July 03, 2004

I posted a link to a streaming video of a news report on Dr. Cosby's presentation last week because after the buzz the first speech caused (and I still can't find a transcript) I thought it would be good if folks are going to talk about it, they should know what he said.

The snippets that made it into the press last time were pretty brutal…and they were just what folks wanted to hear. I know it's sort of against the Cosby spirit to talk about how non-Black folks are responding to all this. Oh well. It's just for one installment anyway, and it's necessary because that reaction is part of the environment we have to deal with. So I searched for "Cosby" in Google News early this morning. I wanted the first reactions.

I found a lot of that AP release with a word changed here and there. Basically I grabbed that and the first few that, judging from the excerpt, looked like they were trying to write something.

Sometimes I was wrong.

Anyway, here's a bag of headlines and the first paragraph of each article. When you think about it, it's interesting they're all writing about the same event.

Education tops sports, Cosby tells parents
He strutted across the stage and gripped the hand of his fraternity brother, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, then Dr. William H. Cosby Jr. held the entire room in his hands as he preached the tough love that has gained headlines -- and for which he offered no apologies.

Bill Cosby has harsh words for black men
CHICAGO -- Bill Cosby went off on another tirade involving the black community yesterday, telling activists that too many black men are beating their wives while their children run around not knowing how to read or write.

Actor Cosby hits out at language
Black actor Bill Cosby has criticised young African-Americans for the use of "profane" language.

Locals sound off on Cosby comments
Bill Cosby grabbed attention, and drew more criticism, yesterday for comments criticizing some members of the black community. But some people said he struck just the right chord.

Cosby's rage at wife-beaters
ACTOR Bill Cosby has again hit out at members of America’s black community, telling men to "stop beating your women".

Bill Cosby defends criticism of blacks
ATLANTA -- A day after publicly criticizing shortcomings in the black community a second time, Bill Cosby said he wanted to make it clear he meant it.

This Cosby show will tolerate no funny business
Let's get this out of the way: Bill Cosby is not interested in sitting down and talking to a reporter about his recent critiques of the black community. But he's certainly not keeping his controversial views quiet.

Debate Continues as Cosby Again Criticizes Black Youths
As Dr. Cliff Huxtable, TV's quintessential sitcom dad, Bill Cosby offered gentle, homespun advice to his young family each week. But in real life, Cosby lately has been delivering a much harsher message: African Americans, particularly the young, have only themselves to blame for a variety of social ills.

'It's about our minds,' Cosby tells conference
The cardboard sign said it all: “Bill Cosby, You Don’t Need to Apologize.”

Cosby Calls On PUSH, Black Parents To Make Changes
Actor-Comedian To Black Community: 'Turn Mirror Around"
In a passionate and controversial lecture before the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference Thursday, Bill Cosby challenged black parents to insist that their children perform better in all avenues of life.

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Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July

July 4, 1852
Rochester, New York

Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to,us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the halleluiahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap like a hare."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justicc, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying rhat nation in irrecoverable ruin. I can today take up the lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a song and they who wasted us, required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more into]erable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondmad, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of Americal "I will not equivo- cate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute-books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of tbe slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping,using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets,authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that while we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men-digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave-we are called upon to prove that we are men?

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of bis own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Ameri- cans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer and insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the last, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No; I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that fiod did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storrn, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, bRass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings,with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisys thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

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Here's a news report out of NBC5 in Chicago on the latest discussion Dr. Cosby had at Rainbow/PUSH. It's video, so you can get much of it out of his own mouth.

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Every self-respecting race guy on the planet is feeling called out by Dr. Cosby right about now. And some of y'all think I'm talking about what you might think of as the Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton types, but I'm also talking about what you might think of as your Rush Limbaugh or Jesse Paterson types.

Naturally I'll write something, but what would be more than beating the same drums as everyone else?

I'm working on it. And I want to share the occasional thing I find on the path, stuff I think will lay the groundwork at best and be interesting enough to read at worst. So when you check out the article below you'll find it's about Israel, not Black folks…yet I'm thinking about Black folks as I present it.

The Politics of Self-Criticism: Cosby Gets Cheers, Lerner Gets Threats
By DAVID SIEGEL (06-22-04)

As a Jew who is critical of Israeli policy, I am no stranger to confrontation. Despite the strain I’ve placed on my personal relationships, despite having to stand alone in political debates, I have always been vocal in my defense of the cause of Palestine. A few weeks ago, however, I began to feel as though I was fighting a losing battle. It began to seem natural that everyone sticks by their group, right or wrong, as a simple matter of survival. Who was I to defy this basic law of human relations? This feeling nagged me until June 2, when I picked up an article entitled “Hooray for Bill Cosby.”
Cosby’s comments at the May 17 commemoration of Brown vs. the Board of Education have received widespread attention. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal,” he said. Referring to a black youth shot to death by police for stealing a piece of pound cake, he remarked “what the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?”

Cosby’s statements implying that the ills of poor blacks are self-inflicted were met with virtually unanimous applause from the media. Dick Myer of CBSNews.com, in his May 26 piece praising Cosby, wrote that he expected to report on the controversy, but found that “there was no chorus of criticism.” DeWayne Wickham of USA Today wrote an article entitled “Cosby Isn’t Alone in Asking Blacks to Own Up to Problems.” Syndicated columnist Brent Bozell III wrote “An Ovation for Bill Cosby.”

What an amazing double standard! When blacks criticize other blacks, they are praised for their “tough love” and for their courage in telling hard truths about their race. When Jews criticize Israel, however, they are ridiculed, labeled “self-hating Jews,” and even threatened with death.

Though I find it disgraceful that successful writers should so unhesitatingly agree that institutional racism is dead, my purpose here is not to address that issue. Rather, I want to contrast media reaction when blacks and Jews, respectively, criticize other members of their race.

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Quote of note:

But Zebari welcomed an offer by Yemen, which does not share a border with Iraq, to send peacekeeping troops provided they were under United Nations or Arab League command.

"With regard to Yemen's proposal, we are in principle for the participation of Arab peacekeeping troops from beyond the immediate neighbors," Zebari said.

Iraq Declines Jordan's Offer to Send Troops
Sat Jul 3, 2004 09:34 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq declined Jordan's offer to send troops to help stabilize the country on Saturday, but said it would welcome peacekeeping forces from Arab countries that do not share its borders.
King Abdullah said on Thursday Jordan was willing to send the first Arab troops to Iraq if the interim government, which formally took over sovereignty this week, requested it.

"We welcome the support of Arab and Islamic countries...but there are many ways for these counties to stand with the Iraqi people and offer a helping hand," Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told a news conference.

"There are sensitivities over the participation of neighboring countries in peacekeeping forces, but these countries can back United Nations activities."

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Brought to you by Fox News, of course.

Colin Powell Sings Village People's 'YMCA'
Friday, July 02, 2004

JAKARTA, Indonesia — U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell donned a hard hat and tucked a hammer in his belt Friday to perform a version of the Village People's hit "YMCA" at the conclusion of Asia's largest security meeting — which tradition says ends with a night of skit and song.

Powell danced alongside five other U.S. officials dressed in fancy dress and blasted out a version of the 1970s disco classic to the delight of foreign ministers from across the Asia-Pacific and Europe.

"President Bush, he said to me, Colin I need you to run the department of state. We are between a rock and a hard place," Powell and his colleagues sang to the tune of the disco classic.

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Bush Moves on Kerry to Keep Campaign 'Terror' Lead
Fri Jul 2, 2004 05:46 PM ET
By David Morgan

Analysts said the real message is that the terrorism issue has emerged as a vital asset for Bush and Kerry in a race that has them running neck and neck.

"The president is continuing to fall both in overall approval ratings and on most of the major issues with the exception of fighting the war on terror," said Calvin Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

"This suggests that Kerry is leading the president by various amounts on most of the domestic policy issues and the war in Iraq had now turned negative. But the war on terror continues to be a strong suit."

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed Bush's overall approval rating at a new low of 42 percent, while 45 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of the president.

Yet Americans were still more likely to believe Bush would do a better job in steering the United States through a foreign crisis and protecting it from future attacks.

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I have asked a number of people who feel Bush handled Iraq better than Kerry would have, exactly what could have turned out worse than it did? Don't tell me we could have had higher casualties; not with our weapons technology. What could have been handled worse than Bush's handling of this whole War on a Noun thing?

So far, no one has given me an answers other than "Kerry would suck" of "he'd give up out sovereignty," which is nonsense.

But I think I know the real answer. I think people realize foreigner leaders think Bush is batshit crazy, that he controls too much physical force (and is too anxious to use it) to risk flipping him out.

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A clear victory for privacy rights
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Friday, July 2, 2004

FEDERAL Judge Morrison England was unequivocal: States have a right to stop banks from selling or sharing personal financial information without customer permission.

His ruling, in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, thus allowed California's landmark financial privacy law to take effect Thursday.

"Finally, in a court of law, the interests of everyday consumers prevailed over the big banks," said Shelley Curran, a lobbyist for Consumers Union. "This is the first time in a long while."

California's financial privacy law was signed last August after a more than three-year struggle in the Legislature. England's ruling pierced one of the financial-services industry's main arguments against the measure -- that regulation of privacy, as with most aspects of interstate banking, is a matter for Congress.

The federal judge noted that the Financial Modernization Act, passed by Congress in 1999, explicitly gave states the right to "enact more stringent privacy regulations" than the weak federal rules on the sharing of confidential information.

After a determined battle that tested the fortitude of legislators and Gov. Gray Davis to stand up to a powerful industry -- with timidity often reigning, unfortunately -- the California measure finally got traction last fall when a citizens' initiative on financial privacy gained enough signatures for the March ballot. The initiative threat caused the banking and insurance industry lobbyists to withdraw their opposition, and the legislation by Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, breezed through both houses of the Legislature in near-record time.

Under the new law, financial companies will be required to obtain customers' permission before selling or sharing phone numbers, account balances, spending patterns or other personal information with telemarketers and other third parties. The new state law also requires companies to give customers an opportunity to restrict information sharing within a family of companies, a process known as "opt out."

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Quote of note:

It is not clear yet what other action Google will take to police GMail accounts and whether it will confiscate or close accounts that flout the policy change.

Despite the policy change Google still seems happy for invitations for accounts to be swapped and traded.

Google bans GMail sales
GMail sellers beware, Google wants to stop people profiting from the trade in popular e-mail addresses.

Search giant Google has updated the program policy for GMail on Monday adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of GMail accounts for commercial purposes.

Like the early days of the domain name boom some people have been creating GMail accounts that could be snapped up by speculators.

The change is aimed at those wanting to cash in on the scarcity of GMail accounts rather than those swapping invitations to open a new account.

Domain boom

GMail debuted on 1 April but the numbers using it remain relatively low because new accounts can only be opened via an invitation from an existing user.

The scarcity has meant that GMail accounts are being coveted by many net users.

Accounts are being sold on ebay and exchanged on sites such as GMail Swap.

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July 02, 2004

The mechanics of things are such that a change in the standards of judging Black folks is coming. There's a couple of reasons for this; one would probably think Bill Cosby's recent…I reach for "rant" or "outburst" but not only do those term have more negativity attached to them than I feel toward his statement I do NOT feel the were unplanned…but I think Dr. Cosby's new aggressiveness has an underlying reason.

Because of the upcoming holiday I'll likely be in slacker mode, but I will be pulling together some stuff for early next week.

In the mean time, anyone who'd like to say something on Dr. Cosby's message or methods can log into Prometheus 6 using "On Cosby" as user name and password. I have no idea what sort of response I'll get, if any. I will delete posts that have nothing to do with the topic, though I don't mind links to folks' sites and and shout-out as long as they are in addition to the topic.

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Drugs Prices Outpace Medicare Discounts

Summary: The AARP (American Association for Retired Persons) has issued a report indicating that manufacturers' prices for prescription drugs rose 3.4% during the first quarter of 2004. That is nearly 3 times the rate of inflation. Significantly, these drug price increases came AFTER the Medicare prescription drug benefit was signed into law and before the consumer could benefit from using the Medicare discount cards.

Comment: It is small comfort that a pharmaceutical industry spokesman, commenting on the AARP report, said that hospital costs rose by a much higher percentage than the costs of prescription drugs.

Barbara K. Hecht, Ph.D.
Frederick Hecht, M.D.
Medical Editors, MedicineNet.com

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Louis at LatinoPundit hipped me to the Associated Press' new weblog. They have an RSS feed, which isn't like Reuters, but there are a couple of interesting things on the site.

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This is like 300K, a GIF animation of Saturn rotating.

But I really like this one. The full resolution original is 1824 x 1360. I resized it for my desktop wallpaper.

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Implored to 'Offshore' More
U.S. Firms Are Too Reluctant to Outsource Jobs, Report Says
By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page E01

A report by an influential consulting firm is exhorting U.S. companies to speed up "offshoring" operations to China and India, including high-powered functions such as research and development.

In blunt terms, the report by the Boston Consulting Group warns American firms that they risk extinction if they hesitate in shifting facilities to countries with low costs. That is partly because the potential savings are so vast, but the report also cites a view among U.S. executives that the quality of American workers is deteriorating.

"The largest competitive advantage will lie with those companies that move soonest," the report states. "Companies that wait will be caught in a vicious cycle of uncompetitive costs, lost business, underutilized capacity, and the irreversible destruction of value."

Boston Consulting, which counts among its clients many of the biggest corporations in the United States, admonishes them that they have been too reluctant rather than too eager to outsource production to "LCC's," or low-cost countries.

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It's a cable channel that will be running a three-part series called "The N-Word", starting Sunday.

It's going to be FASCINATING, and if you don't believe me they got trailers up.

Point being, I want these suckers on tape. So if anyone has Trio and is willing to risk three blank video tapes until I mail them a check, please holla.

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Quote of note:

So what's the catch? If you have to ask, this shows why inflation tends to happen once a generation. It's been about a generation since the last round in the late 1970s, and many people have forgotten or never knew what it was like.

To start, it is like a tax on anybody living on a fixed income, or any investor with a fixed return. It makes economic transactions difficult and planning impossible. And inflation feeds on itself, as everybody tries to beat it. You cannot have inflation of 11% very long. Either it will soar until the currency is destroyed, or it will be brought painfully back under control.

Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker administered the pain the last time. For almost two decades now, with tremendous skill, Volcker's successor, Alan Greenspan, has preserved that expensive victory without choking off prosperity (or at least not for very long). On Tuesday, the Fed raised short-term interest rates by a quarter of a percent. On Wednesday, all the experts were saying that's not enough.

But Bush has put Greenspan in a terrible bind. By heedlessly running up the deficit, he has goosed the economy in the short term. And by chipping away at the tax base, he has made it harder to restore fiscal responsibility. There's a drunk at the wheel, and all Greenspan's got is the brake. But he doesn't want to slam it on. Can you blame him?

Oh! Kinsley is unfairly bashing ODP (Ol' Dirty Our Dear President) over his youthful indiscretions!

(heh heh heh)

Bush's Secret Deficit-Reduction Plan
Michael Kinsley

July 2, 2004

The plan was: a $400-billion federal budget surplus this year, and a national debt of $2.1 trillion heading rapidly to zero. That was the plan in January 2001, when President Bush took office. And not just the plan: that was the official prediction of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Now we have a new plan. Instead of a $400-billion surplus, Bush's budget calls for a $500-billion deficit. The national debt is $4.4 trillion and headed to more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the CBO. Interest on that debt will cost $156 billion this year. Bush says he'll cut the deficit by half in four years. The deficit, not the debt. It's a remarkably modest brag. And even so, almost nobody believes him.

There are four ways to deal with a gigantic government debt. One is to live with it. But this is not a stable situation. Even if you're living within your means and borrowing only to cover the interest payments, your debt will compound. When deficits turned into surpluses in the late 1990s, the achievement was especially impressive since it required the government to not just cover its expenses but pick up retroactively a lot of the expenses of the spendthrift '80s.

That is the second way to deal with a soaring national debt: fiscal discipline. The third way is through an economic miracle: an explosion of productivity that increases tax revenues painlessly.

In the late 1990s, fiscal discipline and a booming economy both helped. But you cannot count on another economic miracle like that one. As for the prospect of fiscal discipline: No one looking at the last four years can reasonably expect that from Bush, and it hasn't exactly been a major theme for John Kerry either.

Luckily — or not — there is a fourth way to deal with the national debt. That is inflation. Inflate the debt away. The temptation is enormous: The United States government is a debtor that can borrow any amount of money and pay it back in a currency whose value the debtor controls. Other governments are forced to borrow in dollars, not in their own currencies, when lenders start getting suspicious. But Uncle Sam remains preapproved.

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Cheney Unrelenting on War Policy
The vice president repeats assertions of Hussein-Al Qaeda ties and implies that Clinton repeatedly failed to punish terrorists.
By Peter Wallsten and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

July 2, 2004

NEW ORLEANS — Returning to the controversy about Saddam Hussein's links with Al Qaeda terrorists, Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday repeated his assertion that "long-established ties" existed between the former Iraqi dictator and the terrorist network.

Speaking hours after Hussein's appearance in a Baghdad courtroom on charges of mass killings and other crimes against humanity, Cheney offered a broad assessment of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism, saying that President Bush had made the world safer by taking "relentless action" and launching "a broad and sustained war on terrorist networks around the globe."

