From the LewRockwell Blog:

I remember once arguing with an honest young atheist, who was very much shocked at my disputing some of the assumptions which were absolute sanctities to him (such as the quite unproved proposition of the independence of matter and the quite improbable proposition of its power to originate mind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he delivered with an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: “Well, can you tell me any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who accepted the miraculous?” I said, “With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere – as many more as you please.” To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man made this astonishing reply – “Oh, but of course they had to say that; they were Christians.” First he challenged me to find a black swan, and then he ruled out all my swans because they were black. The fact that all these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or other a proof either that they were not great intellects or that they had not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in a charmingly convenient form: “All men that count have come to my conclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count.”

~ G. K. Chesterton

A recent article entitled “Ron Paul’s dilemma” makes the case that “Ron Paul may be in the ultimate damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation as next month’s Ames Straw Poll draws closer.”

If Paul polls fourth or fifth at Ames, it will feed the existing narrative that he is a second-tier candidate with a devoted but small legion of fans. Ames will be, at best, a wash. If, on the other hand, Paul finishes first or second, it will feed the narrative that he’s a straw-poll paper tiger with a small but devoted legion of fans that swamped Ames from around the country. The media will give itself permission to ignore the result and instead focus on the “serious” candidates.

Rasmussen makes the unfortunate factual error of stating that Ron’s “legion of fans” could “swamp Ames from around the country.” The Ames Straw Poll is only open to Iowa residents. A simple Google search could have prevented that mistake and allowed him to reword it differently, though at the expense of weakening his argument. A victory in Ames would not mean that Ron Paul is backed by a small group of fanatics that crawled out of the woodwork, but that he has strong core of support within the key state of Iowa. Let us ignore that fact for now.

Instead, lets focus on the substance of Rasmussen’s opinion: The Ames Straw Poll is very important, but only if Ron Paul doesn’t win. It doesn’t matter whether or not Ron wins, or even how many percentage points he wins by. The Iowa Straw Poll can help every other candidate, but it can only hurt Ron Paul. The voters at Ames can have no bearing whatsoever on Ron Paul’s viability as a candidate. A vote for Ron Paul ipso facto makes it irrelevant.

You see, Ron Paul supporters don’t count, even though they are the paragon of what the ideal political activist would be. They are arguably the only true grassroots activists in existence right now. They don’t wait for direction or leadership from Ron Paul himself. Rather, inspired by Paul’s ideals, they act on their own. Nothing else in history comes close to what they’ve accomplished.

It was Ron Paul supporters, not the Ron Paul campaign itself, that invented the “money bomb.” Money bombs are online fund-raising events, often held on dates with great historical and political significance, which seek to generate a large amount of donations within a short period of time. Such events are marketed through “viral advertising” where individuals take the initiative and spread the news of the event through online vehicles such as social networks, YouTube, and online forums. People who might think that their small contribution to the campaign might not make a difference, or who otherwise might not “get around to it,” find themselves encouraged by a large number of their peers to take an active part in these events and donate larger amounts more often than they otherwise would have. By seeking to set ever higher records in hourly, daily, and weekly fund-raising, money bombs can generate millions of dollars in free advertising in the media as well.

Remember the Ron Paul Blimp? Once again, Ron Paul supporters acted on their own initiative to make something happen. At 200 feet long, it beat out the Goodyear Blimp as the largest blimp in North America. It also cost $600,000 to fly for the six weeks it was in the air, and might not even get off the ground this year. Flying over the eastern seaboard, it generated over $2 million in publicity. The blimp needs to be flying over Iowa now, but there seems to be little interest in it! A single money bomb could do it, easy.

Let us imagine for a minute a Mitt Romney blimp or a Mike Huckabee blimp, constructed and financed by grassroots supporters independent of their respective campaigns. They would be praised from the rooftops for their creativity and initiative. They would be asked, “What is it about Mitt Romney that gives you so much hope?” With such a spontaneous surge of enthusiasm and devotion for this man, some may begin to wonder, could he be The One? We’d never hear the end of it, but because it was part of the Ron Paul Campaign, nay, the Ron Paul Movement, it is referred to as a desperate publicity stunt of questionable legality.

In every campaign in the history of campaigning, a lost run for office means that interest in the candidate mostly dies out, but not for Ron Paul. Supporters of Ron Paul are qualitatively different from those who support other candidates. Jack Hunter summed it up perfectly.

