Prometheus 6

Among the benefits of being rich is the ability to have your own private fire departments. Who cares what the local tax base looks like?

Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration

The offensive by businesses has been spurred by the federal enforcement crackdown, by inaction in Congress on immigration legislation and by a rush of punitive state measures last year that created a checkerboard of conflicting requirements. Many employers found themselves on the political defensive as they grappled, even in an economic downturn, with shortages of low-wage labor.

So what? you ask.

A human resources manager who worked for the company a decade ago hired a number of workers without conducting an extra check of their documents with the Social Security Administration, the executive said. Now she has received notices from the agency of mismatches in the identity documents of 20 workers who were hired 10 years ago, out of 90 workers on the assembly floor today.

ABC News' Teddy Davis, John Santucci and Gregory Wallace Report: No policy proposal more sharply divided Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton than the former first lady's plan requiring adults to purchase health insurance.

But as the one-time rivals head to Unity, N.H., on Friday, a health adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee is signaling that Obama's plan could eventually go in Clinton's direction.

The funny thing is, this is true...yet the differences were so small you could actually ignore them for purposes of projecting the outcome of implementing each.

Please, ABC, Tell Us What This Story Is About
Another Obama flip-flop? Or just a plan that insurers will support?
By Trudy Lieberman Tue 1 Jul 2008 01:59 PM

A Dart to ABCNews.com for a muddled mess of a story that may be interesting to Beltway health cognoscenti, but is confusing as the devil to the man (or woman) on the street. The story, entitled “Obama Health Plan Could Go In Clinton’s Direction,” seems to say that Barack Obama now supports an individual mandate for health care. During the primaries, Obama repeatedly said that he would not require people (except children) to have insurance, and blasted Clinton for supporting an individual mandate.

As Michael Happy, who writes the blog under discussion says

our “blatant agenda-mongering” – trying to heal Detroit one park, school, house, block, neighborhood at a time – is now on the national radar.

You gotta start somewhere. And no matter how progressive your goals, your first steps are going top look a lot like this: one park, school, house, block, neighborhood at a time.

Crossing Lines
In a bombed-out Detroit neighborhood, a new blog works to rekindle a community

A few miles east of Detroit’s gleaming new ballpark and glittering new casino hotels, a few miles west of the sprawling mansions lining Grosse Pointe’s Lakeshore Drive, north of the General Motors assembly plant, south of the Daimler-Chrysler assembly plant, and just west of the regional airstrip known as City Airport, you’ll find a five-acre parcel of land known as Fletcher Field. At first glance, Fletcher could be pretty much any park in urban America: it has a baseball diamond in one corner, an asphalt basketball court in the other, a large swing set, and a bright-red jungle gym. It has two electric-blue plastic picnic tables and one spring rider, origin unknown, in the shape of a dolphin. As of last year, it has mowed grass. As of last month, it has a small garden of flowers and a few stalks of corn, guarded by a cheerful scarecrow salvaged from the wreckage of a nearby home.

This is the U.S. on drugs
Only cops and crooks have benefited from $2.5 trillion spent fighting trafficking.
By David W. Fleming and James P. Gray
July 5, 2008

The United States' so-called war on drugs brings to mind the old saying that if you find yourself trapped in a deep hole, stop digging. Yet, last week, the Senate approved an aid package to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, with a record $400 million going to Mexico and $65 million to Central America.

The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.

You would think the fact that limited human intelligence keeps recycing the same themes, it might get easier to recognize and ignore them.

White House says ruling could free detainees in US
Friday, July 04, 2008 7:24:16 AM
By DEB RIECHMANN

The White House said Thursday that dangerous detainees at Guantanamo Bay could end up walking Main Street U.S.A. as a result of last month's Supreme Court ruling about detainees' legal rights. Federal appeals courts, however, have indicated they have no intention of letting that happen.

The high court ruling, which gave all detainees the right to petition federal judges for immediate release, has intensified discussions within the Bush administration about what to do with the roughly 270 detainees held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

This is pathetic.

I knew I'd miss Washington Journal this morning so I had it on record. I am watching it right now.

They opened with opinions on the passing of Jesse Helms. I do not think they expected the response. In thirty minutes so far there have been six pro-Helms calls. One was from a woman whom Helms authorized payment for her granddaughter's liver transplant. Three others were about Black people...of course. And two declared him a consistent Conservative and not a hater at all.

“It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all.”

The problem is, government funded tasks are not essentially religious. There's also the nonsense that a single Baptist in the midst of a Jewish owned organization causes the organization to no longer be Jewish. Unless they're asserting the equally absurd argument that one Baptist would cause an influx of Baptists that must be hired.

