Prometheus 6

"They won't sell to us," says Cooper, 59, who is white. "They really only sell to their own. They will not say that, but they make it very hard."...

"White people think the film is unbalanced and unfair," says Ranen, 45, who is white and now lives in San Francisco. "When I show it to mixed audiences I'm sometimes attacked by white people and hugged by black people. There is fear from white people about exacerbating Korean/black tensions."

Product placement
A new documentary has people talking about who controls the black hair-care market
By Vanessa E. Jones, Globe Staff | October 28, 2006

Black women wear their hair in a multitude of ways. They may start the week with straight or curly hair, then move on to twisted or braided styles. And when they grow bored with that, they'll add wigs, weaves, or hair extensions to create even more looks.

It can cost a lot of money for women to keep up this pace. In 2004 , sales of black hair- care products exceeded $1.7 billion , according to a report by Mintel International Group , a consumer research company. And that doesn't include the synthetic and human hair additions that are also extremely popular.

...if you worry about the embryos, you had bloody well better look into the eyes of the people dying of these diseases. You had better ask yourself whether slowing research that might save them is an acceptable price for your principles.

If you can't -- if all you can see is "acting" -- then you need more help than they do. Fox's disease can only take your body. Limbaugh's can take your soul.

Limbaugh Outfoxed
By William Saletan
Sunday, October 29, 2006; B02

I once had a friend who listened to Rush Limbaugh three hours a day. He was a Republican operative. He sat in my apartment, wearing headphones, while I worked. He swore that if I put on the headphones for 10 minutes, I'd be hooked. So I put them on.

Hindsight Advice on Paying for College: Buy Stocks in 1982
By FLOYD NORRIS

It now takes more than a year of work for the average American to earn enough income to pay for a year at a private college, where costs have risen more rapidly than inflation for 26 consecutive years.

But by one measure, American colleges cost less than they used to. Those who plan on paying for their children’s education by selling part of their stock portfolios now need to sell less than half as many shares as their parents would have had to sell a quarter-century ago.

...KBR routinely stamped nearly all of the data it collects on its work as proprietary, impeding not only the investigations into the company’s activities but also things as simple as managerial oversight of the work...

As a result, the memo said, “KBR is not protecting its own data, but is in many instances inappropriately restricting the government’s use of information that KBR is required to gather for the government.”

Report Says Iraq Contractor Is Hiding Data From U.S.
By JAMES GLANZ and FLOYD NORRIS

A Halliburton subsidiary that has been subjected to numerous investigations for billions of dollars in contracts it received for work in Iraq has systematically misused federal rules to withhold basic information on its practices from American officials, a federal oversight agency said yesterday.

It’s time to get real, and either fight (through the courts, if possible) to reinstate the rule of law as established by the Constitution, or accept that Enlightenment-era democracy simply doesn’t work and move into a new phase of government by decree or market forces or whatever it is that comes next.

In any case, it serves no one to have a “pretend democracy” that’s actually something else. I’m going to stop denying what’s going on here, and use what influence I have with lawmakers, government workers, and activists to get them to do the same. Instead of trying to feel better about all this, I’m going to allow myself and everyone around me to feel worse.

Acceptance (doesn’t equal) Acquiescence
by Douglas Rushkoff
from Arthur No. 24 / Oct 02006:

I’ve been debating for a while about whether to do this. Whether to come right out and say it. On a certain level, it’s like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. What good is it to announce a problem if I don’t have a ready solution at hand? Furthermore, what if sharing this information – this perspective on our predicament - simply exacerbates our paralysis to do anything about it. I mean, fascism breeds best in populations that have been stunned into complacency, cynicism, or despair.

(That’s called a “buried lede” – a publishing term for hiding the main idea of a story deep within a paragraph. Editors don’t like it because it makes it hard for the reader to figure out what an article is about. But I felt it necessary because, well, I’m not quite comfortable talking about it too directly, just yet. This fascism stuff.)

