April 17, 2004

By now several folks will have concluded I'm some Socialist that hates the free market system and wants to redistribute all the wealth evenly to all the citizens of (and illegal aliens in) the country.

BZZZT! Wrong.

Capitalism is great. Free markets are the best. Anyone who doubts that should think about how a team of people could support themselves while inventing the transistor, figuring out how to use it and manufacture it, spreading the word of the existence of the new things it made possible, selling the things and collecting the proceeds of the sales. No, I fully recognize and deeply appreciate the power of the greed it all inspires.

What I am against is the ahistorical belief that the free market is self-sustaining, and the ideal means of rationing all things. That we should monitize whatever we can, simply because we can.

We as a people have made choices. We do not want to see people starve without cause, we do not want to see people homeless without cause, we do not want to see people suffer from illness without cause. And the fact is, any time you seriously make a choice about the nature of general conditions…which requires following through, by the way…you take things out of free market conditions. And because we don't want to see these things, we will either prevent them from happening or remove those to whom it happens from our sight. The cheaper cheaper option is the market based solution.

We as a people have made choices. It seriously is well past time people stop pretending otherwise, because we can seriously damage the legal and social mechanisms that keep the free market going. I'm pretty sure we've already given it a nasty kick in the shin.

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Get Your War On is brutal.

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9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM DWYER ASHINGTON, April 17 — Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.

At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."

For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after two weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.

The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.

While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.

Huh? What's that got to do with The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act?

A lot. You see, while we're all gloating about the Bushistas getting caught up in lies and having their arrogance exposed for all to see, they're using the hearings to build a case for more oppressive domestic capabilities.

We know what their plans are. We know law enforcement officials have already used their new anti-terrorism powers for non-terrorism-related cases. We've seen an attempt to make the drug "war" part of the "war" on terrorism through the invention ofthe term "narco-terrorist" (hatched, btw, by Ashcroft, who it seems was disregarding terrorism and focusing on drugs all along).

We know they're saying the full powers authorized by the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act have never been used. Why, then, do they want more?

Even if you trust this crew, do you want such powers laying about for future unknowns to use as they see fit?

The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act expires in 2005, but folks aren't waiting. Patriot II was sliced up into components in an attempt to slip it in, like passing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle under the door. Don't allow it. Even if you think we need more domestic intelligence capabilities (why? The threat was known for years! It wasn't information that was lacking, it was political will) make them prove the need for each additional capability they request. Build in safeguards to prevent their abuse (how? How hell should I know? That neither of us can think of safeguards is just more proof the powers granted by the Act should not exist).

Stay awake. This political thing is about a lot more than Munsters and monkeyboys.

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From here…

UnderCurrents: Leaving the Apples at the Bottom of the Bowl . DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR (04-16-04)

Ray Bradbury once wrote a story about a man who entered a home, hung around a while, visiting, and then killed the fellow who lived there. On his way out, the man took out a rag and wiped the places where he thought his fingers might have touched. Each time he was ready to leave, he thought of a new place to wipe where he might have left traces of his identity. And then, it occurred to him that he might not have sufficiently wiped each place, and so he went back to rewipe. The police caught him there some hours later, the house spotless and sparkling, the murderer still mindlessly polishing. He had even polished the wax apples at the bottom of the bowl on the kitchen table.

The whole idea being to avoid capture, the point Mr. Bradbury makes is that in obsessing over the details of an exercise, you sometimes miss the whole reason you started the task.

Thus might my liberal and progressive friends appear to miss the mark in the present hand-rubbing and chortling over the Bush administration’s actions (or inactions) on Sept. 10, 2001, and the days and weeks immediately preceding.

…to here:

Forget the fingerprints, my friends. Stop the goddamn polishing. Remember the whole point of it. The tragedy of the American left, indeed, would be to wake up on the day after the November elections to find their own actions have left neo-conservative policies firmly in place, regardless of whose ass it actually is that sits on that chair in the Oval Office.

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Just wondering.

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A Different Kind of Intelligence Failure
By ADLAI E. STEVENSON III

…Foreign policy in the Bush administration reflects a lack of experience in the real world away from a Washington overrun with armchair polemicists and think-tank ideologues. Too many inhabitants of this world have no experience in the military, where one learns to expect the unexpected, or in international finance, where America's vulnerability also resides. This White House is well known for its hostility to curiosity and intellectual debate.

After all, terrorism is not a phenomenon of recent origin. Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, did not expect his gunshot to bring about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He expected only a reaction — and the empire's reaction led to World War I and its own downfall. The United States government's reaction to the attacks of 9/11 could end up inflicting great damage on America.

The Bush administration demonstrates the point. One pre-emptive war against the dictator of a desert quasi-state crippled by international sanctions has stretched the American military thin. The United States is widely perceived to be waging war against Islam in the Middle East, a perception reinforced by the president's decision this week to support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and his settlement plan.

Meanwhile, the dollar — a barometer of confidence in the American economy and polity — has sunk against other currencies. In Spain, Argentina, Germany, South Korea and Pakistan, candidates win public office by denouncing or distancing themselves from the Bush administration. This record owes nothing to failures of intelligence.

Studies have recommended reforms of the intelligence community. But reform does not change the limited nature and function of intelligence. There is no substitute for the pragmatic intelligence of policy makers acquired from history and experience in the real world — and the courage to act on it.

Before 9/11, neoconservatives like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney inhabited a world of contending great powers in which force and technology were transcendent. Terrorists armed with box cutters — and now Iraqis resisting the occupation — have exploded their fantasy. The failures of the Bush administration are not those of foreign intelligence but of a cerebral sort of intelligence.

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A More Humble Hawk By DAVID BROOKS In spite of some missteps, I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that President Bush did the right thing

Oh, it's just David Brooks in the NY Times again. Never mind. No link, you know where that crap is if you want it.

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Wal-Mart, a Nation Unto Itself
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 13 — We already know that Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer. (If it were an independent nation, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) We also know that it is maniacal about low prices. (Some economists say it has single-handedly cut inflation by 1 percent in recent years, saving consumers billions of dollars annually.) We know that its labor practices have come under attack. (It charges its workers so much for health insurance that about one-third of them do not have it.)

But the more than 250 sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other scholars who gathered at the University of California here on Monday for a conference on Wal-Mart came looking for more than the company's vital statistics. Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here were examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture. As Susan Strasser, a history professor at the University of Delaware, said, "Wal-Mart has come to represent something that's even bigger than it is."

Indeed, with $256 billion in annual sales and 20 million shoppers visiting its stores each day, Wal-Mart has greater reach and influence than any retailer in history. "In each historical epoch a prototypical enterprise seems to embody a new and innovative set of economic structures and social relationships," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California here and the organizer of the conference. "These template businesses are emulated because they have put in place, indeed perfected for their era, the most efficient and profitable relationship between the technology of production, the organization of work and the new shape of the market."

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Just goofing around with a "fortune cookie" generator, looking for clever phrases to stock it with, I encountered:

He who takes credit for rain will be blamed for drought.

and

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

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April 16, 2004

Non-sequitur of note:

Terry Holt, Bush's campaign spokesman, said: "The biggest mistake in this election so far is that Kerry's had no serious policy for winning the war on terror. . . . The Democrats simply don't understand the threat we face."

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DNC's Ad Mocks Bush Over News Conference
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page A05

The Democratic National Committee is trying to hang President Bush with his own words -- and pauses.

A mocking ad posted on the party's Web site yesterday uses footage of Bush struggling at Tuesday's news conference to answer a question from Time magazine's John Dickerson on what has been his biggest mistake in office.

"Hmm. I wish you had given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it," the president is shown saying, slowly. "You know I just, uh, I'm sure something will pop into my head here, in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet. . . . You just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be on coming up with one."

Some suggested mistakes fill the screen: "Mission accomplished." "We found the weapons of mass destruction." "Bring 'em on." The tag line: "Credibility is on the ballot this November."

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In Afghanistan, U.S. Envoy Sits in Seat of Power
By AMY WALDMAN

Published: April 17, 2004

ABUL, Afghanistan — "So what are we doing today?" Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked the United States ambassador, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, as they sat in Mr. Karzai's office.

Mr. Khalilzad patiently explained that they would attend a ceremony to kick off the "greening" of Kabul — the planting and seeding of 850,000 trees — in honor of the Afghan New Year.

Mr. Karzai said he would speak off-the-cuff. Mr. Khalilzad, sounding more mentor than diplomat, approved: "It's good you don't have a text," he told Mr. Karzai. "You tend to do better."

The genial Mr. Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious Mr. Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive. With his command of both details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternate seat of power since his arrival on Thanksgiving.

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Gospel Movies Reveal Myth And Society
Whereas The Fighting Temptations portrayed black religious culture as Sunday morning Dance Fever, the Coens' have consistently examined its often ignored complexities.

By Armond White

Church lady Marva Munson, played by Irma P. Hall in The Ladykillers represents an authentic social type so rarely seen in our contemporary popular culture that writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen have virtually rediscovered a lost American. She's a heavy-set widow who wears flowery-print dresses, broad-brim hats and walks in sturdy, splayed-leg steps that recall Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland's description in the film Freedom on My Mind of those Southern black women who marched during the civil rights era: "They be walkin' heavy with such pride. Look like the earth would catch they feet and hold them."

The Coens have re-rooted the proverbial black church mother — a vanished figure in the hip hop landscape - by placing Marva Munson opposite Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks), a criminal mastermind posing as a musicologist. In The Ladykillers' caper plot, Prof. Dorr rents a room in Marva's house and brings in four associates to tunnel from her cellar to a gambling casino that they intend to rob without her knowing, but that's only the movie's dramatic hook. Underneath that is a fascinating, at times powerful, film that satirizes the differences between black and white American culture.

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At the moment I'm having trouble remembering what Abiola and I disagreed on.

Deregulation, that's right. That, and fact son the ground about Haiti. Obviously is wasn't anything having to do with how to treat folks.

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Attack of the LGFers

For me, the strange thing about the sheer level of hatred and intolerance of dissenting viewpoints displayed by LGF commenters on questions relating to the Middle East and Islam is that, unlike most of these people, I've spent years living in a majority muslim environment, have seen the dark side of Islamic zealotry at first-hand, and yet, I've managed to avoid developing a generalized hatred of all things Islamic of the kind on show at LGF or "Emperor Misha." In fact, I'm willing to bet that the average Israeli, despite living daily with the threat of being killed by Islamic fanatics while going about his or her daily business, harbors less hatred for Islam than your run-of-the-mill LGFer.

…As I've said before, Islam as practiced by the majority of muslims in our day really does have serious problems, which aren't just confined to "a small minority", as the usual cant on this issue goes. Nevertheless, mindless hatred and dehumanization of all muslims will do absolutely nothing to move things forward to a state where the most we'll have to worry about from religious muslims will be phenomena like the Religious Right's never-ending attempts to get abortion outlawed and creationism into the schoolbooks; to the contrary, indiscriminate bashing of muslims as "vermin", "subhumans", "ragheads" and so forth is a surefire way to undermine any moral claims outsiders may seek to make with respect to the practice of Islam.

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Trustee seeks apology for spoof photo

Parents opposing a school program used a picture from a satirical newspaper on their pamphlets.
MARISSA NELSON, Free Press Education Reporter 2004-04-08 03:15:19

A school board trustee is demanding an apology from a parents' group that used a fake photo from a satirical newspaper on its pamphlets opposing the expansion of a safe schools policy. Simply Truths Our Priority, or STOP, handed out pamphlets and computer discs with a 300-page book of Internet research outside a public meeting last week.

…The photo shows a teacher at the front of a class with explicit sexual images and terms drawn on the board and is supposed to represent one of the "countless" classrooms where homosexuality is promoted.

The picture was copied from the Onion, a satirical newspaper from the United States. The headline of the 1998 story says, " '98 homosexual drive nearing goal."

The story, written out of San Francisco, goes on to say children are being successfully recruited into homosexuality because of the "gay lobby's infiltration of America's public schools."

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Are there any legitimate government functions beyond national defense and enforcement of contracts?

If so, what are they?

Are principles also to be enforced?

How would a Libertarian government pay for national defense and enforcing contracts?

I won't be challenging the answers. I may ask a followup question or two.

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Voted in the first of many Rittenhouse Review weekly polls?

This week’s question, I’ll admit, is a tough one: “Who is the most dishonest member of the Bush administration?”

I provided eight choices (in alphabetical order) -- John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Elaine Chao, Dick Cheney, Scott McClellan, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld -- though the software I use allowed for as many as 10 options, but let’s not go crazy, right?

It's not a popular choice, but I'm leaning toward Colin Powell, because I get the sense the other guys believe in what they're doing but Gen. Powell doesn't.

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Thanks a lot, Oliver.

Does Big Government Hurt Economic Growth? By JEFF MADRICK

IN widely reported comments before a Congressional committee in February, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, suggested that President Bush's tax cuts should not be even partly rescinded. Rather, Mr. Greenspan said, the nation should cut future domestic spending, including Social Security benefits, to balance the budget. Higher spending or higher taxes would deter economic growth, he warned.

The committee should have asked the statistically oriented chairman for the evidence. A comprehensive analysis by the economic historian Peter H. Lindert, published in a new book, "Growing Public" (Cambridge University Press), contends that there simply is none. His analysis is partly a broad extension of other studies by economists like Joel B. Slemrod of the University of Michigan, but he adds considerably to the argument.

…As Mr. Lindert points out, estimates by some economists, like Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, find that extra government spending leads to a large reduction in gross domestic product.

In fact, taken literally, these studies suggest that the gross domestic product of Sweden, to take an example of a nation with heavy social spending, should have been reduced by up to 50 percent. But nothing remotely like that has happened.

The principal problem with such studies, Mr. Lindert writes, is that they are simulations of a highly simplified world. The economists recreate an economy where almost all incentives lead to slower growth, Mr. Lindert said, but that world does not exist.

Statistics vs. quality of life, indeed.

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As suggested by George

1.Grab the nearest book.
In my case, Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson…

2.Open the book to page 23.
3.Find the fifth sentence.
…ignoring the fractional sentence that starts the page…

4.Post the text of the sentence on your blog.
I come up with:

Mindreading is literally a part of our nature.

…which certainly reassures me about the outcome of a recent mailing list discussion.

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Ad Let Out of the Bag
Disavowed Video Riles but Reaches Audience
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page E01

It's a scene that's hard to believe, and Ford Motor Co. says it didn't want anyone to see it in the first place:

A small black car is parked in a suburban British driveway, accompanied by the sound of birds chirping. A ginger-colored cat wanders up, and the car's sunroof suddenly slides open. The cat climbs up the hood and windshield to investigate, pokes its head into the sunroof . . . and the sunroof draws shut, slowly beheading the cat.

