They invite you to score Mr. Bush's performance, reflecting on whether he acknowledges, ignores or spins the issue.

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African food appeal 'exaggerated'

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong pump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blacks and Latinos Try to Find Balance in Touchy New Math

By MIREYA NAVARRO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smarter Gauge of Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are changes that would serve the law's admirable aims:

• The law defines subgroups of students by ethnicity, poverty and learning disability. For the school to meet its goals, all subgroups must improve by a certain amount on every test. As a result, schools with more subgroups are far more likely to fail, according to a recent study by Policy Analysis for California Education. It's a simple statistical truth: More groups to focus on means more ways to fail.

  Other schools fail because not enough students in a group took the exam. Ninety-five percent of each subgroup must participate; just two students out sick from a class of 33 children would put it under that limit. Of the 3,000 California schools that fell short this year, a third raised scores among all groups but missed the 95% participation mark for one or two.

  A better way: Let schools with large numbers of subgroups and strong overall progress off the hook if a group or two doesn't improve one year in a single subject. Just don't allow this to happen with the same subgroup year after year. And lower the participation rate to a more realistic 85%.



• Less-qualified teachers are clustered in inner-city schools; No Child Left Behind seeks to change that. The act requires a knowledgeable, well-trained teacher in every classroom. It also pushes to have the most qualified teachers assigned to the neediest schools.

  So why is the Department of Education allowing many states to declare all their teachers qualified merely on the grounds that they're already teaching?

  California tried to take that route but changed direction under federal scrutiny. Indiana and other states got away with it. Although only about half of California teachers are listed as meeting the standard, Indiana lists 95% of its teachers as highly qualified, even in impoverished schools.

  Stiffen the rules on qualified teachers. Make states come up with plans for moving more of those teachers to high-poverty schools, which need them most but are least likely to have them.

• Many special-education students cannot fathom standardized tests; some can't even sit long enough to take them. The Education Department set a rigid rule that 99% of all students must use the standard test.

  Parents of the learning-disabled often opt out of testing, considering it an exercise in frustration for their children. This results in the school failing the participation requirement.

  A more reasonable rule would provide a special test for children who cannot function in a regular classroom without an aide.

• Level out the standards. The feds measure how many students are academically proficient, but permit states to define "proficient."

  California and South Carolina set high academic standards; Connecticut lowered its standards; and states such as Wyoming set theirs so low that they reported having few or no failing schools. That adds up to a lot of children left behind, even if their schools look good on paper.

  Similarly, most states, including California, set such outlandish definitions for dangerous campuses that, nationwide, only 52 schools are listed as dangerous - none of them in this state. This solves the sticky problem of students having the right to transfer out of crime-ridden schools but doesn't make them safer.

Setting standards has always been a state job, but Washington should at least set a floor and reward states that set high expectations for students.

No one said putting No Child Left Behind into practice would be easy, and despite a recent promise of an extra $2 billion, President Bush continues to underfund the act. The measures to weaken the law stand little chance because many powerful Democrats, including California Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), remain staunch supporters of it. But these measures do stand in the way of more constructive changes.

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January 16, 2004

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

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

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

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

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That says it all, I think.

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

January 16, 2004, 12:09 PM EST

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

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

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

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

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The Zora Neale Hurston Plays

About the Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emancipated Voices: Online Recordings Tell of Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly two dozen people are interviewed. Many of the recordings -- most cut on scratchy 78 rpm discs -- have not been released before.

Most of the reminiscences come from elderly men. Billy McCrea, questioned when he was 89, remembers seeing a group from the North set up a Freedmen's Bureau in a southern town.

Another former slave tells an interviewer: "I got my name from President Jeff Davis. He was president of the Southern Confederacy. He owned my grandfather and my father."

The recordings are important because we can hear the oppression. Michael Taft, head of the library's archive of folk culture, says, "These are the only voices we have from a defining era in American history."

He adds: "These are the stories of people's lives who grew out of slavery."

Reams of written documents regarding slavery, mostly from field historians of the Works Progress Administration, are kept in the library's American Folklife Center and are available on the Web at the American Memory site, Taft says. But those interviewers used dictation and could not always be faithful to what was being said.

