Prometheus 6   

The existance of sites like this suggests an answer

Trashing the media
Veteran journalists are coming to some grim conclusions about their industry. Are they raising red flags or merely grinding axes?
By Reed Johnson
Times Staff Writer

January 11, 2004

You dislike us. You really dislike us. Or maybe the harsher truth is, we've begun to dislike ourselves.

Let's admit it: We in the mainstream media deserve some of this rancor and resentment after the year we've had. Jayson Blair's serial falsehoods, the New York Times management crackup, the Washington Post's gung-ho reporting (and later re-reporting) of the Pfc. Jessica Lynch rescue, media mogul Conrad Black's financial faux pas, CBS' leveraging of a Michael Jackson interview and entertainment special — the list of snafus in 2003 goes on and on.

No wonder so many people have been taking us to task: pundits, bloggers, journalism school professors and politicians right up to and including the president of the United States, who told Brit Hume of Fox News that he rarely reads newspapers because "a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news." Instead, Bush revealed, he relies on "people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Not only are mainstream media untrustworthy, Bush implied, but also largely irrelevant.

The leader of the free world isn't alone in his meager estimation of the fourth estate. It's no secret that the public's faith in the mass media has been slipping for years, that journalists today are regarded by many Americans as predatory, biased, out of touch with readers, motivated by personal agendas, complacent and complicit with the corporate and governmental powers that be.

In a poll of 1,201 adults conducted last summer by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 56% of those surveyed said news organizations "often report inaccurately," 62% thought the media "try to cover up mistakes" and 53% believed the media "are politically biased." Seventy percent also said the media were "influenced by the powerful," and 56% said journalists don't care about the people they report on. Most of these negative numbers have held steady for some time, although public perceptions of the media improved briefly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What's striking today is how many media insiders and observers agree that the profession is falling down on the job. Bookstands teem with teeth-gnashing titles testifying to the media's alleged moral vacuousness, lack of fairness and independence, or sheer incompetence: "Journalistic Fraud: How the New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted"; "Off With Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business"; "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception — How the Media Failed to Cover the War On Iraq"; "Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us"; "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News."

(Rule of thumb: Any book about the media with a subtitle of five or more words probably won't be flattering.)

Many of these new books, along with stacks of newspaper columns and magazine articles, are being written not by Beltway spin-meisters and hard-core ideologues but by veteran journalists, career newsmen and -women who've come to some grim conclusions about their industry, its owners and its practitioners. Are they raising red flags or merely grinding axes? Do the mainstream media's problems go beyond politics, beyond the transgressions of individual reporters, beyond the increasing pressures of the bottom line?

Joe, Joe, Joe

Lieberman Gains Votes, but Not the Best Kind
By DIANE CARDWELL

Published: January 10, 2004

CONCORD, N.H., Jan. 9 — In many ways, Stan Kowalski is precisely the kind of undecided voter that the campaign of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman is trying to reach.

Learning from a flier on his car that Mr. Lieberman would appear at the In a Pinch Cafe, Mr. Kowalski showed up, chatted with him and left strongly inclined to vote for him.

"I like Joe," Mr. Kowalski, a biochemist turned law student, said. "I feel like he's in touch with the middle class. He's a good man."

There was just one hitch. Mr. Kowalski, a registered Republican, cannot vote for Mr. Lieberman in the Jan. 27 Democratic primary here.

With less than three weeks to go before the primary, Mr. Lieberman is making an all-out push here, leaving his Manchester apartment shortly after dawn and returning some 16 hours later while his wife, Hadassah, stumps the state, often on her own.

But the interest of Republicans like Mr. Kowalski, coupled with Mr. Lieberman's seeming inability to attract the kind of Democratic hordes who flock to see Howard Dean and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, has renewed the perception that although he could mount a challenge to President Bush, he may not get the chance.

I may have to read this one

Former Official Describes Bush as Disengaged
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 — Paul O'Neill, who was pushed out of the administration as treasury secretary because it was felt he was not a team player, says President Bush was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

Mr. O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a book that paints Mr. Bush as a disengaged president who did not encourage debate.

To promote the book, which will be available on Tuesday, Mr. O'Neill is to be on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

In an excerpt from the book released by CBS, Mr. O'Neill said that a lack of real dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the first two years of the administration.

Mr. O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying that the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."

Mr. O'Neill said in the CBS interview that the atmosphere was similar during his one-on-one meetings with Mr. Bush.

Speaking of his first meeting with the president, Mr. O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage him on."

He added, "I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

Okay, enough is enough

My apologies to my Green friends, but your leader is delusional.

ASHINGTON, Jan. 9 — He is sounding like a presidential candidate again, charging the Bush administration with "messianic militarism and subservient corporatism," and the Democrats with soft-pedaling liberal policies that were once mainstays of their party.

Three years after the election in which Democrats say he cost Al Gore the White House, Ralph Nader is considering another campaign, and says he will decide shortly.

At this point, Mr. Nader said in an interview this week, a run depends only on his ability to collect enough money and volunteers to mount a credible effort. Otherwise, he said, he has a zillion reasons to go ahead — including, he insists, that doing so would be good for the Democrats.

"But you've got to have money, and you've got to have volunteers," he said, though declining to specify the levels he would need of each. "The verdict is still out, but I'll decide by the end of the month."

Four years ago, he said he was running for president because he believed that the major-party nominees, Mr. Gore and George W. Bush, were virtually indistinguishable and that the parties were too cozy with corporate America. Now Mr. Nader, 69, says he has seen enough of Mr. Bush's administration to make defeating him and ending Republican control of Congress the chief goals. And those goals are more achievable, he says, if he joins the race.

The NY Times doesn't get it

School Reform Left Behind

Then President Bush campaigns for re-election, he will probably point to the No Child Left Behind Act as proof that his philosophy of compassionate conservatism is working. He should be forced to answer questions about the way the law has been put in place. The administration has failed to make the states live up to the education standards it claims to be upholding. And the states have been encouraged in their resistance by the failure of the federal government to come up with all of the promised aid.

The administration is right when it says that education financing has increased sharply since No Child Left Behind was signed two years ago. Indeed, the funds for Title I, which is aimed at the poorest students, have jumped 30 percent since then — with proportionately more of the money going to the poorest districts. But the Title I allotment is also $6 billion short of what Congress authorized when it passed the law. The new money would have come as a windfall if most schools were not so poorly financed in the first place. As things stand, however, districts need every cent they were supposed to get if they are to reach the strict new standards laid out by the federal government.

NOW he cares about jobs

Bush Seeks Ways to Create Jobs, and Fast
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - The stage had been set to celebrate the revival of jobs.

With a phalanx of women entrepreneurs at his side and a billboard covered with the word "Jobs!" behind him, President Bush proclaimed his confidence about the economy here on Friday. But he made only passing reference to the latest news about employment.

The reason was clear: Friday's report on unemployment in December was much weaker than either the administration or most independent economists had predicted. Job creation was virtually nil, and the unemployment rate declined only because the labor force shrank by 309,000 workers. Many of those were people who had simply become too discouraged to keep looking for work.

The problem confronting Mr. Bush is that there is little he can do between now and the elections except wait and hope that the employment picture improves. And the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already reduced short-term interest rates to just 1 percent.

"In terms of big levers to pull, they don't have anything," said Pierre Ellis, a senior economist at Decision Economics, a forecasting company.

It is entirely possible that the job trend will abruptly improve over the next several months. Businesses are more optimistic and more willing to invest in expansion than they have been in years, and that should translate into more jobs at some point.

President Bush may also have an ace in the hole. Last year's tax cuts are expected to produce another big bulge of tax refunds and lower tax bills between now and June - about $40 billion in extra cash flow to households, according to economists at Goldman Sachs and Macroeconomic Advisers.

"It's not a good idea to give excessive weight to any particular statistic," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. "If you look at the pattern, most of the economic news has been good rather than bad."

Both the White House and the Fed are confronted by a recovery unlike any other in modern history. Economic growth has been soaring for months, corporate profits have shot up and the stock market has regained much of its old ebullience.

Yet job creation has been slower than in almost any previous recovery, and wage growth has slowed to a crawl. That appears to reflect another big new element that lies entirely outside the president's control: the enormous increases in productivity, which have made it possible for companies to squeeze more output from each worker.

"The evidence is powerful that we can have 4 or 5 percent growth without hiring much," said John Makin, a senior economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Makin has long been among the more pessimistic economic forecasters, but the employment and wage data on Friday came in far worse than even he had expected. "I was stunned, quite frankly," he said.

Either Bush or the Supreme Court must have reneged on their deal

High Court to Hear U.S.-Born Detainee's Case

By Charles Lane and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 9, 2004; 4:03 PM

The Supreme Court announced today that it will decide whether the Constitution authorizes President Bush's claim that he can order the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens captured abroad fighting for terrorist groups, a key element of his legal strategy in the war on terrorism.

In a brief order, the justices rebuffed repeated Bush administration requests to turn down the appeal of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S.-born Saudi and alleged Taliban fighter who was taken into custody by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001. He has been held by the U.S. military without access to a lawyer or any other outside contact ever since. A Richmond-based federal appeals court had ruled in the administration's favor, accepting the administration's view that the judicial branch should not second-guess the executive to consider military matters.

The court's action was the latest sign that the justices take a far less deferential view of the judiciary's role and that they believe the time has come for them to exercise oversight of the executive's conduct of the fight against terror. Only a month ago, the justices brushed aside strong Bush administration opposition and agreed to rule on an appeal by foreign terrorism suspects currently being held at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo.

The court's unequivocal stride into the battle over civil liberties and national security shows once again that its current membership takes an expansive view of the court's independent capability -- and responsibility -- to resolve large national issues.

A third terrorism-related case is also pending. Many legal observers believe the justices will likely review a separate appeals court ruling from New York in the alleged "dirty bomb" case of Jose Padilla, who has also been held without a hearing or legal representation.

In that case, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the administration could not hold Padilla as an enemy combatant absent authorization from Congress. Padilla is a U.S. citizen who was arrested in May 2002 in Chicago.

U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson this week urged the court to defer consideration of Hamdi's appeal until the government files its appeal in the Padilla case by Jan. 20.

The justices made no mention of the Padilla case in its order accepting the Hamdi case for review today.

After Hamdi was captured, according to the Justice Department, he told military authorities he was in Afghanistan to "train with and, if necessary, fight for the Taliban." Originally held with other detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he was transferred to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., after the government learned that he was born in Louisiana.

His father appealed the detention in the federal courts, but was told by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that it would not interfere with what it called the president's broad powers to protect the national security.

"The practice of capturing and detaining enemy combatants is as old as war itself," Olson wrote in unsuccessfully urging the Supreme Court to deny Hamdi's appeal. "There is no obligation under the laws and customs of war for the military to charge captured combatants with any offense."

Tonight's DVD

I'll be watching the first few episodes of the first season of 24 tonight.

Now this is interesting

via the Center for American Progress' "Progress Report"

Cheney Target of Criminal Investigation

Though neglected by major media in the United States, international news sources report that French law enforcement authorities have made Vice President Dick Cheney the target of a criminal investigation for his role in a massive bribery scandal during his time as CEO of Halliburton. Le Figaro, one of France's biggest (and most conservative) newspapers, reports "an investigative judge is looking into allegations of corruption during construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria by Halliburton" and a French oil company. The international AP newswire reported on 10/11/03 that the judge is "looking into who may have benefited from nearly $200 million in potentially illegal commissions allegedly handed out from 1990 to 2002." In May, Halliburton admitted that, under Cheney's stewardship, it paid "$2.4 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to get favorable tax treatment." Halliburton now says it is cooperating with a simultaneous review by the Security and Exchange Commission.

THE POTENTIAL CHARGES: The London Financial Times reports the investigation specifically focuses on the criminal charges of "misuse of corporate funds" and "corruption of foreign public agents." The Sydney Australia Morning Herald reports the investigative judge is specifically targeting Cheney for his "alleged complicity in the abuse of corporate assets."

THE POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES: Though the investigation is being spearheaded by French law enforcement, the UK Guardian notes, it would be prosecuted under international laws agreed to by the United States in a 35-nation treaty signed in 1997, meaning the consequences could be very real. The treaty, "under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aims to fight corporate attempts to buy the favors of public authorities abroad." Not coincidentally, the London Financial Times points out that the Bush Administration is using similar agreements to aggressively "seek the extradition and pressing claims against senior French finance industry executives connected with the Credit Lyonnais purchase of Executive Life, the failed Californian insurer."

