February 21, 2004

I do this sort of thing because not everyone reads comments and I believe this to be an important discussion.

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Derek Lowe at Corante's In The Pipeline noticed the link in yesterday's post and was good enough to visit.

Derek disagreed with my two objections to the whole idea of opportunity costs being folded into the cost of producing a new drug:

1. The money was NOT spent all on day the drug was approved
2. Most of the money spent was Federal money

On the first point he says:

My response, lifted from comments:

This morning I recognized another disagreement with reality in this argument: taxes. I'm not sure is pharmaceutical companies declare opportunity costs as actual expenses or losses, but if they do they don't declare the entire expense or loss incurred in developing a drug. They would if they could, but they don't know the figure so they can only declare what they can calculate. Taking that into account when calculating opportunity cost would lead to a less assailable figure.

As for the second point, that most drugs are developed in government funded research, Derek says:

I think my response:

…is reasonable if a bit disingenuous.

I feel it justified though. And it's a real suggestion. Let corporations have process patents on the ways they've developed to mass produce the drug, but if it was developed in government funded research the drug itself should be in the public domain.

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I'm linking to Aaron's entry. He's got the links to Atrios and DeLay's rant. I just think the closing line is hysterically appropriate.

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About that title.

I'm not against real economists, the ones that do the observations, recognize the correlations, and do the math.

I'm against the fake corporate and think tank economists that get paid to conflate correlation and causation. I'm against those that have convinced people that financial benefit = morality.

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Report Finds Atlanta Police Cut Figures on Crimes
By ARIEL HART

n audit of the Atlanta Police Department concluded that the department consistently underreported crimes for years. The audit, which was released yesterday, found evidence of both negligence and deliberate efforts to improve the city's image for tourism, possibly including the Summer Olympics in 1996.

The report, by the management consulting firm Linder & Associates, painted a picture of a department mired in disorganization and increasingly besieged by 911 calls, some of which never got a response.

"We've not seen this sense of a condition of being overwhelmed in any other major city," said John Linder, president of the consulting firm.

Auditors studied crime reports only from 2002, but shed light on previous years through interviews with more than 200 police officers and a confidential survey to which about two-thirds of officers responded. Atlanta residents were also interviewed and surveyed.

Several police officers told auditors that during the selection process for the 1996 Olympics "a concerted effort" was made to improve Atlanta's chances for selection by underreporting crime to the point of discarding incident reports and improperly closing cases. Their claims have not been verified.

Nearly half the officers who responded to the survey said they believed that crime reports were routinely changed to downgrade incidents. One former deputy chief said that if crime were reported correctly "it would drive the tourists off," Mr. Linder said.

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I couldn't think of a better title.

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Elections With No Meaning

Let's hope the presidential contest is a close one this November. Otherwise, many of the voters who go to the polls may ask themselves why they bothered to show up. It's highly unlikely that the contests for Congress or the state legislatures will make them feel as if their votes make a difference. Both parties have succeeded in drawing district lines in ways that cement their power by eliminating contested elections.

The Supreme Court is poised to rule in a case that could put limits on this partisan gerrymandering and put power back where it belongs: with the voters. The plaintiffs have already made a compelling case, but two recent events — an investigation in Texas and a court ruling in Georgia — underscore the need for the Supreme Court to act against the scourge of partisan line-drawing.

Totalitarian nations hold elections, but what sets democracies apart is offering real choices in elections. In recent years, contests for the House of Representatives and state legislatures have looked more and more like the Iraqi election in 2002, when Saddam Hussein claimed 100 percent of the vote for his re-election. In that same year in the United States, 80 of the 435 House races did not even include candidates from both major parties. Congressional races whose outcomes were in real doubt were a rarity: nearly 90 percent had a margin of victory of 10 percentage points or more. It is much the same at the state level, only worse. In New York, more than 98 percent of the state legislators who run for re-election win, usually overwhelmingly. Anyone who knows anything about New York's state government knows that's not because the populace is thrilled with the job they're doing.

A major reason legislative elections are becoming a charade is that the parties that control the redistricting process now routinely follow the dictum of "pack, crack and pair." They pack voters from the other party into a single district and crack centers of opposition strength, dispersing opponents to districts where they will be in the minority. They redraw lines so two incumbents from the other party will wind up in one district, fighting for a single seat. Using powerful computers, line-drawers can now determine, with nearly scientific precision, how many loyal party voters need to be stuffed into any given district to make it impregnable.

This sort of hyperpartisan line-drawing was evident in Texas last year, when Republicans pushed through a plan that, by aggressively packing and cracking Democratic voters, could unseat as many as 8 of the state's 17 Democratic members of Congress. Now a local prosecutor is investigating charges that a political action committee run by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, may have illegally used corporate contributions to help Republicans take control of the State House of Representatives — control that the party needed to have a free hand in redrawing new Congressional districts. The investigation is revealing just how much planning Mr. DeLay and the national party put into their Texas strategy, which seems to have involved every political player in the state except the voters.

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Quote of note:

Total Poverty Awareness
By DAVID K. SHIPLER

CHEVY CHASE, Md. - Thanks to the focus by John Edwards on the "two Americas," the working poor have become a topic in the Democratic presidential race. Let's hope they will remain so as we move into the general election. Yet nearly 40 years after the national War on Poverty began, much of the public conversation and official response remains disconnected from the real lives of poor families. Instead of approaching poverty as a whole made up of many parts, we tend to address it bit by bit. It's like having all the pieces of a puzzle before you, but letting them lie scattered and unlinked.

Some educators and other specialists speak of a "culture of poverty" as if it were a collection of mores, values and rituals. But poverty is not a culture. It's more like an ecological system of relationships among individuals, families and the environment of schools, neighborhoods, jobs and government services. Professionals who aid the poor witness the toxic interactions every day. Doctors see patients affected by dangerous housing, erratic work schedules, transportation difficulties and poor child-rearing skills. Teachers see pupils undermined by violence at home and malnutrition.

About 35 million Americans live below the federal poverty line. Their opportunities are defined by forces that may look unrelated, but decades of research have mapped the web of connections. A 1987 study of 215 children attributed differences in I.Q. in part to "social risk factors" like maternal anxiety and stress, which are common features of impoverished households. Research in the 1990's demonstrated how the paint and pipes of slum housing - major sources of lead - damage the developing brains of children. Youngsters with elevated lead levels have lower I.Q.'s and attention deficits, and - according to a 1990 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine - were seven times more likely to drop out of school.

Take the case of an 8-year-old boy in Boston. He was frequently missing school because of asthma attacks, and his mother was missing work so often for doctors' appointments that she was in danger of losing her low-wage job. It was a case typical of poor neighborhoods, where asthma runs rampant among children who live amid the mold, dust mites, roaches and other triggers of the disease.

Pediatricians at the Boston Medical Center did what they could with inhalers and steroids, and then dispatched a nurse to inspect the family's apartment. She found a leaky pipe and a wall-to-wall carpet where mites could survive the most vigorous vacuuming. The mother asked the landlord to repair the pipe and remove the rug. Nothing happened. The nurse wrote the landlord a letter. Nothing.

So the pediatrics department turned to its staff of five lawyers, hired for just this kind of situation. "After two telephone conversations with our lawyer," said Dr. Barry Zuckerman, the department's chairman, "the landlord took up the carpeting and fixed the leaky pipe." Within weeks, the boy was back in school regularly and his mother was able to keep her job.

This is a model of what needs to be done for low-income families. Unfortunately, it is employed too rarely by private and government agencies, which tend to tackle only the problem the poor present to a particular office. The assistance is often shallow and temporary and, as a result, leaves people vulnerable to the next crisis.

Most doctors, teachers and police officers have no way to reach outside their jurisdictions. That is why Dr. Zuckerman, using donations, has hired lawyers and social workers to help patients press for safe housing, Medicaid and other benefits. He estimates that about 25 clinics around the country are doing the same. "As pediatricians," he says, "we see failed social policies on the faces and bodies of children daily."

Government is especially bad at connecting the dots. Health is over here, housing over there; budgets are separate and are protected by officials with entrenched interests. Practically every program has its own eligibility requirements and forms, and many working people simply can't take time off the clock to trek from waiting room to waiting room. One-third of those eligible don't get food stamps, according to the Census Bureau, and about 30 percent of the poor who are entitled to Medicaid are not enrolled.

One remedy, tried by community action centers created by the War on Poverty, put a variety of specialists under one roof. Their effectiveness unsettled politicians. "Mayors didn't like them because they were doing something that was very good," recalls Frances Fox Piven, a professor of political science and sociology at City University of New York. "They were badgering municipal agencies to provide services." The money for the centers eventually dried up.

Decades later we are still testing this idea, now called "one-stop shopping," as if it were some dubious proposition. Since last July in five California school districts, applications for subsidized lunches have been used as applications for Medicaid as well. What has to be proven for the rest of the state to follow? In Chicago, schools get computerized lists of children who are enrolled in the lunch program but not in Medicaid. Why not in all of America's schools? Job placement is done at a few public housing sites; why not at every one?

We need more than patchwork projects. We need a sweeping national program to create what could be called gateways. At private and public institutions that are frequented every day — clinics, schools, food banks, housing projects, police precincts and the like — a person should be able to find easy referrals to child-rearing instruction, drug treatment and other assistance.

What works is an intensive, holistic approach like the one used by the Maya Angelou Charter School in Washington. The school brings its 100 students in for breakfast and keeps them until after dinner. They have small classes, homework sessions with 75 volunteers and counseling from three full-time social workers and a psychologist. Most students arrive in 10th grade reading at sixth- or seventh-grade levels; three years later 70 percent go to college. The cost isn't low — it runs over $25,000 annually per student — but it is a humane investment, one that is helped in part by donations. With more money, the school could become a platform for supporting whole families.

The amalgam of charity and government can be effective, but the full force of the nation's financial power can be mobilized only by the federal government. Only then can we alter the ecology of poverty.

David K. Shipler, a former Times correspondent, won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He is the author, most recently, of "The Working Poor: Invisible in America."

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The Wrong Man to Promote Democracy
By KAMEL LABIDI

CAIRO — This week, President Bush played host to President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia, giving this ruthless autocrat a long-coveted audience at the White House. To his credit, Mr. Bush rebuked Mr. ben Ali for his violations of press freedom, but the United States is sorely mistaken if it believes that democracy and the rule of law can ever take hold under leaders like Mr. ben Ali. The Bush administration's welcome of Mr. ben Ali makes America's aggressive promotion of democratic reform in the Arab world ring hollow.

It's not obvious from Mr. Bush's public statements, but Tunisia today is one of the world's most efficient police states. Since his ouster of President Habib Bourguiba in a coup in 1987, Mr. ben Ali has quashed virtually all dissent and silenced a civil society that once was an example of vibrancy for North Africa and the neighboring Middle East. In the early 1990's, the regime cracked down on the country's Islamist movement, arbitrarily arresting thousands of suspected activists and subjecting them to torture and unfair trials. Mr. ben Ali then extended his crackdown to human rights defenders, opposition leaders and independent journalists. (I, for example, was stripped of my accreditation after 19 years as a journalist following the publication of an interview with a human rights advocate.)

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Remember the mad rush to jam every item on the conservative extremist wish list into law immediately after the Bushistas occupied the White House? Think back past 9/11, I'm sure you'll remember. Think about the redistricting plans, the strong-arm tactics that have destroyed long-standing traditions that balanced control and respect in Congress.

There is a reason for all this that everyone needs to remember. The Bushista program is so pro-Corporation that it is anti-human. I mean anti-real-flesh-and-blood-human, not the carnivorous fire-breathing legal fictions created by perverting the 14^th amendment that stalk the social and economic landscapes.

Every decision the Bushistas have made benefited some corporate supporter or another, and no corporate supported has been displeased. But not every item on the Conservative Extremist program will find some human it appeals to, and some (like all the cheap labor initiatives) will be downright painful to humans, pretty much across the political board. Sooner or later they would run out of things that humans would support as opposed to accept or fail to resist. Sooner or later they would put forth proposals even humans that mistook corporate support that incidentally benefited them will find against their personal moral agenda.

That moment may be upon us.

Outcry on Right Over Bush Plan on Immigration By RACHEL L. SWARNS

CHICAGO, Feb. 20 — Amid the crowded field of Republicans vying for a seat in the Senate here, Jim Oberweis seems a most unlikely insurgent. He is a wealthy supporter of President Bush who favors pinstriped suits, tax cuts and a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Oberweis, a plainspoken dairy owner, has become a leader in a widening conservative revolt against the president's sweeping plan to grant temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.

"The president's plan is just plain wrong," Mr. Oberweis says in a radio advertisement and at public appearances that have drawn hundreds of supporters to his campaign. "I want to be the voice for Illinois voters to tell the president we think illegal immigration cannot be rewarded with amnesty."

Mr. Oberweis is a symbol of a simmering conservative uprising against one of the president's biggest initiatives. One month after Mr. Bush promised the most comprehensive overhaul of immigration law in nearly two decades, opposition to his plan is mounting among conservative Republicans vying for votes in House and Senate races in Illinois, North Carolina, California, Kansas and elsewhere.

With his plan, Mr. Bush hopes to revamp an immigration system widely viewed as broken and to re-establish his credentials as a compassionate conservative — particularly with Hispanic and swing voters — at the start of an election year. But in debates, campaign stops and interviews, some Republican candidates have sharply criticized his position as they seek to tap into conservative anxiety over the proposal.

The plan has left the party divided, much like the growing deficit has. Some Republicans — backed by some Hispanic constituents — praise the president for trying to make it easier for businesses to employ illegal immigrants for low-wage jobs that Americans are reluctant to take. Others argue that the plan is tantamount to an amnesty for lawbreakers. The issue is so complicated and divisive that Republicans in Congress now say it is unlikely that legislation supporting the president's plan will be introduced this year.

And if it isn't, it would be good to talk as if it were.

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Oh, well. It's not like he's going to gain support by this practice. All he can do is slow the bleeding.

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via TalkLeft

Pryor Appointed to Federal Court - Updated Post
by TChris

President Bush will, for a second time, use a recess appointment to install a judicial nominee on the federal bench who failed to win Senate approval. Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor will be appointed to the Eleventh Circuit this afternoon. Democrats opposed Pryor's appointment for reasons that TalkLeft reported last year.

Bush used a recess appointment last month to place Charles W. Pickering Sr. on the federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Both appointments will last until the next Congress takes office in January.

It seems likely that Bush made these appointments to appease conservatives who have been critical of the President's actions (and particularly his spending) outside of Iraq. Bypassing the Senate and appointing judges who are likely to favor conservative interests helps the President shore up his base of support.

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February 20, 2004

Sit through the boring part. I'm going to explain something fundamental.

This is a scatter plot.

Scatter Plots (also called scatter diagrams) are used to investigate the possible relationship between two variables that both relate to the same "event." A straight line of best fit (using the least squares method) is often included.

Things to look for:

* If the points cluster in a band running from lower left to upper right, there is a positive correlation (if x increases, y increases).
* If the points cluster in a band from upper left to lower right, there is a negative correlation (if x increases, y decreases).
* Imagine drawing a straight line or curve through the data so that it "fits" as well as possible. The more the points cluster closely around the imaginary line of best fit, the stronger the relationship that exists between the two variables.
* If it is hard to see where you would draw a line, and if the points show no significant clustering, there is probably no correlation.

Caution!

There is a maxim in statistics that says, "Correlation does not imply causality." In other words, your scatter plot may show that a relationship exists, but it does not and cannot prove that one variable is causing the other. There could be a third factor involved which is causing both, some other systemic cause, or the apparent relationship could just be a fluke. Nevertheless, the scatter plot can give you a clue that two things might be related, and if so, how they move together.
Scatter Plot statistics:

For scatter plots, the following statistics are calculated:

Mean X and Y:	the average of all the data points in the series.
Maximum X and Y:	the maximum value in the series.
Minimum X and Y	the minimum value in the series.
Sample Size	the number of values in the series.
X Range and Y Range	the maximum value minus the minimum value.
Standard Deviations for X and Y values	Indicates how widely data is spread around the mean.
Line of Best Fit - Slope	The slope of the line which fits the data most closely (generally using the least squares method).
Line of Best Fit - Y Intercept	The point at which the line of best fit crosses the Y axis.

No, I did not write that.

Here's the point. All the individual data points on the graph represent events. The line of best fit represents the general statement you can make based on your having observed and recorded the particular events you have. And very few actual events fall exactly on the line.

The data points are market transactions. The line of best fit is economics.
The data points are people. The line of best fit is Black people.
The data points are actions. The line of best fit is ethics.
The data points are what happened. The line of best fit is what you think happened.

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What Gives Texas A&M the Right?
By GREG MOSES

[Editors' Note: During February the Texas Civil Rights Review uncovered documents from a specially appointed task force at Texas A&M that recommended strongly in favor of affirmative action on Aug. 29, 2003. That finding was over-ruled by the President and buried from public view. Following is the cover story that will appear for the next month at the Texas Civil Rights Review.]

During the Fall Semester of 2003, Texas A&M University President Robert Gates put the Civil Rights Act in his pocket and he left it there until people thought it was his. And when he refused to take it out of his pocket ever again, people said, okay, he can do that. But can he?

Can the President of a University pocket-veto the Civil Rights Act? Ultimately this is a question for the federal government to decide. It would make a fine question for our Presidential candidates. If elected president, Mr. Kerry or Mr. Edwards, will you enforce the Civil Rights Act in College Station, Texas?

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Edwards sees 'personal responsibility' on civil rights
By MIKE GLOVER
The Associated Press
2/20/04 6:46 PM

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) -- Broadening his populist economic theme, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Friday his background as a Southern politician gives him "an enormous personal responsibility" to be a leading advocate for civil rights.

Edwards, who was born in South Carolina and grew up in North Carolina, said the segregation he witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s converted him to a lifelong advocate for civil rights. The 50-year-old Edwards would have been a young child in the '50s.