The tagline says, "Ford Sportka, The Ka's evil twin."

The 40-second video is an Internet-only advertisement for a small Ford hatchback sold in Britain. Except that Ford has disowned the ad, claiming that it rejected the spot as too extreme and did not approve its release.

How the video wound up e-mailed around the world over the past few days is something of a mystery. Animal rights advocates in the United Kingdom have condemned it in the British press, and Ford's ad agency -- Ogilvy & Mather -- is conducting an internal investigation to figure out what happened.

But in the world of Internet "viral" advertising, which aims to reach Web-savvy young people with offbeat messages that are so funny or shocking they'll spread through e-mail like viruses, the cat spot is already considered a big success.

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A Difficult Lesson
Job Retraining, Though Touted, Often Fails the Test

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page E01

After Jerry Nowadsky lost two machinist jobs in a row, watching as his employers in Iowa moved the work to other countries, he decided to go back to school to study computers.

The coursework was hard for a middle-aged former factory worker who hadn't been in a classroom for decades, recalled Nowadsky, now 49. But he earned a certificate and set out a year ago to find work in computer systems maintenance and assistance.

Instead he found a job market awash with unemployed computer workers.

Now, Nowadsky, a married father of three living in Monticello, Iowa, is stocking shelves at a grocery store at night. He said he works 20 hours a week for $10 an hour, making less than half the pay he was pulling in at the factories, with no benefits.

"I've basically given up on computer jobs because they're all going overseas," he said in an interview, adding that he now feels the training was "a waste, because there are no jobs out there."

Policymakers have long pointed to worker retraining programs as a way to prepare the losers in the Old Economy to become winners in the new.

But decades of efforts show that retraining, while politically appealing, is no cure-all for a workforce struggling through economic transition. The success of retraining appears to depend on many factors, including the availability of jobs, the characteristics of the workers themselves and the quality of the training resources provided, according to analysts who have studied and administered such programs. And while some workers may thrive after retraining, many others do not.

Nowadsky's experience illustrates one of the reasons such efforts have often failed. The extra training doesn't help if the jobs aren't there in the new industry.

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This is all rather fascinating, but totally unsurprising.

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Bush Planned for War as Diplomacy Continued
By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; 10:45 AM

Beginning in late December, 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In three and a half hours of interviews with Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bush defended the secret planning and said war was his "absolute last option." But "Plan of Attack" describes how the growing commitments required of the military, the CIA and U.S. allies as the planning intensified would have been difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration led by Vice President Cheney, who Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force" who had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force.

By early January, 2003, Bush had made up his mind to take military action against Iraq, according to the book. But Bush was so concerned that the government of his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, might fall because of his support for Bush that he delayed the war's start until March 20 because Blair asked him to seek a second resolution from the United Nations. Bush later gave Blair the option of withholding British troops from combat, which Blair rejected.

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Quotes of note:
On the one hand-

Though their style is sometimes comically imitative of American artists, Colombia's rappers take special pride in the authenticity of their adopted art, to the point of professing disdain for their more famous counterparts to the north, who they say have sold out to get big record deals.

"This is real rap, not fake," said Juan Emilio Rodríguez, Cescru Enlace's 30-something leader, who goes by the name 3X. "It is contrarian. It is political. It is not about cars and women. They do not do this in the U.S. anymore. We are doing it."

But on the other hand-

The biggest sellers remain Americans, artists like 50 Cent and the group NWA. Some American rappers, like Eminem, have had phenomenal success here, selling even more albums than better-known stars of more traditional popular music, like cumbia.

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For Colombia's Angry Youth, Hip-Hop Helps Keep It Real
By JUAN FORERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, April 7 - In the living room of their mother's modest cinderblock home, beneath the glare of two bare light bulbs, the Rodríguez brothers, Juan Emilio and Andrey, whirled into action, arms swinging, as they burst into a rap about Colombia's drug-fueled guerrilla war.

"Blood in the fields, colonized lands, invisible bonds of slavery, in the Amazon," they sang in rhyming Spanish in "Criminal Hands," a song about Washington's war on drugs.

In another, "Exodus," about the refugees who have fled Colombia's civil conflict, they say, "as the war advances, there's only a ticket out."

"The exodus continues, burden of the violence," they chant, "The war is uncertain, incomprehensible, absurd science."

Juan Emilio and Andrey, rappers in a threesome called Cescru Enlace, are hardly household names. But they have released two CD's, their first in 1999, and their politically charged songs are catching on among young Colombians.

Today rap is produced and heard virtually the world over, as young people nearly everywhere mimic the lyrical styles and fashion of America's hottest selling music. Rap has spread across the Spanish-speaking world, too, but in few other countries are rappers as political in their lyrics as they are in Colombia.

"They've become like poet reporters for their neighborhoods," said Ruth Kathryn Henry, who studied Colombian hip-hop as a Fulbright scholar. "They're speaking for the people around them who don't necessarily have a voice."

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Educations falls into the "public goods" category, and as we all know public goods are not adequately allocated by the free market. The term for it is "market failure." So what do the idiots do?

Quote of note:

But focusing on the rocky start misses the big picture, said Jeffrey Cohen, president of Sylvan Education Solutions, one of the largest tutoring companies. "This is the establishment of a whole new marketplace," he said. "It's like when Medicaid started, the creation of a new right for low-income parents. It will breed investment and innovation."

So what happens when education becomes as "affordable" as health care? How much will education insurance cost? Can incompetent practitioners be sued for malpractice?

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For Children Being Left Behind, Private Tutors Face Rocky Start By SAM DILLON CHICAGO, April 13 — The competition between public schools and private enterprise that the Bush administration is encouraging heated up the other day, just outside Classroom 207 at Wentworth Elementary School here.

Over several months, a string of novice tutors from a private company offering federally financed after-school classes had tried and failed to control Room 207's dozen rambunctious students. A supervisor from the company was dispatched to troubleshoot. Effie McHenry, Wentworth's principal, was clucking her tongue in disapproval.

"I just don't think they're prepared to deal with challenging inner city children," Mrs. McHenry said of the company, talking past the supervisor to a visitor. "I think they expected to find children who'd just sit down and wait for them to expound. These kids aren't like that. They need challenging instruction."

The No Child Left Behind law has kicked off one of the nation's largest experiments in educational capitalism by inviting private companies and other groups to offer tutoring in failing public schools and financing the effort with federal money previously spent on the schools themselves. The aim is to help struggling children perform in their regular classrooms, while invigorating public education with private competition. The initiative has set off a stampede, with 1,000 companies rushing to recruit armies of tutors and grab chunks of what experts say could be a $2 billion-plus tutoring market.

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New Yorkers want other, `richer' schools to fix poor schools
By Michael Gormley, Associated Press Writer | April 15, 2004

ALBANY, N.Y. --Most New Yorkers want to take state aid from rich school districts to help poorer, struggling schools, according to a poll released Thursday.

"The tough question is going to come when people are told: `Your district is rich,'" said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University poll.

To underscore his point, just 2 percent of those polled felt their school district's aid should be cut. Fifty-eight percent said their state aid should increase and 35 percent said it should remain the same.

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Muslim Army chaplain cleared of convictions
By Jane Sutton, Reuters, 4/15/2004

MIAMI -- The US military yesterday dismissed the convictions against a Muslim Army chaplain who was initially suspected of espionage at the Guantanamo prison camp but was found guilty only on lesser charges.

The appellate decision by Army General James Hill, the Southern Command chief who oversees US military operations at Guantanamo, wipes the slate clean for Captain James Yee, who had been assigned to minister to prisoners at the base in Cuba.

"This means there will be no official mention of it in his military record," Hill said.

His decision put an end to what one of Yee's lawyers called a "hoax" case against the chaplain.

Yee, 36, was found guilty in March of noncriminal charges of committing adultery and storing pornography on a government computer. He ministered for 10 months to foreign terrorism suspects held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yee was arrested on suspicion of espionage in September and faced six criminal charges that included mishandling classified information at Guantanamo. Court documents accused him of spying, mutiny, sedition and aiding the enemy, and he was held in solitary confinement in a military brig for 76 days.

The military dropped all the criminal charges in March, citing national security concerns that would arise from the release of evidence against him.

Army Major General Geoffrey Miller, who at the time commanded the task force running the Guantanamo prison, then found Yee guilty of the noncriminal charges and issued a written reprimand.

Yee appealed the decision. His civilian lawyer, Eugene Fidell, said the proceedings were biased and "a hoax by any standard." Fidell said he had not had time to prepare a defense because the Army did not give him the evidence in the case until 11 minutes before Yee's hearing began.

As the Southcom commander, Hill had jurisdiction to hear the appeal.

Hill said his decision was based in part on the massive notoriety and media attention the case had received and in part on the fact that Yee had already served 76 days of confinement in a military brig.

"I view this as a matter of mercy and equity, not necessarily a matter of law," he said.

Hill said Miller acted correctly to bring the charges based on what was known at the time and said Yee's religious beliefs and Chinese ancestry had nothing to do with the original charges or the decision to throw out the conviction.

Yee was one of four men working at Guantanamo to be charged in connection with a suspected espionage ring. Charges against the other three are still pending.

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Plea Bargain Frees Man from 1969 Race Riot
Date: Friday, April 16, 2004
By: Associated Press

YORK, Pennsylvania -- A black man who implicated himself on the witness stand in the fatal shooting of a white police officer during a 1969 race riot was released from jail Wednesday after reaching a plea deal.

Michael E. Wright had been charged with homicide in the slaying of Henry Schaad but pleaded guilty instead to conspiracy to commit an unlawful act.

He was sentenced to time already served after apologizing to the rookie officer's family and released from jail, where he had been since January 20.

Schaad's death came during days of fighting between blacks and whites, and sparked revenge attacks that included the fatal shooting of Lillie Belle Allen, a 27-year-old black woman.

The 10 days of rioting left dozens injured and entire blocks burned before 400 state police and National Guardsmen armed with rifles and tanks quelled the violence.

Two black men were convicted of killing Schaad.

Ten white men were charged in Allen's case; two were convicted of second-degree murder, and seven others pleaded guilty or no contest to lesser charges. Former York Mayor Charlie Robertson, a police officer at the time, was acquitted of inciting violence against blacks.

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EarthLink finds rampant spyware, trojans
Paper identifies 300,000 programs capable of stealing personal information
By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service April 15, 2004

Internet service provider EarthLink and Webroot Software released a report on Thursday that said an average of almost 28 spyware programs are running on each computer. More serious, Trojan horse or system monitoring programs were found on more than 30 percent of all systems scanned, raising fears of identity theft.

The report presents the results of scans of over one million Internet-connected computers. Many of the 29 million spyware programs that were found were harmless "adware" programs that display advertising banners or track Web surfing behaviors. However, the companies also found more than 300,000 instances of programs that are capable of stealing personal information or providing unauthorized access to computers, the companies said.

Spyware is a generic term that describes a wide range of programs that track user behavior on a computer, often for marketing purposes. The programs are sometimes bundled with other software, such as peer to peer (P-to-P) file sharing programs, and installed legally on users' systems. However, once installed, they run surreptitiously in the background and can be difficult to detect and remove.

The report covers the first three months of 2004 and compiles information from scans conducted by both EarthLink and Webroot. It is the first of what will be regular updates that track the prevalence of spyware, the companies said.

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Can you guess what it might be?

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Survey: Small business health care costs rose 13 percent in 2003
By LINDA A. JOHNSON
AP Business Writer

April 15, 2004, 3:13 PM EDT

TRENTON, N.J. -- Companies in New Jersey saw the cost of providing health insurance to their employees jump 13 percent last year and expect this year to be the third straight with double-digit cost increases, a survey found.

The New Jersey Business & Industry Association's annual employer benefits survey, released Thursday, indicates the average cost for a year's health insurance for one employee could soon hit $7,000. Already, the average is $6,692, up $781 from 2002. That amount is a whopping 15 percent of the average wage of the companies' workers, now $43,940 per year.

"We are in a very dangerous period of hyperinflation in the cost of health insurance that is putting a tremendous, tremendous financial burden on both employers and employees alike," said Philip Kirschner, the association's president. Job creation has been stifled as well, he said.

The findings are based on responses to a January survey from 1,468 association members, 85 percent of whom have just 2 to 50 employees.

The survey found that altogether, health insurance costs for the participants rose 53 percent over the last four years. The average increase was 15 percent in 2002 and is projected to be 11 percent this year _ compared with increases of about 8 percent each year from 1999 through 2001 and only 3 percent in 1997 and 1998.

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Matt Stoller at The Blogging of the President places me in the third of four anti-Bush categories:

Three, there are people who care less about policies than progressive politics, believing that the system is too ossified to serve its purpose without substantial political reform. Joe Trippi and Jon Stewart falls into this camp; they dislike the Democratic party machinery (such as it is) because it continually undercuts the ability for progressive ideas to emerge. More than that, these people think that the media is as much a part of the insider machinery as any political organization, and seek to break down the broadcast culture of politics. They respect Ralph Nader's underlying critique, but see him as stubborn and counterproductive. Far leftists like Green Party candidate for mayor of SF Matt Gonzalez fit in this mold, as do right-wingers like Ross Perot and John McCain. While not in agreement about solutions, this group is distinguished by its disgust with the methods of discourse and the lack of pragmatic principle in the current American political system. This group is generally disgusted with party politics, and wants to go around the party system; it therefore shows up strongly on the web.

And Digby at Hullabaloo says to all four segments:

However, I will be my usual dark Cassandra in this argument and issue my standard warning. There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy's Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We'd best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain't gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC'rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don't have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have.

If the Democrats take back the White House the Republicans are going to lose their minds, not because our party is faulty because theirs is. We need to remember that. We may be imperfect, but they are nuts.

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April 15, 2004

The rise of the baby al-Qaidas
Bush's failed strategy in the war on terrorism has spawned more al-Qaidas -- and they're funded by the booming heroin traffic in Afghanistan.
By Husain Haqqani

April 7, 2004 | In the 30 months since President Bush's declaration of war against global terrorism, the U.S. and its allies have ostensibly detained or killed 70 percent of al-Qaida's senior leaders. But the frequency of terrorist acts worldwide attributed to al-Qaida has increased, compared to the pre-9/11 period. Baby al-Qaidas are being spawned in new regions of the world -- striking from Turkey to Spain, from Uzbekistan to Tunisia -- and a new generation of terrorists is stepping up to take the place of those killed in Afghanistan or detained in Guantanamo. Is the U.S. underestimating the enemy and not paying sufficient attention to al-Qaida again? Or are the war in Iraq and the grandiose scheme to democratize and reshape the Middle East it represents distracting the administration from the pursuit of the perpetrators of 9/11?