And Michael Kinsley isn't making an economic argument either

At least he admits it in the very first paragraph, though.

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, January 9, 2004; Page A17

One of the tiresome conceits of political debate is that when opponents agree on something, it is more likely to be true. Another is that an assertion is more credible if it comes from someone who used to assert the opposite.

…The core of free-trade theory is the concept of "comparative advantage." Schumer and Roberts make the classic college-student mistake of confusing comparative advantage with absolute advantage. Nations trade because for each one, there are goods or services it is more efficient to buy from abroad than to produce at home. If there is nothing America can offer the world that is either uniquely desirable or cheaper than elsewhere, the world will not buy anything from America. And after a while, the world won't sell anything to America either, because we won't have the foreign currency to pay for it. So even in this extreme case, there is no need to restrict trade, because trade will restrict itself. But in fact, as Ricardo demonstrated, there will always be something worth trading. Even if Nation A can produce both apples and oranges more efficiently than Nation B, it will still make sense to concentrate on producing one fruit and import the other[P6: Why?]. And Nation B will make itself poorer, not richer, by keeping out fruit from Nation A. If Nation A retaliates by keeping out fruit from Nation B -- and why shouldn't it? -- Nation B will be doubly punished.

…Traditionally, the most troublesome thing about free trade -- apart from the difficulty of convincing people that it works -- is the unequal distribution of its benefits. The whole country is better off, but there are winners and losers. Generally, the losers are lower-income workers, whose jobs are the easiest to duplicate in less developed countries. It seems misguided to me to avoid a policy that makes the whole nation richer because it makes some individuals poorer. With more to play with, it ought to be easy to ease the burden on free trade's losers. Of course, under a Republican administration, we don't do nearly enough of that.

…But the real difference between traditional trade in heavy, earthbound objects and 21st-century trade in weightless electronic blips, or in sheer brainpower, is that the losers in new-style trade are more likely to be people that U.S. senators and fancy economic consultants actually know. These are people with advanced degrees and high incomes. Their incomes will likely be above-average for our economy even if they are driven down by competition from poorer economies. Under these circumstances, denying the benefits of free trade to the whole nation -- and denying opportunity to the rising middle class in developing countries -- to protect the incomes of a relative few seems harder to justify, not easier, than it was back in the days when our biggest fear was Japanese cars.

And exactly WHAT is a "sinister nexus"?

Based on the headline, I was prepared to give Powell some dap. Based on the extensive use of terms of art, I retract the offer.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.

Mr. Powell offered a vigorous defense of his Feb. 5 presentation before the Security Council, in which he voiced the administration's most detailed case to date for war with Iraq. After studying intelligence data, he said that a "sinister nexus" existed "between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."

Sanity erupts

New Jersey to Recognize Gay Couples
By LAURA MANSNERUS

TRENTON, Jan. 8 — The debate was expected to be volatile, but members of the New Jersey Senate instead showed broad support on Thursday for a measure to give the state's recognition to same-sex domestic partnerships. The measure, passed by a 23-to-9 vote, goes to Gov. James E. McGreevey, who has said he is eager to sign it.

New Jersey is the fifth state to recognize domestic partnership in some form, though the status accorded gay couples in the new legislation is short of marriage, and of the civil unions allowed in Vermont.

Senators took less than 15 minutes to reach a vote, as opponents fell silent and supporters in the gallery struggled to contain their applause. Five senators spoke in support of the bill, and none voiced opposition.

In the gallery, despite a plea for silence from the Republican co-president of the Senate, John O. Bennett, elation broke out as supporters clapped, laughed and hugged. "I was in tears," said Deborah Smith of Scotch Plains, a mental health therapist who has lived with her partner for 14 years. "After listening to those speeches, I would have voted for whatever they were voting for."

The legislation, which also applies to heterosexual couples over age 62, permits those registered as domestic partners to make critical medical decisions for each other. It requires insurance companies to offer health care coverage to domestic partners equivalent to that for spouses.

The measure also extends health coverage and pension benefits to the domestic partners of state employees, but makes no requirements of private employers.

The legislation does not confer most of the entitlements of marriage, however, like the right to share property acquired during the marriage, to seek financial support when the relationship ends and to be recognized as a family member for many public benefit programs.

Steven Goldstein, who has directed lobbying for the bill for Lambda Legal, a gay-rights organization, said: "I'm on Cloud 27. It's not just that we won. It's that we won without rancor."

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

Farmed Salmon Have More Contaminants Than Wild Ones, Study Finds
By GINA KOLATA

Published: January 9, 2004

A new study of fillets from 700 salmon, wild and farmed, finds that the farmed fish consistently have more PCB's and other contaminants, but at levels far below the limits set by the federal government.

The study, the largest so far to look at contaminants in salmon, is being published today in the journal Science. It found more than a sevenfold difference in PCB levels, with farmed salmon having an average of 36.63 parts per billion and wild salmon having 4.75.

The authors advised people to limit their consumption of salmon. "Although the risk/benefit computation is complicated," they wrote, "consumption of farmed Atlantic salmon may pose risks that detract from the beneficial effects of fish consumption."

Dr. Barbara Knuth, a study author who is chairwoman of the department of natural resources at Cornell University, said, "It indicates that the vast majority of farm-raised Atlantic salmon should be consumed at one meal or less per month."

More than 90 percent of the fresh salmon eaten in this country is farmed, and sales have been growing by 10 percent to 20 percent a year, said Alex Trent, executive director of Salmon of the Americas, an industry group.

Officials of the Food and Drug Administration disputed the study's recommendations.

"We certainly don't think there's a public health concern here," said Dr. Terry Troxell, director of the agency's office of plant and dairy foods and beverages. "Our advice to consumers is not to alter their consumption of farmed or wild salmon."

The agency's tolerance level for PCB's in salmon is 2000 parts per billion, which is nearly 55 times the level found in the farmed fish. The Environmental Protection Agency has a lower level for fish caught in sport fishing, but defers to the F.D.A. when it comes to setting levels for commercial fish.

Dr. Troxell said most contaminants were found in the skin of the fish and the fat just beneath it.

"Most people aren't eating the skin," he said. "And when salmon is cooked, you lose a considerable amount of fat, and so the levels go down quite a bit."

The Ghost of Leonard Jeffries

Ice Age Ancestry May Keep Body Warmer and Healthier
By NICHOLAS WADE

A team of California geneticists has found that many of the world's peoples are genetically adapted to the cold because their ancestors lived in northern climates during the Ice Age. The genetic change affects basic body metabolism and may influence susceptibility to disease and to the risks of the calorie-laden modern diet.

The finding also breaks ground in showing that the human population has continued to adapt to forces of natural selection since the dispersal from its ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago.

The genetic adaptation to cold is still carried by many Northern Europeans, East Asians and American Indians, most of whose ancestors once lived in Siberia. But it is absent from peoples native to Africa, a difference that the California team, led by Dr. Douglas C. Wallace of the University of California, Irvine, suggest could contribute to the greater burden of certain diseases in the African-American population.

Other experts praised the findings about adaptation to cold but said the role of mitochondria, relics of captured bacteria that serve as the batteries of living cells, in these diseases was less certain.

The genetic change affects the mitochondria, which break down glucose and convert it into the chemical energy that drives the muscles and other body processes. But the mitochondria will generate heat as well, and less chemical energy, if certain mutations occur in their DNA that make the process less efficient. Just such a change would have been very helpful to early humans trying to survive in cold climates.

Dr. Wallace and his colleagues have now decoded the full mitochondrial DNA from more than 1,000 people around the world and found signs of natural selection. By analyzing the changes in the DNA, they have been able to distinguish positive mutations, those selected because they are good or adaptive, from negative or harmful mutations. In today's issue of the journal Science, they report that several lineages of mitochondrial DNA show signs of positive selection.

These lineages are not found at all in Africans but occur in 14 percent of people in temperate zones and in 75 percent of those inhabiting Arctic zones. Dr. Wallace and his colleagues say this correlation is evidence that the lineages were positively selected because they help the body generate more heat.

Until now, most genetic change in the human population since it left Africa has been thought to be either random or just the elimination of harmful mutations. The evidence of the new analysis is that positive or adaptive selection "played an increasingly important role as people migrated out of Africa into temperate and Arctic Eurasia," the California team writes.

One implication is that everyone is adapted to a particular climate zone, and that moving to different zones may cause certain stresses. Mitochondria of the lineages found in Africa, Dr. Wallace suggests, may contribute the extra burden of certain diseases found among African-Americans, like diabetes and prostate cancer.

His reasoning is that African lineage mitochondria have never had to develop a mechanism for generating extra heat. So when an African-American and a European-American eat the same high calorie diet, the European's mitochondria burn some calories off as heat but the more efficient African mitochondria are liable to generate more fat deposition and oxidative damage, two results that could underlie the higher disease rates, Dr. Wallace said.

Separately, some of the European mitochondrial lineages appear to protect against Alzheimer's and Parkinson diseases and to be associated with greater longevity.

"Therefore," the California team writes, "to understand individual predisposition to modern diseases, we must also understand our genetic past, the goal of the new discipline of evolutionary medicine."

Explains a lot about neocons

Brain May Be Able to Bury Unwanted Memories, Study Shows
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Unwanted memories can be driven from awareness, according to a team of researchers who say they have identified a brain circuit that springs into action when people deliberately try to forget something.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, strengthen the theory that painful memories can be repressed by burying them in the subconscious, the researchers say.

In the study, people who had memorized a pair of words were later shown one of them and asked to either recall the second word or to consciously avoid thinking about it.

Brain images showed that the hippocampus, an area of the brain that usually lights up when people retrieve memories, was relatively quiet when subjects tried to suppress the words they had learned. But at the same time, another region associated with motor inhibition, called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, showed increased activity.

The scientists also found that the more the subjects were told to resist thinking about a word, the more likely they were to have trouble recalling it later.

"This suggests a neurological basis for how people can actually shove something out of mind," said Dr. Michael C. Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon and lead author of the study. "There's no question that we're tapping into something that's relevant to the experiences of people who survive trauma and find the memories become less and less intrusive over time."

Sticking my neck out

Over at Daniel Drezner's place I see he disapproved mightily with a NY Times editorial by Charles Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts. From Mr. Drezner's place I found Brad DeLong also looked askance at the editorial and Mark Kleiman called it drivel. Without doubt, as an economic argument the editorial is an abject failure.

Apparently, the economic error (beyond the protectionist stance I don't think any legit economist will ever support), concisely, is this statement

and the economic response (courtesy of Noam Scheiber at TNR's &c.:, concisely, is:

I have a couple of questions; not all are rhetorical.

First, the rhetorical question stuff—what makes any of you gentlemen think the editorial was presenting an economic argument? There IS a difference between "the free flow of goods and the free flow of factors of production," but it's a social difference, not an economic one. Just like the difference between government and private sector spending is social rather than economic, n'est pas?

[LATER, BUT BEFORE I POSTED THIS: It didn't wind up with a question, but I'm leaving it the way it came off my fingers. I guess my question is, barring the assumption that the Next Big Thing will originate here and give us stuff we can provide that no one else can, am I getting the big picture here?]
Now here's the non-rhetorical stuff. If all decisions were to be based on the principles that the market will determine the outcome and that all participants are free to respond to market forces as they see fit, it seems that companies with foreign competition in the domestic market would be driven toward outsourcing or relocating their means of production because it's cheaper to make it there and ship it here, than it is to make it here. Labor costs, basically. One response to that is productivity increases enabled by superior tech, but if you think about it, there's a physical limit to that: robot arms can only move so fast, silicon can only crystallize at the rate it crystallizes, humans can only do so much before they have to eat and sleep. In the real world, you can't assume a deus ex machina in the form of a major tech improvement to bail you out, nor can you assume you'll be able to afford (or justify!) it. So in the real world it strikes me that, unless labor costs equalize around the world, every US company would reach the point where the least expensive means of increasing their productive efficiency is to relocate across some border.

