July 24, 2004

This is at Cobb's joint.

Glenn Loury, several years ago, encapsulated precisely the entire question of racial justice in an essay that I have kept on my site since then. Entitled 'An American Tragedy', I find it resonates clearly these many years. I have adopted it in its entirety as the way I see the race problem. Ghettos are designed to be dysfunctional and everything we perceive as wrong with blackfolks may or may not be true, but it is certainly true that no matter who you are, you'll perform worse in the ghetto.

The excerpt I highlight today is really directed at the excuse making that passes for realism when we confront the problems with American public education.

The problem with talk about black culture, black crime, and black illegitimacy, as explanatory categories in the hands of the morally obtuse, is that it becomes an exculpatory device--a way of avoiding a discussion of mutual obligation. It is a distressing fact about contemporary American politics that simply to make this point is to risk being dismissed as an apologist for the inexcusable behavior of the poor. The deeper moral failing lies with those who, declaring "we have done all we can," would wash their hands of the poor.

I have come to the preliminary conclusion that this is part of the core undoing of our society. What we seek in the Old School is the undisputed title of Black, and yet we must fight for that to be a dignified label in light of the degenerate 'culture' promulgated by mass media. Soul Plane is just a lighthearted (benefit of the doubt) tip of the iceberg. It goes without question that successful African Americans like Cosby are indeed Black in all the best ways, and yet masses of African Americans languish relatively speaking. While we all share American culture and the mass influence of the vulgar marks us all, we need to make distinctions of quality and make them stick. We are all Americans and we all share the blame for letting our popular culture be polluted. Michael Powell's crusade at the FCC is too little, too late. We are ignorant. We are vulgar. We are more Fear Factor and less Jeopardy. It's not the fault of our participation, but the fault of our tolerance.

A little later in the post he looks at ghettos another way and makes a simple observation that is rarely taken into account.

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Having seen via Technorati that his email does indeed contain what I expected I'm satisfied with having not read it.

However, after having checked I must admit I was wrong when I said in the comments he applied a rather foul term to Mac Diva. I don't feel the need to correctly attribute the insult beyond saying Mr. Barger is innocent of that particular misdeed.

That's the only correction, though.

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LATER: What I'm doing here is giving enough of Bush's address to provide context to my reactions, which are in the blockquotes.
LATER-LATER: Okay, apparently I need to be consistent. Who knew? So Bush is now blockquoted and I'm not.

Part 1.

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…We've got to have affordable health care. We must have trade policy that enables small businesses to sell products overseas. That says we're going to level the playing field.

Which playing field? For who?

Listen, we can compete with anybody, anyplace, anywhere if the rules are fair, which is precisely what this administration is doing. They need less regulation on small businesses.

But remember about the tax policy in terms of small businesses. Most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax rate. See, that's reality. Ask your friends and neighbors who are entrepreneurs. They will tell you they're either a sole proprietorship or a subchapter S corporation, which means they pay tax at the individual income tax rate. And so when you cut the individual income taxes, you're really helping small business owners. It's an entrepreneur -- we're stimulating growth and the small business sector of America today is alive and well. And more minorities are owning their own small businesses, and that's really good for the future of the country.

I think you should look at this. It documents exactly where the 2001 tax cuts will go if made permanent as Bush would like. You'll see it simply doesn't do that much for those businesses he discusses in this paragraph.

See, if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America. This administration promotes what I call the ownership society. When people tell me statistics, they say, more people are owning their own small businesses, and a lot of minorities are owning their own small businesses. That's really good news for the future of the country. It also happens to be really good news for the economy. The more small businesses there are, the more likely it is people are going to find work.

And that's what's happening right now in our society. We've rewarded $6 billion in new markets tax credits.

To whom?

Those are important. They promote economic and community development in low-income areas. And when you do that, the spinoff is more ownership for businesses. When there's a vitality in a neighborhood that has been -- that needed help, new businesses spring up. That's all part of a vital tomorrow. Our plan is to help people help themselves, is to create an environment where the entrepreneur can flourish.

There is, of course, the implication in all this that the owners and beneficiaries of this economic development will be the locals.

Not likely.

It's a matter of financing. Very few people in the Black community have the capital and experience to take advantage of this new property…the repercussions of being excluded from "The Greatest Generation."

Marc, I read your comments, and the National Urban League is a partner in the $127 million reward we announced in May this year just to do that, to create an environment where people have a chance to realize their dreams by owning their own business. (Applause.)

An interesting project that's going on inside inner cities, which makes life better but also helps the entrepreneurial spirit, is the cleanup of brownfields. Since I've come to office, we've cleaned up more than 1,000 brownfields. Those are old industrial sites which have been abandoned. They're not only eyesores, they're blight in the communities. They've been cleaned up. They're now viable pieces of property. Businesses are springing up -- businesses around, businesses are springing up. An integral part of stimulating economic growth and activity to give people a chance to start and own their own company is wise policy in the inner city, such as brownfields cleanup policy. We've been aggressive with brownfields, just like we have with empowerment zones.

Not a lot to say about brownfields…it's not like this cleanup is done to benefit Black folks and it's not like you really have the option to ignore them forever.

What I'm telling you is, the role of government is to create an environment where people from all walks of life have a chance to realize their dream. And that's precisely what's taking place in America. And the economy is better for it, and more people are finding work, and we must not go backward to the days of high taxes, high spending, more regulation and more lawsuits, if we expect more people to own their own business.

Secondly, we've got work to do to encourage and train a new generation of entrepreneurs. And that's why I'm pleased to announce today that we're joining with the Urban League to expand minority business ownership. (Applause.) It's an interesting project. You can't say to somebody, you must be an entrepreneur. You can't say that. But you can say, if you want to start your own business, we'll help you. And I want to thank Marc's leadership on this and the board's leadership in understanding the need to work with the federal government to set up what they call one-stop centers where minority enterprise can receive business training. It's one thing to say, let's go be an entrepreneur. But if you're not certain how to do it, people need help. You may have a great idea, but you're not sure how to keep the books. It's a practical application of federal assets to help people understand how to own and run their own business. You can develop contacts there. You get advice on financing. It's practical ways to help people realize their dreams, is what we're talking about here.

This is actually a good thing. It could be an element in the wealth-building education and subsidization effort the USofA owes Black folks, and Kerry should honor the commitment when he wins.

It's also interesting because it could (as the Republicans obviously intend) greatly enhance the NUL's position in the upscale Black communities. I can definitely see an NAACP/NUL turf war, or at least a turf jockeying-for-position.

[Two paragraphs of babble redacted]

When I first came to the Urban League, I vowed to change that attitude in Washington. It was one of the things I said. I said, give me a chance to work the education system. And we have. We passed good law. Listen, the government has got a funding responsibility. We have. We've increased federal funding for K through 12 by 49 percent from 2001. I label that significant. (Applause.)

That 49 percent statistic doesn't sound right either. I need to check that.

But you know what else has changed? For the first time, the federal government is asking the question, can our children actually read? And see, I feel comfortable asking that question, because I believe every child can read. You don't ask that question if you believe certain children cannot read; you say, okay, fine, shuffle them through, the consequences of which, when people get out of high school, they're illiterate, they're lost, they're frustrated. They don't have a chance to realize the great promise of the country. We're changing that attitude in public schools.

So do you believe they can read or that they graduate illiterate?

[Several paragraphs sucking up to the Black belief that education solves all problems redacted]

The several paragraphs were redacted because it's all noise beyond the two claims made

• we've increased the number of men and women who will be receiving Pell Grants to nearly one million.
• And why, under my budget, funding for historically black colleges is at an all-time high.

I was proud to support Mayor Tony Williams. He's my Mayor right now. I've got one mayor in Crawford and one mayor in Washington. (Laughter.) Tony is the Mayor of Washington. He's a very good Mayor, by the way. He's a good man. Maybe you know him. But he and I -- (applause.) I work with Tony. And I signed a bill into law creating taxpayer-sponsored scholarships for students in Washington, D.C. And let me tell you why. I believe this: If school choice is good for the wealthy, it's good enough for disadvantaged children in America. This is a good piece of legislation. (Applause.) It's a good piece of legislation, which is going to help improve education for all children in the nation's capital.

I spent a while googling for this "scholarship program" until a light went on.

Vouchers.

Okay, move along, nothing to see here…

Progress for African Americans and all Americans depends on more citizens living the dream of owning their own home. There's nothing better than somebody saying, welcome to my house; I'm putting out the welcome mat in my piece of property. (Applause.) And this has been a focus of this administration, because we want people owning their own home. It's a vital part of the -- of the American experience, isn't it.

So we're providing downpayment assistance, good counseling. Listen, people walk in, first-time home buyers, and they take a look at the contracts and the print's about that big, and they say, forget it. You know? They get driven away by the complexity of the situation. Sometimes they get skinned by loan sharks, you know? And we're doing everything we can to make sure the loan application process is understandable and fair and open. We're proposing tax credits to encourage the building of more affordable housing, particularly in inner-city America. In other words, we want there to be a greater supply of homes. (Applause.)

Let me tell you something hopeful about the country. For the first time in our history, a majority of families and minority groups own their own homes. We're making progress. People are saying, this is my home. And we must continue the progress we're making. (Applause.)

Sounds like he's got an advisor that reads P6. If so…

You don't get to say "we" are making progress when your cohort resisted and continues to resist every systemic effort to correct the damage caused by racism. You don't get to say "we" are making progress when your cohort's most successful campaigns are based on fear or hatred or jealousy.

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I'm not racist, says princess, I even pretended to be 'half-caste'
Tania Branigan
Saturday July 24, 2004
The Guardian

It was a curious way to bury allegations of racism, but then there is much about Princess Michael of Kent that is curious. Ignoring the first rule for dealing with any gaffe - stop digging - she has revealed she once pretended to be "half-caste" and has declared her love for "adorable" Africans.

Dubbed Princess Pushy thanks to a reputation for demanding behaviour and an unduly privileged lifestyle, she got into difficulty two months ago when she allegedly told a group of African American diners in New York to "go back to the colonies". She said there had been a misunderstanding.

In a bizarre interview to be broadcast on ITV1 on Sunday, she has enlarged on the injustice of the accusations.

No one could consider her racist, she said, were they to know of her past.

"I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes I did not get away with it, but I dyed my hair black," Princess Michael said.

Then she digs some more: "I travelled on African buses. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted experiences from Cape Town to right up in northern Mozambique. I had this adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people and to call me racist: it's a knife through the heart because I really love these people." Whether the sentiment is reciprocated is unclear.

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You'll notice I don't actually do much of that around here.

Part of the reason is my understanding that there are white folks who already got a grip (and let me tell you I had one hell of a difficult time choosing which of Ampersand's cartoons to link there), and they're really the ones most white folks hear best. Part of the reason is it kind of gets repetitious…one must always establish the validity of one's starting point; one must establish that the problem is as one sees it. I don't have to backtrack as far with Black folks, because of certain commonalities of experience.

But when white folks think like this:

This situation happens to me quite a bit: I'm walking to work, and either (1) the street lights change in a way that makes this a convenient point to cross the street, (2) the bag starts to slip a little, or (3) both. But I notice a black person walking down the block towards me. So, I consciously avoid either crossing the street or hiking my bag up so as not to appear like I'm acting out of fear of the black person. I especially find myself doing this (or rather, not doing it) when the other person is a youngish black man. Maybe I should also point out that I'm male (I think a woman clutching her purse closer to her looks different than a man doing the same with a briefcase), and I don't appear nervous or skittish when encountered by strangers on the street.

So, my question is, Am I racist for not wanting to seem racist? That is, Is it racist to assume that this person might misinterpret my actions and be offended? I generally think it's racist to make assumptions about someone based on his or her race, and isn't that what I'm doing?

and this:

What is a well-meaning white guy supposed to do? Even if I manage to sound convincing when I protest that no, really, I'm not a racist, I can always be trumped by the ominous implication that my racism is subconscious, suppressed or blocked out like I have multiple personalities, or refuse to remember I was once molested by a priest. Defending oneself against an accusation of racism is like being questioned by the cops - when the interrogator thinks you're lying, you question even the truth you know is true. Doubt creeps in when you realize that the truth - being true - is something you always took for granted. A good cop can make you confess to the Lindburgh kidnapping. White people constantly wonder if, deep down, we're really racists after all.

…it's more evidence that the they are as crazy as we are.

Incidentally, it's becoming more obvious since it was brought to my attention that folks are really, really troubled by the fact that Black people feel so free to use a term no one else can use.

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T-Steel misrepresents me a bit but not enough for me to get tense over.

Interesting thought:

Black racism towards black people is the main reason racism still is alive and kicking in America.

Yes you saw it right. The bigger racist in America right now is the black man and woman. But only towards themselves which equally cause white people strife while systematically played into, yet created by white people.

Calling this "racism" may be just choosing the most…energizing term available, but look: if you not going to be able to solve white people's concerns over being held responsible for racism and Black people's concerns over experiencing racism without recognizing them as separate issues, you're DAMN sure not going to do any good by tossing Black self-image problems on the same pile.

But keep looking for the synthesis.

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Steve Gilliard's reaction to (in his words) Toastmaster Bush yukking it up with negroes:

HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....ROTFLMAO

Want some advice? Stop getting black kids killed in Iraq. Otherwise......

Well, he's always got his "wife" Condi to guide him. Uh, why won't the GOP admit the simple fact that they are the party of racists. Now I know some little Uncle Tom on the White House staff fed him those lines, but it's a joke. If this was a colorblind America, Herman Cain and Vernon Robinson wouldn't have wound up with 20-25 percent of the vote after polls showing them winning or running even with white opponents. White Republicans don't vote for black candidates.

[P6: Steve does occasionally surprise with his directness.]

Avery at Stereo Describes My Scenario needs to recognize that Black politics is the bastard child of mainstream politics, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I'm tired of Black politics and politicians. Seriously. There's not even an exchange of ideas any more, except between people who already share some common thoughts. There may be some rousing exchanges between fellow conservatives on a given issue, and probably the same types of interesting dialogue between progressives, but once the audience gets mixed, it's game over. All of a sudden, the only thing that matters is representing your "side." No acknowledgement of any of the "opposition's" valid points, no recognizing the limitations of their own position, nothing. We each hunker down behind our respective banners and lob missives from there. Sure, there are some people who wander out into the middle, but our voices tend to get lost in the cacophony.

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Cynthia McKinney Gets A Big Win
By: Staff Reports, Atlanta Daily World July 21, 2004

The big story is the return of Cynthia McKinney to the U.S. Congress. Voters of the 4th District gave her the nod with 51 per cent of the vote. McKinney bested a field of five other candidates in a bid for the seat she lost two years ago to Denise Majette.
McKinney will face Republican Candidate Catherine Davis in the fall, but is favored to win the heavily Democratic District. Majette, the former 4th District Congresswoman who resigned to seek the U.S. Senate seat, is in a runoff for the seat with political newcomer Cliff Oxford. The winner of this race will face Republican Johnny Isakson in November. Isakson gave up his 6th District seat to seek the U.S. Senate seat.

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Democrats blast GOP lawmaker's 'suppress the Detroit vote' remark

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Democrats on Wednesday denounced a Republican lawmaker quoted in a newspaper as saying the GOP would fare poorly in this year's elections if it failed to "suppress the Detroit vote."

State Rep. John Pappageorge, R-Troy, acknowledged using "a bad choice of words" but said his remark shouldn't be construed as racist.

Pappageorge, 73, was quoted in July 16 editions of the Detroit Free Press as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."

"I'm extremely disappointed in my colleague," state Sen. Buzz Thomas, D-Detroit, told reporters Wednesday during a conference call. "That's quite clearly code that they don't want black people to vote in this election."

Blacks comprise 83 percent of Detroit's population, and the city routinely gives Democratic candidates a substantial majority of its votes.

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Okay, I'll be reading Mike at TopDog04 (who is a NY State delegate as well as a regular here), Christopher at Afro-Netizen (because he's definitely putting a Black spin on the coverage), Matt at The Blogging of the President (not at the official Democratic convention blog) becase the site in general makes me think. That's the daily stuff.

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July 23, 2004

Mr. Berger's Incredible Misadventure

Exactly why Samuel Berger removed copies of classified documents from the National Archives last October is not clear. Mr. Berger, the former national security adviser to President Clinton who was a Kerry adviser until Tuesday, wasn't going to be able to alter the records or give John Kerry an edge. The missing documents were copies of memos, which Mr. Kerry would have had access to anyway.

If, as Mr. Berger says, the removal was simply a blunder, it was inexcusably careless legally and daft politically. Senator Kerry can't be too happy that Mr. Berger compounded his initial sin by not informing him of the Justice Department's inquiry when it began in January. Mr. Berger and his lawyers may be indignant about the investigation being leaked, but they must have known it would get out.

Meanwhile, the Republican hyperventilating is overdone. The same Congressional leaders who shrugged at the leaking of a C.I.A. agent's identity to punish her husband, a critic of administration policy, demand hearings on Mr. Berger. The politicians should all let the Justice Department do its job.

