For more than four years, every visitor and tenant of one of the tallest buildings in downtown Rockville, 51 Monroe St., was greeted with the Fox News channel on large, flat-screen televisions mounted near the elevators of the ground and first floors. The channel never changed.
To those who complained, building management offered a standard answer: Only one channel was available on the sets. This assertion went unchallenged until the district office of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a tenant on the fifth floor, got involved.
As part of the renegotiation of its lease last fall, the district office insisted that the televisions be tuned to different news channels, not exclusively Fox, said Joan D. Kleinman, the office's district director. It's not written in the lease, which took effect in January, but it was brought up in negotiations, Kleinman said.
Management appears to have relented.
A building employee said yesterday that the channels are rotated weekly. Now, on some days, tenants and visitors can watch CNN while waiting for the elevators. On other days, they can watch a local news station. And still, on other days, Fox News appears.
Way to go, Joan! And what a lying sack of pusballs at that office building. "Only one channel." Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
On the flip side, women we don't love so much: Ellen Sauerbrey (behind that infernal New York Times Select firewall, but sometimes a direct link helps).
Frank Rich writes movingly of the complete failure of the Bush Administration to provide outlets for asylum to the tens of thousands of Iraqis who supported our ill-fated occupation of their country. In the eight months after the fall of Saigon in 1975, 131,000 Vietnamese refugees were settled here. By contrast, in the past four years, by contrast, a grand total of 466 asylum applications from Iraqis have been granted.
And who is the utterly ill-suited person in charge of U.S. refugee policy at the State Department? Former Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerbrey. I'll let Frank Rich explain:
Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes" in March, is that most of them "really want to go home."
Read the Rich article -- it's appalling, and it's being perpetrated in your name. All part and parcel of the Bush Administration policy of "whatever happens, it's not our fault."
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