Poor, poor Baldpate.

Don't worry, though. I'm sure he's banked enough to get by...he's never struck me as stupid, just disingenuous.

Administration Agitprop
Saturday, January 8, 2005; Page A18

"IT WAS BAD judgment." That was the response of Armstrong Williams, television commentator and pundit, when we asked yesterday whether he had, as alleged in a USA Today story, accepted $241,000 of government money in exchange for promoting the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind education reform legislation. Mr. Williams also confirmed that the contract he signed with Ketchum Inc., a public relations firm hired by the Education Department, not only obliged him to run advertisements during his show but to also "regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts" and to encourage other producers to "periodically address NCLB" as well. Mr. Williams, a commentator who appeared on MSNBC, CNN and Fox, as well as on his own syndicated program, "On the Right Side," also published a handful of articles directly or indirectly praising the Bush administration's education policy, none of which noted that he was accepting money from the Education Department. Asked whether he was aware of the codes of ethics published by multiple journalists' and broadcasters' associations, which explicitly forbid members to accept money for promoting particular views, Mr. Williams said, "I don't know anything about these kinds of documents."

PTCruiser asked

Does anybody with sense enough to come in out of the rain really believe that prosecuting the killers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner will actually lift the cloud hanging over the state of Mississippi?

...and though this isn't about Mississippi it does answer the question.

For Civil Rights Crusaders, Arrest Brings Relief

By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 8, 2005; Page B01

For Lawrence Guyot Jr., Thursday's arrest of a suspect in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi was not only a philosophical vindication but also something deeply personal.

Four decades ago, as a field worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Guyot almost joined Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in their drive to the Mississippi town of Philadelphia to investigate the bombing of a black church. At the last moment, he decided not to go. But he advised them that with all the national media attention to a voter registration drive in the state that summer, they would be perfectly safe.

Their bodies were found 40 days later. More than 40 years would pass before authorities would arrest a reputed Ku Klux Klan member on murder charges.

"I prayed to live until this day," Guyot, a program monitor with the D.C. Office of Childhood Development, said yesterday. "We fought for this. We dreamed of this. And now it is reality. It's a statement that political assassinations are not acceptable in the state of Mississippi. Never again."

U.S. Is Haunted by Initial Plan For Iraq Voting
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 - In its struggle to transfer sovereignty back to Iraq last spring, the Bush administration made some tough decisions about the makeup of the political system and how Iraqi elections could occur quickly and fairly. But now a little-noticed decision on election procedures has come back to haunt administration officials, just weeks before the vote is to take place, administration and United Nations officials say.

The fundamental decision set up one nationwide vote for a new national assembly, rather than elections by districts and provinces. With a violent insurgency spreading through the Sunni Arab areas of the country, it now looks as if fewer Sunnis will vote, distorting the balance of the legislature and casting doubt on whether the election will be seen as legitimate.

According to officials planning the election, the decision was driven by the realities of an unstable Iraq and the unrelenting pressure to speed the country to a vote by the end of January 2005, as demanded by many Iraqis. To make that deadline, it was believed, there was no time to conduct a census or go through the politically divisive chore of drawing district lines.

A national constituency also made it easier to meet the demands of the former exiles installed in power in Baghdad to let millions of Iraqis living outside the country vote, and the demands of others to ensure that 25 percent of the legislators were women. The experts reasoned that it would be much easier to find women for slates running nationwide than for each of many smaller districts.

"We looked at a lot of alternatives and presented them to the Iraqis and everyone else," said an official involved in the decision-making process. "Basically, a nationwide constituency solved a lot of problems and made our lives a lot easier."

But now, with the violent insurgency and more than 7,000 candidates, many in alliances with other candidates, running for 275 seats nationwide, the disadvantages of the current system are becoming all too apparent, according to American, Iraqi and United Nations officials.

For one thing, these officials say, there is no possibility of postponing the election selectively in those districts gripped by the insurgency. For another, the expected low turnout in perhaps a fifth of the country, where the Sunni minority lives, will presumably lessen the chances of candidates who are popular there.

This problem is discouraging Sunnis from running or campaigning, and a failure of these candidates to win proportionate to their share of Iraq's population, could easily reinforce the Sunnis' alienation from the Shiite majority.

Thus an election intended to bring Iraq together and quell the insurgency could produce the opposite outcome, in part because of the way it has been organized.

One of the regulars (read the comments to see who!) said:

p6 created a forum which welcomes the intellectual discussion of racial issues. He created a body of prior work, and creates stimulating analysis on a daily basis. One doesn't have to be especially observant to see that it's a lot of work. I don't know what p6 hopes for as a goal, but I do hope he feels rewarded.

Feels rewarded? I don't think I'll live long enough to feel rewarded, which is not an "I've been to the mountaintop" thing. It's that by my understanding of things I expect to be rheumy and bedridden by the time what I'm doing now has any substantial impact.

What am I doing? Attempting to provide an object lesson or two. Hoping enough people see the utility of keeping reality in mind that it becomes at least a minor trend.

So the WTO has ruled the USofA violated treaty obligations by forbidding Internet gambling. Yes, that sounds stupid to me too. So does the USofA'S stated problem with all this.

Officials from the trade representative said that Antigua and Barbuda, as well as the W.T.O., were interfering with United States sovereignty

None of this seems to matter very much to Americans that want to gamble.

While the United States government has deemed such gambling illegal, about half of the roughly $7.6 billion lost in wagers last year came from American bettors, industry analysts said.

We love our games of chance. Off-Track Betting, casinos in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Reno and ancient tribal lands, Lotto, Mega-Millions and Powerball, Pick Three, Pick Five, Pick Ten, this week's new scratch-off lottery game (I really, really want to include equity trading on the list but that would be considered tacky)...and as long as you're willing to give a cut to the licensing authorities, gambling is totally acceptable. The real difference between New York's Off Track Betting and Looie at the bar on the corner is OTB takes your money first...you can't run up a tab big enough to get your leg broken...and winnings are reported to the taxation authorities.

Best line of the day:

But it has remained something of a mystery as to why state and county prosecutors have been unable to bring murder charges in the killings of the three men, who worked for the Congress of Racial Equality.

How's that for denial? Forty years later and they still can't just speak the truth.

Indictment Makes Start at Lifting a 40-Year-Old Cloud Over a Mississippi County
By JAMES DAO

...The 1964 killing of the three civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman, Michael H. Schwerner and James E. Chaney - and the inability, or unwillingness, of state and local prosecutors to bring charges in the case had left many here wondering whether the town's image would forever be tainted by a single unsolved crime.

