June 05, 2004

I'm rearranging things so it will be easier for me to maintain, change or relocate the joint. First is the reference linkage on the sidebar, in particular The Public Library. I've always intended it to be more useful than it is.

I decided to set up a WordPress experiment. The modifications from the default templates are very minor. I use absolute positioning to place the sidebar, same technique as here. I stripped out the commenting stuff and customized the colors.

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Ex-President Reagan Dies After Alzheimer's Ordeal
Sat Jun 5, 2004 05:30 PM ET

By Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who forged a conservative revolution that transformed American politics, died on Saturday after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 93.

His wife, Nancy, and family members had gathered at his bedside at his house in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles.

The White House said President Bush had been informed of Reagan's death.

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Women

I have issues with women.

Why? Because I'm a man. That just seems to be the nature of things.

Okay, it's more complicated than that, but as I think about all the different guys I know they all have issues. They explain them in various ways (if they're aware of them at all), but the fact of having issues with women is so universal among men that I'm tempted to call it instinctual. I don't because all the issues seem to be rooted in the interaction of self and culture (ego) rather than directly in self.

I hope. Because I've never been great at relationships of any type, even lasting friendships. And women are too important a part of my life for me to walk around thinking foul-ups in this area are my fault.

Fighting the urge to drift into psychobabble, women are so important to guys like me because:
1.Sex. As organisms, carriers of the genome, our job is to reproduce with organisms that represent complementary genomes…a bullshit method of saying we automatically want to fuck. That's biology and I can't apologize for it, but I can recognize there's more than one way to balm the perpetual itch.
2.Synergy. When I'm in a satisfying relationship I do things differently because the relationship makes it possible. Pluses and minuses here because when the relationship isn't working the synergy drains instead of sustains, and any damage caused may be irreversible. Trust me.

(Again, not a perfect description. I want descriptions that recognize and distinguish that which is a repercussion of physical structure and that which is a repercussion of the meaning we infuse in those structures. But I don't want to be too airy-fairy about it…I want it recognizable.)

The body has order, structure that imposes requirements but it has no intelligence. The only way it knows it's gotten what it needs is by receiving the sensory input it 'expects' when its needs are met. So, for example, masturbation can quiet the physical need for sex. Mentally, though, we need methods that are compatible with the meanings we've attached to our physical requirements. We gotta do what "real men" do. Conversely, we have to feel what we do is what "real men" do.

Interestingly enough, if you flip the sexuality in the last two sentences, all the above applies equally well to women. If you vary the gender it fits gay folks as well. Fitting, given that we're all one species.

Anyway, fulfilling the sex thing is pretty straightforward. The synergy thing is where it gets interesting. It's essentially a division of labor and physically any number of arrangements could satisfy our essential human needs. But we are not essential humans; we've been sculpted by the elements, changed by time and events. Our experiences direct our attention to certain areas and activities, and we express our selves in terms of the potentials of those areas. We see our sexuality in terms of these potentials as well. Some of us find sufficient synergy in confirmation of our maleness, whatever that means in the realms in which we live. Others have a view of themselves that, translated back to physical reality, they cannot support. They look for mates that (at best) balance or (at worst) support them so their self image can be sustained. Race and class issues come into play. Some few see the relationship as a vehicle for growth…interesting because they must seek conflicts to surmount. There are those who see it as an activity that lasts as long as it provides greater benefit than cost. To some, the particular selection of a mate is an indicator of the station one has attained…Donald Trump come to mind. And we seek sex and synergy that meets the needs of these, and many, many other, restrictions.

Simply put, we want relationships that give us the benefits we're looking for without making us do anything different.

As a result, we got issues.

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The First Question

Given as I'm supposed to be honest, I guess the first thing we ought to consider is why guys like me don't always make the best decisions of which we are capable. It's not like we make these massive blunders on a daily basis. It's that the most effective or intelligent response isn't always the one we want. Stuff like beer, being horny (did I just repeat myself?), ambition or lack thereof, human stuff, keeps distorting our judgment.

You know how you act different at work than at church? You know why? (of course you do…it's just one of those times I have to give some background into how I describe things) Each set of behaviors is a compromise between ego-who you think you are (as opposed to self-who you are) and what you think you can get away with under the circumstances. This compromise is called a persona-Greek for "mask". There is a persona for each distinct identifiable scenario in your life and each persona expresses the compromise it represents in its judgments and decisions. This results in decisions that are biased in that they are based on a fragment of your life. Decisions that often have unexpected effects in other areas of your life…unexpected not because you couldn't see them coming but because you didn't.

Fact is, the only reason you can yell at yourself over bad decisions is because the guy doing the yelling isn't the guy making the decisions. That's a persona too, the one you look at yourself through. And that's about the only time you bring him out.

It seems to me that a lot of the sub-optimum decisions we think we make are really one persona second-guessing another. If you made the best decision you could, learn, let it go and move to the next thing.

But did you make the best decision you could, "best" meaning "left you stronger and/or more capable than any other decision you could have made?" Ummmmm…

Because dammit, the persona we view ourselves through was right. We could have done better. We could have stopped to think. We could have considered other important relationships. What we actually did think about, though, was those things we thought we had to. The things we didn't consider just weren't a high enough priority at the time.

You know, if in some situation you consistently miss doing the right thing, then doing the right thing isn't your goal. At least not in that situation. And if we deny it, we can't take steps to change it.

Now. For stuff more specific to guys like me.

I'm going to use cigarettes as an example for two reasons: it displays the basic pattern without going so deeply into my personal business as to embarrass me, and because I just lit one.

I remember when I started smoking, about 30 years ago. You and your boys, cool and adult as hell, cussing and smoking. Shortness of breath only lasted a few minutes after the cigarette. After a few weeks you didn't notice it anymore. We'd already heard cigarettes were bad for you, but we figured the benefits of smoking outweighed the incremental damage.

And there, in a sentence, is the problem. The perceived immediate benefits are judged to be more important than the immediate incremental damage suffered. It's like seeing life as a series of snapshots, judging each frame with no reference to the others, instead of as a movie. We didn't consider what would happen when the damage increments happened more frequently, or even before we fully recovered from the previous one.

I still smoke, by the way. It's addiction, of course, but it's habit as well-which may be worse. Our fundamental, reflexive habits were formed when we were young and didn't know shit.

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Introduction

I have a close friend who is a poet, author, and activist. She's seen essays and poems on a web site I used to run, and other, private stuff because she's special and she gets to do that. She thinks I should write. I haven't been writing more because the flow was clogged than any other reason. I've tried, and either had stuff go by too fast to write it down or dry up as I attempted to shape it into words.

Recently she told me what was especially good about essays I had written in the past. She said it was obvious that I was talking to a particular audience, had listened to them and was responding. I think there's something to that.

So I've decided to try this. I'm going to try to write about what's important…I always have (though you are highly unlikely to have ever seen my attempts). And the folks I'll be talking to are guys like me.

The target audience is important, especially when the range of inquiry is defined by so nebulously as "important stuff." This particular target audience lets me relax and write about whatever interests me because it has a strong chance of being of interest to other guys like me. But you other folks can read if you like.

Actually, I think there are a lot of guys like me. Guys who see better options than they choose. As I write, that's what I see as the main characteristic of guys like me…and to tell the truth, I don't like admitting it. I mean, it's one thing not to see the better options or to see them and not value what they offer. The problem is seeing the options, knowing their value and denying it for now.

Another thing about guys like me…most of us, anyway…making a living is a big part of our life. I purposely avoided saying "a job is a big part of our life" because some guys like me are hustlers.

Guys like me read non-fiction sometimes.

And our personal affairs at least as important to us as world and national affairs.

If you scanned a crowd looking for guys who feel they would fit that description, you'd find a lot of them. On the other hand, I'm sure I could give you a couple of my personal traits that no one else would admit to, thereby proving there are no guys like me at all. Some of them I'll likely have to explain, even to guys like me…the judgments I make are not always the common ones. Sometimes they are, but I think I need to be clear when they're not.

For instance.

I don't actively believe or disbelieve in the survival of an individual's personality after the death of the body. This means I don't consider a vast domain of concepts-as problems or solutions.

Another thing.

I see a difference between the physical planet and the worlds of meaning and experience we build on it. Mismatches between the world and our expectations of it are a major source of problems. When this happens to me, I tend to cede victory to the planet. This rarely changes my intent, but it will change my approach.

One more thing.

I agree with the work of Abraham Maslow. He says there's a series of needs that humans must satisfy pretty much in sequence:
1)Physiological: hunger, thirst, bodily comforts, etc.;
2)Safety/security: out of danger;
3)Belongingness and Love: affiliate with others, be accepted; and
4)Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition.
5)Cognitive: to know, to understand, and explore;
6)Aesthetic: symmetry, order, and beauty;
7)Self-actualization: to find self-fulfillment and realize one's potential; and
8)Transcendence: to help others find self-fulfillment and realize their potential.
(More detail, if you wish, at http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/regsys/maslow.html)

Makes sense to me…I actually don't think you can work a level without having resolved the issues of the lower ones. And it makes sense that people on different levels, having different needs, will respond differently in the same situation. So when I see someone do something stupid, I try to see if there's a level on which the action makes sense.

Sometimes it works. The other times, well, maybe they're on a higher level than me and I just can't figure it out. Or maybe they're stupid.

I don't want to be overly conceptual about this. I want to consider issues and problems that are important, that actually exist. I want to be nakedly honest about it.

[Actual reason for all this noise redacted]

May, 2000

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I started a series of essays about my world-view a couple of years ago, for personal reasons. I needed to get fundamental, and writing is still one of the best clarifying tools I have. Anyway, I had like three and a half essays and I thought I'd post them, what the hell. World premiere and all that

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Quote of note:

If the U.S. military treats one of its own soldiers this way — allowing him to be battered, and lying to cover it up — then imagine what happens to Afghans and Iraqis.

Oh, here's another one:

But Mr. Baker began suffering seizures, so the military sent him to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment of a traumatic brain injury. He stayed at the hospital for 48 days, was transferred to light duty in an honor burial detail at Fort Dix, N.J., and was finally given a medical discharge two months ago.

Meanwhile, a military investigation concluded that there had been no misconduct involved in Mr. Baker's injury. Hmm. The military also says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident.

Most appalling, when Mr. Baker told his story to a Kentucky reporter, the military lied in a disgraceful effort to undermine his credibility.

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Beating Specialist Baker
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The prison abuse scandal refuses to die because soothing White House explanations keep colliding with revelations about dead prisoners and further connivance by senior military officers — and newly discovered victims, like Sean Baker.

If Sean Baker doesn't sound like an Iraqi name, it isn't. Specialist Baker, 37, is an American, and he was a proud U.S. soldier. An Air Force veteran and member of the Kentucky National Guard, he served in the first gulf war and more recently was a military policeman in Guantánamo Bay.

Then in January 2003, an officer in Guantánamo asked him to pretend to be a prisoner in a training drill.

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Bush Meets Pope, Who Voices His Displeasure Over Iraq
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: June 5, 2004

ROME, June 4 - With President Bush at his side, Pope John Paul II on Friday reiterated his unhappiness over the invasion of Iraq and urged the president to speed the restoration of sovereignty to the Iraqi people.

Speaking haltingly in front of reporters and a television camera after a 15-minute private meeting with Mr. Bush at the Vatican, the pope mixed praise for the United States with a diplomatically worded but unmistakable expression of displeasure with the war and its aftermath.

The pope welcomed the establishment of an interim Iraqi government, but said it was "a moment of great concern" for the Middle East and called on the United States to work quickly toward a new United Nations resolution.

"It is the evident desire of everyone that this situation now be normalized as quickly as possible with the active participation of the international community and, in particular, the United Nations organization, in order to ensure a speedy return of Iraq's sovereignty, in conditions of security for all its people," the pope said.

He went on to suggest that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by the United States had undermined the broader battle against terrorism.

"In the past few weeks, other deplorable events have come to light which have troubled the civic and religious conscience of all, and made difficult a serene and resolute commitment to shared human values," the pope said, referring to the reports of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "In the absence of such a commitment, neither war nor terrorism will ever be overcome."

Thousands of demonstrators marched through Rome on Friday

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Court Rejects Phone Rule Extension
By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: June 5, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 4 - In a ruling that could reduce competition in local phone markets, a federal appeals court Friday rejected a request by regulators and the two largest long-distance telephone providers to extend regulations that give the companies and small rivals deep discounts for leasing the network equipment of the four Bell operating companies.

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Circling the Wagons
By DAVID BROOKS

Over the next few months, I hope to write a fair bit about the dominant feature of our political life: polarization. [P6: Could someone stop him please?] I hope to figure out how deeply split the nation is, and what exactly it is we are fighting about — questions that leave me, at present, confused.

Today's topic is what it means to be a partisan, because partisanship is the building block of polarization.

In a perfectly rational world, citizens would figure out which parties best represent their interests and their values, and they would provisionally attach themselves to those parties. If their situations changed or their interests changed, then their party affiliations would change.

But that is not how things work in real life. As Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Schickler argue in their book, "Partisan Hearts and Minds," most people either inherit their party affiliations from their parents, or they form an attachment to one party or another early in adulthood. Few people switch parties once they hit middle age. Even major historic events like the world wars and the Watergate scandal do not cause large numbers of people to switch.

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Pot.

Kettle.

Negro.

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Jobs and the Recovery
Published: June 5, 2004

It's certain that Mr. Bush will continue to credit his tax cuts for the comeback. These are the same cuts, you may recall, that were first designed as a means of "giving back" part of the mounting surplus to the public. Then, as the surplus evaporated, they were relabeled a stimulus plan. Now, with no surplus and no slump — and with looming deficits a threat to long-term growth — it's hard to think of what Mr. Bush can call his tax cuts to justify their renewal. The administration could go with truth in advertising, and simply relabel them a handout to wealthy families at a time of war and deficits.

