ThinkFast: February 27, 2006

ThinkFast is a new feature of ThinkProgress. (It’s still a work in progress – let us know what you think.)

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. In 2004, “the net worth at the 90th percentile was $831,600 — or 62 times the net worth of the 10th percentile, which was $13,300.” In 2001, the top ten percent had 57 times as much as the bottom ten percent.

Two-thirds of the $3.27 billion in donations raised after Hurricane Katrina has been spent, leaving less than $1 billion that “will need to be stretched over years to rebuild lives and reconstruct the social fabric of the Gulf Coast.”

In 2004 and 2005, inspectors at the Sago coal mine said that 90 percent of the hundreds of safety and health violations endangered only one person. “Fines go up “” by hundreds and potentially thousands of dollars “” if an inspector finds numerous people at risk.”

Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-NY) “is soliciting political contributions by in effect scalping tickets for NCAA ‘Sweet Sixteen’ games at Washington’s sold-out MCI Center for more than 30 times face value.”

Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton billed the Army for “more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.” The Army has decided to pay the company almost the full amount anyway. Only $10 million will be withheld, because, according to an Army spokesperson “the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement.”

The Center for Economic and Policy Research finds that Bush’s Medicare prescription drug bill is riddled with “waste and inefficiency,” adding an extra $800 billion to the cost of prescription drugs over the next decade.

8%: The amount median income fell for householders under 35 from 2001 to 2004.

The EPA has “dropped its objections” to a plan by chemical firm DuPont to treat several million gallons of chemicals left over from a VX nerve agent disposal operation. Officials in two states opposed an earlier version of the plan over fears that traces of VX — a “pinhead-sized droplet” of which can kill an adult human — would enter the Delaware River, where the operation is located.

250: The number of pages of emails from Vice President Cheney’s office that were “recently located” and turned over to CIA leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In a letter last month, Fitzgerald charged that “many e-mails from Cheney’s office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.”

A U.S. veteran suffering “bizarre symptoms after serving in the first Gulf War — blackouts, chest pain and numbness in the extremities” — says he was given placebos (sugar pills) instead of real medicine by his VA doctor.

And finally: Scotland reviving “weapons-grade whiskey.” The London Times reports that the fabled firewater “was said to be enough to kill a grown man.”

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section.