Prometheus 6

Pick one.

Keyes said he plans to join the Values Voter Presidential Debate Sept. 17 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

I wonder if they'll let him in this time. I believe it was his last Presidential run when he showed up for a debate and they wouldn't let him in. Much hilarity and public pouting ensued.

Alan Keyes announces for President!
Will appear in Values Voter Debate Sept. 17
September 14, 2007
RenewAmerica staff

On Friday, Sept. 14, Alan Keyes filed a Statement of Candidacy (Form 2) with the Federal Election Commission --thus officially announcing as a Republican candidate for President of the United States.

Keyes told Janet Parshall, host of a nationally syndicated radio show, that he's "unmoved" by the lack of moral courage shown by the other candidates, among whom he sees no standout who articulates the "key kernel of truth that must, with courage, be presented to our people."

See?

But industry officials, consumer groups and regulatory experts all agree there has been a recent surge of requests for new regulations, and one reason they give is the Bush administration’s willingness to include provisions that would block consumer lawsuits in state and federal courts.

Such pre-emption clauses were included, for example, in a drug label rule issued by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006 and in a new fire-prevention standard for mattresses imposed by the Consumer Product Safety CommissionGeorgetown University Law Center. in July, said David C. Vladeck, a professor at the

The pre-emptions bar consumers from filing liability claims in courts and supersede any tougher state regulations, extremely valuable protections for a major manufacturer, Mr. Vladeck said. “This is Christmas,” he said of industry, “this is their wish list.” A number of businesses are seeking such pre-emptions, though the clauses are being challenged in many courts. 

In Turnaround, Industries Seek U.S. Regulation
By ERIC LIPTON and GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — After years of favoring the hands-off doctrine of the Bush administration, some of the nation’s biggest industries are pushing for something they have long resisted: new federal regulations.

Why the Feds Won't Prosecute West Virginia Torture Case as a Hate Crime
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
Posted on September 14, 2007, Printed on September 15, 2007 

The Williams case is a near textbook example of how prosecutors deal with crimes, even possibly racially motivated crimes. They may be horrific, but they are seen as common crimes and are treated as such. Few state prosecutor will chance inflaming racial passions and hatreds by slapping a hate crime tag on a case.

There's also the belief that hate crimes are mostly a thing of the past. When they do occur, they are isolated acts committed by a handful of quacks, and unreconstructed bigots, and that state authorities vigorously report and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes.

14th Annual Labor Day ‘Executive Excess’ Report
Americans Pay a Staggering Cost for Corporate Leadership

(Washington, D.C.) With leading Presidential candidates turning up the heat on overpaid CEOs, a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy documents for the first time the extreme pay gaps that have opened up not just between U.S. business leaders and American workers, but between U.S. business leaders and leaders elsewhere in American — and European — society.

Download the complete report “Executive Excess 2007” at www.faireconomy.org/reports/2007/ExecutiveExcess2007.pdf (PDF, 1 MB).

I just keep finding more and more reasons to stay the hell out of Texas. 

Primed for a Voting Rights Act overhaul
A Texas lawsuit seeks to show that '60s-era oversight is no longer neeeded.
By Edward Blum
September 15, 2007 

ON MONDAY, A THREE-JUDGE PANEL of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is scheduled to hear arguments in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 vs. Alberto R. Gonzales. It sounds like a ho-hum case, but a great deal is riding on this lawsuit. The outcome could decide the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and open the way to ending racial gerrymandering and other political distortions that no longer make good sense or good policy.

And in 2003, at an antiwar forum in Reston, Moran said: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."

Said Halber this week: "There are only so many mistakes he can make before it's fair to call him an anti-Semite."

That's not a mistake, though. Neither is any statement he made in the Tikkun interview Ms. Gardner is reporting on.

Moran Upsets Jewish Groups Again
U.S. House Democrat Said Pro-Israel Lobby Promoted War
By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2007; B05

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) has again come under fire from local Jewish organizations for remarking in a magazine interview that the "extraordinarily powerful" pro-Israel lobby played a strong role promoting the war in Iraq.

