May 29, 2004

Moore Spoke With Berg Months Before Death
By JASON STRAZIUSO
Associated Press Writer

May 29, 2004, 3:29 PM EDT

PHILADELPHIA -- In an unused interview shot for Michael Moore's latest film, the American who was beheaded in Iraq said he was concerned about security there as he prepared to seek work as an independent businessman, his family said Saturday.

Moore's crew shot the 16-minute interview with Nicholas Berg during an Iraqi business conference in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 4, said his brother, David Berg.

…Moore confirmed Thursday that he had footage of Berg -- shot for his film "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is critical of President Bush -- but said he would share it only with the family.

…David Berg said Moore handled the situation with "dignity, respect and discipline."

"Michael Moore has really been a total class act with this whole thing," David Berg said. "He could have sold this to the media or stuck it in his movie."

Sara Berg said she saw the video footage as a "gift."

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You know, the Black communities, the Children of Africa, have a long tradition of reaching back for the less fortunate among us. It goes all the way back to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to slaves buying their freedom and hanging around to buy their family's freedom, risking recapture to help others escape, giving a greater fraction of our disposable income to charity that any other self-identified group.

This is why it bothers the hell out of me to keep hearing Black Conservatives trying to convince people that tradition needs be disposed of.

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Subtitled, "Why Conservatives, Black and Otherwise, Are Still Wrong," and brought on by Gregory Kane's Black leaders must choose between criminals and victims.

Look, we know Black folks got grief. What makes me write all y'all off is your insistence on attaching "Stop Blaming White People" to "Take Personal Responsibility." See, I personally am tired of hearing "we know there's racism, but…" And I'm SERIOUSLY tired of "Blaming White People" being caste as the opposite of "Take Personal Responsibility."

The reason I'm tired of it goes back to what I've said about the word racism actually meaning different problems to Black folks and white folks. I have come to the conclusion that the major problem white folks have with racism is that they get blamed for it. So when I hear "Stop blaming white people and take personal responsibility" as though white folks have nothing to do with racism (whichever meaning you want to work with), it becomes clear that the major issue at hand is whose fault it all is. All the while admitting racism is still a problem.

Here's a fact: the racial problems in this country get their input from everyone who has racial problems.

And here's a speculation: when white folks start taking personal responsibility for racism, they will find Black folks willing to meet them half way.

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Keeping Harlem's Storied Jazz Past Jamming
By SHERRI DAY

With the big-band era long gone and hip-hop music dominating radio charts and dance clubs, what's an old jazz master to do?

Jam.

On a recent Monday night in Harlem at the New Amsterdam Musical Association, which claims to be the oldest jazz organization for black musicians in the country, a 13-piece band sliced through the silence on a residential block with the sounds of "Satin Doll," "Pennies From Heaven" and "Take the 'A' Train."

William Pyatt, 75, a tenor saxophonist whose cheeks bulged as he leaned into the mike, took frequent solos. Albert Sheldon, 79, tidy in a three-piece suit, closed his eyes and swayed, his shoulders twitching as he extended his red and white accordion. Emmanuel Grier, 63, delighted the crowd with a one-handed solo on the conga drums. And W. Morris Mitchell, 76, who travels from his East New York home on a senior citizens' Access-a-Ride shuttle, kept the melody on the piano.

Most of the musicians at the jam session are longtime members of the music association, a blue-collar bedrock of jazz history in Harlem. Black musicians who were not welcome in the local musicians' union because of their race founded the organization in 1904, jazz historians said. These days, the old-timers - none of whom were alive when the organization began - are trying to rebuild NAMA as it celebrates its 100th anniversary. They also want to inspire new generations to play jazz.

"I like to keep the legend alive," said Fred Staton, an 89-year-old tenor saxophonist who has played with Billy Strayhorn, Art Blakely and Billy Eckstine. "If we don't, no one else will."

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Conservative Allies Take Chalabi Case to the White House
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, May 28 � Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop what one has called a "smear campaign" against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last week in an American-supported raid.

Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under President Bill Clinton.

Members of the group, who had requested the meeting, told Ms. Rice that they were incensed at what they view as the vilification of Mr. Chalabi, a favorite of conservatives who is now central to an F.B.I. investigation into who in the American government might have given him highly classified information that he is suspected of turning over to Iran.

Mr. Chalabi has denied that he provided Iran with any classified information.

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That the neocons would defend Chalabi is no surprise. Chalabi is so deep in the mix that discrediting him would discredit all who took his word as gospel. Propping up Chalabi, getting the spy stuff squashed even if (if?) he doesn't wind up in charge of Iraq, is a self defense move.

No, what is priceless is the nature of Perle's complaints:

"There is a smear campaign under way, and it is being perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. and a gaggle of former intelligence officers who have succeeded in planting these stories, which are accepted with hardly any scrutiny," Mr. Perle, a leading conservative, said in an interview.

Mr. Perle, referring to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the campaign against Mr. Chalabi was "an outrageous abuse of power" by United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad.

Talk about being hoist by one's own petard. The Neocons really do argue like Flame Warriors; they have a line and a technique and they stick with it.

For some reason though, this line cracks me up.

"I know of no inaccurate information that was supplied uniquely by anyone brought to us by the Iraqi National Congress," Mr. Perle said.

"Hey, we were no more fucked up than anyone else, why pick on us?"

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I watch commercials for the latest in consumer innovation, disposable wash dishcloths, with a mixture of fascination and a vague feeling of horror. The next thing to annoy me enough to create an extended rant will likely be marketing.

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As Satan Scrubbed My Toilet
It's a slew of new, disposable products that really scream "Screw the planet, I'm an American!" Life is good
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 28, 2004

Pity the poor beleaguered housewife, still struggling like a haggard dog through her array of thankless daily chores.

Just look at her, hair pulled tight and life a-shambles, saddled with all manner of horrible bristly toilet brushes and horrible sponges and horrible cloth towels to wipe down the horrible countertops and then topping it all off with being forced to use one of those horrible old-fashioned bristle brooms to sweep the floor. Horrible!

Thank God, then, for modern ultraconvenience. Thank God for the corporate household-product industry, so thoroughly glutted on excess merchandise and overinvention they can't possibly think of things we actually need anymore. And thank God for our concomitant complete lack of any real environmental conscience. Yay America!

See, now, the happily narcotized, entirely sexless, vaguely bulbous modern housewife in the recent TV commercial as she finally tosses away her angry, growling, animated (!) toilet brush (see how it snaps and snarls at her like a drunken deadbeat dad! See her toss it into the trash can and then plop her butt down on it in satisfied glee!) in favor of -- say it with me -- disposable toilet scrubbers you use once and throw away!

Like the ScotchBrite! Or the Clorox ToiletWand™! Or the Scrub N' Flush! Or the Scrubbing Bubbles™ Fresh Brush™ Toilet Cleaning System! Yes, Virginia, the world is certainly headed in the right direction.

Just watch that brush head break apart in a swirl of pulpy chemical fibers in the toilet. Look at the nifty cheap-ass landfill-plastic handle -- remember, it's not a brush, it's a "toilet-cleaning system." Look at the shiny plastic tub of refills you have to buy every month just to keep the goddamn thing stocked before the handle snaps in half and you have to buy a whole new one because it's actually worth about seven cents and is made by disposable factory workers in Malaysia who die of petroleum-related cancer even faster than BushCo can decimate the Clean Air Act. Neat!

See? Life is easier already. Who knew you needed a new toilet brush to replace that tough metal one you had that lasted years? No one, that's who! What was wrong with the old, sturdy kind? Nothing, that's what! Hail marketing!

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Quote of Note:

"It is my belief that America does better together � not split, fractured, splintered," he said. "I liked it when George Bush ran for office and talked about bringing everyone together. I haven't liked the result. We have an executive who seems to be a good man but who could stand some good counsel."

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Ex-Governor's Possible Run Is Talk of Louisiana Senate Race
Buddy Roemer's chance of winning would be small, analysts say, but his effect would not be.
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer

May 29, 2004

HOUSTON � There are moments, amid the din of Louisiana's halls of power, when it seems like Charles "Buddy" Roemer III is the only person who has not declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Still, he's getting the lion's share of the buzz.

In an interview this week, the Democrat - turned - Republican � who served as Louisiana governor from 1988 to 1992 � gave the strongest indication yet that he would like to jump back into politics. Though most analysts have said his chances of victory would be slim, the effect of his candidacy could be enormous.

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From the Ranks to the Street
Nearly a fourth of the homeless are veterans. Reasons vary, but many fail to adjust to life's randomness after the order of military service.
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
Times Staff Writer

May 29, 2004

After the homecomings are over and the yellow ribbons packed away, many who once served in America's armed forces may end up sleeping on sidewalks.

This is the often-unacknowledged postscript to military service. According to the federal government, veterans make up 9% of the U.S. population but 23% of the homeless population. Among homeless men, veterans make up 33%.

Their ranks included veterans like Peter Starks and Calvin Bennett, who spent nearly 30 years on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless and addicted.

Or Vannessa Turner of Boston, who returned injured from Iraq last summer, unable to find healthcare or a place to live.

Or Ken Saks, who lost his feet because of complications caused by Agent Orange, then lost his low-rent Santa Barbara apartment in an ordeal that began when a neighbor complained about his wheelchair ramp.

"I'm 56 years old," Saks said. "I don't want to die in the streets�. This is what our [soldiers in Iraq] are coming home to? They're going to live a life like I have? God bless them."

Studies indicate that some will live such a life. Male veterans are 1.3 times more likely to become homeless than non-veterans, women 3.6 times more likely. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the estimated number of homeless Vietnam veterans is more than twice the number of soldiers, 58,000, who died in battle during that war.

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From Wages to Canadian Drugs, Bills Contain Risks for Governor
By Jordan Rau
Times Staff Writer

May 29, 2004

SACRAMENTO � For six months, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has managed to keep his position unknown on a host of potentially divisive issues. Now he is going to have to start filling in the blanks.

After acceding repeatedly to a Republican governor determined to deliver on campaign promises, the Democrats who control the state Senate and Assembly this week approved a number of measures that likely will force the governor to make some difficult choices.

The Assembly endorsed raising the minimum wage to $7.75, a 15% increase. If the more liberal Senate concurs, as expected, the governor will have to choose between being a champion of low-wage workers or signing a bill that small businesses and the California Chamber of Commerce say will cost the state jobs.

The Legislature is also poised to approve a handful of measures that would encourage individual Californians and state agencies to import prescription drugs from Canada, where they are cheaper. The notion is popular among elderly voters and could save the state millions.

But approving those bills would put Schwarzenegger on a collision course with the pharmaceutical industry and the Republican administration in Washington, both of which oppose drug imports as unsafe.

Schwarzenegger may have to choose between politically appealing measures and some of his bigger campaign supporters in other areas.

Car dealers, for instance, will strongly urge him to veto a measure that would allow used car buyers to return a car within three days of sale.

The bill passed the Assembly this week. Automotive interests have donated $824,335 to Schwarzenegger, according to arnoldwatch.org, a consumer activist website.

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May 28, 2004

Michelle Malkin started trash-talking Wonkette, who (the little header graphic not withstanding) does not take it laying down!

Wonkette not only fisks Ms. Malkin, she uses tables to lay out her case to make sure you can't miss the point. Selected examples follow:

Michelle says	Michelle means
I don't usually write about such inside-the-Beltway gossip, but Cutler's indecent conduct, glib rationalizations and in-your-face shamelessness, and the accompanying feeding frenzy over her, deserve a firm outside-the-Beltway lashing.	I am so turned on right now.
It harms those trying to succeed on their merits in the professional arena.
And it also harms our own daughters, who will be forced to fight harder to protect their dignity and credibility in a "Girls Gone Wild" culture.	Fight against other women like Jessica Cutler, I mean. Men don't play any role in this scandal at all. Just Jessica and our daughters, fighting. . . wrestling, really. . . against each other.

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I wonder how many terminal bloggers, if they had to start over again, would do things the same way?

In the course of my experiments I just set up Wordpad on my intranet and imported all the entries ever published on P6/Blogger, P6/Gray and P6/Green. Some 4000 of them, plus comments. Just the process of doing it made me review how I'd handled entries. P6/Blogger had no categories because it was the free account, and I lost all the Haloscan comments. And P6/Gray was crippled because I couldn't stand waiting for the import of some 2000 posts. I don't know if I broke my installation (a possibility, because it was really an emergency move) or I was just too impatient with the rebuilding process. I kept all the static pages I'd generated, which is why you can google the site and get those old gray guys. But comments are dead there and the built-in search can't reach the pages and it's all just annoying.

