Prometheus 6

…so that I don't.

nna, a 22-year-old graduate student in Manhattan, said she remembers clearly how she was introduced to one of New York's sauciest underground social scenes. It was via an instant message from a stranger who had seen her personals ad online at Nerve.com. A local promoter of erotic events called One Leg Up was organizing a party in a TriBeCa loft on the theme of the film "Moulin Rouge," her suitor wrote, and he wanted to know if Anna would be interested in going "with me and my hot tattooed girlfriend." Anna mulled her reply, then fired off an e-mail message.

"I was like, `Yeah, dude, I'll check that out,' " she recalled.

To gain entry, Anna first had to send an erotic essay and a photo of herself to One Leg Up's founder, a husky-voiced, 33-year-old proselytizer for sexual experimentation who goes by the name Palagia. Anna made the cut, was given the party's location and a pass phrase — "untie my corset" — and on a chilly night last year donned fishnet stockings and high heels and headed out to her first sex party.

The gathering was awkward at first, she said, but at 12:30 a.m., a gong rang, signifying that guests should strip to their underwear, and things soon began to heat up. Anna said she spent most of the evening entwined with a couple she had just met — not the one that invited her — and besides the minor annoyance of having to locate all her clothes at the end of the night, she said the experience lived up to her expectations. She has since been to 15 similar parties in Manhattan, and though just a year above the legal drinking age, counts herself a full-fledged member of what insiders refer to simply as "the lifestyle."

Her take on the scene is uncomplicated: "I think sex is cool and people should have a lot of it," she said.

The idea of swinging may evoke an image of middle-aged, ennui-riddled suburban couples of the 1970's — think of key parties and the movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." But among a certain adventurous younger crowd in Manhattan these days, swinging — or at least a high-velocity form of sexual exploration that resembles swinging, but for the dearth of actual spouses (many participants are shy of marrying age) — is thriving with a twist. Unlike the dismal, failed swinging attempt in "Carnal Knowledge," in which two husbands make a surreptitious deal to seduce each other's wives, the younger scene is driven largely by women — many of them erotic-party promoters who use the Internet as both a marketing tool and a screening aid, to keep their crowds enticingly attractive and to keep paying customers coming back.

Why the Next Pope Needs to Be Italian
By ROBERTO PAZZI

ERRARA, Italy--For years Vatican specialists in Italy have, in delineating the uncertain features of John Paul II's successor, been fueled by a silent question: will the new pope be Italian? Why, one might ask, should Italy hope for an Italian pope, given the almost universal praise for the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla?

The origins of this question go back in time and deserve examination. I was watching on that unforgettable Roman evening of Oct. 16, 1978, when, on the state television network, RAI, which was still broadcasting in black and white, the newly elected pope appeared: a foreigner, Polish. I confess that, once I'd got over my surprise, like many of my fellow Italians I felt a certain bitterness, because my country had lost its last universal sign of power. Although today Romano Prodi, as president of the European Commission, in part makes up for that loss, it's not the same. The archetype from which the pope descends is that of the imperial Caesar, while Mr. Prodi's charge covers a merely political body that is still being defined and is, besides, limited to Europe.

A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
Iraqis of African Descent Are a Largely Overlooked Link to Slavery

By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq

The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she sensed it was an insult.

Abd. Slave.

"The way they said it, smiling and shouting, I knew they used it to make fun of me," said Youssef, recounting the childhood story from her living room couch.

"I used to get upset and ask, 'Why do you call me abd? I don't serve you,' " Youssef said.

Unlike most Iraqis, whose faces come in shades from olive to a pale winter white, Youssef has skin the color of dark chocolate. She has African features and short, tightly curled hair that she straightens and wears in a soft bouffant. Growing up in Basra, the port city 260 miles southeast of Baghdad, she lived with her aunt while her mother worked as a cook and maid in the homes of one of the city's wealthiest light-skinned families.

In the United States, Youssef's dark skin would classify her as black or African American. In Iraq, where distinctions are based on family and tribe rather than race, she is simply an Iraqi.

The number of dark-skinned people like Youssef in Iraq today is unknown. Their origins, however, are better understood, if little-discussed: They are the legacy of slavery throughout the Middle East.

Historians say the slave trade began in the 9th century and lasted a millennium. Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa to Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East.

"We were slaves. That's how we came here," Youssef said. "Our whole family used to talk about how our roots are from Africa."

Though centuries have passed since the first Africans, called Zanj, arrived in Iraq, some African traditions still persist here. Youssef, 43, a doctoral candidate in theater and acting at Baghdad University's College of Fine Arts, is writing her dissertation about healing ceremonies that are conducted exclusively by a community of dark-skinned Iraqis in Basra. Youssef said she considers the ceremonies -- which involve elaborate costumes, dancing, and words sung in Swahili and Arabic -- to be dramatic performances.

"I don't complain about being called an abd, but I think that's what provoked me to write this, perhaps some kind of complex," said Youssef, who began researching and writing about the practices of Afro-Iraqis in 1997, when she was studying for a master's degree. "Something inside me that wanted to tell others that the abd they mock is better than them."

Spanglish moves into mainstream
Debate continues: Is it creative argot or corrupt speech?

By Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times, 1/11/2004

LOS ANGELES -- On a muggy Sunday afternoon at the Duenas, mariachi music jumped from a boombox on the concrete in the driveway. The roasted smells of "carne asada" lingered over a folding picnic table, like the easy banter between cousins.

"Le robaron la troca con everything. Los tires, los rines," a visiting cousin said.

Translation: "They robbed the truck with everything. The tires, the rims."

"Quieres watermelon?" offered Francisco Duenas, a 26-year-old housing counselor, holding a jug filled with sweet water and watermelon bits.

"Tal vez tiene some of the little tierrita at the bottom."

Translation: "Want watermelon? It might have some of the little dirt at the bottom."

When the Duenas family gathers for weekend barbecues, there are no pauses between jokes and gossip, spoken in English and Spanish. They've been mixing the languages effortlessly, sometimes clumsily, for years, so much so that the back-and-forth is not even noticed.

O'Neill: U.S. had Iraq plan early in '01
Ex-official calls moves 'a leap'
January 11, 2004

CRAWFORD, Texas -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends that the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq days after President Bush took office in January 2001--more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired Sunday night.

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he described as the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.

"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.

SCO approached Google about Linux license

SEATTLE (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc., the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement.

"Certainly if they're using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix, we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.

The article has a link to the whole cartoon, which is pointed and on point.

Israel to take all Ethiopian Jews

The Israeli Government are to speed up the moving of the remaining 18,000 Ethiopian Jews to the Middle East.