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Bush Calls Terror 'Challenge of Our Time'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 5, 2004

Filed at 7:37 a.m. ET

ROME (AP) -- Trying to rally skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, President Bush said Saturday that the war on terrorism is the "challenge of our time'' and insisted that bitter disputes among U.S. allies over the war in Iraq were dissolving.

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Yes, l'il Georgie. It is indeed the challenge of our time, and we SO appreciate your arranging it for us. All that Democratic peace and prosperity was

Thank you for bringing a little excitement into our lives.

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Cheney could have been the direct source of the leak and simply be so delusional he himself doesn't think so.

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Cheney Reportedly Interviewed in Leak of C.I.A. Officer's Name
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, June 4 — Vice President Dick Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors who asked whether he knew of anyone at the White House who had improperly disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, people who have been involved in official discussions about the case said on Friday.

Mr. Cheney was also asked about conversations with senior aides, including his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, according to people officially informed about the case. In addition, those people said, Mr. Cheney was asked whether he knew of any concerted effort by White House aides to name the officer. It was not clear how Mr. Cheney responded to the prosecutors' questions.

The interview of the vice president was part of a grand jury investigation into whether anyone at the White House violated a federal law that makes it a crime to divulge the name of an undercover officer intentionally.

Mr. Cheney is not thought to be a focus of the inquiry, which Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, heads. Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed by the Justice Department as a special counsel in the case.

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Silly me. I looked at Technorati's most popular this morning. On the way to an extraordinarily vacuous piece on "The Blogosphere" keeping important stories like Bill Cosby's excoriation of all the Black folks in the world (that's how the right wingers seem to read the situation) by Matt Rosenberg on NRO I would up on an unnamed right wing blog. Said blog linked approvingly to one Delroy "I Wanna Be Dick Cheney When I Grow Up" Murdock, who on June 3, 2004 still trumpets (and I quote) Increasing evidence suggests Saddam ties to 9/11. He says

Fresh evidence suggests the attack on America may have featured Baathist fingerprints.

…and my first reaction was "Nigga, please," but I can't say that. Republicans love playing the race card, and that would distract from the fact that not a single date in the post is later than 2002 and not a single issue raised by Mr. Murdock was not widely reported. In fact, the article, if linked, would have more blue underlines than white space (dag, he's getting all racial again, maaaan…).

So instead I'll mere respond to the closing paragraph:

Absent surveillance footage of Saddam Hussein driving Mohamed Atta to Portland, Maine's airport en route to American Airlines Flight 11, war critics and Bush bashers refuse to believe that Iraq's deposed dictator might have been involved in 9/11.

That's because no one's offered any, like, proof. You know what proof is, don't you?

Still, Baathist files keep offering clues that the carnage of September 11 might not have caught Saddam Hussein totally by surprise.

That's because you keep rereading them and acting like you're surprised at what you found for the fifth time.

I should have paid attention to me spell checker. It kept offering the "Ignore" option on Delroy's name.

Weirdest of all, though was an NRO piece that identifies the panel on blogging Keven Drum said he was on the other day. The woman actually wrote:

Because this panel was called "L.A. Bloggers Take on Politics and the Media," I tried to make it reasonably balanced politically, so I invited Reason media critic Matt Welch, who's vaguely libertarian but is voting for Kerry; Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and screenwriter/mystery novelist Roger Simon, both of whom run anti-Islamofascist sites and (although basically Democrats) are probably voting for Bush; Moxie, a freelance writer/photographer and staunch Republican; Kevin Drum, who used to run his own left-of-center Calpundit blog until it was annexed by the neoliberal Washington Monthly; and Slate's Mickey Kaus, who may not like Kerry but is planning to vote for him anyway.

The panel was basically evenly divided, and in the strictest sense probably tilted left.

which last sentence proves her delusional.

Where's that "Ignore All" menu option? Oh, there it is, good…

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June 04, 2004

Check this correction:

- Because of a misplaced pronoun, Clarence Page's Wednesday column incorrectly indicated that Democrat John Kerry had shifted his positions on nation-building, a Department of Homeland Security, an amendment against gay marriage and negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. In fact, it was President Bush who changed his positions on those issues.

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I use the Google toolbar (and the Firebird equivalent) and I just noticed my Google page rank is 7/10.

I think I need to find out just what this page rank business is about.

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That speech by Robert Borosage that I said troubled me? Here's the part under consideration:

This is not an impossible dream. Last weekend, we celebrated the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation in World War II. That generation, raised in the Depression, steeled in the war, shared service and sacrifice. The wealthiest paid taxes of over 90 percent to help pay for that war. African Americans left segregated communities to fight for this country. Japanese Americans left intern camps They came home and passed the GI bill opening up college and training to an entire generation. They subsidized housing to create the American dream. They organized unions to insure that profits and productivity were shared. For 25 years, they built the broad middle class that made America strong, and we all grew together.

You know what that very same time frame looked like for Black folks?

The Advantages Grow, Generation to Generation

Less known are more recent government racial preferences, first enacted during the New Deal, that directed wealth to white families and continue to shape life opportunities and chances today.

The landmark Social Security Act of 1935 provided a safety net for millions of workers, guaranteeing them an income after retirement. But the act specifically excluded two occupations: agricultural workers and domestic servants, who were predominately African American, Mexican, and Asian. As low-income workers, they also had the least opportunity to save for their retirement. They couldn't pass wealth on to their children. Just the opposite. Their children had to support them.

Like Social Security, the 1935 Wagner Act helped establish an important new right for white people. By granting unions the power of collective bargaining, it helped millions of white workers gain entry into the middle class over the next 30 years. But the Wagner Act permitted unions to exclude non-whites and deny them access to better paid jobs and union protections and benefits such as health care, job security, and pensions. Many craft unions remained nearly all-white well into the 1970s. In 1972, for example, every single one of the 3,000 members of Los Angeles Steam Fitters Local #250 was still white.

But it was another racialized New Deal program, the Federal Housing Administration, that helped generate much of the wealth that so many white families enjoy today. These revolutionary programs made it possible for millions of average white Americans - but not others - to own a home for the first time. The government set up a national neighborhood appraisal system, explicitly tying mortgage eligibility to race. Integrated communities were ipso facto deemed a financial risk and made ineligible for home loans, a policy known today as "redlining." Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to whites. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans.

These government programs made possible the new segregated white suburbs that sprang up around the country after World War II. Government subsidies for municipal services helped develop and enhance these suburbs further, in turn fueling commercial investments. Freeways tied the new suburbs to central business districts, but they often cut through and destroyed the vitality of non-white neighborhoods in the central city.

Yeah. "America was never America to me." Langston Hughes hit it.

This is documented fact. This explains the wealth gap…which contributes to the health gap, and the education gap, etc. All your opinions can only modify how you see this reality. And yeah, I can appreciate Mr. Borosage's speech, but I can't help but react to the way it totally misses the experience of Black people in the USofA.

"America was never America to me."

You know what, though? I want everyone to take the Democrats at their word. I want them held to their professed principles. Because they chose this poem, I didn't choose it for them. And because they chose it, because they put it from and center,

…no one can pretend not to know the deal anymore.

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hat tip to Talkleft

The Serious Implications Of President Bush's Hiring A Personal Outside Counsel For The Valerie Plame Investigation
by John W. Dean

Recently, the White House acknowledged that President Bush is talking with, and considering hiring, a non-government attorney, James E. Sharp. Sharp is being consulted, and may be retained, regarding the current grand jury investigation of the leak revealing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert operative.

(Plame is the wife of Bush critic and former ambassador Joe Wilson; I discussed the leak itself in a prior column, and then discussed further developments in the investigation in a follow-up column.)

This action by Bush is a rather stunning and extraordinary development. The President of the United States is potentially hiring a private criminal defense lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the White House is doing all it can to bury the story, providing precious little detail or context for the President's action.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush explained his action by saying, "This is a criminal matter. It's a serious matter," but he gave no further specifics. White House officials, too, would not say exactly what prompted Bush to seek the outside advice, or whether he had been asked to appear before the grand jury.

Nonetheless, Bush's action, in itself, says a great deal. In this column, I will analyze what its implications may be.

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I found this speech at TomPaine.com.

Time To Take Back America
Robert Borosage
June 03, 2004

You know what problems hold our nation back, but what would America look like if progressive leaders grabbed the reigns of power? Here, veteran political activist Bob Borosage talks about what progressives are for. He outlines his vision for an America where the “blessings of prosperity and growth are widely shared."

It's a nice speech, and the really good stuff is below the fold; read it or not, whatever because in an hour or two I'm going to write about why a part of it makes me a little bitter. The very last part I quoted. But I'll quote the offending part directly later so you still don't have to load the extended text.

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If the election this fall is a referendum on the Bush record and that proposition, the president will be in trouble. He knows that. That’s why he will campaign as a war president, and wrap himself in the troops that he put at risk. That’s why he unleashed $70 million in mostly negative attack ads on a Democratic candidate who hadn’t even received his party’s nomination yet. That’s why he’s posturing on the Patriot Act and pushing for a constitutional amendment on gay marriage. Bush knows he has little upside, so he must peddle fear, sow division, and scare the hell out of Americans about the threat posed by John Kerry.

But for this country, the fate of this administration is not the sole question. Whatever happens this fall, we must challenge the ideas, the policies and the power of the so-called movement right that dominates our politics.

And to do that, progressives will have to move on up. For the last years, we’ve been called upon to oppose—mobilizing to block one lame-brained initiative after another. We rallied against the tax cuts. We stopped them from packing the courts completely. We mobilized millions against the war before it started. We exposed their attempt to further media consolidation. We stopped their big oil energy plan. We helped defend affirmative action. We’ve won significant victories against great odds.

But the vast majority of Americans are looking for a different direction. And they aren’t clear what the choices are.

So we’ve got to go from opposition to proposition. We’ve got to start mobilizing about what we are for, not simply what we are against.

Frankly, this won’t be easy. They have left a lot of ruin behind them. Worse, the conservative grip on our politics has not simply circumscribed our choices, it has crippled our imaginations.

When fighting off another tax cut for the wealthy, it is hard to imagine having the resources actually to revive our schools. Small ideas and small steps seem more plausible. Changes commensurate with the size of our challenges seem beyond us.

We have to move on up. Offer Americans a clear vision of what could be, an agenda that deals both with kitchen table concerns and our national “situations” before they become calamities.

No single political leader or candidate can do this. Bush is wedded to the right-wing agenda because he has little choice. The right provides the ideas, the organizers, the leaders and the energy for his party. They built independent institutions—think tanks, political action committees, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to mobilize the base, coalitions across issues, and a message and attack machine that is unparalleled in our politics.

Now progressives are starting to build that independent capacity. You’ll hear reports on various aspects of it—the new Center for American Progress, the expanded Institute for America’s Future, the ground operations at Americans Come Together and the AFLCIO, the coordination of America Votes, the stunning creativity of Moveon.org as it tries to reinvent our democracy for the internet age. Progressive Majority's new efforts to recruit and support the next generation of Paul Wellstones. This conference both reports on that effort and is a part of it.

We should do this in the confidence, as Stan Greenberg will demonstrate, that a majority of Americans are ready. If we provide them with a clear choice—between the politics of hope and the politics of fear—they stand with us.

For investing in schools rather than tax cuts on the rich
For health care as a right, not a privilege
For defending Social Security, Medicare, the public school, the national parks
For an America that leads; that finds its security in collective security, not as a 'globocop' seeking to police the world
For raising the minimum wage, empowering workers and holding corporations accountable
For fair trade rather than corporate free trade
A renewed democracy over crony capitalism and big-money politics
Energy independence over big oil subsidies
Choice, equal opportunity, civil rights, environmental protection—these are mainstream values now.
We can build an America where full employment comes first, and the blessings of prosperity and growth are widely shared.

We can build an America where every child gets the nutrition and health care and pre-school needed to make equal opportunity a reality from the start.

We can build an America that guarantees its citizens affordable health care and the highest quality public education.

We can build an America that builds a democracy that is a beacon to the world. That secures its people without trampling their liberties. That celebrates voting and service, and guarantees that every vote will count and be counted.

We can build an America that addresses its situations before they become calamities.

This is not an impossible dream. Last weekend, we celebrated the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation in World War II. That generation, raised in the Depression, steeled in the war, shared service and sacrifice. The wealthiest paid taxes of over 90 percent to help pay for that war. African Americans left segregated communities to fight for this country. Japanese Americans left intern camps They came home and passed the GI bill opening up college and training to an entire generation. They subsidized housing to create the American dream. They organized unions to insure that profits and productivity were shared. For 25 years, they built the broad middle class that made America strong, and we all grew together.

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Jeanne D'Arc at Body and Soul:

It is very hard to talk about the promise of America without falling into self-congratulation and delusions, or worse, into a sense of entitlement. The language has been sullied, maybe beyond cleansing, by too many speeches in which our "values" are a nicely wrapped package we can hand someone else, or even force on someone who doesn't want them. America as an inheritence from a rich daddy, which allows you to take whatever you want, screw up repeatedly, and never pay for your mistakes, and still believe that your the best piece of work God ever created.

Faced with that, it makes perfect sense to look inside the package and point out that there isn't much under the pretty wrapping, that justice and free speech and equality and all those other nice things are more talked about then practiced. And I won't disagree with anybody who presses me to look at the emptiness inside the box. But I still think the box itself is a framework for something wonderful.

Which is why, unlike Timothy Noah, I think John Kerry's new campaign slogan -- "Let America be America again." -- is marvelous.

More typically good stuff on the other side of the link.

