August 18, 2004

Setting up a new site is easy. Converting an old one is a bitch, especially if you never had such conversions in mind when you started out.

Right now, every post I've ever written and most of the comments are at http://www.prometheus6.org/drupal/. It looks cute and it works and all that but don't even THINK about internal links going anywhere but the static pages that were created by MT. And having just become somewhat familiar with regular expressions I find experimenting with mod_rewrite a somewhat humbling experience.

RSS at http://www.prometheus6.org/drupal/node/view/rss2.

All this effort should have gone into the Niggerati Network site I was working on. I'm tired, cranky and a little impatient to get back to writing. And I'm giving less of a damn about broken links (internal and external) by the minute…given that I average between 15 and 20 clips per day that works out to over 5000 entries over the course of a year. Most do not have links out there to worry about, but some do. And I'm thinking lazy now, especially since I'm changing the M.O. around here a bit, what with the group blog thing and all.

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August 17, 2004

This mess should be fininshed tomorrow morning. It would be done already except I've run across the type of problem that lets you know you didn;t get enough sleep last night.

I've already talked enough about what I wanted done. I'll just warn you that if you want to comment without registering you can, but you have to go through the preview and CAPTCHA thing.

An hour or so ago I put on my tinfoil hat while taking a break. See, that very unintelligent rant I got by mail troubles me. As I said, I simply can't picture someone sending me than nonsense, not if they read the site well enough to find the email address. And given the political situation I find Republicans aren't the only ones I don't trust.

After some thought I decided to take steps to insure I never become the Black Instapundit.

Understand, folks: I'm on the Democratic side because the Republican side is dangerous. But…and I'm speaking Black now…Democrats are almost as selfish in their dealings with Black folks as Republicans.

Rather than making assumptions or attacking a phantom, I've decided to just do what I do and bypass blatant stupidity. That means whether it comes from a stupid Republican or a Democrat that thinks s/he's smart I'll be passing along no more missives of that type.

Remember that, because this post does NOT get imported into the new software.

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I'm still busy but I can't just not react to this.

Look at the BLATANTLY RACIST APPEAL being made here. This is what Republicans call a serious outreach to the Black community?

Subject: wake up!!!! From: [email protected] Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 19:33:58 EDT To: [email protected]

Black folks have morals too. The sodomites have not only penetrated the moral shield, standard of black culture, but have overwhelmed that once pristine shield falling prey to the dictates of the liberal Democratic Party. That Party consists of wealthy Ivy League homosexuals destined to sissify the black male. Why you have little black boys age 6 to 18 wearing make-up and earrings and lip-gloss on purpose to attract little boys and grown men for sodomy and the white racist liberal thinks this is perfectly "chic"(of course they call it pedophiliac or Catholic priest molestation) and are "gleeful" about it. The ultra-liberal sap, Oprah Winfrey wouldn't dare address this issue for fear of offending her vile white racist liberal saps. These fiendish liberals pant and foam at the mouth to attract blacks willing to fall for the trap. Black people have no business embracing same-sex "marriage" or abortion (killing black children mostly), it is hellish. At least Vernon Robinson addresses these issues squarely and I'll vote for him and I'm black too and ghetto raised. Better to have Robinson than the white wealthy female.

This is complete. The headers are that non-existant so it's some asshole who cobbled together a script.

How does someone read this site…especially over the last few days…and send me some stupid shit like this?

I'll bet this closed-minded idiot doesn't even live where he'd suffer Robinson's rule. And it don't write Black. It had to write "and I'm black too" because it knows no one will believe it.

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I've decided to do it and be done with it. That's why you haven't seen anything.

It's going to be a bit more of a hack than I'd like, but it's nicely hacked. I didn't mess with the data or change any of the core modules.

But you know, it's interesting on this side of the keyboard. After using Blogger, looking around the "new" Blogger, running MT, writing MTClient (verion 1.6 which has just had its 200^th download) and now working with this software erector set called Drupal, one starts forming contrarian opinions.

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August 16, 2004

We may lose it for a day or so here.

It seems warding of a blast of comment spam with a huge MT-Blacklist file is a significant load on the server. My web host has been patient, but it's getting ridiculous. So:

Comments are going away within the hour. It will not look like it though because I'm not going to rebuild the whole site; that would be the last straw.

Prometheus 6 will be Drupalized very, very shortly. Now, that's not the Network site because I said I needed to keep stuff separated. And you should probably be ready to reset whatever RSS feed you've got set up; we'll see.

_{grumblegrumblegrumblegrumblegrumblegrumblegrumblegrumble}

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What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? Philip E. Agre

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

You know, I read this and found it constructs a viewpoint with enough predictive power to be useful. I'm just having trouble picturing the person that would be convinced by it if they didn't already basically hold the same position. It's more deconstructing Conservative rhetoric than Conservatism. There is a category of people who will read it all the way through…I'm one of them, obviously…but I feel like most folks will stop reading before they get the whole picture.

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Drug companies dodge ban from Medicare, Medicaid
By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY

The government has yet to use its power to bar major drug companies that commit fraud from doing business with federal programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.
A 1996 law mandates exclusion from federal health care programs for those who plead guilty to, or are convicted of, felony health care fraud after Aug. 21, 1996. But since 2001, at least four major drug companies, including two recently, avoided that penalty under settlements with prosecutors.

• In July, the government reached a $345 million settlement with Schering-Plough over charges that private insurers were charged much lower prices on Claritin than the government was. The guilty plea was entered by an inactive Schering-Plough sales subsidiary with no employees where the fraud occurred. It's excluded from federal programs, but the parent company's products are not.

• In May, Pfizer's Warner-Lambert division agreed to $430 million in fines and pleaded guilty to illegally marketing the drug Neurontin "through at least August 20, 1996" — one day shy of the law's trigger date for mandatory exclusion. Prosecutors alleged the misconduct occurred later, too.

• TAP Pharmaceuticals in 2001 and Bayer in 2003 pleaded guilty to illegal acts before August 1996, although prosecutors also alleged later misconduct. If the pleas had covered that, the companies "likely would" have been subject to exclusion, the Department of Health and Human Services says.

"The settlements are structured very carefully to avoid mandatory exclusion," says John Bentivoglio, a former Justice Department lawyer who represents health care companies.

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Income Gap Up Over Two Decades, Data Show
By LEIGH STROPE, AP Labor Writer

WASHINGTON - Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less.

The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.

The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else's fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent.