The imported posts don't all look so smooth because I'd embedded CSS styles all over the place. And any number of things, like the Public Library section, would be better as multi-paged posts. Of course, with all the text laying about, it wouldn't be easy to find all of the good stuff. If I'd used categories better the first time through it would be easier to restructure.

Fixing all this stuff would invalidate damn near everything Google knows about me. I'm giving it serious consideration, though.

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Happy Furry Puppy Story Time has survived for a year without anyone kicking Norbizness's ass. Congratulate him before his victims catch up with him.

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Court lifts cloud from Berkeley schools
Judge says district has desegregated

BY SEANNA ADCOX
Of The Post and Courier Staff
A federal judge has dismissed a 34-year-old federal desegregation order against the Berkeley County School District and declared its schools unitary.

The school district has "eliminated the vestiges of the former dual system and has achieved unitary status," U.S. District Judge David Norton wrote in his order signed and filed Wednesday in Charleston.

The declaration means Berkeley County public schools have complied with court orders and eradicated racial discrimination "to the extent practicable." Berkeley County is the state's fourth largest school district with more than 26,000 students.

"This is a wonderful present," school district spokeswoman Pam Bailey said Thursday. "It's the end of the school year today and the end of a 34-year-old shadow."

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Well, it's a 600 year shadow if you're actually counting.

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The 2004 ACS National Convention
June 18-20, 2004
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
Washington, D.C.

The theme of this year's Convention will be: "Liberty and Equality in the 21st Century"

The Convention will feature a keynote address by: United States Supreme Court
Justice Stephen G. Breyer

ACS's First National Convention last year was a tremendous success, as hundreds of ACS members and others who care passionately about legal and public policy issues came together to learn, debate, and strategize. Attendees reported that they learned much, were greatly inspired, and had a wonderful time.

2004 is the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This year's ACS Convention will honor these landmark developments in American law, and explore today's challenges in the pursuit of liberty and equality, with speakers including dozens of leading lawyers, judges, policymakers and academics. For a complete list of Convention programs and speakers, see the full Convention schedule.

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The chairman of Great Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, he has been quoted here several times, most recently in a link to a BBC article. Seems the British are as hung up on terminology as Americans are.

Anyway, he's turned up again, and I keep blogging about British race issues because they are so close to ours, yet no being ours there's a chance people will have enough distance to consider them rationally. So today I link to How British do you want to be?

If there is a tension between people from different ethnic backgrounds, who has to act to change that? Those who feel persecuted, learning their Shakespeare as rapidly as possible, or the majority, claiming that the very notion of Britishness may be under threat?

The Observer asked people from across the cultural and racial spectrum, all British passport holders, for their points of view. From Chinese restaurateurs to Muslim musicians to white postmen, we asked: Is multiculturalism a threat to Britishness? Or is it an essential part of it?

The polls suggest that Britain is a country uncomfortable with ethnic diversity. One poll last weekend found that a quarter of the public want to 'close the doors' to any more immigration and that 16 per cent would consider voting for the British National Party.

At a time of heightened ethnic tension, rows over immigration and concerns over the position of British Muslims in the country of their birth, Trevor Phillips's comments were bound to spark a debate. Some may think that his call to be abandon multiculturalism, as presently understood, was the last thing a chairman of the CRE should be saying.

And I link to an article by Phillips himself, titled Multiculturalism's legacy is 'have a nice day' racism, explaining his debate-causing comments at length.

…This was a debate waiting to happen. Some on the left had been worrying aloud for months that "immigrants" are doomed to become ghetto-bound minorities, a divisive presence threatening Britain's underlying social fabric. They need to relax. All but the racist fundamentalists of the far right accept that Britain's economic and social vigour has always been renewed from the wellspring of immigration. Scotland's first minister, Jack McConnell, sensibly wants new migrants to revive Scotland's relatively elderly population. Even Norman Tebbit recently stunned a BBC audience with a warm and unqualified welcome to migrants from eastern Europe. The real argument is how we manage the process of integrating migrants.

Integration only works if it both recognises newcomers' differences and extends complete equality. Celebrating diversity, but ignoring inequality, inevitably leads to the nightmare of entrenched segregation. Half a century after legal segregation was outlawed in the US, nine out of 10 African-American children are in black-majority schools; nine out of 10 whites live in areas where the black population is negligible. Guess whose schools underachieve, and whose districts are poorer.

That is why I disagree with those who say that integration and Britishness are irrelevant to the struggle against racism. There can be no true integration without true equality. But the reverse is also true. The equality of the ghetto is no equality at all.

And yes, newcomers do have to change. The language barrier is a real obstacle to work, friendship and democratic participation. Many Bangladeshi-born women in Britain are economically inactive and thus largely excluded from society. But we have to do more than teach people English. Too many institutions have seized one half of the integration equation - recognition of difference - while ignoring the other half: equality.

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But I will. Jeralyn Merritt introduced Talkleft readers to The BrownWatch, "news for people of color."

One of the commenters said:

What's this News for color People???
i'm black, and i am ashamed with this initiative.

And I'm REALLY not understanding why this person feels shame.

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lifted from Talking Points Memo

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The official list of terrorist people and organizations.

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Quote of note:

Over the past 25 years, the U.S. prison system has more than quadrupled in size, as the nation adopted policies to get tough on crime. Among those incarcerated are hundreds of thousands of people sentenced to long terms for relatively minor crimes like drug possession, the majority of them black or Hispanic.

"Mandatory sentences are filling federal prisons with low-level offenders instead of the kingpins they were supposed to catch," said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

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U.S. Record Prison Population Rises Again
Thu May 27, 2004 05:14 PM ET

By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States saw its prison and jail population increase again in 2003, the Justice Department reported on Thursday.

The number of people held in U.S. federal and state prisons and jails on June 30, 2003, was 2,078,570 -- almost 41,000 more than the previous year and the biggest increase in four years.

The Justice Department reported earlier this month that the annual cost of the U.S. prison system was around $57 billion.

Women inmates passed the 100,000 level for the first time ever. The number of women incarcerated rose by 5 percent, almost double the rate of increase among males.

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Iyad Allawi Chosen as Iraqi PM, Aide Says
Fri May 28, 2004 10:52 AM ET

By Tom Perry
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iyad Allawi, a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council with long-time links to the CIA, has been chosen as prime minister in Iraq's interim government, an aide to Allawi told Reuters on Friday.

"There was a meeting of the Governing Council and Dr Allawi was unanimously chosen as prime minister," Hani Adris said.

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Looming Atlantic Hurricane Season Seen as Busy
Fri May 28, 2004 08:03 AM ET

MIAMI (Reuters) - The Atlantic-Caribbean hurricane season that starts on Tuesday will be busier than average with 14 named storms, eight of which will become hurricanes, a well-known cyclone researcher said in a revised forecast on Friday.
Of the eight anticipated hurricanes, three will become intense, with winds over 111 mph, Colorado State University storm researcher William Gray predicted.

Gray's forecast for the season that runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 was unchanged from his last forecast on April 2, but added one more named storm than his team's initial forecast in December.

Circular tropical weather systems are given names when sustained winds reach 39 mph and become hurricanes when they hit 74 mph.

The long-term average for the Atlantic-Caribbean season is 9.6 named storms, with 5.9 of those reaching hurricane strength and 2.3 of those becoming intense.

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To Tell the Truth
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 28, 2004

…So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After 9/11 much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief.

Another answer is the tyranny of evenhandedness. Moderate and liberal journalists, both reporters and commentators, often bend over backward to say nice things about conservatives. Not long ago, many commentators who are now caustic Bush critics seemed desperate to differentiate themselves from "irrational Bush haters" who were neither haters nor irrational � and whose critiques look pretty mild in the light of recent revelations.

And some journalists just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters.

Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation, and you had to worry about being denied access to the sort of insider information that is the basis of many journalistic careers.

The Bush administration, knowing all this, played the press like a fiddle.

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Quote of note:

The death toll was so high, in part, because almost all the trees on those hills are gone, and the soil is eroded, leaving no natural barrier for the annual spring rains. The trees have been cut for charcoal, the only product with much market value in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

Grief as Haitians and Dominicans Tally Flood Toll
By TIM WEINER and LYDIA POLGREEN

…Government officials in both nations said the confirmed death toll from the devastating floods reached nearly 900 on Thursday. But they said it might go as high as 2,000, with the greatest losses in Haiti, making it one of the worst natural disasters in Caribbean history.

The death counts remain estimates from officials citing conflicting and sometimes second-hand information. They stood as high as 1,660 or more in Haiti, according to some government officials, and were confirmed at more than 300 in the Dominican Republic.

A total of at least 11,200 families, probably more, have been displaced by the flood in both nations, Red Cross workers here said. Thousands of homes and shanties have been destroyed in villages so poor and isolated that no one is exactly sure how many people lived there before the flood.

Two weeks of heavy rains, which continued Thursday, became a deadly torrent at dawn on Monday. In Haiti, as much as five feet fell in 36 hours on the town of Fond Verrettes, in a valley about 40 miles east of the capital, Port-au-Prince, officials said.

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If Oil Supplies Were Disrupted, Then ...
By SIMON ROMERO

HOUSTON, May 27 - With demand high, supplies squeezed, prices climbing and refineries already running flat out, what if something really went wrong? Something like a terror attack on crucial oil installations in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, or something less sinister but just as disruptive, like a fire or accident at a major refinery or port or a flare-up of civil or labor turmoil in Nigeria or Venezuela?

Industry experts say that the drum-tight American fuel market has become unusually vulnerable to any such nasty surprises, because there is little spare capacity available and because traders, executives and policy makers are nervous about terrorism and other threats - to the point that crude oil now carries a "risk premium" of 12 to 25 percent, analysts estimate.

"The problem is, we've already tasted some of these events in one form or another," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy analysis company. "The threat of an oil shock is very tangible. If an oil trader wants to think about risk, all he has to do is turn on the television."

Just how big a risk premium traders will demand on oil is a subjective calculation, driven up or down from day to day by news developments. One energy strategist, Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Company in New York, estimated that worries about Nigeria contributed about $1 a barrel; Venezuela another $3; the situation in Iraq, $4 more; and jitters about new trouble in Saudi Arabia, $5 a barrel. "In a psychologically charged market, bad news travels faster than good news," Mr. Gheit said.

Without the black cloud of vulnerability from the market, many analysts say, crude might trade for $30 or $35 today instead of nearly $40.

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NEC Unit Admits It Defrauded Schools
By MATT RICHTEL and GARY RIVLIN

SAN FRANCISCO, May 27 - Criminal investigations into corruption and waste in the E-Rate program, a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries, yielded their biggest legal settlement to date on Thursday. NEC Business Network Solutions, a subsidiary of NEC, the computer giant, agreed to plead guilty to two federal felony counts, one for wire fraud and one for antitrust violation, and to pay $20.7 million in fines and restitution.

The settlement, announced in federal court in San Francisco, comes amid increasing scrutiny of the multibillion-dollar E-Rate program. Congressional hearings on the program may be held as early as next month, according to Congressional staff members. Lawyers involved in the case said there were likely to be additional, and even larger, settlements with other technology vendors.

"This is just one piece of a nationwide scheme that is all coming to light," said Eric R. Havian, a lawyer who is representing the San Francisco Unified School District, which tipped federal prosecutors to the fraud. "There are many school districts that were victimized."

Gerald P. Kenney, general counsel of NEC America, said in a statement: "We made mistakes with E-Rate. We've acknowledged and accepted responsibility for those mistakes, cooperated fully with the government and taken action to ensure that these problems can't happen again."

Established with great fanfare in 1996, the E-Rate program added a tax to telephone bills, with the proceeds to be distributed mostly to poor and rural schools. The program has been used by school districts to pay for network infrastructure, like routers and switches to direct Internet traffic, computer servers to manage the system and cables to connect them.

The program gave schools the ability to seek competitive bids from vendors. But there is mounting evidence that some companies hired to provide equipment and services persuaded schools to forgo competitive bids, inflated their prices or defrauded administrators of the E-Rate program when presenting the final cost for services.

"Schools are being promised million-dollar systems when a system costing $10,000 would make more sense," said John Dunbar of the Center for Public Integrity, a public policy research group in Washington. "That's one of the flaws of the system. If the schools had vested interest in making sure that the money was being spent wisely, then it wouldn't be so easy to defraud the program."