The study found that the white men were more likely to supplement heroin use with inexpensive fortified wine, while the African American men were more likely to supplement heroin with crack. Most of the white men were expelled from their families when they began engaging in drug-related crime; these men tended to consider themselves as destitute outcasts. African American men had earlier, more negative contact with law enforcement but maintained long-term ties with their extended families; these men tended to consider themselves as professional outlaws.

Study Finds Different Patterns Of Street-Based Drug Use Among White And African American Men
27 Oct 2006

Among men who live on the streets and inject heroin, there are important differences between African American men and white men in their patterns of drug use, risk of health problems, and strategies for survival, according to a unique study published in PLoS Medicine.

If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it’s on a mission to save America from gay marriage.

Conserving That Compassion

When future generations of Americans look back on the current era, they’ll puzzle over what it was about George W. Bush that made people imagine there was anything compassionate to his conservatism.

What we have here is a fundamentally dishonest budgeting process.

Mr. England informed the Army and other military services that the administration’s ground rules covering what costs can be included in so-called supplemental spending bills “are being expanded” to include “costs related to the longer war against terror,” not just continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Steven Kosiak, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the Pentagon was “sending a signal to the services” that they now have permission not to limit their request to war-related costs. 

White House Is Trimming Army Budget for Next Year, Officials Say
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — White House budget officials are planning on asking for a $121 billion budget for the Army next year, not the $138 billion that senior Army officials have been seeking, two senior Pentagon officials said.

Starting with the brain's recognition of discrimination, the body sets into motion a series of physiological responses to protect itself from these stressful negative experiences, Mays said. These physiological responses include biochemical reactions, hyper-vigilance and elevated blood pressure and heart rate. With many African Americans, these responses may occur so frequently that they eventually result in the physiological system not working correctly.

According to Mays, the experience of race-based discrimination for some African Americans is akin to the response a person's body mounts when it experiences significant life-threatening danger, such as fear for a person's life or of a possible attack. She said that if the body mounts a response to protect itself against a "life-threatening" experience on a regular basis, after awhile it is strained and overworked. Many of the chemicals that come to its rescue can damage systems in the body that are associated with disease and obesity.

Race-Based Discrimination Contributes To African-American Health Disparities
Posted by:
UCLA
on 10-27-2006.

"As we deal with skyrocketing rates of obesity and rising rates of diabetes in African Americans and other racial and ethnic minority groups, we need to think about the impact of race based discrimination and how they respond to that stress."

The experience of racial discrimination may be a key factor in explaining why African Americans have higher rates of obesity and suffer at higher rates from such diseases as diabetes and cardiovascular disorders, according to UCLA researchers.

A functional perspective on group memberships: Differential need fulfillment in a group typology
Amy L. Johnson, Matthew T. Crawford, Steven J. Sherman, Abraham M. Rutchick, David L. Hamilton, Mario B. Ferreira, John V. Petrocelli

Abstract
The social motivation functions of intimacy, task, and social category groups were investigated. In two studies, participants were asked to consider the extent to which their group memberships fulfilled several needs. A factor analysis confirmed that the needs comprised three factors: affiliation, achievement, and identity. Intimacy groups were associated with affiliation needs, task groups were associated with achievement needs, and social category groups were associated with identity. A study using implicit measures reinforced those results, revealing the presence of the same implicit associations between group types and need fulfillments. A final study manipulated participants’ need state through a priming procedure. Priming a specific need (affiliation, achievement, and identity) led to an increased accessibility of the group type that was best suited to meet that need (intimacy, task, social category, respectively). Results help clarify the functional aspects of groups and have implications for the perception and organization of group-level information.

None of this is to say business has changed sides. It continues to give far more to Republicans than to Democrats. And the major groups representing the business community, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are working hard to protect the GOP majorities in Congress.

Moreover, many business groups seek to play down their campaign contributions to the other side. New York Life spokesman William Werfel said that his company's PAC was giving more in general this cycle and that the GOP still got the most.