Of real concern is that bleeding, yet again, of politics into criminal justice. After initially claiming it knew nothing of the case, the White House has had to admit it was informed. That sort of heads-up taints both sides. It leaves the White House open to questions about whether it timed a leak to the release of the 9/11 panel's report, and it feeds cynicism about the independence of federal prosecutors. Mr. Kerry, by the way, ought to stop stoking that cynicism with groundless claims that the prosecution of Kenneth Lay was improperly delayed.

For its part, the White House's denials about this leak would sound more credible if it assigned some urgency to solving the C.I.A. leak case.

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Pentagon Releases Bush's 1972 Military Records
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:29 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon on Friday released newly discovered payroll records from President Bush's 1972 service in the Alabama National Guard, though the records shed no new light on the future president's activities during that summer.

A Pentagon official said the earlier contention that the records were destroyed was an ''inadvertent oversight.''

Like records released earlier by the White House, these computerized payroll records show no indication Bush drilled with the Alabama unit during July, August and September of 1972. Pay records covering all of 1972, released previously, also indicated no guard service for Bush during those three months.

The records do not give any new information about Bush's National Guard training during 1972, when he transferred to the Alabama National Guard unit so he could work on the U.S. Senate campaign of a family friend. The payroll records do not say definitively whether Bush attended training that summer because they are maintained separately from attendance records.

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United Airlines Ends Pension Plan Contributions
By MICHELINE MAYNARD and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

United Airlines said today it would not contribute to employee pension plans while it remains in Chapter 11, a move likely to save it billions of dollars in cash and make it more attractive to the investors it needs to emerge from bankruptcy protection.

United also said it was considering its options on the plans' future, which union leaders interpreted as a signal that it will move to terminate the plans. The action came a week after United skipped a $72.4 million pension payment that it owed to three of its four pension plans. United also faced making hundreds of millions more in pension payments in September and October.

The plans have enough assets to keep paying benefits to retirees for now, but none of the four plans has enough to assure that employees will receive future benefits they have already earned. If the airline abandons the plans, billions of dollars in liabilities for those future benefits will fall on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government-sponsored agency whose finances have already been ravaged by the collapse of pension plans at other bankrupt companies in the airline, steel and other industries.

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I just saw an interview on Paula Zahn's show with a Rev. Joe Wilson talking up Bush and the Republican platform. Smooth, good delivery, but since he's saying the same thing Bush is, he'll not likely have any more success.

One fundamental error the Republicans make is assuming Black people don't know what Bush's message is.

One fundamental error we're going to make is to assume a message means anything at all in the face of the repercussions of acts.

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I saw part of the address, most of it I think. And if you trust him he had a statement or two that would give one pause.

If you believe him. So far, the comparison of implied promise (because no promise has been given by the current incarnation of the Republican party to Black folks) to outcome isn't pretty. Add to that the administration's tendency to pick the particular words that can be shaded particular ways and denied in particular other ways, and I feel the desire to have the specific words I'm responding to in front of me.

I suspect I'll want the transcript of Kerry address as well.

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Quote of note:

While the exact effect is hard to calculate, the funding change means longer waiting lists for vouchers and fewer choices for families looking to escape poorer neighborhoods.

Of course. That's what it always means.

HUD cuts trickle down
Residents using rent vouchers across area may have to move--soon--due to funding reductions
By William Grady and Li Fellers
Tribune staff reporters
Published July 23, 2004

Lemika Early, a single mother living with two children near downtown Elgin in a first-floor apartment that accommodates her wheelchair, is about to become a casualty of the battle over rising federal budget deficits.

In an effort to curtail costs, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development made funding changes this spring that have forced cutbacks in the nation's largest housing-assistance program for low-income people. In turn, there's been a tightening of the financial screws on public housing authorities throughout the U.S.

One result is that Early, 23, and her young sons could be forced to leave their home at the end of the month because the Housing Authority of Elgin does not have enough money to help pay her $1,050-a-month rent.

Like dozens of other agencies across the country, the Elgin housing authority is scrambling to patch its budget after Congress and HUD opted to change the way the housing choice voucher program, formerly known as Section 8, is funded. The change could cost Elgin nearly $2 million this year, said Sandra Freeman, the authority's executive director.

Other Illinois housing authorities say they could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some are considering cutoffs or reductions in rental assistance for hundreds of families.

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What We Know Now
TIME's guide to the new revelations about how Sept. 11 happened
By DANIEL EISENBERG

As horrifying and deadly as it was, Sept. 11 apparently just might have been even worse. That was only one of the revelations about both the plot and the U.S. response to it that the independent commission investigating the attacks made public last week. Some of the information released by the commission had already been reported — or at least hinted at — in books and memoirs published since the attacks, but its extensive review of classified materials — including unprecedented access to interrogations of high-level al-Qaeda detainees — gives its findings greater sweep and credibility. So what new details have we learned? The most eye-opening nuggets can be divided into three main categories:

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Quote of note:

Ibrahim Ahmed, a Sudanese political analyst, said it was clear that there was no legal basis for saying genocide was under way in Darfur, otherwise the U.S. administration's lawyers would have adopted the term.

"But what is equally obvious is that the American public thinks that it is genocide and therefore getting Congress to rule on this was a politically expedient way of mollifying public opinion while circumnavigating the legalities," he added.

Yasir Abdullah, a journalist from northern Sudan, said the U.S. Congress and administration did not understand the roots of the Darfur conflict and were dealing with it very superficially.

"They are biased and have their own agenda. Sanctions will not harm the government, they will harm the people. Have they not learned this yet?" he told Reuters.

Sudanese Criticize U.S. Genocide Resolution
Fri Jul 23, 2004 06:58 AM ET
By Nima Elbagir

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudanese Arabs Friday slammed a U.S. congressional resolution declaring genocide in the western region of Darfur, while Darfuris asked what Washington would do now to make it safe for them to go back home.

"Is Iraq not enough? Do they want to destroy us too? ... America wants everyone who is Arab (in Sudan) to pay. They do not understand anything," said Ismail Gasmalseed, a 34-year-old driver in Khartoum.[P6: Sorry, dawg, but in Iraq we had no proof. With you, we do. On the other hand, this shows the loss of moral standing the neocon's handling of Iraq has caused the USofA.]

The U.S. Congress approved the resolution Thursday and its supporters hope it will help mobilize the international community to protect Africans in Darfur from Arab militias.

But the accusation of genocide is highly controversial and has not been formally adopted by the U.S. administration, the United Nations, Darfuri rebels or most of the humanitarian organizations working on the ground in the remote region.

The Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, have been driving non-Arab villagers off their land in Darfur in an extension of a long conflict over farmland and grazing. The conflict has displaced more than one million people in the region.

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Anthrax Kills Wild Apes in Ivory Coast -Scientists
Wed Jul 21, 2004 02:32 PM ET

By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Anthrax has killed apes in tropical rainforests in Ivory Coast where it has never been seen before and could pose a threat to humans, German researchers said on Wednesday.

Scientists had known from experiments that the acute infectious disease caused by spore-forming bacteria could kill monkeys but until now they had never come across evidence of it in wild populations.

"Anthrax has never been found killing chimpanzees in the wild before," Heinz Ellerbrok, a virologist at the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin, said in an interview.

"It could pose a danger to humans because in this part of Africa it is quite common for bushmeat to be consumed and there is also illegal poaching going on," he added.

Conservationists have warned that Africa's lucrative bushmeat industry, which is a key source of food and income for poor people, is threatening species such as gorillas and chimpanzees with extinction.

Scientists are also concerned that people who hunt and eat the wild animals are being infected with animal illnesses that could pose a public health threat to humans.

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EU Vows to Play Peace Role Despite Israeli Rebuke
Fri Jul 23, 2004 07:20 AM ET

By Matt Spetalnick
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The European Union's top diplomat vowed on Friday that the EU would play a role in Middle East peacemaking "like it or not" despite Israel's rebuke for backing a U.N. resolution against its West Bank barrier.

The pledge by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana followed talks on Thursday in which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned him there would be little chance of EU involvement in the peace process without a drastic change in the European position.

Rocky relations between Israel and the EU have hit a new low after the 25-nation bloc voted for a Palestinian-sponsored General Assembly resolution demanding that the Jewish state heed a World Court ruling calling on it to tear down the barrier.

Israel says it needs the network of razor-tipped wire and concrete walls to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a land grab that will deny them the state they seek to establish on land captured by Israel in a 1967 war.

After failing to resolve the row in meetings with Israeli leaders, Solana wrapped up his visit telling reporters: "Europe ...is a very important international power and is going to play a role, (whether) you like it or not."

He said the EU had a right to participate because of its important interests in the region.

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Quote of note:

While Democrats called the bill unprecedented, backers said Congress had moved before to limit courts' authority on matters from cleaning up hazardous waste to protecting trees.

"If limiting the jurisdiction of the federal courts is good enough to protect trees, shouldn't it be good enough to protect a state's marriage policy?" Sensenbrenner said.

You sure you want to compare the E.P.A.'s protection of the environment to Constitutional protection of the rights of all citizenry? Especially the E.P.A. under G.W.B?

Trees are not citizens.

The House bill would prohibit federal courts, even the Supreme Court, from considering challenges to the 1996 U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, which empowered each state to decide on its own whether to allow same-sex marriage.

Opponents contend the bill would violate the equal protection clause by cutting off from federal judicial review a law affecting a specific minority.

House Votes to Curb Same-Sex Marriage
Thu Jul 22, 2004 09:21 PM ET

By Thomas Ferraro
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill to curb same-sex marriage on Thursday after rejecting concerns the measure may be unconstitutional.

On a vote of 233-194, the House sent the proposal to the Senate where members of both parties said it will likely die. But it could help rev up an election-year issue.

Last week, on a related front, the Senate easily blocked a bid pushed by President Bush to amend the Constitution to define marriage as a union strictly between a man and a woman.

The House measure, also supported by the administration, offers a different approach. It would forbid federal judges from requiring one state to recognize a same-sex marriage licensed in another.

Democrats accused Bush and fellow Republicans of pushing the proposals merely to rally their conservative base for the November congressional and presidential contests.

"This debate is about a national election," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in opposing the bill. "We are playing with fire with this bill, and that fire could destroy the nation we love."

"I rise in defense of the Constitution, in defense of the separation of powers," said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat. "What's next? No judicial review of laws that restrict freedom of speech or religion?"

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New Genome Test Finds Big Differences Among People
Thu Jul 22, 2004 04:36 PM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new way of comparing DNA has turned up surprising genetic differences among normal, healthy people, researchers said on Thursday.

The researchers found -- by accident -- that some people are missing large chunks of DNA, while others have extra copies of stretches of DNA.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers have dubbed these differences "copy number polymorphisms." They are found in genes linked with cancer risk, with how much people eat and with reactions to drugs.

"Thus, a relationship between CNPs and susceptibility to health problems such as neurological disease, cancer, and obesity is an intriguing possibility," the researchers wrote in their report.

The team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and elsewhere used a new kind of DNA test called Representational Oligonucleotide Microarray Analysis or ROMA.

"It can detect differences in DNA from any two sources," said Cold Spring Harbor spokesman Peter Sherwood.

The researchers were looking for genetic differences linked with cancer.

"As a control in the cancer experiment they compared normal to normal DNA, expecting it to be pretty much the same," Sherwood said in a telephone interview.

"They detected more than 70 of these large chunks of DNA that were altered in normal human cells."

These were large differences that have not been reported before -- involving much more DNA than so-called single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are well-known single-letter changes in the A, C, T, G nucleotide code that makes up DNA.

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Quotes of note:

"The word of mouth is that it's easy, it's safe and it's gratifying," said Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who has studied bank robbery for 30 years. "So it's not surprising that the octogenarian, or a mother with children at home, or people with all sorts of uncharacteristic backgrounds would be attracted to trying to give it a go. It can be just about anybody."

and

Security and law enforcement officials say a number of factors are to blame for the democratizing of bank robbery, chief among them the knowledge, widespread among the public, that bank tellers are often instructed to comply with thieves in order to get them out of the bank as quickly as possible.

Why are they notable? Because they imply that criminality in the mainstream is a widespread problem, suppressed only by fear of punishment. Incredibly significant, if true.

Today's Bank Robber Might Look Like a Neighbor
By WARREN ST. JOHN

The case of J. L. Rountree seemed at first an aberration, something from "News of the Weird." Last August, Mr. Rountree, 91 years old, walked into the First American Bank in Abilene, Tex., and handed the teller a note reading "Robbery."

"You're kidding," the teller said.

"Hurry up," snapped Mr. Rountree, who was unarmed. "Or you'll get hurt."

Mr. Rountree — no sprinter — left with $1,999 and was soon arrested by the local police, who gave him the perfect headline-grabbing nickname: the Grandpa Bandit. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Then in December, Sally Ann Smith, 56 and described by a neighbor as "a wonderful, caring and loving person, and a devoted grandmother," was arrested at her home in Peoria, Ariz., on charges of robbing two banks at gunpoint. Ms. Smith, too, got a nickname: the Grandma Bandit.

Then there were Robert Day, an armed 68-year-old bank robber in Texas, and Brenda Bishop, the Granny Bandit of Macomb County, Mich., who was unarmed; both are now in prison. And on Thursday, the police said, an unarmed 70-year-old man named Gordon Bryant tried to rob the Farmers State Bank in Versailles, Ill. The police said they had found Mr. Bryant outside the bank with a stocking over his head.

While it may be tempting to view these bank-robbing grandparents as evidence of a moral collapse among older Americans, more likely they say something about the changing nature of bank robbery. Once the pursuit of hardened, shoot-'em-up bandits like Bonnie and Clyde, and later of violent street gangs packing 9-millimeter guns, bank robbery has become a kind of everyman's felony.

While about half of bank robberies in the United States are still committed by drug addicts desperate for money and a third by veteran bank thieves, law enforcement officials and criminologists say an increasing number are being pulled off by thieves who have a lot more in common with Willy Loman than Willie Sutton. They are teenagers and senior citizens, stay-at-home parents and established career types — in short, anyone with an acute need for cash.

…The number of bank robberies nationwide has fluctuated for 15 years, spiking during tough economic times and falling during good years. Although violent bank robberies are still a problem — banks in Washington D.C., for example, have recently been terrorized by a gang of masked, heavily armed robbers — the majority of the 7,412 robberies last year were so-called "note jobs," heists committed by pen and paper rather than a weapon. Twenty-five years ago, according to the F.B.I., only about a third of robberies were note jobs — the preferred method of the Average Joe and Jane bank robber with no criminal past, experts say.

"Most of these are people who have no record at all. They start off as virgins to crime and they jump into this as a first option," said William J. Rehder, a former bank robbery expert for the F.B.I.

New York City experienced a kind of note-passing epidemic last year. Bank robberies surged 64 percent, and though 84 percent of the robberies involved no weapons, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly admonished bank executives for not paying enough attention to the problem. Last year, 16 of Commerce Bank's 17 branches in New York were robbed. In 2003, North Fork Bank, which has 78 branches in New York City, experienced 36 robbery attempts.

The people pulling off some of those heists hardly fit the profile of seasoned crooks. Last September, the police said, a 12-year-old boy made away with $30,000 from an East Village branch of Citibank after passing the teller a note that read, "Give me the money or I'll shoot you" (He was later arrested and his mother charged for putting him up to it.)

In January, Pamela Kaichen, 44, a riding instructor known as the "soccer mom bandit," pleaded guilty to the unarmed robbery of six banks in Connecticut and Westchester County and received a four-year sentence. (Ms. Kaichen, who wore a blond wig during the holdups, blamed her crimes on stress from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She had volunteered at Ground Zero.)

Outside New York, the story is much the same. Last June, for example, Tighue Shields, 53, the greenskeeper of the Weston Hills Country Club in South Florida and well-known in the golf world for his greens work on the P.G.A. Tour, was arrested in connection with three armed bank robberies in Scottsdale, Ariz. The authorities said Mr. Shields flew to Scottsdale to rob banks on his days off.

And just eight days ago, a 15-year-old Michigan girl pleaded no contest to bank robbery; though she was unarmed, the girl passed the teller a note saying there was an AK-47 pointed at his head.

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Congress Clears Final $416 Billion Defense Bill
Thu Jul 22, 2004 11:08 PM ET

By Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Thursday sent President Bush a $416.2 billion defense spending bill that includes $25 billion in emergency funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving the measure overwhelming backing after little debate.

The Senate unanimously approved the huge bill to finance the Pentagon 96-0, its last major act before breaking for a six-week recess to campaign for Nov. 2 congressional and presidential elections.

Also scrambling to complete business before the recess, the House of Representatives passed the measure 410-12.

The Pentagon can tap the $25 billion emergency funds for Iraq and Afghanistan -- provided as a down payment until the administration seeks a much bigger emergency spending bill next year -- once Bush signs the bill.

The $391 billion core of the Pentagon's budget, up $22 billion from current levels, becomes available with the Oct. 1 start of the next fiscal year.

…The Pentagon acknowledged it may have to start using the emergency money before next fiscal year after the Government Accountability Office, Congress' auditing agency, in a report on Wednesday said the administration had underestimated this year's costs for the wars by $12.3 billion.

The Pentagon said it hoped to get through September by shifting funds in various accounts, but Democrats said the GAO report highlighted administration bungling.

"This is the most astounding evidence to date that the administration has fundamentally mismanaged the financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat.