"I believe those of us from the South carry a special responsibility when it comes to issues of equality, race and civil rights," he said. "That responsibility, by the way, is to lead, not follow, when it comes to issues of civil rights."

…In building on his second-place showing in the Wisconsin primary, Edwards hopes the trade theme will resonate in key states with primaries March 2. In Georgia, he also courted the black vote, an important constituency in a state he is targeting for special attention.

"I have, as many of you have, seen the ugliest face of segregation and discrimination, young African-American kids sent upstairs in movie theaters, white-only signs on restaurants and lunch counters," he said. "We have such an enormous responsibility, I feel an enormous personal responsibility."

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And if you're a writer, save the page.

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Appropriate disinterest

What these guys have failed to understand about rejection is that it isn’t personal. If you’re a writer, you’re more or less constitutionally incapable of understanding that last sentence, if you think there’s any chance that it applies to you and your book; so please just imagine that I’m talking about rejections that happen to all those other writers who aren’t you.

Anyway, as I was saying, it realio trulio honestly isn’t about you the writer per se. If you got rejected, it wasn’t because we think you’re an inadequate human being. We just don’t want to buy your book. To tell you the truth, chances are we didn’t even register your existence as a unique and individual human being. You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper. And that’s as it should be, because when readers buy our books, the words on the paper are what they get.

This all becomes clearer if you think about it with your reader-mind instead of your author-mind. Authors with books are like mothers with infants: theirs is the center of the universe, uniquely wonderful, and will inevitably and infallibly be loved by all who make its acquaintance. This has its good aspects; books, like infants, need someone to unconditionally love them, and champion all their causes. On the other hand, it can be a form of blindness.

Your reader-mind has a different understanding of the whole book thing. Your reader-mind knows what it’s like to walk into a bookstore, or a Costco, or a Target, and confront a wire rack the size of your living-room wall, with slot after slot filled with books. At that moment, standing there in front of that rack, you don’t much care about encouraging new writers, or helping create a more diverse literary scene, or giving some author a chance to express herself. You want a book that will please you, and suit your needs, and do it right now. Dear reader, you are many things, but “gentle” isn’t one of them.

You may be a tired middle manager who just wants some fast-moving entertainment, or a teenager who wants entertaining, non-embarrassing books that tell you how the world works, or a language-sensitive reader hoping for a book where the sentences and paragraphs don’t hurt. You could be looking for something more specific—a Regency romance, a sexy vampire novel, or the numinous landscapes and significant personal actions of genre fantasy. Your single likeliest choice, statistically speaking, is a book by an author whose other works you’ve read and enjoyed, because you know it’s a good bet that you’ll enjoy this one too. But whatever it is, it’s all about you.

Thus the reader-mind in action. If you-the-writer can catch that reader’s attention with an intriguing premise, and further seduce them with well-written prose as they go flipping through the pages, there’s some chance they’ll buy it. If they like the book, next time around you’ll be one of the author names they’ll be looking for. And if they really like the book, or if they’ve read and enjoyed two or three of your books, they may begin to wonder about you as a person. But not before.

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This one will have links scattered all over hell and back.

Sebastian Holsclaw, who visits here periodically and DESPERATELY NEEDS TO GET THE RIGHT PERMALINKS INTO HIS RSS FEED gives props to a Corante blog I used to read that is dealing with one of my "favorite" subjects.

Pharmaceutical Prices Derek Lowe has a number of excellent posts on the problems of drug research. His most recent series focuses on the high cost of research and the difficulty in recovering the costs. His posts are:

Darn Those R&D Costs Anyway

The Contact Sport of Cost Accounting

More on Prices, High and Otherwise

Drug Prices and Costs--From the Mail

He has one of my very favorite quotes on the subject: "There will be more next week on drug costs and research spending (the mail keeps on coming!), but no matter what, I think we can assume that the two are somehow related."

The strangest thing is that many people act as if drug costs and research spending are at closest, distantly related. I say 'act'. I'm sure that if you cornered them, they would admit that there is some relation between the two. But many people who want to talk about the subject are shockingly incurious about how much other industries spend on 'marketing, advertising and administration'. They aren't interested in investigating the high failure rate of drug companies.

Anyway, if you are interested in such topics, you should read articles by someone who knows. And Derek Lowe's articles are a great place to start.

I linked to the posts that actually say something.

Derek Lowe, in turn, links to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:

Firms spend on R&D from the day the development process begins up until the day the drug is approved for marketing which may be a decade or more later. But a dollar spent early in the process could have been earning interest in the bank for years before marketing approval is achieved. Recognizing this, DiMasi et al. calculate the cost of the drug as if all the money had been spent on the day the drug was approved.

Is this unreasonable? Well, suppose you lend me $5000 - how much would you want back in a year, in 2 years, in 10 years? The longer the loan period the more you would expect back when the loan came due, right? This is exactly the same calculation performed by DiMasi et al.

This is a common calculation. It is nonsense because

1. The money was NOT spent all on day the drug was approved
2. Most of the money spent was Federal money

The question is not whether the calculation is accurate. It is whether the calculation has any bearing on reality. See how simple it is when you deal in reality instead of just abstractions?

Mr. Lowe also links to a WSJ rant which may be fairly summed up as:

"Damn those Democrats anyway."

I rarely link to rants per se.

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Jesse at Pandagon has a bit of brilliant satire up.

CONSERVATIVE SPICES [John Derbyshire]
Are there distinctly conservative spices, a reader asks? Well, I would argue that Mrs. Dash promotes a constancy and a reverence for marriage that are otherwise absent from most mainstream spices.
Posted at 07:42 AM

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The Tragedy of Colin Powell
How the Bush presidency destroyed him.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004, at 9:56 AM PT

Is Colin Powell melting down?

It's hard to come up with another explanation for his jaw-dropping behavior last week before the House International Relations Committee. There he sat, recounting for the umpety-umpth time why, back in February 2003, he believed the pessimistic estimates about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I went and lived at the CIA for about four days," he began, "to make sure that nothing was—" Suddenly, he stopped and glared at a Democratic committee staffer who was smirking and shaking his head. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man back there?" Powell grumbled. "Are you part of the proceedings?"

Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, objected, "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."

Powell muttered back, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you, giving editorial comment by head shakes."

Oh, my.

Here is a man who faced hardships in the Bronx as a kid, bullets in Vietnam as a soldier, and bureaucratic bullets through four administrations in Washington, a man who rose to the ranks of Army general, national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state, a man who thought seriously about running for president—and he gets bent out of shape by some snarky House staffer?

Powell's outburst is a textbook sign of overwhelming stress. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Then again, he's also been having a bad three years.

As George Bush's first term nears its end, Powell's tenure as top diplomat is approaching its nadir. On the high-profile issues of the day, he seems to have almost no influence within the administration. And his fateful briefing one year ago before the U.N. Security Council—where he attached his personal credibility to claims of Iraqi WMD—has destroyed his once-considerable standing with the Democrats, not to mention our European allies, most of the United Nations, and the media.

At times, Powell has taken his fate with resigned humor. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last year of a diplomatic soiree that Powell attended on the eve of war, at which a foreign diplomat recited a news account that Bush was sleeping like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, "I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

At other times, though, Powell must be frustrated beyond measure. One can imagine the scoldings he takes from liberal friends for playing "good soldier" in an administration that's treated him so shabbily and that's rejected his advice so brazenly. That senseless dressing-down of the committee staffer—a tantrum that no one with real power would ever indulge in—can best be seen as a rare public venting of Powell's maddened mood.

The decline of Powell's fortunes is a tragic tale of politics: so much ambition derailed, so much accomplishment nullified.

From the start of this presidency, and to a degree that no one would have predicted when he stepped into Foggy Bottom with so much pride and energy, Powell has found himself almost consistently muzzled, outflanked, and humiliated by the true powers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Bureaucratic battles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon have been a feature of many presidencies, but Powell has suffered the additional—and nearly unprecedented—indignity of swatting off continuous rear-guard assaults from his own undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an aggressive hard-liner who was installed at State by Cheney* for the purpose of diverting and exhausting the multilateralists.)

One of Powell's first acts as secretary of state was to tell a reporter that the Bush administration would pick up where Bill Clinton left off in negotiations with North Korea—only to be told by Cheney that it would do no such thing. He had to retract his statement. For the next nine months, he disappeared so definitively that Time magazine asked, on its cover of Sept. 10, 2001, "Where Is Colin Powell?"

The events and aftermath of 9/11 put Powell still farther on the sidelines. He scored something of a victory a year later, when Bush decided, over the opposition of Cheney and Rumsfeld, to take his case for war against Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly. But Powell's attempts to resolve the crisis diplomatically ended in failure.

Once the invasion got under way, the principles of warfare that he'd enunciated as a general—the need to apply overwhelming force on the battlefield (which, during the last Gulf War, was dubbed the "Powell Doctrine")—were harshly rejected (and, in this case, rightly so—Rumsfeld's plan to invade with lighter, more agile forces was a stunning success, at least in the battlefield phase of the war). Powell's objections to Ariel Sharon's departure from the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" were overridden by a White House where Eliot Abrams had been put in charge of Middle East policy. Powell's statements on the Middle East came to be so widely ignored—because no one saw them as reflecting U.S. policy—that Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to the region when he wanted to send a message that would be taken seriously. When Bush dispatched an emissary to Western Europe after the war to lobby for Iraqi debt-cancellation and make overtures for renewing alliances, he picked not Powell but James Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and his father's secretary of state.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk-assessment firm, notes that Powell has scored significant policy achievements on China, Georgia, and the India-Pakistan dispute. But these are issues over which neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld has much at stake—politically, ideologically, or financially.

There have also been occasions, on higher-profile topics, when Powell has broken through the barricades and advanced his positions. He (and Condi Rice) persuaded Bush, over Rumsfeld's opposition, to implement the U.S.-Russian accord reducing strategic missiles. However, he couldn't stop the president from pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty.

Last September, Powell met with President Bush in the Oval Office to make the case for presenting a new U.N. resolution on the occupation of Iraq—and to announce that the Joint Chiefs agreed with him. This was a daring move: Rumsfeld opposed going back to the United Nations; Powell, the retired general, had gone around him for support. Even here, though, Powell's triumph was partial, at best. Bush went back to the United Nations, but the resulting resolution did not call for internationalizing political power in Iraq to anywhere near the degree that Powell favored.

Similarly, Powell has had a few successes at getting Bush to participate in negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons program. (Cheney and Rumsfeld oppose even sitting down for talks.) Yet Bush has declined to adopt any position on what an acceptable accord, short of North Korea's unilateral disarmament, might be. More than a year into this perilous drama, the fundamentals of U.S. policy haven't changed at all.

Powell has also won the occasional battle—or, more accurately, has been on the winning side—when his position converges with Bush's vital political interests. For instance, against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Bush will probably turn over at least some political control in Iraq to the United Nations. He will do so not because Powell has advised such a course, but because the presidential election is coming up and Bush needs to show voters that he has an exit strategy and that American soldiers will not be dying in Baghdad and Fallujah indefinitely.

If there is a second Bush term, Powell will almost certainly not be in it. News stories have reported that he'll step down. He has stopped short of quitting already not just because he's a good soldier, but because that's not what ambitious Cabinet officers do in American politics. Those who resign in protest usually write themselves out of power for all time. They are unlikely to be hired even after the opposition party resumes the Executive Office because they're seen as loose cannons.

Powell, who at one point might have been an attractive presidential candidate for either party, has fallen into a double-damned trap. He can't quit for reasons cited above; yet his often-abject loyalty to Bush, especially on the Iraq question, makes him an unseemly candidate for a future Democratic administration.

He seems to have launched a rehabilitation campaign, to escape this dreaded state. Last month, after David Kay resigned as the CIA's chief weapons inspector and proclaimed that Iraq probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction after all, Powell told a reporter that he might not have favored going to war if he'd known there were no WMD a year ago. He almost instantly retracted his words, as all internal critics of Bush policies seem to do.

Powell's best option, after January, may be to abandon his ambitions for further public office, nab a lucrative job in the private sector, and write the most outrageous kiss-and-tell political memoir that the world has ever seen.

Correction, Feb. 19, 2004: The piece originally identified John Bolton as the No. 2 in the State Department. In fact, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary, is the department's No. 2. Bolton is one of six under secretaries. Return to the corrected sentence.

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Edwards wants Sharpton, Kucinich out of debate
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Since former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean ended his presidential run, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina sees only two viable Democratic Party candidates and wants at least one debate without the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio.

Mr. Edwards said the two front-runners — Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and himself — should have a one-on-one debate before the Super Tuesday primaries on March 2.

Donna Brazile, head of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, agreed, adding that the top candidates should have a chance to face off during Thursday's debate sponsored by CNN and the Los Angeles Times.

"It's probably too much to get them to move aside and allow us to see a one-on-one debate between the two viable contenders," Ms. Brazile said. "Sharpton and Kucinich have been great participants in all the debates, but this is the playoffs."

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Don at Nitecrawler gets TWO links for this one.

the heterosexual agenda

I'm here today my friends to expose a great evil perpetrated on our great nation. I'm talking about the evil of heterosexuality. Heterosexuals have quietly and insidiously taken control of nearly every aspect of our culture.

Consider the institution of marriage, which is completely controlled by heterosexuals for the sole purpose of advancing their perverted agenda and passing it on to their innocent and vulnerable children in order to expose countless future generations. Here are a few simple facts about heterosexual marriage which they would rather you not know about:

Most sexual abuse of children happens in heterosexual families, with a parent being the most common perpetrator. In fact, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, it is estimated hundreds of thousands of children are physically abused each year by a parent or close relative.

And, according to one set of statistics, of the nearly 3 million reported referrals of child abuse to state or local agencies in 1998, three quarters of the perpetrators were parents.

In short, heterosexual marriage is bad for children!

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Plan for Caucuses In Iraq Is Dropped
U.S. to Seek New Transition Process

By Robin Wright and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 20, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration is abandoning the core idea of its plan to hold regional caucuses for an Iraqi provisional government and will instead work with the United Nations and Iraqis to develop yet another plan for the transfer of political power by June 30, U.N. and U.S. officials said yesterday.

The decision, forced by rejection of the caucus system by a wide range of Iraqis, means that the Coalition Provisional Authority led by the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, will instead hand over authority to a caretaker government until direct elections can be held, officials said.

In a meeting at the United Nations yesterday, Secretary General Kofi Annan told a gathering of diplomats with interests in Iraq that the Iraqis themselves should determine the participants and form of a caretaker government that will be credible to Iraq's disparate society, according to U.N. officials who attended.

Annan is prepared to dispatch his special envoy, former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, back to Baghdad in the coming weeks to help mediate a new formula if the Iraqis and the U.S.-led coalition do not come up with another plan, U.N. diplomats and U.S. officials said.

"We need to find a mechanism to create a caretaker government and . . . help prepare the elections later," Annan told reporters after briefing U.N. members who belong to the world body's 46-nation Friends of Iraq group.

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CIA Struggles to Spy in Iraq, Afghanistan
Security problems and short-term assignments hamstring the agency, sources say. Its Baghdad chief is again replaced and outposts are closed.
By Greg Miller and Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writers

February 20, 2004

WASHINGTON — Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns about that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources.

The previously undisclosed moves underscore the problems affecting the agency's clandestine service at a time when it is confronting insurgencies and the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, current and former CIA officers say. They said a series of stumbles and operational constraints have hampered the agency's ability to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, find Osama bin Laden and gain traction against terrorism in the Middle East.

The CIA's Baghdad station has become the largest in agency history, eclipsing the size of its post in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, a U.S. official said. But sources said the agency has struggled to fill a number of key overseas posts.

Many of those who do take sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve only 30- to 90-day rotations, a revolving-door approach that has undercut the agency's ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, sources said.

There is such a shortage of Arabic speakers and qualified case officers willing to take dangerous assignments that the agency has been forced to hire dozens — if not hundreds — of CIA retirees, and to lean heavily on translators, sources said. The agency has also had to use soldiers for tasks that CIA officers normally perform, sources said.

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Republicans waiting for Bush to sharpen his focus
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 2/20/2004

WASHINGTON -- Republicans are increasingly worried about President Bush's reelection prospects as he struggles to combat questions about his credibility and as some polls released this week indicate that he is trailing his Democratic rivals by significant margins.

Members of the president's party said he must better control the information coming out of the administration -- which in the last two weeks has been forced to backtrack on an assertion that "outsourcing" jobs overseas is good for the economy and on an overly rosy jobs forecast. They also want him to control surging government spending that has opened him up to charges of fiscal irresponsibility.

A poll released yesterday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center indicated sharp increases in the numbers of voters concerned about the rising deficit and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That poll indicated Bush was tied with Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts in a prospective matchup, but others indicated Kerry was far ahead -- 12 percentage points in a CNN poll by the Gallup organization.

"I would describe the mood among conservatives right now as frightened," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group that supports Republican policies.

Republicans who expressed concern about Bush's prospects point out that the president has eight months to improve his standing before facing voters and that criticism of the president has gotten a lot of attention from the news media as Democratic candidates compete for their party's nomination.

But they add that many of the president's problems have been self-inflicted. The concerns about job creation and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been exacerbated by his administration's refusal to acknowledge the extent of the problems. His appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" was weak, they said. And his administration has failed to control federal spending, contributing to a budget deficit that has exploded past $500 billion.

"For the first time," said a top staff member for a GOP senator, "some Republicans are facing the prospect that the president could lose."

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Bush hit hard in primary season
By Nancy Benac, Associated Press, 2/20/2004

WASHINGTON -- The presidential primary season has been good for Democrats and tough on President Bush, according to a national poll released yesterday.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press indicated that the public's impression of the Democratic field has been improving as the candidates have battled for their party's nomination -- with 45 percent now viewing the field positively, compared to 31 percent a month earlier. Bush's overall favorability rating still is positive at 53 percent, but it was 72 percent last April, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, and is at the low point of his presidency.

Likewise, Bush's job-approval rating has dropped to 48 percent, the first time in his presidency that it has fallen below 50 percent, according to the poll.