Koufax Awards

Well, I'm feeling a bit guilty because I've only mentioned the Koufax Awards in passing but I found out today I got three nominations: Best Post (Where We Stand), Best Series (the Startin' Stuff reparations series - the link at Wampum goes to the first entry, which I imported from Blogger. This link goes to an archive of all the posts and comments from that series) and Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. I know Al-M submitted Where We Stand, and Colorado Luis nominated me for wider recognition. To them, and the mystery nominator (who last month had the taste to pick one I would picked myself without even asking),as well as mslauren, I give a hearty, heartfelt "Aw, shucks…"

Thing is, there was a LOT of good progressive writing out there, and the field needs winnowing. There are 36 Best Blog nominations, 80 Best Post nominations, 29 Best Single Issue Blog nominees, 36 Most Humorous Blog nominations (including some that are really questionable), 31 Best Series nominations (NONE of which are questionable), 17 Best Non-Liberal Blog nominees, 38 Best Writing nominees, 29 Best Group Blog nominees, and 30 Most Deserving of Wider Recognition nominees. And since I counted them on the screen I'm not promising I didn't drop one or two.

It is not realistic to suggest anyone read all those blogs. But since you now have a nice neat list of links to all the nomination categories in one place I do suggest you save this post, pick two or three categories, and try out two or three blogs that are unfamiliar to you. Part of the idea of the awards is to let folks know what's out there; though I wasn't part of the selection process, I'm pretty sure that's why all the nominees are linked over there.

Anyway, you should submit a couple of votes here and there (I mean, beyond the three I was nominated for) and try a random few new to you nominee blogs.

A question just occurred to me

Since the only value the free market recognizes is the ability to pay, and we know democracies and republics aren't always liberal, exactly what are we claiming democracy and free markets are going to do in Iraq?

Surprises

Al-Muhajabah nominated Where We Stand for a Koufax Award. Given the quality of the competition, I do NOT expect to win, really appreciate the acknowledgement but didn't mention it because I thought it something of a fluke.

Today, mslauren at feministe nominated the Identity Blogging thread for Best Meme of 2003 at the Bloggies.

The Identity Blogging thread wasn't strictly mine; I collected links and commented on all of them but it was about the most open discussion of race and identity I've ever participated in. Plus it brought in one of my favorite (and most frustrating) commenters: The Everlasting Phelps (so I have a small masochistic streak).

I do think these two represent some of my best stuff, though if I were to nominate one of my own for an award it would be either the reparations series or the racism series.

I can't read this yet

I opened up A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last night and read through about half the acknowledgements. I've already reached a few conclusions:

• David Eggers is a madman
• I'm going to enjoy the book. A lot.
• I can't read it on a day when I want to think about serious stuff. WAY to scattered.

If I were an Intelligent Design advocate I could raise hell with this

New-Found Old Galaxies Upsetting Astronomers' Long-Held Theories on the Big Bang
By KENNETH CHANG

ATLANTA, Jan. 7 — Gazing deep into space and far into the past, astronomers have found that the early universe, a couple of billion years after the Big Bang, looks remarkably like the present-day universe.

Astronomers said here on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that they had found huge elliptical galaxies that formed within one billion to two billion years after the Big Bang, perhaps a couple of billion years earlier than expected.

A few days earlier, researchers had announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted a gathering cloud of perhaps 100 galaxies from the same epoch, an early appearance of such galactic clusters.

On Wednesday, astronomers at the meeting said that three billion years after the Big Bang, one of the largest structures in the universe, a string of galaxies 300 million light-years long and 50 million light-years wide, had already formed. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, or almost six trillion miles.

That means the string is nearly 2,000 billion billion miles long.

Some astronomers said the discoveries could challenge a widely accepted picture of the evolution of the universe, that galaxies, clusters and the galactic strings formed in a bottom-up fashion, that the universe's small objects formed first and then clumped together into larger structures over time.

"The universe is growing up a little faster than we had thought," said Dr. Povilas Palunas of the University of Texas, one of the astronomers who found the string of galaxies. "We're seeing a much larger structure than any of the models predict. So that's surprising."

Enemies within

Wolves in Democrats' clothing
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, January 5, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

I'll bet not one American in 200 knows, or cares, who Al From is. And (let's go double or nothing) I'll bet not one in 20 knows, or cares, what the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is.

I know ... now ... because I looked it up last week. And both From and his council are powerful influences in this year's presidential campaigns.

Mr. From would argue with my description of him, but I'd describe him as a kind of agent provocateur, a plant inserted by the Republicans into the leadership of the Democrat Party. His goal: Wreck the party, turn it into the Republican Lite Party.

If that's his goal, he's doing a fine, fine job. And he's using the DLC to do it. He founded the DLC, a collection of Democrat politicians, in 1985, apparently out of fear that the Democrats were done as a political party. After all, they had not had a president for five full years.

In Al From's world, any Democrat who thinks like a Democrat is an extremist. A Democrat who thinks like a Republican is a centrist.

Cutting back on counterfeiting

via Slashdot:

Subject: Printing copies of currency

As an experiment I tried to copy an print one of the new $20 bills. Before you say I am breaking the law by doing so read the
web site referenced at the end of note. I fully intend to obey the rules. I was able to do a full scan at 1600 DPI using Photoshop CS (ver 8.0) and save the resulting image to the hard drive.

When I tried to print it on my Canon i850 only a small part of it would print regardless of the orientation or the size. Other
printing programs resulted in the same results. I was able to cut a small part of the image and print it. When I tried to cut about half the image Photoshop informed me that it was illegal and referred me to the web page below. It seems as though the printer and software vendors are stepping past what is legally required.

As per the legal requirement I have deleted the file that contained the image.

http://www.treas.gov/usss/money_illustrations.shtml
U.S. Currency
The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, permits color illustrations of U.S. currency provided:

1.. the illustration is of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of the item illustrated;

2.. the illustration is one-sided; and

3.. all negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof are destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use.

Last choice should be "none of the above"

…but that choice would win in most elections.

Gephardt gets top spot on Democratic primary ballot
Kerry lands 8th in Mass. drawing

By Matthew Rodriguez, Globe Correspondent, 1/8/2004

Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri will top the list of 10 Democratic candidates on the ballot in the March 2 Massachusetts presidential primary, and home state US Senator John F. Kerry will be eighth, after a random drawing at the State House yesterday.

Small manila envelopes containing the names were pulled one by one from a clear container by Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who said the candidates will appear on the ballot unless they drop out by tomorrow.

The other nine candidates on the Democratic ballot, in the order they will appear following Gephardt, are: Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, retired Army General Wesley K. Clark, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, former senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, Kerry of Massachusetts, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., and the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York.

LaRouche, a perennial candidate for president who does not have the support of the Democratic National Committee, obtained the necessary 2,500 certified signatures to be included on the Massachusetts ballot.

Candidates have until tomorrow to withdraw from the ballot, otherwise they will appear regardless of their performance in the contests before the Massachusetts primary.

The only Republican candidate on the GOP's ballot in Massachusetts is President Bush. Yesterday, Galvin also drew the names of Libertarian and Green-Rainbow party candidates, determining placement on their party's ballots.

Five Libertarian candidates will appear on their party's ballot in the following order: Jeffrey Diket, Ruben Perez, Aaron Russo, Michael Badnarik, and Gary Nolan. The four candidates on the Green-Rainbow party ballot, in the order they will appear, are Kent Mesplay, Lorna Salzman, Paul Glover, and David Cobb.

The last listed option on each ballot for voters is "no preference."

Well, it's not a tax hike

You know, if I didn't have friends in Cali I might think all this is just karma for the blnd anti-tax fervor that has ruled over there for years.

Another pretty bizarre point: the GDP doesn't only include consumer goods (things like cars, jewelry, clothes and such). It includes investment goods, also called capital goods (things like bridges and manufacturing equipment) and…here's the interesting part…human capital.

This is appropriate because education (even the compulsory type ) is, at root, the most valuable investment we can make as a society, even though it's really hard to nail down who, specifically, makes money from the investment.

At any rate, this means the increases in educational expense (and I don't limit this to California, obviously) adds to the bottom line of the GDP. We get to claim economic growth when we raise student tuitions. And of course, student loans also pump it up. Both issuance and payments are transactions that go into the mix.

I point this out to help drive home the fact that the GDP is a good rough measure of how the economy has done in the recent past, but it's a very rough measure indeed. And there are things that increase the GDP but actually have a negative impact of quality of life.

January 8, 2004

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to propose a 10% fee increase for Californians attending college at the University of California and California State University and a fee hike of up to 40% for graduate students at the universities, sources familiar with the governor's budget said Wednesday.

At the same time, the budget is expected to contain reductions in college financial aid for students from moderate-income families.

Diana Fuentes-Michel, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, said she expects the governor's proposal to tighten qualifications for Cal Grants, the state's main financial aid program.

The move likely would eliminate financial aid for some students by lowering the ceiling used to determine which families are eligible for aid. Currently, students from a family of four are eligible for aid if the family income is no more than $66,700. Fuentes-Michel said she expects the maximum size of the Cal Grant awards - which currently range from $1,551 for community college students to $9,700 a year for students attending private universities - to remain unchanged, but that reductions are possible there as well. The cost of the program has increased rapidly in recent years.

Any fee hikes for the UC and CSU systems would come on top of increases for undergraduate and graduate students in the past 13 months of about 40% - the steepest fee hikes in state history.

Both university systems raised undergraduate student fees by 30% before the current fall term began, a jump that followed a rise of 10% to 15% for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively, in December 2002.

For professional school students, those same December fee increases ranged from 19% to 26%.

The governor's budget is not expected to provide better news for the state's community college students. Officials at the two-year colleges have said they are preparing for the governor to propose raising fees from $18 to $26 per credit, a 44% increase.

That move would follow a fee increase last year for community college students, from $11 to $18 a credit. The state's budget crisis also has forced the colleges to cut course offerings significantly in that time period, with more students crowding into the remaining classes.

Even with the fee increases Schwarzenegger is expected to propose, UC and Cal State fees for undergraduates who are residents of California would be lower than the average of comparable public universities in other states.

For Cal State schools, systemwide fees for undergraduate students who are California residents stand at $2,572 for the current year. A 10% increase would add $257 to the total. Individual campuses add additional fees to the systemwide figure. Cal State's 23 campuses have 410,000 students, primarily undergraduates.

At UC, undergraduate students who are California residents now pay mandatory systemwide fees totaling $4,984. Campuses also charge miscellaneous fees, which boost the total average fees for an undergraduate to about $5,530.

Graduate students who are California residents now pay systemwide fees at UC of about $5,200; with campus fees included, that figure rises to $6,843 for average total fees.

Students attending UC law, medicine and business schools pay substantially higher fees. To attend the UCLA law school, for example, a California resident now pays $17,011.

The budget Schwarzenegger will present Friday also is expected to call for a 20% rise in tuition for non-resident students at the two public university systems, according to sources familiar with the governor's spending plan.

Students who are not California residents currently pay $19,740 per year in UC tuition. Graduate student tuition for nonresidents is now $19,333. At the UCLA law school, tuition for nonresidents $29,256.

For the 2002-03 academic year, the UC campuses had around 192,000 students — about 148,000 undergraduates and 44,000 graduate students.

In his State of the State address Tuesday, Schwarzenegger proposed capping annual student fee increases for the state's university systems at 10%, but did not specify whether he was referring to undergraduate or graduate students.

In his speech, the governor spoke of the necessity of ending what he described as the "boom-and-bust cycle of wildly fluctuating fees with a predictable, capped fee policy" for college students.

"And we must limit fee increases to no more than 10% a year," Schwarzenegger said. "Like our kindergarten through 12th grade schools, our colleges and universities must also share the burden of the fiscal crisis."

Late Wednesday, a spokesman for the Department of Finance said Schwarzenegger was referring only to undergraduate students when he proposed a cap on university fee increases.

"The governor's comment in the State of the State speech was in regard to undergraduate fees," Palmer said.

Palmer would not confirm the amount of the increases for graduate students and non-residents, saying they would be disclosed when the budget is released on Friday. But another source said: "At the graduate level, they are recommending a very big increase, like in the neighborhood of 40%."

Fee increases for graduate and professional schools have generally been less politically sensitive than increases for undergraduates.

UC and CSU officials declined to comment late Wednesday on the governor's proposed fee increases. The two system's governing boards ultimately set the actual fees that students pay, based on the level of state funding provided by the governor and the Legislature.

Schwarzenegger already has made midyear reductions of $53.6 million to the two university systems.

A taxing conversation

A Tax Debate Full of Hazards for Democrats
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — Twelve days before the Iowa caucuses, the battle for the Democratic nomination has become an increasingly furious debate over how to reverse President Bush's tax cuts, yet avoid the politically deadly charge that the Democrats are the party of tax increases.

Nowhere is this more striking than in the sudden scrambling of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, who has advocated repealing all of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, including those for the middle class. Now, under heavy fire from his rivals, Dr. Dean is preparing a new tax plan that is widely expected to offer tax relief for the middle class.

