January 24, 2004

Remember this from the other day?

Phelps' reply:

…brought this extended response down on you. Blame him.

To begin with, that the interests of corporations and the wealthy privileged class differ from those of mere mortals (and Chaos deities) isn't a matter of belief, it's a matter of observation. And yes, those with influence will try to increase that influence.

Yet if we've seen cycles at all, it consists of people assuming physical control means psychological control and overreaching…sometimes they overreach within their own society, sometimes their society overreaches and sometimes they just reach until they're in no condition to respond to change, but no one sees infinite growth. And when those with control fail, that which they control fails, at least briefly. And since we ARE talking nations, societies,, economies, even a brief failure is a whole lot of grief that we'd really just rather not have to endure.

Some counter is needed to balance the tendency to overreach. Some balance is needed to compensate for the influence wealth has on the direction of society. There are very few social forces powerful enough to fill that role.

Though I concede that, at this point, none of those social forces are even trying to fulfill it.

Why not just let things sort themselves out, let market forces define our society? Because market forces pay no regard to things like hunger, tornadoes and mud slides and yes, terrorist attacks. Suppose we had let market forces sort out New York's problems after the World Trade Center was destroyed? What market forces played into the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and not Col. Gaddafi?

The specific answers are not important in this case. The point is, non-market based decisions are made all the time. Do we really have a choice but to restore New York City?

We as a people decide what is important. It is a choice which issues are lovingly shepherded into actuality and which left to the winds of time and fate. And among those with the right to influence those choices, we the people have only one real way to play, and that's through government.

Government CAN…not to say will, but can…shift the balance of power back to the people. Corporations know this, which is why they lie. Yes, lie…how many bills are promoted by industry groups and lobbyists as ways of promoting competition _deregulation when we all know that NO BUSINESS WANTS COMPETITION. The way electronic voting is being implemented by companies with very close ties to the Republican party gives me pause for similar reasons.

The power of government isn't the problem. The problem is the end to which that power is bent. I'd rather keep the mechanism around and just get control of it back where it belongs. And it's something that must be done now. See, the neocons are right in this, that what happens in the next five years will shape the next fifty.

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Surprisingly enough, Where We Stand is a Koufax Award finalist. I have to thank Al-Muhajabah for the nomination. I'm not going to pretend the recognition isn't appreciated.

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Conservative Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they moved in with people who had built defensive walls. They paid the owner of the wall for its protection.

Liberal Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they hired professional warriors to protect them while professional builders constructed a defensive wall.

Libertarian Lens:
People needed protection from raiders, so they bribed one set of raiders to defend them from all the rest. The hired raiders built a defensive wall to ease their task.

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…otherwise I'll lose the election again!

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The President Makes Danger His Campaign Theme
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

ASHINGTON

THERE was something familiar in the language that President Bush used in his State of the Union speech Tuesday when he asked Americans to stay with him through the journey that began on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. "We've not come all this way through tragedy and trial and war only to falter and leave our work unfinished," Mr. Bush said, in words that bore the strong imprint of his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian.

Some listeners detected an allusion to a passage in "Amazing Grace," the hymn written by a slave trader turned minister and abolitionist, John Newton, after he survived an Atlantic storm:

Through many dangers, toils and snares,

I have already come;

'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

and grace will lead me home.

Newton was referring in the last two lines to his salvation by God, a sentiment often echoed by the president. But in this speech, which served as the opening shot of Mr. Bush's 2004 campaign, the real message was there if listeners substituted the name "Bush" for "grace."

In short, Mr. Bush was holding himself out as the candidate who can best protect the nation from the evils of a post-9/11 world. Many Democrats call it the politics of fear; Republicans call it reality. Whatever the terminology, Mr. Bush has never before so bluntly told voters that the choice was between him and "the dangerous illusion" (read Democrats) that the threat had passed. Members of both parties say that running on national security may well guarantee Mr. Bush a second term. The White House is betting the election on it.

This is hardly news to the Democrats, who have never said the fear is not real. The candidacy of Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the commander of the Kosovo bombing campaign, was driven in large part by Democrats nervous about the national security credentials of the antiwar Howard Dean; John Kerry began to surge after a soldier whose life he saved in Vietnam turned up in Iowa. The Democrats tried to make the economy the issue in the 2002 midterm elections, but Mr. Bush led the Republicans to gains by vowing to hunt the killers down "one by one" and charging the Democrats with holding up the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

The State of the Union speech took the strategy to new heights. "This was a remarkably candid acknowledgment of how much he intends to exploit the political value of his posture as the only effective warrior in the war against terror," said David M. Kennedy, a professor of history at Stanford. "It's a very strong card, and may well prove to be a trump card."

Historically, Americans have not voted out the commander in chief in the middle of war, which helps explain, Democrats say, why Mr. Bush used the grand stage of the State of the Union speech to underline the threat. ("And it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false.") It is also why the president traced the two-year narrative of a war on terror and then rebutted those who questioned, as he put it, "if America is really in a war."

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Anyone have opinions about portal software…PHP-Nuke, Slash, that sort of thing?

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Sincere, appropriate apology
David Steele
Saturday, January 24, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Steve Kerr did not claim ignorance as an excuse for the offensive term for Chinese Americans he used during a nationally televised NBA game Monday. He offered it as a reason, while making a sincere apology for using it.

"I didn't know it was a derogatory term," he said of the phrase -- "Chinaman" -- he used to describe the Rockets' Yao Ming. "I'm sorry that I offended a lot of people.'' Smart move, because people of Chinese descent, and of Asian descent, understand ignorance as a reason. They don't accept it as an excuse.

They have made that clear since Monday night, when the outraged e-mails and phone calls started crisscrossing the country. Many of them landed at the Organization of Chinese Americans' headquarters in Washington, D.C. Many of them came from the Bay Area, including several addressed to The Chronicle.

The OCA (with 10,000 members in 80 chapters, including the Peninsula and Silicon Valley) listened. So did Kerr, who during his lengthy NBA career had a well-earned reputation as one of the brighter and more perceptive pro athletes.

Kerr made a point of not only issuing apologies in writing and in interviews, but of making one directly to Yao, and admitting that with a Chinese American sister-in-law and a brother-in-law who teaches Chinese history at Cambridge, "of all people, I should know better.''

Kerr didn't do the right thing on the air -- and his timing was particularly egregious, coming on Martin Luther King Day and three days before Chinese New Year -- but he has done the right thing since. Now, he has a chance to help himself and everyone else do the right thing by sports fans from all Asian ethnicities.

"He was actually quite cooperative, and we are continuing the dialogue in order to promote cultural awareness with the Asian American community," OCA executive director Christine Chen said from Washington on Friday.

It's a desperately needed dialogue. It's one that the biggest Asian sports star in American is capable of generating. And, to the chagrin of Asian American fans, it's one that probably will include more insults, inadvertent or not.

"Yao Ming is going to be around a long time," Chen said, "and we're afraid that there will be more ignorant comments and derogatory comments made in the future.''

She's afraid for good reason: Her group has been too busy lately addressing such comments. It was only three months ago that golfer Jan Stephenson went on a tirade in a magazine against the Korean players dominating her sport. A month after that, Mets executive Bill Singer (who later was fired) publicly unloaded a volley of racist insults on Dodgers executive Kim Ng.

Kerr's comment came a year after Shaquille O'Neal spewed gibberish disguised as a Yao impression in a TV interview (a clip that was gleefully repeated by radio talk-show hosts all over the country) and three years after then-Kings guard Jason Williams got into an obscene exchange with Asian fans at a Warriors game in Oakland.

Several viewers angrily saw Kerr's remark as a continuation of an ugly trend, one that crosses gender and racial lines (which they find even more inexcusable) and feeds into the same mind-set that, for example, produced last year's Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts - that Asians exist in America solely to be made fun of, stereotyped and caricatured.

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Bush Seeks 7% Boost in Military Spending
The $402-billion plan covers weapons and antiterrorism programs. A separate request is expected for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

January 24, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration wants to boost military spending by 7%, to nearly $402 billion, in fiscal 2005, the Pentagon said Friday.

That would take the defense budget to levels exceeding those at the height of the Cold War. The increase would help pay for a raft of costly weapons and programs bolstered by Washington's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But the proposed budget does not include the costs of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for two years have largely been funded through massive supplemental spending bills.

The administration is expected to make a request later in the year — most likely after the November presidential election — for an additional $50 billion or more to pay for those military operations.

The $401.7-billion request is in line with what the Pentagon a year ago projected it would seek as part of a long-range plan to boost military spending to $484 billion annually by 2009. It does not include defense programs funded by the Energy Department, expected to cost about $20 billion in 2005.

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How Vouchers Will Enrich Public Schools
By TERRY M. MOE

TANFORD, Calif.
This week, Washington's public schools got some very good news when Congress approved a plan to provide school vouchers to low-income families in the nation's capital. For critics, however, the fight against vouchers goes on. And they continue to repeat their mantra: vouchers drain money out of the public schools.

This argument is persuasive because it seems so obviously true. After all, vouchers do allow students and money to flow out of the public schools, and it would seem to follow that schools are worse off with fewer resources. End of story.

But like many obvious arguments, this one is thoroughly misleading. True, when students use vouchers to go to private schools, the vouchers' costs come out of the government's education budget. So if the total budget stays the same, there is less money available for the public schools. What the critics don't say, however, is that the schools also have fewer children to educate, and would receive the same money per child as before.

In fact, the public schools should actually come out ahead. In a typical voucher program, the cost of the voucher (say, $4,500) is far lower than the average amount the public schools spend on each student (say, $8,000). This means that when students go private, only part of the money budgeted for their education goes with them. The remainder stays in the government's pocket. If these savings were put back into the public schools, the schools would actually have more money per child. And the greater the number of students using vouchers, the greater the increase in spending per child could be.

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But the cost of supporting the physical support a school system requires doesn't change. And how many private schools will accept a student for the amount these voucher programs will pay?

Most of all, when did the school system coming out ahead even become a consideration in the face of the NEED to educate children, the NEED to keep the society literate?

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Pakistan Chief Says It Appears Scientists Sold Nuclear Data
By MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: January 24, 2004

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 23 — Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged Friday that scientists from his country appeared to have sold nuclear designs to other nations probably "for personal financial gain." He denied that the Pakistan government knew of any sales at the time but vowed that suspects would be dealt with "as antistate elements."

General Musharraf's statement at a global economic forum here came after weeks of delicate efforts to force Pakistan to deal with the scientists, according to diplomats and American officials. Technical documents recently obtained from Libya on its nuclear program, as well as documents relating to Iran's nuclear activities, undercut years of Pakistani denials and appeared to force General Musharraf's hand, diplomats and American officials said.

The documents "have created a situation in which the denials no longer hold up," one senior American official said.

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Iraq Illicit Arms Gone Before War, Departing Inspector States
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: January 24, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year.

In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them."

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Asked directly if he was saying that Iraq did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country, Dr. Kay replied, according to a transcript of the taped interview made public by Reuters, "That is correct."

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January 23, 2004

Cheney Is Adamant on Iraq 'Evidence'
Vice president revives assertions on banned weaponry and links to Al Qaeda that other administration officials have backed away from.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

January 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq's biological weapons programs.

The vice president stood by positions that others in the Bush administration have largely abandoned in recent months, as preliminary analysis of the trailers has been called into question and new evidence — including a document found with Hussein when he was captured — cast doubt on theories that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated.

Cheney's comments were seen as stoking the controversy over Iraq as the vice president was embarking on a trip to an economic summit in Switzerland and meetings with European officials, some of them fierce opponents of the war who have been dismissive of U.S. claims about the threat posed by Iraq.

Cheney has consistently espoused the most hawkish views among senior administration officials. His statements Thursday suggest he intends to maintain that tone as he takes a more high-profile role in President Bush's reelection campaign.

"There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," Cheney said in an interview on National Public Radio. "I am very confident that there was an established relationship there."

