Prometheus 6

I'm saying he was never a Democrat.

I've completed a module to search for books at Amazon.com. It's very basic, you can search search on title, author, publisher or keywords and the links returned have my Associate ID embedded (of course) so the site gets commissions and stuff. I figure if I'm going to piss everyone off by being all honest and shit I better work out a means to make my soapbox self-supporting. Amazon's been having associate system-related grief this weekend, so I don't know if the generated links will work by the time you see this. But it's them, not me, honest. I got more Amazon-related stuff in mind, but I'm going to put it on hold so I can figure out how I want forums and weblinks to work. Then I'll have the minimum functionality I need to do what I have in mind for The Niggerati Network. And I've already started on my next version of MTClient. But the only other structural thing that gets done this weekend is setting up a menu to the major functions of the site.

This is amusing.

Thomas Frank reviews four books in the New York Times: The Great Divide Retro vs. Metro America, The Uncivil War How a New Elite Is Destroying Our Democracy, Who We Are Now The Changing Face of America in the Twenty-First Century and Myths of Free Trade Why American Trade Policy Has Failed. I suggest skipping to the last page of where he covers the books that have my his approval. It just makes more sense to point out to folks that, regardless of their future aspirations, they are in the economic position that is receiving fire in this class war than it does to harden positions based on issues most of us really have no personal doubts about.

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In addition, the gap in punishment between blacks and whites widened. While blacks and whites received an average sentence of slightly more than two years in 1984, blacks now stay in prison for about six years, compared with about four years for whites. The report attributed this disparity in part to harsher mandatory minimum sentences that Congress imposed for drug-related crimes like cocaine possession. In 2002, 81 percent of offenders in such cases were black.

81 percent of those convicted were Black. The precision is needed because drug use across the racial veil has been proven to be equal on a percentage basis. The only reason for such an imbalance is one is looking for problems only on one side of the veil. And that is significant. Anyway… Sentencing-Guideline Study Finds Continuing Disparities WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (AP) - The number of minority inmates in federal penitentiaries, as a percentage of all federal prisoners, has increased sharply since sentencing guidelines took effect in 1987 and now accounts for a majority of the prison population, a study reviewing 15 years of data has concluded. The study was conducted by the United States Sentencing Commission, which sets the guidelines for federal judges. The panel examined how well the guidelines had brought uniformity to punishments, and found that while sentencing had become "more certain and predictable," disparities still existed among races and regions of the country, with blacks generally receiving harsher punishment than whites. The findings come as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the guidelines, which advocates say are crucial to achieving fairness in punishment. The justices could decide as early as next week whether to throw out the system because it allows judges, rather than juries, to consider factors that can add years to sentences. …Whites made up 35 percent of the prison population in 2002, a sharp decline from nearly 60 percent in 1984, according to the report. It attributed the decrease to a striking growth in Hispanics imprisoned on immigration charges - to 40 percent of federal prisoners, from about 15 percent.

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"We don't have any population of Asians," Mr. Jarvela said, and Census statistics largely bear him out. Here in Barron County, the 2000 census counted just 145 people of Asian descent, less than 1 percent of the population. Mr. Jarvela said he had never heard about clashes between white and nonwhite hunters, but he added that because northern Wisconsin was very large, "if you happen to have an incident, nobody knows about it."

Worlds Collide in North Woods Hunting Ground By STEPHEN KINZER and MONICA DAVEY Published: November 28, 2004

In three decades, St. Paul has drawn at least 25,000 Hmong immigrants, transforming it into the Hmong capital of America. Even there, it has not always been an easy fit, with so many Hmong refugees arriving so rapidly, often with no English and little education or urban job skills. The Hmong are from large farming families from the hills of Laos, where the Central Intelligence Agency recruited many of them to be part of an anti-Communist secret army during the Vietnam War. The northernmost edges of Wisconsin are made up mostly of people of European descent. Many come from Scandinavian, German, Czech and French Canadian backgrounds.

Waiting for the start of Friday's funeral service for Mark Roidt, 28, one man turned to another and said, "This is going to be a horrible week." His friend replied, "The worst week ever." Mike Katterhagen, another mourner, said he and many of his neighbors felt anger about what happened, but he said, "I don't know if you can place it at who." Asked if people here have a negative attitude toward Asians or people of other races, Mr. Katterhagen replied, "Personally, I don't." Then he added, "Some people, I think, may have it."

"I mostly ignore what people call me, but it does hurt." said Va Pao Xiong, a college student in Wisconsin who was celebrating the New Year in St. Paul on Friday. "They have called me 'chink' and things like that. And it makes you wonder whether they even understand who the Hmong people are, where we come from, or what we've been through."

Like many others here, Mr. Xiong, who is 24, has distinct and painful memories of his family's flight from Laos. After Communists won power there, the Hmong people, who had rescued downed American pilots and fought North Vietnamese soldiers, said they found themselves under attack and began fleeing through the jungles, escaping across the Mekong River and ending up as refugees in Thailand and elsewhere. In part as a show of gratitude for their sacrifice in the Vietnam war, the United States has allowed tens of thousands of Hmong people to come here. "Young people now don't seem to know anything about all that," Mr. Xiong said.

"It's difficult to be Hmong-American right now," said Mee Moua, a Hmong in the Minnesota State Senate. "There's an expectation that the Hmong-American community ought to be answerable, or ought to be responsible for this one man's action." Ms. Moua said that was absurd: "Don't hold our community to blame for something one individual has done." Nearly everyone interviewed at the New Year celebrations said they had experienced name-calling at some point. Elee Vang, who is 19 and was crowned Miss Deaf Minnesota this year, said she was once spit at by a white boy on a bus. Workers at Tswvtxos Yang's old manufacturing job used to call him Bruce Lee, he said, as if he and Mr. Lee, the late kung fu film star, were close enough.

Tou Ger Xiong, a Hmong comedian, rapper and motivational speaker from St. Paul, said his father, who speaks little English, was once approached by a white hunter who simply demanded his gun. He said another white hunter ordered his brother to leave a tree stand he had built on public land, and threatened to use a chainsaw to tear it down. But Laurel Steffes, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said she was unaware of tensions between Hmong and white hunters. "We've had our ear to the ground since this happened," she said, "and we're not picking up on that at all."

People here say that the complaints by some Asian hunters of insults or harassment from white hunters are exaggerated. "I haven't heard any anger against the Hmong," said Patty Behrndt, manager of a bookstore in Rice Lake, the main town in this part of the North Woods. "Not anger, just disbelief and confusion. People aren't able to make out why or how. You hear talk now about racism, but I don't see it."

And after the Feds tie up all that money, who will everyone else borrow from?

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Vast Borrowing Seen in Altering Social Security By RICHARD W. STEVENSON WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - The White House and Republicans in Congress are all but certain to embrace large-scale government borrowing to help finance President Bush's plan to create personal investment accounts in Social Security, according to administration officials, members of Congress and independent analysts. The White House says it has made no decisions about how to pay for establishing the accounts, and among Republicans on Capitol Hill there are divergent opinions about how much borrowing would be prudent at a time when the government is running large budget deficits. Many Democrats say that the costs associated with setting up personal accounts just make Social Security's financial problems worse, and that the United States can scarcely afford to add to its rapidly growing national debt. But proponents of Mr. Bush's effort to make investment accounts the centerpiece of an overhaul of the retirement system said there were no realistic alternatives to some increases in borrowing, a requirement the White House is beginning to acknowledge.

Senator Frist Tightens the Screws Flexing their new muscles, Congressional Republicans seem intent on reigning as a dissent-smothering monolith. First, House G.O.P. members slavishly obeyed the maneuver by Tom DeLay, the majority leader, to render his control of the caucus ethics-proof by making it possible for a party leader to keep his post even if he is under indictment. His counterpart in the Senate, Bill Frist, was more discreet but no less ham-handed. He has engineered a rules change designed to cow the few Republican moderates who may still be willing to nip back at demands for party fealty. The rule undercuts members' independence by giving Dr. Frist the power to fill the first two vacancies on all committees. This hobbles seniority, which has been the traditional path to power. The leader now has a cudgel for shaping the "world's greatest deliberative body" into a chorus line. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, chronic Republican maverick, got to the heart of the matter in skewering her leader's accomplishment: "There is only one reason for that change, and it is to punish people."

Politicians Seek Debate on Blair's Iraq 'Misconduct' Wed Nov 24, 2004 08:16 AM ET By Mike Peacock LONDON (Reuters) - Parliamentarians will table a motion on Wednesday demanding a debate on Prime Minister Tony Blair's "gross misconduct" in leading Britain to war against Iraq. The impeachment motion, the first one to be tabled since the mid-19th century, has been signed by 23 members of parliament (MPs) from various opposition parties. But even if a debate is granted, any attempt to accuse Blair of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is doomed to fail in the elected House of Commons, where his Labour party has a majority of more than 150 seats. "We must make a stand or watch the democracy that we have fought for so often against foreign enemies be subverted from within," Welsh nationalist MP Adam Price said. "The rules of constitutional conduct have been brushed aside. The cabinet table has been replaced with the sofa ... and the facts replaced with 'belief'."

States Pull Out of Talks to Cut Aircraft Pollution Tue Nov 23, 2004 05:09 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. state and local air pollution control officials said on Tuesday they are pulling out of five-year-old talks to develop a voluntary program for reducing pollution from aircraft engines. A pollution-fighting deal with the aviation sector -- which is expected to see a doubling of nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions by 2030 -- could not be reached, and the officials said they told the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) so on Monday. Major airports already have NOX emissions that are greater than those by large stationary sources, like refineries and power plants. Officials with the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators (STAPPA) and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials (ALAPCO) joined talks in 1999 to cut pollution from aircraft engines. "More than five years later, we are extremely disappointed that no progress was made concerning the primary objective of reducing aircraft emissions," the associations said in a joint letter to the EPA and FAA. The two associations represent air pollution control agencies in 54 states and territories and over 165 major metropolitan areas across the United States.

But you know what?

Some Thoughts on Bigotry Commentary by Martin Kelly November 24, 2004 This column abhors all discrimination against black people, women and homosexuals on account of colour, gender or sexuality. However, it also denies the existence of concepts called ‘racism’, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia.’ The words ‘racism’, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia’ are rooted in Marxist thought. As a life-long anti-Marxist, one cannot endorse or approve of anything that started as a Marxist construct designed to ensure Marxism’s ascendancy by creating divisions. There is a very much more suitable and ancient word to describe those who despise black people, women and homosexuals on account of colour, gender or sexuality. That word is ‘bigot’, and common humanity, not Marxist political correctness, should at all times inform the conservative to disavow and shun bigots.

As long as you don't deny the actual existence of the problems or the need to address them, then if I sweat you over your choice of terminology, I'm being as silly as you are. The reason I was going to call it stupid is I don't want bigotry defined as the intersection of the three manifestations but as their union.And I don't want folks feeling every anti-bigotry gesture must address the full union; I don't want people to forget that by reducing the size of one of the union's components you reduce the size of the union. And I want people to understand that reducing the size of component A can reasonably be seen as a neutral event by members of population B…and excessive insistence to the contrary may be seen as a hostile gesture. And I was going to call it stupid because racism, sexism and homophobia manifest in different ways, on different levels…the concepts are rooted in manifest existence. And both sexism and homophobia, being based on physical differences of significance, have a more ancient, venerable history than racism…which was assembled. Their different origins and natures make different concepts more than appropriate. It makes them necessary. However, as I said, if you really like this particular conflation I'm not going to be as silly as you. If the words 'racism', 'sexism' and 'homophobia' sets your knee jerking we can talk 'bigotry' instead. But I will frequently specify racial bigotry, sex bigotry, anti-gay bigotry. Because I know what I mean to say.

Alarm raised on Asia's males Risks seen from 'surplus' numbers By Michael S. Schmidt, Globe Correspondent | November 26, 2004 The explosive growth of male populations in China and India could threaten social order in those countries as well as international security, according to a book by two academic researchers. In "Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population," Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer predict that by 2020, males 15 to 34 could outnumber females by more than 60 million in China and India combined. Hudson said men at the lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, who already are predisposed to violence [P6:???], will be the least likely to find partners because they lack the job skills, money, and looks needed to attract wives. These men will not create families that would give them a stake in the established rule of law, she contends. "You haven't given them anything to care for in the sense that society can protect the people and the family good, and they are without allegiance," Hudson said. "Bare Branches" suggests these men will be more likely to commit violent crimes and test government power by organizing themselves in irregular armies.

Black colleges find new market in appeal to Latino students At Texas school, success evident in campus influence By Dana Calvo, Globe Correspondent | November 26, 2004 HOUSTON -- More Latinos are attending black colleges than ever before -- changing the way student bodies look, expanding the dance music at parties, and, in some cases, helping to attract more Latino professors to the faculty. From 1976 to 2001 -- the most recent data available -- the number of Latino students enrolled in black colleges has nearly doubled, from 3,442 to 6,665, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But here, at Texas Southern University, the numbers are even more dramatic. With 498 Latino students enrolled this fall -- about five percent of TSU's entire undergraduate student body of 9,585 -- specialists say it has one the largest populations of Latino students of any black college in the country. School administrators say appealing to Latino students is good business. "The Latino market is growing. They haven't been targeted as well as they should be by mainstream universities. There's a lot of effort by [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] to capture that market," said Hasan Jamil, assistant vice president for enrollment services at TSU. "We are aggressively recruiting those students. By 2015 they'll be the majority in the state and in Houston, and we're in the growth business. This is the new market for us."

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Few schools had the cash on hand to lend to their students, and so the program wasn't very popular. But in the last few years, loan companies have started enticing colleges with favorable deals. A university doesn't even have to put up its own money up front -- it can borrow the cash from a bank. The loans are the same federally guaranteed loans that banks offer, and college finance officers report receiving dozens of phone calls from counterparts at other schools who want to know how it's done. This is how it works: The university makes a loan to a graduate student, either with its own money or borrowed funds. At some point, the school sells the loan to a bank, which pays a premium for it and then eventually collects from the student. This premium is what provides the bulk of the school's profit.

More colleges replace banks for student aid Some see conflict of interest in loans By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | November 26, 2004 Tufts University expects to earn at least $1 million this year by lending tuition money to its graduate students, and Simmons College will make nearly that much -- both among the growing number of colleges playing the role of banks to their own students. As tuition rises, colleges are increasingly seizing on a 1965 law that allows schools to act as lenders, charging students about the same interest rate as banks would. Although there aren't any official statistics, it is estimated that about 70 schools nationwide are now acting as lenders, many of them new to the practice in the last few years. As their numbers grow, so does the criticism that schools like Tufts and Simmons don't belong in the business of lending money. School leaders say the arrangement saves money for both students and colleges, but to some it presents a conflict of interest: Nonprofit colleges are essentially profiting from higher tuition, since the more money students need to take out loans, the more the colleges earn from their payments. ''It seems to me they've crossed the line from being an institution of higher education to being a business entity seeking loan volume," said Eileen K. O'Leary, associate vice president for finance at Stonehill College and chairwoman of the National Direct Student Loan Coalition, a group that advocates a rival lending program. Officials at colleges that have decided to participate in the school-as-lender program couldn't see it more differently. ''We are in fact taking money away from the banks and giving it to our students," said Humberto F. Gonalves, vice president for finance and treasurer at Simmons, which is in its fourth year of lending to its graduate students. ''It's a modern version of Robin Hood, almost." For student borrowers, the loans aren't much different from bank loans, and can be somewhat cheaper. At Tufts, students borrowing directly from the college don't have to pay the usual 3 percent ''origination fee," and they get discounts for making their payments on time. And critics have not shown any link between the loans and higher tuition. As the practice becomes more widespread, however, some members of Congress are debating whether the program should be changed, or even abolished.