The State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, testified last week before the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights. In his testimony, the 28-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations listed "some important successes against the al-Qaida organization" resulting from the coordination of U.S. efforts with those of its allies. Al-Qaida had been deprived of "a vital safe haven" in Afghanistan, most of its known leadership had been decapitated, and it had been "separated from facilities central to its chem-bio and poisons development programs."

But, according to Black, "a new cadre of leaders" and "relatively untested terrorists" has started to emerge. "Al-Qaida's ideology is spreading well beyond the Middle East" and "has been picked up by a number of Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe." Black also said that "Some groups have gravitated to al-Qaida in recent years, where before such linkages did not exist" -- something that "greatly complicates our task in stamping out al-Qaida".

Iraq was described by the State Department's senior counterterrorism official as the emerging "focal point for the foreign jihadist fighters." According to Black's testimony, "Jihadists view Iraq as a new training ground to build their extremist credentials and hone the skills of the terrorist." In short, the war in Afghanistan struck a severe blow to terrorism, but the war in Iraq may have resuscitated it. The U.S. will prevail against terrorism eventually, but the problem is with us for the foreseeable future. The administration's desire to proclaim "mission accomplished" too quickly might actually have prolonged the war against terrorism.

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river at Baghdad Burning:

I know it bothers the CPA terribly to have the corpses of dead Iraqis shown on television. They would love for Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia to follow Al-Hurra's example and show endless interviews with pro-occupation Iraqis living abroad and speaking in stilted Arabic. These interviews, of course, are interspersed with translated documentaries on the many marvels of... Hollywood. And while I, personally, am very interested in the custom leather interiors of the latest Audi, I couldn't seem to draw myself away from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia while 700+ Iraqis were being killed.

To lessen the feelings of anti-Americanism, might I make a few suggestions? Stop the collective punishment. When Mark Kimmett stutters through a press conference babbling about "precision weapons" and "military targets" in Falloojeh, who is he kidding? Falloojeh is a small city made up of low, simple houses, little shops and mosques. Is he implying that the 600 civilians who died during the bombing and the thousands injured and maimed were all "insurgents"? Are houses, shops and mosques now military targets?

What I'm trying to say is that we don't need news networks to make us angry or frustrated. All you need to do is talk to one of the Falloojeh refugees making their way tentatively into Baghdad; look at the tear-stained faces, the eyes glazed over with something like shock. In our neighborhood alone there are at least 4 families from Falloojeh who have come to stay with family and friends in Baghdad. The stories they tell are terrible and grim and it's hard to believe that they've gone through so much.

I think western news networks are far too tame. They show the Hollywood version of war- strong troops in uniform, hostile Iraqis being captured and made to face "justice" and the White House turkey posing with the Thanksgiving turkey... which is just fine. But what about the destruction that comes with war and occupation? What about the death? I don't mean just the images of dead Iraqis scattered all over, but dead Americans too. People should *have* to see those images. Why is it not ok to show dead Iraqis and American troops in Iraq, but it's fine to show the catastrophe of September 11 over and over again? I wish every person who emails me supporting the war, safe behind their computer, secure in their narrow mind and fixed views, could actually come and experience the war live. I wish they could spend just 24 hours in Baghdad today and hear Mark Kimmett talk about the death of 700 "insurgents" like it was a proud day for Americans everywhere...

Still, when I hear talk about "anti-Americanism" it angers me. Why does American identify itself with its military and government? Why is does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti-American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as "Pepsi".

I hate American foreign policy and its constant meddling in the region... I hate American tanks in Baghdad and American soldiers on our streets and in our homes on occasion... why does that mean that I hate America and Americans? Are tanks, troops and violence the only face of America? If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi are "America", then yes- I hate America.

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US counterterrorist strategy held hostage in Uzbekistan
By Eugene Rumer

…A loyal partner in the war on terror, Uzbekistan is the perfect illustration of the challenge the US faces in its long-term antiterror strategy. The Uzbek regime is key to the task of defeating terrorists and thwarting their operations - yet it is an intractable part of the terror problem because it contributes to the underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit.

The Uzbek regime has already portrayed itself as a victim of Islamic terrorism and will continue to do so, seeking to justify its oppressive actions at home. The US has condemned the recent terrorist acts in Uzbekistan - and it should request that Uzbek authorities allow US law enforcement agencies full access to the investigation. Without such access and full public disclosure upon completion of the investigation, its results will be automatically suspect. Public scrutiny will be essential to the credibility of Uzbek appeals for US assistance to combat terrorism. The US can't afford the perception that it is propping up a corrupt and oppressive regime.

The US can make clear - publicly and privately, in blunt and certain terms - that the reactionary policies of Uzbek leaders are creating conditions ripe for extremist exploitation. The Uzbek leaders are thus failing their own people in this critical aspect of the war on terror.

As seen from Tashkent, the US is beholden to Uzbekistan as an indispensable ally, and for as long as the US maintains a military presence there, warnings about domestic reform can be ignored. Uzbekistan's leaders must be disabused of this notion.

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White Male Beneficiaries

In the last seventy years of social engineering, the vast majority of direct beneficiaries of affirmative action policies were not minorities; they were white males. Preferential social policies for those in need were not invented by civil rights leaders. Under Franklin Roosevelt, whom most white Americans still revere, the New Deal embarked upon a massive affirmative action approach to social crisis. With the critical exception of segregation, Americans approached their social problems -- unemployment, poverty of senior citizens, re-entry needs of veterans and GIs, farmers needing price supports -- through planned social engineering. The post World-War II Marshall Plan, a plan that provided billions of dollars for training and jobs, was a massive affirmative action plan for Europe. Former enemies got free training programs in Europe that were denied Black GIs at home in America.

The New Deal concepts became unpopular only after they were applied to the crisis and effects of segregation. It was not affirmative action itself, but the extension of affirmative action to minorities and women, that caused the backlash.

As white men whose own families got free medical care, unquestioned access to higher education through the GI Bill, who shared in the social uplift of the New Deal and Fair Deal, members of “Angry White Guys For Affirmative Action” support affirmative action for those who are still left out.

There is a normal tendency in most of us to overlook the social props, the network of special benefits on which we and our families depend. The late Mitch Snyder, advocate for the homeless, once gave an address to an affluent, white audience. He asked members in the auditorium: “Who lives in federally subsidized housing?” No one raised a hand. But then he asked homeowners to identify themselves. All hands went up, after which he pointed out that homeowners are subsidized. The Treasury gives up $46 billion each year to homeowner deductions in a system that predominately benefits people who earn more than $50,000 a year.

Tax breaks for home buyers may not be wrong. What is wrong is the smug psychology of the Bushites, the Rehnquists, who take advantage of all kinds of breaks for themselves while denying affirmative action for the most oppressed areas of society.

Affirmative action is already part of the fabric of American life. We are all bound together in a vast network of affirmative action, of mutual support systems we take for granted. It is hypocritical and profoundly wrong to call affirmative action for minorities “racism in reverse,” while treating affirmative action for bankers, farmers, white men of power, as entitlements.

There isn't a white judge on the U.S. Supreme Court that hasn't benefited from affirmative action.

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April 14, 2004

So we got David Anderson at In Search of Utopia running a project to get books to Costa Rican kids. The project is named after his daughter, Project Apollonia.

That link is there so you can read up one it. Couple of other folks have already made mention of it.

David need space for a smallish site to support the project and I figure I can do that. I wouldn't have mentioned I did it except he's already posted the fact on his blog and I have to link to it, so there you go.

Anyway, it's a good thing and if it don't hurt you, you should help.

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I'm no musical puritan. Music was just as much about sex back in the day though we used euphemisms rather heavy-handedly. I'm no puritan at all. And I'm not anti hip-hop, though I do see it as a larger thing than commercial music. The problem this sort of thing is supposed to demonstrate how cool and strong the performer is, and it's done in terms the audience understands. This sort of male sexual dominance display reduces the woman to currency in power transactions. And the constant repetition has the impact of The Big Lie; anything heard often enough become a legitimate thought to think. Again, no one should feel it legitimate to see folks as a pile of sexual organs…and again, Black folks can less afford to do it than anyone else.

Black men and women should treat each other well. And neither one should fuck anyone they don't genuinely like.

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Critical Noir: Spelman Women Take a Stand
By Mark Anthony Neal

I'll admit that I've only seen the video once, but the few minutes that I saw left an indelible image in my mind - that of a young black male, running a credit card through the "crack" of a young black woman's behind as if it were a direct payment of some sort. The image is of course from the music video for Nelly's song "Tip-Drill," already a classic on BET's overnight
pornographic showcase UnCut. I'll also admit that a few years ago I would have found such a brash depiction of the hip hop generation's male/female relations in an era of cash and carry sexual politics ironic. But taking seriously the world that my young daughters are charged with navigating, there was something disturbing and indeed frightening about the possibility
of them being reduced to giant sexualized credit card machines (akin to Akinyele's "Six Foot Blow Job Machine"). Some of the young women at Spelman College, the historically black all-women's college in Atlanta, also found Nelly's "Tip Drill" video offensive and earlier this month mounted a demonstration to protest his planned appearance on their campus.

Nelly was to appear on the Spelman campus on April 2nd in support of a bone marrow drive sponsored by his foundation 4Sho4Kids. Nelly began to raise consciousness about the need for more blood stem cell and bone marrow donors after his sister was diagnosed with leukemia last year. But for some of the women at Spelman College, no amount of good will by the rapper excused his role in circulating misogynistic images of black women. As Asha Jennings, the head of the college's Student Government Organization told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "We care about the cause, and we understand the need for bone marrow is so great within the minority community," but "We can't continue to support artists and images that exploit our women and put us out there as over-sexed, nonintelligent human beings." In response to the planned protest, Nelly and his foundation pulled out of the event. According to reports, the Student Government Organization at Spelman only agreed to host the event if Nelly agreed to also appear at a forum where he could address the implications of his "Tip-Drill" video.

For the uninitiated, "Tip-Drill" is a ghetto colloquialism for the proverbial "ugly girl with a nice body." In the context of Nelly's video, such women are only good for one thing - and even then, only from the back. "Tip-Drill" is representative of a world where young black men often view young black women as "chickenheads," "skeezers," "gold-diggers," "birds" and a host of other unsavory adjectives. The common denominators are that such women are viewed as being solely motivated by their desire for money and are only valued as sex objects, hence the highlighting of cash and carry sexual relationships. In many ways "Tip-Drill" is the logical follow-up to "You Owe Me," Nas's club hit from 2000. The song, which was produced by Timbaland and features vocals by Ginuwine, drops gems like "Shorty, say what's your price/Just to back it up/You can hold my ice/Now let's say you owe me something/Yeah, owe me back like you owe your tax/Owe me back like forty acres to blacks." The latter lyric incredibly equates Nas's "getting some ass" with reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. On the recent DVD release of the Nas Video Anthology Volume 1, the artist quips that he simply wanted a "club hit."

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There's not normally this long a gap between posts around here. I been busy though.

My ex makes hand-made organic soaps/scultures that she sells at street fairs (REALLY good stuff…I got skin issues sometimes and the chamomile soap just handles it). She has this boutique joint selling it too. Doing pretty well.

She want to look into internet sales now, so I get a phone call. Cool, but a definite distraction My daughter is going to do the visual stuff. She's an astounding artist, no brag. If she'd let me hand out some links to some fan sites she designed for her crew on LiveJournal...Anyway, love my kid, taught her HTML and CSS but I've never worked with her. Add to that the need to bone up on accessibility requirements (and commercial site that doesn't is just stupid) and I'm going to have to back away from at least one of my background projects.

That's fine anyway. I've been giving some thought to my approach, the link forum and aggregation blog. I've decided I didn't have a clue in life what I was doing. The link forum needs, well, links. It's like any other network thing: it's value increased as the square of the number of links of some such statistical crap. That means in the beginning no one is interested but me. So I need to populate it, and that means reading a whole lot of sites. And I have to come up with categories that are useful to other people…you may not have noticed but I consider elements that most other folks don't and ignore a lot that other feel important (one of my favorite wise old saying is, "It's amazing how many things there are that actually aren't").

As for the aggregation blog, I have automated assistance but it's still a manual thing. Not to mention that it's pretty much what I do here, truth be told. I have the germ of an idea of a new approach. I need time to let it feed in my subconscious.

So, working with my daughter on a web site for her mother that will make me learn a few practical things comes up right about on time. Rather than displacing something it's giving me space to think about how to get all the ragged egdes of my projects neatly hemmed and cuffed.

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I do Blogcritics once in a while. Today Eric wrote a thing, The Song, Not the Singer: Bush On the War.

Let's forget Bush for a moment. George W. Bush is a very odd vessel for what is the most important message of our time: that there are implacable forces in the world that hate us, our way of life, our vibrant culture, our personal freedom, and those forces will do all they can to kill us. This is a real war. There are various sources of this ideology, but they are quite willing to set aside their differences to act against us, "the enemy of my enemy" and all.

…and so forth. He quotes a bunch of the speech, then says

Set aside the source for a moment: every word of this is profoundly true, the importance is the song, not the singer. I honestly don't care all that much about the singer and have many differences with him in other areas. But somehow, someway, this particular man grasped on 9/11 that all of the incidents listed above ARE connected, cannot be addressed piecemeal, cannot be addressed in a defensive mode - as every Western leader and every American president, Republican and Democrat alike, had previously done - and that decisive, resolute, offensive action was the only possible way to win this war, a war we did not seek, and in fact assiduously sought to avoid prior to 9/11.

The question of the moment is, is Iraq a genuine part of this war? It sure as hell is now.

Seperating the message from the messenger. Why not? It worked for Louis Farrakhan...

Yo know Eric, I totally agree that we need to deal with terrorism effectively. and I agree with this precise phrasing:

is Iraq a genuine part of this war? It sure as hell is now.

Now the question, the one with bearing on the election, is why is it a part of the war on terror? Was it necessary that Iraq be part of the war on terror? And if not do you want to keep those who made it so in the driver's seat.

The reasons you give for staying the course have nothing to do with the reasons given for starting out on the course. We all know we're not leaving Iraq for quite a while, no matter who wins the election so we should just stop pussyfooting around with that. Just accept it and decide how to handle it. To me, the first step is to get someone in there running things whose judgement I trust. That's not Bush.

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Because Bush had literally heard it all before.

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I'm told I overreact about Scalia here.

Context. It wouldn't bother me from some random individual.

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

You must remember this is a Supreme Court justice talking about constitutional rights.