The newly released digital recordings are raw and fresh, straight from wellspring. The quality is sometimes poor, and here and there words are swallowed or unintelligible. There are transcripts on the site for every recording. The beauty, Taft says, is that the recordings "are the only way you hear how they expressed themselves."

It is an eerie feeling as you sit in the gray glow of your computer and hear Charlie Smith, reported to be well over 100 years old when he was interviewed, tell of other slaves wanting to throw him off a ship as he sailed from Africa to America. "I was a child, a boy," he says.

His tone is rhythmic, slow. He talks on and on and his voice is crackling, yet resolute, like a rusted gate hinge.

He was tricked onto the slave ship, he tells the interviewer, by promises of pancakes.

At one point during the crossing, he says matter-of-factly, folks were yelling: " 'Throw him overboard!' I was in cuffs. 'Throw him overboard, let the damn whale swallow him like he done Jonah.' "

Smith was interviewed in Florida by historian Elmer Sparks. The other 15 interviewers include notable writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and folklorists such as John and Alan Lomax.

John Lomax, you learn from listening, could be an abrasive interrogator. At one point he snaps at Ledbetter, "Louder. Sing it louder." Ledbetter, with a meek, dulcet air, complies.

"No soap, no starch," Ledbetter trills with a haunting wistfulness. "Nobody, nobody to wash my clothes. Nobody to wash my clothes."

He tells Lomax, "I hate to sing to anybody. My voice, it, it broke."

The site is handsome, as is nearly every Web presentation the library creates. It takes a while to understand the site's navigation, but the investment of time and techno-patience is worth it.

Nearly seven hours of material is available. The recordings were made between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states.

Washingtonian Roscoe E. Lewis, working with the WPA and the Federal Writers' Project, made three recordings of former slaves for the state of Virginia. He and a group of 16 African American chroniclers also put to paper hundreds of oral histories and, in 1940, published "The Negro in Virginia."

Nine of the newly available recordings were produced by the American Dialect Society. The rest come from various sources. The site features 28 songs sung by former slaves.

More than 2,000 additional interviews, compiled by the Federal Writers' Project, are also in the library's collection and available online through the American Memory Web site.

But if you want to hear real people speaking in real voices, you can use your ears and your computer's media player.

The introduction to the library's presentation, on the site's home page, reminds listeners that most of the recorded interviews took place long after the subjects had been in slavery.

Slavery is the recurring theme, but the men and women also discuss their lives after bondage and the changing society around them.

Interviewer John Henry Faulk, a renowned storyteller from Austin, caught up with Laura Smalley in Hempstead, Tex., in 1941. She remembered eating with other slave children from a long, wooden trough-like tray.

Smalley's voice is like a fast-moving train, sometimes sounding like two voices melded into one -- an older woman and a younger girl.

She refers to herself as "a great big girl" and "a big old girl" at times in the interview.

At one point Smalley is asked what her family did after the Emancipation Proclamation. "Mama and them didn't know where to go, you see, after freedom broke," Smalley says. "Just turned, just like you turn something out, you know. Didn't know where to go. That's just where they stayed."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the recess appointment "a finger in the eye to all those seeking fairness and bipartisanship in the judicial nominations process."

Another Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said, "It is quite unfortunate that the president has chosen to seat Judge Pickering only days before the nation celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Thompson said that while on the federal bench in Mississippi, Pickering had sought to "limit minority voting strength and to stifle the rights of women - counter to everything Dr. King and the civil rights movement were all about."

The 5th Circuit handles appeals from Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, and the federal judges on that circuit have been trailblazers on desegregation and voting rights in the past.

Pushing for Pickering's confirmation last year, Bush said, "He is a good, fair-minded man, and the treatment he has received by a handful of senators is a disgrace. He has wide bipartisan support from those who know him best."

Democrats have used the threat of a filibuster to block four U.S. Appeals Court nominees this congressional term: Pickering, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Texas judge Priscilla Owen and Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada. Others, including California judges Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown, are expected to be blocked by Democrats as well.

Frustrated at the delays, Estrada withdrew his nomination in September.

Pickering's nomination had sparked one of the most contentious battles between Republicans and Democrats over the federal courts.