However, the emigration of the Falasha Mura community would not start next week as had earlier been reported, says Israel's foreign ministry.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom admitted at the end of a two-day Ethiopia visit, that the issue was a complex one.

The Falasha Mura are the last remaining Jewish community in Ethiopia and have long been persecuted for their beliefs.

The last mass emigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel was in 1991.

There are around 80,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, many of them airlifted there during times of crisis.

Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, speaking alongside Mr Shalom, said a mass migration was not needed as Ethiopians were free to travel wherever they wished.

"The Ethiopian Government has no objection for the Ethiopian Jews to travel to Israel," he said, but added that "in today's Ethiopia, there is no need for an organised intervention as in the 1980s and 1990s".

Press hails Sudan wealth deal

There is a strong sense of optimism in the African and Middle Eastern press at the news that the Sudanese Government has signed a wealth-sharing agreement with southern rebels.

One Sudanese paper says a fair spread of wealth is the only way to combat widespread poverty in the country.

A couple of Saudi papers see the deal as a major step towards lasting peace.

But a Kenyan daily says that more pressure must be exerted on the warring sides to bring peace talks to a successful conclusion.

"Fantastic news"

The agreement, which was signed in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, sets out how the two sides will share revenues following the 20-year civil war.

"A just distribution of wealth is what people are looking forward to, and expecting," says Sudan's Al-Ra'y al-Amm newspaper.

Most Sudanese, the paper notes, are "burdened by poverty and deprivation". Redistribution, it says, is the only way these problems can be tackled effectively.

Uganda's New Vision daily shares its excitement at the agreement. "This is fantastic news for Sudan, Uganda and the whole of Africa," it says.

"Everyone now seems to believe the final peace deal should be signed within a matter of weeks."

The paper says the deal will do much to strengthen Africa's reputation across the world. "The longest-running conflict on the continent is now almost over. This must surely help to improve Africa's negative global image in 2004."

Next time a Libertarian equates taxation with slavery, let 'em know what the realities are.

UN opens slavery remembrance year

The United Nations has launched its International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery.

A ceremony was held in the Ghanaian port of Cape Coast, once one of the most active slave trading centres.

Unesco head Koichiro Matsuura, who is visiting the west African state, said slavery was a tragedy which had remained unrecognised for many years.

But one campaigning organisation cautioned that slavery had not been abolished completely around the world.

The Anti-Slavery International group is working with Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, to raise awareness in schools globally of the transatlantic slave trade, in a programme called Breaking the Silence.

2004 is also the bicentenary of the creation of Haiti, the first black independent state and a symbol of slaves' resistance.

P6 has been a bit quieter than normal this weekend because I've been playing with a new site design. It's got a bit more color and drama than the current design, and (this is the cool part) is a pure CSS design. No tables, and works correctly in Mozilla and IE6.

I just watched Donovan McNabb shake off two guys, out-run the other pursuers, and drop a TD pass into Pinkston. He rushed for 36 yards personally during the drive.

I couldn't help but wonder if Rush Limbaugh just feels stupid or what.

I have a book on heuristics…problem solving techniques…that, in explaining the need for such a book, gives a nice metaphor for racial positioning statements made by politicians and the like.

The problem with the way we're taught to solve problems is, the examples we're given to work on always come immediately after the necessary technique is demonstrated. To demonstrate the problem, the authors presented this triangle:

The problem is, prove the length of side AB plus the length of side BC is greater than the length of side AD plus the length of side DC, or

Racial pronouncements are easy to make because you know what they have to sound like. Racial gestures are easy to make because you know what they have to look like. But solving racial problems in situ is a mutha.

At any rate, this set of gestures was symbolically sufficient. Much better than Bush's propensity for picture with pickaninnies.

DES MOINES, Jan. 11 — The Democratic presidential contenders grappled on Sunday night with issues of race, taxes and national security in their final debate before next week's Iowa caucuses, getting in sharp jabs at one another on some of the most delicate questions in American politics.

Scrambling to sway undecided voters in the final days of the first presidential contest of 2004, eight of the nine candidates used a forum intended to address issues of special concern to blacks and Latinos to highlight their broad collective differences with Republicans. But under prodding from the two black candidates, they also squared off with one another.

Christie Whitman, who is not the worst Republican, reminds her party that all that punditry noise about extremists taking over progressive politics applied to them first.

OLDWICK, N.J. — On May 5, 1996, when I was halfway through my first term as governor of New Jersey, there was a picture of me on the cover of this newspaper's Sunday magazine, accompanied by the headline, "It's My Party Too." I liked that message so much, I had it framed and hung it in my office in Trenton and, later, Washington. To moderate Republicans like me, that headline proclaimed our belief that there was still room for us in the party of Lincoln.

Now, almost eight years later, many moderate Republicans feel even less certain of their place in the party. When President Bush, arguably one of the more conservative presidents in recent history, is under attack from the right wing of the party for his proposal regarding immigration and migrant workers, is it any wonder moderates feel out of sync?

Yeah, I know I shouldn't reuse a title, but it's so…appropriate…

No economic statistic is watched more closely as a gauge of the economic recovery's staying power - or of President Bush's prospects among voters - than the monthly employment numbers. Yet these numbers are failing to explain what is really happening to the nation's workers.

More people are working than have as yet been recorded in the official job count - the one compiled by Bureau of Labor Statistics that gets all the attention. But the official unemployment rate, in turn, greatly understates the number of people who would like to be working.

In December, for example, the nation's employers added 1,000 new jobs, a small number, but the unemployment rate plunged 0.2 percentage points, according to data released by the bureau on Friday. How could there be only 1,000 new jobs yet 300,000 fewer unemployed people, as the December numbers suggest?

The answer, economists say, is that the labor force has changed, and the official data no longer easily capture these changes, particularly the sharp rise in low-wage employment. The disparities in the numbers are giving politicians unusual leeway to make conflicting claims about the employment picture.

The Democratic presidential candidates, for example, heaped scorn on the Bush administration for the almost nonexistent job creation in December. The president, on the other hand, pointed to the drop in the unemployment rate, to 5.7 percent from 5.9 percent in November, as "a positive sign the economy is getting better." And the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, said in an interview that the official job count showing 1,000 new jobs in December was not accurate by itself.

"I view all economic statistics as imperfect," he said. "They have to be taken with a grain of salt."

In challenging the reliability of the official count, Mr. Mankiw sought to water down its message, which is that 2.3 million jobs have disappeared since President Bush took office in January 2001.

Once again, a Bush "compassionate conservative" initiative turns out to benefit businesses more than the ostensible subjects of the initiative.