First Amendment right not to speak on radio or television when I do not wish to do so

He has a First Amendment right to speak in public venues.

The press has a First Amendment right to peaceably assemble where he speaks and to report thereon.

His First Amendment right, in reaction to that, is to not speak. NOT to deprive others of their First Amendment rights. In the past that has been his reaction, and I merely called it ironic. This time he's spinning the law; not even interpreting it. It's like a preacher quoting Jesus…love thy neighbor…in order to get laid.

I would like to see TV cameras and tape recorders show up at every public appearance he makes for the rest of his life.

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This is a fascinating study. The whole article is below the fold, but here are the key points we as fellow anthropoids should note.

But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. "You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group," said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. "It's an attitude that's being transmitted."

The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.

Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, "The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained," he said.

"And if baboons can do it," he said, "why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there."

…The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the males still obsess over hierarchy. "We're talking about baboons here," said Dr. Sapolsky.

What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings. When a dominant male wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size and rank. As a result, a greater percentage of male-male conflicts in the Forest Troop occur between closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings. Moreover, Forest Troop males of all ranks spend more time grooming and being groomed, and just generally huddling close to troop mates, than do their counterpart males in the study.

…Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. "I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be," he said. "All it would take is two or three neocons jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture."

[P6: Sorry. Couldn't resist]

No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture
By NATALIE ANGIER

ometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal," said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, "but the jerky new guys are obviously learning, `We don't do things like that around here.' " Dr. Sapolsky wrote the report with his colleague and wife, Dr. Lisa J. Share.

Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.

The researchers were able to compare the behavior and physiology of the contemporary Forest Troop primates to two control groups: a similar-size baboon congregation living nearby, called the Talek Troop, and the Forest Troop itself from 1979 through 1982, the era that might be called Before Alpha Die-off, or B.A.D.

"It's a really fine, thorough piece of work, with the sort of methodology and lucky data sets that you can only get from doing long-term field research," said Dr. Duane Quiatt, a primatologist at the University of Colorado at Denver and a co-author with Vernon Reynolds of the 1993 book "Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge and the Evolution of Culture."

The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records notwithstanding, humans hold no patent on multiculturalism. As a growing body of research indicates, many social animals learn from one another and cultivate regional variants in skills, conventions and fashions. Some chimpanzees crack open their nuts with a stone hammer on a stone anvil; others prefer wood hammers on wood anvils. The chimpanzees of the Tai forest rain-dance; those of the Gombe tickle themselves. Dr. Jane Goodall reported a fad in one chimpanzee group: a young female started wiggling her hands, and before long, every teen chimp was doing likewise.

But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. "You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group," said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. "It's an attitude that's being transmitted."

The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.

Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, "The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained," he said.

"And if baboons can do it," he said, "why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there."

Jerkiness or worse certainly seems to be a job description for ordinary male baboons. The average young male, after wheedling his way into a new troop at around age 7, spends his prime years seeking to fang his way up the hierarchy; and once he's gained some status, he devotes many a leisure hour to whimsical displays of power at scant personal cost. He harasses and attacks females, which weigh half his hundred pounds and lack his thumb-thick canines, or he terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot retaliate.

Dr. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who wrote the 1985 book "Sex and Friendship in Baboons," said that the females in the troop she studied received a serious bite from a male annually, maybe losing a strip of flesh or part of an ear in the process. As they age and lose their strength, however, males may calm down and adopt a new approach to group living, affiliating with females so devotedly that they keep their reproductive opportunities going even as their ranking in the male hierarchy plunges.

For their part, female baboons, which live up to 25 years — compared with the male's 18 — inherit their rank in the gynocracy from their mothers and so spend less time fighting for dominance. They do, however, readily battle females from outside the fold, for they, not the males, are the keepers of turf and dynasty.

The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the males still obsess over hierarchy. "We're talking about baboons here," said Dr. Sapolsky.

What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings. When a dominant male wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size and rank. As a result, a greater percentage of male-male conflicts in the Forest Troop occur between closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings. Moreover, Forest Troop males of all ranks spend more time grooming and being groomed, and just generally huddling close to troop mates, than do their counterpart males in the study.

Interestingly, the male faces in the Forest Troop may have changed over time, but the relative numbers have not. Ever since the tuberculosis epidemic killed half the adult males, the ratio has remained skewed, with twice as many females as males. Yet the researchers have demonstrated that the troop's sexual complexion alone cannot explain its character. Examining other troops with a similar preponderance of females, the Stanford scientists saw no evidence of the Forest Troop's relative amity.

Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. "I confess I'm rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how vulnerable they may be," he said. "All it would take is two or three jerky adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy the culture."

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Public's cynicism about media has become a pressing concern
By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff, 4/14/2004

At a time when public distrust of the news media appears to be at a dangerously high level, there is evidence of a deep and fundamental disagreement between those who produce news and those who consume it.

Although most journalists believe quality and values are vital elements of their work and see themselves as providing an important civic function, the reading and viewing public seems to think of journalism as a bottom-line-driven enterprise populated by the ethically challenged. Last month, the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism released a wide-ranging study -- "The State of the News Media 2004" -- that concluded that a key factor in journalism's sagging image is "a disconnection between the public and the news media over motive."

"Journalists believe they are working in the public interest, and are trying to be fair and independent in that cause," the survey found. "The public thinks these journalists are either lying or deluding themselves. The public believes that news organizations are operating largely to make money, and that the journalists who work for these organizations are primarily motivated by professional ambition and self-interest."

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Ben Sargent follows Bush's Middle East Roadmap

Pat Oliphant lets us in on a Father-Son talk

Tom Toles sits in on a PDB

Tony Auth asks, what do you get when you cross Harry Truman with the FBI?

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I plead guilty.

When ex-Governor Bush explained his thought processes during the run-up to the Iraq war, as I reviewed his moral reasoning, the deeply felt desire to advance freedom in the world and protect the citizens of Iraq from the depredations of a brutal fascist dictator, one thought kept going through my mind:

"That's not what he said at the time…"

Do I need to pull the press clippings? Do I need to point to the online articles? Do I need to get the quotes? No. You're familiar with all of them. And before anyone decided to explain how this or that reason is why we should have, and how they said all along the reason is, I'm saying the problem is the reasoning used to justify the invasion is not even mentioned anymore until someone pushes the issue. I'm saying the problem is an administration that tells its citizenry we know exactly where to find things that simply didn't exist…convinced our nation to go to war over the non-existent things.

The question Bush supporters posed to Richard Clarke is germane: Then you said X, now you say Y. If X wasn't really the case then, why should we believe you now? I feel a fundamental disrespect for the average guy from this administration.

And, of course, now we're hip-deep in crap, our allies symbolic, in a position that military power alone can't solve…even if it were possible to project enough force to control the situation from the other side of the planet. Which it ain't.

George W. Bush can not bring peace because he himself is one of the central issues. Neocons in general can't bring peace because their agenda…and apparently their methods…are central to the problems in Iraq as well.

Because of this, and because I truly feel that validating the lack-or-thought processes that got us into the quagmire by returning the Bushista cohort to the White House, I confess to being one of the progressives who finds removing Duh-bya more important than victory in Iraq…because I consider it a prerequisite.

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Drug War Led Bush Astray Before 9/11
But what is perhaps even more astonishing is that, because the Bush administration's attention was focused on the "war on drugs," it praised Afghanistan's Taliban regime even though it was harboring Bin Laden and his terror camps. The Taliban refused to extradite the avowed terrorist even after he admitted responsibility for a series of deadly assaults against American diplomatic and military sites in Africa and the Middle East.

On May 15, 2001, I blasted the Bush administration for rewarding the Taliban for "controlling" the opium crop with $43 million in U.S. aid to Afghanistan, to be distributed by an arm of the United Nations. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced the gift, specifically mentioning the opium suppression as the rationale and assuring that the U.S. would "continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans."

Five months before 9/11, I publicly challenged the wisdom of supporting a regime that backed Al Qaeda: "Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998." I'm not clairvoyant, but I didn't need my own CIA to know that it's self-destructive to reward a regime that harbors the world's most dangerous terrorists.

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Resolve, With Few Details
Unapologetic Bush passes up chance to lay out map to his vision. – Dan Balz

Other Terror Warnings?
Panel cites a stream of alarming reports before the Sept. 11 attacks. – Dana Priest

Bush's Rosy Vision
In a nationally televised White House press conference Tuesday evening, President Bush sought to remind and reassure Americans during the bloodiest month in Iraq since major combat was declared over last May.

Under pressure, a leader stumbles in the spotlight
By Michael Tackett
Controlling the violent insurgency, or even the staid commission, are matters beyond the reach of President Bush, a chief executive with a penchant for internal administration discipline.

So Tuesday night he turned to a forum over which he had far greater control, a prime time East Room news conference, an event that typically proves beneficial for the holder of the Oval Office.

But the president who spoke repeatedly about being on a war footing hardly seemed sure-footed, even on questions that could scarcely be seen as overly aggressive.

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If the majority of folks killed were NOT combatants it will come out…here eventually and there immediately.

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US military 'pressuring' journalists
Patrick Barrett
Wednesday April 14, 2004

Al-Jazeera: accused of taking an 'anti-coalition stance'

The US military has been accused of threatening the media covering the conflict in Iraq and pressuring journalists into presenting a one-sided picture of events.

Al-Jazeera, the Arab TV channel, made the accusations after a US army spokesman, Brigadier General Kimmitt, accused the station and the Dubai-based al-Arabiya news channel, of taking an "anti-coalition" stance in their reporting.

The already fractious relationship between the US military in Iraq and Arab media has been made more difficult by pictures of wounded civilians within the besieged town of Falluja. The American administration in Iraq accused al-Jazeera of exaggerating the number of civilian casualties and helping to boost anti-coalition sentiment.

The US marine commander in charge of Falluja has said the majority of the estimated 600 people killed in the four-day conflict were legitimate targets, saying, "95% of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting". However al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have repeatedly shown pictures of women and children among the dead and injured.

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Pollution Study Favors Regulation
By BARNABY J. FEDER

egulation is more effective than relying on voluntary programs to reduce air pollution, according to the authors of a new review of the environmental record of the nation's 100 largest electric power companies.

The report, to be released today, was sponsored by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, which includes environmental, investor and business groups; the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group; and the Public Service Enterprise Group, the parent of New Jersey's largest utility. It focuses on data collected by the federal government from the utility industry covering 1991 to 2002.

The data showed progress in reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, two federally regulated pollutants that contribute to smog and acid rain and are associated with increased risk of heart and lung disease.

But unregulated carbon dioxide emissions, which most scientists say are raising the temperature of the atmosphere and contributing to more violent weather, rose substantially in the 1990's. Utilities generate roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide for each kilowatt of power produced that they did in 1991, according to the report.

"Voluntary programs don't work at all in the utility sector," said David G. Hawkins, a former assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who now directs the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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That's not Jessica Rabbit's measurements. That's the percentage of Black, Latino and White residents of Milwalkee, WI. Which means if they feel there's racism in the electoral process they can do something about it.

Quote of note:

Somehow this election took on a shape and symbolism bigger than one politician versus another. For many in the African-American neighborhoods on the North Side of this city, it was a chance to make history, to spread power, to open up the field of possibilities for black Milwaukeeans. But then Mr. Pratt lost. Suddenly, an election that seemed likely to heal racial divides had created new ones.

Black voters who had begun to anticipate having a new, loud voice in city affairs now felt crushed and resentful in defeat. That perplexed many white voters, whose support for Mr. Pratt dipped after a barrage of reports about his questionable financial dealings. Those white voters said the election had nothing to do with race. But for black voters, it had everything to do with it.

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Big Loser in a Polarizing, No-Holds-Barred Election Is Race Relations
By MONICA DAVEY

Marvin Pratt, who lost his bid to become this city's first elected black mayor last week, sat on his living room couch the other day and reflected on his failure.

Mr. Pratt said he felt let down. Let down by the news media, for what he saw as a last-minute flurry of unfair, negative coverage. Let down by his opponent, Tom Barrett, once a friend, who had splattered him with attack advertisements in the final hours, questioning his competence.

It wasn't that Mr. Pratt and Mr. Barrett, both Democrats, differed much on the issues. But in appealing to voters in this racially divided city, the two men — one black, one white — were about as far apart as they could be. On election day, most black voters picked Mr. Pratt. Most white voters chose Mr. Barrett, who won handily.

Mr. Pratt, who has been acting mayor since January, when Mayor John O. Norquist stepped down early, leaves City Hall next week. Mr. Pratt selected his words carefully, somberly, when asked what the election might say about race relations in Milwaukee.

"I want to say it's getting better," he said. "But it's still very polarizing."

Just then, his wife, Dianne, cut in, with blunter words.

"Racism," she said, "is alive and well in Milwaukee."

Mr. Pratt quickly pointed out that he had never said that. Mrs. Pratt, however, pressed on: "It's alive and well and thriving. I said it's thriving here. This is redneck America — citified. The vote showed it."

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Decades After Liberation, Landmines Remain Lethal
Stanley Karombo

HARARE, Apr 12 (IPS) - Rumbidzai Zulu, a woman in her early twenties, stares at the freshly bandaged stump that used to be her leg. A landmine blew off the limb while she was looking for firewood in the bush - also claiming the life of her unborn child - and she is struggling to come to grips with the trauma.

Hundreds of people have been killed, maimed or injured by mines which were planted by government troops and their opponents in the 1970s, during Zimbabwe's liberation struggle. A toll has also been taken on domestic and wild animals.

It is estimated that Zimbabwe is one of the most heavily-mined countries in the world, its borders with Mozambique and Zambia being virtually impassable in certain stretches.

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Quote of note:

''I don't think any purpose would be served by an inquiry,'' U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters during a 24-hour visit to Haiti last week. ''We were on the verge of a bloodbath and President Aristide found himself in great danger,'' he said.

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POLITICS-U.N.:U.S., France Blocking Haiti Probe
Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 13 (IPS) - The United States and France have intimidated Caribbean countries into delaying an official request for a probe into the murky circumstances under which Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from power in February, according to diplomatic sources here.

The two veto-wielding permanent members of the 15-nation Security Council have signalled to Caribbean nations that they do not want a U.N. probe of Aristide's ouster.

Any attempts to bring the issue or even introduce a resolution before the Security Council will either be blocked or vetoed by both countries, council sources told IPS.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has been caught in the middle of the dispute, says he is unable to act unless he has a formal request to do so either by the Security Council or the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM), of which Haiti is a member..

''We have read news reports that CARICOM wants a U.N. investigation. But unless we receive an official request either from CARICOM or from the Security Council, we cannot act on it,'' U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told IPS.