Ask the average Paul fanatic what they like about him and all you will hear nothing but specific policies: “Follow the Constitution!” “End the Fed!” “End the War!” Paul is the purest example of what I like to call “philosophical conservatism” in that what he believes – strict adherence to limited government and Constitutional principles – is more important to him and his followers than how his party perceives him.

Even after Ron Paul lost the 2008 Republican nomination, the Ron Paul movement remained a force to be reckoned with. It was Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty that forever changed America’s political landscape. It was the tireless efforts of the Campaign for Liberty that made the Federal Reserve a national issue. Through countless emails, letters, and phone calls made by people who were educated about the Federal Reserve and Austrian Business Cycle Theory, HR 1207, The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, gained some 319 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. The Senate version, S. 604, had 32 cosponsors. So great was the movement to “End the Fed,” the majority of Americans are not only conscious of the Fed’s existence and activities, but are radically opposed to it. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke now feels the need to have futile press conferences to try and win over the people.

A common soundbite you’ll hear in the news nowadays (if you still watch it) is that “many are coming around to Ron Paul’s points of view.” The truly astonishing thing is that any politician can posses a sound, logical form of thought in the first place, much less convince people of anything. Scott Conroy’s Doomsday Scenario may prove to be true, as the “famously devoted supporters of Texas Rep. Ron Paul wipe the sweat off their brows without batting an eye and descend on the campus of Iowa State University to propel the libertarian-leaning icon to yet another straw-poll victory”. This, for Conroy, would be a tragedy. If Ron Paul were to win in Ames, the sanctity of the event and the godly wisdom of all who attend would have to be called into question.

Yes, it is very true that it is not how high a candidate can get in the national polls, but how many of his supporters he can actually get out to vote that wins elections. If you show up to vote for Ron Paul, however, well then, you’re just some crazy fanatic who’s part of the ever growing cult of Ron Paul worshipers. You are like a pestilence that swarms GOP events to drown out the voices of more reasoned minds, a sacrilegious abuse of the Holy Democratic System. Your votes are not to be regarded with the same reverence as those offered up to the other lying, thieving, murderous scumbags that always get elected president. You are at best an outlier, at worst, a very real threat to our political way of life. The Ron Paul Movement, the greatest grassroots campaign in political history, could destroy Iowa’s position as an early primary state, and ruin the chances of any grassroots campaign for a small-name politician of ever being competitive in presidential politics ever again.

The establishment media would like to completely ignore Ron Paul by not even including him in the polls. When they can’t ignore him, they use a very simple formula. On the eve of an important straw poll, say he can’t win. When he does, downplay the results as meaningless. Now, on the eve of the Ames Straw Poll, they are hedging their bets with doublespeak; The Ames Straw Poll is very important, but only if Ron Paul doesn’t win. It’s a strategy that will likely stretch well into the primary season, but this can only work for so long.

When it become too obvious that the Ron Paul movement is taking over the country, they will resort to blatant lies and deception. This is precisely what Fox News did earlier this year when they tried claim that Ron Paul was booed at the 2011 CPAC by playing the clip from 2010. When Bill Hemmer asks Ron Paul how he felt being about booed, he laughs in a very odd, juvenile way. The way his tong moves around in his mouth, almost as if he is savoring the opportunity to humiliate Ron Paul, I imagine him once being a large, fat bully in the fifth grade. Ron Paul in fact got a standing ovation when he was announced the winner of the 2011 CPAC Straw Poll. Such an amateurish attempt at deception was quickly found out, and Fox News via Hemmer was forced to publicly apologize for their “honest mistake.”

How far will the mainstream go in order to stem the tide of the Ron Paul Revolution? They already say it threatens to destroy the presidential primary system. Will they go as far as Glen Beck did, and group Ron Paul supporters in with terrorists? Perhaps a bombing or a mass shooting will be blamed on the anti-government Libertarian movement. A so-called “Libertarian Bomber” would be just the excuse needed to send federal troops to arrest people at Ron Paul rallies.

It all makes one wonder how accurate those polls are that place Ron at around 10%. It’s clear that the media sees his supporters as a mere factor that skew the polls away from results that are more “representative of America.” The fact is that Ron Paul does represent America. He opposes the wars, he opposes the income tax, he opposes further burdening the country with more debt, and he wants to restore sound money and end the Federal Reserve. What the media doesn’t want is for Americans to figure this out.

