George Steinbrenner

from the Baseball Library dot com

George Steinbrenner made himself synonymous with owner meddling, involving himself
with the day-to-day fortunes of his ballclub to an extent unmatched by any owner
since Connie Mack, who was his own manager. Only Charlie Finley can approach Steinbrenner
in this, but not even Finley equaled Steinbrenner’s record of 17 managerial changes
in his first 17 seasons. Finley rehired Alvin Dark as manager just once; Steinbrenner
gave Billy Martin five separate terms. Graig Nettles commented, “Every year is like
being traded – a new manager and a whole new team.”

The son of a Great Lakes shipping
family, Steinbrenner made his money as chairman of the American Shipbuilding Company,
a Cleveland-based firm. In his youth he was an assistant football coach at Northwestern
and Purdue universities (Jim Spencer said of his employer, “George Steinbrenner knows
nothing about baseball. He doesn’t understand that this is a major league team, not
Purdue”) and assembled national champions in the National Industrial and American
Basketball leagues. In 1973 he put together the group that bought the Yankees from
CBS, promising at the time, “I won’t be active in the day-to-day operations of the
club at all.” But one-time associate John McMullen, who later owned the Astros, said,
“Nothing is more limited than being a limited
partner of George’s.”

The advent
of free agency proved a boon to Steinbrenner although he said of it early on, “I
am dead set against free agency. It can ruin baseball.” After Catfish Hunter was
released from his A’s contract in 1974, the Yankees paid him the unheard-of salary
of $2.85 million for four years. He signed Reggie Jackson after the team won the
AL pennant in 1976, and the move was largely responsible for back-to-back World Championships
in 1977-78. However, in that period Steinbrenner had solid baseball minds such as
Al Rosen and Gabe Paul in the front office making trades like the one that brought
Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss from Cleveland, and also refusing to trade Ron
Guidry. Steinbrenner’s initial success purchasing free agents led to a tendency to
overstock the team with superstars to the point where there wasn’t room in the lineup
for them all. His preference for name players came from the conviction that “you
measure the value of a ballplayer by how many fannies he puts in the seats.” The
departure of general managers nearly matched the turnover of managers and apparently
was accompanied by a corresponding lack of GM control over major decisions. A series
of disastrous acquisitions in the early 1980s (Ed Whitson, John Mayberry, Doyle Alexander,
Mike Armstrong) was made worse by a steady stream of departing stars escaping from
what had been dubbed The Bronx Zoo. From 1979 through the end of the next decade,
the Yankees won only one more pennant, in the strike-split 1981 season; the 1980s
were the first decade since the 1910s in which the Yankees did not win a World Championship.
(SH)

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“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the
voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the
path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of
terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives
in fear.”
-Harry Truman-

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Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests
Audit Finds Possible Rule Violations

By John Solomon and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 9, 2007; A01

A
Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the
FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and
financial records in national security cases, officials with access to
the report said yesterday.

The inspector general’s audit found 22
possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations —
some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293
“national security letters.” The letters were used by the FBI to obtain
the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and
2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.

Officials
said they could not be sure of the scope of the violations but
suggested they could be more widespread, though not deliberate. In
nearly a quarter of the case files Inspector General Glenn A. Fine
reviewed, he found previously unreported potential violations.

The
use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued
more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests
for information.

The letters enable an FBI field office to compel
the release of private information without the authority of a grand
jury or judge. The USA Patriot Act, enacted after the 2001 attacks,
eliminated the requirement that the FBI show “specific and articulable”
reasons to believe that the records it demands belong to a foreign
intelligence agent or terrorist.

That law, and Bush
administration guidelines for its use, transformed national security
letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and
visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

Now the
bureau needs only to certify that the records are “sought for” or
“relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international
terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

According to
three officials with access to the report, Fine said the possible
violations he discovered did not “manifest deliberate attempts to
circumvent statutory limitations or departmental policies.”

But
Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without
citing an authorized investigation, claimed “exigent” circumstances
that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate
documentation to justify the issuance of letters.

In at least two
cases, the officials said, Fine found that the FBI obtained full credit
reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be
employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of
other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and
Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed
personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to
be released. The FBI “sequestered” that information, a law enforcement
official said last night, but did not destroy it.

Alan Raul,
vice chairman of the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight
Board and a former Reagan White House lawyer , said in an interview
that the Bush administration has asked the board to review and
recommend changes in the FBI’s use of national security letters.