Dr. Dean insisted on Wednesday that he had long intended to propose "additional tax reforms that will make the tax code fairer for working families and that will ensure that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share." But the political pressures to do so are intense — both from his opponents for the nomination and from the increasing imperative to reposition himself to the center for what he hopes will be a general election campaign.

Most immediately, Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Senators John Kerry, John Edwards and Joseph I. Lieberman, seeking to present themselves as the more centrist, electable alternatives to Dr. Dean, are hitting the issue hard in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"I don't want to go back to being the old Democratic Party that doesn't get it," Mr. Kerry said in an interview on Wednesday. "I've been fighting all year to protect middle-class taxpayers." Mr. Kerry has advocated eliminating the tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans, but preserving those for the middle class. His campaign is planning a new television spot in Iowa faulting others for not doing the same.

Adding to the pressure within the Democratic Party are the first maneuverings of the general election campaign. The Bush camp and its allies clearly look forward to campaigning against their eventual opponent as a throwback to the old tax-and-spend days of the party. Conservatives are already running advertisements and directing barbs along those lines at Dr. Dean. A new television advertisement in Iowa produced by the Club for Growth, a conservative group, shows a man and his wife denouncing Dr. Dean's "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking" policies.

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative strategist, said of Dr. Dean: "In order to be the baddest Democrat in the primary, he had to stake out the most radical pro-tax position. I don't intend to let him walk away from that in the general."

U.S. Reasserts Right to Declare Citizens to Be Enemy Combatants

U.S. Reasserts Right to Declare Citizens to Be Enemy Combatants
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: January 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration on Wednesday reasserted its broad authority to declare American citizens to be enemy combatants, and it suggested that the Supreme Court consider two prominent cases at the same time.

The Justice Department, in a brief filed with the court, said it would seek an expedited appeal of a federal appeals court decision last month in the case of Jose Padilla, jailed as an enemy combatant in 2002.

The divided Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled on Dec. 18 that President Bush lacked the authority to indefinitely detain an American citizen like Mr. Padilla who was arrested on American soil simply by declaring him an enemy combatant. Mr. Padilla has been held incommunicado at a military brig in South Carolina. American authorities say he plotted with operatives of Al Qaeda overseas to detonate a "dirty" radiological bomb in the United States.

But the Justice Department said in its brief that the ruling was "fundamentally at odds" with court precedent on presidential powers.

The decision "undermines the president's constitutional authority to protect the nation," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson wrote.

What to do?

Cleis at Sappho's Breathing asks

I'd suggest voting idealistically in the primaries so the Democratic Party gets a better sense of what its constituency REALLY thinks than the existence of the DLC suggests. Then get behind the party's nominee.

It's a trilogy!

I was mad at Aaron for putting a link to the weekly comic book list on his site, which I noticed because I was checking his new site design. I now have no excuse left—I'll be getting Thanos #4 and Superman/Batman #5, and what the hell I'll look for the last three issues of The Truth and see if I can find back issues of The Crew as well.

See why I'm annoyed?

Anyway, he also has a link to Nalo Hopkinson's site. Ms. Hopkinson is one of three Black women I know of that write science fiction/fantasy and one is in the works. I haven't read much of her stuff though, so I check out the site. She's discussing a writing workshop she was in, and her mentor was James Morrow. Mr. Morrow wrote a book called "Towing Jehovah" that was pretty bugged. Seems God died…and his body fell into the Atlantic Ocean, where all the little fishies was ripping chunks out of the carcass for lunch. The angelic hosts couldn't have that, so they hired a guy to tow the massive (and I DO mean massive) body to Antarctica for preservation.

Suspend believe long enough and you find yourself one hell (eh?) of a story that tackles all manner of religious issues in a way that would give the authors of the "left Behind" series a conniption.

Anyway, Nalo Hopkinson linked to a page that displayed the cover of the book…and the two subsequent volumes!

Like I ain't got enough to read.

God is dead. "Died and fell into the sea." That's what Raphael, a despondent angel with luminous white wings and a blinking halo, tells Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday.

Soon Van Horne is charged with captaining the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long corpse through the Atlantic toward the Arctic, in order to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition. Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, an estranged father, sabotage both natural and spiritual, a crew on (and sometimes past) the brink of mutiny, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas.

In Towing Jehovah, the discovery of the two-mile-long corpse of God in the mid-Atlantic proved a serious menace both to navigation and to faith. But was God truly dead, as the nihilists and the New York Times believed? In Blameless in Abaddon, his body - comatose yet far from inert - has been hauled from its temporary resting place in the Arctic to Florida, where it has become the Main Attraction at Orlando's Celestial City USA. And now one Martin Candle, a small-time and sore-afflicted judge practicing in Abaddon Township, Pennsylvania, proposes further travels for the Corpus Dei: to the World Court in the Hague, to answer for history's injustices large and small.

God's body has self-destructed and His skull is now in orbit directly above Times Square, triggering a plague of "death awareness" and causing the United States to resemble fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death.

As the epidemic accelerates, two people fight to preserve life and sanity: Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to rescue her only son, and Gerard Korty, a brilliant sculptor struggling to to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God's abdication. Among other apocalyptic wonders, Morrow depicts a pitched battle between Jews and anti-Semites on a New Jersey golf course ... a theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic ... and the villainy of Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new church in Coatzacoalcos and inventor of a cure more dreadful than any disease.

Market-based non-solutions II

These guys had a talk about globalization. Here's the transcript.

And here's a few chunks of it:

A couple of the guys made real observations:

and

But THIS is what I want to bring to your attention:

Mr. Fong says we have to want to work like the Chinese: six 14 hour days in exchange for a nice lunch (because they're killing overtime). Isn't THAT a lovely vision for your future?

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest says it as well as I ever could:

Per your request

When I first ran across Cobb I found he was connected with another blog, Vision Circle. Lester Spence writes over there (I've linked a couple of his posts here recently) and Mike even said I could post over there if I wanted. The three of us are old school types but Mike is a conservative old school Black man, Lester is a progressive old school type and I'm a "reification of a chaos deity" old school type. As it stands Mike and Lester makes Vision Circle much like a good marble cake, but I listed it under Conservatives in the sidebar because it lives in Cobb's web spaces, if for no other reason.

Since Lester has pretty much taken over posting at Vision Circle recently (and because I was asked to), I've moved Vision Circle to the "Normal People" section.

Which means I'll have to finally get around to moving the major chunk of blogroll off blogrolling.com so's I can have better control of it.

What would the USofA do if another third world country reacted this way to a similar IMF report?

I.M.F. Report Says U.S. Deficits Threaten World Economy
By ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report made public today bythe International Monetary Fund.

In nearly 60 pages of carefully worded analysis, the report sounded a loud alarm about the shaky fiscal foundation of the United States, questioning the wisdom of the Bush administration's tax cuts and warning that large budget deficits posed "significant risks" not just for the United States but for the rest of the world.

The report warned that the net financial obligations of the United States to the rest of the world could equal 40 percent of its total economy within a few years — "an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country" that it said could play havoc with the value of the dollar and international exchange rates.

The dangers, according to the report, are that the United States' voracious appetite for borrowing could push up global interest rates and thus slow down global investment and economic growth.

"Higher borrowing costs abroad would mean that the adverse effects of U.S. fiscal deficits would spill over into global investment and output," the report said.

White House officials dismissed the report as alarmist, saying President Bush had already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years. The deficit reached $374 billion last year, a record in dollar terms but not as a share of the total economy, and it is expected to exceed $400 billion this year.

Administration officials have made it clear they are not worried about the the United States' burgeoning external debt or the declining value of the dollar, which has lost nearly one-fifth of its value against the euro in 18 months and which hit new lows earlier this week.

Mortar attack

35 US soldiers were injured in a mortar attack.

Market-based non-solutions

Though I've taken a pause to watch DVDs, I'm still studying economics.

I've said before how impressed I am with Economics Explained: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works and Where It's Going by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow. Having finished it I feel like I have enough of a grip on the basic concepts to understand a discussion because I know which words are terms of art; to actually think about stuff I need a bit more.

At any rate, this post was inspired by a comment made about markets clearing.

How many of you know what "markets clearing" means?

I thought so.

I've scanned and uploaded a chunk of a chapter explaining what "supply" and "demand" are in microeconomic terms, a nice, bland HTML file. No graphs or anything; you have to get the book for that. But just in case you don't like links and such:

And the extended text has enough of the chapter to let you know where this is coming from.

THE MARKET AS A RATIONING SYSTEM

Now look at what this shows us. All the buyers and sellers who can afford and are willing to pay the equilibrium price (or more) will get the goods they want. All those who cannot, will not. So, too, all the sellers who are willing and able to supply the commodity at its equilibrium price or less will be able to consummate sales. All those who cannot will not.

Thus the market, in establishing an equilibrium price, has in effect allocated the goods to some buyers and withheld it from others. It has permitted some sellers to do business and denied that privilege to others. Note that the market is, in this way, a means of excluding certain people from economic activity, namely customers with too little money or with too weak desires, or suppliers unwilling or unable to operate at a certain price. It is, in fact, a rationing mechanism!

Our view of the price system as a rationing mechanism helps to clarify the meaning of two words we often hear as a result of intervention into the market-rationing process: shortage and surplus.

In everyday language we often say that there is a shortage of housing for low-income groups-meaning that poor people cannot find housing that they can afford. Yet as we have seen in every market there are always some buyers who are unsatisfied. We have previously noted, for instance, that in our market for blouses, all buyers who could not or would not pay $19.95 had to go without. Does this mean there was a shortage? In economic terminology, no. A shortage in economic terminology does not mean there are no unsatisfied people in a market. It means only that no one who is willing and able to meet the going price is unable to get the goods he or she wants.

In a market that "clears," no such buyers exist. To be sure, there may be many would-be buyers happy to buy blouses at, say, $16.95, but there are none for sale at that price. Thus "shortage" only refers to buyers who are willing and able to pay the going price but who cannot get their demands filled at that price.

Why not? The answer must be that some nonmarket agency-in medieval times, perhaps the Church; in our day, more likely some government agency-has set the price below the equilibrium level. Now buyers who could not get blouses at $16.95 come crowding into the store-only to find that there are not enough blouses to meet the swollen demand. Who will go without-the buyers who were willing and able to pay the higher price, or the new "lucky" buyers who are now able to pay the lower price? The answer is queues in stores to buy things before they are gone, under-the-counter deals to get on a preferred list, or black or gray markets selling goods illegally at higher prices than are officially sanctioned.

The opposite takes place with a surplus. Suppose the government sets a price floor above the equilibrium price, for instance, when it supports the price of corn above its free-market price. In this situation, the quantity supplied is greater than that demanded. In a free market, the price would fall until the two quantities were equal. But if the government continues to support the commodity, then the quantity bought by private industries does not have to be as large as the quantity offered by farmers. Unsold amounts-the surplus-will be bought by government.

Thus the words "shortage" and "surplus" mean situations in which sellers and buyers remain active and unsatisfied because the price mechanism has not eliminated them from the marketplace. This is very different from a free market where buyers and sellers who cannot meet the going price are not taken into account. Most people, who have no demand for fresh caviar at eighty dollars per tin, do not complain of a caviar shortage. If the price of fresh caviar were set by government decree at one dollar a pound, there would soon be a colossal shortage.

What about the situation with low-cost housing? Essentially what we mean when we talk of a shortage of inexpensive housing is that we view the outcome of this particular market situation with noneconomic eyes and pronounce the result distasteful. By the standards of the market, the poor who cannot afford to buy housing are only one more example of the rationing process that takes place in every market. When we single out certain goods or services (such as a doctor's care) as being in "short supply," we imply that we do not approve of the price mechanism as the appropriate means of allocating scarce resources in these particular instances. Our disapproval does not imply that the market is not as efficient a distributor as ever. What we do not like is the outcome of the market-rationing process. In other words, for all its worth, efficiency is not the only criterion by which we judge the market system.

That word efficiency brings us to the last and perhaps most important aspect of how markets work. This is the ability of markets to allocate goods and services more effectively than other systems of rationing, particularly planning in one form or another.

There is no question that the market is one of the most extraordinary social inventions in human history. If we recall the attributes of the pre-market societies of antiquity we may remember that they typically suffered from two difficulties. If they were run mainly by tradition, they tended to be inert, passive, changeless. It's very hard to get things done in a traditional economy if anything has to be done in a new way-if, for instance, a change in climate forces a search for new ways of growing food or catching game.

