Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
As you know, P6's motto is
In general, I feel that's more warning than anyone I don't know deserves, and people who know me (whether they like me or not) already understand it.
Well, in the comments to Seriously TroublingI got this response to something I said:
As for this:Open your eyes. This coming from someone--me--who you KNOW is reasonable.Except when you aren't reasonable, right? As I understand it, you are reasonable until you read something that pisses you off enought that you don't care if it is true or not, right?
Obviously we're talking social and psychological phenomena, not physics or math.
I thought about it, and the person who said this has been hanging tough and I feel deserves an actual explanation of the thought processes. The response is here instead of the comments just 'cuz.
It's been said that you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. The fact is, all of us have positions we didn't reason ourselves into. I'm pretty aware of which positions I hold that were not reasoned into, and it'll be harder than hell to move me out of them.
It is possible, though. You have to present me with information I didn't have before or prove it more likely that things operate differently than I understand them to. If your explanation is no more likely than mine, I see no reason to give mine up. And if I see you feel my explanation is no more likely than yours and you choose to not accept mine, I won't dispute you much further.
Roughly 30 minutes ago things fell into place with a loud, resounding click that echoed across the land.
The chances of there being any blogging or responding to comments tomorrow are about zero. I am required by law to celebrate.
Hat tip to Hellblazer
Hurricane force winds whipped up the northeast today and yesterday, generated by enormous blasts of hot air during the latest Senate filibuster.
GOP senators seemed unconcerned about the dire consequences of their actions as they complained that the Democrats had blocked only 4 (what amounts to 2 per cent) of President Bush's judicial nominees, as opposed to the "collosal job" done by the Republicans in blocking 63, or a whopping 20 percent of Clinton's nominees during his tenor.
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Of course it's not political news. What did you think?
By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff, 11/14/2003
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers have harnessed newly discovered cells from an unexpected source, the spleen, to cure juvenile diabetes in mice, a surprising breakthrough that could soon be tested in local patients and open a new chapter in diabetes research.
The MGH scientists injected diabetic mice with the spleen cells. The cells migrated to their pancreases, prompting the damaged organs to regenerate into healthy, insulin-making organs, ending their diabetes.
This is among the few documented cases of a major organ regenerating itself in an adult mammal. The research also finds a potential use for the spleen, long considered an organ with no apparent purpose.
"This shows there might be a whole new type of therapy that we haven't tapped into," said Dr. Denise Faustman, MGH immunology lab director and lead author of the new study, which appears today in the journal Science. "We've figured out how to regrow an adult organ."
Dr. George King, Joslin Diabetes Center research director, who was not involved in the research, said: "That you could just take spleen cells, infuse them, and somehow the pancreas is regenerated, that's exciting . . . The next step is to see if it can be done in humans."
By Michael Kinsley
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29
…President Bush's recent speech committing the United States to a "forward strategy of freedom," declaring that "the advance of freedom is…the calling of our country," and that "freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for" (an odd anticlimax, by the way) is being heralded as eloquent. Which it is. Some of the finest eloquence that money can buy. A beautiful endorsement of an activist foreign policy that goes beyond protecting our interests to advancing our values.
The eloquence would be more impressive if there were reason to suppose that Bush thinks the words have meaning. One test of meaning is the future: what the words lead to. As even some admirers of the speech point out, the details of this "forward strategy of freedom" are missing, except for pursuing our current military adventure in Iraq -- which was sold to the country on totally non-Wilsonian grounds. But meaning can also be tested by looking at the past. Eloquence is just a hooker if it will serve as a short-term, no-commitments release for any idea that comes along.
…A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.
…And what should you do if you are a supporter of a politician who changes his mind on one of the fundamental questions of democratic government? George W. Bush's powers of persuasion are apparently so spectacular, at least to some, that almost all the pro-Bush voices in Washington and the media have remained pro-Bush even when "pro-Bush" means the opposite of what it did five minutes ago. The Comintern at the height of its powers, in the 1930s, couldn't have engineered a more impressive U-turn. If places like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had been as enthusiastic about nation-building back in 2000 as they are now, Al Gore might be president today.
By Richard Cohen
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A29
Against all expectations -- but not against my better judgment -- I've taken a liking to Jessica Lynch. Initially she brought such a rush of cynicism to my head I thought I would swoon from vertigo. But to the undoubted horror of the White House, the Pentagon and everyone at Fox News, she has refused to play the propaganda puppet and has, shockingly, told the truth. She is a hero -- not for what she did in Iraq but for what she did on the "Today" show.
There, as in other places, she denied that she emptied her rifle into the enemy, as initial reports had it, and instead conceded that she did not fire her rifle at all. She rued that her rescue has been videotaped and used to suggest that the operation matched the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. She thanked the troops who had snatched her back to safety -- her heroes, she said -- but lamented the use to which the video was put.
I confess that I was totally unprepared for such refreshing candor -- and I bet the entire Military-Industrial-Television-Publishing Complex was too.
Deal on 9/11 Briefings Lets White House Edit Papers
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 � The commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said on Thursday that its deal with the White House for access to highly classified Oval Office intelligence reports would let the White House edit the documents before they were released to the commission's representatives.
Fraud Didn't Enrich Officers, Authorities Say
By MICHAEL WILSON
It all started in a barbershop in the Bronx. Between the bustle of four chairs, a Ms. Pac-Man machine and the Spanish soap operas on the little television, prosecutors said, two owners of the barbershop, one of them a former police officer, came up with a way to be paid for automobile accidents that had never happened.
Over two years, prosecutors said yesterday, the scheme grew to include four police officers and a dozen civilians, who filed claims for necks and backs that had never been sprained, for chassis that had not been bent. They cheated seven insurance companies out of almost $230,000, the authorities said, by filing the fake reports and sending the supposed drivers to medical clinics pretending they had been hurt.
All four officers were arraigned yesterday and pleaded not guilty.
The indictments came one year after three officers in Brooklyn were charged in a similar auto insurance case. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly praised the investigation that uncovered what he called a betrayal of the department.
But for all their trouble, and all the trouble they are now in, the officers got little back from the operation, no more than $1,000 each over two years, prosecutors said.
This image
which I cropped from this cartoon is brilliant. And soooo useful.
I want to nominate Tom Toles for the Nobel Prize.
Press Statement
Zambia has been host to the first ever Southern Africa Social Forum held at the Mulungushi Conference Center, from Sunday, 9 November, till today, 11 November.
We have been meeting as anti-globalisation activists, social movements, NGOs and unions opposed to neo-liberalism and corporate-led globalisation. We have drawn our inspiration from the growing international anti-globalisation movement as symbolized in the form of the World Social Forum, and from its African counterpart, the African Social Forum.
Our gathering included women and men, youth and the more elderly, from Angola, the DRC, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean delegation demonstrated its commitment by traveling in large numbers by road. The Tanzanian and Malawian delegates also traveled by road. There were also participants from countries beyond Southern Africa. Participants from Kenya and Britain delivered messages of solidarity.
We unanimously agreed that the globalisation process, dominated by the giant transnational corporations from the North, is impacting negatively on the people in our region. We rejected the role played by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation in imposing the agenda of the governments and corporations of the North. We noted the ways in which many of our governments have supported this agenda. We rejected Nepad as an expression of support by certain leaders of our continent for the world's elite at the expense of the majority in the Southern African region and the continent as a whole. We noted with serious concern the role of the South African government and the expansion of South African corporations throughout the region at the expense of local economies. We rejected this new form of colonialism and sub-imperialism.
Over the last three days, we have deliberated on many themes, including: gender, HIV/Aids, debt, trade, governance, education, culture, labour, malaria, media and ICTs, land and environment, agriculture and food security, youth and peace and security. Some of the areas of agreement arising out of these deliberations include:
~ We reject HIPC and the PRSPs as nothing other than the continuation of structural adjustment. The debt owed to the World Bank, IMF and other Northern creditors must be be unconditionally cancelled;[P6: Good luck on THAT one…]
~ Privatisation has put social services out of reach of the majority and must be vigorously opposed;
~ We must go beyond the demands for debt cancellation, an end to structural adjustment conditionalities and a reversal of privatization. Apartheid, debt, SAPs and privatisation have caused immense damage in the region, and those responsible, including those banks and companies that supported Apartheid, as well as the World Bank and IMF that have imposed their disastrous economic policies, must make reparations for the damage caused;
~ On HIV/Aids, the governments in the region must have comprehensive policies to address the issues of stigmatization, discrimination, prevention, treatment and care. In particular, we say: Treat the People Now!;
~ We must abolish inequality with regard to gender, and governments must introduce clear policies towards gender equality;
~ We insist on the right to free education;
~ We demand youth participation at all levels of society in the region;
~ We must put a stop to gun-running and the mercenary business;
~ There must be significant redistribution of land to the poor and, in particular, to women. The poor and women must be involved in decision-making in this regard; and
~ We must develop our sub-regional resource base to ensure the agricultural capacity to achieve food security, including developing our human resources, protecting our natural resources, developing infrastructure and ensuring access to finance.