Jobs and the economy top the list of voter concerns this election year. President Bush touts a strong economy that is growing, but polls find that Americans have doubts and think jobs are scarce. John Kerry is trusted more on the economy, with Democrats talking regularly of "two Americas," divided between the rich and everyone else.

That argument has merit, some private economists say.

"For those working in the bottom half of the pay scale, they're under an enormous amount of pressure," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com.

New government data also shows that President Bush's tax cuts have shifted the overall tax burden to the middle class from the wealthiest Americans.

"We're just trying to get ahead." said Debbie Reames, 49, of Raytown, Mo., whose bank job of 24 years was sent overseas in February. "But it seems like we climb a few rungs and then we fall back again."

Reames has a new secretarial job, which pays $7,000 a year less than her bank job, and she works catering jobs for extra money. Her husband, Russ, can no longer work after an injury. One son is finishing college and another will start in the fall.

So the family budget tightened. That meant fewer cable channels, more meals at home, postponed doctor appointments, missed vacations, delayed credit card payments, all to "keep the wolf away from the door," she said.

The U.S. jobs market is soft, sending wages down. Hiring came to a near standstill last month, with companies adding just 32,000 new jobs overall, stunning economists who had expected seven times as many.

More than a million jobs have been added back to the 2.6 million lost since Bush took office, but they pay less and offer fewer benefits, such as health insurance. The new jobs are concentrated in health care, food services, and temporary employment firms, all lower-paying industries. Temp agencies alone account for about a fifth of all new jobs.

Three in five pay below the national median hourly wage — $13.53, said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo.

On a weekly basis, the average wage of $525.84 is at the lowest level since October 2001.

The income gap is showing up in booming sales of luxury items. Porsche Cars North America Inc. says sales are up 17 percent for the year. Strong sales at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes.

Real estate agent Lance Anderson, 38, of Overland Park, Kan., expects a record sales year, as homeowners upgrade to more expensive homes and commercial clients expand. He recently took his family to Disney World for a two-week Florida vacation.

"My clientele, it seems as a whole, has seen positive growth," he said. So his family, including three children, now eat out more often and spend more on clothes. They recently bought two new cars and anticipate buying a larger house in the next few years.

Economists say wages should rise as companies boost hiring. But the growing gap between the haves and have-nots will remain.

Technology has eliminated many U.S. jobs, as has global competition, particularly from low-wage countries such as China. Highly skilled, educated workers in America will thrive as demand rises, Sohn said, while low-skilled jobs remain vulnerable to outsourcing.

"This really has nothing to do with Bush or Kerry, but more to do with the longer-term shift in the structure of the economy," Sohn said.

Associated Press writer Matt Sedensky in Kansas City contributed to this report.

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Al-Muhajabah showed me this from the San Francisco Chronicle

Muslim roots of the blues The music of famous American blues singers reaches back through the South to the culture of West Africa - Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, August 15, 2004

Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connection between Islam and American blues music, she'll play two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that's heard from mosques around the world), and "Levee Camp Holler" an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.

"Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. ("Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad . . . Well, I was thinkin' 'bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.") But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam's best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

"I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious," says Diouf, an author and scholar who is also a researcher at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "People were saying, 'Wow. That's really audible. It's really there.' "

Interesting article.

You can check here to hear for yourself if "it's really there."

Diouf has written a book, "Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas", which Al-M reviewed a while back:

The book is the result of extensive research in primary sources about slavery and builds a profile of the African Muslims who were brought to the Americas as slaves. Diouf believes that about 15-20% of all slaves were Muslims. She analyzes the historical record in Africa as well as in the Americas to reconstruct the story of these slaves.

Many of the Muslims taken as slaves were highly educated, in the religious sciences and in general. They were marabouts (holy men), warriors, traveling scholars, merchants, or members of the upper class. They had often dedicated their lives to Islam and established a respected place for themselves in their societies. They were often used to being leaders. (Diouf's analysis of the African historical record explains why the Muslims taken as slaves tended to fit this profile).

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Ex-Chess Champion Fischer to Marry Japanese Woman
Mon Aug 16, 2004 08:30 AM ET

By George Nishiyama
TOKYO (Reuters) - In a bold gambit worthy of the chess champion he once was, Bobby Fischer plans to wed a four-time Japanese great in the hope of avoiding deportation home to the United States, where he is wanted for breaking sanctions.

But it is far from certain that his move will pay off.

In the latest twist to a bizarre tale, former world chess champion Fischer, 61, has decided to marry Miyoko Watai, acting head of the Japan Chess Association, his lawyer, Masako Suzuki, said Monday.

However, it was not clear that the move would allow him to avert deportation. The grandmaster has been wanted in the United States since 1992 when he violated U.S. economic sanctions by going to Yugoslavia, beating his old rival, Boris Spassky, and winning a $3 million prize.

"Fischer and Watai had been living together since 2000 ... but decided to go through with legal procedures to get married," Suzuki said in a statement.

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Americans in Afghan Trial Ask FBI for Documents
Mon Aug 16, 2004 10:02 AM ET
By Simon Cameron-Moore

KABUL (Reuters) - Three Americans standing trial in Afghanistan Monday for imprisoning and torturing Afghans were given a week to provide evidence, which they say was withheld by U.S. authorities, proving that they had official clearance.

The leader of the group, ex-soldier Jonathan "Jack" Idema, said his group hunted "terrorists," but was disowned by the U.S. government after their arrest because their case followed in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.

Wearing khaki fatigues, combat boots and dark glasses, and speaking through an interpreter, the bearded Idema told Judge Abdul Basit Bakhtyari that "political motives" were at play.

He accused the FBI and U.S. embassy of withholding documents, videotapes and photographs which showed the group had worked with Afghan and U.S. authorities as well as the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) peacekeeping mission.

"I have this document between the Department of Defense and me. It clearly proves the ISAF is lying ... the army is lying when it says we were not working for them, and the Department of Defense is lying when they say they didn't know we were here."

His co-accused are Edward Caraballo, a cameraman who was making a documentary, and Brett Bennett, another former soldier. Four Afghans employed by Idema were also on trial.

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The Quote of Note is actually a reminder of something I posted yesterday:

All you that ridicule tree-huggers, take note
Quote of note:

The team stresses that its figures take account of the fact that people are living longer and it has also made allowances for the fact that diagnoses of such ailments have improved. It is comparing death rates, not numbers of cases, it says.

Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases
Scientists alarmed as number of cases triples in 20 years

Juliette Jowit, environment editor
Sunday August 15, 2004

The Observer

Anyway…

Polluted Sites Could Face Shortage of Cleanup Money
By FELICITY BARRINGER

ASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - With about six weeks left in the federal government's fiscal year, dozens of Superfund sites that are eligible for cleanup money are likely to be granted nothing or a fraction of what their managers say is needed because of a budget shortfall that could exceed $250 million, according to a survey by the Democratic staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The list of sites was compiled from information provided privately by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a letter sent on Friday to Michael O. Leavitt, the agency's administrator, from Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The letter and an attached list indicate that at sites like Atlas Tack, a company that made tacks and nails in Fairhaven, Mass., Omaha Lead in Omaha and Woolfolk Chemical Works, in Fort Valley, Ga., cleanup managers are likely to fall behind in clearing toxic residue like lead particles, cyanide and arsenic in soil or groundwater.

The original cleanup fund, built on industry taxes, has dwindled to negligible levels in the nine years since Congress abolished those taxes, so the money is now almost entirely drawn from general tax revenue.

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Suppress the Vote?
By BOB HERBERT

The big story out of Florida over the weekend was the tragic devastation caused by Hurricane Charley. But there's another story from Florida that deserves our attention.

State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.

The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March.

Officials refused to discuss details of the investigation, other than to say that absentee ballots are involved. They said they had no idea when the investigation might end, and acknowledged that it may continue right through the presidential election.

"We did a preliminary inquiry into those allegations and then we concluded that there was enough evidence to follow through with a full criminal investigation," said Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Department of Law Enforcement.

The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.

I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.

"I can't talk about that," he said.

I asked if all the people interrogated were black.

"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said.

He also said, "Most of them were elderly."

When I asked why, he said, "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview."

Back in the bad old days, some decades ago, when Southern whites used every imaginable form of chicanery to prevent blacks from voting, blacks often fought back by creating voters leagues, which were organizations that helped to register, educate and encourage black voters. It became a tradition that continues in many places, including Florida, today.

Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote.

The president of the Orlando League of Voters is Ezzie Thomas, who is 73 years old. With his demonstrated ability to deliver the black vote in Orlando, Mr. Thomas is a tempting target for supporters of George W. Bush in a state in which the black vote may well spell the difference between victory and defeat.

The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Joseph Egan, an Orlando lawyer who represents Mr. Thomas, said: "The Voters League has workers who go into the community to do voter registration, drive people to the polls and help with absentee ballots. They are elderly women mostly. They get paid like $100 for four or five months' work, just to offset things like the cost of their gas. They see this political activity as an important contribution to their community. Some of the people in the community had never cast a ballot until the league came to their door and encouraged them to vote."

Now, said Mr. Egan, the fear generated by state police officers going into people's homes as part of an ongoing criminal investigation related to voting is threatening to undo much of the good work of the league. He said, "One woman asked me, 'Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?' "

According to Mr. Egan, "People who have voted by absentee ballot for years are refusing to allow campaign workers to come to their homes. And volunteers who have participated for years in assisting people, particularly the elderly or handicapped, are scared and don't want to risk a criminal investigation."

Florida is a state that's very much in play in the presidential election, with some polls showing John Kerry in the lead. A heavy-handed state police investigation that throws a blanket of fear over thousands of black voters can only help President Bush.

The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State.

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Crisis in Sudan: Thorny Issues Underlying Carnage in Darfur Complicate World's Response
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NDJAMENA, Chad, Aug. 15 - There is no disagreement about the consequences of the war under way in Sudan, Africa's largest country: tens of thousands killed, cholera outbreaks, severe malnutrition, more than a million people forced to flee their homes, many into neighboring countries like Chad.

Yet there is deep disagreement among world leaders over how to respond. The stalemate comes from issues underlying the conflict in Darfur, a region in western Sudan: questions of racial identity, competition for natural resources and the imperatives of a powerful sovereign state.

Unfortunately for the victims of the war, the international response is also complicated by issues that reach beyond this conflict. First, in pitting Arab herders against black African farmers, the civil war in western Sudan underscores a larger struggle for power, land and water that cuts across borders in this arid part of Africa. Second, efforts to address the Darfur crisis have become entangled in the larger grievances of the Arab world - not least, the United States-dominated war in Iraq.

The result? The Arab Islamist government of Sudan, joined by its allies in the Arab League, has angrily accused Western countries of ganging up against an Arab-led government to exploit its oil and gold reserves. The Bush administration has dismissed that contention, and the United States Congress has accused the Arab militias, backed by Sudan and known as the Janjaweed, of genocide against Darfur's black Africans. Nearly 150,000 black Africans have fled to seek refuge on the barren eastern frontiers of Chad.

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Chavez Appears to Survive Referendum
By Andrew Selsky
The Associated Press
Monday, August 16, 2004; 6:12 AM

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez survived a popular referendum to oust him, according to results Monday, while Venezuela's opposition swiftly claimed fraud.

Backers of the leftist populist president set off fireworks and began celebrating in the streets of the capital in the pre-dawn darkness upon hearing the news from Francisco Carrasquero, president of the National Elections Council.

Carrasquero stopped short of declaring Chavez the outright winner. But vote counts he released showed the firebrand former army paratrooper had a virtually insurmountable 58-42 percent lead, with 94 percent of the vote counted.

Carrasquero said 4,991,483 votes had been cast against Chavez's recall, with 3,576,517 in favor.

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How to Sweep an Accusation Under the Rug
By Al Kamen
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A15

And now, the winners in the In the Loop Carpetbagger Deflector contest. This was to help our Gaithersburg neighbor and new Illinois GOP Senate candidate, Alan Keyes, come up with a deft sound bite to overcome allegations that he is a carpetbagger.

He also needed a hand parrying churlish critics who dredged up his old criticism of carpetbagging Illinoisan Hillary Rodham Clinton when she ran for the Senate from New York. It was a "destruction of federalism," he said, that he certainly would not "imitate."

The hundreds of e-mail entries -- including several dozen from Illinoisans -- generally grouped around a few themes: Polish sausage vs. crab cakes; Abraham Lincoln's being from Kentucky; Clinton; Osama and Obama; locks and "Keyes"; and spending time at O'Hare.

Our judges, Metropolitan Editor Robert Barnes and Reliable Source star Anne Schroeder, helped cull the entries, all certain to put this hypocrisy silliness to rest, down to the following winners in no particular order:

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They seem to be pointing out that we had a once-in-a-generation-or-more opportunity to change things drastically with the economic conditions of the 90's

The productivity revolution inside American companies seems to have reflected technological and organizational changes that had been percolating inside corporations for at least a decade, none of which had much to do with government policy.

