July 10, 2004

Trio has some excellent sounding music specials coming up and I still don't have the channel.

I'm so pissed I'm not even going to tell you about it. You can ask at Trader Mike.

EJ Flavors gets away with rubbing my nose in these shows because he's got my N-Word tape.

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I've had The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity linked like forever. Every so often someone links to it on a BBS/forum system and I get 10-20 hits in two days.

Recently it's been picked up more frequently. And now, I checked my stats and saw 90 hist in the last hour. Instalanche? Nope, too small. It seems it's been found by the Free Republic.

Now, what's cool about this is, it lives over in my old Earthlink.net space, which has a gig of traffic all its own per month. It has my page counter on it so I get the "benefit" of all that traffic in my stats (in quotes because next month I'll not likely match it...). But it does NOT have a direct link back to P6. Delete the file name in the URL and the index page will redirect you here. It's something of a test, to see if the article is talking about you or not.

Anyway, the vast majority of the visitors to the guest house will never see the main structure over here. Those that do will at least have some wits and curiosity.

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This came to my attention via The Corsair, my version of The Gothamist:

'SHOW IS RUINING MY LIFE'
By MICHAEL STARR

July 2, 2004 --
DAVE Chappelle is re peating his on-stage re frain that his Comedy Central show, "Chappelle's Show," is ruining his life.

"There's truth in it, absolutely," Chappelle tells Blender magazine in the August issue. "Sometimes the popularity of something ruins it.

"It's one of the things I've thrown on the scales as I'm deciding if I'm going to do the show again."

"Chappelle's Show," which has aired for two seasons, has become Comedy Central's biggest hit, spawning several catchphrases — including "I'm Rick James, b**ch!"

But Chappelle hasn't yet committed to bringing the show back.

"Everyone says, 'It's a no-brainer; they're giving you all this money,' " Chappelle says. "Yeah, but money is not why the show worked. The show worked because we acted like nobody was watching. And now, everybody's watching."

Chappelle tells Blender he's thought of ending the show after two seasons — particularly in light of the recent FCC crackdown on indecency.

"It's crossed my mind, absolutely," he says. "The show is so good. I'd hate for it to ever be bad. And scrutiny might ruin it.

"I'm looking at what Howard Stern's going through [with the FCC] and it would be hard to do my show with those boundaries put on me."

He says he's not using the threat of ending the show as a negotiating ploy with Comedy Central.

"Nah, I don't need those kinds of tactics," he says. "For them, my show is like 'Friends.' "

The August issue of Blender hits newsstands July 13.

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He also has a few quotes from the interview in The Blender, like:

"Blender: You talk about race, this country's great unspoken topic.

"Dave Chappelle: It's hilariously unspoken ... you know who goes through it and no one talk about? Poor white people. Poor white people feel like they're supposed to be rich. That's why they always sound crazy -- like 'Niggers are taking all the jobs at Burger King.' Alright, you sound like a fucking idiot right now ...

…for which reason Ron should get a commission on the copy of Blender he just sold to me.

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SPN at Soul Photo.Net spotted this and cruel though it may be I thought it was hilarious. I just kept thinking about those Warner Bros. cartoons where Sylvester the Cat thought the baby kangaroo was a giant mouse.

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Warning over killer kangaroos
Wednesday, July 7, 2004 Posted: 12:28 PM EDT (1628 GMT)

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) -- Australians living in the nation's drought-ravaged capital have been warned to keep their distance from aggressive kangaroos after the iconic marsupials attacked one woman and killed a pet dog.

Eastern Grey kangaroos, which can grow 1.7 meters (5.6 feet) tall and weigh 70 kg (154 lb), []P6: What's that, welterweight?] have started moving out of the parched bush into inner Canberra suburbs during the day to look for grass and water, increasing their contact with people.

A senior wildlife ecologist with Environment ACT, Murray Evans, said on Wednesday the kangaroos could pose a threat to people and dogs, with one woman savaged by a large kangaroo as she was walking her small, pet dog in a paddock last week.

"Her dog went near the kangaroo and she followed and before she knew it the kangaroo lashed out, scratching her down the side of her body," Evans told Reuters.

Another woman told how a kangaroo drowned one of the four dogs she was walking with a friend, attacking it in a pond and holding it under the water with its hind legs while it hit out at one of the other dogs with its front legs.

"My friend started shouting: 'There's a kangaroo in the pond. It's got Summer'. It was surreal, like your worst nightmare," Christine Canham told the Canberra Times newspaper.

"She was screaming and screaming. The kangaroo just stared back at us. I will never forget that."

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"Bang goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van..."

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Jesse at Pandagon noticed a Bush supporter's curious response to a poll question:

there was a quote from a Bush voter that struck me for its understanding (or lack thereof) of the way our government works.

"I want Bush in there, because the other guy is like sending a boy to do a man's job," said Glenn Foldessy, 45, of Streetsboro, Ohio, outside Cleveland. Foldessy, who usually votes Republican, said Edwards made the Democratic ticket stronger, but not strong enough.

"We have somebody now who's established and has things on track and if we destabilize this government during the war on terror, that's playing right into the hands of the terrorists," he said.

One of the best parts about the American system of governance is that transitions between administrations don't destabilize the government. Even with the bogus worry over a "constitutional crisis" in 2000, the government was never in danger of being destabilized. When Kerry wins and takes office in January, the government will actually function quite well - it make take a few weeks for Kerry to get all of his players in place, but each incoming team is extensively prepped on how various departments work, what they're doing, and what the major overarching plans are. Unless Bush refuses to do that, there's almost no chance of "destabilization" in the federal government.

One has to wonder, though - how widespread is this idea?

Don't worry, Jesse. It's only common among those stupid enough to think things are "on track" in "the war on terror."

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Because I LOVE it when folks set themselves up.

But here is the danger: no matter what your interest is, or ethnicity, or whatever, you are always making a major miscalculation if you align yourself with only one party. Because then the fate of your issue rises and falls with the fate of that party. Black people need to start realizing this: Democrats do not respect them, and Republicans don't bother with them. And believe it or not, it is not because either party is racist. It's a simple matter of pragmatism: Democrats know they don't need to do anything but play the "rah rah" game to win black votes, and Republicans have learned through difficult experience that nothing they do will get black votes anyway.

Republicans have tried reminding Black folks they're "the party of Lincoln" and been bitterly disappointed at the results. I would now like to remind Republicans they used to be the party of Lincoln but don't seem to be anymore.

Republicans should remember they USED TO have the same lock on the Black vote Democrats do now. If you REALLY want the Black vote you need to think about what changed that caused Black people to abandon the Republican party in droves.

Republicans CAN get the Black vote. But they won't. They don't have the will to do so.

Oh, yeah, blame Ambra for bringing your error to my attention.

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Mac Diva:

Texas education miracle wasn't

Education in Texas was the recipient of boxcar loads of attention a few years ago. When it was in the news, it played to the tune of a mariachi band. George W. Bush rode into the White House, or at least into the Supreme Court, partly because he claimed mastery of one of the major domestic dilemmas in the country -- the failure of our schools to teach and graduate more literate people. Bush then appointed the man he claimed had shepherded the Texas education miracle, Rod Paige, U.S. secretary of education. Now, cue the violins. The truth about the alleged miracle has emerged. The 'miracle' seems to have consisted of frauds on several levels.

The Houston Chronicle reports the Texas has the highest proportion of dropouts in the country, and, it is not improving.

For the second straight year, Texas has the lowest percentage of high school graduates in the nation, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study released Tuesday.

Seventy-seven percent of Texans age 25 and older had a high school degree in 2003, the same percentage as a decade earlier, when Texas ranked 39th in the country. So while other states have seen their graduation rates improve -- a record 85 percent of Americans have high school degrees -- Texas is treading water.

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Let me state on the front page here that anyone that want to bring me grief because I link to any particular person should not even consider complaining. Just keep stepping.

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I'd seen this story and figured those who are supposed to be outraged would handle it, fine, fine... but Glenn at Hi. I'm Black! noticed something I didn't:

California education chief calls preschooler 'stupid dirty girl'
Riordan apologizes for remark
Friday, July 9, 2004 Posted: 7:13 AM EDT (1113 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- State Education Secretary Richard Riordan jokingly told a child her name, Isis, meant "stupid dirty girl," prompting the head of the California NAACP on Thursday to call for his resignation.

…Democratic state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who had scheduled a protest by civil rights organizations, canceled the demonstration after an apparent mix-up over the girl's racial background.

Dymally was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News Thursday saying the child was "a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?"

The girl is white, with blonde hair.

Dymally did not return telephone calls. His office issued a statement Wednesday calling Riordan's remarks to the girl "outrageous and irresponsible," then issued another statement Thursday saying, "To err is human; to forgive is divine."

"Race is not a factor in this issue," Dymally said in Thursday's statement, adding that Riordan had apologized a second time. "It is time for us to move on."

… though for different reasons than Glenn did…and btw, bruh, it wasn't the NAACP that planned and cancelled. That confusion, where one sees "civil rights groups" and thinks "NAACP" is why I call bullshit. It's hard enough being a partisan without some politician screwing your rep up.

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Thais Go Condom Crazy Over Biggest Ever AIDS Meet

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Waiters wearing condoms on their heads greet diners at the 'Cabbages and Condoms' restaurant in Bangkok and volunteers hand out condoms of all shapes, colors and sizes at cash machines, metro stations and the airport.

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Oregon Court Orders Gay Marriages Registered
Fri Jul 9, 2004 08:36 PM ET

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - A state court on Friday ordered Oregon to register 3,000 controversial gay marriages conducted last spring, though their ultimate fate rests with the state supreme court, officials said.

"We will not appeal" the court's decision, Attorney General Hardy Myers said in a statement. "Our primary goal is to get a final ruling from the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Oregon's marriage statues as expeditiously as possible."

Portland's Multnomah County on March 3 began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, one of several U.S. municipalities to do so.

Opponents sued and in April Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Frank Bearden ordered a temporary halt to the weddings.

The main lawsuit, which will determine if the state constitution prohibits same-sex marriage, is currently at the State Court of Appeals and will likely move quickly to the Oregon Supreme Court.

But Myers noted that although the judge on Friday ordered the state to register the licenses, "he also stated that the licenses are not valid unless specifically declared valid by the Oregon Supreme Court."

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Poachers Burn One-Third of Rwandan Park
Thu Jul 8, 2004 03:05 PM ET

By Ed Stoddard
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Poachers have burned a third of Rwanda's largest national park, hampering efforts to protect wildlife from dangers posed by the country's surging rural population.

"It's true, one third of Akagera National Park has burned over the past week...(but) the fires are under control as I'm speaking," park warden David Mugisha told Reuters on Thursday by telephone from Rwanda.

Akagera is a haven for wildlife in overcrowded Rwanda, where over 8 million people are squeezed into just 26,300 sq kms (10,160 sq miles) and deforestation is already widespread.

The sprawling 900 sq km park in the east of the country is home to elephants, giraffes, zebra, and various species of antelope and monkey.

Mugisha said poachers lit the fires to scatter animals and then set snares to catch them should they return to feed on vegetation that grows back.

"We are very much concerned...it's very damaging and very abrupt for the biodiversity of the park," Mugisha said.

He said the poachers were both commercial hunters working in the bushmeat trade and subsistence hunters trying to feed themselves. Rwanda's swelling rural population is among the poorest in the world.

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U.S. Science Policy Swayed by Politics, Group Says
Thu Jul 8, 2004 11:32 PM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is still packing scientific advisory panels with ideologues and is imposing strict controls on researchers who want to share ideas with colleagues in other countries, a group of scientists charged on Thursday.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said in a report that the administration's policies could take years to undo and in the meantime the best and the brightest would be frightened away from jobs in the National Institutes of Health and other government institutions.

The union, chaired by Dr. Kurt Gottfried, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cornell University, said more than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates and members of both political parties, had joined the call for "restoration of scientific integrity in federal policymaking."

"I don't think one should simply assume that the problem ... will go away if there is a new administration in office," Gottfried told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"What is happening under this administration is a cultural change. We have to address this cultural change and fix it."

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Quote of note:

There are also several "shops" offering straightforward political merchandise supporting Bush and Cheney, who during the 2000 presidential campaign vowed to "restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington."

Cheney's F-Word Quote Lives on T-Shirts and Thongs
Fri Jul 9, 2004 02:46 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Your dog, your toddler, your car and your computer can now sport the same pungent phrase -- suggesting an anatomically unlikely sex act -- uttered in a moment of pique by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Within weeks of Cheney's angry suggestion to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go f--- yourself" on June 22, an online cottage industry quoting the vice president has sprung up at Cafepress.com, a Web site offering customized merchandise.

"I thought it was funny," said Sean Bonner, a Los Angeles art gallery owner who designed a range of products with the legend, "'Go f--- yourself' - Vice President, Dick Cheney."

"I kind of wanted a shirt like that and the best way to do it would be to make it myself," Bonner said by telephone.

Bonner's section of the Cafepress site -- www.cafepress.com/vpquote -- offers regular T-shirts, thongs, creeper outfits for toddlers and infants, dog T-shirts, computer mouse pads, car stickers and trucker hats.

After a mention in The Washington Post on Friday, this collection went from getting few hits to being one of the top four "shops" on the site, a spokesman for Cafepress said.

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Bush Launches Broadside Against 'Pessimist' Edwards
Fri Jul 9, 2004 08:50 PM ET

By Caren Bohan

…He alluded to Edwards' sunny demeanor as he criticized his and Kerry's emphasis on difficulties facing workers such as rising health-care costs and the outsourcing of jobs overseas.

"Whether the message is delivered with a frown or a smile, it's the same old pessimism," Bush said.

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Words of wisdom. One's facial expression doesn't change the truth or meaning of one's message. Remember this when you see Bush's "trademark smirk" as he tells you how much better you're doing, that there's weapons of mass destruction to be found, that "the buck stops here."

Oh, right. He never made that last claim. Sorry.

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Quote of note:

In an interview with reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer and other local Pennsylvania newspapers, Bush described his relationship with current NAACP leaders as "basically nonexistent."

Bad idea of note:

McClellan said that "the president is going to reach out to everyone in the African-American community and ask for their vote based on his record and his vision for the country."

Bush to Skip NAACP Meeting Due to Hostile Comments
Fri Jul 9, 2004 11:15 PM ET

KUTZTOWN, Pa. (Reuters) - President Bush has decided not to speak to the country's largest civil rights group, the White House said on Friday, citing openly hostile comments by its leaders about the president.
The White House initially attributed Bush's decision not to accept the invitation to speak at the NAACP annual convention to a scheduling conflict. The convention opens on Saturday in Philadelphia.

But White House spokesman Scott McClellan, traveling with Bush on a campaign bus trip through Pennsylvania cited "hostile political rhetoric about the president" from the group's leaders.

"It's disappointing to hear," McClellan said.

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July 09, 2004

No transcript but audio.

Flawed Judgment
Jeffrey Brown gets additional perspectives on the committee's findings from David Kay, the former lead weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations and the United States; Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department official; and Peter Brookes, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense. [RealAudio]

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But you must follow the link. Rick Perlstein's How Can the Democrats Win? has an excellent review of the political history of the Democratic Party—what worked when and why it stopped. Detailed enough to help me fill in the blanks in a pattern I'd seen.