In an interview with Tikkun, a California-based Jewish magazine, Moran said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is "the most powerful lobby and has pushed this war from the beginning. I don't think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all, but because they are so well organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful -- most of them are quite wealthy -- they have been able to exert power."

Moran's remarks were criticized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington and the National Jewish Democratic Council. Ronald Halber, executive director of the first group, said Moran's remarks are anti-Semitic and draw on ugly stereotypes about Jewish wealth, power and influence. [P6: Black guy here, with a startling lack of sympathy]

"The Bush administration admits that the Protect America Act can be read to let them collect Americans' business records," said Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "They simply ask us to trust them not to. Trust is not good enough -- that's why we need to have court oversight."

Bush Administration Aiming To Ease Surveillance Concerns
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2007; A03

The Bush administration, facing withering criticism over its temporary foreign intelligence wiretap law, has launched a campaign to assure Democratic lawmakers that the law will not result in domestic surveillance without a court order, and at the same time it has indicated that it is willing to consider changes.

The effort comes as Congress prepares to tackle a broad overhaul of the government's foreign intelligence wiretap authority.

I wasn't going to comment at all on Mr. Weeks as it is just not my business. But this

Weeks said their current troubles began on June 3, when, he said, Bynum suddenly announced to their congregation that she was quitting the church, the church that she and Weeks had founded together, never to return. “It was the first time I knew she felt this way about our church family,” Weeks said. Bynum has always maintained her own, separate ministry that she founded and led prior to their marriage in 2002.

is some trifling shit.

Emphasis correctly added by Skeptical Brotha.  Weeks said "The devil made me do it." He did not say, "The devil made the church whip her ass." It ain't the church family she's upset at. It's Mr. Weeks.

A sentencing hearing that had been scheduled for September 20 is now off, he said.

The protest scheduled for that day, however, would appear to be on. That trip is still necessary, since five of the six are still at risk.

The unnecessary trip was to the criminal court in the first place. If Jena officials hadn't insisted on a cruel and unusual punishment, they wouldn't be sweating the possibility of six times more protesters than the population of the town.  

Louisiana judge tosses conviction against teen tried as adult

(CNN) -- A Louisiana appeals court Friday vacated the remaining conviction of a teenager accused in a violent, racially charged incident in Jena, Louisiana, his attorney said.

Bob Noel said the 3rd District Court of Appeals in Lake Charles threw out the conviction for second degree battery against Mychal Bell, saying the charges should have been brought in juvenile court.

"We're happy now, but tomorrow is another day," Noel told reporters.

I'm going to be honest and admit I'm not a big sports page reader. In my youth I could play ball with particular people. My two younger brothers and I were difficult to beat, but that was because of them, not me. I knew them well enough to feed them, set pick and get open where they could see me. But I couldn't beat the brother immediately younger then me. Lucky to get a tie once in a while. And I could only beat the youngest because I was five years older than he and much taller. And even with that I wouldn't try claiming more than half the games we played. My sports were swimming and gymnastics (until I got too tall...I could grab the high bar without leaving the ground). 

All that to say I'm not real familiar with sports pages or sports writers. So I have to ask those who are into it two questions about Mr. Whitlock that, because of the way he came to my attention, mystify me.

1. Does he know anything about sports?
2. Does he ever write about sports?

Take this mess, which dnA at Too Sense wrote about. The first half was about Miss Teen South Carolina and a football player that abandoned his obscenely expensive vehicle after getting in an accident, and sentence or two involving Tank Johnson. 

Then.

An arbitration panel dropped the NYPD starting salary to $25,100 starting with the class of January 2006. The pay jumps to $32,813 once the new cops graduate from the academy.

165 police recruits quit, leaving 'Impact' program at risk

Police recruits continue to bail out of the NYPD's training academy - putting at risk a crimefighting technique credited with slashing the city's murder rate.

