June 12, 2004

Quote of note:

"Alcohol abuse is more prevalent among whites than among Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians. Alcohol dependence is more prevalent among Native Americans, Hispanics and whites than among Asians," the NIAAA, one of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.

Report: Alcohol abuse up, but fewer alcoholics

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- More Americans are abusing alcohol than in the 1990s, but fewer are technically alcoholics, U.S. government researchers.

They found that the number of American adults who abuse alcohol or are alcohol dependent rose to 17.6 million or 8.46 percent of the population in 2001-2002 from 13.8 million or 7.41 percent of the population in 1991-1992.

The researchers cannot say why heavy drinking is up.

"The fact that alcohol disorder rates are highest among young adults underscores the need for concerted research on drinking patterns that initiate in adolescence," Dr. Ting-Kai Li, Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said Thursday.

The NIAAA study defines alcohol abuse as causing a failure to fulfill major role obligations at work, school, or home; interpersonal social and legal problems; and/or drinking in hazardous situations.

Alcohol dependence, also known as alcoholism, is characterized by impaired control over drinking, compulsive drinking, preoccupation with drinking, tolerance to alcohol and/or withdrawal symptoms.

---

AngryDesi at Minority Report:

Welcome Home, Immigrant... Now Leave!

Last night, my best friend called me because his uncle had his green card taken away from him by Citizenship and Immmigration Services (the new name for the INS) when returning to the U.S. from an international trip. According to my friend's account, his uncle - a practicing Sikh - was taken into a room where he was subjected to 40 minutes of questioning.

CIS offered his uncle two options: Go back or sit in a detention facility for a judge to decide. His uncle had the perception (I'm still trying to find out why) that the CIS officers were motivated to take away the green cards. He said they were very aggressive and generally unsympathetic. After 40 minutes, they finally offered a third alternative - his uncle could sign a form that says that he was "voluntarily" surrendering his green card in exchange for temporary visa that would allow him to continue his trip.

…A person coming home to the U.S. (since greencard holders are LEGAL PERMANENT RESIDENTS) who wants to go back to their family is told either to go back to some other country or sit in a detention facility for an indefinite time period to await the judgment of a judge which will probably be negative. After giving the individual a taste of detention by holding them for close to an hour, they offer an alternative that allows them to continue back to their loved ones albeit with some consequences.

---

Michigan Court Rules on Race Bias Suits
By DAVID EGGERT
Associated Press Writer

6:07 PM PDT, June 11, 2004

LANSING, Mich. — A former police officer who accused his department of discriminating against him because he is white should not have a tougher time proving his case in court than a minority would, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.

In a 5-2 decision, the court struck down a legal standard requiring people who file reverse discrimination lawsuits to prove their employers have a track record of discriminating against majority groups.

"We all ought to stand equally before the law," said Marshall Grate, attorney for Michael Lind.

---

Yet a minority person pressing such a complaint would have to show such a track record. And mind you, it has to be a record showing discriminatory intent, not merely discriminatory impact. If we all stood equally before the law, the Michigan Supreme Court would have ruled against him.

It's HARD to prove intent. But it's even harder to show a track record of discrimination against majority groups white folk because there's not enough history of white folks being subjected to the will of minorities.

---

You're a Spirograph!! You're pretty tripped out,
even though you've been known to be a bit
boring at times. You manage to serve your
purpose in life while expending hardly any
effort (and are probably stoned to the gills
all the while).


What childhood toy from the 80s are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

---

I've appreciated Professor Kim's News Notes since I first found it. Right now she's tracking seriously cogent commentary on Bill Cosby's poundcake speech:

The roots of these issues are complicated, and don't lend themselves to quick-hit conversations. But, since we've already invited white America to listen in on this long overdue conversation, it only makes sense that we take it out of its current, unhelpful, name-calling state, and into the realm of rational discussion.

and some seriously accurate commentary on the impact the Reagan presidency had on minority communities.

This leaves me free to rant, be obscene and generally make a nuisance of myself.

---

Abiola at Foreign Dispatches has another blog, Tech Notes. Just have your thinking cap on if you visit, because this:

A very interesting Slashdot discussion is going on about the pros and cons of learning assembly language. Although I'm familiar with more than one assembly language myself, including Motorola 68000, DEC Alpha and (yuck!) Intel x86, I'm personally of the opinion that unless one is working in a field like game development or numerical computing where top performance is the utmost prioirity, messing about with assembly is mostly a waste of time, and performance improvements are better obtained by focusing on algorithms, i/O and program architecture. Even the most carefully hand-optimized piece of assembly code that happens to use an O(n2) algorithm like bubble sort will eventually be outperformed by a piece of Perl or VB6 code that uses an O(n log n) alternative like merge sort.

For numerical computation, game development or anywhere else where access to the SIMD functionality included in most modern-day CPUs is vital, intimate knowledge of assembly-language will continue to be vital, as it will be for those who have to work at the systems level, e.g. low-level driver writers and the like. For the vast majority of programmers outside these fields, knowledge of assembly language is only important insofar as it is difficult to do binary-level debugging without it, as is often necessary when source-code is not available. Fiddling about with register instructions and so forth is a massive drain of developer time and energy which can be put to more profitable uses, and the worst thing of all is that in most cases, the hand-tweaked code people come up with will actually turn out to be slower than what they'd have obtained had they left the optimizing to a decent compiler.

…is typical. Not to mention the reason I DON'T do assembly language.

Back in MS-DOS days, you HAD to know some assembly language because the system call API was in assembly (int 21, anyone?). Comes Windows and the idea of writing whole programs in assembly because as absurd as writing them in C (C was more absurd because it gave you the illusion of help whereas in assembly you KNEW you were on your own).

---

Ron at The Corsair:

Family Values Limbaugh Ends Third Marriage

Pumpkinheaded family values exemplar Rush Limbaugh has is ending his third marriage. Shrewdly, he announced it on Friday, thus hoping it would be buried in the little read Saturday papers. But The Corsair never sleeps.

---

I have no idea how Aaron finds the things he does.

Watch for this new version of the Bush campaign web site to go, er, live.

And don't nobody bitch at me about disrespecting the dead because

1. It's Bush that's being disrespected, and if you're not used to that by now you should become so


2. The dead don't care anyway

---

New York State is running an ad campaign with the same claimed purpose as the one in California we've recently discussed. I saw an ad on the back of the bus yesterday.

The ad is in three parts: Picture of cute baby boy on the left, picture of clean-cut father on the right, underneath a panel with two words:

Fathers Count.

See, if you gonna get all up in people's business (which may well be necessary in this case) this is how you do it. With respect. And damned if it doesn't support everyone:

You ducking child support? You shouldn't — fathers count.
You denying your ex's visitation rights? You shouldn't — fathers count.

---

June 11, 2004

That panel is a chunk of a cartoon Ben posted at his site, Hungry Blues. Said cartoon saves me from having to write anything more about Reagan, pretty much for the rest of my life.

Truth, I only get by Hungry Blues every so often because it feels a bit like eavesdropping. Much of it was about his investigations into his father's life (his father, Paul Greenberg, was deep in the mix with the Civil Rights movement).

He's now expanding his focus a bit, while keeping the ethics intact:

This year's Democratic National Convention in Boston will mark the 40th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's noble failure in Atlantic City. The failure of the MFDP laid bare the hypocrisy of Democrats who professed Jeanne's values. The MFDP failure also exposed the sadly compromised position of liberal Blacks and whites, largely from the SCLC and organized labor (the liberal coalition my father was part of). Yes, it's true that the MFDP representatives were defeated by the "emptiness inside the box," to use Jeanne's phrase—but they came to Atlantic City to demand that the promises of representative democracy be met. They came with a belief in what the wrapping paper seemed to promise would be inside.

I'm mentioning the MFDP now because we, as a nation, desperately need the Democratic Party to stand for what the MFDP stood for. If to get George Bush out of the White House we must support John Kerry, then we must make sure that John Kerry knows that his constituents expect him to live up to the radicalism of the Langston Hughes quote used in the Kerry slogan, "Let America be America again." [P6: emphasis added]

It's my impression that even folks reasonably familiar with Civil Rights Movement history don't know about the MFDP. As this year's Democratic National Convention approaches, I'd like to recall the events in Atlantic City with some passages from James Foreman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries. In the 1960s, Foreman was Executive Secretary and Director of International Affairs of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

---

He says this is a pretty open confession, one which I myself never thought I'd see in print. I guess this is just my day to be amazed.

Ronald Reagan Started a War That Rages Today
Liberalism would not go quietly into the night.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, June 11, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ronald Reagan was explicit in saying that his target was not the idea of government itself, as was often wrongly believed, but the Great Society. The Great Society was, and remains, a remarkable edifice. Consider the times in which it came to life. John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and the liberal promise he embodied erupted into a moral crusade, whose general was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Besides the burden of expectation left by a murdered and sanctified president, LBJ inherited two of the nation's most traumatic political crucibles--the aborning civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. For liberals then and now, the former was the most morally compelling experience of their lives; the latter, the most immoral.

…The fervor with which LBJ's speeches describe the Great Society's legislative crusade matched and even exceeded Ronald Reagan's. His 1964 State of the Union Speech was astonishing in its list of "we must" goals: "All this and more can and must be done." He committed the government to "unconditional war on poverty." The next year he was giving speeches on the signing of historic bills for civil rights, Medicare, education, even highway beautification, which seeded the environmental movement. On signing the 1965 education bill in Johnson City, Texas, LBJ remarked, "My minister assured me that the Lord's day will not be violated by making into law a measure which will bring mental and moral benefits to millions of our young people." Yes, moral benefits.
[P6: Remember-this is what Republicans are fighting]

The ethos of Ronald Reagan and LBJ represent the two great political ideologies of our lifetime. The substantive disagreements that put these factions in opposition is not that of the mundane contests between Ford and Carter or Clinton and Dole. It was more like a religious war and remains so to this day.

---

I learned of this astounding bit of xenophobia via Foreign Dispatches

Something that seems to be a part of many conversations, but rarely explicitly so, is the question: How many Americans should die in order to achieve the fill in the blank goal? A parallel is the question: What is the value of an American life as compared to the value of a non-American life [P6: emphasis added]

…There's also the issue of how exactly to put values on the different factors. For me, to paraphrase the commercial, to save my kids, priceless. For others, who knows? Perhaps some Nobel-winning economist or philosopher may have already written extensively on this and come up with some very well-thought out values. Absent that, and SOLELY for the sake of discussion, let's use the following values (which may change upon further reflection):

US citizen: 50 points

US military: 47.5 points

Citizen of a 'Friend of the US' country (England, Spain, Israel, for example): 25 points

Citizen of a 'Not acting like a friend, yet not totally hostile' country : (Germany and France, for example, and for the time being): 20 points

Citizen of a country that we just don't have a lot of experience with: 8 points

US Human shields: 5 points

Non US citizen human shield: 0 points (sorry, I just don't care)

Innocent (non-arms bearing) citizen of a hostile country: 4 points

Those wishing for the US to 'get its butt kicked' (Tom Robbins, Chrissie Hynde): 1/2 point each

---

A legacy that left blacks behind
By Julianne Malveaux

Every dead soul deserves a parting prayer. But while decency demands condolences for the former president's family, accuracy requires an assessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy

Ronald Wilson Reagan was openly hostile to African-Americans. In his campaign, he vowed to cut "waste" in the federal budget. But we came to learn that when he said waste, he meant us. Reagan slashed social programs so ruthlessly that the homeless population soared up to 3 million and food-stamp and hunger-assistance programs shrunk. Even as the nation struggled with double-digit unemployment, he cut employment-assistance programs.

The entire urban infrastructure was attacked. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which partly subsidized city workers in libraries, parks and social-service agencies, was gutted. Cities did not close libraries during the Great Depression, but libraries were closed during the Reagan years.

Reagan managed to do all of this in a jocular manner, saying that the people who received public assistance were overweight, which meant they were not starving, or noting that the homeless were probably so "by choice." He wanted to make ketchup a vegetable to get around rules that said federally subsidized school lunches should be nutritionally balanced.

By the time Reagan got finished with America, poverty was perceived as a personal problem, and the poor were viewed as somehow morally deficient.

President Reagan was especially hostile to the civil-rights community. He fired members of the Civil Rights Commission because he disagreed with their stance on affirmative action and the enforcement of civil-rights laws.

---

This idea is on the money
By Grover Norquist

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the greatest American president of the 20th century.
[P6: Please pass whatever it is you're smoking. Not to me, I NEVER get THAT wasted.]

…Is it too soon to judge Reagan's legacy? [P6: No] He left office 15 years ago and public life 10 years ago with his 1994 letter announcing he suffered from Alzheimer's. The Berlin Wall is not coming back. The Soviet empire is not coming back. America is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. "Malaise" is not coming back.