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Here's a video tape and analysis of Cheney's presentation.

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I think this is worth revisiting.

And this.

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The Other America
By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 23, 2004

Money quote:

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For a Fee, Wind Up Atop the Search Heap
By BOB TEDESCHI

Published: January 22, 2004

GOOGLE vanity is getting to be costly.

As Internet users seek to differentiate themselves from people who share their names, some are buying their way to prominence on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The added exposure comes courtesy of keyword advertising, in which marketers - or common folk, for that matter - bid to have brief advertisements appear atop or beside search results whenever Internet users type in certain words.

Most commonly, that means users who type the phrase "airline tickets" into a search box on Google or Yahoo will see a prominent text ad for Expedia or Travelocity, for which those companies bid more than 75 cents per click last week on Yahoo (Google does not disclose bid prices). But increasingly, it means people will also find an "ad" for Mark Pincus, for instance, whenever they type in his name into Google.

Mr. Pincus, a San Francisco-based technology entrepreneur who most recently founded a networking site, www.tribe.net, bought his own name on Google in 2002, he said, because he thought people would have trouble finding him after a job move.

"I'd been chairman of a company called Support Soft, so if people wanted to find my bio, they could Google me and find me that way," Mr. Pincus said. "But when I stepped down, that was gone, so in a sense my Internet history had been wiped out."

"I knew that when people Googled me, what came up was a lot of random stuff, and I wanted to control what was found about me," he said. "And O.K., I also loved to see how many times I got Googled in a week."

When Internet users type Mr. Pincus's name into Google these days, they are greeted by a tinted ad with a link to his biographical page, atop a page of other Mark Pincus-related links. The ad, when clicked, yields a résumé and links to Mr. Pincus's personal Web log, or blog, and the blog of the extended Pincus family. He pays the Google minimum, a nickel per click, for the ad - and 25 percent of those searching for his name click on the link.

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Why Libya Gave Up on the Bomb
Published: January 23, 2004

Money quote:

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Money quote:

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Democracy at Risk
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.

Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?

Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story about some of the results in the 2002 midterm elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it's not just a bad technology — it's a threat to the republic.

First of all, the technology has simply failed in several recent elections. In a special election in Broward County, Fla., 134 voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting machines showed no votes, and there was no way to determine those voters' intent. (The election was decided by only 12 votes.) In Fairfax County, Va., electronic machines crashed repeatedly and balked at registering votes. In the 2002 primary, machines in several Florida districts reported no votes for governor.

And how many failures weren't caught? Internal e-mail from Diebold, the most prominent maker of electronic voting machines (though not those in the Florida and Virginia debacles), reveals that programmers were frantic over the system's unreliability. One reads, "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded." Another reads, "For a demonstration I suggest you fake it."

Computer experts say that software at Diebold and other manufacturers is full of security flaws, which would easily allow an insider to rig an election. But the people at voting machine companies wouldn't do that, would they? Let's ask Jeffrey Dean, a programmer who was senior vice president of a voting machine company, Global Election Systems, before Diebold acquired it in 2002. Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting" (www.blackboxvoting.com), told The A.P. that Mr. Dean, before taking that job, spent time in a Washington correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files.

Questionable programmers aside, even a cursory look at the behavior of the major voting machine companies reveals systematic flouting of the rules intended to ensure voting security. Software was modified without government oversight; machine components were replaced without being rechecked. And here's the crucial point: even if there are strong reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper trail; there is nothing to recount.

So what should be done? Representative Rush Holt has introduced a bill calling for each machine to produce a paper record that the voter verifies. The paper record would then be secured for any future audit. The bill requires that such verified voting be ready in time for the 2004 election - and that districts that can't meet the deadline use paper ballots instead. And it also requires surprise audits in each state.

I can't see any possible objection to this bill. Ignore the inevitable charges of "conspiracy theory." (Although some conspiracies are real: as yesterday's Boston Globe reports, "Republican staff members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media.") To support verified voting, you don't personally have to believe that voting machine manufacturers have tampered or will tamper with elections. How can anyone object to measures that will place the vote above suspicion?

What about the expense? Let's put it this way: we're spending at least $150 billion to promote democracy in Iraq. That's about $1,500 for each vote cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility of democracy at home?

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Bush to Seek More Money to Fight Terrorism at Home
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: January 23, 2004

ROSWELL, N.M., Jan. 22 — President Bush said today that he would ask Congress for another major increase in financing for domestic security, and, in a clear indication of the strategy his aides say he plans to pursue in his re-election campaign, he urged Americans against taking false comfort in the absence of terrorist attacks on American soil for more than two years [P6: emphasis added].

Mr. Bush's warning at the New Mexico Military Institute here came less than 48 hours after he used the State of the Union address to defend the invasion of Iraq and to counter arguments from Democratic candidates that his pursuit of Saddam Hussein hampered the broader fight against terrorism.

One senior political adviser to Mr. Bush described the president's strategy in the coming months as "a healthy mix of optimism and the fear factor," tapping into what White House officials believe is a wariness among swing voters about putting the nation's security into the hands of any of the Democratic aspirants.

While White House officials gave few details of the 9.7 percent increase Mr. Bush is proposing in the domestic defense spending — about $2.8 billion, they calculated, though there is significant dispute about how to categorize many of those spending programs. Democrats and critics of Mr. Bush's domestic security strategy have argued that some of the money already sent to state and local agencies had been diverted to projects that had only a peripheral relationship to security efforts.

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Apparently, "winning" is also a term of art nowadays…

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Ashcroft, Upbeat on Iraq, Aims at Corruption
By ALAN COWELL

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 22 — A year after he faced a broad wave of anti-American sentiment here, the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft, returned to this Alpine village on Wednesday to say that America was winning the war on terrorism and to promote a new campaign to assail global corruption.

Mr. Ashcroft was the most senior American official to address the annual World Economic Forum as Washington seeks to swing international opinion behind its vision of a transfer of political authority in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney is also expected to attend the gathering at the weekend.

At his previous appearance last January, just weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Ashcroft and others, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, confronted business and political leaders whose mood varied from skepticism to hostility toward America's military intentions in the Middle East. Mr. Ashcroft also faced wide criticism of the harsh measures he had taken to combat terrorism.

"I didn't come back to Davos because I haven't been able to find any hostility in Washington, D.C.," Mr. Ashcroft joked at a lunch gathering, apparently referring to questioning in the United States about the extent to which civil liberties have been subjugated to security measures taken in the name of pre-empting new terror attacks.

At this year's meeting, the mood is more muted and diffuse, focusing on an array of economic and business uncertainties. But there were some important leaders who challenged the results of America's war on terrorism and its campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, told a conference session that the war in Iraq "complicated the already tense situation in which the world found itself" with many Muslims resenting the way their cause was being depicted and feeling a "deep sense of injustice and powerlessness."

"The world became a very dangerous place to live," he said.

Mr. Ashcroft had a more positive message.

"We are winning the war against terrorism," he said, insisting that despite criticism of his record, Washington was respecting the civil rights "at the highest level possible."

He was referring specifically to questioners who challenged the Bush administration's decision to detain people as "enemy combatants" with no access to lawyers or legal support.

But Mr. Ashcroft alluded to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to say that America was at war, giving Washington the right to seize its foes.

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The Sweet and Lowdown on Sugar
By KELLY D. BROWNELL and MARION NESTLE

To lose weight, people must eat less, be more active, or both. The first part of that prescription, of course, raises the question, "Eat less of what?" For the World Health Organization and most nutritionists, one obvious answer is sugars. But the United States and American food companies seem to have a different idea.

Last spring, the W.H.O. and another United Nations group, the Food and Agriculture Organization, issued a report called "The Expert Consultation on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases." It suggested a strategy of dietary changes for individuals, including limits on sugar consumption, as well as policies that might make it easier for people to eat more healthfully.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services should have applauded, but instead it produced a 28-page, line-by-line critique centered on, of all things, what it called the report's lack of transparency in the scientific and peer-review process. Although the department framed the critique as a principled defense of scientific integrity, much evidence argues for another interpretation — blatant pandering to American food companies that produce much of the world's high-calorie, high-profit sodas and snacks, especially the makers of sugars, the main ingredients in many of these products.

The critique was sent to the W.H.O. in the hope that its executive board would reject its report when it met this week. Instead, the board decided to send the strategy to its full membership for a vote in May, but, under pressure from some member states, it gave dissenters an extra month to comment before a final draft is issued. If accepted in May, the strategy won't be binding, but it would provide guidelines to countries seeking to reduce obesity.

To understand the significance of this battle, it is crucial to know that Americans are not alone in gaining weight. Obesity is now a global epidemic, with the International Obesity Task Force estimating that one billion people are overweight or obese. In all but the poorest countries, obesity and its consequences - rising rates of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and so on - are overtaking malnutrition as major health problems. Modern society, with its overabundance of high-calorie food, makes healthful eating difficult.

That the food industry is disputing the W.H.O.'s science is all the more astonishing because the report is notable for the stunning banality of its dietary recommendations: eat more fruits and vegetables, and limit intake of foods high in fats and sugars. Such recommendations are no different from those issued by governments and health organizations since the late 1950's and are thoroughly supported by both science and common sense.

One recommendation in the report raised particular ire - that people should limit "free" sugars. "Free" refers to sugars added to foods that aren't thought of as sweet - mayonnaise and peanut butter, for example - as well as the more obvious soft drinks, snack foods, pastries and candy. The report suggests an upper limit of 10 percent of calories from added sugars - about the amount recommended by our own Department of Agriculture's food pyramid. According to the Agriculture Department, if you eat 2,200 calories a day, you should limit added sugars to 12 teaspoons. The typical American consumes 20. Added sugars made up 11 percent of calories in American diets in the late 1970's; they now are 16 percent overall and 20 percent for teenagers. By itself, that 20-ounce Coke or Pepsi in a school vending machine provides 15 teaspoons of sugars.

Understandably, industry lobbyists are uneasy about calls to cut consumption of sugars. One trade group, the Sugar Association, demanded that the W.H.O. remove an early draft of the report from its Web site and conduct another scientific review. It also vowed to use "every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the report, including asking members of Congress to challenge the United States' $406 million in contributions to the W.H.O.

When food industry executives or government officials complain about the lack of sound science, self-interest is generally at work. Internationally known scientists drafted the W.H.O. report. The report comes to obvious conclusions. Threatened by such conclusions, food companies and their friends in government try to pick apart the science, ridicule the process, and delay action, just as the cigarette industry did for so many years. Senators Larry Craig and John Breaux, co-chairmen of the Senate Sweetener Caucus, asked Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to call on the W.H.O. to "cease further promotion" of the report, while trade associations for the sugar, corn refining and snack food industries questioned the report's legitimacy and asked for Mr. Thompson's personal intervention. They got it.

By making its position on the W.H.O. indistinguishable from that of the food industry, the Bush administration undermines the efforts of more forward-thinking food companies and threatens public health. Its action underscores the need for government to create a wall between itself and the food industry when establishing nutrition and public health policy. Recommendations to cut back on sugars may not please food companies, but it's time to stop trading calories for dollars.

Kelly D. Brownell, professor of psychology at Yale, is author of "Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It." Marion Nestle, professor of public health at New York University, is author of "Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health."

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Words of Support From Bush at Anti-Abortion Rally
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

ASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — Thousands of opponents of abortion who gathered on the Mall here on Thursday for the annual "March for Life" rally cheered vigorously as President Bush thanked them for their "devotion to such a noble cause" and vowed to press ahead with efforts to protect life at all stages.

"Above all, we must continue with civility and respect to remind our fellow citizens that all life is sacred and worthy of protection," Mr. Bush said by telephone from Roswell, N.M., his voice amplified through large speakers. "I know as you return to your communities, you will redouble your efforts to change hearts and minds, one person at a time. And this is the way we will build a lasting culture of life, a compassionate society in which every child is born into a loving family and protected by law."