Published: January 12, 2004

Every year Frank Romano has trouble hiring enough workers to fill the vacancies at his nursing home chain in Massachusetts, from $60,000-a-year nurses to $8-an-hour kitchen and laundry workers.

Not only are there not enough American-trained nurses available, said Mr. Romano, who hires 300 new workers a year, but hardly any Americans are willing to take the lowly, sweaty jobs in a nursing home's kitchen or laundry.

Mr. Romano has long savored one solution for such hiring woes: the federal government should make it easier to bring in workers from abroad.

Not surprisingly, he joined executives in many industries, including hotels, restaurants, hospitals, construction and agriculture, to applaud President Bush's new proposals to revamp immigration policy and to make it easier to hire foreign workers.

"Americans just don't want to take a lower-paying, entry-level job," said Mr. Romano, founder and owner of the Essex Group, a chain of 15 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, based in Rowley, Mass. "They will not apply for it. Last year, I had to spend close to $300,000 on help-wanted ads because it was such a struggle to find people to do the jobs we need done."

Mr. Bush's proposals would give renewable three-year visas to illegal immigrants already working in the United States as well as to foreign applicants who are newly hired for jobs here. But many unions and immigrant advocacy groups have denounced the plan, saying it would create a permanent, exploitable second-tier of workers who would never have the opportunity for permanent residency and full citizenship.

Mr. Bush's plan is an outline, and Congress is expected to add specifics when it takes up new immigration legislation. Under the plan, businesses would have to show that no Americans want the jobs available before they bring in temporary workers from abroad. Business wants that test to be minimal, with many embracing a White House proposal that businesses be allowed to hire foreigners if no Americans respond to job postings on Web sites.

Hip-Hop's Unlikely Voice
At 52, Shaping the Playlist for a Young Audience

By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01

LOS ANGELES -- Mary J. Blige, in thigh-high green stiletto boots, grinds her hips on stage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. "Got a jones in my bones," she sings over the band's jumpy hip-hop beat. "And it's all for you, babe. Can't leave you alone."

Six thousand young people are on their feet bouncing and pumping their fists. Twenty rows back, between two young black women, sits a redhead named Mary Catherine Sneed, an Alabama native raised on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She sways and nods demurely as the two teenage girls in front of her shake it. Later, after the lights come up, while she waits for the crowd to file out, Sneed turns to her assistant: "She was great. Every song is like a chapter in the life of Mary J. Blige."

Few in this crowd know how much this 52-year-old white woman's opinion matters: She controls what many of them hear when they turn on their radios.

Just in case you didn't notice, I added a link to the report under discussion.

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12

A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.

His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.

But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.

Bush Visits Neighbors No Longer So Friendly
A summit will highlight how views have changed in Latin America.
By Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writer

January 12, 2004

MONTERREY, Mexico — Three months after taking office, a deferential President Bush made his debut on the world stage by embracing — and charming — Latin America.

"I grew up in a world where if you treat your neighbor well, it's a good start to developing a wholesome community," he told his 33 counterparts at the Summit of the Americas.

Three years later, Bush is deeply unpopular in much of the region. Latin Americans view him as a distant neighbor at best — often at odds with them over security and trade policies, and aloof from their worst economic and political crises.

Which is the better avatar?

O'Neill's Straight Shooting

According to former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, "ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process [in the White House] that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas." O'Neill said he, along with former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Secretary of State Colin Powell – who shared his non-ideological approach – "were used for window dressing." O'Neill criticized the President for "signing onto strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through." White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan lashed out at O'Neill saying, "it appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinion than looking at the reality of the results." But the President has articulated a different assessment of O'Neill's integrity. Announcing his nomination in December 20, 2000, President Bush said that when Paul O'Neill speaks, he "speaks with authority and conviction and knowledge." A month later, at his swearing in, the President said O'Neill "has earned a reputation as a straight shooter."

DISHONEST DEFICIT POSITION: O'Neill opposed the second round of Bush tax cuts because he believed "a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it." When O'Neill presented his concerns to Vice President Cheney, he was cut off. Cheney told him that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." This is a very different position on deficits than Cheney has expressed publicly. On September 13, 2003, Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press: "I am a deficit hawk. So is the President." Cheney added that "without question, we've got to make choices, we've got to have fiscal discipline on the rest of the budget."

DISHONEST TAX CUT RATIONALE: President Bush has been quick to say that his tax cuts are not unfairly skewed towards the wealthiest Americans. But according to O'Neill, behind closed doors the President admitted the opposite. When advisers presented the President with the tax cut (a plan that disproportionately benefits the wealthy), Bush said, "Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again." The President added, "shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" But, according to O'Neill, Karl Rove just kept repeating "Stick to principle. Stick to principle," and the mantra eventually won Bush over. Nevertheless, when Bush presented the tax cut proposal on January 7, 2003, he presented it as a tonic for the middle class. He said we "know that middle-income families need additional relief" from taxes in order to help them deal with "living paycheck-to-paycheck and never getting a chance to save for their children's education or their own retirement."

DISHONEST WAR RATIONALE: The plan to oust Saddam Hussein, according to O'Neill, was underway long before 9/11. O'Neill said that from the first day the President took office "we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country, and, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this' " Publicly, however, the President said that the Iraq war was prompted mainly because of 9/11. In a press conference shortly before the attack he said, "September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country....It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we're now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home."

WEAK ON CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: After Enron and other corporate scandals rose corporate governance to the forefront of the national policy debate "O'Neill and Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable." But, O'Neill reports, "Bush went with a more modest plan because 'the corporate crowd' complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency." The President, however, touted his reform package as tough on corporations, saying, "America is ushering in a responsibility era...and this new culture must include a renewed sense of corporate responsibility. If you lead a corporation, you have a responsibility to serve your shareholders, to be honest with your employees."

Justices Allow Policy of Silence on 9/11 Detainees
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrest and detention of hundreds of people, nearly all Muslim men, in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Without comment, the court let stand a ruling by a federal appeals court here that had accepted the Bush administration's rationale for refusing to disclose either the identities of those it arrested, most of whom have since been deported for immigration violations unrelated to terrorism, or the circumstances of the arrests.

A complete list of the names "would give terrorist organizations a composite picture of the government investigation," a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a 2-to-1 ruling last June. "The judiciary owes some measure of deference to the executive in cases implicating national security," the majority said.

The dissenting judge, David S. Tatel, said the majority had "converted deference into acquiescence" by accepting a categorical secrecy policy without requiring the government to show why the names of those who had been cleared of terrorist connections could not be made public. Of the nearly 1,000 people arrested, the government eventually released the names of 129 against whom it brought criminal charges.

The Supreme Court's action on Monday brought an end to one of the biggest court cases related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Even though the justices gave no reason for declining to take the appeal, the development was undoubtedly a welcome one for the administration after several recent judicial setbacks.