When you're talking about leadership positions in a religious organization, faith and knowledge of doctrine is a legitimate job requirement. There's no need to legally validate discrimination to protect them. And the government isn't paying for leadership positions in churches.

Mr. Rosen also noted that “without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds.” If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Is Planned Parenthood federally funded? Besides, anti-abortion types cannot properly council folks who have decided to have an abortion. Again, we're talking job requirements here.

Add to that the fact that Planned Parenthood is neither church nor state and so the separation of church and state doesn't apply to them any more than anti-discrimination law applies to family businesses with like 20-30 employees.

Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government
By PETER STEINFELS

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

Profit uber alles.

Accounting Plan Would Allow Use of Foreign Rules
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — Federal officials say they are preparing to propose a series of regulatory changes to enhance American competitiveness overseas, attract foreign investment and give American investors a broader selection of foreign stocks.

But critics say the changes appear to be a last-ditch push by appointees of President Bush to dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron and other large companies — measures that were meant to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices that led to those corporate failures.

Amistad to Publish Photo Book of Obama’s Campaign
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2008 7:40:00 AM

HarperCollins’s Amistad imprint announced today it will publish Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photos on October 28 with a 250,000-copy first printing. The book will cover Barack Obama’s campaign from its beginning through June, and will include more than 150 full color and b&w photographs plus an introductory essay.

Deb Willis, chair and professor of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Photography and Imaging, will select and edit the photos. Kevin Merida, author of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas (Doubleday) and a Washington Post writer, will write the introductory essay.

Amistad v-p and editorial director Dawn Davis and Deb Willis negotiated the book deal; literary agent Andrew Blauner negotiated the deal for Merida’s essay.

Read around this ol' site and ask when Black folks should start celebrating their independance.

Because in "Why Do We 'Keep and Bear Arms'," he asks

Is "Militia" — as the Framers intended — an arm of government? Or did the Framers define militia as something completely different — a group of armed citizens with a right to "keep and bear Arms" to guard against unjust or tyrannical government power?

As you would expect, he says the second option is the answer. And he quotes a couple of dictators to support his contention.

Dictators throughout history sought to disarm their citizenries in order to impose power:

Vladimir Lenin said, "One man with a gun can control 100 without one."

Mao Zedong said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Josef Stalin said: "We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?"

Secret video raises questions about bakery leader's role in Bailey killing
By Thomas Peele, Bob Butler, Mary Fricker and Josh Richman
THE CHAUNCEY BAILEY PROJECT
Article Created: 06/18/2008 10:20:17 PM PDT

Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV kept the gun used to kill journalist Chauncey Bailey in his closet after the attack and bragged of playing "hella dumb" when investigators asked him about the shooting, according to a secretly recorded police video.

He describes Bailey's shooting in detail on the video, then, laughing, he denies he was there, and boasts that his friendship with the case's lead detective protected him from charges.

Bey IV has not been arrested in Bailey's Aug. 2 death; Devaughndre Broussard, a then-19-year-old bakery handyman, has been charged in the killing. In an interview last week at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, where he is being held on unrelated kidnapping and torture charges, Bey IV, 22, denied any role in the killing.

The video and scores of other documents and police recordings obtained by the Chauncey Bailey Project raise questions about Bey IV's possible role in a conspiracy to kill Bailey, who was working on a story about the financially troubled bakery.

Sorry, y'all may not care about this but I do, and it's Independence Day, right?

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew
A header to save the internet
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 2nd July 2008 05:20 GMT

Bundled with AVG's newest anti-virus engine, AVG 8, and used by roughly 20 million people worldwide, LinkScanner checks search engine results for malware before you on click them. If you type a keyword into Google, for instance, it automatically visits each address that appears on Google's results page.

This has caused an enormous spike in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register, and many webmasters may not realize where these hits are coming from. Hoping to fool malware writers, LinkScanner mimics real live human clicks. At least in part.

When scanning pages, LinkScanner employs the IP addresses of those 20 million people who use the product, and as of last week, it sends the same user agent as Microsoft's IE6 browser.

At the moment, there is a way of filtering AVG traffic from log files. But it's unclear whether this method would bag legitimate traffic as well. And Thompson suggests that - in the name of high security - AVG may make changes that prevent such filtering.

That could destroy web analytics as we know it.

"A situation like this where there is in effect false traffic, where something is generating what is bogus data, leads to wrong budget decisions and marketing activities," says Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, a popular web analytics firm. "I completely get the value proposition [of LinkScanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly."