Outside court after the arraignment on Friday, Mr. Duncan, 45, who has lived here his entire life, said he did not push for an indictment because he wanted to heal the town's old wound.

"But," he added, "if that's what it does, I'm all for it."

Think that will do it? I don't. From the same article:

You can truthfully claim not to be a torturer once you've redefined the word "torture."

Gonzales Speaks Against Torture During Hearing
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - Alberto R. Gonzales, nominated by President Bush to be attorney general, denounced the use of torture against terrorism suspects on Thursday and pledged to abide by all international law, even as he came under sharp attack from Democrats and some Republicans over the administration's treatment of prisoners.

"This administration does not engage in torture and will not condone torture," Mr. Gonzales said during a daylong hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering his nomination to succeed John Ashcroft as attorney general.

Because there's no way they found something now that wasn't known 40 years ago.

The fact that it was known forty years ago is all that allows they to prosecute now. After all, how many 40 year old unsolved cases are suddenly resolved? Don't get fooled by Cold Case...that's just fiction.

This isn't justice. This is the sacrifice of a scapegoat, an internal purge that will let white folks believe they've finally addressed racism.

Anyway...

Case Revisited After 40 Years, and Mothers' Wounds Reopened
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
and MICHELLE O'DONNELL

After 40 years, after all the ceremonies, the visits to Mississippi, the interviews, the strokes, the deaths of loved ones, births of grandchildren and the simple march of time, the news came, and two mothers, separated by 80 miles but locked together in history, came to realize the obvious. Their sons had not come back, but a painful part of their lives - and civil rights history - had.

Both in their 80's, they carried themselves yesterday with aplomb, and a bit of resignation, having believed for so long that someday, maybe, someone would be charged in the murder of their sons, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, and a companion, Michael Schwerner. They were young men - Goodman and Schwerner, white New Yorkers, and Chaney, a black Mississippian - killed in 1964 during a voter registration drive in Mississippi in a crime that shocked the conscience of the country. On Thursday, Edgar Ray Killen, described by officials as a former Ku Klux Klan leader, was charged with the murders. Mr. Killen pleaded not guilty yesterday.

Fannie Lee Chaney, 82, spoke of her son James and the recent turn of events early yesterday in her tidy bungalow in Willingboro, N.J. She fled Mississippi in 1965 after shots were fired into her house, amid other threats.

She said she knew Mr. Killen, the first person to face murder charges in the 40-year-old killings. He was the preacher, she said, who visited the home of a white woman Mrs. Chaney was cleaning for shortly after the murders. A young boy came in the kitchen, where Mrs. Chaney was washing the dishes, and asked her if she had heard the preacher's words: "God bless the black hands."

Shannon, who told me I screwed my server configuration yesterday, linked to a really long, really excellent post at Brutal Woman, that starts thus:

Madness Du Jour

I have a confession: I'm pretty nonplussed about the tsunami. 150,000 people dead, yea, so, 2 million died in Rwanda and nobody gave a fucking shit. 1 in 3 people in Southern Africa has HIV or AIDS, and the US is pushing abstinence-only programs there instead of condoms.

Whoop-dee-doo 150K dead.

Oh. Yea. That s right. White tourists were there! Poor white tourists, their cozy vacations were ruined!

Let me tell you a story, because I had to pull out this story to put it all back into perspective for me. Before I was writing here at Brutal Women, I was sending "updates" to my writing buddies a couple times a month. I dug this one out this morning, about one of the times me and some of the other U of Natal academics went to a neat little bar in Durban called Bean Bag for B s going-away-to-an-American-university party. So, let me channel my 22-year-old self and share:

And just...continues. Covering things other than you might expect.

I have an excuse, I been programming. But while programming I though I remembered a couple other recent episodes of Federal departments incorrectly spending our money at Bush's behest. And just now I find Oliver pulled them together already. Stole the basis of a compelling post from right under my nose.

And check this absurdity he found (he stole from me, I steal from him, right?).

MORE: The White House is claiming it has no control/oversight of the Department of Education or the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Who's minding the store?

USA Today says the Education Department paid a TV commentator, Armstrong Williams, about a quarter million dollars to promote No Child Left. And in a related matter, the GAO found yesterday the drug policy office broke federal law by using taxpayer money for covert, "propaganda," with made for TV story packages. Are these practices that you condone?

MR. McCLELLAN: On the first one, that was a decision by the Department of Education, and a contracting matter. So you ought to direct those questions to the Department of Education. I know the headline said that the White House -- basically implied that it was the White House, and it wasn't. If you read the story -- if you read the story, it pointed that out.

Circling the Peace Wagons in Oakland
By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

West Oakland Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nancy Nadel says she wants to use some of Oakland’s newly-passed Measure Y violence prevention money on something she calls “peacemaking circles.” Ms. Nadel says that a judge in Nogales, Ariz. has used the circles with couples involved in domestic violence, and that a training in the technique was attended early last year by OPD Lt. Lawrence Green of North Oakland, who, she reports, “thought it was very useful.” The technique is also apparently being used, with some success, in both Massachusetts and Minnesota.

With some slight modifications for Oakland use, I believe the councilmember is on to something.

He got more than Rev. Al did!

Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

Imagine the following scenario. 

You are at home alone at 8:00 on a Friday night.  You are 8 weeks pregnant.  You are excited about the pregnancy, but being cautious, you haven t told anyone about it yet except your partner, your best friend, your parents, and your doctor. 

All of a sudden, you begin to experience heavy cramping.  Bleeding ensues.  You realize with shock and sadness that you are probably experiencing a miscarriage.  You leave a message with your doctor s service.  The on-call doctor calls back, offers sympathies, and advises taking pain medication or going to the hospital if the bleeding gets worse. She offers you the next available appointment for a follow-up exam - Monday at 3PM.  You accept. You are overwhelmed with grief and surprised by the intensity of physical pain involved. You call your partner and ask him to come home from his  boys night out , sparing him the reason over the phone.  You call your best friend.  She offers to come over immediately and make you cocoa.  You cry. 

You decide not to tell your parents yet; let them sleep through the night before delivering the terrible news.  Your partner comes home and you break the sad news to him.  He holds you on the couch and you both cry together.  Your best friend comes over with cocoa.  You cry some more.  Over the next few hours, you suffer pain, cramping, and intermittent bleeding.  Exhausted, you finally fall asleep in your partner s arms around 4 AM.  You sleep until noon, and then gird yourself for the difficult call to your parents, who were so eagerly anticipating their first grandchild.