Over the administration's opposition, the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear appeals on behalf of 16 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay and an American citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, confined to a naval brig in South Carolina, all designated "enemy combatants" by the government.

The case the court turned down on Monday had in fact been the occasion for one of those judicial setbacks when a federal district judge, Gladys Kessler, ruled in August 2002 in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups that the government had to disclose most of the names. This was the ruling that the appeals court overturned nearly a year later.

My advice: you know what these idiots have to say, so don't bother buying the book.

AN END TO EVIL
How to Win the War on Terror
By David Frum and Richard Perle
284 pages. Random House. $25.95.

The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.

The book takes the instructive, prescriptive stance assumed by many conservative theorists in recent books, but it turns out to be less a reasoned effort to convince the unconvinced than a furious manifesto aimed at true believers. It is a screed that expends as much energy denouncing the State Department, Europe, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., Democrats, the foreign-policy establishment and even former President George H. W. Bush (the authors accuse him of trying "to prevent the Soviet Union from disintegrating"), as it does on denouncing terrorists and terror-minded states.

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors' track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush." Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980's for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements.

For Men's Designers, the Muse Is Only 13
By GUY TREBAY

FLORENCE, Italy — All men, at some level, are 13. Or so one might have concluded from the tone of Pitti Immagine Uomo, the big men's wear trade show held last week in Florence, which was a major center for Italian fashion until Milan stole the spotlight three decades ago.

If in most societies masculine rites of passage are organized around puberty and the onset of the reproductive years, in a materialistic culture, the transition to adulthood is best marked by the stirrings of an independent ability to select and consume. Americans enter a mature demographic cohort at 13, the age by which most marketers say that the buying patterns of a lifetime are formed.

from A New Map of the Universe, With Advice From Einstein
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Upstarts Upset the Tobacco Cart
States, Big Four Are Trying to Stunt Growth of Discount Cigarette Brands

By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page B01

RICHMOND -- When Virginia tobacco farmer Mac L. Bailey started a cigarette manufacturing company 10 years ago, his business consisted of little more than a secret tobacco blend, a couple of hand-held rolling machines and a burning desire to take on the big tobacco companies that paid farmers like him a relative pittance for the lucrative product they grew.

"I saw years when I didn't have enough to pay my expenses," said Bailey, 60. "I looked at what the farmer was getting and what the big manufacturers were getting, and I said, 'That's too much money for the big guys.' "

Today, Bailey owns a private jet, and his company, S&M Brands of Keysville, Va., produces about 1 million cartons a month. The growth of discount cigarette companies such as Bailey's has reshaped the industry -- and led to an odd alliance between big tobacco companies and many of the states that sued them over the public cost of smoking.

Numerous states are considering or have adopted legislation aimed at increasing the price of discount cigarettes and protecting the market share of the "Big Four" tobacco companies -- Philip Morris, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and R.J. Reynolds. The Big Four are vowing a push this year in the Virginia General Assembly.

Anticipating the legislative onslaught, two small cigarette manufacturers incorporated in Virginia and a third in Oklahoma launched a legal counteroffensive Monday, filing a lawsuit in Louisiana federal district court. The suit charges that the new laws seek to unconstitutionally limit the companies' right to market their product. Bailey is not a party to the suit, but he said he will be following the case closely.

"States are aligning themselves with our competitors and trying to destroy us," said former Virginia attorney general Anthony Troy, who worked on the lawsuit and represents the Council of Independent Tobacco Manufacturers of Virginia. "That is not the American way of doing business."

But states such as Virginia, which is struggling with a budget deficit, have a powerful reason to go along with the Big Four: money.

In a settlement reached six years ago, major tobacco companies agreed to make annual payments to the states estimated at more than $235 billion over 25 years. Those payments are tied to the sales of the participating companies; if they lose market share, the states lose money.

"We need to guarantee a continuing flow of revenue that we use to help balance Virginia's budget and pay for health care and economic development in the tobacco-dependent regions," said Sen. Charles R. Hawkins (R-Pittsylvania), who plans to introduce legislation targeting the independents.

Microsoft Changes Mind on Windows 98 Support
Reuters
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; 4:24 AM

AMSTERDAM -- U.S. software maker Microsoft said on Tuesday it would continue to offer support to customers who still own versions of its Windows 98 operating system, in a move aimed to sooth developing countries.

Extended Support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE had been scheduled to come to an end on Friday, January 16, while Windows Me support had been scheduled to end December 31, 2004.

The company has now decided to lengthen the Extended Support phase for Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millennium Edition (Me) through June 30, 2006.

It bit the bullet after it emerged that many users in developing countries who still rely on Windows 98 were confused about Microsoft's support guidelines. These were shorter for some Windows 98 products than for its more recent batch of Windows operating systems like Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Microsoft has come under pressure in recent years, particularly by authorities in developing countries, for its attempts to push customers into buying or subscribing to newer, expensive Windows and Office software versions.

Many countries have started to buy computers that run on the freely available Linux system, while others hang onto older Windows versions that have been paid for and still do the job.

In-House Audit Says Wal-Mart Violated Labor Laws
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

n internal audit now under court seal warned top executives at Wal-Mart Stores three years ago that employee records at 128 stores pointed to extensive violations of child-labor laws and state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals.

The audit of one week's time-clock records for roughly 25,000 employees found 1,371 instances in which minors apparently worked too late at night, worked during school hours or worked too many hours in a day. It also found 60,767 apparent instances of workers not taking breaks, and 15,705 apparent instances of employees working through meal times.

Officials at Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, employing 1.2 million people at its 3,500 stores in the United States, insisted that the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took.

"Our view is that the audit really means nothing when you understand Wal-Mart's timekeeping system," said Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for communications. She said Wal-Mart did nothing in response to the audit, saying it always strives to comply with the law.

But missed breaks and lunches have become a major issue in more than 40 lawsuits charging Wal-Mart with forcing employees to work without pay through lunch and rest breaks, and several lawyers and former employees who have sued Wal-Mart said the audit only bolstered their cases. They said that many employees continued to complain of missing meals and breaks.

"Their own analysis confirms that they have a pattern and practice of making their employees work through their breaks and lunch on a regular basis," said James Finberg, a lawyer who has assisted several suits against Wal-Mart. "What this audit shows is against their own company policy and against the law in almost every state in which they operate."

Kew is newest 'world wonder'

Kew Gardens is to join the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China as a modern wonder of the world.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in south-west London was recognised as a "unique cultural landscape" by the United Nations, which has given it World Heritage Site status.
The 132-hectare site contains some of the world's largest and most famous botanical glasshouses and historic buildings.