“The
processes seem to be seriously in need of tune-up,” Raul said. “We hope
to play a role in helping the FBI get to where it knows it needs to be.”

Lanny Davis,
another board member and a former attorney in the Clinton White House ,
said his recent briefing by the FBI left him “very concerned about what
I regard to be serious potential infringements of privacy and civil
liberties by the FBI and their use of national security letters. It is
my impression that they too regard this as very serious.”

Fine’s
audit, which was limited to 77 case files in four FBI field offices,
found that those offices did not even generate accurate counts of the
national security letters they issued, omitting about one in five
letters from the reports they sent to headquarters in Washington. Those
inaccurate numbers, in turn, were used as the basis for required
reports to Congress.

Officials said they believe that the 48
known problems may be the tip of the iceberg in an internal oversight
system that one of them described as “shoddy.”

The report
identified several instances in which the FBI used a tool known as
“exigent letters” to obtain information urgently, promising that the
requests would be covered later by grand jury subpoenas or national
security letters. In several of those cases, the subpoenas were never
sent, the review found.

The review also found several instances
in which agents claimed there were exigent circumstances when none
existed. The FBI recently ended the practice of using exigent letters
in national security cases, officials said last night.

The
report, mandated by Congress over the Bush administration’s objections,
is to be presented to several House and Senate committees today. But
senior officials, speaking with permission on the condition that they
not be identified, said the Bush administration has already responded
vigorously to the audit’s findings.

Attorney General Alberto R.
Gonzales learned of the findings three weeks ago and “was incensed when
he was told the contents of the report,” according to a Justice
Department official.

“The attorney general commends the work of
the inspector general in uncovering serious problems in the FBI’s use
of NSLs,” said Tasia Scolinos, a spokeswoman for Gonzales. “He has told
[FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III] that these past mistakes will not
be tolerated, and has ordered the FBI and the department to restore
accountability and to put in place safeguards to ensure greater
oversight and controls over the use of national security letters.”

FBI
and Justice Department officials have long described national security
letters as an indispensable tool in combating terrorism, and Fine’s
report, according to one official who cited excerpts, said
investigators told the inspector general that the letters “contributed
significantly to many counterterrorism and counterintelligence
investigations.” Fine did not make an independent assessment of the
efficacy of the letters as investigative tools.

FBI procedures
require that any possible violation of law or regulation on national
security letters be reported to the President’s Intelligence Oversight
Board within 14 days of discovery. Of the 26 breaches it discovered
before Fine’s review, the FBI referred 19 to the oversight board.

Among
the responses officials highlighted last night is a tracking database
under development by the FBI to ensure that its accounting of national
security letters is accurate. One official said the FBI would begin
deployment of the system in four of its 56 field offices by the end of
the year. Meanwhile, the official said, each office will be required to
“hand count” the numbers every month.

Gonzales, officials said,
has ordered the department’s national security division and inspections
division to begin audits next month of a sampling of national security
letters in every field office. About 15 offices should be audited by
the end of the year, the official said.

Gonzales has also ordered
that he chief counsel of every field office personally sign off on
every national security letter, a practice that has been encouraged but
not required until now.

The office of Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell has established a working group to consider
how much of the information gathered by national security letters
should be retained and whether any of it should be purged. After the
Patriot Act was passed, the Bush administration eliminated the FBI’s
requirement that irrelevant personal information from case files be
discarded after cases are closed.

Mueller has ordered improved
training of agents involved in national security cases and better
record-keeping. Last May, changes began with the fixing of databases.

A
senior group of FBI inspectors has been asked to review the conduct of
agents and their supervisors to determine if any should be disciplined
for mistakes.

Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests – washingtonpost.com

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Judge Quits, Reportedly
Over U.S. Spy Program

Judge Quits, Reportedly Over U.S. Spy Program – New York Times

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MnDOT feared cracking in bridge but opted against making repairs

By Laurie Blake, Paul Mcenroe, Pat Doyle and Tony Kennedy, Star Tribune

Last update: August 03, 2007 – 1:32 PM

Structural
deficiencies in the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed Wednesday were
so serious that the Minnesota Department of Transportation last winter
considered bolting steel plates to its supports to prevent cracking in
fatigued metal, according to documents and interviews with agency
officials.The department went so far as to ask contractors for
advice on the best way to approach such a task, which could have been
opened for bids later this year.