Cheney, addressing Republican supporters at the National D-Day Museum, also leveled implicit criticism at Bush's predecessor, former President Clinton.

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The Rainbow/PUSH coalition just wrapped their annual conference, and Dr. Cosby was a presenter at the sessions on parenting.

The Chicago Sun-Times had a staff reporter there and gave a much more nuanced report than the AP story you will see everywhere today. For instance, Ms. Jackson of the Sun-Times adds this bit at the end:

In his NAACP remarks in May, Cosby had spoken of the high percentage of black males in low-income households who drop out of school, the high numbers of black men in prison and the large numbers of black teenagers who become pregnant.

"I was not talking about 'all,' " Cosby said. "I just took for granted that it would be understood that, if you talk about 50 percent, you can't be talking about all."

which information exactly none of the reports with titles like "Bill Cosby has more harsh words for black community" includes. No, they's rather go here:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Bill Cosby went off on another tirade against the black community Thursday, telling a room full of activists that black children are running around not knowing how to read or write and "going nowhere."

I felt the need to juxtapose the two approaches to the exact same event. AP knows what its audience want and so spins accordingly and nationwide newspapers suck it down and regurgitate it with a snappy headline.

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Bush Marks 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: July 2, 2004

WASHINGTON, July 1 - President Bush marked the 40th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on Thursday, telling an audience at a White House ceremony that the United States has been a better place since the law was passed but that the problem the legislation addressed has yet to be eradicated.

"The work of equality is not done, because the evil of bigotry is not finally defeated," Mr. Bush said. "Yet the laws of this nation and the good heart of this nation are on the side of equality, and as Dr. King reminded us, we must not rest until the day when 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' "

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Ain't you learn nothing from the Hemingses?

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Thurmond's Biracial Daughter Seeks to Join Confederacy Group
By SHAILA K. DEWAN and ARIEL HART

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a biracial woman who stepped forward last year to acknowledge that she was the daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, now wants to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization of descendants of soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War.

Evidently she is eligible: Senator Thurmond, once a fierce segregationist, was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a similar group for men. Ms. Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in Los Angeles, also plans to apply for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Black Patriots Foundation, which honors black Revolutionary War fighters. One of her two sons will apply to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, her lawyer said.

The announcement, which was made this week, was in keeping with the confounding nature of a story that some said was emblematic of racist hypocrisy in the South, but which produced no apparent bitterness on the part of Ms. Washington-Williams. Her mother, Carrie Butler, was a maid in the Thurmond family home in South Carolina and was 16 when she gave birth to Ms. Washington-Williams. Mr. Thurmond saw her about once a year and gave her financial support, she has said.

Out of a desire to protect her father, Ms. Washington-Williams waited until after his death a year ago to come forward about her parentage, and put an end to decades of silence with a simple dignity, saying, "At last, I feel completely free."

On Thursday, her name was added to a monument to Senator Thurmond on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., joining the names of the senator's other children.

Ms. Washington-Williams is joining the Confederate organization not to honor the soldiers that fought for a Southern way of life dependent on slavery, but to explore her genealogy and heritage, her lawyer, Frank K. Wheaton, said yesterday. In applying, she claims an honor that can be bestowed only on someone of her lineage, he said, and she hopes to encourage other blacks in a similar position to do the same.

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To be honest, it looks like the Thurmonds are more accepting of all this than the Jefferson descendants. Goven all the testable DNA laying around, that might not be optional but adding her name to the monument (after gagging on the very concept of a monument to ol' Strom) was definitely optional. Unless she asked for it.

But you know, there's no need to join the Confederates to explore your heritage and geneology.

The Dunovant family was deep into the Confederacy, and I'm honestly not as sure about how I connect to those two guys as I am about these two, but I'm trying to picture what it would take to get me to apply for membership to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and nothing comes to mind.

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Got another one of those online political sites for ya. Alliance for Justice.

The Alliance for Justice is a national association of environmental, civil rights, mental health, women's, children's and consumer advocacy organizations. Since its inception in 1979, the Alliance has worked to advance the cause of justice for all Americans, strengthen the public interest community's ability to influence public policy, and foster the next generation of advocates.

They focus on judicial, nonprofit, foundation and student advocacy

One really fun thing they do is track all the nominees for the federal bench at Independent Judiciary (and they've been at it since 1985…when they say independent, they mean it). For instance, in late March this year 60 Minutes did an interview with Charles Pickering they found offensively misleading—unbalanced is how they phrased it; here's one and a half of five pages:

In Sixty Minutes Mike Wallace and Judge Charles W. Pickering, Sr., tried to erase Pickering’s forty-year record of hostility to civil rights. In last night’s story, Wallace allowed to go unanswered a number of misstatements made by Pickering and his supporters regarding his role in reducing the sentence of a convicted cross burner and omitted an extensive list of actions Pickering has taken over the course of his legal and judicial career that, considered collectively, present a devastating portrait of insensitivity to and ignorance of issues of race.

Cross-Burning Case
Wallace attempted to recast Pickering’s actions in pushing prosecutors to drop an arson charge against Daniel Swan, a convicted cross burner, that carried a mandatory five-year penalty. Judge Pickering stated on the program that he was appalled by the sentence he would be forced to impose on Swan compared with the lenient plea-bargain deals to the two he regarded as the main culprits of the crime. But in giving Pickering the microphone without refutation, Sixty Minutes omitted that:

The other two defendants pled guilty, while Swan, the defendant for whom Pickering went to bat, decided to take his chances on going to trial. Disparate sentences routinely result when one party opts to plea and the other goes to trial.

• The other two defendants were differently situated from Swan. One was a minor, and the other had diminished mental capacity. Swan was the only competent adult involved in the commission of the crime.


• Swan played a key role in executing the crime. Among other salient facts, he obtained the wood, built the cross, carried the cross in his truck, doused the cross with gasoline, and burned the cross in the couple's yard. He did not actually light the cross because he had gasoline on his hands.

Pickering asserted on the show last night that he acted appropriately in seeking leniency for Swan. Far from singling out a cross burner for leniency, Pickering argued, he was showing the sort of leniency he has demonstrated in other cases in which he lowered sentences for African-Americans who have been convicted of crimes.

• In fact, in imposing lower sentences on defendants convicted in other cases, Pickering was acting within the discretion given him by federal law. In the cross-burning case, however, Pickering went beyond what he is permitted to do under the law. Pickering tried to circumvent the mandatory minimum through off-the-record threats and ex parte phone calls to force prosecutors to drop the most serious charge against Swan. There is no relationship between the actions he took in other cases to reduce sentences under the sentencing guidelines and the extraordinary, extra-legal actions he took on behalf of a convicted cross-burner.

Pickering testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 2002 that when he approved the plea agreement of the minor, who was sentenced
home confinement and probation, he did not know that the minor had fired
gun three months earlier into the home of the victims.

• But according to the Washington Post (May 27, 2003), “the record makes clear that Pickering approved [the minor’s] sentence on Aug. 24, 1994, three months after Swan’s trial aired the allegations against all three men. In addition, the sentencing document—which bears Pickering’s signature—included [the minor’s] admission of guilt for the shooting.”

I'd be less than honest, though, if I didn't let you know what brought them to my attention was a Flash animation.

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July 01, 2004

Read Our Baby.

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Because we already know Cheney is on drugs.

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Cheney Tries to Turn War Success Into Political Advantage
By Carol Giacomo
Reuters
Thursday, July 1, 2004; 3:51 PM

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I read that headline, and I'm like "Success???"

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r@d@r at ex-lion tamer gave up th elink to the transcript of the whole speech. This is what Common Dreams saw as the Quote of Note…and I agree.

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This is the Fight of Our Lives
by Bill Moyers
Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004


"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

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San Francisco Homeless Program Could Be National Model
By Lee Romney
Times Staff Writer

July 1, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO -- City officials Wednesday unveiled an ambitious 10-year plan aimed at one of the United States' most intractable homelessness problems, saying they hope to "abolish chronic homelessness" by replacing emergency shelters with permanent housing that includes supportive services.

The new plan, which Bush administration officials have praised as a potential national model, would try to move the most desperate street people out of shelters and into permanent housing where they could receive treatment for addiction, mental illnesses and other chronic health problems.

"It's a significant day in San Francisco," said Mayor Gavin Newsom, who campaigned last year on a pledge to attack the problem aggressively. "We're moving ... toward a goal and desire not to manage but to end homelessness. It's brilliant in its simplicity, if we have the courage to change."

For years, San Francisco has poured funds into social and medical services for the homeless while dealing separately with the issue of housing. That approach, officials now say, has proven to be inefficient.

The city government spends about $200 million a year on helping the homeless. Of San Francisco's estimated 15,000 homeless, 3,000 who are defined as "chronically homeless" use up about 63 percent of the money, said former San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto, who led the effort to develop the new plan.

The care of one chronically homeless person using shelters for housing, hospital emergency rooms for medical treatment or jails, where inmates also receive medical services, costs an average of $61,000 a year, city officials estimate. Permanent supportive housing, including treatment and care, would cost $16,000, they say.

Providing services more efficiently for the chronically homeless would free funds that could then be used to help the other 12,000 people who are homeless for shorter periods of time, officials hope.

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A defiant Saddam Hussein appears at hearing, says Bush is 'the real criminal'
HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer

Strict pool arrangements severely limited media access to the hearing, and video from the session was cleared by the U.S. military.

The only journalist working for an Iraqi publication, Sadiq Rahman of the newspaper Azzaman, was ordered out of the courtroom by the judge 10 minutes before the hearing began. One Iraqi working for the pan-Arab Shaq al-Awsat newspaper was allowed to attend.

"Unfortunately, they are already being unfair to Iraqi journalists," Rahman said afterward, noting that some U.S. television reporters were allowed inside in addition to the pool.

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Defense bill could stifle computer trade
By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

In a move that has re-energized the debate over export controls on high-performance computers, the latest version of a defense-spending bill would require companies to seek licenses to export even underpowered desktop computers.

What's new:
The latest version of a defense-spending bill in the House requires companies to obtain licenses to export even low-powered computers.

Bottom line:
The proposed rules are the latest flashpoint in a decades-long tussle between computer companies and national security hawks over the best way to limit the export of technology that could end up in enemy weapons.

The dramatic tightening of export regulations is included in the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual military funding bill that has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Though the proposed rules are only a tiny portion of the 630-page bill, they could have a devastating impact on the computer industry.

"It would bring exports to a grinding halt," said Dan Hoydish, director of trade, public policy and government affairs for Unisys and chairman of the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, a trade group that counts many major technology companies as members. "We wouldn't be asking for 20 export licenses in a year, we would be asking for 20,000 in a day."

Today, computer sellers are required to get a license to export any computer with performance equal to or greater than a system with 32 Intel Itanium processors. The current version of the defense authorization act would lower that limit to systems deemed "militarily critical" by the Department of Defense. That level is currently set to the equivalent of a computer using a Pentium 3 processor running at 650MHz, state of the art in 1999 but considered feeble today.

Moreover, the proposed rules would apply to exports destined for any country, including U.S. allies.

The controversial section is not included in a U.S. Senate version of the bill that passed last week. That means the fate of the proposed rules, known as Section 1404, will be determined by negotiations between the House and the Senate, currently slated for later this month.

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This harkens back to February and the several discussions on pharmaceutical pricing I had with several pharmaceutical industry types. And as usuall, I was right…

REALLY LONG Quote of note:

The most important of these laws is known as the Bayh-Dole Act, after its chief sponsors, Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) and Senator Robert Dole (R-Kans.). Bayh-Dole enabled universities and small businesses to patent discoveries emanating from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the major distributor of tax dollars for medical research, and then to grant exclusive licenses to drug companies. Until then, taxpayer-financed discoveries were in the public domain, available to any company that wanted to use them. But now universities, where most NIH-sponsored work is carried out, can patent and license their discoveries, and charge royalties. Similar legislation permitted the NIH itself to enter into deals with drug companies that would directly transfer NIH discoveries to industry.

Bayh-Dole gave a tremendous boost to the nascent biotechnology industry, as well as to big pharma. Small biotech companies, many of them founded by university researchers to exploit their discoveries, proliferated rapidly. They now ring the major academic research institutions and often carry out the initial phases of drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies that can market the new drugs. Usually both academic researchers and their institutions own equity in the biotechnology companies they are involved with. Thus, when a patent held by a university or a small biotech company is eventually licensed to a big drug company, all parties cash in on the public investment in research.

These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that.[7] At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.[8] While Bayh-Dole was clearly a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry, whether its enactment was a net benefit to the public is arguable.

The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell

…Before its patent ran out, for example, the price of Schering-Plough's top-selling allergy pill, Claritin, was raised thirteen times over five years, for a cumulative increase of more than 50 percent—over four times the rate of general inflation.[2] As a spokeswoman for one company explained, "Price increases are not uncommon in the industry and this allows us to be able to invest in R&D."

…In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States.

…Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?

Third, the industry is hardly a model of American free enterprise. To be sure, it is free to decide which drugs to develop (me-too drugs instead of innovative ones, for instance), and it is free to price them as high as the traffic will bear, but it is utterly dependent on government-granted monopolies—in the form of patents and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved exclusive marketing rights.

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The Black Commentator has an article up called The Small and Minority Business Game that, important in and of itself, touches on one of my real pet peeves.

I have questioned the word "minority" and caused a few high-brow eyebrows to be raised at my exposure of the games they have been playing on Black businesses. Now they are conducting a stealth move away from one demeaning term to one that is more palatable. More and more they use the term "small" when it comes to slicing up the public contracting pie. I have no problem with that word, as opposed to the word, "minority," with which I have a tremendous problem. However, I do want those who use it to define it. And I do want those who are classified as "small" to know what it really means in their particular business circles.

We have seen all sorts of terms used to describe Black businesses, i.e., minority, small, disadvantaged, underutilized, but there has been no confusion about the term used for white females; they call their businesses "women-owned." Unfortunately, we have seldom looked into the real meaning of those terms nor have we been advantaged by them. The latest okey-doke is the term "small." Black business owners will do yourselves a favor by learning just what is considered "small" as you compete in your local Small Business Program.

…The city made one significant change in addition to those guidelines, however. It raised the level of net worth that one owner of a small business could have from $325,000 to $750,000, thus, enlarging the so-called playing field to include even larger "small business" owners. This criterion is in addition to the SBA’s definition, which allows a small business to earn millions in annual revenue and employ hundreds of people.

With most Black business owners, especially those in construction trades, having far less in annual revenue, oftentimes no employees, and a much lower net worth, the chances of them competing and winning contracts just got slimmer. To make matters even worse, our Small Business Enterprise Program, which calls for 30% of the business to go to "small" (there’s that word again) businesses, includes everyone. That’s right. Even white males can participate in the Small Business Program now. Let’s get this straight. White males get the 70% and then they can get in on the 30% as well. They can even start front companies for their wives and daughters and get even more of the 30% that way as well. What a deal! And guess what. We have black (small "b") city council persons who approved this silly program.

I've been annoyed at the way everything Black becomes minority, or diverse, or of color, or in some other way diluted. I'm not talking biology. I'm saying somehow whenever something is set up ostensibly to ease the anti-Black racism problem, it's too damn much for the public conscience to just say "this is because Black folks get screwed." It HAS to be spread around, HAS to be tailored so that EVERYONE benefits, SO even handed…

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I will say it again: Black people's problem with racism is we are tired of being discriminated against. White people's problem with racism is they are tired of always being blamed for it. Fully half the reason progress is so slow is because we so damn busy trying not to offend folks over offensive shit.

Affirmative action was designed to get around white people's habitual prejudices. Somehow it became about Black people proving themselves worthy. And I could fill one of my overlong posts with nothing but links to respectable sounding folks who are dedicated to making sure none of the affirmative action programs are effective…remember, they were created to modify WHITE FOLK's behavior, not Black folks'. At the time, Black folks' behavior didn't need adjustment...well, maybe a little more aggression.

Remember what I quoted from Kathleen Cleaver the other day?

there was a amount of opportunity available under certain conditions for a certain number of people. A large number of black people already met those criteria. They were barred by race. They were not barred by deficiencies in education, deficiencies in ability, etc., etc. So those people who could take advantage of those

And I know you didn't read the article from the a 1925 issue of The Survey Graphic, so here's a part that applies here:

GLIMPSES of the whirring cycle of life in Harlem leave the visitor bewildered at its complexity. There is constantly before one the tempting invitation to compare and contrast the life there with that of other communities one has had the opportunity of observing. Should I not find there, if anywhere, the distinctiveness of the Negro, of which I had heard so much? Should I not be able to discover there his ability, of which we are so often told, to produce unique cultural traits, which might be added to the prevailing white culture, and, as well, to note his equally well-advertised inability to grasp the complex civilization of which he constitutes a part?

And so I went, and what I found was churches and schools, club-houses and lodge meeting-places, the library and the newspaper offices and the Y. M. C. A. and busy 135th Street and the hospitals and the social service agencies. I met persons who were lawyers and doctors and editors and writers, who were chauffeurs and peddlers and longshoremen and real estate brokers and capitalists, teachers and nurses and students and waiters and cooks. And all Negroes. Cabarets and theaters, drugstores and restaurants just like those everywhere else. And finally, after a time, it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a community just like any other American community. The same pattern, only a different shade!

THE PROBLEM WAS NOT BLACK FOLKS.

But now we think it is, for some reason.