The defense bill also funds an authorized increase of 20,000 Army troops, despite the Pentagon's objections that its need for more forces is temporary and should not be built into the budget.

The Pentagon instead wanted to fund the increase of about 30,000 troops it says it needs for Iraq and Afghanistan from emergency spending bills.

Also tucked into the final measure was $500 million in emergency funds for fighting U.S. wildfires, $95 million for humanitarian aid in the Darfur region of Sudan and $25 million each for Boston and New York to tighten security at the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions.

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China Tells U.S. Not to Sell Arms to Taiwan
Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:42 AM ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - China told the top U.S. military officer in Asia Friday that it resolutely opposed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and that it would not allow the island to become independent under any circumstances.

After meeting visiting Pacific Commander Admiral Thomas Fargo, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told state television that China was willing to advance Sino-U.S. relations but its "biggest concern" was Taiwan.

"We resolutely oppose the United States violating the Three Joint Communiques and violating the 'one China' principle to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan because this does not benefit our efforts to peacefully resolve the Taiwan issue," Li said.

The communiques date back to 1979, when Washington switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei. One of the communiques pledged to gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan in qualitative and quantitative terms.

But Washington is also obliged to defend Taiwan from attack and has close unofficial relations with the island. Taiwan is considering weapons purchases of $18 billion from the United States, including Patriot anti-missile systems, submarines and anti-submarine aircraft.

Li told Fargo the United States should "clearly understand the seriousness and sensitiveness of the Taiwan situation, halt its arms sales to Taiwan and stop its relevant military exchanges aiming to upgrade substantial relationship with Taiwan," Xinhua news agency reported.

"We are prepared with the greatest sincerity to make the greatest efforts to realize the peaceful reunification of the motherland. But we certainly will not allow Taiwan to become independent," Li said.

"We certainly will not allow anyone, using any excuse, to cut Taiwan from our great motherland, to split it from the great motherland. Everyone should be clear on this piece of information."

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Complain about the legibility of site and you'll likely get a pretty quick positive response.

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July 22, 2004

I have not ordered the DVD because I didn't feel the need for the education. But I'm rethinking.

See, I just came from the page of trailers and excerpts from the documentary. You need to check the page. Interview clips in low, medium and high bandwidth versions.

To me it's still not an education but's one whole hell of a lot of ammunition.

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The Black Commentator has handled it for you.

Acting White: African American Students and Education
by Edward Rhymes, PhD.

I have heard a lot of static concerning African Americans and their supposed disregard for education. “Our black kids look down on education” say many of the black pundits, “they tease the black kids who are doing well school and say they are acting white.” I’ve heard this repeated over and over again by African-American personalities and celebrities (none of which, by the way, have any extensive, classroom teaching experience). Let me also add, that in all my years as an educator and youth program specialist, I have never heard any student equating scholastic achievement with whiteness. Nevertheless, this assertion is usually made without challenge, rebuttal or explanation. This is yet another sign of the reactionary times that we now live in, here in America – with a pit bull-like tenacity we lock on to what is being said without examining why it’s being said. I, in the course of this writing, will endeavor to unmask this widely-held misconception.

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July 21, 2004

I got a bag of new comic books to read.

Meanwhile, I just got this by email. I don't know if it's true, but I'd like it to be.

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THIS IS THE BEST LAWYER STORY OF THE YEAR, DECADE AND PROBABLY THE
CENTURY.

A Charlotte, NC lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire, among other things. Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company. In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires."

The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. The lawyer sued.. and WON! (Stay with me.) In delivering the ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer "held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire" and was obligated to pay the claim. Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires". NOW FOR THE BEST PART. After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!! With
his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine. This is a true story and was the First Place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest. ONLY IN AMERICA! NO WONDER THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES THINK WE'RE NUTS!!

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I'm a responsible person and at the personal level, I choose to be responsible for racism - for any word from my mouth or act of my own hands.

At the race level, I would rather not be held responsible for racist acts performed by those outside my very small realm of influence.

Not a lot more could be asked of you. Some, but not a lot. Because your realm of influence may be greater than you think.

But what would happen if you changed how you expect others to behave?

Okay, this particular thread is officially taking a break from The Big Picture. But understand that talking race issues on the personal level is as different from doing it on the social level as quantum mechanics is from ballistics.

I've moved in several different circles in my life, so I've developed several different sets of expectations. What I do with those expectations depends on the situation. The more I deal with you the more I whittle away at the pretty formless block of general expectations we assign first impressions.

Okay, that's a fancy way of describing what we all do. Thing is, sometimes you get folks in the wrong bucket and you've got to be willing to move them where they belong (this is most easily done before the relationship develops roots but you can't always tell a relationship will be significant). And you've got to identify where your categorization went wrong and stop doing that.

I did not say do the opposite.

Because what can happen is, you put someone in a bucket, they do something "unbucketed" and you try to figure out why a guy who belongs in that bucket would do that rather than saying, oh, wrong bucket, or only one foot in the bucket, or he goes in the bucket when he needs to or any of the other likelihoods.

I don't think you want me to change that approach. It's what lets me have conversations like this sanely, why I don't call Thomas Jefferson a racist (though one or two of his descendants&hellip:). It's what lets me know you don't mean to be presumptuous by suggesting you have a better way for me to think about my life than I do. It's seen me through several career changes and several life changes.

That's the quantum mechanics.

On the personal level, I have no problems with rapproachments, new friends, any of that. But I'm clear that it's taking aspirin to prevent a heart attack, know what I mean? It keeps the patient alive, but he still needs to stop smoking so damn much.

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Memorandum
July 20, 2004

To:All Interested Parties
From:Ross Wiener, Policy Director, Education Trust
RE: Perkins Reauthorization

Current Perkins Bills: NOT GOOD ENOUGH

As Congress considers reauthorizing federal assistance for vocational and technical education, Members need to place the interests of students front and center. Unfortunately, bills currently moving through the House and Senate essentially reauthorize the status quo - extending a system that works well for some, but stifling the opportunities of far too many participants with skills in reading and math that are inadequate for 21st Century jobs. A bad reauthorization is worse than no reauthorization at all -- if Members do not have the time (or the will) to seriously reform Perkins, then they should defer to the next session.

As it reauthorizes Perkins for the next five years, Congress should be unequivocal: federally supported programs need to complement vocational and technical skills with rigorous academic preparation.

Right now, the federal program (known as "Perkins") is at best ambiguous and ambivalent about the need to ensure that vocational education programs integrate strong academics along with more narrow technical and vocational skills. A major, independent analysis commissioned by Congress recently concluded that Perkins' "approach of encouraging 'integration' as a way to move secondary vocational education toward supporting academics has been slow to produce significant reforms." In addition, this National Assessment of Vocational Education concluded that "secondary vocational education itself is not likely to be a widely effective strategy for improving academic achievement or college attendance without substantial modifications to policy, curriculum, and teacher training." (National Assessment of Vocational Education, 2004).

All high school graduates - regardless of whether they plan to enter college or go directly into the workforce - need strong reading, writing, and math skills. These bedrock skills of lifelong learning are an absolute necessity for our future citizens, soldiers, and workforce. Federal policy needs to be clear that vocational training cannot substitute for strong academic preparation. Moreover, despite conventional wisdom, research is clear that students learn more and fail less often when they are in the most challenging academic courses (this is true even for those students who had not done well in the past - and even true for vocational students in particular).

Congress should make at least the following five modifications to ensure that vocational and technical education adapts to the 21st Century:

.Define "academic rigor" and "high skill, high wage jobs."

The proposals currently working their way through Congress rely heavily on these two phrases. But these catch-phrases fail to convey any substance or provide any meaningful direction to federally supported programs.

The proposals currently before the House and Senate not only fail to define "academic rigor" or "high skill, high wage jobs," they do not even ask the states to define these terms. Indeed, lobbyists for the vocational education community have insisted behind closed doors that defining these terms would be inappropriate because some existing programs don't meet these standards. This begs the question: Why would Congress want to support vocational programs that do not prepare students for "high skill high wage jobs" or that do not incorporate academic rigor?

Congress must define these terms to offer more guidance regarding the opportunities they expect students to have after participating in federally supported programs.

.Differentiate state-reported data for student outcomes that are clearly different.

Right now, state reporting on outcomes for vocational students is virtually meaningless. Why? Because states report the percent of vocational students who enter the military, go to college, or go directly into the workforce as one, undifferentiated outcome -- even though they collect the data separately for each of these outcomes. Data on graduation rates is similarly confused (e.g., a GED is treated the same as a regular high school diploma).

The problem is that these results represent very different outcomes for the students themselves and for society. Graduating from high school with a regular diploma is not the same as getting a GED, and going directly into the workforce is not the same as entering higher education. Aggregating the data on outcomes prevents Congress - or anyone else - from gauging the value of federally supported vocational programs.

.Focus on valid and reliable data.

The data on which vocational education is to be evaluated is not reliable. For example, most states measure outcomes for vocational students using a direct-mail survey. Only those students who respond to the survey are counted in the denominator, making outcomes look rosier than reality. And many states use 10th grade assessments to measure whether vocational education students are getting the academics they need, even though most vocational courses are taken after 10th grade.

Meaningful accountability is not possible without meaningful data. The reauthorization of Perkins must require states to use better data, especially in their measures of academic skill attainment.

.Account for the knowledge base of vocational teachers.

In 2000, almost 9% of vocational high school teachers did not hold even a baccalaureate degree. More striking is that prospective vocational teachers have lower scores in reading and writing (on the PRAXIS exam) than those planning to teach at the elementary school level, the least skilled of all teachers. The proposals in Congress give lip-service to the need for vocational teachers to integrate rigorous academics, but these proposals fail to acknowledge the depth and scale of the challenge.

If Congress is serious about integrating rigorous academics into federally supported vocational programs, we need a serious investment in professional development, and states need to set standards for acceptable levels of knowledge for these teachers.

.Do not prioritize vocational spending over mainstream academic spending.

Under the current Congressional proposals, states will be penalized with a reduction in federal funding if they spend even one dollar less on vocational education programs than they did in the previous fiscal year. In contrast, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (i.e., NCLB), states can cut their spending on mainstream academic programs by 10% and still receive full federal funding. This system offers a perverse incentive to a state faced with a budget crunch and forced to cut educational spending. The state can reduce spending on primary and secondary education by 10% and suffer no decline in federal support, but if the state reduces spending on vocational education by a penny it will jeopardize its federal dollars.

Federal legislation should not contain any incentive for states to cut their primary and secondary education programs before they cut their vocational education programs. Indeed, the original House bill recognized this incongruence and proposed to bring Perkins in sync with NCLB, but it was later changed to once again prioritize spending on vocational programs.

High school graduates face increasing demands in the 21st Century, but in some ways federal vocational education policy is better aligned with the 19th Century demands for which it was originally designed.

The workplace demands more than it used to. Congress should demand more, too.

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If Sandy Berger removing this document has been under investigation for months, why has it come to light so coincidentally timed with the 9/11 report?

The reason for the question: this administration is so secretive and tight-lipped, all leaks are vetted. This is the administration that told Afghanistan to get some terrorists, but time it so the announcement fell on the days the Democratic Convention took place. This, obviously, did not happen…and this smells suspiciously like a back-up plan.

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Even if you're anonymous, I still have to bring this one up from the comments.

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There are a couple of things I want to get off my chest about this Bill Cosby stuff and I guess here is an OK place for that.

First, doing well in school is supposedly "acting white". That was not the case in any of the mostly white high school and college I went to and it was not the case in the all black elementary or junior high schools I went to.

Being a nerd is being a nerd, acting white is acting white. Two different things. It was real easy in the 80s and 90s and probably still. If you listened to hip-hop you acted black, otherwise you acted white.

More directly, if you hung out with other black kids you act black. If you hang out with white kids you act white. How complex can that be? The single smartest black person in the school in my experiences has always acted black. Maybe that's just luck.

I can imagine a circumstance where there are schools that are nearly all white in the "top classes" and nearly all black in the "bottom classes". In that situation, the smartest black kids mostly hang out with their white classmates, listen to rock and roll like their friends and are accused of "acting white". I've never seen this but I imagine that is the case in some places. In that case doing well in school happens to align well enough with acting white that there are black children complaining to adults that they are accused of "acting white" just because they do well. Those complaints seem to have reached Bill Cosby. But the fact is the kids accused of "acting white" really do "act white".

So enough of that. I think this stuff about doing well is acting white is a myth produced by distorted perceptions. Cosby and other critics of black people latched onto it just because it fits their theories that the culture of black children is to blame for everything.

The next issue is that supposedly moral standards have degraded since when Bill Cosby was a child.

How is this supposed to have happened? Did the culture fairy sprinkle dust on a whole generation of black children?

Cosby points to a school in Brooklyn with a 50% drop out rate. Seems to me that between older siblings and older friends, people who attend that school have a clear picture of what happens to the people who graduate and what happens to the people who do not graduate.

Do the 50% who graduate get better jobs than the 50% who do not graduate? It is possible that graduating is in some cases rationally not worth the aggravation.

Something has to have changed if drop out rates increased. It was not the culture fairy. Instead of blaming the children Cosby should be asking has the amount of stress involved in going to school increased for some people? Have the benefits of finishing decreased for some people? These are issues that can and should be addressed. When cultures change, they usually change for a reason.

Next. Black leaders. Bill Cosby is not one. You may not like Farrakhan or Sharpton or Jackson, but they have devoted their working lives to trying to improve the status of the Black community. Bill Cosby has spent his working life trying to make people laugh, and mostly white people at that. That does not mean its not possible that as a fluke, the comedian might have some insight that those who dedicate their lives have missed, but we don't expect that to happen. That sure hasn't happened here.

Whew. Let's get back to the work ethic for a second. My grandmother moved from Mississippi to New York City at the beginning of the 20th century to work. My grandfather moved from Barbados to New York City to work. My other grandparents moved from Georgia to Detroit to work.

Every black person in every major US city has the same story. At one point I believe the Black participation in the labor force was higher than the white participation. So what happened to the work ethic?

Its not the culture fairy. If employers are prejudiced against Black people, that lowers the expected return from a given amount of job seeking effort. The problem is not backwards pants. Any rational actor will expend less effort seeking a job if there is a lower expected reward. Instead of fixing the backwards pants, let's fix the expected reward from a given amount of effort looking for a job.

OK. I'm done. Thanks P6 for providing a forum where I can spit this out.

Does everyone know about Geoffrey Canada? I read his autobiography recently Fists Sticks Knives Guns. Its real good. Geoffrey runs a major program in Harlem to improve the outcomes of at-risk children. Bill Cosby should give him a call.

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Yes, this was DEFINITELY an okay place to get that off.

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This is short, but because I've answered everyone else on the front page, I'll answer Wes here too.

This has been sitting on my monitor for, oh, a half hour or so. It is so neat a reversal of the Black position…and I strongly suspect there's no animus or trickery involved on Wes' part so I'm not trying to jack him. But let's try this for a moment:

We got half the problem. You got half the problem. If I were into quotas I's say we got 12.5% of the problem.

And in response to the particular hypothetical ("If you do not, or will not, acknowledge the majority of whites that hold no animus toward blacks"), I quote from my post which started this really interesting discussion:

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.

Do I have to say "emphasis added" when I'm quoting myself?

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I got email overnight from Mr. Barger. I have not read it.

I have not deleted it, either. I may read it, though I know pretty much what's in it. One of the vast, cosmic powers that are my inheritance as a reification of a Chaos Deity is the ability to perceive the form of negative spaces…which is to say I read between the line well. I expect it says I misinterpreted his "swinging from the trees" reference to my grandparent's generation. Juliette, in her comments, said she read it as a reference to lynching.

I'm not sure I give a good god damn.

You see, my great-grandfather WAS lynched. My grandfather was brought along by the lynchers to cut him down from the tree. My father, as a child, was there.

Whether he meant as anthropoids or strange fruit, it was stupid, insensitive and totally unacceptable. And he let me know right up front, via a link to an old post on his site he keeps around for JUST such an occasion and dumping those hoary old chestnuts into the conversation, exactly what type of discussion he wants to have. And I ain't havin' it.

What leads me to prejudge the poor man so harshly, you ask?

For example, I'm sympathetic to the classic complaint about black guys having trouble getting a taxi, but do you expect taxi drivers not to notice or take into account that young black men in this country have far higher crime rates than about any other group? Do you expect them to ignore reality in front of their faces and their own physical security?

And of course HE expects ME to ignore the fact that the young men he describes DON'T TAKE CABS. They got no job, no education, remember? And even if I felt it rational to fear these young men (and I take into account being a 6'2" 185 lb Black guy influences my view of how fearsome the precocious little darlings are) it is NOT rational to avoid the guy in the $300 tailored suit because you're afraid of a boy in $20 jeans that are too big for him.

He also expects me to get all hyper about this. I'm not. There ARE Black cab drivers, and I tip well. And for some reason I don't even have to search specifically for them. All I have to do is stand on the corner and raise my arm. The cabbies sort themselves by race, just for my benefit. Or maybe it's another manifestation of my Chaos Powers. I got so many, I lose track sometimes…

At any rate, I think it time for the long form answer to Mr. Barger's White America's central racial concern:

By the way, what exactly would I, Al Barger White America, need to do or say in order be judged clean and not-racist?