…and Bush's policies have wasted and dissipated the resources generated atthat time.

The Growth Mystery

…If the Bush administration knew how to create the conditions for another growth spurt, critics might have to rethink their opposition to tax cuts. According to the Berkeley-Brookings projections we cited yesterday, the deficit is likely to register at around 3.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2014. But if the economy grows by just under 4 percent a year, rather than just under 3 percent as assumed in the projection, the deficit in 2014 would come to a far less alarming 0.5 percent of GDP.

What could President Bush do to boost growth? His officials argue that tax cuts will contribute, but this seems unlikely. Lower tax rates on wages do boost the labor supply; lower tax rates on investment may boost savings; more labor and more capital mean more economic output. But Mr. Bush's tax cuts also have an offsetting consequence. Because they have not been accompanied by spending cuts, government borrowing has gone up, nudging everybody's cost of borrowing higher than it would be otherwise. A range of econo- metric studies suggest that these opposing impacts -- more labor and capital on the one hand, higher interest rates on the other -- roughly cancel one another out. Therefore, to boost growth, the Bush administration will have to look elsewhere.

…The government's options are limited. The experience of the late 1990s shows that higher growth, unlike Social Security reform, has the potential to transform the fiscal outlook. But it's equally true that we don't know how to repeat the 1990s miracle, and the government's policy options -- a trade deal, tort reform, deregulation -- aren't powerful enough to do it. The productivity revolution inside American companies seems to have reflected technological and organizational changes that had been percolating inside corporations for at least a decade, none of which had much to do with government policy. It would be nice to believe that a second productivity revolution will fix the looming fiscal crisis. But it seems unwise to count on it.

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Quote of note:

The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable. But the Bush administration's interpretation of those two sentences could tip the balance in regulatory disputes that weigh the interests of consumers and businesses.

'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A01

Things were not looking good a few years ago for the makers of atrazine, America's second-leading weedkiller. The company was seeking approval from the Environmental Protection Agency to keep the highly profitable product on the market. But scientists were finding it was disrupting hormones in wildlife -- in some cases turning frogs into bizarre creatures bearing both male and female sex organs.

Last October, concerns about the herbicide led the European Union to ban atrazine, starting in 2005. Yet that same month, after 10 years of contentious scientific review, the EPA decided to permit ongoing use in the United States with no new restrictions.

Herbicide approvals are complicated, and there is no one reason that atrazine passed regulatory muster in this country. But close observers give significant credit to a single sentence that was added to the EPA's final scientific assessment last year.

Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption.

Those words, which effectively rendered moot hundreds of pages of scientific evidence, were adopted by the EPA as a result of a petition filed by a Washington consultant working with atrazine's primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection. The petition was filed under the Data Quality Act, a little-known piece of legislation that, under President Bush's Office of Management and Budget, has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation.

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Quote of note:

The changes within OSHA since George W. Bush took office illustrate the way that this administration has used the regulatory process to redirect the course of government.

To examine this process, The Washington Post explored the Bush administration's approach to regulation from three perspectives. This article about OSHA traces the impact on one regulatory agency. Tomorrow's story will look at a lobbyist's 32-line, last-minute addition to a bill that created a tool for attacking the science used to support new regulations. Tuesday's article will document a one-word change in a regulation that allowed coal companies to accelerate efforts to strip away the tops of thousands of Appalachian mountains.

Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust
OSHA Made More Business-Friendly
By Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A01

Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers -- all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths.

By the time President Bush moved into the White House, the tuberculosis rules, first envisioned in 1993, were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years.

Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary.

The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan .

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Couldn't sleep last night. I have the Mp3 stream from SwissGroove.ch playing and they come up with The Novel Sound by Ludovic Llorca (mp3).

If you're into jazz or Ibiza, just download the thing, play it locally. Once you hear it you're going to want to keep it anyway.

I'm going to spend a little time at Epitonic's page on Llorca's stuff today.

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August 15, 2004

That might give you an idea ofth eposition US forces are in.

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U.S. Keeps Winning Battles, Losing Wars
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 12 (IPS) - Once again, U.S. armed forces appear on the verge of winning a decisive military victory in Iraq -- this time in the holy city of Najaf. And once again, they appear closer to losing the larger wars for a stable and friendly Iraq and for an Islamic world that will cease producing anti-U.S. terrorism.

That is the rapidly growing concern of Middle East and Islamic specialists as U.S. Marines, after a week of fighting, captured virtually all of central Najaf on Thursday, including the home of Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and launched a final siege of the Imam Ali mosque, which is considered the world's holiest shrine by some 120 million Shiite Muslims.

Even as the military commanders and Iraq's interim president, Iyad Allawi, debate whether to wait out Sadr and his armed followers, who are believed to be inside the shrine, or to invade its precincts -- preferably with Iraqi troops -- the end result is not likely to work in Washington's favour, according to most experts here.

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Quote of note:

With one in four new HIV cases being reported from Asia, the sprawling continent is on the verge of being felled by an AIDS epidemic that would dwarf the devastation wrought by the killer disease in Africa, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS (UNAIDS) warned.

By the end of 2003, Asia had an estimated 7.4 million people living with HIV out of the 38 million adults and children infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) world-wide, UNAIDS revealed in its latest report.

WHO Hurting Cheap AIDS Drugs Industry - Experts
Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 14 (IPS) - Indian medical experts see the hand of powerful Western drug manufacturers in the World Health Organisation's withdrawals of its recommendations, this month and earlier in May, for some of India's cheap and popular combination drugs against HIV/AIDS using generic 'copycats.'

Generic 'copycats' are alternatives to brand name drugs and according to WHO requirements they must show pharmaceutical equivalents -- which means that the amount of active ingredient, the dosage form, and the strength are identical to those of a comparable brand.

The generic must also be bio-equivalent, meaning the drug must be absorbed into the blood stream at roughly the same rate and extent as the pharmaceutically equivalent brand.

Amit Sengupta, a medical expert with the Delhi Science Forum , a leading policy watch group told IPS that while WHO's stated concern for quality was ''unexceptionable'' it did have the effect of putting generic combination antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) into disrepute in a highly competitive global market.

''It needs to be asked why WHO decided to open speculation on quality and, going by past record, it is quite possible that the world body has come under pressure from the Western pharmaceutical giants,'' said Sengupta.