The rally, followed by a march to the Capitol and the Supreme Court, came on the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that declared a constitutional right to abortion.

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There's no doubt in anyone's mind about the symbolic nature of this event's timing, is there?

So there's no doubt about the symbolic nature of the timing of l'il Georgie's Pickering appointment or last year's anti-Affirmative Action stance, right?

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I am NOT the one who's happy about Frankenfoods. Specifically, I'm not happy with genetic combinations that could not under any circumstances occur in nature…like jellyfish genes inserted into corn.

In fact, GM corn is my biggest worry because everything we eat is either corn or fed corn as it grows.

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Rethinking Regulation of Engineered Crops
By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: January 23, 2004

he Department of Agriculture is considering sweeping changes in its regulation of genetically engineered crops intended to cover more types of plants and insects to keep up with rapidly changing technology.

The proposed changes, announced on Thursday, would toughen regulation in some cases and relax it in others. The department, which issues permits for field trials of genetically engineered crops, said it envisioned moving to a tiered system. The riskiest and most novel crops would get the most scrutiny.

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The department said it would prepare an environmental impact statement. As part of that process, public comment will be sought.

Cindy Smith, who heads biotechnology regulation at the department, said in a conference call that the proposals grew out of an interagency review of regulations sponsored by the White House last year.

The department now regulates genetically engineered crops and insects that pose a risk to other plants. Under its expanded mandate, it would also regulate genetic engineering that could threaten livestock, the environment and public health, as well as organisms intended to control pests. That could put more insects under the department's purview.

"They are trying to recast their regulatory authority to give them a sufficiently broad mandate so that anything that comes up that they want to look at they can," said L. Val Giddings, vice president for agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group.

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January 22, 2004

Gotta go drop off my laptop for repair…a month after getting my wireless act together.

Since I'll be in Manhattan, I may check out the neighborhood the Big Apple Blogger Bash will be in tomorrow. Might go, no decision yet.

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Wall Street Bankers, Reelection Backers
New York's Financial Titans Support Bush in a Big Way
By Ben White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page E01

NEW YORK -- One unseasonably cool evening in late October, a group of Wall Street bankers waited aboard a ferry in New York Harbor for the short trip to Ellis Island and a thank-you event for major backers of President Bush's reelection campaign.

Ordinarily, the bankers -- unaccustomed to waiting for anything -- might be annoyed. But on this night they were placid, despite the fact that Charlie Black, a top adviser to the campaign, was running late.

The Bush administration had given the bankers almost everything they ever dreamed of: a reduction in dividend and capital-gains taxes, a phase-out of the estate tax, an overall reduction in income taxes. So they waited patiently, eager do whatever they could to ensure the president's reelection.

"Wall Street runs on a good economy and the president has given us that," said Mallory Factor, a merchant banker who was among those on the boat. "Then you look at the alternatives on the other side. Either one of those things is enough to make you support the president."

And that's just what Wall Street has done, to an unprecedented extent. Unlike in 2000, when the industry hedged its bets between Bush and Vice President Al Gore, Wall Street thus far has put the bulk of its muscle behind the Republican incumbent.

Through late November, employees of securities industry firms had given at least $4 million to the Bush campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That number will rise significantly -- probably to well over $7 million -- when figures for the full year are reported at the end of this month. As of late November, no Democrat had raised more than $1 million from the industry.

The Bush campaign is not eager to discuss the enthusiastic support it is receiving from Wall Street. Spokesman Scott Stanzel declined to discuss the matter, saying only that the president had raised money from "nearly half a million supporters representing every county in every state."

That reluctance may reflect the fact that the 2004 campaign is unfolding in a very different environment from 2000, a year in which stocks hit their bull-market highs and Enron was still a corporate powerhouse.

Since then, the stock market bubble burst and a series of corporate scandals -- many either directly or indirectly involving Wall Street firms -- rocked investor confidence. Some of those scandals have been pursued by New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, a politically ambitious Democrat who has become a thorn in the side of the industry, and corporate wrongdoing has become a frequent theme in the message of Democrats vying to run against Bush.

Meanwhile, the figures for Bush actually understate the power of his Wall Street support.

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Low-Pay Sectors Dominate U.S. and State Job Growth
In California, industries that are hiring pay 40% less than those that are shrinking, a study finds.
By Nancy Cleeland
Times Staff Writer

January 22, 2004

California is being hit hard by a recent nationwide shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying sectors such as retail sales and tourism, a trend that doesn't bode well for the economy, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute paints a picture of a state and national economy in which employment growth is being driven largely by low-skilled service jobs.

In Los Angeles, according to the preliminary results of another study, the shift is particularly pronounced because so many new jobs are in the "underground" cash economy of laborers who aren't counted in government statistics. These very low-wage workers — people who do yardwork or clean houses or wash dishes — might account for as much as 15% of all jobs in the metropolitan area, said Dan Flaming of the Economic Round Table, which is conducting its study for the city.

"It's really scary," Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said of the long-term implications. An economy increasingly dependent on lower-wage jobs will have a smaller tax base and see less consumer spending, checking economic growth and reducing the quality of public services and infrastructure, Kyser said.

Statewide, since the national recession officially ended in November 2001, the jobs that have been created are in industries that pay an average of 40% less than do those in which jobs have disappeared, the Economic Policy Institute said.

The institute describes itself as focusing on "the economic condition of low- and middle-income Americans and their families" and has been critical of the Bush administration's depiction of the economy.

By the institute's measure, only three other states — Delaware, Massachusetts and Wyoming — fared as badly or worse than California. Only two states, Nevada and Nebraska, saw wages in industries with job growth exceeding wages in sectors with job losses.

"We're losing important manufacturing jobs that have been available to support families, and gaining jobs that don't provide that opportunity," said Jeff Chapman, an economic analyst with the institute. "Now we see that the trend is worsening, even in the middle of a recovery."

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Administration Backs a Food-Labeling Delay
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: January 22, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — Stepping into a contentious debate in Congress over country-of-origin labeling for supermarket beef and produce, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said Wednesday that she supported a two-year delay in the program because Congress needed more time "to put some refinements" on a farm law that requires it starting next fall.

The secretary's comments, her first in public about the labeling question, came during more than two hours of testimony before the House Agriculture Committee on how her department was handling the investigation of the first case of mad cow disease in the United States.

She also outlined her views on labeling in a letter sent Tuesday to Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, who has joined with Democrats to oppose the delay.

"The country-of-origin provision contained in the farm bill is a targeted retail marketing tool, not a food safety or animal health program," Ms. Veneman wrote, "and it should be treated as such."

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Googlewhacking was more fun.

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Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point
By TOM McNICHOL

TIME was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.

But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.

The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

"I'm actually surprised how easy it was to do," said the mastermind of the Bush effort, George Johnston, 46, a computer programmer in Bellevue, Wash., who writes a liberal-leaning Web log called Old Fashioned Patriot (oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com). "It took about six weeks to get Bush's biography as the No. 1 result. I had no idea when I started that I'd get people all over the world involved."

Google bombing has quickly become an armchair sport among those who have a message to broadcast and perhaps a bit too much time on their hands. For nearly a year, the No. 1 search result on Google for the term "weapons of mass destruction" has been a satirical Web page made to resemble an error message that reads, "These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed."

The Liberty Round Table, a libertarian group, started a Google bomb that linked the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, with the term "food Nazis." (As a follow-up, the group is trying to make the Internal Revenue Service site the No. 1 Google result for the term "organized crime.") Other recent Google bombs have sought to associate President Bush, Senator Clinton and Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, with various unprintable phrases.

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John Robb's Weblog:

Isn't it funny (maybe not) how the roles of Republicans and Democrats have shifted over the past 30 years. The aspects of the Republican party that attracted me to them years ago are gone, and they have subsumed by the Dems. For example:

• Fiscal responsibility.
• A non-interventionist foreign policy.
• Personal rights.

Republicans have failed on all of these counts. They are profligate spenders, able to send troops to all corners of the world on a whim, and ready to turn us into a police state. There is nothing left of the Republican party.

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Feds Bust Medical Pot Patients In Courtroom

By Ann Harrison, AlterNet
January 17, 2004

California medical marijuana activists are outraged over the arrest last week of two medical marijuana patients who face potential life sentences on federal drug charges after being turned over by local authorities. David Davidson, of Oakland, California and his partner Cynthia Blake, of Red Bluff, California were arrested in a state courtroom in Corning, California on January 13 as they were seeking to dismiss state charges of marijuana cultivation and distribution.

Davidson and Blake, both 53, have doctor's recommendations to grow and consume medical marijuana under California's 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). While their defense attorneys were meeting in the judge's chambers to discuss the case with Tehama County assistant district attorney Lynn Strom, Strom announced that she was dropping the state charges because Davidson and Blake were being arrested in the courtroom on a federal indictment.

One of the major flaws of California's medical marijuana law is that it does not specify how many plants a patient can grow or how much marijuana they can possess. Each county or city sets its own guidelines and law enforcement around the state has widely ranging interpretations of how much marijuana patients should have.

The Sacramento U.S. Attorneys office did not return calls seeking comment on the case. But Tehama County assistant district attorney Jonathan Skillman argues that Davidson and Blake were growing too much medical marijuana for their personal use. Skillman said prosecutors came to this conclusion after a raid on Davidson and Blake's homes allegedly netted 1,803 plants and over 60 pounds of "processed marijuana."

"He had plans to supply the entire West Coast," Stillman claimed. "It is not in the realm of peronal use."

But Davidson says prosecutors inflated the number of plants seized, which he says is reflected in the charges. He and Blake have been charged with manufacturing more than 100 marijuana plants and conspiracy to cultivate more than 1,000 marijuana plants. The first charge carries a five- to 40-year prison sentence. The second is punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison.

Davidson said Cynthia Blake was growing 33 plants when the Tehama County sheriff's deputies raided her home in July. Skillman acknowledges that the county has no official plant limit for medical marijuana patients. But prosecutors used this information to secure a warrant to raid Davidson's house in Oakland, where he said he grew about 400 plants, mostly single leaf cuttings. Oakland patients are permitted by local ordinance to grow 72 mature plants and 32 square feet of marijuana garden canopy.

In last year's highly publicized federal case of Oakland medical marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal, jurors declined to include cuttings in the count of mature plants. As with that case, Davidson and Blake will likely be barred from arguing that their marijuana was for medical purposes since federal law does not recognized Prop. 215.

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Lawmakers Not Rushing to Take Up Terrorism Act
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — Despite President Bush's plea for an extension of the counterterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress said Wednesday that were in no rush to take up the politically divisive issue in this election year.

Crucial provisions of the law do not expire until the end of 2005, and Mr. Bush's push for their renewal in his State of the Union speech, which he repeated on Wednesday, caught many lawmakers off guard.

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"I'd say he's about a year early," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and a leading member of the judiciary committee. "If I were running for president, I wouldn't have brought it up now."

Mr. Grassley, like other members of Congress interviewed on Wednesday, said that while the antiterrorism act included some important law enforcement tools worth keeping, it was so far-reaching that its continuation needed careful scrutiny.

"I would not take a position of outright renewal at this point," he said.

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January 21, 2004

My cousin just left. She stopped by, made a run wearing my MP3 player and bounced. I tried to set the thing on radio before she left with it. My taste is eclectic as hell and I'm used to people really feeling one song I'm playing only to skeeve on the next one. But she came back feeling my mix, which was a pretty random dump of instrumental jazz, new age with some War and Kool and the Gang sprinkled on top. She was particularly feeling Storms in Africa by Enya.

She asked me to burn a CD of the tracks she'd just listened to, and I'm like cool, and since you like this I'll put together another mix disk too. And I started flipping through the MP3 collection (which I have not re-ripped yet so the genres and such are still only half useful).

I saw the first MP3 I ever downloaded, one of like ten I've gotten from Kazaa without buying the disk it came from. "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles. I got friends that would disown me over that.