There is a growing consensus in Congress that Reagan should be on the $10 bill, but is it too soon to act? [P6: How about respecting his widow's wishes? But this IS Norquist.] Franklin Roosevelt was put on the dime within a year of his death, John Kennedy on the 50-cent piece within a year of his death, and Dwight Eisenhower, who died in 1969, was placed on the dollar coin in 1970.

Are there too many things named after Reagan? Today there are 62: Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) Washington National Airport, Mount Reagan in New Hampshire. The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and government buildings and roads. Too many? There are more than 600 memorials named after John F. Kennedy and more than 800 for Martin Luther King Jr. [P6; Two reasons for that: we've had time to build them, and they didn't suck]

When we honor President Ronald Wilson Reagan we honor the best America is and the best America can become.

---

Normally I'd join in on a conversation like this one, either there or here. This time…

Sometimes I feel this great impulse to get with Michael via a back channel. I know where he's at and he knows where I'm at, but due to current politics…he'll never be an adversary of mine, but he can't be an ally right now either.

The day will likely come, though.

---

And I didn't see any of the Conservative that were so enamored of Dr. Cosby's speech comment at all.

I wonder why that is? They're both entertainers, both highly thought of on both sides of the veil, both with a lot of cross-racial experience.

I just can't understand why the same ones who cheered Cos for speaking out haven't given Bird the same level of support.

Can you?

---

This reorganization of links project seems to be slowly morphing into the community site project. Drupal has actual documentation, almost all the features I want right out of the box, a sane database structure and a module API with the best features of ExpressionEngine's (it makes sense immediately) and PHP-Nuke (straightforward install).

I actually had PHP-Nuke in mind for a while, but Drupal has bumped it. Harshly.

---

Quote of note:

At the same time, the G8 is launching a multi-year scheme to train African troops for peace-keeping missions in the continent. The aim is to have 75,000 troops trained by 2010. Britain's contribution to the project will rise to $12m annually when the scheme is in full swing.

G8 fails to write off Africa's debt but promises help for Aids vaccine
By Rupert Cornwell in Savannah
11 June 2004

• G8 fails to write off Africa's debt but promises help for Aids vaccine


• Gleneagles to host G8 conference in 2005


• Bush gives up on more Nato troops for Iraq


• UN urged to quell ethnic attacks in Sudan

After a brief show of unity, the divisions over the war in Iraq have opened up again

The leading industrial powers plan to help Africa by developing an anti-Aids vaccine and training thousands of new peace-keepers, but did not come up with the hoped for breakthrough on forgiving debt for the world's poorest countries, almost all of them African.

The announcements came as part of an "Africa Outreach" at the final session of the G8 summit that was attended by six African heads of government.

For all its outward cordiality, the three days of talks at the Sea Island resort south of here failed to produce any spectacular new agreements to boost host President George Bush in his campaign for re-election this autumn. Indeed, if the White House was expecting any lift from the summit, and from the deal on the 30 June transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, those hopes were dashed by an opinion poll yesterday showing John Kerry ahead by 51 per cent to 44. The margin is among the biggest yet for the Democratic challenger.

To further the battle against Aids, which is now killing 6,300 people in Africa every day, the US is to contribute $15m (£8m) to a worldwide drive to speed up development for a vaccine against the disease.

At the same time, the G8 is launching a multi-year scheme to train African troops for peace-keeping missions in the continent. The aim is to have 75,000 troops trained by 2010. Britain's contribution to the project will rise to $12m annually when the scheme is in full swing.

The "Outreach" drew mixed feelings, however. "We can expect to be portrayed in some quarters as mendicants," President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa said in a newspaper interview published yesterday. Mr Mbeki was one of six African leaders on Sea Island yesterday, along with the presidents of Nigeria, Algeria, Uganda, Ghana and Senegal. There will also be anger that the summit failed to come up with the debt-relief package for which non-government organisations and aid groups were hoping, involving a 100 per cent cancellation of multilateral debt owed by the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), and the conversion of all borrowings into grants.

Almost every HIPC country is in Africa, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa where real per capita income has fallen in the past 30 years. Instead, the G8 has merely approved a "top-up" of funding for the existing scheme to help the HIPC countries, and a two-year extension to December 2006 of the period in which the poorest countries can apply for assistance under the scheme.

Total cancellation of official debt to the HIPC countries has been strongly backed by Britain, but it appears to have run into continuing objections from Japan and Germany and fallen foul of the argument raging over precisely how much of Iraq's Saddam-era debt of $120bn should be forgiven.

The US and Britain had been pressing for almost total cancellation of Iraqi debt, but France insists that Iraq, with its oil riches, should not be treated any more favourably than the poorest Third World nations. As a result both initiatives have stalled, temporarily at least, to the dismay of the NGOs.

---

Atlanta Civil Rights Landmark to Survive
By ELIOTT C. McLAUGHLIN
Associated Press Writer

1:42 PM PDT, June 10, 2004

ATLANTA — Paschal's Restaurant, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders met over soul food to plan demonstrations during the civil rights movement, has been saved from demolition.

Instead, the downtown restaurant will stand as a monument to the civil rights leaders' efforts, state Rep. Tyrone Brooks announced Thursday.

Clark Atlanta University, a historically black school, bought the site in 1996 and had planned to demolish it to make way for a new dormitory. The black community vehemently protested.

On Thursday, Brooks announced that the university will sell the property, which also includes a motel, to the development company Trammell Crow Co. Trammell Crow will, in turn, sell the restaurant to restaurateur Tracy Gates, who will move her nearby Busy Bee Cafe to the site, Brooks said.

She plans to call it Busy Bee at Historic Paschal's.

"We're just thankful we were able to save this landmark from the demolition ball," said Brooks, who first ate at Paschal's in 1967 and kicked off his 1980 state House campaign at the motel. "That would've been a tremendous blow to African-American history. We're now to the point where we can say hallelujah."

During the civil rights movement, many blacks called Paschal's "Little City Hall." It was there that King, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and other leaders would work out strategy.

The 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., was planned at the restaurant. Demonstrators would also grab a meal there after being released from jail, enjoying Paschal's fried chicken and other Southern dishes.

---

Look at our government.

Fortunately our coups are bloodless. And that's fortunate because bloodless coups are slow, and therefore (up to a point) reversible.

---

DR Congo 'coup attempt put down'

President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo has appeared on national television, saying that a coup attempt has been thwarted
.
There was heavy gunfire in the capital, Kinshasa, after rebel soldiers seized the national TV station overnight.

Artillery and heavy weapons were heard near Mr Kabila's residence and in several other districts.

This is the latest challenge to a power-sharing government set up last year to end five years of war.

"Stay calm, prepare yourself to resist - because I will allow nobody to try a coup d'etat or to throw off course our peace process," Mr Kabila said, wearing military fatigues.

"As for me, I'm fine."

He said that 12 people had been arrested.

The alleged coup leader, Major Eric Lenge, is surrounded with some of his men near the main Ndjili airport, said Mr Kabila's spokesman Kudura Kasongo.

The gunfire is now reported to have ended and the United Nations Mission in DR Congo (Monuc) said there were no reports of unrest outside the capital.

---

Slight disagreement of note:

Undertaken with sincerity, such outreach efforts — contrary to what many may believe — represent affirmative action at its best. Going into communities that have sent few sons and daughters to A&M and where there is no Aggie tradition in previous generations promotes the image of A&M as an inviting place for students of all backgrounds. Offering financial aid demonstrates commitment.

"Undertaken with sincerity" is the operative phrase. But that's not the disagreement.

Right now we have this passle of programs we call "Affirmative Action." But few of them are actually actions the represent an affirmative committment to revesrsing the effects of past racism and discrimination. Sincere outreach and actually addressing those issues that cause unequal access to education and jobs isn't affirmative action at its best…they're the only action that can actually be called "affirmative."

And since I'm in "piss people off" mode, I would like to point out that affirmative action programs were implemented to offset an apparent inability to hire and educate even handedly. They are programs to address shortcomings in the MAINSTREAM, no in minorities, and by flipping the blame for the failure of the rather surface level techniques that were easiest to implement (sit a spook by the door...) on minorities you render the problems unsolvable.

Anyway...

GOOD GOING, A&M
If diversity improves, it won't matter how they did it
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Officials at Texas A&M University say they are proud that the number of blacks and Hispanics who say they will enroll this fall has increased dramatically from the year before. The increase shows what can be done in a short time to make a campus more attractive to bright minority applicants who previously tended to shun it.

University administrators reported last week that, compared with last spring, the number of successful black and Hispanic applicants confirming plans to enroll as freshmen is up 57 percent and 24 percent, respectively. This could mean the reverse of a seven-year decline in minority enrollment that resulted when many minority students offered admission declined to attend a school they perceived as hostile to minorities.

More diversity among A&M's overwhelmingly white student body is good news — especially in light of A&M's controversial decision not to consider applicants' race in the admissions process. At the time, A&M President Robert Gates announced that A&M would try to entice more minority students to College Station by visiting more predominantly black and Hispanic high schools and providing more scholarships for students from low-income families.

Undertaken with sincerity, such outreach efforts — contrary to what many may believe — represent affirmative action at its best. Going into communities that have sent few sons and daughters to A&M and where there is no Aggie tradition in previous generations promotes the image of A&M as an inviting place for students of all backgrounds. Offering financial aid demonstrates commitment.

The real proof of A&M's accomplishment will be borne out in how many minority students actually show up to register for fall classes. It is in the best interest of everyone who cares about this state's economy for more of Texas' promising young minorities to receive the sort of high-quality education that top-notch, in-state schools like A&M offer.

If previous A&M administrators had done more to promote a diverse student body, A&M might not find itself in the awkward position of having to defend why the A&M University System will be considering race in 2006 admissions to its Health Science Center, including its medical and dental schools, to increase minority enrollment. Welcoming more minority students to A&M as freshmen would have created a larger applicant pool for its graduate schools.

But Gates is correct in his defense of the seemingly contradictory policies: "We all have the same goal, and that is to increase diversity," he said. "What matters are results ... ."

---

Race-consciousness needed to reflect minorities' reality
by Ada Wilson

June 10, 2004

Equality. I fight for it every single day of my life. It's a simple word with a clear meaning -- but for some reason the concept appears to be impossible for some to grasp.

…Many people view affirmative action in higher education as an unnecessary handout that rewards unqualified students.

But minority applicants enrolled with the assistance of affirmative action are more than qualified to attend the universities that accept them.

…Manifest destiny destroyed the legacy that American Indians built on this land. Reconstruction ultimately hurt the African-American community more than it helped. And what ever happened to the 40 acres and the mule that former slaves were supposed to receive?

These are the issues that come to mind when people ask me to trust our current society and strive for the 'American Dream' -- yeah right.

But rather than wasting my time focusing on the contradictions within the system, I would rather work toward a permanent solution.

The answer is simply recruitment. Other colleges should follow UNC-Chapel Hill as the model institution for recruitment practices. Many people don't appreciate the University's efforts in recruiting African-American, American Indian, Hispanic and other underprivileged and underrepresented students.

After working with the Minority Student Recruitment Committee, I have learned that through immense student leadership UNC-CH has been able to rise above peer institutions; it's time for other states and other universities to follow our lead.

Programs such as Project Uplift, High School Honors Day, UNC Scholars Day, Decision Days, Native American Recruitment, Hispanic Recruitment and Pre-Orientation offer students an opportunity to pull in underrepresented students all across the state.

The hard work displayed by the MSRC volunteers and administrative staff is a true reflection of the passion that UNC-CH has for creating a diverse campus.

And although the number of underrepresented students has continued to increase on this campus, it still doesn't fully represent the racial proportions that exist in the state or in the country.

The staff of Project Uplift is working overtime right this second to educate qualified students on entering UNC-CH. Programs such as Project Uplift are a step in the right direction in the creation of a diverse campus.

Every single student at the University has a responsibility to uphold the racial integrity of this institution. If you are not helping the cause, you are definitely hurting it. I'm simply tired of hearing excuses. And, I am fed up with the lack of knowledge that University students have toward racially-based campus issues.

Now is the time for everyone to become aware of these issues. Let's not become another UC-Berkeley. Don't let poor enrollment become contagious.

---

Quote of note:

Democratic Rep. Julie Dennis of Muskegon called the amendment racist.

Republican House Speaker Rick Johnson quickly pointed out four Democrats voted for the affirmative action amendment: Steve Bieda of Warren, Jennifer Elkins of Lake, Matt Gillard of Alpena and Lisa Wojno of Warren. But all four voted against the overall budget.

“They’ve got to be calling them racist too,” said Johnson, of LeRoy.

The reason the quote is to be noted:It seems Mr. Johnson's concern is that he not be the ONLY racist.

I've said before that Black people's problem with racism is different than white people's problem with racism. I'm now going to just go ahead an piss folks off by stating what I think white people's problem with racism is.