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Quotes of note:

On a positive note, the report said the ending of Saddam's rule "must be counted a major contribution to human rights in Iraq."

and

"Everyone accepts the good intentions of the Coalition governments as regards the behavior of their forces in Iraq," Ramcharan said. Iraq could now be "on the road to democracy, the rule of law, and governance that is respectful of human rights."

and

Ramcharan's spokesman, Jose Luis Diaz, denied suggestions that the report's language had been watered down at the insistence of the United States. "There was no pressure on this office," he told Reuters.

UN Says Coalition Troops Violated Rights in Iraq

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations (news - web sites)' top human rights official said on Friday U.S.-led occupation forces had committed "serious violations" of international humanitarian law in Iraq (news - web sites) and had ill-treated ordinary Iraqis.

…The 45-page report cited one former Abu Ghraib detainee, Saddam Abood Al-Rawi, 29, as telling U.N. investigators he was subjected to 18 days of torture at the U.S.-run prison.

This included the pulling of teeth, kicking and beating and threats of rape, and warnings that he would be killed if he told a visiting international Red Cross team about his treatment.

Ramcharan, a British-trained barrister from Guyana and long-time U.N. official, suggested that among the more serious violations was the jailing of large numbers of Iraqis "without anyone knowing how many, for what reasons, for how long...and how they were being treated."

His report, which was submitted to U.S. and British officials for comment on Wednesday, cited Iraqis interviewed in Amman as speaking of "arbitrary arrests and detention as an ongoing phenomenon" since the invasion.

In a clear reference to the Abu Ghraib incidents, since when several U.S. soldiers working there have been detained, Ramcharan said "willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of detainees was a grave breach of international law.

Such acts, he added, "might be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal."

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Darfur 'World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis'

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jun 3 (IPS) - Everyone seems to agree on the severity of the crisis that threatens some two million people in the Sudanese region of Darfur, but governments are focussing on a response based on humanitarian aid, while human rights groups are calling for urgent protection for the civilian population.

Even in the best-case scenario, humanitarian experts estimate that more than 300,000 people will die as a result of violence and starvation.

Amnesty International, based in London, holds the Janjaweed -- militias backed by Sudan's armed forces -- responsible for the massive human rights violations suffered by hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur, a region in the country's northwest.

Human Rights Watch, another powerful non-governmental organisation, headquartered in the United States, maintains that Darfur is carrying out a campaign of ”ethnic cleansing” promoted by the government of Sudan against three communities located in the Darfur area.

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Republicans struggling with insecurity

George Tenet's resignation has added to a growing feeling that the US may be safer with a Democrat in the White House, says Philip James

Friday June 4, 2004

…To the outside world, it is looking more and more as though Mr Bush cannot keep his house in order. What is more, his national security credentials - which he was hoping would safeguard his re-election - look increasingly shaky.

John Kerry now has the chance to press home a theme he has carefully exploited over the last few days. It is one going against conventional political wisdom: that the US is safer with a Democrat in office than a Republican.

For the better part of three decades, and certainly from the Carter presidency to the present day, the operating assumption has been that Republicans are strong on defence, Democrats not so much.

However, a poorly-prosecuted and unnecessary war, Mr Tenet's resignation and what promises to be a long, hot summer of revelations about just how badly this administration has mismanaged the nation's intelligence apparatus threaten to alter the equation.

Mr Kerry may be able to flip the "strong on defence" stereotype and fully reclaim it for the Democrats for the first time since the Truman era.

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Juliette at Baldilocks wrote a really impassioned article about (and these are quotes, not scare-quotes) "the large-scale fatherless problem in the black community" that was inspired by a conversation at Dean's World. The discussion is about an article by Glen Sacks and Reginald Brass that begins thus:

National Fatherhood Initiative's Ad Campaign Insults African-American Fathers
By Glenn Sacks and Reginald Brass

"Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. Daddy. Eventually kids stop believing in things they don't see."

"Each Night Millions of Kids Go To Sleep Starving. For Attention from Their Dads."

"Dear Daddy, My Mommy Can't Be My Daddy Too."

Bus stop ads with pictures of small African American children delivering these biting messages to their absent fathers can be seen all over Los Angeles County. They are part of a nationwide campaign to reduce fatherlessness in the African-American community. The campaign is sponsored by the National Fatherhood Initiative, an influential Maryland-based nonprofit organization which has had ties with both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

While the NFI's goal is laudable, research shows that fathers bear only part of the responsibility for black fatherlessness. The other major factor is one which the NFI campaign completely ignores--the obstruction of fathers' visitation rights by custodial mothers.

The conversation at Dean's was brief but interesting.You should read it and the article they discuss before reading Juliette's post.

Okay, this starts a little blog-snarky, but bear with me, I need to get it out of my system. There's some clown named Oscar who said at Dean's

This whole situation is another result of the Left's promotion of victimhood as a way of life.

..like that had anything to do with the conversation. I mean, who's playing victim here...the father denied visitation? the mother who is abandoned? the child with no say in the matter?

Now that that's done...

La Shawn Barber, who I've never had a discussion with, said:

The child support issue is far down on the list...

The undeniable truth is that 70 percent of black babies are brought into this world without the benefit of married parents, no fathers living with them or even involve in their lives. If black liberals find the ads offensive, tough.

My reaction will depend on whether the commas in her second sentence serve as "or"s or "and"s. If they are "and"s, she's flat wrong. And the "black liberals" thing is a bit gratuitous, but fine. In any case Black men in general do raise their kids, are involved. That they didn't do the ritual is proof of a couple of things: that the "marriage" word and ritual aren't required to do the job, and that people should be judged based on what they actually do rather than whether they've submitted to a specific ritual before they did it.

Juliette places most of the blame for the situation on Black women. Her argument would have a strong appeal to Conservatives and conservatives. I wonder if Conservatives recognize what it will take in situ to get the ideal family back to its dominant place. I mean getting seriously fundamental, children are hitting puberty at, what, nine years old? Kids 11-12 years old hit full in the face with a bag of adult hormones on the regular—no way they know how to handle it. Who is there to keep them in check? Both parents have to work to pay the bills. One parent quits, everyone does without…in a world with a someteen zillion dollar industry dedicated to making you want things you don't need, a world where possessions give one social status.

It's a hot mess. I can't tell you why kids ripen so fast nowadays, but if that can't be changed then horny twelve year olds will fuck if not physically prevented…which means one or more parents have to stay with them. And I am asking if this is important enough to Conservatives to insure the economy does not require both parents to work in order to survive. I think that's a non-starter. But what's the other options? I honestly don't know and, to be honest, no longer have a dog in that race.

Speaking of race, you'll notice I don't see this as a race specific problem. I'll justify that later; I have to dig out my copy of Two Nations by Andrew Hacker because he's already packaged the necessary stats very nicely.

Totally as a reaction to the issue, not to anyone's specific statement, a lot of Conservative social programs remind me of those wealthy seashore communities where they truck in sand every spring to replace that which the natural processes of the sea have removed. Observe without value judgments (value judgments are called for, just not while observing) and you'll have to recognize that certain genies just will NOT go back in the bottle.

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Technology industry hits out at 'patent trolls'
By Maggie Shiels
In California
Mad cap patents ranging from protecting a method of painting by dipping a baby's bottom into paint or a system for keeping track of people queuing for the bathroom may soon be a thing of the past if the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has its way.

Such patents, while humorous, clearly show both how broken the American patent system and how lax standards are hurting innovation when it comes to business, the Commission says.

"The intellectual property system was designed to create incentives for people to innovate by giving them, for want of a better word, a monopoly on their ideas for a certain period of time," FTC commissioner Mozelle Thompson told BBC News Online.

"But we have seen instances where companies use that monopoly in an anti-competitive way, sometimes to prevent other products from getting to market, to prevent people from sharing ideas and to prevent the kind of innovation that the patent system is really trying to spur on."

Cash needed

Part of the problem is a shortage of money.

The National Academy of Sciences is calling for more funding for the patent office where 3,000 examiners handle 350,000 applications a year with an average of 17 to 25 hours to check on the validity of a patent application.

Businesses claim a lack of due diligence at this stage often results in patents being granted that should not see the light of day.

Indeed, academic studies have shown that half of all issued US Patents should not have been approved and the Patent Office ultimately greenlights over 95% of all original applications to issue as a patent.

This compares with 65% in Europe or Japan.

Patent trolls

An added problem is the growth of so called 'patent trolls' who can be likened to modern day highway robbers cashing in on the problem.

Google's Rana: The system is easy to abuse

These are lawyers and investors who buy cheaply or assume control over paper patents, mistakenly granted largely to failed companies, explains David Simon, computer firm Intel's chief patent counsel.

The trolls can use these patents to threaten to shut down the entire computing industry with a court order injunction, no matter how minor the feature that has been patented is.

Mr Simon cites one case where a patent troll claimed a patent they had bought for about $50,000 was infringed by all of Intel's microprocessors from the Pentium II onwards and that they were seeking $7 billion in damages.

In the end, the case was thrown out by the court, but it still cost Intel $3m to fight it, Mr Simon says.

"This has become more and more prevalent because people see it as a very, very profitable business model."

That is because the only thing the trolls have to lose is their patent, which typically they have a very low investment in.

"If you are going to trial as a big company, you are risking having a court enjoin you from selling your products. That's a serious risk you have to consider so it's probably cheaper to pay them a hundred thousand dollars than to fight them," says Mr Simon.

Patent experts put the cost of litigation at $2m per party per case.

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Bush Steps Closer to Allies

…After the rawest relations since World War II, what might drive America and its allies toward each other are the facts on the ground.

The biggest fact covering the largest ground is an unstable Iraq (though from Bush's side, the need to deflate Kerry's argument must come into play, as well). It is in no country's interest to see Iraq's democratic experiment fail. Certainly Bush, who has staked his presidency on the war on terrorism, will do everything he can to ensure Iraq succeeds. And since terrorists brought jihad to Europe's doorstep in Madrid this spring, Europe's leaders surely are more sensitized to the implications of failure in Iraq - turning that country into a long-term haven for terrorists and setting back the cause of democratic reform in the Middle East.

One can already observe the outreach on the part of the Bush administration. Its most recent and visible step toward its allies is its joint resolution with the Blair government, seeking UN support for the coming transfer of authority in Iraq. Several members of the UN Security Council have had problems with the resolution - as does the new Iraqi interim government. Bush, however, sounded positively conciliatory this week, saying, for instance, he could be "flexible" on the issue of US troops in Iraq, and throwing out bons mots to the French media in advance of his trip to Paris Saturday.

What might the administration expect in terms of help from its allies who opposed the war? Not troops in Iraq, as it wisely recognizes - not with the steady stream of casualties, anti-Bush sentiment in Europe, and certainly not with the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal continuing to play out. But Iraqi security forces need to be trained, the country needs to be reconstructed, and NATO needs reinforcing in Afghanistan, especially as that country prepares for elections.

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Diversity factors in search process
by Kelly Rohrs
June 03, 2004

As part of ongoing efforts to increase diversity across the University, officials are taking new steps to diversify Duke's applicant pools for upper-level administrative positions.
Under the new guidelines, all hiring short lists will go through a checkpoint to ensure the pool of applicants is broad enough. A list of the candidates under consideration will go to the search's direct supervisor and to the Office of Institutional Equity. If the candidates do not represent a sufficiently broad spectrum of backgrounds, the department will be encouraged to expand the search before preceding to the hiring phase.

"This shouldn't be a special step," said Ben Reese, vice president for institutional equity. "This should be the way we recruit the best people for one of the best institutions in the country."

OIE has had the authority to advise on searches since a 2001 University task force for recruitment and retention of minority administrators recommended the office's increased involvement. A representative from OIE participates directly in searches for senior level positions, but the consultation process for other administrative searches has remained uncodified until the recent guidelines.

The new process is not an affirmative action program, as it affects only searches. "This is about just expanding the net but still hiring the most competent person," said Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta, who is currently overseeing two administrative searches. "I don't think it affects the hiring in any way."

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Oh, but it will affect hiring. By broadening the search, looking at more people, you might find an unusual combination of skills and/or experiences. You might accidentally find a more qualified candidate.

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I saw this one at Discriminations and decided to pluck the cool part from the middle of the post. Without the opening and closing paragraphs it's pretty sane.

A number of months ago the husband of a maternity patient prevailed upon hospital administrators to keep blacks out of his wife's room.

For several days in September, supervisors told African American employees to keep out of a woman's room because her husband, who was white, insisted that only white employees assist in the delivery of his child.

Staffers said they were only trying to prevent a confrontation with the man. But the decision violated the hospital's antidiscrimination policy and prompted outrage among employees and community groups.

The hospital apologized, as it certainly should have done; the ususal suspect consultants on multicultural sensitivity were called in to conduct focus groups and surveys; and their report will soon "dictate terms of a 'cultural competency' training program, which will be mandatory for the hospital's 4,600 employees." The goal, said hospital vice president Meg McGoldrick, is to "ensure that diversity exists in our hospital, and that we're handling these issues appropriately."

It seems to me that the only cultural incompetence on display here is the hospital administrators' inability to recognize that what they need to do is simple, not complicated. They do not need to worry about such politically correct gaseous euphemisms as "cultural competence" or even "diversity." Instead, they should simply enforce their already existing non-discrimination policy.

There is such a thing as overkill. What's going to happen here is, everyone who was not involved in the stupid decision is going to see this training program as a kind of punishment for someone else's misdeeds. Actual repercussions falling visibly on the ones responsible for the decision…NOT scapegoats, that's all too readily recognizable…would be a more effective educational mechanism.

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Or at least shade it a bit further right so Cobb isn't fragged. Yet.