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April 13, 2004

The plan should be to start raising the next error while the last one is still fresh, build a chain of fuck-ups as long as the chains of Marley's ghost. We got more than enough errors to work with.

Good thing no one listens to me, eh?

Quote of note:

One key issue in the fairness debate is whether recent tax-law changes have biased the tax system against those whose income is derived largely from wages and salaries and toward those who get large dividend and capital-gains payments.

Bush ideas "like lifetime savings accounts and lower taxes on dividends and capital gains - all of that is taking the tax burden off of capital," notes Charles Davenport of Tax Notes.

Allan Sloan, a Newsweek columnist, argued this theory provocatively last week, saying Bush would make it harder for people starting up the economic ladder while showering rewards on the rich.

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Tough tax questions face the next president
A growing unintended burden on middle-income people, and a dearth of corporate receipts raise issues of fairness.
By David T. Cook | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

…• Inadequate revenue. "Whoever is president will continue to face huge budget deficits. "They cannot solve those by capping spending," says Charles Davenport, senior contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan publisher. The war in Iraq adds to the problem. On NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, "we are going have to ask for more money after the election, and it's going to increase the ... deficit."

• An explosion in the number of middle-income taxpayers paying the Alternative Minimum Tax. The tax was adopted in the late 1960s to make sure the wealthiest Americans paid at least some taxes. "It now affects substantial numbers of middle-income taxpayers and will, absent a change of law, affect more than 30 million taxpayers by 2010," writes IRS taxpayer advocate Nina Olson in her annual report to Congress. The cost of fixing the problem: upwards of $450 billion over the next 10 years, according to figures from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

• A sizable gap between what the government is owed and what it collects. "The tax gap is more than $300 billion in revenue we think we should be collecting and are not," says Peter Orszag of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "Some of that is nonreporting [of income], some of it is aggressive use of tax sheltering."

• A major erosion in corporate tax revenue. Congress's General Accounting Office recently reported that 61 percent of US-owned companies and 71 percent of foreign-owned firms paid no taxes in the US from 1996 to 2000, when profits were booming. Last year, corporate taxes fell to just 7.4 percent of government receipts, versus 20.3 percent 40 years ago.

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We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. We're changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you got a problem, blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of us are responsible for the decisions we make in life

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No strategy. Just faith based nation building.

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Frustrations shows. "I've got some must-call, I'm sorry." So it's at least partly scripted.

"War footing" "gathering threats" "we have to be right 100% of the time" "mainly history" "moved heaven and earth"

We should count and sort the words from Condi's testimony and Bush's answers. I'll bet there's an unnatural correlation.

Q: 135,000 American troops, 12,000 British, maybe more mercs than Brits, isn't the "coalition" windows dressing? A: Don't say bad things about my friends

This is fucking amazing.

And I blame the press. Maybe three of four questions asked here could have been asked before the war. I remember. The press sucked up from fear the White House would cut them out, but THE CONSERVATIVE COUP NEEDS THE PRESS MORE THAN THE PRESS NEEDS IT.

Think about it…all the spinning, all the creativity put into convincing people invasion was the way to go means they needed you as a channel.

But we need you too.

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If Georgie didn't make decisions based on polls, he wouldn't be on television claiming he doesn't make decisions based on polls. Dr. Rice wouldn't have testified under oath.

If we have a security agreement with Iraq are the troops going to be under the orders of the Iraqi Governing Council?

He refused to disarm because he didn't have the arms you insisted he surrender.

When asked what he has to say about accusations he led the nation to war under false pretenses, he admits the reasons for going to war were not as claimed at the time.

Q: Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility? A: I grieve for the families. That's why we need the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.

We need to go on the offensive and stay on the offensive (!!!!!!!!!!!) Jeezus! The whole world will happy to hera that.

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Causes of Blindness Differ in Blacks, Whites
Tue Apr 13, 4:32 PM ET
By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - U.S. investigators have found that the leading cause of blindness among whites is age-related macular degeneration (AMD), while most blacks lose their sight from glaucoma or cataracts.

Yahoo! Health
Have questions about your health?
Find answers here.

Furthermore, within age groups, blindness occurs nearly three times more commonly in blacks than in whites.

AMD is a frequent cause of deteriorating vision in older adults. As people age, there is a breakdown in light-sensitive cells in the macula, the tissue in the center of the retina.

In contrast, cataracts occur when proteins in the eye's lens begin to clump together, forming a milky cloud that obscures vision. In glaucoma, fluid levels rise in the eye, increasing pressure, which can damage the optic nerve.

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"Let me recap…no, that will take too long. Let me sum up."

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"Let me recap…no, that will take too long. Let me sum up."

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He does know how to read.

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Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing
FDCH E-Media
Tuesday, April 13, 2004; 6:16 PM

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES HOLDS A PUBLIC HEARING ON THREATS AND RESPONSES IN 2001

SPEAKERS:

Thomas H. Kean, Commission Chairman
Lee H. Hamilton, Commission Vice Chairman
Richard Ben-Veniste, Commission Member
Max Cleland, Commission Member
Fred F. Fielding, Commission Member
Jamie S. Gorelick, Commission Member
Slade Gorton, Commission Member
John F. Lehman, Commission Member
Timothy J. Roemer, Commission Member
James R. Thompson, Commission Member
Bob Kerrey, Commission Member
Philip Zelikow, Commission Executive Director
Christopher Kojm, Commission Deputy Executive Director
Barbara Grewe, Commission Senior Counsel

WITNESSES:

Louis J. Freeh, Former Director, FBI
Janet Reno, Former Attorney General of the United States
Thomas J. Pickard, Former Acting Director, FBI
Ambassador J. Cofer Black, Former Director, Counterterrorism Center, CIA
John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General

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I've braced myself for the press conference.

Given that I really believe we've reached the part of the slippery slop where the braking distance is less than the distance to the edge of the cliff, I'm going to be watching the press more than the Prez.

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…is at 308 Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's. On April 30th I'll be hanging there because Curbstone Press is having a thing there for E. Ethelbert Miller and devorah major. devorah and I go back a ways.

I will admit the Bowery Poetry Club's home page gives me pause. On the other hand, the same night Amiri Baraka & Blue Ark are on at 11:59 p.m. On the other-other hand, I'd have to sit through an hour of someone I'm totally unfamiliar with.

Anyway, I'm going to be there on the 30th.

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via MetaFilter

Campaigners decry Rio slum wall
Plans to ring two slums in Rio de Janeiro with a three-metre (10-foot) wall have been condemned by human rights groups and the city's own mayor.

Officials in the Brazilian city are pushing the idea after a drug-related turf war at the weekend left two policemen and six others dead.

"We need to build it immediately," said state Deputy Governor Luiz Paulo Conde.

Amnesty International said the wall would penalise innocent people and was unlikely to be effective.

Another group, Global Justice, said the barrier would create "social apartheid" when what was needed was investment in poor communities.

However, the authorities in Rio state say the wall will help the security forces control the Rocinha and Vidigal favelas, or slums, where 1,200 officers have been on patrol since Friday.

Drug traffickers from Vidigal are believed to have tried to seize control of drug and arms trade.

"The wall isn't to stop the violence, it is to mark off territory," Mr Conde said.

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'Black Jesse Helms' battles for GOP votes
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A North Carolina newspaper meant to chastise Republican Vernon Robinson when it declared: "Jesse Helms is back! This time, he's black."

Now that quote has become Mr. Robinson's campaign slogan as he battles seven other 5th District congressional candidates in the July 20 Republican primary.

The Helms name is powerful among North Carolina Republicans, and even if the retired conservative senator is actually supporting one of Mr. Robinson's rivals, being dubbed "the black Jesse Helms" is a big boost for a candidate in a district where 88 percent of residents are white and most vote Republican.

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College of New Jersey to help low-income students pay school costs
April 13, 2004, 3:49 AM EDT

EWING, N.J. -- The College of New Jersey will provide financial awards to needy students to help them pay expenses not covered by the state and federal financial aid they receive.

College officials said the Equal Opportunity Fund Promise Award program, modeled after similar programs at schools across the nation, gives them an opportunity to recruit desirable applicants from low-income families in New Jersey. The annual cost of attending the Ewing-based school _ including tuition, room, board, books and other expenses _ is about $15,945, and about 80 to 110 incoming freshmen are expected to participate in the EOF program this fall.

"As we started to look at what other colleges are doing throughout the country, it was clear that institutions have found the means to fulfill their commitment to students in similar programs where the financial need exceeds the financial aid available," school President R. Barbara Gitenstein said Monday.

Students must be part of the state's EOF program for disadvantaged students to qualify for the award, and their total family income must meet limits determined by the number of peopler in the their household. For example, a family of four could not make more than $36,800 for the student to qualify.

In the first two years, the extra money will come as a grant, which would not have to be repaid, while part of the award may come as low-interest loans in their junior and senior years.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

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I really think this is almost on a par with complaining that there are no hurricanes with African-American names.

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Google's Gmail could be blocked

Gmail, the planned free e-mail service from Google, could be facing strong legal opposition in California
A draft law is being drawn up by local Democratic Senator Liz Figueroa, who calls Gmail "an invasion of privacy".

Google is being asked to rethink the product, which plans to offer 100 times the storage offered by some rivals.

The problem, Ms Figueroa says, is Google's plan to make revenue from users agreeing to their incoming e-mail being scanned for targeted advertising.

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I mean, we're talking RSS with video attachments. And I don't even have a PVR yet.

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NewsGator Media Center Edition Provides Access to Syndicated Content on TV Sets

"Living Room" Interface Allows Users to Read Selected Content, or Watch On-Demand Video Content

DENVER, CO -- April 13, 2004 -- NewsGator Technologies launched NewsGator Media Center Edition today, which allows users to read syndicated content feeds on their TV with Windows XP Media Center Edition. Both text and multimedia content is supported, with an interface designed to be used with a remote control from across the room. NewsGator Media Center Edition shows information that has not already been viewed on another device by synchronizing user subscriptions with NewsGator Online Services.

Audio and video content is only one click away. Users see visual cues when a feed contains multimedia content; they can then instantly view this content using the remote control. There are a number of featured feeds for the launch, including a video feed from Microsoft.

This is the latest step in the "any time, any place, any device" strategy that distinguishes the NewsGator product line. Users typically use more than one device throughout the day, such as Microsoft Outlook at work, a mobile phone on the road, a web browser in their home office, and a TV in their living room. NewsGator Online Services allows users to read one set of content from any of these devices, without any duplication. The combined power of NewsGator Media Center Edition and Online Services offers customers a productive and fun way to access their personalized subscriptions and information from any device, whenever they need it.

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Quote of note:

Freeh also said intelligence services were aware of the danger that a terrorist might use a hijacked plane as a weapon.

He said steps were taken to defend the White House as well as special events, such as the 2000 Olympic Games and meetings of world leaders, against such a threat but nothing was done to protect the country at large.

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Commission Criticizes Ashcroft, FBI
Tue Apr 13, 2004 01:41 PM ET
By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Tuesday broadly criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for failing to meet the threat from al Qaeda and said Attorney General John Ashcroft did not see counterterrorism as a top priority before it was too late.

In its latest report detailing security breakdowns throughout the government, the commission issued two lengthy staff reports analyzing the failure to prevent the hijacked airliner attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

One report drew attention to a May 10 Justice Department document that set out priorities for 2001. The top priorities cited were reducing gun violence and combating drug trafficking. There was no mention of counterterrorism.

When Dale Watson, the head of the counterterrorism division, saw the report, he "almost fell out of his chair," the report said. "The FBI's new counterterrorism strategy was not a focus of the Justice Department in 2001."

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WHY DID ASHCROFT STOP FLYING COMMERCIAL AIRLINES PRIOR TO 9/11?: Months before 9/11 Ashcroft began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines." Ashcroft started flying on the $40 million GulfStream 5 – at a cost to taxpayers of $1600 an hour – because of an FBI threat assessment. But the FBI would not say "what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it." The jet was supposed to be "for use in special investigations and for the transport of terrorists and other dangerous suspects." Months after 9/11, in an attempt to deflect criticism, a Justice Department spokesman said the threat was about "nonspecific threats against Ashcroft's life." (See Ashcroft's own ramblings on the subject in this video). But the FBI threat assessment has never been made public. Until Ashcroft releases the document, questions about his conduct will persist. 

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Personifying the enemy by kos

…What's depressing is this infuriating penchant for Bush to villify individuals, as though our battles can be won by exterminating a few well-placed leaders. We have seen this with al Qaida and OBL, we have seen it with Saddam Hussein, and now with our two latest boogeymen -- Sadr and Abu Musab Zarqawi.

The enemies we face are bigger than one person. Killing Sadr would be as effective in ending Shiite opposition as capturing Saddam was in ending Sunni opposition (or killing his sons, for that matter). Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden would make us all feel good (especially killing him), but it wouldn't have any real effect on Al Qaida operations.

Yet the administration insists on creating the fiction that killing or capturing any one man can help us win our various wars.

Nuff said.

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Hesiod has one of his caption contests up, but I'm afraid it ain't possible to beat his initial caption.

FIVE MINUTES LATER: Still laughing…

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Nasty little pustule that he is...

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Jeanne D'Arc (who isn't feeling well, so if you email it betta be get well wishes) at Body and Soul:

Photo update

A week ago, I put up a post about a disturbing picture of an American marine playing what seemed to be a very nasty joke on two Iraqi boys, which provoked a long comment thread on the picture's authenticity. Some people thought the words on the marine's sign were photoshopped in, and some argued that there were oddities in the uniform that made it clear the man in the picture wasn't actually a marine.

In the future, I will be less inclined to accept the opinion of armchair warrior wannabes about the authenicity of military uniforms. It turns out there is indeed a Lance Corporal Boudreaux, and he is the man in the picture. The Marines are investigating the matter and considering what charges to bring.

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This is part two. I meant to link to part one the other day but got distracted.

The Florida office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-FL) today called on law enforcement authorities to investigate an assault on a Muslim child at a school in that state as a hate crime. The 12-year-old victim, a student at a middle school in Boyton Beach who wears an Islamic head scarf, says she was assaulted in the hallway of her school last week by four teenage boys who hit her across the face with a leather belt, injuring her lip.

During the assault, the boys allegedly called the Muslim child "Osama" and used derogative remarks about her head scarf and about her ethnic background. (The child is of Pakistani heritage.) The perpetrators also threatened further attacks if the victim notified school authorities.

The same student told CAIR-FL that she was the target of several similar but less violent incidents of harassment in the recent past. She says school officials failed to take corrective action following those incidents.

There are major swaths of the citizenry in the USofA that are leaving me feeling pretty disgusted.