Guess what?  You just earned yourself up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.  Why?  Because you failed to call the cops and report your miscarriage within 12 hours.

The previous post, on welfare reform, exercises a new capability I have to screw up Google again. I can now make multi-page posts on this sucker.

See, the major reason I haven't thoroughly reconstructed my archives of Black historic texts is, it's hard. I don't think there's much profit in dropping an unbroken 16k text file in your browser. But breaking them into pages of digestible size is a pain in the butt. And to keep the sections as subnodes of pages that are subnodes of books gets annoying when you have more than a few books with more than a few pages.

So today I wrote a small module that lets me make multi-page posts just like Wordpress does…drop a <!--pagebreak--> tag in the text and that's it.

So now I redo the books, one pagenated entry per chapter. No more tangled navigation trees, and pasting comment tags is a LOT faster than mark, cut, change window, paste, new title, set categories, set parent in the book outline, submit, get back to the input page.

Not a catchy a phrase as "welfare reform," I know. But I don't want to talk about welfare reform. I want to talk about helping people get into the economic mainstream.

I've had a few days to consider why George Will wrote that editorial that annoyed me so much and I think I figured out why.

The book that set him off, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason Deparle, is an indictment of the assumptions that underlay much of the thinking in "welfare reform" as well as its actual implementation. You see, "welfare reform" was punitive, not supportive, in nature and it turns out all the assumptions that justified that punitive nature are in error. The proof of the error is simple: it didn't work.

Bush's Drug Videos Broke Law, Accountability Office Decides
By JOHN FILES

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.

The accountability office said the videos "constitute covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said.

Rumsfeld Seeks Broad Review of Iraq Policy
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual "open-ended" review of the military's entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

The extraordinary leeway given to the highly regarded officer, Gen. Gary E. Luck, a former head of American forces in South Korea and currently a senior adviser to the military's Joint Forces Command, underscores the deep concern by senior Pentagon officials and top American commanders over the direction that the operation in Iraq is taking, and its broad ramifications for the military, said some members of Congress and military analysts.

So I see this quiz, What's Your EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient)? and the quiz isn't as interesting as the results page.

When describing the scoring ranges it says:

150+: Two possibilities - you've either out "Dr. Phil-ed" Dr. Phil... or you're a dirty liar.

And follows with:

Out of 11678 people the average score was 217

Quote of note:

Cross and Singh were indicted last month on 34 counts of fraud. Prosecutors say Cross ran Morris Brown further into debt with excessive spending and then schemed with Singh to use financial aid awards to ineligible students to pay bills. Both pleaded innocent during a recent court appearance and were released on $50,000 bond.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2002 removed Morris Brown College's accreditation, meaning the institution and its students aren't eligible for federal funds and loans. Enrollment since has plummeted, from a high of more than 2,500 to about 150 students.

Race won't be an issue in UGA's '05 admissions

By PATTI GHEZZI, KELLY SIMMONS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/07/05

The University of Georgia will not add race as a factor in admissions until at least fall 2006, a task force decided Thursday.

The group decided it needed more time to work through legal issues surrounding changes in the admissions policy.

"I think being patient is probably a prudent thing at the moment," said Keith Parker, vice provost for Institutional Diversity.

Quote of note:

Mbeki's government has been criticized for its sluggish response to the crisis and for courting dissident theorists who question the cause of AIDS. Until this year, the government refused to provide life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs through the public health system, citing concerns about their safety and cost.

Mandela announces eldest son died of AIDS
- ALEXANDRA ZAVIS, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2005

(01-06) 08:30 PST JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) --

Democrats in Denial ...

Fabian Nunez is in denial. Nunez, the state Assembly speaker, told Times reporters Wednesday night that he didn't see why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would bother taking his plan to alter how electoral districts are drawn to the voters, who Nunez thinks aren't interested in such matters. Senate Leader Don Perata of Oakland said much the same a few days ago, and even a few Republicans similarly dismissed the idea. We wonder: Have Nunez and his fellow politicians forgotten that extraordinary election in 2003 that sent the popular movie star to Sacramento to clean house and fundamentally change how state government operates?

In case you can't read it, the banner on the top of the picture says

102" The Largest TV in the World

Guys will buy it just to watch girls in flimsy dresses walk in front of it.

... Schools in the Cross Hairs

January 7, 2005

Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was making pacts with his new friends, the teachers unions: Let me, for one year, suspend Proposition 98, which guarantees a set share of state revenues for education, and next year I'll make it up to you. Now the governor is reneging on the deal, shifting $2.2 billion away from schools in his proposed budget and asking to end mandatory funding levels. Schwarzenegger implied in his State of the State address that educators had poorly spent the billions they had already been given.

Schwarzenegger also was brave enough to say what many parents whisper: Teachers' pay should be linked more to performance than seniority. And firing teachers who don't measure up shouldn't be such an impossible task. Some of the most ineffective teachers are burnout cases, doing minimal work but pulling in the top-scale salaries. They're a tiny minority, but a couple of them during a school career is enough to bring a child's academic progress to a crawl.

Screams of imminent disaster are baseless. The governor is still proposing a 7% hike in the education budget, enough to keep schools on the same mediocre track. The billions for schools, however, are less generous than Schwarzenegger thinks. A Rand report released this week showed the state's classes were more crowded than in comparable states, its teachers less well paid and its per-pupil spending lower.

And actually, to an unfortunately large number of people...49% of them, in fact...it is.

AP Poll Finds Americans Split About Bush
By WILL LESTER

Associated Press Writer

12:32 AM PST, January 7, 2005

WASHINGTON   President Bush prepares to start his second term with an ambitious list of tasks but also a public evenly split about his job performance, an Associated Press poll found.

Bush's approval rating is at 49 percent in the AP poll, with 49 percent disapproving. His job approval is in the high 40s in several other recent polls -- as low as any job approval rating for a re-elected president at the start of the second term in more than 50 years.

The Brothers of Alpha Gamma Lambda of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. &

The Ladies of Tau Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

on

Monday, January 17, 2005

11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

George Will, Too, Is Unchanged By Welfare Reform
Copyright © 2004
Earl Dunovant

Let me get this out of the way. I’m a progressive, a liberal, whatever you want to call it. I’m one of those people that think about public policy. As such, I’ve had to find conservatives whose basic integrity I could respect. George Will has been in that group of representatives of the right for some time. Today, though, I find myself disheartened by his editorial, Unchanged by Welfare Reform. It purports to be about Jason DeParle's book, "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare." He calls it a “riveting drama”…perhaps he got so engrossed in the drama of those everyday lives he missed the point of the book.