Oh, I remember the reason now! It was because people claimed they'd be more than willing, mooooore than willing to hire a negro, just as soon as they could find a qualified one.

See, here's the thing. I've done a lot of hiring for Corporate America in my time and I know for a fact it does not take a college degree to do most of the jobs that require a college degree. It was added to the requirements to thin the herd. Because, you see:

[the] capitalist form of democracy, or I like to call it the "commercial democracy", needs people like us, or needs a middle class to function smoothly. It doesn't need equality. What it needs is inequality. It needs a certain number of people at the elite level, a certain number of people in the middle level, and the rest of the people scrambling and hoping they could get there, all following the same zealous commitment to making money.

(That's Kathleen again)

This is a mechanism that screws folks on an equal opportunity basis and always has. But it's not the only one, and the new ones strike me as a bit more targeted. Like decrying the lack of "soft skills."

Anyway.

What the article in today's The Black Commentator points out the Newspeak that lets people avoid facing the fact that the major bias is anti-Black, and that therefore efforts to eliminate anti-Blackism are crippled by trying to address the Newspeak concept rather than the real legacy of government-enforced aparthied. And it reminded me how much I HATE Newspeak.

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I meant to post this yesterday.

I've mentioned The Education Trust before. It's a pro-NCLB group that I feel fairly represents the issues problems and potential (if it's gotten right, which is my personal concern) of…well, of the idea people were pursuing when they voted for it.

The site is a useful source of info and now they've put together a set of web resources for Chicano/Latino parents and activists. There's Spanish and English versions of the page and the PDFs they provide.

Education Trust
Información y recursos en español

Una de nuestras metas centrales en el Education Trust es mejorar la educación de la comunidad latina. Es por eso que, en nuestro continuo esfuerzo por ser más eficaces en esta comunidad, ahora ofrecemos recursos en español para que educadores, padres, legisladores y gente en la comunidad latina puedan aprovechar al máximo este tipo de recursos en su propio idioma.

Acerca de Education Trust

Education Trust fue creado para promover educación de calidad, para todos los alumnos, en todos los grados escolares- del kinder a la universidad. Aunque sabemos que todas las escuelas y universidades podrían servir de una mejor manera a todos sus alumnos, en Education Trust nos enfocamos en aquellas escuelas que con más frecuencia son relegadas en los planes de mejoramiento educativo- usualmente aquellas escuelas que tienen un mayor número de estudiantes latinos, afroamericanos, nativo americanos o alumnos de bajos recursos económicos.

El personal de Education Trust tiene experiencia en muchos campos educativos: maestros de escuela primaria, media y secundaria, hasta aquellos que han trabajado en universidades, grupos comunitarios, o han abogado por los derechos de alumnos y padres de familia. Education Trust se distingue de otros grupos que abogan por la educación, en Washington DC, porque nuestro enfoque es el de obtener altos logros académicos para todos los estudiantes desde el kinder hasta la universidad. Trabajamos en colaboración con grupos educativos locales y comunitarios, y siempre nos enfocamos en lo que es mejor para los estudiantes, particularmente aquéllos que vengan de familias de bajos recursos o de minorías étnicas.

Una de nuestras metas es producir documentos fáciles de comprender de manera que toda la gente en la comunidad pueda obtener el mayor provecho de los mismos. Continuaremos desarrollando y agregando nuevas herramientas y recursos que aboguen por la comunidad latina, así como también ofreceremos más recursos en español. Visite nuestra página Web frecuentemente.

Para asistencia en español favor de comunicarse con:

Héctor Sánchez: (202) 293-1217 Ext. 352 [email protected]

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Could Your Voice Betray You?
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER

IT is a time-honored interrogation tool and a staple of film noir: the lie-detector test that can incriminate or exonerate.

But such tests need not involve strapping someone to a machine. In fact, they may not require the subject's presence - or awareness - at all. And their use is growing far beyond criminal investigations.

Increasingly, lie-detector tests use voice stress analysis, a technology that has been around for decades but that has gained in popularity as the software at its heart continues to be refined.

"It can really be done anywhere," said Detective Pat Kemper of the Springfield Township Police Department in Ohio, who says he has used the voice-based testing to question thousands of suspects over the last decade. "It can be done via a telephone recording. It can be done covertly. You can use it for anything."

Indeed, beyond its applications in law enforcement, proponents of the voice-based technology see its utility in everything from telemarketing to matchmaking. In Britain, a growing number of insurance companies have been using it to screen telephone claims in hopes of rooting out fraud - a goal they say has been borne out, both in fraud detection and in deterrence. One insurer, Admiral, says 25 percent of its car-theft claims have been withdrawn since it began using the system a year ago.

But the technology's reliability is still a matter of debate, and its migration from the interrogation room to the call center has raised concerns about potential privacy implications. Voice analysis of this nature, after all, can easily be conducted without the speaker's knowledge. Now that it is being used in the insurance industry, for example, the concerns include how a suspect claim might affect a customer's subsequent applications for insurance.

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Long Secret, Ruins of an Ancient Civilization Are Revealed in Utah
By KIRK JOHNSON

HORSE CANYON, Utah, June 30 — Archaeologists pulled aside a curtain on Wednesday to reveal what can only be called a secret garden: the pristinely preserved ruins of an ancient civilization that was long ago lost to the mists of time in the remote cliffs of eastern Utah, then resolutely protected over the last 50 years by a stubborn local rancher who kept mum about what he knew.

The ruins, called Range Creek, are spread over thousands of acres, much of it in inaccessible back country and reachable only through a single-track dirt road once owned by the rancher and recently bought by the State of Utah. Preliminary research dates the settlement from about A.D. 900 to 1100, during the period of the Fremont Indian culture.

Researchers say the site's singularity is not its monumental architecture. The people who lived here were more apt to build humble single-family stone-walled pit houses, of which there are believed to be hundreds — no one even knows yet — rather than high-rise cliffside apartment complexes like Mesa Verde in Colorado.

What mostly distinguishes Range Creek is that through quirk of fate and human will, it escaped both the ravages of looters and, until recently, the spades of archaeologists. Cliffside grain-storage vaults have been found here with their lids still intact, the corn and rye still inside. And while many sites in the West can still produce an old stone arrowhead or two, researchers found whole arrows here just a few weeks ago, apparently lying in the dust just where they were dropped 10 centuries ago at the time of William the Conqueror.

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Quote of note:

…political analysts say that by turning to parties that may not be consistent with his ideology and reaping benefits from Republican operatives, Mr. Nader risks tarnishing his longtime reputation as a champion for consumer causes.

"He's grasping at straws," Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, said of Mr. Nader's alliance with the Reform Party…"It suggests that this is somebody acting with a degree of desperation. He has a drive to run that propels him, irrespective of the consequences. He risks appearing to be a figure of ridicule."

Odd Alliances Form in Efforts to Place Nader on the Ballot
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY and SARAH KERSHAW

WASHINGTON, June 30 — In his search for access to the ballot, Ralph Nader can sometimes seem as if he has never met a third party he did not like.

After all, Mr. Nader, the left-leaning consumer advocate, and Patrick J. Buchanan, the right-leaning commentator, hardly seem like political soul mates. But four years after Mr. Buchanan won the endorsement of the Reform Party, Mr. Nader has succeeded him as the party's standard-bearer.

His alignment with the Reform Party is but one example of how Mr. Nader is facing such daunting forces to get his name on statewide ballots this year that he is seeking support from groups that do not necessarily share his long-held liberal beliefs.

Mr. Nader's efforts have only intensified given that last weekend he was spurned by the Green Party, which endorsed him for president in 1996 and 2000.

He is also getting helping from other unexpected quarters. Democrats have sued to keep Mr. Nader off the ballot in Arizona and Illinois and may be planning a similar challenge in Texas, but Republicans and some conservative groups in Oregon, Arizona and Wisconsin are feverishly, if not cynically, mobilizing to get him on ballots in those states in a drive to siphon votes from the likely Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry.

Mr. Nader said in an interview on Wednesday that "there's no quid pro quo" with the Reform Party or any other that would require him to alter his views.

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Hussein's Trial Offers Both Peril and Promise to Iraq and U.S.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 30 — When Saddam Hussein is charged with crimes against humanity in an Iraqi court on Thursday, much more will be at stake than his own fate.

For the people of this country, the Iraqi Special Tribunal could open the door for a thorough accounting of the crimes committed by his notoriously repressive government.

For the fledgling Iraqi government, it could offer an opportunity to shore up confidence among a weary citizenry.

For the Bush administration, known for its dislike of international criminal tribunals, it could mean a chance to establish a war-crimes court it can hold up as a model.

Mr. Hussein appeared before an Iraqi court on Wednesday, after being held in American custody for seven months, but his formal trial is unlikely to begin before next year, Iraqi officials said.

With so much at stake, the proceedings carry as much promise as peril. Already, questions have come up about whether the Iraqi Special Tribunal, relying on Iraqi law and American legal expertise, can produce credible, transparent proceedings or whether the result will amount to little more than victor's justice — or victim's vengeance.

On the one hand, the trial of the former dictator could deliver a degree of empowerment to a country still reeling from the excesses of Mr. Hussein's rule. On the other, it could present the defendant with a political platform of his own.

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US plans huge show of force in Pacific
Seven aircraft carriers to move within striking distance of China; Taiwan forces slated to join in drill
By Ching Cheong

HONG KONG - The United States is planning a massive show of force in the Pacific Ocean near China to register a point with Beijing.

In an exercise codenamed Operation Summer Pulse 04, it is expected to arrange for an unprecedented seven aircraft carrier strike groups (CSGs) to rendezvous in waters a safe distance away from the Chinese coastline - but still within striking distance - after mid-July.

This will be the first time in US naval history that it sends seven of its 12 CSGs to just one region.

According to a Department of Defence statement, Summer Pulse is to test out a new Fleet Response Plan (FRP) aimed at enhancing the American Navy's combat power and readiness in a time of crisis.

The FRP calls for the despatching of six 'forward deployed' or 'ready to surge' CSGs to a trouble spot within 30 days, and an additional two within 90 days.

Although the statement does not say where the seven CSGs will exercise, the Status of the Navy website said the USS Carl Vinson, Abraham Lincoln, John C Stennis and Kitty Hawk were in the Pacific Ocean as of yesterday.

The USS Enterprise and Harry Truman are in the Atlantic Ocean while USS George Washington is in the Persian Gulf.

According to a posting on Sina.com, an influential website in China, the signs point to a gathering of all seven CSGs in the Pacific.

Sources in Beijing say China's reading is that Summer Pulse is being mounted with it as the target audience, a suspicion reinforced by reports that Taiwanese forces are slated to join in the drill.

Clearly, given Beijing's repeated warning that it will use force, as a last resort and whatever the cost, to stop Taiwanese independence, the US feels it needs to send Beijing a message.

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This is some really bad legislation.

Virginia is for Haters

The Virginia General Assembly passed a law April 21 banning all contracts between partners in homosexual relationships. Not just marriage, all contracts.

At the center of HB 751 is this language (emphasis ours):

A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable.

This law not only prohibits civil marriage between same-sex partners, but actively seeks to invalidate any and all legal contracts between these individuals. Durable powers of attorney, health care directives, even wills and property contracts are at jeopardy now that this law has been passed. We have received numerous emails from couples, together for decades, who are now facing health crises made all the more terrifying by this legislation.

All of the private contracts entered into by gay couples looking to attain any measure of stability and protection under the rule of law are at risk. The language in this bill represents a new and dangerous low in legislative attacks on the sanctity and stability of homosexuals not only as committed couples, but as full citizens. It is hateful, dangerous, and demeaning legislation--and it is a shameful action from the state that was the earliest cradle of American democracy. The Washington Post, in an outraged editorial, says the law "flagrantly violates norms of basic fairness and decency."

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June 30, 2004

Cassini Readies for Pass Through Saturn Rings
Wed Jun 30, 2004 05:29 PM ET

By Peter Henderson and Gina Keating

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - NASA's Cassini probe neared Saturn on Wednesday, preparing for its pass through the planet's signature rings in a maneuver that will park it in orbit after a 2.2 billion-mile trip.

Scientists hope the spacecraft will encounter galactic dust at most, since even pea-sized rocks could severely damage the craft as it hurtles along at 50,000 miles per hour.

But they may face a problem on earth -- the antenna in Australia due to track the probe may have to be stowed away due to high winds, in which case scientists would miss the first signals of health from Cassini.

Described as the most capable robotic space explorer built, Cassini will spend four years studying Saturn, its rings and its 31 known moons -- including Titan, the largest.

But first it has to get into orbit in what Charles Elachi, director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory which is overseeing the mission, said were the two most critical hours of the mission as the spacecraft fired its engines to slow down.

"There is no second chance," he said. "There has been a very long time getting close to the 'lord of the rings,' and we will get there tonight," Elachi said.

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White House Dismisses Polls on Iraq Terror Fears
Wed Jun 30, 2004 06:47 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday dismissed opinion polls showing that many Americans feel the war in Iraq has increased the danger of terrorism instead of reducing it.

Several surveys this month have shown growing public concern about the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and its potential for fueling Muslim anger against the United States.

Asked about polling data, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that Americans understood administration policy was "making the world a safer and better place."

"First of all, I don't know that all polls show the same thing on that very subject," he said.

"Because of the action that this president is taking, we are making the world a safer and better place and making America more secure."

President Bush, who has portrayed himself as a war president in his closely fought election-year contest with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, routinely uses his public appearances to assert that the ouster of Saddam Hussein enhanced U.S. security.

But at least three major U.S. polls this month suggest many voters disagree.

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Yesterday Josh Marshall wrote he was expecting a lot of followup on that Financial Times article that claimed to have substantiated the Niger/yellow cake uranium debacle. Said he knew a lot he can't say right now.Well, since William Safire prevaricatedwrote about it, Josh decided he could poke all holes in Safire's story without revealing anything.

You can approach this on a different level. Safire would like us to believe the Bush White House, faced last July with a PR catastrophe over the president's use of the Niger uranium claim in the State of the Union address, decided to fold its cards and issue a series of rather abject apologies even though they had this rock-solid intelligence that they could have used to go on the offensive. That make sense to you? Me neither.

This is why I have my doubts about the story, so much that I've been in no rush to read it. But this:

…One premise of the two FT articles was that smugglers were getting uranium from derelict (and thus unguarded and unregulated) mines in Niger to sell to five countries.

Safire mentions three of the alleged countries: Iran, Iraq and Libya. The FT includes the other two: North Korea and China.

On its face, it's not inconceivable that countries seeking nuclear weapons technology like Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea would be in the market for illicit supplies of processed uranium.

But China? Last time I checked China is an acknowledged nuclear power and has been for decades. They also have a growing civilian nuclear power program. Perhaps most to the point they have big uranium mines in their own country and a national monopoly company (the China National Nuclear Corporation) charged with the running the mines and the nearby-located processing facilities. The IAEA says the Chinese have the domestic capacity to process 1200 tons of uranium a year.

Now, I don't know the precise needs of Chinese civilian and military nuclear activities. But given their own domestic capabilities, how likely is it that they're going to try to cut a deal with low-rent smugglers to get some uranium from derelict (and thus not very productive) mines in Niger? Does that make sense?

has convinced me to print the thing out.

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Five and a half minutes of Jon Stewart is worth an hour of CNN.

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Can't much say I blame them either.

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A Family Divided
Sex, race and the Jefferson feud. An inside look
By ANITA HAMILTON

Late one afternoon in May, a large group of people wearing name tags gathered under the shade of a giant tulip poplar tree on the south terrace of Monticello. As the last of the day's tourists were taken by shuttle bus down the winding, single-lane road leading away from the hilltop home, this lingering band nibbled on cheese cubes and sipped red wine as they admired the building's imposing white columns and soaring rotunda. These lingerers were more than tourists, more than guests. They were Jefferson's family. Many breathed a sigh of relief that the 90°F midday heat was giving way to such a perfect spring evening.

The good weather wasn't the only thing putting them at ease. This was the first time in six years that the Monticello Association, which comprises some 700 descendants of Jefferson, had held its annual reunion without a horde of reporters and photographers in attendance—or the extended family members who had triggered the controversy. The once obscure association, which administers the graveyard at Monticello, got caught in a media storm in 1998, after a DNA study confirmed to the satisfaction of many that a male member of Jefferson's family had fathered at least one child with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings (she gave birth to at least six, and possibly seven, children in all). If that Jefferson was the third President, as many historians believe, it means at least some of Sally Hemings' descendants were Thomas Jefferson's too. After a very public invitation on The Oprah Winfrey Show in November 1998 by an association member, dozens of Hemings began attending the group's annual reunion, albeit as guests, not members.

Getting invited, as it turned out, wasn't the same as being welcome. While a handful of association members supported the Hemings' inclusion, most did not. In 2002, the group voted 74 to 6 to deny them full membership. The already strained relations turned decidedly frigid last year when the association restricted the number of Hemings allowed to attend its reunion and attempted to bar them from setting foot inside the graveyard at Monticello. Paulie Abeles, the wife of the association's president at the time, even admitted to having secretly infiltrated an online discussion group that the Hemings had been using, in order to spy on their messages. "It was just an ugly, ugly situation," says Lucian Truscott IV, the Jefferson descendant and association member who originally invited the Hemings.