During the forum, a delegation from the debt, trade and labour theme joined other civil society leaders in meeting the IMF mission in Zambia. They let the mission know that the IMF is not welcome in Zambia and Southern Africa. It was told in no uncertain terms: Pack Up and Go!
We are saying enough is enough! We have committed ourselves to build the social forum from the grassroots up. We will take on the task of building strong social movements to challenge the global system and the way it manifests in the region. This gathering of the social forum is an initial step in that process.
Another Africa is in the making!
This is our time!
* For more information, visit http://earth.prohosting.com/sasf2003/mission.htm
http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?category=Editorial
Akong Charles Ndika
In less than a year, the African Development Bank (AfDB) will be celebrating its 40th anniversary. This comes at a time when there is growing consensus all over the continent on the need for Africa to have ownership of its development. In tune with this, African heads of states in June 2003 committed their leadership to the New Economic Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which centres on African ownership and management of the agenda, strategy and process of the continent's development. In fact, the overarching goal is for �Africa to claim this millennium�.
The AfDB is tasked with co-ordinating and facilitating NEPAD. The African Development Bank (AfDB) is widely regarded as the premier financial and development institution of Africa. The Bank started operations in 1966 with a clear mandate to promote the economic and social development of its regional members and to promote international dialogue and understanding of development issues relevant to Africa. Within its general policies, the AfDB emphasised the importance of planning an energy sector for social and economic development, and indicated the intention to provide energy services to the maximum number of households at the least economic and environmental cost. This was to be done through loans, equity investments, and technical assistance to regional member countries. This envisaged regional leadership has remained a pipe dream, however, as institutions of global economic governance like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund provided external influences on Bank operations.
It is important to assess how far the Bank has lived up to its commitment to position Africa's infrastructure on the path to sustainable development. A look at the AfDB energy portfolio provides answers to these questions, while basic indicators of transparency between the AfDB and the World Bank are also worth looking at.
Energy policy and accessibility is a pillar of economic and human development. It is estimated that between 40-45 percent of Africa's 730 million people live in absolute poverty. Thirty percent are extremely poor and most of these are women. Energy poverty prevails. The availability of clean, safe energy services is vital for human livelihood and sustainable development. Poverty prevalence and health standards are inextricably linked to energy policy. Africa boasts an array of substantial renewable energy resource options, which if exploited intelligently could electrify rural areas. Solar, micro-hydro, wind and geothermal energy would bring power sooner and with lower environmental impact than conventional policies have done.
The Bank says lending in the traditional sector (i.e. fossil-fuel power plants) has significantly declined [and that] over the recent past, there has been a shift in the bank's lending from conventional energy projects to rural, decentralised projects incorporating renewables. Such a shift is overdue: in the year 2000, just one renewable energy project was funded by the Bank and typically, about 3 percent of AfDB energy investments went to such projects.
The importance of energy to development is acknowledged in the AfDB 1994-draft energy policy which even stated Bank support for the promotion of solar, wind and micro-hydro initiatives. Several small initiatives have helped to identify and promote viable renewable energy technologies but these have been temporary and marginal to the vast majority of energy spending. And the new energy policy of the AfDB borrows greatly from the World Bank programme of privatising publicly owned energy companies. This programme has not resulted in improved development or sustainable energy in developing countries around the world. In this light, AfDB would-be energy policies are highly unlikely to improve energy access in rural areas nor boost development.
Though the AfDB was founded by African governments holding a majority ownership on paper, they don't exert proportionate influence over the Bank. Fifty-three member countries are African while 24 are non-regional members. Within the Bank, the role of non-regional members is large and growing. Since 1999, the share of regional members has shrunk to 60 percent, down from 67 percent, while non-regional members own the remaining 40 percent, up from 33 percent.
Conventions that are upheld within the Bank provide clear possibilities for skewed priority setting. The non-African member countries that provide the capital and set policies in the World Bank also strongly influence the AfDB. So far, the AfDB has not developed viable Africa-relevant alternatives and more often abides by World Bank prescriptions, remaining silent on the negative aspects of the privatisation of public services and assets.
Though it has not assumed leadership in Africa's development, the AfDB is still an important influence over regional and domestic energy policy. Aside from direct spending influence, regional development banks can actually prescribe national policy reforms. The introduction of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in the 1980s by the World Bank and the IMF prompted the AfDB to equally engage in policy based lending. Rather than alleviating poverty, these economic adjustment policies instead generated poverty in the sense that unemployment increased, real wages fell and governments cut social expenditures.
Through policy-based lending, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) facilitate the opening of emerging energy markets to foreign investment through privatisation and deregulation. Development bank sponsored energy sector restructuring and projects for the extraction, processing, transport and combustion of fuels for energy provision have enormous impacts on peoples livelihoods and health and on the environment as well as the affordability or otherwise of essential electricity and liquid fuels. At least in theory - through the resultant economic growth and exposure to market rules - this process facilitates competition and transparency. But in practice the transfer of control and ownership of resources and infrastructure is removing, rather than introducing opportunities for public oversight.
African Development Bank representatives reside in most client countries often with a skeleton staff for basic tasks excluding public liaison. The total absence of full resident missions in some countries of operation precludes the facilitation of information dissemination and public dialogue. AfDB units such as that in Cameroon, which is housed within UNDP offices, have as few as two staff to follow up Bank financed projects and who therefore do not provide information on general Bank operations. Most offices maintain only limited information on projects and are not always ready to release it to the public. The absence of functioning Bank structures in most member countries makes it difficult even for the Bank itself to evaluate the projects it finances, let alone for those operations to be transparent to others.
Public notification is not a requirement when a project comes up for internal consideration: the first step in the approval process. It is invariably difficult to obtain project information, especially project briefs for which access is limited to management and Board members. Project documents are only released once an internal evaluation of the project has taken place and even then, only at the Bank's headquarters in Abidjan. Even this after-the-fact information disclosure can be avoided when the Bank cites legal restrictions or practical constraints or deems the information sensitive or privileged in which case it may be classed as confidential, for official use only. When they are finally available to the public, project files contain the terms of reference and operational directives of the bank but not the financial aspects or information about private sector partners. At this point, the project-in-pipeline becomes available on the official web-site including country, sector and cost of project but has already reached an advanced stage of the approvals process with minimal stakeholder input. Even so, it is regarded as very difficult for an affected community to discuss a planned project with the bank once it appears publicly.
It is worth noting that, though the AfDB and World Bank shareholder constituencies are European and US dominated, the standard of Information Disclosure, Environmental Impact Assessment and Resettlement Policy are substantially lower in the AfDB.
Given the demonstrable power IFIs wield over development prospects and energy sector reform, and the urgent need for sustainable energy provision, transparency within International Financial Institutions is imperative. Because a projects value depends not only on its profitability to investors but its contribution, or at very least its absence of detriment, to the people that live most closely with the consequences, they must have a say over whether the project proceeds and under what terms. Effective public participation, in turn, relies on good information disclosure policy and practice on the part of the Bank. Even as lenders of last resort for many types of programmes, the African Development Bank could function better by aligning policies and projects more carefully with a broader spectrum of stakeholders, especially those directly affected by individual projects. Public funds should not be used for projects or policy reform exercises that affected people are not informed of prior to implementation nor for which no reasonable avenue of appeal exists.
As the controversies over bank reform priorities, policies and projects are broadcast from project-affected people and NGOs to a wider audience - including the major constituencies of Bank Executive Directors in the US, Japan and Europe, greater accountability is being demanded. Development banks and the private sector must exercise the principles and standards of operation that would be expected in their shareholder countries, starting with the basics of reasonable and consistent information disclosure standards across regions. To position Africa on the trajectory to sustainable development, AfDB should make its policies and project documents transparent and based on public input. This is the only path to true ownership of any development initiative for Africa. Until use of public funds is subject to public scrutiny, energy policy that reflects African needs, aspirations and sustainable development will remain elusive for this millennium.
* Akong Charles Ndika is an Energy Policy Analyst with Global Village Cameroon
* Please send comments on this editorial to [email protected]
New Urgency, New Risks in 'Iraqification'
By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page A01
At least four factors forced the administration to overhaul its military and political strategy in Iraq, despite the danger that a new approach might actually diminish U.S. control over the country's future.