This is not to imply I feel all "White America" deserves the ire I baste and braise this turkey with. It is to say, once again, that "White America's" main concern in the discussion of race is to ease its conscience and find out how to approach race safely. Can't say as I blame you all…switch out "pain" for "conscience" and its a fair approximation of "Black America's" main concern. Therefore I shall NOT use Mr. Barger as the example to make my point; instead I'll give you an example of the eggshell-dance Sarah mentioned in her comment yesterday.

Almost a year ago I was approached by a couple of Progressives that had written a post on something or other Bush or the Republican party (like there's a difference right now) said that was, shall we say, wrong. The writer of said post used an Uncle Remus metaphor that included attempts at using the South-Mouth dialect of English, which dialect is related to and often confused with a number of Ebonics dialects. They were concerned about offending and asked my advice.

The advice I gave: Assume nothing and write to make your point.

Another example: during the Dean run a was asked by one of the online volunteers what they could do to engage Black voters.

The advice I gave: Make promises and keep them. I had other issues, like "are you asking as a representative of the campaign that can make binding statements or as a grass roots volunteer talking about what you're sure he'll do," and "if I tell you something and you do it, aren't you acting?"

Now the three Progressive I mention here all meant well…I have no ill feelings toward them at all. But they all made assumptions similar to Mr. Barger's…difference being Mr. Barger avoids guilt by saying any broken eggs are MY problem irrespective of who broke them because I'm the one all spattered with yoke and egg whites, I'm the one with shell shards in my eye (at least it's not a beam). Then he throws a few eggs, just to make sure you got the point. My fellow progressives are trying to avoid guilt by not breaking the eggs

When you have such concerns it is only because you don't know enough about Black folks to have a feeling for the reaction you'll get. Your best bet in such a situation is not to pretend you do. Talk. Ask. Learn. Sad as it is for me to say, your average Black person will almost cum from the delight of being actually heard by white folks.

Which explains a LOT of Black Conservatives. Getting paid is not always a financial transaction.

White America wants off the racial hook no less than Black America does. The hook is in deep, though. Getting it out will hurt, no matter what. So stop looking for a painless method of not being racist. At this point in out history, after just 40 years of Black freedom and 40 years of white folks having to live with the dual-soul syndrome DuBois wrote of in Black folks a century or so ago, there is no painless way for ANY of us.

---

July 20, 2004

Ukip MEP: Pregnant women should resign

Sarah Left

Tuesday July 20, 2004

The UK Independence party today named a man who would like to overturn maternity leave rights as its representative for the European parliament's committee on women's rights and gender equality.

Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom told Guardian Unlimited that maternity policy should be: "If you want to have a baby, you hand in your resignation and free up a job for another young lady."

Mr Bloom was selected by the party's chairman to "represent men's rights" on the influential committee. He still needed to be voted in by the European parliament in order to take his seat as a member of the committee.

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CULTURAL CHANGE IS AT THE HEART OF MARRIAGE'S DECLINE
Sun Jul 18,11:02 PM ET
By Cynthia Tucker

It wasn't even close. The U.S. Senate easily shut down debate last week over a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Democrats were joined by a handful of Republicans -- including Arizona's John McCain -- who remember the cornerstone of conservatism: Government has no business regulating citizens' private lives. As McCain put it, the amendment "strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans."

With that ugly business behind us, perhaps it will be possible now to have a legitimate discussion about the dire state of heterosexual marriage. People of goodwill -- those of all faiths and those with none -- ought to be able to dispense with the lies and illogic that have poisoned the debate so that we can concentrate on the changed cultural expectations that bedevil modern marriage.

The two-career couple; the wife who earns more than her husband; disagreements over religion, money and child-rearing; old-fashioned adultery and betrayal -- those are the challenges that confront contemporary couples. Not to mention a destabilizing factor embedded in 21st-century romance -- the idealized Hollywood marriage, which gives young couples a false premise on which to base a lifetime pledge. (As a divorcee, I know something about the dilemmas that doom so many heterosexual marriages.)

As commonplace as those problems are, you haven't heard much about them in the debate over "saving" traditional unions. Instead, narrow-minded preachers and pandering politicians have propagated a lot of foolish notions; among the most foolish is the idea of a connection between the faltering state of traditional marriage and the growing movement for gay rights. Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and Trista and Ryan -- who married in a televised ceremony after she spent a few weeks culling him from a herd of unattached males on a so-called reality show -- have contributed to the decline of heterosexual marriage. Gays and lesbians have had nothing to do with it.

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What liberal infidels will never understand about the president
The Church of Bush
by Rick Perlstein
July 20th, 2004 10:00 AM

Here are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan. That Bill Clinton is "lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an "African colonialist." That "we don't do torture," and that the School of the Americas manuals showing we do were "just ancient U.S. disinformation designed to make the Soviets think that we didn't know how to do real interrogations."

Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice guy.

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How has the US been spending other people's billions?
Simon Tisdall
Tuesday July 20, 2004
The Guardian

Henry Waxman is an awkward customer. For 30 years, this California congressman has probed, badgered and embarrassed US administrations of every hue.

As the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives' government reform committee, Congress's principal standing investigative panel, he is a difficult man to ignore.

Right now, Mr Waxman has a question on Iraq. In fact, he has several - and in typically robust fashion, he is demanding answers. What he wants to know is whether the Bush administration has been fiddling with Iraq's oil revenues.

He wrote to the Republican chairman of the reform committee on July 9, suggesting there was a serious case to answer. Subpoenas should be issued, he said, "to investigate potential mismanagement of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) by the United States".

The DFI was set up after last year's invasion as the depository for Iraq's multi-billion-dollar oil revenues and was administered, until June 28, by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - with notional UN oversight.

In particular, Mr Waxman is curious about "the [Bush] administration's last-minute 'draw-down' of billions of dollars from the DFI for unspecified expenses" prior to last month's transfer of sovereignty. "For example, $1bn [about £550m] was withdrawn from the DFI during the last month of the CPA's existence for unspecified 'security' purposes."

The administration provided no information about how these funds would be spent, Mr Waxman says, and has yet to do so.

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Realists and Neo-Cons Renew Battle on Iran
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 20 (IPS) - A new round in the ongoing battle between realists and neo-conservative and other hawks over Iran policy got underway here Monday as a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a new report urging Washington to engage Tehran on a selected range of issues of mutual concern.

The task force, co-chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under former President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) and including the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under past President George H W Bush (1989-93) argues that neo-conservative and other analysts who are urging that Washington pursue ''regime change'' in Iran underestimate the staying power of the current government there.

''Despite considerable political flux and popular dissatisfaction'', the 79-page report said, ''Iran is not on the verge of another revolution. Those forces that are committed to preserving Iran's current system remain firmly in control.''

The report, 'Iran: Time for a New Approach', also argues that Washington's invasion of Iraq, as well as Iran's rapid progress in developing possible nuclear-weapons capability, makes it more urgent than ever to resume and broaden bilateral talks that broke off 14 months ago.

But it stresses that a ''grand bargain'' to settle all outstanding conflicts between Washington and Tehran is unrealistic and that talks should focus instead on making ''incremental progress'' on a variety of key issues, including regional stability and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

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U.S. Public Backs Force Against Sudan 'Genocide'
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 20 (IPS) - Amid reports that senior officials in Sudan have directed recruitment, arming and other support to Arab militias waging a ”scorched-earth” campaign against African tribes in the province of Darfur, a new poll shows U.S. citizens feel Washington should back a future United Nations declaration of ”genocide” with armed force.

The poll comes one day after international human rights groups released reports that detailed atrocities that have forced more than one million black Africans from their homes, and linked Khartoum to the Arab 'Janjaweed' (”men on horseback”).

According to Amnesty International, the Janjaweed are using rape ”as a weapon of war” against their female victims.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released government documents it said came from civilian authorities in Darfur, and show the government and Janjaweed working hand in hand to expel the area's African tribes.

”It's absurd to distinguish between the Sudanese government forces and the militias -- they are one,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of HRW's Africa division. ”These documents show that militia activity has not just been condoned, it's been specifically supported by Sudan government officials.”

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Conversational Cheap Shots is a simple explanation of invalid argument techniques.

Not a single damn one of them works in here. Let s/he who has ears hear.

NIT-PICKING: (Known in P6-land as "a debating tactic")
Instead of dealing with a comment or question directly, the idea here is to focus on some insignificant detail to evade the issue or buy time to think.

"We need to define just exactly what you mean by _________."

OUT OF CONTEXT:
A twisted version of NIT-PICKING, the technique here is to purposely misunderstand some word, phrase, or analogy and shift the focus to it instead of the subject. This ploy will derail the other person into a defense of the word, phrase, or analogy instead of the case at hand.

LISTEN UP:
Pretend that the reason the other person isn't able to agree with you is that they are not listening, or at least not hard enough.

PRETEND AD HOMINEM:
A specific escalation of YOU'LL PAY FOR THAT; make it seem as if the other person is attacking you rather than making a simple point or correction, especially if you suspect that the other party is correct. Rather than staying on the subject, begin to act hurt--as if you have been viciously attacked as a human being--rather than admit you are wrong, or could do better, etc.

WISHFUL THINKING:
Instead of proving a point true or false, this technique tries to imply that the individual's desires have led him/her astray without dealing with the merits of the issue itself. (C.S. Lewis termed this "Bulverism".) Any strong desire can be shown to have tainted a conclusion or clouded objectivity, which casts doubt on the legitimacy of a point. This is very close to the classic ad hominem fallacy: "you say that because you are a man."

HEAT-SEEKING QUESTION: (Good luck trying this one)
The intent here is to throw the other person's competence in doubt while at the same time changing the subject. A question is asked that the other person is not likely to know the answer to, destroying their credibility and confidence. To really rub it in, the questioner can give a full answer to his/her own question proving that him/herself to have superior knowledge of the subject.

LUNATIC FRINGE:
If a person is making an imaginative or novel point, the approach here is to push the idea to a radical extreme generally agreed to be bad. The extreme can be either real or imagined. The hope here is that the other person will reflexively back off and retreat to a defensive position, thus short-circuiting the progression of the argument.

QUESTION THE QUESTION / COMMENT:
A great lead-in for the technique of WISHFUL THINKING, or a method of delay giving yourself time to think of an answer.

"Why do you ask that?" / "What makes you ask that?"
"What drives you to make such a statement?"

WORD SALAD, a.k.a. SESQUIPEDALIANISM: (This is a favorite in the Afrofuturism mailing list)
This is a recipe for sophisticated babbling. Ingredients include: philosophic sounding words and sentence structure, unintelligible Latin terms, banal folk wisdom, jargon, catch phrases, truisms, etc. Sprinkle lightly with a few words that appear to pertain to the subject. This will sound very impressive without really saying anything and will buy time to think of something meaty to say while your lips are flapping. In some circles such machinations can actually be passed off as an answer--or a point!

CUT 'EM OFF AT THE PASS: (Typically seen on shows like Crossfire, typically executed by members of the exotic species rudus interruptus , i.e. Ingraham and the Coulter-Thing. Much like Tourette Syndrome)
If you can see where the other person's logic is leading, you can make it very difficult along the way by arguing each minute sub-point and example. If the other person can not get past the first point, how will a case ever be made? Most of the techniques listed can be used to achieve this end.

DENIAL OF A VALID CONCLUSION:
This is the opposite of the CUT 'EM OFF AT THE PASS technique. Instead of arguing along the way, agree with all of the sub-points but deny the obvious conclusion. This is very frustrating to the other person because it automatically changes the subject to epistemology (how we know what we know). Generally, the other person will attempt another explanation rather than get into a heavy epistemological discussion, and the technique can simply be repeated.

SELECTIVE MEMORY:
To bring up a past event and GET IT ALL WRONG, or even to make up a past event. The intent is to get the other person confused, angry, and defensive.

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Keith left an email address rather than a web site.

Technically, my terminology isn't "member of the White Race" but is "people who self-identify as white." One can't get my full position form a single post though so I understand the misapprehension.

You say

a. The problem with black perception of racism is that it's about achieving perfection

and I wonder what brought you to that conclusion. One racist out of a thousand humans would be TOTALLY acceptable to every Black person I know.

More importantly we are nowhere near that point.

b. The part that was most interesting in the thread above was how P6's problem with Juliette wasn't with what she said, per se, but with the fact that she was publicly criticizing blacks in a way where white people might see it and might misinterpret it.

You have misinterpreted me.

My problem is that Juliette posts for the benefit of those she KNOWS are racist. She herself siad:

In answer to your question, it's bad.

and my follow-up is, why do you accept it when you know it's bad? And my explanation of WHY it is bad is that it justifies white people abandoning their half of the problem.

You DO know half the problem belongs collectively to white folks, don't you?

It is time for blacks to realize that their self-censorship of criticism for their own has got to stop. It is only hurting them to cling to the relics and rhetoric of the past. Whites see it, whether blacks criticize or not. Start sticking to the people going places instead of clinging to the people you had no choice about before.

It is time for white people to realize they are just as responsible for the situation we all must adjust to as Black people are. The denial has to stop. Black people see their denial whether white people do or not. Denying it keeps you stuck in the past

And I'm not just going to flip it like that. I'm going to take a market based approach to all this. Just like the drug war, I want to attack America's social problems on the demand side rather than just the supply side.

Raise your children right. There must be something desperately wrong with white culture that makes your children abandon it for Black culture. What happened to them that makes them idolize 50 cent, Eminem and the like?

Raise your children right and the demand dies.Demand dies, no more of those hip-hop thangs that bother Cos so much.

See? It's all a matter of perception. White folks, being the mainstream and all, tend to get away with dealing strictly from their own viewpoint. So, for example, when the first affirmative action programs were created to change the behavior of white folks, white folks put conditions on Black folks in order to participate/slow it down. That tactic continues to this day.

So if you want Black folks to take responsibility, white folks must too.

---

Quote of note:

When Briggs was charged with murder, her family went into debt to pay her attorney's fee, $10,000. Briggs' mother, Shelbia Goss, says she has always known her daughter was innocent. But money was a problem.

"We had no more money, we was losing everything we actually had, we didn't have anything left, all our money was going to fighting for her innocence, and so here she is, in prison, because we don't have any money," Goss said.

Instead of questioning the medical evidence and fighting the case, the attorney told Briggs she should plead guilty to a reduced charge and spend some time on probation.

"He said there was no way we could win because he didn't have the money for the medical people he needed to testify for me," Briggs said. "He told me to take the plea that would be the only chance, that there wasn't no way the judge would give me prison time."

Wrongly Convicted?
Young Mother Hopes New Medical Evidence Will Clear Her in Baby’s Death
By Mike von Fremd and Gina Treadgold
ABCNEWS.com
July 20, 2004— Brandy Briggs sits in a Texas prison, serving a 17-year sentence for shaking her 2-month-old son so severely that he later died. But now, a medical examiner says the baby was never shaken at all.

Briggs, from a small town outside Houston, was just 17 years old when her son, Daniel Lemmons, was born. During his short life, Daniel was in and out of hospitals, suffering from kidney problems and urinary tract infections.
On May 2, 1999, Briggs called 911, saying she had gotten up to feed her baby and found him barely breathing in his crib. Daniel was taken to the emergency room at one hospital, where the medical staff made a horrible mistake. They put a breathing tube in his stomach, not his lungs, and pumped air into his stomach for 42 minutes.

Daniel was transferred to another hospital, where the breathing tube mistake was corrected, and he was put on life support. He died in his mother's arms on May 9, 1999 — Mother's Day.

Briggs' nightmare only got worse. A Harris County assistant medical examiner ruled Daniel had died from "shaken baby syndrome," and his young mother was charged with murder.

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But that's because I'd never stoop so low.

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A Vote of No Confidence

THOMAS M. DIBIAGIO, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, has embarrassed his office and discredited himself by instructing his staff to produce at least three "front-page" indictments for public corruption or white-collar crimes by Nov. 6. His astonishingly inappropriate directives, contained in internal office memos disclosed by the Baltimore Sun, earned him an unusual and deserved public reprimand from his superiors in the Justice Department. In a letter released by the department, Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey ordered Mr. DiBiagio to submit "to me for review any proposed indictment in a public corruption matter." In case Mr. DiBiagio missed the point, Mr. Comey added, "You may not bring such a case without my personal approval."

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Florida Subpoenas Generic Drug Makers on Medicaid
Tue Jul 20, 2004 01:34 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Florida's attorney general on Tuesday said he subpoenaed six drug makers on suspicion the companies overcharged the state's Medicaid health insurance program for the poor by $100 million.

Attorney General Charlie Crist joins officials in about a dozen other states probing the pricing and marketing of pharmaceuticals in public health programs, as state governments grapple with double-digit health inflation and red ink.

Mylan Laboratories Inc., Novartis AG's Geneva Pharmaceuticals unit, Ivax Corp., Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd., Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc. and PurePac Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Alpharma Inc., are the companies targeted.

Officials at Watson and Ivax both confirmed they received the subpoena and said they will cooperate.

Ivax said it believes it is in compliance with all laws. Calls to the other drug makers were not immediately returned.