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Quote of note:

The team stresses that its figures take account of the fact that people are living longer and it has also made allowances for the fact that diagnoses of such ailments have improved. It is comparing death rates, not numbers of cases, it says.

Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases
Scientists alarmed as number of cases triples in 20 years

Juliette Jowit, environment editor
Sunday August 15, 2004

The Observer

The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.

The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.

In the late 1970s, there were around 3,000 deaths a year from these conditions in England and Wales. By the late 1990s, there were 10,000.

'This has really scared me,' said Professor Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University, one of the report's authors. 'These are nasty diseases: people are getting more of them and they are starting earlier. We have to look at the environment and ask ourselves what we are doing.'

The report, which Pritchard wrote with colleagues at Southampton University, covered the incidence of brain diseases in the UK, US, Japan, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain in 1979-1997. The researchers then compared death rates for the first three years of the study period with the last three, and discovered that dementias - mainly Alzheimer's, but including other forms of senility - more than trebled for men and rose nearly 90 per cent among women in England and Wales. All the other countries were also affected.

For other ailments, such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, the group found there had been a rise of about 50 per cent in cases for both men and women in every country except Japan. The increases in neurological deaths mirror rises in cancer rates in the West.

The team stresses that its figures take account of the fact that people are living longer and it has also made allowances for the fact that diagnoses of such ailments have improved. It is comparing death rates, not numbers of cases, it says.

As to the cause of this disturbing rise, Pritchard said genetic causes could be ruled out because any changes to DNA would take hundreds of years to take effect. 'It must be the environment,' he said.

The causes were most likely to be chemicals, from car pollution to pesticides on crops and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of modern life, from processed food to packaging, from electrical goods to sofa covers, Pritchard said.

Food is also a major concern because it provides the most obvious explanation for the exclusion of Japan from many of these trends. Only when Japanese people move to the other countries do their disease rates increase.

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Dispute Over Najaf Disrupts Iraqi Political Conference
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 15, 2004; 2:48 PM

BAGHDAD, Aug. 15 -- More than 1,100 Iraqis convened here on Sunday for the start of a conference aimed at selecting a national assembly, a key milestone in the country's transition to democracy, but the high-security meeting was roiled by a dispute over the use of military force to confront militiamen loyal to a rebellious Shiite cleric.

In a remarkable scene of political activism that would have been unimaginable under Baath Party rule, dozens of Shiite delegates jumped to their feet in a loud protest over the interim government's decision to mount military operations to evict followers of cleric Moqtada Sadr from a Shiite shrine in the holy city of Najaf. Chanting "Yes to Najaf!" and raising their fists, the Shiite dissenters demanded that the participants call upon the interim prime minister and Sadr's followers to refrain from violence and for a special committee of delegates to negotiate a solution to the crisis.

The outburst triggered a hectic succession of events that proceeded to reshape government policy toward Najaf in less than five hours and instill the first measure of checks-and-balances in Iraq's nascent political system. The Shiite protesters, along with several non-Shiite participants, caucused and drafted a letter to interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his cabinet that called for a dialogue with Sadr and "an immediate cease-fire and cessation of all military activities in Najaf and other Iraqi cities."

After the letter was drafted, a four-person delegation from the conference met with Allawi. When the meeting was over, the government announced that its moves to use force to expel Sadr from the shrine were on hold. In a reversal from its position a day earlier, Allawi's cabinet pledged to refrain from military action against Sadr's militiamen and keep an "open door" to a negotiated settlement.

"This is democracy in action," said Ibrahim Nawar, a U.N. adviser who helped organize the conference. "For now, at least, they have succeeded in changing the government's approach toward the situation in Najaf."

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Now, let's see how long that decision stands, as well as al Sadr's reaction to it.

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This is not the sort of thing that I like reading.

Quote of note:

"Such statements by Iran only serve to demonstrate the need for Israel to maintain and further develop defensive systems such as the Arrow II," a senior Israeli defense source told Reuters Sunday.

"It appears that Iran is rattling its saber for fear of a pre-emptive strike by Israel or the United States -- however grounded in fact such fears are or are not," the source said.

Israeli warplanes successfully destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

But many diplomats and defense experts say air strikes against Iran's nuclear plants are unlikely to disable Tehran's nuclear capability, much of which has been built underground, and could prompt a swift military reaction from Iran.

Iran Warns Its Missiles Can Hit Anywhere in Israel
Sun Aug 15, 2004 10:30 AM ET
By Paul Hughes

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A senior Iranian military official said Sunday Israel and the United States would not dare attack Iran since it could strike back anywhere in Israel with its latest missiles, news agencies reported.

Iranian officials have made a point of highlighting the Islamic state's military capabilities in recent weeks in response to some media reports that Israeli or U.S. warplanes could try to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities in air strikes.

Iran last week said it carried out a successful test firing of an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile. Military experts said the unmodified Shahab-3 was already capable of striking Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.

"The entire Zionist territory, including its nuclear facilities and atomic arsenal, are currently within range of Iran's advanced missiles," the ISNA students news agency quoted Yadollah Javani, head of the Revolutionary Guards political bureau, as saying.

"Therefore, neither the Zionist regime nor America will carry out its threats" against Iran, he said.

An attack on Iran "could only be carried out by angry or stupid people. For that reason, officials of the Islamic Republic must always be prepared to counter possible military threats," Javani said in a statement, ISNA reported.

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New York Times Says Reporter Subpoenaed Over Leak
Fri Aug 13, 2004 05:29 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York Times reporter has been subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA undercover officer's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other journalists, the newspaper reported on Friday.
The subpoena to Judith Miller was one of several issued to journalists in the investigation of whether Bush administration officials illegally leaked the covert officer's name.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times' publisher, said the paper would move to quash the subpoena, issued at the behest of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. He said the subpoena seeks to compel Miller to reveal confidential sources.

"Journalists should not have to face the prospect of imprisonment for doing nothing more than aggressively seeking to report on the government's actions," he said.

Lawyers for the Times said the paper expects to receive a separate subpoena for its records, and would fight it.

A federal judge on Monday rejected requests to quash subpoenas issued to Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine on the grounds they violate the reporters' privilege under the Constitution's First Amendment.

Time magazine was fined $1,000 a day, and Cooper was ordered "confined at a suitable place," but the judge suspended both penalties pending appeal.

Novak identified the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in a July 2003 column.

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For E.U. Critics, a Cautionary Tale
Police Raid on Reporter's Home Seen as Retaliation for Story
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A19

BRUSSELS -- The bell rang three times early on a cold Friday morning before a sleepy Hans-Martin Tillack, an investigative reporter for the German newsweekly Stern, answered the door in his T-shirt and boxers. Six Belgian policemen politely filed in, he recalled, handed him a search warrant and went to work.