Let me say a little about leaders and leadership in general before getting back to that Seattle Times op-ed. We are social animals, and thus hierarchical. Over the years I've heard you humans discussing possible ways of organizing socially as though you had no body…as though your physical nature had no constraining power over your plans. We will have leaders. A while back (never mind how long ago; according to Perseus Development I'm older than over 98% of bloggers and that's all you need to know) I was asked just what I thought a leader was anyway. I said they come in three models: sparks, channels and flames. Sparks ignite folks into action. Channels, which I would call wayfinders now, are the first ones, the ones that carve a path to a new destination. Flames shine a new light on things, bringing new knowledge and hence new possibilities. None of which deals with the central fact that a leader is just someone who gets followed. It was more an efforts to help decide what sort of thing your ought follow. Meanwhile to the mainstream, "leader," or more specifically "Black leader" means "gatekeeper." And we will have those kinds of "leaders" too. More accurately the mainstream will have those kinds of "leaders," because they exist in the mainstream's social hierarchy (Rev. Jackson has the additional benefit of a position in ours). Messrs. Counts and Evans were very correct in this:

In conversations with black family members or friends, you will rarely hear anyone speak of our "leaders." It is usually the media that bestow that title

Providing more evidence of my incipient decrepitude, I remember discussions I had with white folks during the run up to the Million Man March. I was told we can't support the march because all it would do is "validate Farrakhan as your leader." I told him it would only validate something in white folks' minds. We all knew Farrakhan and those that would follow him already did. We know the good stuff he says and we know the nonsense, but the march was a symbol to most and I approved of what it symbolized. Has nothing to do with the immediate topic at hand, I just didn't want to leave you hanging. Next installment will be about the healing Messrs. Counts and Evans say is necessary.

17 Parties Demand Iraq Elections Postponed Seventeen Iraqi Political Parties Demand Postponement of Elections Until Polling Places Secured The Associated Press Nov. 26, 2004 - Seventeen political parties on Friday demanded postponement of the Jan. 30 elections for at least six months until the government is capable of securing polling places. The parties, mostly Sunni Arab, Kurdish and secular groups, made the call in a manifesto signed at the home of Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, who said he believed the government was waiting for such a request before seriously addressing the question of whether an election could be held by the end of January. Parties of the majority Shiite community strongly support holding the elections on time but there is widespread doubt within the minority Sunni community because of insurgent unrest in Sunni regions of central and northern Iraq. Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars have called on Sunnis to boycott the election to protest this month's U.S.-led assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. A widespread boycott by the Sunni community could deny the elected parliament and government the legitimacy that U.S. and Iraqi authorities believe is necessary to help bring stability to Iraq and curb the insurgency.

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The contested law allows American companies to receive proceeds from duties levied on foreign rivals for alleged "dumping" -- selling goods at below-market prices, making it impossible for American producers to compete. The WTO backed claims that the amendment breaks trade laws by punishing exporters to the United States twice because they are first fined, and then those fines are passed on to their competitors.

WTO Approves Sanctions on U.S. Exports By Jonathan Fowler Associated Press Writer Friday, November 26, 2004; 1:11 PM GENEVA -- The World Trade Organization on Friday approved sanctions on a wide range of American exports intended to punish the United States for failing to repeal what it considers protectionist legislation. The Bush administration indicated it would live with the new duties. "It's been approved," said Amina C. Mohamed, Kenyan ambassador to the WTO and chairwoman of the organization's dispute settlement body. The European Union and other plaintiffs sought formal WTO authorization to retaliate by imposing new duties against various U.S. products. Among the potential targets are cod, textiles, glassware, mobile homes and apples.

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The news that Graham had sought whistle-blower assistance and protection -- and that FDA managers had sought to undermine his credibility -- was first reported yesterday in the online edition of BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. In that account, Devine said the FDA was "employing a classic law of whistleblower reprisal -- the smokescreen syndrome -- which shifts the spotlight from the message to the messenger. The agency attempted to discredit Dr. Graham rather than provide any scientific evidence contradicting his conclusions."

Attempt to Discredit Whistle-Blower Alleged Group Says His FDA Colleagues Made Calls By Marc Kaufman Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 24, 2004; Page A19 Managers at the Food and Drug Administration last month anonymously called a group that protects whistle-blowers in an attempt to discredit an outspoken agency safety officer who was challenging the FDA's drug safety policies, the legal director of the whistle-blower group said yesterday. Tom Devine of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project (GAP) said the anonymous callers did not identify themselves but he is "100 percent positive" they were managers at the FDA because of their phone numbers and other identifying information. He said he initially took the callers' concerns seriously but later came to see the calls as an effort to smear the whistle-blower, Associate Director David J. Graham of the Office of Drug Safety. …Although the drug safety issue involves a number of medications, companies, patients and officials, it has increasingly revolved in recent days around Graham's personality and positions. He has been at the center of the Vioxx controversy and has touched off more heated words and debate with his congressional criticisms of five other drugs, but his impact on drug safety issues goes well beyond those. During his 20 years in the Office of Drug Safety, he fought passionately to bring about the recall of the diabetes drug Rezulin, the diet pills Fen-Phen and Redux, the cholesterol-lowering drug Baycol, the heartburn remedy Propulsid, and the antihistamine Seldane. Graham, 50, was trained as a physician at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities and has spent his entire career at the FDA's drug safety office. A deeply religious Roman Catholic, he has said that his faith serves as a spur to his work. Some see him as a crusading hero, while others believe he unfairly fixates on certain drugs and fails to take into account the patients who are helped by those medications.

New High-Tech Passports Raise Snooping Concerns By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - The State Department will soon begin issuing passports that carry information about the traveler in a computer chip embedded in the cardboard cover as well as on its printed pages. Privacy advocates say the new format - developed in response to security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks - will be vulnerable to electronic snooping by anyone within several feet, a practice called skimming. Internal State Department documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, show that Canada, Germany and Britain have raised the same concern. "This is like putting an invisible bull's-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the A.C.L.U. Technology and Liberty Program. "If there's any nation in the world at the moment that could do without such a device, it is the United States."

This does NOT counterbalance the FDA screw-ups. This is about people who tried a drug, improved by their own estimate, and want to continue with it despite risks having been found. The FDA story is about risks being found and the information being withheld by order of the FDA. Many See Hope in Parkinson's Drug Pulled From Testing By ANDREW POLLACK With his condition deteriorating from Parkinson's disease last year, Steve Kaufman gave up making improvements to his home in Algonquin, Ill. "I couldn't even hold a nail stable," he recalled. Earlier this year, after taking an experimental drug in a clinical trial, Mr. Kaufman built new kitchen cabinets and an outdoor deck. He was so steady he could walk across a narrow piece of lumber like an Olympic gymnast on the balance beam. The drug, however, is no longer available to Mr. Kaufman or other Parkinson's patients in clinical trials. In June, its developer, Amgen, announced that the drug, which is called glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, or GDNF, had not proved better than a placebo. Two months later, the company said that safety issues had been discovered and it abruptly ordered all patients taken off the drug. Amgen's move has provoked an outcry from patients who say the company is robbing them of their only hope. "It's almost the same thing as a diabetic losing their insulin," said Mr. Kaufman, who is 50 and has had Parkinson's for 10 years. The story of Amgen's drug shows the clash between the faith of patients and the cold logic of science and business. At a time when public debate is focused on whether unsafe drugs like Vioxx are remaining on the market too long, this story shows patients who are more than willing to accept risks to get a drug. Their willingness also raises an ethical question: If a company stops developing a drug for safety or efficacy reasons, is it obligated to continue supplying it to patients from its clinical trials? A complicating factor in the clinical trials is the nature of Parkinson's, a disease that chokes off the supply of dopamine, a signaling chemical, in the brain. Some studies have suggested that mere anticipation of treatment can induce a patient's brain to produce more dopamine, which alleviates the symptoms. The patients not only feel better, they are better - at least for a time. In fact, some of patients in the GDNF trial who improved the most had received a placebo.

Debtor Nation Robert B. Reich November 24, 2004 The holiday buying season is upon us. You might as well spend your cash now because the dollar is dropping like a stone in international currency markets. It’s dropped nearly 30 percent since 2001, and is now at a record low. Even without the recent dour pronouncements of Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow, the greenback is likely to fall further. And the reason is simple: We’re living beyond our means. American consumers are deep in debt. The nation is importing more than we’re exporting. Most importantly, the federal budget deficit is out of control. Nearly all of the increase in public debt over the last four years -- some 1 trillion dollars -- has been financed by foreigners, lending us the money. But who wants to lend more and more to a drunken sailor? Foreigners are bailing out of dollars. Even the Chinese and Japanese, who have kept lending so we’ll keep buying their exports, are starting to wise up.

It was almost a toss-up for the quote of note:

Begun in 1999 as the Major Broadcasting Cable network, Black Family Channel will keep elements of the gospel programming that was part of its original mission. Music programs and documentaries also remain in place. Following a plan of adding programming blocks, the channel was launching five new Thursday night shows this week. An "urban kids programming block" of three new daytime shows debuted last Saturday. Among the new series: a talk show about teenage issues; a series celebrating spoken-word artists; and "Souled Out," a critical look at the messages in music videos. The channel also plans to reinstate and increase its coverage of football games at historically black colleges, temporarily dropped while the new schedule was developed.

I picked this one because I want this venture to succeed. Wildly. I get the sense they still need work, but it's just starting out. This and Radio One's buying a controlling interest in Tom Joyner's media company maybe be the beginning of something. Or maybe not. See the second quote of note below the fold. Black Family Channel Starts 8 New Shows Revamped Black Family Channel Starts Slate of Eight New Programs That Keep Values in Mind The Associated Press Nov. 24, 2004 - Robert Townsend first caught the film industry's eye with 1987's "Hollywood Shuffle," a clever satire about black actors trapped in demeaning roles. Now he wants the country to pay attention to what he calls a new kind of television, entertaining but with a sense of responsibility, especially toward young black Americans. Black Family Channel, which Townsend joined as president and chief executive officer of production five months ago, is starting an ambitious slate of eight new programs geared for children, teenagers and families. "With this network, we want to give people a sense of quality, integrity programming that speaks to them," Townsend said. "We don't want to be an old-school network where people don't want to tune in, but we want to get back to some of those old-fashioned values." He cites Bill Cosby as an inspiration, both for Cosby's groundbreaking '80s sitcom and for his provocative argument that black youth is being undermined by factors including poor parenting and attitudes toward language. "Everything that Bill Cosby is saying about families working together ... (that) we've got to reprogram these kids and we've got to shake it up, that's what we're doing," Townsend told The Associated Press. It's as big a change for the channel as it is for Townsend, who moves from writing, directing, acting and producing to steering a rare minority-owned and operated TV channel (co-founders include boxer Evander Holyfield, baseball's Cecil Fielder and attorney Willie E. Gary.) The major competitor is BET, Black Entertainment Television, owned by media giant Viacom Inc. and criticized in the past for giving viewers more music programming flash than substance.

The Secular Founding Fathers I've never been one for "founding fathers" idolatry, so the impact of this article on my beliefs is essentially nil, but it ought to make for very unpleasant reading for religious conservatives, who overwhelmingly combine a belief in the infallibility of the fathers of the nation with the conviction that America was founded on Christian principles; given what we know, however, both of these things can't simultaneously be true.

Head, meet wall. The past doesn't exist.

More Silliness on Heritability This Telegraph article shows why reading the Ned Block essay I referred to yesterday is such a good idea; the claims made in it are almost certainly rubbish.

The tendency to be unfaithful, to divorce and to believe in a god are more likely to be inherited than major illnesses such as high blood pressure and cancer, according to a major study of twins published yesterday. The discovery that we can inherit a propensity to believe and to betray has come from combining studies of identical and fraternal twins with the biggest survey of sexual and other behaviours of its kind in Britain, making it possible to unpick the contributions of genes and environment to important behaviours.

The propensity to believe in a god is likely "heritable" only in the sense that the number of toys a child has is "heritable" (to use an example given by Block), i.e, as a residual which remains after controlling for only those environmental variations we can identify; a trait can be highly heritable without having any direct underlying genetic causes whatsoever.

Just jealousy because I didn't find the articles under discussion first.

I Don't Get It Why do the likes of Jack Straw feel entitled to cajole Israel to embrace the "roadmap to peace"? Would they think it was just dandy if it were Israel attempting to browbeat them into making a deal with, say, the IRA or ETA? Everybody in Europe seems to expect Israel to put up with a level of interference in its affairs that they would never tolerate in their own.

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Not that I'm agreeing with him on everything obviously, but after the last month or so if politics I find intellect…refreshing.

I happened to read Baldilocks before Solotude today.

Black groupthink for Condi Thoughts painted by Solomon in A Racial World. Toshi and I were drinking our white grape juice tea (mmmm mmmm...) when we saw a short blurb about Condi Rice on CNN. My wife got that deep thought look on her face. When I see that look, I know she's about to drop some serious stuff about something. She and said the following:

I don't particularly care for Condi's views. You know how much I hate the two-party system but Solo, I would vote for that woman in a heartbeat if she ran in 2008. I would register as a Republican, baby. The importance of having a black person and woman to boot, in the Oval Office trumps all my views. (emphasis mine)

And you know what? I would do the same and wouldn't apologize for it. My own mother and two sisters have said the same thing. All with the same reason as my wife. I wonder how my other black folks would do the same? Wouldn't it be something to see Condi Rice win the presidency with 90% of the black vote? The news broadcasts would just fill up with analysts mentioning groupthink. And you'll get a proud "HELL YEAH!" from me.

Solo is a race man, so I understand this. Baldilocks is NOT a race woman, but I understand her approval, and understand its basis is not that on which Solo made his decision…which decision is wrong anyway, in my opinion. Symbolism be damned, look at the woman's positions and allegiances. She should not be supported because she's Black, she should be opposed because she's fucked up. We've been accepting symbolic gestures for way too long.

Red state:

Jim Crow rides crimson tide Tuesday, Nov 16, 2004 By John Brummett …Like other Southern red states including Arkansas, Alabama chose in the overtly racist 1950s to pass a constitutional amendment presuming to interpose state constitutional law decreeing segregation. The foolhardy notion was to fend off federal court rulings requiring racial integration of schools. It was foolhardy because states can't defy the federal government, considering that the Union won. Arkansas repealed its pointless but symbolically destructive amendment - narrowly - in 1990. This year the Alabama Legislature referred Amendment Two to the voters to take out of the state's constitution the three most egregious vestiges of racism in its segregation amendment. They were that schools must be segregated, that a poll tax had to be paid and that a right to an education at taxpayer expense did not exist for an Alabama child. (And you thought the purpose of a constitution was to grant, not void, rights.) The idea of the latter was to make sure no lawyer, judge, outside agitator or godless liberal could ever say under constitutional imprimatur that Alabama bore any responsibility to its black children's schooling. Alabamians voted Nov. 2 on whether to repeal. With nearly 1.4 million votes cast, it appears that Amendment Two failed by about 2,500 votes. The typical Alabama voter marked a ballot for Bush and segregation.