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An extensive, but too important not to focus on, Quote of Note:

In fact, the new system appears designed to virtually eliminate unfettered public access. Under the Freedom of Information Act, all records created by federal agencies are available to the public for modest reproduction fee, with a few specific exceptions. By allowing GCE to directly collect contract data from each agency, the Bush Administration has effectively bypassed the Act, because the compiled records are never directly controlled by any government agency. Drabkin, who has already rejected such requests for the data, says the public can still get access to the raw information by approaching each individual agency.

via The Memory Hole, (which, by the way, the Army has categorized as a political extremist site because it hosts documents produced by the government and big business).

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Public Information, Private Profit?
Long publicly available, a database detailing federal contracts has been outsourced ... to a federal contractor.

Michael Scherer
May/June 2004 Issue

For 25 years, the clearest window into the murky world of federal contracting has been an obscure public database available to anyone for a nominal fee. No longer. Under a new deal approved by the White House, the government's voluminous compilation of contracting information has been turned over to a contractor.

Established by an act of Congress in 1979, the Federal Procurement Data System was a rare island of public information, the only complete record of federal contracts. Using the database, journalists, auditors and federal investigators could review the million or so agreements with corporations Uncle Sam signed each year. They could find the companies reaping the largest awards, track the rise in no-bid deals, and measure the recent drive to replace federal employees with corporate employees. But under a new contract, the General Services Administration has now turned over responsibility for collecting and distributing information on government contracts to a beltway company called Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.

In signing the $24 million deal, the Bush Administration has privatized not only the collection and distribution of the data, but the database itself. For the first time since the system was established, the information will not be available directly to the public or subject to the Freedom of Information Act, according to federal officials. "It's a contractor owned and operated system," explains Nancy Gunsauls, a project manager at GCE. "We have the data."

With the compiled database under private control, journalists, corporate consultants, and even federal agencies will be barred from independently searching copies of it. Instead, GCE has pledged only to produce a set of public reports required by the government, and to provide limited access to the entire database for a yet-to-be-determined fee.

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Couple of dead ones…

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The Homicide Cases
Friday, May 28, 2004; Page A22

PRESIDENT BUSH'S persistence in describing the abuse of foreign prisoners as an isolated problem at one Iraqi prison is blatantly at odds with the facts seeping out from his administration. These include mounting reports of crimes at detention facilities across Iraq and Afghanistan and evidence that detention policies the president approved helped set the stage for torture and homicide. Yes, homicide: The most glaring omission from the president's account is that at least 37 people have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and that at least 10 of these cases are suspected criminal killings of detainees by U.S. interrogators or soldiers.

The deaths reveal much about the true nature of the still-emerging prisoner scandal. First, only a minority of them occurred at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad; nine of the 10 homicides acknowledged by the Pentagon occurred elsewhere. Second, the administration has done its best to cover up the killings: They have been reported only after news of them leaked to the media, and details about most of them are still undisclosed.

No one has been criminally charged in any of the cases, even though some date to December 2002. Investigations have been shoddy and secretive. And no senior officer or administration official has accepted responsibility or been held accountable for allowing unlawful killings to take place under his or her command. Had it not been for the leak of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, which record less serious crimes, it is probable that none of the deaths in Iraq would have become public knowledge.

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Quote of note:

The signs reading "Support Our Troops" and "United We Stand" are still found on posters, school lockers and bumpers. But after 15 months of difficult fighting, many people have decided that supporting American soldiers does not mean backing the war itself.

"I support our troops, but I certainly don't agree with what we're trying to do by trying to Americanize and westernize a culture that doesn't want to be Americanized," said Janet Pope, a management analyst for the Pasadena Police Department. "I'm worried and borderline disgusted that many of our young people will die in this war when we truly don't know the reasons behind it."

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Worry and Anger Over Iraq Situation
Poll, Interviews Find Rising Concern

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 2004; Page A19

OGALLALA, Neb. -- From this edge of the western plains to California's palm-lined drives to New York's urban canyons, Americans say they are worried and angry about the U.S. role in Iraq, with their anxiety matching that of the earliest days of the war when the success of the push to Baghdad was far from secure.

Nearly daily attacks on U.S. troops and continuing revelations about abuse of Iraqi prisoners have combined to stir the unrest, leading many to doubt whether the outcome will match the Bush administration's stated goals for going to war.

…Such questions reflect the concerns of a majority of the nation. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, concluded Sunday night, found that two-thirds of Americans -- 67 percent -- describe themselves as "worried" about the situation in Iraq. In early March of last year, days after combat began, 64 percent said they were worried about the war.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they are "angry," nearly double the figure in March 2003. While most Americans say they are "hopeful" about the eventual outcome, the number of optimists has fallen, from 80 percent 15 months ago to 62 percent today. In another change, a minority today describe themselves as "proud" of the U.S. effort in Iraq.

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Shiite Politicians' Objections Lead Candidate to Withdraw
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 28, 2004; Page A19

BAGHDAD, May 27 -- A politically independent Shiite Muslim who had been a top choice of the United States and the United Nations to become Iraq's prime minister withdrew from consideration after objections from formerly exiled Shiite politicians who want the job for themselves, officials involved in the political transition said Thursday.

The politicians' refusal to accept Hussain Shahristani as prime minister has complicated U.S. and U.N. efforts to form an interim Iraqi government to assume limited political authority on June 30, forcing U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and top U.S. officials to scramble for new candidates. The U.S. occupation authority had hoped to have the government named by Monday, to give appointees a month to work into their new jobs, but U.N. officials said that goal now appears unattainable.

The stand against Shahristani also struck a serious blow to attempts by the United States and the United Nations to fill top positions in the interim government with independents and technocrats instead of politicians, many of whom spent years in exile and enjoy little public support.

The U.S. government funded many exiled opposition politicians during the rule of President Saddam Hussein, and several were appointed to Iraq's Governing Council after Hussein was toppled last year. Because of their unpopularity, however, the occupation authority has sought to minimize their role in Iraq's next government. Yet Shahristani's inability to win their approval illustrates their continuing ability to disrupt U.S. plans for the country's political transition.

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May 27, 2004

Why al-Qaeda Thrives
President Bush says Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, but security experts say Iraq is the reason Bin Laden's movement is growing
By TONY KARON

…President Bush framed his Monday keynote address on Iraq around the idea that the country is now "the central front in the war on terror." He implied that the invasion of Iraq was a choice forced on the U.S. by the Sept. 11 attacks and that the enemy facing the U.S. there shares al-Qaeda's goal of establishing "Taliban-type" rule. In all, he used the words "terror" or "terrorist/terrorism" 19 times. But the president's characterization will hardly have resonated with his Iraqi audience, who see al-Qaeda as a problem brought into their country by the U.S. invasion rather than by Saddam Hussein. Even the U.S. intelligence community has long maintained that Saddam's regime had no connection with the 9/11 attacks, while U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq say that foreign terrorists constitute only a small fraction of the insurgency facing Coalition troops there.

If, indeed, there is a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it may not be the kind the Bush campaign is likely to dwell on.The same day the President spoke, the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies released its annual survey that found, among other things, that far from dealing a blow to al-Qaeda and making the U.S. and its allies safer, the Iraq invasion has in fact substantially strengthened bin Laden's network and increased the danger of attacks in the West. And the London-based IISS is not some Bush-bashing antiwar think tank; it hosted the president's keynote address during his embattled visit to the British late last year.

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Some folks, mostly middle class folks who've built their identity in the hip-hop milieu,have taken Dr. Cosby's speech personally. I wanted to hold off for a while until I could read what he said for myself. The closest I got was an interview on The Tavis Smiley Show. Mike let me know it was coming but it's on at midnight around these parts. PBS has posted the interview in text and RealSomething. Coming from Dr. Cosby's own mouth, it's close enough to the speech for me. NPR has commentary from Cornel West and Eric Michael Dyson.

My own reaction is that he did a piss poor job of selling his idea. And I think he thinks he delineated the problem.

Let me explain really briefly, a really high level overview, of how a section of hip-hop metastasized into commercial rap.
Step 1: MCs keeping the party jumping
Step 2: Rapper's Delight made money
Step 3: Things like P.E. and The Message drew a genuine folk-music type following
Step 4: Corporation Sound started backing production in order to get their standard cut
Step 5: Marketing types applied the standard American attention grabbers: money, sex and violence
Step 6: Americans liked that shit

Seriously, the difference between commercial rap and old school hip-hop is they be flossing all the time now.

Our kids see these guys with all the symbols everyone respects and it really looks like the shortest path to success to many. And it will continue to look that way as long as mainstream folks keep buying it up the way they do. It's almost like those superhero comics where a guy is imprisoned in a machine powered by his own strength.

Keep in mind, this is what Mainstream America likes to see, as predicted by the demographic dudes and verified by unit sales. And the result of that-which-sells and that-which-is-sold is bonded to a genuine Black creation and fired back at us…at our kids. Black culture is marketed, comes at you like water from the business end of a fire hose, but it ain't Black people's hands controlling the nozzle and directing the flow.

And this can be overcome, if you know that's what you're fighting. But you can't convince people of it by blaming them for not putting forth a superhuman effort. You can ask that effort of us, but you can't pretend it's the norm to be strong enough to withstand that fire hose force. It not only takes a lot of personal power it takes courage to stand in front of the stream.

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You know those topics you really don't want to get into, but so many people have so many ideas that are so wrong that if you don't speak up you feel guilty about not challenging the error? Well, Dr. Cosby's speech falls right in the middle of that pile for me.

Black folks' reactions seem to be along the lines of

1. Ho Hum, my daddy said that
2. He's right, we need to do something
3. What a traitor for insulting the culture from which I draw elements to construct my self-image
4. Stunned silence

The reaction of mainstream types (among whom I include, with their approval, Black Conservatives�), has been either stunned silence from the left or from the right something that sounds disturbingly like

though without the admirable brevity Brainy Smurf usually displays,

Of course there were some specific things that put me over the limit today. Fooling around on Technorati I stumbled on a post at Stop the Bleating that was just wrong on several levels.

Which levels?

Mr. Shaw, like any good lawyer, tries a little misdirection and equivocation to avoid having to admit the uncomfortable truth. Of course most people on welfare are not African-American; blacks are still a relatively small minority in this country, so it'd be really surprising if they made up the majority of welfare recipients. But it seems to me that the proportions of blacks and whites on welfare is a much more meaningful piece of information, if one's honestly attempting to refute Cosby's statement.

Although persons of color, particularly African Americans, have historically comprised a disproportionately high percentage of the AFDC/TANF population, this difference has become even more pronounced since the mid-1990s. National statistics reveal that the proportion of white recipients dropped from 37.4% in 1994 to 30.5% in 1999, while, during the same period, African Americans went from 36.4% to 38% of the welfare population and the proportion of Latinos increased from 19.9% to 24.5%.*

Now, according to my calculations (based on this 2002 Census Bureau estimate), blacks and part-black Americans make up about 13% of the population. But they account for 38% of the "welfare population." Draw your own conclusions.

Now, a comparison of the fractions of the Black and white populations on welfare would be meaningful if groups had the same starting conditions or if an adjustment factor can be calculated that would offset the difference in starting conditions. Neither condition obtains.

Then there's this:

Total means-tested welfare expenditures by federal and state governments amounted to roughly $384 billion in 1998. Of that sum, $212 billion--55 percent--went to white recipients. Some $105 billion--28 percent--went to black recipients, and $69 billion--17 percent--went to Hispanic recipients.

Aid to black and Hispanic welfare recipients is greater in proportion to the size of their populations than is aid to white recipients. This can be seen by determining the average welfare expenditure per person for each ethnic group.

As a group, the 207 million white residents in the U.S. population receive $212 billion in benefits. As a group, then, they receive some $1,022 per person in welfare aid.

There are some 30 million Hispanic residents in the U.S., and Hispanics as a group receive $69 billion in welfare, or roughly $2,210 per person. As a group, the 33 million black residents in the U.S. receive $105 billion in welfare aid, or roughly $3,230 per person. *

…which demonstrates such a lack of mathematical understanding as to render anything else unnecessary to consider. [LATER: Just in case: since not all 207 million white people are on welfare, and average across the entire population has no analytical value. Lather, rinse, repeat with the Black and Latino figures.] But he links to Clayton Cramer who says:

See if you can find re-runs of the mid-1960s television series I Spy. It starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, as two American spies running around the world undercover as professional tennis players. Ask yourself how far blacks would have advanced in America if the hip-hop black man had been the image that white Americans saw every week.