For the next 10 hours, they combed through his apartment and his separate office, seizing his computer hard drives, his bank records, his Filofax organizer, four cell phones, 18 boxes of files and a copy of "Spaceship Brussels," his exposé of fraud and waste inside the European Union. When Tillack complained, he recalled, one of the officers shrugged. In Burma, the policeman told him, "journalists get treated much worse."

The police were looking for evidence that Tillack had bribed an E.U. official to obtain a confidential memo from the union's anti-fraud unit, known by its French acronym OLAF. But what they were really doing that March morning, he and other critics allege, was retaliating against a reporter whose stories had embarrassed the E.U. by focusing public attention on corruption and secrecy.

"They think it's more important to find out the leakers than to protect freedom of the press," said Tillack, who says the bribery allegation is false and absurd.

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When I posted about Service Pack 2 for Windows XP I said I was going to wait until someone else verified it doesn't screw up the development tools I use.

Well Nick Bradbury, who wrote FeedDemon (the best RSS reader that exists)and TopStyle Pro (the best CSS editor that exists PLUS one of the best HTML editors around), programs in Delphi as do I. And he says:

Last night I created a VMware virtual machine for the new Windows XP SP2 in order to test both TopStyle and FeedDemon with it, and I'm relieved to report that they both work fine.

I'm not so relieved, however, to report that installing SP2 on my development machine didn't go so well. After installing SP2, rebooting then logging in, I was greeted with a blank desktop (no taskbar, no icons, no nothing). Lucikly, I was able to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to task manager and launch apps from there, but after troubleshooting for a few hours I gave up and simply uninstalled SP2. If you're planning to install SP2, I hope you have better luck than I did!

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Caught this at Oliver's just now

GOP Grapples Over 'Big Tent'

Pitching a "party unity plank," they are suggesting that the platform declare that "Republicans of good faith disagree" on family issues — language sure to be an anathema to the president and his base of social conservative supporters. Differences between the White House and Log Cabin Republicans widened in February, when Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

"We are giving President Bush an opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment," said Christopher Barron, political director of the Log Cabin Republicans. "This is an opportunity for the president to make clear that the GOP is a big tent. If there's room in the party for free-traders and protectionists, they've got to make room for us."

duh

No, they DON'T have to make room for you.

Yeah, you're giving him a chance for a "Sister Soulja moment." But YOU are playing the role of Sister Soulja, dunce.

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Keyes Would Like to End Election of U.S. Senators
From Associated Press

August 14, 2004

CHICAGO — Alan Keyes said Friday he would like to end the system under which the people elect U.S. senators and return to the pre-1913 practice in which senators were chosen by state legislatures.

The Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, asked about past comments on the election process, said the constitutional amendment that provided for popular election of senators upset the balance between the people and the states.

"The balance is utterly destroyed when the senators are directly elected, because the state government as such no longer plays any role in the deliberations at the federal level," Keyes said at a taping of WBBM Newsradio's "At Issue" program. He said it was one of the reasons for "a steady, deleterious erosion of the sovereign role of the states."

Keyes' Democratic rival, state Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago, issued a statement saying he supported the popular election of U.S. senators.

"I certainly trust the people of Illinois to choose who they want to represent them in the U.S. Senate," he said. "That is the very basis of our democracy."

Keyes said he did not consider repealing the 17th Amendment a high priority. "But if I ever see an opportunity in politics to promote it, I will," he said.

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I know I've been on the prison thing the last few days, but I had nothing to do with this, I swear.

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Cobb Calls For an End to THE RACIST DRUG WAR AND THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The Green Party's presidential candidate, David Cobb, today said that "the racist war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex which it has spawned must come to an end."

(PRWEB) August 15, 2004 -- "The war on drugs is racist and hypocritical," said Cobb. "The drug war disproportionately targets the African American and Latino communities: One third of African American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty are in the prison system or on probation or parole and over two thirds of the prison population is Black and Latino."

"Alcohol and tobacco are two of the most deadly drugs and they are legal and widely available. These dangerous substances remain available for two reasons. One, these drug industries contribute heavily to both of the old parties and two, the same lawmakers who accept these 'contributions' are themselves users of these drugs. Drug users making other people’s drugs illegal and sending them to prison for it is the height of hypocrisy," Cobb added. "This has created a situation where prisons are overflowing with non-violent and otherwise law-abiding individuals."

The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country. Since 1971, U.S. prisons and jails have grown ten-fold, from less then 200,000 inmates to 2.1 million. With only five percent of the world's people, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the planet's prisoners -- fully half of them African American. One out of eight prisoners on Earth is African American.

Cobb stressed that drug addiction, of any kind, should be treated as a health concern and not a matter for the criminal justice system.

"With adequately funded schools, social programs and full employment the prison population would be significantly reduced," said Cobb. "We must change our priorities from building prisons to building schools. The racist effect of the drug war, and the connection between schools and prisons, isn't just rhetoric."

Diane F. White, corresponding secretary of the national Green Party's Black Caucus, said that "in some places like Pennsylvania, the government will actually build a brand new state-of-the art prison for juveniles in a rural area before they build a new school in the black community."

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So I have this post with a stupid title because I screwed up and let MT just grab the first five words of the post...real brief comment on an article by Darryl Cox on BlackElectorate.com. The article basically advises Black Conservatives that they have to come to the party if they want to dance and in the process gives up a lot of evidence that they've been wallflowers. I'll link it one more time because it's a fine analysis and a damn good read. Can't remember a thing in it I disagree with.

His purpose wasn't to point the finger at Black Conservatives (as I freely admit is often mine) but to advise them. He feels they can be involved in the Black communities and again I agree…but they won't, in my opinion.

ANTI-TROLL PIXIE DUSTING: Yes there are exceptions.

But look, folks. Look what happened to Jack Kemp. Look at John McCain hugging Bush like they've learned nothing from McGreevey's problems after the foul Rove-initiated personal attacks he endured.

Republicans don't allow white folks an independent voice.

What makes you think they will allow Black people one?

Republicans keep saying Black people need to make the Democratic Party earn our vote and I agree, but the implication is the method should be by voting for a party that has done less than nothing to earn our vote. And that's just stupid.

Darryl and I are exchanging thoughts in the comments of that previous post…the one with the stupid name. You might want to check it out.