The foremost factor is security -- from an Iraqi opposition that has become more intense, more effective, more sophisticated and more extensive. The other three are the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to act, the looming U.N. deadline of Dec. 15 for an Iraqi plan of action and the U.S. elections just a year away, according to administration and congressional officials and U.S. analysts.
All four factors produced a new sense of urgency in Washington. "In an atmosphere of heightened violence and instability, Iraq urgently requires a new political formula. The U.S. administration, increasingly alarmed at the turn of events, is considering a range of options. This will be its second chance to get it right; there may not be a third," the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan watchdog, warned in a report issued yesterday.
Rumsfeld, on Asia Tour, Hints of Shifts in U.S. Forces There
By THOM SHANKER
TUMON, Guam, Nov. 13 � Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld opened a six-day tour of Asia and the Pacific on Thursday, hinting at substantial changes in how American forces are deployed in the region.
Mr. Rumsfeld said the American military was emerging from an era of "static defense" built around a global chain of giant bases. Instead, he said, forces will be repositioned regularly among a potentially larger number of bases as required to meet any threats.
In his first trip to Asia since returning to the Pentagon for a second tour as defense secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld stressed that he was carrying no formal proposals for discussion in coming days with the leaders of Japan and South Korea.
But he said preliminary planning had evolved to the point where it was important to discuss "important conceptual changes" in talks with these two vital American allies.
Chr�tien Leaves at Ease, Even if Bush Is Displeased
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
OTTAWA, Nov. 13 � The departing prime minister, Jean Chr�tien, defended keeping Canadian troops out of Iraq, pushing for gay marriage and liberalizing drug laws in an interview this week that made clear his lasting differences with the Bush administration.
"I don't think a kid of 17 years old who has a joint should have a criminal record," he said flatly on Monday in the broad-ranging interview in his elegant official residence as he prepared to retire after 10 years in office.
While careful not to gloat about his decision not to send Canadian troops to Iraq, Mr. Chr�tien, who is 69, was not apologetic either. "Of course he was not happy," he said, recalling President Bush's obvious displeasure. "I did not expect him to send me flowers."
Democracy would "take time to penetrate in the spirit of the people" in Iraq, he said. In the meantime, he advised giving a larger role to the United Nations, similar to that in Afghanistan, where Canada has 2,000 troops.
Mr. Chr�tien insisted that "relations are not bad at all" with the United States, and he still keeps a photograph of himself and President Bush in the foyer of his residence on the Ottawa River. But his positions left him clearly at odds with Washington on issues defining the core values of the two nations, ranging from Iraq and his support for the Kyoto climate treaty, to his proposed bills to expand marriage rights and decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.
Such stances may well mark Mr. Chr�tien in history as a social activist and a leader who helped define the Canadian character as separate from that of its powerful southern neighbor, a place that even he seemed surprised to inhabit.
G.O.P. Leader Solicits Money for Charity Tied to Convention
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
It is an unusual charity brochure: a 13-page document, complete with pictures of fireworks and a golf course, that invites potential donors to give as much as $500,000 to spend time with Tom DeLay during the Republican convention in New York City next summer � and to have part of the money go to help abused and neglected children.
Representative DeLay, who has both done work for troubled children and drawn criticism for his aggressive political fund-raising in his career in Congress, said through his staff that the entire effort was fundamentally intended to help children. But aides to Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas, acknowledged that part of the money would go to pay for late-night convention parties, a luxury suite during President Bush's speech at Madison Square Garden and yacht cruises.
And so campaign finance watchdogs say Mr. DeLay's effort can be seen as, above all, a creative maneuver around the recently enacted law meant to limit the ability of federal officials to raise large donations known as soft money.
"They are using the idea of helping children as a blatant cover for financing activities in connection with a convention with huge unlimited, undisclosed, unregulated contributions," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington group that helped push through the recent overhaul of the campaign finance laws.
Other lawmakers may well follow Mr. DeLay's lead. Already Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, is planning to hold a concert and a reception in conjunction with the convention as a way of raising money for AIDS charities.
Because I posted this I am obligated to post this followup.
The Associated Press
11/13/03 9:29 AM
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- The oldest of four boys allegedly starved by their adoptive parents had developed a serious eating disorder long before he was placed in the custody of child welfare officials, according to confidential state records cited in a newspaper report Thursday.
The Division of Youth and Family Services reports, obtained by the Star-Ledger of Newark, show that by age 2, Bruce Jackson regularly gorged on food and vomited it. A few years later, he consumed an entire bottle of Scotch and his grandmother's blood pressure pills, the newspaper reported.
Okay, it's but so funny because of the reality behind it. But it really sums up the Republican judicial nomination strategy well.
http://democrats.senate.gov/bedtime_story.pdf
Hat tip to Hesiod at Counterspin Central
It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that conservatives, subtly but unmistakably, are fomenting violence against liberals for the 2004 election. And if they succeed in doing so, America will be facing what has always been considered unthinkable here: a serious manifestation of fascism.
…I concluded previously that it seemed likely that any manifestation of fascism was some ways off, perhaps as long as a generation, if these trends were left unchecked. Now it appears that the timetable is moving much faster than that -- and countervailing forces are so far slow in coalescing, in no small part because of the utter, Stalinist ruthlessness of their opponents.
…This is not mere hyperbole; it is an exercise in eliminationism. As Buzzflash recently observed, talk like this is part of an increasing trend in conservative rhetoric: Pat Robertson wishing to "nuke" the State Department, Bill O'Reilly saying Peter Arnett should be shot, Coulter wishing Tim McVeigh had set off his bomb at the New York Times Building, John Derbyshire wishing for Chelsea Clinton's demise. Unsurprisingly, the same kind of talk is now heard on the "street" level, and it often pops up on talk radio. As we learned in Oklahoma City, eventually this kind of "hot talk" translates into all-too-real tragedy.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that conservatives are less and less inclined to rely on "intellectual" or political exchanges, and are turning more to an eliminationist strategy that seeks to demonize liberals and make them social outcasts -- and concomitantly, acceptable targets for violence because of the "damage" they cause the nation through their ostensible treason.
Already, this eliminationism is manifesting itself in the nation's military, where anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the Bush administration is likely to face recrimination.
Hat tip to TalkLeft
Years before Enron declared bankruptcy in 2001 that the IRS asked the SEC to investigate the firm : 2.5
Number of SEC investigations of Enron that resulted : 0
Source: U.S. Senate Committee on Finance
The California Grocery Workers Strike
The Wal-Mart Distraction
By MICHAEL SCHWARTZ
…But in the end this fight is about more than the grocery workers of Southern California, it's about the working class fighting to hold onto the gains they have won over one hundred years of struggle. This is not a simple dispute between supermarket employees and their employers. A line has definitely been drawn in the sand; all the employers are on one side and all the employees are on the other. These companies have joined together in an act of corporate solidarity. They know which side they're on in this war; the question is which side are we on?
Think about it, multi-billion dollar corporations who are supposed to be in "competition" with each other have joined together to try and crush their employees. They would rather lose tens of millions of dollars a week in the short term in the hopes of stealing hundreds of millions from their employees in the long term. This is not someone else's fight; we all have a stake in it.
I was more than willing to let Kim DuToit's absurdity (you know which one I'm talking about) pass into obscurity, but Ampersand at Alas, A Blog has perhaps the second best response to it I've seen.
For me, arguing about if "pussification" of the Western male is taking place would be like arguing about if Jesus Christ was lord. It might be entertaining, but there's absolutely zero chance of changing any minds. Du Toit is coming from a position of faith, not a position of evidence.
Frankly, I hope that du Toit's right, and that the West is being hopelessly pussified.
…Let me tell you, the Nazi party was anti-pussy. The kids who beat me up in the schoolyard were anti-pussy. The guys who killed Matthew Shepherd were anti-pussy. The KKK was anti-pussy - by bravely getting together in mobs and killing individual black people, they proved what men they were. The crusaders were not pussies, and neither were the Japanese when they attacked Pearl Harbor. Jack the Ripper was no pussy. Truman was no pussy, and if you don't believe it just visit Hiroshima. Andrew Jackson wasn't a pussy, either.
Hitler: not a pussy.
Stalin: not a pussy.
Charles Manson: Not a pussy.
Wouldn't it have been great if all these guys had been through pussification, though? Wouldn't history have been immeasurably improved?
My first real programming job (as opposed to several programs I'd implemented while managing a department that had nothing to do with programming) was creating an ISAPI extension as a web based data warehouse front end. It was all reporting; the data entry was restricted to narrowing down the dataset that was returned.
I learned a lot…not all, but a lot…of the things pointed out in this article. But I also learned that people look at a browser and still want to see all this webby stuff.
As the article implies, a successful web application is designed more like an application than a web page. But it's also cute. Make sure you lay out your pages such that you can add cuteness…after the functionality is nailed down.