They want people who like Ron Paul to think he can’t win; his victories don’t matter; he’s a “fringe candidate;” only kooks support him; best to support someone else who actually stands a chance. The establishment wants to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that a Ron Paul presidency is a hopeless cause. Their plan won’t work. Once the false paradigm is shattered and the people see the truth, Ron Paul will become President of the United States, and it will be all thanks to those “Ron Paul fanatics,” the Black Swans of Politics.

July 30, 2011

Justin T.P. Quinn [send him mail], who lives in New Jersey, has done project management for both private firms and nonprofits.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.

http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001375.html

Although the U.S.-India economic relationship has grown significantly in recent years, economic barriers continue to prevent U.S. investment in several lucrative sectors.

U.S. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner and Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee met in Washington this week to discuss trade and economic investment opportunities between the United States and India in the second meeting under the U.S.-India Economic and Financial Partnership. The Indian economy grew 8.5% in 2010 and American corporations are eager to expand their business reach to the Indian marketplace of nearly 1.2 billion people.

Geithner urged India to implement substantive economic reforms, particularly in the finance sector, to enable the United States and India to fully realize the “enormous potential” of the bilateral economic relationship. Mukherjee lauded the rapid growth of trade between Washington and New Delhi in recent years and acknowledged the need for the easing of trade barriers

Analysis

Despite the robust rhetoric welcoming expanded foreign investment, significant barriers remain to additional U.S. investment in several Indian sectors including banking, education, and legal services. India’s ruling Congress Party has been beset by a wave of corruption scandals that have weakened its ability to pass much needed economic reforms to lessen trade and investment barriers.

India desperately needs foreign investment to develop and expand a national infrastructure that is woefully inadequate to support its continued economic growth. New Delhi is likely to move incrementally toward further economic reforms with an eye toward easing restrictions that will allow foreign investment for infrastructure improvements.

Carolyn Leddy held senior positions with the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council under the George W. Bush administration. She was a 2009-2010 Council on Foreign Relations-Hitachi Ltd. International Affairs Fellow in Japan and Visiting Fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo.

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The United States Federal Reserve’s coffers are bulging with $1 billion worth of unwanted $1 coins that cost $300 million to produce, and it could produce a billion more $1 coins by 2016, according to an investigation by National Public Radio (NPR).

The Fed’s three attempts to popularize the use of $1 coins dates to the Susan B. Anthony coin that went into circulation starting in 1979, and again in 1999.

The Sacagawea dollar started circulating in 2000, and is still being produced.

The U.S. began production of presidential $1 coins in 2007, with the face of an individual president gracing each series released quarterly, starting with George Washington (the current series bears the likeness of Ulysses S. Grant).

NPR quotes a 2010 Federal Reserve report to Congress that said the coins are languishing in vaults “with no perceivable benefit to the taxpayer,” and that they’re being returned by banks in increasing amounts.

“We have no reason to expect demand to improve,” said the report. “We also note that a 2008 Harris poll found that more than three-fourths of people questioned continue to prefer the $1 note.”

One benefit of the coins is that they last longer than bills, the Fed has long maintained. A study by the Government Accountability Office suggests that $5.5 billion could be saved over 30 years by switching exclusively to $1 coins over bills.

The trick is to get the public to switch over to the coins, which some suggest is politically impossible.

Former Delaware Republican Rep. Mike Castle, who sponsored the bill for the production of the presidential coins, told NPR that “politically it’s not something the members want to deal with, so it’s just very hard to get something like that done.”

“It’s ridiculous to have this kind of over-inventory pile up,” Castle continued. “I might actually make some phone calls myself as a result of reading these reports and learning more about what this problem appears to be.”

While there’s a certain logic to completing the series of presidential coins, it also seems outlandish to produce something no one wants, suggested former Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D.

“Is the nation waiting with bated breath for us to get to the Calvin Coolidge coin?” he wondered. “No! Maybe we should call a halt to this whole thing.”

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Legal experts say passage of the Equal Rights Amendment could lead to legalized gay marriage throughout the United States, reports DailyCaller.com.

The amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1973, was not supported by the required 38 states at the time, but has been reintroduced every year since then.

Phyllis Schlafly

The legislation recently was revived after the U.S. Supreme Court shot down a class-action discrimination lawsuit on behalf of female employees against Wal-Mart.

Phyllis Schlafly, a long-time ERA critic and constitutional lawyer, says the amendment could cancel out legal objections to same-gendered couples being wed because of its gender-neutral language.