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Alternating interviews by Stephanopolis:

Keyes said he being Black takes race out of the campaign. Obama says he never raised the issue, maybe THEY were looking at it through a racial lens.

Keyes said his HERITAGE is that of the descendant of ex-slaves. Obama said his grandfather was a servant to the British, maybe Keyes is saying on some scale of victimhood he's more qualified.

Keyes broke into religious song on camera. Obama said, um, catch me in church if you want to hear me sing.

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This Week on ABC.

Chuck Hagel is stoopit.

"We can't lose in Iraq because if we do we will open up a generation of problems we can't envision."

Too damn late.

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On the amnesty offer that the US screwed by insisting it can't be extended to those who killed Americans:
Fareed Zakaria: Now the amnesty become become freedom for bank robbers and car-jackers.

George Will: Kerry said knowing what we know know he'd still vote for the war…that's insane, no one would invade knowing what we know
(Um, Bush would. Cheney would. So they're ALL insane)

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And they're going to show Keyes singing again. Ja-HEE-zuz, why don't the boy just break into buck-dancing and get it over with?

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I keep meaning to link Bare and Bitter Sleep for quite a while…Cinque Hicks does the art thing seriously well totally apart from his blog. And if you want to start an exploration of modern Black artists and such, a more than decent start can be had by branching out from his blogroll. But I keep getting tied up in politics and shit. So I decided to just link it.

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As I said before, the worst possibility is an Iraq unified against the occupation. There has always been concern about the possibility, and now it seems to be coming to pass.

Uniting To Resist?
Why violence is escalating in Iraq
By MICHAEL WARE

Intense fighting broke out last week between U.S. troops, backed by Iraqi forces, and fighters loyal to the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. But while al-Sadr's Mahdi militia represents a serious threat to Iraq's stability, an equally vexing challenge to Iraqi order is taking shape in the Sunni Muslim — dominated area northwest of Baghdad, where Sunni terrorists, Baathists and nationalists are thriving.

These resistance groups have so far cooperated only erratically, when it suits their needs. But insurgent sources tell TIME that elements in the resistance, especially jihadis who have ties to al-Qaeda, are pushing to unite the area's disparate militants under a single command. The insurgents are working through a loose assembly of leaders known as Mujahedin Shura, often translated as "supreme council of the mujahedin." This informal group, which meets occasionally to share intelligence and tactical tips, already has a defense minister, an army chief and an operations commander of sorts. At recent meetings, insurgent leaders — including Iraqi nationalists, Baathists and sundry Sunni extremists — have debated streamlining their activities under a single leader. According to several sources involved in the movement, Syrian intelligence agents in the area, who have helped arm the groups and aided their propaganda campaigns, have also been participating in the debate.

But the resistance has its divisions — at least in part because jihadist leaders allied to al-Qaeda — linked Jordanian terrorist Abu Mousab alZarqawi, a proponent of the unified command, seem to be trying to take control. Militant sources tell TIME that their rise has alienated some insurgents, especially the Baathists and nationalists, who resent the influence of foreigners. Whoever wins, the more disturbing development is that some Iraqi jihadis, hoping to take their fight beyond Iraq's borders, are threatening to launch a terrorist campaign in the U.S. "If America continues to shield its people from the truth," says an al-Zarqawi loyalist, "we shall transport the battle to where their public cannot but see it."

Last July Citizen/Ex-Lt. Smash wrote an impassioned little piece while in Iraq about staying the course. The quote that brought the post to my attention was this:

It really all boils down to this:

Just about everyone here would rather be at home right now—but nobody wants to go home a loser.

If we gave in to the snivelers and peaceniks who cry, “Bring our troops home now!” Iraq would undoubtedly descend into a bloody civil war, and God only knows who would come out on top. Saddam might even emerge from hiding, claiming to have driven the “infidels” out of his country. The United States would have suffered another black eye, and our enemies would be further emboldened to attack us again. We would have lost the war, and all of the brave Americans and British who gave their lives in this operation would have died in vain.

I am not willing to accept that scenario. You shouldn’t be, either.

We are seeing the result of continued war in support of the national ego:

• One cannot but call a popular insurrection against the installed government a civil war
• The United States is suffering black eye after black eye. And not all the black eyes it deserves
  

  Umm Hassen had been telling the story up until that moment, M. was only nodding her head in agreement and listening raptly, like it was someone else's story. She continued it from there… M. and her mother were taken to the airport for interrogation. M. remembers being in a room, with a bag over her head and bright lights above. She claimed she could see the shapes of figures through the little holes in the bag. She was made to sit on her knees, in the interrogation room while her mother was kicked and beaten to the ground.

  M.'s hands trembled as she held the cup of tea Umm Hassen had given her. Her face was very pale as she said, "I heard my mother begging them to please let me go and not hurt me… she told them she'd do anything- say anything- if they just let me go." After a couple hours of general abuse, the mother and daughter were divided, each one thrown into a seperate room for questioning. M. was questioned about everything concerning their family life- who came to visit them, who they were related to and when and under what circumstances her father had died. Hours later, the mother and daughter were taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison- home to thousands of criminals and innocents alike.

  In Abu Ghraib, they were seperated and M. suspected that her mother was taken to another prison outside of Baghdad. A couple of terrible months later- after witnessing several beatings and the rape of a male prisoner by one of the jailors- in mid-January, M. was suddenly set free and taken to her uncle's home where she found her youngest brother waiting for her. Her uncle, through some lawyers and contacts, had managed to extract M. and her 15-year-old brother from two different prisons. M. also learned that her mother was still in Abu Ghraib but they weren't sure about her three brothers.

  M. and her uncle later learned that a certain neighbor had made the false accusation against her family. The neighbor's 20-year-old son was still bitter over a fight he had several years ago with one of M.'s brothers. All he had to do was contact a certain translator who worked for the troops and give M.'s address. It was that easy.

  Abu Hassen was contacted by M. and her uncle because he was an old family friend and was willing to do the work free of charge. They have been trying to get her brothers and mother out ever since. I was enraged- why don't they contact the press? Why don't they contact the Red Cross?! What were they waiting for?! She shook her head sadly and said that they *had* contacted the Red Cross but they were just one case in thousands upon thousands- it would take forever to get to them. As for the press- was I crazy? How could she contact the press and risk the wrath of the American authorities while her mother and brothers were still imprisoned?! There were prisoners who had already gotten up to 15 years of prison for 'acting against the coallition'... she couldn't risk that. They would just have to be patient and do a lot of praying.