Poetic Blacks & Commie Rats

Now is one of those occasions that the corrective influence of blackfolks on particularly rabid elements needs to be heard. I heard somebody going 'round saying Langston Hughes was a commie rat and there ain't gonna be no crap like that. Although I don't see it as my life's mission to defend every African American from every smear any nut is liable to make, beating up on Langston Hughes is something I don't take very kindly.

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Quote of note:

The procedure was known among practitioners as "dilation and extraction." Anti-abortion groups renamed it "partial-birth abortion," a term that was not scientific, accurate or even coherent. They sought to blur the distinction between abortion and infanticide by making the procedure sound like an interrupted birth when, in fact, it was a second-trimester abortion. In short, the ban was conceived as a public relations tool. Even some right-to-lifers complain that it's just for show.

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Abortion Foes Let Their Zeal Trump Strategy
By William Saletan

June 4, 2004

Leaders of the anti-abortion movement are up in arms over this week's ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, signed into law by President Bush last fall, is unconstitutional.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said the ruling reflected the judge's "deep personal hostility to the law." [P6: while the distortion and manipulation of language (D and E vs "partial birth") shows Conservative deep and personal hostility to truth, much less the law of the land] Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said it showed how judges "impose their philosophies on judicial proceedings." [P6: Only progressive judges, though. Conservative judges would NEVER impose their philosophies on judicial proceedings] The White House announced that Bush would defend the ban in order to build a "culture of life." [P6: if he wants a "culture of life" he should check that cheese sandwich he left on the nightstand]

Parts of the opinion by U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton do suggest bias. But it is not one judge's hostility or philosophy that imperils the partial-birth ban as it heads toward the U.S. Supreme Court. It is the hostility and philosophy of the ban's own advocates, whose determination to moralize the language of the debate and to build a "culture of life" makes their legislation medically confusing and resistant to judicial line-drawing. They are an army of crusaders lost in a war of legal argument.

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The Justice Department really comes up short of its name under Ashcroft

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COMMENTARY
You Have Rights -- if Bush Says You Do
By Jonathan Turley

June 3, 2004

This week, the U.S. Justice Department held an extraordinary news conference. After insisting for two years that details of the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen accused of being an "enemy combatant," had to be kept secret even from the federal courts, the Justice Department suddenly released detailed information on his interrogations and their results. What made this press conference particularly notable was its intended audience: the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court is currently reviewing the Padilla case, with a decision expected in the next few weeks, and there is a growing question of whether a majority can be found to support President Bush's claims of absolute authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without filing charges.

It is, of course, considered highly improper to stage such a news conference while a case is pending. Indeed, such a stunt is likely to outrage some members of the court. But the administration appeared to be playing for the one swing justice: Sandra Day O'Connor, who, during the arguments in April, was openly struggling to find any plausible rationale for giving a president absolute power over citizens. With the record now closed, the only realistic chance of getting such information to O'Connor was her morning newspaper.

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June 03, 2004

Rev. Al Sharpton joining CNBC as political commentator
Thursday, June 3, 2004

(06-03) 13:26 PDT NEW YORK (AP) --

Rev. Al Sharpton is joining CNBC as a political commentator for its coverage of the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the network announced Thursday.

The outspoken civil rights leader and former candidate for the 2004 presidential nomination will share his views on "Capital Report," "Dennis Miller" and the new "McEnroe" (scheduled to premiere in July), among other CNBC shows.

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From Capitol Hill Blue

Bush Leagues
Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jun 3, 2004, 05:28

Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

White House spokesmen, however, dismiss the hiring of outside counsel as a routine precaution.

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I ain't saying much because Erica can handle her business. I'm just saying you got time to grow up, and you should take advantage of it.

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TAXES – STUDY SHOWS CUTS MEAN NET LOSS FOR MOST AMERICANS:

A new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and the Tax Policy Center shows more than three-quarters of all households will end up net losers when the government actually pays for President Bush's tax cuts. And no matter how the government eventually decides to pay for the cuts, "The net 'losers' would be concentrated among low- and middle-income households." Only those in the top 20% of the income bracket would register a net gain from the cuts. The report concludes: "The tax cuts are often portrayed by their supporters as painless and simply 'giving people their money back.' But the numbers presented above indicate that the substantial majority of American households ultimately will be made worse off by the tax cuts, because the tax cuts ultimately will have to be financed."

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You really need to read what Jay Allen has to say:

I’ve seen more than a few people around the net offering MT 2.661 for download as an act of rebellion against Six Apart and the new MT 3.0 licenses. Most of them stated that they had read the MT 3.0 license and decided they liked the 2.661 license better. Most of them lamented the fact that MT 2.661 is no longer available for download from the MT site.

Well, I hate to break it to you if you’re one of those users (and I’m being kind by not linking to you) but not only is MT 2.661 available for download (and has been for some time, see screenshot), but you are in violation of your preferred license. Or didn’t you read that part about redistribution?

I'd heard about this, but made the error of looking in my Typepad account page instead of the MovableType site account page.

Movable Type 2.661 IS still available. It's hidden away unfortunately; SixApart should seriously consider putting that link somewhere much more obvious if they really consider version 3.0 a developer release. But if you're one of the folks redistributing 2.661, you really need to stop. You don't really want to be a warez site.

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I don't have to be political ALL the time.

I'm soooo close to version 1.60 of MTClient I can taste it. I have a beta tester who has grief with cut-and-paste from Outlook Express, and he's been SO damn useful I'd have to solve it even if he were the only Outlook Express user in the country (not the case, worse luck...).

Meanwhile, y'all know I've been testing lightweight CMSes to see which provides the best interface to The Public Library. Maturity, capability and price concerns means I've been looking at Movable Type, Wordpress and ExpressionEngine. This is pretty much where I'm at as regards this specific project:

System	Advantages	Disadvantages
Movable Type	I'm VERY familiar with the system With plugins I can get the UI for the site that I'm looking for System documentation out the wazoo	Perl - This is only a problem because I don't do Perl. Assuming success, I may have to buy a commercial license
Wordpress	The administrative UI is easy to use Most of the functionality I need is in there already. In particular the multi-page posts work really well	No local documentation. I really don't like the tendency nowadays to keep all the documentation online.
ExpressionEngine	Easily the most powerful of the set. Almost seems like waste when folks use it just for blogging. The first plug-in system I've seen where immediately on reading the docs I said, "Hey, I can do that!"	Single post pagination doesn't let you specify where the page breaks fall Archive listing pagination doesn't work for date-based archive Remote posting capability limited to moblogging/email posting

This isn't a thorough review, of course. It's strictly related to the capabilities that will make my project possible or impact the ease of carrying it out.

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Wrong George is leaving.

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CIA Director Tenet Resigns
Bush Says Tenet Will Leave in Mid-July for Personal Reasons

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; 11:39 AM

CIA Director George J. Tenet has submitted his resignation and will leave the agency in mid-July, President Bush announced today.

Bush and CIA officials said the resignation was for personal reasons. The CIA officials denied that Tenet quit or was pressured to leave because of criticism of U.S. intelligence over the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or missed clues to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist plot.

"He told me he was resigning for personal reasons," Bush said. "I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people."

Bush said he had accepted Tenet's letter of resignation, which Tenet submitted at a White House meeting Wednesday night.

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Quote of note:

On Tuesday, Senate Republican staff members floated a possible compromise: If the Republican hold-outs would accept a budget framework negotiated with the House, the Republican leaders would support a separate pay-as-you-go rule that would only apply to the Senate.

But that idea vanished before Republican leaders had even proposed it, apparently because some Senate Republicans viewed it as a capitulation to opponents of the tax cuts.

Of course, the REAL reason it should never have even been raised is, it's empty nonsense. I mean, how would it work? The Senate bills must be the "pay as you go" type while House bills can be free-wheeling wastrels?

And who REALLY believes they'd pass that second rule anyway?

Republicans Ponder Not Adopting a Budget This Year
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, June 2 - They have tried sweet-talk and dire warnings, insults and bluffing tactics. None of it has worked, which is why a growing number of Republicans are beginning to despair about agreeing on a budget plan for next year.

Embarrassing as that would be for the party that controls both houses of Congress, many Republicans are concluding they would be better off with no budget plan than with one that would require them to pay the cost of permanently extending last year's tax cuts.

Senate Republican leaders, back from their Memorial Day recess, showed little sign on Wednesday of persuading a small band of rebels within their own party to drop their insistence on "pay as you go" rules.

The four Republican dissenters, joined by most Democrats, are demanding rules that would force Congress to pay the cost of any new tax cuts either with spending cuts or tax increases in other areas.

The impasse has already undermined President Bush's top domestic goal, which is to make the tax cuts permanent, and it will apparently postpone major budget decisions until after the elections.

It has also exposed a rift over Republican priorities: Is it more important to cut taxes or to prevent the budget deficit from expanding beyond its current level of about $400 billion?

The White House and House Republicans have staunchly opposed any such restrictions, because permanently extending Mr. Bush's tax cuts would cost about $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years.

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I salute the Congress Critters who have decided the Bushistas cannot have unsupervised control of the $25 billion they've asked for.

Senator Kennedy is on point: the funds are to help protect the people in harms way while we kick sort out the disastrous policies that got us where we are today.

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With Some Strings Attached, Senate Approves War Money
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, June 2 - The Senate on Wednesday gave the White House $25 billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq but joined the House in putting new controls on the money despite administration requests for substantial freedom in how to use it.

On a 95-to-0 vote, senators agreed to add the money to a broad Pentagon spending plan, bringing the total cost of the legislation to more than $447 billion. Even Democrats who have raised objections to administration policy in Iraq did not oppose the spending, saying they viewed it as a necessity for troops in need of new armor and other vital equipment.

"I draw a distinction between this and an endorsement of the whole policy," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "I look at this as support for the troops."

Under the Senate approach, $22.5 billion of the money is devoted to specific Pentagon accounts while the administration is allowed to allocate $2.5 billion as it sees fit.

However, it cannot spend any of the money unless the secretary of defense consults with senior members of both parties and provides a written report at least five days before any shift. The Pentagon must also provide monthly reports on how it uses the money. The House is imposing similar requirements.

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Sometime you just gotta. Gotta add emphasis, too.

Fiscal Shenanigans President Bush appears to be planning to run for re-election as a tax cutter without discussing what federal programs will be sacrificed to make up for the lost revenue. That can't be allowed to happen. Voters have the right to see the whole picture, including the downside. Chances are they won't like the view.

While Mr. Bush has been out crowing about spending increases in some popular programs, his Office of Management and Budget was instructing federal departments to prepare to pare them down. In a May 19 memo that was first reported in The Washington Post, departments were told to trim domestic discretionary spending in 2006, the first complete fiscal year after the November election. And the administration recently submitted legislation to impose caps that would result in further reductions in every year after that through 2009.

According to estimates by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Office of Management and Budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted reductions in 2006 alone of about $925 million for Head Start and childhood education. That would come at a time when schools are already struggling to meet the demands of Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative without adequate resources. College financial aid, mainly Pell Grants, would take a $550 million hit — at a time when lower-income students are dropping out of school because they cannot meet rapidly rising costs.

The same projections show that veterans' medical care would be cut by $1.5 billion (after a planned $380 million cut in 2005). All told, under the proposed cuts, total funds for these and other affected programs — like environmental protection, housing programs and nutrition aid for poor pregnant women and children — would be $21 billion less in 2006 than today. By 2009, domestic discretionary spending, not counting homeland security, would be $45 billion below its current level and would be a smaller portion of the economy than it has been at any time since 1963.

Two key things:

even all of the proposed cuts in the memo would barely begin to make a dent in the annual deficits, which are likely to range from $300 billion to $400 billion for the rest of the decade.

Understand this well. This is not a matter of "Oh, you want the gummint to solve all your problems." This is a matter of the approach the Bushista/Neocon Axis being unworkable no matter how you slice it. Second:

Some of the staunchest tax-cut supporters in Congress are perfectly aware that the math doesn't work. They hope the accumulating pressure of the deficits will eventually force the federal government to go further and cut entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Very few of them, however, are prepared to run for re-election on that plan.

We need to make them run for reelection on that plan. Every time they speak, the question needs to be asked: since economists (other than the .00001% on your payroll) know the tax cuts and current expenditures are unsustainable, exactly what would you cut?

Those who recognize the Bushista bullshit for what it is have the advantage of being able to say quite precisely what the problem is and how to solve it.

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Boy got himself a lawyer over the Valerie Plame Outing Investigation. First smart move he's made since being installed.

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Bush Finds Lawyer to Use if Called in Leak Case
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, June 2 - President Bush has met with a private lawyer whom he intends to hire to represent him if he is questioned as part of a grand jury investigation into the public disclosure of a C.I.A. undercover officer's identity, the White House said Wednesday.

Mr. Bush met recently with the Washington lawyer, Jim Sharp, to consult with him about the case, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said, confirming a report on "CBS Evening News.''

"The president has had discussions with Mr. Sharp, and in the event he would need his advice, the president would likely retain him," Mr. McClellan said in a telephone interview.

"The president has stated on numerous occasions that he wants the White House to fully cooperate, and that would include himself," he added. "He wants the investigation to come to a successful conclusion."

Federal prosecutors are seeking to determine who disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer, to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak for a column he wrote last summer. Disclosure of the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency can be a federal crime.

It was unclear on Wednesday night why Mr. Bush waited until what appears to be the last stages of the investigation into the leak before he consulted with a lawyer. One administration official speculated that the president must have had some indication that investigators now want to question him.

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Bush Campaign Seeks Help From Thousands of Congregations
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

The Bush campaign is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations around the country in distributing campaign information and registering voters, according to an e-mail message sent to many members of the clergy and others in Pennsylvania.

