February 14, 2004

Juliette at Baldilock has gotten around to posting her reaction to the issue of acknowledging the right of gay folks to get married. In a way it reminds me of my reaction when the Massachusetts Supreme Court opened it all up:

Beyond the Yuck Factor

How will government-sanctioned homosexual marriage cause the downfall of American society as we know it? Who really knows if it will? Hey, it might not. Are you surprised reading that output from the keyboard of a professed Christian? I can’t see why you would be. From a Christian perspective, the mainstreaming of homosexuality into society(ies) isn’t exactly a big surprise.
[followed by biblical quotes about bad people]
The thing is, either one believes this or one does not. Christians believe this is a harbinger of things to come, so why worry about homosexuals marrying? You all knew this would happen if you read the owner's manual. Non-Christians blow it off as superstition or blasphemy, so why worry about it? You don't believe in this stuff anyway.

Juliette's problem is with the way it was started. She feels it should be put to a popular vote.

I can see the outcome of a popular vote on giving Black people the vote in the 60's.
I can see the outcome of a popular vote on interracial marriage…a direct parallel.
I can see the outcome of a popular vote on interning Japanese citizens WW II.

Catch my drift?

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Nader Searches For His Roots
By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: February 15, 2004

WHILE Ralph Nader says that he will decide within the next week or two whether there is enough grass-roots support for him to run for president, so far it is not easy to discern a groundswell.

Mr. Nader tried asking visitors to his Web site, naderexplore04.com, whether he should run, but the poll was halted after a flood of negative votes orchestrated by another Web site, RalphDontRun.net, created by John Pearce, a California Democrat and former Internet executive. [P6: Take a hint, pal]

"There's been a grass-roots response from people who respect Ralph Nader but don't want him to tip the balance to George Bush," Mr. Pearce said. "In just two weeks, the traffic on our Web site has grown from 100 visitors a day to nearly 9,000."

Another measure of grass-roots support, or lack thereof, can be found at meetup.com, where candidates' supporters register to arrange meetings in their communities. As of Saturday, there were more than 188,000 registered supporters for Howard Dean, 45,000 for John Kerry, 23,000 for Dennis J. Kucinich, 9,000 for John Edwards and a grand total of 375 for Mr. Nader. He did however come out ahead of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had 233.

Mr. Nader said his decision would depend mainly on the returns from a fund-raising appeal he recently mailed, and to a lesser extent on whether Dr. Dean remains in the race. Mr. Nader said he was not dissuaded by his standing on meetup.com.

"A third party can push the agenda and increase voting turnout," said Mr. Nader, who did not sound discouraged by his low numbers on meetup.com. "I really don't deal with the Web. There isn't enough time in the day to go into virtual reality."

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Bush's Campaign More Aggressive in Coming Weeks
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — President Bush's political advisers are completing plans for a more aggressive stage of his re-election campaign, seeking to discredit Senator John Kerry and promote Mr. Bush's record and character with television advertisements and a more visible role for the president himself, aides and Republican officials say.

With Mr. Kerry having emerged as the almost certain Democratic nominee, Mr. Bush has told associates he wants to get more assertive in drawing sharp distinctions with Democrats and defending his tenure as he travels the nation.

The planned shift in strategy, to be executed in the next few weeks, comes amid anxiety among Republicans about the president's declining poll numbers, uncharacteristic missteps by a usually assured White House and a torrent of criticism of Mr. Bush from an energized Democratic Party that appears to be unifying around Mr. Kerry.

…"The two defining events for this year have been the State of the Union and the `Meet the Press' interview, and both have been colossal failures," one prominent Republican strategist said Friday night after the document release, referring to an interview broadcast by NBC last Sunday. Mr. Bush's inability to present a compelling, aggressive case for himself in those two nationally televised appearances has "got Republicans, especially at the grass-roots level, questioning the White House's strategy and tactics," said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

…Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said the Republican campaign team appeared not to have fully anticipated the intensity of the news media's focus on the Democratic primary battle, which left Mr. Bush exposed to a months-long partisan onslaught.

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Quote of note:

Another difference, some analysts say, is that during the 1980's, the interests of American workers and companies were more closely linked than they are today. From 1984 to 1986, the American semiconductor industry lost $4 billion and shed 50,000 jobs in the United States.

"But now, it is the workers who are suffering and not the companies," said Ronil Hira, an assistant professor for public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "The companies outsourcing jobs overseas are profitable and mostly gaining market share. There's no gun to their head this time, no real motivation to address the issue."

Beyond jobs shifted, the broader impact may be to put pressure on the wages of many technical workers in the United States, who increasingly live under the shadow of foreign competition.

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Jobs Lost Abroad: Host of New Causes for an Old Problem
By STEVE LOHR

The chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, stepped forcefully last week into an issue that has touched off an escalating, often strident, political debate: the migration of jobs, ranging from call center operators to computer programmers, to lower-cost countries like China and India.

The movement, known as offshore outsourcing, is growing, Mr. Mankiw acknowledged. But he said it was "just a new way of doing international trade" and "a good thing" that would make the American economy more efficient and would free American workers to eventually get better jobs.

History suggests that Mr. Mankiw may be right. The American economy has adapted to unsettling new waves of competition in the past.

Still, many industry executives, analysts and academics - not distraught American workers alone - say the nature of the economic challenge appears to be fundamentally different this time.

The differences, they say, include the kinds of jobs affected by outsourcing, the number of jobs potentially at risk and the politics of developing an effective policy response.

Globalization and technology are amplifying the impact of outsourcing. For decades, American foreign policy has been to urge developing nations and Communist countries to join the global economy in earnest. Now they have, and vast numbers of skilled workers have joined the world labor force, seemingly overnight. Countries like China, India and Russia educate large numbers of engineers. Add the low-cost, nearly instantaneous communication afforded by the Internet, and an Indian computer programmer making $20,000 a year or less can replace an American programmer making $80,000 a year or more.

"The structure of the world has changed," said Craig R. Barrett, chief executive of Intel, the Silicon Valley company that is the world's leading computer chip maker. "The U.S. no longer has a lock on high-tech, white-collar jobs."

But that does not mean that such jobs are about to disappear from the United States. Statistics on the current job flight are estimates. Forrester Research in a frequently cited study, predicted in late 2002 that 3.3 million services jobs in America would move offshore by 2015, about 500,000 of them in computer software and services.

For all the alarm that report generated, a shift of that size over the next 11 years would be small, given that the American labor force has more than 130 million workers and normally creates and destroys millions of jobs every few months.

Many American workers are worried that outsourcing is just beginning, and they fear that in an information-age economy all kinds of jobs are potentially at risk. Not only anxious workers in the United States take that view. Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company, declared at the World Economic Forum last month, "Everything you can send down a wire is up for grabs."

Another difference, some analysts say, is that during the 1980's, the interests of American workers and companies were more closely linked than they are today. From 1984 to 1986, the American semiconductor industry lost $4 billion and shed 50,000 jobs in the United States.

"But now, it is the workers who are suffering and not the companies," said Ronil Hira, an assistant professor for public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "The companies outsourcing jobs overseas are profitable and mostly gaining market share. There's no gun to their head this time, no real motivation to address the issue."

Beyond jobs shifted, the broader impact may be to put pressure on the wages of many technical workers in the United States, who increasingly live under the shadow of foreign competition.

Chris Neustrup, a software engineer from Walnut Creek, Calif., has seen every boom and bust in Silicon Valley since he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. As a seasoned programmer-for-hire, who constantly kept adding to his portfolio of skills, Mr. Neustrup was never out of work for long, and in good years he routinely made $100,000 or more.

But this time, he said, it was different. After 25 months without work, Mr. Neustrup was hired two weeks ago by Emanio, a private software company in Berkeley. The pay is less than he used to make, but he counts himself lucky in this job market. His experience is part of a picture that puzzles economists and policy makers. The economy is growing nicely, corporate profits are rising, and yet job growth remains frustratingly sluggish, even among skilled workers. Some politicians and labor advocates say offshore outsourcing is a betrayal of American workers and support bills to curb it.

Mr. Neustrup, who lives with the turmoil in the high-tech job market, takes a more balanced view. "It's great for these developing countries to move up and adopt this technology," he said. "The trouble for us in the U.S. is that we're at the top of the ladder getting squeezed. And I'm not sure there is a good answer."

The heat of the political debate over outsourcing keeps rising. State and federal bills that would limit the flow of jobs abroad have proliferated. Senator John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, castigates "Benedict Arnold companies and C.E.O.'s" for moving jobs overseas. Last November, Indiana pulled out of a $15 million contract with an Indian company to provide technology services because of objections to outsourcing. The National Foundation for American Policy, a research group, says 30 bills are pending in 20 states to curb the use of offshore contractors by state and local governments.

Senator Kerry introduced federal legislation last November that would require call center operators to disclose where they are located.

The Senate recently passed a bill sponsored by Republican Senators Craig Thomas of Wyoming and George V. Voinovich of Ohio, that prohibits the use of offshore workers on some government jobs. The House has not voted on any similar bill.

These steps, some economists warn, are part of a misguided drift toward protectionism that would increase costs to consumers, make American businesses less competitive and risk more trade conflict.

"This anxiety about outsourcing is not a bad thing, as long as it forces you to make the right choices," said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a professor of economics at Columbia University. "You have to move on and upgrade your skills. We have no choice. And America, as probably the most innovative society in the world, does a pretty good job of it."

That process has begun, as companies and people enhance their skills. The result is new hiring, even as other jobs move offshore. Intel has added 1,000 software engineers in China and India in the last two years, but it has added even greater numbers in the United States.

I.B.M., the world's largest computer company, is also doing both. The company says it plans to transfer 3,000 jobs overseas, many of them white-collar jobs like computer programmer. But I.B.M. also says it intends to add 4,500 employees this year in the United States, including programmers and software designers with specialized skills.

The people in demand, says Hershel Harris, vice president for strategy in I.B.M.'s software unit, are those who are fluent in technology and in how technology can be applied to solve problems in particular fields of business or science.

Mary Trombley, 27, was hired last year by the I.B.M. software group as an engineer in San Jose, Calif. She was an English major at the University of Michigan, which she attended from 1994 to 1998, making her part of the first generation of college students with wide-open access to the Internet. She got enough of a taste for technology that she decided to change course. "It looked exciting and I jumped in," she said.

At I.B.M., she is a "human factors engineer" who helps tailor software tools for companies in the life sciences, retailing and financial services industries so they can more easily sift through vast databases to quickly mine useful nuggets of information. She works with programming languages, C++ and Java, but her main focus is a level above the code itself. "It's understanding a customer's needs and business strategy, and then translating that into solutions," Ms. Trombley explained.

After two years of slight declines, the number of professional software developers rose in the United States last year to 2.35 million, according to IDC, a research company. Today, America has more than four times as many software developers as India, and nearly seven times as many as China. But the recent growth rate, and projected growth, is far higher in those well-educated, developing nations. The United States is continuing to add high-skill jobs, like Ms. Trombley's, but others are being lost.

Maintaining and upgrading older software on mainframe computers is the kind of job at risk from offshore outsourcing. James Fusco, a mainframe programmer from East Brunswick N.J., worked for AT&T for 13 years. In 1999, seeking to cut costs, the company farmed out much of its data center operations to I.B.M.'s global services unit. Mr. Fusco and his coworkers showed up at the same offices in New Jersey, but suddenly they were I.B.M. employees. Their work, improving and updating mainframe billing and marketing applications, was the same, but one project after another was handed off to programmers in India and Canada. In May 2002, Mr. Fusco and many of his colleagues were laid off, their jobs casualties of outsourcing.

"We were not treated like real I.B.M. employees," Mr. Fusco said. "No attempt was made to retrain us to help us get other jobs."

Mr. Fusco is one of the plaintiffs in a class-action suit against the Department of Labor that seeks to extend the government's trade adjustment assistance program, dating to the 1960's and most recently revised in 2002, to software programmers. The plaintiffs have been told by the Labor Department that, because software is not a tangible "article," they do not qualify for financial assistance and retraining for jobs lost to foreign competition, as manufacturing workers do. Efforts are under way in Congress to change the law.

But even those who joined the class-action suit do not seem to resent the foreign workers who are doing their jobs. "I loved my job and I was good at it," said Ron Beyer, 54, a senior programmer from near Gun Barrel, Tex., who made $80,000 a year. "But it's time to move on, and find something else, something that can't move offshore."

Mr. Fusco, 50, found a job last November as a systems administrator at a small company in New Jersey, at a pay cut from the $65,000 salary he earned at I.B.M. With the federal assistance and retraining he is seeking, Mr. Fusco said he might consider training for another field.

"A year ago, I would have gone for newer computer skills," he explained. "But I'm not sure that programming is a smart thing to get back into. It can be done remotely."

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How to help Haitians

2/14/2004

THE LAST thing that Haiti needs at this time of increasingly violent opposition to its elected government is mixed signals from Washington about the Bush administration's support for democratic rule in the Caribbean nation. For that reason, Secretary of State Colin Powell did the right thing Thursday in stating that, contrary to an earlier State Department suggestion, the United States does not support regime change in Haiti.

Regime change, by force if necessary, is the goal of some elements of the disparate opposition to the administration of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was elected to a five-year term in late 2000 in balloting that was boycotted by much of the opposition. Since then, Aristide has failed to build a strong coalition for the social and economic reforms that the country, the hemisphere's poorest, desperately needs. This is partly his fault and partly the fault of those in the opposition who never accepted his 2000 victory and have forced him into the role of consolidating his power rather than governing constructively.

In any case, Haiti still lacks a well-trained professional and indepedent police force. The 5,000-man force is grossly inadequate for a nation of 8 million residents. Haiti also needs basic electoral processes and institutions that will be recognized as fair by all sides. Monitors accused Aristide's party of tilting the parliamentary elections in early 2000, one reason opposition candidates did not recognize his election. International donors stopped the flow of aid after that election, weakening the economy.

In recent weeks, armed rebels -- some of them former allies of Aristide -- have taken over communities, including the nation's fourth-largest city, Gonaives, in violence that has killed at least 49. A protest demonstration against Aristide in the capital, Port-au-Prince, was suppressed Thursday by militants allied with the president who used flaming tires, stones, and sticks. Another demonstration is planned for tomorrow.

The United States and other nations in the hemisphere are concerned both for humanitarian reasons and because a worsening of the current violence could lead to an exodus, overwhelming other countries' ability to absorb refugees. A first step for the United States, Haiti's neighbors in the Caribbean Community, and the Organization of American States should be to get Aristide and nonviolent members of the opposition to resolve the immediate crisis through negotiation.

It would be a mistake for US policy in Haiti to swing between pro- and anti-Aristide poles. The goal of the United States and Haiti's other neighbors should be the development of internal institutions that involve both Haiti's urban and rural citizens, its educated elites, and its poverty-stricken farmers and workers in that much-maligned project, nation building.

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He Ought to Know

Saturday, February 14, 2004; Page A28

IT'S HARD TO RECALL a more brazen display of political chutzpah than the Bush campaign's assault on Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) as a captive of special interests. A video e-mailed Thursday night to 6 million supporters attacks the Democratic front-runner as an "unprincipled" collector of special-interest cash. The video cites a report in this newspaper that Mr. Kerry led the senatorial pack in collecting money from the very Washington lobbyists that he is busy decrying on the campaign trail. As the dollar amount -- $640,000 -- shows on the screen, a female announcer emits a sound of pained surprise. "Oooh," she says, "For what? Nominations and donations coincided." The video concludes: "Fact. Kerry -- Brought to you by the special interests. Millions from executives at HMOs, telecoms, drug companies. Ka-ching!"

Mr. Kerry's fundraising and his relationships with Washington lobbyists are a legitimate topic, even more so now that he has positioned himself, or tried to, as the scourge of Washington business as usual. But -- how can we say this politely? -- let's consider the source.

Mr. Bush's acceptance of special-interest money and his subsequent rewards to the industries doing the giving dwarf anything in Mr. Kerry's record. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, whose figures are cited in the Bush campaign video, Mr. Bush has raised more than four times as much from lobbyists during the 2004 race as Mr. Kerry has -- $960,000 for Mr. Bush to $235,000 for Mr. Kerry. During the 2000 contest, the Bush campaign assigned an industry code to givers so it would know precisely how much it was beholden and to whom. As electric utility lobbyist Thomas Kuhn explained in a 1999 letter to fundraisers, putting the code on the check "does ensure that our industry is credited, and that your progress is listed among the other business/industry sectors." Mr. Kuhn's progress may well have been noted; he met at least 14 times with Vice President Cheney's energy task force.

"Nominations and donations coincided"? You wonder what possessed the Bush people to bring that up. Of Mr. Bush's Pioneers -- those who raised at least $100,000 in the 2000 campaign -- 21 snagged ambassadorships, and these weren't hardship postings. Checks from "HMOs, telecoms, drug companies"? Mr. Bush has swamped Mr. Kerry in all three sectors during this campaign, raking in 10 times as much from donors connected to the pharmaceutical industry ($585,000 to $58,000) and telecommunications ($578,000 to $58,000). The liberal group Public Citizen counted 53 registered lobbyists among the current Pioneers and Rangers (the $200,000-and-up crowd.) Total amount bundled by lobbyists? At least $6.5 million this time around. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

And, since Mr. Bush brought it up, it's worth remembering that Mr. Kerry actually has some bona fides in the area of campaign finance ethics. He swore off checks from political action committees during his Senate races. He supported the McCain-Feingold legislation to end big soft-money checks to political parties -- which Mr. Bush's party did its best to kill and which the president only reluctantly signed. While the Bush administration fights to keep secret the activities of its energy task force, Mr. Kerry has promised to release the records of his meetings with lobbyists during his time in office.

The Bush video may be a long-shot effort to help derail Mr. Kerry's march to the Democratic nomination. More likely, it's an attempt to neutralize the special-interest issue, to inoculate the Bush White House against accusations that it's a captive of special interests and to muddy the waters by convincing voters that both candidates are equally complicit. We don't think voters are quite that slow.

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Racial Tensions Persist in King's Back Yard
Southern Christian Leadership Conference Confronts Cobb County

By Alan Sverdlik
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, February 14, 2004; Page A03

ATLANTA -- It is only a dozen miles from the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Cobb County border, but as soon as Interstate 75 crosses the line it takes the name of a late congressman and John Birch Society member who accused the civil rights movement of having communist ties.

The Larry MacDonald Highway, however, is not the only symbol of white resistance within close range of the organization founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A bit up the highway from the MacDonald marker is a bridge named for the late Georgia governor and segregationist Lester Maddox, who chased African Americans out of his restaurant with an ax handle and retired to Cobb when his political career ended.

On Sunday, with the oratory of the January King holiday still in the air and Black History Month in full throttle, the SCLC is scheduled to open a branch in Cobb County, a devoutly conservative boom-town suburb. In announcing the expansion into Cobb, the chapter president vowed to lead a series of marches -- whether the county granted the SCLC a permit or not -- against the interstate markers and alleged racial profiling and employment discrimination.

"I have 150 people willing to march and go to jail, if necessary," the Rev. O.J. Brown said. "If they can take the Berlin Wall down, why shouldn't they remove those markers? It would help us forget the past. And the past haunts."

As Brown left a King Day memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King once preached and the King family still worships, he said: "You would have thought that his influence would have filtered into his own back yard. But in Cobb, it simply didn't."

Even by the standards of Georgia's rightist political culture, Cobb has been conservative. It was the nucleus of the congressional district that elected MacDonald -- a longtime Birch Society member who had railed against the civil rights legislation of the Great Society -- to four terms. MacDonald died in 1983, a passenger aboard a South Korean airliner that was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter. A year earlier, the city of Kennesaw passed a law requiring all heads of households to own a firearm and ammunition. Only felons and those with religious objections were exempt.

Cobb continued to wage a culture war in the decade to come. In 1993, its county commission passed a resolution that condemned "lifestyles advocated by the gay community" and cut off funding for a local theater company that had staged Terrence McNally's play "Lips Together, Teeth Apart," which touched on some homosexual themes. When the county resisted pressure from the organizers of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to reverse its stand, it lost two events, a volleyball competition and a visit from the torch relay.

Now, Cobb may soon meet the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the flamboyant, larger-than-life character who was one of the gladiators of the civil rights movement -- "a man who built Birmingham, Alabama, into the strongest grass-roots movements in the South" despite a number of savage beatings, said Stewart Burns, a historian at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written about the civil rights movement.

Shuttlesworth, who is 81 and lives in Cincinnati, took over as SCLC's president last month, replacing Martin Luther King III. Given his history of confrontation, speculation has abounded that he might savor a showdown in Cobb, but in a recent interview he would not go that far, saying only that he would not rule out a protest, principally of the county's honoring of McDonald and Maddox.

But one prominent conservative doubts the SCLC has that kind of pull. "The civil rights leaders of yesterday are no longer listened to by the young blacks of today," said Bill Byrne, who was the Cobb County Commission chairman during the controversy over the gay resolution. "The blacks in Cobb are conservative people with conservative ideals."

On the other hand, "it would be vintage Shuttlesworth to take on a place like Cobb," Burns said. "He had a clearer activist vision than King."

As quixotic as a Cobb campaign might be, Burns said, it could "solve an identity crisis that has crippled SCLC's effectiveness over the years." The organization has cycled back and forth between the decentralized, grass-roots orientation that its founders envisioned and a hierarchy that functions from the top down. "Fred could redeem SCLC and return it to its original mission," Burns said.

There are dissenters from that view, however. "Two fundamental questions about bringing in Shuttlesworth come to mind," said David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. "One is he's 82. The other is that he lives in Cincinnati. And by this I mean no diminution of Shuttlesworth's historical reputation."

The new SCLC branch will operate out of the Emmanuel Tabernacle Christian Church, a storefront ministry in a northeast Cobb shopping center. In a county teeming with white, evangelical megachurches, it is common to see biblical verse quoted on signs in their front yards. Last Sunday, Emmanuel greeted worshipers with the message, "Christ was a liberal."

Cobb's conservative majority has been largely silent in the face of promises by the SCLC chapter's founders to engage in civil disobedience. The only reaction thus far has been from the county's substantial black middle class, which was a negligible presence in 1990 but has grown to nearly 19 percent of Cobb's 600,000-odd residents.