A command system, ancient or modern, has a different inherent problem. It is good in undertaking big projects but not in running a complex system. In addition, the presence of political power in the economic mechanism, either as a large bureaucracy or as an authority capable of sticking its nose into daily life, becomes an endless source of inefficiency and irritation.

Against these two difficulties, the price system has two great advantages: it is highly dynamic, and it is self-enforcing. That is, on the one hand it provides an easy avenue for change to enter the system, as imaginative or ambitious individuals try new approaches or invent new goods. In addition, it allows these individuals to get a fair trial without first getting anyone's official permission: all you have to do is to sell your product!

The second (self-enforcing) attribute of the market is especially useful with regard to the rationing function. In place of ration tickets, with their almost inevitable black markets or cumbersome inspectorates or queues of customers trying to be first in line, the price system operates without any kind of visible administrative apparatus or side effects. The energies that must go into planning, or the frictions that come out of it, are alike rendered unnecessary by this remarkable self-policing mechanism. With all its difficulties, which we have by no means fully enumerated or examined, it is this capacity for self-adjustment and self-correction that sets economics apart from-although by no means above-its sister social disciplines.

That always comes as a surprise. We think of rationing as a formal, inflexible way of sharing goods-one ticket, one loaf of bread. This seems just the opposite of the free, unimpeded flux of marketplace. And in some ways it is indeed as different as can be. Just the same, the price mechanism performs a rationing function, exactly as do ration tickets. Money can be thought of as a system of flexible ration coupons. Indeed, there is nothing more important to grasp than this central purpose that markets serve. They are simply sophisticated rationing mechanisms.

On the other hand, the system has the defects of its virtues. If it is efficient and dynamic, it is also devoid of values. It recognizes no valid claim to the goods and services of society except those of wealth and income. Those with incomes and wealth are entitled to the goods and services that the economy produces; those without income and wealth receive nothing.

This blindness of the market to any claim on society's output except wealth or income creates very serious problems. It means that those who inherit large incomes are entitled to large shares of output, even though they may have produced nothing themselves. It means that individuals who have no wealth and who cannot produce-perhaps simply because they cannot find work-have no way of gaining an income through the economic mechanism. To abide just by the market system of distribution, we would have to be willing to tolerate individuals starving on the street.

Therefore, every market society interferes to some extent with the outcome of the price-rationing system. It does so when an "economic problem" crosses the line to become a "social problem." In times of military emergency the nation issues special permits that take precedence over money and thereby prevents the richer members of society from buying up all the supplies of scarce and costly items. In depressed areas, it may distribute basic food or clothing to those who have no money to buy them. Historically speaking, it has used taxes and transfers to an ever-increasing extent to replace the ration tickets of money in accordance with the prevailing sense of justice, rather than by the standards of efficiency. It is, in fact, in the tension between the claims of efficiency and those of justice that much of the division between conservative and liberal points of view is to be found

Take your shot because you never know

A Hip-Hop Author in Search of a Publisher Finds One on the A Train
By DINITIA SMITH

It was a cold February night in 2003. Jacob Hoye, publishing director of MTV Books, was riding the A train home to Brooklyn when he saw a tall, bespectacled young man walking through the subway car selling books. Normally, Mr. Hoye said, he ignores such people, but this one had a charming delivery.

"I'm a young writer," he recalled the young man saying, "and I've just published my first novel, `A Hip-Hop Story.' It doesn't cost a thing to take a look. Just a glimpse? A glance? A peek? This is going to be the No. 1 book in the country. One year from now, No. 1 in the world. You see me here today. Tomorrow you see me on `Oprah.' "

The young man's name was Heru Ptah. Mr. Hoye bought the last copy he had on him, for $10. That night he read the 350-page novel, a fable of the music industry involving two battling rappers named Hannibal and Flawless, a corrupt record label, sex, violence and ambition. At 3:30 a.m., Mr. Hoye left a message on the answering machine at his boss's office: MTV had to buy it.

MTV did, in partnership with Pocket Books, giving him an advance in "the mid-five figures," Mr. Ptah said. Today the book is in its second printing, with about 25,000 copies in circulation. And a third printing is planned.

How Mr. Ptah, 23, came to write a novel that he says sold more than 10,000 copies on the streets and subways before it was republished in September by MTV is another story.

Good question

It wasn't me, I swear

Case Yields Chilling Signs of Domestic Terror Plot
Arms cache in Texas leads to convictions but few answers. Critics fault focus on foreign threats.
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer

January 7, 2004

HOUSTON — One evening two winters ago, a man in Staten Island, N.Y., absent-mindedly flipped through his mail. Inside one envelope was a stack of fake documents, including United Nations and Defense Department identification cards, and a note: "We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands."

It had. The package, intended for a member of a self-styled militia in New Jersey, had been delivered to the wrong address.

From that lucky break, federal officials believe they may have uncovered one of the most audacious domestic terrorism plots since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. Starting with a single piece of mail, investigators discovered an enormous cache of weapons in Noonday, in East Texas, including the makings of a sophisticated sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands of people.

Three people — William Krar, a small-time arms dealer with connections to white supremacists; Krar's common-law wife, Judith L. Bruey; and Edward S. Feltus, the man who was supposed to have received the forged documents — pleaded guilty in the case in November. They are being held in a Tyler, Texas, detention facility and are scheduled to appear before a federal judge for sentencing next month.

But what is typically the end of a criminal case may be only the beginning in this one. Some government investigators believe other conspirators may be on the loose. And they readily acknowledge that they have no idea what the stash of weapons was for — though they have tantalizing and alarming clues of a "covert operation or plan," according to an FBI affidavit.

"What was Krar going to do with this stuff? That's what we want to know - and we don't know," said Brit Featherston, an assistant U.S. attorney and the federal government's anti-terrorism coordinator in the eastern district of Texas. "There is no legitimate reason to have this stuff. The bottom line is that it only had one purpose, and that was to kill people. And it's very troubling that we have yet to figure it out."

Krar, 62, who lived in the piney woods of Noonday, a tiny community about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, pleaded guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and faces a possible sentence of life in prison, Featherston said.

Bruey, 54, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, Featherston said.

Feltus, 56, of New Jersey, has pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the transportation of false identification documents and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, Featherston said.

According to the FBI affidavit, Feltus has told investigators that he is a member of a group called the New Jersey Militia, which, according to its website, believes the federal government has grown too powerful and says it is "ready, as a last resort, to come to our nation's defense against all enemies, foreign or domestic."

It is unclear whether Krar or Bruey had any involvement with the organization. Neither representatives of the New Jersey Militia nor attorneys representing Feltus and Bruey could be reached for comment.

Tonda L. Curry, a Tyler attorney, represents Krar, who appears to have made much of his living, investigators say, by manufacturing trigger parts for .223-caliber Bushmaster rifles.

Krar, Curry acknowledged, is an "eccentric" who broke the law by possessing weapons he was not licensed to own, including fully automatic guns.

He has not cooperated with investigators, and Curry would not reveal any details of her conversations with Krar regarding motives for possessing the weapons. She said, however, that she had "never seen anything that indicates there was any kind of terrorism plot or any intent to use these things against the American people or the government in any way."

"He was not the type who kept these things at ready access. They were miles from his home in a storage facility," Curry said. "His home was not a bunker, an arsenal, whatever you want to call it, where he was ready to attack. These things were stored as collectibles."

The case began to unfold in January 2002, when the package was mistakenly delivered to Staten Island. Investigators traced it to a mailing and business center near Tyler, then to Krar and Bruey, who lived together in Noonday.

With Bruey's permission, they searched a storage facility the couple had rented. The firepower inside shocked law enforcement officers.

Investigators found nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and briefcases that could be detonated by remote control.

Most distressing, they said, was the discovery of 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide - material that can only be acquired legally for specific agricultural or military projects.

The sodium cyanide was found inside an ammunition canister, next to hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids and formulas for making bombs. If acid were mixed with the sodium cyanide, an analysis showed, it would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility, investigators said.

Also discovered were anti-Semitic, antiblack and antigovernment books and pamphlets, according to the FBI's affidavit.

The affidavit included documents recovered from a rental car Krar was driving in Tennessee when he was pulled over by a state trooper in January 2003 for a minor traffic violation. Inside the car, according to the affidavit, the trooper found many weapons, including two handguns, 16 knives, a stun gun and a smoke grenade.

The documents were titled "trip" and "procedure," and appeared to list rendezvous points in cities across the nation. They also listed what appeared to be code phrases; some investigators say they believe the phrases could be used to indicate a level of awareness of law enforcement officials or others.

" 'Tornadoes are expected in our area' - things very hot; lay low or change your travel plans," one document said. " 'Major thunder storms are predicted' - they are looking pretty hard; be cautious."

The clues, wrote FBI Special Agent Bart B. LaRocca in the affidavit, suggested an "involved criminal scheme which could potentially include plans for future civil unrest and/or violent civil disorder against the United States government."

Revelations, however, that many questions remain unanswered in the case have made it the target of the new, post-Sept. 11 politics of terrorism.

Critics of the Bush administration say federal officials and the mainstream media are suffering from tunnel vision - that they are so focused on international threats that they have failed to give sufficient attention to threats at home.

At most, the critics say, increased attention to this case could have brought more answers. At the least, they say, if the defendants in this case had been people with foreign backgrounds or Muslims, U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft himself would have announced the arrests and the guilty pleas.

Instead, details of the case were revealed in a half-page press release sent to local media. Officials say the case was at one point included in President Bush's daily security briefings, but it remains virtually unknown outside East Texas - even though, critics point out, it represents an instance in which federal authorities discovered a weapon of mass destruction.

Much of the criticism has come on Internet Web logs, known as "blogs." People who operate the websites, or "bloggers," have seized on the Krar case and what they perceive as the inattention it received from the Bush administration and major media.

The fault, critics say, lies not with law enforcement officers, whom they believe prevented a deadly plot from developing. Instead, they say, the fault lies with an administration that adheres too closely to a script.

"If anyone wanted evidence that the 'war on terror' is primarily a political marketing campaign - in which war itself is mostly a device for garnering support - they need look no further than the startling non-response to domestic terrorism by the Bush Administration," one blog, called Orcinus, said recently. The blog, which uses a killer whale as its mascot and targets the nexus of politics, culture and journalism, is written and compiled by David Neiwert, a Seattle resident and former journalist.

Robert Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and director of the College of Communication's honors program, agrees with the criticism. He says that the Bush administration, to promote its efforts overseas, "needs a public that is afraid and sees these wars as justified."

"The primary justification is a fear of people 'out there' who want to come here and get us," he said. "Arrests of foreigners are very effective arrests to publicize. It has a political function. Domestic terrorism may be, in some ways, more of a threat. But there is no reason to publicize it. It doesn't have any political benefit."

Federal officials disagreed with the contention that their international investigation into terrorism had distracted them from domestic threats.

"Certainly, our international anti-terrorism efforts are clearly the No. 1 priority," said Mary Beth Buchanan, the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania and the chairwoman of a committee of federal prosecutors that advises Ashcroft. "But domestic terrorism is also a part of that. As we've increased our efforts to find the sources of international terrorism, we are also stepping up our efforts in the area of domestic terrorism as well."

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the observations about the Krar case are overly cynical.

"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities," he said. "We base all our decisions on the facts and the law and we pursue all violations … vigorously."

Value of a life and 41 bullets: $3 million

$3 Million Deal in Police Killing of Diallo in '99
By ALAN FEUER

Almost five years after Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from West Africa, died in a hail of 41 police bullets in the Bronx, his family agreed yesterday to a $3 million settlement of its civil lawsuit against New York City.

The agreement ends an infamous case that led to a hotly contested state trial, a federal investigation and ultimately the dismantling of the Police Department's elite Street Crime Unit. In widespread protests, dozens of politicians and others were arrested on civil-disobedience charges, and the bullet-ridden entrance of Mr. Diallo's home became a symbol of the racial tensions renewed by the shooting.

Just after midnight on Feb. 4, 1999, four police officers in the plainclothes Street Crime Unit confronted Mr. Diallo, a 22-year-old street vendor from Guinea, and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times as he stood in the doorway of his apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx. The officers said later that they thought Mr. Diallo resembled a rape suspect and had drawn on a gun on them when they approached. The supposed gun turned out to be a wallet.