I had to play…no, I had to study…"The Same One" by Brook Benton. Never heard of him, you young whippersnapper, have you? Brook Benton was a crooner, and a great one, in the 40s or 50s. I met him through my parent's collection of 45s. He was Nat King Cole's peer in my opinion, and my pop told me his style influenced a number of other artists of his day.

Brook was a pre-Little Richard pop artist, so his musical accompaniment was typical of the day in sounding almost western. I keep mentally inserting the clip-clop of his horse's hooves when I listen to his stuff. And he is SOOOOOOOO p-whipped…

The only artist whose words evidence equally bad taste in mates is Tracy Chapman.

But I study Brook's stuff. See, once I took a sister to one of the "Jazz Cruise" floating concerts WQCD runs every summer. The performer was Vinx (yes it was a long time ago and yes I am old. fuck you, it's my story). One album wonder discovered by Sting, did "The Captain's Song." And "The Captain's Song," it wasn't our song or anything, I just used to mess with her by telling her one part was about her reaction to me when we met:

Her going with me was something of an acknowledgement of the truth in my tease.

So we're right up front and the concert is cool but Vinx was a crooner and guys can listen but women are his target market. And I'm listening, all the guys are listening, ordering beer, checking the band's performance and Vinx does something with his voice that made every woman in the place…

Let me be clear. This is no exaggeration. Each and every woman in the place reacted.

…I say, every woman in the place whooped, stood and clapped, leaned back and said "Damn!" out loud, something like that. And every man in the place looked around like, "whattheFUCK just happened?" Every man except the band and Vinx…who was wearing this evil grin. The woman wouldn't explain to me what that was under the premise that I'd use the information for evil.

Segue several years and I'm talking to a friend about Brook Benton. I tell her I like his vocal stylings and the way he modulates his voice. She'd never heard him before so, being one of the two days in nine I can sing, I hit her with my favorite, "It's Just A Matter of Time," and she went "oooh!"

It was the reaction Vinx got. And I blew past it so fast I didn't recognize what had brought it on. Fortunately, she actually asked me to sing the section again.

I didn't use the knowledge for evil…sister really was just a friend (as Nietzsche said, a man and woman can probably be friends but to that end a bit of physical disinterest probably helps).

I think I need to cut this off. I have a million memories and connections to my old music and I could go one all night.

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Israeli Man Charged With Bribing Sharon
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

…Appel was indicted in the Tel Aviv Magistrates court for allegedly giving Sharon hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote an ambitious real-estate project in Greece when Sharon was foreign minister in 1999 and to help rezone urban land near Tel Aviv before and during Sharon's term as prime minister.

Sharon was allegedly asked to use his influence to push forward both projects, although neither project in Greece nor the land deal near Tel Aviv came to fruition.

During 1998-1999, the indictment said, Appel "gave Ariel Sharon a bribe in recognition of activities connected to the fulfillment of his public positions.''

It said Appel paid a total of $690,000 to Sharon's family ranch in the Negev desert. Appel, a powerful activist in Sharon's Likud Party, also promised his support to Sharon during two election campaigns, the indictment said.

The indictment also charged Appel with bribing Vice Premier Ehud Olmert to promote the Greek project when Olmert was mayor of Jerusalem in the late 1990s.

It also charged that Sharon's son, Gilad, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultation fees for the Greek project. Prosecutors believe these funds were used to bribe Ariel Sharon.

"(Appel) and Gilad agreed to this arrangement despite the fact that the defendant knew that Gilad had no relevant professional qualifications,'' the indictment said.

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Top Court Rules E.P.A. May Overrule States
By REUTERS

Published: January 21, 2004

Filed at 11:52 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the federal government can overrule state decisions on environmental rules in a dispute over additional power capacity at an Alaskan zinc mine operated by Canada's Teck-Cominco Ltd. (TEKa.TO).

The 5-4 decision said the Environmental Protection Agency can stop construction of a major pollutant-emitting facility permitted by a state authority when EPA finds the state's decision on pollution control technology was unreasonable.

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Kerry, Edwards Rake in Tens of Thousands
By SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The surprise top-two finishes by John Kerry (news - web sites) and John Edwards (news - web sites) in Iowa are already paying off: Each took in tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over their Web sites within hours of the Iowa caucuses.

Kerry, Edwards and third-place finisher Howard Dean (news - web sites) all tried to capitalize on Monday's events with fund-raising e-mails. They urged donors to give in time to make a difference in the next big test, New Hampshire's primary next Tuesday.

"I need your help, and I need it immediately to continue the surge in New Hampshire," Kerry wrote Tuesday. "Please contribute today, as much as you can afford."

Along with his e-mail, Kerry challenged donors to help him raise $365,000 over the Internet on Tuesday — marking the 365 days left before the 2005 inauguration — and collected roughly $300,000 by late afternoon.

The candidates entered the primary season in varying degrees of financial health. The Iowa outcome is likely to shake up the money race further, prompting some undecided donors to get off the fence and those who gave to losing candidates to donate to the early winners as well.

Edwards could be seeing his second reversal of fortune. Thanks in large part to millions of dollars from fellow trial lawyers, Edwards started 2003 leading in money, only to drop behind Dean and Kerry as the year progressed.

Edwards' second-place Iowa finish could help re-ignite his attorney donor base and help him move beyond it.

The North Carolina senator saw an immediate surge in contributions after his second-place Iowa finish, which brought in at least $250,000 online between Monday and Tuesday evenings, his campaign said.

"With you, we can shock the world again," Edwards campaign manager Nick Baldick wrote in a fund-raising e-mail Tuesday morning.

Edwards met his goal of raising $20 million by the Iowa voting, and has enough to see him through at least the Feb. 3 primaries, said spokesman Roger Salazar said. Edwards planned one fund-raiser in Boston and two in New York on Tuesday.

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US forces changes to obesity plan

US officials have forced the World Health Organization reconsider plans to tackle global obesity rates.

A draft document won broad backing at a WHO executive board meeting on Tuesday.

But the US delegation insisted further discussion would be needed before a final plan is approved.

The US has questioned the science underpinning the plans, which include cuts in salt, fat and sugar intake in diets across the world.

The proposals, laid out in a strategy document, are designed to cut disease by promoting healthier lifestyles.

It is estimated that 300m people world-wide are obese, and 750m are overweight.

Obesity is a risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and other life-threatening conditions.

As well as pushing the food industry to make deeper cuts in sugar and fat in food, the WHO proposals include changes to advertising and tax policy to promote healthier diets.

Speaking at Tuesday's meeting, New Zealand delegate Gillian Smith said: "We need a strategy to take us out of the comfort zone, because more of the same is clearly not an option."

Opposition

The food industry has claimed that some suggestions - particularly recommendations on sugar - are not based on hard science.

And the US administration has been accused of trying to dilute the proposals to satisfy the industry's demands.

US delegation head William Steiger drew criticism earlier this month after writing to WHO director-general Dr Lee Jong-wook to challenge the science on which the proposals are based.

Mr Steiger said the report did not place sufficient emphasis on the responsibility of the individual to eat a balanced diet.

He also objected to singling out specific types of food, such as those high in fat and sugar.

The WHO executive accepted the US proposal that allows governments more time to suggest changes to the document before it is presented to the 192-nation World Health Assembly in May for final approval.

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In trying to understand humans well enough to create general models of behavior I begin with a trait common to ALL humans: in any dilemma, humans make the choice which least disturbs their habitual patterns of activity. Note that I didn't say the easiest, fastest or smartest choice. With this in mind, let's revisit yesterday's post where I quoted from Clay Shirky's Many-to-Many post, "Inequality," after a brief excursion to secure an understanding of the term "power law distribution":

More precisely (without excess precision)

This pattern would explain a lot of specific economic and social facts (like that average income can rise at the same time the number of broke people increases). A lot of worthy discussion could proceed from this point, but I really did mean this diversion to be brief.

The main thought here comes from combining my opening assumption about human nature with the four methods he mentioned of responding to a power law distribution. Keeping in mind who does the official responding to socioeconomic events, how do you think the economic equivalent of each technique would be appraised by Conservatives™?

You can tax the system, moving more of X (whatever is being ranked) from where it is abundant to where it is scarce. This is how progressive taxation works, transferring money from those with most to those with least. The result is still a power law distribution (the economist Vilfredo Pareto called the distribution “a predictable imbalance” and found it in all market economies), its just got a shallower slope, and an average that’s further from the #1 position and closer to the median.

No need to guess here. Only the various Messiahs get more respect than the idea of cutting taxes.

You can limit the head of the curve. Sometimes this happens naturally — even Joi Ito falls short of the number of connections required for a raw power law distribution on LinkedIn, while over at Friendster, they have placed an artificial cap at 200 links.

This translates to setting limits on oneself; NOT your typical Conservative™'s habitual behavior.

You can also try to make the system more dynamic, by making it possible for new nodes to get attention. This is what Sifry is up to with his Interesting Newcomers list. These are not weblogs with a high number of inbound links, but rather high growth.

Facilitating the competition. Not the habitual behavior of Capitalists™, of which Conservatives™ are a subset. That leaves:

You can truncate the tail, periodically dumping those links that are below median or some other threshold.

This is the Conservative™ plan…the way unemployment figures are calculated is a near archetypical example (no, the idea of not counting those who are no longer looking for work isn't a Conservative™ plot, though last summer's decision to change the method of adjusting the figures…a change that coincidentally made the Bushista's Boys look better…probably qualifies as a plot). It requires no change on their part, and by insisting that amoral market forces set the truncation threshold they can avoid the moral repercussions of allowing amoral market forces to set the threshold in the first place.

It's pure self interest at work. But it's not an irrational decision. It's not stupid or evil. That's a good thing because you can't actually talk to stupid, irrational or evil.

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magpie at Pacific Views brings us this from the Economic Policy Institute:

In 48 of the 50 states, jobs in higher-paying industries have given way to jobs in lower-paying industries since the recession ended in November 2001. Nationwide, industries that are gaining jobs relative to industries that are losing jobs pay 21% less annually. For the 30 states that have lost jobs since the recession purportedly ended, this is the other shoe dropping—not only have jobs been lost, but in 29 of them the losses have been concentrated in higher paying sectors. And for 19 of the 20 states that have seen some small gain in jobs since the end of the recession, the jobs gained have been disproportionately in lower-paying sectors.

and says:

Just note there are at least two ways to establish equality: raise everyone to the same level or depress everyone to the same level.

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booooooring…

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Bush calls for key change to Social Security
Taxes would be diverted to private accounts
Cox News Service
Posted: Jan. 20, 2004
Washington - President Bush used his State of the Union speech Tuesday to promote a key economic goal: turning millions of average Americans into investors via the Social Security system.

Bush called on Congress to dramatically alter the nature of Social Security by allowing some Americans to divert their payroll taxes into private accounts.

"Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account," he said. "We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people."

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Labor takes hard look at political operations after defeat of two union-backed candidates
By LEIGH STROPE
The Associated Press
1/21/04 2:32 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Organized labor is taking a hard look at its political influence and voter turnout operations after the two union-backed candidates that were to dominate the Iowa caucuses sank instead.

Unions were to be the powerhouse in Iowa, with white-collars for Howard Dean and blue-collars for Dick Gephardt. But in a stunning upset, they emerged battered in third- and fourth-place behind Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards.

Leaders of industrial unions that formed a coalition supporting Gephardt, called Americans for Economic Justice, were to confer Wednesday to assess what happened in Iowa and map out a political future.

But already, union leaders say the lesson from Iowa is that organized labor remains split over which Democrat is best suited to challenge President Bush in November. Of the 64 unions in the AFL-CIO, less than half were committed to a candidate.

"I don't anticipate us arriving at another candidate," said Donald Kaniewski, political director of the Laborers' International Union of North America, a member of the coalition that backed Gephardt. "We've got plenty of work to do on jobs, health care and trade, and that work will continue."