"I'm a little surprised by how negative people are toward Bush personally," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew poll. He said the negative views of Bush might be linked to the high number of people who are paying attention to the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Three-fourths say they are following the issue very or fairly closely.

When the pollsters asked people for a one-word description of Bush, equal shares gave positive and negative responses. Last May positive answers outnumbered the negative 2-to-1. The most frequently used negative word this time was "liar," which was not used last May. The most frequently used positive description this time was "honest," the same as last May.

The shifting perceptions of Bush and the Democrats have been accompanied by changing expectations for the outcome of the general election this fall -- 51 percent now think Bush will win, compared with 61 percent a month earlier. Among Democrats, 25 percent now think Bush will win; 38 percent did in January.

Kohut said Republicans did not enjoy a similar boost in 1996, the last time there was a contested primary to determine who would take on an incumbent president, Bill Clinton. "When Bob Dole seemed likely to be the nominee, there wasn't this big bounce for him," Kohut said. "This has been a surprise how much attention the public's paid and how favorably they've responded to the Democrats generally."

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Let's see if The Enron Kid gets away with this.

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Delay, discredit key to defense
Skilling will want change in venue
By Robert Manor
Tribune staff reporter

February 20, 2004

Defense lawyers say former Enron Corp. Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling will try to delay his trial, move it as far as possible from Houston and then try to convince jurors the prosecution's star witness, former Enron finance chief Andrew Fastow, is an outrageous liar.

Skilling, who was charged Thursday with 35 counts of fraud, insider trading and other crimes, faces up to 325 years in prison and fines totaling more than $80 million if convicted on all counts. He also faces more than $60 million in fines stemming from a civil suit filed Thursday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Attorneys say he faces major obstacles in the case but that there are legal tactics that can give him a better chance of acquittal, or at least a hung jury.

The first is to put off the trial as long as possible. Lawyers say a lengthy delay is probable because the case is complex.

"I don't see this case coming to trial anytime soon," said Neal Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor and former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

While he awaits trial, some of the attention focused on Skilling will diminish, Sonnett said.

Skilling's lawyers also are likely to ask for a change of venue out of Houston, where thousands of people lost their jobs and life savings when the energy company collapsed.

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with apologies to Jiddu Krishnamurti…

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Is Your Religion Unsanitary?

That great genius heretic Joseph Campbell summed it up best when he said, "The wicked thing about both the little and the great 'collective faiths', prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known.

"They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the 'error of the found truth,' or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

"They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and, therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society."

…Of course, it must be noted that there are millions who believe in a gentle form of organized religion, a tolerant, forgiving Christian God, persons who are warm and open minded and who do not ever attempt to shove their beliefs down anyone's throat. They are kind and selfless and practice their beliefs quietly, tenderly, in their own nontoxic way. This is glorious and good. This is not the slightest problem. This is, in fact, to be encouraged.

But, sadly, these people are strongly overshadowed, publicly overpowered, by the far more outspoken and well-organized religious fire breathers who attempt to set the spiritual agenda for America and delineate what actions we can take and what kind of sex we can have and whom we can and cannot love. It is these karmically scrunched people whom we are now working to save. And it is the call of any true patriotic, open-minded American to come to the aid of the misinformed and the lost. You know who you are.

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This site is in the process of being Slashdotted, so you might want to try checking the video tomorrow.

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Welcome to Humboldt County. Papers, Please.
No? You're Under Arrest.

On the evening of the 21st of May, 2000, Dudley Hiibel stepped out of his red 1988 GMC pick-up truck and lit a cigarette. The pick-up was parked on the side of Grass Valley Road, a rural stretch of asphalt that leads out of the mining town of Winnemucca into the rural cattle ranching area where Dudley lives and farms.

The pick-up had been driven by Dudley's 17 year-old daughter Mimi, with whom Dudley had been having an argument over a boy Dudley didn't approve of that she'd been seeing in town. Mimi got mad at her dad and punched him in the shoulder. They continued shouting at one another as they drove back to to the ranch, and Mimi eventually pulled over the truck after her dad said he wanted out.

That's what Dudley Hiibel was doing that May evening in 2000: standing on the side of Grass Valley Road smoking a cigarette, his elbow resting on the rolled-down passenger window, talking with his daughter.

Then the police arrived.

Deputy Lee Dove of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department came on the scene - siren a-wailing - in response to a domestic violence report. Someone saw Mimi arguing with her dad and thought it had come to blows. The witness said that he saw "a man with a black cowboy hat" who "slugged the female". Dove was there to investigate the report.

Everything that happened next is all on videotape... you be the judge.

If you think that the first thing Deputy Dove would do on the scene would be to make sure the 'slugged female' was all right, you would be wrong. Deputy Dove never asked or even looked at Mimi until she had been thrown to the ground face-first and handcuffed.

But that comes later in the story.

Rather than investigate the complaint, Deputy Dove (who has twice had evidence he collected suppressed by the court) instead began to demand Dudley Hiibel show his ID. Eleven times Dove demanded Dudley show 'his papers'. Dudley asked a simple question: why?

"Because I'm investigating", said Dove.

"Investigating what?" Dudley asked.

"I'm investigating an investigation" was Dove's non-reply.

Eleven times Dove demanded Dudley's ID. And when the Deputy decided Dudley wasn't "going to cooperate", he cuffed, then tossed him in the back of his patrol car.

Meanwhile, Dudley's daughter was watching the encounter between her dad and the Law from the cab of the pick-up truck. You can hear her screaming "Nooo" as her father is being handcuffed.

Another policeman, a Nevada state trooper by the name of Merschel, was on the scene and was holding the door of the pick-up truck shut so that Mimi couldn't get out. Screaming, she finally forced the door open only to be thrown face down into the hard dirt by the side of the road by Trooper Merschel.

The video is almost too painful to watch at this point. A second trooper climbs on top of Mimi and he and Trooper Merschel brutally pin 17 year-old Mimi to the ground and slap on the cuffs.

With Dudley Hiibel arrested for refusing to show ID and his daughter Mimi beaten and in handcuffs, Deputy Lee Dove now comes over to talk to Mimi and 'investigate'.

Dudley Hiibel was charged with Domestic Battery, Battery, Acts Which Constitute Domestic Violence, and Obstructing/Delaying A Peace Officer. As there was no battery or domestic violence involved, the only charge that was left was Delaying A Peace Officer. By refusing to show Deputy Lee Dove his ID, Dudley was fined $250.00 . He's appealling it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

It is this very charge that is now coming before the U.S. Supreme Court on the 22nd of March. The question before the Court is this: Did Dudley's refusal to show ID give Deputy Dove the probable cause needed to arrest him? Or is it the Constitutional right of every American to just say 'no' when asked to produce 'the papers'?

Mimi Hiibel was hauled-off to juvenile detention and charged with resisting arrest. In court, her father asked the judge a simple question: what charge was Mimi arrested for resisting? The case was dismissed.

Watch the video. See the incident unfold. You decide...

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FBI Proposes Warning On All Entertainment, Software Products
The FBI's seal is designed to deter individual piracy and aid in prosecuting piracy rings.
By Tony Kontzer, InformationWeek
Feb. 19, 2004

The FBI says it will give the movie, music, and software industries a digital anti-piracy seal, an analog to the FBI's warning displayed at the beginning of videotapes.

Joined by execs from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Software and Information Industry Association, and the Entertainment Software Association, FBI officials said during a Thursday press conference that the seal not only will deter individuals engaging in piracy, but that it would aid in the prosecution of piracy rings by ensuring a particular work's status as copyright-protected could not be disputed.

How the seal would be used and when it will begin to appear remains undetermined. But it could be embedded on the surface of disks or printed on packaging, or it could also be deployed as a pop-up screen during software installation. The seal, marked by the "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning" label, is accompanied by a statement that criminal copyright infringement is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

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Cdn. researcher: Cells can grow on silicon

CALGARY (CP) -- Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.

"We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced," said Naweed Syed, a neurobiologist at the University of Calgary's faculty of medicine.

The nerve cells also exhibited memory traces that were successfully read by the chip, said Syed, co-author of the landmark study published in February's edition of Physical Review Letters, an international journal.

The research was done in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Germany.

The team cultured nerve cells from a snail and placed them on a specially designed silicon chip. Using a microcapacitor on the chip, scientists stimulated one nerve cell to communicate with a second cell which transmitted that signal to multiple cells within the network.

A transistor located on the chip then recorded that conversation between cells.

Syed said the discovery is groundbreaking.

"We've made a giant leap in answering several fundamental questions of biology and neuro-electronics that will pave the way for us to harness the power of nanotechnology," he said.

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Women Tailor Sex Industry to Their Eyes
By MIREYA NAVARRO

Carlin Ross and Christina Head, a lawyer and a documentary filmmaker in New York, recently teamed up to plot new careers.

Among their first moves: Ms. Ross, 30, a general counsel to dot-coms, this month restarted an adult Web site that features "sex and love from a woman's perspective."

Ms. Head, 26, who has primarily covered subjects like inner-city youth, hopes to produce and direct pornographic films and television programming.

"It's all about empowering and educating women and, of course, I enjoy sex," Ms. Head said. "We're women. We enjoy sex."

Ms. Head and Ms. Ross are part of a growing cadre of women who are selling sex to other women, in this case what Ms. Ross calls "female empowered" adult entertainment — the kind with plots, foreplay and cuddling in the afterglow, the kind that is mindful of women's tastes and suggests new possibilities for women's pleasure.

Experts say demand by women — both heterosexual and lesbian — is driving the growth of all sorts of sex-related ventures, from stores, catalogs and sex toy companies to adult Web sites, pornographic films and cable television shows. At the same time, many women, they say, see the sex industry as a legitimate place to make a living.

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February 19, 2004

My one year blogging anniversary cometh.

I'm thinking of initializing some drama. I have a thought, and I look at my traffic and maaaaybe I can do this…That's why I'm doing all this research on lightweight CMSes like Movable Type and the Nuke descendants, why I'm going code crazy and ignoring everyone in my physical life.

I've also been thinking about what I've been posting and why. When I refer an article the choice is sometimes almost whimsical, but generally it's on a topic I think needs to be considered clearly. That doesn't mean the article will always express my position or even stand very close to my position. It will tend to be on the same side of the road as me…

At any rate, I haven't been writing as much original stuff as I first thought I would. I still get some in once in a while but the news brings me a nice fresh bunch of worries every day. And I like the way the site has evolved. It's sort of like an iceberg because the best stuff isn't visible on the front page. In general the comments are the best part of P6 in my opinion. I've learned a lot and come to understand more, and I'm sure there's more to come.

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Dear Supporter,

I am very proud of all of you and very grateful to all of you for your extraordinary hard work.

I announced today that I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency.

I am so thankful for all of you who traveled around the country, showed up at our office, worked around the clock, because you believed in what we were doing - to you, thousands of Americans who have given generously of your time, in your states, because you believed in our cause.

I want to thank the 300,000 small donors that decided that they wanted their country back.

I want to thank all the people in every state who heard our message and supported us.

We have led this party back to considering what its heart and soul is. Although there is a lot of work left to do, I am very proud of all of you and very grateful to all of you for your extraordinary hard work.

As the fight moves forward, I have some things that I specifically want to ask of you.

First, keep active in the primary. We are still on the ballots. Sending delegates to the convention only continues to energize our party. Fight on in the caucuses. Use your network to send progressive delegates to the convention in Boston. We are not going away. We are staying together, unified -- all of us.

Secondly, we will convert Dean for America into a new grassroots organization, and I hope you stay involved. We are determined to keep this entire organization vibrant. There are a lot of ways to make change. We are leaving one track, but we are going on another track that will take back America for ordinary people again.

Third, there have been a lot of people who have decided to run for office locally as a result of this campaign. I encourage you to run for office and support candidates like you who run for office. We will use this enormous organization to support you as you run -- we will change the face of democracy so that it represents ordinary Americans once again.

We must beat George W. Bush in November. I will support the nominee of our party and do everything I can to beat George W. Bush and I urge you to do the same. But we will not be above letting our nominee know that we expect them to adhere to the standards that this organization has set for decency, honesty, integrity and standing up for ordinary American working people.

One of the things that I realized a long time ago is that change is very difficult. There is enormous institutional resistance to change in this country. You cannot expect people with great privileges taken at the expense of ordinary working people to surrender them lightly.

Change is hard work. Change does not happen simply because you go to a rally and simply because you make phone calls -- and I know how hard everybody has worked. But change is a process that you can never give up on.

Change is the state of America and change is the state of humankind. The history of humanity is that determined people overcome obstacles. It is natural for people to resist, but it is also inevitable that we will win.

So we will continue to fight. This is the end of phase one of this fight, but the fight will go on, and we will be in it together. We will continue to bring our message of hope and change to the American people.

Thank you very much for everything that you have done.

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.
Stay connected at http://www.blogforamerica.com
Contribute at http://www.deanforamerica.com/contribute

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I'm looking at my server-side stats.

Discounting myself, Google and Yahoo!, P6 has served up almost 18,000 pages this month to almost 6,000 unique visitors, including RDF/RSS downloads. Even discounting the 1500 or so folks looking for post Super Bowl tit-tay, I'm pretty impressed with myself.

I know where a lot of this came from. I'm getting a LOT of hits in The Public Library. It seems some of the folks who came from the Bloggies to read the Identity Blogging thread hung around. And I'll tell you what pleases me: pre-Bloggies nomination I was averaging 1.4 page views per visit, according to Sitemeter. And that nomination brought me a big spike in traffic. And the average pages per visitor for that time frame was…1.4.

I need to rework The Public Library. All that stuff is static web pages in the design I used with Blogger. I want it to match the rest of the site, vain bastard that I am. I want it searchable. I got stuff to add. And finally, I think I want it downloadable. See, I'm not worried about traffic limits; this account gives me 40 gigs of traffic per month. And in the stats I noticed two site grabbers…and one of them, WebCopier, went for the gusto, pulling down 135 pages. This, in my opinion, is a Good Thing®. I'd just rather folks DID something with them. So I'm considering making either downloadable PDFs or a collection of plain vanilla (no flaming hands) HTML collections of the documents. It's not a big deal to do, I just have to decide where it goes in the queue.

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Dominion at A Skeptical Blog takes a look at "whites only" scholarships. Now, there's not a lot there to surprise you, but someone decided to comment on his post and Dominion makes short work of him.

One of the articles Dominion quotes allows a severe misrepresentation to pass, though:

Coday is an unknowing fool. The UNCF supports Negro Colleges, which welcome white folks.

If this is what PolSci majors learn, we are doomed as a nation.

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I was just thinking the other day that I hadn't gotten a press release from The Education Trust in a while.

The Education Trust is a pro-NCLB organization that makes what I think are fair and honest judgments about what is necessary to make NCLB work.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: 02-19-04
Contact: Don Owens
Cell: 202-302-5928
Ofc: 202-293-1245 x231

TRUST FOR EARLY EDUCATION'S AMY WILKINS' STATEMENT ON NIEER PRE-K SCHOOL READINESS REPORT
Nation's Failure to Invest in Quality Pre-Kindergarten Tied Directly to School Readiness

(Washington, DC) - Amy Wilkins, executive director of the Trust for Early Education, released the following statement regarding the National Institute for Early Education Research's report on pre-kindergarten:

"The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) has made a significant contribution to public policy discussion with its report, "The State of Preschools; 2003 State Preschool Yearbook." NIEER's Yearbook shows, state by state, that too few children in the United States have access to pre-kindergarten and those that do are getting too little in the way of high quality pre-kindergarten programs.

"The most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), indicates that 70% of 4th graders nationwide have not reached a proficient level in reading and 69% are below the proficient level in mathematics. Years of research on how children learn demonstrate conclusively that the most effective way to raise these scores is to both reach children before they enter kindergarten and provide effective instruction in the early grades. The school readiness problem has a direct bearing on the low academic achievement levels that continue to plague K-12. If we are serious about boosting K-12 achievement we must invest, at both the state and federal levels, in high quality pre-kindergarten as well as improve instruction in our public schools.

"The early years are a critical time for the acquisition of cognitive, social, and emotional skills needed for later academic success. Yet, as the NIEER report so vividly points out, state funded pre-kindergarten programs reach less than 15% of the nation's children. Even when Head Start is added in, public programs still reach fewer than half of the nation's three and four year olds. Currently, the vast majority of public programs serve only the poorest children, despite the fact that the school readiness problem affects children of all backgrounds. Over one half of the children who enter kindergarten not knowing the alphabet are middle class or higher.

"While the reach of these programs is limited, their quality may ultimately be the greater issue. Children who enter kindergarten with a strong foundation of learning skills are much more likely to do well. NIEER finds that none of the programs reviewed for the report met all ten of the Institute's "quality benchmarks". Study after study makes clear that teacher quality is the critical factor in overall program quality; 4 year college degrees are equally important for pre-kindergarten teachers who teach 3 and 4 year olds as for the kindergarten teachers with their 5 year old brothers and sisters. Yet only eighteen states require that their pre-kindergarten teachers to hold bachelor's college degrees.

"This report also makes the case for carefully initiating coordination between Head Start and state funded pre-kindergarten programs. Nearly half a million of the nation's most vulnerable children will continue to be poorly served unless the federal government acts to improve the quality of the state funded programs. We believe that the most immediate opportunity for the federal government to support state pre-kindergarten programs and address the school readiness problem is to develop and adequately fund a handful of carefully constructed federal/state Head Start partnerships specifically designed to build on the strengths of Head Start and the state's pre-kindergarten program. We continue to urge the House, Senate, and White House to include language -- beyond that contained in any of the proposals we have seen thus far -- in the final Head Start bill that will address this important issue.

Simply continuing the Head Start status quo will do nothing to improve services to children enrolled in either Head Start or the state funded pre-kindergarten programs. The federal government must also begin to consider how its other investments in child care and education can be used to leverage increased state investment and improvements in state policy to better serve children and address the nation's school readiness issue."