Liberal groups charged that the effort invited violations of the separation of church and state and jeopardized the tax-exempt status of churches that cooperated. Some socially conservative church leaders also said they would advise pastors against participating in such a partisan effort.

But Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush administration, said "people of faith have as much right to participate in the political process as any other community" and that the e-mail message was about "building the most sophisticated grass-roots presidential campaign in the country's history."

In the message, dated early Tuesday afternoon, Luke Bernstein, coalitions coordinator for the Bush campaign in Pennsylvania, wrote: "The Bush-Cheney '04 national headquarters in Virginia has asked us to identify 1,600 `Friendly Congregations' in Pennsylvania where voters friendly to President Bush might gather on a regular basis."

In each targeted "place of worship," Mr. Bernstein continued, without mentioning a specific religion or denomination, "we'd like to identify a volunteer who can help distribute general information to other supporters." He explained: "We plan to undertake activities such as distributing general information/updates or voter registration materials in a place accessible to the congregation."

The e-mail message was provided to The New York Times by a group critical of President Bush.

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Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 2 — Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon to determine who may have disclosed highly classified intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi who authorities suspect turned the information over to Iran, government officials said Wednesday.

The polygraph examinations, which are being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are focused initially on a small number of Pentagon employees who had access to the information that was compromised. American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Chalabi informed Iran that the United States had broken the secret codes used by Iranian intelligence to transmit confidential messages to posts around the world.

Mr. Chalabi has denied the charge. On Wednesday, his lawyers made public a letter they said they had sent to Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III repeating Mr. Chalabi's denials and demanding that the Justice Department investigate the disclosure of the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.

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June 02, 2004

There's a few folks that read the Google cache instead of P6 directly. I see it because Google caches the Sitemeter counter.

Why?

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Did you know that Craig of Craig's List has a blog? And I believe the first two political posts ever went up today

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the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse
June 02, 2004
Well, that's Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz.

You ever work with people who got management positions due to superb company political skills, but they screw up a lot and leaves messes around for you to fix? Think about the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.

Sorry if I sound frustrated, but I had that experience for twenty years in corporations. However, it's worse when our foreign policy is this screwed up.

Is Condi Rice the Shemp character?

(note to staff: if I ever get pointy-haired, put me out to pasture.)

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I like that. The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse.

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What makes something your property is not the ability to use it, or to allow others to use it.

It's the ability to prevent others from using it.

If this goes through, you will not own the music you buy.

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Labels to dampen CD burning?
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD "burns," a piracy defense that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music.

What's new:
Record labels say CD sales have plummeted as a result of copies--and copies of copies. Now the labels are testing technology that would limit the number of times a CD, or its copy, could be burned.

Bottom line:
Such anticopying efforts have met with consumer resistance in the past, but if the labels have their way, it may be that not only CDs, but also iTunes-style digital downloads, will be restricted.

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Quote of note:

"It was a terrific concept," Allen said. "To come to a black club, to be taken care of by black families…Most tennis experiences I had were run by white folks.

"It was a very inspiring weekend. It was the first time I had ever walked into a tennis club and everyone didn't turn their heads and stare. Most other places, I had to explain why I was there. But in the Sportsmen's Club, there was no baggage. I didn't have to explain myself to anyone."

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Winning lessons in the game of life
Gibson visit still vivid, 25 years later
By Jackie MacMullan, Globe Staff

They remember her vividly, their vision uncluttered by the 25 years that have passed. Memories tend to fade like the photographs that chronicle the moment, but Althea Gibson was -- is -- unforgettable. A quarter of a century ago, she came to Dorchester to train four top young African-American tennis players for a week.

In seven days, she changed their lives.

Zina Garrison, Leslie Allen, Kim Sands, and Andrea Buchanan learned so much more than tennis when they arrived at the Sportsmen’s Tennis Club in Dorchester. They learned about life skills, about succeeding as a minority in an overwhelmingly white culture, about handling themselves with the grace and dignity that made the late Gibson one of the most revered sports figures in history.

‘‘It feels like yesterday,’’ Sands said. “I was 22 years old, meeting an American legend. It had a tremendous impact on me.”

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By the way, Joseph Taylor, alias RedEye, yea, verily he who attacked me with no reason, support or merit, doth truly suck. He owes me and everyone who is a Black Partisan an apology.

I still don't know what his problem is, beyond a mind shut tighter than a coffin.

The funny thing is, here I am doing the political thing as a Black man rather than the Black thing politically. And with my piddly 500 or so unique visitors per day (per SiteMeter) it's not like I'm influencing America anyway, you know? And that dipshit set me off.

He had the exact opposite effect he thought he would. And that's a good general reminder. People who try to manipulate me, unless I love them dearly, NEVER get the expected results. And even those I love get a warning with their results.

I'm just a nice, reasonable, thinking man. It's actually best for all concerned to allow me to remain so.

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Actual title:

Nigga, PLEASE

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Boxing promoter Don King stumps for Bush
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press Writer | June 2, 2004

PHILADELPHIA --Don King, the wild-haired boxing promoter, is touring the country with Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie to tout President Bush's re-election.

…King's rap sheet makes him an odd choice for Bush front man. He was convicted in the 1967 beating death of a man who owed him money and spent nearly four years in prison. In 1954, he killed a man who was robbing a numbers house he operated in Cleveland, but it was ruled self-defense.

King also has beaten tax evasion and fraud charges, faced numerous lawsuits from boxers and their handlers and endured three grand jury investigations and an FBI sting operation -- all while cementing his status as one of the world's top boxing promoters.

Republicans see King as a way to reach the ever-elusive black vote.

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They would.

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Generation Debt - The New Economics of Being Young
by Anya Kamenetz
A Sleeping Class
Young Americans fight for every cause but their own. Wake up, already.

…Not for a decade have politicians made a serious effort to address young people as voters, and in that time they've really put the screws to us, cutting student aid, standing by while education costs soar and more and more of us scrape by without health insurance or a permanent job. The response, from the "Rock the Vote" generation, has been…nothing. Less voting, more apathy, and little in the way of protest beyond the occasional sit-in when student activity fees go up. At this rate, we're more likely to save the redwoods than ourselves.

Frustratingly few young people seem to recognize their shared interests across the lines of class, education level, and ethnicity. Now, in this election season, a few people have stopped hitting the snooze button. Josh Green, a 25-year-old Harvard grad student, co-founded the 2020 Democrats in 2002. His 1,500-member group is working on long-range policy ideas while raising generational consciousness. "We've started to wake up to the fact that the baby boom generation is saddling us with an extraordinary set of problems," he says. "They're enriching themselves with tax cuts, and if we don't make our voices heard, we're literally going to be paying the bills. I would say that besides class and race, there's starting to be a generational cleavage in this country."

The numbers back Josh up. Tuition at public colleges is up 47 percent since 1993, and the increase is landing disproportionately on students' shoulders. Grants used to make up half of all school aid; now they make up just over 40 percent. The average undergraduate debt in 2002 was $18,900. Right now, the picture is getting yet worse: Republican lawmakers are talking about saving money by eliminating the low guaranteed rates students lock in when they consolidate unbearable debt. Variable rates put borrowers at the mercy of the market, and by some estimates individuals would pay $5,484 more in interest on a typical $17,000 loan. Hitting seniors in their pockets like that would cause a revolt.

Most cruelly, young people are incurring these unprecedented levels of debt in order to gain admission to a world of middle-class comfort that may not be waiting for them, now or ever. As this year's grads step off the commencement stage, they face the highest unemployment rate of any age group, and are the most likely to be popping echinacea in lieu of a health plan; their average $2,000-plus credit-card debt will stick with them longer than Petrarch's sonnets.

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Quote of note:

If the Democrats really want to attract the white male vote, they will need to overcome two major hurdles:

First, white men are likely to be the primary breadwinners for their families. They view higher taxes as an obstacle to their ability to be good providers. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70% of men favored smaller government, but only 48% of women believed the same way. So men are far more likely to view big government as part of the problem, not the solution.

Second, men (and many women, as well) have grown tired of the Democrats’ endless pandering to female voters. On his website, candidate John Kerry promises, “As president, I will put American government and our legal system back on the side of women.” (www.johnkerry.colm/issues/women) Really, it is doubtful that there is anyone left who truly believes the U.S. government is NOT on the side of women.

With attitudes like this, Republicans are about to become extinct due to lack of reproduction.

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White Males: Hot Demographic for the 2004 Elections
Carey Roberts

As President Bush’s polling numbers falter, Democrats are beginning to salivate over the prospect of winning the November elections. So everyone is asking, what is the demographic group that holds the key to election success?

The answer: white men, who represent a whooping 45 million of the total U.S. electorate.

Back in 1976, Jimmy Carter attracted a majority of white male voters to seal his underdog Presidential bid. But around that time, the Democratic Party began to view women as one of its core constituencies, and to define women’s needs through the lens of radical feminism. Not surprisingly, white men began to abandon the Democratic party in droves.

So by the time the 2000 elections rolled around, only 36% of white men voted for Al Gore, compared to an impressive 60% for George W. Bush. To Democratic pollsters like Celinda Lake, that was a demographic disaster. During the 2002 mid-term elections, white men came through again, handing Republicans control of the Senate.

So now Ms. Lake is arguing the Democrats will never win the White House unless they begin to reach out to the massive voting group she has dubbed the NASCAR Dads. Indeed, the male gender gap has become so worrisome that the liberal New York Times recently ran an article offering advice on how to rev up the NASCAR vote.

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Check this:

Because Alvarado was in custody of the police, he should have been warned of his rights, the three-judge panel held. "A criminal defendant's age has long been a relevant factor…. We do not believe that a reasonable 17-year-old in Alvarado's position would have felt 'at liberty to terminate the interrogation and leave,' " wrote Judge Richard D. Cudahy, quoting an earlier Supreme Court ruling.

And what was Alvarado's position?

Det. Cheryl Comstock, who was investigating the murder, had contacted Alvarado's parents and said she needed to speak with Michael. They took him out of school and to the station house. There, according to Alvarado's account, the police told his parents that they would have to wait in the lobby while the detective questioned him.

Now when you were 17, what would you think was going on if the police removed you from school, took you to the precinct and told you your parents can't see you until they were done questioning you? Would you feel free to leave? And what do you think would have happened if he just stood up and tried walking out?

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said "ordinary common sense" called for a different result. "Would a reasonable person in Alvarado's position have felt free simply to get up and walk out of the small room in the station house at will during his two-hour police interrogation? I ask the reader to put himself, or herself, in Alvarado's circumstances and then answer that question," Breyer said. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed with him.

The real problem here is this is now a precedent, and you can believe it's not going to be limited to 17 year olds.

THE NATION
Teens' Miranda Rights Redefined
No Special Treatment Because of Age, Supreme Court Says
By David G. Savage
Times Staff Writer

June 2, 2004

WASHINGTON — The police need not always warn a teenage crime suspect of his rights before formally questioning him, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

The 5-4 ruling gives police a bit more leeway to question suspects without warning them of their Miranda rights, and it says that a suspect's youth is not reason enough to treat him with more caution.

The decision upholds the second-degree murder conviction of a Los Angeles County man who was 17 at the time of the crime.

Michael Alvarado was charged with being an accessory to the 1995 murder of a truck driver at a shopping mall in Santa Fe Springs. He was convicted based on tape-recorded comments he made during an interview with a Los Angeles County sheriff's detective.

At issue in the Supreme Court was whether those comments should have been excluded from his trial because Alvarado had not been warned of his rights.

In the past, the court has ruled that suspects who are "in custody" of the police must be told, before being questioned, that they have rights to remain silent and to see a lawyer. People are said to be in custody when they are in the control of the police and do not feel free to leave.

But deciding whether a suspect is in custody often comes down to a judgment call.

On Tuesday, the high court agreed with state judges in California who said that Alvarado was not in custody when he was questioned at a police station in Pico Rivera.

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Faith-Based Chief Cites 'Culture War'
By Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writer

June 2, 2004

WASHINGTON — The head of the White House's faith-based initiatives program said Tuesday that a "culture war" was dividing the Bush administration and its critics who challenge the constitutionality of mixing church and state.

"It's true that much attention is being placed on the war in Iraq, but there's also another war that's going on," said Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, during a conference promoting the funding of religious groups engaged in social service activities. "It's a culture war that really gets to the heart of the questions about what is the role of faith in the public square."

Towey, who has worked for Democrats and Republicans and was a lawyer for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, warned that when faith was driven out of that public square, "you almost wind up creating a godless orthodoxy."

His remarks came shortly after President Bush delivered an emotional 40-minute address to the gathering of 2,000 religious leaders and social service workers in which he pledged to increase the money available to faith-based organizations.

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You want to know the role of religion in the public square?

Well, in the American public square, it has no role. People inspired and shaped by religion have as much role as they want, but they have no more right to impose their way of life in the public square than atheists do.

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Well, at least it will bring the unemployment rate down.

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Army Moves to Hold Onto Troops
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

10:04 AM PDT, June 2, 2004

WASHINGTON — Overstretched by conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army said today it would keep thousands of soldiers beyond their contractual commitments as it scrambles to maintain 138,000 troops on the ground without permanently increasing personnel.

Lt. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief, announced the latest move, which puts what the Army calls "stop-loss orders" into effect for all soldiers deploying to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in coming months. Such orders prevent troops from retiring or rotating out of their units for as long as the units are deployed and for 90 days after they return — even if the extension exceeds their contractual term of service.

The decision is certain to stir controversy in the ranks.

The Army has instituted similar orders during the conflicts. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Hagenbeck said, some 45,000 soldiers have been ordered to remain in the service beyond the contractual end to their enlistment.

The new order puts the policy into effect for all soldiers whose units are involved directly in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and could continue for several years.