"Pharmaceutical pricing is a priority for attorneys general," Crist told Reuters. "We've noticed some spreads in the pricing that seemed inappropriate."

In general, drug companies must give government programs the best deal on pharmaceuticals. The subpoenas request material to determine if the companies violated the state's false claims act.

Of Florida's $58 billion budget, about $15 billion is spent on Medicaid, Crist added.

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Iraq Requests Return of UN Nuclear Inspectors
Tue Jul 20, 2004 02:11 PM ET

By Amil Khan
CAIRO (Reuters) - Iraq has asked the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to send inspectors to conduct an inventory of the country's nuclear material, and the agency's head said U.N. arms experts should also return to finish their job.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said inspectors charged with the task of verifying the status of Iraq's nuclear material would return to Baghdad soon.

"We received an official request from (Iraqi Foreign Minister) Hoshiyar Zebari for the return of international inspectors in the coming days," ElBaradei told reporters after arriving at Cairo airport.

Unlike their pre-war counterparts, these inspectors will not be searching for signs of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

Instead, they will be performing a routine task that even Iraq's ousted President Saddam Hussein allowed the U.N. agency to carry out after barring U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq in the wake of U.S. and British bombing raids in December 1998.

The IAEA said it hoped it would be a step toward a resumption of full inspections.

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Democratic priorities
Democrats Demand Vote on Bill to Improve Grid
Tue Jul 20, 2004 12:39 PM ET

By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly one year after the power blackout that left 50 million people in the dark, frustrated Democrats began a push on Tuesday to get the Republican-controlled House to schedule a vote on legislation that would improve the U.S. electricity grid.

With time running out for Congress to pass a comprehensive energy bill, Democrats are demanding a vote on stand-alone legislation that would impose and enforce electric transmission reliability standards on U.S. utilities.

The Bush administration and Republican lawmakers insist that electricity issues can be addressed only in a larger energy legislation package that also includes billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil, natural gas and coal firms.

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Republican priorities
Measure to Outlaw Flag Burning Advances in Senate
Tue Jul 20, 2004 01:33 PM ET

By Thomas Ferraro
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw the burning of the American flag won the approval on Tuesday of a Senate Judiciary Committee split largely along party lines.

Raised by some Republicans as a mark of patriotism this election year, the measure passed on a 11-7 vote and was sent to the full Senate for final congressional approval. While the Senate has repeatedly rejected such measures in the past, both sides predict a razor-close vote this time.

The Judiciary Committee's vote came a week after a divided Senate blocked a White House-backed bid to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, another issue Democrats have accused Republicans of pushing merely to rally their conservative base for the November elections.

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This comment

I don't have much of a "race problem." I think I'm fairly straight on these issues, other than having to fend off the occassional bit of nonsense from some particular black person who insists on trying to inflict their personal patholgies off on me.

On the other hand, I don't particularly expect a merit badge for this. It's easier for me to be straight on this than it is for you - my people in my grandparents' generation weren't swinging from the trees.

Is an unacceptable comment from a racist pig.

An unacceptable racist pig that's running for the US Senate as a Libertarian.

Tell me again how racism isn't a problem.

LATER: I added a link to the post in which this foulness appeared. And I edited out Barger's URL.

But I kept his IP.

---

---

via Ezra at Pandagon
NEW DETAILS SURFACE
by PAUL SIMMS
Issue of 2004-07-26
Posted 2004-07-19
Vice President Dick Cheney cursed at Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, in a confrontation on the Senate floor while members were having their annual group picture taken earlier this week. . . . According to [an] aide, Mr. Cheney . . . responded with a barnyard epithet, urging Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility.
—The Washington Times.

…As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle.

Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases “unethical for certain,” “crude oil spurtin’,” and “like Halliburton.”

Despite the fact that both participants brought their A-game and succeeded in dropping mad scientifics, the bout seemed to end in a draw.

Unfortunately, as other senators (along with assorted aides and support-staff members) were casting their votes to decide the winner, using the admittedly subjective but generally accepted “Make some noise up in here!” protocols, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Leahy took the proceedings to what one aide accurately described as “the next level.”

Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) was the first to notice that the two men were circling each other, Mr. Cheney brandishing a switchblade and Mr. Leahy the jagged neck of a broken bottle.

---

Black Americans discovered by Democratic party
Greg Palast - GregPalast.com

07.20.04 - Like Christopher Columbus blinking in shock at first seeing an American Indian, John Kerry has just discovered African-American voters.

On Thursday afternoon, Kerry landed at the NAACP convention, stepped off his slow-moving campaign boat and announced that he was exploring for one million missing Black voters.

Let me explain -- because the New York Times won't. In the 2000 elections, 1.9 million ballots were cast which were never counted -- "spoiled" is the technical term. Ballots don't spoil because they are left out of the fridge. There's always a technical reason: a stray mark, or my favorite, from Gadsden County, Florida, writing in Al Gore's name instead of checking a box.

According to data from the US Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard University Law School Civil Rights Project, about half the nation's spoiled ballots -- one million -- were cast by Black folk. Just as African American communities get the worst schools, the worst hospitals, they also get dumped with the worst voting machines, which eat, mismark, mangle and void ballots. [P6: emphasis added]

Poof! A million Black votes gone, zapped, vanished.

…Senator Kerry is no Corrine Brown. The man who would be President is first trying out the 'D' word in front of the friendly natives at the NAACP. But still, it's a first step: mentioning out loud the massive, systematic Disenfranchisement of the Black vote.

But the real change won't come until Kerry can say the 'D' word in front of say, a gathering of the members of his wife's country club. And until he confronts the boys holding the electoral lynching ropes in both parties.

I have a dream. I imagine John Kerry taking this message to the floor of the convention next week and proclaiming, "Three decades after Martin Luther King's murder, one million African-Americans cast ballots never counted. This will not stand!" Imagine it: At that moment, for the first time in a generation, the Democratic Party will have nominated a Democrat.

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Mike at TopDog04 spotted this one

Understand what has happened. And do it with no further comment from me because the comments would not be pleasant.

Victory Slipping Away for Black Farmers

The Department of Agriculture has denied payments to almost 90 percent of black farmers who sought compensation for discrimination under a landmark court settlement the agency reached with African American growers five years ago, according to a report set for release today by a Washington-based environmental group.

A two-year investigation by the Environmental Working Group found that USDA officials contracted Justice Department lawyers to aggressively fight the farmers' claims after the settlement of the $3 billion class-action lawsuit. Of the 94,000 growers who sought restitution for discrimination in a process set up by the court, 81,000 were turned away, the report says.

The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, said the USDA's actions "willfully obstructed justice" and "deliberately undermined" the spirit of the settlement....

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As of this writing I have three right interesting comments from (I assume) regulars at Baldilocks. I don't want them all conflated with the original discussion I'm going to present and respond to them in separate posts.

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King of Fools:

There's a difference between "view[ing] things through the framework of race" and understanding that one must take into account that the number of people you will encounter that do NOT do so is small enough to consider a statistical glitch.

Separate yourself from the issue for a moment.

There is no one who will deny that racism still exists, structurally and personally. Would it be intelligent of me to act as though it doesn't?

Stay separate a little longer.

Under the circumstances of extant racism, under what conditions may I safely assume I am free of it?

Bringing it back to your comment, there are two things I find interesting. You agree with the fact of my statement but dispute a reason you assume supports it. And if you didn't identify with white folks you couldn't be offended by the statement.

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Due to the length of this one, I'm inserting my comments in his.

Al Barger of Culpepper Log

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Sarah from trying to grok

Similar eggshells? OH yeah. But we're on eggshells over the collective reactions…things like making sure the guy who's following you in the store knows you're not a shoplifter. (I actually have a story I think is pretty funny. As teenagers my brother and I were walking around the furniture section of Sears while waiting for my mom. A guy was following us everywhere and I was feeling cranky that day. But my brother handled it… he opened up his jacket quickly and grabbed the back of a recliner like he was going to shove it in there. The guard started for a second, paused, then walked away shaking his head.)

But here's the root of the problem, as I see it. Racism is a power relationship, and we think personal measures are the means of eliminating it…the "we" has no racial division in it but this one phenomenon manifests differently in Black folks and white folks because of our different starting points.

Because our issue is the experience, many Black people feel being held personally responsible for structural issues is simply the result of those same structural issues. Because your issue is the responsibility and you're convinced racism is a personal affair, you take responsibility (and feel the liberal guilt) for things that are not your personal fault.

Knowing this may not help with your eggshell situation. We are, unfortunately, living in the transition period. From a historical perspective it may look like a mere point on a time line. But the fall of the Mayan civilization is just such a point, and to the individual Mayans involved each day was really, really long.

---

Quote of note:

"They began their attack on AOL 10 years ago," she said. "Since then they have lost billions, and now they are making money. It gives me a real sense of just how patient they are."

Microsoft's Online Unit Shows Signs of Life
By SAUL HANSELL

At an October 2002 gala to introduce Microsoft's MSN 8 Internet service, Bill Gates showed a video of himself wearing a butterfly costume and handing out software for the service.

His point was that after seven years of floundering in the Internet access market, Microsoft would do whatever it took to beat its longtime rival America Online. That included pouring $500 million into MSN to match AOL's most popular features and another $300 million into marketing, featuring MSN's butterfly mascot and a concert highlighted by rocker Lenny Kravitz singing "Fly Away."

But all that flew away was the better part of a billion dollars. Microsoft's share of the Internet access market has declined steadily since.

In the years since the start of what was first called the Microsoft Network, Mr. Gates has tried dozens of different business models, from Internet access to Web sites to monthly software subscriptions. They all had one thing in common: they lost money.

Over the last year, however, MSN has finally started to see some profits. The unit began making money last fall and is expected to post an operating profit of about $200 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with a loss of about $531 million last year.

The reason has little to do with any of Microsoft's more ambitious Internet strategies. Instead, it was one of the businesses that it had put on the back burner - Internet advertising - that really started to take off.

Even without a lot of new investment, MSN's Web site has long been the third most popular destination on the Internet, bringing together its Hotmail e-mail service, the MSNBC news operation and a variety of other channels. Recently, it has worked to repair a frayed relationship with Madison Avenue, putting the company in a good position to gain as the ad market rebounded. Over the last year, MSN has ranked second in online advertising revenue, behind Yahoo and ahead of the longtime leader AOL, a unit of Time Warner.

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Governors Join as 'Big Four' to Pool Clout
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and AL BAKER

WASHINGTON, July 19 - It is a lobbying dream team that calls itself The Big Four: a Hollywood star turned politician, a formidable East Coast fund-raiser, a close friend of the president and the president's little brother.

They are among the nation's most prominent Republican governors - Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, George E. Pataki of New York, Rick Perry of Texas and Jeb Bush of Florida - and they are increasingly concerned that smaller states are gobbling up more than their fair share of federal aid, particularly because of the disproportionate clout those states have in Congress.

So these governors are pooling their considerable political influence to advance the interests of their states, in a move that has caught the attention of politicians and power brokers along K Street in Washington. "Very impressive," said Bill Paxon, an influential Washington lobbyist who was thought of as a potential speaker of the House before he left Congress in 1999. "In the lobbying world, it just doesn't get any better than that."

The alliance represents the first time in recent memory that the governors of the nation's four most populous states have entered into a formal agreement to jointly lobby members of Congress, according to political historians and analysts.

But more than that, it brings together some of the biggest names in the Republican Party: Mr. Schwarzenegger, who provides star power to the party; Mr. Pataki, who offers a Rolodex of wealthy Wall Street donors and is the longest-serving governor in the nation; Mr. Perry, who was George W. Bush's trusted lieutenant governor before Mr. Bush handed the job of governor to him; and Mr. Bush, who is, well, a Bush.

The men brought their combined weight to bear last week in a letter adorned with the seals of their states - informing Republican Congressional leaders, by way of introduction, that there was a new political force to be reckoned with here in the nation's capital.

"As governors of the four most populous states, we represent over one-third of the nation's gross domestic product," the July 15 letter said pointedly. "Our states employ over 43 million people and represent the largest agricultural, manufacturing, technology, tourism and service-based economies in the country."

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Let the internecine strife wax bountifully!

Do you realize what massive population shifts would take place if the states received benefits exactly proportional to their contributions like corporations do? It would hollow out the center of the country.

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The Arabian Candidate
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In the original version of "The Manchurian Candidate," Senator John Iselin, whom Chinese agents are plotting to put in the White House, is a right-wing demagogue modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roger Ebert wrote, the plan is to "use anticommunist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover."

The movie doesn't say what Iselin would have done if the plot had succeeded. Presumably, however, he wouldn't have openly turned traitor. Instead, he would have used his position to undermine national security, while posing as America's staunchest defender against communist evil.

So let's imagine an update - not the remake with Denzel Washington, which I haven't seen, but my own version. This time the enemies would be Islamic fanatics, who install as their puppet president a demagogue who poses as the nation's defender against terrorist evildoers.

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(That headline sorta reminds you of "I agree with Clarence," don't it?)

Ban on Printing Information on Kobe Bryant Accuser Is Upheld
By KIRK JOHNSON

Colorado's highest court ruled yesterday that the judge in the rape trial of the basketball star Kobe Bryant was justified in barring the news media from publishing court documents detailing the sex life of Mr. Bryant's accuser even though the trial court itself had accidentally released the information to the public.

But the State Supreme Court panel, ruling 4 to 3, was deeply divided, reflecting the issues at the center of the pretrial hearings in the case: how much protection does Colorado's rape victim law afford Mr. Bryant's accuser? And can the legal system in the Internet age even provide those protections in a case where the news media's coverage - and the resulting opportunities for lawyers to make their case in public - has been so pervasive?

The appellate panel's narrow majority said that the obligations to protect were ironclad and irrevocable and that so-called prior restraint on publication and its resulting abridgement of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution was justified by the damage that could be done to the woman if the material were published or broadcast.

The minority, in sometimes blistering language, said the court and the state had already failed in their duty to protect the woman and that barring publication now would make little difference.

"Prior restraints are not meant to mitigate harms that have already occurred," the dissenting judges said. The trial court, they continued, cannot "require the media to do what the state failed to - give the alleged victim the protections afforded by the statute."

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See, here's the thing: once one of these protections is breeched, shoring it up legally is the right thing to do. Not doing so before now is not a failing of the court because it all exploded too fast for the legal system to react to; how long did it take for a picture of the girl to start circulating on the net? THAT may be the flaw, if there even is one.

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Drug Approved for Heart Failure in Black Patients
By ANDREW POLLACK

A drug aimed at treating heart failure specifically in black patients has proved so effective that the clinical trial in which it was being tested has been halted early, the company sponsoring the trial said yesterday.

The results are expected to lead to approval of the first drug specifically for a single ethnic group. They seem to validate the gamble by the company, NitroMed, to take a drug that had failed to win approval for general use and test it only on African-Americans, an approach that ignited controversy on the relevance of race to medicine. The company's stock soared on yesterday's announcement.

Michael D. Loberg, the president and chief executive, said the company had been expecting the drug to be approved in early 2006 but would now be ready to introduce the drug in early 2005, if the Food and Drug Administration approves it that soon for use by blacks.

NitroMed has argued that blacks have a higher rate of heart failure than the American population as a whole and that they tend not to respond to some existing heart failure drugs as well as other groups. For NitroMed executives, those factors, and some earlier evidence that blacks respond better to the drug, which is called BiDil, justified a test of the drug just in that ethnic group.

Yesterday, NitroMed said that an independent committee of medical researchers overseeing patient safety in the trial decided it would be unethical to continue giving some patients a placebo because those getting the drug were living significantly longer. The trial, which began in 2001 and had enrolled about 1,050 of the 1,100 patients eventually intended to take part, was halted immediately and all the participating patients will be offered BiDil.

"It is a spectacular result," said Anne L. Taylor, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the study. "It offers an additional treatment for a group of patients who traditionally, with standard medications, have not done as well."

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The original source of this is CQ Today, which requires a subscription that I don't have so this is an extract from an abstract on civilrights.org

Senate Resumes Partisan Fight over Judicial Nominees with Another Cloture Vote
July 19, 2004

Keith Perine
CQ Today

"Senate Republicans will resume the battle over President Bush's judicial nominees on Tuesday with a procedural vote on the nomination of William G. Myers III to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is not likely to muster the 60 votes he would need on his motion to invoke cloture, or limit debate, on Myers' nomination. But the vote, coming days before Congress adjourns for a six-week summer recess, appears intended to remind voters that 'obstructionist' Democrats are blocking a handful of Bush's judicial picks. Republicans are determined to make that an issue in the fall elections

Democrats should just quietly prepare the statistics. The number of judges submitted by both Bush and Clinton, as well as the number accepted and the length of time each took. Make nice, pretty charts and wait for Republicans to raise the issue of obstructionism.

The points to make in the response:

• The high acceptance rate is proof that Democrats are more than capable of compromise on the issue (might as well turn the past few years of wimpyness into judo).
• The high acceptance rate is a strong implication that there are serious issues with these few candidates
• The high acceptance rate having established a broad set of criteria by which one could easily identify candidate that would be acceptable to the majority on both sides of the aisle, one could easily choose to do so and move on.
• The absolute rejection of these few is a stand on principle, and you must expect it of us just as you expect Conservatives to absolutely reject a number of possible Progressive candidates

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Two things to notice: first, the title of this Department of Labor news release. Notice we are no longer talking only about "faith based" community service programs. Now we've added "faith based" training and contracting.