The Trust for Early Education (TEE) was created as part of The Pew Charitable Trusts' initiative to advance high quality pre-kindergarten for all of the nation's three- and four-year-olds through objective, policy-focused research in conjunction with state public education campaigns and national outreach. TEE was established by The Education Trust with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts and other funders. TEE appreciates the continued support from: The Foundation for Child Development, The McCormick Tribune Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Schumann Fund for New Jersey and The W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

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I've decided PHP is going to be my server-side language. I've been amused by the contortions Perl programmers can go through to make a really tight implementation of an algorithm, and it's really the best language to use if you're distributing scripts. See, if you design it right you can lift discreet chunks of functionality and recode them one by one in the most obfuscated way possible…and with Perl, that is very obfuscated indeed. But I just don't like working in the language. And Python is just too loose for this old Wirthian developer.

What I want now is a strong PHP IDE. I have two free editors, Dev-PHP and PHPEdit, that are more than decent. And my preferred HTML editor, HTML-Kit, has plug-ins that are of great assistance. For the next few weeks, though, I'll be shaking out a 21 day demo of Komodo, which ironically enough was intended as more of a Perl/Python IDE but has seems to have better support for PHP than the alternatives. For instance, code completion recognizes functions defined in imported files in Komodo whereas PHPEdit and Dev-PHP only deal in functions defined in the currently edited file.

Komodo as a learning tool may be worth the $30 for a personal license. But if anyone knows any other good options, I'd like to hear about them.

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So, there's some 20-30 people in possession of MTClient. And I think most of them looked at the rather tacky looking discussion board I set up to support it.

Yesterday I flipped the look of it. And I'm restarting the blog I used for testing and tech discussion. I want a test blog I can just toss incoherent stuff at. I may open up a guest account on it so people can try the software without messing with their own blog. And I want a place to think publicly about MTClient and anything else I may write.

No blog links until I'm done. The support board is right where it's always been.

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What Did You Do in the War, Dad?
'Chicken hawk' slur has no place in today's politics.
Max Boot

February 19, 2004

There are good arguments to be made against the war in Iraq. Calling its supporters "chicken hawks" isn't one of them. Yet to judge from an appearance I recently made on a C-SPAN call-in show, it's a favorite of the antiwar crowd. As someone who thinks that ending the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein was a good idea, but who doesn't have a Medal of Honor on my mantelpiece, or even a dusty uniform hanging in the closet, I am, of course, fair game.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had student deferments during the Vietnam War, are much higher-profile targets of these venomous attacks. Even President Bush — who served, but not in combat — is on the receiving end of such criticisms from Democrats who accuse him of being AWOL during his term in the National Guard.

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Because they're out of touch with Mainstream America.

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A Roll Call on Weapons

Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A22

THOUGH THERE is no sensible, compelling reason for a civilized society to be loading up with assault-style weapons -- arms that sportsmen do not need -- Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and state lawmakers who answer to the call of the National Rifle Association favor the free flow of these arms. And though several surveys over the years have shown that most Marylanders support a ban on such weapons, opponents are working to defeat a measure that would keep a state ban in place if Congress fails to extend a federal ban to expire Sept. 13. A critical vote -- which could be decided by one swing senator in Annapolis -- is set for today or tomorrow in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee.

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Haiti has been socially and economically isolated since slaves rebelled and took over the joint. The reasons are obvious if you think about it. By now it's a well established habit.

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No Help for Haiti
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A22

ONCE AGAIN a poor nation with strong ties to the United States is in desperate trouble -- and once again, the response of the Bush administration is to backpedal away, forswear all responsibility and leave any rescue to others. Last summer President Bush refused to commit even a few hundred U.S. troops on the ground to help end a bloody crisis in Liberia. Now he and his administration stand by as Haiti, a country of 7.5 million just 600 miles from Florida, plunges into anarchy.

Armed gangs are spreading through cities across the country in a violent rebellion against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose own police force is so weak that a group of about 40 thugs was able to take over a town of 87,000 people on Tuesday. France and the United Nations have begun exploring the possible deployment of police or peacekeepers -- which is probably the only way to stop the killing. But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made clear that "there is frankly no enthusiasm" within the Bush administration "for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence." Mr. Powell rejected "a proposition that says the elected president must be forced out of office by thugs." But that, apparently, doesn't mean the United States -- which has intervened repeatedly in Haitian affairs during its 200-year history -- is prepared to take any action to stop it.

Nor has the administration been willing to take the lead in seeking a political settlement to the crisis. For several years it has delegated the arbitration of Haiti's mounting domestic conflict to well-meaning but powerless diplomats from the Organization of American States or the Caribbean Community, also known as Caricom. In particular, it has declined to exercise its considerable leverage on the civilian opposition parties, some of which have been supported by such U.S. groups as the International Republican Institute and which have rejected any political solution short of Mr. Aristide's immediate resignation. Apart from Mr. Powell's statement, the administration's rhetoric has mostly been directed at Mr. Aristide. "There certainly needs to be some changes in the way Haiti is governed," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

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Sorry, I meant President Cheney…

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Democrats Can't Get Firm Grip on Jobs Issue

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A01

Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their campaigns, but even some of the candidates' economic advisers acknowledge that remedies offered -- such as closing tax loopholes on overseas income and offering tax breaks for domestic hiring -- would probably do little to stop the bleeding.

The issue of job losses in old-line manufacturing and moving service jobs overseas catapulted to the political forefront last week, after the Democratic presidential campaigns traversed hard-hit industrial states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri. The rhetoric was further amplified when President Bush's top economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, said last week that outsourcing was "probably a plus for the economy in the long run."

Yesterday, President Bush appeared to back off projections in his own Economic Report of the President, which predicted that 2.6 million jobs would be created this year.

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This is Black History Month, so let me get a little ethnic.

The Republican Party, because it is directed by extremists, is currently categorized by me as an Enemy of Black People in the United States of America. On the other hand, the Democratic Party is currently categorized by me as Not A Friend At All of Black People in the United States of America.

Do not let the fact that the Republican platform sucks so mightily cause you to forget that the Democratic Party has taken us for granted for so long. Someone will be upset at me, but I'm going to resurrect my "all carrot and no stick" concept later today.

I would advise white folks the same way, but I already know y'all will remember. Y'all some politically unforgiving mofos.

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Suicides in Iraq, Questions at Home
Pentagon Tight-Lipped as Self-Inflicted Deaths Mount in Military

By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A01

LUFKIN, Tex. -- Two-year-old Jada Suell tumbled out of the car and ran ahead of everyone -- her grandmother, her mother, her cousins and her 4-year-old sister, Jakayla -- toward the grave of Joseph Dewayne Suell.

"Dada," said the little girl. In the Sunday afternoon quiet of Cedar Grove cemetery, her toddler voice reverberated like a shout.

"Yes, we're going to Daddy's grave," her grandmother Rena Mathis said reassuringly.

The silver grave cover bore colorful wreaths and American flags -- a nod to Suell's three years of military service. He was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 as an Army petroleum supply specialist out of Fort Sill, Okla. Less than two months later, he was dead.

A report provided to the family at their request says that the 24-year-old died of a drug overdose on Father's Day, one of 22 suicides reported among troops in Iraq last year.

According to William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, who discussed the suicides in a briefing last month, that represents a rate of more than 13.5 per 100,000 troops, about 20 percent higher than the recent Army average of 10.5 to 11. The Pentagon plans to release the findings of a team sent to Iraq last fall to investigate the mental health of the troops, including suicides.

The number Winkenwerder cited does not include cases under investigation, so the actual number may be higher. It also excludes the suicides by soldiers who have returned to the United States.

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The quote of note:

This isn't noteworthy so much as it's impact on me is…it's a reminder that I'm not supposed to be dogging Republicans, but Republican extremists. Not like many people (including Republicans!) see a difference, but I do.

Now, on to the story.

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FEC Moves to Regulate Groups Opposing Bush

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A06

The Federal Election Commission decided yesterday that many of the political committees raising "soft" money to campaign against President Bush are subject to regulation, but it postponed deciding how tough the restrictions should be.

The FEC voted 4 to 2 to warn Americans for a Better Country that activities that "promote, attack, support or oppose" a federal candidate must be paid for with hard money, a type of political donation that, unlike soft money, has tight restrictions on sources and amounts. This is a broader standard than used in the past. Activities that benefit a mix of federal, state and local candidates are to be paid for with a mix of hard and soft money, the commission determined.

Interpretations of yesterday's action varied greatly.

FEC Vice Chairman Ellen L. Weintraub said the decision should not severely constrain those seeking to raise and spend soft money, which is not subject to limits and can come from unions and corporations as well as individuals. "I don't think sophisticated political actors would have a hard time figuring out how to work within this framework," she said.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, in contrast, said the ruling will put out of business "groups like America Coming Together [ACT], the Media Fund, Partnership for America's Families and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund." All are pro-Democratic groups organized under Section 527 of the tax code.

These and other 527 committees, as they are known, are aiming to become a shadow version of the Democratic Party, financing television commercials and voter mobilization in 15 to 17 battleground states this fall. They plan to pay for some or all of their activities with large soft-money contributions.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law barred the national parties from accepting soft money, prompting the creation of many 527 committees. Campaign watchdog groups have challenged the groups' legality, and yesterday's FEC ruling was among the first to address their questions.

Harold Ickes, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and now head of the Media Fund, accused Gillespie of misconstruing the consequences of yesterday's FEC decisions to "inhibit our supporters and donors by his willful misreading."

Jim Jordan, spokesman for the Media Fund and ACT, two of the most ambitious pro-Democratic groups, said: "It's clear that today's action is limited in its scope. We remain confident that we'll have the room we need to operate robustly and effectively."

The Media Fund, which plans to run TV ads attacking Bush and supporting Democrats, and ACT, which plans to conduct voter mobilization in 17 battleground states, have a fundraising goal this year of $95 million each.

McCain-Feingold's restrictions on soft money have hurt the Democratic Party, which depended heavily on large contributions from unions and rich partisans to pay for issue ads and voter mobilization. The GOP has been far more successful raising still-legal hard money, which can involve contributions of up to $25,000 to the parties.

Key decisions yet to be made by the FEC include: If organizations such as ABC or ACT can spend a mix of hard and soft money, what rules will govern the ratio? And under what circumstance will 527 organizations -- such as the Media Fund, which is currently not registered with the FEC -- and politically active groups known as 501c4s, fall under FEC regulation?

In reports filed with the FEC, ACT has used an allocation formula allowing it to pay 98 percent of its costs with soft money and 2 percent with hard money. The FEC yesterday signaled it will reconsider such allocation formulas in May.

If ACT were required to spend hard and soft money equally, the committee would have to raise large amounts of difficult-to-come-by hard money, a costly and time-consuming process.

On philosophical, not partisan, grounds, two of the Republican commissioners -- Chairman Bradley A. Smith and David M. Mason -- voted against regulation of the Democratic groups, rejecting pressure from the RNC. "If Republicans think they can win by silencing their opponents, they are wrong," said Smith, and "they are going to deserve to lose."

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Okay, Boeing is full of it on this one. How you going to hire someone before they leave your client and then fire them becase you hired them before they left your client?

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Recruiting Uncle Sam
The Military Uses a Revolving Door to Defense Jobs

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page E01

George K. Muellner spent more than 30 years in the Air Force, rising eventually to the position of deputy acquisition chief. Now he's the senior vice president of Air Force Systems for Boeing Co.'s defense unit. E.C. "Pete" Aldridge, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, resigned in May 2003 and joined the board of the nation's largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., a month later.

General Dynamics Corp. got a prized recruit in David Heebner, who was hired in 2000 after more than 30 years in the military, most recently as the Army's assistant vice chief of staff. The company was so pleased to have snagged a member of the top brass that it announced Heebner's hiring a month before his official retirement.

Earlier this month, General Dynamics, which counts the Army among its largest customers, reeled in another veteran: John M. "Jack" Keane, who was named to the company's board. Keane spent 37 years in the Army before retiring as the vice chief of staff.

The career moves of these military veterans created barely a ripple in Washington. Traffic between the Pentagon and the nation's big defense contractors has been busy for as long as anyone can remember. Not until someone gets stuck in the revolving door -- as an Air Force official recently did -- does the debate about its propriety heat up again.

Boeing hired Darleen A. Druyun, the deputy acquisition chief for the Air Force, in January 2003 and then fired her in November for allegedly holding job talks while she was still supervising Boeing contracts. Her role at the Air Force included weighing the government's lease and purchase of Boeing tanker jets potentially worth $17 billion to $18 billion. Boeing also fired its chief financial officer for allegedly concealing the improper discussions and violating its hiring policies.

The Druyun case has put the revolving door under its sharpest scrutiny in years.

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U.S. to Keep Key Data On Infrastructure Secret
Firms Encouraged to Report Security Gaps

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A21

Starting tomorrow, chemical companies, railroads, electric utilities and other parts of the nation's critical infrastructure can begin submitting sensitive information to the Department of Homeland Security about their vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks with assurances that their proprietary data would be safe from public disclosure.

Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the department can deem data voluntarily provided by businesses that help the government stave off possible disruptions by terrorists as secret and unavailable to outsiders. The law's supporters view it as a way for U.S. officials to help map security plans for critical U.S. infrastructure, 85 percent of which is in private hands.

But some advocates for environmental protection and open-records laws say unscrupulous firms might manipulate the rules as part of an attempt to evade federal enforcement of health or safety rules.

Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst with OMB Watch, a nonprofit group that opposes government secrecy, said that during the drafting of the law and the rules being released this week, key industries successfully lobbied for procedures ensuring that any information they share with Homeland Security would remain secret and would not be usable by other agencies in civil enforcement actions.

"The government agreed that 'we'll keep secret this information you give to Homeland Security, and we won't do anything with it,' " other than for counterterrorist purposes, Moulton said. "It's naive to think we won't have bad actors in industry" misusing the protections, he said.

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More States Are Fighting 'No Child Left Behind' Law
Complex Provisions, Funding Gaps In Bush Education Initiative Cited

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A03

Two years after President Bush proclaimed a "new era" in American public education with the passage of his No Child Left Behind initiative, a growing number of state legislators and school administrators are looking for ways to opt out of requirements they view as intrusive and underfunded.

Resistance that began in New England last year over the implementation of the broadest education reforms in a generation has spread to several southern and western states, with Republicans joining Democrats in criticizing a plan that once enjoyed bipartisan support.

Utah's Republican-dominated House voted last week to refuse to implement No Child Left Behind "except where there is adequate federal funding." The bill, now before the state Senate, closely parallels a move last year by the Vermont legislature to bar any state funding for the Bush education reforms.

Over the past few days, Republican legislators in Arizona and Minnesota have introduced bills that would allow the states to reject parts of No Child Left Behind or opt out of its provisions. The legislatures of at least 10 other states, from Virginia to Washington, have adopted resolutions critical of the law or requested waivers from the Education Department.

While the protests have yet to become a nationwide rebellion, some analysts predict that the movement to opt out of the program will gather momentum as more and more schools are put on watch lists required by the law that designate them "in need of improvement." As many as half the schools in some states have failed to meet the law's complicated definition of "adequate yearly progress" in student test scores, triggering a range of costly remedial measures and sanctions.

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Is Texas Really a State of Mind? The Professor May Disagree.

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A04

…In January, Sechrest published a 7,000-word article in Liberty, a tiny libertarian journal, titled "A Strange Little Town in Texas." After dispensing with the things he likes about Alpine -- great climate, clean air, awesome scenery, low crime rate, friendly locals, frontier spirit, robust theater scene -- Sechrest came to his main point.

"The secret problem is that the students at Sul Ross, and more generally the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well . . . just plain stupid," he wrote.

Harsh, yes, but Sechrest, a libertarian himself who grew up near Dallas, was just warming up. He dissed his students and neighbors as "some of the dumbest clods on the planet," and his fellow faculty members as "mostly a waste of space." As for the local schoolkids, many "are only a notch above retardation," he said.

What happened next was an object lesson in the perils of roiling the waters in a placid small town -- or, as City Council member Katie Elms-Lawrence put it, "Sweetheart, you don't defecate in your own back yard."

Having written the article last year, Sechrest sent it off to the magazine, which is published in Washington state. He figured that was that. He said he never imagined it would find its way back to Alpine, population about 5,000.

Bad call. Not long after the magazine came out, around New Year's, the article began circulating in Alpine and on campus. The effect was as if Sechrest had set off a colossal stink bomb.

Many wanted to know why, if Alpine and Sul Ross were filled with airheads, Sechrest stayed. (He said it was because of the money -- he makes $96,000 a year as a professor -- and his academic freedom, "most likely because no one has any idea what I'm writing about.") Almost everyone in Alpine was furious. Most insisted Sechrest was simply wrong.

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February 18, 2004

SOMEbody is living the Libertarian dream…

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via Kerim at Keywords

GAO Says Pentagon Pays Corporate Tax Evaders

About 27,100 Department of Defense (DoD) contractors owe the federal government $3 billion in unpaid taxes, but the Pentagon continues to hire and pay them with taxpayers' money, a congressional investigation has found.

The government has the power to garnish checks cut to scofflaw contractors but has not done so in a significant way, forfeiting an estimated $100 million a year for the U.S. treasury, the study found.

"It's more than irritating. It's outrageous that individuals who have obligations to pay taxes and are earning big money, don't pay taxes," said Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), chairman of the Senate Permanent subcommittee on Investigations, in a meeting with reporters Wednesday.

In one case, the Pentagon paid $3.5 million in 2002 to a company that owes nearly $10 million in back taxes. It provided dining, trash-hauling security and other services at military bases. The owner of the unnamed company allegedly borrowed nearly $1 million from the company, bought a home and a boat in the Caribbean and dissolved the business in 2003. The company transferred its employees to a relative's business and continued to submit invoices and receive payments from the DoD through August 2003, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO).

Another unnamed company that manufactures parts for DoD aircraft owed the government nearly $2 million, and has been paid that much by the DoD in 30 contracts issued from 1997-2002.