But the really interesting part is the parallel drawn between short term investment strategy and the current thrashing about for meaning the Democrats are going through. Rick said the net meaning of the article is, think long-term. In fact, here's the Quote of Note:

Shortly before Halloween of 2003, a very self-satisfied Newt Gingrich gave an interview to Susan Stamberg on the subject of power. She asked him if he missed the perquisites of being Speaker of the House. He answered, “If you’re trying to do big things, petty power isn’t very interesting; it doesn’t really matter very much, if you’re trying to do something historic . . . Remember that I spent from 1978 to 1994—that’s 16 years—to create a majority. So I’m comfortable with long-term projects. . . . I kind of measure things different [than most].”

I just finished the article. There are some interesting replies to the article as well, but I haven't gotten to them yet. The link up there is to the index that includes links to Rick's article and all the replies.

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And whose money is harder earned than the working poor?

Whenever I go past PBS.org I look around for other interesting stuff. Today's find is an interview with David Shipler about his book, "The Working Poor: Invisible in America."

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DAVID SHIPLER: I wanted to get inside people's personal lives as well as I could, so that I could see from their perspective the forces that were leaving them in a position where they were working and yet were poor or near poverty. So I spent a lot of time with people and let them talk. And a lot of these folks revealed a tremendous amount about themselves and about their backgrounds. And I watched them go through trials.

I saw a guy who washes cars, but doesn't own one; a woman who's an assistant teacher, but doesn't have the money to send her own children to the daycare center where she works; another woman who was working in the back room of a bank filing canceled checks, but had $2.02 in her own account; migrant workers in North Carolina who harvest the sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving and the Christmas trees in time for Christmas; garment workers in L.A... and people that all of us encounter personally also every day, in Wal-mart, in Burger King and so forth.

RAY SUAREZ: They were people who, as you kept reminding us, work hard, work a lot, and never seem to get ahead. Why?

DAVID SHIPLER: Well, they're paid very low wages. They work long hours if they can get the long hours. Not all of them are able to find work that will get them the 40 hours or more a week. They have expenses because a lot of them support families. Half the poor families in America are headed by single women, so there right there you have an economic problem, because if you have one wage earner at seven or eight dollars an hour, you're not making enough to support you very well and lift you above the poverty line. And the other thing is that these folks, a lot of them were struggling hard to get above the poverty line, and the federal poverty line is pretty low, it's artificially low.

RAY SUAREZ: Remind us what it is.

DAVID SHIPLER: Well, for a family with three children and one adult, it's $18,725 a year. And what these folks are finding, and many of them have come off welfare and they're working, is that crossing the poverty line is not like showing a passport and crossing a border. It's like going across a very long mine field, and if you make a misstep, you're dead. And that happens to a lot of folks. They make some mistakes and they've had it.

RAY SUAREZ: Quietly and without a lot of fanfare, I should say, you slip in two notions that are pretty challenging to the conventional economic wisdom of America: One, that this kind of low-wage work makes life comfortable, easy, and affordable for middle class and upper middle class Americans and that a lot of this work comes in the form of a subsidy to employers because people make up the gaps in their paycheck by depending on various forms of government support.

DAVID SHIPLER: That's right. There are, of course... folks who are in this position make the living standards for the more affluent Americans rather high. We can afford a lot of things that we could probably not afford if people were paid a living wage, a much higher wage. In addition, as you point out, there are government programs that in effect subsidize the low wages.

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Selected quotes from The News Hour that I feel sum up each party's position relative to the Senate's indictment of the C.I.A.

INTELLIGENCE FAILURES

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: We had flawed intelligence on enough, I think, to cause us not to go to war. And WMD, weapons of mass destruction, you know, the so-called nuclear threat/Niger thing, and the question of was there a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein and the destruction and 9/11 and that tragedy, which has been discounted since by the intelligence community. It didn't... you know, Pat and I, when we go back to our respective states every weekend, we see men and women who are in the guards and reserves and the regular military and they're over there, or their spouses are over there, fighting, and dying and losing limbs, and I have to ask the question of: Are we better... are the Iraqis better off that we went in there, and are we better off? And in both cases I cannot answer yes. I think we went in under false pretenses. We did not have the reason to do it, and my judgment is the president wanted to do it.

SEN. PAT ROBERTS: Well, I think that it is the job of the intelligence community, just as Jay has indicated, to use what we call red teams. You have people who simply offer, you know, contrary ideas and then, "say prove it." But then again... let me put it this way. If you're an analyst, and it was before 9/11, and there were ten dots to connect, you had to really connect eight or nine of them before you pushed the product to the policy maker to make a decision. After 9/11 everybody says, "oh, my gosh, we're too risk averse," you have the 9/11 commission saying we didn't connect the dots, we should have thought about this.

So say that the analysts has four dots and he starts to push the product, you could be wrong. So consequently everybody was leaning forward and I hope to heck that there is pressure by repeated questioning. As it turns out, in the WMD section there was not any repeated questioning, or what some people call pressure. In the other section in regards to links to terrorism, there was repeated questioning and it was a better document.

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PBS's The News Hour covered it, of course. Very interesting, if you're interested in that sort of thing. I think when the transcript is posted later, I'll fisk a couple of participants using quotes from a couple of the others.

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U.S.-Backed Tunisia Isolating Political Prisoners - Report

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 7 (IPS) - The North African nation of Tunisia is holding in isolation as many as 40 leaders of a moderate Islamist movement, who are among 500 political prisoners in the country chosen by U.S. President George W Bush as the base for his plan to democratise the Middle East, says a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The detentions in solitary confinement violate both Tunisian and international laws, adds the 33-page report, 'Tunisia: Long-Term Solitary Confinement of Political Prisoners'.

HRW found that all of the prisoners in prolonged isolation are Islamists, most of them leaders of the moderate Nahdha movement banned by the government of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in 1990 after the authorities accused it of plotting to overthrow his regime.

While the prisoners, who have been permitted occasional 15-20-minute closely monitored visits with family members, have never been told why they are in solitary confinement, HRW believes it is due to the government's fear that their ideas could sway many in the country's general prisoner population. Their correspondence is censored; they have been refused permission to receive books and journals; and their access to writing materials is restricted, according to the report.

”Tunisia is using long-term solitary confinement to crush political prisoners and the ideas they represent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division. ”This inhumane policy does not serve any legitimate penal objective.”

The report comes five months after Bush himself hosted Ben Ali -- who has long been close to the United States -- at the White House, where he was described as among the moderate of Arab leaders and a dependable friend of the West. As a result, the administration chose Tunis as the regional centre for its Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a new programme designed to promote democracy and political reforms throughout the Arab world.

The choice was widely denounced by human rights activists, especially in the Arab world, where Ben Ali's reputation as an ”unreconstructed autocrat who runs one of the most repressive police states in the Arab world” -- as one veteran campaigner, Neil Hicks of Human Rights First (HRF), described him -- is well established. At the time, Ben Ali had just pushed through a constitutional reform that will allow him to remain in office through 2014.

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Quote of note:

The country is turning against the people who thought they knew better. This change in mood goes beyond ideology, because Americans are as pragmatic as they are idealistic. Beyond the rights and wrongs of whether the United States should have gone it alone in Iraq - based on at best flimsy and at worst fabricated evidence - is the unavoidable fact that the policy has not worked. Horrific images of Americans being beheaded underpin the nagging anxiety that the country is at least as vulnerable to a terrorist attack today than it was before the incursion into Iraq, if not more so.

In short this administration made a compact with the American people that they have failed to keep. They declared they would make the country safer by taking on Iraq, but they clearly have not delivered. In fact the opposite has ensued with the result that the experience card they had hoped would work to their advantage is now working against them.

Experience you can't trust
Any effort by the Bush administration to portray the Kerry-Edwards ticket as unprepared for government is likely to backfire, writes Philip James

Friday July 9, 2004

Ronald Reagan may have once joked that he would not make an issue of his opponent's youth and inexperience, but George Bush was deadpan as he tried to do exactly that to the newcomer entering this year's race for the White House.

Hewing to a line of attack already prepared by Republican message crafters, Bush's first substantive reaction to the choice of John Edwards as Kerry's running mate was to insist that his resume was too short to put him a heartbeat away from the presidency.

…The Bush campaign is hoping that while voters may be jittery over national security, they are even less likely to take any chances with an untested leadership. This might have been a reasonable ploy had the current president not come to the White House with only five years political experience as governor of Texas - a state that affords its governors the constitutional authority of a town crier. In fact if we are going to count, Edwards has one more year as senator under his belt than Bush had as governor.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign is rightly staying above the pettiness of such a numbers game. The images of their clans gathered together on the lawn of Kerry's Pennsylvania estate to introduce the full ticket harked back to the archival footage of the Kennedy family at play - all vim, vigour, youthfulness and promise.

Choreographed to include horseplay between Kerry and the youngest Edwards family member, the scene brimmed with the visual grammar of forward-looking optimism.

In stark contrast, Bush's trademark smirk was absent at his news conference. The man who emulates Reagan's sunny disposition looked grim and embattled as he went negative on Edwards. And while Edwards is already grinning with confidence on the campaign trail, Cheney can barely manufacture a smile out of the side of his face on the hustings. "Do you want to hear this speech or not?" he barked at one over-enthusiastic crowd last week.

This is not where the Bush White House thought they would be four months from election day. They were confident that a sitting war president from a party traditionally thought stronger on national security than the Democrats would sail to re-election. But it has not worked out that way.

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Convention bloggers named

The Democrats have started issuing credentials to bloggers. Some of the ones credentialed so far include:

• Dave Winer of Scripting News

• Dave Weinberger

• Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

• NYU's Jay Rosen, who has lengthy essay about the incoherence of modern conventions and the freshness bloggers may bring.

• Markos Moulitsas Zuniga from the Daily Kos

• Jerome Armstrong

• Aldon Hynes for greaterdemocracy.org

• Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft

• Matt Welch, for his personal blog and Reason's

• Tom Burka for Opinions You Should Have and The American Street, which will also have two Oregon state delegates blogging from the convention, Jenny Greenleaf and "BeckyG."

• Paul McCullum, Will Oemler and Allison Grady for dinnerforamerica.com

• OxBlog

• Rick Heller for the Centrist Coalition's blog, Centerfield

• Matthew Gross

• Byron LaMasters of BurntOrangeReport.com

•

Other who may blog from the convention include:

• Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette

• Dave Barry

NOTE: This list is continuing to be updated.

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AP: Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought
AP Exclusive: the Iraq Insurgency Is Far Larger Than the 5,000 Guerrillas Previously Thought

The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq July 9, 2004 — Contrary to U.S. government claims, the insurgency in Iraq is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not foreign fighters, and is far larger than previously thought, American military officials say.

The officials told The Associated Press the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated.

That number is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at the insurgency's core. And some insurgents are highly specialized one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers.

Although U.S. military analysts disagree over the exact size, the insurgency is believed to include dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams.

The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state.

"We're not at the forefront of a jihadist war here," said a U.S. military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Bush National Guard Records Lost
Associated Press
Friday, July 9, 2004; 10:44 AM

Military payroll records that could more fully document President Bush's whereabouts during his service in the Texas Air National Guard were inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

In a letter responding to a freedom of information request by The Associated Press, the Defense Department said that microfilm containing the pertinent National Guard payroll records was damaged and could not be salvaged. The damaged material included payroll records for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972.

"President Bush's payroll records for those two quarters were among the records destroyed," wrote C.Y. Talbott, of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information and Security Review section. "Searches for back-up paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful."

---

Quote of note:

The White House dismissed the ruling

World Court Rules Israeli Barrier Violates Law
Israel Ordered to Tear Down Network of Fences

By Keith Richburg and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 9, 2004; 11:45 AM

PARIS, July 9 -- The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled Friday that Israel's security fence being constructed on occupied West Bank land is illegal, violates the human rights of Palestinians and must be dismantled.

The wall "cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order," said Judge Shi Jiuyong of China, who announced the non-binding ruling. "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law."

The court is also expected to order that Palestinians whose land had been confiscated for the building of the barrier should be compensated, and it will call on countries not to give aid or support to Israel in building the fence.

The ruling was 14 to 1, with the court's only American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, siding with Israel. The ruling, which was requested by the U.N. General Assembly, is called an "advisory opinion" and is non-binding.

But the International Court's opinions do carry moral and political weight, and past decisions, such as its 1971 ruling against South Africa's occupation of Namibia, have been used to pressure governments in the court of public opinion.

---

I've started sorting thru a bunch of stuff I got out of storage last month; books, software, vinyl albums…

I just ran across a pile of old Zip disks and I have no idea what's on them or why I put them in storage.

---

Dr. Cosby appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation recently. They also interview several teachers on the subjects Dr. Cosby's issues.

---

No Plans for Military Draft, Official Says
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 8, 2004; Page A10

There are no plans to reinstate a military draft and the Bush administration does not support conscription, the Pentagon's top official for personnel and readiness told Congress yesterday.

Trying to counter recent Internet rumors that the military and the Selective Service System are girding for a potential draft to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Undersecretary of Defense David S.C. Chu said there is no reason to bring back the draft. He fielded questions at a House Armed Services Committee hearing that focused on the strains on military personnel as officials plan to rotate more troops into the conflicts in coming months.

"The administration does not support resumption of the draft," Chu said, responding to a question from Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.). "There is no secret plan on this front."

---

Conservatives and the Religious Right are just not sane when it comes to abortion rights.
Look, you've got a majority of the population against gay marriage yet that groundswell of opposition to the actual ceremonies only happened among politicians. To your average reasonable person, what someone else does just isn't that big a deal as long as no one is either forced to or prevented from doing it.

And I don't think the RR will ever hear me when I say (and this is speaking as a Chaos Lord, this is official Universal Knowledge) the task is to transform the sin in one's own nature, not the sin in another's.

Anyway…

Senate Braces Itself for Fight on Gay Marriage
By CARL HULSE and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, July 8 - Admitting upfront that they do not expect to win, conservatives are preparing to plunge the Senate into an election-year fight over a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

More precisely, conservatives say, they do not expect to triumph in the Senate, whether the main showdown comes on a procedural issue or on the amendment itself. But they say they expect to get one thing they very much want: a vote that puts every member of the Senate on record on an issue that both Republicans and Democrats see as a political wedge.

With the Senate set to begin debate on Friday, Dr. James C. Dobson, a popular conservative Christian self-help author and broadcaster, devoted two episodes of his radio program this week to urging listeners to call their senators and reciting the names of 69 senators who had not yet agreed to support the amendment.

"We may not have the votes to win it," Dr. Dobson said in the broadcast. "I am afraid we don't, and our listeners need to let their senators know right now that they are watching, that they are paying attention and they will remember the vote that occurs this week on this critical issue."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobbying group, said, "Social conservatives are looking at this issue so we know who needs to be educated on this issue or removed if that is possible."

---

Dove's Eye View, on flying the Confederate flag in an Independence Day parade…

Why pledge allegiance to "one nation, indivisible" if you're going to break that pledge by flying the flag of those who sought to divide it?

…or frankly, at all.

---

AlphaPatriot has a long post reacting to Dr Cosby and his overhearing a conversation at McDonalds. In the process he has the very reaction warned about at Get In Where Ya Fit In

Here's the AlphaPatriot:

So if "nigger" is not the derogatory term that it once was, then everyone should be able to use it. I should have been able to turn to the kids and say, "He's right. If you're going to be a nigger you should be a straight up nigger!" and they would laugh and I would smile and wave. But I can't. Had I done so there may have been bloodshed. Because had I done so I would now be in jail for shooting one or two people as they would almost certainly have turned on me with hate-filled eyes, animus in their hearts and malice in their souls.