When the Rev. Dwight Graves, Emmanuel's preacher, called Cobb a "plantation that gives some blacks a nice standard of living as long as they don't rock the boat," the telephone lines to several talk shows on African American radio stations were buzzing with calls from incensed listeners.

"I'm not going to beat myself up because I'm an upper-middle-class black," said Chris Orange, a 39-year-old technology analyst with the telecommunications giant Sprint. "What other group gets attacked for being successful?"

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via Tena, blogging for Atrios:

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Censor 'Scooby-Doo'? Words fail

By Dan Moffett, Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2004

The Bush administration has decided that people with bad hearing have bad judgment, too, and need special guidance from the federal government.

So the U.S. Department of Education is declaring about 200 television programs inappropriate for closed-captioning and denying federal grant requests to make them accessible to the hearing-impaired.

The department made its decisions based on the recommendations of a five-member panel. Who the five members are, only the government seems to know, and it isn't saying. But the shows they censored suggest a perspective that is Talibanesque.

The government is refusing to caption Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, apparently fearing that the deaf would fall prey to witchcraft if they viewed the classic sitcoms.

Your government also believes that Law & Order is too intense for the hard-of-hearing. So is Power Rangers. You can rest easy knowing that your federal tax dollars aren't being spent to promote Sanford and Son, Judge Wapner's Animal Court and The Loretta Young Show within the deaf community. Kids with hearing problems can forget about watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, classic cartoons or Nickelodeon features. Even Roy Rogers and Robin Hood are out.

Sports programming took a heavy hit, too. The government has decided that people with hearing problems don't need to watch NASCAR, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League or Professional Golf Association tournaments.

The National Association of the Deaf says the government used to caption these shows but abruptly changed course, deciding that the shows don't fit the required definition of "educational, news or informational" programming.

"They've suddenly narrowed down the definition of those three kinds of programming without public input," says Kelby Brick, director of the NAD's law and advocacy center. "Basically, the department wants to limit captioning to puritan shows. The department wants to ensure that deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are not exposed to any non-puritan programming. Never mind that the rest of the country is allowed to be exposed."

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I can give anecdotal support to this report from my own experiences.

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Whole-grain foods may lower diabetes risk

Last Updated: 2004-02-13 11:46:49 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who consume plenty of whole-grain foods, particularly fiber-rich cereals, may be less likely to develop health conditions that put them at increased risk of diabetes, new research suggests.

"Individuals who incorporate whole-grain foods into their diets may prevent or reduce their risk of developing the metabolic syndrome, a clustering of risk factors that often precedes type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease," Dr. Nicola M. McKeown of the Jean Mayer U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston told Reuters Health.

"In our study, the health benefits of whole grain foods were observed among people who consumed three or more servings of whole grains per day," McKeown said. People who ate this much whole grain had better insulin sensitivity and were less likely to have the metabolic syndrome, she said.

But the Boston researcher noted that the average American consumes less than one serving of whole-grain foods per day.

Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, occurs when the action of insulin in regulating blood sugar levels becomes blunted.

Type 2 diabetes is on the rise in the U.S., and an estimated 24 percent of adults have the so-called metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk for diabetes and heart disease. Signs of metabolic syndrome include abdominal obesity, high levels of blood fats called triglycerides, low levels of "good" HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar.

Low-carbohydrate diets are all the rage these days, and there is some evidence that a low-carb diet may improve insulin sensitivity in obese people. Overweight and obese people often develop insulin resistance, a precursor to full-fledged type 2 diabetes.

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The argument? Drug pricing.

Hal Pawluk at Tude put together this explanation on BlogCritics of why prescription pharmaceutical prices are so high. If it makes anyone feel better,in the version posted on his own site, he suggests getting back to more of a free-market in drugs.

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I keep an eye on diabetes research because I have it, even though most research isn't applicable to my case.

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Energy Factory Defect in Diabetes

Background: "Type 2 diabetes has always been a snake in the grass....The term "mild diabetes" persists, even though the disease is a leading cause of premature death from cardiovascular causes, amputations, and blindness. Life expectancy is considerably worse after the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes than after the diagnosis of some types of cancer." (Dr. Roy Taylor, in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine)

New Research: A genetic defect that causes an energy shortage in the body's cells appears to be a major factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. Mitochondria -- the cells' energy centers -- do not appear to work correctly in children whose parents have type 2 diabetes. This defect may lead to an accumulation of fat inside muscle cells and to the development of insulin resistance, the hallmark of type 2 diabetes.

Comment: The basic concepts of the causation of type 2 diabetes have not changed significantly for more than two decades. This new research brings a welcome new direction in our understanding of this "snake in the grass."

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Making All Faces Familiar for Those With Autism

THURSDAY, Feb. 12 (HealthDayNews) -- University of Washington researchers have discovered that the brains of people with autism function differently than the brains of normal people when they see pictures of unfamiliar people.

The study of 11 adolescents and adults with autism and 10 age-matched controls also found that when people with autism see a picture of a familiar face, their brain activity is similar to that of other people.

The researchers say these findings indicate that in people with autism, a brain region called the fusiform gyrus that's associated with face processing has the potential to function normally, but may need special training to do so.

The study was presented Feb. 12 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle.

"It appears that our brains have evolved to have special processors to recognize that something is a face because faces are important in survival, in understanding emotions and in forming special relationships with others," researcher and psychology professor Geraldine Dawson, director of the UW's Autism Center, says in a prepared statement.

"We have special and distinct regions for perceiving faces and others for perceiving objects. These regions are located in different parts of the temporal lobe. Our brain imaging studies are finding that people with autism often use object processing areas when they are looking at faces," Dawson says.

--Robert Preidt

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New Technique Can Help Dyslexic Kids Read Better
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Feb. 12 (HealthDayNews) -- Specialized training can reorganize the brains of dyslexic children and help them read better, researchers report.

"The idea is to really understand nature-nurture interaction; how the brain influences learning, but also how instruction influences the brain," says Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington's Center on Human Development and Disability.

Berninger is one of three dyslexia experts from the University of Washington scheduled to present their findings Feb. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.

Dyslexia is the term used to describe people who have difficulty spelling, writing and reading. Dyslexia is a so-called "neuro-behavioral" disorder that is genetically based. It's not a disease, Berninger says, adding that dyslexics are often gifted and creative.

Approximately 2 million U.S. school children are dyslexic, according to the Educational Resources Information Center.

Berninger says reading is a complex activity involving different parts of the brain. Each word has three "forms" -- how it sounds, how it's spelled and what it means. And each of these forms is processed in a different part of the brain, she says.

Berninger developed methods to teach each of these word forms to elementary school children with dyslexia. The hypothesis is that you have to train for all three forms of the word to help teach a child to read.

Educators debate whether it's more effective to teach reading using phonics, or by emphasizing meaning, Berninger says. However, she found the brain is sensitive to the interrelationship between both sound and meaning.

Dyslexic children could learn to read when instruction made them aware of word forms and their interrelationship, Berninger says.

Before the instruction, tests showed measurable differences in brain activity between children with dyslexia and those without the disorder, the Washington researchers say.

"We did MRI scans on 10 dyslexic and 11 non-dyslexic children," says co-researcher Elizabeth Aylward, a professor of radiology at the Center on Human Development and Disability. The children were in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades.

Aylward says there were differences in the activation of specific brain regions between the two groups of children when they were asked to perform a specific word task during the MRI.

After three weeks of specialized training, however, the dyslexic children showed brain activation patterns similar to the normal children during a second MRI. They also improved on reading tests, Aylward says.

"This shows that what the brain is looking for is to create interrelationships between sound and meaning," Berninger says.

"This also shows that you can get kids to improve their reading using the same brain pathways as normal readers," Aylward adds. "Even though dyslexia is a genetically based disorder, there is still enough plasticity in the brain that it can be jump-started."

Says Berninger: "I haven't cured them, but I have shown that they are teachable. These kids are ready to learn when they go back to school, but unfortunately the instructional practices aren't in place in the schools to support this jump-start."

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College Rapes Tied to Binge Drinking
By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Feb. 12 (HealthDayNews) -- Binge drinking and rape seem to go hand-in-hand on U.S. college campuses.

A new study has found colleges and universities with higher rates of binge drinking also have more rapes. In addition, nearly three-quarters of rape victims reported being intoxicated at the time of the attack.

Rape victim advocates are critical of the findings, which appear in a recent issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.

"Binge drinking is unhealthy. No one questions that, [but] putting the blame for rape on alcohol is an excuse. In reality, the decision of the attacker to commit rape is the only cause of that crime," says Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network in Washington, D.C. "We've worked very hard to foster a simple, undisputable understanding that rapists alone are responsible for this decision to commit this heinous crime. I think that this kind of study can be very harmful to that message. This is a crime. It's criminal behavior, period."

The study authors deny they have done this. "We're not blaming these women. The men who raped them are the guilty parties," says study author Henry Wechsler, director of College Alcohol Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. "We're pointing out the danger of certain high-drinking situations."

What's more, Wechsler and his colleagues are hoping the findings will be used to ramp up college prevention programs. "Most efforts around drinking are tied to automobile fatalities, and people are generally aware of this connection," Wechsler says. "In the public, there's less of a realization of the relationship of heavy alcohol use to rape. There may be a number of incidents where this is reported as occurring, but there hasn't been a quantification of this before now on the college scene."

Regardless of its exact consequences, binge drinking is indisputably a major problem on most college campuses, as is rape. Previous research has indicated alcohol is associated with at least half of sexual assaults on female college students.

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There was no such complaint when they rejected MoveOn's ad.

Wimpy whiners…

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CBS Pulls Advertisement on Medicare Prepared by Administration
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — CBS said on Friday that it had stopped running a television advertisement for the new Medicare prescription drug law while Congress investigates its accuracy.

The 30-second advertisement, prepared by the Bush administration, assures Medicare beneficiaries that the program is not changing in any way except to provide "more benefits." Democratic members of Congress and some liberal advocacy groups say the advertisement amounts to a taxpayer-subsidized political commercial for the administration.

Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS in New York, said: "The ad has been pulled. It violated our longstanding policy on advocacy advertising. We pulled it as soon as we became aware of the investigation."

The government is spending $9.5 million to run the advertisement on national network and cable programs in the next six weeks.

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, is examining the advertisements at the request of several Democrats. The lawmakers say the commercials are inaccurate and constitute an illegal use of federal money to promote the re-election of President Bush.

The CBS policy says the network "does not sell time for the advocacy of viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance." A commercial is considered unacceptable if it explicitly takes a position on such an issue, or if it presents arguments parallel to those made by one side, "so as to constitute implicit advocacy."

CBS's decision angered Republicans in Washington.

"This is a political decision," said John P. Feehery, a spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

Mr. McClintock said the decision had been made by Martin D. Franks, an executive vice president of CBS.

Mr. Feehery asserted that Mr. Franks was "a partisan Democrat" who had contributed money to Democratic candidates. CBS executives rejected the criticism as a smear tactic, and they insisted that their policy had been applied in an evenhanded way.

"People on both sides express displeasure when you have a clear and consistent policy down the middle," Mr. McClintock said.

Last month CBS rejected a request from a liberal group, MoveOn.org, that wanted to run a Super Bowl advertisement criticizing President Bush's fiscal policies.

Kevin W. Keane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, denounced the decision on the Medicare advertisement.

"It's unfortunate that CBS has chosen to undermine our efforts to educate seniors about the law," Mr. Keane said.

But Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said: "The Medicare ad is a propaganda effort with taxpayer dollars. CBS has done the responsible thing. Other networks must now follow suit."

President Bush and Republicans in Congress have taken credit for delivering drug benefits to the elderly. But since the legislation was signed on Dec. 8, Democrats have kept up their criticism, describing the law as a giveaway to pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and the majority leader, called on CBS to reconsider its decision. Dr. Frist said the advertisement was "clearly nonpartisan," and he noted that under the law, federal officials must "broadly disseminate information" about the new drug benefit.

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No link, because the the article is old enough to have vanished

This came to my attention because of a letter to the editor:

One DOES have to be white to feel the way the letter writer does.

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Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers
By AMY HARMON

lose observers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: the company's Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the United States site under signatures like "a reader from New York."

The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching.

John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.

"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them."

Mr. Rechy is in good company. Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess both famously reviewed their own books under assumed names. But several modern-day writers said the Internet, where anyone from your mother to your ex-agent can anonymously broadcast an opinion of your work, has created a more urgent need for self-defense.

Under Amazon's system, any user may submit a review without publicly providing any personal information (or evidence of having read the book). The posting of real names on the Canadian site was for many a reminder that anonymity on the Internet is seldom a sure thing.

"It was an unfortunate error," said Patricia Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman. "We'll examine whatever happened and make sure it won't happen again."

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

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Civil Rights Survivors Meet, Remember
By JAY REEVES
Associated Press Writer

12:46 AM PST, February 14, 2004

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Four decades and a half-dozen trials haven't erased the raw feelings that still surround the civil rights murders of the segregated South.

Through tears and voices choked with emotion, victims' relatives, police and prosecutors recalled those hard times Friday in the first gathering of both relatives who lost loved ones to several infamous murders and the people who helped bring the killers to justice.

By sharing vivid stories of seven slayings in Alabama and Mississippi and the decades of work that it took to get the guilty behind bars, participants helped salve years of hurt and frustration.

"We still are learning things. We are still in therapy of sorts," said Chris McNair, whose daughter Denise was among four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963.

It was only in the last three years that the last two remaining suspects, ex-Ku Klux Klansmen Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, were sent to prison for the bombing, the deadliest act of the civil rights era.

Weeping, Junie Collins Peavy told of identifying the body of her sister Addie Mae after she died in the church blast and the two decades of internal turmoil that followed as killers walked free.

"People used to look at me and shake their heads like there wasn't any hope," Peavy said. "But I always felt there was hope."

The meeting, a symposium billed as "The Gathering: Civil Rights Justice Remembered," was organized mainly by Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor who sent Blanton and Cherry to prison.

Besides the church bombing, the conference focused on three other civil rights murders that finally ended in guilty verdicts despite years of delays.

It was only a year ago that Ernest Avants went to prison for murdering Ben Chester White in 1966 near Natchez, Miss. FBI Special Agent Kevin Rust recounted how Avants was murdered by Klansmen in an apparent attempt to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to Mississippi for assassination.

"The only thing he had done to deserve it was the color of his skin," said Rust.

The widow of Vernon Dahmer, who angered the Klan by helping blacks register to vote in Mississippi, recalled the night their home was shot up and firebombed, fatally injuring her husband on Jan. 10, 1966. Fearful of an attack, the family had been taking turns sleeping until only days before.

"In December of '65 we stopped getting threats, so we stopped sleeping in shifts," said Ellie Dahmer. "But we stopped a little too soon."

While the gathering at Birmingham-Southern College marked the first time for an event of its kind, many of the victims' families met years before. Vernon Dahmer Jr. said McNair, who is a photographer in Birmingham, came to Mississippi to take pictures at his father's funeral.

Klan leader Sam Bowers was convicted in 1998 of ordering Dahmer's death.

Retired FBI agent Neil Shanahan, who helped investigate the church bombing, said officers often knew quickly from informants and other sources that Klan members were behind civil rights killings.

"There wasn't a big mystery about who had done this collectively," he said. "The problem was sorting out from these organizations (the individuals) who did it. ... It takes time."

Another retired agent, Robert Murphy, got choked up remembering how he was forced to leave Birmingham with his family after Blanton allegedly threatened to kill him amid the investigation. There was still work to be done, said Murphy.

"I did want to finish the Baptist church case," he said.

---

I just got back from St. Mark's Books on 3rd and 8th in Manhattan. It's been a while since I was there because I never get out a cheap as I planned to. That was okay this time because it was my Black History Month Book Run, even though none of the books I bought are history books per se (did you know you can actually run out of history to learn?). St. Mark's Bookstore has an interesting buyer that brings in a really eclectic selection. I actually saw a copy of "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Today's purchases (in addition to "Lord of Light" and assorted superhero comic books) were
"Erasing Racism" by Molefi Asante,
"Rock My Soul" by bell hooks, and
"War Talk" by Arundhati Roy

It's a nice mix. "Erasing Racism," subtitled "The Survival of the American Nation," is about addressing the legacy of slavery socially and politically. "Rock My Soul,: subtitled "Black People and Self-Esteem," is about addressing it internally. "War Talk" is in there because Arundhati Roy is just sooooo bad…

Black Future Month is coming, I just don't know when. Hopefully before Black English Month rolls around again.

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February 13, 2004

dKos:

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Here's another review of "Lost in Translation," the movie the Asian American-focused Model American commented on.

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Is Lost in Translation Racist?

By E. Koohan Paik , ColorLines RaceWire

The most interesting thing about Sofia Coppola's film, Lost in Translation, has been the resulting discourse around that bugaboo of a question: Is this movie racist?

It is precisely the brilliance of Lost in Translation that warrants its unsentimental scrutiny. Understanding the nature with which media worm its agendas into the deepest levels of the subconscious is all we can do to inoculate ourselves against its relentless barrage-though they still often manage to have their way with us. Questions more complex than whether the film is patently racist need to be asked. For example, what is the political and historical context of the film? What, and who, is not shown in the film? What implicit social conventions go unchallenged? Only after answering such questions can one rationally ponder political impact in media, the arts, and propaganda.

The film tracks, in heartbeat-delicate movements, mounting romantic tension between world-weary Bob Harris (Bill Murray as a version of himself) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) the soulful wife of a crass photographer. Bob's in Tokyo making commercials for Suntory whiskey. She's there as a desultory tag-along to a work-obsessed husband. Over the course of several days, they brush paths within the placid steel-and-glass hotel towering high above the chaos of Shibuya and Shinjuku (one shot poignantly references theVegas neon in the elder Coppola's lackluster love story, One From the Heart). Finally, after a masterfully paced series of restrained encounters, Bob and Charlotte elegantly climax their relationship with a kiss.

Camps are generally divided between those who feel the film makes a mockery of the Japanese people, and those who defend the authenticity with which Coppola portrays the experience of dislocated foreigners bumbling in Tokyo. One group calls for fair representation; the other believes that political correctness shouldn't snuff out the rich humor and romance of an honestly wrought film.

The Japanese are presented not as people, but as clowns. And the performances are flawlessly comic. Yutaka Tadokoro, as the mop-headed hipster, directs Bob for a commercial with the precision exuberance of Seiji Ozawa conducting Stravinsky. Fumihiro Hayashi, as a call girl, plays hilariously off straight-man Murray, demanding that he "lip my stocking!" and in doing so, elevating the tired joke about how the Japanese confuse L's and R's to high comedy, not to mention the unbridled absurdity of her solo date-rape tussle on the floor of Bob's hotel room. And finally, Matthew Minami, real-life TV star of Matthew's Best Hit TV, is disturbingly unforgettable as a dayglo, amphetamine-boosted update of a Japanese archetype-the silly, teahouse homosexual. The timing of all the lines, gestures, and editing is impeccable, but the hilarity is rooted entirely in the "otherness" of the Japanese people. We laugh at them, not with them. This is why the film is accused of being racist.

Even verité-style footage of authentic locals focuses on the Japanese as a sorry lot, preoccupied with cheesifying all things western (the spiky-haired youth thrashing a video-game guitar is shot with Arbus-ian detachment, for example). These scenes are occasionally "balanced" by appropriately reverent, but equally inscrutable, shrine-and-temple sequences. Moreover, the film is simultaneously scornful and smug in the knowledge that imitation, no matter how tacky, is the sincerest form of flattery. This sentiment is actually articulated in the dialogue, by Charlotte's husband, galled by a rock-band photo shoot: "Let them be who they are! They're trying to make them Keith Richards when they're just skinny and nerdy." The subtext here is when westerners ape the Rolling Stones, it's normal; but when Asian kids fall prey to the same media hype, they're pathetic wannabes. They should be meditating in a dojo somewhere, not playing rock and roll.

But is negative representation an accurate criterion for discrimination? If it were, then an entire storytelling tradition would be considered politically incorrect. Good versus evil is a mainstay of western culture. Are we to censor Nurse Ratched and Ebenezer Scrooge for slighting women and the elderly? An important distinction needs to be made: it is not negative representation of the Japanese, but, rather, the shirking of responsibility to depict them as full human beings, either negative or positive, which constitutes discrimination, or racism.

We've seen this phenomenon in countless films in the case of women: the fully dimensional (human) characters are all men, while females are represented with cardboard depth, existing only as "markers" (mother, love interest) against which the protagonist and other males can flex their identities. Many a "classic" has missed true greatness because of such sexist oversights.

To deprive a character of dimensionality is the true insult. Take, for example, the Mother Superior in The Magdalene Sisters, one of the most loathesome roles to hit the silver screen. Because she's a full character, not a caricature, the film is saved from being a wholesale diatribe against the Catholic Church and nuns as a group. She's a villain, to be sure, but she's complex, multi-dimensional-that is, human. Then there's The Quiet American, a scathing critique of U.S. imperialism, which, like Lost in Translation depicts only those of European descent as multi-faceted human beings. The Vietnamese love interest is a doll; the other Vietnamese characters are nearly invisible or melodramatically evil. In neglecting to craft all characters fully, including the Vietnamese, Asian "otherness" is perpetuated, and, as we shall see, imperialism is justified-the ironic opposite of the film's objective.

Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola's riff on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, takes place in a land of exotic otherness -again, in Indochina. And, as with Conrad's classic, the film is about white men, though its African American GIs qualify for the "honorary white person" exemption specific to Vietnam war pictures. Take the black man off the streets of an American city and put him in the jungles of Cambodia, and, voilà, he's transformed from felon into one of "us."

The Asians, needless to say, are not. They are "them." Anyone who has seen Hearts of Darkness, a documentary by Mrs. Eleanor Coppola on the making of Apocalypse Now (not to be confused with Heart of Darkness), has seen the bravado with which the patriarch Coppola beseeches that no detail be overlooked in a scene re-creating a French colonial dinner in Vietnam. Even the wine has to be the correct temperature, he implores. The obsessive lengths he went to make a scene which didn't even make it into the final cut stand out in insulting relief to his highly inaccurate depiction of the "natives" up-river. Just smear some mud on 'em and make 'em shake their spears, appears to be all the preparation made for the scene. Does Coppola really care about these "primitives"? It's hard to believe. Though he, and his muse Conrad, mean to critique imperialist aggression, the fact that it is done entirely through the prism of European self-absorption undercuts the sincerity of any intention.