There are also gardens which the more than one million yearly visitors can enjoy.

Kew director Professor Peter Crane spoke of his delight after the decision by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

"Being awarded World Heritage Site status is hugely exciting for us.

"It is a stamp of approval that puts us in the company of the best of the best and it brings with it increased prestige and public awareness."

from The Awful Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Carnagie Endowment for International Peace has a report titled WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications that provides an honest and very interesting review of the truth behind the "facts" used to justify the second Iraq war.

A couple of days late for no good reason, tonight I'll really be making MTClient release candidate 1 available for download. But that's not what I'm ashamed of.

I'm about to go buy "Freddy vs. Jason." Oh, the humanity!

I decided to watch episode 4 of the first season of "24" tonight. Watching it on DVD without commercials means it runs faster than real-time. It's like drinking from a firehose. Damn fine show… tell you, if Fox could get their entertainment head out of their news/propaganda ass I could enjoy some of their stuff. Anyway, I'm watching some more "24" tonight.

But before I do, I want to waste a bit of time.

There's a blog call Properwinston whose author tries to get my attention periodically. Today's effort links me to the word "racialist," asks a bunch of rhetorical questions and compares me to Cobb, The Mulatto Advocate and an article about Randall Kennedy by Derrick Bell.

In keeping with my tradition of not linking to those whose thought processes I have no respect for, I provide links to Cobb and the article, though the article link is approval of Professor Bell, not Professor Kennedy.

I'm getting database errors, too many connections. What this means is, I can't always post or make comments when I want to. I can save my posts locally and upload them when everything clears up, but that affects my timeliness and is a general annoyance.

This being the case, I need to accelerate a couple of changes. P6 may become unavailable for a while in the next day or two.

This is not what I had in mind for the REAL New Years Day, but it's too cold to hang out anyway.

If this works, I'm going to cut my losses

I have no problem setting up MovableType. I have no problems with page design and all that.

I have no idea why I can't import the entries from P6-Gray into P6-Green.

I tried using the export file function. Eight megs of posts and comments. I imported then posts into the new site here, and it looks like it works…but site rebuilding function hangs. I tried SQL dumps, but that restores the blog settings (root path on the server and all that)…you have no idea how badly you can screw up an MT installation that way.

Finally, I decided to wipe the whole damn thing and start over.

The individual entries from the P6-Gray are gone. The weekly archives have been moved over here.

I have strong suspicions about the nature of my technical difficulties here. And without going into any unprovable suspicions, I think it's over for now. However, I've already committed, submitted DNS changes and such. So I'll try a couple more things tonight since there's no sense trying to keep P6-Gray here updated. Soon it will only be accessible by IP number.

I really hadn't planned to relocate yet. I'm tuning the new site at http://www.niggerati.net/prometheus6/. www.prometheus6.org will be a valid address to reach the blog soon enough The other URL is gone. I'd been fooling around setting up subdomains, databases and otherwise getting accustomed to the web-based control panel on my web hosting account.

I ran across considerable grief trying to move stuff from this site to the alternate one. I can export my entries and it looks like they are imported but the site won't rebuild. That means I lose the conversations and native MT search capabilities for those entries.

At any rate, don't confuse my temporary dormancy for anything permanent. In fact, I'm very tempted to start blogging at http://www.niggerati.net/prometheus6/ immediately.

1- I turned 47 years old.
2- Somehow I let slip the specific significance of the day aroundEJ Flavors, who sent me a novel, "daughter," by asha bandele...I know enough artsy types to recognize the lack of capital letters is intentional.
3- Partner of mine, a Rastafarian, put me onto a Chinese herbalist. I'm making an appointment by the end of the month.
4- I wasted the whole day fighting with the very concept of moving posts from one MT installation to another. Probably because I've generated an absurd amount of text. I think I understand why most people just leave their old archives intact.
5- All manner of news items were mentioned on TV and in the papers, and I didn't blog a single one of them.
6- Got through the sixth hour of "24." Will probably watch another two hours tonight.
7- Heard from everyone who should have heard from me earlier.
8- Put off the birthday celebration until it gets warmer 'round these parts. Since time is an illusion, I can do that.
9- Convinced my daughter to put down the Frontpage installation in favor of hand-coding CSS and HTML by building a page design she wanted but couldn't get Frontpage to create.
10-Decided to schedule some stuff: two hours before bed, grab a book and read for an hour, then meditation, then sleep. This assumes I don't get so focused on something I fall asleep at the keyboard.

As you see, the site is back, and with the new design in place.

Still have a few kinks to work out: my "Best Of" articles have to be put back where they can be gotten at, I need to set up a Google site search so I can search my old stuff (the import of old articles did not go well, and though I intend to understand why I'm not getting crazy about it). I need to adjust my info at TTBL, Technorati and Sitemeter. I'm probably set up another place or two that slips my mind... Most of that will be done today so I can get back to MTClient which is a mere week behind schedule.

I'd appreciate it if you folks would tell me about any problems you may encounter. And now, without further ado, we return to bitching about world affairs.

I promised myself not to make this prediction in 2004 because it's close enough to the nominating convention that folks will remember if I'm wrong. But even with Dean's lead in the polls I still feel no one will lock it down before the the convention. And if that does happen, a Draft Gore movement will be hard to resist.

Gore's presentation skills have apparently improved. His early endorsement of Dean positions him favorably in the eyes of Dean supporters (Dean/Gore '04? nahhh…). And Clark as VP would lock down the Clinton Camp. Dean could stump all over the South and take all the heat over Confederate flags and such.

Race Tightens in Final Days of Iowa Battle
By CARL HULSE

DES MOINES, Jan. 15 — The Democratic presidential field shrank by one on Thursday, but the race for the Iowa caucuses appeared unusually wide open going into the final weekend.

Pollsters, aides to the rival campaigns and one of the candidates said that Howard Dean, Richard A. Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards were all in contention and that the race was volatile.

"It's a four-way tie," Dr. Dean said in a call to CNN's "Larry King Live." "We can't tell who's going to win. All we can do now is work our you-know-whats off."

Ben Foecke, caucus director for the Iowa Democratic Party, said, "This thing is absolutely up for grabs."

U.S. Joins Iraqis to Seek U.N. Role in Interim Rule
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — The Bush administration, trying to rescue its troubled plan to restore sovereignty to Iraq, is joining Iraqi leaders to press the United Nations to play a role in choosing an interim government in Baghdad, administration officials said Thursday.

L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, and an Iraqi delegation led by Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, will make an urgent appeal on Monday for greater United Nations involvement, the officials said.