Blue state:

Banned in Boston: American Indians, but Only for 329 Years By KATIE ZEZIMA BOSTON, Nov. 24 - It is a prejudicial, archaic concept that prohibited Native Americans from entering a city for fear members of their "barbarous crew" would cause residents to be "exposed to mischief." But it is more than notions and phrases in Boston. A ban on Indians entering Boston has been the law since 1675. Mayor Thomas M. Menino took a step toward repealing the ban on Wednesday, filing a home rule petition. Mr. Menino said a repeal would remove the last vestiges of discrimination from a vibrant, diverse city that is looking past old racial conflicts.

Quote of note:

The idea of an independent drug safety office was also endorsed this week by the editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, who said it was unreasonable to expect the same agency that approves drugs "also be committed to actively seek evidence to prove itself wrong." Similar proposals have been floated in the past, usually after a high-profile controversy involving a particular drug.

Idea of Drug Safety Office Is Already Hitting Snags By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - Despite calls from medical experts and a prominent Republican senator for an independent office to monitor drug safety, the idea, prompted by the Food and Drug Administration's handling of the painkiller Vioxx, is already running into obstacles on Capitol Hill. "Another layer of bureaucracy at the F.D.A. is probably the last thing we need," Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican and chairman of the Senate health committee, said Wednesday. The remark sets the stage for a potential conflict between two powerful Republican committee chairmen: Mr. Gregg, who is stepping down from the health committee because of term limits but is expected to become chairman of the Budget Committee in January, and Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican and Finance Committee chairman, who backs legislation to strengthen the F.D.A.'s drug safety arm. Mr. Grassley, who convened a Senate hearing on Vioxx last week, said in an interview Wednesday that he expected to have a bill ready as early as February, but did not yet have particulars. He said he expected that passing legislation would be difficult because of resistance from the pharmaceutical industry and the food and drug agency.

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Okay, seriously…what kind of "resistance" can the pharmaceutical industry put up? Can someone spell it out for me? How about the FDA…what kind of "resistance" can they effectively mount? I mean, they just flipped the whole damn C.I.A. by Presidential fiat.

Quote of note:

"You're dealing with processes that take place in one's head," Mr. Donner said. "We can't arrest people for wearing certain clothes."

Dutch Try to Thwart Terror Without Being Overzealous By CRAIG S. SMITH AMSTERDAM, Nov. 18 - His telephone was tapped, his apartment was watched and many of his friends were already behind bars, so the Dutch authorities were not surprised by evidence that it was Mohamed Bouyeri, a Dutchman of Moroccan descent, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in broad daylight one morning this month. Yet they had been powerless to stop the crime. It is a problem faced by most European governments as radical Islam spreads across the Continent: how to arrest suspected militants before they act, without trampling on individual rights or risking charges of discrimination. The government of the Netherlands has come under criticism for missing Mr. Bouyeri when Islamist death threats were made against Mr. van Gogh. But stopping him would have meant assessing guilt before the crime, Justice Minister Jan Piet Hein Donner said in an interview.

Quote of note:

At Mr. Singh's table, dinner is not a political statement. Nor is it an opportunity to reflect on the impromptu harvest festival that started the whole thing more than 300 years ago. "I can assure you, nobody is sitting down and thinking of the Pilgrims and the Indians and the corn," he said. "Neither are we spectacularly saying, 'Oh, gosh, Americans have taken over everything, and we don't care for that.' It's just a huge eating escapade."

Turkey Is Basic, but Immigrants Add Their Homeland Touches By KIM SEVERSON ATERSON, N.J. - For all those struggling to get Thanksgiving dinner on the table, consider the plight of Yaser Baker, a restaurateur in this city's Arabic shopping district. First Mr. Baker had to find a turkey that was slaughtered according to Islamic dietary law, a challenge because some local halal butchers decided not to sell turkeys this year. Then he had to adapt the traditional American recipe to Arabic tastes, which meant bathing it in lemon and olive oil and stuffing it with rice, beef and pine nuts. Finally he had to brace for reaction from his Muslim neighbors, some of whom are either too devout or too upset about the war in Iraq even to acknowledge Thanksgiving. But for Mr. Baker, Thanksgiving is all about the bird. "Believe me, I don't look at it as an American holiday or a holiday that is not for Muslims," said Mr. Baker, a Palestinian and naturalized American who has been in the United States for 24 years. "I live in America. You tell me to eat turkey, I'm going to eat turkey."

2 Top Officials Are Reported to Quit C.I.A. By DOUGLAS JEHL WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - Two more senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine service are stepping down, intelligence officials said Wednesday, in the latest sign of upheaval in the agency under its new chief, Porter J. Goss. As the chiefs of the Europe and Far East divisions, the two officials have headed spying operations in some of the most important regions of the world and were among a group known as the barons in the highest level of clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations. The directorate has been the main target of an overhaul effort by Mr. Goss and his staff. Its chief, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy resigned this month after a dispute with the new management team. An intelligence official said that the two division chiefs were retiring from the agency and that there would be no public announcement. Neither could be named, the official said, because they are working under cover. A former intelligence official described the two as "very senior guys" who were stepping down because they did not feel comfortable with new management.

Lawmakers OK antipiracy czar Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved last weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar. Under the program, the president can appoint a copyright law enforcement officer whose job is to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law. Intellectual property law enforcement is divided among a range of agencies including the Library of Congress, the Justice and State departments and the U.S. Trade Representative. It is hoped that designating a single overseer to coordinate copyright law enforcement will put some cohesion into the federal effort, said one Senate Appropriations Committee aide. "You need a head. You need someone who has to answer," the aide said. "If staffed out and funded by a number of different agencies, it never does anything. Agencies don't want to give up good people. When you don't have an agency responsible, their attitude gets to be, 'I don't have to do anything about it.'"

Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark Mon Nov 22, 2004 09:52 PM ET WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday. Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark. "They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).

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I know dolphins mean well, but I keep telling them humans get a big head about shit like this.

Congress Adds $300 Mln for Heat Bills of Poor Mon Nov 22, 2004 04:23 PM ET By Tom Doggett WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress approved a $300 million boost in emergency funds to help poor and elderly Americans pay home heating bills that are expected to be sharply higher than last winter. The government last week forecasted colder weather than normal in the U.S. Northeast and in other parts of the nation this winter. That, plus an increase in energy prices, mean the average home heating oil bill will jump 37 percent from last year and natural gas will be 15 percent higher, according to Energy Information Administration estimates. Lawmakers included the money -- half of the $600 million boost initially sought by consumer advocates -- in legislation cleared last weekend to fund the government. A total of $2.2 billion in funding was approved for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). That's $1.9 billion in regular funding plus $300 million in emergency assistance, which can be released to the states at the direction of President Bush.

Bush Cabinet Moves Seen as Stifling Dissent Tue Nov 23, 2004 12:08 PM ET By Alan Elsner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is moving to concentrate power as he begins his second term, placing trusted members of his inner circle in key positions, but some analysts believe he risks stifling healthy debate within his administration. "It is understandable that this president, like any president, wants his decisions to be taken as writ," said William Galston, a government professor at the University of Maryland, who served as a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. "However this president is running the risk of restricting the range of debate within the administration very seriously," Galston said.

Hat tip to reader PTCruiser. Long but worthy quote of note:

Rice and McKinney are roughly the same age. Both can point to significant academic accomplishments. Both have had prominent careers in public life. But they are very different in the most fundamental of senses. While each woman came of age in the South at the time when the civil rights movement was entering its most critical stage, Rice was never an activist while McKinney was. While Rice left her native Alabama for California and began to move in conservative political and corporate circles, McKinney stayed deeply rooted in her native Georgia and became one of the state's best-known African-American figures. While Rice was appointed to increasingly powerful positions by her patrons in the Republican Party, the corporate world and the Bush family, McKinney won election to the state Legislature and then to five terms in the U.S. House. But while conservatives hail Rice as an "accomplished African-American" woman who is above reproach, they have shown no qualms about reproaching, attacking and dismissing Cynthia McKinney.

John Nichols: Many Rice defenders hypocritical By John Nichols November 24, 2004 Conservative apologists for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the most thoroughly discredited nominee for secretary of state in memory, are trying to thwart criticism of her selection by suggesting that they are aghast at the notion that liberal cartoonists and commentators would aggressively challenge the record of this "accomplished African-American woman." Certainly, conservatives have a right to object when they see or hear racial stereotypes. There ought to be broad ideological agreement that the legitimate debate about Rice's nomination is warped by the casual use of phrases such as "Aunt Jemima" and "Uncle Tom." But the notion that conservative outrage over attacks on Rice is rooted in respect for the accomplishments of African-American women is a stretch. Barely two years ago, the same people who are now defending Rice were busy attacking Cynthia McKinney - despite the fact that McKinney, then a member of Congress, was by most reasonable measures a far more accomplished African-American woman than Rice. McKinney was battered throughout the early months of the 2002 election season by right-wing political operatives and their allies in major media - as well as conservative Democrats - because she dared to ask tough questions about what members of the Bush administration knew before Sept. 11, 2001, about the threat of terrorist attacks. As we now know, McKinney's questions were troublingly appropriate - since it has turned out that Rice and other Bush aides knew more than a month before the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network were determined to launch devastating attacks on the United States. McKinney's "crime" was to ask the right questions at the wrong time - i.e., before official Washington had decided it was appropriate to examine how and why the Bush administration had failed to respond to pleas from former White House anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and others for a more aggressive response to an increasingly obvious threat. Her punishment was ridicule, political abandonment and defeat for re-election in the 2002 Georgia Democratic congressional primary. Rice and McKinney are roughly the same age. Both can point to significant academic accomplishments. Both have had prominent careers in public life. But they are very different in the most fundamental of senses. While each woman came of age in the South at the time when the civil rights movement was entering its most critical stage, Rice was never an activist while McKinney was. While Rice left her native Alabama for California and began to move in conservative political and corporate circles, McKinney stayed deeply rooted in her native Georgia and became one of the state's best-known African-American figures. While Rice was appointed to increasingly powerful positions by her patrons in the Republican Party, the corporate world and the Bush family, McKinney won election to the state Legislature and then to five terms in the U.S. House. But while conservatives hail Rice as an "accomplished African-American" woman who is above reproach, they have shown no qualms about reproaching, attacking and dismissing Cynthia McKinney. Ultimately, however, it is McKinney who will get the last laugh. Voters in Georgia re-elected her to Congress on Nov. 2. And she says she is coming back to the Capitol to battle against "the war machine," "the corporate propaganda machine" and the conservative political machine. McKinney will again be challenging the Bush administration's lies and misdeeds. And you can bet that the same conservatives who are so busy defending Rice's "honor" will be slandering McKinney. That's because the only accomplishment that seems to matter to the conservative chattering class is learning to say "yes" to George W. Bush.

Prof. Mark Anthony Neal has an article up at PopMatters titled The Real Nigger Show that you should read. I hesitate to excerpt it because he's more drawing a picture of a pattern than drawing attention to the specific events in the pattern. But, of course, I'll excerpt it anyway.

Boskin notes in his book that the "minstrel show became the most popular fare throughout the country... Shuffling and drawling, crackling and dancing, wisecracking and high-stepping, the white minstrel man welded the image of the black male to material culture, laid the foundations for its entry into the electronic media of the following century, and carried it to audiences on three continents" (75-76). In other words white male performances of blackness -- faces donned with burnt cork in an attempt to "represent" the realities of black life and culture -- became one of the most popular forms of American entertainment in the 19th and early 20th century. In the absence of "real" contact with African-Americans, the minstrel stage became the site of authentic blackness for many white Americans, so much so that Mark Twain could remark in his autobiography that the minstrel stage was "the real nigger show -- the genuine nigger show -- the extravagant nigger show". Though the minstrel stage was the most popular site for Sambo, the icon could be found in a wide array of locations including postcards, magazines, children's books (Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo for instance), advertisements and stereoscopic slides -- the precursor to the movie projector and television. Sambo was also presented in a variety of forms including stage performers, artifacts and athletes. According to Boskin, what all of these images shared was the intent by its purveyors to "make the black male into an object of laughter, and, conversely, to force him to devise laughter…to strip him of masculinity, dignity and self-possession." ). Boskin adds Sambo as an "illustration of humor as a device of oppression, and one of the most potent in American culture" -- an attempt to "render the black male powerless as a potential warrior, as a sexual competitor, as an economic adversary." The critical point here is though the early minstrel performances were dominated by whites in blackface, the very idea of Sambo created a context in which even black performers were forced to adhere to the conventions of minstrelsy. And of course there were rewards for such performances by blacks -- financial and social rewards that far outweighed the reality of being black and actually having to live in a Jim Crow society as opposed to performing "Jim Crow". This explains why even a light skinned black artist like Bert Williams felt compelled to "cork-up" for white mainstream audiences in the early 20th century and why some black performers continued to cork-up well into the mid-20th century.

As it happens, I agree with the description of the way Sambo was used by the mainstream, but disagree on his origin. Doesn't matter though. This piece is seriously worth the read.

You remember him from Politically Incorrect (which died on moving to broadcast TV). He's Redd Foxx to John Stewart's Richard Pryor. I got a link by email to the site for his HBO series, Real Time. It presents several interesting quote from his guests, and transcripts of his "New Rules" monologue.

New Rule: Stop claiming you have an "agenda." It's not an agenda. It's a random collection of laws that your corporate donors paid you to pass. The American people were not clamoring for a cap on medical malpractice awards. If a surgeon leaves an Altoids box in my chest cavity, I want to see him in debtors' prison.

New Rule: Kerry campaign manager Bob Schrum must switch careers. He is now 0-for-8 in presidential campaigns. The Washington Generals had a better record against the Globetrotters. Seriously, Bob, politics isn't the kind of business where you can have absolutely no proof of success and keep getting asked back. Or is it? [photo of George W. Bush] Hey, we lost! We deserve a few jokes.

And finally, New Rule: Stop saying that blue state people are out of touch with the values and morals of the red states. I'm not out of touch with them. I just don't share them. In fact, and I know this is about 140 years late, but to the Southern States, I would say, "Upon further consideration, you CAN go. I know that's what you've always wanted, and we've reconsidered. So go ahead. And take Texas with you." You know what they say. If at first you don't secede, try, try again. And give my regards to President Charlie Daniels.

Sorry, there I go again, kidding when I should be healing. Hey, say what you will about the Republicans, they do stand for something: Armageddon, but it's something. Democrats, on the other hand, have been coasting for years on Tom Daschle's charisma. But that's not enough anymore. Democrats will never win another election if they keep trying to siphon off votes from the Republicans. They will only win by creating a lot more Democrats. And you don't do that by trying to leach onto issues that you should be denouncing. You wind up - you wind up in a goose-hunting outfit a week before the election--trying to appeal to guys who would sooner vote for the goose. Guys who even in down-to-earth, economically-ailing Ohio, thought blowjobs more important than job-jobs.