Creating a universe in which one group is singled out and represented as dolls or cartoons (or not represented at all) has political impact. It is arguably the most effective means of driving home a message of the group's "otherness." (Incidentally, at the 1998 Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film and Video Festival, a statistic cited that, in the mainstream media, there were more representations of extra-terrestrials than of Asians.) And once this "otherness" is established, any violation against that group can be justified. This is summed up by Gen. William Westmoreland in the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds where he dismisses Vietnamese casualties, saying, "Life is cheap in the Orient." In other words, "they" experience death differently than "us." It's not that big a deal for them.

"Otherness" can justify any incursion, occupation, or subjugation, because implicit in the myth of otherness is its corollary: "We know better." The idea is, they can't fend for themselves so they need our help. They need our military to install democracy since they can't do it for themselves, our genetically modified crops since they can't feed themselves, our economic models because they can't uphold a decent standard of living by themselves, and in the vein of a "softer" imperialism, our NGOs because they can't organize for themselves. To be acted upon and spoken for is to be "the white man's burden."

Lost in Translation relies wholly on the "otherness" of the Japanese to give meaning to its protagonists, shape to its plot, and color to its scenery. The inaccessibility of Japan functions as an extension of the alienation and loneliness Bob and Charlotte feel in their personal lives, thus laying the perfect conditions for romance to germinate: they're the only ones who understand each other. Take away the cartooniness of the Japanese and the humor falls flat, the main characters' intense yearning is neutralized and the plot evaporates.

Granted, the "otherness" is an innocent construction, intended only to set up dramatic tension, not to subjugate a people. But art does not function isolated from political context. We live in an era when "otherness" logic makes the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike and expansion perfectly acceptable, regardless of reason.

One of the most insightful thinkers on race politics was the late Edward Said, whose Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism have become defining works in the canon of writings on the subject. He focused on the ecology of art and politics. After all, the geopolitical landscape can't be successfully conquered, through guns and tanks, without first conquering the landscape of the mind, through culture. Look at Iraq-people can't be bombed into subjugation. But they can be brainwashed into it. This is where art comes in.

The "otherness" logic has been a convention in English literature for centuries and has also informed cinematic storytelling. In fact, it's so deeply rooted that even in Lost in Translation, a film which takes place in a country of superior technological prowess, superior social conditions (crime and homelessness are nearly nonexistent) and superior politesse, the ethnic European protagonists cop the same arrogant attitude found in the jingoistic characters of Kipling. "East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet" could've been Lost in Translation's publicity campaign tagline. The Coppola adherence to the convention of the superior westerner remains steeped in the era of sahibs in pith helmets. It's the classic schism between cinematic virtuosity and political cluelessness.

"Arrogance" is the operative word here. In Lost in Translation, not a single attempt is made by Bob or Charlotte to communicate in Japanese. It's as if it were beneath Charlotte to respond with a simple "Konichiwa" when warmly welcomed by an ikebana matron. Worse yet are Bob's bursts of jokey invective directed in English at uncomprehending bystanders, whose only crime is their Japanese-ness. Sure, Americans aren't exposed to the same diversity found in polyglot Europe. But does that justify linguistic arrogance? Imagine French tourists in New York refusing to speak English, deriding waiters in French, and wondering amongst themselves, eyes rolling in disgust, why the few Americans who make efforts to speak their language make such idiots of themselves. No, even the French aren't that arrogant.

This is behavior unique to the imperialist worldview. It's the linguistic equivalent to what one-time currency speculator George Soros recently observed about the current global power dynamic: "In the Roman Empire, only the Romans voted. In modern global capitalism, only Americans vote." Lost in Translation illustrates how Americans have made the peculiarly imperialist combination of ignorance and arrogance a national identity.

E. Koohan Paik is a filmmaker and film historian living in Hawaii.

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via email from the Center for American Progress

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The extended text has a table that shows invading Iraq costs select cities all over the country. Comments are off for this one because:

1. It's so long I don't want to scroll to the bottom of the page to read them
2. There's really nothing anyone can say about it anyway

State:	City:	Share of $87 Billion	Share of $141 Billlion
Alabama		$848,412,686	$1,379,036,310
	Birmingham	$36,282,315	$58,974,401
	Montgomery	$40,135,732	$65,237,865
Alaska		$155,489,882	$252,738,080
	Anchorage	$69,530,401	$113,016,872
	Valdez	$1,291,391	$2,099,068
Arizona		$1,251,617,734	$2,034,418,308
	Phoenix	$327,425,818	$532,208,086
	Tucson	$90,694,343	$147,417,399
Arkansas		$736,116,372	$1,196,506,396
	Little Rock	$58,870,866	$95,690,533
	Rogers	$13,446,270	$21,855,985
California		$11,120,615,867	$18,075,794,152
	Berkeley	$31,595,756	$51,356,722
	Brea	$14,628,243	$23,777,200
	Goleta	$23,017,152	$37,412,793
	Hayward	$49,540,322	$80,524,376
	Humboldt County	$27,310,621	$44,391,532
	Los Angeles	$937,062,145	$1,523,129,892
	Mendocino County	$21,466,032	$34,891,555
	Mountain View	$33,904,166	$55,108,884
	Orange County	$1,157,355,881	$1,881,202,167
	Oxnard	$57,238,536	$93,037,293
	San Bernardino	$39,911,090	$64,872,724
	San Bernardino County	$497,103,091	$808,006,791
	San Francisco	$296,509,718	$481,956,098
	San Jose	$434,571,594	$706,366,156
	Santa Barbara	$30,314,998	$49,274,939
	Ventura County	$310,669,354	$504,971,609
Colorado		$1,334,263,077	$2,168,752,614
	Boulder	$27,840,424	$45,252,689
	Colorado Springs	$106,916,433	$173,785,288
	Denver	$143,973,055	$234,018,272
	Durango	$3,192,299	$5,188,862
	Ft. Collins	$34,666,566	$56,348,112
	Greeley	$18,409,424	$29,923,248
	La Plata County	$11,596,552	$18,849,396
Connecticut		$2,036,532,452	$3,310,243,051
	Hartford	$33,457,097	$54,382,203
	New Haven	$40,578,098	$65,956,901
	New London	$9,622,914	$15,641,383
Delaware		$486,419,998	$790,642,160
	Wilmington	$33,430,057	$54,338,252
District of Columbia		$395,937,528	$643,569,146
Florida		$4,464,246,810	$7,256,325,310
	Miami	$61,247,463	$99,553,527
	Tallahassee	$33,133,421	$53,856,091
Georgia		$2,643,739,967	$4,297,216,989
	Atlanta	$110,207,668	$179,134,963
	Brunswick	$2,644,253	$4,298,051
	Hinesville	$8,098,560	$13,163,652
	Pooler	$2,241,272	$3,643,033
	Richmond Hill	$2,492,454	$4,051,313
	Savannah	$29,063,285	$47,240,366
	Thunderbolt	$637,983	$1,036,997
	Tybee Island	$1,284,073	$2,087,171
Hawaii		$269,177,305	$437,529,145
	Hilo	$7,114,285	$11,563,780
	Honolulu	$74,770,870	$121,534,893
Idaho		$230,919,326	$375,343,440
	Boise	$37,444,350	$60,863,208
Illinois		$4,681,155,716	$7,608,895,777
	Chicago	$904,967,439	$1,470,962,161
	Oak Park	$25,148,858	$40,877,735
Indiana		$1,428,282,845	$2,321,575,262
	Decatur	$2,004,789	$3,258,647
	Fort Wayne	$42,454,682	$69,007,158
	Indianapolis	$176,960,049	$287,636,356
Iowa		$617,551,862	$1,003,787,963
	Des Moines	$40,801,405	$66,319,870
	Mt. Vernon	$928,543	$1,509,283
Kansas		$699,494,701	$1,136,980,395
	Kansas City	$31,051,665	$50,472,341
	Topeka	$28,160,334	$45,772,680
Kentucky		$733,695,300	$1,192,571,110
	Lexington-Fayette	$55,914,954	$90,885,902
	Louisville	$39,842,579	$64,761,364
	Mt. Sterling	$856,889	$1,392,813
Louisiana		$749,527,125	$1,218,304,651
	Baton Rouge	$35,630,272	$57,914,550
	New Orleans	$67,727,096	$110,085,723
Maine		$250,953,498	$407,907,604
	Bangor	$4,947,419	$8,041,689
	Portland	$12,106,693	$19,678,595
Maryland		$1,705,122,491	$2,771,559,014
	Baltimore	$119,263,497	$193,854,590
	Montgomery	$15,484,579	$25,169,116
Massachusetts		$2,590,010,343	$4,209,883,192
	Arlington	$22,031,405	$35,810,529
	Boston	$188,587,681	$306,536,269
	Cambridge	$39,280,529	$63,847,791
	Fall River	$21,546,842	$35,022,905
	Framingham	$29,341,062	$47,691,873
	Franklin County	$23,556,944	$38,290,188
	Ashfield	$768,783	$1,249,604
	Bernardston	$787,831	$1,280,565
	Buckland	$737,107	$1,198,117
	Charlemont	$510,601	$829,947
	Colrain	$586,899	$953,963
	Conway	$819,664	$1,332,308
	Deerfield	$1,909,369	$3,103,548
	Erving	$474,454	$771,193
	Gill	$558,744	$908,200
	Greenfield	$4,859,004	$7,897,976
	Hawley	$103,474	$168,189
	Heath	$328,608	$534,129
	Leverett	$849,006	$1,380,001
	Leyden	$314,195	$510,703
	Monroe	$19,156	$31,137
	Montague	$2,314,255	$3,761,662
	New Salem	$365,358	$593,864
	Northfield	$1,171,370	$1,903,981
	Orange	$2,237,737	$3,637,287
	Rowe	$118,921	$193,298
	Shelburne	$699,091	$1,136,324
	Shutesbury	$883,628	$1,436,277
	Sunderland	$1,133,318	$1,842,130
	Warwick	$254,946	$414,398
	Wendell	$349,211	$567,618
	Whately	$748,753	$1,217,047
	Great Barrington	$696,726	$1,132,480
	Hampden County	$146,369,391	$237,913,351
	Agawam	$11,228,088	$18,250,483
	Blandford	$519,090	$843,745
	Brimfield	$1,353,433	$2,199,912
	Chester	$462,937	$752,471
	Chicopee	$15,747,892	$25,597,112
	East Longmeadow	$7,138,863	$11,603,730
	Granville	$652,976	$1,061,367
	Hampden	$2,742,645	$4,457,980
	Holland	$1,012,441	$1,645,653
	Holyoke	$9,795,743	$15,922,305
	Longmeadow	$9,528,967	$15,488,679
	Ludlow	$8,052,254	$13,088,384
	Monson	$3,513,089	$5,710,283
	Montgomery	$312,014	$507,157
	Palmer	$4,183,482	$6,799,962
	Russell	$623,720	$1,013,813
	Southwick	$3,732,123	$6,066,309
	Springfield	$37,365,875	$60,735,652
	Tolland	$182,806	$297,138
	Wales	$686,188	$1,115,351
	Westfield	$14,643,489	$23,801,982
	West Springfield	$9,074,195	$14,749,477
	Wilbraham	$7,075,419	$11,500,605
	Hampshire County	$56,692,185	$92,149,237
	Amherst	$11,272,682	$18,322,967
	Belchertown	$5,495,917	$8,933,235
	Chesterfield	$475,968	$773,654
	Cummington	$333,769	$542,519
	Easthampton	$5,837,573	$9,488,573
	Goshen	$368,870	$599,573
	Granby	$2,689,224	$4,371,148
	Hadley	$2,007,454	$3,262,977
	Hatfield	$1,318,448	$2,143,046
	Huntington	$859,734	$1,397,439
	Middlefield	$223,009	$362,486
	Northampton	$9,786,080	$15,906,598
	Pelham	$695,145	$1,129,910
	Plainfield	$177,224	$288,065
	Southampton	$2,690,507	$4,373,234
	South Hadley	$6,483,666	$10,538,752
	Ware	$2,891,332	$4,699,661
	Westhampton	$712,528	$1,158,165
	Williamsburg	$926,302	$1,505,640
	Winchester	$15,809,103	$25,696,606
	Worthington	$544,184	$884,533
	Lawrence	$16,284,222	$26,468,880
	Lowell	$33,293,379	$54,116,091
	New Bedford	$20,881,256	$33,941,042
	Pittsfield	$13,188,655	$21,437,249
	Wellesley	$24,438,907	$39,723,758
	Worcester	$49,679,018	$80,749,817
Michigan		$2,628,806,922	$4,272,944,355
	Ann Arbor	$31,262,334	$50,814,767
	Detroit	$166,326,683	$270,352,552
	Lansing	$24,573,003	$39,941,722
	Ludington	$1,390,081	$2,259,481
	Pontiac	$12,259,178	$19,926,449
Minnesota		$1,914,418,832	$3,111,755,783
	Albert Lea	$4,979,548	$8,093,912
	Duluth	$24,242,916	$39,405,189
	Mankato	$9,095,338	$14,783,844
	Minneapolis	$120,018,244	$195,081,378
	Rochester	$34,794,149	$56,555,489
	St. Paul	$91,970,059	$149,490,987
	Winona	$7,344,073	$11,937,285
Mississippi		$401,114,348	$651,983,710
	Jackson	$25,221,617	$40,995,999
Missouri		$1,559,813,136	$2,535,368,679
	Kansas City	$120,704,101	$196,196,192
	St. Louis	$69,487,760	$112,947,561
Montana		$136,996,688	$222,678,669
	Butte	$4,755,594	$7,729,890
	Helena	$4,079,654	$6,631,195
Nebraska		$500,679,000	$813,819,185
	Lincoln	$68,278,660	$110,982,252
	Omaha	$116,305,563	$189,046,671
Nevada		$681,445,978	$1,107,643,442
	Las Vegas	$161,281,857	$262,152,535
New Hampshire		$387,915,574	$630,530,013
	Concord	$10,959,255	$17,813,514
	Nashua	$28,560,493	$46,423,112
New Jersey		$3,839,932,115	$6,241,544,831
	Jersey City	$75,214,793	$122,256,459
	Newark	$60,923,022	$99,026,171
	Ocean City	$5,619,507	$9,134,121
New Mexico		$292,346,861	$475,189,661
	Albuquerque	$80,840,222	$131,400,205
	Santa Fe	$11,830,061	$19,228,948
New York		$7,392,838,227	$12,016,548,688
	Albany	$25,799,547	$41,935,384
	Buffalo	$64,465,257	$104,783,830
	Herkimer County	$19,043,944	$30,954,618
	Madison County	$25,052,180	$40,720,591
	New York City	$2,753,182,044	$4,475,107,538
	Oneida County	$75,912,527	$123,390,577
	Rome	$10,556,460	$17,158,797
	Suffolk County	$831,965,039	$1,352,301,793
	Tompkins County	$32,291,700	$52,487,931
	Utica	$13,567,277	$22,052,673
North Carolina		$2,055,298,877	$3,340,746,580
	Chapel Hill	$12,424,844	$20,195,726
	Raleigh	$83,861,096	$136,310,428
North Dakota		$110,896,293	$180,254,277
	Bismarck	$10,924,521	$17,757,055
	Grand Forks	$8,415,932	$13,679,517
Ohio		$3,265,307,346	$5,307,531,898
	Cinncinati	$68,613,767	$111,526,946
	Cleveland	$87,107,079	$141,586,549
	Columbus	$189,344,181	$307,765,907
	Dayton	$32,002,333	$52,017,586
	Mansfield	$10,456,929	$16,997,017
	Toledo	$71,678,767	$116,508,892
Oklahoma		$875,225,177	$1,422,618,164
	Oklahoma City	$134,321,526	$218,330,377
	Tulsa	$105,412,017	$171,339,964
Oregon		$757,528,970	$1,231,311,097
	Myrtle Creek	$567,212	$921,964
	Portland	$114,947,527	$186,839,277
	Salem	$28,808,414	$46,826,091
Pennsylvania		$3,568,856,526	$5,800,930,156
	Bethlehem	$18,510,374	$30,087,336
	Erie	$21,333,079	$34,675,449
	Ligonier Borough	$392,359	$637,753
	Philadelphia	$338,077,081	$549,520,980
	Pittsburgh	$69,302,002	$112,645,625
Rhode Island		$346,670,537	$563,489,049
	Newport	$8,459,487	$13,750,312
	Providence	$36,648,692	$59,569,921
South Carolina		$716,988,768	$1,165,415,795
	Charleston	$16,440,008	$26,722,099
South Dakota		$138,941,649	$225,840,068
	Sioux Falls	$26,660,893	$43,335,442
Tennessee		$1,351,829,778	$2,197,306,075
	Knoxville	$31,240,756	$50,779,695
	Memphis	$137,158,130	$222,941,080
	Nashville	$139,860,446	$227,333,509
Texas		$6,560,561,559	$10,663,740,362
	Austin	$220,862,555	$358,996,852
	Bryan	$16,387,275	$26,636,385
	College Station	$11,330,841	$18,417,500
	Dallas	$352,427,607	$572,846,770
	Galveston	$13,034,843	$21,187,238
	Houston	$563,694,510	$916,246,551
	San Antonio	$326,646,538	$530,941,421
	Santa Fe	$3,577,613	$5,815,162
Utah		$407,228,594	$661,921,995
	Ogden	$10,485,662	$17,043,720
	Provo	$14,390,885	$23,391,391
	Salt Lake City	$26,776,578	$43,523,481
	Salt Lake County	$173,308,532	$281,701,066
	Utah County	$67,361,487	$109,491,451
	West Jordan	$15,205,143	$24,714,912
	West Valley	$19,878,095	$32,310,473
Vermont		$132,903,046	$216,024,736
	Burlington	$6,871,415	$11,169,011
	Montpelier	$1,610,471	$2,617,709
Virginia		$2,454,186,245	$3,989,110,486
	Richmond	$45,721,482	$74,317,116
Washington		$2,321,189,525	$3,772,933,491
	Olympia	$14,939,471	$24,283,080
	Seattle	$221,670,905	$360,310,768
	Spokane	$54,315,813	$88,286,609
	Vancouver	$51,400,621	$83,548,165
	Yakima County	$66,691,478	$108,402,397
	Yakima	$18,218,142	$29,612,333
West Virginia		$245,986,457	$399,834,021
	Charleston	$8,322,198	$13,527,160
	Wood County	$13,415,113	$21,805,341
Wisconsin		$1,459,369,782	$2,372,104,935
	Eau Claire	$13,954,710	$22,682,418
	Green Bay	$24,677,683	$40,111,872
	Madison	$54,216,675	$88,125,467
	Milwaukee	$119,493,716	$194,228,794
	Shawano	$1,626,431	$2,643,652
Wyoming		$150,340,118	$244,367,494
	Cheyenne	$16,550,693	$26,902,011

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Attention everyone else: Get the cost of War in Iraq affects your state from The National Priorities Project.

The President recently submitted a request to Congress for $87 billion of taxpayers’ money for war and occupation. If Congress accepts this request, total funds allocated to war, occupation of other countries and reconstruction abroad will be well over $200 billion since the war on terrorism began. The vast majority of this money has been devoted to a single political project: invading and occupying Iraq.

Invading and Occupying Iraq
The Impact on New York
Grassroots Factsheet Volume 6, Issue 4, 2003

Cost of War to New York

The $87 billion in additional war spending will cost New York’s taxpayers $7.4 billion. If that money were spent on other priorities in New York, it could pay for:

• $1.5 billion for school construction resulting in 36,525 new jobs, AND
• 7,232 new affordable housing units, creating 17,704 new jobs, AND
• $1.3 billion for local and state roads and
  bridges, creating 28,471 new jobs, AND
• 21,413 new firefighters, AND
• health care coverage for 203,977 people.

Consider this…
$ The estimates for rebuilding Iraq over the next few years range from the Bush Administration’s conservative $50 billion to
hundreds of billions of dollars.
$ The deficit will be close to $500 billion this fiscal year, an astonishing reversal from a $127 billion surplus as recently as
2001. The level of occupation and war spending leaves a stark choice: more cuts in local programs such as education and housing; raising taxes; or risking a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions.
$ Halliburton, the oil well services and equipment company whose last CEO was Vice President Cheney, was handed $1.7 billion in contracts from the federal government for reconstruction in Iraq, and is likely to garner hundreds of millions more. These contracts were dispensed without any other businesses, American or otherwise, having a chance to bid on them.
$ In addition to the tragic loss of life and permanent disabilities suffered, there are uncounted costs to the businesses, communities and households reliant on reservists as their term of duty is extended far beyond any projection.
? The American occupying forces, after months in Iraq, have still not found any weapons of mass destruction.

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Attention everyone else: Get the information on how The Bushista Budget will affect your state from The National Priorities Project.

In the Bush Administration’s budget for fiscal year 2005, the President proposes to cut grants to state and local governments, increase military spending, and make the tax cuts of the last few years permanent.

Cuts in Federal Funding to New York

The Bush Administration’s proposed budget would cut numerous programs: health agencies, pollution control, conservation, mass transit and many others that affect the wellbeing of our communities. It would also cut almost $28 billion in grants to state and local governments, further aggravating recent state and local crises. New York could lose an estimated $2.2 billion if this budget passes Congress, including:

Housing assistance	$328,943,255
Title I education assistance	$101,458,264
Community development	$10,210,175
Clean Water Fund	$57,564,391

The Cost of Permanent Tax Cuts to New York

Recent tax cuts primarily account for the rapid turnaround from record surpluses to record deficits. This year alone, the deficit is expected to reach $521 billion. If the budget were to be balanced this year, the average taxpayer in New York would have to pay an additional $1,894 to cover this gap.

President Bush proposes making his tax cuts permanent, which will cost at least $2 trillion over the next decade. The vast majority of the tax cuts will benefit the wealthy. More taxpayer dollars will go towards paying interest on the debt, while forcing even deeper cuts in national priorities such as education and health care.