What the hell is "faith based" contracting? Christianist construction workers praying the building doesn't fall down?

I know what faith based training is, though. They're saying DOL funds can be used for things like attending a seminary, training to qualify for the ministry. I'm not sure about my position on this in particular. I mean, if you think of the ministry as just another job…

The second thing I want you to notice is the straw man on which this is all based:

Currently, faith-based institutions can be barred from competing for federal contracts if they hire staff in accordance with their religious beliefs. The Labor Department will revise the current regulation to conform with Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and make it clear that faith-based institutions that secure government contracts are not barred from hiring members of their own faith.

Federal regulations have never barred anyone or any organization from hiring members of their own faith.

What they did was forbid excluding people for the sole reason that they are NOT members of their own faith. In other words, they forbade religious discrimination. Now, not having read the new regs directly I can only infer their content (and therefore impact) from the press release.

My problem is seeing the agency responsible for enforcing the law willfully misrepresent it. As written, it doesn't authorize a direct requirement that one belong to a specific faith. It DOES, however, authorize requiring a specific set of beliefs; there's no other meaning possible for "hire staff in accordance with their religious beliefs."

You may be hard-pressed to see the difference. I understand. Totally.

I'm having a problem with the practice or writing up legal methods of irrational exclusion. I'm a Black guy with more than a smidgen of historical knowledge; I'm sure you understand why this sort of move will, at minimum, get my attention.

Anyway…

OPA News Release: [09/22/2003]
Contact Name: Ed Frank
Phone Number: (202) 693-4676

U.S. Department of Labor Announces Elimination of Barriers to Faith-Based Training, Contracting

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) today announced it is moving forward with two regulatory changes that would eliminate barriers to faith-based training and contracting.

The Labor Department announced a notice of proposed rule making (NPRM) that would conform Workforce Investment Act (WIA) job-training funds to rules already governing federal Pell grants and student loans and allow recipients to pursue faith-based careers. Currently, individuals who receive WIA training vouchers are barred from using them to pay for faith-based studies, while individuals who receive Pell grants or federal student loans are allowed to use them to pay tuition in postsecondary faith-based institutions. The department’s proposal would end that inequity and remove this barrier for men and women who want to pursue faith-based training.

The department also announced a direct final rule that amends its rules regarding federal contractors to eliminate the barriers to faith-based institutions contracting with the federal government. The rule implements President Bush’s executive order of Dec. 12, 2002, which mandated that DOL make certain reforms to existing federal contracting rules that affect faith-based organizations.

Currently, faith-based institutions can be barred from competing for federal contracts if they hire staff in accordance with their religious beliefs. The Labor Department will revise the current regulation to conform with Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and make it clear that faith-based institutions that secure government contracts are not barred from hiring members of their own faith.

“Faith-based organizations play a critical role in helping dislocated and unemployed workers find new job opportunities,” said Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao. “The two regulations announced today remove barriers to faith-based organizations and provide a level playing field so they can help people in their communities.”

# # #

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I suspect pro-choice groups would favor a referendum. Not that it's any stranger's business what a woman chooses to do in such situations

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Abortion Advocates Bash President Bush in Wake of New Campaign Ad
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
July 19, 2004

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A leading abortion advocacy group is coming to the aid of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in the wake of television and radio ads from the Bush campaign that criticize Kerry's pro-abortion voting record.

President Bush's re-election campaign has been running ads that take Kerry to task for voting against parental notification legislation and a bill to protect pregnant women from violent assaults. They imply that Kerry voting record is out of the mainstream.

But NARAL, a leading pro-abortion group, says it is Bush, not Kerry, whose position is at odds with most voters.

"George Bush is making a desperate attempt to distract Americans from his radical record and dangerous views on reproductive rights issues," NARAL's interim president Elizabeth Cavendish said. "Bush's real position is clear -- he has never backed away from his vow to 'do everything in my power' to take away a woman's right to choose."

NARAL cites a July 2004 Catholics for a Free Choice poll and a June 2003 NARAL survey that claim 60 percent of Catholic voters favor legal abortion and 80 percent of voters believe abortion should be a decision made between a woman and her doctor.

However, those surveys are anomalies and contradict most polls that show a majority of Americans -- including women and Catholics -- are pro-life.

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July 19, 2004

Today I ran through some of the old magazines. The link in the post below is a direct result.

I found my very first deck of tarot cards. They are older than a LOT of you.

I got a voice modifier that goes with the full head rubber alien mask. The battery had just enough charge to show it still works.

And notebooks, GHOD, I always knew I was a fool for jotting down notes and crap, but I think I'm up to eight now.

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Every so often The Atlantic Monthly publishes something that you remember because you want to be able to say "I told you so" to everyone that missed it. This, from 1995, is one of them.

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The Diversity Myth
The hortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony, leaves us with nothing useful to say to the failed states and riven polities of the post-Cold War world
by Benjamin Schwarz

SOLIPSISM is a perennial American temptation. In a grotesquely comic muddle of causes and cultures, Lyndon Johnson once sought to buy off the North Vietnamese with promises of a Great Society--style project along the Mekong. Variants of the cry "Why can't they be more like us?" have long served as a staple of American tourists and foreign-policy mandarins alike. We have made ourselves at home in the world, characteristically, by regarding it as America in the making.
Thus imbued with ourselves, we often get the world wrong. Mussolini was not an impetuous New Dealer, nor Ho Chi Minh a Democratic pol. The West Bank is not the American South, nor is the cause of the Palestinian homeland an exotic version of the black struggle for civil rights. Similarly, the ethnic tumult loosed by the end of the Cold War is not to be assessed by pious invocations of our multi-ethnic, multiracial heritage of tolerance and civic comity. The bloodlettings in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, and Haiti have no parallel in the Parson Weems idea of our past which we trumpet abroad. Not that they are incommensurably worse than anything in the American experience. Rather, the history we hold up as a light to nations is a sanctimonious tissue of myth and self-infatuation. We get the world wrong because we get ourselves wrong. Taken without illusion, our history gives us no right to preach--but it should prepare us to understand the brutal realities of nation-building, at home and abroad.

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$20 Million? I'd be ready to retire.

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Microsoft pays to end Lindows suits
By David Becker
CNET News.com
July 19, 2004, 10:02 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5274944.html

Microsoft will pay upstart Linux seller Lindows $20 million to settle a long-running trademark dispute, according to a regulatory document filed Monday.

In exchange for the payment, Lindows--which recently renamed most of its products "Linspire" to work around European trademark suits--will give up the Lindows name and assign related Web domains to Microsoft, according to the registration statement Lindows filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Oliver is promoting his bosses' work again.

Right-Wing Squares

TOTALLY on another topic, the down side of full-text RSS feeds is a guy can do a bunch of work switching stuff up and you may never notice. believe it or not, it was the URL in that link up there that made me look to see what system Oliver is using, and he's moved to Drupal.

Dude. Get rid of the ugly default theme. Check out Cyberdash for a quick fix. Or work the phptemplate theme like I'm doing. Note that the two test accounts, Prometheus 6 and The Ultramarine, have different titles and avatars in in the header. A minor hack of blog.module and phptemplate.theme. And if you're interested you can have the fortune cookie/random quote module I wrote.

You can't have the weekly archive pages yet, though.

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How to heat up racism
Roy Greenslade
Monday July 19, 2004
The Guardian

The Sun was unequivocal about the British National Party. Its front page boomed: "Bloody Nasty People". Its leading article spoke of the party as "a collection of evil, hate-filled moronic thugs ... wicked men ... criminals who should be locked up."

The following day, after the BBC's documentary had been screened, the Sun punched home its message in another leader urging the authorities to arrest BNP members who were secretly filmed spouting "racist bile".

Good stuff, eh? Britain's best-selling daily newspaper laying into the BNP in terms which any liberal could not but applaud. Hang on, though. This is the same Sun that is also responsible for publishing material, day after day, which feeds the prejudices of people who are recruited by, and increasingly vote for, the BNP.

In the past couple of years the Sun has run stories, some of them false, some far-fetched, many full of distortions, which are guaranteed to stimulate its readers' latent - and, all too often, manifest - racism. How else can the paper explain its extraordinary three-page "exclusive" a year ago about "callous" east European asylum seekers alleged to be stealing, killing and eating swans?

This story, which was sure to provide fodder for the bigots of the BNP, was founded on an unsubstantiated rumour started by an anonymous phone call to a swan sanctuary which appears to have been passed on to a police wildlife crime unit. There was not an iota of proof to back it up. It had not resulted, as the Sun claimed, in a police swoop, nor in "east Europeans" being caught "red-handed about to cook a pair of royal swans".

In almost every respect a story likely to inflame passions about a very sensitive issue was wholly wrong. Yet the Sun refused to apologise, eventually carrying a nonsensical "clarification" six months later, tucked away at the back of the paper. By then it had already published another unprovable, unsourced story claiming that asylum seekers were poaching "our fish".

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Sound like any blogs we're familiar with?

These were not isolated examples. The Sun has been in the press vanguard in stoking up concern about Britain being "swamped" by asylum seekers, relying for its scare stories on dodgy figures supplied from unofficial sources. Even when the National Audit Office issued a report in May which concluded that the government's asylum data and statistics were "in most respects reliable", the Sun's news report accentuated the negative, beginning: "Ministers were slammed yesterday for putting out 'misleading' figures about asylum seekers".

Nor has the paper cared about delineating who it is talking about. For the Sun, there appears to be no difference between asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. They are all the same: foreigners "our people" don't want. In other words, the paper has echoed the views of the BNP.

The Sun has taken every chance to attribute Britain's social problems on incomers, as a classic headline last November illustrated, "HIV soars 20%: Migrants blamed for rise". In fact, the report on which that story was based, by the Health Protection Agency, laid greater emphasis on the increase in HIV transmission by homosexual and bisexual men.

These were not isolated examples. The Sun has been in the press vanguard in stoking up concern about Britain being "swamped" by asylum seekers, relying for its scare stories on dodgy figures supplied from unofficial sources. Even when the National Audit Office issued a report in May which concluded that the government's asylum data and statistics were "in most respects reliable", the Sun's news report accentuated the negative, beginning: "Ministers were slammed yesterday for putting out 'misleading' figures about asylum seekers".

Nor has the paper cared about delineating who it is talking about. For the Sun, there appears to be no difference between asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. They are all the same: foreigners "our people" don't want. In other words, the paper has echoed the views of the BNP.

The Sun has taken every chance to attribute Britain's social problems on incomers, as a classic headline last November illustrated, "HIV soars 20%: Migrants blamed for rise". In fact, the report on which that story was based, by the Health Protection Agency, laid greater emphasis on the increase in HIV transmission by homosexual and bisexual men.

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"Terror" in the Skies - A Question

Unless someone can provide a cogent explanation as to why the objections I've raised don't constitute good reasons to expect any hypothetical new terrorist strike to occur in a manner that utilizes the element of surprise, I'll continue to maintain that the only reason people are giving this ridiculous story about possible Syrian "terrorists" the milage it's obtaining is because it caters to their pre-existing prejudice that they ought to be spared the indignity of increased scrutiny, while other, swarthier persons should be made to bear the whole burden, as if such profiling would ever catch another Timothy McVeigh, Richard Reid, Jose Padilla or the white Australian convert Jack Roche.

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Wandering about three links out from Culture Kitchen's sidebar, I spotted this posted on Upcoming.org:

Chicks and Giggles... All Female Comedy : Bush For Kerry Edition Tuesday, August 3, 2004 8:30 PM

Laugh Lounge
151 Essex Street (Yahoo! Maps, Mapquest)
New York City, New York 10027 To recognize the influx of the GOP, we are planning our own grand comedy party on Essex Street! The funniest females in NYC will make you laugh and giggle.
Starring
Tasha Space
Ana Carolina
Molly Reisner
Mo White
Giulia Rozzi
Ann Design
Ellen Lloyd
Andrea Hancock
Jessy Delfino

door at 8;show at 8:30pm
$8 cover with 2-drink min.

All I can say is, they better be funny because I'm going.

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When it's working...

I saw a link to P6…the index page, not a particular post, so I didn't get notice of it by email… that had text in the extract that was nowhere to be seen on the page. All that was in the linking post, in fact, was:

Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same

The blog in question is Culture Kitchen and though I don't like them big blocky fonts It's easy enough to overlook because the content is working.

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Cabin Fever
By , The Advocate
Posted on July 16, 2004, Printed on July 19, 2004

Patrick Guerriero, executive director of conservative gay rights group Log Cabin Republicans, has been getting asked one particularly humorous question a lot these days: "So who are you going to vote for? John Kerry or Ralph Nader?" After all, he and his group of gay Republicans have seemingly been hung out to dry by the Bush administration and its backers in Congress. This week Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate pushed for but failed to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. A procedural vote on the proposal needed 60 votes to pass but went down on Wednesday by a vote of 48 votes backing the amendment to 50 against. Still, Guerriero and his fellow gay conservatives have been left feeling beleaguered by all the antigay rhetoric that surrounded the Senate debate. "I do a lot of soul-searching," Guerriero admitted. "Our membership is ticked off."

Mind you, that does not mean Guerriero is going to leave his Log Cabin post or the Republican Party. Growing up in a middle-class Boston suburb, he feared that his sexual orientation would thwart his political ambitions, especially as a budding young Republican. But unlike generations of gay and lesbian conservatives before him, he has refused to stay in the closet and has been successful. However, he is furious that the GOP – of which he and others have remained loyal to for so long – seems to be completely shunning gay men and lesbians while catering to a far-right agenda in which advocating the opposition of gay rights has become a favored means for raising campaign funds.

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Commentary: Wanted: More Soldiers for Civil Rights
Date: Monday, July 19, 2004
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

It’s a pity that, outside of academia, the political arena and a few churches, there has been no real celebration of the Brown v. Board school desegregation ruling of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – two landmark events for which the country is inarguably much better off. Maybe we were too busy planning for the Fourth of July.

Or perhaps we were dumbstruck by Bill Cosby’s scathing indictment of black irresponsibility which, at best, only told part of the story by focusing on the effect while shrugging off the cause and thus was a metaphysical failure. Sure got a lot of media attention, though, didn’t it? But, of course. How they love it when the fault is not with the stalker but with the stalkee for not taking proper precautions.

Or it could be that we’ve just gotten complacent and that after the modern movement made its biggest scores, we did as the Rev. Jeffrey I. Johnson alleges, and let our guard down.

Johnson, the youth pastor at Baltimore’s Empowerment Temple A.M.E. church, took it to the choir last week when congressional Democrats convened its second annual African American Leadership Summit. Although he came to praise civil rights efforts, activists and achievements, Johnson also came to eulogize the old-school movement, trumpeting a new approach, or at least the need for one.

“When we got post-1970,” he said, “we chilled. There was a group of individuals who said, ‘I don’t want my baby to have to fight the way I fought. So just go to school, get a job, baby; move to the suburbs and enjoy your life.’ There was another group of individuals that said, ‘Don’t even worry about being black; if you don’t mention it, maybe they won’t notice. Don’t say that you’re black, don’t be proud of being black, but just be black in whiteface. And so you can go to a college campus and pretend like you don’t have a heritage that you’ve been given; you can pretend like you don’t have issues that frustrate you.’”

Ouch. And he was just getting started.

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No Manipulation in 'Memogate,' Says Civil Rights Commission Lawyer

(CNSNews.com) - The deputy general counsel for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded there was "no delay or actual manipulation" of the Senate's judicial confirmation process pertaining to the "Memogate" controversy.

Deborah Carr said she found no evidence of wrongdoing by liberal interest groups who asked Democrat senators to delay or reject President Bush's judicial nominees.

"The parties that are mentioned are allowed by law to lobby, and based on the information that has been discussed and talked about, I believe there was no delay of a process or actual manipulation of a process that occurred," Carr said at Friday's commission meeting.

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from Kairosnews; and I must say I think it rocks that someone who signs him or herself "blogalvillageidiot" deconstructs this noise so completely.

THE Quote of note:

In plain language now: Did the administration adequately justify the evidence it presented to the public and the Congress? Joe Wilson is simply telling us that it did not, as far as I can tell. And he appears to have some justification for his belief. The question of whether it was deliberately misleading or merely negligent is a red herring. Negligence resulting in multiple deaths is also an actionable cause, and can be argued from demonstrable facts.

Rhetoric

The vast right-wing conspiracy is buzzing today with the claim that Joseph Wilson's report to the CIA on uranium from Niger may actually have bolstered the infamous "16 words" in the 2002 State of the Union address.

It seems to me that these exercises in advanced hermeneutics turn on a rather sophisticated interpretation of one of those 16 words: "recently." The administration and its allies are playing a semantic game with "recently" comparable to Bill Clinton's lawyerly parsing of the terms "sex" and "sexual relations."

Wilson had reported vague feelers from the Iraqis about uranium in 1999. The National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 reported possible Iraqi attempts to procure uranium in 2001, but subsequent investigation along other lines led American intelligence to reject or heavily qualify that conclusion, partly because documents supporting that hypothesis proved to have been forged.