In Iraq on Thursday, tens of thousands of demonstrators put pressure on the United States to change its plans, marching in Basra to support calls by Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for direct elections.

The new move involved yet another change in strategy for an administration under pressure from shifting events in Iraq. From the start of planning the war to oust Saddam Hussein, the administration has had an ambivalent attitude toward the United Nations.

As it begins to reach out for help, and as European nations indicate that they may provide some, the administration is also considering reversing itself and allowing businesses in countries that opposed the war, including France, Germany and Russia, to bid on contracts to rebuild Iraq, officials said.

U.S. Insurer of Pensions Says Its Deficit Has Soared
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: January 16, 2004

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit had grown from $3.6 billion to $11.2 billion in just a year and that it would try to deal with the escalating problem by overhauling its own investments, among other measures.

The agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, said that two consecutive years of record failures by corporate pension plans and continuing adverse market conditions left it with a shortfall much greater than a year earlier, which had been the previous low point in the agency's 30-year history.

People briefed on the new investment plan say the agency intends to reduce its risk in the stock market by investing in assets - including bonds and stock-like instruments - that will mature when it must make payments to retirees. Steven A. Kandarian, the executive director who will soon leave the agency, said that the board had recently voted to change the investment policy but declined to provide details. [P6: Diversification? What a revolutionary idea!]

I suppose I'll be less smug when California closes its border to immigration from the other 49 states.

Published: January 16, 2004

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 15 — The state Democratic Party convention was conceived months ago as a victory celebration for a party that was dominating California's electoral politics as it had not since the late 19th century.

But when the convention opens here on Friday there will be considerably more gloom than glory, as Democrats from across the state meet for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, became governor two months ago.

Advertisement

Being a Democrat in Mr. Schwarzenegger's California is taking some getting used to, and there is growing consternation about how the party can distinguish itself in the celebrity glare of the new governor. A poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California showed Mr. Schwarzenegger with a 59 percent approval rating, while the Democratic-controlled Legislature received just 36 percent.

Even as the Democratic convention opens here, Mr. Schwarzenegger is likely to steal the political limelight by endorsing Bill Jones, a former California secretary of state, who is running in the Republican primary for the United States Senate seat occupied by Barbara Boxer, a Democrat.

"After every defeat there is always a struggle within the losing party," said former Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, who was removed from office in an October recall election. "When you lose an election, it is time for introspection and to redefine the goals of the party. That process clearly will begin at this convention."

A Republican official in the Schwarzenegger administration suggested that the state's Democrats were in a particular quandary because a past strategy of vilifying Republican governors as right-wing extremists, as happened with Gov. Pete Wilson in the 1990's, would not work this time.

"He is the perfect California moderate," the official said of Mr. Schwarzenegger. "He has a bipartisan administration, his wife comes from a Democratic iconoclastic family, and he has developed relationships with Democratic leaders already."

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chief Retires
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

ASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — Elaine R. Jones, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., told her staff on Thursday that she planned to step down, leaving the post she had held for 11 years and the organization she had been a part of for 32 years. Her last day with the organization, she said, will be May 1.

Ms. Jones, who has spent her career defending equal rights in education, criminal justice, employment, political representation and voting rights, said she refused to call her move a retirement.

"Retire, to me, means you are dropping out, and I'm not dropping out," said Ms. Jones, 59, the first woman to lead the organization. "These issues are still a part of me, and I'm still going to find ways of impacting them. I'm just going to find ways of doing it that don't have me flying 150,000 miles a year."

As only the fourth person to head the organization since it was established in 1940 under Thurgood Marshall, Ms. Jones took the helm at a time when conservatives were challenging many achievements and objectives of the civil rights movement, sometimes with success before increasingly sympathetic courts.

Cookies aren't working right now because MT isn't running under the same domain name as the site.

I think my import problem comes down to insufficient patience on my part. Importing more the 2750 posts is apparently no joke.

I'm just gonna take it from here.

Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) bypassed Congress and installed Charles Pickering on the federal appeals court Friday in an election-year slap at Democrats who had blocked the nomination for more than two years.

Bush installed Pickering by a recess appointment, which avoids the confirmation process. Such appointments are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.

Pickering, a federal trial judge whom Bush nominated for a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in New Orleans, has been waiting for a confirmation vote in the Senate.

"I'm grateful to the president for his continued confidence and support," Pickering told The Associated Press from his home in Mississippi. "I look forward to serving on the 5th Circuit."

Democrats have accused Pickering of supporting segregation as a young man, and promoting anti-abortion and anti-voting rights views as a state lawmaker.

Bullwhip Days transcribes a lot of the material these recordings were drawn from. It's good they've taken steps to preserve the recorded interviews, and just as good that they've made accessing some of them easy.

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page C01

Deep, resonant like coming thunder is the voice of Bob Ledbetter as he remembers his life as a slave -- singing to pass the time, learning to read and write, joining the church and getting married.

"Well, how have you got along so well in life?" the interviewer asks Ledbetter in a 1940 conversation in Louisiana. "What's been your principles?"

In his rumbling tone, Ledbetter replies: "I know what's right and I tried my best to do what's right in everything I do."

Beginning today people the world over will be able to listen to interviews with Ledbetter and other former slaves through the online presentation "Voices From the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories" on the Library of Congress's American Memory Web site (www.memory.loc.gov).

One of the most amazing encounters is with Wallace Quarterman, who was interviewed in the mid-1930s. At age 87, he is sometimes difficult to understand when he speaks. He says at one point that he remembers being told that the Yankees were coming and he should run down to the field and let all the slaves go free.

But he is eerily clear when he sings "Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land."

He and others, in intricate harmony, sing: "My God is the rock in the weary land. Shelter in the time of storm."

The words are comforting when you read them; chilling when you hear them.

In the Dropping Knowledge section is a link to the Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.

It seems Ms. Hurston registered a number of unpublished plays on which the copyright has expired. They've made scans of them available for viewing online.

About the Collection

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress received eight of the ten Zora Neale Hurston plays that appear in The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress in the late 1980s as transfers from the United States Copyright Office. At that time, these plays were dispersed among the approximate 250,000 transferred scripts registered as unpublished, which were arranged roughly chronologically, 1901-77, by registration numbers. The other two Hurston plays had been previously transferred when curators selected them for custody by other Library of Congress divisions, probably following their registrations in 1925 and 1944.

The Copyright Deposit Drama Collection from which the Hurston plays were selected is a rich source of twentieth-century theatrical and cultural history. It includes scripts for early silent film and vaudeville; radio and television plays; and dramas by unknown as well as famous writers, many forgotten, many unproduced, many remaining unpublished. The entire mega-collection is being microfilmed, and selected scripts, such as the Hurston plays, will be retained in their original paper format.