Heavy government borrowing will cause interest rates to increase, impacting families with flexible rate or new mortgages. Even a one percentage point increase on a modest size mortgage could cost an additional $725 or more a year.

Are these Federal Policies Working in New York?

In New York, 580,520 workers remain unemployed. Many others have left the labor force, discouraged after a long search for work. Nationally, the proportion of people who participate in the job market has fallen to a low not seen since the recession of the early 1990s.

Since 2000, most states have experienced a growing job gap – the difference between actual jobs available and the number of jobs needed to keep up with the growth in the working age population. New York is 359,417 jobs short of the mark.

Personal bankruptcies are at an all time high as families struggle to pay the bills. In New York, 18,452 people have declared bankruptcy, up 27% since 2000.

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I just stumbled into HispanicMuslims.com today. Interesting site.

Because Spain was an Islamic nation for some seven centuries, they call it "reversion" when a Hispanic person converts to Islam. Lots of links to testimony and other sites that focus on Hispanic Muslims.

LATER: Duh, ignorance. See the comments as to why I want to delete the first sentance in the last paragraph.

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Civil Rights vs. Hip-Hop

In the case of civil rights vs. hip-hop, two generations separated by a deep chasm of disrespect and with seemingly not much more in common than their ethnicity, the jury is still out on just how wide the gap is separating the two groups and just how that gap can be closed.
As one observer noted: "The generation of the '60s was killed fighting for civil rights; today's generation is killing itself."

The NAACP, SCLC and other traditional civil rights groups have made efforts to reach out to young African-Americans. Still, the general look, feel and "bling-bling" attitude of hip-hop is a major turn off to a generation with vivid images of segregation, mass marches, beatings and lynchings and other reminders of "the struggle" permanently ingrained in their minds.

They see the latest incarnation of young Blackness, with rap music as its tattooed, violent, misogynistic messenger, as apolitical and unappreciative of who and what has gone before them.

In return, the hip-hoppers look them squarely in the eye and dis them as out of step and uninformed.

It's not a healthy relationship. And the gap becomes all too apparent in the context of Black History Month.

…"We're looking at a general Black population that's torn," she said. "You have the people who are still stuck in the 60s, still looking for a revolution of some sort and still talking that same rhetoric and thinking with that same mindset.

"And you have another set of people who just don't even deal with any of that; let's make the money, get the house, the big car, they aren't interested.

"Neither group is looking forward. We need to analyze the past, the good and the bad, and we need to move forward from whichever way you're approaching."

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The Real Man

…There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious.

Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present. And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean about his past. Instead, he remains evasive. On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records — and promptly broke that promise.

I don't know what he's hiding. But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies. And that is the point: Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon his handlers portray.

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Even from other blogs. Some of them, anyway:

…There was no reason, no excuse, and no rationalization for that war. Not within the bounds or either security or morality. Not while many nations of the world are lead by vicious tyrants who are at least as bad as Hussain. Not while, even as we prepared to attack Iraq regardless of any U.N. “findings”, we were actually being threatened with (strongly implied) use of nuclear force against us by a nation which we knew for a fact not only has the weapons, but has a delivery system that can get those weapons within our boarders. You’ll notice that we didn’t attack them, as we didn’t attack the former U.S.S.R., and don’t attack China

You want proof that we knew Iraq did not have weapons with mass destructive abilities? Here it is: We did attack them.

If, as with Korea, we knew Iraq had nuclear weapons, or any ABC devices which could damage us or our allies, we would, as with Korea, still be pursuing diplomatic channels while trying our best to not get them too pissed off at us. We’d probably be asking Iran to talk sense into them, while secretly funding their own nuclear program.…

h.p. rand

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The other day U.S. News and World Report ran an article titled "Why computer models are voting for Bush" (link and text below the fold) that describes one economics-based election modeling method James Pethokoukis (the editorializer) finds effective. Thearticle has all manner of links embedded, including one to the site run by the Yale professor that created the technique. The site includes a page where you can input figures and see the projected outcome of the election.

As a dues-paying member of the A.B.B. team, I felt obliged to check it out. I found it to be bullshit. Here's the formula the model applies. See if you can tell what's wrong with this picture:

The equation to predict the 2004 election is
VOTE = 55.57 + .691*GROWTH - .775*INFLATION + .837*GOODNEWS
Value to be computed:
? Republican share of the two-party presidential vote in 2004 (V0TE)

Your input values:
- growth rate of real per capita GDP in the first 3 quarters of 2004 (annual rate) (GROWTH)
- growth rate of the GDP deflator in the first 15 quarters of the Bush administration, 2001:1-2004:3 (annual rate) (INFLATION)
- number of quarters in the first 15 quarters of the Bush administration in which the growth rate of real per capita GDP is greater than 3.2 percent at an annual rate (GOODNEWS)

Give up?

Let's do some simple substitution. Let's assume the growth rate of real per capita GDP in the first three quarter of 2004 GROWTH) is (0 (zero). We will also assume the number of quarters in the first 15 quarters of the Bush administration in which the growth rate of real per capita GDP is greater than 3.2 percent at an annual rate (GOODNEWS) is 0.

So far we have
.691*GROWTH = 0
.837*GOODNEWS = 0
VOTE = 55.57 + 0 - .775*INFLATION + 0
VOTE = 55.57 - .775*INFLATION

Now, what would INFLATION have to be in order to make VOTE = 50?

VOTE = 50
55.57 - (.775 * INFLATION) = 50
.775 * INFLATION = 5.57
INFLATION = 7.1870967741935483870967741935484

So according to this formula, if we have NO growth and NO "good news", then it would take an inflation rate of 7.19 (approx.) to bring an opposing candidate to 50% of the vote. That is a patent absurdity.

BTW, I asked if I were dense because I didn't pick this up from simple inspection of the "formula." I actually plugged data for a few minutes until it because apparent the formula would never yield a loss for an incumbent for any reasonable values you use.

Why computer models are voting for Bush

In a recent U.S. News story, I took a look at what some computer models are predicting about the 2004 presidential election. These models usually look at some combination of economic and political factors to make their forecasts. One highly regarded election-forecasting model, has been devised by Yale economist Ray Fair. Fair's model-which, specifically, predicts the share of the two-party vote that the candidate from the incumbent party will win-mainly takes into account the economy's performance over the 15 quarters before an election. The key variables are inflation and the total number of what Fair calls "good news" quarters-the number of quarters with per-capita GDP growth above 3.2 percent. To capture the financial mood of voters right before the election, Fair also factors in real per-capita GDP growth in the first three quarters of an election year.

And how does Fair forecast what all those numbers are going to be in the coming months? By consulting a sophisticated model of the U.S. economy that he's also devised. In addition to weighing economic factors, Fair's political model also gives an edge to incumbents and penalizes a candidate if his party has been in the White House for the past two terms.

Fair has just updated his forecast using economic data through last week. He is now predicting that President Bush will win 58.7 percent of the two-party vote, up from 58.3 percent in his October forecast.

Now I have a great deal of skepticism about computer forecasting models. But since creating his model of voting behavior in 1978, Fair's forecasts have been uncanny in predicting the vote share of the incumbent party. In six elections, the model has been as close as 0.2 percentage points (in 1980) and never off by more than 1.9 points (in 1988). Using data from all presidential elections since 1952 to "post-dict" the outcomes, Fair's average deviation is only 2.12 points.

Since my original piece on Fair's model, an economic research firm called Macroeconomic Advisers (founded by former Federal Reserve governor Lawrence Meyer) issued a study that tweaked Fair's model by eliminating the political component and substituting a couple of different economic variables that it determined were more statistically significant. Instead of using GDP as a measure, for instance, Macroeconomic Advisers punches in the annualized percentage change in real disposable personal income over the three quarters immediately prior to the election quarter. The firm also found that housing starts are a statistically significant measure of how voters view the economy-unlike the widely touted consumer confidence numbers. (The reasoning: If you're going to build a new house, you've got to be pretty upbeat about where the economy is heading.)

After plugging in the most recent data, Macroeconomic Advisers found that their version of Fair's model give Bush 60.8 percentage of the two-party vote. And when the firm backtested its model to 1952, it proved even more accurate than Fair's, missing by an average of just 1.21 percentage points. Oh, and if you plug in the firm's economic forecast into Fair's original forecasting model, Bush gets an even greater 61.9 percent of the vote.

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Google bans environmental group's ads from site
MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer
Thursday, February 12, 2004
©2004 Associated Press

(02-12) 17:53 PST SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --

Online search engine leader Google has banned the ads of an environmental group protesting a major cruise line's sewage treatment methods, casting a spotlight on the editorial policies that control the popular Web site's lucrative marketing program.

Washington D.C.-based Oceana said Google dropped the text-based ads displayed in shaded boxes along the right side of its Web page because they were critical of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

Oceana believes Royal Caribbean pollutes the oceans by improperly treating the sewage on its ships and hoped to publicize its complaints by paying to have its ads appear when terms like "cruise vacation" and "cruise ship" were entered into Google's search engine.

The ad, which said "Help us protect the world's oceans," appeared briefly last week before Google pulled it from its page.

When Oceana challenged the ban, Mountain View-based Google responded with an e-mail advising the group that it doesn't accept ads with "language that advocates against Royal Caribbean."

Oceana's ad didn't mention Royal Caribbean directly, but the link directed Google visitors to a Web page critical of the Miami-based cruise line

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Black, gay rights linked in history

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 2/13/2004

THOSE African-American ministers in Massachusetts who deny any link between the black civil rights movement and the movement toward same-sex marriage are running back into a dank closet of yesteryear. These ministers who want to stuff today's gay and lesbian couples into separate and unequal compartments of commitment have forgotten how the civil rights movement forced Bayard Rustin, one of the movement's greatest theorists, to make himself invisible because he was gay.

During the Montgomery bus boycott, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was constantly worried about Rustin's presence in the movement, especially among ministers "among whom tolerance for homosexuals was shunned as the wedge of evil," wrote Taylor Branch in "Parting the Waters." On one occasion, King invited Rustin down to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for a strategy session.

But King's "desire to hide Rustin from practically everyone was so strong that he asked him to fly into Birmingham instead of Montgomery. Bob Williams met Rustin there and put him face down in the back seat of his car. King's instructions were that Rustin was not to raise his head until the car was parked safely at the Dexter parsonage."

Rustin paid his dues in the movement. He was arrested off a freedom ride in 1947 and put on a chain gang. He was jailed and lost some front teeth in a beating in New Orleans. A true disciple of Gandhian nonviolence and Quaker pacifism, Rustin reacted to a man who threatened to beat him with a stick by handing the man an additional stick. Rustin invited the man to commence the beating. The stunned man ran off to beat someone else.

But his sexual orientation resulted in beatings on his persona. He was kicked out of one group after he was arrested on morals charges in 1953 with two other men in the back of a car in Pasadena, Calif. During a point in 1959 where King's Southern voter registration drives were faltering, he wanted to hire Rustin to be the publicist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But the hiring was postponed indefinitely when King also brought up that he wanted to quell friction between the SCLC and the national NAACP, headed by Roy Wilkins.

"King wanted to bargain with Wilkins," Branch wrote, "but the SCLC preachers were quick to point out that he would reduce his leverage if he hired Rustin, whose background was well known to Wilkins. As always, it seemed, one of King's goals was hostage to another."

In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell held King hostage with Rustin. King threatened to picket the Democratic National Convention. Powell, the New York congressman, wanted no distractions as he was aiming to be the first African-American to chair a major congressional committee. Powell sent a message that if the picketing were not called off, he would tell the media that King was having an affair with Rustin. Soon afterward, King, despite his "loyalties of principle and personal feeling for Rustin," sent an emissary to tell Rustin that he was too much a liability to have further direct contact with King.

Yet Rustin's skills were so valuable the debate of who would organize the 1963 March on Washington revolved around him. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP still did not want Rustin. King lauded Rustin's skills but worried about his "liabilities." A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader who went back two decades with Rustin, agreed to lead the march only if Rustin could be his deputy.

"You can take that on if you want," Wilkins told Randolph, "but don't expect me to do anything about it when the trouble starts." Senator Strom Thurmond did try to start trouble by taking a J. Edgar Hoover wiretap and blasting Rustin for sexual perversion on the Senate floor. The attack was ignored by the media. Rustin went on to organize one of the greatest events in US history, from transportation and crowd control of the 250,000 people to cooling tempers backstage as arguments erupted among the speakers. Rustin even ran the volunteer cleanup after King sent them home with "I Have a Dream."

When Wilkins personally told Rustin that he did not want him organizing the March on Washington because of his past, Rustin challenged Wilkins by saying, "If you stand up and have some courage, it will do no damage." Without Rustin, the March on Washington might not have crystallized into a symbol of the nation's courage. Had the black ministers and politicians of yesterday accepted Rustin all along, the civil rights movement might have made even more progress than it did.

Rustin was living proof that there was a link between the black civil rights movement and homosexuality. Unfortunately, it was a link that should never be repeated. If today's ministers stood up with courage to acknowledge their link to the cause of gay civil rights, they will find out that it will do no damage. They might find out that it will give them even more allies in their own fight for equality in America.

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Even though this is a short editorial I still want to specifically point out the key to this police unit's high quality work:

The unit's officers train five or six days each month, according to Lieutenant Robert O'Toole, commander of the tactical team. Supervisors stress discipline and self-control as well as tactics. That's why entry team officers are able to remain calm and professional, says O'Toole, "when our guy goes out on a stretcher and the other guy walks out with an attitude."

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Good police work
2/13/2004

TWICE IN less than a month, Boston police officers have shown exceptional restraint in the face of gunfire. The members of the department's entry and apprehension team deserve the public's gratitude for a dangerous job done exceptionally well.

On Wednesday, Officer Kevin Ford, 49, was shot once while executing a search warrant for drugs and firearms in Roxbury. The bullet struck Ford's body armor, sparing him serious injury. Members of the unit subdued the suspect without returning fire. Another member of the entry team, Officer Scott O'Brien, 27, was shot and seriously wounded last month while serving a warrant in Quincy. The suspect fired at least half a dozen shots at officers. Police fired back just once, enough to drive back the suspect, who later surrendered unharmed.

Members of the 40-member unit specialize in apprehending barricaded suspects and serving warrants on dangerous felons. Officers are expert in the use of several weapons systems, wall penetrating radar, ballistics shields, remote cameras, and other high-tech tools. The unit lacks thermal imaging equipment, however. Police administrators should supply that tool, which might have been useful in detecting and intercepting the hidden suspect who shot O'Brien.

The unit's officers train five or six days each month, according to Lieutenant Robert O'Toole, commander of the tactical team. Supervisors stress discipline and self-control as well as tactics. That's why entry team officers are able to remain calm and professional, says O'Toole, "when our guy goes out on a stretcher and the other guy walks out with an attitude."

High-risk entry teams operated at the district level until 2000. But O'Toole argued successfully to centralize the function as a means to improve both training and unit cohesion.

The reputation of the entry team is climbing steadily in Boston.

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'Our Resolve Is Absolute. A "Live" Show Is Alive, or Not'

February 13, 2004

Repercussions from the Janet Jackson breast-baring incident during the Super Bowl halftime show continue. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Frank Pierson sent the following letter to the members last week:

At their Feb. 3 board meeting, the Academy governors considered a request from the ABC network to impose a five-second delay on the telecast of the 76th Academy Awards that would allow the network to delete unscripted and objectionable language from the show.

The Academy Awards have never been subject to a tape delay, and in fact have a 50-year track record of maintaining high standards of taste and decorum.

The governors found themselves balancing a pair of crucial concerns. Even a very brief tape delay introduces a form of censorship into a broadcast — not direct governmental control, but it means that a network representative is in effect guessing at what a government might tolerate, which can be even worse.

There was also a concern about just how slippery a slope the Academy might be setting its foot on. This year's five-second delay would be aimed at individual words. Once the principle of a delay has been accepted, though, how much broader a scope might be sought in subsequent years and how long before not only words but ideas become subject to deletion?

The 1st Amendment concerns were weighed against the Academy's own long-standing objective of offering a tasteful, sophisticated event which parents can encourage their children to watch without concerns about elements of coarseness.

The threat of massive fines of dubious legality presents ABC with a serious financial, legal and moral dilemma, and we're sympathetic with them.

But our resolve is absolute. A "live" show is either alive or not. Free speech is free or it is not. Viewers are free to use their remote or Tivo. Parents are responsible or they are not.

The Academy has no contractual ability to refuse the network's decision to bow to government pressure. But we cannot endorse a delay. We will present the show live, a celebration of achievement, with a little glitz, a little glamour, as always. If it comes with a bleep, we are all losers

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The 'Fence': Failed predictions (12 Feb 04)
AMIRA HASS
Haaretz

"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.

We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.

One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.

The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.

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Israel to boycott security wall case
International court's jurisdiction questioned by Sharon cabinet
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Friday February 13, 2004
The Guardian

The Israeli government said yesterday it will boycott a hearing at the international court of justice at The Hague on the legality of the "security fence" under construction through the occupied Palestinian territories.
The prime minister's office said that Ariel Sharon and an inner core of cabinet ministers made the decision after legal advisers said there was no point in fighting the case because the government had already submitted written arguments challenging the court's jurisdiction in a "political" case.

The submission said that the court "has no authority to discuss the terrorism prevention fence since it concerns Israel's basic right of self-defence", Mr Sharon's office said.

"The professional teams made their recommendations after considering the positions of major countries, including [inter alia] the US, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia."

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Sharing a duckblind vs. blind justice
By Daniel Schorr
WASHINGTON - In no other courtroom in the land - perhaps in the world - is it left to a judge to decide solely on his or her own whether the appearance of conflict requires the judge to step back from a case.

But then the United States Supreme Court is rather special, as we learned on Dec. 12, 2000, when five members handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

For more than two years, Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting demands that he release records of the energy task force that he headed. The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch want to know especially whether industry figures, like Ken Lay of Enron, helped to write a policy that favored oil and gas companies.

A lower court ordered Mr. Cheney to release the records. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which announced on Dec. 15 that it would hear the case. Three weeks later, on Jan. 5, Justice Antonin Scalia and several others flew down to southern Louisiana with the vice president on his official plane, Air Force Two, for a few days of duck hunting.

The hunting camp is owned by the head of a local oil services company. The local police were asked to keep their presence a secret. Speak of undisclosed locations!

But, after their departure, the trip became known to the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times. Justice Scalia has, so far, refused to recuse himself - that is, disqualify himself from hearing the Cheney case. In a written statement he said, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned." He compared the trip to being invited to dinner at the White House.

At an Amherst College gathering this week Scalia stuck to his guns, saying that this was "a government issue," not a lawsuit against Cheney as a private person.

Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Joseph Lieberman have written Chief Justice William Rehnquist asking whether Scalia can be a "fair and impartial adjudicator" in the Cheney case.

The Chief Justice replied that the court has no formal procedure for reviewing a justice's own decision, and he suggested the senators' complaint was "ill considered."

So, unless the strong-minded Scalia changes his mind and recuses himself from a case involving his duck- hunting friend, you can expect in coming weeks to hear a lot of, "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...."

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What do black women want?
By Jill Nelson

The headline, "Are You Satisfied? The New, Ground-Breaking Ebony Sex Survey" called my name when I saw the March issue of Ebony. Founded in 1945 by John and Eunice Johnson, the magazine has been a part of black America for 60 years. But Ebony? Sex survey? This isn't the magazine my grandparents and parents knew and read — and I'm glad.
I tore into that magazine as if it were food for the starving, which, in a way, it was. I'm seriously looking for answers. There were none, yet: The survey questions won't be published until the April issue. But that headline hooked me.

Now that I know it's coming, I have time to urge all of my female friends, acquaintances and strangers in line at the grocery store to participate. The survey offers the opportunity for black women to help answer that age-old question: What do women want?

Let's hope that once women have voiced their feelings and the results are in, others — particularly male others — will want to hear the answers.

Ebony 's managing editor, Lynn Norment, says the magazine decided to do the survey because so many female readers ask about sex and sexuality issues, yet "we didn't find much information that reflected the problems afflicting African-American women."

The survey is the work of Hope Ashby, a New York psychotherapist. I was struck by her comments in the current issue about how history and culture can affect sexuality negatively. Many black women, she says, see two choices: Jezebel the Slut or Mammy the Asexual. I don't know anyone who precisely fits those stereotypes, but we are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to acknowledging our sexuality and getting what we desire.

It's nearly impossible to read women's magazines without taking at least one sex survey; I know I have. But what's exciting about this one is that it is tailored to elicit honest responses from black women. I'd wager that a black female psychotherapist can come up with questions that will encourage and enable us to do just that. The results also could have an important impact on black women's physical and mental health.

On the face of it, it's surprising that Ebony, not renowned for being sexy or hip, is hosting this survey. Yet it's precisely because Ebony is so venerable - and virtually a mandatory subscription for many African-American families - that its survey has the potential to reach not only a large number of women, but also women across class, generations and political views.

By responding, each woman will give voice not only to herself, but also to all African-American women.

Jill Nelson is a writer and editor in New York City.

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February 12, 2004

Brad DeLong:

I now learn that National Review writer Donald Luskin comes not from the Theta Quadrant but from the World of Null-A. I asked the question, "Is Donald Luskin an enthusiastic endorser of the budget proposals that George W. Bush released a week and a half ago?" He wrote something that I interpreted as a "no" answer. I said so. He then went ballistic, and said I was lying. So I changed what I had written and said that Luskin gave a "yes" answer--and he went ballistic again, saying that I had compounded my lie.

Now there are yes/no questions that don't have yes/no answers that are true: "Is 'no' the answer to this question?" is the simplest one. But I did not think "Is Donald Luskin an enthusiastic endorser of the budget proposals that George W. Bush released a week and a half ago?" was one of them.

But that's not the good part. This is:

UPDATE: This is highly, highly amusing: I now have six emails from Luskin dittoheads denouncing me for lying and falsely claiming that Luskin is not an enthusiastic supporter of Bush economic and budget policies, and eight emails from Luskin dittoheads denouncing me for lying and claiming that Luskin is an enthusiastic supporter of Bush economic and budget policies. I'm tempted to introduce them to each other.