Most of the DoD contractors owe primarily unpaid payroll taxes -- meaning they have withheld money from employees' paychecks for Social Security and Medicare but have never passed that money on to the government.

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Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber

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Hat tip to Apathy, Inc.

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Max Sawicky noticed that poor Mankiw is being left out there all alone.

Here's the Economic Policy Institute spanking the presidential projections in a three page PDF.

And here's the renouncing:

McClellan is wrong. I care about reality. The Bushistas keep insisting on trying to jam a nice, round reality into their very square understanding of things. The Bushistas have been dealing in statistics of some sort or another since 2001…Bush says he ignores polls then Rove takes a poll to see how people reacted to his statement.

The problem with being guided by statistics is you're always looking backward. Looking backward is part of what kept those buggy whip manufactures going for so long.

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Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts
By JAMES GLANZ

The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today.

The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations.

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies."

A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today he had not seen the text of the scientists' accusations. "But I can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science," he said.

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University who signed the statement and spoke in the conference call, said the administration had "engaged in practices that are in conflict with the spirit of science and the scientific method." Dr. Gottfried asserted that what he called "the cavalier attitude toward science" could place at risk the basis for the nation's long-term prosperity, health and military prowess.

The scientists denied that they had political motives in releasing the documents as the 2004 presidential race began to take shape, with Howard Dean dropping out a day after Senator John Kerry narrowly defeated Senator John Edwards on the Wisconsin Democratic primary. The organization's report, Dr. Gottfried said, had taken a year to prepare - much longer than originally planned - and had been released as soon as it was ready.

"I don't see it as a partisan issue at all," said Russell Train, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, and who spoke in the conference call in support of the statement. "If it becomes that way I think it's because the White House chooses to make it a partisan issue," Mr. Train said.

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from Many-to-Many

geomapping of orkutsters

This is cool. Very, very cool.

Someone has apparently scraped Orkut for name and city data, and mapped the results to a satellite map application. You can put in a latitude and longitude, or a zip code, and see all the Orkut users who’ve listed that as their home.

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Somebody need ta tell Jesse he early.

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Human Rights Watch (Washington, DC)
February 18, 2004
By Michael Posner

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C.
20500

Dear Mr. President:

Next week you will meet with Tunisian President Zine el Abdine Ben Ali. This meeting offers challenges and significant opportunities with respect to refining the bilateral relationship with Tunisia. More broadly, it provides a timely setting to advance the important agenda you have set out for strengthening democratic institutions and the rule of law throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Since coming to power in 1987, President Ben Ali has repeatedly promised a program of democratic reform. Instead of reform, the Tunisian government has prosecuted political opponents, and otherwise suppressed non-violent dissent. Tunisian human rights activists, who are among the most sophisticated and courageous in the region, have been singled out for repression. Freedom of the press has been stifled and the Tunisian people, especially those who have been advocates for change, live in constant fear of the omnipresent secret police.

You and your Administration have made strong public statements in support of advocates of political reform and human rights in the Arab world and throughout the Middle East. We very much welcome a "forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East." At the same time, as you know, many people in the region remain deeply skeptical about the long-term U.S. commitment to promote democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

We believe that your meeting with President Ben Ali provides an excellent opportunity to begin to counter this skepticism and demonstrate that your Administration will indeed expect a higher standard of respect for human rights from Tunisia and other U.S. allies in the region. As you have noted: "When the leaders of reform ask for our help, America will give it."

The leaders of reform in Tunisia, who are part of the country's resilient human rights movement, face constant repression. Their organizations are banned and their activities blocked. They have no access to the media. They are restricted from travel and periodically arrested or subjected to physical attack. Their telephone lines are cut or otherwise disrupted.

In light of the above, we urge that you raise the following issues in your meeting with President Ben Ali:

- Request that he permit independent human rights organizations like the National Council for Civil Liberties (CNLT) and the Association for the Support of Political Prisoners (AISPP) to function freely.

- Ask him to launch a public investigation into the assault against human rights activist Sihem Bensedrine on January 5, 2004 - the most recent of many attacks on human rights activists in Tunisia.

- Ask that he lifts restrictions on the press by granting licenses to independent newspapers and magazines. For example, Sihem Bensedrine's application to register her publication Kalima has been rejected three times.

- Request that he permit Tunisians to have unimpeded access to the Internet. Currently sites dealing with human rights issues in Tunisia, including those from international organizations like Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, are blocked.

- Ask that he release Neziha Rejiba, also known as Om Zied, from prison. She is the editor-in-chief of Kalima who was sentenced to eight months imprisonment in October 2003 for "currency exchange violations."

- Ask that he release Hammad Ali Bedoui, a member of the CNLT, who has been held under house arrest since January 3, 2004.

- Urge the President to permit opposition political parties to operate freely and participate in contested elections.

We urge you actively to address these and related issues with President Ben Ali. You have spoken about the need for transforming the Middle East and North Africa from a "place of tyranny and despair and anger" into a region open to political reform and expanded safeguards for human rights and the rule of law. President Ben Ali's state visit provides an important opportunity to make clear how your Administration will translate these aspirations into practice.

We urge your active attention to this vitally important agenda.

Sincerely,

Michael H. Posner
Executive Director
Human Rights First

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Issues Mombasa Talks Should Focus On
The Nation (Nairobi) [P6: vial AllAfrica.com]
By Ada Mwangola
Nairobi

Trade ministers from 16 African countries meet today in Mombasa, jointly with the European Union and United States trade delegates, to jump-start stalled World Trade Organisation negotiations.

This meeting, which is being attended by the WTO Director-General Panitchadi Supachai, provides an opportunity to reclaim lost ground and move forward.

While all the parties must be drawn by the challenge of conviction to move forward, the challenge of responsibility will weigh more on the EU and US.

Both must show pragmatism and work towards a meeting of minds with Africa in its call for global trade justice. Tokenism and half-hearted concessions will only further undermine the credibility of the WTO as a forum that can promote Africa's development priorities, following the propitious collapse of the Cancun Ministerial.

This meeting collapsed due to a spirited determination by African countries to rewrite the rules of global trade. It argued that the skewed nature of existing trade agreements had tilted benefits overwhelmingly in favour of stronger economies with limited scope for poor countries struggling to fight poverty and register growth. The call was made for affirmative policy measures to help narrow this divide.

At the time of the collapse, limited progress had been made on key negotiating thresholds agreed to at the Doha conference on agriculture, special and differential treatment, and implementation issues at the core of Africa's call for a new global trade architecture.

This lack of progress was an indictment on industrialised countries, principally the EU and US, who showed little enthusiasm for a timely conclusion of negotiations on these areas. Cancun's collapse thus put the clock back, and for Africa, represented a squandered opportunity for meaningful progress.

Since Cancun's collapse, African countries have placed many concrete and sensible proposals on the table which should inform discussions in Mombasa. The need to end trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in Europe and America cannot be belaboured.

These subsidies, which total a daily average of $1 billion, have spurred export dumping and impoverished over 900 million small farmers living on less than $1 a day in poor countries.

By promoting export dumping through cheap food exports, the livelihoods of many African smallholders have been ruined.

Cotton, a key sticking point at Cancun, provides a compelling illustration of the devastating impact of subsidies. The $3 billion annual subsidy spent by the US supporting its cotton farmers is estimated to cut world prices by a quarter. In just one of the countries that relies on cotton, Benin, this pushes a quarter of a million people below the poverty line.

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Given the title:

It's Time to Call for New Black Leadership
We Need You
by Thulani Davis
February 18 - 24, 2004

…it's safe to assume I have an opinion. Being a bit on the long side, I'll have to get back to the article a bit later. Meanwhile…

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Quote of note:

The Making of an African Petrostate
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

GALABA, Chad - As night fell and the bright lights of the brand-new oil field wrapped this hamlet in their golden glow, Neurmbaye Elie, a local farmer, pointed across the field before him.

There, Mr. Elie said, just left of the blazing gas flare, under the streetlight, once stood the village initiation site. Animals were sacrificed there, spirits were supplicated, and the village boys became men. Then it became part of the oil complex, fenced in, a patch of earth not unlike the rest; the village got about $130 for it.

Now, he worries. What if the spirits, displeased, sprang from that sacred ground and spread willy-nilly across the land?

Oil is bringing big changes to Chad, some cultural, like the one Mr. Elie worries about, others practical, like the way the World Bank will be overseeing how Chad manages its new wealth. Chad, among the poorest countries in the world, is now Africa's newest petrostate.

Its $3.7 billion underground pipeline, stretching 670 miles, began ferrying crude oil through neighboring Cameroon to the Atlantic coast last year. The pipeline is the largest single private investment in Africa.

Because the pipeline stands to transform this landlocked country, for better or worse, Chad is under a special glare — from the oil industry, global lending institutions and development groups.

The investment has come with strings attached: the oil revenues are to be transparent, and the government is to use the wealth to better the miserable lives of its nine million citizens. A citizens' committee is to review all spending to see that it conforms to the law.

If the rules work as intended, they could set a new model for how oil business is done in Africa. But if the usual corruption sets in, if democratic reforms are postponed, it will be just one more case of the spectacular misery that has befallen Africa's oil states, like Sudan, where oil greased the engines of war, or neighboring Nigeria, where living standards plummeted since oil production began 40 years ago.

"You're dealing with a government that's certainly not a model of governance," said Jerome Chevallier, who oversees the pipeline here for the World Bank, which partly financed the project. "It's basically a high risk, high reward project. If you can use oil to lift Chad out of its extreme poverty, it's a win. The risks, of course we know."

It is the World Bank's first foray into oil development, and early missteps since ground was broken in 2000 suggest that the risks are indeed formidable.

When the group of oil companies offered a $25 million "signing bonus" four years ago, the government spent the first chunk on arms and another refurbishing ministers' offices. According to the oversight committee, one ministry tried to buy rice and millet at twice the market price. Another wanted six off-road vehicles. The oversight committee blocked many of those requests.

"We said, `No, no, no guys, too much," recalled its chairman, Mahamat Mustapha. [His future as chairman is unclear; President Idriss Deby's brother-in-law was recently appointed to the committee.]

This year, Chad will see its first share of oil royalties, about $100 million, an amount that will enlarge the government treasury by about 40 percent, virtually overnight. While this allotment will be closely watched, another $100 million from taxes and customs duties is entirely at the government's discretion.

Certainly, there is no dearth of need. Electricity and water are beyond the reach of a majority of people here, and the average Chadian can expect to die before his 45th birthday. The per capita income barely exceeds $1,000 a year. Chad ranks 165th of 173 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index.

Critics say it is foolhardy to expect a leadership dominated by one ethnic group (the president's) and with a record of repression and mismanagement to do anything but use its new wealth to crush opponents.

They point to worrisome signs: the banning of an antipipeline protest, the temporary closure of an irreverent radio station, the execution of criminals after what critics believe to be incomplete trials.

The most recent sign of trouble was a suggestion by supporters of Mr. Deby, a military ruler twice elected president, to amend the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term. "For those who lead us, the law is just a piece of paper," said Dobian Assingar, head of the Chadian League of Human Rights and a member of the oversight committee.

The government, for its part, points out that no country has ever opened its revenues to such scrutiny. "I can only say: `Wait. Wait until the revenues are spent,' " said Tom Erdimi, the state's liaison to the project.

No matter how the money is spent this year, Chad is certain to have more in its future. ExxonMobil has already found more oil, and a Canadian company, Encana, is busy exploring north of here.

The World Bank says the government has agreed to apply similar oversight in the future. The government is also likely to demand a larger share of the wealth; its current 12.5 percent in royalties is paltry compared with what is reaped by Africa's oil giants like Angola and Nigeria.

In Ngalaba, the farmer, Mr. Elie, remembered when the oil workers first started drilling in the middle of his village. The noise was so loud it was unlike anything people had heard before.

Today, many villagers are unhappy about the payment they got for the oil under their land. Villagers and oil company representatives deliberated for weeks about how much the land was worth, driving up the price of each mango tree to $1,000.

In the end, Chadian villages affected by pipeline construction received $6.3 million in compensation, an impressive amount by the standards of this country, but as some villagers note, a fraction of the investment made. Moreover, some complain, the one-time cash payment and the other changes that oil ushered in have done little to improve their lives.

A few villagers have managed to use compensation money to put tin roofs on their huts. Other have spent their windfall on beer.

But Mr. Elie pointed to the generally sorry state of his community. No school. No hospital. None of the things the villagers had hoped would come with oil, he said.

The oil wells sprouted in the middle of millet fields, and the social landscape was transformed. A schoolteacher took a job as guard for an oil well. Prostitutes and bartenders trickled in from across Central Africa. Carpenters and tinsmiths flocked here too, looking for shipping crates and scrap metal.

"A poor man is always looking for work," Abdel Kadre Ahmat said from under his workshop, where he makes hoes, shovels and cooking ladles from the carcass of an air-conditioner, a patch of aluminum siding and a rusty sign. He did not know what the materials had been used for previously, but he did not much care. They were free and, in his hands, very useful.

"I just know it's their garbage," he said.

ExxonMobil says that its compensation packages included schools and health centers for the most affected villages. At the peak of construction 10,000 Chadians got temporary jobs, the company says. The country's gross domestic product has shot up.

The novel oversight system is a boon for oil companies. In a sense, it exonerates them: here is how much your government is getting, the oil companies can say to its destitute neighbors, and now it is up to the government to spend it wisely.

That, said Ron Royal, president of the ExxonMobil subsidiary Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., has not stopped government representatives from beseeching the oil company for more: one asked for electricity, another an off-road vehicle. The president, a northerner, asked for a school in the north.

Mr. Royal declined. "What you have to get your mind around is having to say no to people and then explain why," he said. "They see we have so much. `Why can't you give a little?' Because there's a principle here. You've got this responsibility. We've got this responsibility."

World Bank officials say the pipeline represents a singular opportunity for Chad to become a viable state, if not a wealthy one. Mr. Chevallier, the bank's project manager, said the people of Chad's oil country have indeed profited from contact with the outside world. Speed limits are now enforced on the red dust roads. Seat belts are compulsory. He called it the "discipline of the industrial age."

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N. Gregory Mankiw, President Bush's chief economist, who stirred controversy by suggesting that shipping service jobs overseas could be good for the economy, said his comments were "far from clear and were misinterpreted." Mr. Mankiw, speaking to the National Economists Club, said nothing he said should have been construed "as praising U.S. job losses." Any lost job "is an awful experience" for workers and their families, he said, adding that he had learned from his misstep that "economists and noneconomists speak very different languages."

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…which is why regular people making decisions based on their "understanding" of economics is ungood. It's why I'm making a point of understanding both the text and context of economics.

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Quote of note:

BZZZT! Wrong.

It did, indeed, expose your thoughts and beliefs…just as you intended them to when you got them. Asshole. It's not like forcing you to talk, it's like understanding what you're screaming out at the top of your lungs.

Tattoos Affirmed as Evidence
By PATRICK HEALY

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Feb. 17 - The State Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that a defendant's own body - specifically, his tattoos exalting swastikas and skinheads - could be used as evidence that he committed a crime fueled by hatred.

The 4-to-2 ruling in Albany, by the state's highest court, treads the ground between a defendant's right against self-incrimination and a prosecutor's obligation to present evidence to jurors, and it rekindles one of Long Island's most notorious cases of anti-immigrant violence.

The suit was brought by Christopher Slavin, one of two men convicted in 2001 of luring two Mexican laborers the previous year into an abandoned warehouse in Shirley and kicking, beating and stabbing them.

Mr. Slavin and his co-defendant, Ryan D. Wagner, had posed as employers. Both men were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

To convince jurors that the attacks had been motivated by prejudice - a crucial component of some of the charges - prosecutors showed photographs of tattoos on Mr. Slavin's arms, chest and abdomen that featured black swastikas, a white fist and a skinhead kicking a large-nosed man wearing a skullcap.

Mr. Slavin had objected when the police took the photos, and his lawyer protested when they were shown in court, first to a grand jury to secure an indictment, and then during the trial.

Mr. Slavin's lawyer, Robert Del Col, said during the trial that prosecutors were using the tattoos to make the jury dislike Mr. Slavin and that the tattoos were not relevant to his guilt or innocence.

During the trial, an expert on hate speech explained the images' symbolism to jurors.

Mr. Slavin's argument before the Court of Appeals was that photographing his tattoos and displaying them on a projector screen violated his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. The tattoos disclosed his thoughts and beliefs, he argued, and showing them was akin to forcing him to talk.

"We disagree," the majority wrote in their decision. "The tattoos were physical characteristics, not statements forced from his mouth."

Judge Carmen B. Ciparick and Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye dissented, saying that Mr. Slavin's "heinous crimes and despicable beliefs do not exempt him from the protections of the Constitution or the law."

Unlike a blood-alcohol sample taken from a drunken driver, or a tattoo used to identify a suspect, the prosecutors used pictures of Mr. Slavin's tattoos to plumb his mind, thoughts and motives, the dissenting judges wrote. Doing so over his objections amounted to a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights, they said.

The Mexican laborers who were attacked never saw the tattoos on Mr. Slavin or his co-defendant, according to the court's ruling, so they could not have been shown to identify the defendants.

Although there was ample evidence that Mr. Slavin committed the attacks, the dissenting judges wrote, there was little besides the tattoos to prove that the crimes had been motivated by prejudice, and they recommended that Mr. Slavin's conviction for aggravated harassment in the second degree be reversed.

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February 18, 2004
Bush Officials Offer Cautions on White House Jobs Forecast
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

RICHLAND, Wash., Feb. 17 — Treasury Secretary John W. Snow distanced himself on Tuesday from the Bush administration's official prediction that the nation would add 2.6 million jobs by the end of this year.

That prediction, which is far more optimistic than that of many private sector forecasters, was part of the annual economic report released last week by the White House Council of Economic Advisers and was immediately echoed by Mr. Bush himself.

