Prometheus 6

Stifling Debate

It's hard to imagine how a Fox-sponsored debate would be any better than the farcical ones run by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, what with his grade-school "raise your hand if" questioning and his tendency to monopolize the debate while asking questions primarily of Clinton and Obama.

As was demonstrated last week, Fox News cannot differentiate between Rep. William Jefferson, under indictment for bribery, fraud, and racketeering, and Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee. It can't even manage an apology to Conyers that includes his name (the first attempt only apologized for running the wrong video).

By collecting and analyzing our own data, the New York Police Department has developed increasingly sophisticated methods of identifying patterns and trends for assaults, robberies, drug sales, shootings and every other type of crime. Yet Congress prevents us from seeing the national data that would allow us to crack down on the No. 1 public safety threat facing our officers and the American public: illegal gun-trafficking rings.

Washington’s Secret Gun Files
By RAYMOND W. KELLY

A NARROWLY divided Congress will vote in the coming days on whether to renew legislation that stops the federal government from sharing with local police departments and prosecutors crucial information about guns used in crimes. The Tiahrt amendment, first passed in 2003, prohibits Washington from releasing crime data about guns that used to be provided to state and local law enforcement. If House members reauthorize the measure, they will harm efforts to curtail gun violence in this country.

I'm glad the NY Times ran this.

Much controversy swirls around the subsidies and tax exemptions state and local governments offer expressly to attract businesses to a community. But far less attention has been focused on the many kinds of indirect favors that are showered on places like Bandon Dunes through government policies that influence the flow of money from the public to private interests and often serve to reinforce benefits for those who are already successful....

Even if the planned growth of the resort leads to a doubling of the full-time payroll to 650, the airport expansion alone represents a one-time cost to taxpayers of almost $48,000 a job. The average pay for a full-time Bandon Dunes worker, including benefits and tips, is about $36,000....

No official tally of business subsidies exists, but in separate studies Peter S. Fisher of the University of Iowa and Kenneth F. Thomas of the University of Missouri estimated that state and local subsidies aimed at creating jobs total about $50 billion annually. More subtle subsidies like those that benefit Bandon Dunes are not counted in those figures and may be even larger.

Assisting the Good Life
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

BANDON, Ore. — Mike Keiser, who made a fortune selling greeting cards on recycled paper, turned this remote spot on the southern Oregon coast into a golfing mecca that attracts wealthy people in private jets from around the world.

To many in this hard-luck town of 3,000, Mr. Keiser is an economic hero. Work became scarce after the timber and fishing industries collapsed a quarter-century ago, and his Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, a few miles north of town, has created 325 full-time jobs, plus hundreds more part-time jobs. Mr. Keiser earns millions of dollars in profits each year.

But beneath this model of enterprise, largely hidden subsidies from airline passengers, state-lottery players, taxpayers and company shareholders support the benefits that the owner, workers and visitors at Bandon Dunes enjoy.

Fatah Storms Hamas-Controlled Buildings
Fatah Gunmen Storm Hamas-Controlled Buildings, Including Parliament and Government Ministries
The Associated Press

RAMALLAH, West Bank

Hundreds of Fatah gunmen on Saturday stormed Hamas-controlled institutions in the West Bank, including parliament and government ministries, and told staffers that those with ties to Hamas will not be allowed to return.

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with a senior U.S. diplomat, his office said. The meeting between Abbas and the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, Jacob Walles, took place at Abbas' headquarters in Ramallah, hours before Abbas was expected to swear in an emergency government.

“It makes sense for three guys in a garage making something,” said Victor Fleischer, an associate professor of law at the University of Illinois who met last month with Congressional aides to discuss his research on the tax advantages of private equity firms. “But when you apply those to a $1 billion investment fund, it doesn’t make that much sense.”

The amount of taxes at stake is huge, based on a rough estimate of the earnings of the biggest private equity firms.

Tax Gap Puts Private Equity Firms on Hot Seat
By JENNY ANDERSON and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

This week, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most profitable firm, reported that it earned about $3.4 billion for the second quarter. As always, it set aside a big chunk of money — $1.1 billion, or about 32 percent — to pay corporate income taxes on its healthy profits.

Mr. Daniels stirred the biggest controversy last year when he leased the Indiana Toll Road, where tolls had not increased in more than two decades, to Macquarie-Cintra, an Australian-Spanish consortium, for 75 years. The state got $3.8 billion in return, which will pay, the governor said, for scores of highway projects.

Critics were outraged. How expensive might driving the road become? Who could predict the changes to come over 75 years?