Racism is the one concept that is universally seen as evil in the USofA (torture used to be in that category, but well…). And it is irrevocably tied to race-based slavery in the USofA, which is the undeniable creation of white America. White folks are as collective as any other set of humans, and to me the most interesting thing about that is the collective belief that they are absolute individuals. Because of this collective belief, they take both too much credit and too much blame for collective actions. This means asserting the continued existence of racism is, to them, an assertion of their personal evil.

NO ONE will accept that.

The possible responses to this are to

1. rise above it


2. drag everyone down into it

Dragging everyone down is easier/quicker than growing. One can grow out of racism or the need to identify so absolutely with the collective, but to take that last path one must be aware that they are, indeed, in the collective. And the Caucasian Collective does not acknowledge it collectivity. So we get charges of reverse racism, exhortations to "get over it"...a phrase that ANNOYS THE HELL OUT OF ME because it is an acknowledgement that you got fucked AND that no one's going to do a damn thing about it. The activity of Alaskan king crabs-in-a-basket.

Anyway...

House debate produces scuffle over affirmative action revision
Budget drops college funds for preferential admission treatment

Associated Press

LANSING — A debate over affirmative action in the state House on Wednesday night resulted in a scuffle between two Democrats.

The incident happened in the House chambers after the Republican-controlled House narrowly approved next year’s higher education budget that included an amendment to prevent universities from receiving any state funding if they give preferential treatment to applicants.

The brief scuffle between Rep. Morris Hood, D-Detroit, and Alan Canady, House Minority Leader Dianne Byrum’s chief of staff, was the result of concern among some Democrats that the caucus had not done enough to stop the affirmative action amendment.

---

For the record, I had Bird down as a wigger for a while.

And it just occurred to me:

ESPN host Jim Gray asked Bird whether the NBA lacks enough white superstars.

Why in hell did Gray ask the question in the first place? It ain't like we need no help starting racial shit in the agora…

---

Exciting, compelling athletes popular with all fans
10:52 PM CDT on Thursday, June 10, 2004

Let's get this straight: Larry Bird tells ESPN that the NBA needs more white superstars because the majority of fans are white.

"And if you had a couple of white guys in there," he says, "you might get them a little excited."

Not a Kevin Garnett clone. Not a twin of Tim Duncan.

Not Shaq's shadow. No Kobe copy.

More white guys.

Let's put aside whether Bird's sentiments are racist because, frankly, we're all worn out with that.

---

June 10, 2004

TChris at Talkleft

Manhattan Officer Charged With Manslaughter

Officer Bryan Conroy has been charged with manslaughter for shooting an unarmed African immigrant, Ousmane Zongo, to death. Conroy was guarding a locker full of counterfeit compact discs inside the Chelsea Mini-Storage when he saw Zongo.

Zongo, who did not speak English, had no criminal record and was not involved with the counterfeit ring, got scared and tried to flee, police said. Conroy pursued him and in a scuffle fired four shots at close range.

Conroy, who was in plain clothes, says he pulled his gun on an unarmed man to identify himself as a police officer. Pulling out a badge would have been more effective and less threatening. According to Conroy, Zongo thought Conroy was trying to rob him, so Zongo lunged for the gun. Conroy says he had no choice but to shoot Conroy. Four times.

…As TalkLeft reported yesterday, a 12-year-old who lacks the maturity to exercise sound judgment is facing a life sentence for murder. In this case, a police officer whose failure to exercise sound judgment resulted in a needless death might get probation. Does this make sense to anyone?

---

I had to quote this

14. Ann Coulter, columnist

Pro: Flattering position would silence her exposing of the true evil liberal agenda
Con: Is composed entirely of spiders and deadly snakes writhing beneath a latex "skin"

---

Orcinus:

The GOP's little problem with extremism -- notably the neo-Confederate version -- has cropped back up in South Carolina, where one of the radicals who has been trying to take over the heritage-oriented Sons of Confederate Veterans, a fellow named Ron Wilson, is now running for the state Senate:

S.C. Senate candidate touts right of secession

Notably, Wilson is in the running for the GOP nomination:

Running as a Republican for an Anderson County seat in Tuesday’s primary, Wilson openly promotes the right of secession. He also wants to have "Confederate Southern Americans" designated a specific minority group, like Hispanics or African-Americans.

"Confederate Southern Americans are a separate and distinct people," Wilson said in a statement posted on the Internet. "As a people, Confederate Southern Americans are tired of being the 'whipping boy' for the rest of the country's racial problems."

Wilson has been significantly involved in recent years in the attempt to radicalize the Sons of Confederate Veterans by placing neo-Confederate ideologues in upper-echelon positions. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking this takeover attempt for some time now (a recent report follows up on this in-depth study of the matter); the SPLC also named Wilson as one of its "40 to Watch" catalogue of the nation's most powerful right-wing extremists.

---

Latino Hip-Hop Summit
Saturday, July 13nd, 2004
Lehman College
Doors Open @ 11am
Official Latino Hip-Hop Summit Program 1:00pm to 4pm

Theme:
Taking Back Responsibility: Redirecting, Protecting & Celebrating Our Community

In order to attend the Latino Hip-Hop Summit, you should do the following:

1) Pre-Register to attend the Latino Hip-Hop Summit by becoming a member of the Latino Hip-Hop Team Vote by clicking here!

2) To become a Registered Voter, in the State of New York, you may obtain your offiicial New York Voter Registration Application by clicking here to the official New York State Website, filling out the form with the correct information, and mail it in!

Your free Admission ticket to the Latino Hip-Hop Summit will be available for all youth who register to vote.

---

Unqualified Offerings, via I Protest:

UPDATE: To clarify, this isn't just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady.

---

Believe it or not, it was Hesiod more than Atrios or anyone else that tipped me from reader to blogger.

Counterspin Central:

Thursday, June 10, 2004:

LAST POST: Just wanted to let everybody know that my family and I are OK. I'm not locked up in Guantanamo or anything.

I just decided for personal reasons that the time was right for me to stop blogging.

Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about.

Just wanted everyone to know that and hopefully people will respect and honor my decision.

So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your support and encouragement these past two years. It meant and means a lot to me.

Take care everyone.

Here's to victory in November and beyond!

P.S. This last post was partially designed to dispel the rumor that I was, in fact, Ronald Reagan.

---

Bird reminds of another who took race Cavalierly

Thursday, June 10th, 2004

It was Ted Stepien's 79th birthday yesterday, and the former Cleveland Cavaliers owner was not so much amused at the irony of Larry Bird's clumsy dilemma as he was sympathetic. Stepien is a stubborn, old-school guy, and one who got himself into all kinds of trouble 25 years ago by uttering racial stuff that was similar, only worse, to what Bird says tonight on ESPN's "Two on Two."

Stepien once insisted that half the NBA's roster should be white, in order to appeal to white fans. Bird, ignoring the importation of Eastern European standouts in recent years, now says the league needs more white stars to reach a white audience. These are slightly different propositions, but products of the same, impaired vision.

"Larry Bird is a gentleman," Stepien said, from his advertising office in Willoughby Hills, Ohio. "He took his share of shots. I'm sure he can take the criticism.

"When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, you could call a black guy a ---, an Italian a ---," Stepien said. "I'm Polish, and you're supposed to be an imbecile because of that. Because I'm Polish, I like to see these guys coming from Europe, and of course they're white."

Case closed. There are people who talk about race and ethnicity who probably should filter their thoughts, and Bird joins Stepien as two of them.

---

via Negrophile:

Black Professors: On the Track but Out of the Loop By FRED A. BONNER II

When I was in my first year as a tenure-track faculty member, a friend of mine summed up a concern that many of us newly minted African-American professors had. She said: "I am not so sure that I am willing to become the person I must become in order to gain tenure." Her remark drew a round of "uh-huhs" and "I know what you means" from the audience.

…Five themes were almost universal.

And I need to speak to this one:

Providing the entertainment. At the beginning of one semester, a student dropped by my office to ask what textbooks and supplementary materials she needed to purchase for my course. After I answered her questions, she said, "I am very excited about taking this course with you -- I hear that you are a very good teacher. But I expect you to make this fun!"

I'd have told the child on the spot she's out of her god damn mind. Unless she really likes pure knowledge. Little pissant need to go to clown school. Set her right up to work with the Neocons.

I had listened to my nonminority colleagues in nearby offices as they engaged in similar conversations with students. Their discussions centered on issues of academic expectations and rigor. Not once had I heard their students talk about the enjoyability of courses. It was as if they could satisfy students by providing knowledge, while for me the bar was raised. Not only was I to convey academic content, but I also had to entertain students.

One of my colleagues echoed my feeling: "I don't have the luxury of coming to class with just a book and a smile, like some of my nonminority colleagues. I have to 'flash and dash' them with media and PowerPoint, lest they view me as lazy and incompetent." Another said ruefully, "It would be nice to sit back and just enjoy teaching without all of the extra pressures of trying to be an entertainer, but I guess this is not my lot."

Good thing I'm not up for tenure. I'd never make it.

---

Zell Miller is not a Centrist.

Zell Miller is a quisling, and should be the first person actually thrown out of a political party.

---

GOP says N.Y. would be swell with Zell
By Geoff Earle and Klaus Marre

Some Republicans are hoping that sharp-tongued Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia will appear at the GOP’s national political convention this summer.

“It would be great if he could be there,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “Zell Miller is a Harry Truman kind of Democrat. He tells it like it is. He’s plain-spoken. He doesn’t mince words. He’s the person he is, and a patriotic American.”

An appearance by Miller would help President Bush try to re-establish his bipartisan credentials at a time when he has lost his polling edge on such issues as education and the economy.

The centrist Democrat has aided the GOP’s political goals since he was appointed in 2000 to fill the term of the late Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.). Miller provided a critical stamp of bipartisanship to President Bush’s tax cuts.

---

There's a pre-alpha version of what is essentially a hit counter for syndication feeds. FeedBurner says pre-alpha means:

…there are still likely to be many many bugs, and while the software isn't unstable at this point, we wouldn't go throwing around the term "high-availability" just yet either. Caveat Emptor.

But it looks interesting. For publishers, they do is take your syndication feed, massage it into any of the existing formats from Atom to RSS, because not all readers are supporting Atom yet. For consumers they tune the feed to match the user agent your aggregator claims to be:

NOTE: We currently maintain a database of over 624 different RSS/Atom feed readers and aggregators that have requested feeds (including such notables as Soup 0.7.1, something called "Mmm....Brains...", and Shmozilla). We are identifying many new readers and plan frequent additions to the list of supported user-agents above. (We use the term "user-agent" because SmartFeed will behave differently depending on which version of some of the listed clients it detects!). We will shortly publish a list of all the agents for which we maintain behavior characteristics and for which SmartFeed behaves appropriately. This list we publish and treat uniquely will always be a small subset of the total list of known readers, for two reasons: a) some readers don't make enough feed requests to warrant investment in reacting to them specifically, and b) some readers shroud their identity in generic user-agents. The Bloomba client, for example, presents itself as Java/1.4.1_05, as do a number of other clients, thus preventing us from treating them in a unique way, even though the current version of Bloomba doesn't support Atom. Similarly, many readers send up a blank user-agent, and this also prevents us from providing them with the most appropriate feed.

---

Subtitled: HELL naw, I STILL ain't saying shit.

Quote of note:

It didn't escape Bird's notice that the league was considered "saved'' once he arrived, with Magic, and that the popularity was due to wane the longer it took for another star of his caliber and hue to emerge.

The truth makes Bird's remarks important. This was not Paul Hornung revisited, an old man spouting antebellum myths about black athletes' intelligence. This was Larry Bird, unwilling participant in a two-decade nationwide forum on race and sports, telling what he's discovered on his journey.

He proved that even for a man out of his culture and comfort zone, a white man in a black-dominated game, it's all about whether you can play. But he learned that "white America'' -- again, his words -- still prefers white skin on its favorite players. The facts aren't pretty, but no one promised they would be.

---

Bird chirps: White America wants white basketball stars
- David Steele
Thursday, June 10, 2004

Part of the reason Larry Bird was so admired, so beloved, so exalted throughout his NBA career was the widespread belief that he was smarter than everybody else, blessed with better perception and better vision.

You believed it then, whether it was true or not. So now that he's saying out loud, on national television, what has been hinted at or whispered or thought about silently for years, do you believe him?

You should.

In a cable interview to air tonight in which he shares the floor with Magic Johnson, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, Bird said -- among other things -- that having a white American superstar in the NBA today is "good for a fan base because, as we all know, the majority of the fans are white America. And if you just had a couple of white guys in there, you might get them a little excited.

"But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever. I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.''

For starters, hear what he says, not what's been misinterpreted; Bird didn't say he wants the NBA to have more white stars. He was asked if the league needs white stars, and he said yes. Because it's what white fans in this country want, what they will watch and are willing to pay for. As he added, "It is a money game.''

Now try to disprove it.

---

You know, after posting about Ray Charles' passing, this feels kind of irreverent.