My immediate reaction was, oh no, he did not just suggest the civil rights movement hinged on I Spy. A couple of minutes later I ran through the Black images from the mid-60s that white Americans saw every week. Lou Rawls. Black children attacked by dogs. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. Rochester. Black folks getting firehosed. The Temptations.

It was a couple of hours before I had the frightening thought that I Spy could conceivably have had more impact on white folks than Bull Connor.

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And why everyone else in the media should too. via Digby at Hullabaloo

Moving to those rationales, twenty-seven rationales for the war were used at one time or another, and, of the sixteen rationales that emerged before the final phase of research, thirteen appeared in later phases. Thus, the campaign for the war on Iraq was broad and there seemed to be a great deal of continuity between the phases.

Uncovering the Rationales for the War on Iraq: The Words of the Bush Administration, Congress, and the Media from September 12, 2001 to October 11, 2002[{PDF]
Thesis for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
By: Devon M. Largio

…The change of focus from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein came at different times for each source examined here. President Bush began to mention more about Saddam Hussein in April of 2002. The media switched to focusing on Saddam Hussein in July of 2002. And, finally, Congress mentioned Saddam Hussein more in April then switched back to Osama bin Laden and eventually settled into a pattern of discussion on Saddam Hussein in September of 2002. Yet, as much of the research that follows looks at the response to the search term �Iraq,� a comparison was made between the usage of Saddam Hussein and the usage of Iraq by the various people and sources studied here. The results show that, though Iraq appears more frequently, the trends remain the same for President Bush and the media. Yet, these higher numbers do alter the changeover from Osama bin Laden to Iraq. For example, Congress moves to examining the topic of Iraq in greater number by January of 2002, an earlier and more stable change than the change to a focus on Saddam Hussein. Additionally, the change to Iraq from Osama occurs in January of 2002 for the President and in February of 2002 for the media.

The Bush administration, and the President himself, established the majority of the rationales for the war and all of those rationales that make up the most prominent reasons for war. Initially, the media introduced Iraq to officials and they responded accordingly; by Phase Two, the officials were introducing Iraq, and by Phase Three almost all of their public statements were about Iraq. This changing focus of the administration lines up with the statistics cited earlier in the paper that showed February 2002 as the month in which President Bush began addressing Saddam Hussein and Iraq more than Osama bin Laden, at least numerically, with a solid change made by April of 2002. Additionally, much of what the administration said was covered in the news and quickly appeared in the words of members of Congress and in the Congressional Record. Again, the statistics can be brought to bear on the rationales. The statistics show Congress changing its focus in early 2002, focusing on Iraq by January of 2002, and pretty solidly set on Saddam Hussein and Iraq by the summer. In the rationale analysis,
Congressmen and the Congressional Record brought up the war more often and talked more openly about the prospect of war, without prodding from the media, in Phases Two and Three. Looking at the media, in Phase One much of the discussion around Iraq was initiated by questions from reporters, with the exception of Senator John McCain who brought up the topic of Iraq on multiple occasions. Yet, by Phase Two, most of the officials were talking about Iraq without much prodding and certainly by Phase Three there was no need to ask questions and introduce the topic first. Overall, the media highlighted all of the identified main and secondary rationales, meaning that it did follow the lead of the administration.

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I was going to post something else entirely when I realized I needed to lay some preparatory groundwork first.

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Form/No Form
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright � 1996

First one must understand that one's current emotions affect the way things look. When angry, one's favorite sweater�the one he gave you�doesn't look right anymore. When infatuated, the most grotesque habits are acceptable. When relaxed, everything is simple. When tense, everything happens too fast. Immediate emotions affect the way things look because, when you come down to it, they are neural impulses and as such contribute equally to the brain state we perceive as sight, sound ("I thought I heard my name"), touch ("Snakes feel nice"), taste (some people like chitlins), etc.

Beyond immediate affects there are also long-term memories, such as the personality, which are used as a basis of judgment, consciously or not. These memories generally express themselves as preferences and desires. As we all know, desires and preferences are among the most potent thoughts we entertain, perhaps because acting on them is more direct than acting on the avoidance of damage. One compares one's understanding of the situation before them to those in one's memory. When one finds the closest correlation to a pleasant memory, one gives preference to that which is seen as missing when compared to the memory.

The long-term memories are what give structure and form to one's consciousness and thought. As such, the memories give one's perceptions their characteristic bent, leading one person to say all is well with the world and another to say everything sucks. This form, into which one's memory casts the world, is taken to be the nature of things, for people need explanations. Yet things are easily connected in error. . . we know this, but few act on that knowledge. And so the form of the man is the form of the world.

But since thoughts, memories and emotions change the way we see things, and all our actions are accompanied by thoughts, memories and emotions, it follows that we have no knowledge or experience of the world in its "unperceived" form.

This need not be.

A man may open himself and allow the obscuring memories to pass. One may observe the thought passing as one observes a bird passing your window�neither calling for its coming nor seeking to halt its passing. Can you see without comparison to remembered pleasure or pain? Can you hear familiar music without reciting the words in your mind? Can you see the world without the form you've given it all these years?

Abandoning the form causes the erroneous connections to cease activity. True, unsuspected causal connections become visible and active�and this may appear frighteningly chaotic at first because one's experience no longer appears to be a guide.

But you are no worse off than before, because no form is true, stable or substantial.

Even the form of our mind is a result of the clenching together of thoughts and memories, as the form of a fist is the result of clenching together of fingers. But a fist can be opened, a hand can be pointed, held, used as a weapon or a healing tool. . . and if any would limit the hand to only one of these functions, one eventually damages the hand.

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Survey Finds U.S. Agencies Engaged in 'Data Mining'
By ROBERT PEAR

Published: May 27, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 26 - A survey of federal agencies has found more than 120 programs that collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on individuals to predict their behavior.

The survey, to be issued Thursday by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that the practice, known as data mining, was ubiquitous.

In canvassing federal agencies, the accounting office found that 52 were systematically sifting through computer databases. These agencies reported 199 data mining projects, of which 68 were planned and 131 were in operation. At least 122 of the 199 projects used identifying information like names, e-mail addresses, Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers.

The survey provides the first authoritative estimate of the extent of data mining by the government. It excludes most classified projects, so the actual numbers are likely to be much higher.

The Defense Department made greatest use of the technique, with 47 data mining projects to track everything from the academic performance of Navy midshipmen to the whereabouts of ship parts and suspected terrorists.

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I do wonder why it seems so much easier to label the equally diverse Latino/Chicano communities, though.

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UMass study details Asian-American diversity
Challenges facing community defy simple fixes, authors say

By Monica Rhor, Globe Staff | May 27, 2004

No easy labels fit the Boston area's Asian-American population.

It is made up of rich and poor, college graduates and high school dropouts, city renters and suburban homeowners, white-collar professionals and manual laborers. They are second- and third-generation Chinese-Americans, well-to-do immigrants from India, recent refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, and students from Japan and Korea.

Together they make up the fastest-growing -- and one of the most diverse -- populations in the metro area, according to "Asian Americans in Metro Boston: Growth, Diversity and Complexity," a study being released today.

Conducted by the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the study gives an overview of Asian-Americans in the city and surrounding towns, and seeks to dispel myths that portray the community as either a "model minority" or a "yellow peril."

"Historically, Asians have been stereotyped as a monolithic group, and those stereotypes have had consequences in terms of how they are treated," said Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian American Studies and the study's lead author. "One way to try to counteract that is to understand the complexity and diversity that exists within the Asian-American community."

That community, fueled largely by immigration, has grown significantly in both numbers and complexity over the past decade, the study says.

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British Racism Can Be a Royal Pain
By Gary Younge
Gary Younge is the New York correspondent for the Guardian.

…According to a group of black New Yorkers, on Monday night the Princess Michael of Kent turned to their noisy table and chided them: "You need to go back to the colonies." A spokesman for the princess � who is the wife of Queen Elizabeth's first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent � on Wednesday said: "She did not make a racist comment."

As far as the princess is concerned, this is probably true. For the most part, the British upper class would not recognize a racist statement if it ran up and stuck a burning cross on their lawns. Prince Philip once referred to the "slitty eyes" of the Chinese and commented that a fuse box bursting with wires looked "as if it was put in by an Indian." The late Queen Mother lamented that former apartheid leader P.W. Botha got bad press.

When Nicole Young, one of the young black New Yorkers in question, challenged the princess afterward, the royal elaborated on her insult. Relating the exchange to the British wire service, the Press Assn., Young said she told the princess: " 'What you said to us before was completely disgusting, despicable and out of line.' She looked up at me and said, 'I didn't say go back to the colonies, I said, 'Remember the colonies.'

"And I'm, like, 'Remember what about the colonies?'

"She said, 'In the days of the colonies there were rules that were very good.'

"And I said, 'What rules in particular are you referring to?'

"She goes, 'Just think about it.' "

Just think about it. A German-born British aristocrat � whose father was in the Nazi SS � in the United States telling African Americans who have been here for centuries to "remember the colonies"?

As someone whose parents came from the colonies (Barbados) to settle in Britain, where I was born and raised, the remarks sadly sound familiar. In the narrative of British history, the emigration of white people to conquer and plunder the world was considered part of the natural order of things. But when the empire struck back with immigration to Britain, our parents were met with great hostility.

"Go back to where you came from" was a remark I often faced growing up. "We are here because you were there" is a response I learned only later in life.

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1,000 Feared Dead in Caribbean Storm
By AMY BRACKEN and PETER PRENGAMAN
Associated Press Writers

1:19 AM PDT, May 27, 2004

FOND VERRETTES, Haiti � Health officials feared up to 1,000 people could be dead in a single Haitian town from floods that wiped out villages across Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a figure that would nearly double the death toll from the disaster.

As search crews worked to recover bodies from devastated towns and villages in the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola, U.S.-led troops delivered bread, fruit and bottled water, and international aid employees fanned out to assess the damage.

The death toll was about 950, but the number was expected to jump. In the Haitian town of Mapou, as many as 1,000 people could be dead, said Margarette Martin, the government's representative for the southeast region in nearby Jacmel. Only about 300 bodies had been counted so far, said Dr. Yvon Lavissiere, the health director for the region.

Martin said officials believed hundreds more may have died because houses were submerged and rescuers saw bodies underwater that they were unable to retrieve.

The town of several thousand people, located 30 miles southeast of the capital of Port-au-Prince, is still isolated by mud and landslides. The town is in a valley that often floods when it rains.

In the Haitian border village of Fond Verrettes, meanwhile, U.S. and Canadian troops handed out food to hundreds of survivors who lined up seeking help.

Troops in the U.S.-led force were sent to stabilize Haiti after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's ouster on Feb. 29. Since then the new interim government has struggled to provide even basic services. Left bankrupt, the government has scant resources to deal with natural disasters.

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A U.S. Ally Caught Between Two Goals in Iraq
If insurgency splinters the country, ethnic Kurds will have to weigh Washington's dream of unity against their own dream of independence.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

May 27, 2004

BAGHDAD � The iconic image of the Kurd is a man in billowy trousers with a rifle, a knife and a will to fight to the death. He has battled throughout the generations, and Kurds say he may be called upon again.

Kurds fear that Shiite and Sunni Muslim insurgencies against U.S. troops in Iraq could splinter the nation. If that happens, the Kurds � who account for just 19% of the population but control the country's largest ethnic army � will be forced to choose between their risky dream of independence and the Bush administration's goal of a unified Iraq.

With the June 30 deadline for Iraqis to regain sovereignty little more than a month away, a U.N. envoy is putting the finishing touches on an interim government representing all of the country's main religious and ethnic groups. Kurds are expected to hold prominent positions in the government, but they are uneasy about whether Iraq's disparate factions can hold the country together.

"The turmoil in south and central Iraq threatens us Kurds," said Hewa Abdullah, a painter studying at Sulaymaniya University in the mountains of northern Iraq. "Islamic extremism has arrived in the south and is strong in the middle of the country. If we don't go toward independence, we will lose all our achievements."

A Kurdish push for independence is one of many troubling scenarios rippling from the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies. The unrest underscores Iraq's perilous political map and how generations of ethnic and tribal animosities can flare with the ferocity of a desert sandstorm. It also illustrates how much of Iraq's fate is tied not only to U.S. resolve, but also to radical clerics, terrorists and the agendas of neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran.