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Bush proposes to revamp voucher program for low-income families
By GENARO C. ARMAS
The Associated Press
2/12/04 4:12 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration wants to overhaul a federal voucher program that helps almost 2 million low-income families pay the rent, proposing to give local housing authorities more control over how the money is spent.

Housing and Urban Development Department officials say the plan outlined in President Bush's 2005 budget proposal could help reduce long waiting lists for Section 8 housing vouchers and increase flexibility for public housing agencies while lowering costs.

Critics contend the plan eliminates protections that mandate that most new vouchers go to the poorest families. They also say recipients may be forced to pay more than they can afford to make up the rent amount not covered by the voucher.

The proposal is estimated to cost $13.4 billion. A liberal-leaning think tank, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said that amount was $1 billion short of adequately funding the program and could mean that 250,000 families lose vouchers.

"This is a decision to provide less money, so either you give fewer people the benefits or you give money to people who are less in need," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee.

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It's not like us knowing who you are is any guarantee you're not a partisan idiot…

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Calpundit:

This is interesting by itself, but taken as a whole the article also confirms a deeper subtext that we've also learned from other stories recently: the FBI investigation is dead serious, it's casting a surprisingly wide net, and it's making a lot of progress.

And since one of the sources is a "current administration official" it also makes clear that there's at least one current Bush official who's pretty unhappy with the whole Plame situation and is speaking to the press about it.

And has been talking for a while. Check this excerpt from the Chris Matthews Show from the weekend of Oct. 19-20, 2003. Scroll to the bottom, the section in which Matthews asks his guests, in this case Rosiland Jordan, White House correspondent for NBC News, to tell him something he doesn't know.

MATTHEWS: Do you have anything--anything--anything I don't know you can share with me.

Ms. JORDAN: Anything you don't know? I've had a couple of people come up to me at the White House, completely off the record, hoping that the media does not ignore the CIA leak investigation, that we just don't take what we are being told every day, `Oh, it's being investigated and the attorney general is managing the situation properly. There's no need for a special counsel'...

MATTHEWS: So inside White House people would like to see a real investigation.

Ms. JORDAN: There are a few. I wouldn't say it's many.

MATTHEWS: Oh, God.

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FCC: 'Pure' VoIP not a phone service

By Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Story last modified February 12, 2004, 12:51 PM PST

Handing a partial victory to Internet phone providers, federal regulators said Thursday that voice communications flowing entirely over the Internet are not subject to traditional government regulations.

The Federal Communications Commission, in a split decision, approved a request from voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Pulver.com to be immune from the hefty stack of government rules, taxes and requirements that applied to 20th-century telephone networks.

"This is in no way different than e-mail and other peer-to-peer applications blossoming on the Internet," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said. "Such services have never been held to be telecom services." Commissioner Michael Copps opposed the decision, and Jonathan Adelstein said he partially dissented.

In a significant limitation, the decision does not address whether traditional phone regulations might apply to VoIP services that interconnect with the traditional telephone system. As a result, the FCC's vote for now only applies to developers of VoIP applications similar to Pulver.com's Free World Dialup (FWD)--software that allows voice conversations to take place between computers, but not between computers and ordinary telephones.

Other applications covered by the decision include Skype and instant-messaging programs from Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online. But the ruling appears to leave in limbo VoIP services from Vonage Holdings, cable giants and others that allow calls to be placed from a computer over a broadband connection to any phone number in the world, and vice versa.

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It was said:

If we believe in the organizing power of the free market

The more accurate statement would be

If we believe the free market is all that is necessary

I don't.

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There's more to the editorial, but no more need be said.

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A matter of rights
Thursday, February 12, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

THIS NATION has a proud history of amending its Constitution to end discrimination and to expand individual rights. Examples include the abolition of slavery (XIII, 1865), the expansion of due process and equal protection (XIV, 1868) and the extension of voting rights to all races (XV, 1870), women (XIX, 1920) and 18-year-olds (XXVI, 1971).

The few exceptions have either been narrow (such as limiting a president to two terms, XXII, 1951) or an unmitigated disaster -- namely Prohibition (XVIII, 1919), which was repealed in 1933.

The notion of using a constitutional amendment to constrict the rights of a targeted group of people -- defined by sexual orientation -- is plainly abhorrent to American values and traditions.

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In other breaking news, the White House announced the indictment of Martha Steward fulfills Bush's promise to crack down of dishonest CEOs.

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Probe of Supplements Lab Yields Indictments
From Associated Press

10:47 AM PST, February 12, 2004

WASHINGTON — Barry Bonds' personal trainer, a track coach and top executives of a San Francisco-area nutritional supplements lab were charged today with running an illegal drug distribution operation.

The 42-count federal indictment returned by a grand jury in San Francisco and obtained by The Associated Press alleges the scheme provided anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, EPO and other drugs to major league baseball and NFL players, as well as track and field stars.

None of the athletes was charged and none was named in the court documents.

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Homeland Defense

Thursday, February 12, 2004; Page A36

IT'S THE ONE CHUNK of discretionary spending in this year's budget slated to go up substantially. Yet when Tom Ridge, secretary of homeland security, testifies today in front of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, no one will be well prepared to question him about his department's proposal to increase spending by 10 percent. Is it too much? Too little? Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has accused the Bush administration of underfunding the whole department, "tinkering while the clock on homeland security is ticking." But in fact no one can actually measure whether the proposed $40 billion in new resources will be money well spent.

The new department still does not provide Congress with regularly updated risk assessment reports, which would serve to justify its spending choices and enable yearly evaluations of its progress. Congressional staffers say the administration has objected to proposed legislation that would require regular reports, arguing that justifications for spending are contained within the annual budget. Spokesmen point out that the department has requested assessments of homeland security needs from all 50 states; only when those are evaluated and processed, they say, will it be possible to produce a meaningful national strategy. It's hard to quarrel with the department's proposals to spend more on container screening, border technology, vaccines, first responders or reducing the immigration backlog. Nevertheless, without a better analysis of likely threats and targets, it's impossible to say whether the amounts allocated are grossly inadequate or wastefully large.

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All I want to know is, what record would definitively establish L'il Georgie's presence at the time under discussion and what does it say?

This is being handled exACTly the way the run-up to invasion was handled. Find some scrap of data that tends to support what you want to say and ignore all the rest.

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Right in the Teeth
By Dan Froomkin
Special to Washingtonpost.com
Thursday, February 12, 2004; 10:07 AM

Dental records are typically used to identify the dead.

Last night, the White House e-mailed the press corps a copy of Lt. George W. Bush's dental exam -- to prove that Bush was alive, and not AWOL, at an Alabama Air National Guard base.

The day Bush went to the dentist -- Jan. 6, 1973 -- was one of the days for which he was paid, according to other military records released on Tuesday. But those records did not indicate where he was or what he was doing. The teeth definitively put him in Alabama.

And it wasn't the only time the White House showed some teeth yesterday. Press secretary Scott McClellan repeatedly lashed out at those who questioned Bush's service as engaging in "gutter politics" and "trolling for trash." (In his mid-day briefing, he said "gutter politics" five times and "trolling for trash" three times, and that's not even counting the morning gaggle.) Here's the transcript and the video.

Most strikingly, however, White House officials yesterday backed off Bush's unqualified pledge Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" to open his entire military file.

Also, the Boston Globe says that Bush's suspension from flying should have triggered an investigation, according to guard regulations.

And USA Today and the New York Times both give a lot of play to one man's allegation that Bush advisers in the late 1990s discussed ways to limit the release of potentially embarrassing details from his military records.

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Columbine-style attack averted -- 2 students arrested in Elk Grove
Charlie Goodyear, Chuck Squatriglia and Mark Martin, Chronicle Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Elk Grove -- A plot by two students to carry out a Columbine-style massacre today inside their Sacramento County high school cafeteria was thwarted after a parent of one of their classmates tipped off police, authorities said Tuesday.

Sacramento County sheriff's deputies arrested two 15-year-old students of Laguna Creek High School in Elk Grove on suspicion of conspiracy, making terrorist threats and hate crime charges. Authorities say the suspects planned to target African American students in their attack.

The unidentified white suspects, a freshman and a sophomore, were planning to rob local sporting goods stores, steal weapons, storm the school's cafeteria and shoot students during the lunch hour today, authorities said.

Investigators searched the home of one suspect and seized a .22-caliber rifle owned by a parent. Authorities also recovered Nazi-themed drawings and a map of the school cafeteria. Four other students have been questioned in connection with the plot but have not been arrested.

"These kids had some major hate toward a lot of different groups,'' said Sgt. Lou Fatur, a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department.

According to a statement from the Elk Grove Unified School District, the suspects were also planning to set off explosives. Letters notifying parents of the plot were sent home with students on Tuesday.

Students and teachers were shocked by the news.

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February 11, 2004

This was actually picked up by Model Minority, subtitled "A Guide to Asian American Empowerment," which is where the story link goes to.

I'm not sure how happy I am with the title The Guardian chose for this op-ed. Black folks were mentioned twice in the piece:

Some have hailed the film's subtlety, but to me it is reminiscent of the racist jokes about Asians and black people that comedians told in British clubs in the 1970s.

and

Those not conforming to this never have a voice of their own. They simply don't have a story to tell, or at least not one that interests "us". This is the ignoble tradition into which Lost in Translation fits. It is similar to the way white-dominated Hollywood used to depict African-Americans - as crooks, pimps, or lacking self-control compared with white Americans.

I don't feel the mentions were necessary to make the point; but there's making a point and having impact.

Bringing in Black folks at the end of a well written report on prejudice against other folk is like kicking white folks when they're down. They bring up Black folks as a way of saying, "And it ain't like you don't got a history of that shit." There's two ways of looking at that technique: using the mainstream's own history against it, or using Black folks against it.

It's kind of unfortunate that every group that looks to assimilate into the USofA will find Black people to be the most effective lash. You hate the driver but you hate the whip too, you know what I mean?

It would be good if everyone made their own case. Because you have one. And Black folks will support your efforts even if you don't mention us.

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Can't Touch African-Americans, So Roll Out the 'Funny' Orientals
By Kiku Day
©2004 The Guardian (Manchester, England)
February 3, 2004

Film reviewers have hailed Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation as though it were the cinematic equivalent of the second coming. One paper even called it a masterpiece. Reading the praise, I couldn't help wondering not only whether I had watched a different movie, but whether the plaudits had come from a parallel universe of values.

Lost in Translation is being promoted as a romantic comedy, but there is only one type of humour in the film that I could see: anti-Japanese racism, which is its very spine.

In the movie, Bill Murray plays the alienated Bob, a middle-aged actor shooting whisky commercials in Tokyo. He meets the equally alienated Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, a Yale graduate accompanying her fashion photographer husband.

The film is billed as exploring their disconnection from the country they are visiting and from their spouses, and how they find some comfort in one another through a series of restrained encounters.

But it's the way Japanese characters are represented that gives the game away. There is no scene where the Japanese are afforded a shred of dignity. The viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the Western lifestyle without knowledge of its real meaning. It is telling that the longest vocal contribution any Japanese character makes is at a karaoke party, singing a few lines of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.

The Japanese half of me is disturbed; the American half is, too. The Japanese are one-dimensional and dehumanised in the movie, serving as an exotic background for Bob and Charlotte's story, like dirty wallpaper in a cheap hotel.

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Sharpton Faces Questions on Matching Funds
By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press Writer

10:05 AM PST, February 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — For months, Al Sharpton's presidential campaign has been supported indirectly by "love offerings" -- donations by churchgoers to minister Sharpton, who then lends money to candidate Sharpton.

The arrangement -- unusual among presidential candidates but legal within restrictions -- has helped keep his campaign going. Federal Election Commission documents show the campaign is at least $110,000 in debt to Sharpton, who also draws ministerial income from such sources as book sales and speeches.

As Sharpton seeks vital federal matching funds, the loans from minister to candidate may raise obstacles. FEC rules bar candidates who receive matching funds from lending their campaigns more than $50,000. An FEC spokesman said the commission, ultimately, would decide the matter.

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I'd like to know what LatinoPundit Luz Paz and Colorado Luis think of this.

(The above links are just to appropriately political post so they get the trackback pings.)

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COMMENTARY
Latinos Vote for Patriotism, Not One-Upmanship
Military records could have effect on the campaign.
By Frank del Olmo

February 8, 2004

So who is more likely to get Latino voter support in November: a former National Guard flyboy from Texas or a former Navy officer from Massachusetts?

Far more important questions about the Latino vote will be asked before election 2004 is over. And they will focus on far more complex issues, like President Bush's recent guest-worker proposal or his administration's effort to reform American schools so there is "no child left behind."

But for now, with the presidential primaries well underway, an interesting trend may have emerged in two states with large Latino populations: Arizona and New Mexico. Last Tuesday, the acknowledged front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, won easily in both states with solid Latino support — 41% in Arizona, according to one exit poll. But what I find intriguing is who came in second in those two states, both in overall voting and among Latinos. It was neither of the two men most pundits see as jockeying for the No. 2 spot, Howard Dean and John Edwards. It was retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

In Arizona, Clark got 26.8% of the primary ballots. Among Latino voters, he got 29% of the vote, according to an exit poll by Edison Research. In the presidential caucuses in New Mexico, where 30% of voters are Latino, Kerry won with 37.7% support and Clark got 19%.

Obviously, one should not make too much of voting trends so early in an election year. But the Arizona and New Mexico voting results do offer one useful reminder to the Democrats. They provide more evidence that Latinos do not easily fit into the liberal mold, where too many Democrats try to lump them with African Americans.

Though Latinos tend to favor more spending on schools and many of the government programs backed by liberals, they also tend to be conservative on social issues like abortion and support for the military. At least that is one credible explanation why Clark, who was in uniform until recently, got voter support second only to Kerry, a Vietnam War hero.Of course, the fact that Latinos are pro-military comes as no surprise to anyone who knows the pride that Latino families take in relatives who have served in the armed forces. Walk into almost any Latino home and somewhere on a wall or shelf you'll see prominent photos of fathers, uncles, cousins or siblings in uniform. They may be grainy old pictures from World War II or fresh new snapshots of young men or women serving in the Persian Gulf, but they have a place of honor in the family gallery.

And although not as visible an issue as education, or as emotional a topic as immigration, Latino attitudes toward the military could loom in the background as a key factor that determines whether Latinos vote for Bush's reelection or support his Democratic opponent, who it now appears will be Kerry.

Bush's campaign is aiming to increase his Latino voter support from the respectable 35% he got in 2000 to at least 40% in 2004. They are hoping Latino swing voters will push New Mexico, which Bush lost by 600 votes in 2000, over to the GOP.

For their part, Democrats point to Arizona and Nevada, which Bush won in 2000, in the hopes of gaining enough new Latino votes to win those states.But in a Bush-Kerry race, any discussions of military service are muddled by politically inconvenient facts.

Kerry was a wounded war hero, to be sure, but he returned from Vietnam to publicly criticize the war. There are many veterans who consider that a betrayal of his comrades in arms.

"Throwing those medals away, that could stick in a lot of guys' craw," said Dan Ortiz, a Los Angeles veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Some Latino families might feel the same way.

On the GOP side, there is the question of whether Bush completely fulfilled his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard or was, as some of his more ardent critics claim, AWOL part of the time. "A lot of vets, it doesn't matter so much what you did as long as you served," said George Ramos, a Vietnam veteran from East Los Angeles. "But some may say Kerry was in 'Nam and the president wasn't, and hold that against Bush."

Late in 2002, a few White House operatives briefly tried to bash Democrats in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus - including some military veterans - because they had voted against the resolution giving Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq. Despite the fact that the caucus is notably more liberal than Latinos on many issues, the GOP ploy generated a nasty backlash.

So a useful reminder Republicans can draw from the Arizona and New Mexico voting is that, given Latinos' positive attitudes toward the military, it might not be a good idea to try such a political stunt again. Better to honor all forms of service and patriotism, as Latino families do, than to try to compare old military records in a tacky version of one-upmanship.

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Compton Ex-Mayor Bradley Is Convicted
Two other former officials also are found guilty of misusing funds. Two are acquitted.
By Richard Marosi and Monte Morin
Times Staff Writers

February 11, 2004

Self-styled "gangster mayor" Omar Bradley and two other former Compton city officials were convicted on felony corruption charges Tuesday and ordered jailed amid the screams and protests of furious supporters.

The ex-mayor, former City Councilman Amen Rahh and former City Manager John D. Johnson were found guilty of misappropriating public funds and making unauthorized loans while in office. Called a flight risk by prosecutors, the three were ordered into custody to await sentencing May 7. Each faces as much as five years in prison.

Two other defendants in the three-month corruption trial — former Councilwomen Delores Zurita and Yvonne Arceneaux — were acquitted of lesser charges.

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via Hesiod at Counterspin Central

Workable
by Jonathan Cohn

His name is Chuck Kulikowski, and his shirt bears the emblem of American Bikers Aiming Toward Education, a group that crusades against helmet laws and other "motorcycle-unfriendly" legislation. (Motto: "Let Those Who Ride Decide.") Yet while Kerry is a well-known Harley Davidson enthusiast, Kulikowski says it wasn't the senator's interest in motorcycles that drew him to the Friday event. Instead, he says, it was Kerry's desire to drive President Bush from the White House--a desire Kulikowski shares fervently. "He's too rich, too arrogant, and he thinks he's running the world," Kulikowski says of the president. "He does what he wants, and doesn't care what other people think."

You expect to hear those sorts of things at a Democratic campaign rally, but not from a guy like Kulikowski and certainly not in a place like Warren, smack in the middle of Macomb County. A northern suburb of Detroit, Macomb is legendary for its large population of "Reagan Democrats"--white working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party in the 1980s because it had veered too far to the left. And Kulikowski is an almost perfect Reagan Democrat specimen: Having voted for Reagan during the 1980s, he tends to agree with Republicans on hot-button issues like abortion and gun control. But even after I point out all the issues on which he seems to disagree with Kerry, Kulikowski says he likes what he sees. "What good is a gun if you don't have a job?" says Kulikowski, a 57-year-old unemployed toolmaker. "You can't buy the bullets."

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Rumsfeld 'unaware' of WMD claim

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he cannot remember hearing the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

The claim was a part of the UK government's September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction arms dossier in the run-up to the war.

It came to British intelligence from an Iraqi military source, but its use in the dossier has caused controversy.

Tony Blair last week admitted he had not known full details of the claim.

He told MPs he had not been aware before the war that it referred only to battlefield weapons rather than long-range strategic missiles.

That admission prompted Conservative leader Michael Howard to call for the prime minister's resignation for failing to ask "basic questions" before the war.

Asked his view of the claim, Mr Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon briefing: "I don't remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest."

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The neocons occupying the seats in DC have offered the capitulation of several troublesome regimes as proof that the invasion of Iraq was justified, irrespective of the fact that the reasons given for the invasion have all turned out to be wrong.

However, the lack of proscribed weapons in Iraq is objective proof that containment can work as well. Had the neocons not insisted on this invasion, we would have had to take Saddam Hussein's word that it worked.

Now we have two models for bringing troublesome regimes to heel: invasion and containment. One must now choose the method with the least cost (social and economic).

Another good thing is, the invasion and its aftermath has finally made neocon mendacity visible to the man on the street.

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…is that they could have been talking like this (i.e., telling the truth) all the time.

… All of which points to the broader problem with the numbers that Mr. Bush cites to refute suggestions he is a big spender. The slice of the federal budget identified by the president as an example of restrained growth amounts to only about one-sixth of overall federal spending. Yet that is precisely where he wants to inflict additional cuts in the years to come. Mr. Bush proposes to increase defense spending by 7.1 percent next year -- and that doesn't include any additional money for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps $50 billion more. He wants to increase spending on homeland security by an additional 9.7 percent. That would leave other spending effectively frozen -- or cut, once inflation is taken into account.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has presided over a huge -- and bigger than first advertised -- increase in mandatory spending with the addition of a prescription drug benefit for Medicare now estimated to cost $534 billion in its first decade. Having put that in place, he now shows little appetite for curbing the growth of entitlement programs, which account for a far bigger share of the federal budget. Indeed, his proposal to create private accounts for Social Security, restated in the budget just released, would make the cost of the prescription drug bill look trivial. Mr. Bush argued on Sunday that his record has been one of fiscal restraint. The facts -- once checked -- show otherwise.

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Tumors Prevalent in Anacostia's Fish
Rate Rivals Highest Recorded for U.S. River; Vehicle Pollution Blamed

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page B01

Fish in the Anacostia River have cancerous tumor rates that are as high as ever documented in an American river, and a U.S. government-led study to be published next month links the tumors to pollution caused by vehicle emissions and runoff.

Fifty to 68 percent of mature brown bullhead catfish collected in 2001 from three parts of the river in the city had liver tumors, most of which were cancerous, according to the study led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In addition to the liver tumors, 13 to 23 percent of the bullheads had skin tumors, scientists found.

"It says that there are serious problems with the health of the fish and that it's a highly polluted system that needs a lot of work," said Fred Pinkney, co-author of the study and a scientist in the Chesapeake Bay field office of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The study, scheduled for publication in the March issue of the scientific journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, links the liver tumors to changes in the DNA of the fish. Those DNA changes were, in turn, linked to polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) -- contaminants that often come from fossil fuels, most commonly in the form of settled vehicle emissions and runoff.

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Didn't I say Norbizness is not to be underestimated?

Oh, yeah, that's down the page a bit. Anyway, I said it.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, the budget is fucked up, we're going into huge debt, where's the WMD, where's the garlands of flowers, how's Afghanistan going, outing the CIA agent, worst secrecy ever.

It's February, for God's sake. Pounding this jerkoff over his activities 30+ years ago instead of on the above issues could (1) actually make this incompetent dumbass look like some victim of gotcha politics and (2) obscure real domestic and foreign policy blunders that actually affect voters.

I'd rather see a commercial comparing his triumphalism in the flight suit to the realities of combat deaths than a commercial comparing Vietnam-era activities between the two candidates. Call me selfish, and say I'm missing out on the greatest thing since Grover Cleveland's illegitimate kid, but I'm in the here and now.

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The title of this post may be the first mention I've ever made of Bill on his site.