  By the end of her tale, M. was crying silently and my mother and Umm Hassen were hastily wiping away tears. All I could do was repeat, "I'm so sorry... I'm really sorry..." and a lot of other useless words. She shook her head and waved away my words of sympathy, "It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they did was beat me."

  
  
• Our enemies have been further emboldened to attack us.
Since the day Citizen/Ex-Lt. Smash wrote that entry there have been 807 strictly military casulaties…638 from the US Military. Five thousand two hundred thirty three wounded. And though I have considerably less sympathy for them than for the soldiers, 125 contractors acknowledged dead or missing. As much detail on those figures as you like…far more than I like…is available here.

The Lieutenant-Citizen was right to this degree: I am not willing to accept that scenario. You shouldn’t be, either. And as I said at the time:

You can add, "Remember who got you in this predicament. Remember that you wouldn't be at risk were ot not for what has basically proven to be lies told by this administration for arcane reasons known only to themselves. Remember who set things up such that American pride, honor and world influence can only be preserved at the expense of American lives… and remember that it was not necessary."

This is not about being a sniveller or peacenik. This is about the fact that the anarchy you fear will descend on Iraq would never have come to pass but for an interventionist war that has not yet been justified. A war that, as time passes, looks more and more to have been created out of whole cloth by a criminal exploitation of illegitimately gained power.

That's not what you are defending, I know that.

But dammit, it better not be what you defend when you vote, either.

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Why the Najaf Offensive is on Hold
New truce talks suggest that the political cost of a U.S. military victory over Sadr may have been prohibitive
By TONY KARON

…If anything, Sadr's decision to confront Allawi and the Americans from inside the holy city reflects a canny, and often underestimated political instinct on the part of the populist cleric. Ever since Baghdad fell to U.S. forces in April 2003, Sadr has parlayed his strong following among the Shiite urban poor and the growing resentment toward the U.S. to his own advantage. And his previous showdown with the U.S. — last April, when they tried to arrest him in connection with a warrant issued by an Iraqi judge — had showed that tangling with the Americans actually boosted, rather than undermined his political standing in Iraq. The problem facing Allawi and the U.S. in waging war in Najaf has been that while Sadr may be unpopular among many of the townsfolk and viewed somewhat ambiguously by a wider Shiite audience, the U.S. is considerably more unpopular, a trend that the fact of handing authority to the new government last June does not yet appear to have reversed.

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That one has vast physical power is no proof one understands its nature and therefore its most effective use. Aikido is a demonstration that the one who exerts the force is not necessarily the one that directs it. In fact, the one who exerts the force may be the one who receives its impact.

Aikido teaches one to interact with attacks. To redirect them. This requires the use of some degree of force on the part of the warrior of course, but here's the key: it does not require superior force…it needs merely sufficient force.

This is something the USofA, which for various reasons doesn't deal in the concept of "enough," can't seem to understand.

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This is Joe Klein, writing at Time Magazine:

America Divided? It's Only the Blabocrats

…Scream journalism — Crossfire, Hannity and Colmes, the various "gangs" and "groups" of Washington blabocrats assaulting our senses — was always nauseating, but it was more understandable in a world where the most important issue was the definition of the word is. It was the only way to scare up an audience in those days. But this is a different world now. And we are being forced to examine the most serious, complicated sorts of issues—war and solvency—through an anachronistic, irresponsible political-media lens created for more trivial times.

He's got a good point. It's been a long time since America's fat lazy collective ass has had to deal with issues of significance and we weren't ready.

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Nice try, Dahlia. Your concept is flawless but the word you invented for it sucks. Mine is much better.

You DEFINITELY get the Quote of the Day, though:

no one ought to be allowed to claim that the act of clubbing a live Constitution to death isn't activism.

In the case of the Black ones like Owens and Thomas it's not just activism but blatant stupidity.

Re-activist judges are able to present themselves as "strict constructionists" or "originalists" by arguing, as does Justice Clarence Thomas, that any case decided wrongly (i.e., not in accordance with the framers of the Constitution) should simply be erased, as though erasure is somehow a passive act.

Come on Clarence. Such a position would have you picking cotton. Such a position would have gotten your neck stretched when you got married. The framers of the Constitution did not have anything remotely resembling the Voting Rights Act in mind when they wrote that thing. Yeah, noble stuff in the Declaration of Independence…but you better keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence is not and never has been the law of the land.

Anyway…

Activist, Schmactivist
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

…Let's invent a new term right here, today, for judges or judicial nominees on the right, who claim to be merely "interpreting" the Constitution, even when they are refusing to impose settled law; law they deem unsettled because it was invented by "liberal activist judges." And while I am open to better suggestions, here's a tentative offering: "Re-activist judges."

Re-activist judges are the ones trying to roll back time to the 19th century. Re-activists are the judges who have reactivated federalism by rediscovering the "dignity" of states. Re-activists view Lawrence v. Texas - last year's gay sodomy case - as having all the jurisprudential force of a Post-it note. When the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld an Alabama ban on the sale of sex toys last month, it did so by sidestepping the logic animating Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence. Ignoring Kennedy's lofty promises of sexual privacy - his assurance that "there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter" - the 11th Circuit framed the case as a dust-up over the constitutional right to a vibrator.

Re-activists like Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, rewrite the Texas parental notification statute in abortion cases, to make it vastly harder for young women to bypass parental consent. Re-activists like another Bush nominee, Janice Rogers Brown, have called the Supreme Court's shift toward defending New Deal legislation in 1937 the start of "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

Re-activist judges have increasingly adopted the view that their personal religious convictions somehow obviate the constitutional divide between church and state. President Bush's recess appointment to the 11th Circuit, Bill Pryor, expended energy as attorney general of Alabama to support Judge Roy Moore in his quest to chisel the Ten Commandments directly into the wall between church and state. Pryor is entitled to be offended by case law barring government from establishing sectarian religion. But what re-activist judges may not do is use their government office to chip away at that doctrine.

Re-activist judges are able to present themselves as "strict constructionists" or "originalists" by arguing, as does Justice Clarence Thomas, that any case decided wrongly (i.e., not in accordance with the framers of the Constitution) should simply be erased, as though erasure is somehow a passive act. And while there is an urgent normative debate underlying this issue - over whether the Constitution should evolve or stay static - no one ought to be allowed to claim that the act of clubbing a live Constitution to death isn't activism.

So, judicial re-activism. It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, I know. But let's put it out there anyhow, and attempt to level the rhetorical playing field before November.

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