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Friday 13th June 2008 20:05 GMT

Exclusive Early last month, webmasters here at The Reg noticed an unexpected spike in our site traffic. Suddenly, we had far more readers than ever before, and they were reading at a record clip. Visits actually doubled on certain landing pages, and more than a few ho-hum stories attracted an audience worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Or so it seemed.

As it turns out, much of this traffic was driven by the new malware scanner from AVG Technologies.

Excerpt: 'Buried in the Bitter Waters'
by Elliot Jaspin

NPR.org, March 8, 2007 · The story of how I found America's racial cleansings begins in an unlikely place: the small town of Berryville in northwest Arkansas. I was visiting there in 1998 and, with time on my hands, decided to tour a small history museum in the center of town. It was a quirky place — one room was devoted to antique embalming equipment — with all sorts of bric-a-brac piled on tables.

As I wandered from room to room, a picture on one wall caught my eye. In the top of the frame was a photograph of a farmer and his wife taken some time before the Civil War. Below the picture was the farmer's will. On separate lines he carefully recounted his earthly possessions, parceling each out to family and friends. It was what you would expect until this line: Wedged between livestock and land were five slaves to be given away.

A friend once described walking into a vault in the New Orleans courthouse and seeing stacks of old record books listing the slaves that each person owned. He stood there in horror. Before him was row after row of moldering books with their ghastly roll call. I understood the shock he tried to describe because it was what swept over me as I stared at that will. How do you describe an encounter with the artifacts of slavery? It is the corpse at the funeral. In it we see both our own loss and the loss of someone else.

I stared at the will and as the shock drained away, a question began to form. I had been in the area for several days. For the first time it occurred to me that, in all the time I had been there, I had not seen a single African-American. Yet here in front of me was proof that at one time blacks had lived here. Were they still here? If not, when had they left and why? I walked out of the museum with the questions nagging me.

Cornfield worked with students ranging in age from 14 to 18 at Del Rey, a continuation school that provides a smaller and more personalized environment for students considered at risk of not completing their education, said district spokeswoman Monica Carazo.

L.A. Unified principal posed as a girl in chat room, authorities say
Del Rey Continuation's Randolph Cornfield was arrested in June for allegedly having child pornography images on his home computer.
By Victoria Kim
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 4, 2008

No Google source code for Viacom, just 12TB of YouTube data
By Nate Anderson | Published: July 03, 2008 - 01:15PM CT

As part of the discovery process in its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, Viacom asked for an astonishing array of information: the source code for the search functions that power Google and YouTube, the source code for YouTube's new "Video ID" program, a complete set of every video ever removed from the site, databases containing information on every video ever hosted at YouTube, and a copy of every private video. The judge has now ruled, saying no, no, yes, yes, and no. Even with the limited discovery, some poor drone at YouTube can now look forward to weeks of copying information onto Viacom-provided hard drives. ...

Keepping the "no"s, the "yes"s are:

I saw this headline

Scientists: Watermelon Yields Viagra-like Effects

...and thought, "Yeah, make some watermelon jokes NOW, muhfuggas!"

Truthfully, it ain't really like that.

Found in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body's enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, an amino acid that benefits the heart and the circulatory and immune systems.

"Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it," said Bhimu Patil, a researcher and director of Texas A&M's Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center. "Watermelon may not be as organ-specific as Viagra, but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side effects."

And it turns out watermelon has all these other effects

[M]y sense, though it’s hard to prove, is that the press is feeling a bit ashamed about the way it piled on General Clark. If so, news organizations may think twice before buying into the next fake scandal.

If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.

Rove’s Third Term
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves.

I am convinced evidence in these cold cases pop up when the old murderous bastards the community hid and supported for 40 years are about to die, can't pay for their homes anymore, shit like that. They're being sent to a nursing home, and I want them to die in the gutter, hungry and naked.

Many of the dozen or so men who opened fire on the couples with shotguns, rifles and a machine gun are now dead, they say. And in the days following the massacre, residents of the community about 40 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia, were tight-lipped with federal agents sent by President Truman to investigate.

New evidence collected in 1946 lynching case
By Doug Gross
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.

In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.

And thank you James MacLean!

And I have an excuse to post pictures of Venus and Serena.

I like them power pictures, but don't sleep on 'em...

U.S. Is in No Shape to Give Advice, Medvedev Says
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — Russia’s new president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, less swaggering than his predecessor but as touchy about criticism from abroad, said in an interview that an America in “essentially a depression” was in no position to lecture other countries on how to conduct their affairs.

With soaring oil revenues bolstering the Russian economy and Kremlin confidence, Mr. Medvedev brushed aside American criticism of his country’s record on democracy and human rights. He also said that a revived Russia had a right to assume a larger role in a world economic system that he suggested should no longer be dominated by the United States.