged to a televised joint session of Congress that there were no earmarks in his $787 billion stimulus package, only to remain silent as House Democrats passed a bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks the very next day, answers Time’s question in the affirmative.

Because earmarks bypass the regular legislative process that forces projects to compete for the same dollars, most earmarks tend to be pure political pork. So earmarks in the current spending bill are just as likely to be wasteful as they were when Republicans were busy funding the “Bridge to Nowhere.” For example, there’s $1.8 million to manage swine manure in Iowa, $190,000 for a “Buffalo Bill Historical Center” in Wyoming, $2.2 million to study grape genetics in New York, $175,000 for “façade improvements” on a dilapidated theater in Pennsylvania, $162,000 for cricket control in Utah, and a total of $41.5 million for the presidential libraries of three former Democratic presidents: FDR, JFK and Lyndon Johnson. Taxpayers will be billed for all of it.

No wonder less than two months into the new administration, thousands of angry Americans have already participated in Tea Party protests all around the country. Obama said last week that he “gets it” on executive pay caps. It’s time he gets it on earmarks, too, and veto this ridiculously wasteful omnibus pork bill.