---

Singer Ray Charles, seen performing during the 25th annual Easter Seal fundraiser event in Pasadena in 1996, died at his Beverly Hills home on Thursday. He was 73.

---

Mac Diva has the second of two posts on the topic. Good analysis.

And I also see Janine at startle the echoes had a reaction to Mac's first post that I'd like to address:

I did find an informative post examining the bus ads themselves. P6 linked to MacDiva who researched and found good information about the background and politics of the organization that put out the ads.

I hope folks aren't mixing the issue with the messenger by intimating that if you think there's a problem in this country with black fathers being absent from their children's lives and you support addressing that problem then you're supporting the bus ads and the organization that sponsors them.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that that's not the case. Does the fact that the right wing is attempting to use this issue for its own purposes negate the validity of the issue itself? Not in this household! I hope we're not going to spend all our time and energy focusing on bus ads instead of looking directly at the crises faced by millions of black families. (Not just black families, btw, but that's where I'm focusing my attention.)

Like I said in my first post, it's a hot mess we're dealing with here.

First of all, I think it's pretty obvious that there are marketing techniques that creep into your head while you ain't looking. I once worked with this really nice mature (consciously choosing the Politically Correct terminology) woman who told me that she didn't drink beer, ever. Didn't like the taste. Yet on a really hot summer day, those beer ads make her really thirsty and curious. And most people don't consciously notice the sexual imagery in ads though they seem to respond to it. So when a high-profile campaign targeting Black people emerges you damn skippy I want to know who's behind it and what their motivation is. Based on what's coming out about this crew, they should be specifically disallowed any input into the discussion.

That, of course, means I think there should be a discussion.

I don't think acting out a specific ritual is what bonds a couple. I think their bond validates the ritual rather than the other way around. So I'm pro-commitment, pro enlightened self interest, and if your view of things is such that you must undergo the ritual to be that way, fine…but don't riff on folks that work it out without the ritual. The stats say some 50% of single mothers have never been married, but mere inspection shows that the number of single mothers with no men in their children's lives is nowhere near that high. As Mac says:

Nor is there any recognition that many of the women are in committed relationships, often involving cohabitation. They may not 'have papers on a man,' but a man is present in the home. Of equal importance, some of those women made rational decisions to give birth based on their economic status, physical and mental health and desire to have the experience of parenthood. If one has any respect for women as autonomous human beings, one has to grant them the right to make the decision to reproduce for themselves.

And there's also this to consider:

Births Out Of Wedlock, 1950-1992
Year	Black	White	Black multiple
1950	16.8%	1.7%	9.9
1960	21.6%	2.3%	9.4
1970	37.6%	5.7%	6.6
1980	56.4%	9.3%	6.1
1992	68.3%	18.5%	3.7%

This comes from Two Nations by Prof. Andrew Hacker. Notice that the ratio of Black to White Out Of Wedlock Births is decreasing, while the absolute number of each is increasing.

This all suggests something is going on that affects Americans across the board, that it's affecting white folks more than Black folks, but that Black folks (having less headroom) is hitting the crisis point first. Just a suggestion, but since it's in keeping with my understanding that there's really only one kind of human irrespective of one's social in-group, I run with it. You may disagree…I'm just stating my position for possible future reference. At any rate there are two questions this raises: what is causing this, and how to react to it.

No answers here yet.

---

I just noticed Drupal will pull in an RSS feed and just deal with it like another kind of node. I found out by noticing a link back to my post about the preconfigured versions the other day. They've set up a Feedster search for "drupal.org", suck it down as RSS and build the page automatically(?).

Mad possibilities. Seriously.

---

Economy Provides No Boost for Bush
Foreign Policy Concerns Hurt Approval Ratings

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A01

The nation's economy is growing smartly, wages have begun to rise, and employers have added more than 1.4 million jobs to their payrolls in the past nine months. Yet voters continue to give President Bush poor ratings on his handling of the economy.

It may sound baffling, but interviews with voters, pollsters and economists suggest Bush's stubborn difficulties on domestic policy boil down to an obvious problem abroad.

"It all goes back to Iraq," said Steven Valerga, 50, a Republican in Martinez, Calif., who voted for Bush in 2000 but plans to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in November. "It's a drain on the economy, when there's so much needed elsewhere. My gosh, we didn't need to be there."

---

National Poll Gives Kerry Solid Lead - LA Times
Thu Jun 10, 2004 03:01 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat John Kerry has a solid lead over President Bush among voters nationwide, according to a Los Angeles Times poll on Thursday that cited widespread unease over the country's direction, Iraq policies and the economy.
Kerry, the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, led Bush by 51 percent to 44 percent nationally in a two-way match-up, according to the poll of 1,230 registered voters taken from Saturday to Tuesday.

The figures dropped with independent Ralph Nader in the mix: Kerry drew 48 percent in a three-way race and Bush 42 percent, the poll showed.

Majorities disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy and Iraq, despite encouraging news on both recently, the poll said. Fifty-six percent of respondents said America "needs to move in a new direction" because Bush's policies have not improved the country.

However, in an indication of the race's volatility, the newspaper's polling in three fiercely contested states shows the Republican president with a double-digit advantage over Kerry in Missouri, with Nader included, and running even with the presumed Democratic rival in Ohio and Wisconsin.

However, majorities in each state say the country should change direction, the survey said.

---

Rights Group Says Bush Policies Created Iraq Abuse
Wed Jun 9, 2004 05:47 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Human Rights Watch on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of creating the climate for the Iraqi prison torture scandal when it "cast the rules aside" on prisoner interrogation techniques.

The New York-based watchdog said Washington circumvented international law and spent two years covering up or ignoring reports of torture or abuse by U.S. troops in the war in Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq.

The U.S. government has denied it had a policy to mistreat detainees in its war on terrorism.

"The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not simply the acts of individual soldiers," Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said in a statement with the 38-page "The Road to Abu Ghraib" report.

"Abu Ghraib resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to cast the rules aside."

---

Kurds Win Round on Constitution
By DEXTER FILKINS

AGHDAD, Iraq, June 9 — Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said Wednesday that his government would adhere to the interim constitution agreed to in March until elections are held next year, in an effort to defuse, at least temporarily, a looming crisis with the Kurdish leadership.

In a statement issued by his office late in the evening, Dr. Allawi's spokesman, George Hada, declared the new government's "full commitment" to the interim constitution until democratic elections are held later this year or in January.

The statement from Dr. Allawi's office followed a threat this week by Kurdish leaders to pull back from the Iraqi state and possibly secede. The leaders were alarmed after officials in New York failed to include the interim constitution in the United Nations Security Council resolution, approved Tuesday, on the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis.

The Kurds are worried that without the protections in the interim constitution, they might lose the broad autonomy they have garnered since 1991 under American military protection. The interim constitution recognizes the autonomy of the Kurdish region and grants the Kurds extraordinary powers to protect it.

But the commitment made by Dr. Allawi will likely only postpone a solution. His statement binds the new Iraqi government to the constitution only during "the provisional period," which will end when elections are held.

Many Shiite leaders say it is at that point, when the Shiites will likely hold a majority of the seats in the national assembly, that they would remove the language that grants the Kurds effective veto power over the permanent constitution.

---

Quote of note:

Bush hawks were visibly relieved to be on TV answering questions that had nothing to do with prison torture, phantom W.M.D. or our new C.I.A.-operative-turned-prime-minister in Iraq. What a glorious respite to extol a strong, popular, visionary Republican president who spurred democracy in a big backward chunk of the world — even if it isn't W., and it's the Soviet bloc and not the Middle East.

Showing they haven't lost their taste for hype, some Bushies revved up the theme that Son of Bush was really Son of Reagan.

---

Epitaph and Epigone
By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON

Sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a nation mourn. And sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a paternity suit.

At every opportunity, as the extraordinary procession solemnly wended its way from California to the Capitol, W. was peeping out from behind the majestic Reagan mantle, trying to claim the Gipper as his true political father.

---

Quote of note:

American courts have already accepted the doctrine of command responsibility. In July 2002, for example, a federal court in Miami found two retired Salvadoran generals liable for torture — even though neither man had committed or ordered the crimes in question. The jury held that they were nonetheless guilty, since as El Salvador's minister of defense and head of its national guard at the time of the torture, they knew (or should have known) about it and could have stopped it.

For their part, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials recently told Congress that they didn't know and couldn't have known about a few instances of sexual abuse in Iraq. But this claim is contradicted by the officer formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, who has said that her superiors were warned about the abuses months before they were exposed. And the Red Cross documented widespread abuses in Iraq last year and raised them with the White House in January.

---

An American in The Hague?
By JONATHAN D. TEPPERMAN

The Bush administration has yet to accept much responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. True, the president has apologized for the abuse on Arab television, and several top military officials in Iraq — including the general in charge of the prison and her boss — have been quietly suspended or will soon be transferred. But so far, legal responsibility has fallen exclusively on the seven court-martialed soldiers who were directly involved. Administration officials have argued that they themselves are not liable, since the incidents were the work of a few bad actors.

This may or may not be true. Even if no smoking gun is ever found to directly link American officials to the crimes, however, they could still find themselves in serious jeopardy under international law. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them — so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals.

This doctrine is the product of an American initiative. Devised by Allied judges and prosecutors at the Nuremberg tribunals, it was a means to impute responsibility for wartime atrocities to Nazi leaders, who often communicated indirectly and avoided leaving a paper trail.

More recently, the principle has been fine-tuned by two other American creations: the international tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which were established in the last decade by the United Nations Security Council at the United States' behest. These tribunals have held that political and military leaders can be found liable for war crimes committed by those under their "effective control" if they do nothing to prevent them.

---

Ex-Detainees Sue Companies for Their Role in Abuse Case
By KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON, June 9 - Lawyers representing former detainees who say they were sexually humiliated, beaten, and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison said Wednesday that they have sued two private companies that provided translators and interrogators at the prison.

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and a Philadelphia law firm, accuses the Titan Corporation and CACI International Inc. of conspiring to abuse detainees in order to secure more contracts from the United States government.

It alleges that the two companies and three men who worked for them directed and participated in illegal conduct at the prison to squeeze information from detainees in an effort to prove that the companies should be awarded more contracts.

The plaintiffs say they were hooded, raped, stripped naked and kept in isolation, and subjected to repeated beatings with chains and boots.

Two of the men, Stephen A. Stefanowicz and John B. Israel, worked as interrogators for CACI; a third, Adel L. Nakhla, was a translator for Titan.

"It is patently clear that these corporations saw an opportunity to build their businesses by proving they could extract information from detainees in Iraq, by any means necessary," Susan Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker, & Rhoads, said in a statement.

---

In Pivotal Case, Bush Backs Off Rule That Eased Phone Line Fees
By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: June 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 9 — In a move that critics say could lead to higher telephone rates, the Bush administration on Wednesday sided with the four regional Bell companies in a court case over the fees they charge their rivals for access to their networks.

The administration's decision, which could affect the phone bills of nearly 50 million customers across the country, was a significant policy reversal in a case making its way to the Supreme Court.

---

June 09, 2004

David Anderson showing up in the comments reminded me:

Project Apollonia

He's trying to get the first 1,000 books off the beginning of July.

And not stealing his thunder, but a long-time online partner of mine has a similar project working for Ghana.

Here's the deal: y'all got stuff you don't need, the kids need stuff they don't got. Meet in the middle. Everyone will be happy.

---

It's the collaborative book feature. At first glance it looks perfect for my multi-paged archives...not as easy as sticking page breaks into a single entry, but I can definitely get the sort I have in mind. You can add any existing node (blog post, for now) into a book, which is ideal for "Best of"-type stuff. And maybe my pain threshold has increased due to messing with this stuff over the course of a year, but it's much less scary than when I first checked it out.

I got some more fooling around to do, and maybe some studying up on mod_rewrite. But it looks really good.

---

Philosoraptor:

My Alternative Counter-Terrorism Plan for the $200 Billion We've Spent in Iraq

Here's my plan for the $200 billion we've spent in Iraq. The plan is designed as a counter-terrorism plan, and, since our actions in Iraq are alleged to be part of the "global war on terror," my plan constitutes an alternative to the administration's strategy of invading Iraq.

My Plan for the $200 Billion:

Burn it. Put it in a big fucking pile, pour gas on it and burn it up. Reduce it to ashes. Scatter it to the four winds.

Wasteful, you say? A foolish allocation of funds? Au contraire, mon frere. Speaking purely from a national security perspective for a moment and ignoring humanitarian considerations, my plan is far, far more efficient and cost-effective than that of the Bush Administration. Had we employed my plan, at least we wouldn't be spending our own money to help our enemies, we'd merely be wasting it. It's rather like the difference between throwing away $1000 on the one hand and using it to buy $1000 worth of cigarettes on the other--at least if you do the former, you aren't wasting money and killing yourself. But since smoking cigarettes can at least provide you with some pleasure, that analogy doesn't really work. A better one: It's like the difference between throwing away that $1000 and giving it to the Aryan Nation for its recruitment drive. By comparison, throwing the cash away is positively thrifty. By comparison, it's a brilliant plan.