Unions are looking ahead to contests in labor-dense states such as Missouri on Feb. 3, where more than 13 percent of the work force belongs to a union, and Michigan on Feb. 7, with more than 21 percent of its work force unionized. In Iowa, about 11 percent of workers are union members.

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January 20, 2004

George W Bush and the real state of the Union
Today the President gives his annual address. As the election battle begins, how does his first term add up?
20 January 2004

232: Number of American combat deaths in Iraq between May 2003 and January 2004
501: Number of American servicemen to die in Iraq from the beginning of the war - so far
0: Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender to the Allies in May 1945
0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to be photographed
0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq
100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003

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Just enough to make you read the rest…

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America as a One-Party State
Today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.

By Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 2.1.04

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.
In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars…

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Ever since Clay Shirky wrote "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality he's been dogged by follow-up articles on repercussions, reinterpretations and discussions about what the discussions about it mean.

Mr. Shirky just posted something at Many-to-Many titled Inequality that is about networks but since society is a kind of network I don't feel I'm reaching when I suggest you apply the analysis to politics, society and all that.

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Technorati is testing a beta version of its service, which is good because the current version keeps showing two and three days between this site updating. The beta site is more up to date, and in examining what it reported I found The Struggle: Liberation vs Social Power at Cobb.

Interesting. The core statement:

…is something I can get with. In fact, Michael says:

I don't think that's our primary difference (but that's probably because my reasoning is different ), but the rest is close enough that I can let it lay. We share a lot of perceptions and have parallel analytical methods so we have little choice but to agree on a lot of things. I think I'm the more realistic of the two of us, though…I'm willing to accept J.C. Watts, Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice as proof of the impact Black people can have on the Republican platform;never mind the l'il Georgie's annual MLKDay pronouncements.

Also, I don't spend a lot of energy dissing your president; he's an easy target.

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Trooper files sex-bias claim
Copter pilot says she was harassed

By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff, 1/20/2004

The first and only female helicopter pilot in the Massachusetts State Police has filed a discrimination complaint with the state alleging that after she rejected her supervisor's unwanted sexual advances, he retaliated by spreading false rumors and asking the Federal Aviation Administration to revoke her license.

The complaint that Trooper Jody A. Reilly filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination this month is the 30th gender and sexual bias claim against the State Police since 1995. Three complaints were settled and three dismissed for lack of probable cause.

Reilly is featured in State Police recruitment posters and at one point was the only woman on the cover of the agency's recruitment brochure. Inside that brochure,

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Hopes for Civility in Washington Are Dashed
In Bush's Term, Tone Worsened, Partisans Say

By Dana Milbank and David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A01

Thirty-seven months ago, President-elect George W. Bush stood in the Texas House chamber and called for the nation's leaders to "put politics behind us and work together" after the bitter Florida recount.

"I am optimistic that we can change the tone in Washington, D.C.," he said after the Supreme Court cemented his victory. "I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past. Our nation must rise above a house divided."

But as Bush begins the final year of his term with Tuesday night's State of the Union address, partisans on both sides say the tone of political discourse is as bad as ever -- if not worse.

Democrats complain that they have been shut out of all legislative action and that those who challenge Bush have their patriotism questioned and may be accused of aiding terrorists. Republicans counter that Democrats seem intent on blocking all Bush initiatives and are running a presidential primary campaign based on personal attacks on the president.

There have been moments of civility, such as the crafting of bipartisan education legislation and the national unity that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But those moments have been overtaken by bitterness.

Early in the term, "I had high hopes for Bush" changing the tone, said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), a voice of civility in Congress. "We were on the high road then, but now I think we've hit an all-time low."

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Last presidential election l'il Georgie revealed the depths of his compassion, recognizing how hard it is to put food on your family. He then dug a hole deep enough to send everyone a couple hundred bucks each…and dug some more until he was deep enough to send really rich people many thousands of dollars each. And set up machinery that would send them some more, dig a little deeper, every so often.

He is now going to show even more compassion. He's going to show he recognizes how hard it is to put a place to live on your family.

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An Assault on Housing Vouchers

The Bush administration, which created a record budget deficit partly through tax cuts for the rich, is threatening to make up some of the difference by cutting desperately needed programs aimed at the poor. One candidate for the chopping block is Section 8, the federal rent-subsidy program whose main purpose is preventing low-income families from becoming homeless.

The Section 8 voucher program subsidizes families who rent apartments in the private market. The renters, most of whom live at or below the poverty level, pay 30 percent of their incomes toward rent, and the voucher covers the remainder.

At the moment, the program covers about 2.1 million households. Most of these families include minor children; 40 percent include elderly or disabled people. Section 8 came about during the 1970's, when the government began to move from housing needy people in publicly owned developments to housing them in private housing, through rent vouchers and construction subsidies. The most recent data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, based in Washington, shows that the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment has risen by 37 percent since 1999. The yearly cost of the voucher program has reached $14 billion - and will grow as long as housing costs continue to rise faster than incomes.

Like health care, housing has become a necessity priced out of the reach of many families, particularly the working poor. It is understandable that the government should look at the cost of housing programs with concern. But the one unacceptable option is simply to decide to let people fend for themselves.

Even now, families sometimes wait for years for vouchers, which become available when current voucher holders die or get better jobs and become ineligible for subsidies. By some estimates, only one in four families who actually qualify for Section 8 vouchers receives them. Given that the affordable housing crisis is likely to become worse as time goes by, anything that makes it harder to house poor families is by definition a disastrous idea.

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Annan Signals He'll Agree to Send U.N. Experts to Iraq
By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 — Secretary General Kofi Annan gave strong indications on Monday that he would accept a request to send United Nations experts to Iraq, in a move that could help end the stalemate over how to turn over authority to an Iraqi-led government.

Mr. Annan met Monday with top American, British and Iraqi officials from Baghdad. The meeting came after months of ill will between the United States and the United Nations, which refused to authorize the Bush administration's decision to use military action. Last fall, after a fatal bombing at its Baghdad headquarters, the United Nations pulled out of Iraq, citing security concerns and a lack of clarity about its role.

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Striking a stance that was at once cooperative and cautious, Mr. Annan told a news conference that he understood the urgency of the issue but that "further discussions should take place at the technical level." Those discussions began almost immediately, with United Nations election experts being briefed on the complicated political plans by which the occupation authority hopes to transfer power to Iraqis on June 30.

Diplomats said that despite Mr. Annan's careful public statements, it appeared likely that he would decide quickly to approve the request. A European diplomat who took part in the meeting said, "In my experience at the United Nations, when you say you'll consider something, you've already put your foot on the slope."

The occupation authorities had largely shunned the United Nations in their political planning but have suddenly turned to it now that the most revered cleric among Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has objected to the American plans for a transition and has instead called for direct elections. Thousands of his followers have staged demonstrations backing his plea. A march on Monday in Baghdad drew 100,000.

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I'm preordering this sucker today. And while I'm at it, I'll probably grab Drop Squad.

Now if only they'd release Cosmic Slop on DVD, we could start up the Angry Blackman Video Club.

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A Story of Black Insurrection Too Strong for 1973
By PETER M. NICHOLS

Published: January 20, 2004

The Negroes are the trouble spot," a black aide tells a white senator who is behind in the polls in "The Spook Who Sat by the Door," Ivan Dixon's film about mounting a black insurrection in six American cities. Based on a provocative book by Sam Greenlee, "Spook" encountered plenty of trouble itself when it was released in 1973. The story goes that the government pressured the distributor, United Artists, to pull the movie from theaters. Facts are hard to come by, but "Spook" quickly disappeared, consigned to cult status and a murky life on bootleg video.

"I've been bootlegging it myself out of my shoulder bag," Mr. Greenlee said in an interview last week. That will no longer be necessary. On Jan. 27 "Spook," restored by Obsidian Home Entertainment, will be released on DVD.

Obsidian works to revive black films of particular interest. This one recalls the blaxploitation movies of the early 70's. (Gordon Parks Jr.'s "Superfly," a prime example, is available in a new edition from Warner.) But "Spook" had nothing in common with most films of that genre. "Nobody expected this kind of movie," said Tim Reid, the actor and director and founder of Obsidian. "They thought it was another nice little black vs. whitey story with girls and drinking. Instead there was this political drama."

On screen the senator decides to boost his standing with black voters by recommending that the C.I.A. appoint its first black agent, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook). After five years in menial positions, Freeman quits and takes what he has learned about terrorist tactics back to Chicago, where he starts to put together a guerrilla operation.

Shot on a bare-bones budget, "Spook" is as much street scramble as revolution, but it has some interesting pointers: in guerrilla warfare, not losing is winning; keep to basics (or, as Mr. Greenlee puts it in the screenplay he wrote with Melvin Clay, sleep on the floor and you won't fall out of bed).

" `The Spook Who Sat by the Door' is a difficult work to judge coherently," Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times. "It is such a mixture of passion, humor, hindsight, prophecy, prejudice and reaction that the fact that it's not a very well-made movie, and is seldom convincing as melodrama, is almost beside the point."

The rage is real, Canby continued, even if the characters and situation are not very believable. The book, published in 1969, worked more expansively. In an interview this week, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African-American studies department at Harvard, said that he had not seen the film but had read the novel while he was an undergraduate at Yale.

"It was a cult book for us because we all wanted to be spooks who sat by the door," he said. "We all wanted to be inside the system, integrated into the historically elite white institutions of America, transforming them from inside."

Mr. Greenlee, 73, said that he showed only action scenes to United Artists, which agreed to distribute the film thinking it would be the usual blaxploitation fare. "When they saw the final cut, they went up the wall," he said.

The plan was to shoot the movie in Chicago. "The mayor had read the book, or part of it, and hated it," Mr. Dixon said, referring to Richard J. Daley. Lacking permissions, the production moved to Gary, Ind.

Mr. Dixon, 73, was primarily a television director ("The Waltons, "The Rockford Files," "Quincy") and actor (Sergeant Kinchloe in "Hogan's Heroes"). Last week he said that "Spook" was only trying to show black anger, not suggest armed revolt as a credible step.

Mr. Greenlee described his own intention. "I wrote it as a training manual so that people would do it right," he said. Among those who didn't, he added, were the Black Panthers. "Their mistake was not going beyond being armed propagandists," he said. "Had they gone underground, they might have maintained themselves." Distributed by Monarch. $19.95. 102 minutes.

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Is any further proof necessary that collective punditry has its collective head up its collective ass? Not that Iowa is all that typical…

Truth is, I don't know why they kept calling it a four-way race. The only thing I was as sure of as I am that Lieberman is unelectable is that Gephardt is unelectable. And Sharpton. And Kucinich. But then, I didn't think Edwards would have such a strong showing either.

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January 19, 2004

It seems like a lot of people at least investigate Bloggies nominees. Referrals from the Bloggies site have roughly tripled my visitor count.

It seems the competition is Blogshares, Unconscious Mutterings, 100 Things About Me and The Friday Five. That's both the the order of our appearance on the ballot and, in my estimate, the likely inverse of our finishing positions.

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What Should be in the State of the Union

To: President Bush, Karl Rove
From: Robert O. Boorstin
Re: State of the Union

January 19, 2004

Robert O. Boorstin
As you spend these last hours considering your speech tonight, we recommend that you make a sharp turn in your approach. Specifically, we think that you should shoot straight with the American people about the course of our national security policy over the past year and the tough realities that lie ahead in 2004. While we recognize this move would change the tenor of the State of the Union – and could draw media attention – we believe that this abrupt shift will take your political opponents by surprise and position you as the honest candidate as we head for the fall election.

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…followed by suggestions that would require three days of mouth-unscrewing before the words could leave l'il Georgie's mouth.

