The American Staff

The code of omertà has been shattered. Big Jack Abramoff has cracked; the feds will make him tell all. And up on Capitol Hill, on the Republican side of the aisle, it soon will be the season of the rat. The prosecutors will begin with the small fry. The staffers will sing first (the notion […]

Alito’s Excuses With the discovery of an entire arsenal of smoking guns documenting Judge Samuel Alito’s fervent opposition to abortion rights, the media haven’t really looked into the Supreme Court nominee’s other questionable attributes. Which means we may need to wait until his confirmation hearings in January to learn what Alito was thinking when he […]

New Orleans’ population before Hurricane Katrina was 462,269 … Today, 138,026 households, or two-thirds of the 2000 census population, are still forwarding their mail to new addresses … The city’s budget for 2004 was roughly $16.8 billion … It operated a deficit that year of approximately $600 million … According to the 2004 Current Population […]

The United States has detained approximately 70,000 people outside U.S. territory since late 2001 … It’s believed that more than 10,000 are still in U.S. custody in various camps and prisons in the United States, Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan … In a May 13, 2004, story, The New York Times reported that the whereabouts of […]

In August, Governors Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Janet Napolitano of Arizona declared states of emergency due to illegal immigration across their borders … The declarations allow the governors to spend nearly $1.5 million each to bolster the states’ law enforcement and border patrols … In 2004, 537,151 people were naturalized to the United […]

The percentage of schools that during the 2002–03 school year flunked the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act were 5 percent in Alabama, 14 percent in Wyoming, 40 percent in Illinois, and 76 percent in Florida … 99 percent of California schools are projected to fail proficiency tests […]

Global military expenditures topped $950 billion in 2003 … Arms transfers accounted for $25.6 billion of this figure … 60 percent of all arms sales from 2000–03 were made to developing nations … The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are the […]