And rightly so, for it is a word filled with hate that should never be used.

People, if you don't want me to say it then don't use the word. More importantly, if you don't want your peers of other races to say it, then don't use it. You can't be mad if they do. You mustn't.

Why "mustn't" we? And why is it "more important" to make sure our peers of other races don't use the term?

Because it's so frustrating to white folks not to be able to do something Black folks can, that for other minorities to do so would simply compound the frustration?

This is a typical case of speaking to "issues with minorities to be dealt with" as opposed to "issues minorities must deal with."

A-P isn't the first to insist that Black folks deal with racism as defined by white folks rather than as experienced by us. Won't be the last. And I won't even go into the curiosity of a self-identified middle aged white man hanging at BET looking for Black folk's reaction to being yelled at. But you should think about it when you get the time.

Anyway, so no one has to go searching, here's the PREsponse from Get In Where Ya Fit In::

So I get a lot of hesitant, and probing questions like; "Ummm... Mark, I was just wondering .... Umm.... Why do uh ..... black people you know...... call each other.... ummm.... Nigger?". Well first of all, no black person I've ever heard of calls anybody a Nigger. We use the term nigga. It's taking a word and re-branding it. Second, I'm assuming the majority of white people know the answer but I'll explain it to the one's who don't since I still occasionally get the question. Since blacks were treated so awfully in this country for so long, that word was a potent symbol of all that discrimination and oppression. When the time came for a lot of lifting of the most heinous of these forms of racism, the word was turned back in on itself and used as a badge of honor and repudiation. Basically saying, I've taken your worst and survived it. You can't use that word as a weapon to bludgeon us anymore. Kinda noble in a way. Let's call that the "old school nigga" but I'll get back to that. I occasionally use the term in the "old school" way by which I simply mean a person who lived through the hard times of racism and overcame it and what that communal experience entailed.

Now once that is answered, (inexplicably in my mind) the next question is always well since you guys say it, why can't I? The sentence is never phrased that way of course. It's always asked in another context, but that's what is really meant. Why are you able to say something I can't?

And AlphaPatriot isn't all bad. Actually demonstrated some reasonableness by linking in a Boston Globe editorial before I got to it. Here's his reference:

Update: The Boston Globe has an excellent take on why this is not just black America's problem:

From a white perspective, it is easy to cheer on Cosby then smugly write off his words as a long-overdue wake-up call for black America. It's their problem, not ours, right?

Their problem it may be, but the big issue -- declining values and standards -- isn't limited to one ethnicity or neighborhood.

Today the American minivan is hip-hopping along the way to soccer games and baseball practice. The beat is a better pickup than caffeine, but listen to the lyrics and the message is a real downer. Not to sound like Tipper Gore, but after a while you realize you are singing about shaking your "tailfeather," "milking the cow," and "double-Ds," with the n-word thrown around as generously as the Beatles used "yeah, yeah, yeah." White boys can't jump, but many of them want to be Kobe Bryant or, short of that, Ja Rule. They want the money, the cars, and the bootylicious babes, and they see no connection between those goals and reading "A Separate Peace." (Incidentally, it is difficult to explain why a certain ethnic slur is unacceptable when they hear their rap idols singing it on their favorite CDs.)...

The hip-hop generation is not all black. White America just likes to believe it is.

Read it all.

I believe AlphaPatriot's understanding of the Black communities to be flawed. But it's obviously not evil…if you get all the way to the bottom of the page.

---

July 08, 2004

James of Hobson's Choice jumped the gun a bit with this interesting comment. I didn't really address it in the comments because it was my intent to bring it up anyway.

I'm sorry, I must be an idiot. I cannot figure out what he said that's so controversial. African American leaders are constantly saying things like that, because that's what leaders do. Moreover, affluent African Americans have a surprisingly conservative outlook because they aren't embarrassed about telling others to "snap out of it."

European Americans make much of it because many of us are relatively thin-skinned; we hear frequent references to racism or discrimination, police brutality and sharp critique of US treatment of African Americans, and we flinch. So when someone like Mr. Cosby says things like what he did, we jump all over it because we think it takes the onus off Whites to shape up. But I'm certain that was well known to you.

Yes, very well known.

There's no dispute here over the pathologies the Black communities need to address (you'll note I'm saying "communities" rather than "constituencies" here. Quite intentional; I'm discussing people rather than politics). But let me tell you how things look to me. Let me explain what I see as the issue raised. Conservatives will find my conclusion a mixed bag—they'll love much of my conclusion but hate how I got there and what the conclusion actually means.

Think. Why was the first executive order directing the government to act affirmatively to bring Black Americans into the economy issued? What was the order intended to accomplish?

It was intended to change the behavior of white Americans.

You see, at the time there were plenty of educated Black folks, college degreed janitors, because of racism. It certainly wasn't because Black folks didn't want the work. The order was intended to override white racism.

The response to the order was along the lines of, "I'd love to hire a niggra if I could find a qualified one." And when the underemployed college graduates stepped up, it because, "Oh, but he didn't got to THAT college like HE did. HE is more qualified that the niggra." And the niggra takes a lesser position because he's more qualified than any white person willing to take a job on that level.

Or the response was to just hire a colored person and show him as proof they were integrated.

Or the response was to drop someone into a slot totally unprepared and shake your head sadly when he fails.

Or a lawsuit, almost all of which were settled out of court, all such settlements saying there's no admission of guilt it's cheaper to buy you off.

And to set aside record numbers of civil rights complaints, so you can be rewarded with a federal judgeship…and who knows where that could take you…

And scapegoating.

And every time a Black person mentions there's still racism to be dealt with, he's reminded of how many Blacks are in the middle class, how much closer we've gotten to equal pay for equal work, like white people had a damn thing to do with it. Collectively, I mean. Some of y'all individually are da bomb. Most of you ain't bad and I really feel most of you mean no harm. But collectively "White People" have fought tooth and nail against leveling the playing field and everyone has been too fucking polite to just say it like that, to put the pattern together under everyone's nose.

I had to do it to explain that the controversy in the Black communities is, do white people get off scott-free for racism?

That is the question underneath the discussion. It's beneath the discussion in the white communities too.

And in my opinion, the answer is yes. White people get off scott-free, It actually comes down to a question of "what the fuck are you gonna do about it?" I mean, check this out, from Tacitus:

Seeing Slate's take on the morally abominable Jude Wanniski reminds me of our late efforts to secure a paleocon voice for redstate. Now, I could personally care less about paleocon representation, but my partners argued, and justly so, that they're conservatives too (if increasingly not Republicans), and certainly not all bad. Though a lot of them are bad -- see Domenech do battle with them, as "evilcons," here and here. As part of this ideological quota effort, we considered asking Steve Sailer to contribute, until I came across this squirm-inducing essay on football and race (note, please, that blacks have a biological advantage in "trash talking"). The problem was that so many of the prominent paleocon essayists have this racist junk, if not up front in their ouevres, then somewhere buried not terribly deep in their archives. It and bizarre revisionist history constitute a pretty disturbing propensity within that demographic. I'm actually not sure if we ended up getting a paleocon for redstate. If we did, I'm not aware of it, but I trust my partners to do the proper vetting. But if we didn't, that's all the same to me: I'm happy to consign most of them to the company of Raimondo, Rockwell, and the assorted odd corners that the American fringe retreats to.

Tacitus, of course, has the right correct reaction:

Braying fools barking about the rational basis of their hate aren't worth engaging beyond a certain point, and that point has passed. I'll doubtless write in the future about the conservatives who do too little to oppose and eject this crowd from our movement and our party. I definitely won't be further engaging those who think that conservatism is a form of identity politics for white people. One might as well try to reason with a mad dog.

A conservative friend put it best in an e-mail about Sailer:

I realized maybe a year ago that when the paleocons talk about America being "under attack," they don’t mean by radical Islamic terrorists or by postmodern anti-family cultural values. They mean you and me. The people with ethnic surnames. The Mexicans and the Puerto Ricans. We’re the ones attacking this nation, just by being here.

And if we were to tell them face to face that we felt accused, they’d disagree; they’d say it isn’t people like you and me that they’re talking about. Our skin isn’t brown enough, and we speak English.

Disingenous bastards.

But it's way too many of these suckers in too many influential places. Like Tacitus' partners said, they're conservatives too.

Myself, I hold to Derrick Bell position on the permanence of racism. I honestly don't expect the mainstream to come clean. I expect Black folks to have to deal with racism for the foreseeable future of the foreseeable generations to come, both personal and structural. Because there's no knobs on society, we can't just dial back our human reactions.

But we can learn the environment, learn to navigate and negotiate it, manipulate it as selfishly as every other affinity group out there.

What did Justice O'Connor say, twenty five years? Better get on it.

---

France opposes UN Sudan sanctions

France says it does not support US plans for international sanctions on Sudan if violence continues in Darfur.

…"In Darfur, it would be better to help the Sudanese get over the crisis so their country is pacified rather than sanctions which would push them back to their misdeeds of old," junior Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told French radio.

France led opposition to US moves at the UN over Iraq. As was the case in Iraq, it also has significant oil interests in Sudan.

Mr Muselier also dismissed claims of "ethnic cleansing" or genocide in Darfur.

"I firmly believe it is a civil war and as they are little villages of 30, 40, 50, there is nothing easier than for a few armed horsemen to burn things down, to kill the men and drive out the women," he said.

---

…but this is the single stupidest thing ever said by a Black Conservative, possibly by any Black person at all:

I know Republicans want a larger piece of that "black vote", but I'm so glad they don't need it to win elections.

"Please suh…marginalize me some more!"

---

Gotta go for a minute and I'm not actually sure I'll be back in time to continue The Cosby Effect tonight. So I want to leave you a few more things to chew on.

First of all, in checking over what I've been doing here, I noted I lifted part of a post from Rhetoric and Race without a link or acknowledgement. Very unintentional. The blog looks kind of new, and I've been waiting to see if the ramp up before referring folks. Bemused, who wrote the post I accidentally stole, reads like an interesting sort from his first post.

George reminded me I ought to throw some stats at you. He's got links at Negrophile, to the Census Bureau and stats from Black Americans: A Statistical Sourcebook by way of the St Louis Post Dispatch:

In fact, his conclusion appeared to be accepted by many as truth.

"Cosby probably feels liberated today by a new intellectual honesty that bright young talents like Chris Rock have brought to black entertainment," wrote Clarence Page, a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. "Here's hoping our new candor can lead us to new action."

Colbert I. King, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, wrote. "Whether Cosby should have used the upscale D.C. event to share his observations about the state of black America may be open to question. That what he said needed saying, however, is not at issue."

And Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote: "Much of black America, especially its middle class, is ready to have that conversation. In that sense, Cosby's speech was a watershed event - a sign that black America is now comfortable enough with its accomplishments to discuss its shortcomings."

But the truth is that education and economic indicators show that African-Americans are doing better than they've ever done, largely because of the gains made by those low-income blacks, according to data from "Black Americans: A Statistical Sourcebook."

And in some cases, the poorest African Americans do a better job than upscale African-Americans in outperforming their white counterparts, the book says.

Right interesting read.

Lester at Vision Circle commented yesterday about how the knuckleheads helped hone his skillz, an experience I shared. Now he has to listen to the audio of Bill's speechifying, which the Washington Post had hidden in the bowels of its site since the end of May.

That's the second link to it I've posted today…if you're going to talk about him, you might as well know what he said. You can check the video of his second assessment too.

There's some more conversation I'd like to tie into all this, but I gotta go.

---

The Washington Post has a recording, though.

We're talking the first Cosby statement on parenting, by the way.

[LATER:George was good enough to leave the transcription of the recording in the comments. This is cool because the link to the recording will eventually rot, as all links do]

---

President Declines NAACP Invite to Speak
President Declines NAACP Invitation to Speak at Annual Convention, Kerry Accepts

The Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA July 8, 2004 — President Bush declined an invitation to speak at the NAACP's annual convention, the group said.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People expects more than 8,000 people to attend the convention opening Saturday.

Democratic challenger John Kerry accepted an invitation to speak next Thursday on the final day of the convention, the NAACP said.

Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention in Baltimore when he was a candidate. But he has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, the first president since Herbert Hoover not to attend an NAACP convention, John White, a spokesman for the group, said Wednesday.

The NAACP received a letter from the White House three weeks ago declining the invitation because of scheduling conflicts and thanking the it for understanding. It was signed by presidential scheduler Melissa Bennett.

---

It's the only explanation for such hostility to the planet.

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Another Attack on the Arctic
By BRUCE BABBITT

BARROW, Alaska — Thwarted by the public in its efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, the Bush administration and the oil companies are now quietly turning their attention to the balance of the Arctic region of Alaska, all the way west to the Chukchi Sea, within sight of Siberia. In advance of its efforts, the administration has jettisoned environmental safeguards and is now threatening the traditional-use rights of the Alaska Natives who have hunted caribou and waterfowl along the Arctic slope for thousands of years.

This plan was announced in Anchorage just as Congress recessed for the Reagan funeral. Outside Alaska it has received little notice, not even for its centerpiece — a proposal to lease rights for oil and gas development in Teshekpuk Lake, a body of water that is vital to the region. This shallow lake, which is about 30 miles across, is the biological heart of the western Arctic, the summer nesting and breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of black brant, spectacled eider, yellow-billed loons, white-fronted geese and other migratory birds that arrive here each year from 32 of the lower 48 states as well as countries as far south as Argentina.

---

The New Cosby Kids
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

…But it's just so 1985 to beat up on the black poor. During the buildup to welfare "reform" in 1996, the comfortable denizens of think spas like the Heritage Foundation routinely excoriated poor black women for being lazy, promiscuous, government-dependent baby machines, not to mention overweight (that poundcake again). As for poor black youth, they were targeted in the 90's as a generation of "superpredators," gang-bangers and thugs.

It's time to start picking on a more up-to-date pariah group for the 21st century, and I'd like to nominate the elderly whites. Filial restraint has so far kept the would-be Social Security privatizers on the right from going after them, but the grounds for doing so are clear. For one thing, there's a startling new wave of "grandpa bandits" terrorizing rural banks. And occasionally some old duffer works himself into a frenzy listening to Cole Porter tunes and drives straight into a crowd of younger folks.

The law-abiding old whites are no prize either. Overwhelmingly, they choose indolence over employment — lounging on park benches, playing canasta — when we all know there are plenty of people-greeter jobs out there. Since it's government money that allows them to live in this degenerate state, we can expect the Heritage Foundation to reveal any day now that some seniors are cashing in their Social Security checks for vodka and Viagra. Just as welfare was said to "cause poverty," the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is a risk factor for osteoporosis: the correlations are undeniable.

And the menace posed by the elderly can only get worse, as ever more of them sink into debt. What's eating up their nest eggs? In many cases, drugs. How long before the streets are ruled by geezer gangs mugging us to support their insulin and beta-blocker habits?

---

Class Action Bill Bogs Down in U.S. Senate
Wed Jul 7, 2004 08:58 PM ET

By Susan Cornwell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legislation to rewrite the rules on class-action lawsuits became mired in procedural wrangling in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday over whether to allow unrelated amendments on issues like immigration and drug re-importation.