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Bush Plans to Focus on Fuel Ban to End Spread of A-Bombs
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: February 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — President Bush is to announce a new proposal on Wednesday to limit the number of nations allowed to produce nuclear fuel, senior administration officials said Tuesday. He will declare that the global network in nuclear goods set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, developer of Pakistan's bomb, exposed huge gaps in accords to stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology, they added.

In an afternoon speech at the National Defense University, they said, Mr. Bush will call for a re-examination of what one official called the "basic bargain" underlying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: that those states that promise not to pursue nuclear weapons will receive help in producing nuclear fuel for power generation.

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You know, by increasing the absolute dollar amount allocated for schools, imposing requirements that would cost more than the allocation increase provides, and withholding funds from those that don't do what they can't do, you wind up giving out less money to schools and have the built-in reason that "the schools don't want the money."

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A school-district rebellion stirring
Fazed by the rules and reach of 'No Child Left Behind,' more schools opt out of the most substantive reform in a generation.
By Amanda Paulson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CHICAGO - From Utah to Virginia, a revolt is building in classrooms and legislatures against the biggest education reform in a quarter century. As elements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act take effect, state and local education officials, upset over the stringency of testing requirements and the cost of implementation, are openly criticizing the measure - and even threatening to defy it.

The rebellion, in some cases led by GOP lawmakers, could endanger a signature achievement of the Bush administration in an election year. At the least, it highlights the frequent tensions between policies in Washington and their effects in the classroom.

"I think Bush got maximum benefit for this bill on the day he signed it," says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. "Now that we're into the very difficult implementation problems, he's probably going to get tarnished with the backlash."

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Wages up for the well-off, but not for others
'Rich-poor gap' relates to long-term forces, but could hurt Bush as it reaches record level prior to election.
By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Most US workers saw their earnings fall or stagnate last year, with those at the bottom of the income scale hit hardest.

The trend, coming alongside a slack job market, explains why many Americans feel left out of the economic recovery - and why President Bush faces a tough sell with his campaign-trail message that there is "good strong growth." Democratic rivals point to "two Americas," one for the rich, one for the poor.

Whether concerns over widening wage inequality will damage Mr. Bush remains to be seen. But the gap between workers in the 90th earning percentile and the 10th has never been wider. That opens the door for a populist message by a Democratic challenger to resonate, if job creation doesn't pick up.

Beyond the election, the stalling progress for the bottom half of American workers represents a challenge to the health of an economy traditionally driven by a growing consumer class.

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Nathan Newman:

…Every intelligence estimate, every budget number, every economic statistic put out by this administration has been bastardized. Who knows what the honest statisticians in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other departments think-- they are obviously either being forced to doctor the numbers, or the political department is just redoing them in the dark of night and then inserted into publicly released documents.

Under Reagan, folks complained about "rosy scenarios" where the budget office always picked the most optimistic estimates. That's not what's happening in the Bush administration, since even optimists can't buy these numbers. These are psychedelic scenarios, hallucinogenic tabs to distract the population from Bush's miserable failure on economic policy.

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I try to be gentle with Libertarians, I really do. But when one says:

Tell you what, I would not be opposed to a bunch of you and your socialist friends breaking off a portion of the US and forming your own little USSA here.

I must respond thus:

You mean like this?

And when a Libertarian extremist asks:

Why do you insist on imposing your utopian vision on everyone, including those who want nothing to do with it?

The proper response is:

Because those of you who don't want it are a small, distinct (f you'll pardon my placing my metaphorical thumb in your philosophical soup) minority small enough to be written off as the lunatic fringe. Which ain't to say you're crazy, just that there are so very few that DON'T want what you call a welfare state, so few that actually understand what you'd be giving up.

What percentage of the population are registered Libertarians? Has the Free State Project gathered their 20,000 commitments? Your "millions of people" rhetoric has no basis in fact. You are, in fact, those that would impose your will on the majority. By your definition, that makes YOU the tyrants.

I fully support the Free State project. Self-isolation by the vanishingly small set of people who agree with Libertarian extremism would be far less disruptive than restructuring the nation along the lines you suggest. And your reintegration into the mainstream once the project fails from lack of internal support would be straightforward as well. In fact, there are so few real Free Staters that they could simply melt back into the mainstream without the collapse of the project ever being noticed.

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February 10, 2004

To go with my Canon Digital Rebel, I just got a 75-300mm zoom lens with image stabilization. Ho-hah!

Sovereign Eye suggested a while back that I should cover the Republican Convention when it show here. Now that I don't have to be right up in the mix I may well do that.

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But Max at MaxSpeak linked to this and I had no choice.

Make sure you try all the buttons on the remote control.

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It occurs to me that P6 is one of the best reasons you can give for using RSS aggregators. You do NOT want to download the whole page every time.

Anyway, Norbizness (whose twisted sense of humor should not make you underestimate him) explains why you should buy an remanufactured engine. Now. I already have my coveralls.

Calpundit is the one to watch, for a while anyway…at least until he gets this Bush AWOL burr from under his saddle. That'll be around November, hopefully.

Unlearned Hand has a post up about a lecture on Jim Crow and the Power of Law

Of particular note to the blogosphere, Klarman cited Volokh Conspirator David Bernstein as a leading libertarian advocate for the (paraphrased) position that law played a pivotal role, and that these positive discrimination laws AND the underlying legal complicity in the physical violence (i.e. refusal to prosecute whites for racial violence) can be blamed for the uniform discrimination and disparities. From what I gathered, the argument would be that without these laws (and with proper protection of blacks' rights of life, liberty, property, and contract) the marketplace would have worked out most of the problems itself. It would gradually become less and less economically feasible to exclude blacks (think of railroads that wouldn't have to have separate cars, or colleges that wouldn't have to have separate dorms) and the market would ensure much greater equality.

by an associate of David Bernstein's.

I should note however, that the dispute between Klarman and myself is relatively narrow: we both agree that government economic regulation was only one of a web of factors that created and sustained Jim Crow, and we both acknowledge that social prejudice and informal (extralegal violence) were important factors as well. My argument is that the role of economic regulation has been overlooked by mainstream historians, not that it was the sole cause of Jim Crow, and that social pressure by itself, unaccompanied by both regulation and government complicity in violence, would not have led to a draconian racial caste system. I do my best to disclaim any notion that my research directly impacts the debate over modern civil rights laws; some could argue that my research supports the view there is less need for them then is generally assumed,* but others coud argue that it shows the government has a special responsibility to make up for its past misdeeds.

And no I'm not trying to get the Volokhs' attention, they just happen to be referenced in places that caught my attention today.

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Wishful Thinking
or
Idealism Could Be The Death of Us
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 1995

There's no doubt that there's a vast amount of talent, intelligence, skill and good intent in the Black community. There's also no doubt there's a lot of pain, miseducation, anger and hurt in there. We have done everything possible to do, it seems…volunteers abound, programs proliferate, special studies, meetings, leaders come and go…Yet the troubles in our family seem as intractable as they ever were. There's the feeling outside the community that we are destined for destruction, and the fear inside the community that those on the outside are right.

Of course, we've been in worse situations. Historically speaking, we're pretty well off, even those who are in a self destructive mode. But we don't have the share of America, of life, that we've earned.

Normally people go down a list of problems and a list of possible solutions. They say "This is what we should do, this is what they should do," with all confidence that they actually understand the problem. The results of these efforts are proof that the problem has never been understood by most who would solve them. Oh, some have been brilliant; Du Bois' "dual soul" formulation encapsulates the start of the situation cleanly and eloquently. He, and others like Carter G. Woodson and Harold Cruse set forth the causes well. But there has always been confusion (yes, I think that's the proper word) about how to use that knowledge when your efforts are actively resisted…and worse, passively denied. I think we need to pause and look at, not what should be done, but what has been done…by us, with us, and to us. In my own investigations, I find that all that has been done was done based on hope, on idealism (even that which was done to us was done based on the hope/wish/belief that we actually are inferior).

We have idealized the life that white Americans live because they seem to have so much fun living it. We have idealized what it will be like when we can do everything they can, but have we thought out what happens when we not merely can, but do? We think we know, just like the person who claims winning Lotto won't change them, not a lick, thinks they know how suddenly coming into (for all practical purposes) unlimited wealth will affect them. But very few Lotto winners who declared they would continue working at their old job if they win Lotto actually do so. And in New York there are Lotto winners whose annual payments go directly to their creditors. These are people who assumed their newfound wealth was truly unlimited. These are people who, after living within their means for their whole life, didn't realize how the availability of all those material niceties would change them.

Think about that.

We are not African. We are African American, I have to recognize that. Yet there's still much of Africa in us. We had constant infusions of Africa as our ancestors were brought in decade after decade. Consider that Christian church that folks say is the white man's religion. We were given a god. We were given a bible. We were given an interpretation. But we were not given the way we worship. The song, the rhythm, the oratory, the passion, all came straight from the heart of Africa. We shared from necessity. We supported each other because there was no other way we could survive. Our culture became an extended family, we accepted each other for what we were forced to become.

Think of what we have always been. Think what happened to us when we tried to become what white America is. White America is now saying that the problems we've had accelerated when the civil rights legislation became law. This is true. They are also saying that the civil rights legislation is responsible for the acceleration. This may be indirectly true, because the law wasn't the only thing that changed. Our goals changed. Our goals were to get each other over and now our goal is to get over ourselves. Our methods also changed. Once our methods were to take care of our own. Now our methods are to take care of ourselves. And these changes were made possible by our beliefs about what integration and the civil rights legislation meant.

We changed, when we should have grown. This is the result of our efforts to become fully American. It worked, sort of. We became American in the same way that those Lotto paupers became rich. But unlike those Lotto paupers, we're not bound by law and contract to be what we are. We can reject the changes we made, we can make new changes. As long as we live we can grow…and if they haven't killed us yet, I don't think they can. But that may be idealism on my part.

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In the comments to All schools should do this once a year, Brian gives a long passionate response. See if you can figure out which half I agree with (hint: it's in the middle).

In the comments to Some of us can get rich making others go broke, James made a statement I wish I had thought of:

In 1959, the poverty rate for African Americans was 55.1%; by 2001 it was 22.7%, in large measure because of a tiny share of GDP dedicated to anti-poverty initiatives. Was the desire to spent >1% of GDP on anti-poverty efforts evidence that "leftists hate the successful"? Is a reduction of poverty by that amount not a worthy goal?

This single statement covers so much groung it ain't funny. Have we made great progress? Yes. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes. Is helping the poor expensive? No. Is it worthwhile? Yes, both economically and morally.

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I remember the Pascal vs. C wars.

Programming language wars only became possible with the popularity of PCs because that's when people with too much time on their hands were able to get a good look at their options.

PCs used to ship with an assemble, linker, debugger, edlin (I refuse to call that thing an editor. Edlin was deeper than even vi) and, of course, the BASIC interpreter that was Bill Gates' entry to fortune. The computer magazines of the day would publish source code for programs and utilities that you'd have to type in yourself and they were all in BASIC.

Until Turbo Pascal. When TP 1 came out, people were trying to sell compilers for, oh, about the price they're selling for now. TP1 shipped on a single floppy disk for less than a c-note. Magazines, notably PC Magazine which published great hordes of code and utilities, shifted to publishing Pascal code. And all was right in the world…except other compiler vendors (yes, there used to be other compiler vendors) hated the idea of compatibility with a competitor as a selling point. Microsoft Pascal was a perfect example. Microsoft released an object oriented version of Pascal which was TP compatible, but they pushed the OOP extensions as the marketing point. A couple of months later Borland released TP5.5, which had the OOP extensions. Borland crushed MP 1.0.

This was only a concern because there was no dominant language at the time.

C became dominant, not because of any superior capabilities (C is really simple, it's the way it's used that sucks) but because the competition could advertise compatibility with an ANSI standard and thereby not automatically yield the leadership position. That and the fact that so many tools were released to overcome the lack of strong typing (you haven't heard of lint in ages because it's been subsumed in every IDE made…it's a requirement) that a strong buzz was created. It seemed like everyone was using C so all the noobs headed straight for it. But let's not pretend Pascal the language has superior capabilities either. It's all a matter of what you do with them, and how.

C should not be used for applications because it's a system level language. Pascal is as well, but its strong typing forces you to explicitly command the compiler to do stupid thing, as opposed to C compilers which make it a point of pride to give you as little support as possible.

What brought this on?

Today I ran across an article titled Why C Sucks that I agree with totally. Then I ran into Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language at Kuro5hin (which someone needs to tell me how to pronounce), and in the comments to THAT post is a link to a pdf titled Software Fault Prevention by Language Choice: Why C is Not my Favorite Language. And the Kuro5hin post has, as of this writing, 457 comments (349 topical, 108 editorial, 0 hidden).

The C vs Pascal Wars will be going on longer than the cold war, it seems.

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That's the question Brian Leiter both asks and answers, to the annoyance of David Bernstein (to which I can only reply, "heh heh heh").

First, if we measure things by revealed preferences we measure error. How many folks do you know with complete enough knowledge to make such a judgment?

Fundamentally, the attraction to the USofA is more like lust than love…not so much "I can't stand not living there" as "Gimme some of the money you've skimmed off the rest of the planet so I can send it back where it came from."

As for not knowing a lot of permanent American expatriates, the discussion thread at Crooked Timber would seem to indicate Bernstein has simply run up against one of Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.

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Remarkably, the NY Times has a picture of a non-Black perp. Equal rights for all.

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Student Opens Fire at a High School Near Albany, Hitting a Teacher
By MARC SANTORA

Published: February 10, 2004

EAST GREENBUSH, N.Y., Feb. 9 - A 16-year-old student opened fire at his high school on Monday morning with a pump-action shotgun, shooting a teacher in the leg and spreading fear among thousands of children and parents in this Albany suburb.

The student, Jon W. Romano, 16, fired at least two shells before he was tackled by an assistant principal at Columbia High School, the police said. He was arrested at the school shortly afterward and was charged with one count of attempted murder, said the district attorney of Rensselaer County, Patricia DeAngelis. Mr. Romano, who pleaded not guilty, could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

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I remember last year some city was considering this and the opponents claimed a study on how to implement it would cost huge bags of money…and a proponent suggested giving each precinct $200 and directions to Radio Shack.

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National Law Group Endorses Videotaping of Interrogations
By SUSAN SAULNY

The American Bar Association unanimously accepted a resolution yesterday that urges law enforcement agencies around the country to videotape interrogations of criminal suspects, a measure that was pushed aggressively by a group of New York lawyers in the wake of the Central Park jogger case, in which five men were wrongfully convicted.

The association is one of the nation's largest and most respected professional groups, and its endorsement of videotaping interrogations in their entirety, is expected to be influential at a time when an increasing number of jurisdictions are considering the issue of wrongful conviction.

Last year, Illinois became the third state, after Alaska and Minnesota, to require taping.

"This is an incredible, important endorsement of videotaping and should go a long way toward getting states to adopt legislation in this area," said Steven A. Drizin , a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law.

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This should have been done BEFORE NCLB was put in play.

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Study Says U.S. Should Replace States' High School Standards
By KAREN W. ARENSON

A patchwork of state standards is failing to produce high school graduates who are prepared either for college or for work, three education policy organizations say in a new report. The solution, they say, is to adopt rigorous national standards that will turn the high school diploma into a "common national currency."

"For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," the groups, which favor standardized testing to improve education, say.

Working through what they call the American Diploma Project, the organizations — Achieve Inc., the Education Trust and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation — consulted with higher education officials and business executives in five states to develop standards they say will ensure that high school graduates are equipped to move into either college-level work or a decent-paying job.

"For many kids, the diploma is a ticket to nowhere," Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, said. "In this era, where some postsecondary education is essential, that's no good."

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The project is just starting up, so there's not a lot at their site beyond good intentions.

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The American Diploma Project is conducting three primary pieces of research.

The state-based analysis of postsecondary expectations is designed to:

• detail the content of current high school graduation and college admissions and placement assessments in each partner state;
• reveal gaps between standards-based assessments and college admissions and placement assessments;
• analyze the extent to which current standards on those assessments align to the stated expectations of postsecondary faculty in the state; and
• develop a set of preliminary benchmarks that outline the knowledge and skills consistent with those expectations.

The national new economy workplace study is designed to:

• identify “good jobs” in the new economy: those with good earnings, sufficient training, and adequate occupational-entry and career-growth opportunities;
• examine the educational path of students who have performed those jobs; and
• develop a set of preliminary benchmarks that outline the knowledge and skills needed for those jobs.

The legal analysis of federal legal issues is designed to reveal how the ADP may implicate relevant federal laws, to provide a legal framework for states to analyze their ADP-related efforts, and to recommend ways to minimize legal risk.

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Because sometimes they tell the truth. Better late than never, I suppose.

Democrats Suggest Inquiry Points to Wider Spying by G.O.P.
By NEIL A. LEWIS

ASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — Senate Democrats who were briefed Monday about an investigation into how Democratic strategy memorandums dealing with judicial nominations ended up in the hands of Republican staff members said they now believed the problem was far more extensive than previously thought.

Some of the internal memorandums appear to have been used to prepare one or more of President Bush's appeals court nominees to answer specific questions from Democratic senators during their Judiciary Committee hearings, Democrats said Monday.

The Senate's sergeant-at-arms, William Pickle, has been investigating how Republican staff aides were able to view and distribute to conservative news outlets several internal Democratic computer entries dealing with judicial nomination strategy. Mr. Pickle discussed his inquiry with four Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, some of whose memorandums were disclosed last year on The Wall Street Journal editorial page and in The Washington Times and a column by Robert Novak.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said he learned from Mr. Pickle's briefing that the improper reading, copying and distributing of confidential Democratic memorandums had gone on far longer and had involved a greater amount of information than had previously been believed. "The extent and duration of the improper access was both remarkably longer and more widespread than I had ever imagined," Mr. Durbin said.

Panel Member Says Bush Erred on Details of Threat to Reactors
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: February 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — President Bush was probably wrong when he asserted in his 2002 State of the Union address that American forces routing guerrillas of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had found designs for nuclear power plants, one of the three members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said.

9/11 Panel Threatens to Issue Subpoena for Bush's Briefings
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — Members of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks warned the White House on Monday that it could face a politically damaging subpoena this week if it refused to turn over information from the highly classified Oval Office intelligence reports given to President Bush before 9/11.

The panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and the former governor of New Jersey, said through a spokesman that he was hopeful an agreement would be worked out before the commission's next meeting, on Tuesday. Commission officials said that negotiations continued throughout the day on Monday and into the evening with the office of Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel.

But other members of the commission said that without an immediate resolution, they would call for a vote on Tuesday on issuing a subpoena to the White House for access to information in the documents.

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Too Young to Vote, Old Enough to Donate
By GLEN JUSTICE

Published: February 10, 2004

THE WOODLANDS, Tex. — It did not take Kaelynn Adams-Haack long to decide she wanted to support the re-election campaign of Representative Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. The two met at a dinner party, talked for part of the evening and by the time Kaelynn left she had decided that she wanted to give the congresswoman a $1,000 contribution.

And she did — as soon as she checked with her parents. Then Kaelynn headed home to resume the life of a first grader: homework, chores and the usual fun and games.

"I knew not to give her too much and not to give her too little, so I gave her $1,000," said Kaelynn, who is now 8 and says she hopes to make more donations in the future.

While Kaelynn may be a little girl with an uncommon interest in politics who has every right to make donations, contributions from people her age are often used by adults as a way around laws restricting how much an individual can give to a campaign.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which took effect more than a year ago, included a ban on donations by those under 18. But in December, the Supreme Court struck down the prohibition, saying it trampled free-speech rights.

The result is that people who are too young to drink, drive or vote can again contribute to presidential and Congressional campaigns, a practice that political strategists and fund-raisers say may intensify as competition for donations heats up. This in turn gives greater influence to families with political interests who want to funnel large amounts to politicians, campaign finance experts say.

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The "Duh!" factor in this story is astounding in its immensity.

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Political Money Said to Sway Pension Investments
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: February 10, 2004

For more than a decade, a small group of businessmen contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of their county commissioners in Luzerne County, a waning coal center in eastern Pennsylvania. The elected officials gave the businessmen control over the county pension fund, about $200 million at its peak. After hiring insurance companies, brokerage firms and others to manage the money, the businessmen reaped several million dollars in commissions and fees from the companies.

No one paid much attention until the market went sour. Then a quarter of the pension fund melted away. A new county controller was elected, and he concluded the flow of political money had undermined the fund.

"It was a pay-to-play system," said Stephen L. Flood, who was elected controller of Luzerne County in 2002 and ordered an audit of the fund. He and the county pension board have filed a racketeering suit against the businessmen, the county commissioners and the companies that have handled the pension money since 1988, contending that they chose unsuitable investments and drained millions of dollars through excessive fees.

The case, detailed in the lawsuit, is an unusually stark example of a claim that has been made from Connecticut to California: when elected officials sit on government pension boards, investment decisions can be tainted by campaign contributions.

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President Calls Economy 'Strong and Getting Stronger'
By ROBERT PEAR and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: February 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — President Bush said Monday that a soft economy had caused "hardship for people in many industries and regions of our nation," but he declared that "America's economy is strong and getting stronger," and he predicted the creation of 2.6 million jobs this year.

The prediction provides a benchmark that the president and his critics can use to measure the performance of the election-year economy.

In his annual economic report, Mr. Bush defended his record, which Democrats have harshly criticized.

"Since May 2003," Mr. Bush said, "we have seen the economy grow at its fastest pace in nearly 20 years."

He predicted that prosperity would soon "reach every corner of America."

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HARLEM HONORS ALTHEA

February 10, 2004 -- One tennis legend paid tribute to another in Harlem last night.
Billie Jean King joined former Mayor David Dinkins in honoring the late Althea Gibson at an event sponsored by the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce and the Harlem Jazz and Music Festival.

The Post presented a $2,500 check to the Althea Gibson Foundation to assist in finishing tennis courts in Harlem's Fredrick Johnson Park, a few blocks from where Gibson grew up.

Gibson, the first black woman to win Wimbledon and the U.S. National title, died last September at 76.

"Her struggles never impeded her success," King said.

Dinkins also honored Gibson's climb to become a champion in the 1950s.

"It was difficult, particularly for a black woman to play tennis but she did so with grace, dignity courage and athleticism," he said."

