“As a former officer in the United States Navy, integrity and commitment to public service are values I take seriously. Unfortunately, as recent developments have come to light, I cannot in good conscience continue in my current position.”

– Peter Kauffmann, communications director for New York Gov. David Paterson, explaining his sudden resignation last week after being interviewed by prosecutors from the New York attorney general’s office, “which is investigating the administration’s response to a domestic violence case involving another top aide to the governor,” reports the New York Times.

Kauffman said he could no longer serve Paterson, explaining to investigators “that he had come to doubt the veracity of what he was being instructed by the governor to say to reporters,” according to the Times.

Source: New York Times, Mar. 5.

“The bottom line is that if you don’t get a disease picked up early and you don’t get necessary treatment, you’re more likely to die.”

– Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, talking to the New York Times last week. Dorn’s comments come amid coverage of a new report warning that without reform of the healthcare system, “more than 275,000 adults nationwide will die over the next decade because of a lack of health insurance.”

The new report comes from the liberal advocacy group Families USA, but uses the same methodology employed by the nonpartisan Institute of Medicine, calculating the figures on both a national and state-by-state basis.

“A growing body of research has explored the connection between a lack of health insurance and an increased risk of death,” notes the Times. “Uninsured people are more likely to skip screenings and other preventive care, so their medical problems are often diagnosed later, when they are more advanced and tougher to treat.”

Source: New York Times, Feb. 26.

“Unfortunately, this document is very telling. We’re going to hold Toyota’s feet to the fire and make sure they do what’s necessary.”

– U.S. Transportation Department spokeswoman Olivia Alair, talking to the New York Times following press reports of newly uncovered documents from Toyota in which the automaker praised its efforts to rein in federal recalls and investigations of its vehicles.

In a confidential presentation from July 2009, “Toyota estimated that it saved $100 million by negotiating with regulators for a limited recall of 2007 Toyota Camry and Lexus ES models for sudden acceleration, the same problem that has since prompted it to recall millions of cars,” notes the Times.

Three congressional investigations are slated to begin over the next two weeks, according to the Times, with Toyota’s chief executive, Akio Toyoda, scheduled to testify on Wednesday.

Source: New York Times, Feb. 21.

For more information, see: USA Today, Feb. 21 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 15 — Related Newsline commentary, Feb. 8 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 8.

“Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it.”

– Gikas Hardouvelis, an economist and former government official who helped write a recent report on Greece’s accounting policies, talking to the New York Times. The Times reports that Greece was able to hide its crippling $300 billion debt, which now is roiling international markets and threatening the euro currency, largely with the help of the same U.S. banks complicit in the financial games that precipitated the current recession.

“Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere,” notes the Times. “In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.”

Source: New York Times, Feb. 13.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

– U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, speaking last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee and urging the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay military personnel from serving openly.

Mullen and Defense secretary Robert Gates both said the 1993 policy should be repealed, a view supported by President Obama but opposed by critics like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who says the move would strain the military.

Wikipedia notes that “of the 26 countries that participate militarily in NATO, more than 22 permit gay people to serve; of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, two (Britain, France) permit gay people to serve openly, and three (United States, Russia, China) do not.”

Source: New York Times, Feb. 3.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

– South Carolina lieutenant governor Andre Bauer, speaking about poor people receiving government assistance at a town hall meeting last week. Bauer, who is running for the governor’s seat being vacated by disgraced philanderer Gov. Mark Sanford, later said he regrets his choice of words, reports the Associated Press.

Source: AP, Jan. 25.

“This is of serious concern to me and to the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan because, indeed, it conveys a perception that is absolutely contrary to what it is that we have sought to do…. It is disturbing to us, frankly, that this was done.”