Statistics show 165 members of July's 1,131-strong entering class have dropped out - about 14.6%.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has told the City Council the department's successful Operation Impact program will be at risk if the NYPD can't graduate at least 800 recruits per class.

If the attrition rate holds among the remaining 966 recruits, the NYPD class will fall below 800 graduates.

Rookies said the reality of the $25,100 starting salary has sent them running out the door.

Any advocacy group seeking to place a single, full-page, black-and-white ad in The Times on "standby" over a seven-day period - the paper picks the day - pays what MoveOn.org  did, $64,575, sources said....By the end of the day - with Giuliani's challenge already scoring huge points on conservative talk radio and Web sites - his campaign released its ad. It was unclear when it would run in The Times or how much it cost, but sources indicated it was the same $64,575 as MoveOn.org  paid.

Rudy Giuliani hits N.Y. Times, Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
Friday, September 14th 2007, 4:00 AM

For Rudy Giuliani, it was the perfect liberal trifecta - a way to slam The New York Times, Hillary Clinton and the leftist MoveOn.org  group in one fell swoop.

All Giuliani needed was one bogus newspaper story and $64,575 in campaign cash, both of which the Republican presidential hopeful used yesterday to spawn a bonanza of free publicity in the conservative blogosphere.

In our last episode the FCC 'compromised' with  Google's open access suggestions. Verizon did not like that...they are lobbying for some pretty absolute barriers to entry into the market to provide services using this chunk of spectrum. This is because it is a threat to the existence of the current telecommunications market.

Under the FCC's rules, whoever wins the spectrum auction must allow consumers to use any device and any lawful application on their networks.

Seriously. Open Source VOIP is just the beginning. You could build the one necessary network in this spectrum...it's where television lives now.

...In November 2004, Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler said we had "broken the back of the insurgency." In March 2006, Abizaid assured us, "We are winning." Three years ago, Petraeus himself said that "18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress."...

If confident predictions by generals could be taken as gospel, this war would have been over long ago. But the totality of evidence gives no more reason to think we will do any better in the future than in the past. Given the choice, it's better to have commanders who believe they can overcome any adversity than commanders who are easily discouraged. But sometimes, as we have learned repeatedly in Iraq, optimism is just another word for self-delusion.

More false optimism on the Iraq war
Petraeus the latest general with rose-colored glasses
Steve Chapman
September 13, 2007

Gen. David Petraeus says the Iraq war is going well, and I believe him. I believe him the way I believe the coach of a perennial football doormat who, every August, assures fans he expects a winning season. Coaches don't get paid to admit they're bound to lose, and generals who are tasked with military missions don't get paid to announce that they can't get the job done.

"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea strongly denounces the above-said intrusion and extends full support and solidarity to the Syrian people in their just cause to defend the national security and the regional peace."

Report: Israel spots nuclear installations in Syria
Washington official says Israeli surveillance shows possible Syrian nuclear installation stocked by North Korea, Israeli Arab newspaper claims target of alleged raid last week was Syrian missile base financed by Iran
Ynetnews

Israel believes that North Korea has been supplying Syria and Iran with nuclear materials, a Washington defense official told the New York Times. “The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” he said.

The official added that recent Israeli reconnaissance flights over Syria revealed possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials estimate might have been supplied with material from North Korea.

I wonder if he's available for the vice presidency? He could be like the Anti-Cheney.

The men who join Johnson's program will not carry weapons or make arrests but will instead emphasize conflict resolution, similar to the Guardian Angels' ground rules.

Philly's top cop wants 10K black men to patrol streets

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The city's embattled police chief, acknowledging that police alone cannot quell a run of deadly violence, has called on 10,000 black men to patrol the streets to reduce crime.

Sylvester Johnson, who is black, says black men have a duty to protect more vulnerable residents. He wants each volunteer to pledge to work three hours a day for at least 90 days.

"It's time for African-American men to stand up," Johnson told the Philadelphia Daily News, which first reported the story Wednesday. "We have an obligation to protect our women, our children and our elderly. We're going to put men on the street. We're going to train them in conflict resolution."