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Here's the most annoying finding from the report:

In the past 30 years, numerous studies and reports have been conducted on Virginia’s indigent defense system, most pointing out similar problems and calling for similar solutions.

Justice Denied in Virginia
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A22

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION guarantees a lawyer to those accused of crimes -- but in Virginia this guarantee often isn't worth much to defendants without money. This fact has been shamefully true for some time, and for some time the state has shrugged off criticism. Now a new and authoritative report documents in detail the magnitude of the state's failure, including its failure to heed prior warnings. The warnings should not be ignored again.

The central finding of the report, prepared on behalf of the American Bar Association, is that the commonwealth's system for providing lawyers for poor people accused of crimes "is deeply flawed and fails to provide indigent defendants the guarantees of effective assistance of counsel required by federal and state law." Compensation for court-appointed lawyers in Virginia "is the lowest in the nation, thus strongly discouraging counsel from spending more than a few hours" on cases, according to the authors from the Spangenberg Group research firm. The state pays, on average, $245 for a defense -- a pitiful $12 more than it did in 1971. For felonies that can carry a sentence of life in prison, the state will pay no more than $1,096, even if a case goes through a full-blown trial. For those that can carry up to 20 years, it pays a measly $395.

Under these circumstances, lawyers are under tremendous pressure to have their clients plead guilty; otherwise, they soon find themselves losing money. Such low pay "puts lawyers at substantial risk of violating professional rules of conduct when representing indigent defendants" and "substandard practice has become the accepted norm" in these cases. Meanwhile, oversight of court-appointed lawyers is minimal and ineffective, and in those jurisdictions that have public defenders, the offices are overburdened and have too few resources.

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Israel Hems In a Sacred City
Encircling of Jerusalem Complicates Prospects for Peace

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A01

JERUSALEM -- Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats.

The status of Jerusalem -- a city sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians -- is one of the most divisive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides claim Jerusalem as their religious and political capital, but most countries do not officially recognize it as such, and the United States and others keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. Under past Israeli-Palestinian accords, neither side is supposed to take any action to change the city's status, which is to be resolved through negotiation.

Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say.

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Are squid vicious?
They have hooks, hundreds of suckers and beaks that can break your wrist in two bites. Oh, yeah, and more of them than ever seem to be swarming the Gulf of California. Pete Thomas jumps in with them.
Pete Thomas

February 10, 2004

LA PAZ, Mexico — I stand on the deck of the boat with a tank of air on my back, a weight belt around my waist and images of space aliens swarming my mind.

Beneath me prowl thousands, perhaps millions of creatures that might as well be from another world -- voracious animals with probing arms and tentacles lined with hundreds of gripping suckers and clasping hooks, and with beaks designed to tear off fist-sized hunks of flesh.

Marine biologists have a lot to learn about the Dosidicus gigas, a.k.a. Humboldt squid, or jumbo squid. What they know is that these cephalopods can reach lengths of 7 feet and weigh as much as 100 pounds, that these torpedo-shaped mollusks thrive at great depths and use a form of jet propulsion to squirt themselves quickly through their hazy realm, and that they're extremely strong and agile.

"Dosidicus is the Arnold [Schwarzenegger] of the squids, for sure," says William F. Gilly, a professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. "They are the most powerful squid and have quite the armament for dealing with big prey: thousands of rings and sucker cups. Yet to see them feeding on the little fish in the wild is really interesting. They reach out so delicately and grab them as though they're eating snacks at a cocktail party."

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Opponents warn lawmakers that polygamy will be next

By Raphael Lewis, Globe Staff, 2/10/2004

Opponents of gay marriage stepped up their rhetoric yesterday, warning state lawmakers that Massachusetts will soon see the legalization of marriages with multiple spouses if they do not overturn the Supreme Judicial Court's ruling allowing same-sex marriages.

"I think once you cross this bridge, this is a bridge gone too far," said Tony Perkins, who heads the Washington-based Family Research Council. "I think there's no turning back the clock."

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, a Princeton University professor who spoke with Perkins at a State House press conference, said the SJC's ruling Nov. 18 paved the way for further challenges to traditional marriage. He said the courts would not be able to bar other arrangements made by consenting adults, once the heterosexual union of a man and a woman is adulterated.

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What's wrong with this picture?

It was taken at the Hula Bowl half-time show. No grass skirts.

You know, the fall of Western civilization can come about through over-rigidity as well as licentiousness.

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Diana Ross gets jail time for DUI
February 10, 2004

TUCSON, ARIZONA -- Diana Ross was convicted Monday of driving under the influence and ordered to spend two days in jail.

Ross, who telephoned into the city court hearing from New York, pleaded no contest to DUI. Two related charges were dropped.

Tucson Magistrate T. Jay Cranshaw found Ross guilty of DUI and sentenced her to serve 48 hours in jail before March 9 and to complete at least 36 hours of alcohol-abuse treatment by Aug. 9. She also was assessed about $850 in fees and fines.

Ross asked no questions and had no comment during the hearing other than thanking the judge. Tucson police arrested her Dec. 30, 2002.

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Assault weapons ban back in play
Feinstein tries to get reluctant Congress to renew 10-year-old law
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Monday, February 9, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Washington -- Gun control hasn't emerged as a leading issue in the 2004 presidential race, but that is likely to change as Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein intensifies her effort to win renewal of the decade-old assault weapons ban, which expires in September.

Feinstein's bid should be as tightly contested and bitterly fought as it was 10 years ago. The ban will be part of a package of firearms legislation before Congress that includes a gun industry proposal to win an exemption from the type of liability lawsuits filed by San Francisco and other cities across the country.

The gun control issue will surface in the middle of the campaigns for the White House and Congress. Many Republicans oppose renewal of the assault weapons ban, which House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, promises will never even come up for a floor vote in the lower house. However, President Bush has said he will sign a renewal, if it makes it to his desk.

Some congressional Democrats are uneasy about the coming fight. Many blame the party's loss of House control in 1994 on the assault weapons vote of that year and President Bill Clinton's support for the law. Al Gore's pro-gun- control positions may have cost him the electoral votes of West Virginia and New Hampshire in 2000 -- along with the presidency.

"Guns will be an issue in the election. The more Congress has to deal with it, the more candidates will be asked about it,'' said Robert J. Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland and the author of "The Politics of Gun Control.''

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Having learned said lesson prevents me from using the title that originally occurred to me: The Stupidity of Brilliant People.

So once again I've been hinting about this idea in the back of my mind, and I'm investigating several portal, bulletin board and blogging packages to see what capabilities are available. As much as I love Movable Type I'm not pretending it's the Universal Hammer. At the moment I'm looking into PHP-Nuke, Wordpress and YaBB SE. Meanwhile, I'm plotting improvements to MTClient and generally keeping my plate full.

Now, I have some friend that run a bulletin board on Boardnation, which runs a customized version of YaBB SE. I told them about the now-expired free hosting offer from 1and1.com. Having taken advantage of it myself to set up a discussion board and development blog for MTClient, I offered to set up their board for them. We chose YaBB SE for its familiarity. All was smooth and cool, went wonderfully well. Until I tried moving the site from a subdirectory to the root directory of the account.

I decided to back up the database tables, reinstall YaBB SE, and restore the data to the new tables. What I did NOT decide to do, but did anyway, was connect to my own 1and1.com account when I looked up the database info for the second install. I wound up with the PHP code on one site accessing the database of another (mine!). But here's the REALLY stooopit part…when I inserted the data from the original install, I noticed some tables whose names started with mt_ and I'm like, "Huh? How'd they get there?" And I deleted them. Yup. I dropped the tables that support my development blog.

Of course, this causes all manner of stupidity. Fortunately, my friend's database was intact so I was able to get everything back to where we started the day but one directory level higher. And I guess I'm spending the next few days getting my development blog back on its feet.

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End Abuse Campaigns: Reaching Men
Coaching Boys into Men

Teach Early. Teach Often.

Boys are swamped with influences outside of the home – from friends, the neighborhood, television, the internet, music, the movies… everything they see around them. They hear all kinds of messages about what it means to “be a man” – that they have to be tough and in control. There are numerous conflicting and some harmful messages being given to boys about what constitutes “being a man” in a relationship. So teach boys early, and teach them often, that there is no place for violence in a relationship.

Whether you are a father, coach, teacher, uncle, older brother or mentor, you can make a real difference in a boy’s life. Teach boys that violence against women and girls is wrong.

Sometimes the only messages boys get are the wrong ones. Many young men need advice and direction on how to behave towards women and they want to talk to you about it. Share your experiences and let them know what you’ve learned.

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February 09, 2004

Since it's Black History Month and all, I thought I'd do some of my own historical stuff. Since I'm a Black guy and all.

This is the first thing I ever posted on the Internet, although not it's original form. I was the moderator of something similar to a Usenet group on issues of concern to Black folks when I wrote it. It was something of an experiment; I'd estimated some 90 or better percent of online discussions formed around some disagreement. I wanted to see if I could write something that was both positive and objectively undeniable…I wanted to see what kind of discussion would develop if we started from an agreement.

Originally the first two paragraphs/stanzas were one:

By "men" I meant "human." I found that everyone liked it, but some women felt they were left out by "men" and some men agreed, and felt Black men needed positive strokes to the degree that it should be exclusively about Black me.

Me, I was convinced to hone it so that it undeniably speaks to everyone I intended it to.

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…or have I been getting a bit lazy about making sure stuff I paste from other sites don't have extraneous crap embedded?

Either way, I guess it is me…

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Harry Brighouse is asking folks to gibve him two Books Every Educated Person Should Read, and of course no one limited themselves to just two.

Anyway, I thought I'd post the three books I suggested

If second copyrights count, I’d suggest “How To Solve It” by George Polya. If second copyrights don’t count, I’d suggest changing the criterion.

“Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstader(sp? I’m not getting up to look);

“What’s The Name Of This Book” by Raymond Smullyan, which I doubt anyone has heard of. It’s a series of original logic puzzles that start with the classic “island of knights and knaves” form and escalates such that you have to apply theorems from boolean algbra to solve them. In one of his books he takes you all the way to Godel’s incompleteness theorem. In another he lost me entirely in the middle of combinatory logic. I’m recommending the one I understood.

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But I'm staying away from Nutrigrain bars and those who consume them. Damn shame, some of them are pretty tasty.

Ya might be right about Beyonce too.

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MideastWeb Middle East Web Log isn't a regular stop for me, but this sounded so…familiar I need to share enough to let you decide if you want to read the rest. It's kinda long.

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Facing "enlightened" racism
02/09/2004

One of the dilemmas of writing a blog that invites reader comments is that you may sometimes receive comments that do not address your views one way or the other, but go off in other directions, and run at cross-purposes to the enterprise of the weblog itself. How much time does anyone want to spend policing a website, anyway?

The occasional stray comment that's unrelated to the contents of a blog entry is inevitable and probably not worth anyone's concern. Worse is a de facto re-purposing of the comments section -- through either lengthy or multiple posts -- as a soapbox for other people's miscellaneous rants, a sort of free-rider blogging. (Get your own, folks!)

And worse yet is a "re-purposing" that turns MidEastWeb into a forum for racist diatribes. What follows is a description of two recent encounters with comment board abuse. It's meant to suggest how this blogger, at least, will respond to future outbursts. Your comments are, of course, welcome...

…To be sure, not everyone involved with MidEastWeb lives in the Middle East -- I don't -- but the main point remains the same: dialog, tolerance, rapprochement, not conflict and hate propaganda. Coexistence, in short. (The formal name of the group is "MidEast Web for Coexistence.") An essential ingredient of the project is to humanize people to each other:

The "enemy" takes on demonic proportions in any conflict. Each side may imagine the other with horns and a tail. The enemy may be imagined as engaging in terrorism and sadism most of their waking lives. In reality, the enemy are people quite like their enemies. They (We) eat, they get married, they have children and hopes for the future. They have insights and talents and foibles. They mourn the losses of loved ones. They read books and enjoy a good joke now and then. These simple truths must be brought home to all parties in any conflict through personal contacts, exchange of small talk and jokes and the trivia of life, through accounts of personal tragedies and loss, and of joys and disappointments, through working together, and eating together and relaxing together, as well as through exposure to culture and wisdom of others.

(Curious readers will find reflections of this perspective in some of my earlier comments here, here, and here.)

An important tool in the pursuit of this agenda is dialog, which we hope to advance online through the MidEastWeb dialog email discussion list, as well as the comment boards at this blog. So it is disappointing to see certain readers trying to turn the blog into their personal platform for the disparagement of "the enemy." Two recent examples also testify to the growth of a more sophisticated racism -- forms of systematic hatred that attempt to camouflage their malignancy behind a patina of enlightenment.

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…after Ashcroft is sent packing. I don't trust him not to file all the test results somewhere.

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Race only skin deep
S.J. STUDENTS DISCOVER GENETIC LINK
By Katherine Corcoran
Mercury News

In the stratified world of high school, where cliques often form along racial lines, Carolyn Abbott's biotechnology students recently made a startling discovery:

More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan.

``That's crazy,'' said junior Christina Romero, as she scanned the wide array of facial features, hair colors and skin tones among 17 teenagers who were suddenly related.

``I finally have an excuse to be in the Chinese Club,'' said sophomore Beth Gomes, a white student among the consanguineous classmates.

It was a highly technical genetics experiment involving polymerase chain reactions and gel electrophoresis. But it yielded deep revelations that forced the identity-conscious teens to re-evaluate their differences. And it prompted students to ponder a perplexing question: Does race exist?

With the recent mapping of the human genome and the intricate picture now available of humans on a molecular level, scientists know that traditional notions of race no longer hold up.

``It's kind of mind-blowing,'' said Alan Goodman, president-elect of the American Anthropological Association, who likens the discovery to ``what it must have been like to understand that the world isn't flat. The majority of individuals, if you asked them if race is based on biology, they would say yes.''

(don't tell Lawrence at [caught In between] I've been lurking on his blog, okay? I'm trying to take credit for all this…]

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Uprising Against Aristide Spreads in Haiti
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:30 a.m. ET

ST. MARC, Haiti (AP) -- Rebels blocked streets and hundreds of Haitians looted shops in this port town as an uprising raged in several communities against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Using felled trees, flaming tires and car chassis, residents blocked streets throughout St. Marc on Sunday, a day after militants drove out police in gunbattles that killed two people. Many residents have formed neighborhood groups to back insurgents in their push to expel the president.

``After Aristide leaves, the country will return to normal,'' said Axel Philippe, 34, among dozens massed on the highway leading to St. Marc, a city of about 100,000 located some 45 miles northwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

At least 18 people have been killed since armed opponents of Aristide began their assault Thursday, setting police stations on fire and driving officers from the northwestern city of Gonaives -- Haiti's fourth-largest city -- and several smaller nearby towns.

Anger has been brewing in Haiti since Aristide's party won flawed legislative elections in 2000. The opposition refuses to join in any new vote unless the president resigns; he insists on serving out his term, which ends in 2006.

Clashes between government opponents, police and Aristide supporters have killed at least 69 people since mid-September

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James at Hobson's Choice has a lot of the history behind this mess.

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I feel like a bit of a traitor, especially after all the grief I went through to install the damn thing on my intranet, but Wordpress is a really nice looking mini-CMS. The administrative interface isn't as elegant looking as Movable Type's but after you get the damn thing installed it has some really good functionality. I like that I can import OPML and manage a blogroll as an integral part of the site.

Now I get to play around and see how compatible MTClient is with it.

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How Main St. and Wall St. Will Feel as the Dollar Plunges
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: February 9, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — Treasury Secretary John W. Snow has tacitly but unmistakably abandoned Washington's longstanding support for a strong dollar in favor of a weak dollar that is getting weaker, though he continues to insist there has been no change in policy,

Stripped of the code words and elliptical references to "excessive volatility" in exchange rates, the message that Mr. Snow delivered this weekend to finance ministers from Europe and Japan was that the dollar's plunge against the euro is just fine and that the dollar should now decline more rapidly against Asian currencies as well.

In so doing, the Bush administration has made a calculated economic and political choice. By condoning and even encouraging a cheap dollar, the administration is providing a big push to American exporters by making their products less expensive in foreign markets.

That should encourage more hiring and lower unemployment leading up to the election. The only immediate losers are exporters in Europe and Asia who have to choose between cutting prices or losing market share in the United States.

But the long-term risks are substantial. At some point, a weaker dollar will inevitably lead to higher prices for imported goods — almost all consumer electronics bought by Americans, most of their clothing, many of their cars and much of the oil that provides the fuel to drive them.

A much bigger risk is that a plunging dollar could contribute to a rise in interest rates, as foreign investors demand fatter risk premiums before agreeing to buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Treasury securities to finance America's high levels of indebtedness.

The United States needs to attract $1.5 billion a day in net capital inflows from abroad — $500 billion a year more than it sends out — which means that the world is being flooded by American I.O.U.'s at levels never seen before. The administration's huge budget deficits could increase that need for foreign capital even more, and higher interest rates would add billions of dollars to those deficits.

Foreign buyers, and Asian central banks in particular, are now the most important buyers of American Treasury bills and bonds. But much of that buying had little to do with the rosy economic outlook for the United States and very much to do with propping up the dollar against the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan.

The dollar would probably be declining regardless of what Mr. Snow said, because the United States is now so indebted to the rest of the world that the appeal of American securities is considerably less than it was at the height of the boom.

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Interestingly enough, I come up on the first page of results if you google "relativity of truth", quoted so it searches for the phrase.

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"I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind."

…even before the war.

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…so their survey must be horribly wrong.

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Online, Political and Influential
Survey: Visitors to Candidate Web Sites Are Opinion Leaders

By Brian Faler
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, February 9, 2004; Page A05

Freaks? Geeks? Or trendsetters?

The question of who, exactly, has been frequenting candidate Web sites, online political discussion groups and campaign blogs this election season has left many observers scratching their heads. Some have said they are, mostly, college students. Or aging ex-hippies. Or tech geeks.

But a new survey, one of the first systematic looks at these otherwise faceless "netizens," suggests that they tend to be white, well-educated and, disproportionately, opinion leaders in their social circles.

The study, which was conducted by George Washington University, the polling firm RoperASW and Nielsen/Net Ratings, found that 69 percent of those queried -- those researchers considered to be "online political citizens" -- qualify as "influentials," the sort of people who have an outsized influence on what their friends and colleagues think about everything from political candidates to restaurants. By comparison, the study said, 10 percent of the general population qualifies as influential.

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Linking Lawmakers, Scientific Knowledge
Grant to Fund Source for Data on Terrorism

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 9, 2004; Page A19

Congress will get a new source for information on the science of terrorism and national security under a $2.25 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

The money will go to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and is designed to make it into a link between policymakers in need of scientific information and academics who might have it.

"We've heard a lot about how policymakers need advice on scientific issues related to terrorism," said Kennette M. Benedict, director of international peace and security for the MacArthur Foundation. "This is not so much about building capacity in this field, but in how to get the information to policymakers in a form they can use."

The new AAAS initiative will try to fill some of the void created when Congress abolished the Office of Technology Assessment eight years ago. Although the new center will not have a formal status like the technology office, Benedict said, it will try to offer similarly independent and nonpartisan scientific information.

"Lawmakers are often looking for authoritative and trustworthy information, and the center will connect them with it," she said. MacArthur is also providing $4.5 million this year to 15 universities around the world to research scientific aspects of the threats from biological, chemical and nuclear materials.

According to Frank von Hippel, former assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the AAAS center would fill an obvious need.

"Congress used to have an in-house operation where policymakers could task a group of technical people, and through them a whole network of specialists, with technical problems they were having a hard time getting a handle on," he said. "This is an effort to bridge the gap."

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Online Search Engines Help Lift Cover of Privacy
By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 9, 2004; Page A01

Sitting at his laptop, Chris O'Ferrell types a few words into the Google search engine and up pops a link to what appears to be a military document listing suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members, date of birth, place of birth, passport numbers and national identification numbers.

Another search yields a spreadsheet of names and credit card numbers.

"All search engines will get you this," O'Ferrell said, pointing to files of spoils he has found on the Internet: Medical records, bank account numbers, students' grades, and the docking locations of 804 U.S. Navy ships, submarines and destroyers.

And it is all legal, using the world's most powerful Internet search engine.

Cybersecurity experts say an increasing number of private or putatively secret documents are online in out-of-the-way corners of computers all over the globe, leaving the government, individuals, and companies vulnerable to security breaches. At some Web sites and various message groups, techno-hobbyists are even offering instructions on how to find sensitive documents using a relatively simple search. Though it does not technically trespass, the practice is sometimes called "Google hacking."

"There's a whole subculture that's doing this," said O'Ferrell, a long-time hacking expert and chief technology officer of Herndon-based security consultancy Netsec Inc.

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Why don't we wait until we figure out the mess we already have on our hands before making another one?

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Bush Aims For 'Greater Mideast' Plan
Democracy Initiative To Be Aired at G-8 Talks

By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 9, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration has launched an ambitious bid to promote democracy in the "greater Middle East" that will adapt a model used to press for freedoms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Senior White House and State Department officials have begun talks with key European allies about a master plan to be put forward this summer at summits of the Group of Eight nations, NATO allies and the European Union, U.S. officials say. With international backing, the United States then hopes to win commitments of action from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries.

"It's a sweeping change in the way we approach the Middle East," said a senior State Department official. "We hope to roll out some of the principles for reform in talks with the Europeans over the next few weeks, with specific ideas of how to support them."

Details are still being crafted. But the initiative, scheduled to be announced at the G-8 summit hosted by President Bush at Sea Island, Ga., in June, would call for Arab and South Asian governments to adopt major political reforms, be held accountable on human rights -- particularly women's empowerment -- and introduce economic reforms, U.S. and European officials said.

As incentives for the targeted countries to cooperate, Western nations would offer to expand political engagement, increase aid, facilitate membership in the World Trade Organization and foster security arrangements, possibly some equivalent of the Partnership for Peace with former Eastern Bloc countries.

Vice President Cheney first hinted at the initiative last month in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. "Our forward strategy for freedom commits us to support those who work and sacrifice for reform across the greater Middle East," he said. "We call upon our democratic friends and allies everywhere, and in Europe in particular, to join us in this effort."