Hey, these folks aren't "undecideds." They're not in play. No, what the Democrats need are fresh, new ideas that are dumb and hateful enough to win these people over. You know, stuff like, "No drinking on Christmas." Or how about a Constitutional Amendment protecting the song, "God Bless America"? I say, let's put a fetus on the dollar bill! With Reagan! And you know what country has been asking for an ass-kicking in the worst way? Finland. Yes, Democrats need a really, really stupid, meaningless and utterly symbolic issue. And by issue, of course, I mean, thing to hate. How about this? An amendment that says people with gerbils are threatening the sanctity of pet ownership--and that from now on, pet owning will be defined only as the relationship between a person and his cat or dog. Now, my opponent may disagree. That's because he's a fag. So, Democrats - Democrats and liberals, stop saying you're going to move because Bush won. Real liberals should be pledging to stay because Bush won. Trust me, you can't get away from Bush by moving to France. Because that's where we're invading next.

Governor supports clemency revisions for felons BY JASON GROTTO AND DEBBIE CENZIPER [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - Thousands more felons could regain the right to vote in Florida under a series of changes supported Tuesday by Gov. Jeb Bush and members of the state Clemency Board. Bush said the board plans to introduce revisions in early December, including easing restrictions in clemency rules so that more people can get their civil rights restored. He also said he may beef up the state's overburdened clemency staff so it can handle the thousands of cases waiting to be decided. ''It's not a science,'' Bush said. ``We sit up there in judgment of people and it's not an easy thing to do.'' Bush's comments Tuesday follow a four-part Herald investigation of problems in Florida's system for restoring the civil rights of felons. Though Bush previously declined to be interviewed by The Herald, he did answer questions Tuesday at a meeting of the Florida Cabinet. Bush, who leads the four-member board, acknowledged that he wants to see more people regain their rights. Some of the changes were first suggested in September, two days after The Herald contacted Bush and Clemency Board members about its investigation. ''We're looking at reforming the rules,'' he said Tuesday. He did not provide specifics. Florida is one of just seven states that permanently strip felons of their civil rights -- including the right to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office. Those rights can only be restored by the Clemency Board, which is composed of the governor, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson and Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher.

Quote of note:

A black plastic pipe, stretching a tenth of a mile down the ridge, delivered the booze to a livestock watering trough. From there, the moonshiner could fill plastic jugs, jars or whatever, "just like you were at a filling station," said Jason Brown, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent stationed in Rabun County. Was it rough stuff? Probably. Could you get legal stuff more cheaply? Certainly, but that's not the point. "It's all about heritage," Brown said. "It's a link to the past."

Police blow up moonshine still By MARK DAVIS The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 11/23/04 RABUN COUNTY — State and local authorities stumbled across a small piece of private enterprise Monday as they poked about in the ridges above Lake Rabun. So they did what any cop would do. They blew it to the moon. That's "moon" as in moonshine still, and that's what Rabun County and state officials detonated Tuesday afternoon: a well-made little manufacturing plant capable of producing about 300 gallons of white lightning every week. …With its production capabilities reaching 300 gallons a week, the still was probably a going enterprise, police said. Prime stuff fetches anywhere from $35 to $50 per gallon, meaning potential sales of $10,500 to $15,000 each week it operates. "When you see somebody putting that much effort into it [a still], they're not doing it for a hobby," said Bart Graham, the commissioner of the state Department of Revenue, who witnessed the explosion. The cops, who had made no arrests late Tuesday, destroyed it almost reluctantly. Even guys who blow up stills for a living recognize a good one when they see it.

Boy fights weapons infraction By JEN SANSBURY The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 11/23/04 The parents of a 9-year-old suspended for having a small, dull knife in class say DeKalb County school officials have gone overboard on discipline. Fourth-grader Jason Simmonds will be back at Marbut Theme Elementary School on Monday after a four-day suspension for "possession of a weapon" because of a tiny black pouch he took to school last week. �One side of the pouch that Jason took to school holds a pocketknife-style mechanism with a flip-out file, bottle opener and a dull 1-5/8-inch blade. "I've got butter knives that are sharper than that," said Jason's mother, Carol Simmonds. It was confiscated by a substitute teacher after Jason twirled it around on his pencil and it dropped onto the floor. Associate Superintendent Frankie Callaway said Marbut officials did not suspend Jason because of the knife alone. "It had a second item inside that could have harmed the child himself or other children," she said. Callaway initially said she was informed the compact toolkit included "a corkscrew with a point on it." Then she said she was told it had four items: an "Army knife," a bottle opener, a file and a pair of scissors.

Bush Wants to Bolster CIA but Doesn't Offer Specifics He seeks a 50% increase in spies and analysts. No time frame or funding is set. Many are skeptical. By Greg Miller and Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writers November 24, 2004 WASHINGTON — President Bush has ordered what may be a major expansion of the CIA, calling for the beleaguered agency to add thousands of analysts and spies as part of an ongoing buildup in the war on terrorism, according to a White House memorandum released Tuesday. But the directive set no timetable for the changes and offered no indication that the White House intended to ask Congress for the massive funding increase such a plan would require. The proposal was outlined in a memorandum delivered to CIA Director Porter J. Goss last week. Bush instructed the intelligence chief to increase the number of analysts and spies at the CIA by 50%. The figure stunned current and former intelligence officials, several of whom said the CIA had not charted such an aggressive course of growth since its inception after World War II. The CIA is thought to have an annual budget of about $5 billion and employ more than 17,000 people, although the figures are classified. Sources said the agency's clandestine service employed several thousand people, and that its analytic branch — known as the directorate of intelligence — was even larger. The Bush memo said the increases were to take place "as soon as feasible," and would be "subject to the availability of appropriations." Bush gave the agency 90 days to develop a budget and a plan.

If It's Supernatural It Isn't Science by Edward J. Larson Edward J. Larson teaches the history of science and law at the University of Georgia and is the author of "Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory" (Random House, 2004). November 24, 2004 National media attention focused on suburban Cobb County, Ga., last week as a federal court heard constitutional challenges to a school district policy requiring that a biology textbook carry this disclaimer: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Plaintiffs complain that the disclaimer, which is similar to others popping up in school districts from Alabama to Wisconsin, violates the separation of church and state. But scientists themselves call evolution a theory. Why can't a school district? …The norms of science call upon scientists to account for physical phenomena in terms of natural — repeatable, observable, testable — causes. Even if God specifically created the first humans in his image in a one-time event, that could not be a naturalistic explanation for our existence. It might be true, but it cannot be science. It's supernatural, not natural. Mixing scientific and religious explanations for origins in a classroom is a bit like mixing apples and oranges in a bowl. It can be done, but they're still different fruits. Consider recent trends in medical education to incorporate some discussion of the healing power of prayer into the curriculum. In most cases, this involves alerting medical students to evidence that prayer can give patients psychological strength to battle disease, not teaching them how to invoke God's help to heal patients miraculously — or undermining theories of natural causation in medicine. As far as I know, neither God's judgment nor demon possession is presented as sources of illness in licensed medical schools. We expect our physicians to learn the germ theory of disease, not faith healing. Similarly, the educational effect of teaching evolution as a theory depends on how it's done. If students learn to understand a theory as scientists do, then they may better appreciate the nature, power and limits of evolutionary science as a developing tool for understanding life. But if they are allowed to conclude that the theory of evolution is little more than Darwin's best guess on the origin of species, then science education is gravely undermined.

Quote of note:

But the opposition was more muted than in past meetings, and leaders of the movement to save the trauma center seemed resigned. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who helped organize much of the opposition, was unusually conciliatory in remarks to the board. She said afterward that she considered the outcome a victory, because the supervisors said they would try to reopen the trauma unit as soon as possible. "It will not be shut down; it will just be suspended," Waters told reporters after the meeting. "I think we've had something of a win." Although both Waters and Burke referred to the action as a suspension, not a closure, the head of the county's Emergency Medical Services Agency said hospital regulations make no such distinction. Carol Meyer, whose agency oversees the county's trauma network, said the unit will be closed, and the county will have to reapply to restore its trauma designation if and when it reopens.

King/Drew's Trauma Unit Ordered Shut Supervisors say the closure will help them save the troubled hospital, and they adopt the goal of eventually reopening the unit. By Mitchell Landsberg and Jack Leonard Times Staff Writers November 24, 2004 Despite impassioned protests, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to close the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, saying the unit had to be sacrificed as part of a larger strategy to save the troubled hospital. The decision marks the strongest action yet by county officials to reform King/Drew, where medical lapses have been tied to the deaths of several patients and now threaten the hospital's accreditation and federal funding. The King/Drew trauma center in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, serves the most violence-prone neighborhoods in the county, and is credited with saving the lives of countless victims of gunshots, stabbings and serious traffic accidents. County health officials said, however, that because trauma victims required such intense care, the unit was putting too much of a strain on the rest of the hospital. "These actions truly are the first step in a long road to restore medical standards and excellence to the hospital," said Supervisor Mike Antonovich. "Right now, anyone being treated there is being treated at a danger to their health and their life." The five-member Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 0 for the closure, with Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke abstaining. The board cushioned the blow by approving an amendment by Burke — who represents the South Los Angeles area where the county-run hospital is located — committing the county to a goal of eventually reopening the trauma center. "It's not a good day," Burke said after the vote, "but the reality is that we can't ignore that we have problems at the hospital. We have to do something. And we're doing something."

Still here Eric's response to Jon Sobel (quoted at the end of the previous post):

However, I never held up Project 21 as an authoritative source on anything, I received a press release from them that brought up very salient points that have only now been partially addressed with the apology from Sylvester for calling blacks, ANY blacks, Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima. I gave my own opinions, which still stand: racism is racism regardless if the target is liberal, conservative, middle, or apolitical.

This made me respond:

I gave my own opinions, which still stand: racism is racism regardless if the target is liberal, conservative, middle, or apolitical.

That's fine. Now, why is it Black people's job to address it? It's not Black people doing it, it's not Black people's reputation at risk like when Harry Belafonte went there (and ALL the 'respectable' organizations tripped over each other separating themselves from that). You accuse them of not doing white people's job. And by now the NAACP is cowed enough to apologize. Damn shame.

See, this is the thing. This is white people's problem. And what's the response? "Why don't Black folks protect us?" when any other time it would be called whining. Plus, in cognitive science terms, the house nigger/field nigger dichotomy is, to us, what you'd call a "live metaphor" (race, by the way, is a dead metaphor). Anyway, the fun part started when Deroy Murdock (who??), TNR contributor and syndicated columnist, joined the conversation. The same Mr. Murdock that on June 3, 2004 wrote Increasing evidence suggests Saddam ties to 9/11. That statement is either absolute denial or an absolute attempt to mislead. Either case is absolute justification for dismissal. So when he wrote:

As for the idea that those of us who work with Project 21 have "sold out," I have one simple question: Where is my check? Project 21 does a great job of booking me for radio and TV appearances. I don't believe even one of those engagements has earned me one thin dime. Those of us black conservatives and libertarians who work with Project 21 do so because we share a belief in individual freedom, personal responsibility, limited government, free enterprise, and peace through strength. We do not get paid for this.

I had no choice but to point out this

The director, David Almasi, immediately issued a stream of defensive remarks that only added to the surreal humor. First he explained the tire blowout, and said he called another member of the group trying to get someone else to appear, but nobody was available (guess the flat and the one phone call exhausted the ranks of conservative blacks in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area). Then he gave a tortured explanation that he was only an employee of the group; he took his marching orders from all of these mysterious black conservatives suffering from flat tires and broken phone lines. He didn't actually "direct" the organization; he was just the director. (As a bonus, this means that the difference between the group of black conservatives and the white guy working for the group of black conservatives is that the white guy gets paid to do it. You really have to love that as an affirmative defense!)[P6: emphasis added] Frankly, it was the best real-world re-enactment of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain � I am the BLACK CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT!" that I've ever seen.

And boomcrashbaby

Mr. Murdock says:

we share a belief in individual freedom, personal responsibility, limited government, free enterprise, and peace through strength.

That's interesting. Switch out the last one with humanitarianism and those are the values that make me a progressive! Individual freedom: woman's right to choose, keeping government out of the bedroom, etc. Personal responsibility: leaving this planet liveable for our children, no driving gas hogs, speaking out and fighting corporate pollution, not snubbing our noses at those less fortunate, but being a responsible good samaritan and giving a helping hand so that they can then begin their own personal responsibility, etc. Limited government: see individual freedom. Also opposed to government pandering to big business at the expense of the citizen. Free enterprise: I love capitalism, which is why the government needs to ensure there are no monopolies (I consider Microsoft such) or mega-monoliths, (I consider Wal-Mart such) which do more harm than good. Peace through strength: I don't believe in this one, that's why I'm not a conservative. I don't believe that being perceived as a big bully to intimidate is the way to achieve peace. It certainly hasn't worked for us in the Middle East. Replace this value with humanitarism, helping those down and out, being considerate and listening to other people/nations, and you've got one heck of a progressive!

And as of this writing, Mac Diva has the closer. All in all, once you weave through the tactics, there's a pretty complete indictment of the falseness that is Project 21. I appreciate Eric's raising the topic.

Talking about this post, and bring you directly to the point- Eric Olsen

Let me see if I get all of this straight: racism is fine as long as the object of the racism is "not on your side," which I assume is determined by political position. Project 21 has "no credibility" because there are white people involved at some level, or because it is a conservative organization? Weren't white people involved in the founding of the NAACP? Who determines legitimacy? And who determines who is and who isn't "politically aware"? And when is "simple caricature" that includes "racist symbolism" okay? Is that also determined by political position?

I figured there were two comments there that could be responded to: the second and the fourth. The first is a spin that he would have to justify rather the me explain, defend or take any kind of responsibility for. The third is simple proof he did not get all of this straight. Mac was whacking any Project 21 references for the moment, so that left number four�in a less noisy environment I would simply have asked "where has anyone said that?" But I didn't have a less noisy environment so I wrote this instead.

And when is "simple caricature" that includes "racist symbolism" okay? Is that also determined by political position?

No, that is not the question I asked. I asked how can you tell which is simple characature and which is racist symbolism. I also make the point that none of this matters to those whining about civil rights organizations not defending Dr. Rice's honor except as an opportunity to excoriate a couple of Black folks. And I'll go further. You can't show me a genuinely racist portrayal in editorial cartoons�we ARE talking editorial cartoons, not something unimportant like employment, housing or education�that has not been rejected by the civil rights organizations.

To which Eric replied

I see, so symbolism only counts sometimes, as determined by .. whom, exactly? What astonishes me is ANYONE having the gall to set themselves up as the arbiter of who is and who is not "legitmate" and worthy of being treated with simple human dignity, based upon, for all I have heard thus far, their political affiliation. I guess the 10-15% (or whatever the exact number is) of African-Americans who happen to be Republican or conservative deserve whatever racism comes their way. After all, they asked for it by having the outrageous, automatically delegitimizing nerve, or lack or intelligence, or lack of "political awareness," or some other heinous crime not yet defined; but whatever IT is, it's their own fault and they deserve whatever racism comes their way, right?