---

Jeanne at Body and Soul has a question about a Pew Research Center poll of how Democrats and Republicans rate the reliability of various news sources:

What's more, Republican trust in the media is declining rapidly -- and this is where I really get confused. Over the past four years, Democratic trust in most media sources has dropped a few percentage points. CNN, for instance, went from being trusted by 48% of Democrats in 2000 down to 45% this year. Meanwhile, Republicans who trust CNN dropped seven points, from 33% to 26%. And that's not an unusual drop. The non-cable networks each dropped between eight and thirteen points.

I'm trying to be fair, but I find it hard to imagine how any rational person, no matter how conservative, could argue that the press has become more liberal in the last four years. Even if I try to factor in recent coverage of Bush, and especially of the war, which is a bit more realistic, and therefore inevitably more negative than it was a couple of years ago, I can't help but notice that press credibility among Republicans was already declining rapidly in 2002, when it's pretty hard to imagine how the press could have been more subservient.

You have to remember: Rush Limbaugh, who is Big Media if anyone is, can excoriate "the big media" and get nothing but sage nods of agreement from his audience.

The sort of person who Jeanne feels would drive up Fox' trustability score has a different idea of what "the news" is. Rush, Hannity and Colmes, O'Reilly, etc. aren't "the news", aren't Big Media. War coverage isn't "the news" either. "The news" comes on around five-ish and ends just in time for Jeopardy.

I think if the survey asked opinions of the personalities of the respective networks, it would have turned out closer to Jeanne's expectations.

---

Didn't l'il Georgie promise the Senate investigators into the torture scandal full cooperation from everyone?

Then why's Ashcroft holding out?

---

Kurds Threaten to Bolt Iraq Government
Kurds Threaten to Bolt Iraqi Government if Shiites Dominate; Saboteurs Blow Up Oil Pipeline

The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq June 9, 2004 — Kurdish parties warned Wednesday that they might bolt Iraq's new government if Shiites gain too much power. In another challenge to the interim administration, saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline, forcing a 10 percent cut in electricity output.
Kurdish fears of Shiite domination rose after the Americans and British turned down their request to have a reference to the interim constitution which enshrines Kurdish federalism included in the U.N. resolution approved Tuesday.

The country's most prominent Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, warned he would not accept mention of the interim charter in the resolution. Shiites oppose parts of the charter that give Kurds a veto over a permanent constitution due to be drawn up next year.

---

One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure
By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON

The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures.

And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.

---

U.S. Will Revise Data on Terror
The State Department works to amend its report on global attacks after critics alleged an undercount and political manipulation.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

June 9, 2004

WASHINGTON — The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.

When the most recent "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued April 29, senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world.

"Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.

But on Tuesday, State Department officials said they underreported the number of terrorist attacks in the tally for 2003, and added that they expected to release an updated version soon.

Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

---

Professor Kim has a collection of quotes from and links to various Black folks reminiscing on Reagan.

I'm not in there because I have no opinion about him. HATE the fucking policies he championed, but this week is the first time I've thought about him in years.

---

Man, Lester pointed out an interview with Larry Bird that I ain't saying shit about. I'm just going to set up a news watch at Google for "larry bird interview".

---

---

Legalizing Torture
Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A20

…This week, thanks again to an independent press, we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture. In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.

There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.

---

Reagan the new face of the $10 bill?
Conservatives will push for image of 40th president to grace $10 bill, $20 bill or dime.
June 9, 2004: 10:11 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Ronald Reagan's face could one day adorn the $10 bill or half the dimes minted in the country, if fans of the late president get their way.

On TuesdaySen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed that he is considering sponsoring legislation in the Senate to have Reagan's image replace that of Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, on the $10 bill.

Meanwhile, an effort is underway in the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), to put Reagan's face on the $20. And Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) wants to swap Reagan for John F. Kennedy on the 50-cent piece.

---

Dime debate pits Reagan against FDR
From Ted Barrett
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) --Congressional Republicans are pushing a bill to honor former President Reagan by putting his profile on the dime.

But Democrats intent on keeping the existing image of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt oppose the idea.

Former first lady Nancy Reagan is siding with the Democrats.

"While I can understand the intentions of those seeking to place my husband's face on the dime, I do not support this proposal and I am certain Ronnie would not," she said in a brief statement issued in Los Angeles Friday night.

"When our country chooses to honor a great president such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him and replace him with another.

"It is my hope that the proposed legislation will be withdrawn," Mrs. Reagan's statement concluded.

---

Nancy Reagan vetoes efforts for Ronald Reagan University

DENVER (AP) — Nancy Reagan is just saying no to the idea of a Ronald Reagan University in Colorado. Organizers wanted to name a proposed 10,000-student university after the former president, but his wife issued a statement Thursday effectively killing the idea.

"We do not support the creation of a separate university," she said.

Federal law gives former presidents or their spouses final say over the use of the president's name as long as either is alive, said Terry Walker, the founding president of the university.

---

Cobb asks:

So whenever anything gets through congress that benefits african americans, and republicans vote for it, do you give credit where credit is due, or do you resort to stereotypes about the Southern Strategy.

"Benefits african americans" covers a lot of ground. Handling generic American issues correctly would benefit Black folks to some degree and they will get credit. Specifically, for handling generic American issues correctly.

They will also receive blame for creating problems for the Black community. KNOWINGLY creating them. And generic pluses do not offset specific negatives.

Do you know the difference in temperament between Mark Racicot, Dick Armey, Dennis Hastert and Tom Delay, or do they all look alike to you?

Who gives a shit about their temperament? Their POLICIES all look alike to me.

Why are you even asking me about their temperament?

---

I hope no one bookmarked that Wordpress site I've been playing with as an expansion of my Public Library links.

Wordpress is good, but it's just not hitting the spot for me. So, onward…

The next experiment is with Drupal. I avoided it, even though it was one of the first packages I was seriously impressed with, because it doesn't have a learning curve it has a learning cliff. Not to mention that drupal.org misbehaves pretty badly in IE, which you will see for yourself if you check out this link to an announcement of the availability of two Drupal packages that are preconfigured sanely.

From Cyberdash, the home of said packages:

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that it's difficult to configure. I'll agree. As I've said in this discussion thread on drupal.org, most Drupal users know "that the reason that Drupal is difficult to customize is that it's like a block of clay--has to be molded for the particular site configuration." And I firmly believe, despite some of the comments in the same thread, that this is the number one obstacle stopping many people from adopting it.

Well, I'll admit. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take the Linux kernel, assemble the necessary packages, and configure everything. That's what Linux distributions are for.

So in the interest of making Drupal easier for newbies, I've assembled two Drupal distributions:

DrupalEd is intended for the writing classroom. I say that not because it can't be used for other classes, but writing teachers are generally more interested, I believe, in discourse and community interaction more so than content delivery. And in this area Drupal excels. Looking for testing and grading modules? They won't be here. It's simply the configuration that Terra and I have been using for a few semesters now.
DrupalBlog is setup as in individual blogsite, much like what Terra, Clancy and I use. By modifying a couple of permission settings, it can easily be configured to allow for multiple authors like Kairosnews.

And the demos for the packages (DrupalBlog for typical weblogs and DrupalEd prove that Drupal can play quite nicely with IE. Nice selection of skins, too.

---

It's true. The slipshod adherence to standards is appalling!

Thailand, a prospective member of the Axis of Evil? Thailand? Gosh, standards for evilness are getting lax these days. Back when I was a young demon, it took more than having a few terrorist cells that your government was trying to hunt. It took more than declining American "help" in hunting them. It took a blatant disregard for war crimes, widespread rape, invasion of privacy, and flouting the rule of law.

It used to be that nations that openly discriminated against minorities and kept them from getting married were eligible for membership. Nations that started premptive wars were eligible for membership. Nations that had sham elections were eligible for membership. Nations that ran up huge debts and left the bill for their kids to pay were eligible.

Ahhh, the good old days. They just don't know evil anymore.

---

One of the things that annoys the hell out of me is when college sports announcers say things like "This team hasn't won a championship since 1959," or "The last time this team was in the final four was [YEARS before any member of the team was even born]." Trivial, maybe even petty, but it's an unavoidable side effect of my personal philosophies. Confusing the name of a thing with the thing itself is the root of many an evil.

Those personal philosophies force me to join Walter at Idols of the Marketplace in hoping Cobb, in his examination of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will explain why the breakdown by party of that 40 year old vote is relevant when most of those Democrats he would decry switched parties because of that vote.

As I told Bob Parks when he stopped by:

I haven't disputed the Democratic/Republican vote breakdown. I'm saying the people who voted against the Civil Rights Act were not liberal whites, though they may have been both white and registered Democrats. As proof I submit the fact that all those registered Democrats that voted against the bill exited the party pretty much en mass and joined the Republican party.

You're impugning an outlook because of the actions of a group that did not hold the outlook at the time.

Even a fellow member of his Conservative Brotherhood has issues she raises in Cobb's comments:

This is a key reason why, even though I agree with 65% of Republican ideology, I hesitate to register as a Republican (but I ain't a Democrat either). When even Glenn Loury, Robert Woodson, and J.C. Watts grow exasperated by their party peers, then I know it ain't for me. That stuff doesn't get overlooked by black folks either, and is often brought up in discussions about Republican politics.

If Cobb is making the "mistaking the name for the thing named" error that would be surprising but correctable. If he's not, then I'm disappointed in myself for overestimating him.

---

Key sites:

HIVTest.org, from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On what kind of tests there are, why to take them and where.

The National Black AIDS Institute the only national public policy and research organization in the United States focused exclusively on HIV/AIDS among Black people. A necessary thing, although they have one of those damned annoying "On The Down-low" articles up at the moment…

The National Association of People with AIDS, a highly motivated set of folks.

AIDSVote.org

aidsvote.org is a joint project supported by dozens of the nation’s leading HIV/AIDS service, advocacy and research organizations.

We have two goals: to educate and inform presidential candidates of the concrete steps necessary to ensure our country is the world leader on HIV/AIDS and public health, and to educate and inform voters on the stands taken by the candidates on these crucial issues.

NATIONAL HIV TESTING DAY TO FOCUS ON KNOWING HIV STATUS: African Americans Urged to Get Tested

(Jun. 8, 2004) LOS ANGELES - Thousands of communities across the country come together each June 27 to hold special awareness and testing events in support of National HIV Testing Day (NHTD). The theme of this year’s campaign, “It’s Better to Know,” spotlights that people who test positive can receive care and treatment to preserve their health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that as many as 280,000 people in the United States are HIV-positive and are unaware of their status.

The National Black AIDS Institute (BAI) urges African Americans to seek voluntary HIV testing and counseling to learn their HIV status. Local communities across the United States from Los Angeles to New York, want to be part of the national solution to the AIDS epidemic and encourage at-risk African Americans who have never had an HIV test or who have engaged in unprotected sex or shared needles since their last test to seek voluntary HIV counseling and testing.

“It is particularly important that African Americans participate in National HIV Testing Day on June 27th. AIDS is devastating our communities because too few of us know our HIV status, " says Phill Wilson, The Institute's Executive Director. "Black women account for over 73% of new HIV cases among women in the US--a 99% increase in the last year. AIDS has become a health disaster in Black communities. Knowing our HIV status is the first step in HIV prevention and care.”

---

When Lester writes an Africana article on Reagan, do I link to it directly or to his blog entry pointing folks to it, which makes a different point?

And when jimi izrael writes about Reagan's impact on hip hop (seriously) should I skip it because I'd already planned to link to his blog entry on the reaction he got to his Cosby post (I didn't link the post itself because I've decided I'm not as interested in the controversy as I could be)?

---

Critics See a Reagan Legacy Tainted by AIDS, Civil Rights and Union Policies
By ROBIN TONER and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, June 8 - Despite Ronald Reagan's personal popularity, his domestic agenda was in many ways bitterly polarizing. Then, as now, conservatives hailed his tax cuts, his stirring defense of traditional values and his commitment to getting government "off the backs" of the American people.

But many liberals and progressives see his domestic legacy very differently, particularly on AIDS, civil rights, reproductive rights and poverty. Though clearly sympathetic to Mr. Reagan's family, they are still angry over his policies, which they assert reflected the unbridled influence of social conservatives.

---

June 08, 2004

…is to absorb at your own speed "Black Power Defined," a 1967 article by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It's nicely paginated so if you find it too long for one sitting you can bookmark where you are and go back to finish it.

That way when I discuss it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

One of us should, anyway…

---

I'm on an animated political cartoon kick.Just one more and I'll stop, I promise.

---

Haven't you wondered how this whole invasion mess really got started?

---

Brown at 100
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The Century Foundation, 5/17/04

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, overturning the policy of "separate but equal" in schooling, much of the focus has been on the past. But it's also important to ask where we're headed. What will schools look like 50 years from now on the 100th anniversary of Brown?