…Visually, the digitized images presented online in this collection are very rough, at times running into margins and off the bottom of a page. That is because they were scanned from typescript copies made on old-fashioned manual typewriters imprinting through carbon paper, with a few original typescript pages included. Hurston appears to have typed some pages herself and dictated others to clearly non-professional typists. Authorial changes on some pages are in pencil or ink, with occasional original typescript inserts. In one case, Hurston has drawn a scene's stage set (Spunk, act 1, scene 2).

So many scholars have asked to copy these play texts in the years since 1997 that the Library of Congress has decided put them online for the world to examine, enjoy, and produce. Hurston showed great foresight in depositing the scripts with the Copyright Office. She knew of its close connection to the Library of Congress, which preserves cultural-history documents. She had worked with Alan Lomax and corresponded with Benjamin Botkin, both of the Library's Archive of Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center). Many Hurston productions failed during her life--due, perhaps, to her strong personality, the prevailing prejudices, bad luck, or bad timing. Now her plays may be studied and staged on into a new century.

Alice L. Birney
American Literature Specialist
Manuscript Division
Library of Congress

Bush to Revive Social Security Tax Plan
By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press Writer

January 16, 2004, 12:09 PM EST

WASHINGTON -- President Bush will use next week's State of the Union address to try to revive a proposal that would allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, the White House said Friday.

His election-year agenda also calls for pressing Congress to make already-enacted tax cuts permanent, such as the elimination of inheritances taxes and reductions in capital gains taxes. Bush is likely to renew his push for a new kind of tax-preferred savings accounts that could be used for retirement, college, health care or other purposes.

That says it all, I think.

White House Meeting on Plan to Restore Self-Rule in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 16, 2004
Filed at 8:31 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States will revise its plan to create self-rule in Iraq, the U.S. administrator said Friday after consultations with President Bush, but he rejected postponement of a June 30 deadline for ending the occupation and handing over power.

"The Iraqi people are anxious to get sovereignty back, and we are not anxious to extend our period of occupation,'' the administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said after conferring at the White House with Bush and senior U.S. officials.

The No Child Left Behind thing is going to be a problem for a while yet.

The landmark No Child Left Behind Act was born of rare bipartisan frustration over poor and minority children stuck in subpar schools.

Legislators' ire was focused on the billions of federal dollars that had flowed to low- income students since passage of the 1965 Title I Education Act, without any apparent effect.

The thinking behind the new law, which just marked its second anniversary, was that schools must use Title I money to raise children's skills and ambitions, not just to hire poorly trained classroom aides in what critics derided as a job-creation boondoggle.

Now that the law and its sanctions against supposedly failing schools are in place, the reality is more jarring.

Schools that are making progress are too often ranked as failures. Children with severe learning disabilities are forced into tests they can't comprehend. States define marginal teachers as highly qualified.

Bipartisan support has devolved into political rancor, with some Democrats pushing a legislative agenda to weaken the law's accountability measures, and the law's advocates rejecting any change no matter how badly parts of it are working.

This won't do. The law will fail unless its problems are fixed; children will fail if the law's basic premise — improving the achievement of all students — is gutted.

US to lift HMO rates
Insurers plan to cut premiums of seniors

By Christopher Rowland, Globe Staff, 1/17/2004

The federal government said yesterday it will pay an average of 10.6 percent more to health insurance companies that operate private Medicare HMO plans, welcome news to Massachusetts insurers that were losing customers.

The size of the rate increases will vary from plan to plan, but Tufts Health Plan, for example, said it would receive an average of 10 percent more in 2004 for the 60,000 Massachusetts patients it has in its Secure Horizons program.

Tufts said it would roll most of the new money into premium reductions, effective March 1, and put the remainder into higher payments for doctors and hospitals. Tufts has not yet calculated the size of the reductions or payment increases, said spokeswoman Julie Rosen. Reductions would follow several years of hefty increases. "We're hopeful that we'll see an increase in membership," she said. "We're trying to make this as affordable as possible."

Congress approved the additional funds as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit law signed by President Bush in December. The increase was criticized by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who released a Senate report claiming the money wouldn't help senior citizens but instead would increase HMO revenues by $189 billion annually by 2010, and profits as much as $26 billion annually.

"This mandate is symptomatic of the flaws in the Republican plan. Long before senior citizens see a dime in coverage, the HMOs will get billions of dollars in extra payments," Kennedy said in a statement.

I'd like to write something clever about this, but I don't think I'm up to it this early. So:

• "Latino," in this context, is more of a political alliance than an ethnicity.
• When people say there's no single Black community, I consider the Latino case (which is ironic in a way).
• Blacks and Latinos should NOT let this type of discussion divide us more than our natural differences require.

Blacks and Latinos Try to Find Balance in Touchy New Math

By MIREYA NAVARRO

The Web site for Black Entertainment Television put the question bluntly: "Does it bother you that Hispanics now outnumber African-Americans in the U.S.?"

The response has been torrential. One visitor to the site wrote, "Blacks are beginning to experience another wave of racial bias and favoritism not in our favor." The writer complained that employers now have a preference for bilingual applicants, and bemoaned "attempts to replace our threatening stance against discrimination with a Hispanic vote."

But another cautioned: "Sounds like the same old trick to me. `Divide and conquer.' Are we really going to let some numbers dictate how we treat one another?"

The BET.com message board is only one forum, but it has evoked some of the emotions, worries, hopes and even awkwardness that have been felt nationwide over a singular moment in American demographics. Last summer, the Census Bureau announced that Latinos had surpassed blacks as the country's largest minority, with blacks making up 13.1 percent of the population in 2002, and Hispanics 13.4 percent.

That statistical shift, years in the making, hardly came as a surprise. Yet it has captured the attention of both Latinos and blacks, who have been grappling with its meaning in meeting rooms, on radio shows and on the Internet.

Those conversations have raised hard questions: Does the ascendance of Hispanics mean a decline in the influence of blacks? Does it doom, or encourage, alliances between the two groups? Does the old formula for those alliances — shared grievances — have much meaning given the diversity of income and status even within each group?

African food appeal 'exaggerated'

A group of leading charities in the UK overstated the seriousness of southern African food shortages in 2002 and 2003, an audit has said.

Auditors Valid International said some fund-raising campaigns had talked of famine or a crisis of biblical proportions, which was an exaggeration.

The audit said this approach could lessen credibility in future appeals.

A spokesman for the charities said most of the report had been positive, but they would learn from any mistakes.

The charities raised $29m, and the report says their work saved lives and eased suffering.

Wrong pump

As well as using misleading or emotive language, the audit said some groups had not consulted local people enough and did not fully understand their needs.