So, what began as an extended-family reunion has disintegrated into a bitter family feud between Jefferson's white family and his black one. For the first time since the DNA results came out, not a single Hemings attended the association's annual reunion this past May. "Nobody wants to be where they aren't wanted. The environment felt stuffy and very formal," says Shannon Lanier, a Hemings who works as a TV production assistant in New York City and co-authored a book about the family called Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family. Instead, last year the Hemings began holding their own reunions at Monticello, complete with a sunrise graveyard service at the recently discovered slave burial site on the estate.

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Voting Official Seeks Terrorism Guidelines
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission.

Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel.

Soaries was appointed to the federal Election Assistance Commission last year by President Bush. Soaries said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in April to raise the concerns.

"I am still awaiting their response," he said. "Thus far we have not begun any meaningful discussion." Spokesmen for Rice and Ridge did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Soaries noted that Sept. 11, 2001, fell on Election Day in New York City — and he said officials there had no rules to follow in making the decision to cancel the election and hold it later.

Events in Spain, where a terrorist attack shortly before the March election possibly influenced its outcome, show the need for a process to deal with terrorists threatening or interrupting the Nov. 2 presidential election in America, he said.

"Look at the possibilities. If the federal government were to cancel an election or suspend an election, it has tremendous political implications. If the federal government chose not to suspend an election it has political implications," said Soaries, a Republican and former secretary of state of New Jersey.

"Who makes the call, under what circumstances is the call made, what are the constitutional implications?" he said. "I think we have to err on the side of transparency to protect the voting rights of the country."

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Professor Kim:

A little distortion with your morning coffee

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) recently told a group of wealthy Democratic donors that if their party wins control of the White House and Congress in November,they would probably roll back some of the Bush administration's tax cuts (summarized in this .pdf document to help get the economy on track. According to an AP account, she said:

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Judging by some of the response's to Clinton's remarks, one would think that she had proposed robbing widows and orphans to pay for Congressional pay raises.

Links to outraged Conservatives over there.

You know, I propose that unearned and passive income be taxed at the same rate as earned income. I think, in fact, unearned income should always be taxed at a higher rate than income earned by one's personal efforts but that's not part of my proposal. It is part of my proposal that any future tax cuts be directed toward earned income rates as long as earned income is taxed at all.

I think taxing all income at the earned income rate is simple, totally focused on those who work for a living and is morally irrefutable.

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via Steve Gilliard:

Cheney just got booed at the Yankees game

(I was thinking of retitling this: "Yankee fans tell Cheney 'go fuck yourself.'")

I just got a live phone-in from the Yankees vs. Boston game in NYC taking place right now. Dick Cheney just got booed by the crowd!

Even as my friend Michael called me from his seats at the game, God Bless America was still playing in the background. During the 7th inning stretch at Yankees Stadium, they play God Bless America and show on the big screen pictures of anyone famous who's in the audience that night. Dick Cheney is apparently in the audience, and as soon as his face went up, the entire crowd started booing! As my friend Michael tells it, this is the blue-collar Bronx we're talking about, and Cheney is still getting booed - not a good sign for the Bush-Cheney ticket. As soon as the camera guys realized Cheney was getting booed, they quickly switched the picture on the screen to someone else.

Michael's read of the situation, as a die-hard Yankees fan: The election is over.

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Playing Games With Housing

Congress and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have been playing a transparent game of "good cop, bad cop" since HUD set out to savage Section 8, the federal program that provides housing subsidies for the poor. Republicans in Congress say they budgeted enough money to underwrite the program, and they blame recalcitrant officials at HUD for the cutbacks — while the agency, in turn, maintains that it is doing what Congress told it to do.

Behind the game, however, both sides seem intent on squeezing money from the HUD budget to help pay for all those tax cuts for the rich, even if it means exposing thousands of poor families to the possibility of eviction.

Most of the families who receive subsidies under the 30-year-old Section 8 program live at or below the poverty level. They pay about 30 percent of their incomes toward rent and government vouchers pay the rest.

Conservative Republicans, who have long wanted to scale back the program, have usually been beaten back by their colleagues. This time around, the appropriators in Congress provided full financing for the program while quietly authorizing HUD to make cuts by administrative means. The department then announced that it would no longer pay the full cost of the vouchers, and it froze federal funds at the level of August 2003, plus an adjustment for inflation.

In addition, HUD's new policy involves retroactive cuts, which only became clear at the end of May, long after local housing authorities had committed themselves to helping new families, including many who had waited for years to get decent housing through the voucher program. Obviously, if cuts have to be made, the only sensible way to make them is to do so gradually and well in advance, so the local housing agencies can adjust to the new reality while preserving housing for their most vulnerable tenants.

Faced with unexpected shortfalls, local public housing agencies have informed landlords that they can no longer pay agreed-upon rent subsidies, making it likely that many Section 8 tenants will soon be shown the door. A recent survey from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests that most agencies with shortfalls will go this route. The survey also shows that local authorities have revoked newly issued vouchers and have begun to withdraw from circulation the vouchers that become available when families get better jobs and move out of the subsidy program.

In addition, local agencies have begun to raise rents for the vulnerable families who can least afford to pay, something that is a sure way of destabilizing these families while driving them deeper into poverty.

The Bush administration is counting on Republicans at the state level to keep quiet in the interest of party solidarity. But given the disastrous nature of the new policies, governors, state legislators and mayors of both parties have both a moral and political obligation to speak out.

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This ought to fuel howls about the liberal media conspiring against l'il Georgie for another two, three weeks.

Quote of note:

The Senate is now in a two-week recess. In one of the few signs of life on Capitol Hill on this issue, Mr. Warner promises to resume his hearings after the recess. But even the Red Cross in Geneva has got it figured out: the administration has no intention of cooperating. It's time for the Republican majority in Congress to stop covering for the White House and compel the administration, by subpoena if necessary, to turn over all documents relating to Abu Ghraib — starting with those Red Cross reports.

Abu Ghraib, Stonewalled

While piously declaring its determination to unearth the truth about Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has spent nearly two months obstructing investigations by the Army and members of Congress. It has dragged out the Army's inquiry, withheld crucial government documents from a Senate committee and stonewalled senators over dozens of Red Cross reports that document the horrible mistreatment of Iraqis at American military prisons. Even last week's document dump from the White House, which included those cynical legal road maps around treaties and laws against torturing prisoners, seemed part of this stonewalling campaign. Nothing in those hundreds of pages explained what orders had been issued to the military and C.I.A. jailers in Iraq, and by whom.

It took the Pentagon more than two weeks to appoint a replacement for Maj. Gen. George Fay, who had to be relieved of the task of investigating the military intelligence units at Abu Ghraib because he was not senior enough to question Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq. The process underscored the inability of the military to investigate itself at this level. The Pentagon named someone of high enough rank — just barely. That officer is a three-star general, as is General Sanchez. He will have to get up to speed before questioning General Sanchez, and the Pentagon will undoubtedly stall again when the new investigating general, inevitably, needs to go yet higher.

The Pentagon has also not turned over to the Senate the full report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the Army's biggest investigation so far into abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon has still not accounted for the 2,000 pages missing from his 6,000-page file when it was given to the Senate Armed Services Committee more than a month ago; the missing pages include draft documents on interrogation techniques for Iraq. The committee's chairman, Senator John Warner, said last week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had assured him that he was working on the problem. Mr. Warner's faith seems deeply misplaced.

Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of another issue, the Red Cross reports on Iraq, is the most outrageous example of the administration's bad faith on the prison scandal. The Bush administration has cited Red Cross confidentiality policies to explain its failure to give up the reports. The trouble is, the Red Cross has repeatedly told the administration to go ahead and share the agency's findings with Congress, as long as steps are taken to prevent leaks.

On May 7, the Senate armed services panel asked Mr. Rumsfeld for these reports on widespread abuse in the military prisons in Iraq; one of the reports had already appeared on the Internet. Mr. Rumsfeld assured the committee that he would turn them over, if the Red Cross agreed. Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides have not handed over the reports — 40 in all, including 24 from Iraq. Over the weeks, the Pentagon has assured increasingly angry senators that it was negotiating with the Red Cross, and then offered the rather absurd claim that it was still "collecting" the documents.

In fact, the International Red Cross gave its consent within 24 hours of Mr. Rumsfeld's empty promise, and has repeated it several times.

In late May, Kevin Moley, the American ambassador to the international organizations based in Geneva, invited the head of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, to "express any concerns" his organization had about giving the documents to Congress. Dr. Kellenberger replied that it was never a problem as long as the documents were kept confidential. Given the administration's habit of selective disclosure, however, Dr. Kellenberger insisted that all of the reports, not just some, be sent to Congress, in their entirety. He has also asked for an inventory of what is shared.

Still, the Pentagon told Senator Warner's committee that it had not worked out an arrangement. On June 15, Christophe Girod, head of the Red Cross delegation in Washington, wrote to Senator Edward Kennedy, a leader in the fight to get the prison reports, that the decision "lies with the U.S. authorities." He confirmed that the Red Cross had given the Pentagon permission to hand over the documents in early May.

Last Thursday, members of the Armed Services Committee attended a closed-door briefing with the Pentagon, ostensibly on the Red Cross reports. But the briefers did not turn over any documents; they merely showed the senators reports on Guantánamo Bay that had no bearing on Iraq.

The Senate is now in a two-week recess. In one of the few signs of life on Capitol Hill on this issue, Mr. Warner promises to resume his hearings after the recess. But even the Red Cross in Geneva has got it figured out: the administration has no intention of cooperating. It's time for the Republican majority in Congress to stop covering for the White House and compel the administration, by subpoena if necessary, to turn over all documents relating to Abu Ghraib — starting with those Red Cross reports.

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Reality Intrudes on Promises in Rebuilding of Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIK ECKHOLM

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 29 — The four big smokestacks at the Doura power plant in Baghdad have always served as subversive truth-tellers. No matter what Saddam Hussein's propagandists said about electricity supplies, people knew they could get a better idea of the coming day's power by counting how many stacks at Doura were spewing smoke.

Mr. Hussein is vanquished and a new Iraqi government has just gained formal sovereignty, but those smokestacks remain potent markers — not only of sporadic electricity service but of the agonizingly slow pace of Iraq's promised economic renewal.

More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.

Inside the high-profile Doura plant, American-financed repairs, originally scheduled to be completed by June 1, have dragged into the summer even as the demand for electricity soars and residents suffer through nightly power failures.

At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.

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Picture this:

The world is behind us, post-9/11. We do the Afghanistan thing with world-wide support. We stay focused there, rooting out the last of the Taliban and Al Qaida.

Then the Sudan genocide arises. But we are neither tied down not opposed militarily because we have not invaded Iraq. We can go back to the UN and tell them we need to lead a military intervention to prevent the genocide and we want the world behind us.

We would get the support. The Sudanese government would feel like an attack trained chihuahua facing the NYPD S.W.A.T. team. Lives saved, moral rectitude irrevocably established, the now-proven-illusory belief in the absolute power of the American military unchallenged and hence intact, American hegemony off to a rolling start.

Anyway…

Powell Heads for Darfur, Annan Arrives in Sudan
Wed Jun 30, 2004 06:49 AM ET
By Saul Hudson

KHARTOUM, Sudan (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell left for Sudan's troubled Darfur region on Wednesday on a trip aid agencies said could save lives by putting the pressure on Khartoum to curb Arab militias and streamline relief work.

As Powell took off from the Sudanese capital, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Khartoum on a similar mission, demonstrating the high-level international interest in the plight of some two million Darfuris affected by conflict.

Foreign aid officials said Powell's visit to a camp for people forced to leave their homes in Darfur could pressure the Sudanese government to ease the crisis and save lives.

Powell's trip to the scene of what is widely described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis will also highlight the need for aid and may spur other governments and institutions to help the Darfuris, they said.

Powell and Annan have warned Khartoum of possible Security Council action if its does not act against the Janjaweed Arab militias, which have been driving black Darfuris from their homes, and lift restrictions on access by relief organizations.

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Kerry Makes Push for Hispanic, Black Votes
Wed Jun 30, 2004 06:50 AM ET

By Mark Egan

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Seeking support from minorities in November's presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry on Tuesday promised Hispanics he would help illegal immigrants gain citizenship and told blacks he would make college more affordable.

Speaking in Phoenix to the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group, Kerry pledged to sign a bill in his first 100 days in office to allow undocumented workers to apply for citizenship if they have paid taxes for five years and have no criminal record -- a proposal that brought the large crowd of Latinos to its feet.

In Chicago earlier at a conference of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Massachusetts senator promised $10 billion to help states defray education costs -- funding he said would be contingent on state universities keeping tuition increases to no more than the rate of inflation.

The two events were aimed squarely at winning the country's two biggest minority voting blocs, who are certain to be a crucial factor in November.

Blacks have been a loyal Democratic constituency, but Kerry has been criticized by some black Democrats for having too few members of minorities in his inner circle.

He also faces increased competition for the fast-growing Hispanic vote, a prime target of Republicans. President Bush won 35 percent of Hispanic support in 2000 in his race against Democrat Al Gore.

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How absurd is it to claim Iraq as an example of the flowering of democracy on the one hand, and to deny he want to impose democracy on the other?

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Bush Urges Middle East to Fight Terror with Reform
Tue Jun 29, 2004 12:43 PM ET

By Steve Holland

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - President Bush tried to persuade Middle Eastern states Tuesday that political reform was vital to combat extremism but said Washington would not impose democracy on the region.

Speaking with his back to the Middle Eastern side of the Bosphorus, the strait that divides Turkey, Bush argued that political change was needed to bring prosperity, to make governments more stable and to undercut support for militants.

"The historic achievement of democracy in the broader Middle East will be a victory shared by all," said Bush at the end of a five-day trip to meetings with European Union and NATO leaders.

Speaking a day after U.S.-led occupiers handed power to a United Nations-appointed interim government in Baghdad, Bush called violent Iraq "the world's newest democracy" and an example to the rest of the region of freedom flowering.

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Born Under a Cloud of Irony
The new, free Iraq may officially be in the hands of a former terrorist.
Robert Scheer

June 29, 2004

The ironies are flowing thicker than crude oil in Iraq these days.

First, the United States surreptitiously turns over nominal control of the country to a government appointed by outsiders while leaving real power in the hands of U.S. military commanders and calls it an exercise in democracy.

And although the interim prime minister is a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who later conducted anti-Hussein terrorist operations on behalf of the CIA — operations in which innocent Iraqi civilians may have been killed — his anointment as leader of a "free Iraq" is being hailed by President Bush as a great victory in the war on terror.

According to several former intelligence officials interviewed by the New York Times this month, the political group run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the 1990s, but financed by the CIA, "used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Iraq" in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize Hussein's regime.

With such a record, it is perhaps not strange then that Allawi, who built his exile organization with defecting Iraqi military officers, is already proclaiming the need to delay elections scheduled for January and impose martial law. On Monday Bush said coalition forces would support such a call for martial law, presumably enforced by U.S. troops.

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Justice Department Says It Can't Share Lobbying Data Because Computer System Will Crash
By Ted Bridis
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department's database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.

"Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating," wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department's office for information requests.

Advocates for open government said the government's assertion that it could not copy data from its computers was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.

"This was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them," Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the Justice Department's decision.

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June 29, 2004

Natasha at Pacific Views has a piece of Jon Stewart's Daily Show posted

JS: ...Bremer left so fast, the new government's first task will be repairing the Bremer shaped hole he left in the wall. But Bremer didn't leave before taking care of some last minute odds and ends.

All of which should be filed under "sad but true."

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Prisoner 27075 learns limits of sovereignty
By Nicolas Pelham in Baghdad
Published: June 28 2004 19:57 | Last Updated: June 28 2004 19:57

Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges' order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops.

US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva Conventions they were not bound by Iraqi law.

A few hundred metres from where outgoing administrator Paul Bremer formally ended the US occupation of Iraq on Monday, Mr Kanum - prisoner number 27075 - cowered handcuffed on a backroom floor in the Central Criminal Court, where Iraqis are tried for attacks against coalition forces.

"Iraqis who have been detained as a security threat can still be detained until firstly the coalition leaves or secondly they are considered to be no longer a threat," said Michael Frank, deputy special prosecutor for Multinational Force-Iraq (MNFI), who oversaw the case dressed in military fatigues.

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Reagan Pyramid Nears Completion

SIMI VALLEY, CA—Slave manpower was doubled this week in an effort to ensure that erection of the gigantic Reagan Pyramid remains on schedule to be completed in time for the 40th president's mummification and ascension into the Afterworld.

Swift completion of the towering structure is "of paramount priority," according to Republican Party insiders.

"Only the most gigantic tomb ever created will be worthy of the Great Communicator," former Reagan Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said. "As his mortal subjects, it is our holy duty to provide Reagan with a burial commensurate with his stature, in order that he may enter the Realm of Death bedecked with raiments and honors so that he may take his rightful place beside the mighty Sun God, Ra."

According to project overseer and Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, the 118,000-ton pyramid, which is visible from a distance of more than 40 miles and has already cost the lives of some 50,000 slaves, will serve not only as Reagan's conduit to the Empire of the Gods, but also as an earthly repository of the deified Republican's vast wealth.

"Buried with Reagan will be his finest treasures," Meese said, "including 2,500 MX intercontinental ballistic missiles, 15 stealth bombers, a golden chalice of jelly beans, and his most prized servant, former president George Bush Sr."