– U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, condemning the decision by a U.S. contractor to carve Bible references onto the rifle scopes sent to military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan

Petraeus, who is responsible for U.S. military operations in 20 countries from Egypt to Pakistan, said the actions of Michigan-based Trijicon Inc. hurt U.S. efforts to “convince the Muslim world that the U.S. fight against al Qaeda militants should not be viewed as a war against Islam,” a view that spread after President Bush called his war on terrorism a “crusade,” notes the Reuters news agency.

Trijicon has been embossing rifle scopes with a reference to a Bible passage that reads, “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Trijicon’s president last week issued a statement saying the company would quit carving the reference into scopes for U.S. soldiers, calling the decision “both prudent and appropriate,” reports Reuters.

Source: Reuters, Jan. 22.

“A hotel has to be like a father, mother, everything at the same time. When (President Jean-Bertrand) Aristide was thrown out in 2004, it was tough. An Italian journalist had toothache, and when I took him to see a doctor, they nearly killed us at a roadblock. But this earthquake overshadows everything.”

– Frantz Rimpel, the general manager of the Hotel Villa Creole in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, talking to the Reuters news agency. The hotel, a once-elegant establishment, was damaged badly by last week’s earthquake, which is believed to have killed as many as 200,000 and destroyed entire towns. The Hotel Villa Creole is now “operating a hospital in its front entrance and allowing scores of aid workers, journalists and others to camp out on its grounds,” notes Reuters.

“My grandparents founded this hotel. We have lost priceless works of art,” co-owner Melissa Padberg told Reuters. “But this is nothing to do with money now. We are just trying to keep open to give basic services to our clients, and allow ourselves to somehow help.”

Source: Reuters, Jan. 15.

“I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come. It’s time for me to talk about the past and to confirm what people have suspected…. After all this time, I want to come clean. I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my congressional testimony, but now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it. I’ll do that, and then I just want to help my team.”

– Former baseball power-slugger Mark McGwire in a statement released to the Associated Press on Monday, admitting for the first time that he repeatedly used steroids and human growth hormone over the course of his career, including in 1998, when he set baseball’s home run record while playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. McGwire retired in 2001, but is expected back in the bullpen this spring as a hitting coach for Cardinals.

Source: AP, Jan. 11.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 16, 2009 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 2, 2009 — Related Newsline story, June 9, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 18, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 17, 2007.

“It’s a setback for whistle-blowers everywhere. It just undermines the public interest that thousands of major tax cheats all escape any prosecution, and the one person who turned it in gets the longest sentence.”

– Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington and the attorney for Bradley Birkenfeld, “a key informant in a U.S. investigation of offshore tax evasion aided by UBS.” Kohn made his comment on Monday after a judge ordered Birkenfeld to begin serving his two-year prison sentence — by far the longest sentence imposed on anyone involved in the tax evasion scam, reports BusinessWeek.

Birkenfeld, who pleaded guilty in 2008, was instrumental in helping the U.S. government prosecute UBS and its officers, all of whom received far lighter prison sentences. UBS “paid $780 million in February and handed over data on 250 accounts to avoid prosecution. It agreed in August to turn over data on another 4,450 clients sought by the IRS. Another 14,700 U.S. taxpayers voluntarily disclosed offshore bank accounts to the IRS last year,” notes BusinessWeek.

Source: BusinessWeek, Jan. 4.

It is “routine practice to use post-production techniques to correct for lighting and other minor photographic deficiencies before publishing the final shots as part of an advertising campaign.”

– Consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, issuing a defense of its U.K. ad campaign featuring English model and actress Twiggy. The company’s cosmetics division Olay was taken to task recently for Photoshopping wrinkles from Twiggy’s face — the latest in a series of public protests against ad campaigns criticized for distorting body image.

In August, U.K. lawmakers began calling for a ban on “digitally altered ads, suggesting they mislead the public,” reports Yahoo.

Procter & Gamble has pulled the air-brushed ad for its Definity eye illuminator and replaced it with “one in which there was no post-production work around the eyes,” notes the U.K. Guardian.

Sources: Yahoo, Dec. 17 — Guardian, Dec. 16.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Dec. 14.