Hat tip to Jay Allen
River at Baghdad Burning (the REAL one)
…I think it's safe to say that when you put a bunch of power-hungry people together on a single council (some who have been at war with each other), they're going to try to promote their own interests. They are going to push forward their party members, militias and relatives in an attempt to root themselves in Iraq's future.
"Bremer noted that at least half the council is out of the country at any given time and that at some meetings, only four or five members showed up."
Of course they're outside of the country- many of them don't have ties in it. They have to visit their families and businesses in Europe and North America. For some of them, it sometimes seems like the "Governing Council" is something of an interesting hobby- a nice little diversion in the monthly routine: golf on Saturdays, a movie with the family in London on Fridays, a massage at the spa on Tuesdays, and, oh yes- nation-building for 5 minutes with Bremer on the Xth of each month.
…People have been expecting this for some time now. There's a complete and total lack of communication between the Council members and the people- they are as inaccessible as Bremer or Bush. Their speeches are often in English and hardly ever to the Iraqi public. We hear about new decisions and political and economical maneuverings through the voice-overs of translators while the Council members are simpering at some meeting thousands of miles away.
We need *real* Iraqis- and while many may argue that the Council members are actually real Iraqis, it is important to keep in mind that fine, old adage: not everyone born in a stable is a horse. We need people who aren't just tied to Iraq by some hazy, political ambition. We need people who have histories inside of the country that the population can relate to. People who don't have to be hidden behind cement barriers, barbed wire and an army.
…Another problem is the fact that decent, intelligent people with political ambition refuse to be a part of this fiasco because everyone senses that the Governing Council cannot do anything on its own. Bremer is the head and he's only the tip of the iceberg- he represents Washington.
A national conference is a good idea, but it will fail as miserably as the Puppet Council, unless� there's a timetable. The occupation forces need to set a definite date saying, "We're going to begin pulling out on *this* month, next year- let's get organized before that." A timetable is vital to any progress, if any is going to be made. Only then, will things begin to move forward.
Prominent, popular politicians and public figures don't want to be tied to American apron strings- this includes lawyers, political scientists, writers, and other well-known people. Not because they are American apron-strings per se, but because this is an occupation (by American admission, no less). No matter how much CNN and the rest try to dress it up as a liberation, the tanks, the troops, the raids, the shootings (accidental or otherwise), and the Puppet Council all scream occupation. If it were French, it'd get the same resistance� just as if it were a Saudi, Egyptian or Iranian occupation.
It is also vital that all interested political parties be allowed to be a part of the national conference. Any political conferences in the past have been limited to American-approved political and religious parties which have left a large number of political groups outside of the circle- groups that have more popular support. Furthermore, the conference can't be run and organized by occupation forces (troops and the CPA). If there's one thing Iraqis are good at- it's organizing conferences. Why should vital political decisions critical to Iraq's independence be made under the watchful eyeball of an American Lieutenant or General? Everyone wants a democratic Iraq, but that just isn't going to happen if people constantly associate the government with occupation.
I just recognized a possibly offensive pun in the title to this post. I know I got gay readers. at least one of whom I'm SURE would tell me if I screwed up. Or maybe I'm oversensitive from exhaustion.
I'm going to bed. Somebody tell me tomorrow.
C.I.A. Report Suggests Iraqis Are Losing Faith in U.S. Efforts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 � A bleak top-secret report by the Central Intelligence Agency suggests that the situation in Iraq is approaching a crucial turning point, with ordinary Iraqis losing faith in American-led occupation forces and in the United States-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
The report, sent to Washington on Monday by the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief, suggests that the situation is creating a more fertile environment for the anti-American insurgency. Officials said the report was adding to the sense of urgency behind the administration's reappraisal of its policies in Iraq.
The officials said that the report, dated Nov. 10, had been explicitly endorsed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, and that the warnings it spelled out had been a factor behind Mr. Bremer's abrupt return to Washington for consultations this week.
The C.I.A. and the White House refused even to confirm the existence of the report, which was first disclosed by The Philadelphia Inquirer. But government officials outside those agencies said its conclusions were among the darkest intelligence assessments distributed since the American-led invasion of Iraq in March.
"It says that this is an insurgency, and that it is gaining strength because Iraqis have no confidence that there is anyone on the horizon who is going to stick around in Iraq as a real alternative to the former regime," one American official said.
The latest C.I.A. report follows earlier intelligence assessments that warned American commanders in Iraq of increasing resentment among ordinary Iraqis. The picture those reports presented was very different from the public view presented by administration officials. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has repeatedly spoken of the opponents of the American-led occupation as "dead-enders, foreign terrorists and criminal gangs."
But the Nov. 10 situation report was described by the officials as reflecting a more formal assessment. They said Mr. Bremer's unusual endorsement was intended to give the document added credibility.
Say it's about religion. Don't claim condoms don't protect against STDs as they did in Africa.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 � The nation's Roman Catholic bishops, acknowledging that American Catholics pay little heed to their teaching on contraception, launched an effort today to reinforce the ban on birth control and linked it to the anti-abortion campaign.
Holding their regular meeting in Washington, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops tackled another sexuality issue today. They approved the text of a brochure that lays out the church's condemnation of same-sex unions.
The contraception question was introduced by the Committee for Pro-Life Activities, the bishops' anti-abortion committee, which proposed the writing of an easily understandable booklet. The booklet would address questions about the church's teaching on marriage and sex, why "natural family planning" � seeking or avoiding pregnancies according to the fertility cycle � is acceptable and why it believes birth control is wrong.
It would also examine the "relationship between contraception and abortion" by pointing out that there is a link between abortion and failed contraception, and the potential for some contraceptive drugs to be "abortifacient."
Intending to write an article about K12 (but preferably K3) teaching techniques I ran across an embarrassment of riches about other shit entirely. In particular, the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies makes me want to open my skull and pour the whole site in. But my body clock says it's late and I've done a lot today; my brain feels like a saturated sponge and I can't even begin to write, much less absorb a bunch of stuff when all I really wanted was documentation of what I know.
Doing some Delphi stuff, supposed to be figuring out some details on table-less CSS design, having this discussion on OSP with a guy who seems to be trying to convince me that Democratic senators shouldn't oppose right wing extremist minorities because it would be racist (hey, does RIGHT WING EXTREMIST explain anything??) and I should be working on two more articles for OSP this week...
...and my body clock absolutely refuses to synchronize with worldtime.
bah.
LATER: Well, I figured out my CSS issues (damn punctuation mark), made some more progress on my Dephi project (I can retrieve and maintain MT blog configuration, I can retrieve posts, and publishing ought to be simple now that I got the rhythm), now that it's clear I won't be trying to answer ill-defined questions the conversation at OSP looks to be over. Maybe I can do two articles tomorrow. If I can sleep thru my pop heading out for dialysis, I'll probably be cool tomorrow.
…when he ain't doing politics.
F.B.I.'s Reach Into Records Is Set to Grow
Someone else can point out that Patriot II is still creeping up. And that, as it is the creepiest legislation in the history of creepdom, that its creeping is rather appropriate.
Explosion Rocks Italian Police in Iraq
Someone else can point out another ally is about to bail for their own good.
U.N. Estimates Israeli Barrier Will Disrupt Lives of 600,000
Someone else can point out that this was Sharon's plan all along.
Never Love a Stranger
Someone else can point out that Safire is an ass.
U.S. Aide in Iraq in Urgent Talks at White House
Someone else can point out that it took too long for Rove Bush Cheney to realize the coup has failed and to revert to a good ol' war of conquest.
Congress Is Nearing Approval of Record Pentagon Spending
Someone else can point out that by giving all the money to the rich guys and paying the working class enough to support the government with its taxes, the Bushistas have no choice but to do to Iraq what it will do to any other swamp that has resources they want.
Hold the Vitriol
Someone else can point out that even grown-ups get tired of spoiled, selfish children constantly kicking them in the shins and shit.
…In recent weeks, President Bush has declared that his administration is making great progress in its diplomatic effort to disarm both countries, putting together coalitions of neighboring countries to pressure the two surviving governments of what he famously called the "Axis of Evil."
But the essence of the Central Intelligence Agency report about North Korea is that that country is speeding up its weapons production. And Iran's decision to allow the international agency into facilities that were previously closed to inspectors may, diplomats said, blunt Mr. Bush's effort to seek some kind of sanctions in the United Nations, leaving Iran with an advanced nuclear infrastructure that could be restarted at a moment's notice.
Taken together, the reports show that Iran and North Korea have each dabbled in separating plutonium � one path to a bomb � and have each set up centrifuges to enrich uranium. The difference, as the C.I.A. told Congress, is that North Korea has fully mastered the complexities of detonating a bomb, perhaps with the help of some of its nuclear suppliers like Pakistan. There is no evidence that Iran has made that much headway.