Seeking to bar unrelated additions to the bill which could complicate its future in negotiations with the House of Representatives, Senate Majority leader Bill Frist on Wednesday evening moved to limit the debate to germane amendments. A vote on this motion was set for Friday.

In the meantime, Frist said, he welcomed senators to propose relevant changes to the bill, which has supporters in both parties, on Thursday.

Earlier Wednesday, Frist used a different procedural maneuver, which effectively blocked other senators from making any amendments at all while debate continued.

"We are not prepared to have this bill become a magnet for every unrelated issue that is brought to the floor," the Tennessee Republican declared. The bill would allow most class action suits to be shifted from state to federal courts.

But Frist's efforts to bar unrelated amendments provoked an outcry from Democrats, who had several waiting in the wings such as proposals to raise the minimum wage and to allow re-importation of less expensive drugs from Canada.

---

Quote of note:

(There's a postscript to the story, as reader Mosher pointed out: Steven Chu wasn't the first Asian American to direct a U.S. national laboratory, despite statements to the contrary by UC President Robert Dynes. That honor goes to Praveen Chaudhari of the Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, N.Y. He was appointed early last year.)

Why race mattered
- Dick Rogers
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

BY HIS OWN ACCOUNT, Steven Chu was the family's "academic black sheep," an uninspired student in his early school years amid relatives with an array of advanced degrees.

So Chu's academic awakening in geometry, where rote learning took a back seat to logic and ideas, was a turning point.

A parade of achievements followed: a successful educational career, 10 years at Bell Laboratories, 18 years as a professor at Stanford University, the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and a string of other awards.

Last month, he made news with yet another accomplishment: Chu was selected by the University of California Board of Regents to direct the 4,300- employee Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

The Chronicle announced Chu's appointment under the headline "First Asian named to run Berkeley lab." The lead paragraph of the story said: "The first Asian American has been named to run a U.S. national laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Berkeley hills."

To reader Bob Mosher, it was a "pointless ethnic emphasis" that minimized the man in favor of his race. "I am most pleased that he was selected -- not because he is Asian," Mosher said, "but because he appears to be so well qualified.

"I do not object to race being mentioned," he said. "It is, to some extent, newsworthy. My objection is to it being the headline and the lead of the story."

…The Chronicle left itself open to criticism by making race the most prominent aspect of the story, then immediately dropping it. After the headline and lead sentence, there wasn't another word on the subject. The story failed to provide context, background, comments or quotes. If you didn't already know the racial significance of Chu's selection, you wouldn't by reading the story.

Somewhere along the line -- from reporter to assigning editor to news editor to copy editor -- someone should have asked, "If this is so important, why don't we say more about it?"

The result might not have persuaded reader Mosher, but it would have given depth and value to the story. Readers could have decided for themselves whether the regents' decision was politically motivated, whether it represented the best person for the job or whether there was a whiff of political correctness.

Readers might have learned, for example, that Asian Americans earn more than a quarter of the doctorates in science and technology each year at U.S. universities. Nonetheless, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says, Asian Americans struggle to reach the highest echelons of science, both in the private and public sector.

We also might have learned that there was powerful symbolism in the appointment among those who were deeply angered by the Wen Ho Lee spy case. Lee, a nuclear scientist, was accused of feeding secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to China. The case collapsed and Lee was freed with credit for time served.

Many Asian Americans felt that Lee was the victim of discrimination and stereotyping by the government. The 59-count indictment against Lee prompted L. Ling-chi Wang, professor of Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley, to lead a boycott against UC-run national labs.

But readers learned none of those things. So the paper ended up making much of race without saying much about race.

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S. Africa as Seen in a Mirror
A reporter returns a decade after apartheid's fall to find blacks and whites taking different roles in a country with pride in its transition.
By Scott Kraft
Times Staff Writer

…As a correspondent in South Africa from 1988 to 1993, I watched the dying breaths of apartheid: The failed attempt to force blacks into autonomous "homelands." The dismantling of laws imposing racial separation. The week in 1990 that the African National Congress was unbanned and its leader, Nelson Mandela, freed. And I returned in 1994 when the black four-fifths of South Africa's 45 million people got their first chance to cast a free vote.

When I returned again recently, I found a country that, at first, felt and looked familiar. The haze of coal smoke and mining dust still carpeted the mile-high metropolis of Johannesburg. The combis, vans packed with black commuters, still speeded to and from the sprawling township of Soweto. Thickets of squatter shacks still pressed against the road from Cape Town's airport to Table Mountain. And the singular beauty of this land, from its shimmering veld to its pristine beaches, was undiminished.

But, on closer inspection, it was clear that 10 years of black majority rule had brought profound change. An aggressive affirmative action program had lifted blacks into private industry and swelled the black middle class. All-white schools had become predominantly black schools. All-white suburbs were deeply integrated.

What was equally remarkable, though, was what the black majority had not done. It had not used its new upper hand to crush the white minority. It had not taken property from whites or jailed leaders of the former regime. It had not erased the achievements of white rulers from its history books. In fact, the victors had displayed a confidence and magnanimity rarely seen in post-revolutionary societies.

Race once dominated conversations here. But no longer. Today, South Africans complain most frequently about crime, and they've built higher security walls and hired more private guards. They criticize the government's mishandling of the AIDS epidemic that now claims 600 lives a day. They lament the persistent poverty, fed by an unemployment rate of more than 20% — twice that, by some estimates.

And, when asked, they look back in surprise that their country has undergone a peaceful transition from black oppression to multiracial democracy.

---

A Tenuous Peace in Sadr City
An anti-American cleric called a truce that has held for two weeks in the Shiite area of Baghdad. The relative calm elicits disbelief among troops.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writer

July 8, 2004

BAGHDAD — After 10 weeks of fierce combat, an odd sense of normality has returned to this capital's most battle-scarred neighborhood.

The break in running clashes between U.S. troops and Shiite Muslim militiamen loyal to outspoken cleric Muqtada Sadr has brought a tenuous peace to the sprawling district known as Sadr City. By most accounts, Sadr's declaration of a truce two weeks ago was a collateral benefit of Iraq's return to a semblance of self-rule.

The militantly anti-U.S. cleric has expressed a strong desire that his popular movement be represented in national elections scheduled for January. Sadr wants a place at the bargaining table as a political leader, not a warlord.

"We are not terrorists as some are describing us," said Sheik Abdul-Hadi Darraji, the manager of Sadr's compound in Sadr City. "We are serving our country."

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SEEKING SHORT AFRICAN & AFRICAN AMERICAN FILMS ON HEALTH

Original URL: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/tfr/35725543.html
Posted by: [email protected]
Posted on: 2004-07-07, 12:24PM

The Harlem Health Festival is in the process of preparing for our September 2004 event in Harlem. We are looking for short films (under 30 minutes) on health issues as they relate to the African and African American communities. Our primary interest is narrative fiction, however, all genre is acceptable. If you are a filmmaker with a film that fits our criteria, please e-mail me at the address provided.

When responding, please put "AA HEALTH FILM" in the subject line. In the body, please include contact information, tell us a little about yourself, give us the title and a brief synopsis of the film and the running time. Please DO NOT send any attachments with your e-mail. ALL E-mails containing attachments will be deleted.

Thank you in advance.

Have a great day.

Peace & Blessings,

Darsell

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I was fooling around in Fireworks 4 and hit the key combination {Ctrl-Alt-Down Arrow} by accident. And my Windows XP Pro desktop turned upside down.

Talk about stunned.

In case you try it and it works (it's quite repeatable over here) {Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow} sends it back. Talk about your serious practical jokes…

---

July 07, 2004

In case you missed anything:
The Cosby Effect: What Did They Hear?
The Cosby Effect: Why did he say it?
The Cosby Effect: What's wrong with the approach
The Cosby Effect: The understanding that was missing
A little ahead of schedule
The Cosby Effect: The Early Edition

You could draw the conclusion that I feel Dr. Cosby has pointed to issues that need addressing but has done so a little carelessly. Let's get a little more careful. As I said hinted in The Early Edition, the idea that all the issues Dr. Cosby raised have a single root cause…bad parenting…makes little sense to me. In point of fact, much of it is American, not Black-specific. For instance:

• Participating in the production of media that
  • lionizes violence
  • celebrates misogyny
  • promotes a destructive, dysfunctional capitalism
• Overvaluation of sports
• Undervaluation of education

Now, we're busy telling folks wealth = nobility, and being horrified when our young aspire to the roles that are both extremely lucrative if you succeed and full of folks that ain't that different from themselves.

And who's paying for all this bling and bounce and gold teeth? White folks. And it's white folks who keep most of the proceeds too. Of the records AND the leased dreams the artists live in front of the Cribz camera, the TV burning the idea of platinum happiness lived to the beat…don't think those bling shows are harmless. They convince the next generation of artists (they come along every six months or so) that they, too, can drive a Hummer at 20 years old.

Wealth is the definition of good in the USofA. To expect our youth to act otherwise is like blaming fish for being wet.

But I'll come back to this later.

• Non-mainstream dress
• Non-mainstream speech to the exclusion of standard TV English
• Vulgar speech

These are issues of style, not capability. And you know why they dress and talk they way they do. Because it's cool, it's how we know you're with it.

I've discussed the core problem before in The Racism Series, in the post titled The Root of the Resistance but I didn't directly apply it to this.

Maslow posited a hierarchy of human needs based on two groupings: deficiency needs and growth needs. Within the deficiency needs, each lower need must be met before moving to the next higher level. Once each of these needs has been satisfied, if at some future time a deficiency is detected, the individual will act to remove the deficiency. The first four levels are:

1. Physiological: hunger, thirst, bodily comforts, etc.;
2. Safety/security: out of danger;
3. Belongingness and Love: affiliate with others, be accepted; and
4. Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition.

According to Maslow, an individual is ready to act upon the growth needs if and only if the deficiency needs are met…

Number three is the killer. The need to affiliate with and be accepted by others must be resolved prior to the need to gain recognition for competence. This is also the reason there are more followers than leaders, and why everyone looks for a leader in the first place. It's why, in a time when adults openly declare their fear of the children, the children look to each other. And it's real easy to reject mainstream values when you are rejected by the mainstream.

The above two sets of issues are normal reactions for a human in the conditions under discussion. As I said, they're not Black-specific:

My experience working with students from k-undergarduate, parents and teachers bears out the generalizations from research.

Students with highly engaged parents tend to do very well in school. The most engaged parents tend to be Asian-Americans, European immigrants and Jews. Most native-born American parents, white or black are disengaged from their children's education and a significant minority are indifferent or hostile to education though not to school athletics or other social fluff.

The crucial difference is that while the average white student is just as likely to embrace an empty, instant gratification, hip-hop/pop/video game/sports/Reality show/Jerry Springer value system mass culture - their Black fellow student is more likely to also be in poverty, have fewer positive adult role models and be further removed from the mainstream.

To a certain extent, the lifetime effect of the average white student spending school years wallowing in ignorance and self-absorbtion, is mitigated by being immersed in the traditional mainstream which they can understand or affect even when they do not actually practice those traditional values. That's part of the reason white students do not get the same criticism that Cosby has levelled - the aggregate effects are not as dire or at least as visible.

Many Black students can ill-afford the same kinds of self-imposed cultural handicaps in addition to systemic ones like racism or poverty.

That's my boy Mark, from the comments. Don't bitch at me if you don't like the conclusion. You can complain about what got emphasized to me, though.

The last set is new, though.

• High teenage pregnancy rate
• Physically abusing women in reaction to poverty

…and they'll take a minute to discuss, as a separate issue, I think.

No, domestic abuse is not new, but for this specific reason…and it's rare enough to be disregarded. But I DO know someone who was in the situation which is why I don't just blow it off, I guess.

We're not done by a long shot here.

---

Let's see if I have it all:

• Non-mainstream dress
• Non-mainstream speech to the exclusion of standard TV English
• Vulgar speech
• Participating in the production of media that lionizes violence, misogyny and a destructive, dysfunctional capitalism
• High teenage pregnancy rate
• Overvaluation of sports
• Undervaluation of education
• Physically abusing women in reaction to poverty

Am I missing anything? Seriously.

---

This is how you act when the other guy DOES have weapons of mass destruction.

---

U.S. Will Push for Diplomatic N.Korea Solution - Rice

TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice held talks with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and other officials on Wednesday, and vowed to pursue a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis.

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Lawsuit Challenges Florida Ballot Recount Rules
Wed Jul 7, 2004 02:51 PM ET

By Jane Sutton
MIAMI (Reuters) - Voting rights groups sued Florida election administrators on Wednesday to overturn a rule that prohibits manual recounting of ballots cast with touch-screen machines, a lawsuit with echoes of the state's disputed 2000 presidential election voting.

The lawsuit said the rule was "illogical" and rested on the questionable assumption that electronic voting machines perform flawlessly 100 percent of the time. It also said the rule violated a Florida law that expressly requires manual recounts of certain ballots if the margin in an election is less than 0.25 percent of the votes cast.

---

From affiliate marketing site Commission Junction:

"You can help build a better tomorrow for America by supporting the Republican National Committee! You can be a part of the team working with President Bush and a Republican Congress to fully enact our compassionate conservative agenda. We need your help to continue the advancement of the bold, responsible Bush/Republican agenda for a better tomorrow for every American. We cannot do it without the help of concerned citizens like you. We must give President Bush the support he needs to keep our country moving forward in a positive direction. Only you can help provide the resources needed to re-elect a Republican president and Congress. Your support is urgently needed. This program is to acquire online donations. You will receive 30% of each donation (capped at $300). Please note that search marketing is NOT allowed. Affiliates will NOT be paid for donations generated through search engine marketing"

via Oliver Willis

---

Yeah, I'm going to do my own thoughts on the issues raised by The Cosby Effect. But I saw this in the middle of jimi izrael's latest and found it kinda real:

And you know what else? Where the fuck is Coz living where the eight-year old boys with funny names walk down the street with their clothes on backwards raping little girls while their parents smoke crack and beat each other up on the stoop? Bill needs to step up his game. The truth is that Bill ---just like the rest of his ilk and 99.9 percent of white suburbia---watch just enough BET to be scared shitless.

Perspective, people. Perspective.

A little foreshadowing: There's more than one problem here, and we're pretty much talking about them as the result of some single thing. Well, that's all very Socratic but it's also bullshit.

---

Quote of note:

If there is some good news, it is that the epidemic is stabilising in Africa, Piot said. In East Africa particularly there is a decline in infections among the young, mostly in urban centres.

Moves to Contain AIDS Failing
Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jul 6 (IPS) - Moves to fight AIDS have been failing overall with five million more infections reported last year, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot announced Tuesday.

"It is a failure of reaching infected people, and of treating them," Piot said while releasing the UNAIDS annual report. The report was released ahead of the 15th international AIDS conference to be held in Bangkok July 11-16.

Apart from five million new infections, three million died of AIDS related causes last year, Piot said. Both the infections and the deaths were the highest reported for a single year.

"We are now entering the globalisation phase of the epidemic," Piot said. "So far the epidemic has been largely in sub-Saharan Africa. But now one in four new infections is being reported in Asia, and the fastest growing epidemic is in Eastern Europe."

AIDS is also becoming more and more an issue for women, Piot said. In 1981 AIDS was a phenomenon among white middle class gay men. "Now half of all people infected with HIV are women," Piot said. "In Africa it is 60 percent and increasing."