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Sudan, Rebels Seal Accords to End War
In Kenya talks, the two sides resolve issues such as power-sharing that have delayed peace in a 21-year conflict costing over 2 million lives.
From Associated Press

May 27, 2004

NAIVASHA, Kenya � Sudan's government and rebels signed three key agreements on power-sharing and administration of disputed areas Wednesday, resolving the last issues that were preventing an end to Africa's longest-running war.

All that remains for the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army to work out is procedural matters to end the 21-year civil war, in which more than 2 million people have died, mostly of war- induced disease and famine.

The accord is unrelated to the conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where fighting between the government and rebels has raised fears of "ethnic cleansing."

The signing took place in Naivasha, about 60 miles northwest of Kenya's capital, Nairobi. It could take months to determine whether the diplomatic solution will translate into actual peace.

"We have reached the crest of the last hill in our tortuous ascent to the heights of peace," rebel leader John Garang said after the signing. "There are no more hills ahead of us, the remaining is flat ground."

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Former Editor Rejects Thrust of N.Y. Times Note
Howell Raines denies Iraq stories were rushed to get scoops during his tenure and blames supervisors, not chief reporter, for mistakes.
By Josh Getlin
Times Staff Writer

May 27, 2004

NEW YORK � Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, on Wednesday sharply criticized an editor's note that said some of the paper's stories about Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction were inaccurate and might have been rushed into print by editors hungry for scoops. The stories in question appeared during Raines' tenure.

Raines also defended stories by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who has been criticized by some journalism observers for relying on misleading information from dubious sources.

The former editor said any blame should fall on those who supervised the reporter's work, including Managing Editor Jill Abramson, who personally edited Miller's stories.

"My feeling is that no editor did this kind of reckless rushing while I was executive editor," said Raines, who issued his comments in response to a query from Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten. Raines resigned last year amid the national uproar over Jayson Blair, a reporter who was found to have plagiarized and fabricated numerous stories, embarrassing the paper.

"I can tell you positively that in 25 years on the Times and in 21 months as executive editor, I never put anything into the paper before I thought it was ready," Raines said. "Any of the 30 or so people who sat in our front-page meetings during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and the first phase of the war can attest to the seriousness with which everyone took the story."

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May 26, 2004

I got my email with a discount code from SixApart today. 50% discount on a license, personal or commercial. I don't know if I can combine it with the $20 discount I get for having registered 2.6x, but if so then I'd get the personal edition for $15.

They have a LOT more developer information available for MT3. Too bad I don't do Perl, in a way…looking over the API documentation I think anyone comfortable with Perl could get real productive.

So I have these three incredibly powerful lightweight CMSes that I'm stalling about installing because I've promised an osCommerce installation to a friend (okay, it's my daughter's mom but we managed to stay friends, go figure). ExpressionEngine has the functional edge without question and is much less expensive than an equivalently licensed Movable Type, but then MT hasn't been a moving target for a while. Wordpress comes up short by not supporting multiple sites, but the tremendous functionality they added in version 1.2 (assuming it all works, I haven't tested it yet) brings it about even with MT3.

Given the pricing and capabilities of these things, SixApart needs to make a pretty serious move.

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We Denounce the Gruesome Murder
The Inquirer (Monrovia)
EDITORIAL
May 26, 2004
Posted to the web May 26, 2004
Monrovia

IT HAS NOW been confirmed that a member of the visiting U.S.Military Assessment mission John Auffrey was murdered in his hotel room at the Mamba Point Hotel in Monrovia on Monday by alleged robber(s).

The gruesome murder of the American, who was part of a delegation that had come to begin the process leading to the restructuring of the Armed Forces of Liberia(AFL), has sent shockwaves in the spines of many for its gravity.

ACCORDING TO REPORTS, the American citizen was murdered on Monday, May 24 in his hotel room. The management of the Mamba Point Hotel said the death was as a result of a May 24 break-in and burglary of one of their guest rooms.

MEANWHILE, THE LIBERIAN Government through the Ministry of Justice and the management of the Mamba Point Hotel in separate press releases claimed to be saddened by the homicide of the American citizen.

Both extended their heartfelt condolences to the family of the American guest who died at the hands of unknown assailants.

THE JUSTICE MINISTRY also said the Government of Liberia takes the incident serious, will therefore leave no stone unturned to arrest and bring the culprits to justice. The Ministry also urged the joint security and the Liberia National Police to vigorously continue their investigation into the matter until the doers of the act are brought to justice.

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And all his minions, too.

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Federal Court Upholds Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law
By ADAM LIPTAK and SARAH KERSHAW

Published: May 26, 2004

A federal appeals court today rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block the only law in the nation authorizing doctors to help their patients commit suicide.

The decision, by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld Oregon's Death with Dignity Act.

The majority used unusually pointed language to rebuke Attorney General John Ashcroft for overstepping his authority.

"The Attorney General's unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers," Judge Richard C. Tallman wrote for the majority, "interferes with the democratic debate about physician assisted suicide and far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law."

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You know, the Senator is cool and sane and all that but if Democrats don't stop this stupid Kerry/McCain crap I may have to abstain. I can't vote for Bush and I can't vote for stupid either.

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Man, today there's two hot articles you need to check out at Africana.com.

First on I noticed was the first in an ongoing column called The Black Slate. Lester Spence, who also writes at Vision Circle, describes the approach he'll be taking:

Over the past 20 years, many of the gains of the sixties have been dismantled. I'm referring to the erosion of Affirmative Action in some of our best colleges, as well as the erosion of the Voting Rights Act (see: Florida 2000). But I 'm also talking about the erosion of the safety net played off as "ending welfare as we know it." I'm talking about the erosion of environmental safeguards, and the erosion of public schools. The policies have been replaced steadily and stealthily, with a language that supports individual initiative and bootstrapping. The barbershop language of black pathology and self-hatred, combined with a knee jerk belief that government cannot aid our situation, has neutered our ability to combat those wishing to return to 1896.

I note above that we can win.

I sincerely believe this; however, for us to do so we have to open up democratic spaces within our communities and within our institutions. We have to engage in a number of projects simultaneously.

We have to promote, applaud, and laud local organizing. How have individuals and organizations not only fought against subjugation but promoted a vibrant new vision of what American life should look like in the 21st Century? What type of tactics and strategies did they adopt? How did they (or didn't they) use popular culture in order to mobilize black folk?

We also have to detail the various and sundry ways we're being snowed. On one level, this is relatively straightforward. How is George Bush using images of black people (and you say Condoleezza Rice? I knew that you would...) in order to bolster anti-human policies and practices? How has the Freedom of Information Act been gutted in a way that could prevent progressive men and women of various backgrounds from uncovering government wrongdoing? But we also have to turn the gaze towards our own representatives, both elected and non-elected. How are they using the language of race and community in order to hoard benefits for a select group of black people, leaving the rest of us in the lurch?

Finally, we have to begin to think outside of the box and use tactics of misdirection and passive aggression in order to make further strides. For most of us, for example, the odds of us casting a vote for the Republican Party are about the same as the odds of us being struck by lightning. How could we hack the Republican Party for progressive purposes?

I'm down with his approach, but I knew that. And I will be following the column.

The other excellent article is by another favorite of mine, Mark Anthony Neal, on mysogyny in hip-hop (with a little of the old P6 emphasis added):

Let me be clear � I'm on the front lines of any effort to get the men in hip hop to rethink their pornographic uses of women's bodies and performance of lyrics that more often than not express, at best, a deep ambivalence about and fear of women (perfectly captured 14 years ago with the Bell Biv Devoe quip "never trust a big butt and a smile") and, at worst, outright hatred. But as we make demands of these artists, it's important that we understand the demands of the peculiar space they occupy within pop culture. Without doubt, the performance of black masculinity continues to be hip hop's dominant creative force. Yet over the last decade or so sales figures have consistently shown that young white men are the primary consumers of the various performances of black masculinity and the pornographic images of black and brown women found in mainstream hip hop.

By asking hip hop to reform, we are essentially demanding hip hop's primary consumer base to consume music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and possibly feminist. And in what context have young white men (or black men for that matter) ever been interested in consuming large amounts of black feminist thought? Clearly these young whites are consuming hip hop for other reasons. In the case of young white males, hip hop represents a space where they work through the idea of how their masculinity can be lived � what they literally take from the hypermasculine "black buck" (think about 50 Cent's influence in the killing fields of Iraq) and indeed it is an integral part of the cash and carry exchange.

In a society that remains largely ignorant of the scholarly, political and cultural contributions of women like Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis ("oh yeah, the chick with the afro, right?"), June Jordan, bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Patricia Hill-Collins, Jewell Gomez, Joy James, Beverley Guy-Sheftall and Masani Alexis De Veaux, how can we expect hip hop to do the heavy-lifting that hasn't been done in the larger culture? Despite popular belief, hip hop is not the most prominent site of sexism and misogyny in American society but a reflection of the misogyny and sexism that more powerfully circulates within American culture.

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Cobb links to one Doc Rampage's beliefs about the nature of folks on the left and right side of the political spectrum. He tries to sound reasonable, and if his assumptions were true, he would be.

The difference in a nut shell: the left believes that the measure of a society is how well it produces good people. The right thinks that the measure of a society is how well it controls bad people. To the left, if a society has bad people that need to be controlled, then it is a failure already. To the right, society has little impact on how good a person is, it can only control their more harmful actions.

I almost have no problem with this, but the good doctor leaves out a major difference: the right has some pretty bizarre (to me, anyway) ideas about what constitutes help and harm. Not to mention that he has the entire dynamic backward (hence "livE" rather than "Evil").

Anti-discrimination laws, for instance, punish behavior rather than intent. Try to find a rightwinger in favor of actually enforcing anti-discrimination laws (which I judge by their actions in budgeting rather than their rhetoric…by Doc Rampage's lights, that makes me a right winger).

The right has been trying to coopt the left's issues because the "Compassionate Conservative Crap" is the horse they rode into a 50% share of the popular vote on. Without the CCC (yes, I remember the organization with those initials quite well, thank you) they'd have never even have gotten close.

Doc Rampage believes, and that's unfortunate.

Again, the left is correct. What they fail to understand is how utterly obvious that fact is to conservatives. Of course there are brutal and cruel people in America. Of course some of these brutal and cruel people are in the military. Of course even otherwise good people sometimes do evil things. None of this shocks the right, or even seems worth remarking on. That is why conservatives misunderstand what the left is saying. When a person says something utterly obvious, you assume that they mean something else by the remark. If you ask a friend how he likes your new car and he says, "Well, it's red." You assume he doesn't just mean to tell you the color of the car. And when the left constantly points out evil things done by Americans or the American government, the right is inclined to react similarly, looking for the meaning in these obvious and trivial statements.

Multiple problems here. The response of the right has been to deny the evil of (for example) butt-nekkid men on my TV.

DON'T make me get the quotes.

To the left, the human mind is a computer that takes inputs and produces outputs. If the inputs are frustration, want, and suffering, they will deliver outputs of violence, cruelty and brutality. Correspondingly, if you want to prevent violent outputs then you simply change the inputs. That's why leftists fear movies about the suffering of Christ or pastors who say that homosexuality is a sin. They fear these inputs will trip a switch in some hapless mind that sets someone to violence.

What Doc does here is deny the ability to learn from one's environment. I don't know anyone on the left that feels one can simply program the human mind.

The right sees these arguments and finds them patently offensive for treating human beings like robots. It seems morally arrogant to always presuppose that you can manipulate others to see things your way.

…which means the Bushistas are leftists.

You want objectivity? Ignore the good doctor. Check the promises Bush made in 2000. Kinder. Gentler. Compassion. Help putting food on your family. Compare what they promised to what they've done.

I'm assuming from all this that Doc Rampage and Cobb are both voting against Bush.

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David Neiwert has a post up at Orcinus pretty much about an anti-Latino inspired increase in white supremacist activity among Californian youth.

Though the article itself is interesting, the second comment is vital reading, IMO.

Gangs and such form along racial lines because that's still the primary determinant of identity for most folks…decry it if you will, but facts are facts. But race isn't, at root, the reason folks join such social clubs. It is the physical need inherent in all social animals to belong, to fit into a social hierarchy, that is being sated and unless better ways of filling that need are created gangs and skinheads will continue to have that irresistible allure.