"The Iranians did a lot better at this than Saddam Hussein did," one administration official said. "But not as well as Kim Jong Il," he added, referring to the North Korean leader.
…Of course, this non-conversation about immigration reform has a lot in common with other non-conversations -- about Social Security reform, say, or health care reform -- that happen in Washington all the time. What makes it different is the deeper level of absurdity into which immigration policy has lately sunk. Consider this: Violent gangs of smugglers regularly cross the Mexican border into this country, where they conduct shootouts in broad daylight. At the same time, a whole new, post-Sept. 11 visa bureaucracy now regularly prevents distinguished scientists and pianists from visiting this country at all. In other words, you can get in if you're a gun-toting thug, but not if you're a visiting professor of neurology.
And consider this, too: American agriculture is now utterly dependent on the labor of millions of illegal immigrants. As a result, business lobbies have recently persuaded both right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats to back bills that would make it easier for companies to get temporary visas for their migrant workers, without whom they could not function. Yet this logical method of legalizing a huge swath of the underground economy -- which would be extremely useful from a "homeland security" point of view too -- is considered so politically explosive that few in Congress believe it can even be discussed so close to an election. Millions of illegal immigrants are here, in other words -- and 11/2 million more enter every year -- helping to keep food prices, restaurant bills and leaf-raking costs low, yet it's considered "controversial" even to admit that they exist.
Government Outgrows Cap Set by President
Discretionary Spending Up 12.5% in Fiscal '03
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01
Confounding President Bush's pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, capping a two-year bulge that saw the government grow by more than 27 percent, according to preliminary spending figures from congressional budget panels.
The sudden rise in spending subject to Congress's annual discretion stands in marked contrast to the 1990s, when such discretionary spending rose an average of 2.4 percent a year. Not since 1980 and 1981 has federal spending risen at a similar clip. Before those two years, spending increases of this magnitude occurred at the height of the Vietnam War, 1966 to 1968.
The preliminary spending figures for 2003 also raise questions about the government's long-term fiscal health. Bush administration officials have said fiscal restraint and "pro-growth" tax cuts should put the government on a path to a balanced budget. Bush has demanded that spending that is subject to Congress's annual discretion be capped at 4 percent.
But the Republican-led Congress has not obliged. The federal government spent nearly $826 billion in fiscal 2003, an increase of $91.5 billion over 2002, said G. William Hoagland, a senior budget and economic aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Military spending shot up nearly 17 percent, to $407.3 billion, but nonmilitary discretionary spending also far outpaced Bush's limit, rising 8.7 percent, to $418.6 billion.
…is to stop putting people who think war is a proper means to peace in office. Or get them out as soon as you get a chance.
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A01
JERUSALEM, Nov. 11 -- Three years into war with the Palestinians, Israelis are losing patience with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. With violence continuing and peace efforts at a months-old impasse, members of Sharon's government are voicing dissent, activists are pursuing independent peace initiatives and opinion polls show his approval ratings sinking.
The military's top general has publicly challenged Sharon's handling of the conflict, and long-dormant peace groups and dovish politicians are showing signs of rejuvenation. A memorial service for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 1 drew 100,000 people and turned into the largest peace rally since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising.
"After three years, it's time to rethink," said Asher Friedberg, a political science professor at the University of Haifa. "Both sides are tired of what's going on. We're at a dead end."
Israeli pollsters and political analysts said the confluence of events and trends has produced the sharpest divisions within the Israeli leadership and among the populace since the first months of the uprising. Political leaders and analysts said the dissatisfaction among Israelis is exacerbated by mounting concern over the deterioration of the U.S. occupation in Iraq and its potential for inflaming the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Blair Defends Bush Partnership
President's Visit Seen as Chance to Explain Policies
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A19
LONDON, Nov. 11 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair, facing a wave of protest over President Bush's planned state visit here next week, pleaded Tuesday with the British public to give Bush -- and himself -- a chance to explain anew their policies on Iraq and terrorism.
"What I say to them is, just listen to the argument," Blair said in an interview with six American news organizations. "Try not to believe that myself or President Bush are sort of badly motivated people who want to do the worst, just try and look at it from the perspective that we are talking on."
Go ahead, play Mark Fiore's new game.
Japan and E.U. Threaten U.S. on Import Sanctions
By THOMAS CRAMPTON,
International Herald Tribune
HONG KONG, Nov. 11 � A day after the World Trade Organization ruled that American steel tariffs are illegal, Japan and the European Union threatened the United States today with billions of dollars' worth of sanctions. China and South Korea threatened similar action if Washington retained the tariffs on imported steel.
In its ruling, the W.T.O. rejected a United States appeal of a ruling in July that said the tariffs are illegal.
Japan's economy, trade and industry minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, said in a statement today:
"Should the United States refuse to terminate its illegal practice, we will notify the W.T.O. of our retaliatory measures based on the overall losses. We do hope the United States will accept the ruling and terminate the measures immediately."
China, the world's largest steel producer, warned that strong action would be taken if the tariffs remained in place.
China welcomes "the W.T.O.'s ruling and hopes the U.S. government can remove as soon as possible the safeguard measures on steel that are detrimental to W.T.O. rules," a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said at a news briefing. "With respect to the further measures taken by various parties, it will depend on the attitude that the United States will take."
via dKos:
By Laura Blumenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A03
NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.
"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."
Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.
Overnight, Soros, 74, has become the major financial player of the left. He has elicited cries of foul play from the right. And with a tight nod, he pledged: "If necessary, I would give more money."
"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."
Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.
Or, my first Instapundit link. Credit where due.
"The people I hang out with are not drug dealers," Sam said. "We play basketball. We have nice clothes because we have jobs."
Down the hall, Josh was standing with his friends when he heard a rustling and felt something hit him in the back. When he turned around, he said, he saw a police officer standing behind him with his gun drawn.
"He told me to get down on the ground," said Josh, who then was instructed to put his hands behind his head and stay down.
Sam and Josh said that when the search was over, police told them that any innocent bystanders in the crowd should blame the search on the people bringing drugs to school.
Bah. Tar and feathers are looking better all the time. This guy should be fired, now, as should the police and prosecutors who approved this raid and these tactics. Michael Graham notes:
Fired. Now.
Calpundit linked it, it's not my fault…
Truth, I didn't blog on this (um, that Nazi school raid that tuned up nothing) because all I knew was what I saw on TV…which was a blurry tape. I just didn't know enough to comment intelligently.
I check the RSS reader and see all these posts titled Veterans Day. So this is mine.
Hey, I live in a time warp. I don't notice holidays birthdays or any of that crap.
Taylor Seen as Still Meddling in Liberia
A bounty offered by the U.S. for the warlord's capture indicates peace accord's fragility.
By Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2003
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa � A $2-million bounty approved last week by the U.S. government for the capture of former Liberian President and international war crimes fugitive Charles Taylor comes amid reports that the exiled leader is making persistent efforts to meddle in the affairs of the fragile nation.
The measure specifies that $2 million will be used "for rewards for an indictee of the Special Court in Sierra Leone," which is seen as a clear reference to Taylor. The money would be given to anyone responsible for delivering Taylor to the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, following the precedent of war criminals captured after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Rwandan genocide.
The action against the warlord is an indication of Taylor's continuing influence and the fragility of Liberia's nearly 3-month-old peace accord as the West African nation awaits the arrival of 11,500 United Nations peacekeepers in the coming weeks. Those troops will reinforce 4,500 soldiers, many of them Nigerians, already on the ground.
Nigeria, which gave Taylor asylum in August to hasten peace efforts in Liberia and to protect him from a U.N. war crimes indictment for his involvement in a war in Sierra Leone, is one of the United States' major oil suppliers and a key political ally in Africa. Nigerian leaders heightened security around Taylor's villa in the city of Calabar over the weekend and warned that they would not tolerate any breach of territorial integrity, making imminent U.S. military action unlikely.
But the reward, which was signed into law Thursday by President Bush as part of an $87-billion spending bill to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, is a clear shot across the bow for Taylor and his supporters in Liberia. It is also meant to be an inducement for Nigerian officials to turn over Taylor to the war crimes tribunal, said U.S. congressional aides who requested anonymity.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A25
Our foreign policy debate right now pits radicals against conservatives. Republicans are the radicals. Democrats are the conservatives.
That jarring but shrewd perspective, offered by Anthony Lake, President Clinton's former national security adviser, explains much that is strange in our national discussion. And while Lake is critical of President Bush's policies, he does not use the word "radical" to make a partisan point. He is also critical of his own party's newly discovered conservatism.