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Scientists Find New Type of Gene in Junk DNA
Wed Jun 2, 2004 02:04 PM ET
By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - Junk DNA may not be so useless after all.

Scientists coined the term to describe the genetic wasteland within the human genome, or book of life, which consists of long uncharted stretches of DNA for which there is no known function.

But researchers from Harvard Medical School in the United States said on Wednesday that within junk DNA in the yeast genome they have discovered a new class of gene.

Unlike other genes, the new one does not produce a protein or enzyme to carry out its function. But when it is turned on, it regulates a neighboring gene.

"This doesn't explain all junk DNA. It gives a potential use for some junk DNA," Professor Fred Winston, who headed the research team, said in an interview.

"I cannot think of another regulatory gene such as this one," he added.

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ECONOMY – PROFITS UP, WAGES STAGNATE

The Economic Policy Institute issued a new report noting that, while corporate profits have risen 62.2 percent since the peak of the last recovery, private-sector wages have decreased by 0.6 percent - the worst record of any "recovery" since World War II, and well under the historical average of 7.2 percent. But in the context of the Bush administration's policies, the numbers are not that surprising. The White House has blocked efforts to increase the minimum wage, tried to strip 8 million workers of overtime pay protections, and promoted the outsourcing of well-paid U.S. jobs to cheap overseas labor markets – all while pushing for billions in new tax breaks for chemical and energy companies.

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No Homeland Security contracts to any company that moved out of the U.S. to evade taxes.

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HOMELAND SECURITY – PAY DIRT FOR A CORPORATE TAX EVADER:

The NYT reports, "the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday named Accenture as the prime contractor for a multibillion-dollar project" focused on border security. Accenture received the contract even though it recently moved its headquarters to Bermuda to avoid federal taxes. Two years ago, when Congress considered legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security, Accenture lobbied against legislation by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) that would have barred the new department's contracts from going to corporations which exploit tax loopholes and move to tax havens during a time of war. When DeLauro's amendment passed, Accenture used its considerable clout and campaign contributions to have the measure stripped out of the final bill. Now, those efforts have paid off, with Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) noting the Bush administration has "awarded the largest homeland security contract in history to a company that has given up its U.S. citizenship and moved to Bermuda."

Yes, it's another Center for American Progress thang.

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I am not pretending to understand what shapes transexuals. I can't even say I feel it was a good idea to arrange a gender switch for someone who hasn't reached the age of majority.

But I'm not claiming to understand most of what shapes hetrosexuals, particularly what made these three young men decide cool, calculated murder was the way to assuage their egos. This murder is seriously one of the more evil acts I've ever heard of.

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Calif. Transgender Teen Slaying Planned -Prosecutor
Tue Jun 1, 2004 09:13 PM ET

By Daniel Sorid
HAYWARD, Calif, (Reuters) - Three friends became partners in a calculated murder after discovering that a teenager two of them had been having sex with was biologically male, a California prosecutor told jurors on Tuesday.

In closing arguments, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Chris Lamiero portrayed each defendant as equally guilty of the strangulation death of the 17-year-old, who was born Eddie Araujo but lived as a woman known as Gwen or Lida.

Araujo, whose October 2002 murder galvanized support from transsexual and transgender people across the country, was beaten with a can and a skillet, bound and strangled with rope, and buried by the men, Lamiero said. The body was found in a remote area near Lake Tahoe.

The killing is being prosecuted as a hate crime and the three defendants face 25 years to life in prison if convicted.

"It might as well have been all of them that squeezed that rope," Lamiero told the jury. "It was a team effort."

Prosecutors have said that Araujo was beaten and then killed after a party at the home of one of the defendants during which the three men learned that the teenager was biologically male.

Lamiero said the friends acted purposefully to carry out the murder and hide the body, with one of the men, Jason Cazares, calling for a pause in Araujo's beating while he went to get shovels for a burial.

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Moore's Anti-Bush Film Set for June 25 U.S. Debut
Tue Jun 1, 2004 10:01 PM ET

By Bob Tourtellotte
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Film director Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" will hit U.S. theaters on June 25 after backers Bob and Harvey Weinstein struck distribution deals for the controversial, Cannes festival award-winning film, the parties said on Tuesday.

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and IFC Films, major players in the arena for independent movies, will release Moore's movie to theaters, and cable television network Showtime will handle the sale of rights for pay-TV.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" caused a firestorm of publicity in May after the Walt Disney Co. refused to allow its Miramax Films unit, which is run by the Weinstein brothers, to release the movie to theaters claiming it was too politically charged.

"Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the coveted Palm d'Or, the top prize at last month's prestigious Cannes film festival, looks at America's reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

And it attempts to link President Bush and his family to powerful Saudis, including the family of Osama bin Laden.

"I think, for a large segment of the population, it is going to be a must-see film," said Jon Feltheimer, Lions Gate chief executive. "Forget the controversy, if you look at the body of Michael Moore's work. It's really good filmmaking."

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America Already Is America
The Stalinist roots of John Kerry's new slogan.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, June 1, 2004, at 2:41 PM PT

In the June 1 New York Times, David M. Halbfinger reports that the Kerry campaign thinks it's found a winning slogan in "Let America be America again." They couldn't be more wrong.

Start with its provenance. The line is the title of a poem published in 1938 by Langston Hughes, the celebrated black poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The Times notes, in passing, that when Kerry first used the poem (in a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education), he skipped the following "bitter aside on racism":

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

But to call this a "bitter aside" is willfully to misread the poem. Anyone who takes the time to read "Let America Be America Again" will quickly understand that its entire thrust is that nostalgia for a golden age of American freedom is a crock. In the poem, idealized paeans to "the dream [America] used to be" alternate with parenthetical responses exposing the harsher reality ("America never was America to me"). Who is this angry dissenter? Hughes answers in a voice that echoes Walt Whitman's:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

and so on. Rather than pretend America ever was the land of the free (remember, this was written by a black man in the Jim Crow era), Hughes urges his heterogeneous countrymen to fulfill for the first time America's promise of freedom:

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Fair enough. Yet kind of irrelevant.

First of all, what Mr. Noah calls the "entire thrust" of the poem is only half the thrust…da boyz would accuse him of short stroking. The point of the poem is that America has not been what it has promised to be, but could—and should—be. Noah can perhaps be forgiven for his misunderstanding; he is, after all, a pundit not a poet. One can not forgive him for dealing with the poem as if it were the slogan and vice versa.

But let's look at what the slogan says, and what it implies.

There's a whole lot of people who feel America isn't what it was, to them. It was the opportunity for growth, wealth and community. All that still exists on one side of the chasm that separates the haves from the have-nots. And there are a lot of people to whom, yes, America never fulfilled its promise at all

Who?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

America has the wealth and power to be what it professes to be, for all its citizens. And America will never be what it professes to be, until it is such for all its citizens.

Setting that theme is just a first step. There's a walk to be walked, which the Kerry camp acknowledges. The Bushistas just want to pretend we've arrived.

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via dKos

File under Republicans are hypocritical idiots.

In "Kerryopoly," the Republican National Committee roasts the Democratic presidential candidate with an online satire of his well-heeled lifestyle.

Players begin with just $40,000 in Kerryopoly money, the average national household income. "After a few trips around the board, most players will be millions of dollars in debt, proving that John Kerry's lifestyle is out of reach and out of sync with most Americans," RNC communications director Jim Dyke said in a statement.

Three leading Republicans in the federal government -- President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee -- are multimillionaires. Asked Tuesday if their lifestyles also were out of reach of most Americans, RNC spokeswoman Christine Iverson responded "no" but declined to elaborate.

Seriously, if they are going to run a story on this "game", the least the AP reporter could do is force the RNC spokeswoman to elaborate.

Because class warfare against Kerry won't work unless, well, Bush's class is different than Kerry's. But leave it to Bush campaign to make being a millionaire a negative, as though their own guys ever had to do an honest day's work in their lives. What's next? An attack on Kerry's Vietnam service?

Oh, wait....

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Quote of note:

Paul C. Light, an authority on bureaucracy who is a political scientist at New York University, said Bush "should have been sharp enough to see the potential damage to the U.S. reputation, if not his own." But Light said that with Bush's approach to governing, an international group's concerns about detainees would have been viewed as "nothing but a rounding error" in the greater goal of fighting global terrorism.

"This administration has been blinded by its hubris," Light said. "The way this group of people operates is to have this kind of echo chamber in which they hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. . . . They have no formal or informal method for challenging themselves, and that is a perfect recipe for this kind of result."

Management Style Shows Weaknesses
Delegation of Responsibility, Trust In Subordinates May Have Hurt Bush

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2004; Page A06

President Bush has long prided himself for focusing on big goals rather than on niggling details and delegating significant responsibility to his aides. But his belated attention to the brutality at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison has revealed vulnerabilities in a management style that had brought him personal and political success.

Bush's aides say the graphic images documenting the abuse of detainees took him by surprise. But as they tell it, the president and his staff received many clues over the past year that there might be a problem -- for example, periodic reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross -- and did nothing because they had been assured the Pentagon was on the case.

A variety of presidential advisers and scholars said the White House's failure to recognize the significance of the warnings points to flaws in Bush's approach to governing that also could have contributed to the administration's inadequate planning and inaccurate presentations in the run-up to the Iraq war.

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In the Iraqi Interim (www.washingtonpost.com)

LAKHDAR BRAHIMI worked no miracles in the appointment of Iraq's new government. The veteran United Nations envoy had been cast by the Bush administration as a one-man nation-builder who would somehow produce an administration that was broadly representative and capable of taking over sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation. In the end, hemmed in by hovering U.S. officials and their present and former Iraqi allies, Mr. Brahimi acquiesced to a cabinet led by the same former exiles and Kurdish politicians who populated the discredited Iraqi Governing Council.

Oh! NOW I remember!

Massive bankruptcy after a long period of denial, a renaming more than a restructuring, everyone pays except the crew that caused the problem, and we're supposed to pretend all that is old is now new.

Feh.

Counties cut deal on WorldCom debt

06/02/2004

Associated Press

The collapse of communications giant WorldCom cost Oregon counties hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid property taxes.

WorldCom owed $2.3 million to a dozen counties when it declared bankruptcy two years ago. The counties have since joined forces and negotiated a deal to recover more than 60 percent of the money.

Multnomah County stands to lose the most in the arrangement between MCI WorldCom and the counties. The unpaid tax bill in the county totaled just over $1 million, with recovery of $641,000.

Washington County also takes a substantial hit, collecting $428,000 of the $647,000 owed by WorldCom.

Lane County's share came to just over $134,000, and it looks as if the $82,000 the county collected through the legal agreement will be the last payment.

Lane County Assessor Jim Gangle said the deal was "the best possible result."

WorldCom had contested the tax bills on the basis that its properties had been overvalued, "and given the nature of the telecommunications industry at that time, the company may have had a good argument," Gangle recently wrote in a memorandum to the board of commissioners.

If the board agrees, it could vote this week to close the books on WorldCom's Lane County debt, writing off the remaining $52,000.

Baker, Clackamas, Columbia, Coos, Douglas, Josephine, Linn, Marion, Tillamook and Umatilla counties also participated in the bankruptcy proceeding against WorldCom and received lesser sums.

In June 2002, WorldCom announced it had uncovered nearly $4 billion in hidden expenses — the beginning of a spiral that would become the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history. The fraud is now estimated at $11 billion.

WorldCom filed for bankruptcy July 21, 2002. It emerged from bankruptcy protection in April, changing its name to MCI and with new headquarters in McLean, Va.

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Halliburton?
E-Mail Links Cheney's Office, Contract
Officials Say Only Involvement in Halliburton Deal Was Announcing It

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2004; Page A06

Shortly before the Pentagon awarded a division of oil services contactor Halliburton Co. a sole-source contract to help restore Iraqi oil fields last year, an Army Corps of Engineers official wrote an e-mail saying the award had been "coordinated" with the office of Vice President Cheney, Halliburton's former chief executive.

The March 5, 2003, e-mail, disclosed over the weekend by Time magazine, noted that Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, had signed off on the deal "contingent on informing WH [the White House] tomorrow." [P6:: Notice- not asking, but informing.]

"We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's office," it continued.

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That about says it all, folks.

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Republicans pretend to be "compassionate," knowing the original liberal democratic nature of the culture will not allow them to be elected otherwise.

Senator Plans to Introduce Drug-Importation Measure

Recognizing voter concern about the high cost of medicines, a key Senate committee chairman said yesterday he plans to announce legislation this week that would allow the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, said his legislation would allow importation from Canada first, and later add other industrialized countries. He declined to give details, or to give a timetable for committee action.

With the costs of U.S. drugs rising sharply, whether to allow drug imports has become a big election-year issue. Drugs in Canada, similar or even identical to U.S. medications, are sold for a fraction of the U.S. cost.

Of course Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, would decline to give details, or to give a timetable for committee action. That's because the action scheduled is to drop it like a hot rock after November.

The Reverse Robin Hood

Shedding its "compassionate conservative" veneer, the White House today acknowledged for the first time that it plans massive cuts to domestic programs in 2006, even as it pushes $1 trillion in new tax cuts. Two weeks after President Bush touted his commitment to education funding, the White House leaked plans to slash $1.5 billion out of the Department of Education – virtually eliminating previous small increases. It would also slash $177 million out of Head Start, the early-childhood education program for the poor. Less than a month after the president bragged about his commitment to funding veterans' health care, the White House is ordering a $910 million cut to the existing veterans' health care budget – a budget the Veterans of Foreign Wars has previously deemed "disgraceful" and "deplorable." The $78 million funding increase that Bush pledged for a homeownership program in 2005 "would be nearly reversed in 2006 with a $53 million cut."