In 1979, on the 25th anniversary of the Brown decision, tremendous progress had been made. In the South, by the 1970s, one-quarter of black students attended intensely segregated minority schools (90-100% minority), down from 100% at the time of the 1954 decision. On the 50th anniversary, we've slid back some, with 31% of black students attending intensely segregated minority schools, according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project. And, according to a study conducted by David Rusk for The Century Foundation, schools are becoming more segregated by economic status as well.

The courts have held that school desegregation must be a temporary matter, and have released districts from desegregation plans despite the continued de facto segregation of students. In a number of districts, even voluntary efforts to use race in student assignment have been declared unconstitutional. Worse, our public policy discussion is dominated by education reforms that are essentially about the job of making "separate but equal" work – No Child Left Behind, vouchers, smaller class size, teacher development and the like.

The good news is that a small but growing number of districts are addressing segregation in a new way: by socioeconomic status. In Wake County, North Carolina; Cambridge, Massachusetts; La Crosse, Wisconsin and elsewhere, districts are seeking to make sure that all schools have a strong core of middle class families. The number of students attending districts with socioeconomic integration programs has increased from 20,000 in 1999 to almost a half million today. These districts rely primarily on public school choice rather than compulsory busing, to achieve this goal.

School policies that promote integration by socioeconomic status avoid the legal complications of student assignment by race. More importantly, the social science research evidence suggests that where integration raised African American achievement, it was not because black kids need to sit next to white kids to learn, but because poor kids of all races do much better in middle class environments.

---

Group: Poverty a Security Threat to U.S.

By BARRY SCHWEID
AP Diplomatic Writer

June 8, 2004, 10:19 AM EDT

WASHINGTON -- Poverty and disease in places such as Afghanistan, Haiti and Somalia pose serious threats to U.S. national security but are frequently overlooked by American policy-makers, a group of former U.S. government officials said Tuesday.

"U.S. foreign policy must break its habit of inertia toward weak states," the Center for Global Development, a private group formed four years ago, said in a report. Among the potential signs of danger is when basic rights are not protected in weak countries, providing an opening for violent political opposition and corruption, it said.

"The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan warn of the serious consequences for our security when we allow governments to collapse and chaos to reign," the report said.

Among the recommendations were establishing a single Cabinet-level agency that that consolidates U.S. support for development for poor countries.

"Weak and failed states pose a 21st century threat to U.S. security, interests and values," the report said. "But the U.S. government institutions charged with meeting this threat are relics of the mid-20th century."

Group: Poverty a Security Threat to U.S.

---

American Families at Risk
An Overview
By Richard C. Leone
Issue Date: 05.04.04

Since the Great Depression, there has been a strong national political consensus supporting policies that help middle-class families cope with the multiple risks in our market economy. These include the risks of illness, destitution in old age, hazards from defective products, polluted natural resources, industrial accidents, corporate frauds, high unemployment, and other assaults largely beyond the individual's control. Such policies are not, by and large, targeted redistributions to the poor but protections for the broad middle class. Many government activities reflect this concern, including social investments financed by a progressive tax code and a wide array of regulatory protections, almost all the result of necessary responses to past abuses by the market. Such essential services as electricity, water, telephone, and, for that matter, private insurance of various kinds have also been secured by government investment and regulation. Without these diverse government activities, ordinary middle-class families would be extremely vulnerable. With them, America both preserves the dynamism of a market system and defends innocent individuals from avoidable economic calamities.

Today, the radicals in charge in Washington are targeting regulations that protect middle-class consumers from financial swindles, monopoly pricing, unsafe food and drugs, and environmental hazards. They are undermining social outlays that serve mostly the middle class, such as unemployment insurance, college-loan programs, Medicare, Social Security, public education, and much more. They have warped our fiscal priorities in ways that will affect the nation for decades. Shifts in the tax code further shrink the share of taxes paid by the highest-income groups and corporations and thus transfer the burden to the wages of working Americans. Because the shifts also add to the nation's debt, they lock in high taxes for future generations of middle-class workers.

The right, of course, applies labels to its "reforms" that sound very appealing: ending "death taxes" and double taxation; offering medical savings accounts, new personal investment accounts, and school vouchers; enacting tort "reform"; reducing the burden of regulation. Yet, like the tax cuts, the effect in each case is to overturn practices that, by and large, have greatly benefited Americans across the income spectrum.

---

The Fat Epidemic: He Says It's an Illusion
By GINA KOLATA

Published: June 8, 2004

…Dr. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the changes in Americans' body weights from 1991 to today by Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics. At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As you move up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but even at midrange, people today are just 6 or 7 pounds heavier than they were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30 pounds, Dr. Flegal reported.

As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991.

Dr. Friedman gave an analogy: "Imagine the average I.Q. was 100 and that 5 percent of the population had an I.Q. of 140 or greater and were considered to be geniuses. Now let's say that education improves and the average I.Q. increases to 107 and 10 percent of the population has an I.Q. of above 140.

"You could present the data in two ways," he said. "You could say that the average I.Q. is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled."

He added, "The whole obesity debate is equivalent to drawing conclusions about national education programs by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled."

---

Darfur starvation will be televised ... eventually
By Andrew Stroehlein

…Journalists who are getting into Darfur right now arrive at an eerily calm interregnum. They aren't there to witness Janjaweed attacks, they only see villages that were burnt to the ground weeks or months ago. For print and radio this is not an impossible obstacle, and articles and radio packages now appear regularly, though not frequently, in several serious newspapers and on radio.

The same cannot be said for TV, however. There was a tiny blip of television reports in mid-May based on interviews with refugees in Chad, but the few TV crews that were there have long since packed up and left. Even fewer have any intention of returning soon.

This moment between Darfur's ethnic cleansing and mass starvation is not made for TV as it is understood by news producers. They want active visceral footage to enliven a story. And, looming famine or no, video of burnt-out, abandoned villages only goes so far.

So, rather than report early on a horrific tragedy in the making - and thus possibly even contribute to its prevention or at least its amelioration - television news will wait for the starving to begin.

Once that happens, of course, everyone will send in a TV crew to film the dying and the dead. And reporters will link up to the world by videophone to ask why this has happened, and ask why no one did anything to stop it weeks and months before - that is, today, when television is refusing to cover the story.

---

In response to yesterday's fractional essay on manhood, Netwoman forced me to invoke my poor overused brain:

I think that much of your notions of masculinity are rooted in biology, and I have to disagree. Masculinity and femininity are socially constructed - historically and culturally fluid - ever changing and contested. It is not the same as categories of man and woman, which is based on biological sex characteristics (and even this dualism is challenged as the case with hermaphrodites and so forth).

bell hook's "We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity [2003]" is an interesting read

Actually, my analysis of the notion of masculinity is rooted in the recognition that it grew seamlessly from out of the experience of the biology. And the twistyness of that sentence is a sign of why the essay is unfinished. I haven't found the right level of observation and expression to be simple and clear about it.

Masculinity and femininity are socially constructed - historically and culturally fluid - ever changing and contested. It is not the same as categories of man and woman, which is based on biological sex characteristics

Granted. Gender is the meaning assigned to sexuality. Meaning can only be assembled from the content we have in our minds, which content (of necessity) varies from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. Gender roles are behavior patterns (jobs, stylistic gestures) to which a gender (NOT a sexuality!) has been assigned.

Hermaphroditism not withstanding, sexuality is a binary thing on this planet, That hasn't changed and likely won't. Sexuality is physically fundamental, which means gender is of necessity psychologically fundamental. I strongly feel the meaning we attach to sexuality…our root notions of gender…haven't changed much either. Real changes in our patterns of activity are too new to have been processed by the collective mind.

On an individual level, we seem to have our personal understanding of gender assignments, created by taking the current cultural model and modifying it according to our experiences and desires. We "add up" the traits we see in a person and issue the appropriate (learned) behavior.

We have women doing…well…things they "couldn't" a few years back because they had masculine gender assignments. Males who see nothing else to base their masculinity on cannot accept that; which makes them like dinosaurs in China half a second after that meteor hit around the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago.

See? Not clear enough.

---

Caught this at the Center for American Progress:

MEMO EXEMPTS PRESIDENT FROM LAW: According to the WSJ, at the "core" of the memo is the exceptional argument that "the president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture." But the memo goes even further: not only can the president approve interrogation techniques as he sees fit, but "To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a 'presidential directive or other writing' that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president.'" Reportedly over the objections of some military lawyers, one lawyer who helped prepare the report said the authors "sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to assert 'presidential power at its absolute apex.'"

…which reminds me of this:

One of those hierarchically significant people, I'll call him George (because that was his name) explained to me the purpose of rules. Prior to the conversation I thought rules were intended as a guide, or to insure a rational environment. This gentleman, being a maker of rules as opposed to a follower of them, had a different perspective.

George explained to me that no one looks at what you do as long as nothing goes wrong, and even if they do check they still have no way of knowing what truly happened. All they know is what you recorded and if that's enough to explain the situation at hand, you don't have to say another word. No one can question your judgment…as long as you can document that you followed the rules…no matter how screwed the result. More, a set of rules or laws broad enough to govern a social situation as complex as a workplace will have a sufficient number of rules to insure you can find one to support any personnel decision you'd care to make. In other words, George said, rules are used, not necessarily followed, by people in decision making positions. This accorded with my observation that the main outward sign of power is that a person can decide a situation falls outside the rules and act independently of them.

George explained it very concisely: "Fuck the rules. They're only there to cover our asses. If I want to do it, I will."

That my George is a George and Dubya is a George is proven coincidental by the existance of this George.

---

Quote of note:

Although not so shrill and xenophobic as they once were, these parties are broadly united by fears of immigration and concerns over Turkey's aspirations to join the 25-nation EU.

---

Euroskeptic Right Set to Shake Up EU Elections
Tue Jun 8, 2004 06:39 AM ET

By Jeremy Smith
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A mixed bag of far-right, nationalist and euroskeptic parties aims to redraw Europe's political landscape this week by playing on fears of unfettered expansion, immigration and a federal European superstate.

Nearly 349 million EU citizens can vote from Thursday to Sunday to select 732 members of the European Parliament for the next five years. The center-right is forecast to dominate the new parliament, with the socialists as the second largest group.

One key feature may be gains for the loudest critics of European integration, who hope to see their score boosted by a low turnout and become a significant force, maybe even holding the balance of power in the new assembly.

"My sense is the lower the turnout, the greater is the risk of disproportionate skepticism or extremist parties," Pat Cox, the parliament's outgoing president, told Reuters.

---

Gay Marriage Opponent Asks U.S. Court to Halt Unions
Mon Jun 7, 2004 06:25 PM ET

By Mark Wilkinson
BOSTON (Reuters) - A gay marriage opponent asked a Massachusetts appeals court on Monday to put the state's supreme court decision lifting a ban on same-sex marriage on hold until voters decide the issue.

Mathew Staver, head of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal group, told the First Circuit Court of Appeals that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had overstepped its authority by changing the definition of marriage.[P6: and this clown would have the appeals court overstep ITS authority by overruling the state Supreme Court.]

"The SJC impermissibly amended the constitution's definition of marriage, which is universally recognized as the union of a man and a woman," Staver told three appeals judges. "It has violated the separation of powers."

Staver said the legislature's powers had been undercut by the court's Nov. 18 decision, which lifted the state ban on gay marriage after finding it unconstitutional.

---

Nike Tries a New Medium for Advertising: The Blog
By NAT IVES

Published: June 7, 2004

Gawker Media, a small company that operates snarky Web logs on culture and politics, like Gawker and Wonkette, has begun blogging on behalf of major advertisers.

The company's first paid blog is for Nike. Called Art of Speed, the blog will spend about a month showcasing a series of 15 short films on the theme of speed, all commissioned by Nike. Gawker Media Contract Productions, a new division of Gawker Media, will supply layout, commentary, links and other features. Terms were not disclosed.

---

U.S. Hopes to Have Iraq Resolution by G8 Summit
By Frances Kerry

SAVANNAH, Ga. (Reuters) - Iraq will loom large at a summit of major industrialized nations this week which the United States hopes to go into armed with a new U.N. resolution allaying doubts about the war and the U.S. occupation.

The United States and key war ally Britain are pushing for a resolution that will outline Iraqi sovereignty after the formal handover of power from the U.S.-led force of 160,000 troops to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.

U.S. officials were optimistic the resolution was imminent, meaning it could be approved as Bush welcomes leaders of major industrialized countries, the Group of Eight, for a three-day gathering starting on Tuesday in the secluded resort of Sea Island in Georgia.

He is hoping to use the summit, being convened under tight security amid a spate of al Qaeda actions and threats, to restore his standing with allies such as French President Jacques Chirac who have been deeply critical of the war and to press his case that Iraq can be a catalyst for broader change in the Middle East.

---

quote of note:

The letter to Bush from senators was signed by 43 Democrats, 14 Republicans and one independent.