Bush told reporters, "It is my honor and duty to have my sinus passages ceremonially packed with sand before my still-living, pain-racked body is forever locked with my leader's within the Great Reagan's final resting place. Let us all praise Osiris."

Reagan's mummified husk will be placed in the burial chamber as intact as possible. To this end, Reagan's internal organs were removed shortly after his death and preserved, encased in ornate protective ceramic vessels and sealed in beeswax.

See next page » (Yes, there's two pages of this!)

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American People Ruled Unfit To Govern

WASHINGTON, DC—In a historic decision with major implications for the future of U.S. participatory democracy, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Monday that the American people are unfit to govern.

The controversial decision, the first of its kind in the 210-year history of U.S. representative government, was, according to Justice David Souter, "a response to the clear, demonstrable incompetence and indifference of the current U.S. citizenry in matters concerning the operation of this nation's government."

As a result of the ruling, the American people will no longer retain the power to choose their own federal, state, and local officials or vote on matters of concern to the public.

"This decision was by no means easy, but it unfortunately had to be done," said Justice Antonin Scalia, who penned the majority decision in the case. "The U.S. Constitution is very clear: In the event that the voting public becomes incapacitated or otherwise unfit to carry out its duties of self-governance, there is a danger posed to the republic, and the judicial branch is empowered to remove said public and replace it with a populace more qualified to lead."

"In light of their unmitigated apathy toward issues of import to the nation's welfare and their inability to grasp even the most basic principles upon which participatory democracy is built, we found no choice but to rule the American people unfit to govern at this time," Scalia concluded.

The controversial ruling, court members stressed, is not intended as a slight against the character of the American people, but merely a necessary measure for the public good.

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Sometime last month I wrote

Black people have never been the ones to make "integration" difficult. Black people only pursued separatism when they became convinced there was no way to gain respect in the USofA…to this day most hold out hope for integration; the separatists are a significant but still small fraction of the communities. The collective has been struggling desperately to do exactly what Eric suggests the mainstream requires. The opposition has flavors that range from subtle to bombastic but is still highly active.

Recent conversation has made me feel the need to produce some evidence of this.

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The Dilemma of Social Pattern
By MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS

Looked at in its externals, Negro life, as reflected in Harlem registers a ready--almost a feverishly rapid-- assimilation of American patterns, what Mr. Herskovits calls "complete acculturation." It speaks well both for the Negro and for American standards of living that this is so. Internally, perhaps it is another matter. Does democracy require uniformity? If so, it threatens to be safe, but dull. Social standards must be more or less uniform, but social expressions may be different. Old folkways may not persist, but they may leave a mental trace, subtly recorded in emotional temper and coloring social reactions. In the article which follows this Mr. Bercovici tells of finding, by intuition rather than research, something "unique" in Harlem-- back of the external conformity, a race-soul striving for social utterance

GLIMPSES of the whirring cycle of life in Harlem leave the visitor bewildered at its complexity. There is constantly before one the tempting invitation to compare and contrast the life there with that of other communities one has had the opportunity of observing. Should I not find there, if anywhere, the distinctiveness of the Negro, of which I had heard so much? Should I not be able to discover there his ability, of which we are so often told, to produce unique cultural traits, which might be added to the prevailing white culture, and, as well, to note his equally well-advertised inability to grasp the complex civilization of which he constitutes a part?

And so I went, and what I found was churches and schools, club-houses and lodge meeting-places, the library and the newspaper offices and the Y. M. C. A. and busy 135th Street and the hospitals and the social service agencies. I met persons who were lawyers and doctors and editors and writers, who were chauffeurs and peddlers and longshoremen and real estate brokers and capitalists, teachers and nurses and students and waiters and cooks. And all Negroes. Cabarets and theaters, drugstores and restaurants just like those everywhere else. And finally, after a time, it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a community just like any other American community. The same pattern, only a different shade!

Where, then, is the "peculiar" community of which I had heard so much ? Is the cultural genius of the Negro, which is supposed to have produced jazz and the spiritual, the West African wood-carving and Bantu legalism, non-existent in this country, after all? To what extent, if any, has this genius developed a culture peculiar to it in America? I did not find it in the great teeming center of Negro life in Harlem, where, if anywhere, it should be found. May it not then be true that the Negro has become acculturated to the prevailing white culture and has developed the patterns of culture typical of American life?

Let us first view the matter historically. In the days after the liberation of the Negroes from slavery, what was more natural than that they should strive to maintain, as nearly as possible, the standards set up by those whom they had been taught to look up to as arbiters--the white group? And we see, on their part, a strong conscious effort to do just this. They went into business and tried to make money as their white fellows did They already had adopted the white forms of religious faith and practice, and now they began to borrow lodges and other types of organization. Schools sprang up in which they might learn, not the language and technique of their African ancestors, but that of this country, where they lived. The "respected" members of the community were those who lived upright lives such as the "respected" whites livedÑthey paid their debts, they w alked in the paths of sexual morality according to the general pattern of the prevailing Puritanical culture, and they went to church as was right and proper in every American town. The matter went so far that they attempted to alter their hair to conform to the general style, and the fortunes made by those who sold hair-straightening devices and medicines are a matter of record.

In Harlem we have today, essentially, a typical American community. You may look at the Negroes on the street. As to dress and deportment, do you find any vast difference between them and the whites among whom they carry on their lives? Notice them as they go about their work--they do almost all of the things the whites do, and in much the same way. The popular newspapers in Harlem are not the Negro papers--there is even no Negro daily-- but the city newspapers which everyone reads. And there is the same gossipy reason why the Harlemites read their own weeklies as that which causes the inhabitants of Chelsea, of the Bronx, of Putnam, Connecticut, or of West Liberty, Ohio, to read theirs. When we come to the student groups in Harlem, we find that the same process occurs--the general culture-pattern has taken them horse, foot and artillery. Do the whites organize Greek-letter fraternities and sororities in colleges, with pearl-studded pins and "houses" ? You will find a number of Negro fraternities and sororities with just the same kind of insignia and "houses." Negro community centers are attached to the more prosperous churches just as the same sort of institutions are connected with white churches. And they do the same sort of things there Á you can see swimming and gymnasium classes and sewing classes and nutrition talks and open forums and all the rest of it that we all know so well.

When I visit the Business Men's Association, the difference between this gathering and that of my own Rotary Club is imperceptible. And on the other end of the economic scale that equally applies to Negro and white, and which prevails all over the country, we find the Socialist and labor groups. True, once in a uhile an element peculiarly Negro does manifest itself; thus I remember vividly the bitter complaints of one group of motion picture operators at the prejudices which prevent them from enjoying the benefits of the white union. And, of course, you will meet u ith this sort of thing whenever the stream of Negro life conflicts with the more general pattern of the "color line." But even here I noticed that the form of the organization of these men was that assumed by their white fellow-workers, and similarly when I attended a Socialist street-meeting in Harlem, I found that the general economic motif comes in for much more attention than the problems which are of interest to the Negro per se.

Perhaps the most striking example of complete acceptance of the general pattern is in the field of sex relations. I shall never forget the storm of indignation which I aroused among a group of Negro men and women with whom I chanced to be talking on one occasion, when, a propos of the question of the treatment of the Negro woman in literature, I inadvertently remarked that even if the sexual looseness generally attributed to her were true, it was nothing of which to be essentially ashamed, since such a refusal to accept the Puritanical modes of procedure generally considered right and proper might contribute a welcome leaven to the conventionality of current sex mores. The reaction, prompt and violent, was such as to show with tremendous clarity the complete acculturation of these men and women to the accepted standards of sex behavior. There was not even a shade of doubt but that sexual rigidity is the ultimate ideal of relations between men and women, and certainly there was no more indication of a leaning toard the customs to be found in ancestral Africa than would be found among a group of whites.

Or, let us consider the position of the Negro intellectuals, the writers and artists. The proudest boast of the modern young Negro writer is that he writes of humans, not of Negroes. His literary ideals are not the African folk-tale and conundrum, but the vivid expressionistic style of the day--he seeks to be a writer, not a Negro writer. It was this point, indeed, which was especially stressed at a dinner recently given in New York City for a group of young Negro writers on the occasion of the publication of a novel by one of their number. Member after member of the group stated this position as his own--not Negro as such, but human--another striking example of the process of acculturation.

The problem then may be presented with greater clarity. Does not the Negro have a mode of life that is essentially similar to that of the general community of which he is a part? Or can it be maintained that he possesses a distinctive, inborn cultural genius which manifests itself even in America? To answer this, we must answer an even more basic question: what is cultural genius? For the Negro came to America endowed, as all people are endowed, with a culture, which had been developed by him through long ages in Africa. Was it innate? Or has it been sloughed off, forgotten, in the generations since he was brought into our culture?

To understand the problem with which ue are presented, it may be well to consider waht this thing, culture, is, and the extent to which we can say that it falls into patterns. By the word culture, I do not mean the refinements of our particular civilization which the word has come to connote, but simply those elements of the environment hich are the handiwork of man himself. Thus, among ourselves, we might consider a spinning machine, or the democratic theory of society, or a fork, or the alphabet as much a cultural fact as a symphonic tone-poem, a novel, or an oil painting.

We may best come to an understanding of culture through a consideration of some of the phases of primitive life, where the forces at work are not overshadowed by the great imponderable fact of dense masses of population. As we look over the world, we see that there is no group of men however simply they may live their lives, without the thing we call culture. And, what is more important, the culture they possess as the result of their own historical backgroundÑ is an adult affair, developed through long centuries of trial and error, and something constantly changing. Man, it has been said, is a culture-building animal. And he is nowhere without the particular culture which his group have built. It is true that the kinds of culture which he builds are bewilderingly different--to compare the civilization of the Eskimo, the Australian, the Chinese, the African, and of ourselves leaves the student with a keener sense of their differences, both as to form and complexity, rather than with any feeling of resemblances among them. But one thing they do have in common: the cultures, when viewed from the outside, are stable. In their main elements they go along much as they always have gone, unless some great historical accident (like the discovery of the steam engine in our culture or the intrusion of the Western culture on that of the Japanese or the transplanting of Negro slaves from Africa to America) occurs to upset the trend and to direct the development of the culture along new paths. To the persons within the cultures, however, they seem even more than just stable. They seem fixed, rigid, all-enduringÑindeed, they are so taken for granted that, untiI comparatively recent times, they were never studied at all.

But what is it that makes cultures different? There are those, of course, who will maintain that it is the racial factor. They will say that the bewildering differences between the cultures of the Englishman, the Chinaman, the Bantu and the Maya, for example, are the result of differences in innate racial endowment, and that every race has evolved a culture peculiarly fitted to it. All this sounds very convincing until one tries to define the term "race." Certain anthropologists are trying, even now, to discover criteria which will scientifically define the term "Negro." One of the most distinguished of these, Professor T. Wingate Todd, has been working steadily for some years in the attempt and the net results are certain hypotheses which he himself calls tentative. The efforts of numerous psychological testers to establish racial norms for intelligence are vitiated by the two facts that first, as many of them will admit, it is doubtful just what it is they are testing, and, in the second place, that races are mixed. This is particularly true in the case of the Negroes; in New York City, less than 2 per cent of the group from whom I obtained genealogical material claimed pure Negro ancestry, and while this percentage is undoubtedly low, the fact remains that the vast majority of Negroes in America are of mixed ancestry.

If ability to successfully live in one culture were restricted to persons of one race, how could we account for the fact that we see persons of the most diverse races living together, for example, in this country, quite as though they were naturally endowed with the ability to meet the problems of living here, while again we witness an entire alien people adopting our civilization, to use the Japanese again for illustration?

OUR civilization is what it is because of certain historic events which occurred in the course of its development. So we can also say for the civilization of the African, of the Eskimo, of the Australian. And the people who lived in these civilizations like ourselves, view the things they do--as a result of living in them-- not as inbred, but as inborn. To the Negro in Africa, it would be incomprehensiible for a man to work at a machine all day for a few bits of paper to be given him at the end of his work-day, and in the same way, the white traveler stigmatizes the African as lazy because he will not see the necessity for entering on a gruelling forced march so as to reach a certain point in a given time. And when we turn to our civilization, we find that it has many culture-patterns, as we may term these methods of behavior. They are ingrained in us through long habituation, and their violation evokes a strong emotional response in us, no matter what our racial background. Thus for a person to eat with a knife in place of a fork, or to go about the streets hatless, or for a woman to wear short dresses when long ones are in fashion, are all violations of the patterns we have been brought up to feel right and proper, and we react violently to them. More serious, for a young man not to "settle down" and make as much money as he can is regarded as bordering on the immoral, while, in the régime of sex, the rigid patterns have been remarked upon, as has been the unmitigated condemnation which the breaking of these taboos calls forth. The examples which I have given above of the reaction of the Negro to the general cultural patterns of this country might be multiplied to include almost as many social facts as are observable, and yet, wherever we might go, we would find the Negro reacting to the same situations in much the same fashion as his white brother.

What, then, is the particular Negro genius for Culture Is there such a thing? Can he contribute something of his vivid, and yet at the same time softly gracious personality to the general culture in which he lives? What there is today in Harlem distinct from the white culture which surrounds it, is, as far as I am able to see, merely a remnant from the peasant days in the South. Of the African culture, not a trace. Even the spirituals are an expression of the emotion of the Negro playing through the typical religious pattern of white America. But from that emotional quality in the Negro, which is to be sensed rather than measured, comes the feeling that, though strongly acculturated to the prevalent pattern of behavior, the Negroes may, at the same time, influence it somewhat eventually through the appeal of that quality.

THAT they have absorbed the culture of America is too obvious, almost, to be mentioned. They have absorbed it as all great racial and social groups in this country have absorbed it. And they face much the same problems as these groups face. The social ostracism to which they are subjected is only different in extent from that to which the Jew is subjected. The fierce reaction of race-pride is quite the same in both groups. But, whether in Negro or in Jew, the protest avails nothing, apparently. All racial and social elements in our population who live here long enough become acculturated, Americanized in the truest sense of the word, eventually. They learn our culture and react according to its patterns, against which all the protestations of the possession of, or of hot desire for, a peculiar culture mean nothing.

As we turn to Harlem we see its social and economic and political makeup a part of the larger whole of the city--separate from it, it is true, but still essentially not different from any other American community in which the modes of life and of action are determined by the great dicta of "what is done." In other words, it represents, as do all American communities which it resembles, a case of complete acculturation. And so, I return again to my reaction on first seeing this center of Negro activity, as the complete description of it: "Why, it's the same pattern, only a different shade!"

The Survey Graphic Harlem Number (March 1925)

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Kathleen Cleaver (who I would interview for you if I didn't suck at networking) was also interviewed for The Two Nations of Black America. Here's her answer to the question posed by the series.

INTERVIEWER: 1997. Largest black middle class in history. Largest black underclass. Black middle class has roughly tripled since the day King died, but 45 percent of all black children live at or beneath the poverty line. How did we get here?

CLEAVER: Well, one of the ways we got here was through the takeover by corporate interests of the legal and political structures that govern our lives. The ways in which, let's say, anti-trust law or tax laws used to prevent monopolies, have been shunted aside. The ways in which the information services that are supposed to be at the disposal of the people, now are at the service of corporate interests. The ways the educational system is supposed to be under the control of the community, at the service of at least not the communities I see. The radical gap in income and residence through the sub suburbanization. So many cities have this, what you call "donut shape". In the middle is a little black hole. And all on the outside, it's all the wealth and the tax money and the resources, where white people live. And so the economic disparity has widened. It's greater than any time since the 1920's. The opportunities for people at the bottom aren't there. In order to have opportunities, you basically have to have a graduate degree. Now, only certain kinds of people can get those. But those are the people through the Affirmative Action policies implemented by a lot of private corporations, not just the government, that have created this middle class.

GATES: So the system adjusted itself. Precisely when it was annihilating the Panthers, the system adjusted itself to expand the size of the middle class to a certain point, and then shut it down. So that's why the black middle class has tripled since '68?

CLEAVER: I wouldn't say the system adjusted itself. What I would say, it was there. On the one hand, there was a amount of opportunity available under certain conditions for a certain number of people. A large number of black people already met those criteria. They were barred by race. They were not barred by deficiencies in education, deficiencies in ability, etc., etc. So those people who could take advantage of those Remember the saying back in the sixties, the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Certain People?

And one thing that is important to understand is that capitalist form of democracy, or I like to call it the "commercial democracy", needs people like us, or needs a middle class to function smoothly. It doesn't need equality. What it needs is inequality. It needs a certain number of people at the elite level, a certain number of people in the middle level, and the rest of the people scrambling and hoping they could get there, all following the same zealous commitment to making money. Now, when you have people who are revolutionaries, they repudiate the commitment to making money, and say, "We want justice. We want change. We want truth. We want freedom." Well, that's not going to work if the structure is based on financial rewards and financial incentives. So we were at odds with the way the system worked.

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A couple of years back, PBS's Frontline (hella show, on hiatus until September, unfortunately), did an excellent series called The Two Nations of Black America. The question under investigation was

Thirty years after Martin Luther King, Jr,'s death, how have we reached this point where we have both the largest black middle class and the largest underclass in our history?

An excellent question. People who want to focus on advancing one one of the classes should be ready to respond.

Anyway, one of the many interviews in the series was with Eldridge Cleaver. I pulled it up yesterday in a conversation I was having around here and decided I'd scare the hell out of everyone with it.