He was the first of Bush's nominees to be blocked by Democrats, while they controlled the Senate in 2001, and his chances of getting through the Senate waned with the resignation of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., over racially insensitive statements about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Pickering, however, refused to step aside and continued to try to build up support in the South. He strongly denied allegations of racial insensitivity.

"For 25 years I have strongly advocated that African-Americans and whites should sit down and talk in a positive and constructive manner to try to promote better understanding. This I've done," Pickering said after a meeting with the Mississippi Black Caucus last year.

Republicans concentrated on other nominees like Estrada and Owen, but always promised to get back to Pickering.

During Pickering's nomination hearing, Republicans accused Democrats of being religiously biased against Bush's anti-abortion nominees, a theme they continued with Estrada and other Bush anti-abortion nominees.

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

I'm just gonna take it from here.

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

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NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chief Retires
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

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

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

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

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

The shifting environment forced Ms. Jones to rethink the strategy of the organization, which has argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other private legal group, and to work more behind the scenes, trying, often, to keep cases away from the Supreme Court.

The legal fight to preserve affirmative action, in particular, became an overarching struggle in Ms. Jones's tenure. Employing tactics that were at times controversial, she made it a personal mission to see that only a case that would best support the use of racial preferences came before the justices.

It was the Supreme Court's ruling last June upholding the use of race in admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School, Ms. Jones said, that finally freed her to make the decision to step down.

"It was clear when I took this job that the Supreme Court was going to look at an affirmative action case," she said. "We had to make sure it was the right one. Michigan was it, and it ended in a slam-dunk victory affirming the principles we have been fighting for. After that I knew I could go."

The legal wrangling to block the advance of other affirmative action cases by the Legal Defense Fund drew criticism from conservatives, most vociferously in an employment discrimination dispute out of Piscataway, N.J., in which a white teacher sued her school board for discrimination after she was laid off instead of a black teacher.

The record of the case in the lower courts lacked crucial elements, Ms. Jones said, including the fact that though the teachers had the same seniority, the black teacher had a master's degree and the white teacher did not. When the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case, after the white teacher had won in the lower courts, Ms. Jones said she was overcome with a mix of anxiety and fierce determination.

Fearing a defeat with sweeping repercussions, she sat bolt upright in bed one night, she said, and declared, "Piscataway cannot be the case." She rallied civil rights groups to force a last-minute settlement in the dispute, and the case was dropped from the court's calendar just weeks before it was to be argued, an outcome that provoked widespread resentment from the case's backers.

In other cases, Ms. Jones had to bend not just the justice system to her will, but the public as well. When the defense fund first took up the cause of Kemba Smith, a young black woman who, because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, was sent to prison for 24 years for her peripheral association with a drug ring run by her boyfriend, many middle-class blacks, she said, were not attuned to the repercussions of the sentencing laws.

Ms. Jones rented a limousine and took the national presidents of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Links, two influential black women's organizations, of which she is a member, to the prison to see Ms. Smith.

"I needed them to see their daughters and nieces, to identify with the issue," she said. "They did, and they did not let that case go." Ms. Smith was pardoned by President Bill Clinton at the end of his term.

Ms. Jones's announcement, to her staff and board of directors, produced widespread shock.

"The staff was genuinely caught off guard," said Theodore M. Shaw, Ms. Jones's associate director-counsel. "People need some time to digest it. It will take some adjustment."

Ms. Jones said her decision to step down was motivated solely by a desire to devote more time to her health and personal life. She said she planned to get a personal trainer and enter a long-distance bicycle race.

May will be the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and while the Legal Defense Fund, known as L.D.F., may take a moment to pat itself on the back, she said, it must also maintain pressure to preserve the principles of the case.

"It's up to L.D.F. to write the real story of Brown," she said. "Not how we got the decision, but what has happened to it in the years since, how we've gotten into this pickle we're in now. The work is unfinished and that's putting it mildly. We cannot spend the next 50 years like we have spent the past 50."

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

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California Democrats Face Grim Post-Mortem
By DEAN E. MURPHY

Published: January 16, 2004

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

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

Advertisement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published: January 16, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Race Tightens in Final Days of Iowa Battle
By CARL HULSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 15, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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