---

AIDS Catastrophe Set to Hit Asia, Warns U.N.
Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 6 (IPS) - With one in four new HIV cases being reported from Asia, the sprawling continent is on the verge of being felled by an AIDS epidemic that would dwarf the devastation wrought by the killer disease in Africa, experts warned.

''Asia now is facing life and death choices when it comes to the epidemic,'' Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said here Tuesday at the launch of a global report on the pandemic.

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HEALTH-LATIN AMERICA: HIV/AIDS an Unequal Epidemic

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 6 (IPS) - There are 1.6 million people in Latin America living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the AIDS epidemic is growing, and although it is under some control, it continues to hit certain countries and certain groups very hard.

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I wonder would the Vatican pony up if the archdioces got no legal relief.

What will happen, of course, is the legal entity that is the archdiocese will reorganize into two entities: one with all the liabilities and some fraction of the current assets, and the other with no liabilities and the balance of current assets. I leave estimating the ratio as an exercise for the reader.

---

Sex claims 'bankrupt US archdiocese'

A Roman Catholic archdiocese in the US is to declare bankruptcy because it cannot meet the cost of claims by people allegedly abused by its priests.

The Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, will be the first in the US to do so.

The action will suspend the start of a civil trial of a priest accused of molesting more than 50 boys.

Other US Roman Catholic dioceses are also facing bankruptcy, or have had to sell property, to meet the cost of abuse claims brought against priests.

---

US reveals Iraq nuclear operation

The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month.

"This operation was a major achievement," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a statement.

He said it would keep "potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists".

Along with 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" were also removed.

The material was taken from a former nuclear research facility on 23 June, after being packaged by 20 experts from the US Energy Department's secret laboratories.

It was flown out of the country aboard a military plane in a joint operation with the Department of Defense, and is being stored temporarily at a Department of Energy facility.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency - and Iraqi officials were informed ahead of the operation, which happened ahead of the 28 June handover of sovereignty.

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Bloggers come of age in US presidential race

WASHINGTON (AFP) - It started as a way to have a cyber-rant or just share a personal thought, but the blogger has become cutting edge media with a role to play even in the US presidential election race.

…The Republican National Committee, has not yet chosen an official convention blogger for its conference starting August 30. But spokeswoman Alyssa McClenning said, "We're working on getting them credentials, We'd like to see them here."

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Got this by email. I'm actually thinking about going. On the one hand, it's on Thurday. Only folks who are serious about partying or off on Friday hang out Thursday. On the other hand, with Kurtis Blow in the house, I wouldn't even be The Old Guy in the Club.

DEMOCRACY IS LIKE SEX: IT's ONLY GOOD IF YOU PARTICIPATE

The incredible artist line up includes the legendary Peter Rock, Kurtis Blow, Immortal Technique, The Fire Department (Eric & Neal from Soulive), Groove Collective, Anthony B and MORE.

SO GET DOWN TO BROOKLYN AND SHAKE YOUR JUICY TO SOME GOOD GROOVES, because who wants a revolution they can't dance to? It is time to SWING THIS ELECTION OUR WAY... and if you got the groove, you got the power!
Thursday July 8
at VOLUME
Williamsburg Brooklyn
99 N 13th ST
Bedford stop on the L
Doors at 7
Show at 8
Tickets are 20$ at the door
18+

Featuring:
PETE ROCK
KURTIS BLOW
GROOVE COLLECTIVE
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT (Eric & Neal from Soulive) w/ special guest MCs
ANTHONY B
DJ G BROWN
DJ MKL
IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE
CUBAN LINK
AND MORE..

With Special guest speakers

http://www.rezenebe.com/democracy/

The show benefits the following organizations: X The Box, The League of Pissed Off Voters, ActivElement

Music For America will be there registering people to vote

---

July 06, 2004

…except that Follower thing.

20 Questions to a Better Personality

You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

---

As a side note, you should know the reason I don't destroy the weak and unsuspecting is, it's no challenge.

Juliette found this one.

---

Just around the turn of the century, The Ballantine Publishing Group put out a series of books called The Library of Contemporary Thought. One of the first in the series, and apparently the only one that's not out of print, was, Workin' The Chain Gang: Shaking Off The Dead Hand of History by Walter Mosley (yes, the Walter Mosley of "Easy Rawlins" fame).

This is not a book I suggest to a lot of folks because I don't think many are ready for it.

Sections are crystaline, though, and this is one. This is Cosby's message, but it's descriptive of everyone. Somewhat lyric, but some messages are best delivered in that mode.

There's a difference between the person we see in the mirror and those we see in the street. My eyes are mine, as is my stomacheache, my broken heart, my slow descent into old age.

What does this have to do with the new millenium?

Just this: We must recognize the volume and quantity of baggage that we all carry; the years of experience, the quirks of our genes. We're like tiny three-leaf weeds that have beneath us a root system larger than a peacock's fan. What we show, what we see, is nothing compared to what we are. This is why change, real change, is so difficult.

Maybe you should shed a leaf, one three-leaf weed suggests to another.

I've been thinking of moving out from under the shade of that big oak, yet another weed declares.

Anything is possible, but not without the knowledge of our true situation. The three-leaf weed cannot simply move out from under the shade of the all-encompassing oak. She will have to alter the excruciatingly slow process of growth to drag her leaves to a brighter sun. Failing that, she will have to scatter her seed toward the light.

---

Highest rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia are seen in African Americans females aged 15 to 19 years
Tuesday, 6-Jul-2004, by News-Medical

African-American female adolescents who reported that they had high levels of parental supervision had reduced incidence of gonorrhea and chlamydia infections than their peers who reported low parental supervision, according to an article in the July issue of The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

According to the article, the highest rates of gonorrhea (GC) and chlamydia (CT) infections are seen in female adolescents aged 15 to 19 years, with disproportionately high rates in African Americans. Understanding how family life affects the acquisition of STDs among African American females may be helpful to craft interventions to reduce STD acquisition among these adolescents.

…The researchers found that fewer than 20 percent of the participants’ parents were married or living together. The prevalence of GC and CT at the beginning of the study was 30.5 percent (85 of 279 total participants) and the incidence at six months was 20.9 percent (33 of 158 participants who completed the follow-up portion of the study six months later). The researchers found that high levels of perceived parental supervision were linked with reduced GC and CT infections, but high levels of parental communication (talking about STDs) were not.

“Our prospective results showed that high levels of perceived parental supervision led to a reduction in the laboratory-confirmed incidence of GC and CT in African American female adolescents, regardless of their age,” write the authors.

“Parental involvement as a strategy for promoting protective behaviors among adolescents is increasingly a subject of research, and our results provide further evidence that interventions designed to increase parental involvement may affect not only adolescent behavior but disease acquisition as well,” the researchers write.

---

Though Mudbone said it best: "You don't get to be old by being no fool."

---

Old People May Hold Key to Human Success -Study
Tue Jul 6, 2004 05:11 AM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Old people may hold the key to human civilization, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They found evidence that, around 30,000 years ago, many more people started living into old age, in turn fueling a population explosion.

Rachel Caspari of the University of Michigan and Sang-Hee Lee of the University of California at Riverside believe that groups in which old people survived better were more successful, in turn allowing more people to live into old age.

"There has been a lot of speculation about what gave modern humans their evolutionary advantage. This research provides a simple explanation for which there is now concrete evidence -- modern humans were older and wiser," Caspari said.

"We think with increases in longevity two things happened to increase survivorship," Caspari, an anthropologist specializing in evolution, added in a telephone interview.

"First, individual people have more kids because if you live longer you can continue to have kids after your kids have kids. And second, you can contribute to your extended family and increase the survival of your progeny. This can increase population size, and it can happen quite quickly."

The finding, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the so-called "grandma hypothesis," Caspari said.

This credits grandmothers with helping to raise their extended families, contributing to a group's success.

Caspari and Lee studied 768 different human fossils, including examples of Cro-Magnon, which are early Homo

---

The Democratic ad featuring John McCain, direction courtesy of Oliver.

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Australia, U.S. to Work Together on Missile Defense
Tue Jul 6, 2004 06:26 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Australia on Tuesday defended plans to help the United States develop a costly and controversial missile defense system, although it faces no current threat from ballistic missiles.
"From an Australian perspective, we are looking well into the future. We don't have any threat against us from ballistic missiles at this time. But the day might come when we have," Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill told reporters.

He spoke during a visit to U.N. headquarters before going to Washington on Wednesday to sign a memorandum of understanding committing Australia to work with its U.S. ally on research over the next 25 years on missile defense systems.

---

Only 90 non-Iraqis in the 5,700 detainees.

Are we sure Iraq is the central front on The War on Terror©?

Few Detainees in Iraq Are Foreign Fighters
Tue Jul 6, 2004 02:33 PM ET
By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only 90 of the more than 5,700 people in custody in Iraq as security risks are foreign fighters, defense officials said on Tuesday, a figure that suggests the Bush administration may have overstated the role of outside militants in the deadly insurgency.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said the U.S. military command handling security detention facilities in Iraq confirmed a report in USA Today that fewer than 2 percent of those in custody were foreigners.

The small percentage indicates the war in Iraq may not have attracted very many Islamic militants from other countries.

The Bush administration has insisted that foreign insurgents are playing a key role in Iraq, led in part by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Jordanian-born Zarqawi is leader of the Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, which has claimed several deadly suicide bombings, assassinations of Iraqi officials and the kidnapping and beheadings of a South Korean and an American hostage.

Of the 90 foreign captives, about half are from Syria and others are from Arab countries including Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, defense officials told Reuters.

---

Quote of note:

HP said while a wider roll-out schedule for the product has not been finalized, it would like to bring the machine to new markets by year-end. But, the computer maker added, the product will be marketed solely to developing nations.

In the meantime, HP said it is talking to Pan-African organizations such as SchoolNetAfrica to bring the 441 to markets outside South Africa. Impoverished school districts in Western Europe and North America though will have to wait.

Problem of note:

Analysts wonder whether the cost of altruism may be too high for major computer makers whose bottom line depends on selling PCs. It's a common dilemma for companies who seek to sell their products in emerging markets.

"Large hardware vendors are likely to be reticent to introduce machines which might reduce their total sales," said Martin Hingley at market research group IDC.

They may be missing out on a yet-untapped market for small offices and home users, however. "There is a massive opportunity for something similar to this for the home," Hingley added.

PluggedIn: Price of PCs and Corporate Altruism
Tue Jul 6, 2004 01:41 PM ET
By Lucas van Grinsven and Bernhard Warner

AMSTERDAM/LONDON (Reuters) - A pilot project in Africa which aims to provide a single computer that can be used by four school students simultaneously has stumbled across one of the business world's basic facts of life.

Why make a cheap machine when customers in the developed world will pay good money for a more expensive one?

The question hangs over efforts being made by American computer-maker Hewlett Packard (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , which in the last two weeks introduced the Multi-user 441 desktop, a computer based on the open-source Linux operating system.

HP reckons the unique design -- in which four keyboards and monitors are connected to a single central processing unit -- will save schools up to 60 percent of their ballooning computer costs.

But there is a hitch. HP has only made enough machines to sell to cash-starved school districts in South Africa.

As interest in the machine grows, the limited supply has turned a well-intentioned product into a source of confusion among educators and a point of debate among industry analysts, who question whether a major computer maker has an interest in bringing a low-cost alternative to a wider mass market.

"Usually what happens is, if we come across a system that works and works well, we try to spread it out across our (schools) network," said Sara Kyofuna, a member of SchoolNetAfrica, a non-profit organization aiming to bring computers to classrooms in Africa's poorest nations.

---

Quote of note:

Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems denied any conflict between the commission's finding of no Saddam/al Qaeda relationship and the vice president's position. He described Cheney as being "pleased" about the commission's statement and said the message "put to rest a non-story."

No conflict between the Commission's findings and his position? Pleased at the end of a non-story?

Do you really want someone so loosely connected with reality to be "a heartbeat from the Presidency?"

Anyway…

Cheney Had No New Data on Saddam, Al Qaeda-Panel
Tue Jul 6, 2004 08:11 PM ET
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Sept. 11 commission, which reported no evidence of collaborative links between Iraq and al Qaeda, said on Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no more information than commission investigators to support his later assertions to the contrary.

The 10-member bipartisan panel investigating the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington said it reached its conclusion after reviewing available transcripts of Cheney's public remarks on the subject.

The vice president has asserted long-standing links between the former Iraqi president and Osama Bin Laden's Islamist militant network.

"The 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," the commission said in a statement.

Neither commission Chairman Thomas Kean nor Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton were available to elaborate on their panel's statement.

---

African Union to Send Troops to Darfur
Mon Jul 5, 2004 01:56 PM ET

By Opheera McDoom
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - The African Union is preparing to send hundreds of troops to Sudan's strife-torn Darfur region where more than a million people have been uprooted by conflict, a senior AU official said on Monday.

"The protection force will be deployed as soon as possible ... Forces from Rwanda and Nigeria are on standby. They are ready go to," AU Director of Peace and Security Sam Ibok told a news conference.

The Darfur mission, announced on the eve of the annual summit of African leaders in Addis Ababa, will mark the organization's only joint military deployment since it sent peacekeepers to Burundi in 2003.

The AU has deployed unarmed observers to Darfur and had said if all parties agreed it was necessary, it would send armed troops to protect the monitors.

Ibok said he was certain Sudan would not object.

"We are confident that they will accept. It has been difficult, but we are talking to them," Ibok said.

---

AngryDesi pointed out this lovely piece of work

According to American journalists present at the 30-minute hearing of Saddam and 11 former ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral in civilian clothes told camera crews that the judge had demanded that there should be no sound recording of the initial hearing. He ordered crews to unplug their sound wires. Several of the six crews present pretended to obey the instruction. "We learnt later," one of them said, "that the judge didn't order us to turn off our sound. The Americans lied--it was they who wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and pictures."

Initially, crews were told that a US Department of Defence camera crew would provide the sound for their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS crews went to the former occupation authority headquarters--now the US embassy-- they found that three US officers ordered the censorship of tape which showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round his waist which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no reason for this censorship.

---

County of Santa Cruz et. al. v. Ashcroft et. al.

The Drug Policy Alliance, together with the prestigious law firm Bingham McCutchen, criminal defense attorney Gerald Uelmen, and Santa Cruz attorney Ben Rice, is representing the city and county of Santa Cruz, seven terminally and chronically ill patients and the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) in an unprecedented lawsuit against the federal government. The suit, Santa Cruz v. Ashcroft, aims to halt the Bush Administration’s ongoing interference with state medical marijuana laws.

The suit was prompted by a raid that received national attention last September, in which armed agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stormed WAMM, terrorizing residents and patients. WAMM, which provides medical marijuana under California’s 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215), was shut down and several members were detained.

This case is the first in which a public entity sued the federal government on behalf of patients who need medical marijuana. The case also focuses on the constitutional right of chronically and terminally ill patients to control the circumstances of their own pain relief and ultimately their deaths - a right recognized by the Supreme Court. WAMM itself is also unique. Unlike other medical marijuana cooperatives, it doubles as a hospice and does not charge money for its services.

The lawsuit was filed against Attorney General John Ashcroft, DEA Acting Administrator John Brown, and Drug Czar John Walters. The seven patient-plaintiffs in the lawsuit represent more than 200 others served by WAMM. They suffer from HIV/AIDS, cancer, post-polio syndrome, epilepsy, and chronic pain. These patients use medical marijuana to relieve such symptoms as: nausea and vomiting, wasting syndrome, neuropathy, and severe and chronic pain.