�which I did NOT get to there, so I'll get to it her.

I see, so symbolism only counts sometimes, as determined by .. whom, exactly?

Symbolism counts when it's valid symbolism. But that has nothing to do with my question. In fact, I ask a question and Eric spins it into a statement I haven't and wouldn't make because he can't answer it�and without being able to clearly delineate what is objectionable the whole argument gets flushed. A couple of folks tried to get all rational at this point, in particular jadester

er...just on the ponit of caricatures again, Eric, check out this definition from (funnily enough) dictionary.com:
"A representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect"
i would figure that, therefore, of course you can expect to see "racial" features present in a caricature of a coloured person. Exactly as you would in a caricature of a white person. Or a martian. Or a cat. That's the point of caricatures, they exaggerate identifiable features, most often to the ponit of absurdity. And i say again, i bet you've never complained about caricatures of white politicans.
Sure, caricatures are almost universally mean about their subjects, but if you're gonna complain about one you should complain about them all.

and Jon Sobel

I just checked out the Project 21 website. Its tone, at least, supports Mac Diva's claim that it's a "front," in the sense of being a right-wing propaganda machine aimed at black Americans rather than an organization specifically concerned with the well-being of African-Americans. Get this: they put out a press release about a website run by one of their members which "details ties between Saddam Hussein and terrorism" with, at the bottom, a description of themselves as a "nonpartisan organization." I'll skip making the usual criticisms of such propaganda and merely ask, What the hell does that subject have to do with black people, white people, or any color people? Their stated mission is to "promote the views of African-Americans whose entrepreneurial spirit, dedication to family and commitment to individual responsibility has not traditionally been echoed by the nation's civil rights establishment." I'd like to know in what sense the civil rights establishment has not echoed these things. They think the civil rights movement was about anti-family and pro-welfare state? Is that what they're saying? Pretty darn partisan (and disingenuous) if you ask me.

I didn't start this one, though. A common tactic in the public debate is to try to anger the opposition. The idea is, he who loses his temper first is cast as undisciplined and therefore undependable. I don't like the tactic because it interferes with education, but I have used it on occasion to set up an incorrigible fool for the benefit of others. Fortunately for most, my standard for incorrigibility is rather high. I mention this because if you check the thread you're going to have to wade through a whole bunch of tactics. And it looks to me like Eric has taken my approach to analysis as a tactic called "hold their feet to the fire"�he would not be the first. The thread is/was the nonsense challenge to Black civil rights organizations to rear up in defense of the honor of Dr. C. Rice over some cartoons.

Racism is racism regardless of the political orientation of those involved: one does not somehow "deserve racism" by choosing to be a conservative, does one? Are black Republicans less "black" than their Democratic counterparts? If so, why? If not, why the deafening silence from the civil rights establishment?

Eric chose to use Project 21 as his stalking horse. Bad choice. Mac Diva (a skilled proponent of the 'piss you off' tactic) immediately started poking all holes in Project 21's organizational Blackness. For myself, my initial response to Eric's

So I guess that means overt racism is okay as long as it's directed against conservatives and/or Republicans.

was:

So how do you tell if it's racist symbolism or simple characature? You want the truth, she's simply not on my side. I don't defend everything every Black person does, nor do I leap to the defense of those who work against my interest. I'm moral, not stupid.

to which Mac added (tactic excluded):

It looks like I must be more explicit to get my point across: African-Americans are not criticizing Ted Rall. Most of the politically aware would agree with what he said. The bought and paid for RATs of Project 21 are -- supposedly* -- Rall's critics. The racism in this situation is coming from the handlers of the handerchief heads at Project 21. They are trying to use their Negroes to discredit liberal commentators, both black and white. That is bigotry because it perceives blacks as tools to be used by whites. Supposedly? The words may be issuing from dark faces, but the thoughts are not. They are coming from the white people who actually run Project 21.

followed again by me.

More to the point, the people who are questioning the civil rights organizations' "silence" are the very ones that want them to shut up on every other topic. They have no credibility, and in fact besmirch those causes they associate with by their presence.

Eric's feet-to-the-fire response:

Let me see if I get all of this straight: racism is fine as long as the object of the racism is "not on your side," which I assume is determined by political position. Project 21 has "no credibility" because there are white people involved at some level, or because it is a conservative organization? Weren't white people involved in the founding of the NAACP? Who determines legitimacy? And who determines who is and who isn't "politically aware"? And when is "simple caricature" that includes "racist symbolism" okay? Is that also determined by political position?

�which, of course, is NOT straight. This is why I say he's using a tactic�when I hold someone to their own statements it's their own statements I hold them to, not the most compatible spin I can think of. And it's this statement that engenders the long post here. It targets my response, but I didn't go into it in depth at Blogcritics because the tactics were already louder than the data.

Femi Kuti - Beng Beng Beng Shit's hot. From the 1999 album Shoki Shoki, and it's downloadable/buyable, track at a time. We may have found another sin to indulge.

Quote of note:

Perfect 10 says Google is providing unauthorized access to thousands of its copyrighted pictures. The company charges a monthly membership fee of $25.50 for its Web site. Google displays the images from rogue Web sites operated in foreign countries, according to Perfect 10's lawsuit. The search engine also provides links to password hacking sites that provide ways to gain illegal access to Perfect 10's Web site, the suit alleges.

Tell your buddies to stop spamming our blogs and Google won't find your stuff so fast. Anyway… Adult Site Sues Google for Infringment November 22, 2004 By Associated Press LOS ANGELES (AP)—A Web site that sells photos of naked women is suing Google Inc., alleging that the online search engine leader is destroying its business by distributing links and passwords that provide free glimpses of the nude models. Beverly Hills-based Perfect 10 Inc. is seeking unspecified damages from Mountain View-based Google for alleged copyright infringement.

Suspect in shooting of hunters in Wisconsin says he was fired at first, court documents say - ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press Writer Tuesday, November 23, 2004 A man suspected in the killings of six hunters told investigators he began firing after a shot was fired at him and some of the victims called him racially derogatory names, according to documents filed Tuesday. …A hunter approached and told Vang he was on private property, and Vang started to leave as other hunters approached, the statement said. Vang said the hunters surrounded him and some called him racial slurs. Vang said he started walking away but looked back to see the first hunter point his rifle at him and then fire a shot that hit the ground 30 to 40 feet behind him, the statement said. Vang told investigators that's when he started firing at the group, according to the statement. Five people died at the scene and a sixth died Monday in a hospital. Two others were wounded. The dead were identified as the landowner, Robert Crotteau, 42; his son Joey, 20; Al Laski, 43; Mark Roidt, 28; Jessica Willers, 27; and Denny Drew, 55, who died Monday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield. Willers' father, Terry Willers, remained hospitalized Tuesday in fair condition, while the other wounded hunter was released.

Quote of note:

In only a few weeks, they have exhibited an arrogance that may have served them well on Capitol Hill but is inappropriate — and counterproductive — within the agency. Because the CIA is a secret agency, the turmoil caused by these four staffers is not particularly visible to the public, to the executive branch and to congressional supervisors. But turmoil it is.

Newcomers' Chokehold on the CIA By Thomas A. Twetten Thomas A. Twetten was associate deputy director and then deputy director of operations at the CIA from 1988 through 1993. November 23, 2004 The CIA and the intelligence community have been under close congressional oversight for about 30 years. This has sometimes saved the agency from momentary enthusiasms that could have gone badly awry. It has served as a healthy check on the executive branch. Even within the agency, most professionals recognize it as an important, if occasionally frustrating, reality. But the political culture in Congress is robustly different from the apolitical, professional culture within the intelligence agencies. There is nothing wrong with either culture, but their different needs occasionally get in the way of healthy communication. Staffers of the congressional intelligence committees, for example, whose job is to keep watch over programs, priorities and funds, have been known on occasion to make reckless allegations about the CIA in order to get the ear of the member of Congress they serve. This difference in attitudes can help explain the rocky start that my old friend Porter Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (with whom I trained as a new operations officer many years ago), has had as the new director of central intelligence. His biggest problem is that he brought with him from Congress four partisan staff members of the Intelligence Committee who have not adjusted from their old role as political advocates and critics. Instead, they are grabbing authority wherever they can and making decisions that should be left to the existing chain of command.

Stupidity of note:

Similarly, FDA drug safety advisor Curt Furberg said his invitation to participate in an FDA meeting about Vioxx in February was rescinded after the agency found that Furberg had "a point of view" on the drug and had done some research. The FDA has to be "pretty careful about" letting such people play an active role in drug safety discussions, an FDA spokesman said. This defense, however, only highlights the problem: the agency's absurd insistence that only scientists who haven't studied a drug and have no point of view about it should be entitled to attend meetings to decide how it should be regulated.

The CIA was just told to operate the same way. In fact, it should be pretty familiar to anyone who's been into corporate management. The whole Bush administration's approach comes straight from the "don't try this at home" section of the management science textbooks. The management style is called "firefighting," and i goes something like this

1. Do what you feel like doing
2. Catch as many broken pieces as you can before they hit the ground
3. Assign someone to clean up the mess made by the pieces hitting the ground
4. Go to step one

Oh, yeah. The link. An Ailing, Failing FDA November 23, 2004 As if any more evidence were needed that all is not well at the Food and Drug Administration, consider last week's testimony at a congressional hearing on the controversial painkiller Vioxx. FDA officials apparently showed favoritism to studies designed by drug maker Merck to play up Vioxx's easiness on the stomach while minimizing those that pointed out its increased heart risks. Testimony also revealed that mid-level FDA officials who warned about Vioxx were silenced or ostracized by the agency — calling to mind the treatment of CIA officials who tried to question the evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war. Merck pulled Vioxx off the market on Sept. 30 in response to studies suggesting it may be tied to 88,000 to 139,000 heart attacks, up to 40% of them fatal. Chief Executive Raymond V. Gilmartin insisted at the hearing that Merck didn't have solid evidence of problems until days before it pulled the plug; in fact, he said, his own wife had been taking Vioxx. Yet studies had warned of dangers for years. A Merck memo released last week showed that company scientists signaled as early as 1996 that the drug might contribute to heart troubles. Perhaps the most disturbing testimony involved the FDA's apparent complicity in keeping a dangerous drug on pharmacy shelves. Dr. David Graham, the associate director for science and medicine at the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, claimed his bosses had pressured him to change his negative conclusions about Vioxx.

Abbas Vows to Follow Arafat's Hard Line The new head of the Palestine Liberation Organization says he will not budge on questions about Jerusalem and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. By Ken Ellingwood and Maher Abukhater Special to the Times 1:29 PM PST, November 23, 2004 RAMALLAH, West Bank — Mahmoud Abbas, the newly named head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, vowed today to pursue Yasser Arafat's goals of achieving a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and securing a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. Abbas, nominated by leaders of the PLO's dominant Fatah movement as its candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, in effect launched his election campaign with a speech during a memorial ceremony for Arafat. The remarks seemed calculated to reassure hard-line Fatah loyalists that Abbas would not give in easily to Israel on issues central to Palestinians. Abbas, a 69-year-old former prime minister, is known as a pragmatist and critic of using violence to win statehood. His new prominence has raised hopes among Israeli and American officials for a more moderate Palestinian leadership — but fueled resistance among younger militants. "The path that the leader Yasser Arafat has taken did not reach its destination and we were not able to achieve all our goals," Abbas said during the brief speech, his first since Arafat died Nov. 11. "We still have a lot to do to achieve our national goals." Abbas said Palestinian leaders "will not rest until we achieve the right of return for our people and end the tragedy of living as refugees."

Felons list audit faults state [Registration required] A new state audit criticized how Florida put together a central voter database and a felons list that was sent to election supervisors this year. BY GARY FINEOUT [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - A new audit shows that Florida's attempt to rid the voting rolls of felons this past election season was marred by lax oversight by the Department of State, which failed to follow legal settlements and relied on seriously flawed data when it put together the controversial felons list. The audit, conducted by Kirby Mole, the inspector general who reports directly to Secretary of State Glenda Hood, says no evidence exists to suggest that state officials deliberately intended to purge black voters more aggressively than Hispanic voters. In July, Hood killed the felons list -- intended to be used by elections officials to purge voters -- after news reports pointed out problems with the list, among them that it contained too few Hispanics. Hood did not dispute the audit results Monday. Instead, she put the blame on an overburdened department and said she is taking steps to make sure that this year's problems with the list will not be repeated when Florida unveils a new central voter registration system in 2006. ''There was nothing intentional,'' Hood said. ``Everyone was trying very hard to get things in place and ready. There was just some management controls that were not in place. That will not be the situation in the future.''

Quote of note:

How many injured and ill soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines - like Chris Schneider - are left off the Pentagon�s casualty count? Would you believe 15,000? 60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to grant us an interview. They declined. Instead, they sent a letter, which contains a figure not included in published casualty reports: "More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq." Many of those evacuated are brought to Landstuhl in Germany. Most cases are not life-threatening. In fact, some are not serious at all. But only 20 percent return to their units in Iraq. Among the 80 percent who don�t return are GIs who suffered crushing bone fractures; scores of spinal injuries; heart problems by the hundreds; and a slew of psychiatric cases. None of these are included in the casualty count, leaving the true human cost of the war something of a mystery.

Iraq: The Uncounted �"In my vehicle there was my driver, there was my 50-cal gunner who was in a turret on top," says Schneider. "And then there was myself and another individual in back. We both had M249 machine guns." Schneider saw another convoy coming in his direction - a line of HETS (heavy equipment transports), big rigs on steroids, hogging the road. The first HET just missed hitting his truck. The second one did not. "It threw me up over my vehicle, over the HET and about 50 feet into the field on the left," says Schneider. "When I landed, the next HET in line had locked up their brakes to keep from rear ending the one that we hit. And when he came to rest, the first set of tires on his trailer were parked on my pelvis. And the second set had my lower leg wedged in it to the axle.

You, too, are hauling your carcass that distance. And you got bigger logistics problems than the people who, after all, are at home. Offensive Launched South of Baghdad More Than 5,000 U.S., British and Iraqi Troops Involved in Raids By Anthony Shadid Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, November 23, 2004; 1:05 PM BAGHDAD, Nov. 23 -- More than 5,000 U.S., British and Iraqi troops launched an offensive Tuesday against a swath of territory south of Baghdad where armed insurgents have roamed through the streets, imposed stringent Islamic law and carried out kidnappings and summary executions at checkpoints along the main roads. The campaign began with a series of raids this morning in Jabala, a town east of the most restive region, which Iraqis have dubbed the "Triangle of Death." The U.S. military said in a statement that it had detained 32 men believed to be insurgents. In the past three weeks, it said, U.S. and Iraqi forces have arrested nearly 250 insurgents.

Nearly Half of HIV Adults Are Women, Report Says By Patricia Reaney Reuters Tuesday, November 23, 2004; 9:52 AM LONDON, Nov 23 - Women make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults living with HIV and in sub-Saharan Africa the proportion rises to almost 60 percent, according to a UN report released on Tuesday. "Increasingly the face of AIDS is young and female," said Dr Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Kevin Drum

IS OUR ADULTS LEARNED?....In a recent Gallup survey, only 35% of Americans said they believed evolution was "a scientific theory well-supported by evidence." The other 65% either disagreed or weren't sure. Depressing, isn't it? Maybe so, but on the scale of human ignorance, is it really that bad? After all, according to an NSF survey done in 2001, 25% of Americans think the sun goes around the earth. That's depressing.