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Democrat Wins in South Dakota Special Election
By Joe Kafka
The Associated Press
Tuesday, June 1, 2004; 1:50 AM

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- Stephanie Herseth, a lawyer who left the East Coast for a career in politics in her home state, narrowly defeated a Republican former lawmaker Tuesday in a special congressional election that was closely watched by national parties looking for momentum heading into November.

Herseth will immediately fill the seat of Bill Janklow, who was convicted of manslaughter and went to jail over a deadly auto accident.

With all but 31 precincts reporting, Herseth had 124,594 votes, or 51 percent, to 121,628 votes, or 49 percent, for Larry Diedrich, a farmer who served in the Legislature and was head of the American Soybean Association.

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June 01, 2004

The Moving Ideas Network has another of those incredible pages of links documenting a special Imbalance of Power edition. The theme of the issue is how the growing imbalance of wealth is undermining our democratic republic.

The section heads link to the articles each section supports. Much grist for everyone's mill.

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I know Atrios doesn't read my blog. And now HE know I know. So there.

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The first fruit of my CSS experiments has been installed on P6. A small tweak of the CSS so that the columns are absolutely positioned. This lets me rearrange the pages so that the content comes first and then the columns.

This is important for the folks overseas who (for some reason I don't really grasp) read P6 through Google's and Babelfish's translation tools. See, there's an actual maximum amount of text they process and I was letting it waste a lot of time on the sidebars. Text-to-speech processing would have the same problem.

I can still overwhelm a single translating session with a single post. But I can get in some pretty good stuff, too. I intend to make my Public Library project fully accessible, and P6 will probably inherit most of that.

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While doing my lightweight CMS research I sometimes get sidetracked by a fascinating link. Such a distraction is the css Zen Garden. It's the ultimate site skinning exercise: You get an HTML file—the same one used to create the home page— that you can't touch other than to link your CSS style sheet. Basically every major section has an ID so you can place things very precisely, pretty much anywhere you'd like. And some of the results are pretty amazing.

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U.S. Gives Unqualified Support to New Iraq Leaders
Tue Jun 1, 2004 01:33 PM ET

By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush voiced unqualified support on Tuesday for the leaders of Iraq's newly formed interim government and his national security adviser said they were not "America's puppets."

Bush pledged to work with the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, days after the United States was caught off guard when the Iraqi Governing Council chose him last week.

"All the new prime minister needs to know is that I look forward to a close relationship with him," Bush said at a Rose Garden news conference.

Washington's preferred choice of president, elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, took himself out of the running, clearing the way on Tuesday for tribal chief Ghazi Yawar. Yawar was then sworn in with an interim Cabinet of technocrats and the Iraqi Governing Council was dissolved.

Rather than quibble about names, Bush and top U.S. officials decided to embrace the interim government, point out that both men and women are on it and stress that for Iraqi president, for instance, the United States did not have its heart set on any one candidate.

"I can tell you firmly and without any contradiction, this is a terrific list, a really good government, and we are very pleased with the names that have emerged," said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

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I misread the headline. My bad.

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Judge Rules Against Partial-Birth Abortion Law
Tue Jun 1, 2004 02:26 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A controversial ban on late-term, or partial-birth, abortions signed into law by President Bush late last year was ruled unconstitutional on Tuesday by a judge in the first federal court decision against the law.

San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton said the law was unconstitutional because it was vague and posed an "undue burden" on abortion rights.

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She waited until mid-editorial to sprinkle the anti-troll pixie dust. I, being less courageous, move said pixie dust into the "Quote of note" segment.

Quote of note:

(Before you begin scripting your e-mail protest, let me state for the record that I know that there are exceptions, including former football star Pat Tillman. Why do think there was so much coverage of Tillman's death? He was a rare example of sacrifice by the affluent.)

SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF WORKING CLASS BEAR BURDEN OF SERVICE

Sat May 29, 8:02 PM ET

By Cynthia Tucker

The other day President Bush stated the painfully obvious: "Our work in Iraq has been hard."

But his suggestion of a national mission -- a cause to which all Americans are making a substantial contribution -- was misleading. The hard work of fighting and dying in Iraq has been done by a few -- the sons and daughters of the working classes. The affluent have hardly been troubled unless they tune in to the nightly newscasts.

The frantic calls to in-laws to scrape together child care before shipping out, the desperate planning to keep the painting business together while the owner is in uniform, the wives' attempts to fend off unpaid bills while the soldiers, fighting a distant war, fend off rocket-propelled grenades -- those burdens have been borne by families with modest paychecks and scant savings. So have the grieving and the burying.

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I can't believe I typed those words in that order, but Warren Sutton makes such a compelling case…

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Bremer threatens to veto Iraqis' choice of president
JUSTIN HUGGLER

BAGHDAD -- Talks on naming an interim president for Iraq were deadlocked yesterday as a rift between US occupation officials and the Iraqi leadership they appointed threatens to undermine American plans to hand over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on 30 June.

The US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council wants to appoint its current leader, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, who has spoken out against the failure of the occupation, but the US occupation governor, Paul Bremer, is insisting that they choose instead Adnan al-Pachachi, an 81-year-old former diplomat, who has said he believes American troops need to stay in Iraq until the security situation improves.

It emerged yesterday that Mr Bremer warned the council during talks on Sunday not to put the decision to the vote, saying that if it elected Sheikh Yawar, he would veto the decision. Further talks scheduled for yesterday were postponed at America's request until today, meaning that the deadline to name the interim government by the end of May was missed.

As well as Mr Bremer, a special envoy for President Bush, Robert Blackwill, and the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, are attending the talks.

The sight of the Americans trying to bully the Governing Council into accepting their choice is threatening to destroy the interim government's credibility in the eyes of Iraqis. The US is already facing widespread accusations that the handover is cosmetic, and designed so that President Bush can claim the occupation is over ahead of the American presidential election in November.

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UN peace troops to land in Haiti

UN peacekeepers are poised to arrive in Haiti to take over from a US-led multi-national force as the country struggles with devastating floods.

A total of 8,000 UN peacekeepers, including 6,700 military officials and 1,622 civilian police officers, are expected by the end of June.

The troops will be responsible for ensuring security and maintaining the country's fragile peace.

But the task of helping flood survivors will be more immediate.

At least 2,000 people are known to have died or disappeared after severe flooding over the past week.

They will replace a multi-national force sent to Haiti to maintain security after former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide left in February.

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And they need more than a little more help:

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The Price of Rice Soars, and Haiti's Hunger Deepens
By TIM WEINER

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 31 - One lesson of life in Haiti is never to say things cannot get any worse. They can, and they have.

People say they have had less money, less food and less hope since the February revolt that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

For most Haitians, this has nothing to do with last week's deadly floods, which left 1,000 dead and 1,600 missing in Haiti, according to the official government estimate on Monday.

It has to do with the price of rice.

The cost of living has soared in the past four months. And as they say in Haiti, "Rice is life."

On the Rue de Miracles, one of the capital's biggest sidewalk markets, where thousands buy and sell the necessities of life, people talk of little else. Every conversation that starts with politics ends with the price of rice.

Many Haitians eat one meal a day. The main course is rice, and the price of a 110-pound sack doubled, to $45 from $22.50, between late January and early May. That price has dropped to about $37 in the past few weeks but is still too high, said Clermathe Baron, 29, who sells the big white sacks across the street from the Haitian customs office near the port. The price was driven up by global, national, political and economic forces.

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It's just a metaphor.

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Quote of note:

Among the expressions of support she's received since shuttering the gallery, her favorite is an e-mail whose writer said, "I'm sure that a few and dangerous minds don't understand that they have only mimicked the same perversity this painting had expressed."

SF gallery owner becomes target after showcasing painting of Iraqi prisoner abuse
- LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, May 29, 2004

After displaying a painting of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, a San Francisco gallery owner bears a painful reminder of the nation's unresolved anguish over the incidents at Abu Ghraib -- a black eye and bloodied brow delivered by an unknown assailant who apparently objected to the art work.

The assault outside the Capobianco gallery in the city's North Beach district Thursday night was the worst, but only the latest in a string of verbal and physical attacks that have been directed at owner Lori Haigh since the painting, titled "Abuse," was installed there on May 16.

Last Wednesday, concerned for the safety of her two children, ages 14 and 4, who often accompanied her to work, Haigh decided to close the gallery indefinitely.

The painting was part of a larger show of Colwell's work that mostly featured pastel-colored abstracts.

Two days after the painting went up in a front window, someone threw eggs and dumped trash on the doorstep. Haigh said she didn't think to connect it to the black-and-white interpretation of the events at Baghdad's notorious prison until people started leaving nasty messages and threats on her business answering machine.

"I think you need to get your gallery out of this neighborhood before you get hurt," one caller said.

Even after she removed the painting from the window, the criticism continued thanks to news coverage about the gallery's troubles. The answering machine recorded new calls from people accusing her of being a coward for taking the picture down. Last weekend, a man walked into the gallery, pretended to scrutinize the art work for a moment, then marched up to Haigh's desk and spat directly in her face.

On Thursday, someone knocked on the door of the gallery, then punched Haigh in the face when she stepped outside.

"This isn't art-politics central here at all," Haigh said. "I'm not here to make a stand. I never set out to be a crusader or a political activist."

In closing the gallery, Haigh was forced to cancel an upcoming show featuring counterculture artist Winston Smith. She covered the windows of the gallery with old newspapers from Sept. 11, 2003 that included stories about the war, a statement she insists was coincidental.

For Haigh, who opened Capobianco a year-and-a-half ago, having the chance to work with prominent artists fulfilled a lifelong dream.

"I kept thinking someday I'll have enough of a reputation where I could bring in my heroes of the art world, people like Guy Colwell especially," she said.

The irony of the attacks hasn't been lost on Haigh. Among the expressions of support she's received since shuttering the gallery, her favorite is an e-mail whose writer said, "I'm sure that a few and dangerous minds don't understand that they have only mimicked the same perversity this painting had expressed."

The abuse also has soured her on North Beach, the Italian-American neighborhood that spawned the Beat Generation. Long considered a bastion of free speech, it is also home to many old-time San Franciscans. Haigh believes "it is the locals" who first took aim at her gallery since it's on a mostly residential street and she hadn't advertised Cowell's show when the threats started.

But others in the neighborhood have gone out of their way to offer encouragement and sympathy, among them poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the famed City Lights bookstore. Outside the gallery on Friday, someone had left a bouquet of flowers along with a note reading, "The woman who ran this gallery is a brave and honorable woman. ... She is a true American and a real patriot."

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An AP article on The Cosby Furor (I think it's lasted long enough to get caps) is now making the rounds. So far I've seen it on BlackAmericaWeb, The San Francisco Chronicle and believe it or not, Xposed.com, an online men's magazine (and though I'm not one to frequent such sites, MUCH preferring a three dimensional tactile experience to a two dimensional visual…and ultimately tacky…experience, I must approve of Candace Smith).

Others said they were concerned not with the topic of Cosby's remarks but with his tone.

"If he was going to make such a strong point, he should have chosen his words very carefully," said Wendy Williams, host of the afternoon show on WBLS-FM in New York City. She said callers to her show were split fairly evenly in their opinions on Cosby's comments.

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons also questioned Cosby's tone. "Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question," he said.

Izrael said he was appalled by Cosby's remarks about prisoners and police.

"That's irresponsible," he said. "In this day and age he ought not be giving license to anyone to shoot our kids in the street for petty crime. It negates everything he had to say. He's coming from this really classist perspective."

…Renee Jones, mother of three and grandmother of three, approved of Cosby speaking out.

"If there's a problem, it needs to be addressed," said Jones, 51, while waiting for a friend in Harlem. "He was right on for making people understand and see this is a problem."

But Otis Parker, 67, thought the need was for action, not talk. He questioned whether the speech patterns of black youth were really the concern.

"I was raised to say, 'Yes, Ma'am,' that didn't stop me from going to penitentiary," the retired building superintendent said. He turned his life around after a prison term for armed robbery.

Parker acknowledged that there are those who don't make good choices, but said criticizing instead of reaching out to encourage and help them isn't the way to go.

"You've got to help them all," he said. "You've got to step in."

Mr Parker and Mr. Simmons share my reaction for the most part. But once again it's time for a rectification of names. You've GOT to judge people or you won't even recognize someone needs help. The trick then is to do what you want in a way that works. In general, insulting people does little to get them to dispassionately consider one's views. Trust me, I speak from experience.

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Minister Demands DJ be Fired over Barrino Remark
Date: Monday, May 31, 2004
By: Associated Press

DURHAM, N.C. - A Durham minister has started an online petition drive to oust a local morning radio personality for "racially incendiary" comments insulting "American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino.

Bob Dumas, host of WDGC's top-rated "Showgram", on Thursday used the term "ghetto" and "low class" to describe Barrino, who is black and had a child out of wedlock.

Dumas, who is white, said his use of the term "ghetto" were not race-specific.

"It can be black, it can be white, it can be Hispanic. It can be anybody," he said.

The Rev. Paul Scott, a Baptist minister and founder of the Messianic Afrikan Nation ministry in Durham, said the term was a "code word" of white supremacists to describe the actions of those in the black community. He called the term "racially incendiary" and is circulating a petition on the Internet calling for an apology and Dumas' dismissal.

…The radio station's assistant program director and music director Chase, who uses only one name, declined to repeat Dumas' remarks but acknowledged that Dumas used the words "ghetto" and "low class." He too said there was nothing racist in the remarks.

"'Ghetto' and 'low class' don't insinuate racism," he said. "It insinuates personality traits. He made a point that this had nothing to do with race."

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Black Flight to Private Schools Is Growing
Date: Tuesday, June 01, 2004
By: Associated Press

Early on weekday mornings, as Lesley-Anne Jones implores her three sons to button their shirts and knot their ties and tie their dress shoes, they ask why they can't attend her school.