After the officers were acquitted of murder, Mr. Diallo's parents sued them and the city, saying that racial profiling by the Police Department was a cause of their son's death.

But yesterday, all the major players in the case — from the Diallos to city officials and lawyers for the four officers — said they were content with the settlement of the case, which had been scheduled to go to trial on March 1.

Under the agreement, neither the city nor the Police Department admitted any wrongdoing in the case, although city officials did express their condolences. "The mayor, the Police Department and the city deeply regret what occurred and extend their sympathies to the Diallo family," Michael A. Cardozo, the city's corporation counsel, said in a prepared statement.

But Mr. Diallo's mother, Kadiatou, said she felt the city had acknowledged the shooting was a mistake.

"An apology was given today on the record," she said. "The apology is accepted." She added, "What we lost cannot be replaced, but we agreed to join hands with the city and accept this closure."

Democracy loses in Texas

Texas G.O.P. Is Victorious in Remapping
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Jan. 6 — Republicans who redrew Texas Congressional districts last fall in an effort to gain seats won a crucial victory on Tuesday when a special three-judge federal panel in Austin found no constitutional grounds to intervene.

Barring any action by the Supreme Court, the Congressional campaigns this fall will be fought using the unfamiliar and sometimes tortuous new lines.

The judges ruled that there was no bar to mid-decade redistricting, even though redistricting normally occurs after the once-a-decade census. They also found that politics — not illegal racial discrimination — prompted the redrawing of district lines.

Twice last year, Democratic lawmakers, angered by the proposed redrawing, left the state to withhold quorums that would allow Republicans to pass the redistricting plan, which seemed likely to cost Democrats several seats in the Congressional delegation.

But the decision by the judges, Patrick Higginbotham, Lee Rosenthal and T. John Ward, pointedly noted that "we decide only the legality" of the plan "and not its wisdom." Judge Ward, moreover, partly dissented, arguing that in one district Hispanic voters were illegally disenfranchised and that the Legislature had to remedy the violations.

Justice Department officials cleared the map on Dec. 19, finding it consistent with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By some counts, Texas Democrats, who had held a 17-to-15 edge in the House until Representative Ralph M. Hall announced last week that he was joining the Republicans, could find themselves in a 23-to-9 minority.

The court ruled on four issues: whether Texas could redistrict mid-decade; whether the plan discriminated on the basis of race; whether it was an unconstitutional gerrymander; and whether it diluted the voting strengths of minorities. In all cases, the judges decided, it did not violate the Constitution. But they said, "Whether the Texas Legislature has acted in the best interest of Texas is a judgment that belongs to the people who elected the officials whose act is challenged in this case."

Cleaning up Condi's image

I was just wondering where she'd gotten to after all the noise about her knowing or not knowing or should have been knowing or must have been knowing about. The NY Times does something of a recap.

Sometimes the comments are better than the posts

Case in point: in the comments to the post titled Tax Policy

• Mike from TOPDOG04.COM adds significant detail to the description of John Edwards' tax proposal
• Al-Muhajabah of veiled4allah gives a link to some commentary by Max Sawicky, on whose work both Dennis Kucinich and Wesley Clark based their plans.

Don't ever let anyone tell you the Bushistas are on the working person's side

AP: U.S. offers tips on avoiding OT pay

By LEIGH STROPE
The Associated Press
1/5/2004, 8:14 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — A proposed Labor Department rule suggests ways employers can avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible this year.

The department's advice comes even as it touts the $895 million in increased wages that it says those workers would be guaranteed from the reforms.

Among the options for employers: cut workers' hourly wages and add the overtime to equal the original salary, or raise salaries to the new $22,100 annual threshold, making them ineligible.

The department says it is merely listing well-known choices available to employers, even under current law.

"We're not saying anybody should do any of this," said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.

New overtime regulations were proposed in March after employers complained they were being saddled with costly lawsuits filed by workers who claimed they were unfairly being denied overtime. But the regulations themselves have stirred controversy over how many workers would be stripped of their right to overtime pay.

The issue is being seized by Democrats in their attempt to win back Congress and the White House.

A final rule, revising the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, is expected to be issued in March. The act defines the types of jobs that qualify workers for time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours a week.

Overtime pay for the 1.3 million low-income workers has been a selling tool for the Bush administration in trying to ease concerns in Congress about millions of higher-paid workers becoming ineligible.

But the Labor Department, in a summary of its plan published last March, suggests how employers can avoid paying overtime to those newly eligible low-income workers.

"Most employers affected by the proposed rule would be expected to choose the most cost-effective compensation adjustment method," the department said. For some companies, the financial impact could be "near zero," it said.

Employers' options include:

_Adhering to a 40-hour work week.

_Raising workers' salaries to a new $22,100 annual threshold, making them ineligible for overtime pay.

If employers raise a worker's salary "it means they're getting a raise - that's not a way around overtime," Frank said. The current threshold is $8,060 per year.

_Making a "payroll adjustment" that results "in virtually no, or only a minimal increase in labor costs," the department said. Workers' annual pay would be converted to an hourly rate and cut, with overtime added in to equal the former salary.

Essentially, employees would be working more hours for the same pay.

The department does not view the "payroll adjustment" option as a pay cut. Rather, it allows the employer to "maintain the pay at the current level" with the new overtime requirements, said the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division administrator, Tammy McCutchen, an architect of the plan.

Labor unions criticized the employer options.

Mark Wilson, a lawyer for the Communications Workers of America who specializes in overtime issues, said the Bush administration was protecting the interests of employers at the expense of workers.

"This plan speaks volumes about the real motives of this so-called family-friendly administration," Wilson said.

He says cutting workers' pay to avoid overtime is illegal, based on a 1945 Supreme Court ruling and a 1986 memo by the Labor Department under President Reagan.

But McCutchen disagreed. If changes were made week to week to avoid overtime, they would be illegal. A one-time change is not, she said.

"We had a lot of lawyers look at this rule. We would not have put that in there if we thought it was illegal," she said.

"Unless you have a contract, there is no legal rule ... prohibiting an employer from either raising your salary or cutting your salary," she said, adding, "We do not anticipate employers will cut people's pay."

The final plan does not require approval from Congress. That hasn't stopped Democrats and some Republicans from trying to block the rule, thus far unsuccessfully, out of fear that millions of workers would become ineligible for overtime.

Department officials say about 644,000 higher-paid workers would lose their overtime eligibility. But the proposal says 1.5 million to 2.7 million workers "will be more readily identified as exempt" from overtime requirements. Labor unions claim the figure is about 8 million.

The Labor Department is aware of lawmakers' concerns has read tens of thousands of comments about the proposal, McCutchen said.

"We understand what the public concerns are and we're going to be doing our best to address them," she said. "It's important to allow us to finish that process so we can back up our words with some good-faith action."

Cheap Labor Conservatives!

They get an exclamation point for this one.

Overtime Glance
The Associated Press
1/5/2004, 6:13 p.m. ET

(AP) — The Labor Department is suggesting ways employers can avoid paying overtime to newly eligible workers in its proposal. It offered this example of a "payroll adjustment":

_A worker earning $400 per week for 40 hours becomes eligible for overtime pay, which would average five hours a week.
_The employer can convert the worker to an hourly pay rate. But instead of paying him $10 an hour plus overtime, the employer can cut the worker's pay to $8.42 an hour, or $336.80, for a 40-hour week.
_The five hours of overtime pay at time-and-a-half — totaling $63.15 — gets added to the reduced pay.
_The new pay with overtime equals $399.95 per week, compared to the old salary of $400 per week with no overtime.

This "payroll adjustment option ... could offset the impact of the proposed rule," the department said.

Source: Labor Department's proposal to revise overtime pay rules, published March 31, 2003, in the Federal Register.

Big Apple Blogger Bash

via Jim at NYC99 I discover there's such a thing as a Big Apple Blogger Bash.

I might sneak in just to see what Jane Galt looks like.

Give it some thought

from John Robb's Weblog

Hat tip to Jason E. Shao

The best Google IPO comment

…was made this morning on Slashdot where, in commenting on its potential $12 billion market value, timothy said

Tax policy

The Democratic presidential candidates' proposals for taxes:

Carol Moseley Braun
Supports rolling back President Bush's tax cuts that help the wealthiest Americans.

Wesley K. Clark
Would eradicate taxes for families making $50,000 or less with two or more children. Plans to raise taxes on the top 0.1% — those who make $1 million or more — by 5 percentage points. Would give a flat, $250-per-child tax credit. Supports closing corporate tax loopholes.

Howard Dean
Wants to abolish Bush's tax cuts. Hopes to end corporate tax loopholes and eliminate tax shelters. Would boost Internal Revenue Service resources to help the organization collect billions of dollars in back taxes.

John Edwards
Would repeal the Bush tax cuts that aid the wealthiest 2% of Americans. Wants to limit the top rate on capital gains to 25% for those earning $350,000 or more. Advocates tightening corporate tax regulations.

Dick Gephardt
Would repeal Bush's tax cuts entirely, using the revenue to pay for his wide-ranging health-care plan, which would cost $2 trillion over 10 years.

John F. Kerry
Would create a tax-relief fund of $50 billion for states over two years to end college tuition increases and help cover health-care expenses. Plans to preserve and expand middle-class tax cuts approved by Bush, including the child tax credit and the reduced marriage penalty, while abolishing tax cuts to those who make more than $200,000. Supports a crackdown on corporate tax breaks.

Dennis J. Kucinich
Introduced the Progressive Tax Act of 2003 in Congress, to give $87 billion to working families and collect $107 billion from Bush tax cuts and corporate "giveaways." The bill includes a $1,530 payroll tax credit and a $2,000 family credit to consolidate different child tax credits.

Joe Lieberman
Would preserve middle-class tax breaks but favors reorganizing the income-tax brackets and expanding tax credits for low-income families. The restructuring would raise taxes for those making $200,000 and above, plus repeal the dividend tax and reform the estate tax. Also supports eliminating corporate subsidies backed by Bush.

Al Sharpton
Advocates repealing the Bush tax cuts in full.

Compiled by Los Angeles Times staff researcher Susannah Rosenblatt.

Twisted morality

Out of Their Anti-Tax Minds

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A17

This is the way things happen in my business. In October the extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist was interviewed by Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air." By December a portion of that interview was reprinted in Harper's magazine, where, over the holidays, I happened to see it. I am writing about it today because, among other things, Norquist compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.

This remark, so bizarre and tasteless that I felt it deserved checking, sent me to the transcript of the show, where, sure enough, it was confirmed. In it Norquist referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else."

From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears. "Excuse me," she interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just…compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?"

Norquist explained himself. "No, the morality that says it's okay to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody, just a small percentage." He went on to liken the estate tax to apartheid in the old South Africa and to the communist regime of the old East Germany. How he neglected Iraq under Saddam Hussein I will never know.

… To my mind, the Holocaust should be compared only to itself. I make some allowance for, say, Rwanda or the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica or the gulag of Stalin's Soviet Union. But when it comes to legalized murder by a state, almost nothing can approach it -- not in its size, not in its breadth and not in its virtually incomprehensible bestiality. The morality of the Holocaust, I would argue, is somehow different from that of the estate tax.

For some time now, the estate tax has been a demagogue's delight. Republicans, including George Bush, like to call it the "death tax." It is said to have produced the demise of the cherished family farm -- although the government can offer not a single example. It is, however, the tax most hated by those who hate taxes the most.

Inexplicably, Norquist's "Holocaust" has somehow left quite a few survivors. Among the 10 richest Americans, for instance, are five Waltons -- heirs to the fortune left by the storied Sam, the founder of Wal-Mart. Forbes magazine says they are each worth $20.5 billion. The rest of Forbes's list of the 400 richest Americans is peopled by other heirs, although some got only a billion or two.

In fact, the moral equivalency Norquist concocts is his own -- and it speaks volumes about the morality of anti-tax Republicans. To them, the rich owe nothing -- just like the poor, they would say. (The difference between rich and poor escapes them.) This is unbridled selfishness in the guise of ideology and makes wealth the moral equivalent of ethnicity or religion or even sexual preference. To Norquist, distinguishing between rich and poor is like making a selection at Auschwitz. It not only trivializes the Holocaust, it collapses all moral distinctions.

When Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist (and laundry room Lothario), he revealed a mentality that not even Senate Republicans could publicly support -- and Lott had to resign as majority leader. Norquist has gone even further, likening the morality of mass murder to the imposition of a tax on the rich. At his next meeting of GOP activists, someone ought to ask him if he's out of his mind. If no one does, it's because they all are.

