Prometheus 6

And that's a fair approximation of the damage they sustained. 

Michigan: Affirmative Action Suit Settled
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A lawsuit that prompted a 2003 Supreme Court decision over affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan has been settled, concluding a nearly decade-long battle. The university will pay $10,000 each to the lead plaintiffs, Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, to cover miscellaneous costs, both sides said. In exchange, the two agreed to drop all claims under a nearly 40,000-member class-action lawsuit against the university over its former affirmative action admissions policies. In June 2003, the Supreme Court upheld a general affirmative action policy at Michigan’s law school but struck down its undergraduate formula, which awarded admission points based on race. Ms. Gratz and Mr. Hamacher had sued over the undergraduate formula. In November, Michigan voters approved a ban on the use of race and gender preferences in university admissions and government hiring.

A Guide to Getting your Black History Month Media On

I was just sent a link to this listing of Black History Month television programming. You click on a date, and it will tell you what's coming up. Gear up your Tivo's and knockoff versions of the same. Maybe Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington can co-host "The N-Word F-word Showcase!"

So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — He is hailed by his supporters as the hope of an increasingly multicultural nation, a political phenomenon who can wow white voters while carrying the aspirations of African-Americans all the way to the White House.

So why are some black voters so uneasy about Senator Barack Obama?

Not uneasy...unconvinced. And there's really no rush right now...he's got roughly a year  to let folks know who he is.

I saw this headline

Consumer Spending Up the Most in 5 Months

...and I wondered if this is really good news. This covers December, Christmas season, which means a great deal of that consumer spending was done on credit.

“It looks like we are getting through these rough times pretty comfortably,” said David Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International in New York.

I kept seeing ads targeting folks who are so wealthy they can give their spouse goddamn Lexi, BMWs and the like without said spouse noticing the change in the bank account balance.

According to the Pentagon's current ratio of combat-to-support personnel in Iraq, the surge would require up to 28,000 additional troops to provide security, fuel, food, transportation, and other necessities to support the additional combat troops -- bringing the total troop increase to 48,000 troops, the CBO concluded. If a smaller proportion were used, as the Pentagon has suggested, the surge would require about 15,000 support personnel, increasing the surge to about 35,000 troops, it said.

Support needs could double 'surge' forces
Report pegs cost at up to $27b
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  February 2, 2007

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more combat troops to Iraq might require as many as 28,000 additional troops to provide critical support during the deployment, making the "surge" in US military forces far larger than previously predicted, a government assessment concluded yesterday.

The assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the addition of almost 50,000 more troops could cost up to $27 billion to sustain over the next year -- depending on the size of the force and duration of the deployment. That would be more than three times the largest estimate of the troop expansion's cost provided by the Bush administration.

The report arrived as the Army general who just relinquished the top command in Iraq told a Senate panel that he had recommended that less than half of the 21,500 combat troops be added.

"I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission," said Army General George Casey , who has been nominated to serve as the Army chief of staff, explaining to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday why he recommended that the administration send only two additional brigades rather than the five ordered by Bush.

But Michael O'Hanlon , an Iraq specialist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said the money could be interpreted as a positive sign: it wasn't squandered or stolen.

Yeah, but you have to actively interpret it that way. Otherwise it really sucks that the best you can say ius, "At least they didn't steal it this time." No, this strikes me as closer to the truth.

Yahia Said , who recently led a UN team to Iraq to draft an aid agreement between Iraq and the international community, said Iraq's failure to spend its budget last year is an ominous sign. "This is the strongest indicator of the dwindling capacity of the Iraqi government," he said. 

Iraqi agencies can't perform basic functions, report says
$13b of budget has gone unspent
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | February 1, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The effort to resurrect vital government services in Iraq has been hampered by ethnic and sectarian purges among the ranks of civil servants, a high turnover rate for senior administrative officials, and a lack of comprehensive planning on the part of both Iraqis and the United States, according to an audit by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction released yesterday.

As a result, Iraq's ministries -- the backbone of the fledgling government, responsible for hospitals, utilities, and the provision of food rations and gasoline -- are struggling to perform basic functions, such as drafting budgets and hiring contractors, and too often depend on their American advisers. That in turn has led to the Iraqi government's failure to spend $13 billion -- more than a third of its annual budget -- in 2006, a situation that could further destabilize the country, the audit said.

Representative Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, said Thursday: “...He still acts as if Republicans were in complete control and Democrats had lost the election.”

Nope. It's worse than that.

One measure of the political difficulty facing the president’s plan for Medicare and Medicaid is that he sought $20 billion less in savings from the two programs last year, when Republicans controlled Congress, and few of those proposals were adopted.

It's all posturing, so Republicans can claim Democrats block progress when the budget is so absurd that even discussing it seriously is an obstacle to progress. Better to throw out his budget and start from scratch.

Bush Seeks Big Medicare and Medicaid Saving
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — President Bush will ask Congress in his budget next week to squeeze more than $70 billion of savings from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years, administration officials and health care lobbyists said Thursday.

The proposals, part of a White House plan to balance the budget by 2012, set the stage for a battle with Congress over entitlement spending. Even some administration officials say they cannot imagine approval of such large cutbacks in a Congress now controlled by Democrats.

[T]he president signaled no intent to pursue more aggressive policies favored by some consumer groups, such as banning the marketing of junk food to children or requiring more detailed nutritional labeling. Bush told the executives that it is an individual's responsibility to maintain a healthy diet, not the government's.

Then why did you even call the meeting?

Bush Urges Stepped-Up Campaign Against Childhood Obesity
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 2, 2007; A05

President Bush yesterday added his voice to the growing debate over childhood obesity, as he met at the White House with representatives of some of the companies considered responsible for aggravating the problem and urged them to stress the importance of healthy eating and physical fitness in their marketing campaigns.