I just saw he titled it Ten Things To Do Instead Of Buying The Kanye/50CDs and I knew it was for me.

And yes, that is what Dr. King was in Chicago to address.

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion
By DENNIS OVERBYE

What happens to planets when their stars age and die?

That’s not an academic question. About five billion years from now, astronomers say, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus and dooming life on Earth, but perhaps not Earth itself.

Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a planet that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home star, suggesting there is some hope that Earth could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.

I have just finished Black on the Block by Mary Pattillo. Subtitled "The Politics of Race and Class in the City," it is an out-god-damn-standing piece of work.

As the stuff in it marinates, its subtle flavors blending with the textures in From Cool to Passé: Identity Signaling and Product Domains, a paragraph from Dr. King's Black Power Defined

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

and my Maslow thing (I don't gotta link it again, right?), I will begin The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (which for some reason is an easier read than Black on the Block).

Because there is no consensus within the medical community, or even in the general public, about when life begins, the justices wrote, there is therefore no legal basis for requiring doctors to tell patients “that an abortion results in the killing of a family member.”

Not just that, you were a grown-ass woman when you decided to have the abortion you're suing your doctor for providing .

The 5-to-0 decision came in a case brought in 1996 by Rosa Acuna, who was 29 years old and married when she and her husband, who already had two children, agreed to an abortion about six to eight weeks into her pregnancy....

Mrs. Acuna charged that the doctor, Dr. Sheldon C. Turkish, did not provide her with “material medical information” before she and her husband signed a consent form allowing him to perform the procedure. Specifically, she said in her lawsuit, the doctor had a duty to tell her that the procedure would “terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.”

Zawinul played with Maynard Ferguson and Dinah Washington before joining alto saxophonist great Cannonball Adderley in 1961 for nine years, according to a biography on his Web site. With Adderley, Zawinul wrote several important songs, among them the slow and funky hit "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."

Zawinul then moved on to a brief collaboration with Miles Davis, at the time Davis was moving into the electric arena. It was Zawinul's tune "In a Silent Way" that served as the title track of Davis' first electric foray.

Jazz Legend Joe Zawinul Dies at 75
By VERONIKA OLEKSYN, Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria - Joe Zawinul, who soared to fame as one of the creators of jazz fusion and performed and recorded with Miles Davis, died early Tuesday, a hospital official said. He was 75.

Zawinul had been hospitalized since last month. A spokeswoman for Vienna's Wilhelmina Clinic confirmed his death without giving details. His manager, Risa Zincke, said Zawinul suffered from a rare form of skin cancer, according to the Austria Press Agency.

Zawinul won widespread acclaim for his keyboard work on chart-topping Davis albums such as "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew," and was a leading force behind the so-called "Electric Jazz" movement.

In 1970, Zawinul founded the band Weather Report and produced a series of albums including "Heavy Weather," "Black Market" and "I Sing the Body Electric." After that band's breakup, he founded the Zawinul Syndicate in 1987.

OBITUARIES: LOGANVILLE: Bobby Byrd, James Brown collaborator, sang at funeral
By Bo Emerson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/13/07

Bobby Byrd, collaborator with funk legend James Brown for 50 years, off and on, died Wednesday of cancer at his Loganville home. He was 73.

Mr. Byrd met Mr. Brown in Toccoa, where Mr. Brown was serving time in a juvenile facility for burglary. Mr. Brown pitched for the prison baseball team, and his team played against Mr. Byrd's team.

Mr. Byrd and his family helped arrange for Mr. Brown's early release in 1952. Mr. Brown and Mr. Byrd's gospel group morphed into James Brown and the Famous Flames.

Mr. Byrd's voice can be heard on "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine."

Mr. Byrd sang at Mr. Brown's 2006 funeral along with his wife, Vicki Anderson, who was also in Mr. Brown's touring band. On Wednesday, Mrs. Anderson said that of her husband's songs, "Baby, I Love You" was her favorite.