But as storm clouds gathered over the GOP this election season, business leaders, lobbyists and PACs quietly began to take out a form of political insurance — contributing more to Democrats who, if they become the majority party, will wield power over issues affecting business' bottom line.

Business groups woo Democrats
Campaign contributions rise for lawmakers who might hold leadership positions after Nov. 7.
By Richard Simon
Times Staff Writer
October 27, 2006

"Some people have discovered virtues in me that they had previously overlooked," Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who stands to become chairman of the Financial Services Committee if Democrats control the House, mused recently. "The prospect of the chairmanship seems to have been a very good introduction."

Ideologically and politically speaking, do you really see that much difference between Harold Ford and Michael Steele?

Simply put, the big political difference is that Steele claims to be moving imperfectly against the trends of his party while Ford is moving imperfectly with his party. I'd rather be represented by the least favorite guy the party needs than by the party's favorite marginalized clown.

Ideologically, Steele is a Republican loyalist or they wouldn't be throwing money at his campaign (and I make similar observations about Rep. Obama). Steele's ideology is such that it allows him to claim otherwise with a straight face. I will not venture a guess as to what that ideology is, since Mr. Steele hasn't revealed much beyond implying he's a not Republican. That alone, though, is enough that if he wins he'll be the world's first self-castrating Senator.

Glen Greenwald:

The new documentary, Shut Up & Sing, chronicles the hostile and sometimes threatening conduct directed towards The Dixie Chicks after one of the group's members criticized the Commander-in-Chief, President George W. Bush, during a 2003 concert. The documentary is being distributed by Harvey Weinstein's film company, and a preview for the film can be seen here.

According to Matt Drudge (a phrase that does not roll out of one's mouth easily), both NBC and the CW Television Network (the joint venture of CBS and Warner Brothers that combines the WB and UPN Networks) are refusing to air ads promoting Shut Up & Sing on the ground that the ads are "disparaging" to our President:

In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and The CW Television Network Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech . . .

NBC responded to a clearance report submitted by the Weinstein Company’s media agency saying that the network “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”

The CW Television Network responded that it does “not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”

According to Drudge, David Boies, presumably representing the Weinstein Co., said that "it is disappointing and troubling that NBC and The CW would refuse to accept an otherwise appropriate ad merely because it is critical of President Bush," while Weinstein himself said that “it’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America."

“There was never a question we would help,” she said. “We are an HBCU. We knew we had to step up.”...

A total of 2,456 students have enrolled this fall at Southern University at New Orleans, compared with 3,500 before Katrina. At Xavier, enrollment for the current semester is 3,013, compared with 4,100 before the Katrina. And at Dillard, 1,100 enrolled this fall compared to 2,000 in 2005, according to Weaver’s report.

Study: HBCUs Took in a Third of Black College Students Displaced by Katrina
Date: Thursday, October 26, 2006
By: Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, BlackAmericaWeb.com

About one third of the 9,600 HBCU students displaced in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina found a higher education home at other historically black colleges and universities throughout the country, according to a new study by Atlanta researcher Mike Weaver.

In many cases, it meant that the HBCUs accepted the students without the benefit of their financial aid because they had already paid to attend their home institutions, Weaver told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“If it weren’t for HBCUs, many of the students who were displaced by Katrina may not have gone to school at all,” Weaver said. “We are our brothers' and sisters' keeper. That is what HBCUs have done traditionally. Hurricane Katrina brought out the best in HBCUs.”

A total of 67 HBCUs received students who fled from Dillard, Xavier and Southern University New Orleans. Southern University in Baton Rouge took in the largest number at 960, followed by Texas Southern which took in 600 students.

Black Matters: Where Do the Parties Stand on Issues Important to Black America?, at BlackAmericaweb.com. They didn't seem to find a lot of Republican positions to reflect on...