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Moving on up from the Village Voice…a well deserved move, btw…Mr. Coates reviews The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson. The result is predictable.

…While Dickerson's rhetoric exhibits echoes of black nationalism, she turns an unforgiving eye to that philosophy's more recent manifestations. "Carpetbagging Afrocentrists," as she terms them, are at least as much to blame for the predicament of black America as approval- seeking blacks. "Instead of carrying out substantive studies of African history," writes Dickerson. "These charlatans imagine glorious achievements, such as the Bronze Age of African development, airplanes or routinized surgery." Dickerson dismisses today's nationalist community roughly as "Afrocentric hustlers" who are invoking "mytho-ancestors, so far outside the past, as to be in fables."

At some points in her treatise, Dickerson journeys into interesting, and gutsy, terrain. Her critique of the Condoleezza Rice predicament is illuminating and saddening. I've written about my crush on the National Security Advisor and her counter-intuitive allure. But I suspect that Dickerson's opinion, even in its overstated form, is closer to the truth. "To white men, [Rice] is not a woman. To black men, she's not a fuckable woman; even the vaunted black penis cannot bridge the chasm between them…Her having thrived is somehow an affront to the black man. What black masculinity does to white men, black female competence does to black men."

For almost anyone identified with any sort of political ideology, Dickerson's analysis is a bitter pill to swallow. Unfortunately, the book tops out at just that. For all her flame-throwing, caustic denunciations and grenade lobbing, Dickerson does almost nothing to realize her essential thesis--the assertion that "black" is somehow a woefully inadequate way of describing African-Americans. That's because, for all its bluster and vitriol, Blackness never emerges as much more than a directionless rant.

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Particularly a Justice like Scalia who could wind up running the thing. In today's NY Times:

"The electronic media have in the past respected my First Amendment right not to speak on radio or television when I do not wish to do so," he wrote, "and I am sure that courtesy will continue."

First Amendment right not to speak? The man is confusing the First Amendment with the Miranda decision! Let's see exactly what the First Amendment says:

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What is freedom of the press if not the right to publish what one has heard? The good Justice has the First Amendment right to speak. What he is asserting is a First Amendment right to constrain the press' First Amendment rights. The article also has the second scariest thing ever said by a Supreme Court Justice:

In his letter, Justice Scalia said he did not have the power to "direct security personnel not to confiscate recordings."

If HE doesn't have that power, we damn well better find out who does, and insist they do so immediately.

Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is a blatant example that shows how his personal views and desires override any rational interpretation of the Constitution. And it's a Supreme Court justice, a potential Chief Justice, whose biases are overriding the law. We may be in deep shit.

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…and education, civil rights, the middle class…

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Bush Welcomes Gaza Plan, Without Backing It Fully
By JOEL BRINKLEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: April 13, 2004

CRAWFORD, Tex., April 12 - President Bush said Monday that he would welcome a withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip but warned that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for such a pullback should not replace the White House's stalled proposal for negotiations that would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.

After meeting with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt at his ranch here, Mr. Bush stopped short of endorsing Mr. Sharon's plan for a unilateral pullback from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

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9/11 Panel Is Said to Offer Harsh Review of Ashcroft
By PHILIP SHENON and LOWELL BERGMAN

WASHINGTON, April 12 — Draft reports by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks portray Attorney General John Ashcroft as largely uninterested in counterterrorism issues before Sept. 11 despite intelligence warnings that summer that Al Qaeda was planning a large, perhaps catastrophic, terrorist attack, panel officials and others with access to the reports have said.

They said the draft reports, which are expected to be completed and made public during two days of hearings by the commission this week, show that F.B.I. officials were alarmed throughout 2001 by what they perceived as Mr. Ashcroft's lack of interest in terrorism issues and his decision in August 2001 to reject the bureau's request for a large expansion of its counterterrorism programs.

The draft reports, they said, quote the F.B.I.'s former counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, as saying he "fell off my chair" when he learned that Mr. Ashcroft had failed to list combating terrorism as one of the department's priorities in a March 2001 department-wide memo.

They said the reports would also quote from internal memorandums by Thomas J. Pickard, acting director of the F.B.I. in summer 2001, in which Mr. Pickard described his frustration with Mr. Ashcroft and what he saw as the attorney general's lack of interest in the issue of how the bureau was investigating terrorism suspects in the United States.

Commission officials said the Justice Department, which was provided with a draft copy of the report, had mounted an aggressive, last-minute effort on Monday to persuade the commission to rewrite the parts of the report dealing with Mr. Ashcroft, describing them as one-sided and unfair to him.

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Yeah, right.

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Snares and Delusions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
President Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever.

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The Uncertainty Factor By DAVID BROOKS Ignoring the uncertainties of the age of terror, most people will pick up any stick they can to beat the administration.

…I will simply point out it's the CERTAINTIES we have about the Bushistas—the lies, the sliming, the theatrics unsupported by substance, the absolute certainty in the face of all contradictory fact and the singular hubris manifest as an inability to either see or admit to blatant error—that is the reason to all the Bushwhacking.

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After Ruling, 3 Universities Maintain Diversity in Admissions
By GREG WINTER

Two of the major universities that were forced by the Supreme Court to abandon affirmative action policies that awarded extra points to minority applicants have experienced only slight declines in the racial diversity of the students they admitted for the fall.

To maintain those levels, however, the universities spent far more on admissions than before.

At the University of Michigan, the focal point of the court's decision, black, Latino and American Indian students accounted for 10 percent of this year's accepted students, a decrease of one percentage point from 2003. Yet Michigan spent $1.8 million more to evaluate applicants this year, a 40 percent increase.

At Ohio State University, the same racial groups, often referred to as underrepresented minorities, make up 10 percent of this year's admitted class, compared with 12 percent the year before. And at a third campus that scrapped its point system, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the percentage of black, Latino and American Indian students who were accepted remained about 7 percent.

"To those who would like to call the decision a big defeat for the university, I think these numbers show that is not the case," said Julie Peterson, a University of Michigan spokeswoman. "The changes in our admissions process did not signal any change in our commitment to having a diverse student body."

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Timing of Clinton Memoir Is Everything, for Kerry
By JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, April 12 — As Bill Clinton seeks to finish his memoirs, leading Democrats are voicing concern that the book could overshadow Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign, diverting attention to Mr. Clinton's outsize legacy of scandal and achievement.

Many Democrats said they wanted the book published as far as possible before the election and, certainly, before the Democratic National Convention in late July. They fear that the book will embolden Mr. Clinton's foes to turn out and vote for President Bush.

Mr. Clinton, for his part, has increased the nervous speculation about the book in Democratic circles by making a habit of picking up the phone to regale friends with long passages and even chapters of his prose. Mixing boyish enthusiasm with a craving for approval, people who have received the calls said, he has proudly narrated excerpts about everything from college antics with his pals at Georgetown to his 1995 standoff with Republicans that led to a government shutdown.

Some of Mr. Clinton's friends say he should hurry up.

"It'll get a lot of air space and I think it's kind of imperative that happen in front of the convention," said John D. Podesta, a chief of staff in Mr. Clinton's White House. That way, he said, "Kerry's benefited by having a clear shot, clear air space, from the convention through November."

A close associate of Mr. Kerry, offering a personal opinion, said: "If it comes out any time before the election, it's not particularly good for us because he takes up a lot of oxygen. It's less that he's a negative and more that he'll be out on his book tour and he'll be the story of the week rather than John Kerry."

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April 12, 2004

Complete Text 'Rapid Application Development with Mozilla' Available for Free Download
Monday April 12th, 2004

Wily Yuen writes: "Nigel McFarlane's Rapid Application Development with Mozilla is now available as a PDF download from Bruce Perens' Open Source series at InformIT. Please support the author and buy the book if you find it to be useful."

Displaying a keen sense of irony, InformIT have ensured that their download page does not work in Mozilla. The book is available as a zip file containing a collection of PDFs or as a zip file containing a collection of RTF documents.

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Now let's see how Microsoft implements it.

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Visual Studio 2005 will introduce new C runtime library routines

It’s no secret that some C runtime library routines are much more secure than other routines, simply based on what they're supposed to do. It’s also true that some bugs and vulnerabilities exist even in what appear to be safe routines.

Michael Howard, a Microsoft senior security engineer, recently outlined an ongoing project that intends to make C much safer. The first result of the project is strsafe.h, the Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Platform SDK string functions Microsoft introduced in 2002. (I'll provide more details about strsafe.h in a future column.)

Microsoft’s Visual C++ team is taking the steps I suggest that developers follow: The team is evaluating the security of C runtime library functions. However, they're going far beyond what individual developers could do; for instance, they've rewritten about 400 routines to make them more secure.

The new C functions will debut in Visual Studio 2005, and a few functions will improve older code simply by recompiling. But, as Howard wisely points out, it takes more than improved libraries to make most code secure; it also requires attention to using the most secure functions and practices.

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I'd rather see a study on how to get folks to cut sisters a break.
Quote of note:

The commission found that at 7.5 percent of the total work force, Black women were the largest group among women of color. Yet, they had made the least gains since 1990. Black women's 41 percent gain in total employment, for instance, was dwarfed by the 100 percent gain by Latinas.

In management ranks, Black women hold about 3 percent of all positions, an increase of 75 percent. While that gain may sound impressive, it begins to shrivel when contrasted to the 130 percent gain by Latinas and the 135 percent gain by Asian women. Meanwhile, Black women continue to hold a disproportionate number of lower paying clerical or nursing and healthcare positions.

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Study Seeks To Elevate Black Women
By Carla Thompson | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - The survey will take three years and involve over 300,000 people. When it is finished, it's designed to tell the world what Black women think it will take to become leaders in the 21st Century.

More important, the 31-year-old League of Black Women, which is conducting the survey, hopes the findings can be used to boost the fortunes of Black women, who have persistently lagged other minority women in attaining higher paying jobs and positions of social influence.

"We are seeking information about the important attributes necessary to compete and enjoy sustained leadership," says Sandra Finley, president of the Chicago-based organization. "Given that our ambitions have grown, we need the benefit of better tools and resources that allow us to work faster, have more reach and be more effective with less effort. Right now, we have the dreams but don't have the resources or collective knowledge to accomplish them."

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Complexion Still Colors Black Perceptions
After More Than 300 Years In The U.S., Blacks Are Still Color-Conscious

By Hazel Trice Edney | SACOBSERVER.COM WIRE SERVICES

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Atima Omara-Alwala had just left her office at the State Capitol in Richmond, Va. and was on her way to lunch when she heard a voice from a passing car scream, "Blackie!"

It was the kind of insult that she has come to expect but not accept.

A few years earlier, as a sophomore at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, 40 miles away, she heard some guys in a passing car laugh as one yelled, "Darkie!"

That anyone would stoop to that level of behavior was disappointing enough. But what made these insults doubly painful was that they were uttered by Black men.

"It's not surprising anymore. But it's still somewhat painful," Omara-Alwala admits. "I kind of wince or flinch on the inside. Even when I work in Black communities, I'm always conscious that there might be some reason that I'll be picked on - not because of any fault in my personality - just the fact that I'm this complexion. And, of course, I'm no good if I'm this complexion."

Omara-Alwala's complexion is dark. She was born in Providence, R.I. to parents from Uganda in East Africa.

C. Yvette Taylor, a psychologist who counsels many women of color at the University of Virginia, and has heard many stories similar to Omara-Alwala's, says stereotypes based on color are not unusual.

"Certainly they still exist and they are age old," she says. "And they very likely will always be around. And the ramifications of them are myriad. Lots of people - women and men - struggle with the skin-tone issue."

This is the first of two articles on how one's complexion still colors how many African Americans view themselves and others in their community. Next week's part will focus on a light-skin woman. Hazel Trice Edney is a Washington correspondent for NNPA.

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The title is not misspelled. See below.

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Four Men Arrested For Transporting Cocaine In Rapper’s RV

POSTED: 4:48 pm EDT April 12, 2004
UPDATED: 4:51 pm EDT April 12, 2004

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y -- Four men have been arrested on drug charges after allegedly carrying vast amounts of cocaine to the East Coast by packing it into fancy cars and a rap singer's luxury tour bus, where drugs and cash were hidden under her bed.

The singer, Gloria Velez, who has appeared in videos with rap heavyweights such as Jay-Z, DMX and Ja Rule, has not been charged. Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who announced the arrests, would not comment Monday on whether Velez was cooperating with prosecutors.

Pirro said 75 officers from various agencies carried out search warrants over the last few days and seized more than 200 pounds of cocaine, $800,000 in cash and cars including a Hummer, a Mercedes-Benz, a Cadillac and a Range Rover.

The cocaine and the cash -- plus guns, money counting machines and a vacuum sealer for the drugs -- were displayed for reporters after a news conference in Pirro's office. Also on view were hydraulic jacks used to uncover the trap under Velez's bed in her recreational vehicle.

A call to Velez's manager was not returned.

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So there's going to be a "press conference" tomorrow. I wonder if this one will be scripted too.

Some notables — including Time, Newsweek, USA TODAY, The Washington Post and Hearst columnist Helen Thomas — were never called on, leading to all sorts of buzz in the press corps. Follow-up questions, a White House tradition, were non-existent.

USA TODAY White House reporter Larry McQuillan, seated in the front row, stopped raising his hand after he realized that Bush — who himself used the word "scripted" during the news conference to describe what was going on — was calling on names from a list and not deviating from it.

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Quote of note:

The nations four refineries and the over 1 million jobs they created (consider the multiplier effect) are good pointers to the advantages oil bestowed on the nation. Then something happened.

I don"t know what though. But everywhere things were taking negative bends rather than the vice- versa.

First agriculture took a swiping blow and had never recovered since. The same fate befell almost all sectors from education to power.

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Nigeria [opinion]: Why Borno Won't Mind the Oil Curse
Vanguard (Lagos)
OPINION
April 12, 2004
Posted to the web April 12, 2004

By Anthony Ochela

The dollarised curse may have induced underdevelopment in the country. ....

BEFORE the discovery of oil in Nigeria there were groundnut in the North, cocoa in the West, palm oil in the East and the regions had their peculiar sources of revenue and consequently never bothered to look across the Niger. They were, according to our history books, self-reliant.

There were therefore less social or civil frictions. All there were then were political hiccups in form of alliances and political self-assertions among the big boys. And even then, when the big boys quarrel, they always found ways of resolving issues because in the end they always fall back to their regions. Enter oil. And the quiet evaporated. Evidently the balance that held quiet (and regional balance) in place was swept away by the coming of the money-spinner. This is because the object in question chose a single region in the country to make its home.

Now it was making more money than General Yakubu Gowon, then Head of State, could handle.