---

I removed the lectures and films that have already gone by, and left the four courses for you to investigate at the website if you're interested.

---

Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education: The Ongoing Role of Racism in a "Colorblind" Society
May 19 - June 30, 2004 / July 6 - August 13, 2004
This SUMMER INSTITUTE reviews the role of race in American society since the historic unanimous Supreme Court decision outlawing "separate but equal" education. Four courses, suitable for undergraduates and graduates, will be offered, covering education, housing, poverty/welfare/employment, and the Civil Rights Movement. A university-wide lecture series, featuring prominent civil rights activists, and a race-specific film series, both free and open to the public, will provide additional information and perspectives.

LECTURE SERIES (free and open to the public)
Lectures begin at 8 pm; 1957 E Street, NW, 7th Floor

July 15: School Litigation Since Brown
Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Introduced by Professor Spencer Overton
George Washington University Law School

July 29: The Wages of Sin
Roger Wilkins, George Mason University
Introduced by William L. Taylor
Citizens Commission on Civil Rights
FILM SERIES (free and open to the public)
organized by James Loewen (author of "Lies my Teacher Told Me")
showings begin at 8 pm; 1957 E Street, NW, 7th Floor

July 22: Hoop Dreams (1994)
Directed by Steve James, starring William Gates/ Arthur Agee

August 5: Get on the Bus (1996)
Directed by Spike Lee, starring Ossie Davis

For more information call 202.994.6345 or email [email protected]

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U.S. wages losing ground
Inflation likely to outpace raises next 5 to 10 years

By Art Pine, Bloomberg News
July 3, 2004

Companies are beginning to raise prices as demand for their products strengthens, but that isn't trickling down to U.S. workers in the form of pay increases.

A 2.2 percent rise in wages in the 12 months through May has been more than offset by a 3.1 percent gain in consumer prices.

It's unlikely that employees will get raises that outpace inflation over the next five to 10 years, said William A. Niskanen, former acting chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ronald Reagan administration.

"I don't see any substantial increase in average real wages for some time," said Niskanen, who is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group. Niskanen and other economists cite global competition, which forces companies to keep costs down, shrinking union clout and continuing slack in a labor market with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, up from 4.2 percent when the last recession began in March 2001.

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Pill Thefts Alter the Look of Rural Drugstores
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

IKEVILLE, Ky., July 5 (AP) - Carrie Cinnamond realized just how much times had changed when she had a steel vault hauled into her pharmacy in eastern Kentucky.

Two break-ins in two weeks by burglars in search of painkillers had forced her to adopt many of the same security measures that are used at the bank down the street.

Ever since prescription painkillers like OxyContin became the drugs of choice among dealers and addicts in Appalachia, the days of small-town pharmacists' dispensing medicines from behind an ordinary counter have become a quaint memory.

Now many pharmacies have turned into virtual fortresses. Some have bars over the windows. The most sought-after drugs are stored in vaults. The pharmacists often work behind safety glass, and some have even armed themselves. Surveillance cameras and alarm systems monitor every spot.

Pharmaceutical companies have also adopted practices from the banking industry, delivering pills in armored trucks protected by armed guards and tracked by satellites on carefully chosen routes.

"We feel very strongly that we have a commitment to protect the public and to make sure these drugs are available for people who need them," said Aaron Graham, vice president for corporate security at Purdue Pharma, the Connecticut-based manufacturer of OxyContin.

It was the popularity of OxyContin that forced Ms. Cinnamond to take extra measures. Burglars broke into her pharmacy twice in 2001, and tried unsuccessfully a third time after she had upgraded security.

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To the Editor:

Re "Dude, Where's That Elite?," by Barbara Ehrenreich (column, July 1):

I am one of those Americans the Republicans seem to be confident of having squarely in their camp. My husband is a blue-collar worker; we do not have college degrees; and we live in a rural area in a mobile home!

There are many people like us, however, who could never consider themselves conservatives.

We are card-carrying A.C.L.U. members, and we don't listen to country music. We have never been to a Nascar event, and we oppose the strong-arm tactics of the N.R.A. So by a Republican definition, our beliefs are more those of the "liberal elite."

Michael Moore speaks to our truth, not Bill O'Reilly. Republicans, beware! Dude, we are the "trailer park" elite!

SHERRY FORLAND
Bloomfield, N.M., July 1, 2004

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Campaign Politics Seen as Bottleneck for Welfare Law
By ROBERT PEAR and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

WASHINGTON, July 5 — Welfare programs around the country are in limbo because of a stalemate in Congress that has prompted state officials to postpone new investments in child care, expansions of job training and most other initiatives for welfare recipients and low-wage workers.

Congressional Republicans insist that stricter work requirements must be part of any effort to renew the 1996 welfare law. Democrats, including some who voted against that measure, now embrace it, saying only minor changes are needed.

Major provisions of the law were scheduled to expire in September 2002. Since then, Congress has passed seven bills extending the program, typically for three months at a time. Lawmakers, who return to work on Tuesday, say they see little chance for approval of a long-term reauthorization this year.

If the stalemate persists, states could lose money. The House and the Senate have tentatively agreed to continue providing $16.5 billion a year for the main welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But with large budget deficits looming, lawmakers say, Congress will be under intense pressure to cut this amount next year.

"Our fear is that if you go past the elections, things will change — things will change for the worse," said Marc S. Ryan, Connecticut's budget director.

Representative Wally Herger, a California Republican who is chairman of a subcommittee that handles welfare legislation, agreed, saying, "As time passes, budget pressures will squeeze tighter and tighter.''

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substantive law
n. law which establishes principles and creates and defines rights limitations under which society is governed, as differentiated from "procedural law," which sets the rules and methods employed to obtain one's rights and, in particular, how the courts are conducted.

The Conservative attack on civil rights takes the form of disabling the procedural law by underfunding and bad definitions. But the method has general utility to those who want their way but are too cowardly to just say what their way is. Case in point:

Drugmakers Prefer Silence On Test Data
Firms Violate U.S. Law By Not Registering Trials

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A01

The pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly violated federal law by failing to disclose the existence of large numbers of its clinical trials to a government database, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Doctors and patients say that compliance with the law would go a long way toward addressing their growing concerns that they are not being given the full picture about the effectiveness of many drugs because they are not told about drug trials that fail. The issue has gained urgency with recent disclosures that the publicly available research on treating children with antidepressants obscured the fact that in most studies, the drugs were no better than sugar pills. Drugmakers chose not to publish those studies.

The 1997 law is so little known that scientific journal editors and professional medical associations have recently debated whether to create a system of private incentives for disclosure of trials. When she was told the law already requires companies to register trials, Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said, "That's a surprise to me. Tell me why it's not enforced."

Although the law was primarily passed for other reasons, DeAngelis said it could very well address her concerns.

The FDA acknowledges it has not enforced the law -- officials said the statute did not spell out penalties or explicitly give the agency authority to crack down on violators.

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Airport Screeners' New Guard Private Security Firms Want to Replace Government in 2005

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page E01

After suffering sharp ridicule from the public and near extermination by the federal government more than two years ago, the airline screening industry is seeking a comeback at U.S. airports.

The federal law passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that banned private companies from airports allows them to return by 2005 if they are approved by the government. The provision has led a few security firms -- many of them new to the business -- to begin pitching themselves to undecided airports as a class above the old guard of airport screening companies such as Argenbright Security Inc., which took the brunt of criticism after 9/11.

"The business prior to 9/11 didn't have the best reputation," said Nancy Montgomery, vice president of strategic accounts at Barton Protective Services Inc., a company that employs security guards at office buildings and would like to get into the airport security business. "It's a very different program now."

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The Untold 9/11 Story
VIEW FROM THE RIGHT
- Adam Sparks, Special to SF Gate
Monday, June 28, 2004

…New Evidence of Iraq-Al Qaeda Link

One problem is there's a reason they're not final reports: Not all the pertinent information is included. "There's new intelligence, and this has come since our [most recent] staff report has been written," former U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman announced on "Meet the Press."

Lehman explained that the newly captured documents "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda. One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of lieutenant colonel." An unnamed source in the administration has said Lehman may have made a misidentification and the matter is still under investigation.

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A new parade for Old Glory
Foreign flags touch a July 4th nerve in Fremont
- Jim Herron Zamora, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2004

The Stars and Stripes flew everywhere on Sunday, but Old Glory had plenty of company in Fremont -- the flags of Italy, Qatar, Mongolia and Ireland were among 25 nations represented in a parade that's caused hurt feelings all around and raised the timeliest of questions: What does it mean to be an American?

Vice Mayor Steve Cho's proposal to include flags of other nations started innocently enough two weeks ago, but angered residents who said America's Independence Day would be diluted.

The controversy grew until a plan to have the Boy Scouts carry the foreign flags was jettisoned early last week. But the flagging flag vision was revived Friday when volunteers agreed to carry the symbols of 25 countries -- along with American flags -- along 10 blocks of Fremont Boulevard.

There were only a handful of "boos" from the crowd of about 8,000, and a police officer who accompanied the group said there no problems. But the gesture still riled some.

"This is our birthday -- not theirs,'' said Rob Murdy, 49, who's lived in Fremont 22 years. "I'm all for diversity and letting people come here and keep their traditions. But this is July Fourth, and I think the American flag doesn't need to share this day with the flag of any other country. It's just not right."

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Kerry picks Edwards for Democratic ticket

Kerry planned to announce his pick by e-mail to supporters, then at a rally in Pittsburgh. He settled on Edwards on Monday night, said two senior Democrats who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Quote of note:

No one will be fooled by the claim that we are merely acceding to the demands of the new Iraqi government, since its leader, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has long been on the CIA payroll and was essentially appointed to his post by the U.S.

Even a Tyrant Is Entitled to Due Process
Hussein's trial is shaping up as just U.S. theatrics.

July 6, 2004

Has anyone noticed that the charges leveled last week against Saddam Hussein bore no relation to the reasons offered by President Bush for his preemptive invasion of Iraq? Not a word about Hussein being linked to terrorist attacks on the United States or having weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to our nation's security.

That is because after seven months of interrogation, the United States appears to have learned nothing from Hussein or any other source in the world that supports the president's decision to go to war. Washington turned Hussein over to the Iraqis without charging its infamous prisoner of war with any of these crimes. And even the Iraqis did not charge him with being behind the insurgency that almost daily claims American lives.

It's a travesty, if you think about it. The fact is that the United States, which holds itself up as the exemplar of democracy for the entire Middle East, held Hussein in captivity for seven months, virtually incommunicado, without access to lawyers of his choosing and without charging him with a crime or releasing him at the end of the occupation, as required by the Geneva Convention. If the U.S. believes, as most of the world does, that Hussein committed crimes against humanity, then he is entitled to the same international standards of due process that the U.S. and its allies applied to top Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It is well established in such cases that justice will not be served by turning Hussein over to be tried by his former political rivals or his victims.

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Living Separately and Unequally
By Sheryll D. Cashin

…How can American society be called democratic when the ability to live in a safe, decent area with high-quality public schools is limited largely to those who can afford exclusive enclaves? Although we have eliminated Jim Crow laws, public and private institutional policies tend to steer us apart. From local zoning codes that prevent mixed- income or affordable housing, to private databases that skew public funding and private development toward affluent, heavily white neighborhoods, to pervasive steering of black and Latino home buyers and renters to "appropriate" areas, our policy choices result in communities of great abundance and great need.

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A Crucial Look at Torture Law
By John C. Yoo

July 6, 2004

Among the Justice Department memos released recently by the Bush administration, the one that generated the most criticism, dated Aug. 1, 2002, considered the definition of torture under federal criminal laws.

Its critics have attacked the differences between the memo's conclusions and the definition of torture in the 1984 Convention Against Torture. They've attacked its discussion of possible defenses against prosecution and of the scope of the commander in chief's power. Most of all, they have attacked the fact that it did not consider policy or moral issues.

The Justice Department's office of legal counsel, in which I served, produced the memo. It is important to understand the memo's function so that future administrations may receive such candid advice on the most delicate and important kinds of legal questions.

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Quote of note:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has acknowledged that the status quo isn't working. " 'Tough on crime' should not be a substitute for thoughtful reflection or lead us into moral blindness," he said last month in accepting recommendations for change from the American Bar Assn. Among the group's sound suggestions: repeal mandatory minimums, create treatment alternatives to prison for some drug offenders and those with mental illness, and better prepare inmates for life after prison.

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Enough Abuse for Everyone

July 6, 2004

Federal prison sentences in the United States are rigidly defined, often disproportionate to the crime and too long. This general unfairness aside, the cost to taxpayers is needlessly high. Even so, lawmakers scared to death of being viewed as soft on crime won't touch sentencing laws. They should grab the opportunity and cover provided by the Supreme Court and a pair of federal judges to change the federal law and state laws spawned by it.

Judges in Boston and Salt Lake City, in separate recent cases, ruled that the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 was unconstitutional in its harshness. The Supreme Court's criticism last month focused on state laws but nonetheless signals Congress to fix the law.

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July 05, 2004

Aaron at Uppity-Negro:

A request
July 04, 2004
And I hardly think it's an unreasonable one, but I have been given to understand that my take on such things is often skewed. Cynthia McKinney Wins Support of Congresswomen:

On Saturday June 26, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was visited by Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California’s 35th Congressional District, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California’s 9th Congressional District, who all came to Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District to lend their support to McKinney’s bid to regain her seat.
I realize it's entirely too much to ask that our white liberal "allies" sacrifice any political capital towards this effort, but if it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you not, you know, actively work against it?

I know, I know, it's a lot to ask, to allow us to make our own fucking decisions about who represents us, and we're so ungrateful, after all you've done for us, and she/we are so clearly delusional, and blah de blah.

You know what, though?

And if you read Uppity-Negro with any regularity you know what comes next. Which is one reason I links to him periodically.

And to any Conservatives that get happy about the above, this:

I swear to God, the difference between you and the conservatives/Republicans is measurable in fucking millimeters.

There. I feel much better now.

…ain't exactly a ringing endorsement of YOUR positions either.

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Steve Gilliard

Cosby's whole rant is this internalized feeling that black people should somehow achieve perfection. That we all need to "stick together" like the Jews. Which is insane. Jewish social life is riven with debate. There is nothing like the ideological conformity common in black political life. What's the old joke, if you have two Jews, you have three arguments? So this demand for perfection seems to arise from time to time, driven by myth and unrealistic expectations.

…What most disturbs me is the way Cosby is SO eager to cut the black middle class slack for abandoning it's brothers and sisters, building gated communities, and still lagging behind in test scores. There is still a gap in achievement even when economics is not a factor. And it isn't because blacks are stupid, we know they aren't. Racism might play a role. The black middle class got their money and they ran to suburbia, even when racism limited their options. Look at Long Island. The most racially segregated place in America. You can tell if someone is black by the town they live in, Hempstead, Wyandanch, Freeport, Roosevelt. The same crappy school districts, same poverty you get in the Bronx, except people are far more hostile to change. Before he lectures the poor on their shortcomings, he might want to lecture his peers and the middle class on theirs.

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Jason at Negro, Please:

Why should I care about John Kerry or the Democrats? I'm not a liberal, I'm a fuckin' progressive. I don't want to do politics, I want to do something. Something that matters. Truly, the last 4 years have made me want to be less involved in the political process, not more.