Former Bush Aide Fights Nickname: Gov. Privatize
By MONICA DAVEY

INDIANAPOLIS — At this rate, critics of Gov. Mitch Daniels grouse, all of Indiana will be run by private corporations.

What will be next, anti-Daniels bloggers demand. Will the governor hand over the keys to Indiana University and Purdue to some private consortium? Will he lease to a company the thousands of public toilets that dot the state?

Fisk can't sell any of O'Keeffe's collection
Judge says gift expressly for art education
By JONATHAN MARX
Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, 06/13/07

A Davidson County judge told Fisk University on Tuesday that it cannot sell two paintings worth millions of dollars — or any of the 101 works of art in a collection donated to the university by artist Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949.

The university spent the past year and a half locked in a legal battle over whether it could sell two paintings from its Alfred Stieglitz Collection, O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York and Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3.

Fisk wanted to sell the paintings to raise funds for a variety of pressing needs, including building improvements and replenishing its endowment.

Poll: Americans Want Death-Penalty Moratorium
Growing concerns about making sure the innocent aren’t sentenced to death has caused more Americans to support a moratorium on the death penalty.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Kurt Soller
Newsweek
Updated: 5:34 p.m. ET June 15, 2007

June 15, 2007 - Even though most Americans support the death penalty, there’s rising concern about how the state’s ultimate punishment is levied. A new poll by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that provides analysis on capital punishment, found that 58 percent want a national moratorium on executions. In 2006, there were fewer executions than in any year since the death penalty was reinstated over 30 years ago. NEWSWEEK’s Kurt Soller spoke with the director of the center, Richard Dieter, about the current state of capital punishment in America. Excerpts:

Michael Savage Weiner sicced his uncivilized hordes on C-Span. Brian Lamb read some of the crap that was sent his way and lets you know exactly what Weiner's followers are about. He spaced it out over a half hour; I eliminated the phone calls and came up with about 12 minutes of bile.

Here's part two.

Michael Savage Weiner sicced his uncivilized hordes on C-Span. Brian Lamb read some of the crap that was sent his way and lets you know exactly what Weiner's followers are about. He spaced it out over a half hour; I eliminated the phone calls and came up with about 12 minutes of bile.

Here's part one, part two is uploading as we speak.

In any case, a Harris poll suggested that more than 40 percent of Americans would use genetic engineering to upgrade their children mentally and physically. If you get social acceptance at that level, then everybody has to do it or their kids will be left behind.

Which means that sooner or later reproduction becomes a casting call for “Baywatch” and people like me become an evolutionary dead end....

Jokes?

When given this kind of freedom of choice, people seem to want to produce athletic Aryans with a passion for housekeeping. There is tremendous market demand for DNA from blue-eyed, blond-haired, 6-foot-2 finely sculpted hunks who roast their own coffee. These are the kind of guys you see jogging in the park and nothing moves. They’ve got a stomach, a chest and flanks, but as they bounce along nothing jiggles, not even their hair. They’re like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime from the shoulders down, and Trent Lott from the scalp up....

What if parents are perpetually buying genes on the downward slope? After all, for maximum success, you don’t want President Kennedy’s genes. You want Joseph Kennedy’s genes. You don’t want Bill Clinton’s genes. You want his father’s. What if we get the national equivalent of the 38th generation of the House of Windsor?

The National Pastime
By DAVID BROOKS

At this very moment thousands of people are surfing the Web looking for genetic material so their children will be nothing like me. They are looking through files at sperm bank sites with Jetson-like names such as Xytex, which have become the new eBays for offspring.

These sites take sex and turn it into shopping. They allow you to browse through page after page of donor profiles, comparing weight, noses, personality and what one site calls “tannability.”

Don't you know that both George Will and David Broder said that was Harry Reid's job? Are you so lame a duck that you don't even get the talking points anymore?

Members of both parties cautioned that passage is still anything but certain.

Nonsense.

"I'm sure senators on both sides of the aisle are being pounded by these talk-radio people who don't even know what's in the bill," Lott said. He added that the "leadership will have to be prepared to do what needs to be done."

Bush Continues Push for New Immigration Bill
By Jonathan Weisman and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 15, 2007; 11:24 AM

I clicked on the wrong message in Thunderbird and saw this old message a friend sent to a mailing list we were on.

Here is a question for you: Can you imagine a society of any size, in any place, in which you are not playing by rules that favor (conservative) white people? If yes, you can and should name your own games. If no, here is an alternate question: Can you imagine living in a world of white people's rules, yet playing by those rules only on your own terms and at your convenience?