If Ms. Jones wanted to be factual about it, she could say that the family lives just outside the boundary for Public School 158 in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where she teaches fifth grade. Instead, she tells them the deeper truth. "I'm your mother, and I know what's good for you," she explains. "And the public school won't be."

Then she drives the children to a nearby private school, the Trey Whitfield School. Every month, she and her husband send the school a check for $900, the equivalent of almost two weeks' take-home pay from her job. They make the sacrifice because Trey Whitfield offers their children a demonstrably safer and better education than what is available at either P.S. 158 or their local school, Public School 149.

There is nothing effete about the private education at the Whitfield School. Its campus consists of three cinder-block barracks tucked behind a Baptist church. The curriculum eschews the fashionable pedagogies of whole language and constructivist math. From pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, every pupil wears a uniform. And not a single child in a student body of 470 is white.

In her decision to enroll her children there, Ms. Jones has plenty of company among the Whitfield School parents. Probation officers, nurse's aides, office managers, subway conductors, these are the overlooked legions of the black working class. A vast majority serve actively in their churches and hold a strain of social conservatism alongside political liberalism. Their departure from urban school systems, not only in New York but also across the nation, represents one of the most significant and little-noticed trends in public education.

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Yeah, I saw it. It was a pirate DVD, a couple of weeks before the opening.

Maybe it's because I have a titanium-reinforced ego, but I'm really feeling anyone who ever laughed at Def Comedy Jam or a Redd Foxx joke (or anything similar) really needs to relax. This isn't what you'd call a positive review, but neither do I feel the movie is even capable of causing damage.

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Black Celebs Speak Out on 'Soul Plane'
Date: Tuesday, June 01, 2004
By: Associated Press

HOLLYWOOD - The "first black-owned airline" has barely lifted off, but a determined campaign is already under way to ground it, or at least clip its wings.

…Declaring in a recent speech that "Soul Plane" is "coonery and buffoonery," Spike Lee is one of a number of entertainment figures saying that the film is among the most offensive ever in terms of showing blacks in a negative light. Their protests are mostly based on the R-rated film's trailer, advertising campaign and early drafts of the script.

Other actors, writers and directors have called "Soul Plane" a modern-day minstrel show and a throwback to films in the 1940s and 1950s, when blacks were mostly shown as lazy clowns. The South Los Angeles-based National Alliance for Positive Action has aimed its protest at MGM, the studio behind the film. "Soul Plane" is the latest in a slate of urban-based films being developed by MGM after the crossover success of the studio's 2001 release "Barbershop."

"There is definitely a feeling in the community that this is the film that really does cross the line, that doesn't have any conscience whatsoever," said Lee Bailey, publisher and executive producer of the Electronic Urban Report, a Web site linked to the "Radioscope" entertainment program.

…"First and foremost, this is a comedy that is an equal opportunity offender," said Peter Adee, MGM's president of world wide marketing. "It takes shots at everyone."

Jessy Terrero, a music video director making his directing feature debut with "Soul Plane," said, "I'm part of Generation X, part of the hip-hop culture, and I just wanted to make a good comedy for my generation. I don't see this as a movie about race, it's a movie about class." Terrero said he cut out many of an early script's jokes about race.

"Soul Plane" is the latest in a series of black-oriented movies and TV shows where questions of taste and appropriateness have provoked controversy.

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Making Hay Out of Straw Men
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, June 1, 2004; Page A21

For President Bush, this is the season of the straw man.

It is an ancient debating technique: Caricature your opponent's argument, then knock down the straw man you created. In the 2004 campaign, Bush has been knocking down such phantoms on subjects from Iraq to free trade.

In a speech on May 21 mentioning the importance of integrity in government, business and the military, Bush veered into a challenge to unidentified "people" who practice moral relativism. "It may seem generous and open-minded to say that everybody, on every moral issue, is equally right," Bush said, at Louisiana State University. "But that attitude can also be an excuse for sidestepping life's most important questions."

No doubt. But who's made such arguments? Hannibal Lecter? The White House declined to name names.

On May 19, Bush was asked about a plan by his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), to halt shipments that are replenishing emergency petroleum reserves. Bush replied by saying we should not empty the reserves -- something nobody in a responsible position has proposed. "The idea of emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would put America in a dangerous position in the war on terror," Bush said. "We're at war."

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New Iraqi President Calls for 'Full Sovereignty'
Tue Jun 1, 2004 07:01 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's new president said in his first public remarks after being appointed on Tuesday that he wanted the United Nations Security Council to grant the country "full sovereignty" in a resolution now under discussion.
"We the Iraqis look forward to being granted full sovereignty through a Security Council resolution to enable us to rebuild a free, independent, democratic and federal unified homeland," Ghazi Yawar told a news conference.

Hoshiyar Zebari, newly reappointed as foreign minister on Tuesday by Prime Minister-designate Iyad Allawi, was heading for New York to lobby the United Nations for full sovereignty when the U.S. occupation authority relinquishes power on June 30.

It was not clear if Zebari would ask for amendments to the draft resolution on Iraqi sovereignty proposed by the United States and Britain. Yawar last week, as head of the Iraqi Governing Council, criticized the draft for giving too little control to Iraqis over U.S. troops remaining on their soil.

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Iraqi Governing Council Dissolved, Ex-Member Says
Tue Jun 1, 2004 07:35 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Iraqi Governing Council was dissolved Tuesday after the appointment of an interim government that will take over at the end of June, a member of the outgoing body said.
"The Governing Council dissolved itself today. It no longer exists," Mahmoud Othman, who has been appointed a minister of state in the new line-up, told Reuters.

Prime Minister-designate Iyad Allawi announced a government line-up Tuesday that included many new faces and few former council members.

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Scientists Produce Cow Immune to Mad Cow Disease
Mon May 31, 2004 11:55 AM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Kirin Brewery Co, Japan's number-two beer maker, has succeeded in producing a cow that is immune to mad cow disease, but experts said it was too early for livestock producers to celebrate.
Kirin officials said on Monday the company had produced jointly with a U.S. company a cow that carried none of the "prion" proteins that cause the brain-wasting disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

BSE is passed on by an infectious protein particle called a prion. Neither a living organism nor a virus, it is a misshapen protein that can convert other proteins to the deadly form by touching them.

The animal, produced through genetic engineering, is still in its mother's womb and expected to be born early next year, Kirin officials said.

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Iraq War Woes Deepen Internal Pentagon Tensions
Sun May 30, 2004 10:45 AM ET
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tensions between the civilian leaders of the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the U.S. military's top brass have deepened amid the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Even before the Iraq war some senior officers chafed under the guidance of Rumsfeld and his team, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone.

Retired officers and defense analysts said the problems have worsened during a war in which critics accuse Rumsfeld's team of neglecting to provide enough troops to stabilize Iraq after ousting Saddam Hussein, botching the planning for the postwar period, and failing to anticipate and later comprehend an insurgency that threatens the mission with failure.

"The war itself has led to, rightly or wrongly, the feeling among many in the military that they're not receiving competent direction, that it is too ideological, and that a lot of their military efforts have been wasted by what they regard as poor, inept planning for the stability phase," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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Cheney Office 'Coordinated' Halliburton Deal -Time
Sun May 30, 2004 07:04 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Pentagon e-mail said Vice President Dick Cheney's office "coordinated" a multibillion-dollar Iraq reconstruction contract awarded to his former employer Halliburton, Time magazine reported on Sunday.
The e-mail, sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official on March 5, 2003, said Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, provided arrangements for the RIO contract, or Restore Iraqi Oil, between Halliburton and the U.S. government, Time said.

The e-mail said Feith, who reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH (White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's (vice president's) office."

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Partly because I did something blindingly stupid. But also because I had stuff to do.

This evening I've been making some decisions about the next project.It will not be the community site vaporware I mention periodically. It will be a reworking of The Public Library. See, I get a surprising number of visits…long, multi-page load visits…to the classic lit in there. And they've got to be some of the hardest pages on the web to read. For instance, each chapter is a single page. And it's all static text.

I have quite a bit more Black classics, a number of them from Project Gutenberg, and have links to other resources. I stopped posting them because static text would never be the really useful resource I want to create. Basically, I want the text broken up into more readable (and bookmarkable) chunks, and the whole mess should be searchable. Ideally it should meet a few slightly esoteric archive sorting requirements. Easy support, easy updating, and easy for a person without a lot of loose cash to set up. That narrows the options significantly. My enjoyment of fixes and patches is inversely proportionate to the number of them I must apply. I don't mind hacks; I prefer plugins; ideally, though, everything I need is available out of the box. That orders the options, Last consideration is learning curve, both for me and for anyone who I might hand the keys to.

A little more, a little later. I'm close to a design so I'm close to a decision.

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May 31, 2004

I think back to this, which I first encountered in Junior High School.

The old one was more subtle.

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Robert L. Carter, a senior United States district judge, Southern District of New York, was chief assistant to Thurgood Marshall from 1945 to 1956. In the May 3rd issue of The Nation, he recounts the thinking and planning that went into choosing the cases that lead up to Brown v. Board of Education in an article titled The Long Road To Equality.

In fact, the whole issue is right interesting. I have to read Brown at 50 by Eric Foner & Randall Kennedy to see if I'm still annoyed at Randall.

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Quote of note:

"Party has trumped institutional responsibility," said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The sense of shared political stakes bridging either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has overwhelmed any sense of institutional responsibility."

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Even Some in G.O.P. Call for More Oversight of Bush
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, May 30 - Members of Congress have a proud tradition of asking witnesses tough questions at famous inquiries like the Watergate and Iran-contra hearings. Now the Iraqi prison abuse scandal has some lawmakers asking a hard question of themselves: What doesn't Congress know and why doesn't it know it?

…The issue burst into the open in recent days as the Senate and House took starkly different approaches to the prison abuse inquiry, with the Senate holding a series of high-profile hearings and the House one public session. House Republican leaders criticized the Senate for grandstanding on the issue, and the House rejected a Democratic push for a broader inquiry.

…Mr. Hastert dismisses the rising criticism of the House's oversight record as a partisan effort to build a political case against the Republican leadership. He said the majority had actively kept abreast of developments in Iraq, though it might not be conducting the "show trials" he said Democrats would prefer.

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Black Writers Seize Glamorous Ground Around 'Chick-Lit'
By LOLA OGUNNAIKE

Published: May 31, 2004

…Like its white counterpart, black chick-lit often centers on single women with dream jobs, precariously balancing the personal and professional. Similarly, too, these new authors write with insiders' knowledge about the glamorous worlds they chronicle.

Neither racially charged nor didactic, these books seem meant to be read on sandy shores from Sag Harbor to St.-Tropez. The protagonists, educated and decidedly middle to upper class, effortlessly mingle with both black and white characters. Love, not privilege, is the only real speed bump.

"There is no momma figure acting as the conscience; spirituality is not at the core of these books," said Patrik Henry Bass, books editor at Essence, the leading African-American women's magazine. "You won't find any church scenes."

Tonya Lewis Lee, who along with a friend, Crystal McCrary Anthony, wrote "Gotham Diaries" (Hyperion), said, "We didn't want our book to be heavy." Set against a backdrop of museum galas and million-dollar real estate deals, the novel delights in skewering nouveau riche rappers and pearl-clutching socialites alike. "We need levity somewhere," said Mrs. Lee, wife of the director Spike Lee. "We need to be able to laugh at ourselves."

…According to Target Market News, a research company that specializes in African-American consumer statistics, blacks spent $325 million on books in 2003, an 8 percent increase over 2002. In 1996 the figure was a little more than $200 million.

"Once these black women readers realize that these books are out there, they will really catch on, and they're going to be big," said Janet Hill, vice president and executive editor of Harlem Moon, which besides "Cosmopolitan Girls" has published "Beautylicious: The Black Girl's Guide to the Fabulous Life."

"We think that there is a very healthy market for African-American chick-lit, and we plan to capitalize on it," she added.

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For Soldiers Back From Iraq, Basic Training in Resuming Life
By MONICA DAVEY

FORT RILEY, Kan. — Lt. Col. Dan McClure struts up and down the auditorium in his camouflage fatigues, every bit the drill sergeant he was for years: tormenting any poor soul whose cellphone dares to ring, anyone with the unfortunate rank of lieutenant, anyone blond.

At other incongruous moments on this morning, the gruff officer turns gentle, sounding oddly like Oprah.

Colonel McClure, now an Army chaplain, is here to warn the hundreds of soldiers before him who had returned five days earlier from Iraq, their uniforms still mildewed from the months away, that whatever they think right now, coming home may not be as easy as it seems. After the first embraces with cameras clicking, the homecoming parties, life may get complicated in unimagined ways.

You may find yourself driving your tiny Honda too fast down the center of a Kansas highway, the way you did with your Humvee in Iraq, he tells them. You may get claustrophobic at Wal-Mart, or shaky when a car backfires or a bright light flashes. While you crave sex, your wife may crave conversation. And you will surely get "dumb question No. 3" from those who never set a boot in Iraq: Did you shoot anyone over there?

Colonel McClure, who did two combat tours in Vietnam, shares his own crass retort: "I don't know. I never went to look." But as laughter seeps through the rows, he turns sensitive again. Never answer the shooting question, he advises, because it will only prompt another: How did it feel?

"Don't let them get to that follow-up question," he warns the soldiers, now silent. "That one hurts."

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May 30, 2004

I got my library out of storage. More classic out of print Black literature and sociology than you can shake a stick at. The full set of The Documentary History of the Negro in the United States of America. Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Plural but Equal. All my heroes, entombed in paper but no less live for that.

You think I know shit now, wait until I get all my references in order.

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