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"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. - Jim Horning."

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The quote of note comes from the LA Times index page that links to the editorial:

One of the pious maxims of American politics for the last 40 years has been that a candidate should never be attacked on religious grounds. This stricture is eminently fair insofar as private faith is concerned. But when personal faith begins to determine public policy, then the issue becomes fair game.

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A New Meaning for 'Bully Pulpit'
By Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is the author of the recently published "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books) and director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.

April 12, 2004

One of the pious maxims of American politics for the last 40 years has been that a candidate should never be attacked on religious grounds. This stricture is eminently fair insofar as private faith is concerned. But when personal faith begins to determine public policy, then the issue becomes fair game.

When John F. Kennedy was running in 1960, he was called on, as the second Roman Catholic to seek the nation's highest office, to affirm his support for the separation of church and state. In a speech regarded as a turning point of his campaign, Kennedy memorably declared, "I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me."

President Bush's candidacy deserves the same level of scrutiny — not because of what he might do in the future but because of what he has already done on behalf of an ultraconservative, mainly Christian constituency that has no qualms about trying to turn its faith into the law of the land.

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Janet Jackson on 'SNL,' Back in a Pixelated Flash
By Tom Shales

Monday, April 12, 2004; Page C01

Janet Jackson and "Saturday Night Live" gave Congress and the Federal Communications Commission a richly deserved nose-thumbing over the weekend when Jackson guest-hosted the irreverent and influential satire show.

In the very first sketch, before the opening credits, Jackson did a bull's-eye impression of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testifying, as she did last week, before the commission investigating the 9/11 tragedy. Outfitted with prosthetic teeth that helped with the flashing of a coldly faked smile, Jackson as Rice rehearsed for her testimony with a sinister and snakelike Vice President Cheney, played by master impressionist Darrell Hammond.

If all else were to fail, Cheney advised, "I think you should flash a boob," a reference to Jackson's notorious gig during halftime of this year's Super Bowl. "Just one headlight, real quickly," the Cheney character went on, as the audience laughed. Jackson-as-Rice rejected the notion, but when testifying -- with Jackson edited into footage of the actual hearing -- she did indeed reveal a breast to the commission, then uttered the iconic cry "Live from New York, it's 'Saturday Night!' "

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Are Black People More Religious?
By Jabari Asim

Monday, April 12, 2004; 10:23 AM

While reading a Washington Post article about Americans' reactions to "The Passion of the Christ," I was struck by a researcher's observation that "blacks tend to be more religious and more likely to say the Bible should be taken literally."

The second part of that statement I'd like to examine in a future column. As for the first part, I asked the man who said it exactly what he meant. Michael Dimock, research director at the Pew Research Center, told me he based his comment on blacks whom the center has surveyed. "We ask how often do you attend services, how important is religion in your life, how often do you pray? We get a higher percentage of African-Americans saying religion is important."

Dimock declined to indulge in any grand generalizations, and discouraged me from doing the same. "Even a question as precise as that could be interpreted differently by different people," he said. "Maybe there really isn't that much of a difference but a difference in the way people think about religion."

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If I hadn't I would have missed this.

Political correctness and classroom debate World O' Crap has a long, but very interesting dissection of a recent campus political correctness flair-up at UNC. I had to laugh. Maybe there are schools free of them, but my school definitely was infested with straight white Christian guys (and occasionally girls) who sat around waiting to be offended so they could bring all discourse to a halt by whining about their oppression. They claim that they don't get a voice, but usually the reason their strategy worked was because of the wicked liberal dedication to educational and democratic principles. They got a voice, but so did everyone else, and so the complaint was more about not getting to dominate discussion.

The down side is, now I have to read World O' Crap and Mouse Words, which means I have to do something or other more efficiently to make time for them.

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Quote of note:

The PDB revealed another very fascinating item—the analyst who wrote the piece had access to details about FBI investigations. This is something I never had access to when I was writing PDBs. It was forbidden territory. In other words, Bill Clinton has opened some level of cooperation between the FBI and CIA. The FBI, in a break with tradition, was telling the CIA what it was doing in some measure. Unfortunately, with the benefit of hindsight, not enough was shared.

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Decoding The PDB

Larry C. Johnson is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He served with the CIA from 1985 through 1989 and worked in the State Department's office of Counter Terrorism from 1989 through 1993. He also is a registered Republican who contributed financially to the Bush Campaign in 2000.

Are George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice really as clueless as they are claiming to be? Bush and Rice are both on the record misstating what was in the 6 August 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). They both insist the information was only “historical” and “not actionable.” They apparently are not alone in their faux ignorance. Republican partisans and even some members of the media are busy bolstering the spin that this was “an historical memo.” Absolute nonsense!

I wrote about 40 PDB’s during my four year tenure at the CIA. This particular PDB article was written in response to a presidential request. I am told that Bush’s request was a reaction to the intelligence warnings he was hearing during the daily CIA morning briefings. Something caught his attention and awakened his curiosity. He reportedly asked the CIA to come back with its assessment of Bin Laden’s intentions. The CIA answered the question—Bin Laden was targeting the United States.

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PUBLIC OPINION – MOST BELIEVE WH IS HIDING INFO OR LYING: A CBS News poll taken after Rice's testimony shows that more than three out of four Americans believe the Bush Administration is either hiding something or lying about September 11. Similarly, a Newsweek poll found that 60% of Americans say the Bush Administration "underestimated the terrorist threat and focused too much on other security issues like missile defense and Iraq prior to September 11." Just 23% say the Bush Administration took the threat seriously.

DISHONESTY – STILL SAYING HE REQUESTED THE BRIEFING: The President yesterday insisted that he personally requested the August 6 intelligence briefing because he was so concerned about terrorism, saying "I asked the intelligence agency to analyze the data to tell me whether or not we faced a threat internally...That's what the PDB request was." But according to the CIA, the briefing "was not requested by President Bush." As commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed, "the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile the briefing came from within the CIA."

NOTE: from a psychological perspective it's possible all parties are being honest in their recollections. I would give weight to those whose recollections changed with the frequency.

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rapublican (noun) pl. rapublicans
1: Stupid bling babies
2: Pseudo-conservatives that talk loud and say nothing

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Lester at Vision Circle picked up on this.

It's nice when you go looking for good news and actually find it. It's possible the museum won't survive: Black folks don't like unredacted history any more than any other American; mention slavery to your average Black person and you'll get one of those Bugs Bunny escapes, where the dust contrails go off in eight directions at once.

But it's good to see Black folks who've "made it" stepping up to the cultural plate. REALLY good. I hope the museum makes it, and Judge Keith and crew deserve recognition.

African-American museum came first, risk second
Detroit's elite put their very names on the line
April 9, 2004

BY FRANK PROVENZANO AND ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

The cadre of Detroit's elite who met March 27 and April 6 in Judge Damon Keith's chambers put their reputations and pocketbooks on the line. The goal: save the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, which is running out of cash, time and credibility.

For the prominent executives, it meant attaching their names to a museum that has been failing for years.

For Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, it meant focusing on one need when there are so many -- increasing economic development, reducing crime and fixing the schools.

For Keith, a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals judge, it meant walking an ethical high wire.

Keith, 81, is a legend and mentor to a Who's Who in Michigan law and politics, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a former law clerk whom Keith swore into office. The Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges forbids soliciting funds for educational, civic and charitable organizations as well as using the prestige of the judicial office for that purpose.

He said he served as a catalyst for bringing together the high-power group in his chambers, but did not solicit money.

Keith said he couldn't stand by and watch the museum fail.

"I said we have to save this museum," he said. "Now, we have to hope that the community will now rise up.

"We blacks who are in positions of power and authority who don't use our positions to help the struggle of black people are prostitutes and aren't worthy of being in our position," he said. "We have an obligation to save this museum."

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Check the page, read it all.

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Rap is Republican!
by
Darnley "Mello-D" Hodge

Every now and then I come across an essay that sums up my feelings on a subject. When I do, I pay homage to the writer by posting the essay. Such was the case with when rapper Mello-D said "Rap is Republican!" He did not mean that today's mainstream rap artist endorsed Republicans. He simply meant that the attitudes conveyed, reflected a Republican sentiment. In many ways I feel the same way, so I won't re-invent the wheel, instead I re-post Darnley "Mello-D" Hodge of www.ThermiteRecords.com.

I think Saul Williams said it best when I heard him on the radio a few weeks ago in L.A. "Rap has gone Republican", he said. And, It's true. Early on hip-hop was intended as a counter-culture: underground. Hip-Hop was meant to be a voice for the voiceless. But now? "Hip-Hop" is all about "Gimme mine... look at me... I'm rich... your broke... F you... look at all my fine women.... look at my car... I have the American Dream!". I'm not dissin'.. really... I'm not.... but Jay-Z, Puffy, Nelly and the rest of the pop-rappers do not represent a counter-culture. They don't represent you or me. They represent the system! They need the system, they love the system, they ARE the system! They are doing exactly what America wants them to do. Shuck and jive, tap dance and feed intellectual stagnation and social destruction to our youth. They look controversial but pose no real political influence. Politicians used to be afraid of hip-hop because of the revolutionary messages Public Enemy and BDP and X-Clan had. But nowadays, even Newt Gingrich is "getting Jiggy with it" because rap is no longer a threat.

Remember how they banned all those songs on the radio after 9-11? Rage Against the Machine was banned, a few songs by U2 as well as a hundred or so other songs.... but NO Rap songs were banned. Did you know that? Do you know why? It's because America understands that even though rap may look dangerous on the surface... there is absolutely no threat in the lyrics or content of seeing a brother "blinging" with a big booty chick shaking her butt in a video. Hip-Hoppers think they are controversial? Pleeeeeease.... that's what America wants you to think! The system is 10 times more afraid of a man with a voice than a man with a gun. They aren't afraid of you! You ain't saying nothin'!

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And practically all we ever hear from.

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When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Pseudoconservatism Revisited
By WERTHER*

"Pseudoconservativism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. . . . The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition. . . . [He] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world . . . cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed."

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965.

Conservatism: From Fringe to Mainstream

When Professor Hofstadter diagnosed pseudoconservatism from the dominant tradition of cold war liberalism, he was describing a fringe element, which is why he appended the "pseudo" prefix: Birchers, Minutemen, and McCarthyite remnants of the ideological wars of the 1950s. The only "conservatism" he was apparently comfortable with was the Eisenhower/Rockefeller variant of the New Deal consensus.

Writing 40 years ago, Hofstadter did not seem to grasp that a new political consensus based on conservative ideas would become the ascendant political expression in the United States. Beginning with Goldwater's candidacy and culminating in Republican control of Congress in 1994, conservatism became as dominant in American politics as liberalism was in Hofstadter's day.

…

From Friedrich von Hayek to Ann Coulter

At some point during the mid to late 1990s, dominant conservatism began to replicate the signs of intellectual decay that liberalism showed 30 years earlier. It probably started with movement conservatives' growing obsession with the Clinton family: not as political opponents to be defeated in a war of ideas, but as demonic incarnations of evil who had to be destroyed by any means necessary. As movement conservatives rolled and snuffled in sexual scandal like felines in catnip, there was a corresponding decline in intellectual argumentation. Instead of Wealth and Poverty, bookstore shelves bent under the weight of scandal-mongering exposes of Clinton's sexual dalliances.

As of this writing, more than three years after Clinton's departure from office and two and a half years after the most devastating attack on American soil in history, the magazine Human Events has seen fit to e-mail me a special offer: the "blockbuster" book by R. Emmitt Tyrrell on - Osama bin Laden? A conservative policy analysis of Iraq? The looming fiscal crisis of Social Security and Medicare? Not a chance. Tyrrell's magnificent opus is titled Madame Hillary. The offer promises that I "won't be able to put this book down" as it exposes Mrs. Clinton's diabolical machinations to enslave the guileless American people. And if I subscribe to Human Events for 70 weeks, I will receive this bonus: the "52 most dangerous liberals in America playing card set." Tom Daschle, the American incarnation of Josef Stalin. One is already thinking about rustling up a fourth for whist. Whether the demon du jour is the Clintons or not, conservative books, conservative talk radio, and conservative web sites show a uniform intellectual deterioration.

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Study: Audits of Businesses Down Last Year (AP)
Study: Audits of Businesses Down Last Year
By MARY DALRYMPLE, AP Tax Writer

WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service (news - web sites) audited fewer corporations, small businesses and partnerships last year but more individual taxpayers, according to a study of government data.

Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in its analysis of IRS data, made available Sunday, concluded that the audit rate for businesses of all sizes slid slightly last year to 2.1 audits for every 1,000 businesses, down from 2.2 audits per 1,000 businesses the previous year.

At the same time, the IRS audited 14 percent more individual tax returns. The audit rate for individuals increased last year to 6.5 audits for every 1,000 taxpayers.

Official audit rates released by the IRS last month show a similar trend.

Researchers said the declining audits of businesses exposes a flaw in the administration's tough stance against corporate wrongdoing.

"These and a number of other measures — documented by the agency's own data — indicate that the actual performance of the IRS differs in significant ways from some of the Bush administration claims when it comes to cracking down on corporate scofflaws," the report said.

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The Panda's Thumb is dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world.

WARNING: Yesterday's Mad Cow link may have come home to roost. I must admit I found the picture a bit disturbing.

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I do still read other progressive blogs. Every so often you get something of a jaw-dropper. This one was pointed to by Eschaton so you've probably seen it. But because certain folks think surprisingly well of them, and because one presumptuous person who blogs at TheBlackRepublican (who, you may recall, is not Black) iinvited a few of LGFers into my place…no misbehavior from them, btw…I'm linking to a quiz to see if you can guess which of a series of really xenophobic quotes came from Little Green Footballs and which from Late German Fascists.

WARNING: Those who would sooner pluck out their eyes than load an LGF page…and they are legion…should not hit the links for "certain people" and "invited a few LGFers".

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A summary of a brief conversation at Baldilocks:

Mr. Head: So if you knew for a fact FDR had been warned about Pearl Harbor one month before the Japanese invaded, would you be angry at him?

Ms. Wall: he didn't know. Read this book by a guy who claims FDR knew. I don't believe FDR knew, and I don't believe Bush knew.

Mr. Head: Yeah, but IF he knew.

Ms. Wall: Didn't you understand me? I don't believe FDR knew, and I don't believe Bush knew.

Mr. Head: Fine, but I'm asking you to speculate.

Ms. Wall: I don't believe FDR knew, and I don't believe Bush knew.

Mr. Head: Never mind.

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April 11, 2004

Ultra Tom isn't the site I remember Mad Cow from, but I don't care. It's still one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Having seen that, I figured I need to avoid Mad Cows. Fortunately there's a very simple test you can perform that not even the USDA can block.