Abiola at Foreign Dispatches is right

I do think it's telling just how little people manage to retain of the science they learned in school, and I offer it as more ammunition in support of the contention that what schools ought to most concentrate on is teaching the capacity to think critically, not a Gradgrindian stuffing of students' heads full of facts they'll forget soon afterwards.

But can you imaging the negative impact on the economy universally applied critical thought would have?

Ambra at nykola.com is right.

I believe the Creed of the Modern Thinker is applicable to the cause of liberal morality:

"Everything is okay as long as you don't hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge."

Poppycock.

It IS poppycock. Because she just defined Libertarianism, not liberal morality.

Stop Relying On The Party (Or, How We Can Win) As this Brand Democrat deal has ramped up - way more than I ever expected - I keep hearing from the odd person or two that I should take this to the DNC or Dean or Other Important Democrat. Why? I'd be thrilled if the official Democratic Party adopted some of the ideas we've presented or if President Clinton called me up tomorrow, but that's beside the point. Stop waiting for the party to fix things, because that's not going to happen. Yes, they have a lot of power, but they are nothing without us, their constituency. When the GOP was the party essentially lost in the wilderness, post-Goldwater, Republicans didn't sit around waiting for the RNC to craft a strategy for them. They went ahead and did it anyway. Some of the things worked, some of them didn't. The things that worked caught on, and were integrated into the party message and ideology - this is the opportunity we have now.

I don't think Atrios will mind my lifting the entirety of this post. Requisite hat tip to Republic of T.

---

Marriage Rights Re-run

I've noticed that with many issues, during the peak of discussion/debate, people get a bit smarter about them but then as the issue fades away the stupids begin to take hold of the issue again and discussion of it gets dumber and dumber.


Two big myths about the rights (and responsibilities) conferred by marriage are that they a) can mostly be duplicated by private contract between two parties or b) are almost purely financial. These are both false, as a great number of rights given to people once they have a state-sanctioned marriage are specific rights granted by the state which could not possibly be duplicated by contract and which are not simply financial issues such as tax treatment. In addition, many of the falsely named anti-marriage amendments will make illegal plenty of arrangements would be possible simply through private contracting...

So, to remind us, I'll rerun a post I did awhile back:

In 1999, the GAO prepared a report listing all of the rights and benefits of civil marriage. They came up with 1,049 of them. You can read their list here.


Here's a shorter list. Obviously, if gay people had these rights civilization would end.

I've bolded a few of the ones which aren't explicitly financial and which would be difficult or impossible to establish by private contract.

Marriage Rights and Benefits
Learn some of the legal and practical ways that getting married changes your life.

Whether or not you favor marriage as a social institution, there's no denying that it confers many rights, protections, and benefits -- both legal and practical. Some of these vary from state to state, but the list typically includes:

Tax Benefits

Filing joint income tax returns with the IRS and state taxing authorities.
Creating a "family partnership" under federal tax laws, which allows you to divide business income among family members.

Estate Planning Benefits

Inheriting a share of your spouse's estate.
Receiving an exemption from both estate taxes and gift taxes for all property you give or leave to your spouse.
Creating life estate trusts that are restricted to married couples, including QTIP trusts, QDOT trusts, and marital deduction trusts.
Obtaining priority if a conservator needs to be appointed for your spouse -- that is, someone to make financial and/or medical decisions on your spouse’s behalf.

Government Benefits

Receiving Social Security, Medicare, and disability benefits for spouses.
Receiving veterans' and military benefits for spouses, such as those for education, medical care, or special loans.
Receiving public assistance benefits.

Employment Benefits
Obtaining insurance benefits through a spouse's employer.
Taking family leave to care for your spouse during an illness.
Receiving wages, workers' compensation, and retirement plan benefits for a deceased spouse.
Taking bereavement leave if your spouse or one of your spouse’s close relatives dies.

Medical Benefits
Visiting your spouse in a hospital intensive care unit or during restricted visiting hours in other parts of a medical facility.
Making medical decisions for your spouse if he or she becomes incapacitated and unable to express wishes for treatment.

Death Benefits
Consenting to after-death examinations and procedures.
Making burial or other final arrangements.

Family Benefits
Filing for stepparent or joint adoption.
Applying for joint foster care rights.
Receiving equitable division of property if you divorce.
Receiving spousal or child support, child custody, and visitation if you divorce.

Housing Benefits
Living in neighborhoods zoned for "families only."
Automatically renewing leases signed by your spouse.

Consumer Benefits
Receiving family rates for health, homeowners', auto, and other types of insurance.
Receiving tuition discounts and permission to use school facilities.
Other consumer discounts and incentives offered only to married couples or families.

Other Legal Benefits and Protections
Suing a third person for wrongful death of your spouse and loss of consortium (loss of intimacy).
Suing a third person for offenses that interfere with the success of your marriage, such as alienation of affection and criminal conversation (these laws are available in only a few states).
Claiming the marital communications privilege, which means a court can’t force you to disclose the contents of confidential communications between you and your spouse during your marriage.
Receiving crime victims' recovery benefits if your spouse is the victim of a crime.
Obtaining domestic violence protection orders.
Obtaining immigration and residency benefits for noncitizen spouse.
Visiting rights in jails and other places where visitors are restricted to immediate family.

This is from tonypierce.com + busblog. It all appeared contiguously ina single post, but blockquoting it like this, it's like found poetry.

somebody asked me in the comments why i was defending ron artest even though i have often said that as a Christian i believe in Jesus's invitation to turn the other cheek. and i can understand the gentleman's confusion. and good for him for paying attention because i believe the context of my writing about turning the other cheek was in regards to the pro-war red staters who, along with the president, identify themselves as Christian even though Christians believe in turning the other cheek. so, the question must be, how can i defend ron artest for attacking those who didnt strike him first, while not supporting president bush for doing the same thing to iraq? simple. america should be a little wiser than a guy who wears dennis rodman's number.

and i always defend the brothas. the underdogs. the misunderstood. the sons of soul. the unloved superheroes. my fellow americans who've turned the other cheek for quite a while.

and i was having a little conversation today with a very smart man who happened to be white and i jokingly asked him why the commissioner of the nba is white when almost all the players are black. and he said, not everythings about color. and i can understand a white man thinking that.

In commenting on Universities Record Drop In Black Admissions, Molotov says:

We predict that the black graduation rate will significantly increase, because of the better match between schools and students' abilities. Affirmative action costs blacks in future income, because unqualified folks at certain elite schools drop out when they would have done well at other academic institutions.

This is absurd. Harvard or UVa teaches nothing other colleges don't. The skills needed are the same. And frankly, competition is less valuable than education as a marker of success…those that pass the course work are qualified, and any number of people who were rejected outright would have passed the course work. The comment is apparently based on a preliminary draft of an article Richard Sanders, a law professor at UCLA. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good overview of the arguments Sandler presents.

His study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," found that:

• After the first year of law school, 51 percent of black students have grade-point averages that place them in the bottom tenth of their classes, compared with 5 percent of white students. "Evidence suggests that when you're doing that badly, you're learning less than if you were in the middle of a class" at a less-prestigious law school, Mr. Sander says. [P6: And yet this

  Two of the authors -- David L. Chambers, an emeritus professor of law, and Richard O. Lempert, a law professor, both at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor -- are no strangers to the affirmative-action debate. In 2000 they published a study that found that minority students who graduated from Michigan's law school between 1970 and 1996 were just as successful in their careers as their white peers, even though they started with significantly lower law-school grades and standardized-test scores.

  shows evidence suggests those particular indicators just aren't a good gauge.]
• Among students who entered law school in 1991, about 80 percent of white students graduated and passed the bar on their first attempt, compared with just 45 percent of black students. In a race-blind admissions system, the number of black graduates passing the bar the first time would jump to 74 percent, he says, based on his statistical analysis of how higher grades in less competitive schools would result in higher bar scores. Black students are nearly six times as likely as whites not to pass state bar exams after multiple attempts.
• Ending affirmative action would increase the number of new black lawyers by 8.8 percent because students would attend law schools where they would struggle less and learn more, earn higher grades, and have better success on the job market.

All specious as hell from the student's perspective.

Kathy Hart, a 2003 Harvard Law School graduate who is now working for a law firm in Boston, says racial preferences are not the issue. "The problem is not so much the entry; it's what happens while you're there," says Ms. Hart, who is black. As a minority law student, "you're more likely to feel isolated and marginalized, and feel like 'nobody gets my experience.'" That, in turn, can undermine a student's confidence, she says.

And since when does struggling less mean learning more? His last point i found especially interesting

• With the exception of the most-elite law schools, good grades matter more to employers than the law school's prestige.

…because we are, after all, talking about the very most-elite law schools he admits are the exception. A technical response to Sanders' article is available …I figure since Sanders leaked his article before publication, leaking the reply is cool. But I personally want to note a couple of things. First of all, it's obvious what the elite schools provide that makes attending one a valuable experience: connections. And since we know from Prof. Chambers and Lempert's work the success of one's education is not totally reflected by the grade markers in use (and we know this as regard women as well), since we know stereotype threat is a real problem because it transcends both race and gender, I would think we need more research along the lines of Factors Affecting the Completion of Undergraduate Degrees in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics for Underrepresented Minority Students, done for California State University, or Work in Progress - Cognitive, Affective and Social Factors Contributing to the Success in Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering Education, proposed at the 34th annual Frontiers in Education conference. Research that finds those additional factors for success so they can be used across the board.

It seems they've found the guy that threw the first beer on Artest. I saw more of the mess on CNN this morning and noticed something interesting. Check this clip at Cincinnati Black Blog. If you ignore the amusing special effect, you'll see the first guy Artest charged, the guy in the blue smock, just turned Artest's forward motion toward some hapless random individual. The guy in the blue smock is a cop. Has "POLICE," all caps, printed on his back.

E. J. Dionne's Talking Sense On Court Choices in today's Washington Post is a good read. It's about issues raised by Justice Stephen Breyer in a series of lectures at Harvard University, specifically on the error that is strict constructionism (it seems the good Justice was less direct than I in his description, but he gotta work with them folks).

Breyer's master concept is "active liberty." He argues that the point of our Constitution is democracy -- to guarantee "the principle of participatory self-government" that gives the people "room to decide and leeway to make mistakes." He suggests that justices who focus primarily on the Constitution's text and "the Framers' original expectations narrowly conceived" miss the Founders' basic intention. Their purpose, Breyer says, was "to create a framework for democratic government -- a government that, while protecting basic individual liberties, permits citizens to govern themselves, and to govern themselves effectively."

It was a week of lectures, so the very idea of a transcript at this point is absurd. But Dionne does go into the reason Justice Breyer is concerned:

…Breyer's worries about the new trends are rooted in his criticisms of the courts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He argues that they "underemphasized the constitutional importance of participation by black citizens in our representative democracy and overemphasized the importance of constitutional protections of property."

…the corrective that is apparently being reversed:

Later courts -- the New Deal and the Warren courts -- "emphasized the Constitution's protection of the citizen's freedom to participate in government" and thereby expanded "the scope of democratic self-government."

…and the reason it is appropriate to compare the current judiciary to that of the turn of the century:

…This new conservatism is actually a very old conservatism. It marks a return to the time before the mid-1930s when judges struck down all sorts of decent laws -- for example, regulating the number of hours people had to work without overtime pay -- reasoning that such statutes violated contract and property rights. Such rulings denied legislators the ability to resolve social problems and make our society more just. The pre-New Deal judiciary that many conservatives are now trying to restore was the truly "imperial judiciary."

Though I'm pretty sure the above quote is pure Dionne, it is dead on. See the article on overtime regulation, linked in the previous post.

Attempt to Block Rule On Overtime Thwarted Provision Deleted From Spending Bill By Amy Joyce Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 23, 2004; Page E03 An attempt to block the Bush administration's proposed changes in overtime rules was killed before the 2005 spending bill received final congressional approval over the weekend. Democrats attached an amendment to the Senate's version of the bill that would have overturned the overtime regulations, which went into effect in August. The amendment, which would have prevented any worker previously covered by overtime from losing that protection, was deleted in a conference committee. The White House had threatened to veto the entire $388 billion spending bill if the overtime amendment was included. Democrats say they will continue to fight to overturn the regulations next year.

Poul Anderson wrote one of my favorite novels, Brain Wave. It's out of print and only available as an downloadable secured ebook. In the book, the motion, materials and energies of the galaxy are such that a field that suppresses a broad class of reactions is generated and the Earth happened to be in that field when life developed. Then the Earth came out of that field, and neural activity was greatly affected…anything with a brain got massively more intelligent. One of the lead characters is developmentally disabled, and this is how he experienced the change:

It was funny the way he kept thinking things tonight. Usually he just went along, especially when he was as tired as now, but - maybe it was the moon - he kept remembering bits of things, and words sort of formed themselves in his head like someone was talking. He thought about his bed and how nice it would have been to drive home from work; only of course he got sort of mixed up when driving, and there´d been a couple of smashups. Funny he should have done that, because all at once it didn´t seem so hard: just a few signals to learn, and you kept your eyes open, and that was all. The sound of his feet was hollow on the road. He breathed deeply, drawing a cool night into his lungs, and looked upward, away from the moon. The stars were sure big and bright tonight. Another memory came back to him, somebody had said the stars were like the sun only further away. It hadn´t made much sense then. But maybe it was so, like a light was a small thing till you got up close and then maybe it was very big. Only if the stars were as big as the sun, they´d have to be awful far away. He stopped dead, feeling a sudden cold run through him. Jesus God! How far up the stars were! The earth seemed to fall away underfoot, he was hanging on to a tiny rock that spun crazily through an everlasting darkness, and the great stars burned and roared around him, so far up that he whimpered with knowing it.