“It was magical. I had tears in my eyes because it never happened before. I’ve been here for 10 years and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

– Lynn Willard, a waitress at the Aramingo Diner near Philadelphia, talking about a chain reaction of gift giving after a couple decided to pay for the meal of the people at another table. For the next five hours, patrons covered the tabs for other tables, reports NBC Philadelphia. “I could not believe it … and it continued and continued, it was very nice,” said Willard.

Source: NBC Philadelphia, Dec. 14.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was concerned only with “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets.”

– Excerpt from a scathing report released in late November by the Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. The report by the government-appointed commission found that “the Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin,” reports the New York Times. The paper notes that the “cover-ups spanned the tenures of four Dublin archbishops and continued through to the mid-1990s and beyond,” with police and Catholic officials learning of abuse but doing little about it.

The Irish police and church representatives issued apologies after the report was released. “Because of acts or omissions, individuals who sought assistance did not always receive the level of response or protection which any citizen in trouble is entitled to expect,” said Ireland’s police commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, reports the Irish Times.

As the Associated Press reports, the “720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese — home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics — did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995. By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies — among them qualified lawyers — already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.”

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan notes, “If the Catholic church were a secular institution in Ireland and had been found guilty of child abuse to the massive extent the Church has, it would be forced to close. Its top officials would not be issuing statements of apology and regret, but serving sentences in jail. The name of John Paul II would not be a revered mantra; it would be synonymous with the head of an international organization that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge its own long-running, institutional brutalization of generations of defenseless children.”

Sources: New York Times, Nov. 26 — Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Atlantic (blog), Nov. 27 – Irish Times, Nov. 26 – Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Nov. 28 – AP, Nov. 26.

For more information, see: Report by Commission of Investigation into Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin — Related Newsline story, May 25, 2009 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 17, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 10, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 26, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 15, 2003.

“We just seem to lack the backbone to use this prohibition. In the rare cases it is used, no one at State was willing to talk about it.”

– Daniel Whitman, a former deputy director post at the U.S. State Department, talking to the New York Times about the lax enforcement of U.S. policy barring corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving U.S. visas.

Despite the fact that U.S. policy requires “only credible evidence of corruption, not a conviction of it,” corrupt officials and their families rarely are barred entry, especially when they hail from oil-rich countries with contracts benefiting U.S. companies or wealthy accounts benefiting banks, notes the report.

The Times spotlights the case of Teodoro Nguema Obiang, an official of Equatorial Guinea and the son of its president, who flies to the United States several times a year to vacation at his $35 million estate in Malibu, California.

“The nation’s doors are open to Mr. Obiang … even though federal law enforcement officials believe that ‘most if not all’ of his wealth” derives from corruption, including, in the words of U.S. government documents obtained by the paper, “extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct.”

“Senior State Department people, especially from Africa, kept saying that if something like this is used they wouldn’t have anyone to talk to in their home countries,” Otto Reich, former U.S. special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, told the Times. “It’s politically simply something they do not want to take on.”

Source: New York Times, Nov. 16.

“It makes it much easier for the drug companies to pony up the $80 billion because they’ll be making more money.”

– Steven Findlay, senior healthcare analyst with advocacy group Consumers Union, quoted in a New York Times piece on Monday. The Times reports that U.S. drug companies are jacking up prices ahead of possible healthcare reform that could curb drug spending in coming years. While drug companies have agreed to cut U.S. drug spending by $8 billion a year for 10 years — $80 billion total — they have been raising prices on their most popular drugs, effectively adding “more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill,” notes the Times.

The price jumps come even as the U.S. Consumer Price Index has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year. A spokesman for Merck, which hiked its prices nearly 9 percent in the last year, said the increases “have no connection to healthcare reform,” notes the Times.

Source: New York Times, Nov. 15.

“Those in government thought they were opening a valve, but once it was open, much more happened. Wir sind das Volk. The theme of ‘We are the people’ matters not just for Germany, but rather for all those who seek freedom and democracy.”