But on a tour through Washington and Oregon to promote the president's economic agenda, Mr. Snow and Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans both declined to endorse the White House prediction and cautioned that it was based on economic assumptions that have an inherent margin of error.

"I think we are going to create a lot of jobs; how many I don't know," Mr. Snow said, adding that "macroeconomic models are based on a lot of assumptions" and are "not without a range of error."

Unemployment and the nation's surprisingly sluggish pace of job creation has become a significant political weakness for Mr. Bush, who is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his first term with fewer jobs than when he started.

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February 17, 2004

If you go to Feedster's Politics tab/page/whatever, you'll see a form that, when you pick your favored Presidential candidate, gives you back a little link:

I Blog For:

…to a "custom" Feedpaper with news about your boy.

The "Make a Donation" button links to a PayPal account for donations to the Democratic Party. I don't know what the Bush, Green, Libertarian or Undecided images link to. Don't much care.

LATER: Here's my quandry.
Al-M mentioned that Kucinich doesn't have a PayPal account for donations, and I checked Democrats.org and neither does the DNC. On the other hand is the fact that these are the Feedster guys and quite frankly we can find them if we want to. Finally, I do think giving up a couple of bucks for the cause is a decent idea.

So.

I have TWO "make a donation" buttons. the top one links to the Democratic National Committee's donate-by-credit-card page. The bottom one goes to the PayPal account set up by Feedster.

I don't get credit for any of this, btw.

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Mary Beth Williams of Wampum is running for state representative in Maine.

If you're in Maine you could do hella worse and not much better to have her in the mix. MB made me pay attention to economics, made me realize you can work it so that humans understand it. She's not the only one who can do that, of course, just the one I personally ran across. And, I think, she's now in the 1% or less of politicians that actually understand it.

I'd give you a link to her PayPal campaign donation account but that's all messy and involves forms and crap, so you have to go to Wampum.

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As expected, I didn't win. But the winners are all worthy.

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Police Chiefs Campaign to Fight Senate Bill That Would Protect Gun Dealers
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

A large number of police chiefs and other law enforcement officials have joined gun control advocates in a campaign to defeat a Senate bill that would grant gun makers and dealers almost total immunity from lawsuits.

The bill, which is strongly supported by the National Rifle Association, is scheduled for a Senate vote in early March but could come up for a vote even sooner. As many as 59 senators have signed on as sponsors, only one vote shy of the number needed to defeat any attempt at a filibuster. A similar bill passed easily in the House last fall.

The police officials' campaign began last week when Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department held a news conference there denouncing the bill. Chief Bratton and 80 other police officials then signed a letter to the Senate expressing their opposition. At the same time, a full-page advertisement featuring a photograph of Chief Bratton and paid for by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence appeared in The Washington Post.

The advertisement is expected to appear soon in other major newspapers and on television, and Chief Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner, said he would go to Washington to lobby senators.

The campaign is supported by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents the chiefs of police in the 50 largest cities.

"To give gun manufacturers and dealers immunity from lawsuits is crazy," Chief Bratton said in a telephone interview.

"If you give them immunity," he added, "what incentive do they have to make guns with safer designs, or what incentive do the handful of bad dealers have to follow the law when they sell guns?"

"This is not about doing away with guns, but about trying to ensure the safety of police officers and the American public," said Chief Bratton, who was police commissioner in New York City in the early 1990's when there was a sharp drop in homicides, as there was last year in Los Angeles under Chief Bratton.

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Fraud Kicks in Months Ahead of Medicare Drug Discount Card
By ROBERT PEAR

Published: February 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 — Federal officials said Monday that they had detected evidence of fraud in the marketing of drug discount cards under the Medicare law signed 10 weeks ago by President Bush.

In some parts of the country, people have gone door to door offering "Medicare approved" cards, though none have been approved and enrollment does not begin until May, federal health officials said.

Mr. Bush has said that the cards, to be issued by private entities and endorsed by the government, will deliver "savings of 10 to 25 percent off the retail price of most medicines," though the amount will vary drug by drug and card by card. In addition, as he noted in signing the legislation on Dec. 8, low-income elderly people will be eligible for "a $600 credit on their cards, to help them pay for the medications they need."

Beneficiaries can sign up for the cards in May and start using them in June. But already, federal officials said, some people are promoting the cards as if they had received a federal seal of approval.

Valeria Allen, an insurance specialist at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, "Someone is fraudulently impersonating or misrepresenting Medicare by telephone and by door-to-door visits to beneficiaries' homes, to discuss the Medicare discount drug program and to obtain personal identifying information from beneficiaries."

In some cases, Ms. Allen said, the caller seems to have obtained personal information about beneficiaries before visiting their homes.

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Haiti's Embattled Leader Vows to Finish Term
By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: February 17, 2004

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 16 — President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, defiant in the face of an increasingly violent opposition movement, denounced it on Monday as an effort to overthrow Haiti's elected government and declared that only he can save the country from civil war.

"We have had 32 coups in our history," Mr. Aristide said in an hourlong interview with The New York Times at the National Palace on Monday morning. "The result is what we have now: moving from misery to poverty. We need not continue moving from one coup d'état to another coup d'état, but from one elected president to another elected president."

Asked whether he would consider stepping aside to prevent further bloodshed in a conflict that has killed dozens of people and paralyzed much of the country, he replied: "I will leave office Feb. 7, 2006. My responsibility is precisely to prevent that from happening. What we are doing now is preventing bloodshed."

Speaking in an anteroom outside his spacious office, he called for armed opposition groups to lay down their weapons and for political opponents to begin discussions with the aim of having new parliamentary elections as soon as possible.

"It is time for us to stop the violence and to implement the Caricom proposal for elections," Mr. Aristide said, referring to the plan of the Caribbean Community, an organization of Caribbean states, to build trust between the government and opposition groups as part of the groundwork for new parliamentary elections.

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Va. House Proposes Heavier Tax On Business
GOP Stuns Opposition By Attacking Exemptions

By Michael D. Shear and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 17, 2004; Page A01

RICHMOND, Feb. 16 -- Republicans in Virginia's House of Delegates endorsed a plan Monday to end tax breaks for many businesses, joining Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) and the Senate's Republican leaders in calling for new revenue to balance the state's budget.

Faced with the prospect of closing Virginia's $1 billion budget gap with deep cuts to popular programs, the GOP-controlled House instead voted 59 to 36 to raise $520 million by eliminating sales tax exemptions enjoyed by utility companies, the shipping industry, airlines, dry cleaners, telephone companies and other businesses. House leaders expect the bill to receive final approval Tuesday.

The plan, first put forth by Republican leaders just 80 hours before the vote, turned the Capitol's tax debate on its head. Business lobbyists, Democratic legislators and Warner administration officials gathered for their own tense, closed-door strategy sessions and wondered what to make of a GOP plan that targets the party's traditional business allies.

Proponents of the House measure said they are seeking to solve the state's budget problems without raising sales and income taxes on average citizens. And they said the vote sends a message to business groups who have endorsed the broader tax plans offered by Warner and John H. Chichester (R-Stafford), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

"You can't say, 'We need more revenue, we need more revenue, but not this new revenue,' " said the bill's sponsor, Del. Phillip A. Hamilton (R-Newport News).

The bill won initial approval over the objections of almost all of the chamber's Democrats, who complained that they had too little information about a plan that they say could threaten Virginia's job growth and the state's overall economic recovery.

"We're legislating in the dark," said Del. Brian J. Moran (D-Alexandria).

And it passed despite some dissension among the Republican majority. Some GOP delegates said their party should not be buying into the argument that Virginia's 7 million residents need to pay higher taxes for a growing government.

"I'm suggesting to you we are caving in to a lack of information," thundered Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), an ardent opponent of tax increases. "No case has been made to increase revenues, and this will increase revenues. That's the purpose of it."

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I wonder what the equivalent applied to corporate CEOs would be?

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Police taking notice

2/17/2004

CUTTING-EDGE crime reduction efforts fell off in Boston following the so-called Boston miracle of the 1990s, when police disabled youth gangs through relentless prosecution of chronic offenders. Now the next step in community policing is emerging: joint efforts by police and social workers to prevent crime in unstable families and unsafe neighborhoods. Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce revealed details of the department's comprehensive community safety initiative last month during a Dorchester meeting with criminal justice experts and neighborhood leaders sponsored by the Boston Foundation. Using the high-crime Grove Hall section of Dorchester as a pilot site, police analyzed data on nearly every arrest or field interrogation of an individual over a three-year period ending in September 2003. And for the first time, the Police Department enlisted the help of state social service agencies in what could become a broad anticrime initiative.

The police arrested or interrogated 457 individuals during the study period. As a group, the suspects had been responsible for a frightful 12,000 lifetime arraignments. That finding supports residents who decry sweeping portrayals of their communities as saturated with wrongdoers. In reality, just slightly more than 2 percent of Grove Hall's 19,000 residents caused a large part of the instability.

Next, officers formed into working groups with probation officers and officials from the Department of Youth Services to discuss each of the individuals who had been arrested or interrogated in Grove Hall. They estimated that 80 percent of the suspects would be better served by social service intervention than law enforcement. Change in thinking

It wasn't so long ago that the common police rejoinder to any mention of a suspect's background was, "Do I look like a social worker?" But now awareness is obviously high among officers that many of the suspects they encounter, including many young people, harbor potential for something better than a life of crime. Grove Hall residents in attendance at the Boston Foundation meeting reinforced this message, saying that a paucity of job training and housing opportunities, not criminal intent, undergirds the area's crime problems.

Police next asked the state's Executive Office of Health and Human Services to run the 457 names through its database of clients. The data revealed that 72 percent of the individuals were either receiving social services, ranging from child abuse intervention to welfare, at the time of arrest or had received such services between January 2000 and July 2003.

More analysis is needed. But the data already suggest that state social service agencies are not by themselves especially effective at keeping clients on the straight and narrow. Harry Spence, commissioner of the state Department of Social Services, says he is "intrigued" by aspects of the data that might result in ways to improve services and create alternatives to imprisonment.

One possibility might be for social workers to take a neighborhood approach by providing intensive group services to clusters of young people known to police. Another possibility is to intervene intensively in families where lawbreaking is passed down from generation to generation. Privacy issues

Police envision partnerships with social workers of the kind pioneered in the heyday of community policing in the late 1990s, when officers and ministers joined forces to offer young people alternatives to the street. But privacy concerns are much greater when police and social service workers are at the table together. Social workers are required by law to protect their communications with clients. Rare exceptions include suspected child abuse or specific threats. Even sharing of information among state human service agencies is highly restricted.

Spence, the DSS commissioner, emphasized that the state supplied police with aggregate data only and no information about individual clients. Wisely, Joyce and the police are not pressing for more detailed information. Joyce says police are prepared to enter into a one-way relationship in which they provide information to social workers but receive none in return.

In places with less strict privacy laws, police and social workers are forming effective crime-fighting teams. In 2001, the city of Regina in Saskatchewan was known as the car theft capital of Canada. Police and provincial social workers joined forces to steer young car thieves into social programs rather than jail. After two years, the car theft rate had dropped by one-third, according to Sergeant Bart Leach of the Regina Police Service.

"It's an open exchange back and forth on a daily basis," said Leach. That turnaround, however, was smoothed by numerous clauses written into the province's privacy laws allowing for disclosure and sharing of information among official agencies.

Spence calls the cooperative efforts "exploratory" at this stage. And one of the areas of exploration is clearly to determine whether the relationship can be built without trampling on individuals' privacy rights.

Boston police have found ways in the past to work both effectively and ethically with clergy and street workers to reduce violent crime. The latest effort is worthy of encouragement provided it proceeds on a similarly high plane.

Kathleen O'Toole, the city's new police commissioner, is a protege of Los Angeles Police Commissioner William Bratton, the godfather of community policing. Now O'Toole has the opportunity to blaze some trails of her own.

The lock-'em-up mentality once common in police departments is being replaced by a more thoughtful approach to crime and justice. New models are worth seeking. In Boston, they may well be found where police officers and social workers cross paths.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Actually, I find these two stories to be connected…and vaguely creepy. Maybe because I just finished reading the trade paperback edition of "The Truth."

Muscle building gene therapy might build super athletes, scientist warns
By Paul Recer, Associated Press, 2/16/2004 16:20

SEATTLE (AP) Gene injections in rats can double muscle strength and speed, researchers have found, raising concerns that the virtually undetectable technology could be used illegally to build super athletes.

A University of Pennsylvania researcher seeking ways to treat illness said studies in rats show muscle mass, strength and endurance can be increased by injections of a gene-manipulated virus that goes to muscle tissue and causes a rapid growth of cells.

''The things we are developing with diseases in mind could one day be used for genetic enhancement of athletic performance,'' Lee Sweeney said Monday at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Scientists turn fat cells into fat-burning machines

2/17/2004

In what sounds like every dieter's dream, scientists have figured out a way to turn fat-storing cells into little fat-burning machines. Unfortunately, it has only been done in laboratory rats, and the human applications remain in the future. Nevertheless, the scientists say it could eventually lead to new ways to help Americans fight their expanding waistlines.

"This is in no way a cure for obesity," said Roger H. Unger of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who led the work. "But it is a road map. It's a strategy for future research."

Unger and his colleagues injected rats with a virus genetically engineered to carry the gene for the hormone leptin, which is normally produced by fat cells. The virus infected the animals' livers, causing the organ to produce leptin. The resulting high levels of leptin in the animals' bloodstreams made the rats rapidly lose weight.

When Unger and his colleagues examined the animals' fat cells, they discovered that they had shriveled in size and were chock-full of an unusually large number of structures known as mitochondria, tiny energy-producing powerhouses inside cells, said a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings indicate that fat cells normally develop a defense against their own leptin, which would explain why injecting the hormone into the body has failed to make people lose weight. But when the hormone comes from another part of the body, it appears to bypass that defense. If researchers could identify that mechanism and harness it, that could lead to new weight-loss treatments, Unger said.

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Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H., Terry Campbell, M.H.A., and David U. Himmelstein, M.D.

ABSTRACT
Background A decade ago, the administrative costs of health care in the United States greatly exceeded those in Canada. We investigated whether the ascendancy of computerization, managed care, and the adoption of more businesslike approaches to health care have decreased administrative costs.

Methods For the United States and Canada, we calculated the administrative costs of health insurers, employers' health benefit programs, hospitals, practitioners' offices, nursing homes, and home care agencies in 1999. We analyzed published data, surveys of physicians, employment data, and detailed cost reports filed by hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. In calculating the administrative share of health care spending, we excluded retail pharmacy sales and a few other categories for which data on administrative costs were unavailable. We used census surveys to explore trends over time in administrative employment in health care settings. Costs are reported in U.S. dollars.

Results In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada's national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3 percent; the overhead among Canada's private insurers was higher than that in the United States (13.2 percent vs. 11.7 percent). Providers' administrative costs were far lower in Canada.

Between 1969 and 1999, the share of the U.S. health care labor force accounted for by administrative workers grew from 18.2 percent to 27.3 percent. In Canada, it grew from 16.0 percent in 1971 to 19.1 percent in 1996. (Both nations' figures exclude insurance-industry personnel.)

Conclusions The gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration has grown to $752 per capita. A large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health care system.

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The Health of Nations
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Economic Report of the President, released last week, has drawn criticism on several fronts. Let me open a new one: the report's discussion of health care, which shows a remarkable indifference to the concerns of ordinary Americans — and suggests a major political opening for the Democrats.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans rank health care among their top issues. People are happy with the quality of health care, if they can afford it, but they're afraid that they might not be able to afford it. Unlike other wealthy countries, America doesn't have universal health insurance, and it's all too easy to fall through the cracks in our system. When I saw that the president's economic report devoted a whole chapter to health care, I assumed that it would make some attempt to address these public concerns.

Instead, the report pooh-poohs the problem. Although more than 40 million people lack health insurance, this doesn't matter too much because "the uninsured are a diverse and perpetually changing group." This is good news? At any given time about one in seven Americans is uninsured, which is bad enough. Because the uninsured are a "perpetually changing group," however, a much larger fraction of the population suffers periodic, terrifying spells of being uninsured, and an even larger fraction lives with the fear of losing insurance if anything goes wrong at work or at home.

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Expert: Sharpton Should Quit Unless...
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Al Sharpton, who won less than half of the Black votes cast for Sen. John Edwards in the South Carolina Democratic primary and was almost trounced 2-to-1 among African-American voters by runner-up John Kerry, should either come up with a bold new strategy or get out of the presidential race, says one of America’s most respected political scientists.

“South Carolina ought to be a wake-up call because that’s the biggest. This was the first southern state he’s faced. This was probably the best chance he’s had to pick up any delegates. He should pull out,” says Ron Walters, University of Maryland political science professor and adviser to Jesse Jackson during his two presidential runs.

Things improved slightly for Sharpton last Saturday.

In Michigan, he tied for fourth-place with Wesley Clark, with 7 percent of the vote. Kerry won the caucus with 52 percent, following by Howard Dean with 17 percent and John Edwards at 14 percent. Dennis Kucinich came in last-place with 3 percent of the Democratic vote. As expected, Sharpton did not pick up any delegates over the weekend in Washington state or Maine.

On Tuesday, Sharpton came in fifth in both Virginia (3 percent) and Tennessee (2 percent).

In order to clinch the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs to win 2,162 delegates. So far, Kerry leads the field with 473, followed by Dean with 182 and Edwards with 182. Sharpton has 12 and Kucinich has two.

Still, Sharpton was predicting that he’d remain in the campaign to the end and go into the convention with 300 to 400 delegates, an extremely optimistic projection, given his performance so far.

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I was going to bring over some of the reaction to The Black Commentator's piece on the Al Sharpton/Roger Stone debacle by blogging on some of the email they got. But all the feedback should be read, so I'm just strongly suggesting you do so.