As I said yesterday.

Malpractice Costs Up 150% Since 1999, Hospitals Say
By THOMAS J. LUECK

The cost of medical malpractice insurance in New York City, Westchester County and on Long Island has risen by nearly 150 percent since 1999, creating severe financial strains that have limited patients' access to such specialties as obstetrics and gynecology and made New York a "crisis state" for doctors, according to a report released yesterday by a hospital trade group.

The trade group, the Greater New York Hospital Association, which represents medical institutions in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island, said its analysis had focused on 34 hospitals in and around New York City. On average, it said, the hospitals have been billed for malpractice premium increases of 27 percent a year for five years.

"The increasing cost of malpractice insurance has become a pressing burden for New York's financially fragile hospitals," said Kenneth E. Raske, the association's president.

Now, here's the thing.

via Digby I found this at The Rude Pundit

Taking the Fight To Where They Live (Prologue):
The Rude Pundit has been on a weeklong visit to the deepest, darkest nether regions of Red State America. When he first arrived, he was greeted by car after car on the highway near the airport still sporting "George Bush for President" bumper stickers. The Rude Pundit is a listener, an eavesdropper. In plate lunch joints and bars, he heard the same things over and over: about how great it was that the President was tough enough to fight the terrorists in Iraq. Hell, the fuckin' newspaper here, in an end of 2004 story on the soldiers from this region, directly stated that the war in Iraq was about avenging 9/11. How do you counter that kind of localized propaganda? But, you know, there's something interesting that happens whenever you engage anyone who believes these things in a conversation: they get really, really defensive about Bush. And not in a coherent way. And not even in the knee-jerk-"I-support-my-President" kind of way. No, it's more of an "I don't wanna talk about it - shutupshutupshutup" kind of way, with ears covered and eyes clenched shut. In other words, they know. They know it's all been a huge failure. But they don't wanna know. And it's just easier to pretend that everything's fantabulous than face that horror, that abyss, of mistrust, of awareness of one's own complicity in the voting booth.

I think SixApart and Joi Ito just made a move on AOL.

Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal

So, yes, the rumors were true. Six Apart did indeed acquireLiveJournal. We've assembled a number of links that should answer allthe questions and give you all the information you'd need.

First, we've got our press release announcing the acquisition, and a Frequently Asked Questions list which covers the basics.

Most people who are familiar with either company will probably prefer to read my Mena's Corner post and Brad's FAQ posted at LiveJournal, which discuss some of the same points, but also talk about the
motivations that inspired us to go forward with the acquisition. If you're a techie or a blog professional, you can look at the Professional Network introduction to LiveJournal.

Town Rescinds Health Benefits for Partners
By JENNIFER MEDINA

Four years ago, Eastchester became one of the first communities in Westchester County to offer health benefits to the domestic partners of its employees. Critics charged that the town supervisor had rammed the plan through and voted him out of office. Now Eastchester has become the first town in New York to end the benefits.

At a meeting Tuesday night, the Town Board voted 3 to 2 to approve new union contracts and to end a town policy of providing coverage for domestic partners. The town's Civil Service Employees Association and police union agreed to dropping the coverage, saying their members had more pressing concerns. The two employees who have made use of the benefits will be allowed to continue to do so, but new employees will not be eligible.

Quote of note:

The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.

We Are All Torturers Now
By MARK DANNER

AT least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.

In G.O.P. Divided as Bush Views Social Security in this morning's NY Times, Richard Stevenson writes:

In addition, he is dispatching his Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, to New York to reassure Wall Street that his approach, which could involve trillions of dollars in new government borrowing, is consistent with efforts to reduce the budget deficit and improve the nation's financial condition.

You know what's sad? This is the truth.

It's TOTALLY consistent with his other efforts. There's a presentation of a scenario so worst case that it's impossible an a claim it represents the current state of affairs. There's bullshit about how borrowing billions in the next few years isn't really an increase in debt because the impossible scenario implies we might one day have to pay enough to reach the same figure by adding everything we may have paid over a 75 year time span. And every gesture has a result entirely other than the claimed effect.

Um, since they hold a bag of money?

Quote of note:

As the safety board approached a final decision on the crash last fall, the two companies were jockeying not only over the final division of costs, but also over their reputations for safety. According to people at the safety board, both sought meetings with the five board members and the professional staff, to argue over what conclusions should be drawn.

Agency Official Says Lobbying Hindered Airline Crash Inquiry
By MATTHEW L. WALD

ASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - In a sign that the system used to find the cause of airplane crashes meshed poorly with the legal mechanism for assigning blame, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said on Wednesday that the inquiry into the 2001 crash of American Airlines 587, in Queens, was made harder by lobbying by the airline and the plane's builder, Airbus.

Newly Released Reports Show Early Concern on Prison Abuse
By KATE ZERNIKE

In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show.

"You won't believe it!" the agent wrote.

Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect," he wrote, according to the documents, "it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness."

I'm watching this British reporter in Phuket, Thailand talking about how bad thngs are in "foo-ket."

And I know a Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Phuket Thai Restaurant. And the proprietors don't pronounce it that way.

And, as said in the NY Times today:

One of the reasons that equities have a higher rate of return than other types of investments is that investors have to be compensated for taking risks. Perhaps equities will outperform Treasury bills in the long term but that doesn't mean that they will be outperforming Treasury bills at the specific moment you retire.

For example, a person who retired in 2000 after a lifetime of investing half in stocks and half in bonds would have had 50 percent more in his account than a person making the same investments who retired in 2003. A difference like this could mean that the lucky retiree can afford both food and medicine while the unlucky one must choose between them. The risk inherent in equity investments is unavoidable unless you can leave the investment alone indefinitely, which, of course, most retirees can't do.

Bush Eyes Plan Using Bulk of Payroll Taxes
By LEIGH STROPE
Associated Press Writer

Tort Reform and Its Impact on Medical Malpractice Insurance
Will Non-Economic Damage Caps Help?
by Charles Kolodkin

Gallagher Healthcare Insurance Services

March 2003

The medical malpractice insurance industry is definitely in crisis, with many insurers refusing to cover hospitals and physicians. This scarcity along with skyrocketing costs are thought to be the result of numerous professional liability claims and lawsuits. Tort reform proponants list non-economic damage caps as the number one medical liability reform measure. However, non-economic damage limitations have their greatest impact on lowering hospital, and other institutions’, rates rather than those rates assessed to physicians.

