Prometheus 6

Just cause..

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom.

The people who spoke about Ms. Goodling’s role at the department, including eight current Justice Department lawyers and staff, did so only on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Several added that they found her activities objectionable and damaging to the integrity of the department.

Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, May 11 — Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers.

Is turf protection more important than citizen protection?

Days after signing the new bill into law, Gov. Tim Kaine visited the bloody campus at Virginia Tech and shamefully warned against “hobby horse” politicking over firearms. The deaths of 33 students and teachers highlighted other flaws in the porous gun laws that would-be political leaders should be attacking, not abetting. The horror of tens of thousands of annual gun deaths will be compounded if the new crop of presidential candidates manages to duck an issue that more than 200 mayors, led by Mr. Bloomberg, are fighting from the trenches.

The Mayor Strikes a Nerve

We might ask why Virginia’s Legislature has decided to protect some of its shadier gun dealers from being unmasked. But, unfortunately, we already know the answer: more craven service to the all-powerful gun lobby.

When I was a kid, you were poor if you couldn't afford to pay for your own habitation. Now, three folks team up to pay for one apartment and people don't even TRY to move out of their parents' home until they're 30 or so.

[TS] The Millions Left Out
By BOB HERBERT

The United States may be the richest country in the world, but there are many millions — tens of millions — who are not sharing in that prosperity.

According to the most recent government figures, 37 million Americans are living below the official poverty threshold, which is $19,971 a year for a family of four. That’s one out of every eight Americans, and many of them are children.

More than 90 million Americans, close to a third of the entire population, are struggling to make ends meet on incomes that are less than twice the official poverty line. In my book, they’re poor.

Generating benefits to the nation is what created the problem, and the nation needs to solve it. Put simply: Why should a cab driver in Pittsburgh or Tulsa pay to fix Louisiana's coast? Because he gets a stronger economy and lower energy costs from it, and because his benefits created the problem. The failure of Congress and the president to act aggressively to repair the coastline at the mouth of the Mississippi River could threaten the economic vitality of the nation. Louisiana, one of the poorest states, can no longer afford to underwrite benefits for the rest of the nation.

Our Coast to Fix -- or Lose
By John M. Barry
Saturday, May 12, 2007; A15

There has been much debate in the past 20 months over protecting Louisiana from another lethal hurricane, but nearly all of it has been conducted without any real understanding of the geological context. Congress and the Bush administration need to recognize six facts that define the national interest.

To address the problem, the researchers say the company has "started an effort to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious"....

Google, part of the StopBadware coalition, already warns users if they are about to visit a potentially harmful website, displaying a message that reads "this site may harm your computer" next to the search results.

"Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected," the researchers wrote.

Google searches web's dark side
One in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user's PC.

Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to "in-depth analysis".

About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called "drive-by downloads", sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user's knowledge.

Scientists create 'plastic' blood
Scientists have developed an artificial plastic blood which could act as a substitute in emergencies.

Researchers at Sheffield University said their creation could be a huge advantage in war zones.

They say that the artificial blood is light to carry, does not need to be kept cool and can be kept for longer.

The new blood is made up of plastic molecules that have an iron atom at their core, like haemoglobin, that can carry oxygen through the body.

The scientists said the artificial blood could be cheap to produce and they were looking for extra funding to develop a final prototype that would be suitable for biological testing.

Bill bans illegal govt eavesdropping
Submitted by New York IFP on Fri, 2007-05-11 16:02.

The US house of representatives today passed a bill outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping by the government.

An amendment to the House Intelligence Reauthorization Bill by Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) states that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) shall be the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information may be conducted, and makes clear that this applies until specific statutory authorization for electronic surveillance, other than as an amendment to FISA, is enacted.

Cops: 5 Sixth Graders Plotted To Slit Boy's Throat
Ulster Co. Students Suspended, Charged With Weapons Possession
Tony Aiello Reporting

(CBS) MOUNT MARION, N.Y. Five Ulster County sixth graders were suspended and later charged after apparently plotting to slash the throat of one of their classmates on school grounds during recess.

Ethan Travis, 13, had heard whispers in the hallways of Mount Marion Elementary School about the alleged attack on him, but he didn't want to believe it.

He certainly believes it now as the five classmates were reportedly suspended and charged with weapons possession after an alleged plot was uncovered in which the suspects would ambush the boy, then slit his throat with a razor blade because he had apparently been seeing an ex-girlfriend of one of the would-be attackers.

"I don't think it's for him to judge Giuliani's personal decisions," one person said.

Au contrere. That is exactly a priest's purview.

Giuliani can't take communion anyway because he never got a church annulment of his marriage to Hanover, but the abortion flap has bogged down his campaign for over a week.

Rudy's Wreck: Abortion Flap Fuels Free Fall
Takes Big Hit In N.H. Poll; Business Practices In Question
Marcia Kramer Reporting

(CBS) NEW YORK Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is beginning to stumble.