“It’s a real simple argument,” said Schlafly. “ERA would make all federal and state laws sex neutral. If two men show up and say we want a marriage license and [the person] says, ‘You’re both men, I’m not giving it to you,’ that would be discriminatory.”

Shari Rendall, director of Legislation and Public Policy at Concerned Women for America, agrees. “[ERA] is not so much about rights as committing a feminist agenda, an attempt to create a gender-neutral community,” she told the Caller.

“If they can’t get their agenda through the legislative system, they’ll go to the courts,” Rendall continued. “You see that even in court decisions it has been said that banning same-sex marriage would be unconstitutional in light of ERA.”

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

It’s the story that demands breaking live coverage on not one but two, three cable news networks.

­“Another day of powerful testimony in the Casey Anthony murder trial,” resounded the anchors on cable news.

“Another day of disturbing testimony in the Casey Anthony murder trial.”

Mainstream media is reporting and analyzing every gory detail.

“There were a lot of people upset in court today and that’s because we were hearing testimony about Calee’s limbs,” recounted one reporter. “Her legs being chewed on by animals her trunk torso being dragged off and chewed on.”

The American public literally clamoring to hear it all as people get in near brawls lining up for a seat in the courtroom.

Ask anyone on the street they can tell you why.

“There is something about this case that is mesmerizing and I do think it is because it is a young girl,” said a passerby in Washington DC.

“I mean you can speculate that she is a fairly attractive young mother,” speculated another. “Why else this case? It doesn’t involve a famous person.”

“It’s like a modern day soap opera,” added one more.

And nearly everyone you ask knows who Casey Anthony is.

“Someone who murdered her kid, who allegedly murdered her kid in Florida,” said a stranger in Washington DC.

And one part of the formula for media coverage and obession this journalism professor says can’t be ignored: Casey Anthony is white.

“If it were minorities it would have to be a foot ball player or a politician or something along those lines,” said Chris Chambers, journalism professor at Georgetown University.

 But does this one criminal trial affect the lives of Americans?

“No,” and “probably not,” according to a few people we talked to on the streets.

Nonetheless America can’t get enough.

According to pollsters at Pew research, last week Casey Anthony was one of the top five newsmakers in mainstream news, after people such as the president of the United States and Republican John Huntsman, who made it official that he’s running for president himself.

And the viewers seem to want her to be. Headline News, which has been delivering wall to wall coverage has seen a huge boost in ratings as a result. Media watchdogs report coverage has been sending prime-time ratings surging to first and second place spots on many a day over the last several weeks. 

Meanwhile, men like Michael Austin arrested in 1974 for a murder and armed robbery he didn’t commit, will never get a fraction of the attention. An injustice that most people will never have heard of.

He was exonerated after a difficult battle and serving 27 years in prison, despite plenty of evidence of innocence including an alibi (proof he was working), and a description that pegged the 6’5” black man as a light skinned man of 5’8.”

It’s just one of many cases Americans may never hear about, as they tune into “another day of disturbing testimony in the Casey Anthony murder trial,” on the airwaves.

That attention whether it matters to greater society or not.

The hidden camera ploy that has propelled television host Chris Hansen into an American pop culture phenomenon has pulled a fast one on the To Catch a Predator star.

The Daily Mail is reporting today that Hansen, the Dateline NBC personality that has hosted the popular To Catch a Predator series from 2004 through 2007, has been caught cheating on his wife Mary Joan Hansen, with whom he has fathered two sons.

It is being reported today that the National Enquirer was instrumental in arranging an undercover sting operation last weekend in which Hansen was caught on film going on a date with a blonde-haired reporter 20 years younger than him.

The Daily Mail claims that the hidden cameras reveal Hansen and Kristyn Caddell, a 30-year-old journalist from Florida, going out to dinner at the hoity-toity Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan and then heading off to Miss Cadddel’s Palm Beach apartment. The recording allegedly shows the couple then leaving her apartment the following morning with luggage in tow.

Undercover footage reportedly recorded the couple driving along the ocean, at a gas station, a liquor store and eventually Caddell’s apartment. The next day the tape continued to roll as Caddell took Hansen to the airport.

As host of NBC’s To Catch A Predator, Hansen and his crew have aired 12 investigations across the United States in which authorities carried out undercover stings to nab sexual predators seeking out children for elicit acts. After luring men to the homes of alleged underage prey, Hansen and a film crew question, document and humiliate criminals with the help of NBC videographers, hidden surveillance cams and law enforcement.