S-Train talked about the "Don't Cares"...I'm not quite there but, damn, if I'm just disillusioned with the whole system. So rarely do I hear politicians talk about people anymore. I never hear politicians make real demands of the American people or say something of substance. I'm so fuckin' soundbited out that I want to scream.

I'm desperate for some leadership. Clamoring for it, really. I want more Arianna's. Not just a policy wonk or a pundit or a talking head. I want some real down in the trenches work for the future.

I want somebody to make me pay attention. To get me up out of this arm chair and act.

Because, I'm sorry, I love all you bright eyed Move On folks and everything but damn, I'm really not trying to come to your houses with my little name tag and talk about the genius of Michael Moore.

I want some better shit to do.

I am trying to find some spark.

I don't want to feel this way.

In these difficult times, I want to have feelings of optimism and be called upon to do more and be more.

"We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people" - Senator Robert Kennedy

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Get in Where Ya Fit In:

THE "N WORD".... Shhh....

Either way it got me thinking about the issue and truthfully I'm of mixed opinions on the subject. I have a lot of "hip" white friends (tongue planted firmly in check) who like to ask questions about black culture. Unfortunately our society is still very segregated (Not legally. Just based off when it was legal) so blacks get a lot of their info on whites from TV and I think whites get even more which is never gonna be accurate. Not a knock on my white friends but I guessing this occurs a lot... A minority culture is often acutely aware of the majority culture, even obsessed with it to a degree. The majority culture is often oblivious to anything outside of their culture.

So I get a lot of hesitant, and probing questions like; "Ummm... Mark, I was just wondering .... Umm.... Why do uh ..... black people you know...... call each other.... ummm.... Nigger?". Well first of all, no black person I've ever heard of calls anybody a Nigger. We use the term nigga. It's taking a word and re-branding it. Second, I'm assuming the majority of white people know the answer but I'll explain it to the one's who don't since I still occasionally get the question. Since blacks were treated so awfully in this country for so long, that word was a potent symbol of all that discrimination and oppression. When the time came for a lot of lifting of the most heinous of these forms of racism, the word was turned back in on itself and used as a badge of honor and repudiation. Basically saying, I've taken your worst and survived it. You can't use that word as a weapon to bludgeon us anymore. Kinda noble in a way. Let's call that the "old school nigga" but I'll get back to that. I occasionally use the term in the "old school" way by which I simply mean a person who lived through the hard times of racism and overcame it and what that communal experience entailed.

Now once that is answered, (inexplicably in my mind) the next question is always well since you guys say it, why can't I? The sentence is never phrased that way of course. It's always asked in another context, but that's what is really meant. Why are you able to say something I can't?

Excellent post.

…Let's fast forward to the late 80's and early 90's and what I call the "New School" usage of nigga. Basically what America, and black people in particular found out is that you can't reverse the effect of hundreds of years of racism in a nice 20 year little span. Being the pessimist that I am, it's gonna take centuries of dedication to fix centuries of hate, but that's just my opinion.

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I get the whole Stargate SG-1 series on DVD and what does the Sci Fi Channel do?

TO: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Dr. Elizabeth Weir, Stargate Command General George Hammond, USAF On behalf of the people of the United States, I congratulate you and the Stargate SG-1 team for discovering the hidden Antarctic base of the Ancients, the creators of the Stargates. We now possess the knowledge to travel farther through the cosmos than ever before.

Dr. Weir is assembling an elite team to explore — for the first time — outside our own galaxy. The Stargate Command group currently in Antarctica is already discovering unique new technologies that will aid us as we strike out to the Pegasus Galaxy and beyond.

Yet we must remember this: With all these boundless possibilities will come new threats. Is the balance of risk worth it? I wholeheartedly say yes. And if I may add, I envy those about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

July 15th is the series premiere. Will I watch this? Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope sh…wait, that's not right…

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A New Way to Kill Mosquitoes
By TERESA RIORDAN

WITH the threat of West Nile virus and the invasion of fierce Asian tiger mosquitoes in his neighborhood in Arlington, Va., Donald R. Hall was beginning to worry about his young granddaughter playing outside.

So Mr. Hall, 60, who retired as an electromechanical engineer in the military and intelligence sectors to spend his days dreaming up inventions in his backyard skunk works, went on the offensive several years ago in the war against the mosquito.

Mr. Hall recently received United States patent 6,708,443, a wide-ranging patent covering several approaches that he contends might help control mosquito populations across wide areas such as wetlands or regions in Africa where mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria are rampant. Most of Mr. Hall's approaches rely on the same principal: killing the mosquito eggs rather than the mosquitoes themselves.

"They will breed in a bottle cap," Mr. Hall said. "The idea is to interrupt the life cycle."

…Another device Mr. Hall has invented is a shallow tray powered by what is known as a bimetal coil. As rainwater stagnates in the tray, which has a fine mesh at the bottom, it becomes an attractive spot for mosquitoes to deposit their eggs.

The coil - made of two different metals strapped together, each with different expansion and contraction rates - expands as it warms during the day, pushing the mesh above the water line. The mesh captures the eggs, which bake in the sun during the day. In the evening, the coil cools and contracts, pulling the mesh back under the water, waiting for more unsuspecting mosquitoes to lay their eggs.

Mr. Hall said such devices would require little or no maintenance and would be cheap to build, making them appealing for the developing world or for places where they would need to be distributed widely, such as wetlands.

"You could give them away," he said.

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Quote of note:

There's a lesson, too, for conservatives and other hard-liners: Libertarians are not to be despised even when infuriatingly contrarian. Remember our Jeremiah-like presence in your ranks on the privacy issue when you demand a national ID, or when you hamstring embryonic stem-cell research, or when you make a show of festooning the Constitution with a marriage amendment.

Why do I fear no libel suit from that wimpish professional hysteric, that antebellum Southern belle suffering the vapors, that aider of terrorists? Because I'm him. (It's uncool to say I told you so, but I have not had many chances to say it lately.)

Rights of Terror Suspects
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens."

So wrote a purpling libertarian kook on Nov. 15, 2001, the day after President Bush issued an executive order cracking down on suspected terrorist captives. "At a time when even liberals are debating the ethics of torture of suspects," this soft-on-terror wimp went on, "weighing the distaste for barbarism against the need to save innocent lives — it's time for conservative iconoclasts and card-carrying hard-liners to stand up for American values."

They did not, of course; hard-line commentators dismissed the wimp as a "professional hysteric" akin to "antebellum Southern belles suffering the vapors." Attorney General John Ashcroft said such diatribes "aid terrorists."

At the same time, most liberals — supposed advocates of the rights of the accused — did not want to appear to be insufficiently outraged at terrorists. Only two months after the shock of 9/11, with polls showing strong public approval of Bush's harsh measures to protect us, these liberals turned out to be civil liberty's summer soldiers. No senator from Massachusetts rose promptly to challenge Bush's draconian order, thereby to etch a profile in courage.

But one cabinet member reacted curiously. Despite the White House order to give enemy combatants no legal rights in what the vaporing wimp sniffled were "kangaroo courts," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld convened a panel of serious outside lawyers aware of the wartime mistakes of Lincoln, Wilson and F.D.R. They reshaped the Bush order to give accused noncitizens before military tribunals the rights to counsel, public trial, appellate review and other protections in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Then Ashcroft Justice dug in its heels and the system stalled for years. Military tribunals of aliens captured in Afghanistan were placed in abeyance while Justice claimed in court that the president has the authority to impose open-ended detention on citizens and noncitizens alike. Such wholesale denial of due process is what the soft-on-terror professional hysteric had called "the seizure of dictatorial power."

Last week the Supreme Court that helped put Bush in office intervened to prevent his abuse of it. "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in agreement with the majority, "has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive."

The right of a prisoner — even a noncitizen suspected of plotting to blow up a city — to take his case

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Mutilating Africa's Daughters: Laws Unenforced, Practices Unchanged
By TINA ROSENBERG

Mariam Bagayoko was a powerful and respected person in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Now she is shunned and criticized by many of her neighbors. Ms. Bagayoko used to perform what the West has come to know as female genital mutilation, a practice inflicted on more than 90 percent of girls in Mali.

In 1988, she began to get visits, sometimes twice a week, from Kadidia Sidibe, the director of a Bamako women's group opposed to the practice. At first, Ms. Bagayoko hid when her visitor approached. But after seven years, Ms. Sidibe's photos and videos of mutilated girls with serious health problems finally persuaded her to stop.

Today she runs a group of former circumcisers, as they are called in much of Africa, who talk to Mali's women in prenatal care clinics and at markets, and train teenagers to speak in schools. When she tries to convince women not to mutilate their daughters, Ms. Bagayoko says, she may be accused of betraying their culture for Western money and depriving girls of the chance to marry, thus condemning them to poverty.

Earlier this month in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Bagayoko met eight other former circumcisers from various countries who now work against the practice. The meeting was organized by Equality Now, a New York-based group that finances African women's organizations that fight female genital mutilation. At least 130 million women in Africa have been circumcised, and two million more girls undergo the practice every year in 28 African countries, mostly in the continent's north and central areas.

Female circumcision is just beginning to get attention in Africa, and about 13 countries now punish the practice with jail terms. But with the exception of Burkina Faso, where the government has vigorously enforced the laws, the laws are largely irrelevant.

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Expendable Women

One of the uglier aspects of the Bush administration's assault on women's reproductive rights is its concerted undermining of the United Nations Population Fund based on the false accusation that it supports coerced abortions in China.

The fund supports programs in some 141 countries to advance poor women's reproductive health, reduce infant mortality, end the sexual trafficking of women and prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS. Yet under pressure from conservative religious groups, the administration is expected to withhold the $34 million that Congress appropriated this year for these vital efforts, much as President Bush blocked the $34 million Congress approved in 2002 and last year's $25 million allocation.

The damage does not end there. The administration has lately stepped up its effort to isolate the Population Fund by quietly threatening the financing of other leading groups, including Unicef and the World Health Organization, if they continue to work with the fund. Take the chilling example of Marie Stopes International. Last year the State Department discontinued support for a small but well-regarded private AIDS program for African and Asian refugees run by Marie Stopes and other groups, citing Marie Stopes's cooperating in China with the Population Fund.

Just last month, three federal agencies — the United States Agency for International Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — pulled their support from a major international conference on health issues, apparently owing to the inclusion of speakers from the Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

To justify these destructive machinations, the Bush administration has perpetuated a bogus accusation that the Population Fund has either stood by or helped with coerced abortions in China. This disregards America's own relationship with China, never mind that none of the money approved by Congress would go to China, or that the State Department's investigating team found no evidence that the Population Fund has supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. It also disregards the Population Fund's crucial role in helping to drive down China's abortion rate below the level of the United States and in encouraging China to devote new attention to combating H.I.V. and AIDS.

In truth, the administration's targeting of the Population Fund is not really about abortion. It is an attack on comprehensive family planning and women's sexual and reproductive autonomy, driven largely by right-wing ideologues unswervingly opposed to all forms of family planning and contraceptive use. As a result, the United States is helping to deny vulnerable women living in isolated rural areas essential information and services needed to avoid pregnancy and disease.

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The rather longish article has the summary.

Quote of note:

Pragmatism rather than doctrine seems to be the order of the day at the court now. Justice O'Connor, perhaps the court's leading pragmatist, cast only five dissenting votes in the entire term, far fewer than anyone else, and was in the majority in 13 of the 18 most closely decided cases, more often than any other justice. She formed strategic alliances with other justices, for example writing an unusual joint opinion with Justice Stevens that upheld the central portions of the campaign finance law.

The Year Rehnquist May Have Lost His Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, July 4 — Although it has been 10 years since its membership last changed, the Supreme Court that concluded its term last week was, surprisingly and in important ways, a new court.

It is too soon to say for sure, but it is possible that the 2003-04 term may go down in history as the one when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist lost his court.

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U.S. Steers Consumers Away From IE

Thu Jul 1, 7:00 PM ET Add Technology - TechWeb to My Yahoo!
Loring Wirbel, EE Times

The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer

The Microsoft browser, the government warned, cannot protect against vulnerabilities in its Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 server programs, which a team of hackers allegedly based in Russia has exploited with a Java script that is appended to Web sites.

The particular virus initiated this week inserts Java script into certain Web sites. When users visit those sites, it initiates pop-up ads on home and office computers, and allows keystroke analysis of user information. The target is believed to be credit card numbers. CERT estimated that as many as tens of thousands of Web sites may be affected.

CERT said vulnerabilities in IIS and IE could include MIME-type determination, the DHTML object model, the IE domain/zone security model and ActiveX scripts. Alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Netscape may not protect users, the agency warned, if those browsers invoke ActiveX control or HTML rendering engines.

The only defense may be completely disabling scripting and ActiveX controls.

Microsoft said earlier in the week it is working with law enforcement officials to identify the source of the latest Internet virus.

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Obviously, Dr. Cosby was addressing Black folks last week.

Washington Post:

In an interview yesterday, Cosby said he is speaking out because dropout, illiteracy and teen pregnancy rates are at "epidemic" levels among less-affluent African Americans. "You can't get me to soften my message," he said. "If I had said [it] nicely, then people wouldn't have listened."

But I believe he intended a slightly more subversive impact for the media.

Vanessa Jones at the Boston Globe:

In a pause-laden nine-minute conversation yesterday, Cosby eluded attempts to schedule a face-to-face interview to speak more in depth about these matters. One reason why? "I have other things to do," he said brusquely.

He was willing to entertain a few questions, such as: Why are you talking about these issues at this moment?

Cosby: "I'm not being combative; I'm trying to understand something. When you say `at this moment,' what do you mean?"

The reporter said that "at this moment" means now, as opposed to last year or two years ago. "What I'm talking about specifically is the dropout rate in these areas," he said. "And, um, why now? Because I feel that it has reached epidemic proportions."

Cosby said newspapers should go into neighborhoods and do stories about the problems he's talking about. "There are many, many wonderful, educated people in the [black] community," he says, "who will be willing to talk to you and tell you their first-hand experience -- teachers -- their first-hand experience, and if they want to withhold their names, etc., etc, whatever. But it's not just a matter of Bill Cosby."

And, no, a last-ditch appeal to Cosby to use his celebrity status to explore these issues doesn't change his mind.

"I don't accept that I have to be the fulcrum of this," he said. If "the things that are tied into helping this thing grow and get worse are not addressed, then so be it.

"Maybe it's more interesting [for newspapers] to talk about [these problems] or write about them when [people] are incarcerated or when a parent is beating a child to death."

Another request elicits the comment: "I gotta go."

Really interesting because he had to know the attention his statements would attract. By giving no in-depth follow-up at the height of the interest I think he hoped to drive the media to those "many, many wonderful, educated people in the [black] community."

The problem is, the only thing new about what Dr. Cosby said is that Dr. Cosby said it. The actual issues at hand are not very interesting to the mainstream because they think them specific to Black folks. So, the news becomes "Bill Cosby said this!" That, specifically, is what the media is following up on.

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Quote of note:

The UNDP report is excellent in presenting the problems: Slow economic growth, profound inequalities, and ineffective legal systems and social services are triggering popular unrest and giving way to a new willingness to trust in those discredited old populist caudillos.

Only 43 percent of Latin Americans are supportive of democracy, while 30.5 percent express ambivalence, and 26.5 percent hold nondemocratic views. Fully 54.7 percent say they would support an authoritarian regime over the present democratic forms if authoritarian rule could resolve their economic problems. The first generation of Latin Americans to come of age in functioning democracies has experienced virtually no per capita income growth during their lifetimes and only widening and world-record disparities in the distribution of national income.