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You check your referral logs, of course. Instead of the Sitemeter logs, though I went thru the AWStats reports. It has no time limits because it's installed on the server by my ISP and is, in my opinion, about as cool as a statistics package gets.

Anyway,
1- tyronefearless: you can keep my flaming hand on your page, no biggie. If I check back with you in five years and see you're still so deeply into the bling I will be disappointed.

2- I still bug out over being a semi-regular with a couple of Japanese search engines. Explains the Kanji spam, I guess.

3- Semi-speaking of which, I still get the occasional random hit from Rice Bowl Journals, courtesy of some flatteration from TV Poison.

4- We can officially remove 20 or so unique visitors from the grand total, due to referral spam from porn sites.

5- I've been called a Black blogger, a poly-blogger and a classically named site. Now I'm uncategorized. That's cool, I understand. Besides, there's some cool pictures of herons on the page.

6- My third fourth and fifth top referrers since 4/1,in reverse order: The Bloggies at 143 referrals, blo.gs at 153 (this was areal surprise), Technorati at 202

7- The second top referrer looks like an interesting type of referral spam. It's http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/ at 227 referrals. What makes this interesting is NetNewsWire is an OS/X newsreader which apparently leaves Ranchero Software as the referrer. The top referrer is Movable Type but you have to add up all the variations folks type into the address bar (movabletype, moveabletype) to know that.

8- I got some visitors from Little Green Footballs. They came and went quietly

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Checking this week's stats for my software support site, I see 20 downloads of MTClient 1.5 RC1…and 24 of version 1.01.

I really wish I knew who had the 1.01 version because 1.5 is a much better product.

Ah, well. Come tomorrow the 1.01 links will be replaced.

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At least for today.

I just left a comment on a blog which was attempting to dismiss yesterday's PDB release as inconsequential. Immediately after submitting it, I thought to myself something along the lines of, "Well THAT was useless."

I think the news is starting to get to me.

So I grab a magazine and there's this ad for

SEASONALE. The daily birth control pill that lets you have just 4 periods a year.

Ye. Gods.

This is really one of those topics, like abortion, which as a man I have no business weighing in on. I understand Aunt Flo is quite the bitch and this product may well have been some woman's idea. But damn doesn't anyone think about the distortion this represents? Birth control pills are bad enough along these lines.

I guess not. We got pills to "cure" shyness nowadays.

Bah. I'm going to spend the rest o fthe day watching Stargate SG-1. I got the 6th season, so I can delete the MPEGs of it that I downloaded.

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A Shortage of Seasonal Workers Is Feared
By EDUARDO PORTER

Published: April 10, 2004

Even as economists worry about the lackluster growth in employment, and politicians rail against the loss of jobs to overseas outsourcing, many employers across the country are sounding alarms about an impending shortage of foreign temporary workers this summer.

From roe processors in Alaska to innkeepers in Martha's Vineyard to landscaping contractors in Arkansas, businesses are beseeching Congress to raise the ceiling on the number of visas for seasonal workers.

…"Six hundred to 700 American jobs are at stake if I can't get the six foreign technicians that I need," said Larry Nelson, the president of Great Northern Sea Products. The company employs Japanese specialists during the summer at processing plants in Alaska to grade and sort salmon roe for sale in Japan.

Employers began writing panicked letters to members of Congress last month after the Department of Homeland Security clamped off this year's program of H-2B temporary visas for foreign workers, announcing it had reached the 66,000 limit, six months before the end of the fiscal year of 2004.

It is the first time since the H-2B visa program began 14 years ago that the annual limit has been reached, and the reasons are disputed. Employers and their Congressional supporters say that Americans often do not want the temporary positions, which provide no benefits and typically last for only a few months.

Those in the opposite camp say that the employers simply want cheaper foreign workers and could get local applicants if they simply paid more.

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Pat Buchanan: I think we're seeing the wisdom of Bush the Senior in stopping before Baghdad.

Tony Blankley: babble babble spin and bullshit. [I have less regard for Tony Blankley than anyone else who pretends to be a journalist.]

James Warren: How much do you trust the word of the Pentagon, the same people who grossly underestimated the problem?

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I'm watching This Weekon WABC.

Perle rivals Cheney in the power of his denial. Even George Will is actually ripping him. Perle has the "thugs" and "small minority" meme going and Will is like, "It's fine to call them thugs, but they're thugs that stand and fight, that have coordinated attacks..."

In re: the 8/6 PDB: Perle is like, "What could a president have done?" and Will is like, "That is classic bureaucratese."

When George Will slams a neocon you must recognize how screwed the boy's outlook is.

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Children find guns at Easter egg hunt
April 11, 2004

FLINT, MICHIGAN -- A group of children hunting for Easter eggs Saturday during a church event found two loaded handguns outside an elementary school.

Flint police were called to the scene, where officers also recovered a BB gun and a broken toy gun on the grounds of Gundry Elementary School.

One of the handguns discharged when it was dropped, according to a police report, but it was unclear who dropped it.

No one was injured, Sgt. Michael Coote said.

The pastor of Ruth Street Baptist Church said one gun had a bullet in the chamber, and the other gun's clip had bullets.

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I…think we watch more than enough TV. No need for this.

Might make a nice TV dinner tray, though.

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…With Location Free, Sony is aiming to change the way people watch television.

Taking advantage of the same wireless technology that allows laptop computer users to log on to the Internet over the air, Location Free is designed to make couch potatoes more mobile. After connecting a base station to a dedicated cable or satellite TV feed, you can carry the 5-pound, flat-panel liquid crystal display around the house or into the yard without losing the signal.

If the base station is connected to a DVD player, you can touch the screen to start, stop, rewind or fast-forward a movie. If it is connected to a broadband Internet feed, Location Free becomes a Web-surfing and e-mail machine.

And if you pack Location Free when you go overseas, you can hook up with a hotel broadband connection and watch your favorite shows from back home.

"It definitely has the cool factor going for it," said Tim Bajarin, president of consulting group Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif.

Just ask Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak. He bought an early version of Location Free during a visit to Japan.

"I loved my early Airboard," Wozniak said, calling the device by its Japanese brand name. "It was certainly impressive to … walk around watching TV. I would never have thought of that."

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Make that "Getting it Progressive."

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Florida Seniors Look for Voting Absolution
They want to make up for errors that may have elected President Bush. But concern has risen about reliability of new touch screen machines.
By John-Thor Dahlburg
Times Staff Writer

April 11, 2004

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Maybe the country as a whole has moved on, but not countless seniors here, Betty Sverdlik included. The retired garment industry employee remembers her dread after realizing an error she made in voting may have helped put Republican George W. Bush in the White House.

Nearly four years on, she is impatient for the chance to cast another ballot.

"I don't believe Bush is the right person to run my country," said the 76-year-old New York City native, who lives in Boca Raton and attends a synagogue in this town to the north. "Bush lied to us. He said he was going into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but he sent our boys over there because Saddam tried to kill his daddy."

Welcome to the passionately Democratic, heavily Jewish retiree colonies of Palm Beach County, where in 2000 the novel and complex "butterfly ballot" is thought to have resulted in thousands of people misvoting, helping boost Bush to a slender but decisive victory.

Butt of the nation's jokes, the mostly middle-class residents of these sprawling, lake-dotted senior communities between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades are still smarting over the jests and insults, and anxious for the opportunity of self-redemption. "Our mindset is that our man should have won in 2000," said Marvin Manning, leader of the umbrella group of homeowners associations at Century Village in Boca Raton. "In 2004, we're going to do it one more time, and we will prevail."

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I don't mind when he agrees with me, though.

Quote of note:

What is missing from the story, as it has emerged so far, is any sense that Bush himself was reaching down below the top levels of the White House staff or the intelligence agencies, trying to inform himself of what was happening down in the trenches. It is an open secret in Washington that he is indifferent to much of the daily work of the domestic departments. But it is striking that he seems equally passive on matters of national security, letting information filter up to him through the White House bureaucracy.

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Incurious Bush
By David S. Broder
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page B07

In her testimony before the Sept. 11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice gave glimpses of the inner workings of the Bush White House that were extraordinarily revealing for this highly secretive administration.

Anyone who listened closely during her three hours on the stand could glean much about the strengths and weaknesses of this White House, a place where few outsiders have gained a clue about how it operates.

What emerged was a picture of an organization with great discipline and a strong belief in orderly structures and articulated concepts and policies. But it is also a top-down bureaucracy, with little capacity for hearing variant viewpoints or testing its theories against the practical wisdom of front-line operatives.

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Sending Jobs Overseas Isn't Always Worth It, U.S. Companies Find
Problems with logistics, language and red tape can make outsourcing jobs overseas a money-losing move.
By Alex Pham
Times Staff Writer

April 11, 2004

Christina Oliver and Kristen Kuhns scoured the globe for the same thing: cheap computer programmers.

They found them in different places — Oliver in Australia, Kuhns in India — but learned the same lesson about the global economy: For all the hype and hand-wringing about U.S. companies shipping jobs overseas, outsourcing to foreign countries can be a mind-boggling chore that doesn't always save much money in the end.

It took Kuhns four years to make the move pay off for TierSolution Inc. of Pleasant Hill, Calif. Oliver gave up after a few months and reeled the work back to the Hollywood headquarters of Legacy Interactive Inc.

"We ended up with a much better product, but it ended up taking too much work," said Oliver, a senior producer at Legacy. "Plus, when you add up the extra costs — the delays, the extra money we had to pay above the contract amount and such — it turned out to be less expensive to do in-house."

Big corporations have spread jobs around the world for decades. Only recently have advances in technology and telecommunications made it possible for small outfits like TierSolution and Legacy to do the same — or to try to. In a recent survey by technology research firm Gartner Inc. of 100 companies of all sizes that had outsourced overseas, 18 said they had saved nothing by sending jobs offshore and nine saw their costs rise.

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Laughing in the Face Of Terrorist Reports
Brazilian City Lures Tourists With Humor

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A24

FOZ DO IGUACU, Brazil -- The Brazilian summer was just beginning last year when Mayor Felipe Gonzalez summoned the top business executives, tourism officials and civic leaders in this border town for a meeting.

Just a few months earlier, CNN had broadcast a report saying that Foz do Iguacu -- a city of about 230,000 people in the southwestern corner of Brazil -- was home to a terrorist cell of al Qaeda and Hezbollah operatives. That was followed by a Vanity Fair magazine article saying that senior al Qaeda leaders had recently held a high-level summit here and that there were dozens of terrorist training camps in the surrounding jungle. And then a Brazilian magazine reported that even Osama bin Laden himself may have paid the city a covert visit.

No one here believed there was any truth to the reports, many of which were based on Latin American intelligence. But the bad press -- coming on the heels of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and an economic collapse in neighboring Argentina -- was drying up tourist traffic to the breathtaking waterfalls, and the golf courses and casinos in the area. Gonzalez said he knew something had to be done. This was no laughing matter.

No, wait, maybe it was.

Convinced that the reports were ridiculous, and afraid that a defensive posture would only fortify impressions of Foz Do Iguacu as a forbidding place, Gonzalez said in an interview that he and his advisers decided that humor was the only way to dispel the terrorist cloud hovering over this area known as the "Triple Border," near the intersection of the Paraguayan, Argentine and Brazilian frontiers.

In more than 160 foreign magazines and travel brochures, the city paid for advertisements with captions such as, "If he can find the time to come see the waterfall, why can't you?" under a photograph of bin Laden. Another ad juxtaposed photographs of Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair with the caption: "Foz Do Iguacu; All the world wants to see it, including them."

Civic officials published public notices of "terrorist meetings" and invited journalists to attend. Tourism officials in November organized Humor at the Falls, an international festival at which artists submitted nearly 2,800 cartoons poking fun at everything from the world's water problems to sex to al Qaeda.

"Where there is humor, there is no terror," read the slogan for the event, which awarded a $10,000 prize to the winning cartoon entry.

The city's good humor paid off. Tourism began to pick up again last year, and in the first two months of this year, the Brazilian side of the border attracted more tourists than in any previous two-month period. Tourism officials have added three major comedic-themed conventions -- cinematic comedy, theatrical comedy and a clown festival -- and expect a record 1 million tourists, or about 200,000 more than last year, to visit Foz do Iguacu this year.

"Nobody here is joking about the suffering the U.S. went through on September 11th," said Rogerio Bonato, a local newspaper editor who is also president of Humor at the Falls. "But we figured that humor is the only defense we had against these ridiculous rumors. We were handed a lemon. We made lemonade."

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GOP at Slippery Helm of Government
Party Is Unable To Legislate a Unified Approach

By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A05

Unified government, as it turns out, is not always that unified.

Even with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress as well as the White House, the House and Senate have had trouble agreeing on a common approach on issue after issue, sometimes to the point of deadlock.

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Survey Findings Paint Mixed and Contrasting Pictures of Bush and Kerry

By Dana Milbank
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A04

President Bush has been vacationing on his old cattle ranch in Texas this week, so it is only fitting that Americans are describing him as part ox, part mule.

That image of Bush -- a combination of strength and stubbornness -- was the finding of a new poll testing the personal attributes of Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, done by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey. Bush's largest advantage over Kerry was on the attribute "will make tough decisions despite political pressure." He also outdid his Democratic rival on such traits as "strong leader," "steady," "easy to like as a person" and "has a clear vision of where he wants to lead the country." [P6: But do you really want to go there?]

And Bush was less likely to be seen as somebody who "says one thing, does another," or who "changes his mind for political reasons."

On the other hand, Bush was much more likely than Kerry to be viewed as stubborn. Using a 10-point scale, respondents gave Bush a 6.70 for stubbornness, the highest rating for either man on any attribute; Kerry got 5.02. Bush also led in such undesirable traits as "reckless" and "arrogant," while Kerry was seen as more "knowledgeable."

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Iraqi Battalion Refuses to 'Fight Iraqis'

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 10 -- A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.

It was the first time U.S. commanders had sought to involve the postwar Iraqi army in major combat operations, and the battalion's refusal came as large parts of Iraqi security forces have stopped carrying out their duties.

The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight Monday after members of the unit were shot at in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Baghdad while en route to Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim stronghold, said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who is overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces. The convoy then turned around and returned to the battalion's post on a former Republican Guard base in Taji, a town north of the capital.

Eaton said members of the battalion insisted during the ensuing discussions: "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis."

He declined to characterize the incident as a mutiny, but rather called it "a command failure."

The refusal of the battalion to perform as U.S. officials had hoped poses a significant problem for the occupation. The cornerstone of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is to draw down its military presence and turn over security functions to Iraqis.

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