---

Senators Ask Bush to Change on Stem Cell Policy
Mon Jun 7, 2004 02:55 PM ET
By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of the Senate asked President Bush to change policy and allow stem cell research to better combat Alzheimer's the day before former President Ronald Reagan died from complications of the brain-wasting disease.

In a bipartisan letter signed by 58 of the 100 senators and mailed on Friday, lawmakers told Bush his policy provided "difficult challenges" to those seeking a cure for Alzheimer's and other illnesses. The letter, released publicly on Monday, echoed one sent last month by 206 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

There was no immediate response from the White House, which has placed restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and opposes using stem cells from most embryos. In response to the April letter, officials indicated there would be no change in policy.

---

Key Findings Released In Pennsylvania Racial Profiling Study
The Associated Press

A recent study funded by state police found that while white drivers are less likely than minorities to be searched by state police during a traffic stop, the searches of white drivers more often yielded illegal drugs and alcohol.

Percentage of searches in which state police recovered ``contraband,'' by type of driver:

Whites: 29 percent

Blacks: 21 percent

Hispanics: 17 percent

Others: 12 percent

Source: Pa. State Police's ``Project on Police-Citizen Contacts''

---

I'm glad to see a significant segment of the left recognizes the prohibitions on speaking ill of the dead do not extend to the policies the dead upheld.

---

A new P2P network, Mercora, has an interesting approach to staying legal. You can share files, pictures, but music is streamed under specific legal constraints.

Yes, I can think of about 14 ways around that too.

Thing is, they're not a Kazaa thing where you serve up a bunch of Mp3s and let any and everyone have at them. Apparently file sharing on demand is the problem.

---

June 07, 2004

Someone googled "while liberal guilt" and found a brief post I wrote on the subject. Curious, I check the search results…something I regret like two times out of five.

I was the number two result. Number one was at…Free Republic. And it's most singularly stupid, by someone who has no idea what satire is:

White Liberal Guilt
me | 5/9/2004 | me

Posted on 05/08/2004 9:21:46 PM PDT by DameAutour

Last week's episode of the Sopranos featured a conversation between the daughter, Meadow Soprano, and her unemployed live-in boyfriend. While discussing his out-of-work status, the character says that he won't go to work at McDonald's because he doesn't want to take a job from a minority.

I was struck by just how condescending and patronizing this is. [P6: IT'S A FUCKING TELEVISION SHOW, IDIOT! And I'm convinced the writers had nothing in mind but getting paid when they wrote it.] I grew up in a relatively non-political black household. My parents are more religious than political. However, like most blue-collar black men, my father leans Democrat if anyone ever asks. I grew up believing in affirmative action and I actually liked Bill Clinton before I detested him.

However, my parents raised their children to be intelligent, independent thinkers. One of the things that turned me away from liberalism is the "white guilt". It seems to me that this pervasive attitude presumes blacks can do nothing without the assistance and sacrifices of whites. There is no need for blacks to work hard and compete for success, because whites must hand to them whatever they require.

Can a people really be free if they do not fight for it? Is it possible that being granted freedom by the government is why so many blacks do not get off of the government plantation? As a human being with pride, I detest "white guilt" and the patronizing attitude of so many liberals.

---

Mac Diva noticed the discussion about dumping on Black men as fathers and decided to dig into the organization backing the ads.

And she's not finished:

Note: There will be a second entry on this topic. I had hoped to reach the issue of whether the illness the fatherhood movement seeks to cure actually exists. However, the ideology and funding of the NFI are interesting enough to merit an entry of their own. While waiting for Part II, ask yourself: Why would some African-American bloggers support the National Fatherhood Initiative's ads lambasting black fathers?

Some do? My, my, my…

---

---

Given as how links are status in the blogosphere, a general practice of pinging without linking such that links to one's blog appears on someone else's with no reciprocation COULD cause a filter to be applied.

---

Today ain't one of those days.

---

If I had realized so many folks would respond to it, I'd have kept better track of both sides of the discussion My own reaction was posted in three parts (four, actually). And I suppose I could search the various blog services to see everyone else that spoke out.

But I like responses that deal in empirical facts. That's why I appreciated the article George linked to yesterday, and why I like the two articles Pinko Feminist Hellcat linked to Friday.

I found it today because she commented at S-Train and T-Steel's joint and signed "Sheelzebub." I was like, that handle rocks, and I had to see the blog it was attached to. Good first impression, of both her stuff and the comments I read.

---

---

Past Imperfect: The Cosby Show

Cosby's recent remarks are nothing shocking: the afrostocracy has been criticizing its more ghetto cousins for decades.

By William Jelani Cobb

The old maxim warns us to beware of priests who lose their faith but keep their jobs. By that logic, a whole lot of alleged spokespersons for black people should've been unemployed a long time ago. In the wake of Bill Cosby's now-famous Pound Cake Speech at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's dinner commemorating the Brown v. Board of Education case, the comedian has been praised by white conservatives and black folk at large for essentially keeping it real. For airing dirty laundry. For saying in public what your uncle Bobby has been saying behind closed doors for years.

But hold on. Before you fix your mouth to sing Cosby's praises, consider this: the fact that some black people make similar comments in private does not make them any more accurate when they are spoken in public.

---

I was at True Majority's Serious Fun page today. Saw this rather frightening thing.

For the less twisted among you, they got an explanation of the absurdity of our nuclear weapons budget.

To see Chip explain our crazy nuclear weapons policy just click one of these links

Real Broadband

Real Dial-Up

Windows Media Broadband

Windows Media Dial-Up

---

You'll note I don't tend to post the "white atrocity of the day." They get reported, but they're dealt with locally, by local standards, which means they are rarely resolved, generally dismissed. I usually don't read such stories.

I do read what reader send me, spam notwithstanding. One Black Magic sent me an article from the Sacramento Observer about an incident in a North Carolina school where a teacher is accused of spitting in a child face.

It seems the girl's parents aren't simply accepting the dismissal of the incident, but based on what I read I don't see it going much further.

---

I did say I had three and a half.

---

On Being A Man In The First Place

There are places and times that it's hard to become a Man. Like most of the problems we have, the physical part is automatic. But to become a Man…and we're not going to jerk around denying there are emotional and social dimensions in our recognition of manhood…one must be accepted as a Man by self and society.

In this society, the USofA, there are several rites of passage that indicate the assumption of adult rights, status and responsibilities…getting a drivers license, the first time your mom let you choose cool clothes, high school graduation, the first credit card. And even if you never do any of that, you gain the legal status of adult when you reach the age of majority.

But being a Man is different than just being legal, being an adult. Think about it…picture an archetypical male. What's he like?

"Cool Pose; The Dilemmas of Black Manhood In America" by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson (from which I drew several ideas in this area) says:

"African American men have defined manhood in terms familiar to white men: breadwinner, provider, procreator, protector."

Protect, provide, procreate. Makes sense. The biology drives us to reproduce, and we protect and provide for the resulting family. We meet the demand with activities available to us, and the skills we've learned so far…by having a family or doing things that satisfy soothe that biological itch.

But being a man is more than just being an adult male human. True, that is the minimal definition, but the ways we use the word ("Be a man about it." "Real men don't . . .") shows we attach meaning to the word beyond the mere possession of a penis. And it's very important…VERY important… to men to feel they are men (in the more than minimal sense-which state I will henceforth refer to as masculine so I don't have to keep explaining it).

It was easy for early male humans to be masculine. It was a direct extension of biological maleness. Men were the providers and protectors, hunters and warriors. Aggressive, testosorone-driven behavior was the sign of masculinity, the ability to provide and protect which earned you status and the right to procreate.

When human culture developed to the point where survival, even prosperity, could be had without physically snatching it from someone else, things became more complex. Symbols of social power became an acceptable substitute for physical power. In fact, it became the preferred form of power because social power can get you things physical power never could. Physical superiority wasn't eliminated as a symbol of manhood, though. I would expect the most militant feminist to recognize Evander Holyfield as more masculine than Bill Gates. But…and this is an aspect of the problem men face…social power, the preferred kind, is not such that physical superiority is necessary to wield it. On deep level men (and women, to be truthful) expect power to flow from physical strength. Add in the fact that one can own symbols of power without actually having any power and you have the basis for some serious confusion about who is where in the hierarchy…not a good thing in a social species.

---

States' End Run Dilutes Burden for Special Ed
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

SILVER SPRING, Md., June 6 — Every afternoon, a half-dozen fourth and fifth graders with learning disabilities gather in Julie Grant's classroom at Broad Acres Elementary. Some struggle to turn the words they see and hear into coherent thoughts, others to concentrate.

For now, the future of Broad Acres could depend on how well Ms. Grant's tiny class does on the state's achievement tests. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, every category of student at Broad Acres — including special education — must show improvement or the entire school can face penalties.

But like a dozen other states, Maryland is hoping to circumvent those rules, asking to count students like Ms. Grant's only as children of poverty, a big group that would hide any lack of academic growth.

Maryland officials say their proposals would avoid large numbers of schools being labeled "in need of improvement" when only small numbers of students are doing poorly. If changes are not made, said Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's superintendent of schools, "there'll be a lot of anger on the part of the community," some of it possibly directed at the special education students.

So far, the federal government seems receptive to the states' concerns. It is already allowing four states, in addition to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to require schools to have larger numbers of disabled or non-English-speaking children in order to be judged by their performance, and it is expected to approve similar proposals from at least five more.

But many parents of children with disabilities, who embraced No Child Left Behind because of its pledge to rate schools by the performance of all kinds of students, say they are outraged by the special allowances. "The purpose of the law is to see what's what," said Ricki Sabia, associate director of the National Policy Center at the National Down Syndrome Society. "It's not to make schools look good."

---

In considering whether Reagan's "law" that liberty contracts when government expands is correct, William Saletan takes an approach I tried in November last year, except I specifically mentioned Libertarians

Which is more important: that a government and economy operate by Libertarian principles or that individuals live in Libertarian freedom?

I was on a bit of a tear about Libertarianism® and I asked the question because:

It occurred to me that (given human nature) it is by no means certain that a government whose every decision was vetted for consistancy with Libertarian morality would result in a society where everyone in it had the personal economic ability to live according to that morality.

So I'm wondering which is more important: that the government act in Libertarian fashion, that I act in Libertarian fashion or that everyone acts in Libertarian fashion.

There's a great appeal to plain talkin' analysis and the simplistic solutions that come from them. The problem is that life isn't that plain and to pretend it is puts us all in the bed of Procrustes.

---

Don't you just HATE it when a pundit hits it like this?

---

What Reagan Got Wrong
Liberty is not the absence of government.
By William Saletan
Posted Sunday, June 6, 2004, at 7:16 AM PT

"There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."

That was the money quote in Ronald Reagan's farewell address nine days before he left the White House in January 1989. It crystallized his philosophy. I call it Reagan's Law.

This is what Reagan did best: He clarified the clash of ideas. He forced people to take sides. If you agreed with him, you were conservative. If you didn't, you weren't.

Do you buy Reagan's Law? That depends on two related questions. First, do you define liberty as the right to do things, or the ability to take advantage of that right? If liberty is the right to make a decent living or attend a good school, then getting government out of the way will suffice. But if liberty is the ability to make a decent living or attend a good school, then getting government out of the way isn't enough. In fact, government expansion, in the form of student loans or job training, may be necessary.

Second, do you view private institutions—businesses, churches, communities, families—more as guardians of liberty or as threats to it? To the extent these institutions serve the individual, getting government out of the workplace (through deregulation) and out of the community (say, by permitting collective school prayer) serves liberty. But to the extent these institutions threaten the individual, liberty may be better served by government expansion, in the form of workplace regulation or injunctions against school prayer.

---

Rescue bid for DR Congo peace
The deaths of two peacekeepers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in an ambush has raised fresh fears about the country's fragile peace process.

The European Union has expressed deep concern at deteriorating security in the east of the country.

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel is travelling to Rwanda and Uganda on Monday in attempts to diffuse tensions.

The complete pull-out of renegade troops that occupied Bukavu last week has still to be confirmed by the UN.

European troops

Dissident leader Brig Gen Laurent Nkunda says all of his troops have withdrawn from the town.

UN peacekeepers say some rebels remain but it is not clear whether they are part of Gen Nkunda's group or his Bukavu-based ally, Col Jules Mutebusi.

---

Despite Agreement, Insurgents Rule Fallujah
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 7, 2004; Page A15

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The travelers entered Fallujah first through a checkpoint operated by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a U.S.-trained paramilitary unit meant to add muscle to the American-led occupation. The men in black berets distractedly waved cars past, onto the city's main street.

Then it became apparent who was really in charge. A few yards in, wild-eyed young men in masks pulled cars over at will, searched them and demanded identification documents. No one could leave or enter without passing muster. Other groups of fighters in masks roamed side streets and alleys, brandishing rifles at all sorts of angles.