LATIN AMERICA REFUSES TO CONSIDER WORLD'S SUCCESSFUL MODELS

Fri Jul 2, 8:00 PM ET

By Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- Think of these questions as presenting a challenging puzzle for our times, to be answered -- or not -- at our own risk:

What part of the world has gone through such an historic political transformation that it is today governed almost entirely by democratically chosen leaders? Which region has persistently said no to military rule over the last 25 years and seen a constant improvement in voting rights, fair and free elections, an independent press and most other basic civil liberties?

And which geographical and cultural grouping of nations of the world -- blessed with every kind of natural and mineral riches, plus an intelligent people -- now has a population in which fewer than 50 percent say they prefer democracy to authoritarian rule, and in which a majority would choose a dictator over an elected leader because they remain so backward and impoverished?

The answer is simple, but deeply disturbing because we are talking about Latin America, the sister continent to North America and the one part of the developing world that is of Western (and, of course, Indian and African) heritage.

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Fahrenheit 9/11 Breaks Records in Military Town

"'Fahrenheit 9/11' sets record"
By Matt Leclercq / The Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina)
June 29, 2004

…Many were like Natalie Sorton. She is 25 and married to an infantryman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I want to see what my husband is fighting for," Sorton said Monday before going into the theater with a friend, Kathy Norris.

Another military spouse had recommended the movie. While Sorton described herself as a moderate Republican, she said she gained respect for Moore after seeing his last documentary, "Bowling for Columbine."

…"I think it's going to open my eyes a little, and that worries me," Sorton said before taking her seat.

…After Monday's showing, Sorton emerged with a grim face. She said she plans to buy the film on DVD and give it to everyone she knows.

"I'm disgusted," she said. "Disgusted."

The film changed her opinions on the war in Iraq by convincing her that oil and corporate interests were behind decision-making, she said. Worries over whether Moore would vilify soldiers were unfounded.

"I don't think they portrayed them as bad," she said. "I don't think it portrayed them as not doing their jobs. It showed them doing what they're told.

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My First Wild Week with "Fahrenheit 9/11"... By Michael Moore

Friends,

Where do I begin? This past week has knocked me for a loop. "Fahrenheit 9/11," the #1 movie in the country, the largest grossing documentary ever. My head is spinning. Didn't we just lose our distributor 8 weeks ago? Did Karl Rove really fail to stop this? Is Bush packing?

Each day this week I was given a new piece of information from the press that covers Hollywood, and I barely had time to recover from the last tidbit before the next one smacked me upside the head:

** More people saw "Fahrenheit 9/11" in one weekend than all the people who saw "Bowling for Columbine" in 9 months.

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" broke "Rocky III’s" record for the biggest box office opening weekend ever for any film that opened in less than a thousand theaters.

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" beat the opening weekend of "Return of the Jedi."

** "Fahrenheit 9/11" instantly went to #2 on the all-time list for largest per-theater average ever for a film that opened in wide-release.

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World's Poorest Nations on Slippery Slope

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 2 (IPS) - The meeting was billed as a major gathering of political and economic leaders -- mostly trade and foreign ministers -- from the world's 50 poorest nations.

”Among unprecedented global prosperity,” they concluded at the end of a weeklong high-level meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on Friday, ”the world's poorest nations were more vulnerable now than ever before.”

The 50 nations categorised as least developed countries (LDCs), with a total population of over 700 million people, range from Afghanistan and Angola to Sierra Leone and Somalia. And 34 of the 50 are from sub-Saharan Africa.

The only bright spot was that two of the LDCs -- the Maldives in South Asia and Cape Verde in Africa -- have shown such remarkable economic resilience that they are both on the verge of ”graduating” from the ranks of LDCs to that of developing nations.

This is a break from the past where the number of LDCs has kept increasing over the last two decades -- from about 26 in the 1980s to 50 last year -- symbolising the worsening economic situation in the developing world.

So far, the only LDC that has bucked the trend and graduated to the developing world is Botswana.

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The protocol establishing the Peace and Security Council says that a Peace Fund which receives allocations from the AU budget will finance interventions in Africa. Voluntary contributions can also be made by AU member states and ”other sources” such as the private sector or individuals.

But, Chirambo notes that most African states are short of money without the added burden of footing the bill for a standby force.

”In theory, this is a laudable move,” he says. ”But we should be under no illusions that this is by any means a straightforward adventure. Peace building and security operations are extremely costly.”

As a result, Africa may find itself turning to wealthy countries again to raise money for aircraft carriers, helicopter gunships - and the salaries of troops. It's a prospect that alarms political analyst Thomas Deve. ”Africans will never progress by relying on handouts from the West,” he told IPS.

An African Army, for Africans?

Wilson Johwa

BULAWAYO, Jul 2 (IPS) - As the third annual summit of the African Union (AU) draws closer, the spotlight is falling on the organisation's newest branch: the Peace and Security Council, and its proposed standby force.

Inaugurated in May at the AU headquarters in Ethiopia, the 15-member council will be advised by a panel comprising five Africans of repute. Analysts hope the council - which still has to be ratified by a majority of AU members - will prove a more powerful and efficient agency than other bodies set up to resolve the continent's woes.

The council aims to provide a ”timely and efficient response to conflict and crisis situations” on the continent, such as unconstitutional changes of government, humanitarian and natural disasters.

Inevitably, questions have been raised about funding for the standby force that will give council the muscle it needs to contain such situations.

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BBC 'should close websites'

Read the DCMS statement

Dominic Timms
Monday July 5, 2004

The government has ordered the BBC to redefine the remit of its online services after an independent report into its internet activities said many of the corporation's websites were too commercial and should be closed.
In a long awaited report, headed by former Trinity Mirror chief executive Philip Graf, the BBC was told it had four months to respond to criticisms that parts of its vast online service could not be justified by its public service remit.

Sites covering areas such as fantasy football and local entertainment listings were not "sufficiently distinctive from commercial alternatives, or were inadequately associated with public service purpose to be justified by the remit" said Mr Graf.

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Yesterday's Meet the Press statement was disavowed by Al-Sadr…reannouncing previous announcements…

You know, given that his crew was hand picked by the USofA it wouldn'r surprise me to find them as mendacious as the Bushstas.

Anyway…

Iraq Militant Cleric Vows to Keep Fighting
Iraqi Militant Shiite Cleric Al-Sadr Pledges to Continue Fighting, Despite Power Handover

The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq July 5, 2004 — Militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led an April uprising that left hundreds dead, called Iraq's new interim government "illegitimate" and pledged to resist occupation forces to the "last drop of blood."

On Monday, a government spokesman said Iraq arrested in May four men accused of involvement in the beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg.

The arrests had been previously announced, and it was not immediately clear why the government announced them again Monday.

The cleric's comments apparently reversed earlier conciliatory statements he made to the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Members of al-Sadr's movement had also suggested they might transform their militia into a political party.

"We pledge to the Iraqi people and the world to continue resisting oppression and occupation to our last drop of blood," al-Sadr said in a statement distributed Sunday by his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where his al-Mahdi militia battled American troops until a cease-fire last month.

"Resistance is a legitimate right and not a crime to be punished," he said.

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July 04, 2004

Rhetoric and Race
i've been stewing over the Cosby speech (now speeches) for a while now. in my inarticulate rage, i've been trying to figure out just why the Cos' words irk my last nerve so badly. some of it rests upon the definition my friends and i came up with to define the axis of black culture: we decided that the one trait all blacks had in common was a shared experience of oppression. that trait encompasses liberals, conservatives, da black bougeoisie, da ghetto fabulosi, the niggerati and the skreet kids - a multiplicity of worldviews shaped by the one experience.

if so, where does the Cos stand? Ta-Nehisi Coates hit on it back in May. there is a core of black elitism; one that is ashamed of and hyper-aware of their "country cousins". they exemplify a tried-and-true method immigrants have used to enter mainstream society. let's call it the 'American Way'; assimilate supremacist attitudes towards blacks and black culture in order to gain acceptance.

so what, if any, difference is there between Cos and a white supremacist? Cos is allowed - nay, encouraged - to air his views on the paucity of black culture at every chance. in a society where trent lott was pillaged for hinting that he might have been in favor of segregation, why has the Cos not been urinated upon by the media? instead, he's been lauded by celebrities and pundits, columnists and 'people-on-the-street'.

what makes it worse is that his statistics are off and his distate for his brethren blares from every sentence. p6 spoke on it, as did Earl Ofari Hutchinson. Pinko Feminist Hellcat also addresses the problems inherent in Cosby's words.

Coates noted that Cos' show, set in crack-era NYC, never once had an episode where the kids had their 'pockets were run' (good turn of phrase, mr. coates). a blindness to sociopolitical conditions then; a blindness to socialpolitical conditions now.

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1:30 pm on July 4th and I got 160 visits already? C'mon.

It's break time for me for a while. I'll be back later to post the next piece of my post-Cosby thoughts.

Since you ain't got nothing better to do, check out the test site. Th edesigne is SO PLAIN right now, but I find I like it. Try entering a comment; you can post them on the same terms as MT provides, no registration needed...but you get more stuff if you do (which you can, but remember: everything goes away before live date).

I had August in mind for a cut-over because August 1619 was when the first Africans were sold to the settlers at Jamestown. But I may not wait that long, I don't know.

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Al Sadir sent emmisaries in private. He's looking to be part of the political process. Allawi said Al Sadir promised to disband his militia

The last week has been "relatively calm," calm compared to the prior two weeks.

He still expects an upsurge in insurgency.

He says they WILL accept troops from Jordan, though not right now.

Anyone who helps us will be helped by us later.

Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam Saddam

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Their George and Ours
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

hen they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The audacity!

Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.

George III is accused, for example, of "depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury." Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.

It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king's wars. In contrast, our taxes have been reduced — especially for those who need the money least — and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John Richard Green wrote: "He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II."

But the parallels are there, and undeniable. "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power," the declaration said of George III, and today the military is indulgently allowed to investigate its own crimes in Iraq. George III "obstructed the Administration of Justice." Our George II has sought to evade judicial review by hiding detainees away in Guantánamo, and has steadfastly resisted the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-U.S. citizens to bring charges of human rights violations to U.S. courts.

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About Independence

People too often get the impression that the only people who use the nation's civil liberties protections are lawbreakers who were not quite guilty of the exact felony they were charged with. Perhaps we should thank the Bush administration for providing so many situations that demonstrate how an unfettered law enforcement system, even one pursuing worthy ends, can destroy the lives of the innocent out of hubris or carelessness.

There was, for instance, Purna Raj Bajracharya, who was videotaping the sights of New York City for his family back in Nepal when he inadvertently included an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was taken into custody, where officials found he had overstayed his tourist visa, a violation punishable by deportation. Instead, Mr. Bajracharya wound up in solitary confinement in a federal detention center for three months, weeping constantly, in a 6-by-9 cell where the lights were never turned off. As a recent article by Nina Bernstein in The Times recounted, Mr. Bajracharya, who speaks little English, might have been in there much longer if an F.B.I. agent had not finally taken it upon himself to summon legal help.

Mr. Bajracharya ran afoul of a Justice Department ruling after the 2001 terrorist attacks that ordered immigration judges to hold secret hearings in closed courtrooms for immigration cases of "special interest." The subjects of these hearings could be kept in custody until the F.B.I. made sure they were not terrorists. That rule might have seemed prudent after the horror of 9/11. But since it is almost always impossible to prove a negative, any decision to let a person once suspected of terrorism free constitutes at least a political risk. If officials have no particular prod for action, they will generally prefer to play it safe and do nothing. The unfortunate Nepalese was finally released only because of James Wynne, the F.B.I. agent who originally sent him to detention. Mr. Wynne's investigation quickly cleared Mr. Bajracharya of suspicion, but no one approved the paperwork necessary to get him out of prison. Eventually, Mr. Wynne called Legal Aid, which otherwise would have had no way of knowing he was even in custody.

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It's the Economy, Right? Guess Again
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

THROUGH months of campaigning, Senator John Kerry has presented himself as a centrist on economic policy, a New Democrat directly out of the Clinton mold. He has pledged to cut the deficit, move the country toward budget surpluses and recreate the booming economy of the Clinton years. As if to underscore the point, he has recruited most of his economic advisers from the former president's administration.

But centrism is an easier position to maintain when the economy is in trouble, as it seemed to be in the early days of the campaign. Back then, Mr. Kerry could convincingly denounce President Bush as a miserable manager of the American economy. That argument is harder to make now that a stronger economy has been generating jobs, although at a slower rate in June. So Mr. Kerry is talking more boldly about policy.

Of course, the centrism still comes through loud and clear in speeches and in interviews. But in the heat of the policy debate, deficit reduction appears to be taking a back seat to what is easily Mr. Kerry's most significant economic proposal: an expensive expansion of government-financed health insurance.

He says he would subsidize health insurance for millions of people not covered now. That is the jewel of his economic plan. An omnibus health insurance bill would be the first legislation sent to Congress in a Kerry presidency, he says. But while the centrist Kerry still advocates shrinking the budget deficit, a bolder Kerry, less noticeable so far in the campaign rhetoric, adds that if the deficit threatens to rise rather than fall, well, so be it - he'll go ahead with his health plan anyway.

"Health care is sacrosanct," Mr. Kerry said in a telephone interview, offering the most explicit commitment to date to a program that he estimates would cost $650 billion. That is an amount greater than the cost of all his other economic proposals combined.

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When asked about the Congressional Black Caucus' rejection of Nader, he played the race card! How interesting.

And in the Boston Globe:
Major Bush fund-raiser donates to Nader campaign
Democrats see strategy as bid to hurt Kerry

By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff | July 1, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire Richard J. Egan built his reputation in politics as a major donor and fund-raiser for the Bush campaign, steering hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican coffers in recent years. But now it appears Egan and his relatives are bankrolling a new candidate: independent presidential contender Ralph Nader.

Egan, cofounder of EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, has given Nader the maximum $2,000 allowed under the law, according to federal elections documents that also show a $4,000 contribution to Nader from Egan's son and daughter-in-law, John R. and Pamela C. Egan. An independent campaign finance watchdog group lists the Egan-Managed Capital company -- another family business in Massachusetts -- as among the biggest contributors to the Nader campaign.

Donors often cross party lines to support candidates based on specific regional or business issues, but the Egans' sudden interest in Nader seems to reflect a more sophisticated strategy by Republicans to draw support away from Democratic challenger John F. Kerry by bolstering his third-party rival. For months, Democrats have accused Republicans of conspiring to put Nader on enough ballots to tip the election -- a theory that gained credence this week as two conservative groups in Oregon admitted making phone calls urging supporters to help win Nader a spot on the ticket in that evenly divided state.

Yesterday, a watchdog group in Washington filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the Oregon groups of breaking campaign laws with their efforts on Nader's behalf. The complaint also names the Bush and Nader campaigns, saying that reports of the Bush campaign using its resources to help Nader, and Nader's acceptance of the assistance, would amount to illegal campaign activity. Both groups and the two campaigns denied breaking the law, calling the accusations ''frivolous."

The complaint points ''to no evidence of us doing anything wrong in Oregon -- if some Republican-leaning groups supported our convention it was done independent of us, and they offer nothing to disprove that," Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese said.

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