MnDOT considered the steel
plating at the recommendation of consulting engineers who told the
agency that there were two ways to keep the bridge safe: Make repairs
throughout the 40-year-old steel arched bridge or inspect it closely
enough to find flaws that might become cracks and then bolt the steel
plating only on those sections.

Fears about bridge safety fueled
emotional debate within the agency, according to a construction
industry source. But on the I-35W bridge, transportation officials
opted against making the repairs.

Officials were concerned that
drilling thousands of tiny bolt holes would weaken the bridge. Instead,
MnDOT launched an inspection that was interrupted this summer by
unrelated work on the bridge’s concrete driving surface.

“We
chose the inspection route. In May we began inspections,” Dan Dorgan,
the state’s top bridge engineer, said. “We thought we had done all we
could, but obviously something went terribly wrong.”

Dorgan said
there was enough money in the agency’s budget to pay for construction
work on the underside of the bridge. But he and Gov. Tim Pawlenty
acknowledged that transportation officials will face tough questions
about the state’s upkeep of the bridge, which has had known
deficiencies since 1990.

“We will absolutely get to the bottom of
this,” Pawlenty said. “There were a lot of decisions made, a lot of
judgment calls made, and they’re all going to have to be critically
reviewed.”

Pawlenty said an independent consultant will be hired
to scrutinize MnDOT inspection practices meant to safeguard the state’s
13,026 bridges. In the case of the I-35W bridge, MnDOT inspections
convinced officials that the bridge wouldn’t need to be replaced or
overhauled until 2020, the governor said.

Was there an internal debate?

State
and federal officials said it was too early to speculate on what caused
the eight-lane bridge to collapse during Wednesday’s evening rush hour,
but Dorgan said the focus of the investigation is on the bridge’s
superstructure, or steel underside.

He said inspectors have
long been on the lookout for metal fatigue and cracking in the bridge
because it was designed before engineers learned about dangers to
bridges from fatigue cracking.

“Up until the late 1960s, it was
thought that fatigue was not a phenomenon you would see in bridges.
Unfortunately that was a wrong assumption,” Dorgan said.

According
to a source with knowledge of the state and federal investigations,
MnDOT is focused on the east side of the northbound section of the
bridge past the Washington Avenue entrance as the likely spot where the
bridge first gave way.

Bob McFarlin, assistant to the
commissioner at MnDOT, dismissed speculation that the collapse was
somehow linked to corrosion from de-icing chemicals automatically
dispensed on the bridge.

The National Transportation Safety
Board is conducting the official investigation and Minnesota has hired
its own forensic engineering firm to conduct a parallel study.

A
construction industry official who met with MnDOT about shortcomings on
the I-35W bridge told the Star Tribune that there have been ongoing
concerns among some MnDOT employees about the safety of this and other
similar bridges.

“There were people over there that were deathly
afraid that this kind of tragedy was going to be visited on us,” the
industry official said. “There were people in the department that were
screaming to have these replaced.”MnDOT has been trying to move these
‘fracture critical’ bridges up in their [budget] sequencing so
something like this wouldn’t happen,” the source said.

“The
Lexington Bridge [I-35E over the Mississippi River], that was a
fracture-critical bridge. MnDOT moved that up pretty aggressively. What
was happening on the Lexington Bridge was crack migration in the steel
in the I-beam.”

Dorgan said no open dissension existed.

“It
was talked about whether replacement was needed, whether we could keep
it in service,” Dorgan said. “That was the whole point of those
studies. There was engineering discussion of that, but I’m not aware of
anyone who was rankled, or a heated discussion.”If there was a strong
opposition, it was not voiced,” he said.

MnDOT said Thursday that
about 8 percent of all bridges in Minnesota, including the I-35W
bridge, have been listed by the federal government as “structurally
deficient,” compared with 13 percent nationally. The label doesn’t
necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe, but in the case of the 1,907-foot
bridge, inspections were increased from once every two years to once
every year, officials said.

According to findings from the most
recent inspection in June 2006, inspectors noted various cases of
corrosion and cracking, but found no evidence of growth in pre-existing
cracks, Dorgan said. Another inspection began early this year but was
put on hold when work began on a $9 million contract to patch and
improve the bridge’s driving surface. Dorgan said he has seen no link
between the surface work and the collapse.

“We considered the bridge fit for service,” he said.

Still,
as recently as December, MnDOT indicated a desire to reinforce the
bridge by 2008 with steel plates. According to a newsletter distributed
in January 2007 by the Minnesota chapter of the Associated General
Contractors, MnDOT was intending to take bids in late 2007 on a project
that would “retrofit some of the chord members on the steel deck truss
of [the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River].”The Department is
looking for feedback and advice from contractors regarding the project
staging and constructability,” the newsletter said.