Former Texas District Attorney Louis Conradt committed suicide in 2006 after a SWAT team entered his house during a sting enacted in part by the television program. Authorities had created a fictional 13-year-old boy to whom Conradt engaged in explicit online chats with. When SWAT later stormed his Terrell, Texas home as the Dateline crew surrounded the premises, Conradt killed himself with a Browning .380 handgun bullet to the head.

Hansen has recently been investigating around Florida to try to find out how star athlete James ‘Jimmy T’ Trindade went missing in 2006. An anonymous source has told the Daily Mail that Hansen and Caddell met at a martini bar in Palm Beach earlier this year, and that “there was an immediate physical attraction between them.”

The source also claims that Caddell later boasted to friends that she spent the night with Hansen.

The Enquirer is alleging that the couple has been continuing recondite rendezvous along the East Coast, with the two spending weekends together in Miami, Palm Beach and even New York City. Previously Caddell worked as an intern in NBC’s New York City office.

OK, so maybe the television antennas littering the housetops across urban and suburban landscapes were downright ugly — and perilous to install on steep roofs — not to mention that windstorms could leave them twisting in the wind like pretzels.

And sure, the rabbit ears atop the TV were maddeningly stubborn about pulling in your favorite show without Dad’s having to fiddle around to adjust the metal spines repeatedly until they were just so. Some people even added aluminum foil to boost the signal-capturing ability.

But at least those contraptions weren’t the energy hogs that cable and satellite TV boxes are these days.

Those ubiquitous boxes of the digital age drain as much as a full-sized, but energy efficient, refrigerator and even some air-conditioning systems, according to a report in The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26cable.html

That staggering fact brings to mind the exclamations that exploded on TV sets during “Batman” in the old black-and-white TV era: POW! BAM! And ZAP to your energy bill!

The 160 million boxes in the United States that funnel cable signals and digital recording ability into televisions are the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, the Times reports. Many homes have one or more basic cable boxes, as well as add-on digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, the Times quotes a recent study from the Natural Resources Defense Council as saying.

The boxes consume $3 billion in electricity a year in the United States — and 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded, the study found.

“People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,” said John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission who is now with the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation.

“Companies say it can’t be done or it’s too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn’t cost much, if anything,” Wilson told the Times.

Alternatives to the perpetually “powered-on” state are available, but they are not being required or deployed in the United States, critics say.

Similar devices in some European countries go automatically into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half, the Times reports. They also have an optional “deep sleep” option that can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent.

Alan Meier, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, offered this of the industry in the United States to the Times: “I don’t want to use the word ‘lazy,’ but they have had different priorities, and saving energy is not one of them.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, Ann Bailey, director of Energy Star product labeling, said in an email to the Times.

Back in the day, the biggest energy demand was climbing up on the roof to monkey around adjusting the antenna.

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

SAN FRANCISCO — The photograph on the Home Depot website shows a line of smiling soldiers unloading a truck stacked with power tools and other company wares.

The company says this shows “federal dollars go farther at The Home Depot.”

San Francisco Attorney Paul Scott says the photo also shows the company providing Chinese-made products in violation of the Buy American Act, and the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating.

A federal judge refused Home Depot’s bid in April to toss a whistleblower lawsuit Scott and other attorneys filed against the company. Now the country’s largest home improvement retailer is the latest company accused of running afoul of the Buy American Act, a 1933 law aimed at protecting U.S. jobs. The law requires that all materials used in construction of public projects originate in the United States or “designated countries.”

Like most protectionist trade provisions, the Buy American Act has its supporters and detractors.

Proponents support the act as a way to boost the economy and preserve U.S. jobs. Critics complain the law limits the government’s ability to make the best purchase on price and quality. Further, they argue that complying with the letter of the law is difficult, given the many exemptions and the reality that the component parts of many products originate in multiple countries. In addition, the law’s critics say it’s especially difficult for large companies such as Home Depot that carry thousands of products to ensure it follows the law with every government transaction.

The law has been through many revisions, and trade agreements with Canada, Israel and several other countries allow for use of material made in those countries. In the decades after its enactment, the law was little used. But with the explosion of international trade a number of companies have been accused of violating the Buy American Act over the last several years.

Earlier this year, the national hardware distributor Fastenal Co. agreed to pay $6.25 million to resolve DOJ claims made after a government audit found among other things that it violated its contract with the General Services Administration by providing Chinese-made goods.

Fastenal said in a statement that it settled because “we continue to believe that we complied with our obligation under the GSA contract in all material respects. However, we felt a continuation of our dispute with the DOJ and GSA was not the best use of our resources.”

