But. Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed. As your skinny unhappy friend said the other night: people are just too fat and happy.
A North Dakota manufacturer has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a suit saying it had repeatedly shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including those for the first troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Twelve days before the settlement with the Justice Department was announced, the company, Sioux Manufacturing of Fort Totten, was given a new contract of up to $74 million to make more armor for helmets to replace the old ones, which were made from the late 1980s to last year.
In the evidence in the suit were hundreds of daily inspection records showing repeated violations of the weaving standards, as well as tape recordings of six managers and employees’ admitting covering up violations.
In a conversation Mr. Kenner secretly taped, Rhea Crane, quality assurance officer, worried “if we ever had someone get killed, and they decided to investigate because they thought maybe the helmet wasn’t any good.”
“If we ever got audited,” she said, “you know what they would do to us. Shut us down and fine us big time. Probably never see another government contract.”
Soldiers generally cannot sue the government. And Sioux is owned by an Indian tribe, the Spirit Lake Nation, that can, he said, assert sovereign immunity against private suits.
The company also benefits from a 5 percent federal incentive program for Indian contractors and preferences for disadvantaged small businesses.
10 Investigates took the concerns to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.
"I just don't think the whole situation makes sense," Brown said. "I think the government is overreached and the government should change its mind."
Brown said that he sent a letter to DFAS, complaining about the situation and demanded an explanation.
It is very important that the employees are able to pass continuing security clearances to make sure that the people who have access to our national defense secrets are not in any way compromised.
"I am very concerned about the underlying facts on the taping, the reasons for the judgment on the limited penalties and, most of all, on the inexplicable destruction of the tapes," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., in a Thursday letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Consumers can buy set-top converter boxes to make old televisions play digital signals, and Congress has set aside $1.5 billion to help consumers pay for the converters. Consumers who subscribe to cable or satellite services don't have to do anything. Earlier this month, U.S. residents could begin applying for two $40 coupons to help pay for converter boxes, which are expected to sell for about $50 to $70 each. The coupons can be ordered at www.dtv2009.gov or (888) DTV-2009.
Congress has taken $10,000 each from 150,000 taxpayers to ensure continued audiences for soap operas, Oprah!, and American Idol.which is, of course, one of the enumerated powers of Congress dictated by the Constitution. I'm quite sure it's in there somewhere, if you just look hard enough.
American TV networks have lost almost a quarter of their audiences because of the Hollywood writers' strike, according to new figures, and executives fear that “orphaned” viewers may never return.
The Nielsen ratings organisation found that US viewership for last week's opening of the 2008 TV season was down 21 per cent compared with the same week last year, when new episodes of hit shows such as Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy were aired.
And consider that, according to a new Brookings Institution report, as much as $360,000 in pre-tax wealth could be created if the average, full-time unbanked worker invested in the stock market what he will spend over his lifetime paying to cash his paychecks. That would allow one of those workers to finance about 25 years of retirement at his current standard of living.