So, adjust your hats, folks, because I saved the best for last.

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GATES: Eldridge, how would the world look, how would America look, if the Panthers had won?

CLEAVER: I think the only way we could have won is that the American people would have revolted against the status quo. We had the anti-war movement and the black movement coming together for a better America. Now, victory in those terms would have meant that we would have been able to have a group of people who could get control of the government and administer it. But I do not think that we had a winning scenario. We never dreamed that we would be able to overthrow the American government. We didn't see that as our task. We saw that as the task of the survivors. Our job was to tear down the status quo and leave it to other people on how to rebuild because it was not possible to seize control of the government and install our people. That's reserved for banana republics. We had no illusions on that point and so victory, in our sense, was to get the laws passed that were passed. They started passing voter rights acts and all this kind of stuff, new civil rights bill, so we saw ourselves as providing backbone that was missing from Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolent movement and we did not think that movement would be rewarded.

It's like the NAACP. NAACP used to be considered a wild eyed radical organization until Martin Luther King came along and then they became acceptable and Martin Luther King was the devil. So when we came along Martin Luther King started looking better. To some people. Obviously not to all. Because when the killing started it was to liquidate the plan hatched here in Boston, or I should say in Massachusetts, between the Kennedy dynasty and Martin Luther King.

Their plan was for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to work together because together they could turn out the total black vote and then with the votes that the Kennedys could deliver they would have been able to establish a dynasty that would have ruled this country into the next century. That was their plan and that is why they were liquidated. The two Kennedy brothers killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X killed so that plan could not come into fruition. That was the scenario, that is why they were killed we do not understand that. The only one that really broke it down was this guy Sorensen who was the Kennedy choice for the CIA, but the establishment would not allow him to take control. Maybe it was the FBI, he was supposed to become head of the FBI.

GATES: Theodore Sorensen?

CLEAVER: Yeah. He was a speech writer. And so Kennedy tried to get him appointed head of the FBI and they wouldn't do it and so they were murdered and so the powers that be murdered them and they made -- if you look at all four of those assassinations they were textbook. They were murdered and the finger was pointed at some obvious enemy in all four cases. In all four cases, baloney. They were killed by the powers that rule this country who did not want to see the political dynasty of the Kennedys take control and last into the next century. They were still paranoid from how long Roosevelt was in power. Remember they changed the laws so that he couldn't run again and he obliged them by dying and so they were very fearful that this could be repeated, and it was on the way to being repeated but they knocked them out because by now Martin Luther King would have been president. That was their scenario.

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Last comment on Jesse vs. Jesse.

Apparently one Ricky is really tense about the very existence of Mac Diva.

Let me say this directly, now.

I am not interested in any of your personal beefs out there. I just don't care.

I am not interested in any of your history. I will not denigrate someone's writing, opinion or person because YOU think I should.

If you take this personally, you probably should. But probably not as personally as you have.

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via John Robb

The Dirty Bomb Distraction
The biggest danger from radiological weapons is the misplaced panic that they would cause.
By Richard A. Muller
Technology for Presidents
June 23, 2004

Terrorists might attack the U.S. homeland again this summer, the Justice Department and the FBI warned last month. The same day, the Department of Energy announced a $450 million plan to counter terrorist nuclear weapons and dirty bombs. And shortly afterwards, the Justice Department released some details about Jose Padilla, the one-time street thug who had received extensive al Qaeda training and had hoped to explode a dirty bomb in the United States.

But according to the Justice Department announcement, al Qaeda had doubted that Padilla’s proposal to build a dirty bomb was practical. They directed him instead to blow up two apartment buildings using natural gas. They apparently felt that such an action would have a greater chance of spreading death and destruction than would a radiological weapon.

Al Qaeda was right. Perhaps that should scare you. Al Qaeda appears to understand the limitations of these devices better than do many government leaders, newspapers, and even many scientists.

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Cody at Overflow:

“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

I could not resist posting this quote. What an incredible idea! I say we replace every publicly posted Ten Commandments with a copy of the Sermon on the Mount. Or better yet, take them all down and just live them instead.

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I posted If every country had their own Dick Cheney at Open Source Politics. Got an interesting comment from Chris at Parking lot

Scary...one Cheny is enough. Too much actually.

Oh, and Germany doesn't have a permanent seat on the Security Council, and therefore no veto.

At any rate, I could never understand the USA's approach to its friends on this issue. I'm Canadian. After 9/11 the USA demanded our support on the war on terror. Fine, we said. Here have some troops in Afghanistan. Try not to bomb them.

Four months later the US bombs them and kills four of our guys, but hey these things happen.

USA says sorry and thanks a lot and then slaps what turns out to be an illegal 35% duty on one of our major exports, softwood lumber, devastating the economy of British Columbia. Okay. Thanks pal.

Next up Iraq...join us in Iraq. We say, hang on there pardner, we're not so sure Iraq is such a good idea unless you have the UN involved. We said it kind of like you would try to talk a drunk friend out of driving home. He drives home anyway and totals the car. We feel guilty so we say, look, we'll take over in Afghanistan (we are the largest troop presence there now) and we'll help you out rebuilding Iraq. Then Cheney says nothing doing, you guys didn't pony up for the war, you can't get any of the rebuilding action. Fine, we say. We'll just go back to trying to keep the lid on the half-finished job in Afghanistan (now we're actually in senior command positions there).

Soon things go off the rails in Iraq and the USA calls on our government to pony up some cash and troops and help bail out the US in Iraq.

Are you kidding me? What's the catch? Anyway, our tropps are busy mopping up that stuff you spilled in Afghanistan, so we're spread pretty thin.

So after thinking about it for, like, 15 seconds, we smell a rat and say no, we're still kind of keen on the UN thing. Then the US Ambassador tears a strip off our government for not being a very good neighbour.

Sigh. It's hard being a friend of the USA. It's like living next to a guy that plays his music too loud, yells at the kids on the street all the time and drives drunk. But despite all that you still like him and you still find yourself doing favours for him.

And every year you forgive him for not sending a Christmas card.

Posted by Chris at June 29, 2004 10:57 AM

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Food, Gas Prices Offset Increase in Income By Nell Henderson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page E01

Americans' incomes and spending rose strongly last month, but much of the money went to pay higher food and gasoline prices, the government reported yesterday.

This factoid contains a surprisingly dense bit of information.

When the statistics say Americans' income rose over the last month they are not saying everyone's individual income rose. You know from your own job you get a raise periodically…once, twice a year at best. But the higher food prices DO affect everyone.

Personal income -- which includes wages, salaries, rents, dividends, interest, government benefits and other sources -- rose 0.6 percent in May, the same seasonally adjusted rate of increase as in April, the report said. But incomes were flat after adjusting for inflation and taxes.

So some folks saw more income (especially those with dividend and interest income), and that income was enough to offset the increase in food and energy costs, plus inflation. But most folks, workers whose increases are punctuated, did not see more income to offset those expense increases.

Worse, when they DO get an increase it's keyed to inflation. And the reason it's worse, perception-wise, is because it's salaries rather than inflation that's playing catch-up. Your average worker see the purchasing power of his take-home pay reduce incrementally, then a cost-of-living increase brings him back to where he started.

At one point this pattern was acceptable: when we were recovering from double-digit inflation a 12% raise in a year with 10% inflation followed by a 10% raise in a year with 8% inflation feels a lot like two years of progress. But when you've damped inflation down to its current level you don't have a lot of space in which to cast your illusions.

All in all, it strikes me like the only people that can be convinced the economy is improving are those who get a job or significant raise between now and November.

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Josh Marshall:

According to the Financial Times article, that business man is likely himself the forger of the documents and he has a long history of bad acts which, they say, discredit him as a source of information. That last tidbit plays a key part in the FT story because, in their words, the provider of the documents is "understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel."

That's what the FT says.

I hear something different.

In fact, I know something different.

My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today -- specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can't. But, for the moment, I can't.

Let me, however, offer a hypothetical that might help make sense of all this.

Let's say that certain individuals or organizations are responsible for some rather unfortunate misdeeds. And let's further postulate that such hypothetical individuals or organizations find out that some folks are on to them, that a story is in the works -- perhaps more than one -- and that it's coming right at them. Those individuals or organizations -- as shorthand, let's call them 'the bad actors' -- might well start trying to fight back, trying to gin up an alternative storyline to exculpate themselves and inculpate others. If that story made its way into the news, at a minimum, it might help the bad actors muddy the waters for when the real story comes out. You can see how such a regrettable turn of events might come to pass.

This is of course only a hypothetical. But I thought it might provide a clarifying context.

So read the FT article. But also keep your ears open. It is, I'm quite confident, not the last word you'll hear on this story.

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via LatinoPundit (who is right when he says this needs more coverage):

Raids erode our nation's civil liberties By Gilda L. Ochoa and Enrique C. Ocho

Yet again Latino immigrants are being scapegoated.

This time the attacks are taking the form of immigrant raids in greater Los Angeles. The detaining of hundreds of people this month in an apparent shift in Border Patrol policy to arrest undocumented workers in regions far from the border does nothing to address the U.S. policies that lead to immigration. Instead, it criminalizes and terrorizes members of our communities.

These raids are part of a historical pattern where the U.S. government and corporations have alternately recruited and deported Mexican immigrants depending on the economy. During times of prosperity and when labor has been needed, the U.S has turned to Mexican workers. However, during economic downturns, it has been Mexican immigrants who have been scapegoated.

This pattern began in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Mexicans were urged to come north to help build the U.S. West, working in mines, on railroads, in the fields and in factories, only to be victims of massive deportations during the Great Depression.

This pattern continued with the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964 as 5 million Mexicans were recruited and provided with temporary labor contracts. However, during this same period, anti-communist sentiment and the post-Korean War recession resulted in a wave of mass deportations by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. During this so-called Operation Wetback, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported between 1953 and 1955.

Such policies and practices toward Mexican immigration reinforce unequal power and economic relations between the United States and Mexico and influence the experiences of Mexicans in the U.S.

These are the same practices Black folks endured, and still do to some degree. The US economy has always had its favorites and there's always a people to serve as an economic buffer. The economy would not work without that shock-absorbing capacity.

Which would force us to find another way to describe our activity.

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Colorado Luis:

Vouchers Dead (Again) (For Now)

The crusade to bring taxpayer funded school vouchers to Colorado suffered yet another defeat yesterday when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 (scroll down to Bill Owens v. Kimble Breazell and click on the link) that the latest voucher program violates the state constitution's requirement that school boards be under local control.

Legally, this is huge. The ruling has nothing to do with church and state issues that can always be revisited by the US Supreme Court. It doesn't even have to do with the so-called Blaine Amendment, Colorado's version of a wave of state constitutional amendments that were passed in a fit of anti-Catholic frenzy decades ago and which stand on shaky ground under the federal Constitution. A big win.

What it really means is that the state can't enact a program that will force recalcitrant school districts (read: Denver) to enact voucher programs without amending the state constitution. (The bill's sponsor, Nancy Spence, says she'll give it a try, but good luck.) That means that the ridiculously well funded supporters of vouchers will be back for a third try at passing a state constitutional amendment. They failed the first two times, but they will tell themselves that the same increase in Latino voter participation that Democrats are hoping will help Kerry and Salazar this year can be turned to their advantage. Not to mention the state Supreme Court majority bent over backwards to say how laudable the state legislature's goals in enacting the program are. And, under the logic of ballot initiatives, they might as well go for something really draconian instead of the experimental approach the law that got struck down would have taken.

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Yesterday at Oliver's was kinda fun.

I'm lifting one of the comments from the end of the discussion:

I'm inclined to take a much more radical view on race than most folks here. I recall the word "co-optation" from the sixties and early seventies as a partial basis for my views. African-Americans, because of the prevalence of racism in America, can expect a fair shake from neither the Republicans nor the Democrats until the underlying racism has been eliminated, something I do not expect to see in my lifetime. The fact of the matter is that both sides join forces to condemn an African-American who does not come to his or her prominence by way of one of the parties. Louis Farrakhan is a good example of this. While I eschew separatist ideology, I see a more welcoming place for African-Americans in the Democratic Party, but I also recognize that it will be a self-serving welcome that is issued in any case, because it is usually pandering rather than sincere.

I offer nothing by way of solution here. I still feel that African-Americans can seek redress for racism, but overcoming it is something that can only be organized and led by African-Americans separately from the two main parties.

Posted by dean at June 29, 2004 10:11 AM

Any comments?

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Whether or not the folks will believe we're not responsible for any of the bad stuff anymore.

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Bush's Rating Falls to Its Lowest Point, New Survey Finds
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER

President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found Americans stiffening their opposition to the Iraq war, worried that the invasion could invite domestic terrorist attacks and skeptical about whether the White House has been fully truthful about the war or about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

A majority of respondents in the poll, conducted before yesterday's transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government, said that the war was not worth its cost in American lives and that the Bush administration did not have a clear plan to restore order to Iraq.

The survey, which showed Mr. Bush's approval rating at 42 percent, also found that nearly 40 percent of Americans say they do not have an opinion about Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, despite what have been both parties' earliest and most expensive television advertising campaigns.

Among those who do have an opinion, Mr. Kerry is disliked more than he is liked. More than 50 percent of respondents said that Mr. Kerry says what he thinks voters want to hear, suggesting that Mr. Bush has had success in portraying his opponent as a flip-flopper.

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Who Lost Iraq?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong.

The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start — but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country.

Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution's invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will.

What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.

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Bush Says Iraq Should Be Example for Rest of Middle East
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: June 29, 2004

President Bush, saying that freedom was the future of the Middle East, wrapped up a two-day NATO summit in Turkey today with a message to regional leaders that they should "recognize the direction of the events of the day" following the ceremonial transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis.

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Kerry Urged to Do More to Get Black Votes Lack of Diversity Among Top Campaign Officials, Absence in Community Are Concerns By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A04

A month before Sen. John F. Kerry is to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, African Americans who are experienced in getting out the vote say the candidate has done little to energize a constituency that could help ensure his election.

Although the Massachusetts senator has many black supporters, civil rights leaders and academics are grumbling about his absence from black communities and a lack of top black officials in his campaign.

The current shortage of Black folks in the Kerry campaign doesn't bother me much. Effective campaigns…well, ineffective ones too…grow from a close-knit, almost personal friends group. I expect to see an open, fair search for talent as need demands—and need always demands,

And I understand the focus on swing states will take him away from the ten-twelve places with a bunch of Black folks, but I don't approve. Because Rev. Joseph E. Lowery nailed the problem:

"The issue is not whether black voters will choose a Democrat, it's how many will turn out to vote," Lowery said.

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Democrats Urge SEC Chief to Adopt Ballot Access Rule
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page E01

Key Democratic lawmakers are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt a controversial rule that would help dissatisfied investors more easily nominate board members at public companies.

Citing financial scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and HealthSouth Corp., the legislators recently told SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson there is "no better time" to "bring democracy to the boardroom." Their letter was dated June 24 but it was not released publicly until yesterday.

The issue of shareholders' access to the ballot is the most intensely fought item on the SEC's agenda this year. The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce oppose changes to the way board members are selected, arguing that special interests could "hijack" the process. But shareholder rights groups, including labor-backed pension funds, are pushing for an alternative to the expensive and often futile proxy battles that investors currently must mount to bring change to corporate boardrooms.

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Immunity Provision Extended for U.S. Firms With Reconstruction Contracts
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A18

U.S. contractors working in Iraq will be exempted from the legal processes of the country's new interim government when they are performing official duties and most reconstruction contracts will continue uninterrupted, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Under an order signed Sunday by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, the contractors' immunity provision covers "official acts that they perform in contracts in support of the Iraq reconstruction effort," said Scott Castle, general counsel for the occupation authority. In matters unrelated to their contract work, they will be subject to Iraqi rules.

"From our standpoint, it hasn't really changed at all, and that's a good thing. It gives us a modicum of protection," said Robert L. Rubin, senior vice president of MVM Inc., a Vienna security company. "We do have to justify every shot fired, and even this doesn't change that."

The $18.6 billion allotted by the U.S. government for the reconstruction of Iraq, money that was previously administered by the occupation authority, will come under control of the State Department. Payments on those contracts are expected to continue without interruption.

Control of contracts funded by Iraqi funds, which include oil revenue and seized assets, will be shifted to the country's interim government. Occupation officials worked with the Iraqi Finance Ministry to establish processes for paying contractors. "The bottom line here is that steps have been taken to make sure that contractors will get paid in a timely fashion," Castle said.

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You know, I think I'm a pretty tolerant and reasonable guy. But when I run across certain things that are (as Nietzsche might have said) 'human, all too human'…well, maybe it's my fault. You front like you want a discussion I'll tend to work with you. But when you really want a soapbox, or you want me to assume your issues rather than understand them, or you just want attention, or you just repeat what you've been told, or your method of "winning" a discussion is to outlast your opponent or get them to lose their temper first eventually I get a bit twisted.

And it's taking less time to happen every time I encounter it. I'll probably wind up one of those mean old men that all the kids in the neighborhood are scared of.