Quote of note:

"His plan fails to do anything about the 99 percent of health care costs that are really out of control -- escalating drug costs, which account for 11 percent, outrageous hospital bills, and record insurance profits that increased 1,000 percent last year," said Todd Smith, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

The problem, of course, is the identity of the payers, i.e. campaign contributors.

The White House said there is ample reason to change the system, pointing to anecdotal evidence of doctors moving away from states with high malpractice insurance premiums and cases where doctors have picketed because of the rates.

And yet:
Nation's Largest Medical Malpractice Insurer Declares Caps on Damages Don't Work, Raises Docs' Premiums;
Smoking Gun Document Exposes Insurance Industry Lies
Santa Monica, CA -- The nation's largest medical malpractice insurer, GE Medical Protective, has admitted that medical malpractice caps on damage awards and other limitations on recoveries for injured patients will not lower physicians' premiums.

The insurer's revelation was made to the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) in a regulatory filing obtained by FTCR. The revelation was contained in a document submitted by GE Medical Protective to explain why the insurer planned to raise physicians' premiums 19% a mere six months after Texas enacted caps on medical malpractice awards. In 2003, Texas lawmakers passed a $250,000 cap on non-economic damage compensation to victims of medical malpractice caps after Medical Protective and other insurers lobbied for the change.
and:

Doctors pay more despite new law
Insurers keeping rates up until courts uphold malpractice caps
By Tim Bonfield
Enquirer staff writer

When Ohio lawmakers limited the amount of money that patients can collect for medical malpractice, they expected soaring malpractice insurance rates to fall.

Doctors would quit threatening to leave the state. Ohioans would get quality care at more reasonable costs.

But more than a year after the malpractice cap took effect, doctors are paying more for coverage than ever. Obstetrics doctors paid up to $89,000 last year; surgeons, $68,000. Some doctors are paying more than 25 percent of their gross incomes for malpractice insurance, they say.

Insurers say rates won't come down until the new law proves it can stand up in court.

"I cannot overemphasize the critical role the Ohio courts will play in this issue," says Paul Brutus, a top executive with the Medical Assurance Co., one of the state's five major malpractice insurers.

This is why doctors have launched an aggressive campaign to elect Ohio Supreme Court members who they hope will uphold the cap. Four seats on the seven-member court will be decided Nov. 2.

…none of which is anecdotal.

Bush Launches Battle to Limit Malpractice Awards
Wed Jan 5, 2005 02:10 AM ET

Prosecutors Cite Corruption by Ex-Governor of Illinois
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, Jan. 4 - Federal prosecutors offered a glimpse on Tuesday of the portrait they intend to paint of George Ryan, the indicted former governor of Illinois, as a man who for years helped his closest friends secure lucrative state contracts and state leases, and who got free vacations, gifts and cash for his daughter's wedding in return.

In a 114-page filing in advance of a trial set for March, the prosecutors laid out a web of corruption they say existed between Mr. Ryan, a 70-year-old Republican, and his friends, trusted co-workers and ordinary state employees, who the prosecutors said were sometimes expected to work on government time for Mr. Ryan's re-election campaigns.

…which wouldn't be a problem if increasing savings and the security of our retirement were the goal rather than paying back the campaign contributors.

Anyway…

No Pain, No Savings
By GENE SPERLING

Washington — IF President Bush truly wants a bipartisan agreement on Social Security reform, he should recognize that he can keep the system solvent, increase savings and promote his ownership agenda without dividing Washington by carving Social Security into private accounts.

The president can promote the individual ownership he wants and protect the guaranteed Social Security benefits Democrats insist on with a new universal 401(k) that offers all Americans a private retirement account in addition to Social Security, and uses government funds to match contributions made by moderate and lower-income workers.

In Choose and Lose, Barry Schwartz makes several superb points. This may be the best

Finally, even if we grant the advantages of putting trust fund money into equities, this is something that the government could do without privatizing anything by doing the investing itself. The government as investor can ride out risks better than any individual investor, and administrative costs would be vastly reduced. Only brokerage houses would suffer - from lost commissions. Thus investing in equities, which might be a good idea, is logically independent of privatization, which is a bad one. The Bush administration is deliberately conflating them.

Only during times of war, right? And not against state affiliated agent, official soldiers, right?

Only we have a lot of wars going on. My favorite is the War on Drugs. Ashcroft got the ball rolling when he called drug smugglers "narcoterrorists" when running a VICTORY lap for the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.

All I can say is, it's a good thing we've given up on the War on Poverty.

Bush's Counsel Sought Ruling About Torture
By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS

Quote of note:

Sheriff Hill said one of the reasons for the security accompanying the firings was the assassination of Sheriff Derwin Brown in neighboring DeKalb County in 2000. Sheriff Brown was gunned down in the driveway of his home three days before he was to be sworn in. The former sheriff, Sidney Dorsey, was found guilty of plotting to kill him and sentenced to life in prison.

Georgia Sheriff Fires Workers, but Then a Judge Intervenes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JONESBORO, Ga., Jan. 4 (AP) - On his first day at work, the new sheriff of Clayton County called 27 employees into his office on Monday, fired them and had snipers stand guard on the roof as they were escorted out the door.

Iraqi Governor Slain by Gunmen; Bombing Kills 10
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 4 - Gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad Province on Tuesday as insurgents pressed a campaign to derail elections scheduled for Jan. 30. The governor, Ali al-Haidari, is the highest-ranking Iraqi official slain since May.

The killing came just as a fuel-truck bomb detonated near an office of the Interior Ministry and the main American compound in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding about 60. And it came on a day that five American soldiers fell in three other attacks, according to military officials.

It was the bloodiest day for the United States since the Dec. 21 suicide bombing at a mess tent in Mosul, which killed 14 soldiers and 4 American contractors.

PHP version upgrade took us by surprise.

I been keeping busy on Blogcritics. Those guys crack me up.

Quote of note 1:

But while there is no conclusive evidence that the .50 BMG rifle has ever been used in the United States to commit a felony, it has nonetheless been seized from American criminals' arsenals. A 1999 briefing paper from the General Accounting Office, predecessor of the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, said, "We have established a nexus to terrorist groups, outlaw motorcycle gangs, international drug cartels, domestic drug dealers, religious cults, militia groups, potential assassins and violent criminals."