Some suggest that boys leave school early to take decent paying jobs as painters or truck drivers. But more than a third of the students lost from the high school pipeline depart before 10th grade. That's a little young to be driving trucks.

When it comes to your sons, schools miss the mark

This month, an estimated 1.2 million teenagers — or roughly 30% of the high school class of 2007 — won't be graduating with their peers. But who are the dropouts?

A study published Tuesday by Education Week, an authoritative trade publication, confirms a few well-known facts: Graduation rates are higher in the suburbs than in the inner cities; they are higher among Asians and whites than blacks and Hispanics.

The study also depicts a lesser known but striking gap: Regardless of ethnicity, the graduation rate for boys is lower than that for girls. Nearly three-fourths of girls make it through high school but only two-thirds of boys.

Guard running low on equipment

Eighteen of those 31 states report having half or fewer of the vehicles, aircraft, radios, weapons and other items they are authorized to have for home-front uses, the 50-state review found.

Guard leaders say the shortfalls raise concerns about whether some state units would be able to help other states as they did when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Historically speaking, anyway. We shall see if it continues to be the case with his new venture.

I have engaged in futile battles, but I try not to when I see the end result as clearly as here. I have written off the Bush Justice Department. I think of it as the Consigliere Department now.

Former DoJ Official: Who, Me?
By Paul Kiel - June 14, 2007, 12:20 PM

It's amazing what happens when a former Justice Department official sits behind a microphone.

Earlier this week, six veterans of the Civil Rights Division's voting rights section wrote the Senate Rules Committee to urge that they reject Hans von Spakovsky's nomination as a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission. The reason, they wrote, was that von Spakovsky had been "the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights" when he worked at the Justice Department.

You remember the title of the post where I linked Upper-income black donors back Obama over Clinton? Of course not...why would you remember the randomness that my titling practices produce? Anyway it was Fortunately for Sen. Clinton, there ain't that many of them.

Part of the reason there ain't that many of them is, statistically speaking, we (and I'm going "we" now...that's unusual for me) have no connection with the major ingredient of modern millionaires: technology venture capital.

Definitive numbers are hard to come by, but people in the industry, which includes some 9,300 investors, say the number of African-American and Hispanic women working as venture capitalists is a few dozen.

A Name Change To Honor Slaves Who Built Capitol
Friday, June 15, 2007; A19

Abraham Lincoln was injected into an otherwise staid budget discussion by the House Appropriations Committee this week, when Reps. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) argued that the main entry hall of the planned Capitol Visitors Center should be named to honor the slaves who built the Capitol.

The two lawmakers convinced the panel to toss out plans to call the 20,000-square-foot hall "the Great Hall" and instead name it "Emancipation Hall," despite the fact that $250,000 in signs saying "Great Hall" had already been purchased.

The debates are already formatted so that all the responses fit neatly into a YouTube attention span. 

Debate Duo: CNN and YouTube
By Politics
Friday, June 15, 2007; A07

Think of it as the meeting of the old and new. CNN, the cable network, and YouTube, the popular online video-sharing community, are teaming up to sponsor a round of presidential debates.

The Democratic debate is set for July 23 in Charleston, S.C. Its Republican counterpart will be Sept. 17 in Florida. Both will air live on CNN.

The two-hour sessions will be hosted by CNN's Anderson Cooper, who will introduce videos in which YouTube users pose questions to the candidates. Cooper will also ask follow-up questions.

People can upload their video questions, no more than 30 seconds long, at http://www.youtube.com/debates. CNN will choose the videos, and a few YouTube users will be flown in to watch the debates.

Cooper's advice to those sending in videos: "Be creative . . . just be clean."

September Song and Dance
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 15, 2007; A21

Here's a surprise: Remember how we were told that if we just waited until the fall, we'd see that George W. Bush's "surge" was working in Iraq? Well, now it turns out that we shouldn't expect answers in September after all.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place.

Teen-Sex Case to Be Heard by Ga. Court
Associated Press
Friday, June 15, 2007; A10

ATLANTA, June 14 -- Georgia's Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to hear the state's arguments for keeping in prison a man who had consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. The state's attorney general later said the prisoner's release could lead to hundreds of incarcerated child molesters looking for a way out.

Hundreds of child molesters were wandering around Georgia? I see no mention of this at the Georgia Family Travel web site. Besides, Rev. Lowry said it all in this regard.

"If there are 1,300 people in jail under the same circumstances as Genarlow Wilson, well, they ought to get out,"

Seriously.