The U.S. approach is loosely modeled on the 1975 Helsinki accords signed by 35 nations, including the United States, the Soviet Union and almost all European countries.

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New LDF Head is Ready to Challenge Right-wingers
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Theodore M. “Ted” Shaw, selected to succeed Elaine R. Jones as new president and director-counsel of the 64-year-old NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says he expects continued assaults on equal opportunity programs by Right-wing conservatives.

“That fight has not ended. We still have attacks on all kinds of programs. It isn’t clear what the next attack is going to be by the Far Right, but, we’re preparing to meet them whether it’s on pipeline programs, mentoring programs or scholarship programs,” says Shaw. “In the eyes of the radical Right, all of these programs should be illegal. We’ve got to fight their attempts to end them.”

He adds, “It’s important for people of good will to understand that the stakes are very high and that these people’s perverted view of what constitutes fairness would prevent any attempt to voluntarily and consciously address racial inequality in a targeted way.”

Shaw will serve as LDF’s fifth head, rising from the position of staff attorney in 1982 to his current position of associate director-counsel. His leadership of LDF begins as racial and social issues are illuminated by a high-profile presidential race and the anniversary of the Brown case, which enforced desegregation of public schools.

“In general, we’re going to continue to be the law firm for African-Americans nationally when it comes to systemic racial discrimination,” Shaw says. Among issues of high priority in addition to affirmative action is a racially biased criminal justice system.

“The war on drugs has been distorted into a war on the people of color and the way in which the death penalty is still being implemented,” Shaw explains, “We know that it has never been and cannot be made to be a fair system; and all the evidence is in now about people being convicted for crimes they did not commit and sentenced to death. While we have been able to exonerate some of these individuals, what we don’t know is if we’ve executed people who were never exonerated and should have been.”

Shaw will be taking the helm at the LDF May 1 when the blunt-spoken Jones steps down. The change in leadership coincides with the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education U. S. Supreme Court ruling, argued by LDF May 17, 1954.

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Clay Shirky at Many-To-Many is impressed with the rules at a Captain Obvious

Mr. Shirky is young. Way back in dial-up BBS days there was a guy who did this. Instead of banning troublemakers he lowered their security until they only qualified to participate in a conference called "Village Idiot." Interestingly, those this is seen as an expression of dictatorial powers nowadays, back then it was seen as a remarkably gentle way of handling idiots.

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Blaming everyone but themselves
Feb 6th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda

Mr Bush, for his part, has an election to fight—and fiscal austerity wins few votes. On the contrary, he will claim that his tax cuts have delivered growth and jobs. They have certainly delivered some of the first, but not much of the second. The economy needs to create more than 140,000 jobs per month just to keep pace with the growth of the labour force. Last month, firms added 112,000 workers to the payrolls; in December, they added just 16,000. This is a poor return on tax cuts that cost the Treasury $195 billion in the 2003 fiscal year. For that money, Mr Bush could have hired 2.5m people to dig holes and another 2.5m to fill them, paying them all America’s average annual wage.[P6: Emphasis added]

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Richness of black history shouldn't be segregated into one month

By Joyce King

DALLAS – It happens every February. People who are passionate about the black experience are pressed into a whirlwind schedule that ends as quickly as it begins, some 28 days later. Welcome, we are told, to Black History Month.
While I love the heightened awareness of being African-American that comes for one brief month, how I wish this feeling of inclusiveness extended to March, May, September, through December. Each year I vow to do something to change the thinking about a concept that started with historian Carter G. Woodson as Negro History Week. Isn't it time Black History Month (BHM) continued its evolution into a year-round celebration to ensure that any indifferent citizens can begin to understand that what we teach, preach, lecture, and conjecture about is really American history?

My tiny way of making a difference is to work hard to ensure that the teaching of black history does not wrap on the last day of February. Countless others are committed to the same, but can always use the company of people of all colors who would like to see children educated honestly about painful things that some believe better left in an unacknowledged past. But it was Martin Luther King Jr. who once said, "Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

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The best race relations lessons come when you least expect them
By Elizabeth Armstrong

I don't remember his face as a whole, but there are details I doubt I'll ever forget. His eyes were dark and flickering; his weathered velvet skin revealed the slightest hint of stubble around his mouth; and the muscles in his jaw clenched as he met my gaze.

But those are details, and they come later.

First, there was only a question: "Excuse me, but do you have any quarters?"

I was walking toward Boston Common with a friend on a staggeringly cold afternoon, and I didn't turn to acknowledge him. From the corner of my eye, all I could make out was the shape of a few men bundled up to ward off the cold. The one asking about quarters held what looked to be a cup.

And there was one more thing: These men were black.

This is the part of the story where I begin to flinch, and I want to stop writing. Except there's the possibility that, by facing something I consider so despicable, something I never expected to find within myself, I might learn from the experience, and might even convince others to face it within themselves as well.

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You have not seen me chime in on li'l Georgie's military record up until this point. There were more direct reasons he has my opprobrium.

I have to acknowledge Kevin Drum's reporting, though. I'd like everyone whose tour of duty in Iraq was extended beyond their enlistment term to become aware of it.

It might be time for one of those "contact your local media" letter writing campaigns.

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February 08, 2004

We are pleased that The American Sentimentalist is back.

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Sage Publications publishes an extensive list of professional magazines, the full text of which are available (for a fee) at http://www.ingentaselect.com/.

Until March 31, though, you can get at them for free. Register here and have at it.

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Top clerics join to support amendment

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004

Escalating the campaign against the legalization of same-sex marriage, many of the most prominent religious figures in Massachusetts issued statements this weekend calling on the Legislature to preserve marriage as a heterosexual institution.

Three groups representing African-American clergy -- the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, the Boston Ten Point Coalition, and the Cambridge Black Pastors Conference -- jointly called for the Legislature to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Separately a multifaith coalition, featuring not only Catholic leaders but also leading evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims, declared their opposition to gay marriage. Signatories to the statement included the Rev. William P. Leahy, president of Boston College; the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III of the Azusa Christian Community; the Rev. David M. Midwood, the president of Vision New England, an umbrella organization of 2,000 evangelical Protestant churches; and Metropolitan Methodios, the Greek Orthodox hierarch of New England.

"It's important for people to understand the diversity and the multitude of groups that are concerned about this," said the Rev. Ray A. Hammond, pastor of Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, who signed the statement.

According to leaders who helped pull together the two statements, the documents are intended to make it clear that there is substantial local opposition to gay marriage, even from groups that are not comfortable with some of the more conservative out-of-state organizations, such as Focus on the Family, that have joined the battle on Beacon Hill. "I didn't want us to be viewed as a right-wing group," said the Rev. Wesley A. Roberts, the president of the Black Ministerial Alliance and pastor of Peoples Baptist Church. "I don't see this as a civil rights issue, because to equate what is happening now to the civil rights struggle which blacks had to go through would be to belittle what we had gone through as a people."

The black clergy statement reads, in part: "We acknowledge the pain and suffering of the men and women in the gay and lesbian community who are in long-term relationships. However, given the most recent opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court eliminating the possibility of civil Unions, we support the call for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman."

Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, helped pull together the multi-faith coalition. The Islamic Council of New England, which represents mosques throughout the region, signed on, as did two prominent Orthodox Jews, Grand Rabbi Y. A. Korff, who is the publisher of the Jewish Advocate, and Rabbi Gershon C. Gewirtz, who leads one of the area's largest Orthodox synagogues, Young Israel of Brookline.

"Each of the traditions we represent has long upheld the institution of marriage as a unique bond between a man and a woman," the multifaith statement said.

O'Malley yesterday fielded questions from a crowd of 1,300 Catholic teenagers who gathered at Merrimack College in North Andover, and a young woman from Dorchester asked the archbishop how to show compassion to people concerned about gay marriage and abortion. O'Malley responded that "God's law, that is written on our hearts, is what will truly make us free and noble and good as a people."

O'Malley will headline a rally at the State House today in opposition to gay marriage; in response, the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry, which includes many mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish clergy, will demonstrate on the other side of Boston Common.

"Every denomination or faith community should decide on its own who they will marry or who they won't marry, but because civil rights of individuals are involved, civil marriage should be open to everyone," said Episcopal Bishop M. Thomas Shaw.

Michael Paulson can be reached at [email protected]. Globe correspondent Peter DeMarco contributed to this report. The full texts of both statements are at www.boston.com.

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via Slashdot:

Your Rights Online: SCO Complaint Filed -- Including Code Samples
Posted by timothy on Saturday February 07, @06:51PM

from the all-over-the-board dept.

btempleton writes "The folks at Groklaw have posted a story including a preliminary copy of Caldera/SCO's amended complaint, including lines of code they allege were improperly included in Linux. The PDF can be found at this story The file lists unix filenames with line numbers and filenames and line numbers from the Linux 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, so folks can now go into real depth."

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In Bush's Policies, Business Wins
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2004; Page A04

For three years, President Bush has been willing to anger environmentalists, civil libertarians of the right and left, unions, trial lawyers and conservative advocates of free markets. But one group that almost always comes out a winner when Bush sets policy is the business community, from Fortune 500 corporations to small, family-run companies.

Bush's recent immigration initiative is a prime example. While commentary and reaction focused largely on how it might affect foreign-born workers, the unquestioned beneficiaries are U.S. employers. If the proposal becomes law, they will have a vastly enlarged pool of prospective workers, many willing to perform the dirtiest and most dangerous tasks for low pay.

The policy's likely impact on other constituent groups -- including some important to a Republican president -- is far less clear. Social conservatives, for example, were furious at Bush's plan to make it easier for undocumented workers to stay in this country. The response from leaders of the nation's most prominent Hispanic organizations -- a constituency heavily courted by Republicans and Democrats alike -- ranged from ambivalence to outright opposition because of the administration's failure to provide a direct avenue to citizenship.

But a range of employers hungry for low-wage, low-skill workers hailed the proposal without hesitation. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition -- an alliance of associations and lobbies representing nursing homes, hotels, road and building contractors, restaurants, landscape companies and meatpackers -- praised the Bush initiative.

"The inability of employers to hire enough U.S. workers will be alleviated through his proposal of allowing businesses to utilize temporary workers from abroad," the group said.

The immigration proposal fits a broader pattern encompassing Bush's tax legislation, regulatory decisions, labor policies and economic strategies.

"Since 1932, we have not had a president who has been more closely allied with business and more sympathetic to large and powerful corporations," said Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley, a specialist in the American presidency.

"It's hard to think of anyone [in the 20th century] who has been more connected to the corporate world than maybe Herbert Hoover" in the 20th and 21st centuries, said Robert Dallek, professor emeritus at Boston University and a prominent presidential biographer.

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Now the Regents Math Test Is Criticized as Too Easy
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

Last year, the New York State Education Department faced a storm of criticism from educators who said too few students had passed the Math A Regents examination. Now the department seems to have the opposite problem.

Some math teachers and administrators are complaining that the department's scoring chart for its most recent exam, offered last month, is overly forgiving, and that passing scores are being doled out to students who have not mastered the material. To pass the test, which is required for high school graduation, students had to earn 28 out of 84 points. To pass with a grade high enough to earn the more coveted Regents diploma, students had to score 37 points.

"To score one-third of the points allotted on the test, in my judgment, does not show proper mastery of the content or of the standards," said Alfred S. Posamentier, dean of the School of Education at the City College of New York. "It appears that the passing grade was too low. If that is so, then we are causing more damage than good, because you're allowing kids to pass a course who are not prepared to go on into the next math course."

Last summer, educators complained that the Math A exam was confusing and too difficult. In response, the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, with the Board of Regents, appointed a panel to examine the test. (Dean Posamentier served on the panel.) Heeding the panel's recommendations, education officials created a new test with more multiple-choice questions and fewer open-ended questions.

But when the state released its scoring chart a few days ago, some teachers were shocked to discover that students they thought should have failed the test had, in fact, passed. While schools are not obliged to giving passing course grades to students who pass Regents tests, teachers say it can be difficult convincing students who have passed a test that they need to repeat a class.

"It's almost setting up a scenario where the kids don't seem to feel that standards are standards," said Michael Steger, a math teacher at Oceanside High School on Long Island. "I'm very concerned."

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Ethics Complaint Could Topple Struggling Sharpton Campaign
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

A nonprofit Washington-area group has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, seeking to block the Rev. Al Sharpton's presidential campaign from receiving tax dollars. It is a potentially crippling blow to a candidacy already deep in debt and facing increasing criticism over its relationship with the Republican operative Roger Stone.

The group, the National Legal and Policy Center, which says it promotes ethics in government, filed its complaint on Thursday, charging that Mr. Sharpton's campaign expenses have been improperly subsidized by his not-for-profit civil rights group, the National Action Network, and by Mr. Stone, who has a reputation for questionable political tactics.

"The F.E.C. has an obligation to safeguard the integrity of the matching-funds process," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center. "If there is an effort to defraud the taxpayer, we seek to stop it."

The complaint comes at a difficult time for Mr. Sharpton, whose success at the Democratic presidential debates has not been followed by success at the polls. He has so far failed to pick up more than one delegate in the states that have held primaries, his campaign is about half a million dollars in debt and his relationship with Mr. Stone has even supporters questioning his credibility.

Mr. Sharpton's campaign manager, Charles Halloran, said yesterday that the complaint was without merit and amounted to "harassment by a right-wing demagogue group."

Mr. Sharpton submitted paperwork to the Federal Election Commission in January stating that he qualified for federal matching funds because he had met the fund-raising threshold of $5,000 in donations of $250 or less in 20 states. If those papers are certified, Mr. Sharpton will receive $150,000. The commission said yesterday that certification was not "imminent."

Not only does Mr. Sharpton need to be certified to have any hope of keeping his campaign afloat, but he has also already borrowed against the $150,000 from Amalgamated Bank in New York, according to his filing with the commission. The loan is due March 15, according to the commission's papers, and if the matching funds are not available, Mr. Sharpton's campaign could be in default.

The election commission said it was unusual for a candidate to use an application for matching funds as collateral for a loan before the application had been certified. Mr. Sharpton's case is unusual in another way, said Robert Biersack, a spokesman for the commission. Candidates who have received matching funds may later be disqualified from additional payments if they do not get 10 percent of the vote in two consecutive primary rounds. Mr. Sharpton has not yet been certified as eligible for the funds, and has not yet reached the 10 percent threshold.

The National Legal and Policy Center, in its complaint to the federal agency, also criticizes Mr. Stone's role in financing and staffing Mr. Sharpton's campaign and loaning money to the National Action Network. Some of the financial details were reported in The Village Voice this week. The complaint also suggested that the National Action Network was improperly covering the cost of Mr. Sharpton's campaign travel, as well as his use of consultants and contractors.

Mr. Sharpton dismisses the allegations.

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Kerry Says White House Is Engaged in 'Extremism'
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: February 8, 2004

RICHMOND, Feb. 7 — Senator John Kerry on Saturday challenged Republican assertions that he was too liberal for America with a sharp-edged characterization of his own: that President Bush was pursuing an "extremist" agenda that was "fundamentally at odds with our history and our hopes."

As he rolled to victories in caucuses in Michigan and Washington, Mr. Kerry campaigned in Tennessee and Virginia, where he is hoping to shut out his two Southern-born rivals, Senator John Edwards and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, in primaries on Tuesday. And he unveiled a new speech in which he positioned himself in the "mainstream" and in favor of fiscal responsibility, law and order, a strong defense and aid to veterans.

"I want to make it clear: We Democrats will not run from a debate about who represents mainstream America," Mr. Kerry said at the Virginia Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner here. "We welcome it."

The three major Democrats competing in the state all appeared at the dinner, as did the Rev. Al Sharpton, who followed Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia in addressing nearly 2,000 raucous party activists. But it was the gathering momentum of Mr. Kerry, whom Mr. Warner was expected to endorse Sunday morning, that provided the evening's backdrop.

"This administration has followed the extreme path of the first administration in the history of our nation, when we are at war, to give the highest tax cuts in history to the wealthiest Americans," Mr. Kerry said.

"It is no secret," he said, "that the extreme policies of this administration have watched and squandered goodwill, while manufacturing jobs in our nation are going overseas — three million jobs lost. The stock market, according to Elaine Chao, the secretary of labor, is the final indicator of an economy. That's their view of a world in which corporate profits have gone up 46 percent, while workers' pay increased only three cents on the hour, and workers lost $1,500 on the year. Well, let us make it clear — it is not our mark."

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With this, though late as hell:

…he gets as close to true center on the Iraq Invasion issue as he, and many other Americans, will ever get. I believe it's close enough o the center to allow people to see the flaws in this administration.

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The Home Team
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I was actually at the Super Bowl. Yup. And I too was upset about the halftime show — but not just because of Janet Jackson's antics. After the show ended, I said to my wife: How can we present something to America and the world that is this frivolous and gross when we have 115,000 U.S. soldiers at war in Iraq, dying at one per day? I realize this is irrational — there's no rule that says the Super Bowl show must honor America's soldiers at war. But that halftime show has become a kind of national moment and the grotesque way it came out really captured what has bothered me most about how this war is being conducted: The whole burden is being borne by a small cadre of Americans — the soldiers, their families and reservists — and the rest of us are just sailing along, as if it has nothing to do with us.

And what bothers me even more is that this dichotomy is exactly what the Bush team wants. From the outset, it has adopted the view that this war will be handled by the Pentagon alone. We don't need the State Department and its ideas about nation building. We don't need the U.N. We don't need our traditional allies. And most of all, we don't need the public. The message from the White House has been: "You all just go about your business of being Americans, pursuing happiness, spending your tax cuts, enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show, buying a new Hummer, and leave this war to our volunteer Army. No sacrifices required, no new taxes to pay for this long-term endeavor, and no need to reduce our gasoline consumption, even though doing so would help take money away from the forces of Islamist intolerance that are killing our soldiers. No, we are so rich and so strong and so right, we can win this war without anyone other than the armed forces paying any price or bearing any burden."

This outlook is morally and strategically bankrupt. It is morally bankrupt because 1 percent of America is carrying the whole burden of this war. After the Super Bowl, I went to Tampa to visit Centcom headquarters and Gen. John Abizaid and his staff. They run the war in Iraq. I met many soldiers there, from the women serving as analysts in the intelligence center to the strategic planners just back from Baghdad, who had been separated for months from their families or knew comrades killed or wounded in Iraq.

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Making the Facts Fit the Case for War
By RICHARD GOODWIN

CONCORD, Mass.

In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he took the country to a war that eventually gained it California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he needed a war to get it.

A first-term representative warned that if you "allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him to make war at pleasure." For these words, Abraham Lincoln received the usual reward of political courage: he forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although he would do quite well after that.)

Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism. And in my years in government service, I had the misfortune to see desire win out over skepticism too many times.

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No it's not…

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BLACK VOTERS LOOK OUT FOR THEIR OWN INTERESTS
Sat Feb 7, 7:02 PM ET

By Cynthia Tucker

Let's hope the slander of black voters has ended -- at least for this season.

Before South Carolina's Democratic primary, several political analysts predicted that Al Sharpton (news - web sites) would walk away with the majority of black votes in the contest. That analysis was superficial and insulting, based on the broadest of stereotypes -- black voters will support any black candidate, including one whose slicked-back hairdo imitates his role model, soul singer James Brown.

But the actual results of Tuesday's primary tell a very different story: Black voters supported John Edwards (news - web sites) and John Kerry (news - web sites) by much larger margins than Sharpton. Once and for all, political commentators should have learned the lesson that black voters cast their ballots for those who best represent their interests -- just as white voters do.

It's surprising that black Southerners are so poorly understood by other Southerners. One of the prognosticators with a skewed and superficial view of black South Carolinians was Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga. In the Jan. 5 Wall Street Journal, Miller proclaimed:

"Conventional wisdom says native Southerners John Edwards and Wesley Clark (news - web sites) and moderate Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) will have the edge when the primaries move south. Don't count on it. I'd be willing to bet a steak dinner ... that Al Sharpton will get almost as many votes as Messrs. Edwards, Clark or Lieberman in this supposedly more friendly territory. ... The last time there was an African-American in the primaries, Jesse Jackson blew everyone away, getting 96 percent of the African-American vote in the South. ... So get ready to start counting Rev. Sharpton's delegates."

I hope the senator knows some good steak restaurants. Sharpton received 17 percent of the African-American vote in South Carolina; Edwards and Kerry polled 37 percent and 34 percent respectively.

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Magnetism and the brain

By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
It began as just another research project, in this case to examine the effects of various drugs on patients with a severe mood disorder. Using an advanced brain scanning technology--the clumsily named echo-planar magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging procedure, or EP-MRSI--researchers at Boston's McLean Hospital scanned the medicated and unmedicated brains of 30 people with bipolar disorder in order to detect possible new treatments for the more than 2 million American adults who suffer from the disease.

But something unexpected happened. A patient who had been so depressed she could barely speak became ebullient after the 45-minute brain scan. Then a second patient, who seemed incapable of even a wan smile, emerged actually telling jokes. Then another and another. Was this some bizarre coincidence? Aimee Parow, the technician who made these observations (she is now a medical student in New York) didn't think so. She mentioned the patients' striking mood shifts to her boss, and together they completely refocused the study: to see if the electromagnetic fields might actually have a curative effect on debilitating melancholy.

As it turns out, they did. As reported last month in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 23 of the 30 people who were part of the study reported feeling significantly less depressed after the scan. The most dramatic improvements were among those who were taking no medication. The researchers are cautious. Says Bruce Cohen, McLean's president and psychiatrist in chief: "I want to emphasize that we are not saying this is the answer. . . . but this is a completely different approach in trying to help the brain than anything that was done before."

Looking back. It's a completely different approach because of the way the magnetism is applied to the brain. But it's an example of burgeoning new research on an old idea: that the brain is an electromagnetic organ and that brain disorders might result from disarray in magnetic function. The idea has huge appeal to psychiatrists and patients alike, since for many people the side effects of psychiatric drugs are almost as difficult to manage as the disease itself. And 30 percent of the nearly 18.8 million people who suffer from depression do not respond to any of the antidepressants available now. People with other severe mental disorders--schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder--might benefit as well. And while no one fully understands exactly why or how the brain responds as it does to electrical currents and magnetic waves, intriguing new research is offering some possible explanations.

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