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Do me a favor, folks.

When I say "racist" don't assume I use it as a synonym for "white folks." When I say "white racist" don't assume that's a synonym for "white folks" either. And when I say "white folks" don't assume that's a synonym for "racists"…though you shouldn't assume they are being left out either.

This comes up because of a theme I'm considering. You know I sometimes get a bug up my ass about focus on a specific topic for a week or so. Well, recently the idea of writing up Earl's Rules for Dealing With Mainstream Types, or something similar occurred to me. I've pretty much decided against making a project of it but I've also come to recognize I'll inevitably write SOMEthing on any topic that I declare I'm not touching. So stuff is very likely to leak out and I'm not likely to want to deal with assumptions about my morality.

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The Times and Iraq

Published: May 26, 2004

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In doing so � reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation � we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged � or failed to emerge.

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Quote of note:

Every article of this sort requires a health warning. I am not in favour of international terrorism; blowing people up and the other grievous sins of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

And having put the editorialist's troll repellant on prominent display I direct your attention to what drew my attention.

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Robert Chesshyre: America's brutal culture of unseen oppression
Rotten apples only thrive when the barrel is rancid. Prison guards take their tone from the top
25 May 2004

Travelling in Costa Rica, I met an ex-pat, all-American American - a craggy, Lee Marvin lookalike, with a black Stetson, cowboy boots and a wide leather belt sporting a death's- head buckle. My immediate reaction was that here was the archetypal red neck, who had probably left the United States to live in central America because he found the US soft on "commies" and wanted a home where a man could be a "man".

We fell into conversation, and I asked why he had left home. To my surprise, he cited American penal policy. He didn't feel comfortable and couldn't sleep nights in a country that locked up so many of its citizens; kept thousands (mainly poor and black) incarcerated for years on death rows; and had mandatory "life means life" sentences handed down to impoverished inner city young men who fell foul of the law three times.

He touched a chord. I had fairly recently lived in the United States, and had equally felt the weight of that unseen oppression. Across the sunny uplands of American middle-class life - little league baseball, barbecues in the yard and "have a nice day" greetings at every checkout - lies a giant shadow. It is not something that concerns many citizens. "We've had enough," said an accountant, when I expressed concern that two million Americans are in jail. "Throw away the key."

This man has never been mugged, his house never burgled, his family never molested, while most Britons I know have been the victims of crime. On all else - race, feminism, gay rights - he is "progressive", and he would describe himself as a liberal. Yet the fact that black teenagers, contemporaries of his own college kids, are locked away in violent, custodial rat-holes for the rest of their lives hardly concerned him.

It came as little surprise to me that the Bush administration hit upon the notion of caging al-Qa'ida suspects in conditions few Americans would tolerate for their dogs. Nor that horrific abuses have taken place in Iraqi jails. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, who treats the Geneva Convention much as most motorists treat speed restrictions, must have calculated that - as far as domestic American opinion is concerned - he could act with impunity.

Public complicity is underpinned by a staggering ignorance. Listen to interviews with home town folk in the places from which the Baghdad guards come. "They" - i.e. the wretched Iraqis - deserve all they get - after all, "they" did it to us; "they" blew up the twin towers.

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Oh, this is in Great Britain. Sorry.
Quote of note:

"Their approach on the use of condoms in Africa I think is causing death actually, rather than proclaiming life because they have a doctrinal position."

Preach!

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Catholic church weighs into polls

The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is urging voters to judge candidates for the local and European elections on their moral stances.

The call comes in the church's new pamphlet, Cherishing Life, which warns of a slide towards a culture of death.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the church's leader in England and Wales, said voters should draw on religious teaching when they come to vote.

The new pamphlet particularly opposes abortion and euthanasia.

'Culture of life'

Cardinal Murphy O'Connor pointed to the 180,000 abortions a year, calls for euthanasia and stem cell research, as he said it would be foolish not to raise the alarm.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We all have a responsibility to create a culture of life.

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Chief justice orders examination of judicial ethics after Scalia issue
By By Gina Holland, Associated Press | May 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has ordered a study of federal judicial ethics, a move that follows intense criticism of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for taking a hunting trip with his friend, Vice President Dick Cheney.

A six-member committee appointed by Rehnquist will begin meeting next month, about the time the court is expected to rule in a case involving Cheney that generated much criticism. Rehnquist named Justice Stephen Breyer, a Clinton appointee, to chair the panel.

Supreme Court justices decide for themselves if they have conflicts of interest, and their decisions are final. Separately, a law allows complaints to be lodged alleging federal judges have engaged in "conduct prejudicial to the effective and expeditious administration of the business of the courts."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, told judicial leaders at a private meeting this spring that they were not adequately disciplining their colleagues.

"I decided that the best way to see if there are any real problems is to have a committee look into it," Rehnquist said yesterday through a court spokesman.

Congressional Democrats and many newspaper editorials demanded that Scalia step aside when it was disclosed he took the trip in January with Cheney, on the vice president's plane, three weeks after the court agreed to hear the Bush administration's appeal of a ruling that ordered public disclosure of details of an energy task force chaired by Cheney.

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May 25, 2004

I still have no beef with Movable Type.

However, I AM testing ExpressionEngine and it's pretty deep. How deep? Well, when you can add arbitrary fields to member profiles (call them authors if you like) and post records, use them in your templates as simply as {fieldname} and embed SQL in your templates, that's pretty damn flexible. There's a MovableType plugin that lets you embed SQL in custom tags, but ExpressionEngine comes with this feature out of the box. Admittedly that's probably not that big a deal for someone who's embedding SQL in a page; the big deal is the ability to add fields and just USE them. I have that capability in the link forum software I mentioned some time ago, and it's potent enough that I could use it for blogging or as a BBS systems.

And on the Wordpress front, Jennifer at ScriptyGoddess is converting because she likes it as a development target. Being open source and written in PHP (SG's apparent preferred language), Wordpress can directly absorb her stuff. If much more talent of her caliber starts working in Wordpress, it's going to become really impressive really fast.In fact, I just peeked and found they've released version 1.2 and it already looks impressive.

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Pat Oliphant is so on point that I'm not even presenting a fraction of the cartoon as usual. No, you must go to his page at uComics.com, absorbing all the ads on the page.

Trust me, he's earned it.

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ChristianExodus.org has been established to coordinate the move of 50,000 or more Christians to a single conservative state in the U.S. for the express purpose of reestablishing constitutional governance. It is evident that our Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system. The efforts of Christian activism have proven futile over the past five decades and, whereas desperate times require desperate measures, we are now in the most desperate of times. The federal government is considering whether marriage, the foundation of civilization since Creation, should be reserved solely to a man and a woman. Christians must now draw a line in the sand and unite in a sovereign state to dissolve our bond with the current union comprised as the United States of America.

The success of ChristianExodus.org will lead to an independent Christian nation where people may once again worship God under the protection of a friendly government. In addition, such a nation will be free of burdensome taxation and federal meddling in local affairs. Matter of factly, the liberties we have lost to liberalism over the past century will be restored in one fell swoop.

via Natalie of All Facts and Opinions, on Open Source Politics

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Here's the NY Times' transcript of l'il Georgie's speech.

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After 2000 Chaos, Voters in Florida Are Wary
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Published: May 24, 2004

…"All my life I have never seen the TV stations declare a winner, then change their minds," said Greg Johnson, a fourth grade teacher in Quincy who still wonders if his ballot landed in the scrap heap. "The Supreme Court decided that election, not us. I like politics, but people in power can get away with stuff and I'm just not sure this time."

As Election Day 2004 draws near in a battleground state whose 27 electoral votes could prove crucial to the victor once again, a movement is rising in poor black communities to register and to educate, reassure and entreat. A top goal is to change the mindset of people like Mr. Johnson, who still harbor deep suspicions about everything from the accuracy of voting equipment to how polling places are chosen and what role Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will play in Florida's outcome.

"It's no longer as simple as saying, `You're of age, you're a citizen, you're duly eligible to vote,' " said Andrew D. Gillum, an organizer with the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in Tallahassee, where he is a city commissioner. "Instead we're having to convince a lot of people who are thinking, `Why bother, it won't matter anyway.' "

People for the American Way is training volunteers to fan across the state's northern swath, registering and reinvigorating black voters from Jacksonville to Pensacola. Its African American Ministers Leadership Council is recruiting church members for "Jericho walks," nonpartisan door-to-door efforts not only to register black voters, but also to quell their fears of disenfranchisement and to dispel myths that have circulated since 2000.

The Southern Florida A.F.L.-C.I.O. and other labor unions are also concentrating on black neighborhoods with mailings and registration drives, pushing the concept of early voting for people who work long hours and might otherwise skip it. And black politicians are working to build excitement about the election in their communities, with many tapping into many black Floridians' dislike of Governor Bush.

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More clevernesses at Something Awful

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Over at The Panda's Thumb has a realization about the Intelligent Design crowd that parallels my own discovery about racists.:

I am beginning to understand that the core motivation driving the supporters of such proposals is fear. Not fear for themselves � they are too strong in their faith to be corrupted by evolutionary science. It is fear for their children and in particular, fear for their children�s souls. There is a genuine belief that accepting an evolutionary view of biological phenomena is a giant step on the road to atheism, and in learning evolutionary theory their children are in peril of losing salvation. Given the beliefs they hold, this is not a silly fear. From their perspective, atheism is a deadly threat, and evolution is a door through which that threat can enter to corrupt one�s child. No amount of scientific research, no citations of scientific studies, no detailed criticism of the Wellsian trash science offered in �teach the controversy� proposals, speaks to those fears. If one genuinely fears that learning evolution will corrupt one�s children and damn them for eternity, scientific reasoning is wholly irrelevant.[P6: emphasis added]

This is a subtle realization.

Black folks tend to think that racism = hatred because we feel hated when we run into it. But parents do not teach their children racism out of hatred. They do it out of love, and a true belief in what is being taught.

Now, just try changing someone's mind about something they were taught by someone they love and trust.

Again, the central problem is ignorance. And though short term the struggle is largely political, the long term strategy will involve people learning the old ways are less efficient than the ways knowledge makes possible.

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Mark, having discovered I am much more the Aristotelian than Platonist, muses thus:

With that kind of realism I wonder if you will be considered " progressive " in the current political sense of the term a decade from now

Probably more so.

Understand that 50 is closer than 45, which means I'm well past the point where human brains become inflexible.

More importantly, my insistence on dealing in real things is the reason I align myself with the progressives. The Conservative belief that one can stand athward the flow of time by dint of sheer will is…not accurate. The Neocon belief that one can construct a society by strictly controlling all the I/O is hallucinatory, resulting in the political equivalent of the Dust Bowl…life and society are patterned as opposed to logical (he who understands is spared three blows).

Change is the constant, and in the face of that the only sane reaction is adaptation, and mastery of the ways things change.

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EU projects finds racism related to poor working conditions

[Date: 2004-05-25]

A Europe-wide survey has found that the increasing popularity of right-wing and extremist parties is due to the perceived degradation of socio-economic changes and employment conditions among European workers.

The SIREN project, funded under the European Commission's 'Improving Human Research Potential and the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base' sub-section of the Fifth Framework Programme (FP5) was presented during a workshop on xenophobia and racism that took place in Brussels on 24 May.

SIREN, which conducted interviews in eight European countries, found that over the past five years, European workers have been feeling increasingly frustrated over their working conditions. They complained about a decrease in job security, mounting stress levels and incessant competition, uncertain employment and low income.

Those factors have lead to people feeling more and more receptive to xenophobia, racism, populism and right wing parties. The study also found that those who have benefited from the changing conditions, the so called 'modernisation winners', were increasingly developing 'an aggressively competitive political stance' as well. Albeit for different reasons, the survey found that these people were just as sympathetic to the message of the extreme right.

The report, therefore, urges European leaders to realise the Lisbon agenda in order to 'help address the roots of far-right extremism.'

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Magical History Tour
Bush can't learn from the past if he can't see it.
By William�Saletan
Posted Monday, May 24, 2004, at 11:57 PM PT

In press conferences, TV ads, and interviews this year, President Bush has manifested a series of psychopathologies: an abstract notion of reality, confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances, and a conception of credibility that requires no correspondence to the external world. Tonight, as he vowed to stay the course in Iraq, Bush demonstrated another mental defect: incomprehension of his role in history as a fallible human agent. Absent such comprehension, Bush can't fix his mistakes in Iraq because he can't see how—or even that—he screwed up.