It was not supposed to be like this. Under an agreement made last month with U.S. Marine commanders, a new force called the Fallujah Brigade, led by former officers from Saddam Hussein's demobilized army, was to safeguard the city. The unruly gunmen -- many of them insurgents who battled the Marines through most of April -- were supposed to give way to Iraqi police and civil defense units.

Instead, the brigade stays outside of town in tents, the police cower in their patrol cars and the civil defense force nominally occupies checkpoints on the city's fringes but exerts no influence over the masked insurgents who operate only a few yards away.

---

15 Years Later, The Remaking Of a President
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 7, 2004; Page C01

The uplifting tone with which journalists are eulogizing Ronald Reagan is obscuring a central fact of his presidency: He had a very contentious relationship with the press.

Most reporters liked the Gipper personally -- it was hard not to -- but often depicted him as detached, out of touch, a stubborn ideologue. Sam Donaldson, Helen Thomas and company would do battle in those prime-time East Room news conferences that Reagan relished, and he would deflect their toughest questions with an aw-shucks grin and a shake of the head. Major newspapers would run stories on all the facts he had mangled, a practice that faded as it became clear that most Americans weren't terribly concerned.

The media dubbed him the Teflon president, and it was not meant as a compliment.

Reagan was, quite simply, a far more controversial figure in his time than the largely gushing obits on television would suggest.

---

Remedies for Prisoner Abuse
Monday, June 7, 2004; Page A22

THE ONLY WAY to staunch the continuing damage of the prisoner abuse scandal is for the Bush administration to fully document and publicly report on the dozens of cases of homicide and physical abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, prosecute all those directly responsible, and hold accountable the senior military and civilian officers whose decisions and policies led to the lawlessness. President Bush should meanwhile rewrite prisoner interrogation policies so that they conform to U.S. and international law and should publish the revised procedures so that Americans, and the world, can be assured of their propriety.

For now, there is little reason to hope for such essential corrective actions. On the contrary: There is disturbing evidence that senior U.S. military commanders ignored or covered up serious crimes against prisoners, including homicides, until the disclosure of shocking photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison forced them to act, and that even now the Pentagon's intent is to restrict charges to a small number of mostly low-ranking soldiers and resist all scrutiny of senior commanders and policies. Mr. Bush, for his part, continues to damage his credibility and America's global prestige by insisting that the trouble concerns only a handful of soldiers at one prison in Iraq -- though more than 100 cases of misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan have now been reported -- and to ignore the need to correct his policies.

---

E-Mail to Cheney Called A Courtesy
Note on Halliburton Deal Sent by Army Corps Official

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 5, 2004; Page A03

An Army Corps of Engineers official said yesterday that he was referring to a public relations courtesy when he wrote an e-mail last year saying a large contract with oil services contractor Halliburton Co. had been "coordinated" with the office of Vice President Cheney, the company's former chief executive.

…Democrats in Congress claimed this week the word "coordinated" suggested that Cheney's office had a role in deciding to award a contract to KBR three days later that was worth as much as $7 billion.

Browning, who was allowed to discuss the e-mail yesterday, said he used the word "coordinated" because Feith said his office had contacted Cheney's office as a courtesy to let them know the contract had been awarded. Feith made it clear in the meeting that day that the Pentagon was sensitive to the perception that Cheney might have weighed in on behalf of his former company, Browning said.

---

June 06, 2004

Deja Vu At The Florida Polls?
Scrubbing felons from voters rolls raises fresh concerns
By TIM PADGETT

After the 2000 presidential-election debacle in Florida, state and county election officials there agreed to examine whether the names of more than 19,000 people should be restored to the voter rolls because most of them may have been mistakenly identified as convicted felons and thus ineligible to vote. (In Florida, convicted felons must apply to get back their voting rights after their sentences are complete, though few manage to do so.) Those disenfranchised voters took on increased significance when Bush won the state by just 537 votes. Have the snafus been fixed? Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood has now told county supervisors that 47,000 more names are likely to be purged from the voter rolls this year, and election watchdogs fear that Florida is poised to repeat the mistakes of 2000 on a much larger scale.

---

What Bill Cosby Should Be Talking About
It's fine to be critical. But blacks should be working together, not against each other
By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

…What’s really needed isn’t a black civil war or more uncivil speech. The real problem may not be that blacks and whites are having separate conversations — that’s been true for 400 years — it’s that comments such as the ones Cosby made could be used as bricks for different groups of blacks to wall themselves off from each other. That would be a shame. Right now, on Broadway, Cosby’s erstwhile sitcom wife, Phylicia Rashad, is co-starring in A Raisin in the Sun alongside one of the most successful current purveyors of hip-hop slang, rapper/would-be actor Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. When I saw the show, I thought there was something profoundly appealing about seeing two different generations of black entertainers performing together in a classic play. Cosby, in his speech, declared that blacks should hold each other to a higher standard. Working together, and not just getting each other worked up, may be a good start.

---

I was scanning the Google results for nigritude ultramarine and found this brief discussion, probably the only page on the net that actually discusses "nigritude ultramarine":

Nigritude Ultramarine is really non-sense because the definition of nigritude is Blackness; the state of being black. Ultramarine is either a blue or a purplish blue made of either power of lapis lazuli or made synthetically by heating clay, sodium carbonate, and sulfur together.

Since by saying nigritude ultramarine we are really saying blackness and blue we would be talking about a navy blue or something similar and there fore the two words put together are not very useful or meaningful.

Problem is, it's negritude, not nigritude, he's talking about.

Overview for "negritude"

The noun "negritude" has 1 sense in WordNet.

1. Negritude -- (an ideological position that holds Black culture to be independent and valid on its own terms; an affirmation of the African cultural heritage)

I guess nigritude would be an ideological position that holds excessive bling to be independent and valid on its own terms, at which point (what with the lapis lazuli connection) nigritude ultramarine could possibly be found to have a definitive meaning.

---

The Black Jesse Helms.

Check his radio campaign ads. Kos posted about it yesterday and has a direct link, but I think you should go to his web site and check out The Twilight Zone ad. Because when you hear it you won't be able to believe it's not a satire by the opposition otherwise.

---

Allawi: Iraq Will Control Its Military
By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer

UNITED NATIONS - Iraq (news - web sites)'s new prime minister told the U.N. Security Council his government will solely control its armed forces and coordinate joint military operations and security policy "in full partnership" with the U.S.-led multinational force, according to a letter obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.

Iyad Allawi sent the letter as the council held a special meeting to discuss his view of Iraq's relationship with the multinational force and that of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites). In a letter of response, Powell pledged that the American commander of the multinational force "will work in partnership with the sovereign government of Iraq in helping to provide security."

Council members were expected to receive a new draft on Monday of the resolution endorsing the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq's new interim government on June 30 and authorizing the multinational to help provide security during Iraq's political transition.

---

At Negrophile, George spotted a St. Louis Post Dispatch article with statistics that show Dr. Cosby doesn't have quite the grasp on what the lower classes among us are up to as he thinks he does.

Which means neither do all the gloating conservatives. But we knew that.

---

My mom told me if you can't say something nice…but you know, folks are planning to spend all week talking about the passing of Mr. Reagan and that means going through the archives. Moreover.com went through theirs and republished a link to this December, 2002 Time Magazine editorial in their Black interests news feed.

Lott, Reagan and Republican Racism

If the GOP wants to attract black voters, argues TIME's Jack White, it must confront the legacy not only of Trent Lott, but also of former President Reagan
By JACK WHITE

Here's some advice for Republicans eager to attract more African-American supporters: don't stop with Trent Lott. Blacks won't take their commitment to expanding the party seriously until they admit that the GOP's wrongheadedness about race goes way beyond Lott and infects their entire party. The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party's four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting. They won't make any headway with blacks by bashing Lott if they persist in giving Ronald Reagan a pass for his racial policies.

The same could be said, of course, about such Republican heroes as, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, all of whom used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern white voters away from the Democrats. Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.

---

You know, I'm looking around the web for some information today. I've found a basket of interesting links, but sometimes the links are stale, like one that should have been to a list of web resources at the University of Virginia.

I decided to search on "african american" at the university's web site. The search turned out to be of their libraries' book catalogs. And during a quick scan of the results, this caught my eye:

Unnatural selections : eugenics in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance / English, Daylanne K. (2004)

This was a connection I never even considered before.

Check the publisher's description of the book:

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes The Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Having not read the thing I can't critique it, but my reflexive reaction ain't good. The approach reminds me of a sig I used to use: "There's a pattern to everything; but EVERYTHING makes the pattern. The human failing is making a pattern from parts and calling it the whole." Still, the ability to stretch Du Bois into a eugenicist shows impressive creativity.

---

Wide Gaps Seen in U.S. Inquiries on Prison Abuse
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: June 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 5 — Disparate inquiries into abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far left crucial questions of policy and operations unexamined, according to lawmakers from both parties and outside military experts, who say that the accountability of senior officers and Pentagon officials may remain unanswered as a result.

No investigation completely independent of the Pentagon exists to determine what led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and so far there has been no groundswell in Congress or elsewhere to create one.

But on Capitol Hill, even some Republicans have begun to question whether the Pentagon's inquiries are too narrowly structured to establish the causes of the abuses, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have pledged to do, and then to determine if anyone in the chain of command was responsible for them.

Some House Republicans, bucking their leaders who have said the focus on Abu Ghraib is distracting from the larger effort in Iraq, have joined Democrats in urging a more aggressive review of the investigations. In the Senate, members of both parties said there remained major aspects that fell outside the scope of any of the investigations that are under way — including the role of military lawyers in drafting policy on detainees and the involvement of civilian contractors in their interrogations.

Senator Lindsay O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he was troubled that the only criminal cases brought so far involved seven low-ranking soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company. He said he believed that there was "command failure at many levels that could be criminally culpable."

Representative Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican and former Air Force officer, was unsparing in her assessment of the House's investigative oversight role to date: "We should be doing this directly and bluntly, and in the House we are not. It's been very disappointing to me."

---

Selling to Poor, Stores Bill U.S. for Top Prices
By ROBERT PEAR

Published: June 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 5 — Federal and state officials are expressing alarm about the proliferation of food stores that cater to low-income people but charge more than other grocery stores, thus driving up the cost of a major federal nutrition program.

The program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or W.I.C., helps feed 7.7 million people each month by providing vouchers for infant formula, juice, eggs, milk, cheese, cereal and dried beans. Now a growing number of stores are selling only to W.I.C. families, accepting only the government vouchers, not cash, for payment.

About 47 percent of all babies born in the United States each year participate in the program.

"The rise in W.I.C.-only stores is a fairly recent phenomenon," said Eric M. Bost, under secretary of the Agriculture Department, which runs the program. Analysis of food costs in California and Texas shows that "W.I.C.-only stores in these states have higher prices, on average, than other authorized retailers," Mr. Bost said.

The stores have found a niche in the market that Congress did not anticipate. Proprietors said the stores had become popular because they offer convenient locations and superior service.

---

Communion Issue Creates Split Among U.S. Bishops
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: June 6, 2004

Six months after Archbishop Raymond L. Burke announced that he would deny communion to Roman Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, only a handful of bishops have said they agree and many more have made it clear that they think he went too far.

The discord among the bishops, a group that usually tries to speak with a unified voice, has provoked dismay from Vatican officials and even Pope John Paul II, according to transcripts and reports of recent Vatican meetings with American prelates.

Cardinal Joseph F. Ratzinger, a Vatican official, told a group of visiting American bishops last week that he wanted to meet with an American task force that is studying how to relate to Catholic politicians. And the pope, in an address on marriage last month to American bishops, made a general but pointed reference to "the formation of factions within the church" in the United States.

The bishops are scheduled to hash out the issue at a closed meeting starting June 14 in Englewood, Colo. It will be the first time since the contretemps began that the bishops who disagree with Archbishop Burke, who was bishop of La Crosse, Wis., and is now archbishop of St. Louis, will have a chance to debate.

---

There's this contest to see how high in the Google listings for "nigritude ultramarine" you can get a web page to show up. It's a two phase contest--first phase started a month ago, ends tomorrow and features an iPod as the prize. Second phase ends in another month and the prize is a flat screen monitor.

Now, I have little doubt that, in a field that has grown to half a million entries in 30 day, I have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of winning. Anil Dash leaped into the fray two days ago, which means Big Bloggers will Likely Link.

But jumping in at the last minute is a typical expression of nigritude from The Ultramarine (As you see, I've taken on an alternate nickname. ). And it's an interesting experiment. Google has already dumped about 70,000 posts-the contest sponsors did a search Friday morning and came up wit 519,000 pages. Today I came up with some 448,000 (Correction: 436,000; seems Google is tweaking stuff on the fly).

Now, I'm not going to set up a special page for the term which seems to be the preferred approach. What I've done is put the post title in the <title> tag of my individual archives as God intended. I'll figure out how to work some nigritude into the place (although I'm sure some folks think there's too much here already).

---