This is the sensation you get when you've been studying something for a while and suddenly it clicks and everything is clear. Not just what you were immediately studying but its relationship to a myriad of connected things is in sharp focus. This could be a good feeling. Or, if it shows you a much vaster world of which you're the master of only a small shard, it could be frightening as hell. This is also very much like the change we culturally are undergoing because our collective capabilities are growing so quickly. I understand the Luddite; "I was fine, now this thing comes and I have a problem. The solution is to make the thing go away." I think your typical conservative isn't quite that bad; "Just slow down. After I die you can do whatever you want, okay?" And as a personal response, this is fine. A person has every right to decide to stick to what they know. But for a nation, a culture, that decision is the first step on the path to stasis

Around September of last year a number of media outlets made of point of decrying identity politics. Partly inspired by the flap over MEChA during Cruz Bustamente's run for Governor in California, identity politics was cast as the reason Progressives didn't connect with the mainstream. Well, it turns out all politics are identity politics and as proof I present Mr. Barak Obama. Obama's bipartisan appeal is blatantly race-based. The power of his oratory is based partly in what he says and partly in the fact that a Black man is saying it. Here's the interesting thing though: You can't slide the deuce of spades between what Obama's and Powell's biographies represent to the America and American politics. Both men have a biography that is part Abraham Lincoln allegory, part child-of-immigrant-makes-good story, and part rags-to-riches story all. It's everything every American wants to believe every American can achieve because most Americans, irrespective of race or politics, really do identify with the nation. That identification is why we all find racism so embarrassing. The down side of racism is obvious from the minority perspective but its irrefutable existence does damage to the American self-image�this has subtle but powerful repercussions. Obama and Powell represent resolution, the Progressive and Conservative views of what Black America can become as well as the means of doing so. They assure Americans that, in the final analysis, we can be counted on to recognize talent over race and this is important because if Americans do not believe they can overcome the race issues we face they will not be able to do so. That's why there was so much talk about Gen. Powell running for President a few years back (which was nonsense but made a lot of people feel good about the Republican Party's future). Gen. Powell was considered living proof of the GOP's inclusiveness, but to America at large he was proof that America is putting racism behind it� if even the Republican Party will appoint Black folks to high office, racism must be over, right? The very slightly increase in Black folks who are registered Republicans are the direct rewards the party received for allowing the General to represent them. It's also why so many people immediately declared Obama to be Presidential material. Barak Obama is the Democratic response to Colin Powell and a quite effective one because at the moment he has a few advantages:

Powell just spent four years being assigned to clean up other people's messes and generally disrespected by being left out of the loop

He represents racial reconciliation in his physical person.

That "love triumphs" thing is always effective.

And though Mr. Obama's new prominence does as little directly for Black Americans as Gen. Powell's prominence did, the Democratic Party will be rewarded for elevating him just as the Republican Party was rewarded for elevating Gen. Powell. I believe over the next two or three years Obama's presence will literally wipe out any gains the Republican Party made among the Black constituencies over the last ten or so years. And he doesn't have to be what George Carlin called "openly Black" to get these results. The majority of Black Americans will support a position that reduces the social separation between Black and white Americans and though General Powell is respected in the Black communities the vision he serves is not.

I just read an email exchange wherein a public figure was said not to be Black, irrespective of physical evidence. Which, of course, evoked the "what is Black anyway" question, and the "well, certainly not you" rejoinder, and aahhh� Can we all agree it's possible for a Black person to be totally fucked up? That way we don't have to have the discussion about whether or not to "de-list" they ass. We just get on with identifying and responding to the error. And while I'm at it, can we agree that an editorial cartoon of, say, Dr. Condoleeza Rice that did NOT have prominent lips and a gap in the teeth would not be recognized? Since I'm addressing silly distractions that should never have been considered seriously in the first place, I just though I'd mention that.

via Oliver Willis:

MALKIN�S OUT: Sometime back, Molly Ivins was dropped as a regular on The Pilot�s op-ed page for being �too stridently anti-Bush,� to quote Hartig�s e-mail letter to Lilley. Michelle Malkin had been added, giving another voice to the conservatives. But readers often took issue with her seemingly mean-spirited rantings and suggested that she be dropped. Well, she�s outta here, silenced for being �too stridently anti-liberal,� the assessment of the editorial board, Hartig said. �I was really put off by her penchant for name-calling and ad hominem attack. I think we can do much better,� said editorial writer Don Luzzatto. Says fellow editorial writer Bronwyn Lance Chester: �I think she habitually mistakes shrill for thought-provoking and substitutes screaming for discussion. She�s an Asian Ann Coulter. �I also think that, like Coulter, she says outrageous things just to get TV appearances and book deals. She�s the worst of what�s wrong with punditry today. She adds absolutely nothing to genuine political discourse.�

Hopefully it's the start of a trend.

Quote of note:

In a statement, Traffic said it was "determined to promote the title respectfully," given the sensitivity of the subject.

That's actually not possible. Anyway� 'Docu-game' recreates JFK assassination Associated Press Published on: 11/21/04 GLASGOW, Scotland � A British company said Sunday it was releasing a video game recreating the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The Glasgow-based firm Traffic said "JFK Reloaded" was an educational "docu-game" that would help disprove conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death. The game is due to be released Monday, the 41st anniversary of the shooting in Dallas. Traffic said the game challenged players to recreate the three shots fired at the president's car by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository.

If there was no desire to look at anyone's tax return, the provision would not have been there. If it were so innocent, it would never have been said some anonymous staffer stuck it in when no one was looking.

Mr. Scofield said he found it strange that senators felt they were taken by surprise. He noted that the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Bill Young, Republican of Florida, had discussed it briefly on the House floor, and that the language had been available since Thursday for Senate staff members to read.

So stop, okay?

---

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G.O.P. Says Motive for Tax Clause in Budget Bill Was Misread By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - Democratic leaders and senators from both parties expressed outrage on Sunday about an obscure provision in the huge end-of-session spending bill that would allow the chairmen of the Appropriations Committees and their staff assistants to examine Americans' income tax returns. Republican leaders said that their motives had been misread and that there was never any intention to invade the privacy of taxpayers. They promised that the provision would be deleted from the bill in a special session on Wednesday before the spending measure, which cleared Congress on Saturday night, was sent to President Bush for his signature. Representative Ernest Istook, Republican of Oklahoma, who was responsible for the insertion of the tax provision in the 3,000-page, $388 billion legislation that provides financing for most of the government, issued a statement on Sunday saying that the language had actually been drafted by the Internal Revenue Service and that "nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized." Mr. Istook is chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that has authority over the I.R.S. budget. John D. Scofield, the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said that the purpose of the provision was to allow investigators for the top lawmakers responsible for financing the I.R.S. to have access to that agency's offices around the country and tax records so they could examine how the money was being spent. There was never any desire to look at anyone's tax returns, he said.

Quote of note:

Civil rights cases made up a tiny fraction of the Justice Department's total of 99,341 criminal prosecutions in 2003. The study found, however, that only civil rights and environmental prosecutions were down from 1999 to 2003 as the total caseload rose by about 10 percent.

Enforcement of Civil Rights Law Declined Since '99, Study Finds By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 (AP) - Federal enforcement of civil rights laws has dropped sharply since 1999, as the level of complaints received by the Justice Department has remained relatively constant, according a study released Sunday. Criminal charges of civil rights violations were brought against 84 defendants last year, down from 159 in 1999, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The study also found that the number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation or another federal investigative agency recommended prosecution in civil rights cases fell by more than one-third, from more than 3,000 in 1999 to just over 1,900 last year. Federal court data also show that the government has sought fewer civil sanctions against civil rights violators. One of the study's authors, David Burnham, said the results showed that civil rights enforcement dropped across the board in President Bush's first term in office. "Collectively, some violators of the civil rights laws are not being dealt with by the government," Professor Burnham said. "This trend, we think, is significant." It is unlikely the decline has occurred because of fewer civil rights violations occurring, the study suggests. The number of complaints about possible violations received by the Justice Department has remained at about 12,000 annually for each of the past five years. The Justice Department had no comment about the study.

G.O.P. Constituencies Split on Tax Change By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - Stephen Moore, the president of a conservative fund-raising group, wants to overhaul the tax code. So do Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group. They just don't agree on how to do it. Even though it will be months before President Bush proposes an overhaul of the income tax, key Republican groups are already divided about how or even whether to proceed. Regardless of which path Mr. Bush pursues, he is likely to be pulled by conflicts between parts of his political base. Economic conservatives share an ideological belief in flattening income tax rates and eliminating as many tax preferences as possible. And business groups want to preserve breaks for research, oil drilling, health insurance, equipment leasing and scores of other purposes. Christian conservatives want to promote charitable deductions and "family values," and may want to defend tax breaks for married couples with children. "People are not going to give the kind of support necessary for tax reform that leaves the investor class untaxed," said Dr. Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Commission. "That is not going to be politically viable." These differing constituencies pose a significant challenge for Mr. Bush, so much so that many Republican lawmakers are openly doubtful about whether to attempt a tax overhaul. Some Senate Republicans wonder about public enthusiasm for tax reform, despite widespread discontent with the complexity and apparent unfairness of the current tax code. "You can't very well claim there was a mandate in this election for tax reform," said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. "It was just one of many ideas, and it wasn't specific. There is no consensus in the country about what to do."

John McCain:

MR. RUSSERT: More American troops? SEN. McCAIN: I've said that for--since a year ago last August. MR. RUSSERT: How many more do you think we need, Senator, in all honesty? SEN. McCAIN: I would say at least 40,000 or 50,000 more, but... MR. RUSSERT: Where are you going to find them? SEN. McCAIN: I think you can find them, but it's an enormous strain. We also have to plan on increasing the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. Among others, General McCaffrey is a guy I admire. He says the--you need to increase the Army by about 80,000 and the Marines by 20,000 to 30,000. I don't dispute that. He and others tell me that that's about the right numbers.

And this is for Iraq. No one is even considering the troops it would take to invade Iran while "stabilizing" Iraq…a task everyone admits will take years.

SEN. McCAIN: I'm not--I don't believe we're "close," but we certainly should be very concerned, disturbed and even alarmed, but there's been information about this for a long period of time. The IAEA had given us a lot of that information. The next step obviously is to try to get the Security Council to act in some meaningful fashion. But, you know, Tim, this is a harsh comment, but at the end of the day, it's the United States of America that may have to act if we act, but I hope that we can dissuade them through other means. Well, of course, the first attempt would be to get the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions. So we'll see, but it's a very great challenge. MR. RUSSERT: Would you be disappointed if the Israelis did to Iran what they did to Iraq in 1981 and have a pre-emptive strike on the nuclear reactor? SEN. McCAIN: Well, first of all, it isn't so easy because the Iranians have these facilities spread all over Tehran. You couldn't do it in one strike. So from a practical standpoint, it would be difficult. Second of all, I don't see how it would do anything but provoke probably a conflict between Israel and Iran, and we want to avoid that at all costs. And I think the Israelis recognize that. I don't think the Israelis are at a point where they would feel that they have to do that. It's one thing to attack a reactor in Iraq 20-some years ago. It's something entirely different to take on that challenge now. MR. RUSSERT: What's our timetable? How much time do we have for Iran to stand down? SEN. McCAIN: I don't know. I would think we're talking about a matter of months rather than years.

Education today: readin', writin', rentin' Goal is to get kids in top public schools - Carrie Sturrock, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, November 22, 2004 The Anderson family, fresh from Texas, figured they would rent a place in Orinda for six months and then buy a home. Nearly six years later, they're in their fourth rental and have experienced everything from ancient kitchens to raw sewage in their showers in a house they dubbed "Andersonville Horror." And yet they continue to rent for one simple reason: The schools in this wealthy East Bay suburb are among the best in the state. "Whatever it takes," said Melanie Anderson, who stays at home to care for the couple's two school age children. "If we have to keep renting, we will keep renting." Many families, from the Peninsula to the North Bay, rent in prohibitively expensive housing markets with excellent schools even though many can afford to buy in cheaper towns not too far away. That often means cramped quarters and surrendering perks like home equity and the freedom to install carpet or paint walls. And it underscores the extreme variance in school quality throughout the Bay Area, where top-notch districts sometimes border those with failing schools. "I will rent until my kids finish school," said Venera Maysuryants, who moved to Lafayette from San Francisco even though she and her husband, who own an upholstery business, could afford a house elsewhere. "When you have your own house, you feel better. When you're renting an apartment, you're throwing money away." Still, rents are much cheaper than monthly mortgage payments in many communities where home prices approach $1 million.

It Doesn't End With Fallouja November 22, 2004 A Marine general commented last week after his men ousted nearly all Iraqi guerrillas from Fallouja that the two weeks of fighting had "broken the back of the insurgency." If only it were that simple. Marines did a good job of purging enemies from the city, but as the general spoke, flames and smoke rose in other Sunni Triangle cities in the north and west; foreigners and Iraqis were beheaded, shot or killed by suicide bombers; and political parties vowed to boycott national elections that the Bush administration has put forth as a harbinger of democracy in a nation where the concept is a stranger. More than 50 U.S. soldiers were killed in the Fallouja fight, which began Nov. 8 in one of the cities where Sunni Muslims are the majority, and the U.S. death toll in Iraq has now passed 1,200. An estimated 1,200 insurgents were killed in Fallouja as well. The difficulties of pacifying Iraq were obvious last week. Insurgents showed the depths to which they're capable of sinking when evidence surfaced that Margaret Hassan, the kidnapped director of CARE International in Iraq, had been shot to death. And even as Marines tried to kill the last remnants of resistance in Fallouja, guerrillas stormed police stations in the northern city of Mosul, where more than 80% of police responded by abandoning their posts.

Quote of note:

In the Compton Courthouse, the barriers between people that exist elsewhere seem to have been reconfigured into one enormous, invisible shield—with lawyers and judges, clerks and court reporters all together on the same side. Public defenders vie for Compton assignments because jurors here are more likely to be wary of the police and to sympathize with defendants. They love to tell the story of the colleague whose homeless client was charged with felony assault for allegedly pelting police officers with rocks. He concluded his closing argument with: "Wah, wah, wah." (His client was acquitted of the charge.) "If you've been through the rabbit hole the other way, you tend to have a different take on things," says Andy Thorpe, a longtime public defender. Prosecutors seek out Compton because a win here enhances their credibility. "I tell my trial lawyers if they can successfully prosecute a case in Compton," Kay says, "they can do it anywhere."

The Love Court At the Compton Courthouse, the public defenders love the juries, the prosecutors love the challenge, and at least one judge calls it 'the greatest place in the world.' By Sara Catania Sara Catania is a freelance journalist living in Los Angeles. November 21, 2004 In most urban American settings, the Compton Courthouse would seem a modest structure. But here, rising 14 stories above the flats of South L.A.—a low-slung landscape of scrappy bungalows, storefront churches and off-brand retailers hawking fried turkey or discount electronics—it's a formidable presence. From a distance, the block of white concrete striped with black windows resembles an enormous cage, or a prison cell. It's a tempting target: Police at one point counted 55 bullet holes in the building's western façade. Closer in, graffiti appears on every markable surface, sprayed on the front steps, scraped into the aluminum elevator frames and etched into the windows. Decades of courthouse lore perpetuate Compton's gangsta image: a murder in the parking lot, an attempted carjacking of an attorney a block away and the courtroom stabbings of two bailiffs by a defendant. Bulletproof windows were installed years ago, after a judge found a potshot lodged in the bathroom in his chambers. The courthouse handles all the crimes in South L.A.—including more killings a year than any other jurisdiction in California. At any given time there are between 40 and 50 murder cases "in the building." It is the largest of the 10 branch courthouses in Los Angeles County, and its nearly 800 workers may be the most punctual; get a parking spot in the underground employee lot and you're all but assured that you never have to venture outside. Stephen R. Kay, who runs the courthouse district attorney's office, calls the environment "siege-like" and compares it to the film "Fort Apache: The Bronx." Yet the Compton Courthouse has another, less-celebrated reputation—one of tolerance, humor and humanity. In the midst of a hostile climate, perhaps in part because of it, a close camaraderie and sense of common purpose have flourished. The place has the feel of a small town, where hard work is respected and eccentricities are indulged, and it has become an assignment of choice among judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. Those who land positions here tend to stay, and those who leave often wind up coming back. A court reporter who trained at Compton when she was a student in the late 1970s returned after graduation and has been there ever since. One judge met his future wife at the courthouse when he was a criminal defense attorney and she was a courtroom clerk. They were married in a church he can see from the window in his chambers. Lucy Howard, who has worked as a bailiff in Compton for more than 20 years, considers the courthouse a sanctuary, its workers ambassadors of righteousness. "You don't say it, but you tend to know that you're all on the same mission," she says. "It just touches you deep in your heart." Over the years, many a defendant has told her that Compton is known in the community as the "Love Court." "It's not like they're here for anything nice. It's not like it's a social visit," she says. "But they tell me, 'You go to Compton, you get love.' "

I know Germany is considering pretty much abandoning the U.S. capital markets. They say it's just as easy and less stressful to raise capital elsewhere. That would be bad. I know that even discussing the possibility of a run on dollars means things are really iffy. I know the handling (or non-handling) of any future invasions and the national debt and deficit will be what the world watches. What I don't know, given that it's human reactions more than rational economic considerations that drive decisions, is what is the tipping point? Worldwide effects of sinking dollar Its decline to a nine-year low is impacting everything from the price of goods at Wal-Mart to the vigor of Europe's economy. By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor The sinking US dollar in recent weeks has raised what is suddenly a top concern from Washington to Berlin and Beijing: Is America's currency undergoing a benign adjustment or a precipitous plunge? So far, the dollar's slide to nine-year lows doesn't reflect panic. But some analysts say a run on the dollar is possible. And even an orderly drop could affect everything from mortgages to prices at Wal-Mart. The good news for Americans: It's getting easier for manufacturers to sell products overseas, and more likely that tourists from Germany will flock to US National Parks. But the downside could be significant. America, the world's leading importer of goods, is now buying them at higher prices. And if the dollar's dive makes foreign investors wary, US interest rates may have to rise to attract buyers of federal debt. More broadly, it's a shock to the global economy. Sunday in Germany, officials from the Group of 20 industrial and major developing countries called for the United States to cut its federal deficit, which is seen as a key factor in the dollar's fall.