Quote of note 2:

The .50 BMG rifle, patented in 1987 by Barrett Firearms Manufacturing of Murfreesboro, Tenn., was designed as a sniper weapon for law enforcement and the military; it was widely used by American troops during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Manufacturers say the rifle is accurate at a range of up to 2,000 yards, more than a mile. It fires bullets five and a half inches long described as powerful enough to rip through armor, much less the thin aluminum skin that covers commercial airliners.

"They can pierce the skin of an aircraft," said Daniel R. Vice, a lawyer with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a central supporter of the law. "It could be used to shoot down an airplane. And we certainly don't want to wait until a terrorist buys one before we ban it."

California Bans a Large-Caliber Gun, and the Battle Is On
By CAROLYN MARSHALL

Why?

That doesn't mean nothing should be done to improve Social Security's finances. But privatization is a fake solution to a fake crisis. In future articles on this subject I'll explain why, and also outline a real plan to strengthen Social Security.

Quote of note:

There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is five times the budget office's estimate of Social Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses.

Stopping the Bum's Rush
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government.

Just don't try giving credit to the American government for actions taken by the American people.

Anyway…
A High Quality of Mercy
By CAROL ADELMAN

ALTHOUGH the Bush administration has now pledged $350 million for the Asian tsunami catastrophe, claims that America is "stingy" are still in the air. The criticism stems from the much-touted fact that our government's foreign aid ranks last among developed countries as a percentage of gross national income.

This rankles, as Americans tend to think of themselves as a generous people. How can we, the richest nation in the world, not be more caring? The answer is simple: we actually are.

If brokers are marketed by any name other than "stockbroker," or if they earn fees in addition to, or in place of, commissions, it's safe for the S.E.C. to assume - as the public undoubtedly does - that they're investment advisers. Accordingly, they should follow the same rules that govern registered investment advisers. Trying to establish a test based on what is or is not "solely incidental" to a stock sale is a joke - on investors.

It's the S.E.C.'s job to protect individual investors, not to reassure the securities industry that its brokers are safe from regulatory standards.

Stockbrokers Fail the Duck Test

If a stockbroker was "earning" a free trip to Hawaii for selling you a certain stock, wouldn't you want to know? Good luck in trying to find out.

Putin looked into Dubya's soul and saw a role model.

Putin Demotes Adviser Critical of the Kremlin
By C. J. CHIVERS

MOSCOW, Jan. 3 - President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday abruptly reduced the responsibilities of a senior adviser who last week issued a sweeping criticism of the Kremlin's leadership and expressed deep misgivings about the direction in which Russia was headed.

In a presidential decree released without further comment, Mr. Putin relieved the adviser, Andrei N. Illarionov, of his duties as Russia's envoy to the Group of 8, comprising the world's major industrialized nations and Russia. Mr. Putin reassigned those duties to a presidential aide who is seemingly a more loyal Kremlin insider, Igor I. Shuvalov.

War is one of the greatest economic stimulant known to man. And after the neocon attack on the economy, what else do we have left?

Quote of note:

Rockoff estimates the total cost of World War I to the United States at approximately $32 billion, or 52 percent of gross national product at the time. He breaks down the financing of the U.S. war effort as follows: 22 percent in taxes, 58 percent through borrowings from the public, and 20 percent in money creation.

The Economics of World War I

"The total cost of World War I to the United States (was) approximately $32 billion, or 52 percent of gross national product at the time."

Did World War I produce a major economic break from the past in the United States? Did the U.S. economy change in some fundamental and lasting ways as a result of that war? NBER Research Associate Hugh Rockoff addresses these questions in his recent study Until It's Over, Over There: The U.S. Economy in World War I (NBER Working Paper No. 10580). After surveying the U.S. mobilization and financing for the war, Rockoff concludes that perhaps the greatest impact of World War I was a shift in the landscape of ideas about economics and about the proper role of government in economic activities.

I just posted that last on at Blogcritics...give 'em something to think about.

If you're a Blogcritics reader, you know you have those Amazon links scattered all over hell and back. Well, bloggers have to submit at least one with each post and I always have fun finding books to link that are as appropriate to the story as my headlines are.

The Amazon search, like many of my readings, often spark a new line of inquiry and this is one of those times. I ran across this critter:
Why some double taxation might make sense: The special case of inter-corporate dividends (NBER working paper series), which, while using the annoying "double taxation" meme in the title, made me curious. The National Bureau for Economic Research (the referenced NBER) favored the elimination on taxation of dividends so I was curious about the exception.

Yes, for those who live on unearned income, these are flush times. Thank you, George Bush and the Republican Party.

Cash Flow in '04 Found Its Way Into Dividends
By FLOYD NORRIS

Published: January 4, 2005

American companies stepped up their dividend increases in 2004, buoyed by strong cash flows and by a changed tax law that made dividends more attractive to shareholders.

But the really good news for shareholders on the dividend front was that the number of negative dividend actions hit a record low of just 64. Of those, 35 were announcements of dividend cuts and 29 were decisions to omit dividends entirely.

While everyone is cheering the burst of morality shown by the House Republicans in recinding their rule change designed to protect Tom DeLay, you should note:

Representative David Dreier, a California Republican who is chairman of the Rules Committee, said Republicans on Tuesday would present to the full House a proposal that ethics cases be dismissed if the ethics committee, which is divided equally between Democrats and Republicans, is deadlocked. That plan has also drawn opposition from ethics advocates, including Democrats and some Republicans

Yesterday an investigation would proceed if the panel is deadlocked. Now, think about Republican party discipline. Dismissing ethics cases where the committee is deadlocked would be just as effective at protecting DeLay…and far more subtle.

Working on the clipboard functionality of MTClient forces me to look at a LOT of raw HTML. And as you know, I post stuff from all over hell and back.

Did you know that, for the most part, the LA Times doesn't use <p> tags? It's kinda weird. And the amount of proprietary markup that leaks out is pretty amazing.

That's because I don't know who you are.

But in the comments, Anonymous pointed out that a documentary on Shirley Chisolm's run for the Presidency will be run on PBS during (you guessed it) Black History month. The film's director, Shola Lynch, had a live chat today at the Washington Post, and an interview in September at blackfilm.com.

You know the deal with checking your local PBS station for scheduling.

And obviously I found a photograph of Ms. Chisolm I really like. It was at the blackfilms.com site; that's a thumbnail. You should check the full size one on the other side of the link.

And let me tell you what I like about it. It's recent.

When people pass away, folks go find a picture for the program that everyone recognizes and usually shows a person pretty close to their prime. In fact, you'll probably see a lot of this one.>>

Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with immortalizing their youth once they aren't with us anymore.