Interesting piece, though. I spotted this

"We found through much of our polling that many African-Americans are feeling like it just shouldn't be this hard," Amaya Smith, deputy press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

"These are people who work hard, play by the rules and are trying to raise their family in a country where rising health care costs, skyrocketing tuition and high energy prices are making it that much harder to make ends meet," Smith said.

...immediately before this.

She traced her own skepticism to one afternoon two months before the last presidential election when she overheard several young black men saying they were not going to vote because they feared being arrested at the polling station for their unpaid parking tickets. The neighborhood had been flooded with fliers from the Milwaukee Black Voters League, a fictitious group, saying that even minor infractions like parking tickets disqualified people from voting.

Ms. Affoul, 66, said she argued with the men but failed to convince them that they had been misinformed.

“I realized that maybe the poll tax isn’t gone after all, and that if people were willing to try that trick, they might be willing to do a lot more that I don’t even know about,” she said.

Democrats Fear Disillusionment in Black Voters
By IAN URBINA

Last weekend, Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat who hopes to oust Senator George Allen, crammed in visits to 12 black churches, and for several weeks he has been pumping money into advertisements on black radio stations and in black newspapers.

In Missouri, Claire McCaskill, the Democrat trying to unseat Senator Jim Talent, has been running advertisements about sickle cell anemia, a genetic illness that mostly afflicts black people, and the importance of stem cell research in helping to find a cure.

For Democrats like these in tight races, black voter turnout will be crucial on Election Day. But despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally, there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans.

Staying the Course Right Over a Cliff
By GEORGE LAKOFF

Berkeley, Calif.

THE Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

“That is not a stay-the-course policy,” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday.

The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he’ll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook” during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.

“Listen, we’ve never been stay the course, George,” President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said “stay the course.”

In the anti-Ford ad, viewers transfixed by the blonde’s vixenish sign-off may miss the commercial’s only truly enlightening statement, tacked on in quick-talk: “The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.”

It sure is.

Compounding a Political Outrage

The sleazy way in which campaigns and the political parties use loopholes in the campaign finance laws to evade responsibility for their attack ads is on full display in the Tennessee Senate race. Slick as a leer, pernicious as a virus, a campaign commercial transparently honed as a racist appeal to Tennessee voters has remained on the air, despite assurances from Republican sponsors that it was pulled down.

When the society revealed this year's class in April, Saunders refused to include his name on the list of members.

"I withheld my name from public announcement precisely to avoid dragging BSU through this public confrontation now unfolding," Saunders said in an e-mail interview. "I would have thought the rest of BSU leadership would support this approach."

No.

I don't know Mr. Saunders. Assuming he's a generic human being, I would think such an approach to be...sneaky. At best. And I don't know Michigamua but given its reported history and how recently they repented of it, I would not have a member...especially one that hid his membership...in a leadership position of a minority-oriented organization. 

I've gathered that turning down membership in Michigamua would be somewhat like turning down membership in Skull and Bones...contacts and all that. But hiding your membership will not sit well with Black folks. The correct thing to do would have been to tell the BSU leadership you were joining, promise to help Michigamua to reform and step down from your leadership position.

Two campus groups and the student between them
Black Student Union member stripped of position after joining divisive senior society
Gabe Nelson
Posted: 10/25/06

LSA senior Tony Saunders woke up in the middle of the night last month to the sound of a ringing phone.

When he answered, an angry voice called him names like "Uncle Tom," "racist" and "sell-out."

The voice belonged to a member of the Black Student Union, whose external relations committee Saunders chaired until he was stripped of his position in mid-September.

The two top leaders of BSU's executive board took away his title because Saunders had joined the controversial senior society formerly known as Michigamua.

Saunders is the latest in a string of society members ousted from their other student groups.

When she worked in Charles County there was only one secondary institution for blacks while there were five high schools for whites even though the population of blacks and whites were about the same, she recalled in a 1986 interview in The Sun.

The situation was even more unequal because it was difficult for black students to get to their school's remote location.