Since Bush did not specify a precise time frame, they can now claim to have been referring to Wilson's report on the 1999 contact with the Iraqi trade delegation, not to the forged documents. Likewise, the Butler Report found that the British intelligence assertion about those contacts was not discredited by the forged documents because it was arrived at independently before the discovery of the forged documents.

In that case, isn't the implication of this version of the story that President Bush and his speechwriters "cherry-picked" a piece of anecdotal evidence that was not subsequently corroborated? Their justification is — and here I proudly dust off my rhetorical vocabulary — a kind of inverted post hoc ergo proper hoc. Yes, the forged letter was not discovered until after the British finding, but this does not mean that it does not play a role in a process of inductive reasoning that is logically prior to that claim. If informants are reporting on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium and an attempt to falsify records that support that claim are subsequently discovered, it is reasonable to ask whether the sources consulted earlier might also have had an interest in falsifying such reports.

The real problem here, however, lies in the epistemological claim implicit in the five words "the British government has learned ..." Although the Butler Review concluded that the claim, made prior to the discovery of the forged documents, could not have been based on those documents, the British white paper subsequently relied upon by the President provided no other sources for that claim, and may have ignored or overlooked evidence to the contrary.

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If US media were held to the standard British media must meet, Rupert Murdock would be deported.

In fact, maybe that explains his presence here.

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MEDIA – FOX CITED FOR ITS DISHONESTY: The British Government's Office of Communications (Ofcom) – the official regulator of the UK's communications industries - recently chastised Fox News and found it in violation of various regulations in that country aimed at preventing the media from deliberately spreading misinformation. Ofcom found that Fox News anchor John Gibson made "false statements by undermining facts." Its report stated, "Fox News was unable to provide any substantial evidence to support the overall allegation that the BBC management had lied and the BBC had an anti-American obsession…Even taking into account that this was a 'personal view' item, the strength and number of allegations that John Gibson made against the BBC meant that Fox News should have offered the BBC an opportunity to respond." Ofcom concluded, "Fox News was therefore in breach of Sections 2.1 (respect for truth), 2.7 (opportunity to take part), and 3.5(b) (personal view programmes - opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence) of the [British] Programme Code."

The text of the decision is below the fold.

The Big Story: My Word
Fox News, 28 January, 22:00

Issue
My Word is a personal comment section at the end of an hour-long news programme called The Big Story. On the day of the publication of the Hutton Inquiry Report into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly (which contained criticism of the BBC), John Gibson, the programme anchor, delivered his regular editorial opinion piece. In the course of which, John Gibson claimed:

a) that the BBC had “a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest”;
b) that the BBC “felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives”;
c) that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, in Baghdad during the American invasion, had “insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military”;
d) that “the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie – exaggerate – because, well, the BBC knew that the war was wrong, and anything they could say to underscore that point had to be right”.

24 viewers complained to Ofcom that that the item was “misleading”, “went far beyond reasoned criticism” and “misrepresented the truth”.

In light of such a damaging critique, we asked Fox News whether it had offered the BBC an opportunity to respond.

Response
a) As for the factual basis of John Gibson’s piece, Fox News said that the BBC had appointed a special executive to monitor ‘pro-Arab’ bias at the network; that tapping the phrase “BBC anti-American” into Google resulted in 47,200 hits; that the BBC “continually bashed” American policy and ridiculed the American President; and persecuted Tony Blair because he was pro-American. These facts justified the phrase “frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest”.

b) The BBC “felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives” was a summation of the BBC’s response to the complaint against Andrew Gilligan’s embellishment of his interview with Dr David Kelly.

c) Fox News accepted that Andrew Gilligan had not actually said the words that John Gibson appeared to attribute to him. However, Gibson was paraphrasing Gilligan’s words on April 5 2003 when, as US troops moved towards Baghdad, he said “I’m at the centre of Baghdad … and I don’t see anything, but the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements”. The Iraqi Minister of Information said that the Iraqis had recaptured the airport, which Gilligan and the BBC, Fox News contended, accepted at face value.

d) When it became clear that Gilligan’s source, Dr David Kelly, was not as highly placed in the Government as Gilligan had claimed, BBC executives did not relay their concerns to editorial staff as quickly as they should have done, with the result that Gilligan’s story gained currency. BBC executives at the highest level “argued that the higher form of journalism practised by the BBC required their vigorous defence of Gilligan”. This supported Gibson’s statement that “the BBC … insisted its reporter had a right to lie”. It was clear from their reporting of the war, argued Fox News, that the BBC took a position that the war was wrong.

Fox News did not contact the BBC for a reaction or response to John Gibson’s comments since this “segment is reserved for his opinion only”. But it pointed to an earlier news report that day from London about the Hutton Inquiry

Decision
The Programme Code requires that all factually-based programmes should be characterised by “a respect for truth”; that in Personal View programmes the opinions expressed, however partial, should “not rest upon false evidence” and the “facts should be respected”. To ensure fairness, programmes which contain a damaging critique of any individual or organisation should normally offer those criticised an opportunity to respond.

a) Ofcom does not accept that Fox News’s claim that an appointment of a monitor to detect ‘pro-Arab’ bias is proof of an “anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest” within the BBC. Similarly, we do not believe that a simple Internet search for the words “BBC” and “anti-American” is sufficient evidence to back-up such a statement. (An Internet search will only identify those sites which contain those words, it will not make any editorial judgement over how those words are used). Fox News stated that the BBC’s approach was “irrational” and “dishonest”. However, it did not provide any evidence other than to say the BBC bashed American policy; or that it ridiculed the US President without any analysis; and that it persecuted Tony Blair.

b) We do not accept that the Hutton Inquiry supported the statement that the “BBC felt entitled to lie and when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying”. The Inquiry stated that BBC editorial system was “defective”. At no stage did Hutton accuse the BBC management of lying.

c) Fox News argue that the presenter was not directly quoting Gilligan when he claimed that the reporter “insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military”. However, the manner in which John Gibson delivered these lines and the fact that he indicated that Gilligan said it “on-air” gave the distinct impression that he was quoting Gilligan directly. It did not appear that he was summarising Gilligan’s reporting. Furthermore, Fox News failed to provide any evidence, except that it felt that Gilligan’s reporting of the US advance into Baghdad was incorrect, that supported this statement.

d) As previously stated the Hutton Inquiry concluded that the BBC editorial system was “defective”. There is no evidence, and Fox News did not provide any, that the BBC “insisted its reporter had a right to lie”. Fox News argue that from its “study of BBC reporting” it could claim that the “BBC knew that the war was wrong”. Fox News’s “study” appears to be based on its own viewing and listening of BBC services. It could provide nothing more than this statement to back up this assertion.

We recognise how important freedom of expression is within the media. This item was part of a well-established spot, in which the presenter put forwards his own opinion in an uncompromising manner. However, such items should not make false statements by undermining facts. Fox News was unable to provide any substantial evidence to support the overall allegation that the BBC management had lied and the BBC had an anti-American obsession. It had also incorrectly attributed quotes to the reporter Andrew Gilligan.

Even taking into account that this was a ‘personal view’ item, the strength and number of allegations that John Gibson made against the BBC meant that Fox News should have offered the BBC an opportunity to respond.

Fox News was therefore in breach of Sections 2.1 (respect for truth), 2.7 (opportunity to take part), and 3.5(b) (personal view programmes - opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence) of the Programme Code.

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We're all multi-tasking, but what's the cost?
We're just not wired to do so much at once, as stress and mistakes show.
By Melissa Healy
Times Staff Writer

July 19, 2004

Executives revel in it. Parents with jobs and children rely on it. And circus jugglers make it art.

Multi-tasking, for most Americans, has become a way of life. Doing many things at once is the way we manage demands bearing down on us at warp speed, tame a plague of helpful technological devices and play enough roles — parent, coach, social secretary, executive — to stage a Broadway show.

But researchers peering into the brains of those engaged in several tasks at once are concluding what some overworked Americans had begun to suspect: that multi-tasking, which many have embraced as the key to success, is instead a formula for shoddy work, mismanaged time, rote solutions, stress and forgetfulness. Not to mention car crashes, kitchen fires, forgotten children, near misses in the skies and other dangers of inattention.

So turn off the music, hang up the phone, pull over to the side of the road and take note: When it comes to using your brain to conduct several tasks at one time, "there is no free lunch," says University of Michigan psychologist David E. Meyer. For all but the most routine tasks — and few mental undertakings are truly routine — it will take more time for the brain to switch among tasks than it would have to complete one and then turn to the other.

When the two get squished together, each will be shortchanged, resulting in errors.

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Someone at Howard Stern's joint got mad Photoshopping skillz.

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I'm sure Conservatives actually see the problem here because they seem more concerned with the message an action sends than the action itself.

For three years Bush has sent the Black civil rights community the message that their issues aren't important to him. That's an accurate representation of the Conservative position as far as I can see; they would like to separate the issues from the community and redefine them.

This election is critical to Democrats but important to Republicans as well. It's less of a crisis to Republicans because if repudiated by the real-world results of their decisions they will be able to blame the combination of "the war" and the collapse of the dot-com bubble. But it would still represent a tremendous setback for the neocon agenda…and we all know how tight the race is.

So l'il Georgie can't afford to alienate a single one of his core constituents. And a big part of Bush's appeal to his core is his unshakeable faith in what he's doing. Faith, the evidence of things unseen. Like success.

I digress.

Anyway, shots like this:

are what they want, not shots like this:

and in case you haven't noticed, Bush really sucks at unscripted interactions. So he gonna stay hella far from hostile crowds.

What do you expect? He's never spoken in front of a hostile crowd since taking the chair in the Oval Office. Still, it sends the message that even speaking to Black folks will endanger his standing with his core. Long term, he just made any rapproachment between Republicans and Black folks in general a lot less likely. Short term, forget about it.

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THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Kerry Vows Not to Divide Nation by Race
The Democrat receives a rousing reception at the NAACP convention Bush decided to skip.
By Michael Finnegan
Times Staff Writer
July 16, 2004

PHILADELPHIA — Sen. John F. Kerry sought to capitalize Thursday on President Bush's refusal to speak to the NAACP, telling a national gathering of African Americans that he would "talk to all of the people" and not "divide our nation by race."

"The president may be too busy to speak to you now, but I've got news for you: He's going to have plenty of time after Nov. 2," Kerry told 3,000 cheering members of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People at the organization's 95th annual convention.

Since his election as president, Bush has rejected all speaking invitations from the NAACP, America's oldest civil rights group. White House officials this week cited "hostile" remarks about Bush by NAACP leaders as the reason, a rationale Kerry mocked in his remarks.

"As a campaigner," Kerry told the crowd, "I know something about scheduling conflicts and hostile environments. But you know what? When you're president of the United States, you can pretty much say where you want to be and when. When you're president, you need to talk to all of the people, and that's exactly what I intend to do."

From the moment he entered the convention hall, with the disco hit "We Are Family" booming from loudspeakers, the Massachusetts Democrat was greeted with cheers and standing ovations.

The NAACP stop was part of a concerted push by Kerry this week to build support among African Americans. A strong turnout of black voters is crucial to his prospects for carrying some of the nation's most closely divided states, among them Pennsylvania and Michigan.

An array of black Democrats has complained that Kerry has fallen short in appealing to minority voters, in part by putting too few blacks in the top ranks of his campaign.

The enthusiasm in the convention hall suggested at least some measure of success in Kerry's dual effort to bolster his support among blacks and to use Bush's absence to damage his already dismal standing among African Americans. (Nine out of 10 black voters sided against Bush in the 2000 election.)

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That said, to my mind Kerry's statements aren't sufficient.

Not dividing isn't enough. Facilitating healing must be the goal. It's why Bush's "I'm a uniter not a divider" worked so well, and why he will suffer a backlash for failing to even make a gesture in that direction.

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U.S. Faces a Crossroads on Iran Policy
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A09

…The Bush administration is under mounting pressure to take action to deal with Iran -- and end the drift that has characterized U.S. policy for more than three years.
Since May, Congress has been moving -- with little notice -- toward a joint resolution calling for punitive action against Iran if it does not fully reveal details of its nuclear arms program. In language similar to the prewar resolution on Iraq, a recent House resolution authorized the use of "all appropriate means" to deter, dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weaponry -- terminology often used to approve preemptive military force. Reflecting the growing anxiety on Capitol Hill about Iran, it passed 376 to 3.

In contrast, two of the most prominent foreign policy groups in Washington are calling for the United States to end a quarter-century of hostile relations and begin new diplomatic overtures to Iran, despite disagreements on a vast range of issues. Because the "solidly entrenched" government provides the only "authoritative" interlocutors, Washington should "deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall," says a Council on Foreign Relations report released today.

The disparate range of proposals underscores the near void in U.S. policy toward Iran -- in stark contrast to the two other countries in what President Bush calls the "axis of evil." The administration launched a war to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq and is now engaged in delicate talks over nuclear issues with North Korea. But six months before its first term ends, the administration has still not formally signed off on a strategy for Iran since a review of U.S. policy was begun in 2001, U.S. officials say.

Pressed to define U.S. policy on Iran, one frustrated senior U.S. official cracked, "Oh, do we have one?"

Bush administration policy has generally been piecemeal and reactive to broader or tangential issues, rather than to Iran itself, U.S. officials say. "What we have is a summation of various pieces -- one piece on nuclear weapons, one on human rights, another on terrorism, other pieces on drugs, Iraq and Afghanistan," a senior State Department official said.

White House officials point to a three-paragraph presidential statement two years ago this month as the core policy. It notes local and national elections when voters supported reformers; it then calls on Tehran to "listen to their hopes."

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Schwarzenegger Assails Opponents as 'Girlie-Men'
Democrats Locked in Budget Battle With Calif. Governor Decry Pejorative Term
By Tim Molloy
Associated Press
Monday, July 19, 2004; 5:37 AM

LOS ANGELES -- Democrats aren't amused by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's use of the mocking term "girlie men" to describe some lawmakers, although a spokesman for the governor said no apology would be forthcoming.

Schwarzenegger dished out the insult at a rally Saturday as he claimed Democrats were delaying the budget by catering to special interests. Democrats protested that the remark was sexist and homophobic.

"If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," Schwarzenegger said to the cheering crowd at a mall food court in Ontario.

The governor lifted the term from a long-running "Saturday Night Live" skit in which two pompous, Schwarzenegger-worshipping weightlifters repeatedly use it to mock those who don't meet their standards of physical perfection.

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Republicans Helping Nader to Help Themselves
By Brian Faler

Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A04

The Michigan Republican Party submitted more than 40,000 signatures last week in a bid to get independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the state's November ballot.

Of course, this is not really about helping Nader. It is all about helping President Bush and hurting Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry's campaign in a closely contested state.

The Michigan GOP denies that, of course. Matt Davis, a spokesman for the group, said it was merely concerned about third-party candidates being left off the ballot. He could not name, however, another third-party or independent candidate his party has helped.

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NO ONE actually wants competition. In fact, that's a good way to recognize a scam—anyone that claims to support a something because it increases competition is lying, both about their reasons for supporting that something and the effect they expect it to have.

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Quote of note:

Bush suffers from low approval ratings on the economy, and he and others in his administration have tried to point to positive economic statistics to change public perceptions. Kerry has argued that despite those numbers, the economic recovery is uneven and that middle-class families are under financial pressure from rising medical costs and stagnant incomes.

When McInturff tested those two messages, he found voters responded far more favorably to the Democratic message. In McInturff's findings, 55 percent said they were likely to vote for the Democratic candidate, while 42 percent said they would vote for the Republican.

GOP Urged to Sharpen Message on Economy
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A04

SEATTLE, July 18 -- Republicans risk losing the economic debate in this year's election unless they shift their focus from trying to convince voters that the economy is improving and engage Democrats directly over how to create jobs and expand growth in the future, Republican governors were told here this weekend.

GOP pollster Bill McInturff, in a Saturday briefing for the Republican Governors Association, presented survey results showing that voters are far more responsive to Sen. John F. Kerry's economic message that talks about a middle-class squeeze than to President Bush's efforts to change public perceptions by talking up recent economic statistics.

Republicans have been hoping that, with improving economic statistics, Bush will gain politically, but GOP governors agreed with McInturff's conclusion that voters are not ready for such a message.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R) said economies in many battleground states are improving but acknowledged that voters are not convinced the recovery is real. "People are still skeptical" about the economy, Owens said. "There's a long-term lag between perception and reality. . . . You can't run against that prevailing wisdom yourself."

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) said that economic conditions in his state have improved but that voters were reluctant to give Bush credit for the changes, saying they do not believe his tax cuts have helped them directly. "It's a very, very hard issue for the president to come into Wisconsin and explain what he has done to help us," he said.

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Haiti's Slim Chance

AS THE BUSH administration pours billions into reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, a third nation-building effort is precariously proceeding on a shoestring 600 miles from Florida. Early this year Haiti lived through a revolution that resulted in elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide being transported into exile on a U.S. military aircraft; a day later, 1,800 U.S. Marines belatedly arrived as part of a U.N.-sponsored effort to restore order. Now the Marines have left, replaced by an untested force of Brazilians and other South Americans. Meanwhile, an interim government is struggling to gain control over the country. This week at a Washington conference the United Nations and other organizations will seek $900 million in new funding to jump-start the economy and rebuild shattered institutions. Success might open a modest window of opportunity for the hemisphere's poorest country -- which is why the Bush administration and Congress ought to be doing more to help.