But Dorgan
told the Star Tribune Thursday that plans changed. “We decided to
handle it with inspections instead,” he said. Gary Peterson, MnDOT’s
assistant bridge engineer, said plating would have required drilling
thousands of holes in the bridge.

“If you take a look at drilling
all of those holes in a bridge that is already fracture critical you
could initiate flaws that might initiate a fracture,” Peterson said.

The
option to monitor through inspection was one of two suggestions given
to the department in 2006 by URS Corp., a San Francisco-based
construction management consultant.

Some close observers of MnDOT
continued to speculate Thursday that the decision to monitor instead of
fix deficiencies in the bridge was driven by financial concerns. Dave
Semerad, CEO of the Minnesota chapter of the Associated General
Contractors, said everything MnDOT does is based on cost-benefit
analysis.

“Let’s face it. They don’t have any money,” Semerad
said. “At the end of the day, that’s the issue. This is indicative of a
long-term pattern.”

Asked whether a lack of money was behind
MnDOT’s decision not to reinforce the bridge, MnDOT Metro District
Engineer Khani Sahebjam said: “No, we would never do that because of
money.”

Laurie Blake • 612-673-1711 lblake@startribune.com Paul McEnroe • 612-673-1745 pmac@startribune.com Pat Doyle • 651-222-1210 pdoyle@startribune.com Tony Kennedy • 612-590-5973 tonyk@startribune.com

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Jossip

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IT web site TechRepublic suggests 10 things you can do to coax Windows
XP into booting when it won’t start up properly. The post covers
everything from using your Windows startup disk and system restore to
fixing a corrupt boot.ini or master boot record. This all might sound a
bit difficult, since most people have never heard of master boot
records or partition boot sectors, but TechReplublic provides a simple
walkthrough for each tip. If you’ve had trouble getting your computer
to start up with you, these 10 tips are a good place to start.

10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot [TechReplublic via MakeUseOf]

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New York’s Bridges

August 2nd, 2007

Given that the New York City Department of Transportation maintains 787 bridges, the collapse of the bridge across the Mississippi in Minneapolis raised immediate concerns here.

A 2006 report
on the state of the city’s bridges by the transportation
department listed only three in poor condition—the lowest number
since at least 1997: the Brooklyn Bridge; a pedestrian bridge over the
FDR Drive in Manhattan, and a bridge at in Flushing Meadows-Corona
Park. According to the City Room,
city officials called reporters today to reassure them. “The poor
rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components
of the bridge that are in poor condition,” Lori Ardito, first
deputy commissioner at the transportation department reportedly said.
“They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge —
not the span of the bridge.” She said the city planned no special
action in response to the Minnesota disaster but noted the Brooklyn
Bridge is slated for reconstruction work starting in 2010.

To add to our unease, Gothamist
points out the East River Bridges carry far more traffic than the
Minneapolis bridge – not counting the subways that rumble over
some of our bridges – and are a lot older.

And on the state level, State Senate Transportation Committee
Chairman Thomas Libous is calling for more money to be spent on bridge
and road repairs, telling Gannett News Service,
“Maybe this tragedy (in Minneapolis) is going to open the eyes of
some of my colleagues reluctant to spend the money.” A 2003, a report
by civil engineers found 37 percent of bridges in the state were
considered “structurally deficient” or “functionally
obsolete.” Today, state inspectors were reportedly
out in force checking out the spans. Similarly New Jersey Governor Jon
Corzine, apparently not quite so sanguine as New York City officials, ordered inspectors to examine all of the more than 6,000 bridges in his state.

Several commentators see a link between the bridge collapse in Minnesota and last month’s steam pipe explosion in Midtown Manhattan: aging infrastructure.
“What all politicians must do is put aside the bickering and
blame on the infrastructure issue since every one of them has a
responsibility to help reduce the damage,” writes the Tygrrrr Express.

Gotham Gazette – The Wonkster » Blog Archive » New York’s Bridges

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White House Aide Won’t Answer Questions of a Senate Panel

 

By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: August 3, 2007

WASHINGTON,
Aug. 2 — J. Scott Jennings, a 29-year-old White House aide,
refused repeatedly on Thursday to answer questions before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, saying he was under orders from President Bush not
to respond.