"So we got together and bought a little used yellow school bus and named it Amos," she said. "It gave us fits but it also got out to students for almost 40 miles around. The next year we bought a second bus and by the third year, we were up to having a brand-new bus. By the time I left, we had three buses."

Enolia P. McMillan: 1904-2006
'Matriarch of NAACP' dies at 102
First female national president played key role in headquarters' move to city
By Nicole Fuller and Kelly Brewington
Sun reporters
October 25, 2006

Enolia P. McMillan, the first female president of the NAACP and an educator whose career spanned 42 years, died of natural causes yesterday at her home in Stevenson. She was 102.

Mrs. McMillan, whose father was born a slave, became a teacher in 1927 and quickly became a crusader for equal pay for black teachers and better schools for black students. In 1935, she helped to reactivate the city chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and remained an active force in it for more than 50 years. She played a key role in persuading the NAACP to move its national headquarters from New York to Baltimore in 1986.

That's Tony Snow, Bush's mouthpiece, talking. Go see the video.

I would like to suggest to the DLC and such their attempt to find a race-indifferent platform MUST fail because Republicans will continually play the race card and blame YOU for it when you respond. And if you don't respond you'll lose power as Black folks simply drop out of the process.

Not that you're innocent...you treat Black interests like poker chips. That's just slightly better than being pawns to be sacrificed, though.

I now turn the mike over to Josh Marshall.

In an otherwise solid run-down of the Republicans' Jungle Fever campaign against Harold Ford, Robin Toner has this passage ...

The furor puts Mr. Mehlman in a difficult position. He has spent considerable time as the national chairman preaching the inclusiveness of the Republican Party and its openness to black candidates and black voters. He said in an interview Wednesday night that he did not believe that this would damage his Republican outreach efforts.

Officials with the Republican independent expenditure committee, who include longtime allies of the Bush political circle, did not respond to requests for comment.

Please. It's not a difficult position, just a revealing one.

Like many in his position, on this issue Mehlman is a hypocrite and a liar. I doubt whether he has any strong racist dispositions himself on a personal level. It's just a tool he uses.

Again, let's be honest with ourselves. Racism is one of the key building blocks of Republican politics in the United States. Don't look at me with a straight face and tell me you don't realize that's true. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racists. Far from it. It doesn't mean that a lot of Republicans don't wish the stain wasn't part of their party's recent political heritage. They do. But racism and race-baiting is the hold card Republicans take into every election. When times are good, guys like Mehlman 'reach out' to blacks and Latinos to try to take the edge off their opposition to the Republican officeholders. But when things get rough the card gets played. And pretty much every time.

This isn't surprising. It's expected.

Totally stolen from Media Matters.

If medicine remains the rapaciously capitalist entity it is today, the end result of this will be the absolute lack of a profitable post-patent expiration market for drugs.

Wal-Mart adds 12 states to $4 generic drug plan; total now 27
Updated 10/26/2006 9:39 AM ET

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Wal-Mart (WMT), the world's biggest retailer, said Thursday that it is extending its $4 generic prescription drug plan to 12 more states, bringing the total to 27 states.

States added Thursday are: Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Virginia.

Reminds me of a Blogcritics discussion I had...

Blastomere Blowup
A novel way to harvest stem cells intrigues and inflames
By Charles Q. Choi

ACT's vice president of research and scientific development, Robert Lanza, and his colleagues experimented with 16 unused human embryos from an earlier, eight- to 10-cell stage. Physicians routinely pluck single cells from IVF embryos at that stage for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which scans these cells, known as blastomeres, for diseases. Embryos can compensate for the loss and have so far developed into some 1,500 apparently healthy children since this procedure was introduced more than a decade ago.

You need to understand this stuff before the end of the year so you can harrass your local officials to fix it before next summer. You don't want these questions open in 2008.

How to steal an election by hacking the vote
By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

One bad apple...

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America's private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents' basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they'd been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might've been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it's all too real.

Thanks the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you've been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we're (not) doing on the infosec front.