But time and life changes people. You wear your life's learning in your body. So though it's not wrong, I don't feel it memorializes the person's whole life.

Ms. Chisolm's picture up there...that would properly memorialize a life. My opinion, of course.

#1: Wealth Inequality in 21st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy

#2: Ashcroft vs. the Human Rights Law that Holds Corporations Accountable

#3: Bush Administration Censors Science

#4: High Levels of Uranium Found in Troops and Civilians

#5: The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources

One Wal-Mart Store Costs Federal Taxpayers $420,000 per year

January 3, 8:50 AM - Submitted by MonsterCable (unregistered):

The New York Review summarizes some recent analyses of Wal-Mart's effects on communities and its labor practices: For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

The White House has released the Official Suck-up List.

For the most part, these are the guys that are on the receiving end of the tax-to-capital transformation.

YOU are on the giving end.

The Amazon search has changed. A lot. And will change again.

Now you can search for CDs, videos and classical music as well as books.

Hey, I like classical music too. Sue me.

Anyway, the Black interest searches will return. Right now I'm in the midst of generalizing the thing.

This week MTClient 2.0 alpha shows its face. I just need to write a few short docs because with a lot of big features comes small limitations. I may still be able to code around those limits but it's at the point where I need outside input to improve it and find stuff that's not apparent because of the way I work.

Some of the new features, like CSS styling the WYSIWYG editor on a blog-by-blog basis, need a little explaining. And it has live preview via an embedded IE browser (sorry, a Gecko option is waaaaay off in the future).

I've never been really concerned about previewing posts. And the way I have it set up, it really seems pointless because I'm using the same stylesheet for previews as for editing...the difference between the two views is vanishingly small.

Quote of note:

As it often does with dissenting professional opinion, the administration is ignoring the actuaries. But that doesn't alter the facts or common sense. If the $10 trillion figure is essentially bogus, so is the claim that Social Security is in crisis. The assertion that doing nothing would be costlier than enacting a privatization plan also turns out to be wrong, by the estimates of Congress's own budget agency.

Over a 75-year time frame, Social Security's shortfall is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at $2 trillion and by the Social Security trustees at $3.7 trillion, a manageable sliver of the economy in each case. If the shortfall is on the low side, Social Security will be in the black until 2052, when it will be able to pay out 80 percent of the promised benefits. If it is on the high side, the system will pay full benefits until 2042, when it will cover 70 percent.

Let me repeat that:

If the $10 trillion figure is essentially bogus, so is the claim that Social Security is in crisis.

And the figure isn't essentially bogus, it's TOTALLY bogus. The problem is, we live in a nation where half the population follows their leadership so blindly they will sacrifice their children on command. And when that leadership lies it becomes gospel to these people.

Anyway...

The Social Security Fear Factor

Quote of note:

Mr. Cohen and Detective Addolorato had no particular interest in the Palladium matter. But in the course of their own investigation of a drug and extortion gang they essentially "solved" the Palladium case. (Mr. Lemus and Mr. Hidalgo were already in prison.) A gang member named Joey Pillot admitted that he and a buddy named Thomas Morales had been responsible for the murder, that Mr. Morales was the actual shooter, and that neither Mr. Lemus nor Mr. Hidalgo was involved.

A wealth of evidence has since been marshaled to support that account. Several witnesses have bolstered or corroborated Mr. Pillot's version of the shooting. The prosecution's theory about what happened that night suffered a severe blow when it was learned that Mr. Figueroa, the "friend" who was supposed to have been acting as a mediator, was nowhere near the Palladium when the shooting occurred. He was in prison.

Quote of note:

"I think what I told her was, 'Let's not go there with the politics,' " said Nelson Carman, the father from Jefferson, Iowa, a farming town of 4,500, who met with Ms. Walker that day. "I do believe firmly in this war. Those terrorists are going to bring the war to us. They hate you. They hate me. They hate our life. They hate what we stand for.

I don't believe there has ever been a terrorist strike anywhere even resembling Iowa. There's no political leverage to be gained by blowing up corn.

I never understood why these heartland types have such great fear. But I'm starting to. They have been SO misled by their leaders it's pathetic.

I'm willing to bet the splinter in their mind is the memory of the Kansas City bombing...which was done by an American.

Quote of note:

The Post reported that the Pentagon and CIA had asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for handling detainees, including hundreds of individuals currently in custody but with insufficient evidence against them to bring to a court.

I know. How about letting them go home? We made the error of arresting hundreds of people without evidence. Their only mistake was...being arrested without evidence.

Actually, I think this is a distraction so that whatever they decide to do (which, if immediately suggested, is likely to be seen as immoral) seems reasonable by comparison. Same thing they do with economic projections.

Anyway...

Plan to Keep Detainees in Jail for Life Criticized by Senators

Normally I post a picture and give up a digital moment of silence. Many problems with that in this case.

The first problem is, the most appropriate picture I know of isn't a photograph

Second is, sister was too important. This from the Encyclopedia Britannica, via PBS's African American World Reference Room site:

Shirley Chisholm
(Born Nov. 30, 1924, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.)

American politician, the first black American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

Shirley St. Hill was the daughter of immigrants; her father was from British Guiana (now Guyana) and her mother from Barbados. She grew up in Barbados and in her native Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Brooklyn College (B.A., 1946). While teaching nursery school and serving as director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brooklyn, she studied elementary education at Columbia University (M.A., 1952) and married Conrad Q. Chisholm in 1949 (divorced 1977). An education consultant for New York City's day-care division, she was also active with community and political groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and her district's Unity Democratic Club. In 1964 68 she represented her Brooklyn district in the New York state legislature.

In 1968 Chisholm was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating the civil rights leader James Farmer. In Congress she quickly became known as a strong liberal who opposed weapons development and the war in Vietnam and favoured full-employment proposals. As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 1972, she won 152 delegates before withdrawing from the race.

Chisholm, a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortions throughout her congressional career, which lasted from 1969 to 1983. She wrote the autobiographical works Unbought and Unbossed (1970) and The Good Fight (1973).

Check the quotes from Ms. Chisolm at About.com's Women's History site. A small selection:

Quote of note:

Shelley's troubles revolve around a politician's stock in trade: delivering "pork barrel" spending to his district and collecting campaign donations from political supporters. And an aspect of the Perata inquiry involves something that hits home hard: family. Like many elected officials, Perata has family members   his son and daughter   who work on his campaigns.