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via Blogcritics

Rapper gets six years
Posted by Marty Dodge on January 19, 2004 08:35 AM (See all posts by Marty Dodge)
Filed under: Music, Music: News

Rapper Mystikal was jailed for six years on Friday at the dramatic conclusion to a long running legal case in which the MC's hairstylist claimed to have been sexually assaulted after an argument over money.

As previously reported, the stylist claims she was confronted by the rapper and two of his bodyguards back in July 2002. They accused her of stealing money and then forced her to perform sexual acts as punishment. Mystikal originally pleaded not-guilty to the charges, but switched his plea when a it materialised the trio had videoed the incident and that police had located the tape.

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The San Francisco Chronicle has an editorial (Universal health care -- why not?) discussing a couple of single payer health care systems being considered in California. The specifics of the programs aren't as interesting as the reasoning supporting such a move:

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Applying the premise of the book to the major political parties, or in fact to the nation as a whole, would be interesting.

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Breaking a business down to its 'core' principals

By Tom Ehrenfeld, Globe Correspondent, 1/18/2004

Who Really Matters:
The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success
by Art Kleiner
Currency/Doubleday, $29.95

In his new book, business thinker Art Kleiner gets to the heart of what makes organizations tick with one simple question: Who is "in"?

Such a query -- and its follow-up question of "Who is out?" -- identifies one of the most powerful dynamics of corporate life. According to Kleiner, "In every company, agency, institution, and enterprise, there is some Core Group of key people -- the `people who really matter.' Every organization is continually acting to fulfill the perceived needs and priorities of its Core Group."

Set aside mission statements and audacious goals. Companies exist to serve the financial and psychological needs of the chosen few. Kleiner argues that power resides not in the formal structures and flow charts of an organization but in this rarely identified Core Group. These members receive lavish salaries, comfortable perks, and recognition, as well as a life free of such complications as having to book travel arrangements or deal with personal details.

All other organization men and women are what Kleiner calls "employees of mutual consent" -- people who act on the perceived needs of the Core Group, whether they do so directly or down the chain of command. While these individuals can achieve financial security and even personal fulfillment, they never enjoy the perks and privileges of the insiders.

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Take the effects Mr. Fulton describes, raise it to a national level and multiply by 50, and you've got the essence of
"Compassionate Conservatism®".

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Umbilical Cord That Bleeds Instead of Nourishing
By William Fulton
William Fulton is president of Solimar Research Group and a senior scholar at the School of Policy, Planning and Development at USC. He was elected to the Ventura City Council in November.

January 18, 2004

VENTURA — Usually it takes a governor of California six months or even a year to break financial promises to local governments. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, by his own account, is on a fast track.

He's been in office just two months, and already he's done it twice. The day he was inaugurated, he took $4 billion away from local government by cutting the car tax, money he has promised to restore through an emergency-payment scheme that has angered legislative leaders. And this month, he proposed taking about $1.3 billion in property taxes — a revenue source controlled by local governments in most states — to help balance his 2004-05 budget.

As a commentator, I understand why Schwarzenegger keeps trying to take money away from local governments. But as an elected city official, I'm mad. Every time there's a financial crisis in Sacramento, we feel the squeeze here in Ventura. The streets don't get paved. The libraries can't stay open. We fall further behind in our struggle to pay our police officers and firefighters enough money so that they can live in the community they serve.

However badly we get whacked, counties get hit twice as hard. Of the $1.3-billion cut in Schwarzenegger's budget proposal, counties would suffer $1 billion of the damage. That reduction would make it more difficult for local officials to keep jails open and deliver the health and welfare services that function as the principal safety net in most communities.

The truth is, the whole pattern is beginning to feel a little old. Former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson first bludgeoned local governments more than a decade ago, when he balanced the budget by taking one-quarter of the property taxes away from local governments — a move that has cost cities, counties and special districts tens of billions of dollars.

Wilson characterized the shift as temporary, but he never returned the funds. Democratic former Gov. Gray Davis promised to restore the property taxes to their pre-Wilson levels, but he never did, in spite of huge budget surpluses.

Now Schwarzenegger is following the same path.

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NAFTA 10 YEARS LATER
U.S. Reaps Bittersweet Fruit of Merger
Many Americans lost their jobs as industries moved south to Mexico. Others capitalized, setting up businesses along border areas.
By Evelyn Iritani
Times Staff Writer

January 19, 2004

After Green Giant closed its vegetable processing plant here and moved her job to Mexico in the early 1990s, Yolanda Navarro turned her experience into a crusade against globalization. She crisscrossed the country with a plea: Don't support the North American Free Trade Agreement, or thousands more jobs will be lost.

A decade after Congress narrowly approved the agreement opening the borders between Mexico, the United States and Canada, the 47-year-old Mexican immigrant has seen her fears realized. Four more of this farm community's food processing plants have closed, eliminating nearly 2,000 jobs.

"There are a lot of things wrong with our economy, but one of the big things is NAFTA," said Navarro, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked at the Green Giant plant with her husband, Lauro, for more than 20 years.

Nearly 400 miles south at the California border, Stephen Gross has a different view of NAFTA. The trade pact enabled him to build a thriving business ferrying goods between Mexican border factories, or maquiladoras, and stores and plants in the United States. His 150-employee company, Border Trade Services, handled about $600 million worth of auto parts, electronic components and other cargo last year.

"There are estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 people work in the maquiladoras, but live in San Diego," Gross said. "All those people are contributing to the San Diego economy one way or another."

The experiences of these two cities show that NAFTA's impact on the U.S. economy has varied dramatically from place to place and industry to industry. Consumers enjoy lower prices for many goods. Border regions have seen a boom in transportation and trade-related jobs. But others have suffered as NAFTA made it easier for U.S. automakers, food processors and apparel makers to shift low-margin, labor-intensive work to Mexico.

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Pataki Budget Reducing Aid to Disabled
By MARC SANTORA and AL BAKER

ALBANY, Jan. 18 — Thousands of low-income households with a disabled family member stand to lose part of their public assistance benefits because of a proposed change in state regulations intended to save New York State $9 million, according to Pataki administration officials.

In his budget address on Tuesday, Gov. George E. Pataki plans to include those savings along with other cuts to help deal with the state's estimated $5.1 billion budget deficit for the fiscal year that starts April 1, an administration budget official said.

"There will be cuts in the budget," said the official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. "The economy is starting to come back, but make no mistake, the state faces a $5.1 billion deficit. You have to cut spending to close that gap."

The change does not require legislative approval, but because Governor Pataki plans to include the $9 million savings in his budget, legislators will have a chance to address the issue and perhaps to restore the money.

The proposal came as a surprise to many legislators, as well as advocates for the disabled and independent experts, who said that only a handful of states had tried a similar change.

In addition to the $9 million in state savings, local governments across the state would also save a total of $9 million, the administration said in its proposal, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by an opponent of the change.

In a state budget of more than $90 billion, the total savings would be minimal but at least 26,700 families, many in New York City, could be affected, according to an "impact statement" included with the proposal that was confirmed with an administration official.

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As Consumers Revolt, a Rush to Block Pop-Up Online Ads
By SAUL HANSELL

The boom in Internet pop-up advertisement may be about to, well, pop.

The big ads that flash in separate windows above or below Web pages are among the most intrusive, and to many people, the most obnoxious features on the Internet. Not coincidentally, the pop-up format is also among the most effective for advertisers and the most profitable for Web site publishers.

But the potential reach of these ads is starting to be sharply curtailed as major companies, like Time Warner's AOL unit, Yahoo and Google, distribute software that blocks pop-up ads from opening. This summer, Microsoft will put a pop-up blocking feature in the next release of Internet Explorer, the dominant Web browser.

"There is a consumer revolt as forms of advertising get more intrusive," said Rob Kaiser, vice president for narrowband marketing at EarthLink, the first big Internet service provider to distribute pop-up blocking software. The reaction to pop-ups, he said, is similar to the rush to join the government's do-not-call list to block telemarketing calls and the increase in the use of video recorders to block TV commercials.

Advertising executives, in television and the Internet market, note that consumers who block the ads are undercutting the economic model that provides them with free entertainment and information.

"I haven't spoken to any people who say I love pop-ups, send me more of them," said David J. Moore, the chief executive of 24/7 Real Media, an online advertising firm. "But they are part of a quid pro quo. If you want to enjoy the content of a Web site that is free, the pop-ups come with it."

But even companies like Yahoo and Microsoft, which receive significant revenue from advertising, have decided to bow to complaints from Web users.

"We are adding a pop-up blocker based on feedback from customers,'' said Matthew Pilla, a senior product manger for Windows at Microsoft.

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Television Commercials Come to the Web
By BOB TEDESCHI

TELEVISION commercials, in all their big, loud glory, are coming to the Web.

Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will run full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives say could herald the start of a new era of Internet advertising.

"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.

…Mr. Vail, of Pepsi, said he would monitor online viewers' reactions through a tracking study conducted by the research firm Dynamic Logic, to determine how much use Pepsi will make of such ads in the future. "Yes, it's intrusive," he said. "But I think customers will like it, because it will be so far superior to anything they've seen online." [P6: he must mean technically; if the content is TV commercials it will still, for the most part, suck]

James Nail, an analyst with the technology consulting firm Forrester Research, agreed. "This is the best full-motion, full-video TV ad technology that I've seen," he said. "I expect big demand from advertisers for this."

…With so many people surfing with broadband connections already, and with many more expected to switch to high-speed connections this year, publishers may be tempted to run video ads with much greater frequency, Mr. Nail, of Forrester, said. "The question is, do they understand the need to exercise some restraint, or will they just see this is as the way to make money, and just grab all the cash they can?" [P6: what do YOU think?]

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A Single Conscience v. the State
By BOB HERBERT

Katharine Gun has a much better grasp of the true spirit of democracy than Tony Blair. So, naturally, it's Katharine Gun who's being punished.

Ms. Gun, 29, was working at Britain's top-secret Government Communications Headquarters last year when she learned of an American plan to spy on at least a half-dozen U.N. delegations as part of the U.S. effort to win Security Council support for an invasion of Iraq.

The plans, which included e-mail surveillance and taps on home and office telephones, was outlined in a highly classified National Security Agency memo. The agency, which was seeking British assistance in the project, was interested in "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals."

Countries specifically targeted were Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The primary goal was a Security Council resolution that would give the U.S. and Britain the go-ahead for the war.

Ms. Gun felt passionately that an invasion of Iraq was wrong — morally wrong and illegal. In a move that deeply embarrassed the American and British governments, the memo was leaked to The London Observer.

Which landed Ms. Gun in huge trouble. She has not denied that she was involved in the leak.

There is no equivalent in Britain to America's First Amendment protections. Individuals like Ms. Gun are at the mercy of the Official Secrets Act, which can result in severe — in some cases, draconian — penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of information by intelligence or security agency employees.

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Timing of Address No Accident, Official Says
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CARL HULSE

Published: January 19, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 — The winner of the Iowa caucuses on Monday night will have an unexpected competitor waiting right around the corner, and he is not one of the Democrats running for president.

The opponent is President Bush and his State of the Union address, which White House officials scheduled for Tuesday night, only 24 hours after Iowa, to draw attention from the Democratic victor, a Republican close to the Bush campaign said.

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Checking traffic today made me glad I restored all the old archives. I have a large bag of hits from folks voting for Best Meme at the Bloggies. I guess I ought too behave for the next few days.

Nah.

And I found out who nominated the reparations series for a Koufax…it was Ampersand at Alas, A Blog.

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January 18, 2004

New England vs. ?????

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Hat tip to Hesiod at Counterspin Central
West Liberty Superintendent proposes desegregation limits on open enrollment to stave off effects of exiting white students

By Mindy Moore Muscatine Journal Correspondent
WEST LIBERTY, Iowa - West Liberty School District Superintendent Rebecca Rodocker wants the School Board to approve a desegregation policy she hopes will keep white students from leaving the District through the open enrollment option.

Rodocker plans to make her case at the regular School Board meeting at 6:30 p.m. Monday in the administrative office on Elm Street. "We already know how much money we're losing to open enrollment out," Rodocker said.