The more things change

Waitaminnit. What changed?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 — The fight over Medicare is picking up exactly where it left off four weeks ago, when President Bush signed a bill offering prescription drug benefits to the elderly.

Democrats, denouncing the arm-twisting tactics used to pass the bill in the House, vowed Monday to rewrite the law to reduce the role of private health plans, to increase drug benefits and to authorize the government to negotiate drug prices.

President Bush and other Republicans plan to trumpet the law as a boon to the elderly and will oppose changes, saying the law should be given a chance to work. Administration officials and Congressional Republicans predicted that the Democrats would not gain traction with their arguments.

Within hours after Mr. Bush signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8, Democrats and labor unions held a rally on Capitol Hill.

"We have only just begun to fight," Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said then. Jean Friday of Pittsburgh, a spokeswoman for a group of retired steelworkers, described the bill as "an abomination." Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, advised the elderly, "Beware of Republicans bearing gifts."

Mr. Kennedy said Monday that Democrats and their allies would resume the effort when Congress convened on Jan. 20. "If Republicans think this fight is over, they are wrong," he said.

At the moment, Democrats appear to have no chance of modifying any significant provisions of the law. Republicans said they saw no need for even technical corrections. With their majority in the House, they can usually block consideration of Democratic amendments.

But Democrats plan to make a political ruckus and said they hoped to put Republicans on the defensive.

"We want the debate to start now," said Representative Benjamin L. Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who is drafting a bill to revise the new law. "This issue is far from resolved. We don't want people to go through the election and the year without knowing what's in the law."

What's that smell?

I was awakened early this morning by a horrible stench. It took me a couple of minutes to track down the source…David Brooks' NY Times editorial was up and I had left the computer on.

NAFTA reality check

These links to the NY Times editorials are the non-expiring type.

The celebrations of Nafta's 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped. In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to fulfill the most dire warnings of its opponents and the most fervent expectations of its supporters. In Mexico, however, the treaty remains controversial and even harmful — as do America's efforts to liberalize trade throughout the hemisphere.

Published: January 6, 2004

…The case for free trade is based on the British economist David Ricardo's principle of "comparative advantage" — the idea that each nation should specialize in what it does best and trade with others for other needs. If each country focused on its comparative advantage, productivity would be highest and every nation would share part of a bigger global economic pie.

However, when Ricardo said that free trade would produce shared gains for all nations, he assumed that the resources used to produce goods — what he called the "factors of production" — would not be easily moved over international borders. Comparative advantage is undermined if the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive: in today's case, to a relatively few countries with abundant cheap labor. In this situation, there are no longer shared gains — some countries win and others lose.

When Ricardo proposed his theory in the early 1800's, major factors of production — soil, climate, geography and even most workers — could not be moved to other countries. But today's vital factors of production — capital, technology and ideas — can be moved around the world at the push of a button. They are as easy to export as cars.

This is a very different world than Ricardo envisioned. When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work. To call this a "jobless recovery" is inaccurate: lots of new jobs are being created, just not here in the United States.

In the past, we have supported free trade policies. But if the case for free trade is undermined by changes in the global economy, our policies should reflect the new realities. While some economists and elected officials suggest that all we need is a robust retraining effort for laid-off workers, we do not believe retraining alone is an answer, because almost the entire range of "knowledge jobs" can be done overseas. Likewise, we do not believe that offering tax incentives to companies that keep American jobs at home can compensate for the enormous wage differentials driving jobs offshore.

America's trade agreements need to to reflect the new reality. The first step is to begin an honest debate about where our economy really is and where we are headed as a nation. Old-fashioned protectionist measures are not the answer, but the new era will demand new thinking and new solutions. And one thing is certain: real and effective solutions will emerge only when economists and policymakers end the confusion between the free flow of goods and the free flow of factors of production.

If they had played The Dozens when they were kids, all this would be unnecessary

'Busting Chops' in the Firehouse

The more information that comes out about last week's violence involving two Staten Island firefighters, the more questions it raises about firehouse culture. It now appears that the incident, which ended with one man on a respirator and another under arrest, resulted from "busting chops": firefighters' teasing one another about work habits, physical appearance and — as is reported to have occurred here — sexual orientation. Firefighters have a special need to bond with one another. But the department must ensure that their banter does not rise to the level of harassment, or instigate violence.

Robert Walsh's face was smashed, according to Fire Department sources, after he exchanged words with Michael Silvestri, a fellow firefighter. Mr. Silvestri had called Mr. Walsh names before, another firefighter said, and when he arrived to begin his shift, he directed an anti-gay slur Mr. Walsh's way. Mr. Walsh responded by charging that Mr. Silvestri had gamed the system to earn extra overtime pay, according to this account, and Mr. Silvestri attacked Mr. Walsh with a metal chair.

Initial reports said Mr. Walsh had been injured in a fall. An investigation is now under way into whether a captain misrepresented the incident to his superiors, and whether other firefighters participated in a cover-up. These are serious charges and should be pursued vigorously.

The department says teasing is to be expected in a setting where people live, sleep and eat in close proximity, and it insists that playful ribbing can build the esprit de corps necessary for dangerous work. A "vast majority" of the kidding is innocuous, a department spokesman, Francis Gribbon, says.

That may be true. But as last week's incident indicates, not all of the kidding is harmless. According to The Times's Michelle O'Donnell, a male firefighter who once worked at Bloomingdale's has been referred to as "she" by his colleagues for more than a decade. Other firefighters are mocked about their height or other physical attributes.

The firehouse's culture of taunting may violate anti-discrimination law, and may be one reason white men make up about 91 percent of the department, which has only one woman in its current probationary class of 304. "Busting chops" can also exacerbate tensions and create a risk of violence. While the department investigates the particulars of last week's incident, we hope that it will also examine the role firehouse culture may have played in setting it off.

Because you've done so well, you have to stay your ass right where you are

Army expanding `stop loss' order to keep soldiers from leaving the service
ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004
©2004 Associated Press
(01-05) 15:24 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

About 7,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan who were planning to retire or otherwise leave the service in the next few months are getting new marching orders: Stay put.

The Army is expanding what it calls a "stop loss" order to keep soldiers in uniform -- even those who have met their contractual service obligation or are scheduled to retire -- during a rotation of tens of thousands of troops that begins this month and is scheduled to finish in May.

Col. Elton Manske, chief of the Army's enlisted division, said Monday that the move was deemed necessary to maintain the cohesion and combat effectiveness of units now operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He did not explain why the Army cannot manage the readiness of its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan without forcing soldiers to stay in the service beyond their scheduled retirement or enlistment period. Critics say it is because the Army has too few soldiers and too many overseas commitments.

The order affects all Army units scheduled to return from Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan in coming months. Soldiers will be required to remain with their unit until it gets to its home base, and for a maximum of 90 days afterward, he said. The order mirrors one already in place for the units that are scheduled to deploy to those three countries to replace the units there now.

Manske said the Army also is using a more common management tool to keep soldiers in uniform: it is offering bonuses of up to $10,000 for soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan who are willing to re-enlist for three years or more, regardless of their military specialty.

The bonus program took effect on Jan. 1-2. The expanded "stop loss" order has yet to be implemented. Manske said it is expected to take effects "within days," but he had no specific date.

The use of "stop loss" reflects the difficulty the Army is having in keeping enough soldiers available to meet the Army's worldwide commitments.

The roots of crime

I carved out five paragraphs of Dr. Earls' personal history and post the rest of the article. It's interesting to see the difference between suggestions made as a result of hard research by a specialist in public health, and those made as a result of hewing to a philosophy that finds "sending a message" the single acceptable technique of modifying public behavior.

On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time)
By DAN HURLEY

BOSTON — Dr. Felton Earls was on the street, looking for something at ground level that would help explain his theories about the roots of crime. He found it across from a South Side housing project, in a community garden of frost-wilted kale and tomatoes.

"That couldn't be more perfect," said Dr. Earls, a 61-year-old professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health. Gazing at a homemade sign for the garden at the corner of East Brookline Street and Harrison Avenue, he pointed out four little words: "Please respect our efforts."

"We've been besieged to better explain our findings," he said. For over 10 years, Dr. Earls has run one of the largest, longest and most expensive studies in the history of criminology. "We always say, It's all about taking action, making an effort."

Dr. Earls and his colleagues argue that the most important influence on a neighborhood's crime rate is neighbors' willingness to act, when needed, for one another's benefit, and particularly for the benefit of one another's children. And they present compelling evidence to back up their argument.

Will a group of local teenagers hanging out on the corner be allowed to intimidate passers-by, or will they be dispersed and their parents called? Will a vacant lot become a breeding ground for rats and drug dealers, or will it be transformed into a community garden?

Such decisions, Dr. Earls has shown, exert a power over a neighborhood's crime rate strong enough to overcome the far better known influences of race, income, family and individual temperament.

"It is far and away the most important research insight in the last decade," said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice from 1994 to 2000. "I think it will shape policy for the next generation."

Francis T. Cullen, immediate past president of the American Society of Criminology, said of Dr. Earls's research, "It is perhaps the most important research undertaking ever embarked upon in the study of the development of criminal behavior."

The National Institute of Justice has so far spent over $18 million on Dr. Earls's study — more than it has ever financed for any other project. The MacArthur Foundation has spent another $23.6 million on the study, likewise the most it has spent, and money from other government agencies has brought the cost of the project to over $51 million so far.

His research is, in essence, about the health of communities, not just about crime. "I am concerned about crime," he said, "but my background is in public health. We look at kids growing up in neighborhoods across a much wider range than just crime: drug use, school performance, birth weights, asthma, sexual behavior."

His study, based in Chicago, has challenged an immensely popular competing theory about the roots of crime. "Broken windows," as it is known, holds that physical and social disorder in a neighborhood lead to increased crime, that if one broken window or aggressive squeegee man is allowed to remain in a neighborhood, bigger acts of disorderly behavior will follow.

This theory has been one of the most important in criminology. It was first proposed in an article published 20 years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, written by Dr. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The theory provided the intellectual foundation for a crackdown on "quality of life" crimes in New York City under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Today, "broken windows" policing is endorsed by police chiefs across the country, its proponents sought out for lectures and consulting around the world. But from the beginning, Dr. Wilson concedes, the theory lacked substantive scientific evidence that it worked.

"I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime," Dr. Wilson, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently said in a telephone interview. "People have not understood that this was a speculation."

Testing "broken windows" was not the point of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the study planned and conducted by Dr. Earls and colleagues to unravel the social, familial, educational and personal threads that weave together into lives of crime and violence.

Nonetheless the data gathered for it, with a precision rarely seen in social science, directly contradicted Dr. Wilson's notions. From June to October 1995, trained observers drove a sport utility vehicle at 5 miles per hour down every street in 196 carefully selected Chicago neighborhoods.

As they drove, a pair of video recorders, one on each side of the S.U.V., recorded social activities and physical features: litter, graffiti, drug deals, public drinking, everything within the camera's view. When the researchers were done, 11,408 blocks had been observed and videotaped. Then the police records on homicide, robbery and burglary were pulled for each of these 196 neighborhoods, along with in-person surveys of 8,782 residents.

In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to "broken windows" but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.

"If you got a crew to clean up the mess," Dr. Earls said, "it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was. The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy. If you organized a community meeting in a local church or school, it's a chance for people to meet and solve problems.

"If one of the ideas that comes out of the meeting is for them to clean up the graffiti in the neighborhood, the benefit will be much longer lasting, and will probably impact the development of kids in that area. But it would be based on this community action — not on a work crew coming in from the outside."

Boston's experience in the 1990's, he believes, demonstrates his point. "Right now there are about 35 homicides per year in Boston, down from 151 in 1991," he said. "It plummeted between 1996 and 1998. Many people attributed it to the Ten-Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who took to the streets to engage kids and work with other adults to develop after-school programs.

"At the same time, they were also asking the kids to help them target the ringleaders who were going down to Maryland to buy weapons. And they were coordinating their activities with policemen. So through these ministers, there was an activation of large groups of adults and kids."

Driving back from the community garden in the South End of Boston, Dr. Earls emphasized that the analysis of the findings of the Chicago study had only begun. The entire neighborhood study was repeated between 2000 and 2002, and a second study tracking the behavioral and medical development of some 7,000 children in those same neighborhoods from birth to age 25, was finished in December 2001.

Dr. Robert J. Sampson of Harvard, Dr. Steven Raudenbush of the University of Michigan, Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia and Dr. Earls are now working together on papers that they expect to see published this year.