Here's how Bush, in his speech this evening, described Iraq's place in history:

In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country, and events have come quickly. Americans have seen the flames of Sept. 11, followed battles in the mountains of Afghanistan � We've seen killers at work on trains in Madrid, in a bank in Istanbul, in a synagogue in Tunis, and at a nightclub in Bali. And now the families of our soldiers and civilian workers pray for their sons and daughters in Mosul, in Karbala, in Baghdad. We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus. We must do our duty. History is moving, and it will tend toward hope or tend toward tragedy.

The description is almost biblical. The narrative�"this war on terror"�is a moral test arranged by higher powers. Postwar Iraq, like 9/11, Madrid, and Bali, is "the world as we find it," not as we made it. "History," not Bush, has placed the demands of occupation on our country. "Events," not Bush's mistakes and their consequences, have come quickly. We must focus on the "duty" defined by our situation, not on how we got here.

Bush's ignorance of his part in the tragedy infects everything he says. "The swift removal of Saddam Hussein's regime last spring had an unintended effect," he observed tonight. "Instead of being killed or captured on the battlefield, some of Saddam's elite guards shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population. [They] have reorganized, rearmed and adopted sophisticated terrorist tactics." Note the passive construction. The mistake isn't that Bush failed to prepare for guerrilla tactics commonly adopted against occupiers. It isn't even a mistake; it's an "unintended effect." The cause of that effect is Saddam's "swift removal," not Bush or anyone in his administration who engineered the removal.

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Bush can't win this election now. Kerry can only lose it
A softly-softly long game will put a Democrat in the White House

Martin Kettle
Tuesday May 25, 2004
The Guardian

…Political professionals - Labour as well as Democrat - still shake their heads. Why has he not exploited Bush's setbacks in Iraq more ruthlessly, they ask? Why has he not focused his message more clearly? Again there are solid answers. Because Kerry is playing a softly-softly long game. Because Bush's record in Iraq is doing Kerry's job for him. Because it isn't smart to attack Bush too strongly now for fear of letting him play the patriotic card.

Much of the more militant anti-Bush opinion is frustrated by Kerry too. They want him to do a Michael Moore, to tear into Bush not just on Iraq but on the Middle East, on civil liberties, on inequality, on the environment and on the spiralling government deficit which the new book Colossus by Niall Ferguson (no Michael Moore he) identifies as the achilles heel of America's global role.

But Kerry is proving smarter than all these people think. Back in September 2001, Kerry was one of the Senate Democrats who supported his majority leader Tom Daschle in the hard but uninspiring decision to keep the party's head down on the war on terror. America's mood was such, they argued, that to attack Bush over Afghanistan, civil liberties or Iraq was to walk into the trap that Karl Rove, the president's strategist, was setting for the 2004 campaign. Rove's strategy was and is to present Bush as a strong and successful wartime leader. Daschle's wily response was to lie low. If the war on terror went brilliantly, Bush would win anyway. If it went badly, Daschle and Kerry were determined not to allow Bush to blame it on the Democrats.

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This press release from The Gallup Organization, about Bush's support among Republicans, is a couple of days old. It has some interesting analysis:

Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd contends that Bush has reached a floor of sorts in his ratings because Bush has continually enjoyed high levels of support from Republicans. Since Republicans constitute about a third of the U.S. population, it is mathematically correct to assume that a 90% job approval rating from this group, coupled with some level of approval from independents and Democrats, will result in an overall rating in the 40% range.

Here is a graph that presents the breakout of Bush's job approval at various points in his administration:

George W. Bush's Job Approval Ratings
by Partisanship
Selected Trend 2001-2004

It's clear that Bush's job approval rating among Republicans has remained remarkably high during his entire administration. Bush started in the first months of 2001 with about 9 in 10 Republicans approving of the job he was doing. Then, coincident with record-high overall approval ratings after 9/11, Bush's approval among Republicans zoomed to almost 100%. As Bush's overall ratings slipped, his approval dropped back a little to roughly the 90% level among Republicans, but no further. Remarkably, his job approval rating among Republicans has remained at that level ever since. At the same time, Bush has lost support among both independents and Democrats. In Gallup's most recent poll, in fact, Bush's job performance is approved of by only 14% of Democrats.

No surprise there.

Now add this, from polling results they released today:

This level of partisanship wouldn't bother me were it not for a particular set of beliefs held by the Bush partisans that have been SO disproven by reality as to only be explainable by:

• a lack of information


• a wealth of disinformation


• some combination of the above two

…i.e., ignorance. That most of the country at some time believed Iraq responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington, that so significant a fraction of the population still does is more worrisome to me than anything specific Dubya can pull out of his hat at this point. It is obvious that reason will get no play in the current situation and equally obvious that is not acceptable in the long term.

At this point the Democratic Party is gearing up to match the Conservative Movement's propaganda machine, but its talking points are no more appealing to the right than the right's are to Democrats. And the political polarization is such that the percentage of actually undecided voters is pretty close to falling totally inside the margin of error of any poll. I don't think that's supportable long term either.

Republicans have an "in" to the mind of any given Democrat: money. Okay, that and we have to listen to every voice because we really are a disparate, motley crew, we progressives. Alright, truth be told, the nature…not the content…of the Conservative pitch being imagery rather than ideas there is simply a category of humans to whom it speaks effectively.

There is frankly no counter to that first advantage other than collective spiritual evolution. The second is a side effect of our greatest strength as a nation (which, btw, it not that we allow immigrants to assimilate but that American culture assimilates them) and you don't give that up.The third can be countered by understanding the appeal of the imagery the Right uses. You then create flattering imagery supported by progressive ideas.

This does nothing to address the real long-term problem of ignorance. It actually takes advantage of it. But what can you do, short term? You can't lose sight of your ultimate goal, but you can't let the perfect obstruct the good either.

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US closes in on deal with Iraqi cleric
Despite battles in two cities Monday, officials say talks are under way to turn Moqtada al-Sadr's army into a political group.
By Orly Halpern | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD - As fighting between Shiite militiamen and US-led coalition forces continued Monday, the outline of a Fallujah-like solution began to emerge.

The death toll rose in Baghdad and Kufa as the Mahdi Army of militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr battled US troops. But behind the scenes, direct negotiations were under way to transform Sadr's militia into a political entity and end a violent rebellion.

The coalition has declared repeatedly that it will not negotiate with "militias and criminals." Nonetheless, a deal may be forthcoming with Sadr, said an official close to the talks. The coalition has previously said it wanted the cleric killed or captured.

If the deal pans out, it could bring to an end the seven-week conflict. The hope is that by engaging Sadr politically, the coalition can neutralize him militarily. His militia might also eventually be integrated into the Iraqi national security forces.

Such an accord would reverse previously held coalition strategies - much as happened in Fallujah. In that Iraqi city, the scene of intense fighting in April, militia including many of the same insurgents who were fighting the Marines are now in charge of keeping the peace.

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Dominican storms 'leave 130 dead'

More than 130 people have died after torrential rains swept across the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

At least 80 people were killed in the Dominican Republic when two rivers broke their banks in the small town of Jimani on the border with Haiti.

Fifty-eight people were reported killed in flooding in Haiti, AFP news agency reported.

Meteorologists predict the heavy rains will continue throughout Tuesday and Wednesday.

Torrential rain has been falling for more than two weeks on the Dominican Republic, swelling rivers and saturating the land.

A member of parliament for the area of Jimani, Atila Perez, said 200 homes were flooded and whole families were swept away when the town's river burst its banks.

Mr Perez said that all that was left of the homes in the worst affected neighbourhood were pieces of timber and clothing embedded in the mud.

A makeshift morgue has been set up at the town hospital.

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May 24, 2004

I wrote about it the last four-five times he gave it. I think that's enough.

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Candidates' Iraq policies moot if issue is getting US out
By Dante Chinni

…They do say that Senator Kerry plans to "internationalize" the conflict, involve allies or the UN to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. That approach is winning a lot of supporters, they say, including President Bush, who has moved toward Kerry's position.

Not so, say the Bushies. The president is not moving toward Kerry. In fact, they think Kerry is moving toward Mr. Bush.

And there you have it, America - a campaign that rests on the burning question of who is copying whose position, with, one can only assume by the rhetoric, a final resting place that has both candidates agreeing in principle to the same course in Iraq. That course? Get our troops out and other troops in.

Get ready for debates with cerebral exchanges like this.

Bush: I propose getting our allies more involved in Iraq as soon as possible.

Kerry: I proposed that first.

Bush: No you didn't.

Kerry: Yes, I did.

At this point one or both will put their fingers in their ears and yell, "I'm not listening!" and you'll promptly tune to a "Hee Haw" rerun.

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Continuing the Cover-Up?
Military Takes Action Against Key Witness in Abu Ghraib Abuse Scandal
By Brian Ross and Alexandra Salomon
ABCNEWS.com

May 21, 2004� A witness who told ABCNEWS he believed the military was covering up the extent of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was today stripped of his security clearance and told he may face prosecution because his comments were "not in the national interest."

Sgt. Samuel Provance said in addition to his revoked security clearance, he was transferred to a different platoon, and his record was officially "flagged," meaning he cannot be promoted or given any awards or honors.

Provance said he was told he will face administrative action for failing to report what he knew at the time and for failing to take steps to stop the abuse.

"I see it as an effort to intimidate Sgt. Provance and any other soldier whose conscience is bothering him, and who wants to come forward and tell what really happened at Abu Ghraib," said his attorney Scott Horton.

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The Other Long Occupation: Bush in a Bubble
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was raging, American soldiers were battling Iraqi insurgents near a Shiite shrine, and the Europeans were arguing with the United States over the powers of a new government in Baghdad.

But on that hot, troubled Washington morning of May 14, when President Bush met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with foreign ministers from the Group of 8, the world's leading industrialized democracies, he spoke to them for exactly eight minutes, took no questions, then left.

"We listen to his speeches, and then the president is gone," said a European diplomat who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as criticizing Mr. Bush.

Last week, when the president made a rare trip to Capitol Hill to try to soothe Republicans who are anxious over the increasing chaos of the American occupation, he gave them a 35-minute pep talk, shook hands, took no questions, then left.

"I was hoping the president would have some back and forth," said Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the only Republican in the Senate who voted against the war in Iraq.

Specifically, Mr. Chafee said he would have liked to have asked Mr. Bush one question about Iraq: "If this thing starts spiraling downward, what are our options?"

All presidents live in a bubble, but Democrats, European officials and a group of moderate Republicans say that Mr. Bush lives in a bigger bubble than most. As the problems of the occupation and insurgency in Iraq have intensified, they say, Mr. Bush has appeared to retreat more than ever into his tight circle of aides.

"He needs to break out of that cocoon a little bit, and to listen to more advice than he gets from his vice president and his war cabinet," said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, a frequent critic of the president. "This administration has seen Congress as an enemy and a constitutional nuisance. The world right now is in trouble, and we need to have a Congress and a president and an executive branch that's working together."

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History lesson: GOP must stop Bush

By Carl Bernstein

Thirty years ago, a Republican president, facing impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate, was forced to resign because of unprecedented crimes he and his aides committed against the Constitution and people of the United States. Ultimately, Richard Nixon left office voluntarily because courageous leaders of the Republican Party put principle above party and acted with heroism in defense of the Constitution and rule of law.

"What did the president know and when did he know it?" a Republican senator � Howard Baker of Tennessee � famously asked of Nixon 30 springtimes ago.

…Having read the report of Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, I expect Baker's question will resound again in another congressional investigation. The equally relevant question is whether Republicans will, Pavlov-like, continue to defend their president with ideological and partisan reflex, or remember the example of principled predecessors who pursued truth at another dark moment.

Today, the issue may not be high crimes and misdemeanors, but rather Bush's failure, or inability, to lead competently and honestly.

"You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror," Bush told Rumsfeld in a Wizard-of-Oz moment May 10, as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and senior generals looked on. "You are a strong secretary of Defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude." The scene recalled another Oz moment: Nixon praising his enablers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, as "two of the finest public servants I've ever known."