"They (the Board) want to know the cost so they can make a decision as to whether to proceed. My belief is the initial expense of both my time and the community's time and for attorneys will be well spent if we can stop students from leaving."

The desegregation plan may include an open enrollment component designed to maintain a ratio between minority and non-minority students to ensure that the District's student population accurately reflects that of the community's.

Today, 84 students who live in the West Liberty school district have exercised their right to open enroll out to other schools; 79 of those are white. A year ago, 67 students were open enrolled out; five years ago, 65.

Students choosing to leave the District take with them $4,600 each in state financial aid - that comes out to $386,400 that the district has lost to open enrollment this year.

"Losing almost $400,000 definitely has an impact on the programs we can offer and the staff we that we offer," Rodocker said.

The original premise of the open enrollment law was to allow choice if a school was not offering what a parent or student needed, Rodocker said, but things have changed.

"In the olden days, we would have had an opportunity to sit down with a student and his parents and address any of the concerns or needs they had. The new open enrollment law has no restrictions, so I can leave the district and take the property taxes and state aid for any reason at any time."

The minority population (primarily Hispanic) of West Liberty's school district is 45.6 percent. This compares to 43.5 percent a year ago and 37.8 percent five years ago. "My belief is that a large portion of our open enrolled out is due to our minority population and that's wrong," Rodocker said.

"We had 20 students that moved into the community that should have been enrolled in West Liberty schools for the 2003-04 school year and immediately enrolled out. It's just proof to me it's white flight."

Rodocker insists there is no valid basis for leaving. "Are our test scores lower than other districts? Not at all," she said. "I'll match our scores up to anybody's. So if I was a white parent, there would be no rationale to say my child isn't going to get a good education."

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Each of the candidates in Iowa should do a State of the Union address before the caucus. They should detail the issues that Americans are concerned with and state straightforwardly that any speech that does not address those issues is not reporting on the state of the Union.

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I stole this from TVPoison because it's about a seriously as the issue should be taken.

The thermodynamics of Hell (source unknown)

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

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Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year, "...that it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having an affair with her, then #2 above cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not freeze over."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A".

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Fixing Democracy

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

This is no way to run a democracy.

Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people's votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform.

Among the key issues:

Voting Technology: An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.

They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.

To address these concerns, electronic voting machines should produce a paper trail - hard-copy receipts that voters can check to ensure that their vote was accurately reported, and that can later be used in a recount. California recently took the lead on this issue, mandating paper trails from its machines by July 2006. A bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt would do the same nationally. Congress should make every effort to put paper trails in place by this fall.

Compounding the technology issues are the political entanglements of voting machine companies. Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold Inc., has raised large sums for President Bush, and pledged in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004. Diebold is hardly alone among major voting machine manufacturers in contributing to elected officials, who represent virtually their only market. But the public has a right to expect that voting machine companies that run elections will not also seek to influence them.

Internet voting will be allowed in the Michigan caucuses next month and, for the first time, in the general election in a Pentagon-operated pilot program for overseas voters. Internet voting raises all of the security concerns of electronic voting and more. Given that major corporations regularly find their Web sites and databases hacked, and "Trojan horses" can take over home computers, it's questionable whether any Internet voting can be made completely secure. The Pentagon's program was adopted with disturbingly little publicity or debate. The public is entitled to know more about how it will work, and how it will be protected.

Voter Participation: Our ideal of government with the consent of the governed presumes universal participation in elections, or something close to it. But even in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, a mere 51 percent of voters went to the polls, down from 63 percent in 1960, and far less than in most mature democracies.

We no longer have poll taxes, but there are still significant obstacles to voting. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris, then the secretary of state, hired a private company to purge the voting rolls of felons, but ended up purging many nonfelons as well. There will be more voting roll purges this year, and little scrutiny is being given to how secretaries of state, many of whom are highly political, are conducting them. And the Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle, includes new requirements for voter identification that could be used in some states to turn away voters.

More broadly, we need a national commitment to increasing registration and turnout. Seven states allow some form of election-day registration, which appears to raise turnout. Voting by mail, making Election Day a holiday, and similar reforms can also help. And there is a movement to roll back laws denying the vote to nearly five million people with felony convictions, 36 percent of them black males.

Competitive Elections: The founders intended the House of Representatives to be the branch most responsive to the passions of the people. But with the rise of partisan gerrymandering, redistricting to favor the party in control of the process, competitive House elections are becoming virtually obsolete. Only four challengers defeated incumbents in the 2002 general elections, a record low, and in the nation's 435 Congressional districts, there may be no more than 30 this year where the outcome is truly in doubt.

Pennsylvania is a classic case. After the 2000 census, Republicans, who controlled the state legislature, used powerful computers to draw bizarrely shaped districts - which were given names like "upside-down Chinese dragon" - that maximized Republican voting strength. They paired Democratic incumbents in a single district, so they would have to run against each other, and fashioned new districts where Republicans would have an easy ride. As a result, a state with nearly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans has a Congressional delegation with 12 Republicans and just 7 Democrats.

Partisan gerrymandering takes control of Congress away from the voters, and puts it in the hands of legislative redistricters. It can also profoundly distort the political direction of the country. In four states that are almost precisely evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats - Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan - Republican legislators drew district lines so that 51 of the 77 seats are Republican, a nearly two-to-one edge.

Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potential landmark case challenging Pennsylvania's lines. The court could, and should, use it to establish constitutional limits on redistricting for partisan advantage. Another solution states can adopt on their own - although parties in control of state government will have little incentive to - is appointing nonpartisan commissions to draw district lines that will produce competitive races.

Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power." His faith in democracy was well placed, but for elective government to play this critical role, the elections must be inclusive and fair, and they must use machinery that works.

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Bases for an Empire
U.S. military power girdles the globe. It is imperialism by another name -- and it incites terrorism.
By Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." A longer version of this essay appears on www.tomdispatch.com.

January 18, 2004

CARDIFF-BY-THE-SEA — Many Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Our garrisons encircle the planet, and this vast network of U.S. bases, on every continent except Antarctica, constitutes its own form of empire. The Pentagon has remade the map of U.S. territory in a way unlikely to be taught in any high school geography class. But to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations — and the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order — it's crucial to have a sense of the dimensions of this globe-girdling "Baseworld."

Our military deploys more than half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents and civilian contractors in other nations. It dominates the oceans and seas with a fleet of aircraft carriers. It operates numerous secret bases outside the U.S. to monitor what the people of the world, including our citizens, are saying, faxing or e-mailing to one another.

Our government installations abroad support an even larger web of civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons or provide services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. These contractors are charged with, among other things, keeping uniformed members of the imperium comfortably housed, well-fed, amused and supplied with enjoyable, affordable leisure and vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the U.S. economy have come to rely on the military for their profits.

It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon occupies 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and another 6,000 bases in the U.S. and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases — surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 "Base Structure Report" fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo - even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained since by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root. The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in these places since Sept. 11, 2001. The Defense Department, which recognizes only 60 overseas sites as full-fledged bases, regards these massive redoubts as temporary installations.

For their occupants, these foreign bases are not necessarily unpleasant. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to that experienced by soldiers during World War II or the Korean and Vietnam wars. Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call and latrine cleaning have been subcontracted to private companies. About one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq - roughly $30 billion - are going into private American hands. Where possible, everything is done to make daily existence seem like life at home. The first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous military base we've established at Baghdad's international airport.

Our armed missionaries live in a self-contained world serviced by its own airline, the Air Mobility Command, whose fleet of long-range aircraft links our outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides 71 Learjets and other luxury planes to fly them to such spots as the armed forces' ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up a country's colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base. If you examine our "footprint," the remarkably insensitive metaphor used by defense officials to describe our empire of bases, you can see that it does a good job of covering what those officials call the "arc of instability." This wide swath of the world, which extends from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia, takes in most of what used to be called the Third World - and, perhaps no less crucially, it covers the world's key oil reserves.

Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claims that to put preventive war into action, we require a "global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our thumb. According to the American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get some intelligence on them.

To put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has proposed many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six in Iraq. In addition, we plan to keep under control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait - 1,600 square miles of that country's 6,900 square miles - that we use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for bureaucrats based in central Baghdad to relax.

Other countries mentioned as potential sites for what the U.S. military's top European commander calls our new "family of bases" include: in the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; in Asia, Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria; and in West Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch of metaphors, calls "lily pads," to and from which our troops could jump, like well-armed frogs, depending on where they were needed. The Pentagon justifies this expansion by leaking plans to close many of the huge Cold War military reservations in Europe, South Korea and perhaps Okinawa, Japan. In Europe, plans for giving up our bases include several in Germany, perhaps in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's defiance of President Bush over Iraq.

But such plans are unlikely to amount to much. The Pentagon's planners do not really seem to grasp just how many buildings the 71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany occupy and how expensive it would be to build bases to house them elsewhere. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has said, "There's no place to put these people" in Romania, Bulgaria or Djibouti, and she predicts 80% will end up staying in Germany.

While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several additional reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion or downsizing, will ever be put into effect. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of U.S. military power on its borders and is already moving to preclude additional U.S. bases in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may come into play. By law, the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure Commission must submit to the White House by Sept. 8, 2005, its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down. As an efficiency measure, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he'd like to be rid of at least one-third of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which is sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. To protect their respective states' bases, the two mother hens of the Senate's military construction appropriations subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas bases first and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic bases, which would then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein got included in the Military Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed. But in light of the administration's fervor to expand the U.S. "footprint," the commission is unlikely to have much of an effect.

There is plenty of evidence that our growing military presence abroad incites rather than lessens terrorism. By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy is that it accentuates Washington's impulse to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent British military historian Correlli Barnett has observed, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat from Al Qaeda. From 1993 through the Sept. 11 assaults of 2001, there were five major Al Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the two years since then, there have been 17 such bombings tied to the terrorist organization. As Barnett puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of 'freedom and democracy,' we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are dealing with - an understanding up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policymakers in Washington, especially in the Pentagon."

But perhaps they understand all too well. The "war on terrorism" is, at best, only a small part of the reason for all this military strategizing. The real reason for constructing this new ring of U.S. bases along the equator is to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination of the world. And in that, the administration seems to be succeeding.

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God Hates Unmarried Losers
It's BushCo's $1.5 bil plan to let the homophobic Christian Right dictate love. Whee!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 16, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

Man, those inner-city poor people sure are dumb.

Just look at 'em, popping out babies like crazy and draining the welfare system like there's no tomorrow, all while remaining completely unable to either get or stay married in their sad, un-Christian, gangsta-rap lives. Pathetic.

And oh my God, those damnable gays. Would you just look at them, fighting for basic human rights, whining about wanting to get married, as if they knew anything about God's manly, flag-waving, 100 percent heterosexual love?

Clearly it's some sort of flaming pagan sorcery those gays used to persuade all those misguided states to suddenly begin to offer more and more rights to gay couples, granting civil unions and nearly full benefits and allowing them to copulate and hold hands in public and sodomize each other with strange phallic-shaped devices in the privacy of their own homes, even in Texas.

I mean, what the hell is the world coming to? And what, pray tell, is a self-righteous, homophobic, God-thumping, conservative administration that constantly kowtows to the preening Christian Right to do about all this?

Why, hurl $1.5 billion of your tax dollars at the problem, that's what. Educate them dumb poor people on how to fly right and learn more "interpersonal skills" so they can get married -- you know, just like their much happier and more heavily narcotized, sanctimonious, Botoxed, Zolofted, blank-eyed Republican masters -- er, fellow citizens.

And, hey, if that $1.5 bil happens to reinforce the inviolable God-approved mega-sanctity of all-American ultra-hetero man-woman marriage, if it shows those icky gay people a thing or two about what this country truly values, all while appeasing a perpetually terrified right-wing contingent of BushCo voters, why, all the better.