…His son's democratic imperialism is genuinely radical. What Bush 43 calls for is very different from the transformation of Germany and Japan after World War II. By thrusting war on the rest of the world, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made unconditional surrender and their long postwar occupations inevitable. By contrast, the war in Iraq was an optional war for the United States. We now learn from Bush's latest speech that it was less a war about immediate threats posed by Saddam Hussein than a bold experiment in support of a grand theory. "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East," Bush said in his speech, "will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."
… But Lake is right to say that conservatism in foreign policy is not enough. He offers a useful metaphor: "If you had a house that was being knocked down, in whole or in part, you probably wouldn't just use the old plans to rebuild it. You'd want new plans for new conditions."
Instead of simply defending the old institutions, this means that those who support them should insist on their reform. Much has changed since the United Nations was founded more than 50 years ago. The original mission of NATO died with the Soviet Union. The United States and its European allies need to work out a new division of labor in facing terrorist threats and humanitarian disasters. The global financial institutions need change. The United States and Europe need to come to terms on agricultural subsidies that make a mockery of their claims of standing for either free or fair trade. Democrats, Lake argues, "need to be thinking large, and they're not."
U.S. Loses Appeal On Steel Tariffs
WTO Decision Lets EU Retaliate
By Paul Blustein and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 11, 2003; Page A01
The World Trade Organization issued a final ruling yesterday that the steel tariffs imposed by President Bush violate international trade rules, raising expectations that the White House will soon repeal the tariffs to avoid imminent European retaliation.
The WTO decision gives the European Union and several other countries the right to impose retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars worth of American exports unless Bush reverses the decision he made in March 2002 to give American steelmakers protection from imports. Such sanctions could be the largest ever applied in a WTO case.
That leaves Bush with an unpleasant political choice less than a year before the next presidential election. If he abides by the WTO ruling and rolls back the steel tariffs, he would anger voters in key steelmaking states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. But if he maintains the tariffs, he would risk angering industries in other states that would be hurt by the retaliatory duties. The EU's list of targeted products includes many that were clearly chosen for their political impact: Tariffs on citrus fruit, for example, would hit the pocketbooks of voters in Florida, and the duties on textiles would hit industries based in the Carolinas.
I feel my headline is more reasonable than that of the NY Times or the Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 � The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday that it found no evidence that Iran was producing nuclear weapons, but that inspections and documents turned over by the country found a clear pattern of years of experimentation in producing small amounts of materials that could be fabricated into weapons, including plutonium.
The findings by the United Nations' nuclear agency falls short of backing up the Bush administration's claims that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program as a cover for its nuclear weapons program. But the I.A.E.A. concluded in the report that "given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
November 11, 2003, 2:28 AM CST
VIENNA, Austria -- A confidential U.N. nuclear agency report criticized Iran for a "pattern of concealment" about its nuclear program but said no evidence has been found to back U.S. claims it tried to make atomic bombs, according to diplomats.
The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency also found that Iran had produced small amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium, the Washington Post reported.
Meanwhile, Iran announced in Moscow that it has suspended its enrichment of uranium and agreed to additional U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities.
Given this, from the Washington Post:
"Iran has now acknowledged that it has been developing, for 18 years, a uranium centrifuge program, and, for 12 years, a laser enrichment program," the report says, referring to two of the leading technologies for making fissile material for nuclear power plants or weapons. "In that context Iran has admitted that it produced small amounts of LEU [low-enriched uranium], using both centrifuge and laser enrichment processes…and a small amount of plutonium."
…I'd say it's a bit presumptive of the Chicago Tribune to say Iran was cleared of nuclear ambition. On the other hand, given this
While the amount of plutonium produced was likely minuscule -- far less than needed for a nuclear weapon -- Iran had previously denied conducting any such experiments.
…I'd say the headline in the NY Times (and the Washington Post, for that matter) is a bit strong.
Still, it's hard to find a good side to this. . It seems the USofA has been working with old intelligence again. That the equipment was disassembled over 10 years ago makes any claim of a threat sound suspiciously like the claims made against Iraq—claims that are now an international embarrassment to us. Yet this is still seriously grounds for concern. It would seem Iran has the hands-on knowledge of uranium enrichment techniques to justify concern, given that Russia is preparing to follow through on their contract to assist Iran in building a nuclear electric generation facility.
Yet the USofA, with over 100,000 troops right next door, is tied up and tied down for the forseeable future, and has burned its goodwill worldwide (as evidenced by Dubya's good friend Putin following through on that contract). The mess that has been made of Iraq will make the rest of the world insist on the U.N. inspection process being followed, and the USofA has little leverage available to it to influence that.
Given that the USofA has yet to convince the international community that this optional war is NOT against Islam itself or (given the Palestinian/Israeli situation) that it is capable of dealing with Arab nations in an even-handed way, this brings to mind a single question.
NOW what?
Live by the word game, die by the word game.
Andrew Sullivan arguing that no one said the threat was imminent (emphasis added) ...
Webster�s, well-known dictionary manufacturer, defining �imminent� �
Some curveballs hang too temptingly over the plate.
Erica at Swirlspice pointed to a discussion of obesity at Dean Esmay's joint that I missed when I was skipping stuff this weekend…the reminder was right timely because of a "conversation" elsewhere that desperately needed the objectivity provided by Chuck Forsberg's Adiposity 101 page.
Thank you Dean for the link, and Erica for the representation. You both have greatly assisted in my maintaining a reputation for omniscience.
Ex-Officials Now Behind New Voting Machines
Those who led the state's ballot-count reforms now work for the firms making the equipment.
By Tim Reiterman and Peter Nicholas
Times Staff Writers
November 10, 2003
As secretary of state in 2001, Bill Jones moved to rid California of the type of antiquated voting machines that helped throw the presidential election into turmoil in Florida. Then last year he sponsored a successful $200-million industry-backed bond measure that gave counties money to buy high-tech replacements.
Now, the former elections chief is a paid consultant to one of the major voting machine firms vying for that business.
One of his former top aides has become a vice president for business development with the same company, Sequoia Voting Systems. Another former employee is working on Sequoia business strategies.
In the comments to On Cheney, in response (I believe) to:
comes this conversation:
It is really hard to hold a deep hatred for someone who can make your life better if you would simply get along with them.
…and because this isn't about Cheney I'm responding to both with a new post.
To begin with, it's pretty easy to hate someone from whom you'd receive benefit if you could just get along, even if you're fully aware that you would benefit. It's difficult to ACT OPENLY on that hatred. Black people in the Jim Crow South made huge amounts of money for white people that hated them. And they hated those white people right back.
See, not allowing Black folks to eat in your establishment wasn't an obstacle to selling them food. Racists had a monopoly on EVERYTHING.
And let's be clear: racism is about power;specifically, it's about collective, as opposed to individual, power; precisely, it's about economic power. The base individual emotions are tools by which it is implemented. Hatred, greed, paternalism (and this one is pointed directly at folks who 'want to end affirmative action because it sends the message to black people they can't get ahead without help'…your concern for Black people is a transparently thin cover for self interest), self interest and raw, amoral profiteering are appealed to or supported by racism.
Yesterday I posted a link to an article that I called the most likely demographic fuure of the country. Today, Brent Staples has an editorial explaining California politics as a reaction to that demographic future…or a rather dystopic view of it.
Viewing California Politics Through the Lens of a Science-Fiction Movie
By BRENT STAPLES
The pop-culture pastime of predicting the future through science fiction goes back at least as far as Jules Verne, the 19th-century novelist who foresaw space travel and cities beneath the sea. His view of the future is a picnic compared with the apocalyptic scenarios that dominate science fiction today. Civilization lies in ruins and what remains of the human race is enslaved by the murderous computer from the "Matrix" series or stalked by bone-crushing cyborgs like the one made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the next California governor, in the first "Terminator" film.
Los Angeles in the movies is regularly blown up, burned down or pillaged by aliens. (Life in Southern California recently must have been very much like a fiery disaster film.) But when Californians talk seriously about the future, they inevitably focus on "Blade Runner," the 1982 cult movie that made a star of its director Ridley Scott. It depicts the future of the Golden State as a civil liberties catastrophe where "replicants" (synthetic people) are mass produced as slaves, assassins and prostitutes. The replicants have disappeared from the discussion in real-world California, which tends to focus on the overall civic disaster depicted in the film.
The pollution is horrendous. The rich have withdrawn into fortress-style towers. The avenues teem with unruly, eccentrically dressed immigrants who speak a rough street language instead of English. References to these scenes show up everywhere, from books about politics to civic-planning documents like "L.A. 2000," a look at the future commissioned by Tom Bradley, when he was mayor of the city in the 1980's. The report warned that the region might deteriorate into a scene from "Blade Runner": a featureless sprawl seething with class and ethnic hostilities. In "A California State of Mind," the public-opinion analyst Mark Baldassare writes that Californians who were asked about the future "presented an image more like a nightmare than a utopia" � descriptions that recalled a certain science-fiction movie.