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But before I go, I'd like to drop some professional analysis of the current state of affairs in Iraq. None other than (let me look this up) Zbigniew Brzezinski, who I used to think had the coolest name in government, today on PBS's The NewsHour:

JIM LEHRER: Now, to two analysts who have been with us since the Iraq war began: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Walter Russell Mead, a columnist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Brzezinski, how would you characterize the significance of what happened today?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I think it's a good step in the right direction. But I would avoid using Orwellian language in describing it. This is not a transfer of power, a handover to a sovereign government. We are transferring limited authority to a satellite government, a satellite government that is still to establish its legitimacy and the longer we stay, the more difficult it will be before it to gain legitimacy. That is my basic view

This too:

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, Dr. Brzezinski, that with all your reservations that at least something has been ceded to the Iraqis now? They are in charge of a lot more than they were as of this morning.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Yes, let's not pump it up and let's not distort it. We have had too much Orwellian language in our discussion of Iraq altogether. The Orwellian language was invented by communists but it's being adapted in our political discourse by the neocons. We talk about liberation when it's an occupation. We talk about peace when it's war. We talk about sovereignty when it's limited authority.

Let's be realistic in our assessments and then I think we'll be in a better position to conduct a serious national debate over what needs to be done and what is being done. I think that this is a step in the right direction but the pitfalls are enormous. Unless we recognize that we have to change course rather significantly, I am afraid we may dig ourselves in and be stuck in the Middle East the way the Israelis have been stuck in the West Bank. They have been there for 37 years. I don't want American occupation forces to be stuck in the Middle East for years.

And for balance, The Other Guy:

JIM LEHRER: Dr. Mead, how would you summarize this handover or whatever word you would like to use to describe it?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Well, I agree with dr. Brzezinski that we don't want to be Orwellian about this but I think maybe satellite, which was used to describe the puppet governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may be a little too extreme. This is a transition is the way I describe it. What we have here is an infant regime that we hope will grow. The plan is really for a transition. That is to say this is an interim government. The elections should be held by no later than Jan. 31, and the task is to try to improve stability and security while coming closer to the freest elections in the history of the Arab world, we hope.

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June 28, 2004

It's the only explanation. I figure they switched him out somewhere around 1994.

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I just realized something. Al Franken can't ever be the progressive's answer to Rush Limbaugh because we already have Michael Moore.

Think about it: Loved by his fans, hated by his critics, turned an entertainment schtick into a political career, says everything his fans want to say TO the people they want it said to, fat and funny-looking…

And both spin their stories in the way most likely to hypnotize his fans and infuriate his critics: Moore tells long intricate stories that his fans feel an intelligent person has to appreciate, Limbaugh tells snappy little one-liners his fans feel you'd have to be stupid not to agree with.

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Baldilock picked up on this story from David Neiwart's recap of a bunch of similar troubling signs. She has the right reaction.

It’s likely that I would personally not care for Mr. Cowell’s work of art, however, who would I be to deny him (or Ms. Haigh) the right to display it? Who are these “men” who would physically assault a woman for exercising her right of free expression on her own property?

(One of the commenters in the previous thread judged it to be cowardly to go to the police under these types of conditions. I suppose that Ms. Haigh should have attempted to beat her attacker—likely much larger than she—to a pulp. The likelihood that I might have tried to do such a thing in her place is irrelevant. She did something much more intelligent: she told others and got the attacks publicized. However, were she allowed to and inclined to keep a fire arm in her place of business, such Brown Shirts—that’s what they are--might have thought twice before attacking her.)

Public discourse is circling the bowl and knuckleheads on both sides of the fence are making it happen. Do we on the right want SA-types to promote our causes? Do you on the left want SA-types to stand for what you believe in?

I know what it’s like to live with violence right outside the front door. If reasonable people do not want this whole country to slide down into such an abyss, we have to take a stand against those who would see it happen, no matter whose "side" they're on.

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Well, I linked to J, David linked me, Oliver linked to me via David, and Oliver's commenters being his commenters it was on.

In case anyone is interested. Folks from the other side of the link can carry on here if they wish.

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Supreme Court Decides Terror Case on Technicality
Mon Jun 28, 2004 10:47 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court decided on Monday the case of terror suspect Jose Padilla on narrow procedural grounds and ruled a federal court in New York lacks jurisdiction over his case, a decision that does not reach the heart of the dispute.

LATER:
Okay, I'm less annoyed than I could be…

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U.S. Citizen Can't Be Held in Bush's War on Terror
Mon Jun 28, 2004 10:26 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that an American captured overseas in President Bush's war on terrorism cannot be held indefinitely in a U.S. military jail without a chance to contest the detention.
Four of the nine justices concluded that constitutional due process rights demand that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant must be given "a meaningful opportunity" to contest case for his detention before a neutral party.

Two more justices agreed that the detention of American citizen Yaser Hamdi was unauthorized and that the terror suspect should have a real chance to offer evidence he is not an enemy combatant.

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Hiring up, but many jobless not looking
By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK - After 20 months of looking for work and sending out hundreds of résumés, Jeffrey Schwab has given up trying to find another job as a draftsman. He's now taken early Social Security and is considering whether to sell his Bellingham, Wash., home to move to something smaller. "From what I can tell, there's not much to look for," says Mr. Schwab, who has 35 years of pipeline-design experience. "I am standing around with nothing to do."

Even though the economy has created 1.2 million jobs since January, some 265,000 people have dropped out of the job hunt during the same period. They would join some 19.1 million Americans in the same situation as Schwab, who are unemployed and not looking for work largely because they are convinced they won't find it. This figure, at a record level, is up 44 percent from 10 years ago.

If the job market continues to improve, this large number of people could decide to get back in the job market - which would hold the unemployment rate relatively high, even as new jobs are created.

"If this flow of nonworking Americans were to reverse, it would send the jobless rate toward 8 percent," says John Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago.

That would certainly be the case in Pennsylvania, agrees the state's governor, Edward Rendell (D). The official unemployment rate is 5.4 percent, but it's "much greater," Mr. Rendell says, when factoring in men who have been cut off welfare and never got back into the workforce "and as a result never show up in the unemployment rolls."

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I'm an O.G. I'd have to put a cap in they ass.

It would have been interesting to watch, though. And if S-Train is really going to train this guy, I'd be more interested in following Train's reactions and changes than his student's.

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Quote of note:

White Americans are generally surprised when they encounter stories like this — of an African-American with a proud heritage who nevertheless decides to leave blackness behind. But just about every black family in the United States knows of a light-skinned person who decided to avoid the penalties associated with blackness by becoming white. Hundreds of thousands of these people set sail into whiteness — leaving behind black parents, siblings and children — and were never heard from again. The people who abandoned their families were described as "passed" — a euphemism for dead.

Though tragic, Lydia Connolly's passing makes perfect sense given that she was born in the 1880's, when national impulse toward marginalizing black people was gathering virulence with every passing day.

A Secret Father, a Black Literary Treasure and an Old Woman
By BRENT STAPLES

ladys Watt and Lydia Turnage Connolly had been friends for roughly 30 years — a decade of that as next-door neighbors in Greenwich, Conn. — by the time Mrs. Connolly died in 1984 at the venerable age of 99. Mrs. Connolly seemed to have no family; she relied on Mrs. Watt to take her grocery shopping and regularly ate Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at her best friend's home.

"I never saw a single visitor to her house. Not one," Mrs. Watt told me recently, adding that her friend had been tight-lipped about her origins. When she alluded to her family at all, it was only to say that her father had been "a wonderful man."

Mrs. Watt thought that she knew her friend pretty well. She then stumbled upon a startling secret. Mrs. Connolly had once let the secret slip to strangers but, for most of her life, she had apparently seemed intent on carrying it to the grave.

Mrs. Connolly, who had straight dark hair and swarthy skin, explained her appearance throughout most of her life by describing herself as Portuguese. The disguise began to crumble as she moved into her 90's and became too ill to care for the straight black hair — which turned out to be a wig. When it slipped away, Mrs. Watt recalls, the hair beneath was revealed to be short and coarse to curly. Combined with the darkish skin she had attributed to a Portuguese heritage, it gave her an African-American appearance.

This finally made sense when Mrs. Watt received her friend's meager possessions. They included old photographs, showing Lydia posed with family members. There was also a leather-bound book handwritten by Wallace Turnage, her father. It contained his account of his life as a slave in Alabama.

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The Long Trail to Apology

All manner of unusual things can happen in Washington in an election year, but few seem so refreshing as a proposed official apology from the federal government to American Indians — the first ever — for the "violence, maltreatment and neglect" inflicted upon the tribes for centuries. A resolution of formal apology for "a long history of official depradations and ill-conceived policies" has been quietly cleared for a Senate vote, with proponents predicting passage. Tribal leaders have been offering mixed reactions of wariness ("words on paper") and approval somewhat short of delight ("a good first step").

True, no federal reparations or claim settlements are at stake. But the rhetoric of the resolution pulls few punches about the genocidal wounds American Indians suffered in being uprooted for the New World. The Trail of Tears, the Long Walk, the Wounded Knee Massacre and other travails are specified in the resolution, which calls on President Bush to "bring healing to this land" by acknowledging the government's offensive history.

The apology would have been received as fighting words at the Capitol in the Indian war era, when the government pursued military domination and tribes fought back. But times change, albeit very slowly sometimes, and this time it is significant that the political clout of Native Americans has never been clearer. The parties are vying for support in key political arenas, with the narrowly divided Senate particularly in play. Native Americans' power is considerable in tribal bases like South Dakota, where their turnout was crucial in electing Senator Tim Johnson in 2002; in Alaska, where they are 16 percent of eligible voters; and in tight presidential states like Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Severe health, education and economic troubles still bedevil the reservations, despite the casino riches of a minority. Accordingly, the tribes must aim for more than an apology as they pursue ambitious voter-enrollment programs. An official apology is indeed words on paper. But approval by Congress would be an acknowledgment of modern tribal power, especially if the president presented it this September at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.

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Yeah, it's a bag of stuff I could say about the randomness of this rescue, and how many other wonders like this young lady are lost.

Maybe I can just let it lay with that last sentence.

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Generous Support and a Fresh Start for a Struggling but Gifted Teen
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: June 28, 2004

Then she was still commuting from a homeless shelter in Queens to her high school honors program in the Bronx, Tabitha F.'s yearning to soar sometimes made the burdens of poverty even harder to bear. Reading "Great Expectations" in her shelter bunk bed, with her mother and four younger siblings sleeping nearby, she said she identified with Pip, the poor boy in the Charles Dickens novel, "when he runs away and starts to cry because he realizes his position in life."

Could she really make it into college? Would her family find a home? After pulling through hardship and sexual danger, would she be derailed by poverty despite all her promise?

Tabitha, whose perilous adolescence was chronicled in a March 8 article in The New York Times, is now living the kind of happy ending that Dickens often gave his readers, along with the real-life complications that endure between the lines.

On Friday, she graduated from a college-bound program at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. The day before, after 16 months in a Salvation Army shelter, her family moved into a spacious subsidized apartment in the Bronx. Next week, she is off to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., which has accepted her to a four-year liberal arts program on its most generous scholarship.

And she will travel there in style: on the private jet of a benefactor who has pledged to underwrite all additional college costs, so that Tabitha can graduate debt free.

The article about Tabitha was part of a series examining the reasons behind a nationwide decline in teenage pregnancy. The series also discussed experts' fears that the decline could be reversed, and Tabitha's case illustrated the way poverty stacks the odds. Her history includes a sexual assault that took place because she lacked money for a cab, the loss of her virginity to a young man who gave her a place to sleep after her family's eviction, and a decision to drop the birth control patch because it cost too much.

After the article was published, many readers responded, as one put it, "to her indomitable spirit" as much as to her vulnerability. She had started a literacy program in the homeless shelter, joined a theater youth troupe and impressed her teachers with her love of literature and political ideals. Along with gratitude for the gifts, letters and personal help that poured in from readers, Tabitha said she was now feeling a mix of conflicting emotions.

"I'm scared, happy, sad and depressed and excited, all in one melting pot," Tabitha, now 18, said after her first night in the apartment, for which she co-signed the lease. "My own room - finally! And I'm leaving. Sometimes I feel like I'm deserting my mother."

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Families, Deep in Debt, Facing Pain of Growing Interest Rates
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Published: June 28, 2004

LANCASTER, Pa., June 25 — With the Federal Reserve about to raise interest rates for the first time in four years, Joyce Diffenderfer is beginning to wonder how she and her husband, Curtis, will deflect the growing cost of their $16,000 in credit card debt.

Not that her concern is a pressing issue yet; it is more like a fire drill in anticipation of a fire that she is still not convinced will occur. The Diffenderfers figure that a modest rate increase would initially add only $35 to their monthly card payments, which now total more than $600. Still, they have run out of ways to sidestep the cost of borrowing, and if the rates keep rising, as the Fed's leaders suggest they will, then the only alternative, Mrs. Diffenderfer said, will be to seriously cut family spending.

The Diffenderfers are among the millions of American families who rode the recent wave of low interest rates to home ownership and the rapid accumulation of debt, and now they must cope as rates begin to swing upward. The process is almost certain to begin at a meeting of the Fed's policy makers on Tuesday and Wednesday. They are widely expected to raise rates a quarter of a percentage point and follow that with similar increases periodically over the next 18 months.

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I was going to bitch a bit, but if you're stupid enough to be opening random email attachments:

Gates Says Microsoft Cutting Virus Combat Time
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is cutting the time it takes to blitz viruses but needs personal computer users to turn on their auto-updating features to help it combat potentially dangerous attacks, Bill Gates said on Monday.

…you're probably stupid enough to let some corporation have full access to your personal machine and not smart enough to understand why you shouldn't, so why waste my time?

I'll tell you the truth, I love my Microsoft software (ESPECIALLY One Note; I'm tempted to write ad copy). But I need to be the only one that runs it.

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NATO Signs Off on Deal to Train Iraqi Forces
Mon Jun 28, 2004 07:16 AM ET

…The deal had to be left deliberately vague and differences remain still on whether NATO should train Iraqi officers inside Iraq under an alliance flag, or limit itself to training outside the country and acting as a clearing house for national efforts.

France insists the training is a job for allies not the alliance as a whole, and there should be "no NATO flag" on the ground in Iraq.

The administration of United States President Bush, keen in a U.S. presidential election year to persuade others to help share the security burden in Iraq, is pushing for the most active NATO role possible.

It says NATO's role should be comprehensive, training the army, police, border security forces and bulk of the national defense.

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U.S. Formally Returns Iraq to Self-Rule Two Days Early
Mon Jun 28, 2004 07:41 AM ET

By Alistair Lyon and Lin Noueihed
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The United States handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government two days earlier than expected Monday, aiming to forestall guerrilla attacks with a surprise ceremony formally ending 14 months of occupation.

Iraq's outgoing U.S. governor Paul Bremer handed a letter to Iraq leaders sealing the formal transfer of powers before flying out of the country. The low-key ceremony was over before it was announced and before ordinary Iraqis were aware of it.

"This is a historic day, a happy day, a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to," Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar said at the ceremony, which transferred sovereignty at 10:26 a.m. (0626 GMT). "This is the time when we take the country back into the international community."

U.S. and British officials say the handover is a key step on the path to democracy in Iraq, but one of the government's first actions as a sovereign power is expected to be the imposition of emergency laws, including curfews, to crack down on guerrillas.

A senior U.S. official said in Istanbul, site of a NATO summit, that the handover gave Prime Minister Iyad Allawi more leverage and "strengthens his hand to deal with the threats inside his country."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said in Istanbul the handover had been brought forward to try to thwart insurgents who might have been planning attacks to coincide with the ceremony, long announced for Wednesday.

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Cost to Taxpayers of the New $25 Billion War Request provides a state-by-state breakdown showing what each state will pay to meet the increasing cost of the war in Iraq. This latest request will become the third supplemental appropriation, bringing total spending on the Iraq war to more than $150 billion.

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An example:

Following the bloodiest month of the Iraqi war, the Bush Administration has just
announced that it will request another $25 billion for the war in Iraq.* This will be the
third request for supplemental spending for the war in Iraq. On top of the 775 U.S.
soldiers dead (as of May 13), and more than 4,000 wounded in action, the new spending
would bring the war’s cost to more than $150 billion.

New York taxpayers’ share of the latest $25 billion will total $2.1 billion. Since the
government has committed significant troop levels to remain in Iraq through at least
2005, Americans should anticipate additional funding requests in the future.

How much is $13.0 billion? By comparison, New York will receive from federal aid $5.8
billion for the No Child Left Behind Act, $694.6 million for Environmental Protection
Agency programs, and $1.3 billion in Community Development Block Grant programs over the same three-year period.

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Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs produced a study called Moving to Opportunity And Tranquility (pdf research brief | working paper)

Does living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods directly and adversely affect people’s employment and health outcomes? And if so, what is the best way for the U.S. government to intervene to try and mitigate these outcomes with public housing assistance: through providing subsidized public housing units, or through housing vouchers, monthly rent supplements for private or public apartments for very low to low income households, using federal assistance?

These questions and the implications for public policy are addressed in a new working paper, “Moving to Opportunity and Tranquility: Neighborhood Effects on Adult Economic Self-Sufficiency and Health from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment,” by Jeffrey R. Kling, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, with co-authors Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Jeffrey B. Liebman, of Harvard University and NBER; and Lisa Sanbonmatsu, of NBER. The paper studies adult economic and health outcomes in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, a randomized housing mobility experiment in which families living in high-poverty U.S. public housing projects in five cities were given vouchers to help them move to private housing units in lower-poverty neighborhoods. The study authors’ analysis addresses questions about both the effects of neighborhoods on individual outcomes, and the impacts of alternative forms of government housing assistance.