This, then, is the plan: $1.5 billion to promote "healthy marriages," especially among the lower-income plebes, with the ulterior motive of bashing gays yet again, all newly spawned from the bowels of BushCo to assuage the ever-irritated Christian Right.

You remember them? The masses that are, apparently, incessantly nagging BushCo to get in there and do something to protect the sanctity of marriage before it all falls apart and their straight white gay-hating God up and abandons them entirely and we become a nation of body-pierced single-parent sodomites who read The New York Times and drive Volvos.

Look. This is not a completely hideous idea. You want to help people learn to love more deeply and stay together and deal with their personal issues? You want to educate folks about the value of honest communication and of raising healthy happy kids? Wonderful. I'm all for it.

Here's what you do: Teach them to shun political agenda and hollow religious doctrine and become more self-defined and open and spiritually kaleidoscopic humans.

Teach them to be free to define love and family and human relationship in as raw and intimate and uniquely divine a way as possible. This is what you do. And, oh, yes, teach them to ignore the living hell out of the dishonest Christian Right.

And, oh, those "interpersonal skills." Say it like you mean it. Say it like you believe they have any idea what the hell they're talking about. Say it like it doesn't somehow imply that neocons actually believe the problem with these damn poor people and their damn poor relationships is that they just don't know how to talk better and suck up to Jesus and quit shooting each other over all them illegal drugs.

Hey, $1.5 billion should buy a lot of interpersonal skills. It should pay for a great many notions of how love is this deep potent chaotic impossibly difficult but worthwhile thing, with marriage as one of its more fascinating and culturally applauded expressions. Right?

Or maybe not. Maybe the voices of the Christian Right mean something entirely different. Maybe they mean all those happy hetero marriages we all see every day. You know the ones.

Like when two people, one of whom is a ditzy slut-wanna-be celeb, get totally loaded on vodka slammers and run off to Vegas and get hitched in a puerile drunken haze, only to have it annulled 55 hours later in an embarrassing bout of ugly Hollywood PR. Is that a good sanctified hetero marriage? Oh no wait, that can't be right.

Maybe matrimony is all about sad-looking white Christian people gathering together in overlit studio audiences to bewail, in "Chicken Soup for the Suburban Soul" style, their desperate lack of sex and physical contact and decent stemware, with Dr. Phil looking all furrowed as we all just ignore the 50 percent divorce rate, including all those straight happy Christians. Wait, no, that can't be it, either.

Or maybe "healthy" marriage is when your miserable GOP wife stays home and raises the disgruntled kids and keeps her big trap shut like a good wife should, and, as a reward, she gets all the Botox and therapy and Nordstrom shopping sprees your credit card can handle. Yes. That must be it. Isn't that right, senator?

Interesting, really, how difficult it is to track down one pure example of a healthy and beautiful and communicative Christian marriage -- isn't it, Dubya? We could ask Laura, but it looks like she's busy being a nice GOP token wife, smiling that perpetual wooden-mannequin smile off in a corner somewhere, reading books to baffled children, harmless as a sterile bunny.

Here's a hard flick of the finger into the forehead of GOP sanctimony: Marriage has nothing to do with God. Marriage has nothing to do with Christian "interpersonal skills." Marriage has nothing to do with how one colon-clenched segment of the power elite decides it must restrict matrimony lest it lose more control and become increasingly insignificant and tumble further down the slope into hot pools of rage and intolerance and bad sex once a year with the lights off.

And, finally, marriage has nothing to do with political attitudes or party affiliation or how big your right-wing campaign contribution was during the last election, and therefore how much you get to shove your personal pseudo-pious homophobic missionary-position ethos down the nation's throat.

Because marriage is, of course, about connection. It is about social ritual and new, wide-open definitions of family and the ability of two people to commit to going deep and peeling each other back and agreeing to deal with each other's crap for the next 50 years.

Marriage is, in truth, just one weird messy culturally endorsed facet of the massive, overarching, impossibly powerful love impulse that fuels, engorges and enrages the entire species at all times and in all places across the entire known and unknown universe. Simple, really.

And guess what? You cannot legislate that force. You cannot stop its various mutations and progressions in our culture, and its absolute insistence on forcing our bewildered species to evolve, despite itself.

Such a force laughs in the face of $1.5 billion attempts to slap some sort of hissy little right-wing agenda on it. Such a force laughs in the face of anything that tries to limit its delicious, kaleidoscopic progress.

And, really, shouldn't the rest of us do the same?

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FOLLOW THE MONEY

Sunday, January 18, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

What we said: It's unsettling and unacceptable that some corporations are dodging taxes by artificially relocating offshore. These "inversions" occur when a company moves -- on paper only -- to a place like Bermuda to evade taxes. Having a mail drop beyond the "water's edge" makes a company tax-exempt -- though its plants, workforce and markets are still on U.S. soil. -- Editorial, Sept. 8, 2003.

What happened: Not much. Some of the Democratic presidential candidates have been hammering the Bush administration for refusing to close such corporate tax loopholes. In response, the White House last week introduced a variety of measures to crack down on tax shelters, but the increasingly popular offshore loophole was not one of its targets. Congress has been equally timid about addressing these corporate tax-hideout schemes. An example of legislative spinelessness on this issue came in fall 2002, when leaders of the House of Representatives stripped out an amendment (sponsored by the late populist senator, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota) that would have kept companies using this offshore tax-shelter scheme from getting government contracts on homeland security.

What's next: Nothing, unless Congress -- and the Bush administration --

feel the heat from individuals who are tired of paying their share of taxes when corporations are using their accountants and influence to avoid taxes.

What you can do: You can find the name and contact information for your representative in Congress at www.house.gov.

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It's time to start commenting on the candidates as opposed to the stuff in the air around them.

I just saw John Kerry on This Week. Stephanopolis tried to get him to compare himself to the other three front runners and he declined strongly. He focused on l'il Georgie's flaws, and actually made the point that the Dow is not the economy.

All in all, he presented well. A "debate" between Kerry and l'il Georgie would result in an image bitch-slapping of immense proportions, so don't expect one.

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Schwarzenegger Budget Denies Some Health Care
By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: January 18, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 — It is nearly impossible for many Californians to comprehend the sum of $14 billion, the current estimate of the state's budget deficit next year, and the cuts and contortions that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed to make it disappear.

So think about $320 a month, the price for Esther Bush to include her 8-year-old daughter, Natalia, on her employer-paid health plan. She says she cannot afford it. Governor Schwarzenegger says the state cannot afford to insure Natalia, either.

Ms. Bush, a medical social worker at a nonprofit agency in Los Angeles, is not poor — she earns nearly $30,000 a year — but neither has she climbed into the middle class. Ms. Bush, 33, shares a two-bedroom apartment in a dicey Los Angeles neighborhood with her sister and brother-in-law and their three children. She drives a 1989 Ford Tempo, pays $300 a month for after-school care for her daughter and lives, she said, from paycheck to paycheck.

Until last spring, Natalia received medical coverage under Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program. But when Ms. Bush received a small increase in her salary, she no longer qualified for the program and instead was told to apply to Healthy Families, a state-federal health insurance program for the near-poor.

Because of computer and paperwork problems, her application was delayed, as the state's fiscal situation continued to deteriorate. Governor Schwarzenegger, in his budget presentation last week, proposed capping enrollment in the Healthy Families program at the current level, 732,000 children. An estimated 300,000 additional children are eligible, but could be enrolled only as new slots open under the cap.

New applicants, like Natalia, will be placed on a waiting list, as Ms. Bush put it, "for God knows how long." In the meantime, Ms. Bush prays that no emergencies befall her. As it is, she spends four hours waiting to see a doctor at a neighborhood clinic when her daughter has an ear infection or stomachache.

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U.N. Prepares for Meeting About Iraq, Wary of U.S. Motives
By WARREN HOGE

Published: January 18, 2004

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 17 — The United States comes to the United Nations on Monday, asking the organization that the Bush administration has kept at a deliberate distance from its Iraq stabilization plan to step in now and help rescue it.

In off-the-record comments, many here complain about being asked to validate a process from which they were excluded, and wonder if the world organization is not being manipulated by the White House for election-year political purposes.

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Group Says Sudan Is Forcing Poor to Move
By REUTERS

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 17 (Reuters) — An international aid agency has accused Sudan of closing camps for internally displaced people in the troubled Darfur region and planning to move them to an unsafe camp.

The agency, Doctors Without Borders, said Friday that the Sudanese authorities had closed the camps in the southern Darfur capital of Nyala on Thursday after trying forcibly, without success, to move thousands of the residents by truck to new camps 12 miles from the city.

"Among those who fled were families with severely malnourished children who had been under the care" of Doctors Without Borders, "and did not arrive for their treatment," the agency said.

About 10,000 people had been living in the camps that were closed, the group said, and the new camps were in an insecure area where access by aid agencies was difficult. The group said the effort to move the displaced people to the new sites was cut short when some of them fled in panic.

There was no immediate response from the Sudanese government.

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U.S. Tries to Give Moderates an Edge in Iraqi Elections
By EDWARD WONG

Published: January 18, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 17 — As they head into a crucial meeting at the United Nations, American officials are struggling to cobble together an electoral process that will favor Iraqi moderates in the transfer of sovereignty just five and a half months away.

Complicating the task, the Americans feel pressure to satisfy a caldron of restive Shiites, Kurds hungering for autonomy and Sunni Arabs who fear being marginalized.

The most immediate pressure is coming from the most revered Shiite Muslim cleric in Iraq, who has demanded a general election for a transitional assembly by May 31. Such an election would be rushed and could lead to chaos, a senior official with the Coalition Provisional Authority said, allowing the most organized political groups — hard-line Islamic parties or, much less likely, splinters of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party — to seize power.

"There's not enough time for the moderates to organize," he added.

The political process favored by American officials calls for caucus-style elections for a transitional assembly that would then appoint an interim government by June 30. That arrangement was laid out in an agreement reached on Nov. 15 between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council.

But in recent weeks, Shiite Muslim religious leaders and Kurdish politicians, among the strongest supporters of the American-led invasion, have jeopardized the blueprint by making vocal demands for political rights. In agreeing to meet with United Nations officials and members of the Governing Council on Monday, Bush administration officials are desperately trying to keep that process on track and win international legitimacy for it.

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The conditions described below are, as the article states, increasingly common worldwide. They will generate two reactions toward the USofA (forgive my chauvinism but that really is my first concern):

• Increasing immigration pressures
• Increasing hostility, or jealousy or however you want to phrase it

The number of folks that "hate us for our freedom" is set to expand dramatically.

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Brazilian Slums Seen as Pawns in Political Games
By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: January 18, 2004

ESTRUTURAL, Brazil — Izailde Souza, nine months pregnant with her sixth child, is a prisoner in her two-room shack. She says she is so afraid that thieves roaming the slum will steal her meager possessions that she never leaves her cramped quarters — not to look for work, go to market or walk her children to school.

The last time she remembers going out was more than a year ago, to vote for the politician who fought for her right to squat here on public land next to the city dump: José Edmar.

"He climbed on our rooftops to defend us when the police came to bulldoze our homes," she said. "He's our father here in Estrutural."

Estrutural is a sprawling slum where the shanties look like collages of scrap lumber, rusted metal and chicken wire. It is part of an illegal housing development, one that its critics say is highly organized. Vote-hungry politicians encouraged the poor to settle on public land, then provided them with a school, a clinic and other services to attract more people, environmentalists and prosecutors say.

Estrutural fits a pattern of squatter settlements across Asia and Africa, where explosive growth is expected to nearly double the population of many large cities in the next 15 years, according to the United Nations. Already, a third of the world's urban population — almost a billion people — live in slums.

The United Nations Human Settlements Program, in a report last year titled "The Challenge of Slums" described the phenomenon in the developing world, where "squatting became a large and profitable business, often carried out with the active, if clandestine, participation of politicians, policemen and privateers of all kinds."

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