"Blade Runner" exploits two primordial California fears. It depicts the state becoming part of an undifferentiated sprawl. It also plays into the fears of those Californians who think that the state will someday be dominated by immigrants who usurp the national language. Disquiet about the rising immigrant tide has been an undercurrent in California politics for at least 30 years. It was this sentiment that energized the ballot initiatives that outlawed affirmative action in public universities and bilingual education in public schools.
Fear of Blade Runnerization and the belief that the affluent should spend their tax dollars only on themselves have generated a pattern of civic secession. Wealthy and middle-class Californians have increasingly withdrawn into gated communities that thrive while the older, poorer counties they have fled struggle along on a diminished tax base. The people in the new, homogenous communities tend to be extreme localists who drop out of the broader civic life. When they do engage statewide politics, they tend to do it with ballot initiatives that slash tax revenues, hamstring the Legislature and generally cut the civic ties that bind citizens in one place to those at the far end of the state.
This secessionist impulse is as old as California. Proposals for breaking up the state have surfaced and resurfaced like clockwork but have mainly gone nowhere. The secessionists discovered a powerful tool with the passage of Proposition 13, which fueled the tax revolt when it capped property taxes in 1978. Proposition 13 was a secessionary act by homeowners and corporate landowners who were essentially saying that they wished to withdraw from the traditional system in which affluent citizens underwrite schools, social services and infrastructure used by the poor and working class.
Proposition-style campaigns proved the perfect tool for affluent communities to break off from older, poorer counties � taking with them revenue-producing malls and businesses. The breakaway communities further impoverished the counties they left behind by expanding into land the counties had set aside for revenue-generating development that was all the more crucial after Proposition 13 made it nearly impossible to raise taxes. As the California writer Peter Schrag noted in "Paradise Lost," the new cities used planning and zoning authority to "keep poor and low-income housing out."
More than 60 communities have broken away since the 1970's. Many more attempted to do so. The Legislature slowed the defections by requiring that incorporations be revenue neutral, but the urge to secede continues, most notably in the San Fernando Valley, which is seeking to leave Los Angeles, taking with it a huge chunk of the city's population.
California's response to the pessimistic future in "Blade Runner" is a clear indication of what Californians fear and what might be in store for the rest of us if the appetite for secession spreads across the country. Bear in mind, however, that the breakaway communities in California have deepened the civic problems they hoped to flee. The barriers they erect destroy the ebb and flow through which newcomers have historically become part of the mainstream and moved into the middle class. The fortress-style villages � with affluent whites shut up inside and immigrants outside the gates � are hastening the development of the science-fiction scenario that terrified Californians in the first place.
Which Founding Father Are You?
Think I've been joking?
Living on Borrowed Money
By BOB HERBERT
It's interesting that so much attention is being paid to the modest job creation numbers for October, and so little is being given to a much more significant issue that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is homing in on.
Over the past couple of decades, Mr. Edwards said last week, "the American dream of building something better" has been replaced by the reality of "just getting by."
It has become increasingly difficult to get into � or stay in � the middle class. In speeches, reports and interviews, Senator Edwards has been pointing out that despite income gains, most families have been unable to save money and are dangerously vulnerable to setbacks like job losses and illnesses.
Citing statistics from an influential recent book, "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke," by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, he noted that over the past 30 years home mortgage costs have risen 70 times faster than the average father's income. So you end up with two parents working like crazy just to keep the family economically afloat.
With Cash Tight, States Reassess Long Jail Terms
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
LYMPIA, Wash., Nov. 6 � After two decades of passing ever tougher sentencing laws and prompting a prison building boom, state legislatures facing budget crises are beginning to rethink their costly approaches to crime.
In the past year, about 25 states have passed laws eliminating some of the lengthy mandatory minimum sentences so popular in the 1980's and 1990's, restoring early release for parole and offering treatment instead of incarceration for some drug offenders. In the process, politicians across the political spectrum say they are discovering a new motto. Instead of being tough on crime, it is more effective to be smart on crime.
In Washington, the first state in the country to pass a stringent "three strikes" law by popular initiative a decade ago, a bipartisan group of legislators passed several laws this year reversing some of their more punitive statutes.
One law shortened sentences for drug offenders and set up money for drug treatment. Another increased the time inmates convicted of drug and property crimes could earn to get out of prison early. Another eliminated parole supervision for low-risk inmates after their release.
Taken together, these laws "represent a real turning point," said Joseph Lehman, the secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, who was a major supporter of the legislative changes. "You have to look at the people who are behind these laws," Mr. Lehman said. "They are not all advocates of a liberal philosophy."
When Subsidies to Lure Business Don't Pan Out
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
INDIANAPOLIS � A huge, light-gray building, trimmed jauntily in blue, rises from the rolling, grassy fields on the far side of the runways at Indianapolis International Airport. From the approach road, the building seems active. But the parking lots are empty and, inside, the 12 elaborately equipped hangar bays are silent and dark. It is as if the owner of a lavishly furnished mansion had suddenly walked away, leaving everything in place.
That is what happened. United Airlines got $320 million in taxpayer money to build what is by all accounts the most technologically advanced aircraft maintenance center in America. But six months ago, the company walked away, leaving the city and state governments out all that money, and no new tenant in sight.
The shuttered maintenance center is a stark, and unusually vivid, reminder of the risk inherent in gambling public money on corporate ventures. Yet the city and state are stepping up subsidies to other companies that offer, as United once did, to bring high-paying jobs and sophisticated operations to Indiana. Many municipal and state governments are doing the same, escalating a bidding war for a shrunken pool of jobs in America despite the worst squeeze in years on their budgets.
Because America is as African as it is European.
Black covers the whole African diaspora, in my view anyway.
I'm Black, and I'm American. Two different sets of qualities.
If you haven't seen that crap Kim DuToit wrote, I got two links for you.
Norbizness sums it up. It's short. Just read what Norbizness wrote, don't bother clicking thru the link to the original.
Then check out how The Philosoraptor responds to it all. It's long and worth every minute.
(He got no comments, so email him some approval)
If I were Howard Dean, after declining matching funds I would do the following to make folks understand how serious I am about the need to uproot Bush:
- I'd promise to limit my primary spending to the same levels as the other candidates
- Then I'd pledge the excess would be given to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency if I didn't win it myself
Calpundit has posted a fascinating analysis of Dick Cheney by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and friend of Cheny's youth.
You should check it out. I still think little of Cheney, but it's food for thought.
Money quotes:
Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It's not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore.
Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest habit.
The more common of these has been symmetrical balance of power. This is what kept another world war from breaking out between 1945 and 1990. The Cold War was the ultimate Mexican stand-off, and though many died around its hot edges - in Vietnam, Korea, and countless more obscure venues - it was a comparatively peaceful period. Certainly, the global body count was much lower in the second half of the twentieth century than it was in the first half. Unthinkable calamity threatened throughout, but it did not occur.
The other means by which long terms of peace � or, more accurately, non-war � have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a single ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the Pax Romana, a "world" peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180 AD. I grant that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They crucified dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets, and generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus Himself. But war, of the sort that racked the Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, and indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar, did not occur. The Romans had decided it was bad for business. They were in a military position to make that opinion stick.
(There was a minority view of the Pax Romanum, well stated at its height by Tacitus: "To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace." It would be well to keep that admonition in mind now.)
…If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the latter doesn't necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other.
…I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations through in vastly greater detail than I'm providing here and has reached these following conclusions: first, that it is in the best interests of humanity that the United States impose a fearful peace upon the world and, second, that the best way to begin that epoch would be to establish dominion over the Middle East through the American Protectorate of Iraq. In other words, it's not about oil, it's about power and peace.
Well, alright. It is about oil, I guess, but only in the sense that the primary goal of the American Peace is to guarantee the Global Corporations reliable access to all natural resources, wherever they may lie. The multinationals are Cheney's real constituents, regardless of their stock in trade or their putative country of origin. He knows, as the Romans did, that war is bad for business.
But what's more important is that he also knows that business is bad for war. He knows, for example, there there has never been a war between two countries that harbored McDonald's franchises. I actually think it's possible that, however counter-intuitive and risky his methods for getting it, what Dick Cheney really wants is peace. Though much has been made of his connection to Halliburton and the rest of the Ol Bidness, he is not acting in the service of personal greed. He is a man of principle. He is acting in the service of intentions that are to him as noble as mine are to me � and not entirely different.