A new poll in New Hampshire shows Giuliani losing ground to Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor is now ahead with 32 percent -- a jump of 11 points since January.

This comes as Giuliani is in a political and religious squeeze over his stance on abortion.

I saw this headline

South leads in early childhood education

...and said, "What's wrong with this picture?" I mean, besides this

The South has trailed the nation in education and income levels since before the Civil War, the Southern Education Foundation report said.

...and this?

A report released a day before the Southern Education Foundation's study said the Southeast had the highest dropout rates in the country.

The nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Research Center said South Carolina, Georgia and Florida had three of the five lowest high school graduation rates nationwide. South Carolina was at the bottom: 52.5% of students graduate after four years of high school.

Here's the deal.

THE ALBERTO GONZALES SHOW....One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple.

Under current law, Bratton is prohibited from disclosing to the public the names of the officers involved in the melee and their disciplinary history — for example, whether the officers had prior sustained force complaints. Thus, the public will have no way of knowing whether the Los Angeles Police Department is properly holding officers accountable. The public will never know whether the officers seen on videotape hitting an 11-year-old with a baton, pushing a news camerawoman to the ground, injuring a radio reporter or roughing up a television anchor will be held to account.

The public also will not have access to facts developed in the disciplinary investigation, special reports or witness testimony. The public and media will never know what happened behind those closed doors no matter how much the chief and the Police Commission would like to tell them. Inevitably, public trust in the LAPD will erode, and the chief will not be able to demonstrate how seriously he took the matter and held his staff accountable.

Lift the veil of secrecy on police misconduct
Bratton's commitment to LAPD openness is welcome, but state law ties his hands.
By Merrick Bobb
MERRICK BOBB, a special counsel who monitors the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for the Board of Supervisors, was special counsel for the Los Angeles Police Commission.
May 11, 2007

LOS ANGELES Police Chief William J. Bratton has taken decisive steps following the MacArthur Park May Day melee in which the LAPD seems [P6: seems?] to have used force indiscriminately and disregarded constitutional rights of speech and assembly.

A couple of things bother me about this

so we all know that occasionally, bloggers hit their wall and they just can’t do it any more. that it just builds up and builds up and builds up and finally, things collapse, and there’s the deep horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that you want nothing more than to explode your blog or write a massive fuck you to the entire world?

I’m at that point.

I’ve been feeling this way for a while–and tonight–I’m at that breaking point. I can not speak or think or act coherently at the moment. I will just tell you some things.

Okay, not bother. Just feel like commenting on a couple of things.

Benedict's spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters that such edits are common. "Every time the pope speaks off the cuff, the Secretariat of State reviews and cleans up his remarks," he said.

So it's the Vatican's Secretariat of State that is infallible. Glad we cleared THAT up...

Vatican Seeks to Clarify Abortion Remarks
Edited Transcript Alters Answer on Excommunication
By Victor L. Simpson
Associated Press
Friday, May 11, 2007; A16

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Pope Benedict XVI caused such a stir with his comments on the excommunication of lawmakers who vote in favor of legalizing abortion that the Vatican released a transcript Thursday changing what the pontiff said.

While Benedict met with Brazil's president, and thousands of Roman Catholics streamed toward a soccer stadium for an evening youth rally, the Vatican released a new transcript that seemed to roll back the pope's comments from a day earlier.

I forget where I ran across the WiserEarth site, but I've been going back to it for like three days now.

Its functionality attracts me. I like its design too, but that's somewhat secondary.

I have long considered my lack of social instincts to be a birth defect of sorts. Everything I know about humans, every social skill I have, was consciously decided on after research inspired by some personal need.

The experiment underscores the pivotal part played by unconscious empathy and emotion in guiding decisions. "When that influence is missing," said USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, "pure reason is set free."

To me, my own emotions are data. Required data, to be sure...a holographic judgement I am more inclined at this point to explore than doubt. But data nonetheless.

SCIENCE JOURNAL By ROBERT LEE HOTZ
Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain's Wiring
May 11, 2007; Page B1

Most of us feel a rush of righteous certainty in the face of a moral challenge, an intuitive sense of right or wrong hard to ignore yet difficult to articulate.

A provocative medical experiment conducted recently by neuroscientists at Harvard, Caltech and the University of Southern California strongly suggests these impulsive convictions come not from conscious principles but from the brain trying to make its emotional judgment felt.

Using neurology patients to probe moral reasoning, the researchers for the first time drew a direct link between the neuroanatomy of emotion and moral judgment.

It is a recognition of a sister who gets the importance of libraries.