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Trust No One

…Because the times are ripe for all thoughtful men and women to be suspicious it might be helpful for democracy if all Americans tried to think like Black people. Everyone should start slowly. It isn’t necessary to dwell on the increased likelihood of a mortgage denial or police brutality. Just ask, “If I were Black, would I believe that terror threats always take place when Bush’s poll numbers drop?” Of course the down side must not be ignored either. Anyone who takes this too far would conclude that President Bush advised Janet Jackson to briefly bare her breast. That event certainly took Democrats out of the news.

All humor aside, anyone with common sense should realize that naïve beliefs about equal opportunity and level playing fields make all Americans easy prey for corporate interests and their political allies. White Americans would benefit if they were willing to accept that the system often does not work in their favor any more than it does for Black Americans. The Republican dominated Congress recently enacted legislation that could eliminate overtime pay for as many as 8 million workers.

It is simply obscene for the President and Congress to give corporations permission to take money from working people’s pockets. The obscenity is worsened by a corporate media that gives more attention to a breast exposed for a millisecond than to the theft of Americans' wages. The paranoia possibilities are endless. Corporations take money from working people, take over the media, and then refuse to adequately report the story.

In 2004 we have seen the media give a lying administration a pass on everything from the reasons for waging war to the need for terror alerts. A Democratic presidential front runner is made and unmade with the tacit consent of even liberal pundits. You can call it cynicism, paranoia or just paying close attention, but it is now unacceptable to trust who and what we are told to trust.

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February 16, 2004

Phelps has asked my opinion of a post by one Clayton Cramer on gay marriage. It seems Mr. Cramer sees a parallel between gay people pursuing equal recognition of their rights as citizens and slave holders pursuing their right to debase a major fraction of the population.

Detangling the rants from the attempt to convince:

The analogy is in the thought processes that justify the discrimination. I'm not much concerned about when it happened as with the fact that it did.

Mr. Cramer is misinformed on the morals of the time.

As you see, slavery was acceptable, even engineered into existence, in the 1600s. The maneuvering Mr. Cramer correctly implies took place was to convince the non land-owners to support it…and even that happened well prior to 1800.

…um, like people in interracial marriages want not just permission for their relationship but acceptance? Okay. One point for Mr. Cramer…but note that I elided a rant that significantly changes the tone of this particular statement.

Technically, there can be no violation of free speech in Britain and Canada because they've established no such legal right. The First Amendment is uniquely American.

That said, I would need to verify for myself these things happened, and why. Public expression of disapproval can range from a "tsk, tsk" to a lynching; and I won't defend someone over a letter the content of which I'm unaware of.

That's all the argument there is in a very long post. The rants can be summed up by saying Mr. Cramer's sensibilities are truly disturbed when he pays attention to people he has nothing to do with.

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Opening up like this, letting people know Muslims bring these community benefits, is a good move. American Muslims, and Black American Muslims in particular, can't let others shape their image if they're going to survive.

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Black mosque to offer openness
Sunday, February 15, 2004

By Ervin Dyer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When a congregation of African-American Muslims cracks the soil on a mosque expansion project in the East End later this year, more than ground will be broken.

For a faith group that has spent much of its 84 years misunderstood and separated from the Pittsburgh black mainstream, the new worship space will symbolize a new openness.

A largely working-class community, African-American Muslims are gaining visibility here as more professionals appear among their ranks. With these physicians, teachers, attorneys and scientists comes a desire to reveal more of who they are and what fuels their faith.

One of those lifting the veil and pushing the community out of the shadows is Rashad Byrdsong, a former Black Panther. With his roots in community and social reform, Byrdsong, 54, and others are in the midst of a seven-year plan to build an expanded mosque on the site of the existing one on Paulson Avenue in the city's Lincoln-Lemington section.

The $1 million project upgrades the Masjid Al-Mu'min ("believers" in Arabic) and promises to bring adult care, help for ex-offenders re-entering society and technology training to a long-neglected neighborhood.

Al-Mu'min's plan coincides with development efforts by the nearby Mount Ararat Baptist Church and the new construction of a Kingsley Association community center, which turns 100 this year.

The mosque's ambitious goals include housing and work force development and creating a commercial corridor that offers Islamic garments and hilal meat, which requires a special process for Muslim consumption.

A key element is a cultural library that documents the long history of Muslims in America.

"We've been here for centuries," said Sarah Jameela Martin, a first-generation Muslim and local educator who made Pittsburgh her home in the early 1960s. "We're just looking at ourselves differently." Pittsburgh's African-American Muslims are an orthodox group, subscribing to the traditions and practices of Sunni Muslims. They are distinct and separate from believers in the Nation of Islam, a more nationalist faith begun in 1931.

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New scholarship created for whites only

BRISTOL, Rhode Island (AP) --A student group at Roger Williams University is offering a new scholarship for which only white students are eligible, a move they say is designed to protest affirmative action.

The application for the $250 award requires an essay on "why you are proud of your white heritage" and a recent picture to "confirm whiteness."

"Evidence of bleaching will disqualify applicants," says the application, issued by the university's College Republicans.

Jason Mattera, 20, who is president of the College Republicans, said the group is parodying minority scholarships.

"We think that if you want to treat someone according to character and how well they achieve academically, then skin color shouldn't really be an option," he said. "Many people think that coming from a white background you're automatically privileged, you're automatically rich and your parents pay full tuition. That's just not the case."

The stunt has angered some at the university, but the administration is staying out of the fray. The school's provost said it is a student group's initiative and is not endorsed by Roger Williams.

Mattera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, is himself a recipient of a $5,000 scholarship open only to a minority group.

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I do not read Gawker or Wonkette so I can't vouch for them one way or the other.

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Blogging While (Anti) Black
When websites attack! Media critic John Lee on why Gawker and Blogette have a race problem.

By John Lee

Imagine if there were a website where you could vicariously cruise the halls of power in New York and DC via deliciously campy witticisms about the gossip and gaffes that plague powerful media moguls, real estate barons, and politicos that delight the reader in ways that can only be described with overused nihilistic German words.

Enter Nick Denton. Denton, a former journalist with dot-com money, owns two website blogs called Gawker and Wonkette that serve just that purpose. Gawker and Wonkette have become the sine qua non of the New York and DC cultural elite, or at least those wishing to be a part of it. They chronicle the intricacies of the media power structure, the players and their sycophants in all their hubris. Their succinct invectives come from snippets found in established gossip columns, newspaper articles, wire copy, email tips, and an occasional instant messenger-inspired epiphany.

Denton has mapped out a route for monetizing the blog world in short order. It is a strategy to provoke outrage and publicity by taking the piss out of celebrities and luminaries of New York and DC. And I don't have any problem with that. It's just that these sites have decided that one way to telegraph their supreme coolness is to continually joke about non-whites as marginalized second-class citizens. It's this casual, damaging disregard that is hard to quantify, and yet, Gawker and Wonkette exemplify the growing phenomenon of white hipsters adopting a casual racism. Is it any wonder so many still feel blogging's a white man's sport?

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Memo Theft

Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A26

FOR MONTHS, Democrats and Republicans have agreed that there's a scandal somewhere in those Democratic judicial nomination memos that were leaked last year to the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But they've been unable to agree on what the scandal was. For many conservatives, the issue was what the memos said -- their portrayal of Democratic Senate staffers at the beck and call of liberal interest groups. Democrats meanwhile ignored the memos' embarrassing contents and focused on the way they were pilfered from Democratic computers by Republican staff. Last week, as the magnitude of the snooping became clear, Republicans shifted gears and agreed with their Democratic colleagues that the acquisition of the memos was wrong and possibly criminal.

The change is attributable to an investigation by the Senate's sergeant at arms -- an investigation that, though not yet finished, has concluded that thousands of memos were improperly taken. The investigation led to the resignation of a lawyer from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a lawyer who had worked on the Judiciary Committee and had tapped into the memos. Another Judiciary staffer has also left. Mr. Frist and Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) had taken a beating from conservative groups for responding seriously to Democratic complaints, and Republican senators had previously complained about the investigation itself. But after senators were briefed on the status of the investigation, Republicans supported Mr. Hatch's actions and rejected the criticism by outsiders. Some suggested that Republican memos had been tapped as well.

The content of the Democratic memos is, indeed, offensive. In memos to Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), staffers announce that nominee Miguel Estrada is "especially dangerous because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment." Nominees are characterized as "Good," "Bad" and "Ugly." A liberal lobbyist is described as urging that nominees not be confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit until it finishes hearing the University of Michigan affirmative action case. And one document declares that "most of Bush's nominees are nazis."

That said, the effort by Republican staffers to acquire -- apparently over a long period -- large numbers of confidential Democratic memos and use them for political advantage is quite ugly. We don't mean to sound pious about leaks; newspapers depend on them. But the issue here is less the leaking of the information than its apparent theft in the first place. It isn't much of a defense to suggest that the material was not adequately protected on a shared network and was therefore fair game. If Democratic staffers had left their office doors unlocked, would it be open season on their file cabinets? Senate staffers appear to have done the electronic equivalent of rifling through one another's desks in a systematic and sustained effort to gather intelligence. Mr. Hatch deserves credit for insisting -- in the face of considerable party pressure -- that, even in the midst of a partisan war over judicial nominations, such behavior will not be tolerated.

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Act Fast on Mercury Threat

February 16, 2004

Environmental Protection Agency scientists reported a striking finding this month: About 15% — twice the rate previously assumed — of the roughly 4 million babies born annually in the United States may be exposed to potentially harmful levels of mercury in the womb. Although the estimate is preliminary, based on an analysis by EPA scientist Kathryn Mahaffey, it should prompt fast action by the EPA to require power plants to reduce mercury emissions — and by the Food and Drug Administration to better warn consumers about foods that may contain high concentrations of mercury.

Mercury can cause fetal neurological damage and learning problems. Little testing has been done so far on U.S. children.

At the FDA, Commissioner Mark B. McClellan is creating for release in the next two months dietary guidelines on mercury in fish. They should include better labeling to help pregnant and nursing women limit their intake of the principal sources of mercury contamination: predatory species of fish including swordfish, shark and some tuna.

California already does a better job than most states. Proposition 65 — a measure passed in 1986 to require disclosure of potential toxic hazards wherever they're found — has prompted most grocers to post warnings near their fresh seafood sections. State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer should be more vigorous in applying the measure to canned albacore tuna; he should call for a label warning about the dangers of consuming it during pregnancy, similar to what's on alcohol bottles.

The challenge in labeling is to strike a balance, to warn pregnant women to be cautious while not frightening off adults for whom fish consumption has proven benefits.

It can be difficult to assess the sometimes wildly varying mercury levels within a species. Another pothole is the threat of dueling lawsuits by tuna canners against any labeling and by environmental groups that want even restaurant menus to carry fish warnings.

The most effective solution would be to reduce mercury at the source, primarily coal-burning power plants. EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt should bow to his agency's scientists and adopt the more stringent regulations for reducing mercury emissions endorsed by his predecessor, Christie Whitman, to achieve at least a 90% decline in mercury emissions from coal-fired plants by 2008. Leavitt last month proposed looser market-based regulation that at best would reduce emissions by 70%, and not until 2018.

The studies released this month don't put mercury in the same broadly dangerous category as tobacco. However, they do show mercury to be more harmful to fetuses and nursing babies than previously thought. They should inspire better consumer warnings and tougher emissions regulations now.

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The more I do this blogging thing, the more I recognize how misleading newspaper headlines are. Prof. DeLong complains about the press corp…I think he's up past 50 installments in the series…misrepresenting economic realities (to use the term "realities" rather loosely). I think we have to expect them to misrepresent something as complex as macroeconomics when they can't even get the headline to be about the major point of the stories they're attached to.

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Backers of Aristide attack demonstrators

By Michael Norton, Associated Press, 2/16/2004

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Defying government loyalists, more than 1,000 protesters demonstrated against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide yesterday as exiled paramilitary forces joined rebels in a bloody uprising that has killed about 50 people.

Shouting "Down with Aristide!" members of a broad opposition alliance known as the Democratic Platform marched through Port-au-Prince, saying they did not support violence but shared the same goal as the rebels -- ousting the embattled president.

"We're still dealing with pacific, nonviolent means, but let me tell you, we have one goal," said Gilbert Leger, an attorney and opposition member. "We do support [rebel] efforts."

After a peaceful march, demonstrators ended the protest about a quarter of the way through when police told them they would have to change the route because of security concerns.

Militants loyal to Aristide crushed a similar antigovernment demonstration Thursday, stoning opponents and blocking the protest route. The government said between seven and a dozen attackers have been arrested, but a foreign technical adviser to the police said there have been no arrests.

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Influence of MoveOn undeniable

By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, 2/16/2004

BERKELEY, Calif. -- The biggest powerhouse in progressive politics had decidedly inauspicious beginnings: an overheard conversation at a local Chinese restaurant, a high-tech chain letter, and $89.

Five years ago, tech entrepreneurs Joan Blades and her husband, Wes Boyd -- whose company gave the world the flying-toaster screen saver -- were eating lunch and listening to a group at a nearby table lamenting the time and energy wasted on the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. Blades and Boyd decided to start a petition urging Congress to forgo impeachment, censure Clinton instead, and move on. They e-mailed it to their friends, asked them to pass it on, and paid $89 to set up a website where people could register their support.

Within a week, more than 100,000 people had put their names on the petition, flooring Blades and Boyd. They decided to make their new network of like-minded folks permanent. MoveOn.org was born.

Today, the organization has 1.7 million members -- as many as the Christian Coalition at its height. Its members discuss issues and set the group's priorities on the site, and MoveOn sends regular news updates. It has raised millions of dollars in small contributions from those members -- for Democratic candidates, full-page newspaper advertisements, and prime-time television spots that criticize the Bush administration.

MoveOn's Internet techniques were adopted by former governor Howard Dean of Vermont to power his formidable fund-raising machine. Dean's rivals -- and even the GOP -- are now using them in ways that are revolutionizing political activism and campaign finance.

The organization has sent thousands of volunteers to register their views in congressional offices and to work on political campaigns, and spurred its members to vehement, coordinated protests against the war in Iraq, a war that sent its membership soaring in late 2002. MoveOn.org now consists of an issue advocacy group, a political action committee, and a Voter Fund for battleground-state advertising in 2004. That advertising fund has collected $10 million in mostly small donations from MoveOn members. Billionaire philanthropist and Bush critic George Soros, with insurance magnate Peter Lewis, has committed $5 million in matching funds.

"We sent out this one-sentence petition, and that just ended up sidetracking us for far longer than we'd ever imagined," said Blades.

MoveOn is lauded by Democrats, who credit it with bringing new voters and new life to their causes. It is loathed by Republicans, who call it shadowy and hateful. And it is imitated by everyone. Its methods of raising funds and building networks -- unprecedented in American politics -- have been adopted by both major parties, the presidential candidates, and scores of other advocacy groups.

"They have innovated in ways some of us never imagined," said Michael Cornfield, research director at George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet.

The organization is managed by a paid staff of eight, all working from their homes. Boyd and Blades, both volunteers, preside over the operation from their Berkeley house. Blades, 47, who was working on a laptop in her sun-filled dining room on a recent afternoon, is still amazed at where she and Boyd have ended up. Especially since neither of them had ever been involved in politics before that lunch.

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Red tape stalls S. Africa land transfers
Competing claims of blacks delay sales of white-owned farms

By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 2/16/2004

SEKGOPO, South Africa -- In the fertile Limpopo valley, where juicy mangoes hang heavily from trees and sweet-tasting watermelons grow by the tens of thousands on the vines, the feelings about land run deep.

For the last three generations, since whites took the land from blacks, the town of Sekgopo has been neatly divided along racial lines. Some 20,000 blacks today live in houses crowded together in a depression in the land, where wind kicks up clouds of dust from the dirt roads, while hundreds of whites live on shady farms that ring the village, raising cattle and growing vegetables and fruit on so much land that it stretches to the hills on the horizon.

Soon, many hope, the wrongs of this history will come to an end. But in sharp contrast to neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government more than three years ago unleashed paramilitary forces to seize white-owned farms, many white farmers here are driving the process. They want to sell.

The holdup in Limpopo province and many other rural areas of South Africa, say land reform advocates, is that competing claims among black groups and government bureaucracy have delayed the process for years.

Few blacks have the money to buy the land, or start a farming operation, leaving them dependent on the government to make the deals as well as offer them grants to pay for seed and fertilizer. And in many cases, desirable parcels of land are caught up in complex legal cases under the postapartheid land redistribution procedure.

"There's no doubt that a lot of white farmers are willing to sell and get out," said Marc Wegerif, manager for research and policy at Nkuzi Development Association, which assists blacks in land rights cases. The bottleneck, he said, is that the "government is not giving adequate attention to sorting out the issues."

Wegerif's group and other advocates hope that they can pressure the governing African National Congress in the next two months -- prior to the April 14 national election -- to quicken the pace of negotiations and commit more funds to settle claims. In 1994, after ending three centuries of white minority rule, black government leaders pledged to transfer 30 percent of white-owned farmland to nonwhites in five years. Today, nearly a decade later, they have transferred less than 3 percent.

"People think the radical moment of transition in 1994 has passed," said Edward Lahiff of the Program for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. "But land is the big unfinished business."

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Rescued from neglect, 5 brothers find hope
The odds were high against the children found living in squalor on Keystone Avenue 10 years ago. But a determined foster mom has helped five boys overcome scars left by a horrific case.
By Dawn Turner Trice
Tribune staff reporter

February 15, 2004

HOPKINS PARK, Ill. -- When the five brothers arrived at Claudine Christian's farm nearly 10 years ago, they weren't accustomed to having meals at a dining room table and they ate with their fingers.

For the first several nights, they slept in a huddle on the bedroom floor despite brand-new bunk beds purchased just for them. Nightmares crowded their dreams.

The brothers were five of 19 children Chicago police found in February 1994, in a squalid two-bedroom apartment at 219 N. Keystone Ave.

At the time, the Keystone Kids, as they would become known, made national news as one of the country's most disturbing cases of child neglect. Six mothers, five of whom were sisters, collected more than $4,500 a month in welfare checks and food stamps while young children slept on stained mattresses on the floor, waded through mounds of filth and depended on the older children to raise them.