Bobby Jindal may be world famous soon. He is a Republican, and Indian (as in Asian), possibly the next governor of Louisiana and proof that the whole idea of "race" in the south still resolves to two factions: Black and White.
Bush Acolyte Plays It His Own Way
By Jason Berry
Jason Berry's books include "Lead Us Not Into Temptation" and the forthcoming "Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II."
November 9, 2003
NEW ORLEANS � The Republican candidate in Louisiana's gubernatorial election Saturday is running as the compassionate conservative George W. Bush once promised to be. But Bobby Jindal knows better than to invite the president to campaign for him, because a Bush visit would backfire and cost him votes. Instead, he's campaigning hard for black votes in a state long cursed by the politics of polarization.
Last year, Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu ran for reelection against Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell. Both come from prominent New Orleans Catholic families. During the campaign, Terrell accused Landrieu of abandoning her faith for being pro-choice, a crude demagogic swipe in a state with a substantial Catholic population. The two were in a dead heat when Bush arrived to campaign for Terrell. His visit aroused African Americans, who make up 29% of the electorate. A huge black turnout gave Landrieu a decisive victory.
Jindal, 32, a Rhodes scholar, is in his first run for office. He has discarded Terrell's political playbook for his own in a tight race with Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a popular Democrat. Jindal is a Catholic and an Indian American, the son of Hindu immigrants. He has campaigned relentlessly for the evangelical vote, a solid Bush constituency. Now, Jindal is reaching out to black voters. Last week, he won the endorsement of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat. Of his audacious move, the mayor joked: "I'm just watching my back. Where's my security?" In a city that is 68% African American, Nagin could suffer politically if Jindal loses.
"Pigmentation-wise, Jindal is colored," says Lawrence Powell of Tulane University, author of "Troubled Memory," a book on the 1991 race between former Gov. Edwin Edwards (seeking a return to the state's top office) and white supremacist David Duke. "But color is a social construction. In the eyes of whites, he's a white person. It is kind of ironic that someone who is darker-skinned than the last two [African American] mayors of New Orleans elicits strong support in north Louisiana among conservative whites. Race, to them, is something very specific: African Americans. People who are brown, or yellow, and outside of the black community, apparently don't fall into the category." It's ironic too that to some middle-class blacks, Jindal is dark enough.
To avoid a backlash among African Americans, Jindal didn't invite Bush to stump for him when the president made a recent campaign swing for GOP gubernatorial candidates in Mississippi and Kentucky, both of whom won last week. Jindal is a solid Republican loyalist. But like Arnold Schwarzenegger, he's building a political base tailored for his own state.
Jindal has dazzled audiences with his mastery of arcane policy data. A native of Baton Rouge, he became a Christian in high school and a Catholic as an undergraduate at Brown University. After studies at Oxford, he was 24 when Gov. Mike Foster appointed him head of the Department of Health and Hospitals, a pit of red ink and legal problems under Edwards. Jindal turned the department around. He later went to Washington for a brief stint as a Bush health policy advisor. He resigned to run for governor. Foster's endorsement was pivotal to Jindal's fund-raising.
The irony of keeping Bush at arm's length is all the more poignant in view of Jindal's embrace of faith-based programs, a cause in 2000 that has been largely abandoned by the president. "People of faith should not be required to separate their faith from their daily lives, their professions or from public discourse," announces Jindal's platform. "The public square must always be faith-friendly, and the religious liberty our forefathers so highly valued must always be protected." Jindal's call for "aggressively promoting adoption as an alternative to abortion and closely regulating abortion providers" won evangelical support and has cut into the unusual political base his opponent had slowly constructed.
In the 1980s, as a state legislator from Lafayette, the hub city of Cajun country, Blanco, also a Catholic, appealed to evangelicals in the northern Bible Belt parishes (counties) as a pro-life Democrat. For years, she also visited black churches. As the old populist coalition splintered over issues like abortion, Blanco drew blacks, evangelicals, Cajuns and women into her centrist fold. In 1995 she was elected lieutenant governor; four years later she was overwhelmingly reelected.
Jindal is an absolutist on abortion. He is married with one child and another on the way. Blanco, who raised six children with her husband, a university official, would allow exceptions for rape, incest and to save a mother's life. To Jindal's credit, those distinctions are not a campaign issue.
The lieutenant governor's office is charged with marketing culture and tourism; Blanco touts 21,000 tourism jobs created on her watch and an estimated $400 million in tourism pumped into the state economy last year. "There are two faces of Louisiana," she said. "One is beautiful, creative and energetic. And then there's the other side with undereducated people and an underdeveloped economy."
Many Democrats look beyond Jindal's pitch to the Christian right in the hope that his promises of economic and educational reform will materialize. In the first primary, Jindal ran TV ads attacking liberal policies. In the runoff, he is running radio ads on soul stations. No white candidate could do that. If Jindal wins, he will be a national political figure the next morning.
The Washington Post had each of the Democratic candidates online for chats and questions last week. You can got to the index page for the talks or go straight to the individual transcripts:
A REALLY interesting article from the October 5 NY Times magazine. Magazine articles tend to be long, so get comfortable enough for five pages on the most likely demographic future of the country.
The building at 59-21 Calloway Street in Corona, Queens, is grandly named the Calloway Chateau, but it is really the 21st-century version of Ludlow Street, the first stop off the long-haul plane from Bukhara or Bombay. You put your bags down here, a half-hour's drive on the Grand Central Parkway from J.F.K., and pause to gather breath for the journey into the hinterland.
The residents of the Calloway Chateau are brown, white, black and olive; Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. Joseph Salvo, director of the population division at the City Planning Office, calls what's happening in Queens ''probably the greatest social experiment in history.'' It is the most ethnically diverse county in the country. In 1990, there were 243 census tracts in Queens County that were predominantly white; by 2000, the number had dropped to 116. For the past 10 years, Salvo, along with two colleagues, Arun Peter Lobo and Ronald Flores, has been charting with great specificity where different ethnic groups settle in New York. They have found that there are an increasing number of areas, dubbed ''melting-pot tracts,'' in which no single group dominates. The bar for being classified a melting-pot tract is high: there must be three separate groups who account for at least 20 percent of the population. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of melting-pot tracts in the city rose from 64 to 84. More than half of them are in Queens.
The Calloway Chateau is in Tract 437, in Corona. The tract is Hispanic-dominated as a whole (it is 52 percent Hispanic), but it is also significantly white, Asian and black. The number of people in Tract 437 who identify their ancestry as ''United States or American'' (173) are outnumbered by those who list their ancestry as ''sub-Saharan African'' (199). ''Then you break it up by block,'' Salvo says, ''and you got the U.N. in there.''
Five of the blocks within the tract have been classified as melting-pot blocks. One of those is Calloway Street. Of the 907 residents of the block, 29 percent are Hispanic, 23 percent are white, 23 percent are Asian and 19 percent are black. ''This is extraordinary,'' Salvo says, even for Queens. ''These percentages are not typical.''
Despite this astounding diversity, groups tend to stay within enclaves in the borough; even in mixed blocks, one group or another predominates in each individual building. When I read out the list of nationalities residing in the Calloway Chateau -- Uzbeks, Afghans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Koreans, Filipinos, Ukrainians, Russians, Argentines, Colombians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Peruvians, African-Americans, Guyanese -- Salvo draws in his breath. ''If you look at this building relative to all the buildings in Queens, this is going to stand out. Here is a rather extraordinary example of the melting-pot concept.'' While the Census Bureau doesn't compile data at the level of the individual building, it is quite possible that, for its size, the Calloway Chateau is the most diverse building in New York City.
I could have just posted the headline, since they "declined to provide further details." the rest of the article is a recap of what we know, and hence a waste of at least one tree.
Published: November 9, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 9 � American forces have detained 18 people in connection with a rocket attack earlier this month on the hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz stayed when he visited the country, a military spokesman said today.
The First Armored Division, which is responsible for security in and around Baghdad, made the arrests, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. George C. Krivo, who declined to provide further details.
Thsi is simply a continuation of the problem I pointed out in "The Funding Gap" at Open Source Politics.
If there is any grand, elegant logic behind the federal government's dispersal of more than a billion dollars in college aid, then Maria Hernandez is humble enough to confess that it has escaped her.
Consider her point. Poverty is hardly a rarity among the students of California State University at Fresno, where she is the director of financial aid. Many come from families working in the fields nearby, on farms where students spend their summer and winter vacations harvesting peaches and sugar beets to stay in school.
About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives it about 7 times as much money to help each one of them through college under one program, 28 times as much in another and almost 100 times as much in a third, government data show.
"Pretty sad," if you ask Ms. Hernandez.
Similar discrepancies emerge across the nation, adhering to a somewhat counterintuitive underlying theme: The federal government typically gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares of poor students.