In the last six years, Staples, Office Depot, and OfficeMax have paid a combined $22 million to settle government claims they violated the act. In 2008, the Department of Justice announced that W.W. Grainger agreed to pay $6 million to settle claims the company overcharged the government and provided it with Chinese and Taiwanese products in violation of the Buy American Act.

At issue in the Home Depot case are GSA “schedule” contracts. Those contracts authorize any government agency to purchase tens of thousands of products from the company’s Web site.

The lawsuit alleges that up to half of those products are made in China and other non-designated countries. The lawsuit was filed by two employees of another government contractor in 2008 that claimed their employer, the Actus Lend Lease Co., supplied noncompliant material in several military housing projects.

Before Actus was dropped from the case this year after paying an undisclosed amount of money to settle, lawyers discovered allegations that one of its corporate partners — Home Depot — was also violating the law.

The two Actus employees initially filed the so-called whistleblower lawsuit under seal, as all such claims on behalf of the government are filed. That gives the DOJ a chance to investigate the claims and decide if it wants to take over the lawsuit, which seeks to recover damages on behalf of the government.

All damages recovered are split between the government and the plaintiffs filing the lawsuit, with the government always receiving a larger amount.

Last year, the judge denied the government’s request to keep the lawsuit under seal so it could continue its investigation.

After the lawsuit was made public, Home Depot asked the judge to dismiss the case, noting the government’s non-intervention in the case. In March, federal prosecutors fired back at Home Depot with a court filing stating that it “would be erroneous to assume that the government’s lack of intervention reflects its conclusion that the case lacks merit.”

The DOJ continues to investigate the issue and still has not decided whether to join the case.

In court filings and a brief interview, Home Depot officials argue they have complied fully with the terms of the contract and the Buy American Act.

“We would never knowingly sell prohibited goods under any circumstances, and we have been cooperating with the government to provide requested information,” said Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes. “We believe the plaintiffs have an inaccurate view of the facts, so we look forward to presenting our side of this case as the process moves forward.”

A judge has scheduled a trial for early next year.

© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Automakers that sell vehicles in the United States may have to boost car and light truck fuel economy to an average 56.2 miles per gallon by 2025 under a White House proposal presented this week.

In separate meetings with officials from Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., and Chrysler Group LLC on Wednesday, the Obama administration asked the three largest U.S. automakers to analyze the effects of a 56.2 mpg fuel-economy target, two people familiar with the talks said. The rules also would cover other manufacturers, such as Toyota Motor Corp.

That represents an improvement of about a 5 percent a year in each company’s fleetwide average fuel economy from 2016, when they are required to have a 35.5 mpg average for vehicles sold in the United States The Detroit News reported the administration’s plan today.

Republicans, including Environmental Protection Agency administrators for every Republican president since Richard Nixon, joined other Republicans this week in asking Obama to write “aggressive” fuel economy standards for 2017 to 2025, the years covered under the rule now being drafted.

Increasing fuel economy by the amount proposed could cost at least $2,100 per vehicle, according to a document prepared last year by the EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who have said they will publish a proposed rule by Sept. 30. California’s Air Resources Board is also helping write the rule and was represented at this week’s meetings, according to the people familiar with the talks.

“We continue to work closely with a broad range of stakeholders to develop an important standard that will save families money and keep the jobs of the future here,” Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said in an email. “A final decision has not been made, and as we have made clear we plan to propose that standard in September.”

Any number being floated now is early in the process, Greg Martin, a spokesman for Detroit-based GM, said in an interview.

“There’s a way go to in this process,” said Martin, who said he doesn’t know what the White House said in the meeting. “Any number out there right now has the rigidity of Jello.”

Christin Baker, a spokeswoman for Ford, based in Dearborn, Mich., also declined to comment on this week’s talks.

“Our discussions with the administration are ongoing and productive,” she said in an email.

Spokeswomen for Chrysler, based in Auburn Hills, Mich., and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents automakers from around the world, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment placed outside of regular business hours.

Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council are pushing for a 62 mpg standard by 2025, saying increasing the fuel economy average will help U.S. automakers regain market share they lost to foreign competitors who sold more smaller cars in the U.S.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” council Transportation Program Director Roland Hwang said about the 56.2 mpg proposal in an interview. “That’s a good number as long as there aren’t any loopholes by the automakers” such as making most of the improvements in the later years of the rule.”

© Copyright 2011 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.