Nearly all of the Keystone children--the original 19 eventually rose to 28 because some of the children weren't in the apartment that night--have either been adopted or have "aged out" of the child welfare system.

According to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the five brothers, who now range in age from 12 to 19, are among the last remaining in foster care. Only one other, an 18-year-old, continues to be a ward of the state.

In Christian's home, the brothers have defied what most child-welfare experts say is the lot for children who begin their lives under such horrific neglect. They are junior deacons in their small church. While the older boys once had abysmal school attendance, they now miss very few days of school. With Christian, they have chores and boundaries and distinct expectations. They also have frequent contact with their birth mother.

"When everything happened, we were tired of the cameras flashing and everybody knowing our business," says Johnnie Melton, 18. "We were ashamed. But there wasn't any of that here at Mama's house. She took us in and suddenly we had a real home."

Still, Christian, who has been their most ardent advocate, fears they may not have gotten all they need. Despite many successes, the young men struggle in school with behavioral and academic challenges. The oldest has graduated from high school but can barely read.

From the beginning, social workers knew that the children had experienced such profound deprivation that it was going to be difficult to place them in homes individually, let alone as a group.

When Christian agreed to care for the boys for three months until their mother was released from jail, she wasn't prepared for what was coming: The boys fought incessantly and destroyed items in the home. Her husband decided he couldn't take it anymore and moved out. The foster care placement itself would last more than 10 years.

"Before there was a system, there was a tradition," says Christian, 59, who raised five children of her own before the brothers came. "This was our history: If you knew somebody who couldn't raise their babies, then somebody who could stepped forward. This is just what family and neighbors did for one another."

Christian says she couldn't afford to adopt the brothers, but as they wound their way into her heart, despite the difficulties, neither could she imagine letting them go.

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You know what you need. Health care. Child care. Equal employment opportunity. And you know who will give it to you…and who won't.
Why single women must vote
Ruth Rosen
Monday, February 16, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

FORGET THE ANGRY white men of 1994, the soccer moms of 1998 or the NASCAR dads of 2002. This year, Democrats believe that single women -- one- fifth of the nation's population and 42 percent of all registered women voters -- are the demographic-swing group that could decide a close election, oust President Bush and alter the political landscape in Congress.

Who are these unmarried women? They are never-married working women, divorced working mothers raising kids alone and widows who are worried about their economic security.

Last December, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, two well-known Democratic pollsters, released the results of a survey that Democrats are taking to heart. "Unmarried women represent millions more voters with very clear concerns about the economy, health care and education," said Lake.

To this, Greenberg added, "If unmarried women voted at the same rate as married women, they would have a decisive impact on this (2004) election and could be the most important agents of change in modern politics."

The problem is that single women just don't exercise their electoral power. In the 2000 presidential election, 68 percent of married women went to the voting booth but only 52 percent of single women cast a vote.

That means that 6 million single women failed to vote in an election that hinged on a little more than half a million votes nationally and a few hundred votes in Florida.

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SFGate:

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February 15, 2004

Peer-review system adopted for Africa

KIGALI - African leaders ended their summit having adopted a unique peer review system aimed at allowing countries on the continent to judge the behaviour of fellow African states.

"The most important point is that we can now start evaluation," Mozambican President Joachim Chissano said at the end of the two-day summit in the Rwandan capital.

Heads of state have agreed to a set of criteria defining the term "good governance" in the African context, a crucial intital step if the peer system is to work.

In all, nine African heads of state and government have adopted the Peer Review Mechanism (PRM), and evaluations will apply to 16 participating countries.

Their achievements and shortcomings with regard to good governance and human rights will henceforth be assessed by the others.

The PRM is one of the pillars of NEPAD, an ambitious recovery plan drawn up by the African Union three years ago.

Together with Kenya, Ghana and the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Rwanda will this year be among the first states to submit to assessment by the dozen other subscribers to the PRM and its code of conduct.

On Friday Wiseman Nkuhlu, chairman of the NEPAD steering committee, said that it was critical that participants in PRM adopted the criteria submitted to them so that the process of evaluation could begin in coming weeks.

Meanwhile Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo announced that Angola had decided to join NEPAD, which will bring the total membership to 17.

Critics of PRM regret the lack of provisions for punitive sanctions for those who fall short of good governance benchmarks or who fail to comply with recommendations made by the PRM measures.

AFP

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THE FEAR PRESIDENT
Sat Feb 14, 8:02 PM ET

By Cynthia Tucker

By the time NBC's Tim Russert finished interviewing President Bush (news - web sites) last Sunday, viewers were either frightened or flabbergasted or both.

Frightened because Bush -- announcing himself a "war president" -- used variations of the words "war," "terror," "kill" and "danger" more than 70 times in an interview that lasted less than an hour. It prompted memories of Cold War school drills and hiding beneath the desk.

Flabbergasted because you may have thought you had been mysteriously transported into an episode of "The Outer Limits." Was it Dec. 8, 1941? Or April 18, 1961, the day after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion? Perhaps Sept. 12, 2001?

Actually, President Bush wants you emotionally stuck in the horrible aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The weeks following the atrocities saw the president transformed into a forceful commander-in-chief and brought him sky-high approval ratings. With his ratings now down to about 50 percent, he'd love to flytrap American voters in a 9/11 mindset until November -- which, he thinks, would ensure his re-election.

But the strategy won't work. The president's fear-mongering merely created a strange discordance, since most Americans don't consider the war on terror the most important issue facing the country. A January poll by the Pew Center showed that only 37 percent view defense and security as the nation's most pressing concern. Thirty-five percent list the economy, while nearly 20 percent list other domestic issues as the most important. (The rest chose other issues or none.)

Barring another attack on U.S. soil, the presidential election won't be won or lost on the war on terror. Bush beats the war drum too late; for the past two years, he has spent precious little time enlisting the average American in the war effort.

Wars, after all, demand broad sacrifice; but the president has been reluctant to call upon an America coddled by affluenza to make any sacrifices. Indeed, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the president suggested patriotic Americans return to their routines -- starting with a trip to the nearest shopping mall.

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At The Scobleizer Weblog

One question I got at the O'Reilly conference from someone who has 20 million users: "how can I make syndication scale?" He's concerned by a few things:

1) RSS and Atom feeds are pulled down by news aggregators like the NewsGator I use every hour. Multiply that by 20 million people and that's a bandwidth bill that's many times higher than it is via a web browser (because browsers only visit occassionally, and not every day).

2) RSS and Atom feeds pull down all the content every time, even content that hasn't changed since last time. Is there a way for him to only send down a feed that's changed, or even better, a partial feed with only new items? (My feed sends down 75 items each time whether new or not).

He says that these concerns are keeping him from adopting RSS or Atom at this time. I'm not using his name here because he didn't want his company to be identified, but he's a very senior person at a very well known company with very high traffic (and, yes, I would love to subscribe to this company's syndication feeds).

I was going to comment for the hell of it. Off the top of my head I figured cookies and a script to generate RSS feeds would work. But Dave Winer said:

Actually HTTP anticipated some of your friends' concerns. If the feed hasn't changed, and if the client and server are "304-aware" (many if not most are) nothing goes over the wire other than a very short message that says "Nothing changed."

Tell your friend, if you want, that we'll work with him on getting a scalable system deployed, if he hits a scaling wall. We've been looking for a case to do this with. Even the most popular feeds don't get so much traffic in 2004 to make a big difference in bandwidth. UserLand is hosting the NY Times feeds, for example, and they're quite popular as you might imagine, and they're holding up fine. I'd be happy to talk with them.

And he's going to talk to them.

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Most D.C. Homicide Victims Had Arrests
Analysis Highlights 'Criminal Subculture'

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A01

Nearly three of every four adult homicide victims in the District last year had an arrest history, according to an analysis of court records that casts new light on why the city has one of the highest homicide rates in the country.

The more than 150 slayings are evidence of the cycles of violence plaguing a city hard-hit in the past two decades by drug wars and gang rivalries, law enforcement and criminal justice specialists said, and a blunt statement about the risks of becoming caught up in a lifestyle on the edges of the law.

Although the 248 killings last year were a sharp drop from the homicide tolls of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is a resilient "criminal subculture" in the city, Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said in an interview. Ramsey said this group has grown so entrenched and well armed that it poses a risk to the District's attempts to renew its image and create a better future for its rougher neighborhoods.

"It's a huge problem," Ramsey said.

He and other law enforcement officials cautioned against "blaming the victim for being a victim." At the same time, however, Ramsey said an arrest is often at least an indication that the person participated in, or simply couldn't get away from, risky situations.

"Whether you've got a record or not, no one has the right to kill you -- but when you look at homicides in particular, it's just not unusual to have people involved on both sides to have prior experience within our [criminal justice] system," he said. "The fact is that if you are part of that criminal subculture, or just associated with it, that puts you more at risk."

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Democrats Will Try a Hybrid of Old, New Policies
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A01

After months of bitter disputes over the direction of the party, top Democratic officials from front-running presidential candidate John F. Kerry to House and Senate leaders are coalescing around an election-year domestic agenda calling for higher taxes for wealthier Americans to finance an expansion of health care, education and other federal programs.

With Kerry in position to win the Democratic nomination and mold an election-year agenda with input from his colleagues in Congress, Democrats are essentially splitting the ideological difference between the centrist policies of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and the liberal impulses of many party officials and activists today.

The hybrid ideological approach is reflected in the party's support for putting the brakes on some, but not all, trade deals, starting with one being negotiated with South America; slightly modifying the new education law and increasing spending for it; retaining tax cuts for the middle class; and somehow, holding back government spending enough to reduce the federal budget deficit as fast as, if not faster than, President Bush says he would.

In a nod to the party's more conservative members, especially those in the South, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said there is broad agreement to play down gun control and other cultural issues.

"I cannot recall a time when there was more consensus on the policy direction we should take," Daschle said. "As you go down the list, on virtually every one of these questions, Democrats believe Republicans are ceding the middle, and we are willing to take it."

Kerry said Bush's strategy of playing to his conservative base to maximize voter turnout among Republicans has brought Democrats together on most issues. "George Bush has helped unify the party," Kerry said in an interview last week.

The result: Voters this year likely will be presented with two clear, but not dramatically different, approaches to solving the nation's domestic problems, ranging from failing schools to soaring drug costs.

Kerry and top Democratic congressional leaders have rejected broad policy changes such as repealing all of Bush's tax cuts and moving too quickly to provide health coverage to every American. "While some wanted [to repeal] everything, there is consensus around repealing those [tax cuts] on high income," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Democrats said they will not promote completely undoing two other laws of which they have been highly critical: the No Child Left Behind accountability program for schools and educators; and the Medicare prescription drug plan. "In some places, we have learned lessons," said Kerry, who several times used the word "balanced" to describe the emerging Democratic approach.

But Democrats will promote significant modifications to the education and Medicare laws that would affect the lives of Americans in direct ways.

On Medicare, Kerry and congressional Democrats support allowing the government to negotiate lower prices with drug companies and permitting the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and other foreign countries. Democrats believe this will quickly lower the cost of drugs for American consumers; Republicans counter that such measures will lead to government price controls that could result in less research.

On education, Kerry and congressional Democrats want to maintain the tough accountability standards of the new law but provide states and schools greater flexibility to meet them and, most significantly, provide a big funding increase: as much as $6 billion or more annually on top of Bush's record-high spending on education. Bush supports a more modest increase and maintaining the law as is.

Democratic officials say this split-the-difference policy approach reflects the party's nascent November strategy of stoking its base, already aggressively anti-Bush, but also appealing to swing voters as Clinton did in 1992 and 1996. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean's approach of playing to liberal activists with confrontational ideas such as eliminating all of the Bush tax cuts has been largely rejected by voters and most members of Congress.

Kerry, Daschle and Pelosi said they are confident that Democratic liberals, moderates and conservatives will remain so united in their loathing of Bush that the policy disputes that have long divided the party will cease or at least quiet to a whisper. They point to one constant in polling of voters in primaries and caucuses: Democrats across the board are more concerned about electability than ideological purity.

"The political reality of being out of power . . . means people will swallow things they usually wouldn't," said Steve Elmendorf, a senior aide to Kerry.

To underscore what is at stake, Democrats will highlight the historic potential of the 2004 elections. Bush is the first Republican president since Calvin Coolidge in 1924 to seek reelection backed by a Republican-controlled House and Senate. A GOP sweep of the White House and Congress, some Democrats say, could pave the way for a generation of Republican dominance in Washington -- much as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt did for Republicans at the turn of the 20th century, and as Franklin D. Roosevelt for Democrats with the "New Deal" in the 1930s.

The Democratic agenda also will reflect the prominence of the South in this year's election: Five of the most competitive Senate seats are in southern states, which traditionally also play a key role in picking the presidential winner. Republicans hold a 51 to 48 advantage in the Senate (there is one independent who usually sides with Democrats) and are considered by political handicappers good bets to retain or widen their edge. Republicans are widely expected to retain their majority in the House; currently, there are 230 Republicans, 204 Democrats and one independent.

Assuming Kerry wins the nomination, party leaders said, the Massachusetts senator will have two distinct advantages in keeping Democrats in Congress united behind him: his long record of Senate service and his political wild card in congressional dealings, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Kennedy can help keep liberals on the reservation when Kerry reaches for the center in the general election, Democrats say. "What Senator Kerry wants to do is to harmonize this message, so it's working for the Senate, working for the House and working for [himself]," Kennedy said.

The Democratic nominee will inherit a congressional party that has been slow to adopt a pugilistic minority mentality but has shown signs of starting to fight as one in the aftermath of the 2002 elections, when they lost seats in both chambers. A voting analysis by Congressional Quarterly found House Democrats more unified on party-line votes than at any point since 1960. "The foundation of our victory that we will have in November is the unity of the Democrats," Pelosi said. Because they are in the minority, they will rely heavily on Kerry or whoever the nominee is to get their message out.

To be sure, trade, taxes and spending will continue to divide the party, much as they do the Republican Party. But the most contentious fights of past years -- tax cuts vs. no tax cuts, unfettered free trade vs. no free trade at all, a costly Medicare prescription drug plan vs. a more modest one -- have been largely settled.

Consider tax cuts. The presidential candidates and Democrats in Congress have been divided over the wisdom of cutting taxes since the day Bush took office. The president has picked up some Democrats for all three of his enacted tax cut plans. At the same time, some Democrats advocated no tax cuts or much smaller ones than Bush's.

Now, Kerry and congressional Democrats are mostly unified behind a plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts for those making $200,000 or more a year, which would result in higher income tax rates and bigger tax bills on dividends and estates for those wage earners. They will oppose Bush's plan to make permanent the tax cuts enacted under his watch. For budgetary reasons, many of the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the decade.

Bush has vowed to make the permanency of tax cuts a top campaign issue. Republicans will paint opposition to this as a large tax hike, because Americans would pay higher taxes when all of those cuts lapse.

Kerry and congressional Democrats instead will press to make permanent only those tax cuts benefiting families with incomes of less than $200,000. This includes tax breaks for married couples and parents, as well as lower rates for all taxpayers.

One big worry for Democrats is whether they will have enough money to communicate to voters that they are not raising taxes for anyone but the rich. Some Democrats privately expressed concern that with Kerry atop the ticket, it might be easy for Republicans to paint them as tax-and-spend liberals.

Once the nomination is secured, Kerry plans to roll out a fairly long list of middle-class tax cuts he would enact as president, a top adviser said, including tax breaks for college, after-school programs, small business and health care.

The trick, Kerry's advisers say, is to fit these tax cuts into a budget that also includes a major expansion of federal health insurance programs, which will be the featured item of the Democratic domestic agenda.

Democrats generally favor an incremental approach to covering the uninsured, starting with the poor and children first, by expanding existing programs. Kerry's solution: Increase federal spending on children's health insurance programs and open the federal employees health insurance programs to the public. The Kerry plan, which would cover about six of every 10 uninsured Americans, carries a price tag of $890 billion over 10 years.

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In looking for documentation for a comment left on Pandagon I came across a resource that goes straight to the Dropping Knowledge linkbox.

I call it Little Rock Central High School In The News.

Forty years ago, conflict over integration of Little Rock Central High School captured the attention of the world. That crisis stands as the most significant news event in Little Rock's 20th century history.

The crisis of 1957 was reported in powerful detail by the two statewide newspapers of that era -- the morning Arkansas Gazette and the afternoon Arkansas Democrat. Their pages, reflecting different news cycles but equal competitive vigor, provide an objective record of those momentous times.

For 37 days in August, September and October 1997 the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette republished the front pages of both newspapers from the corresponding date 40 years ago. We offer this unprecedented window onto history as a service to our readers.

And that's not all. They republished selected articles, editorials and op-eds from those 37 days. I tell you, we've come quite a distance from the days in which Billy Graham can be called a nigger lover in a major newspaper because he spread the gospel to Blacks.

It's a fascinating window into a pivotal moment in American…and world…history.

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Guests Fall Ill at Philadelphia Hotel
DAVID B. CARUSO
Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA - Health officials are investigating an outbreak of illnesses at a Philadelphia hotel that recently played host to about 200 Republican leaders, including President Bush.

At least 69 guests at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel - all attending a business conference - went to the hospital last week when a mystery bug caused dizziness and vomiting. More fell ill, but did not seek medical attention.

In addition, two people at a GOP retreat to discuss party policy Jan. 29-31 - a member of House Speaker Dennis Hastert's staff and a second staff member's spouse - became ill the day after checking out, an aide to the Illinois Republican said Tuesday. Neither was hospitalized.

Philadelphia Health Department spokesman Jeff Moran said investigators are looking at several possible causes for the outbreak, including food contamination and the Norwalk virus, an illness that has been known to afflict travelers on cruise ships.

Most of the sicknesses did not occur until several days after the Republicans left. Moran said there was nothing to indicate the outbreak was linked to the GOP gathering, and no foul play was suspected. [P6: hmmm…]

hat tip to Jesse at Pandagon

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