– Joachim Gauck, Lutheran pastor and former East German dissident leader, speaking Monday on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Source: Washington Post, Nov. 9.

“The endemic corruption within the Iraqi system — not only the security forces, but the system — is still probably the biggest problem facing Iraq.”

– U.S. general Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq since September 2008, speaking recently with the BBC. The New York Times includes Odierno’s comment in a piece examining the pervasive corruption in Iraq as highlighted in a new report by Iraq’s Interior Ministry inspector general.

While that report focuses on the country’s security forces, the Times notes that Iraqi “corruption runs much deeper, endangering the fragile sense of security in Iraq as America draws down its forces, with security services that seem aimed as much at enriching themselves as protecting average Iraqis.” The report notes that “in the first six months of this year, 1,455 arrest warrants have been issued by the Iraqi Commission of Public Integrity, in charge of corruption prosecutions.”

Source: New York Times, Oct. 28.

“The Associated Press raised serious questions in its recent coverage of insurance companies and homeowners’ drywall claims. Some of these companies need to be shamed into doing the right thing.”

– U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, talking to the AP last week about insurance companies’ efforts to cancel the policies of people whose homes were built with defective Chinese drywall.

Thousands of people across the country own homes built with the faulty drywall, which emits fumes, contains traces of a chemical that can produce a sulfurous odor, and corrodes “copper pipes, destroying TVs and air conditioners and blackening silverware,” according to the report.

Following the original AP story, the Florida-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. announced that it had changed its mind and wouldn’t cancel the policy of the couple featured in the article. “We’re just elated. I mean, you never hear of an insurance company changing their mind,” said homeowner James Ivory.

Source: AP, Oct. 23.

For more information, see related Newsline story, Oct. 19.

“For a long time, matters that should have been investigated were just ignored, so we’ll have to see what type of accountability we have now.”

– Fred Wertheimer, former president of Common Cause and current president/CEO of Democracy 21, talking to the New York Times about the slow pace and absent punishments by congressional ethics committees.

The Times notes that the House and Senate both rushed to embrace strict ethics enforcement two years ago after the Jack Abramoff scandal. “Since then, however, no member of Congress has been censured, the toughest punishment short of expulsion, despite a number of recent scandals involving sexual impropriety, financial dealings and conflicts of interest. The record illustrates how Congress has struggled to police itself after years in which its ethics committees were often derided as ineffectual.”

The last formal censure in Congress came in 1990, notes the paper, despite the gravity of the Abramoff affair and other scandals involving members of Congress, including Larry Craig (R-Idaho), Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.), Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), John Ensign (R-Nev.), Mark Foley (R-Fla.), William Jefferson (D-La.), Charles Rangel (D-NY), and David Vitter (R-La.).

Source: New York Times, Oct. 17.

For more information, see related Newsline Commentary, Oct. 12.

“Apple is committed to protecting the environment and the communities in which we operate around the world. We strongly object to the Chamber’s recent comments opposing the EPA’s effort to limit greenhouse gases.”

“As a company, we are working hard to reduce our own greenhouse emissions…. We have undertaken this unilaterally and without government mandate, because we believe it is the right thing to do. For those companies who cannot or will not do the same, Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort.”

– Excerpt from tech giant Apple’s letter canceling its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most powerful business federation and lobbying group. Apple’s move follows recent high-profile defections by three utility companies, including California’s PG&E, which “announced it was leaving because of the group’s ‘obstructionist tactics,’” reports the Los Angeles Times.

Athletic retailer Nike also quit the Chamber’s board over the issue, “but has chosen to remain a member in hopes of changing the federation’s climate-change policy from within,” notes the San Jose Mercury News.

Sources: San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 7.

For more information, see: Los Angeles Times editorial, Oct. 12 — Text of Apple’s letter (via the San Jose Mercury News) — Politico.com, Oct. 5.