A Cheerleader for Brooklyn’s Treasury of Books
By ROBIN FINN

IF keeping intelligent tabs on the Brooklyn Public Library’s $92 million operating budget, 60 libraries, 1,100 full-time employees, five million circulating and reference items, and nearly 1.1 million cardholders — she thinks of them as shareholders in the New Age knowledge bank — is what passes for bookish these days, then Dionne Mack-Harvin is a consummate librarian.

She only wishes she had more time to read actual books. She hasn’t had the opportunity to grant a book a double-read since Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” It rates as her all-time favorite precisely because, she admits, “I had to read it twice to really get it.”

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg would surely be amazed by the new Harlem and the new center. His portrait hangs in the lobby, a reminder of the power of a dream. Born in a working-class neighborhood in Santurce, P.R., in 1874, Schomburg was the son of an unwed black midwife or laundress and an unidentified father who was probably of Puerto-Rican and German heritage. After moving to New York in 1891, he befriended political and social leaders and the stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped found Las Dos Antillas, an anticolonialist organization....

The celebration tomorrow is from noon to 6 p.m. It will include a performance by the Hamalali Wayunagu Garifuna Dance Company, a screening of “Ethnic Notions” by Marlon Riggs, a staged reading, face painting and a special presentation by the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center.

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

I'm aware of the Mormon's racial history. And I'll make sure every Black person I know is aware of it if Romney is the Republican's nominee.

Which is likely no news to folks who've been here for any length of time.

Romney Works to Put Skeptics’ Doubts to Rest
By MICHAEL LUO

AMES, Iowa, May 10 — Bart Pals, a county chairman for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, had been given talking points to use when he introduced the former Massachusetts governor at an event in northern Iowa on Wednesday.

But Mr. Pals chose to depart from the script to assert that Mr. Romney’s shift in recent years against abortion was not a “flip-flop” but the result of a “thoughtful moral process.” He also told the crowd in Clear Lake that he was not turned off by Mr. Romney’s Mormonism.

For the most part, trying juveniles as adults was a symbolic response. I would hope the lessons learned are retained.

The laws also are not equally applied. Youths of color, who typically go to court with inadequate legal counsel, account for three out of every four young people admitted to adult prison.

With 40 states allowing or requiring youthful offenders to spend at least some time in adult jails, state legislators all across the country are just waking up to the problems this practice creates.

Juvenile Injustice

The United States made a disastrous miscalculation when it started automatically trying youthful offenders as adults instead of handling them through the juvenile courts. Prosecutors argued that the policy would get violent predators off the streets and deter further crime. But a new federally backed study shows that juveniles who do time as adults later commit more violent crime than those who are handled through the juvenile courts.

[E]xperienced drug abusers and novices, including teenagers, soon discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet — or crushing one and then snorting the powder, or injecting it with a needle — produced a high as powerful as heroin. OxyContin is a pure, high-strength version of a long-used narcotic, oxycodone.

By 2000, parts of the United States, particularly rural areas, began to see soaring rates of addiction and crime related to use of the drug.

At a news conference Thursday in Roanoke, Va., John L. Brownlee, the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said the impact of Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin had resulted in rising crime rates, teenage drug addiction, deaths and other problems.

“The results of Purdue’s crimes were staggering,” he said.

Narcotic Maker Guilty of Deceit Over Marketing
By BARRY MEIER

ABINGDON, Va., May 10 — The company that makes the painkiller OxyContin and three of its current and former executives pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court here to criminal charges that it had misled doctors and patients when it claimed the drug was less likely to be abused than traditional narcotics.

The company, Purdue Pharma, agreed to pay $600 million in fines and other payments to resolve the criminal charge of “misbranding” the product, one of the largest amounts ever paid by a drug company in such a case.

rikyrah ggives us a heads-up.

Tavis Smiley is taking questions for the Democratic Debate in June at Howard University:

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/promos/americandebate

There are some very bright people here, so let's send in our questions, because quite honestly, if they don't get asked at Tavis' debate, what's the likelihood they will be asked at all during this election season?

We now know that the Bush administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea, in order to gear up for the battle ahead. US military forces took part in the assault.

'The US political and military alliance with Ethiopia - which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa', wrote Kadane.

Somalia: The hidden war for oil
Carl Bloice (2007-05-10)
Carl Bloice elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region.

The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007.

Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'

Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with "fundamental Islamic" forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of "terrorists".'

To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa.

via Exodus Mentality

Propaganda, Pimping or Sloppy Journalism: the need to support the black press

Similar to the impact integration had on black schools, once mainstream newspapers included stories related to the black experience, African-Americans abandoned the black press. Unlike other minorities, as soon as blacks are accepted into mainstream they tend to dump their traditional institutions. Don’t get me wrong, we should embrace diversity in mainstream media and applaud the outstanding work of black journalists and broadcasters fighting for fair coverage on the inside. However, the beloved community desperately needs the black press to separate news from propaganda and fact from fiction.