FBI Presence Shadows Legislature's New Session
Sacramento's climate is clouded by inquiries tied to the secretary of state and Senate leader.
By Dan Morain

Times Staff Writer

January 3, 2005

SACRAMENTO   For the first time since the Capitol's "Shrimpgate" scandal more than a decade ago, California legislators open their session today knowing that the FBI is hovering not far away.

By issuing subpoenas, conducting searches and convening grand juries in Oakland and Sacramento, the feds have made their presence unmistakable as they investigate dealings by the new state Senate leader, Don Perata, and Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, a former legislator. Both men are Democrats.

The scope of the inquiries, which are not connected, is not known. But interviews and documents that have become public suggest that the FBI is examining Perata's business and political activity in Oakland, his hometown, and Shelley's procurement of state money for a nonprofit group when he was an assemblyman from San Francisco.

Sentencing by the Numbers

By EMILY BAZELON

Imagine that you could stop a crime before it happened. Not by zapping a murderer seconds before he bloodied his victim, like the future cop played by Tom Cruise in ''Minority Report,'' but by sitting calmly on the bench in judge's robes and perusing a single sheet of data. Armed with the stats, you could predict the likelihood that a convicted drug dealer or thief standing before you would be arrested again in the near future if you let him go free.

For decades, the science of predicting future criminality has been junk science -- the guesswork of psychologists who were wrong twice as often as they were right. But today, the detailed collection of crime statistics is beginning to make it possible to determine which bad guys really will commit new offenses. In 2002, the Commonwealth of Virginia began putting such data to use: the state encourages its judges to sentence nonviolent offenders the way insurance agents write policies, based on a short list of factors with a proven relationship to future risk. If a young, jobless man is convicted of shoplifting, the state is more likely to recommend prison time than when a middle-aged, employed woman commits the same crime.

It's just that I see just about as high a proportion of obese white folks and obese rich folks as obese brown folks and obese poor folks.

And a lot of folks will feel if the hallmark of being poor is being obese, as implied by the first paragraph, the answer is to give them less food.

Anyway...

Heavy Questions
By ELIZABETH WEIL

The road changes just past the Starr County sign. The shoulder disappears, the grass is left uncut and the black-eyed Susans and big pink Texas sage have to compete with the orange traffic cones set out by the border patrol. Just two counties up from the Texas tip, where the flood plains along the Rio Grande change to rolling hills and eroding cliffs, Starr County, largely Mexican-American, is one of the poorest counties in the nation. Fifty-nine percent of its children live below the poverty level, and in the strange new arithmetic of want, in which poverty means not starvation but its opposite, it is also one of the fattest.

Quote of note:

"Tehran is a city the size of Los Angeles, with thrust faults like Los Angeles," Dr. Sieh said. "In Los Angeles the next 7.5 quake might kill 50,000 people. In Tehran, that would kill more than a million people."

The Future of Calamity
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

IN seven hours last week, great ocean waves scoured shores from Thailand to Somalia, exacting a terrible price in wealth and human lives. But unimaginable as it may seem, future catastrophes may be far grimmer. Many more such disasters - from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, to floods, mudslides and droughts - are likely to devastate countries already hard hit by poverty and political turmoil.

The world has already seen a sharp increase in such "natural" disasters - from about 100 per year in the early 1960's to as many as 500 per year by the early 2000's, said Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University. But it is not that earthquakes and tsunamis and other such calamities have become stronger or more frequent. What has changed is where people live and how they live there, say many experts who study the physics of such events or the human responses to their aftermath.

As new technology allows, or as poverty demands, rich and poor alike have pushed into soggy floodplains or drought-ridden deserts, built on impossibly steep slopes, and created vast, fragile cities along fault lines that tremble with alarming frequency.

In that sense, catastrophes are as much the result of human choices as they are of geology or hydrology. Dr. Kerry Sieh, a veteran seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, has spent years studying some of the world's wealthiest and poorest earthquake-prone territory - not only the sickle-shaped scar of faults off Sumatra's west coast that caused last week's tsunami, but also California's San Andreas fault, which could, with a sudden twitch, submerge the inhabitants of some of the most valuable land on Earth.

The difference between the rich and poor countries, Dr. Sieh said, was that the rich ones had improved their building techniques and their political systems to deal with inevitable disasters.

In the Pacific Northwest, where offshore faults could generate a tsunami as large as last week's ocean-spanning waves, officials have created "inundation maps" to know more precisely what would happen in a flood and prepare accordingly. And in response to the threat of earthquakes, buildings on the West Coast now are designed to sway over shifting foundations, and new highway overpasses are no longer stacked like the jaws of a huge horizontal vise.

Istanbul, Tehran, New Delhi and other increasingly dense and shabbily constructed cities, on the other hand, are rubble in waiting. When an earthquake leveled the ancient Iranian city of Bam in 2003, for instance, more than 26,000 people were essentially crushed by their own homes. Several earthquake experts refer to the "seismic gap" as a way of describing this difference between the ability of rich cities and poor ones to withstand earthquake damage.

I realized yesterday that in 5-10 years there willl be a lot more American-style economic systems in southeast Asia because adopting such a system will be a prerequisite for redevelopment funding (as opposed to emergency response funding).

Anyway...

How Nature Changes History
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

WHAT follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties toward a peace table? A surge in Islamic fundamentalism?

If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of Dec. 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself. Disasters rip away social moorings as harshly as they tear children from their mothers' hands, and while faceless nature may be to blame for the first blow, governments may reap the political whirlwind that follows it.

In this case, the wave that rose out of the Andaman Sea broke over some remarkably fragile societies:

Indonesia's Aceh province had been under virtual martial law, largely closed to the outside world as 40,000 troops hunted separatists.

Sri Lanka was cut in two by civil war, and new killings had raised fears that a two-year cease-fire was collapsing.

In Thailand, fighting between the government and Muslim rebels not far from its beach resorts claimed at least 500 lives last year.

And the Maldives, a nation of 1,190 coral islands averaging three feet above sea level, already feared the slow rise in the surrounding waters caused by global warming.

I'll be more fun later today. This morning (well, this early afternoon) I have to go do stuff for folks.

On This Week on ABC, Stephanopolis interviewing Kofi Annan about the world response to the tsunami disaster, asked how can the world trust the UN to run a project of this scale without corruption in the wake of the Iraq oil for food scandal.

Mr. Annan answered quite diplomatically and let everyone off the hook. The fact is, though, there was so much international collusion in that mess, governmental and corporate, that Stephanopolis should have been embarrassed to ask that question.

Annan says it will take five to ten years for the area to recover. And I agree.