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

J. Scott Jennings, a White House aide, at Thursday’s hearing.

“I must respectfully
decline to respond at this time,” Mr. Jennings said about a dozen
times to questions about the White House’s role in the dismissals
of federal prosecutors. Each time Mr. Jennings was asked about the
removals, he looked at a sheet of paper and said in a rote manner that
he could not reply, “pursuant to President Bush’s directive
invoking executive privilege.”

His appearance before the
committee was the latest act in the ripening showdown between the White
House and Congressional Democrats over the issue of executive privilege.

Mr.
Jennings’s explanation was treated scornfully by the
committee’s Democrats, who said they did not accept Mr.
Bush’s assertion that he has the authority to prevent former and
present officials from testifying to Congress.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, called the assertion “a bogus claim.”

Mr.
Leahy was especially withering in his criticism of an earlier claim by
Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, that Mr. Jennings’s
boss, Karl Rove,
had an even greater claim to the privilege. Mr. Fielding wrote that as
a senior official who has regular access to the president, Mr. Rove had
complete immunity from questioning by Congress.

Mr. Rove had been
subpoenaed to answer questions at Thursday’s session, but did not
appear. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, suggested that
Mr. Rove had left it to Mr. Jennings to take the committee’s
heat.

“Why is he hiding?” Mr. Durbin asked.
“Why does he throw a young staffer like you into the line of fire
while he hides behind the White House curtains?”

Committees
in both the House and the Senate are investigating whether there was
any improper political influence in the dismissals last year of several
federal prosecutors and have sought to determine Mr. Rove’s role
in the deliberations.

Although the issue has split Congress largely along party lines, Senator Arlen Specter
of Pennsylvania, the committee’s ranking Republican, has
criticized the White House approach. Mr. Specter said at the Thursday
hearing that it was important to move ahead with the investigation
because he believed it would end with the resignation of Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales, in whom he expressed a lack of confidence.

White House Aide Won’t Answer Questions of a Senate Panel – New York Times

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By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: August 3, 2007

Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall.

Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson was not free to say so.

“The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified and has not been officially acknowledged by the C.I.A.,” Judge Jones wrote.

Asked whether the ruling would affect the book’s scheduled publication date in October, Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Ms. Wilson’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, said only that the book would appear “this fall,” suggesting that revisions required by the decision may cause a slight delay. David B. Smallman, a lawyer who represented Ms. Wilson and Simon & Schuster in the suit they had filed to include the information, said his clients had not decided whether to appeal.

C.I.A. employees sign agreements requiring them to submit manuscripts to the agency for permission before they are published. The C.I.A. has publicly acknowledged only that Ms. Wilson worked there from 2002 to January 2006, when she resigned.

But a February 2006 letter from the C.I.A. to Ms. Wilson about her retirement benefits said that she had worked for the agency since Nov. 9, 1985, for a total of “20 years, 7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service.” The letter was published in the Congressional Record in connection with proposed legislation concerning Ms. Wilson’s benefits, and it remains available on the Library of Congress’s Web site.

Judge Jones acknowledged that the C.I.A. “does not contest that the information is, in fact, in the public domain,” adding that “the public may draw whatever conclusions it might from the fact that the information at issue was sent on C.I.A. letterhead by the chief of retirement and insurance services.”

But she said a classified court filing from Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of the C.I.A., which lawyers for Ms. Wilson and her publisher were not allowed to see, contained a reasonable explanation for the agency’s position. Judge Jones did not reveal it, saying only that Mr. Kappes has persuaded her of “the harm to national security which reasonably could be expected if the C.I.A. were to acknowledge the veracity of the information at issue.”

“His explanation is reasonable,” Judge Jones wrote of Mr. Kappes’s secret statement, “and the court sees no reason to disturb his judgment.”

Mr. Rothberg said that aspect of Judge Jones’s ruling was particularly frustrating.

“Trying to argue a case in which the government was able to submit a supersecret affidavit which we were not able to review was like playing an opponent who has 53 cards in his deck,” he said.

The entire decision, he added, “runs counter to the First Amendment, sets a dangerous precedent and creates an unreasonable standard by which the government can disappear public information and rewrite history.”

The C.I.A. apparently had no significant objections to the manuscript beyond the dispute over how long Ms. Wilson worked for it. In a December 2006 letter quoted in Judge Jones’s decision, the agency’s publication review board said the manuscript was “replete with statements” that “become classified when they are linked with a specific time frame.”

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said only that the agency was satisfied with Judge Jones’s decision.

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