Now this strikes me as research done to prove the obvious, something that has to be done way to frequently for my taste.

Some evidence suggests that the construction of new public housing in the 1950s may have improved health by enabling people to move out of substandard and overcrowded housing conditions. During the past quarter century, however, a number of high-poverty, urban public-housing projects have become centers of violent crime and drug use. Meanwhile, non-experimental research has found strong associations between living in disadvantaged neighborhoods and adverse outcomes in the areas of both employment and health. Whether these associations reflect a causal relationship between living in disadvantaged neighborhoods and outcomes remains uncertain.

I don't think there's a causal connection, like grief is inevitable if you live in a low income neighborhood. It's more like breaking a camel's back with logs instead of straw, just a large additional weight that makes the total burden more than some can bear. Growing up without developmental resources, living without a humane support network, is always going to be a burden.

And it is a burden that didn't have to be. The neighborhoods under discussion are either public warehousing created around the time mainstream folks were getting cheap mortagages or by a public policy of devaluing the neighborhoods via red-lining (actually, two aspects of the same policy).

Kling and his co-authors’ research also bears on whether it is better for the government to provide housing assistance in the form of government operated public housing projects or through vouchers that subsidize rents in the private market. The United States spends about $32 billion per year on housing assistance - more than on food stamps or cash welfare. Public housing projects provide subsidized units for 2.5 million households, and Section 8 vouchers help another 1.5 million households rent private units.

Section 8 in particular is a disappointment. All that money could have gone to mortgage subsidies, like in San Francisco's cooperative experiment. It would have been cheaper, created a class of folks with an interest in permanence and development, and (maybe just as important) it would have had a definitive end.

Importantly, housing assistance is rationed, so that only a minority of eligible families receives assistance and long wait lists for both public housing and vouchers exist in many communities. While the costs of providing a housing project unit and a voucher are similar, and require the same contribution of the household toward rent, there could be large distortions from providing public housing units instead of vouchers.

To receive project-based assistance, a household must accept a specific bundle of housing and neighborhood attributes. In contrast, a voucher user can select from a variety of apartments on the private market – offering many more choices within the same budget constraint. In particular, public housing projects for poor families with children in large U.S. metropolitan areas tend to be located in areas with highly concentrated poverty, while vouchers offer the possibility of living in mixed-income neighborhoods. If neighborhood attributes affect individual outcomes, then switching from project-based assistance to vouchers could improve the well-being of those receiving assistance.

The social repercussions of subsidizing ownership on the one hand and rentals on the other are huge.

Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan
At the Ninth Annual Economic Development Summit, The Greenlining Institute, Oakland, California
January 10, 2002
Economic Development and Financial Literacy

It's a pleasure to participate in your annual summit on economic development. Given the nature of the conference, I would like to focus on a matter of mutual interest--improvements in asset accumulation in traditionally underserved markets of our household and business sectors and the importance of access to the financing and information tools that promote and sustain this progress.

In our economy, the three principal means for household asset accumulation are through home ownership, small business ownership, and savings. As important as these are for the individual, they also represent distinct and important benefits to the broader economy and, therefore, play prominent roles in the operation of our financial markets and the priorities of our public policy.

The choice to buy a home is a decision to plant a family's roots in a community with all the implicit incentives to make that community thrive. Where home ownership flourishes, it is no surprise to find increased neighborhood stability, more civic-minded residents, better school systems, and reduced crime rates.

Just as important is the effect of home ownership on a household's ability to accumulate assets. For most households, home ownership represents a significant financial milestone and is an important vehicle for ongoing savings. The Federal Reserve's 1998 triennial Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that home ownership represented 44 percent of gross assets for families earning $50,000 or less annually. Further, investment in residential property has been generally more stable than other types of investment, and it is perceived to be largely permanent.

With these important benefits, an increased rate of home ownership has been chosen by our society as a national priority, with many public- and private-sector resources devoted to achieving this goal.

And because Black people were excluded from the wealth building process, we are at risk in ways the mainstream is not:

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and many influential economists say that, while household debt remains high by historical standards, consumers will be able to manage the burden in part because rising home values allowed millions of Americans to refinance and roll high-rate credit card debt into low-rate fixed mortgages.
.
Meanwhile, the value of home equity, securities, savings and other assets held by American households rose significantly faster than their debt in the first quarter, according to a new Fed report.
.
That supports the idea that the financial health of Americans is improving and that households increasingly have the means to pay off their debt.

This research is only begins to touch on the adverse impact of these policy decisions, but it still assumes subsidizing rentals rather than ownership is a reasonable plan. That is its flaw.

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June 27, 2004

The Century Foundation is a new-to-me source of research and bloggy backgrounders.

Comparing European and U.S. Living Standards

Bernard Wasow
The Century Foundation, 6/21/04

A number of reports recently have focused on the income gap between Europe and the United States. To some, the persistently lower GDP per capita of Europe underlines the failure of European polices. But a closer look suggests that perhaps it is we who should envy the Europeans.

There is triumphalism in the Wall Street Journal's editorial of June 18 about "a growing split between the U.S. and Europe." The WSJ draws on a recent report from the Swedish think tank Timbro that notes the much lower level of income per capita in Europe than in the United States. As the report frames it, average income in most European countries place them well down among the states of the United States: Belgium is comparable to Alabama, Germany to Arkansas, and Spain is poorer than Mississippi. The WSJ attributes Europe's backwardness to its choice of "the welfare state road to decline."

The pieces do not fit quite as neatly in the Economist's
June 19th comparison of Europe and America. First, if we exclude Germany
(the 800 pound laggard in Europe) GDP per person grew at essentially the same
rate in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2003. Employment grew
only a hair slower in Europe, and productivity per worker hour grew slightly
faster in Europe. Germany aside, aggregate growth in Europe and the United States
over the last decade has been essentially equal.

Still, European income per capita is only about 70 percent of the U.S. average.
But here too, there is an important wrinkle. As discussed
recently by Harvard economist Olivier Blanchard, income is lower in Europe
not because workers are less productive - output per worker hour in Europe and
the United States are almost the same - but because Europeans work fewer hours.
This is not due primarily to higher unemployment or lower labor market participation,
but to a shorter work-week, longer vacations, and earlier retirement. Altogether,
Americans work 40 percent more hours over their lives than Europeans.

Are these long vacations and early retirement choices a response to high tax
rates and the incentives built into public pensions? Some think so, including
Edward Prescott in a
study at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. But Blanchard, looking
at the choice made in various European countries and the tax/pension systems
there, finds almost no support for the idea that workers take longer vacations
because tax rates are higher in Europe.

Between 1970 and 2000, GDP per person rose by 64% in the United States and
by 60% in France. In America, this came about because productivity per worker
rose by 38% and hours worked per worker rose by 26%. In France, it came about
because productivity rose by 83% while hours worked fell by 23%.

Where did the quality of life increase more? Maybe you should take your next
hurried vacation in France, to find out.

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Sometimes, like with the Jesse vs. Jesse post below, I just link to an abstract of what another blogger has written…in this case J. at Silver Rights. In this case there are at least two instances where folks have assumed it was my writing.

Though I agree with J, particularly with the part I quoted, I want to make it clear that was just a slice of her post. You can read the rest there. And if you do want to discuss the concept, here is fine because J don't have comments.

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I just read that Cheney, when asked directly if he'd told Leahy to fuck himself, replied, "Probably."

If ever there was a question that both had a definitive yes-or-no answer and should be handled as such, this was it. Witnesses, dontchaknow…

The "probably" line made sense when talking about having information the 9/11 Commission doesn't. It's enough to skew the judgment of some who are on the fence and if pressed he can say, what do you know, it turns out they knew everything I knew after all. But this is just silly. And I don't think he thought about it…I think his reflex is to leave himself leaway for strategic reversals.

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They are the only one that not only get to tell the truth but understand how to do it without pissing everyone off. Case in point (via Uppity-Negro), Jon Stewart.

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on same sex marriage:

KING: Will same-sex marriage be an issue in the campaign?

STEWART: Same-sex marriage is a very difficult situation and I was freaked out by it too. You know that.

KING: Why?

STEWART: Well, until I found out that it wasn't mandatory, because I love my wife and I'd hate to have to leave her for a dude. So I didn't want that.

KING: You thought it was mandatory.

STEWART: You never know. I don't know what -- they said the gay marriage and people got upset, so I figured, well clearly this means that there's a law being passed that we all now have to be gay.

KING: Oh, I see.

STEWART: Once it was explained to me that only gay people, I seem much more comfortable with it. It doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore.

On Monica:

KING: Would you book her on "The Daily Show?"

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Would not?

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Have no interest, not curiosity about it?

STEWART: I have no interest. Curiosity in what sense?

KING: About her life. About what she got herself into, the events that occurred around her.

STEWART: I am very familiar with what she got herself into. I have gotten myself into that with people that I know.

KING: Elaborate.

STEWART: Sex, isn't it? You never?

How many times -- you've been married like 28 times. You never had -- come on, you've got kids!

KING: Okay, yes.

STEWART: Am I going to have to draw this for you?

KING: No. OK.

on Our Good Friend God:

KING: He's a judgemental God.

STEWART: Very angry. Loves the Americans. Very big. Wants us to have bigger cars. Wants us to have bigger cars and as a little goof on us has only made a finite supply of oil. It's very -- he's very funny. He's a trickster. Here's another little joke he did. He promised three different religions they were the chosen ones, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and then, funny, follow me, he put their holiest sites all in the same place. And then he backed away and he just wants to see who wants it more. That's what this is about. This is God going, hey, show me something, people.

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Opinion: Jesse Jackson deserves r-e-s-p-e-c-t

…Wait a minute, Jackson haters will say. Jesse Jackson has exaggerated his closeness to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. True. But, the relationship is embroidered, not fabricated. And, the detractors will say, he has an out-of-wedlock daughter. True, again. She is a beautiful child. I respect Rev. Jackson's decision to risk having her instead of opting for abortion, as most men in high profile positions would. I don't respect his infidelity. Therein lies the rub. Critics of the man ignore or devalue his contributions to society while overstating their criticisms of him. I do not.

I would be remiss if I did not anticipate the next attack on the best known civil rights advocate in the world. Right Wingers will suggest substituting Jesse Lee Peterson, Larry Elder, Clarence Thomas or some other contemporary handkerchief head for Rev. Jackson. Then, it is time for me to say, 'Gotcha!' Right Wing African-American 'leaders' owe whatever status they have to the white Right. (There really isn't a colored one.) They are groomed by it, popularized by it and paid by it. Their only connection to other blacks is the one they are being used for -- appearance. The reason Rev. Jackson is a legitimate civil rights leader and Peterson is not is that he is opposed to the interests of the very people he claims to represent. Peterson represents the interests of the folks making whitey's last stand, while claiming otherwise.

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Things I noticed about Dr. Rice:
When asked about NATO she responded with "NATO Countries."

She said the new Iraqi government will be representative of the aspirations etc. She did not say it would be representative of the people"as the reconstruction really kicks in"

When asked about security for she said we need to talk about "THEIR plans," and bringing in "more experienced" security people. And when asked if Allawi declared martial law as he said he'd like to, would the US have to enforce martial law she gave the classic trapped Neocon response: "I won't get into hypotheticals."

About Anonymous:
Bush will like the book.

Round table on Iraq
The deadline has been met???

Holbrooke: They did not meet any of the benchmarks. It's a prayer, not a policy

Brooks: Give them credit for meeting the deadline.

Zakaria: The political stuff is being approved because the US has reversed itself so much.

And Holbrooke is spanking the whole round table. He pointed out how Dr. Rice didn't actually answer any of Stephanopolis' policy questions.

Zakaria knows better than to argue with him. But Brooks is still a shill.

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Not that it ever did…

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U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, June 26 -- U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.[P6:That's absolutely amazing. I mean, I know they want to put an American-style government in place in Iraq, but they've gotten a little ahead of themselves. Or maybe their trying to match functionality with little regard to form.

I can't wait to see if it's mentioned on the talk show circuit this morning.]

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is to take over next year. [P6: Modeled after the Republican court-packing plan. Seriously.]

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.

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Will the seventeen people who still believe Rumsfeld please wake up and snap out of it?

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Rumsfeld: More U.S. Troops for Iraq Not Essential
Sun Jun 27, 2004 08:32 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - The United States may not have to send more troops to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday.
"The real task of security is not to flood a country with more and more troops," Rumsfeld told BBC Television from Istanbul, where he will attend a NATO summit.

He said the U.S. Army was making contingency plans for more troops, should commanders in Iraq request reinforcements.

"That does not mean that we will necessarily need them, that means we will do the prudent planning," he added.

The United States has about 140,000 troops in Iraq joined by nearly 25,000 other foreign troops.

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NATO Chief Warns West Cannot Ignore Distant Threats
Sun Jun 27, 2004 07:37 AM ET

By John Chalmers

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - NATO must tackle new threats before they "end up on our doorstep," the alliance's chief warned Sunday as leaders gathered for a summit at which the new Iraqi government will be offered training for its troops.

The transatlantic alliance, which was plunged into one of the deepest crises in its 55-year history by splits over last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, had to haggle hard last week to avert a public row at the summit over its training role.

"I expect that at tomorrow's discussions NATO will ... give a clear signal of our willingness to enhance our support to a sovereign Iraqi government," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said ahead of the two-day meeting in Istanbul.

He did not trumpet the agreement on training, which is a far cry from the boots-on-the-ground role sought by Washington for NATO but blocked by French and German resistance.

Instead, he warned against Western indifference to insecurity in Afghanistan, where NATO has a 6,500-strong peace force, and the insurgency wreaking havoc across post-war Iraq.

"If we do not tackle the problems where they emerge they will end up on our doorstep," de Hoop Scheffer said. [P6: though this line annoyed the hell out of me when run by the Bushistas (given that the odds of being hit by lightning are greater than the odds of getting caught up in a terrorist attack) I must admit Europe has better grounds for concern than the USofA. Those two oceans aren't insuperable barriers but their still pretty dam good.]

"The international community in its entirety, not just NATO, cannot allow itself to see Afghanistan return to being a safe haven for terrorism," he told Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore daily.

"The same goes for Iraq, which cannot go up in flames amid general indifference. Because the entire region would be destabilized." [P6: Let's face it folks: the entire region IS destabilized by any rational definition (and most irrational ones).]

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Does Whatever a Spider (and a C.E.O.) Can
By ROBERT LEVINE

LOS ANGELES

WHEN the novelist Michael Chabon agreed to try his hand at writing "Spider-Man 2," he came here to meet with Avi Arad, the chairman and chief executive of Marvel Studios. He assumed he would encounter a hard-headed businessman — Mr. Arad is, after all, the reigning king of the popcorn blockbuster. His first seven films at Marvel opened at No. 1. The two "X-Men" movies combined grossed just over $675 million internationally, while "Spider-Man" took in $806.7 million.

But Mr. Chabon, who set his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," in the early days of the comic book business, found himself chatting with someone who takes superheroes as seriously as he did. "I was expecting someone more interested in leveraging and marketing," he said in a recent telephone interview. "But the guy knows Spider-Man backward and forward — all the minor super-villains and their secret identities. I found myself totally able to talk to him on this ridiculous, wonderful level of, `Who's tougher, the Lizard or the Rhino?' "

Yes, Mr. Arad sometimes speaks of the "Marvel brand" or refers to the company's characters as "intellectual property." More often, though, he talks about the comics as "literature" with the universal resonance of Greek myth. And in Marvel's Westwood office, he keeps souvenirs from his childhood in Israel: tattered, 60's-era Hebrew translations of Marvel comics that he handles with the reverence usually accorded first editions of Hemingway.

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In an Age of Terror, Safety Is Relative
By GREGG EASTERBROOK

Published: June 27, 2004

WASHINGTON — On the subway a few weeks after the Madrid bombings, I noticed a parcel under a seat. I asked other passengers, but no one claimed the object. I looked inside the parcel and saw some papers and an elaborately wrapped object the size of a grapefruit. The train pulled into Metro Center, the main station of the Washington subway. I contemplated that I might be about to pick up a bomb, but then I'd already been stupid enough to look inside, so I carried out the package, put it on a bench and told the station manager. Officers appeared quickly, though trains continued running and people kept milling past.

When I first saw the package, should I have used the emergency intercom to alert the motorman? Should he have stopped the train and evacuated everyone? When I alerted the manager, should she have closed the station, bringing the entire system to a halt? Had it turned out to be a bomb, pundits second-guessing the disaster that followed might have said the station manager and I were fools for not pushing the panic button. But what if a trainload of frantic people had been evacuated into a dark tunnel with a high-voltage rail, all because of an elaborately wrapped grapefruit?

This is an example of the practical limits to security in the post-9/11 world. With the introduction of sophisticated airport inspections, bomb-screening of checked bags, security stops at building entrances, better passport controls, "smart borders" with improved computers and identity scanners, and hundreds of radiation and bioweapon detectors installed in urban areas, security has significantly improved in just three years. This summer, residents of New York and Boston are seeing lots of extra patrols, bomb-sniffing dogs and police drills, in preparation for the political conventions.

But some of what's being done is primarily psychological: to make people feel more safe, regardless of whether they really are. And though the government must try any reasonable idea to counter terrorism, in the next round of security improvements to come there will be serious limits to practicality and affordability.

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