For example, one charity provided an expensive diesel pump to irrigate a small field where a foot pump would have been sufficient.

And the report said there was not enough understanding of how the Aids epidemic affects the ability to cope with food shortages.

Richard Miller, a spokesperson for the charities' umbrella Disasters Emergency Committee, said the charities would in future pay more attention to whether people wanted money rather than food and what kind of seeds are usually grown in each area.

The BBC's Stephanie Irvine says the report does not question the validity of charities running campaigns for disaster prevention, but rather suggests ways in which those campaigns could work more effectively.

The annual SOTU ritual is almost upon us. And given that we know the address is 30% theater and 65% politics, we know if we really want to know the state of the union we have to dig it out ourselves.

Here's a couple of starting points.

This graph comes from Estimates and Projections Underlying the Joint Statement of September 29, 2003 issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Concord Coalition. The full sized graph can be see by clicking the thumbnail and the full pdf of the report (it's just 19 pages) can be gotten here.

What these good people have done is take the CBO's projections and factor in all the things the CBO didn't but recognized it should have, The results?

This is an important aspect of the state of the union, but there are many others to consider.

The first release candidate of MTClient version 1.0 is ready.

LATER: Now links to the second release candidate

MTClient is a Windows-based desktop blogging client designed for Movable Type weblogs. It has several advantages over the web interface for entering posts:

• Intuitive, easy-to-use interface is close enough to the web interface as to be immediately familiar
• Easy text and paragraph markup. Add bold, links, blockquotes, and paragraph alignment quickly and easily.
• Support for Movable Type all entry fields including:
  • Title
  • Body
  • Extended Entry
  • Excerpt
  • Keywords
  • Multiple categories
  • Comment Status
  • Send TrackBack pings
  • Edit entry date
• Spell checking (including the title)
• Edit previously-published entries
• Offline operation
• Save posts on your hard drive
• Manage multiple blogs on multiple sites
• It correctly converts between the high ASCII characters that choke most other desktop clients and HTML entities. In fact, it has a pop-up (Ctrl-Alt-E) that pastes Latin-1 entities into a message for you
• File uploads (Ctrl-Alt-U) copies the URL of the uploaded file to the clipboard

MTClient can be downloaded as an installation file or as a zip file. The installation file creates an uninstall. Installation of the zip file can be done by simply extracting it into a directory, and uninstallation can be done by deleting it.

Last I'll ask out loud, anyway:

I still have all the old archives, and I can just copy them over here such that any links that are floating around out there. Should I?

I wish TV One much success.

I wish TV One were available here.

There may be hundreds of channels on cable television, but Johnathan Rodgers says there's still something missing for black viewers.

Sure, there are networks for men, women, animal lovers, game show fans and even people nostalgic for old soap operas. But what typical black viewers don't see, said the president of a new network geared toward blacks, is many people who look like them.

"If you want to see a makeover show where your hair and skin happens to be a different texture or color, what do you watch? If you want to see a horror movie where the first person killed isn't black, where do you go?" Rodgers asks.

The answer, he hopes, is the upstart TV One network, debuting on Martin Luther King Day in several metropolitan markets across the country.

With a mixture of lifestyle shows, documentaries and reruns of old sitcoms and dramas, TV One hopes to woo an audience that Rodgers says is starved for black-oriented programming.

TV One and its corporate backers, Comcast Corp. and urban radio company Radio One, are taking on the dominant and largely unchallenged leader of the urban television market -- Viacom's BET.

TV One claims it targets a different demographic, saying it will go for viewers aged 24 to 54 who might not be interested in the hip-hop and other youth-oriented programming on BET.

However, industry analysts say the two will likely compete for viewers and advertising money, although they note that on cable systems with so many different choices, there is probably enough room for both.

"There should be more than two cable channels that aggressively target African-Americans in a universe of more 200 channels," said Jason Helfstein, a media analyst with CIBC World Markets Corp.

N.H. Couple Sentenced for Forced Labor
By Associated Press

January 16, 2004, 4:57 PM EST

CONCORD, N.H. -- A couple were sentenced to six years in prison Friday for forcing Jamaican laborers to work in their tree-cutting business.

Timothy Bradley, 43, and Kathleen O'Dell, 48, of Litchfield, were convicted in August of taking the workers' passports and visas, lying to them and reneging on promises about pay and housing.

"Luring foreigners to our shores with false promises, impressing them into labor, and withholding even the most basic of services is nothing short of modern-day slavery," said federal prosecutor R. Alexander Acosta.

The couple's lawyers portrayed the Jamaicans as disgruntled workers.

Isis Latham, O'Dell's daughter, said the couple never kept workers against their will.

"My mother is nothing like a slave trader," she said. "We shouldn't get sent to prison for our judgment calls."

By any objective measure, American Indians have caught some 10% more grief than American Blacks have. I see the trouble some of them have on the reservations and I look at that the way white folks ought to be looking at Black folks: as the canary in the coal mine.

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — For generations the Noland family has led a troubled life on the Lummi Indian reservation here. The Nolands have struggled with alcohol, painkillers and, more recently, crack. Seven family members are now jailed, several for dealing drugs, on and off tribal land.

Their experience has been repeated hundreds of times on this sprawling, desperately poor reservation of 2,000 Lummi, where addiction and crime have become pervasive. It is the reason that the Lummi tribe has turned as a last resort to a severe and bygone punishment, seeking to banish five of the young men in jail and another recently released. It is also the reason for evicting Yevonne Noland, 48, the matriarch of the Noland clan, from her modest blue house on the reservation, because her son, a convicted drug dealer, was listed on the lease.

Banishment once turned unwanted members of a tribe into a caste of the "walking dead," and some people criticize it as excessive and inhumane, more extreme than the punishments meted out by the world outside and a betrayal of an already fragile culture.

But a growing number of tribes across the country, desperate to slow the wounds of drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have used banishment in varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders see this ancient response, which reflects Indian respect for community, as a painful but necessary deterrent.

"We need to go back to our old ways," said Darrell Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Tribal Council, shortly before an early morning meeting on the reservation recently about the tribe's new campaign against drugs. "We had to say enough is enough."

While the Lummi use banishment to root out drug dealers, other tribes, like the Chippewa of Grand Portage, Minn., are using it to rid the reservation of the worst troublemakers and to preserve what they say is a shared set of core values. The Grand Portage banishments, which can be imposed on Indians and non-Indians who visit the reservation, may last as long as the tribal council deems fit, even for life.

Being banished can mean losing health, housing and education benefits, tribal rights to fishing and hunting, burial rights, even the cash payments made to members of tribes earning hefty casino profits.