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Daimler Bosses May Give Up Pay if Workers Agree to Cuts
By Tony Czuczka
Associated Press
Monday, July 19, 2004; Page A08

BERLIN, July 18 -- DaimlerChrysler's management is ready to give up some of its pay if employees make concessions in the automaker's drive to cut $620 million in costs, a company spokesman said Sunday.

DaimlerChrysler workers have staged walkouts and rallies in recent days, halting production of some Mercedes-Benz cars as recently as Saturday to protest company demands to work more for the same pay. More walkouts are reportedly planned next week.

"I can confirm that the board is willing to make a contribution if there is an overall agreement," DaimlerChrysler spokesman Thomas Froehlich said Sunday.

He refused to comment in detail on a Bild am Sonntag newspaper report that chief executive Juergen Schrempp and other top managers were willing to relinquish 10 percent of their salaries if workers agree to a deal. The report cited no sources.

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July 18, 2004

Quote of note:

The security measures we have been cobbling together are hardly fit to deter amateur thieves, vandals and hackers, never mind determined terrorists. Worse still, small improvements are often oversold as giant steps forward, lowering the guard of average citizens as they carry on their daily routine with an unwarranted sense of confidence. For instance, while the flying public is busy shedding shoes and bags at X-ray check-in points, the tons of air freight being loaded into the belly of most commercial airliners continues to fly the American skies virtually uninspected.

Why America Is Still An Easy Target
The author of the new book America the Vulnerable exposes how the U.S. has failed to protect its infrastructure from terrorists
By STEPHEN FLYNN

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has spent more than $500 million to make America's seaports more secure. Sound like a lot? It isn't. That's about what the U.S. spends in Iraq in four days, notes Stephen Flynn, whose new book on homeland security, America the Vulnerable, concludes that the U.S. is scandalously unprepared for the next terrorist attack. Why? Because it still doesn't see protecting the homeland as a priority. Flynn, a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says our leaders harbor the delusion that the real fight against terrorism is overseas. In the meantime, the U.S. has made scant progress in protecting its own infrastructure. Having spent years visiting America's high-risk targets, Flynn offers a damning assessment and some solutions as well.

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My daughter has the laptop, so I'm working from notes, but the McLaughlin Report noted that 75% of Bush's campaign donations and 43% of Kerry's come from Corporate America. We're talking dollar amount. Eleanor Clift broke it out a bit, saying that the biggest contributors to Bush are in the oil, military supply and pharmaceuticals industries.

Why am I not surprised?

Still, Mort Zuckerman groaned about the 30% increase in discretionary spending and the absolute absence of any vetoes at all. And interestingly enough, he said business would be better off short-term with Bush, but long-term Kerry's greater fiscal responsibility (his term) would be better for business.

They also touched on the American prison population.The United States, at a cost of $49 billion per year, houses 25% of all the prisoners in the entire world. And in the conversation, McLaughlin took Buchanan to the edge of a blatantly racist statement by asking him why he thought there were so many prisoners in the USofA. It is, of course, because so many non-Europeans (his term) are committing crimes. But he was let off the hook by being allowed a non-answer to the follow up question, would reducing the wealth and income disparities help resolve that issue.

I have a chunk of an online transcript from The Capital Gang I want to share too.

SHIELDS: Al Hunt.

HUNT: Remember last year when the White House and Congress delivered a prescription drug benefit? Now, we found out earlier that the $400 billion advertised cost was a lie. Now we discover its estimated employers will reduce or eliminate current drug benefits for 3.8 million retirees, or one out of every three.

It gets worse. The Bush administration agreed to give employers $71 billion to encourage them not to drop retirees. Guess what? They still get the money, even if they deep-six the benefits. Drug companies and rich employers benefits; seniors and taxpayers get the shaft.

Isn't that nice?

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Trying to pay off one of those I.O.U.s, I find that James' distaste for the term "cultural imperialism"

I have issues with the term "cultural imperialism." It occurs, but the phrase can be interpreted very broadly. Also, it implies a sort of nation-culture identity, as if cultural diffusion is a monstrosity if it crosses national boundaries.

…requires a clearer statement than this (mine):

Even Japan, the model for such head transplants, is dealing with the social, political and economic repercussions of flipping its economic model after World War II.

I think the best approach to take is to explain what I see that I'm calling cultural imperialism. It's very possible I'm not using the term the way it's generally used.

When a nation joins the world-wide free market, it is on the terms set by developed nations. That's because developed nations own and control the market, as well as flex all the enforcement power.

Decision-making in the two financial bodies is far removed from the principle of one country-one vote.

The 46 sub-Saharan African countries, for example, have only two executive directors representing them at the World Bank and IMF, while eight northern nations have a single executive director each.

Directors from countries of the Group of Seven (G7) most industrialised nations now control more than 60 per cent of votes at the bank and fund, while the U.S. administration has veto power over any extraordinary vote.

The bank and IMF each have 184 board members from developed and developing countries and 24 members who represent countries or groups of nations.

That system has deprived more populous nations like India and China, which combined represent more than 2.3 billion people of the world's six billion people, of an influential say while giving countries like the United Kingdom, France and the United States greater clout.

Because NO ONE actually wants competition (in fact, that's a good way to recognize the whole deregulation scam is a scam—any business claims to support a law because it increases competition is lying, both about its reasons for supporting the law and the effect they expect it to have), those terms will be offered to those the owners of the market feel will be of benefit to themselves.

Sometimes that's raw material. Sometimes that people to buy their stuff. In either case, left up to the IMF and World Bank all the emerging economies will emerge just enough to provide service for the developed nations of the world.

Archer Daniels Midland says they see a future where everything grows where it grows best…and they sell it, of course. They envision a world where everyone else's growth depends on exports…which will put them in a situation similar to Japan's sooner or later. In fact, I suspect Japan has taken this long to become unbalanced because they joined the game while Europe was rebuilding.

As I wrote this, I realize "cultural imperialism" isn't the right term. Economic sphere of influence is better; economic gravity well is almost exact.

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Scroll down to the fourth animation on this page. Save one of the two (1.5 megs or 4.7 megs) on your hard drive and play it.

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Interesting.

Remember, this isn't about a real expression of outrage. This is creating the climate to put pressure on people using dirty tactics. You want to turn up the heat on these guys and to do that you have to sound genuinely outraged, but not like a pissed off partisan.

The trick in bringing this kind of tactic to light is to sound as calm, rational and reasonable as possible. The best candidate for this is the young mother in a swing district. Vets are also good for this, as are teenagers. But anyone can do it if they mind their tone and contact the right people. This will happen again and again, especially as the Sauron/Gollum campaign spirals to defeat, so save this post and practice it when needed.

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Page, not Thomas. Just wanted to see if you're paying attention.

Quote of note:

Perhaps Bush became more outspoken in his NAACP critique because he knew Education Secretary Rod Paige, a black "lifelong" NAACP member, was about to spring his own stinging critique of the NAACP in The Wall Street Journal's editorial page last Thursday, the same day that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Bush's Democratic opponent, addressed the group.

NAACP vs. GOP: Preaching to the choir
Published July 18, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sounded outraged that President Bush stiffed their invitation to speak at their annual convention, which runs through Thursday in Philadelphia. But I am guessing that they were secretly delighted. After all, as long as Bush didn't show, they didn't have to pretend that they wanted to hear him.

That's just one of several good reasons why the president should have shown up. Politically, it was a no-lose proposition for him in an election year. If the delegates had applauded politely, which they did after his 2000 speech before the body, he would have looked like a winner. If anybody had jeered, which was highly unlikely, he would have looked courageous for making an attempt at peacemaking.

Instead, the president flip-flopped on his 2000 pledge to be "a uniter, not a divider" by slamming the leaders of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group. In an interview with three Pennsylvania newspapers, Bush said he "admired some" NAACP leaders around the country but not its officers, who include President Kweisi Mfume, a former Democratic congressman from Baltimore, and Chairman Julian Bond, who has denounced Bush's judicial appointees as coming from "the Taliban wing" of the GOP.

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The Hulk is back!

Fortunately, not all the way back.

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Comedian Bill Cosby created controversy recently with pointed public criticism of parenting practices in certain African-American communities. Ray Suarez discusses Cosby's controversial comments with Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for the Village Voice.

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When I saw the title of the linked article in my RSS reader my first, rather sardonic, thought was "Did Mugabe learn it from Bush, or did Bush learn it from Mugabe?"

Well, of course, Bush is Bush-league compared to the intensity of Mugabe's crew. Or maybe it's the techniques…I don't think the neocon approach would work in Zimbabwe any more than Mugabe's approach (which involves more than brutality; it involves letting everyone know the source of it as well) would work here. I'm fairly convinced there a difference of degree rather than kind between the two administrations.

But you can't just say stuff like that, you know? So I couldn't use the headline I had in mind.

Anyway…

Mugabe Said to Use Law as Political Tool
Dissidents Face Zimbabwe's Justice System
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A18

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe -- Remember Moyo, a burly man with sad, withdrawn eyes, was arrested on Nov. 11, 2001, and beaten repeatedly and savagely over the next several days. He was charged with murder.

The day after the arrest, Moyo said, police pummeled and stomped him by the side of a road. At a police station outside this southern city, he was stripped, his hands were tied behind his back and his feet were shackled to a metal ring hooked to a wet cell floor, he said. Several times, he said, thugs let themselves in at night and beat him bloody and mute.

"This thing, you cannot forget," said Moyo, who had been an intelligence official and bodyguard for Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. "You can try, but it just sticks."

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President Is Still Mum on Agenda For Second Term
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A01

As he campaigned around the country last week, President Bush asked voters to give him another four years to make the nation "safer and stronger and better." But with the election less than four months away, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the president's campaign is what he would actually do if he wins a second term.

Bush's failure to detail a second-term agenda -- beyond his pledge to keep waging an aggressive war on terrorism -- represents a stark contrast to his previous campaigns, in which he set out a handful of priorities almost from the opening day and rarely deviated from them.

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Using Threats, N.Y. Landlords Feed Immigrants' Fear
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A03

NEW YORK -- They sat there, three diminutive and worried Mexican women, in the shadows in the back pews of St. Jerome's Church in the Bronx. Father John O. Grange noticed and motioned them forward.

The women handed Grange a letter. They had asked for apartment repairs, and this letter contained what appeared to be the landlord's response.

"Dear Tenants," the letter stated, "As you know the United States Government and specifically the Homeland Security Administration is investigating illegal aliens . . . I have given them all the information that I know about my tenants (age, names, work, cars, marriage, country of origin, telephone numbers, children)…You should expect a visit in the near future."

Grange, 64, forms a fist and frowns.

"Their hands were shaking as I read the letter -- they were scared stiff," said the priest, who is a founding member of South Bronx Churches, an ecumenical organizing group that is helping the women. "Evil has reared its head and threatens to ruin their hardworking lives."

Much has changed in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world of New York. There are subway announcements advising riders to watch for suspicious people and unattended packages. There is the shared memory of attacks past and the fear of more to come. And for some of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the city, especially those whose visa papers are not in order, the fear is doubled. They worry about more attacks and about those who might take advantage of them in these troubled times.

"This case in the Bronx is a particularly flagrant example of what our constituency faces with some frequency," said Andrew Friedman, co-director of Make the Road by Walking, an immigrant advocacy group that has worked with tenants in Brooklyn who have received similar verbal threats from landlords. "People put up with absolutely ghastly living conditions and feel they can't complain in this security-conscious world."

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund handled several cases in the past year in which landlords tried to intimidate Muslim tenants by threatening to call the FBI. An organizer who works with nannies said that such threats are common -- and that they recently won a court case for back wages against a tennis instructor who warned he would call the Department of Homeland Security.

"We hear about this quite often -- it's our main challenge, because employers know everyone is so scared now," said Ai-jen Poo, who works for Domestic Workers United in the Bronx. "Even people with legal green cards are afraid of deportation post-9/11. It's a double whammy because the economy isn't great."

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Boeing Has a Powerful Ally With Hastert
House Speaker Throws His Clout Behind Controversial Air Force Tanker Deal

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2004; Page A10

Congress is poised to appropriate $100 million to keep one of the federal government's most scandal-ridden and contentious programs -- the Air Force's plan to replace its aging aerial-refueling tankers with new Boeing 767s.

Insiders say that the primary reason for the payout is that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has made Boeing Co.'s cause his own.

Hastert has worked aggressively behind the scenes to keep the tanker contract in Boeing's hands at least in part, his spokesman said, because Boeing is headquartered in Chicago, not far from his congressional district. Boeing also has needed the help. Questions about the cost of the program, among other worries, have prompted the Pentagon to put off deciding its fate until year-end at the earliest.

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"When you control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."

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You will read this only here (unfortunately)
By Joan Chittister,OSB

You are not supposed to be allowed to read this column. It was solicited by another publisher and then returned to sender, me, because it says things that some people are allowed to say but others, apparently, are not.

The story is this. A magazine in the United States, no names mentioned, planned to publish a "roundtable" feature on the upcoming election. The question posed to each of the writers seemed at first blush to be basically simple, essentially straightforward: "What," the editor wanted to know from each of us, "do you think is the major issue in the upcoming November presidential election?" "Interesting question," I thought. "I can't wait to see the answers to this one."

Then this magazine that is incorporated as a 501c3 organization, or not-for-profit entity, got a ruling from its lawyer saying that if this particular feature were printed they stood in danger of losing their tax-exempt status. Since all of the writers, it seems, had criticized the Bush administration for some failure in regard to the area of interest being treated, the company lawyer feared IRS reprisals against the group on the grounds of "political endorsement."

The magazine withdrew the opinion pieces that formed the basis for the roundtable.

That happened in the face of Catholic bishops who will refuse Communion to candidates who vote for pro-choice legislation and Bush campaign strategists who have targeted 1,600 "friendly" churches in Pennsylvania to hand over their list of members to the local Republican party.

As a result, I have decided to publish those previous comments of mine here, not as a political endorsement of any kind, but simply because I still believe in two things: First, I believe in freedom of speech. And secondly, I still believe in the United States as "land of the free and home of the brave."

When either of those qualities goes, the country won't be worth living in anyway, taxes or no taxes.

So, I repeat here what was meant to be published there:

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Don't matter. It's a nice idea anyway.

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Winning Argument

Most of the political debate in this country does not occur behind podiums but in backyards, bus stops and ball parks. The blog is an effort to give people – or at least those who agree with us – the arguments they need to convince others that they're right. If you disagree with the opinions expressed here, make your case in the comments section.

Their pattern is one topic per day, three reasons supporting the progressive position and at least one counter to the conservative position.

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A thought. Because I know anyone who wants to vote for Nader is taking a principled position. I do respect principle, but after this I'm sure there's better ways of supporting them.

I'm not implying I think his run is a bad idea because of that article. It's more that I hope people see the Usenet quality to his explanations.

Now, I understand y'all do not want to reward the Democratic party with a vote. I hope you don't want to reward Nader's obvious mendacity. And you may feel Nader is himself unconnected with the Conservative financial shenanigans underpinning his campaign (and I hope you gave Sharpton the same slack…I didn't, but given my position on Nader I shouldn't have), but if he receives anything more than a humiliation it will encourage that sort of interferance in the future.

So I suggest the principled progressive response would be to write in your own name.

But I don't know if touch-screen voting machines handle write-in candidates.

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James at Hobson's Choice gives a little thought to a story about GE shaping tax policy. In the process he says something that, when generalized, is a fundamental truth:

Few firms are as well positioned. No company spends more on lobbying than GE, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com -- $7.54 million last year alone. Its political action committee, through which it donates to congressional candidates, ranks in total donations among the top 10 of all corporations this year.

But GE's real strength is in information, not cash. Its effort on the tax bill illustrates what can happen when Congress throws its doors open to the business community on a highly complicated topic and an experienced team is waiting with all the answers.

This actually confirms what I had long suspected--that the biggest force shaping policy choices is often the lack of understanding of alternatives. It's not necessary to argue that legislators are a clutch of varlets; tax laws are incredibly complicated, and with good reason. Likewise, the assumptions that have driven American foreign policy for so many years.

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the Agonist, via Digby at Hullabaloo

Moscow and Washington are quietly negotiating a request by the Bush administration to send Russian troops to Iraq or Afghanistan this fall, Russian government sources tell Stratfor. The talks are intense, our contacts close to the U.S. State Department say, and the timing is not insignificant. A Russian troop lift to either country before the U.S. presidential election would give U.S. President George W. Bush a powerful boost in the campaign.

Russia, as Stratfor reports, has agreed 'in principle':

Sources close to Russia's Security Council tell Stratfor that Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to the request "in principle" and has directed the Russian General Staff to work up a plan by the end of the month.

Digby says it best: "The U.S. inviting the Russians into Afghanistan to help us fight the Mujahadeen is so incredibly ironic I can't even go there. A KGB agent rescuing the neocons is simply hysterical. "

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