Powell Starts New Mideast Peace Mission Powell Tries to Revive Mideast Peace Talks As Israel Weighs West Bank Pullback Before Elections The Associated Press Nov. 21, 2004 - Secretary of State Colin Powell embarked Sunday on a mission to revive the Middle East peace process after Yasser Arafat's death, saying he will ask Israel to help with the upcoming Palestinian election to pick a successor. Israel said it would consider pulling back troops from disputed areas in the West Bank. On his way to the Middle East, Powell told reporters on his plane that U.S.-Palestinian cooperation in setting up the elections "will encourage a degree of cooperation that can spread into other areas." "This is a moment of opportunity," Powell said. "I'll be encouraging both sides to do everything they can to make sure that this election comes off and that the maximum number of Palestinians get the opportunity to participate." He said there were "many things" the Israelis could do to help, and he will discuss them during a Monday meeting with Israeli officials.

Bush fund-raisers won appointments Many recognized after 2000 race By Sharon Theimer, Associated Press | November 21, 2004 WASHINGTON -- One-third of President Bush's top fund-raisers during his 2000 campaign or their spouses were appointed to positions in his first administration, from ambassadorships in Europe to seats on policy-setting boards, an Associated Press review found. The perks for 246 ''pioneers" who raised at least $100,000 also included overnight stays at the White House and Camp David, parties at the White House and Bush's Texas ranch, state dinners with world leaders, and overseas travel with US delegations to the Olympics and other events, the review found.

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His idea was a twist on the current technique for research cloning. Before implanting the DNA from a skin cell into an egg, scientists would turn off a gene that helps direct the formation of the trophectoderm, an outer layer of cells that is crucial in the first stages of development and which eventually forms the placenta. With this gene silenced, the trophectoderm does not form properly. All the cells eventually die, but scientists can still harvest embryonic-type stem cells from the mass, according to Dr. Felix Beck, a professor at the University of Leicester and one of the authors of a scientific paper in May that described how the gene affects the trophectoderm in mice. "The embryo is forming," Hurlbut said. "And unless it forms itself properly, it is not an embryo."

New technique eyed in stem-cell debate By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | November 21, 2004 With the nation deadlocked over the morality of using human embryos for research, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics is quietly promoting a proposal that might allow scientists to create the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, offering a potential path out of the controversy. Dr. William Hurlbut, a Stanford bioethicist and staunch opponent of research on human embryos, has traveled the country developing and winning support for the idea in consultation with a small circle of scientists and conservative ethicists. The procedure, called altered nuclear transfer, would engineer a human egg that could generate cells with the full potential of embryonic stem cells, but without ever forming an actual embryo. The technique has not been attempted with human cells, but biologists consider it feasible with today's technology. The larger question is whether the technique could overcome the strong ethical and religious opposition that has led to sharp limits on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell experiments and turned embryonic stem-cell research into a flashpoint in American politics. So far, three critics of current methods for creating embryonic stem cells -- Archbishop William J. Levada of San Francisco, Robert George, a member of the president's bioethics council, and Nigel M. de S. Cameron, a leading intellectual in the evangelical movement -- have seen Hurlbut's proposal and said they believe it could offer a way around their moral objections. Hurlbut will present his idea to the bioethics council early next month. A proposal acceptable to moral conservatives would mark the first major shift in the debate over human embryonic stem cells since President Bush issued his policy Aug. 9, 2001, barring federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells created after that date. Many scientists see the cells, which can become any tissue in the body, as a uniquely powerful tool for medical research and possibly curing diseases. But religious conservatives have staunchly opposed the work because it involves destroying 5-day-old embryos. In a debate that has come to resemble the seemingly irreconcilable American divide over abortion, Hurlbut's proposal offers the tantalizing hope of a middle ground. "In this country, it is almost as if we would rather argue than find a solution," Hurlbut said. "It would be so much better if we could find a way to produce these cells with a genuine social consensus behind them."

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During one recent meeting, scientists disagreed on such basic issues as whether it would be unethical for a human embryo to begin its development in an animal's womb, and whether a mouse would be better or worse off with a brain made of human neurons. "This is an area where we really need to come to a reasonable consensus," said James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health's Stem Cell Task Force. "We need to establish some kind of guidelines as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not to do."

Of mice, men and in-between Scientists debate blending of human, animal forms By Rick Weiss In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research. Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Living test beds Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact — not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments. But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?

NFL dropout Ricky Williams chilling in Sierra He's been found studying the healing arts - Tom FitzGerald, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, November 21, 2004 Grass Valley , Nevada County -- He's no longer Ricky Williams the football player. He plans to become Ricky Williams the holistic healer. It's been more than 10 months since Williams, one of the premier running backs in the National Football League, last ran off tackle for the Miami Dolphins and four months since he suddenly announced his retirement at age 27. Then he dropped from sight. But now Williams has turned up about as far away from professional football as you can get, as a student of the ancient Indian medical system known as Ayurveda. In the Sierra foothills, no less. "I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate,'' he said, "and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'' Williams gave up the $5 million he would have earned this season, which would have been his sixth in the NFL, amid reports that he faced a league suspension this year for substance abuse. He is on a short list of topflight players, including Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, who have quit in their prime. Williams is now a month into a 17-month course at the California College of Ayurveda (pronounced I-yur-vay-da) in Grass Valley, a city of 12,000 in the Gold Country, about 45 miles northeast of Sacramento. Since he called then-Dolphins head coach Dave Wannstedt on July 23 to give him the shocking news that he was quitting football, Williams has been to Australia, Europe, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Japan, Southern California, Fiji, then back to a campground in Australia, where he lived in a tent for $7 a day.

Falwell's School Joins Others in Teaching Law to Their Flocks The legal program at the reverend's university represents the latest effort by the religious right to change American society. By Emma Schwartz Times Staff Writer November 21, 2004 LYNCHBURG, Va. — What Debra Meador read disturbed her. It didn't seem right that schoolchildren were once barred from holding prayer groups after class. Or that the Ten Commandments couldn't be displayed in a government building. So at 34, the human relations specialist from Lynchburg made good on a longtime interest by enrolling in law school. But unlike most prospective lawyers, she applied to only one place. "I wanted to take it in a Christian setting," said Meador, a member of the inaugural law class at Liberty University, a Baptist college founded here in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "I don't believe anyone could be neutral. We're willing to tell you what we believe and to follow that." The school, like Meador, who aspires to argue cases before the Supreme Court, has grand designs. Right now, it has only 60 students and six faculty members. Provisional accreditation by the American Bar Assn. — which certifies that a school has been evaluated on the quality of its legal education and allows students to sit for the bar exam in any state — is at least two years away. But by teaching law from a Christian perspective, Falwell hopes to train a cadre of Christian lawyers to fight what he sees as the growing secularization of public life across the country. And the school plans to offer select students hands-on experience with a law firm that takes on constitutional issues. That would occur when Liberty Counsel, a legal organization in Orlando, Fla., that focuses on cases involving religion and traditional values, moves its legislative arm to the campus. Best known for establishing in 1979 the Moral Majority, one of the first evangelical efforts to affect political discourse, Falwell sees the law school as an extension of his mission.

Wal-Mart Effect Moves Into the Grocery Aisle A Supercenter is changing shopping habits in the Coachella Valley …A typical Supercenter does $400,000 a week in food sales, said Jonathan Ziegler of PUPS Investment Management in Santa Barbara. At that rate, he said, the La Quinta store will siphon about $20 million a year in food sales from grocery stores in the area. But at the same time, the Supercenter will bring in as much as $850,000 a year in municipal sales tax revenue, the city of La Quinta calculates. And it laid out the welcome mat, giving the developer $2 million in infrastructure improvements as an incentive.

How much sales tax revenue did the stores that are having $20,000,000 a year in sales siphoned from them bring in? Seriously, if Wal-Mart's prices are so much lower (as the article says) wouldn't that generate less sales tax that the purchase of the same goods pre-Wal-Mart?

Bill Clears Way for Government to Cut Back College Loans By GREG WINTER and DIANA JEAN SCHEMO The federal government will be able to require millions of college students to shoulder more of the cost of their education under the new spending bill approved yesterday by the House and Senate. The government moved to change its formula for college aid last year, but was blocked by Congress. Now, however, no such language appears in the appropriations bill lawmakers are considering, clearing the way for the government to scale back college grants for hundreds of thousands of low-income students. Nearly 100,000 more students may lose their federal grants entirely, as Congress considers legislation that could place more of the financial burden for college on students and their families. The cutback stems from a revision to the formula governing virtually all of the nation's financial aid. Last year, the Department of Education changed the formula on its own, angering members of Congress who contended that it was a backdoor way of cutting education spending without facing the public. The department retorted that it was merely following the law. In response, Congress passed legislation in the fall of 2003 to suspend the new formula for at least a year. The Senate put forward the same measure this year, and many members of the House said they also expected the new formula would wait at least until Congress updates the Higher Education Act, which will probably take the better part of the coming year. But keeping the old formula in place for another year would add an extra $300 million in grants for college students to a program that is already running at a shortfall, the Office of Management and Budget said. So, the bill approved yesterday, brokered by Congressional leaders in a conference committee, eliminates a provision that would have barred the Education Department from changing the eligibility formula. A Senate staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the White House insisted the provision be dropped, citing the shortfall, and House Republicans were adamant in their agreement to do so. "They are throwing students out of the opportunity to seek a college education," said Senator Jon S. Corzine, the New Jersey Democrat who wrote the amendment to stop the changes last year, and introduced a similar provision this year that did not survive the conference committee. "It is now clear to me that this was a backdoor attempt to cut funding from the Pell grant program."

Mr. Bush's Better World Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page B06 THE BUSH administration shrugged its shoulders last week at the genocide in Sudan's western province of Darfur. At an extraordinary meeting of the U.N. Security Council in Kenya, it sponsored a resolution that not only failed to advance those that passed in July and September but actually stepped back. The veiled threat of sanctions on Sudan's government was dropped. So was the demand that Sudan's government disarm and prosecute its allies in the Janjaweed death squads, which have burned villages, raped and murdered their inhabitants, and left nearly 2 million people homeless and at risk of starvation. The Bush administration presents this abdication as a triumph. It argues that, by tolerating a weak U.N. resolution on Darfur, it was able to secure a unanimous 15-0 Security Council vote and that this may bring about peace in the separate conflict between Sudan's Muslim-led northern government and the Christian and animist southern rebels.

The Washington Post Ombudsman on those cartoons of Dr. Rice that so perturbs people who really don't like any other Black folks:

I could tell from the mail I got, particularly on the Rall drawing, that at least some of it was from people who had been told about it and were probably part of a campaign, although clearly many people didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. Setting aside last week's episode, this kind of thing has happened before in which a special-interest group picks something that appeared only on the paper's Web site and uses it as part of a campaign or mass e-mailing to make a point. That damages the paper in the process because large numbers of people are told that something appeared in The Post. On the other hand, as one reader argues, "The Post's responsibility is the same regardless of where the strip appeared." Typically, newspapers have a lot more people and resources than the offshoots that look after their Web sites. So episodes such as these raise the question of whether news organizations are hurting themselves by not having enough resources to check the raw material that is fed into the system. On the other hand, this material is widely available on many other sites, so there is no stopping someone determined to find it. After a few days on The Post's Web site, the Rall cartoon was pulled and, according to Doug Feaver, washingtonpost.com executive editor, Rall's work has been dropped from the site. Feaver said the decision was a "cumulative" one based on some earlier drawings as well. Feaver said he felt the Oliphant cartoon was "within the normal bounds of editorial cartoonery, although I understand that others could disagree."

Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos Malnutrition Nearly Double What It Was Before Invasion By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A01 BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government. After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The Power-Values Approach to Policy Move to State Raises Rice's Profile By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A08 Condoleezza Rice, whom President Bush nominated last week as his next secretary of state, was pegged early in her career as a disciple of the "realist" school exemplified by Henry A. Kissinger, more concerned with great-power relations than moral issues. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she has been viewed as an enabler of the "neoconservative idealism" that believes evil governments must be confronted -- and toppled.

I think I'd like to hear that from Dr. Rice's own mouth.

At their core, her speeches and writings reveal a determined individual willing to knock aside established doctrines, especially in this period of international turmoil, but grounded in a strong belief in American values and the essential good of U.S. power.

You know what believing in "the essential good" of your power means, right? It means you're taking the "ends justifies the means" position. I wonder if anyone realizes the active threat a government with this face represents to every nation in the world. Well, except England, I guess. Or maybe especially England…that would explain a lot too.

Congress Agrees on Tight Budget for U.S. $388 Billion Spending Bill Bars Officials From Requiring Abortion Services By Dan Morgan and Helen Dewar Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A01 Congress reached final agreement last night on a $388 billion spending bill funding 13 government departments and dozens of domestic agencies in 2005, after last-minute objections from abortion rights advocates threatened to delay or derail the entire measure. House passage came on a vote of 344 to 51. Later in the evening, the Senate gave its approval, 65 to 30.

I'm sorry but the Democrats wimped out again.

The abortion language remained in the spending bill, but late yesterday, Senate opponents agreed not to block its consideration after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) promised to schedule a vote in the near future on a bill drafted by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to repeal the provision.

They settled for a promise to vote on repealing the provision some time in the future. I'm investing in coat hanger manufacturers.