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Liberals show they can work together

…Name a major interest group aligned with the Democratic Party (the AFL-CIO, the trial lawyers, the League of Conservation Voters and the abortion rights organization NARAL), and it has a representative at the meetings that began last fall. As veteran organizer Cecile Richards, a former aide to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and the daughter of former Texas Democratic governor Ann Richards, puts it, "Some of these folks have never worked together before, and now that they are, it's kind of exciting." Richards, who heads America Votes, presides at the unity meetings of these organizations that (surprise!) all seem to have a vested interest in defeating George W. Bush for re-election. Under the nation's permissive campaign laws, the anti-Bush groups are allowed to coordinate their activities as long as they do not share information with a campaign, such as that of John Kerry's, or a Democratic Party organization.

Since 1993, a consortium of Republican-loyalist conservative groups has been holding Wednesday confabs hosted by Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. In a political year when the shock troops of the Democratic Party have been emulating the organizational moxie of the GOP right, it was inevitable that liberals would steal a page from Norquist's playbook. Asked about the competing America Votes effort, Norquist admitted he was "flattered" but quickly added skeptical comments about the ability of liberal groups to work together.

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'Time': Report to Congress short pages
By John Diamond and Laura Parker, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON � The Pentagon sought Sunday to explain why some 2,000 pages were missing from a congressional copy of a classified report detailing the alleged acts of abuse by soldiers against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement saying "if there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight." He was responding to a Time magazine report Sunday that about 2,000 of the report's 6,000 pages submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee were missing. The report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba consists of a declassified summary and about 6,000 pages of classified annexes, including statements from witnesses, prison guards and military intelligence officials.

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Wal-Mart Welfare

A new report released from Good Jobs First today shows that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has received more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from states for its stores and distribution centers. The subsidies have come as many states are forced by White House tax cuts and reductions in federal grants to make tough budget decisions. A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows states are cutting subsidies for publicly funded health insurance, child care, federal employment, both higher and lower education, and programs aimed at public safety and people with disabilities -- all this while ponying up taxpayer dollars to subsidize a retailer that took in more than $200 billion revenue and netted nearly $9 billion in profits last year,  even as it paid workers near-poverty wages, drove out local businesses and violated environmental regulations.

REPORT: WAL-MART DEPLETES TAX BASE: A key justification for corporate subsidies is the idea that a large project will expand overall business in an area; Wal-Mart executives tout their stores as a positive economic force in the community. But the Good Jobs First report argues that, unlike factories which add jobs and export products outside the region, big chain retailers like Wal-Mart "do little more than take revenues away from existing merchants and may put them out of business and leave their workers unemployed. It's quite possible that a new Wal-Mart will destroy as many (or more) jobs than it creates." And "since many Wal-Mart [jobs] are lower-paying and part-time, they will do less to stimulate the economy." Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First, says Wal-Mart's "negative effect on small businesses in the communities where it locates and its contribution to urban sprawl and traffic raise serious questions about the value of giving it sizable financial incentives to expand."

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I hate talking about race problems when there's more than one race present.

When I get to focus on one crew at a time I get useful discussions like the one at Blogcritics that followed up Joseph Taylor's foolishness. That discussion was useful because I got to point out the central reason Black and white people seem unable to come to terms over race:

But understand that you and I are dealing with different aspects of that legacy.

What problems does racism cause you, a reasonably well-educated white male from a fairly upper middle class background?

What problems does racism cause me, a 6'2" 185 lb Black male, self-educated, no degree, had to work up from messenger to Assistant VP at a bank, father a farmer, mother a laborer that eventually got a nice safe civil service job?

It's because we're discussion two different things. We're not discussion racism, we're discussing "how racism affects me."

I am curious what the practical ramifications are of your Black partisanship. Do you relate to me differently because I am White because of it?

Note that "the practical ramifications" aren't political, economic, social, but are personal to the questioner.

Black and white folks have the same practical definitions of racism: "References to race that will make me feel bad if I accept it as I understand it." So Joseph Taylor can rant about Black partisans, swear up and down he pays no regard to race, no suh, yet drop this gem in the discussion:

But then again, my logic professor was a white guy, so maybe my ignorant belief that attacking someone because he's white is fallacious stems from that... *L*

…demonstrating that race is only racist when it hurts his feelings somehow.

That Eric is so reasonable and Joseph so not while both show this pattern demonstrates this is a matter of understandings, not misunderstandings. And it explains why totally well meaning people can come up with (from my perspective) the worst ideas to "solve" racism. It's because they're addressing a different problem than the one that has been so damaging to us all.

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A fellow traveller.

The growth-above-all rule is not just something the Putin team worked up to get out of Kyoto responsibility. It is Putin's philosophy, one that differs sharply from the socially driven philosophies of Western Europe. Recently, Putin ordered Russian government offices and ministries to reduce staff by 20%. A radical 13% flat tax reduced tax evasion and increased revenues.

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Ronald Brownstein:
Washington Outlook
GOP Leaders Leaving Sacrifice for the Generations to Come

Today, President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress are engaged in a project unprecedented in American history � pursuing massive tax cuts while the nation is at war. The result is that we are paying for the war in Iraq, like the war in Afghanistan and the entire post-9/11 buildup in military strength and homeland security, almost entirely by increasing the national debt.

Bush is presiding over annual federal deficits so large that the Congressional Budget Office projects the publicly held federal debt will soar by 50% through 2010. In effect, that means passing on the bill for our defense to our children.

No earlier generation of Americans has done anything like it. McCain is right; it's a mark of shame.

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I know there'll be all this noise about confidentiality of sources, but you know what? People shouldn't feel safe outing CIA agents. It's that simple.

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Russert, Time Journalist Subpoenaed in CIA Case
From Times Wire Reports

May 24, 2004

NBC's Tim Russert and a journalist from Time Inc. have received federal subpoenas to face questioning about the alleged leak of an undercover CIA weapons expert's identity, but both news organizations said they would fight the subpoenas.

The companies said the subpoenas came from a special grand jury investigating whether the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of the agent, Valerie Plame, after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the White House on Iraq weapons claims.

Russert and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper had reported on the Plame controversy.

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Low-carb dieters knew it all along
In two recent studies, Atkins-style regimens brought faster results than low-fat diets, usually without bad effects on blood lipids.
By Rosie Mestel
Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2004

Obesity rates are rising, but science has barely weighed in on the best way for people to shed fat. That state of affairs is starting to change, and doctors are getting a surprise or two.

Last week, the popular carb-slashing Atkins diet received a dollop of endorsement from two new studies after years of being pooh-poohed by health specialists. The studies, published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, showed that the meat- and fat-rich regimen caused faster weight loss in the short term than a conventional low-fat diet.

More important � because many had feared that the diet, even if slimming, might unfavorably affect cholesterol levels and be bad for the heart � the low-carb regimen also seemed to improve the dieters' blood fat profiles.

But Atkins, like every other diet, is no miraculous fat-melter. The longer of the two studies suggested that a low-carb regimen might be harder to maintain beyond six months compared with a low-fat approach: By the end of the year, the low-fat dieters had caught up and lost the same � very modest � amount of heft.

In addition, even though on average people on low-carb diets didn't experience rises in their so-called "bad" (or LDL) cholesterol levels, about 30% of individuals did.

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Israeli Official Offers Empathy but Hits a Nerve
By JAMES BENNET

JERUSALEM, Monday, May 24 - Israel's justice minister, a Holocaust survivor, started a political uproar on Sunday when he attacked an Israeli plan to demolish Palestinian homes in Gaza and said that a suffering Palestinian woman reminded him of his grandmother.

The minister, Yosef Lapid, said he was not comparing the Israeli Army to the Nazis in his comments, made during a cabinet meeting.

But, he told Israel radio after the meeting, "I did think, when I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines - I did think, 'What would I say if it were my grandmother?' "

Mr. Lapid, who was born in a Hungarian-speaking part of Yugoslavia, lost relatives in the Holocaust, including his father and a grandmother.

His remarks fed an Israeli debate about a continuing Israeli military campaign, now in its sixth day, in the Palestinian neighborhoods of the southern Gaza Strip. At least 40 Palestinians have been killed during the raid, and Palestinians say Israeli armored bulldozers and tanks have destroyed more than 30 homes.

Another cabinet minister, Danny Naveh, who also lost relatives in the Holocaust, rejected any comparison to the Holocaust, even implied.

"Any analogy, even hinted at and - I am convinced from my acquaintance with Mr. Lapid - unintentional, creates greater anger and has no place in any form," he said.

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THE NATION
In a Reverse Migration, Blacks Head to New South
California, other regions lose African Americans feeling the pull of 'home' and a slower pace.
By Mark Arax
Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2004

In what demographers are calling a "full scale reversal" of the Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century, blacks are leaving California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and retracing steps to a place their families once fled � the South.

This population shift of hundreds of thousands of blacks is nowhere near the millions who left the South from 1910 to 1970. But the flow is sustained and large enough, according to a study released today by the Brookings Institution, that a new map of black America must be drawn.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Detroit � cities blacks once considered the promised land � have been seeing more blacks moving out than moving in. As part of this shift, the overall black population in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area dropped for the first time in 70 years.

The new migratory pattern reflects the ascendancy of Latinos and Asians and provides another sign that the high-water days of black community power � when Los Angeles boasted a black mayor for two decades � may be over.

"We came out to California to find gold, and many of us found it," said Noella Buchanan, a pastor at the Community African Methodist Episcopal Church in Corona. "But when it's time to retire, there's this desire to go back home. Even the children who grew up in California are feeling the pull. They're heading off to black colleges in Atlanta and North Carolina and staying there.

"Let's face it. Everything is crazy here. The traffic is crazy, the housing prices are crazy. They're finding a slower pace of life in the South. Out here, we're the forgotten minority. Back there, we're the chosen minority."

The migration out of California, a trend that began more than a decade ago, has grown as blacks from every socioeconomic class seek a better life in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Tennessee.

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May 23, 2004

Staying away from the news this weekend was supposed to give me space for some real world stuff I have to finish up. What actually happened was it allowed some unfinished thoughts to rise up and demand attention.

I am not superstitious of religious in any way you'd normally consider. I do, however, acknowledge synchronicities, defined as significant coincidence. Example: I post this reference to David Neiwert's Media Manifesto, mentioning what I intend to rant about post-election :

Only I (personally) have to prepare for the post-election world. This election is not going to be about the needs of minorities. To me it's only about removing a a group of people whose plans are disruptive to real conservatives and real libertarians as much as real progressives.

I am convinced that minorities will make no progress while the Bushista philosophy reigns…not even so much out of racism as out of the fact that the continuation of their influence requires the continuation of the current state of affairs. I am convinced the bottom 95% of the economic pile will make little to no progress for the same reason. Add to this that minorities defines minority issues as "issues of concern to minorities" while the mainstream defines it as "issues we have with minorities" and you'll understand why I will drop all this electioneering crap as soon as I feel the election process has moved from the free will phase to the destiny phase.

There will be plenty facts for me to check, and lots of asses presenting them.

…and the very next day an ass comes forward that needed checking. I refer to the inestimable Joseph Taylor, of Redeye's Corner who volunteered to demonstrate the difference between "issues of concern to minorities" and "issues I have with minorities" (and who, as a side note, I must say is full of shit, because he claimed he has things to take care of and so couldn't finish getting trounced for his asinine post at OSP nor answer my simple questions: what did you hope to accomplish by lying on and insulting me, and why did you think it would work? Meanwhile, the header at Redeye's Corner says it was last updated May 22nd).

And there's a brother I'm not linking to here that wrote a post that cries out for a response by no less than The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man's representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

and

The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one. Hence, very few Negro political leaders are impressive or illustrious to their constituents. They enjoy only limited loyalty and qualified support.

This relationship in turn hampers the Negro leader in bargaining with genuine strength and independent firmness with white party leaders. The whites are all too well aware of his impotence and his remoteness from his constituents, and they deal with him as a powerless subordinate. He is accorded a measure of dignity and personal respect but not political power.

The Negro politician therefore finds himself in a vacuum. He has no base in either direction on which to build influence and attain leverage.

I've broken a promise by documenting that. Oh, well.

Then there was Bill Cosby's demonstration that our collective mind suffers from the same dual-soul syndrome our individual consciousnesses do. And the whole Integration vs. Board of Education discussion/serial misrepresentation, the myopic misunderstanding of racism as a point rather than a vector. And my hovering on the edge of concluding the final outcome of the invasion is now just a matter of the passage of time. And maybe it's time for a change in focus (not coverage).

And that's just blog stuff. I'm considering restructuring pretty much everything in my universe. Again. Almost as much to make sure I still can do that sort of thing as because I see a need to do so.

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