“A carbon tax is inevitable,” Mr. Chirac said. “

France Tells U.S. to Sign Climate Pacts or Face Tax
By KATRIN BENNHOLD

PARIS, Jan. 31 — President Jacques Chirac has demanded that the United States sign both the Kyoto climate protocol and a future agreement that will take effect when the Kyoto accord runs out in 2012.

He said that he welcomed last week’s State of the Union address in which President Bush described climate change as a “serious challenge” and acknowledged that a growing number of American politicians now favor emissions cuts.

"I am convinced, but I cannot base it on any necessary evidence right now," Kissinger told the senators, "that the president will want to move toward a bipartisan consensus" to stabilize Iraq through diplomacy.

This reminds me of the testimony of one of the cops that shot Sean Bell and his boys. He said he was sure they knew he was a cop because he caught one guy's eye.He couldn't explain how that information was transmitted, he just knew it was. Because he caught one guy's eye.

Kissenger has no more proof of Bush's secret plan than that.

Wherever a Senator's Question Leads, Kissinger Gamely Follows
By Dana Milbank
Thursday, February 1, 2007; A02

So now it can be told: President Bush has a secret plan to end the war in Iraq.

Henry Kissinger, who as Richard Nixon's secretary of state learned something about secret plans, went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday to argue that Bush, too, has such a proposal.

So here it is, the first day of Black History Month. It feels a little funny this year. I think I'm still a member of ASALH, the organization started by the founder of Black History Month, Dr. Carter G. Woodson...I forgot memberships sort of reset on Jan. 1, so I gotta pay my dues. I've found I'm more of a “studies” guy than a “history” guy (difference being “studies” is a search for correlations across disciplines where “history” is a search for patterns within the documentation of a single discipline). But history-the-discipline produces information I use to both direct my attention and establish limits of sanity on my speculations on how people work.

So that's not how folks tend to use history. Sue me.

There'll be a lot of Black History Month stuff going on all month, and I'll link more than a couple over the next four weeks. Right now I'm more interested in right now, because of what I understand from history. I think we're in for a reboot.

In response, the American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias, who is Jewish, led the liberal rescue party, denouncing some of Clark's conservative critics as "moronic" and "hacks" and defending Hurricane Wes on two fronts. First, Yglesias argued, "everything" Clark said "is true" and "everybody knows it's true" so it can't be anti-Semitic. And, second, given that Israel's defenders will call any criticism anti-Semitic, there's no point in getting worked up about it.

Ooohhh...did Jonah Goldberg just imply that Mr. Yglesias is a self-hating Jew?

Truth is a defense against slander, but is it a defense against bigotry? Liberals rarely agree when it comes to defending honored members of the coalition of the oppressed. Just ask former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who questioned whether innate ability explained why fewer women succeed in math and science and who was defenestrated from Harvard as a sexist for his troubles. And let us not run through the list of people called bigots for pointing to inconvenient facts about blacks, Latinos or gays.

No, let's run through those names, Jonah. You'd have a harder time denying their bigotry than I'd have establishing it.

The soft bigotry of blowhards
Wesley Clark et al should watch what they say and how they say it.
[P6: sounds like a threat...]
Jonah Goldberg
February 1, 2007

WESLEY CLARK, the retired general and once — and no doubt future — presidential candidate, says the United States is going to attack Iran. How does he know? Well, he told Arianna Huffington, "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers" that the U.S. government will have to attack Iran.

Clark's comments, predictably, earned him denunciations from Jewish groups. After all, the notion that rich, secretive Jews living in places such as New York are pulling strings to visit war and misery on the masses is a time-honored anti-Semitic cliche heard from Charles Lindbergh, Ignatius Donnelly and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

White House Quietly Retracts Entire State Of The Union Address
January 31, 2007 | Issue 43•05

WASHINGTON, DC—In a brief statement faxed to major media outlets at approximately 11:50 p.m. Friday, the White House retracted the entire 5,600-word State of the Union address delivered by President Bush last Tuesday. "This includes all components of the address, and is not limited to the president's congratulations to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or his plan to give more Americans affordable health care through tax cuts, which has since been deemed infeasible," the statement read in part. "Furthermore, the president's urge for bipartisanship as well as his final statement about the state of the union being 'strong' are hereby stricken from the public record." Like the State of the Union address itself, the White House's retraction has not yet become a significant national news story.

One source familiar with the dynamic between Fox and Obama, who asked not to be named, said Obama and his staff are in for a rude awakening if they think they can write off Fox News. If a candidate is serious about running for president, he or she is going to need a network like Fox to reach out to all those voters in the red and purple states, the source said.

Bullshit. Fox will lie, set him up. and spin his every word. Fox's loyal audience will not be voting for ANY DEMOCRAT (not to mention any Black person for President, irrespective of political party). And Fox isn't the only station broadcasting in those areas. If those Red State people want to know about the Senator, let them check MSNBC. And let every other station expose every distortion and lie Fox puts out.

Not to mention I'm TOTALLY with Thomas Schaller. See Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.

Obama's Grudge Factor

These are chilly days on Capitol Hill ... and on the campaign trail for Fox News journalists -- at least when they're anywhere near Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Sources tell The Sleuth that the Obama camp has "frozen out" Fox News reporters and producers in the wake of the network's major screw-up in running with the erroneous Obama-the-jihadist story reported by Insight magazine.

"I'm still in the freezer," one Fox journalist said, noting that the people at Fox "suffering the most did nothing wrong." (It was "Fox and Friends" host Steve Doocy who aired the Insight magazine piece, which reported that operatives connected to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) found out that Obama, as a child, was educated at a Muslim madrassah in Indonesia.)

Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South author: Thomas F. Schaller asin: 0743290151