"If we are to show that where you grow up is more important than your temperament or your I.Q. or your family, or even equally important, that is a major contribution to science," Dr. Earls said. "We're saying that community is important at a moment in science when many of the most dramatic findings are in genetics. If genetics plays a role, it's got to be a minor role, because the community effects are very robust."

As important as the study's findings, Dr. Earls said, are the measurement tools developed to uncover them. "Newton's discovery of gravity was important because he was able to measure it and quantify it," he says. "What we are discovering around collective efficacy was not terribly obvious before we started to measure it with some precision."

As for policy implications, Dr. Earls said that rather than focusing on arresting squeegee men and graffiti scrawlers, local governments should support the development of cooperative efforts in low-income neighborhoods by encouraging neighbors to meet and work together. Indeed, cities that sow community gardens, he said, may reap a harvest of not only kale and tomatoes, but safer neighborhoods and healthier children.

What real economists think

Rubin Gets Shrill
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Argentina retained the confidence of international investors almost to the end of the 1990's. Analysts shrugged off its large budget and trade deficits; business-friendly, free-market policies would, they insisted, allow the country to grow out of all that. But when confidence collapsed, that optimism proved foolish. Argentina, once a showpiece for the new world order, quickly became a byword for economic catastrophe.

So what? Those of us who have suggested that the irresponsibility of recent American policy may produce a similar disaster have been dismissed as shrill, even hysterical. (Hey, the market's up, isn't it?) But few would describe Robert Rubin, the legendary former Treasury secretary, as hysterical: his ability to stay calm in the face of crises, and reassure the markets, was his greatest asset. And Mr. Rubin has formally joined the coalition of the shrill.

In a paper presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rubin and his co-authors — Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution and Allan Sinai of Decision Economics — argue along lines that will be familiar to regular readers of this column. The United States, they point out, is currently running very large budget and trade deficits. Official projections that this deficit will decline over time aren't based on "credible assumptions." Realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers.

All of this is conventional stuff, if anathema to administration apologists, who insist, in flat defiance of the facts, that they have a "plan" to cut the deficit in half. What's new is what Mr. Rubin and his co-authors say about the consequences. Rather than focusing on the gradual harm inflicted by deficits, they highlight the potential for catastrophe.

"Substantial ongoing deficits," they warn, "may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits." In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.

Lest readers think that the most celebrated Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton has flipped his lid, the paper rather mischievously quotes at length from an earlier paper by Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw, who make a similar point. Mr. Mankiw is now the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, a job that requires him to support his boss's policies, and reassure the public that the budget deficit produced by those policies is manageable and not really a problem.

But here's what he wrote back in 1995, at a time when the federal deficit was much smaller than it is today, and headed down, not up: the risk of a crisis of confidence "may be the most important reason for seeking to reduce budget deficits. . . . As countries increase their debt, they wander into unfamiliar territory in which hard landings may lurk. If policymakers are prudent, they will not take the chance of learning what hard landings in [advanced] countries are really like."

The point made by Mr. Rubin now, and by Mr. Mankiw when he was a free agent, is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn't a birthright. Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity - in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to rein in deficits, paying a political cost if necessary. And in the past that belief has been justified. Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when the budget deficit soared.

But do we still have that kind of maturity? Here's the opening sentence of a recent New York Times article on the administration's budget plans: "Facing a record budget deficit, Bush administration officials say they have drafted an election-year budget that will rein in the growth of domestic spending without alienating politically influential constituencies." Needless to say, the proposed spending cuts - focused only on the powerless - are both cruel and trivial.

If this kind of fecklessness goes on, investors will eventually conclude that America has turned into a third world country, and start to treat it like one. And the results for the U.S. economy won't be pretty.

Bush in 30 Seconds

You know MoveOn.org is running a contest for the best anti-Bush ad. If you haven't checked them out yet, do. There's some talented folks out there.

As for any Republican complaints, let them keep linking to rejected ads. Oliver Willis rightly points out their complaints are just pro forma execution of media manipulation techniques.

Putting the research horse before the NCLB cart

Invest in Educational Research

By John Reed and Catherine E. Snow

Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A17

Recently, to considerable fanfare, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Elias Zerhouni, unveiled a $2 billion, five-year plan to "turbocharge" NIH's research program. The plan calls for promoting collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, speeding the translation of research-based knowledge into improved health care practice and recruiting community practitioners to undertake larger clinical trials.

To far less notice, a National Academy of Sciences panel recently proposed a similarly bold plan to restructure and re-energize educational research -- an area that is arguably at least as important as medical research to the nation's future and its citizens' well-being. The Strategic Educational Research Partnership (SERP) proposal calls for locating educational research in schools and recruiting practitioners as partners to ensure more practice-relevant questions and faster dissemination of promising findings. It also proposes establishing cross-disciplinary research teams to link those who understand biology or mathematics with those who understand how they should teach, how children learn and how schools operate.

The NIH initiative is likely to move forward with ease. The yearly $400 million investment in this initiative is only a drop in NIH's $27 billion bucket -- a budget that has doubled over the past five years.

The SERP proposal, on the other hand, faces an uphill battle. We devote about 10 percent of our resources to education and 14 percent to health care but tolerate an underfunded, uncoordinated and often shabby research effort.

It really would have been better to have said so up front

Dream Denied Gymnast Who Is HIV-Positive
After disclosing his condition and being trained by Cirque du Soleil, he is fired as a risk to other performers. Activists have taken up his cause.
By Lee Romney
Times Staff Writer

January 5, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO — Cirque du Soleil, which redefined the circus with its high flying acrobats and artistic contortionists, is struggling to maintain its reputation after firing a gymnast in a case that critics say amounts to a stumble of national proportions.

Matthew Cusick's dream of performing with the magical Cirque was within tantalizing reach last year. But days before the Maryland resident was to begin a temporary stint on the Russian high bar for Cirque's Las Vegas show "Mystere" in April, his employer fired him.

The reason, according to Cusick: He is HIV-positive, a medical condition he voluntarily disclosed to his bosses nearly a year earlier when he began a rigorous four months of training with the Canadian company.

Although Cusick, 32, had been cleared to perform as a "healthy athlete" by the company's doctors, Cirque officials abruptly told him that his role as an acrobatic catcher might subject fellow artists, and even patrons, to risk. Cusick was stunned. Then he went public with his story and San Francisco's gay and AIDS advocacy groups kicked into high gear.

When the circus performed a recent seven-week stint with its show "Alegria" outside Pacific Bell Park here, the New York-based gay and lesbian civil rights group Lambda Legal — which is representing Cusick — helped organize nightly demonstrations.

In late November, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission filed its own complaint — a rarity for an entity that typically mediates the complaints of others — alleging that Cirque was violating municipal law by discriminating against a qualified HIV-positive employee.

The commission, which has jurisdiction over Cirque du Soleil because it performs on land leased from the Port of San Francisco, is expected to conclude its investigation later this month. It could fine the circus and bar it from performing on public land here for three years.

Meanwhile, a federal discrimination complaint filed by Lambda Legal in July is pending with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission's Los Angeles District Office, which oversees Nevada. That investigation is also expected to conclude this month. If no settlement is reached, Cusick will be free to sue Cirque.

American History

Uncovering Illinois link to slaves' liberty road
By Rick Jervis
Tribune staff reporter

January 4, 2004

Larry McClellan was thumbing through an 1878 history book of Will County when he stumbled onto Deacon Samuel Cushing.

Deacon Cushing, the history read, had been accused by a local sheriff of hiding escaped slaves on his Crete farm. Down the dusty lane from Cushing, a farmer named Moses Cook also had helped slaves escape north to Chicago.

The two finds were the first in a string of discoveries that would lead McClellan, a Chicago Heights pastor and historian, down a previously undocumented leg of the Underground Railroad--the clandestine network that helped thousands of slaves escape during the 1800s--stretching through the south suburbs up toward Chicago.

With help from groups such as the Chicago/Calumet Underground Rail Road Effort, McClellan has taken a 10-year odyssey through microfiche and maps to unearth or confirm sites in towns from New Lenox to Crete to Calumet City.

Like the farm of John and Sabra McCoy, in the middle of today's Sauk Trail Woods, which harbored at least a dozen fugitive slaves. Or Samuel Haven's tavern and hotel in New Lenox, a known safe house.

McClellan plans to present his findings, when completed, to the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, the national verification center for Underground Railroad sites. Twice a year, the center reviews applications and determines official sites. The deadline for the next review is Jan. 15.

But already McClellan's findings, shared at meetings and conferences, are catching the eye of Underground Railroad scholars and experts.

This has to be explained?

Race in America
Strom Thurmond's daughter and the enduring taboo on black/white marriages
Kevin R. Johnson
Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

The nation recently learned from the mixed-race daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., that he was her father. Essie Mae Washington- Williams' story is especially intriguing because Thurmond, for much of his political career, was a staunch segregationist and a fierce opponent of civil rights for African Americans.

The truth of the matter is that, as Washington-Williams herself emphasizes, racial mixture long has been a part of the American experience. In the days of slavery, intimate liaisons -- often involuntary -- were common between white men and black women, with the most well-known probably being that between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

Only in 1967, however, did the Supreme Court in the aptly named case of Loving vs. Virginia strike down Virginia's law -- named "An Act to Preserve Racial Purity" -- barring interracial marriages. Before 1967, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' marriage to his white wife would have violated the criminal laws of Virginia, where they now live, and dozens of other states.

The law was not the only thing standing in the way of interracial relationships. In the summer of 1955, Emmitt Till, a young black youth, was lynched for "eyeing" a white woman. For more than a century after the Civil War, "lynch law" served to terrorize African Americans and strongly inhibited interracial relationships.

Times have changed. It no longer is unlawful to marry across the color line. Interracial relationships and marriages are more socially acceptable than in the days of Strom Thurmond's youth. Essie Mae-Washington's story, however, highlights the underside of the ballyhooed "multiracial America." For nearly 80 years, Strom Thurmond kept his mixed-race daughter a secret. The fact that such a public man (he was a senator for 48 years and once ran for president), failed to publicly acknowledge his black daughter (and at times even denied it could even be possible) reveals much about the legacy of the ban on interracial relationships in U.S. society.

Although interracial marriage is not illegal, blacks and whites both still tend to marry within the same race. As Rachel Moran observed in "Interracial Intimacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2001), "Over 93 percent of whites and blacks marry within their own group. . . ." The truth of the matter is that as this statistic shows, black/white intermarriage has increased relatively little over the last 20 years. So why is it that so few whites and African Americans marry? Racial separation in U.S. society offers a partial explanation. Residential and school segregation remains a fact of life in the modern United States. As a result, African Americans and whites often do not interact socially. Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinas/Latinos as a whole tend to be less segregated from whites than blacks and, not coincidentally, have much higher intermarriage rates.

But there is more to the story. The legacy of the deep-seated animus toward African Americans in U.S. society inhibits whites from marrying blacks. Anti-black sentiment, as well as residential and school segregation, makes it much less likely that whites will interact socially with, much less marry, African Americans. Black/white relationships still are taboo in some circles. In Alabama in 2000, for instance, 40 percent of the state's voters opposed repealing the state's patently unconstitutional ban on interracial marriage. A few years ago, an African American man accompanied by a white woman was stabbed by a white supremacist in a Missouri restaurant. The racial divide about the infamous O.J. Simpson trial in part stemmed from the fact that Simpson's murdered wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was white. In the early 1990s, an Alabama high school principal threatened to cancel the school's prom upon learning that mixed couples planned to attend. Moreover, as Harvard professor Randall Kennedy has written, some African Americans frown on interracial marriages.

At the individual level, the painful experiences of Washington-Williams, who was embraced by the African American community, show an extreme example of the issue of racial identity faced by mixed-race people in the Unites States. Importantly, she went public not out of any desire for attention but to clear the air and end the years of media speculation about whether Thurmond was her father. Now, Washington-Williams can feel "completely free."

The Strom Thurmond/Essie Mae Washington-Williams controversy should make us think about the nation's racial future. As a society, we should consider what the persistently low rate of interracial marriages between blacks and whites tells us about the status of African Americans in U.S. society. With all the talk of a multiracial America, the taboo on black/white relationships, a legacy of the nation's longtime ban on interracial relationships, continues to exist and represents a lasting monument to slavery and Jim Crow.

Kevin R. Johnson is a professor of law and Chicano/a studies at the University of California at Davis. He has published "How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity" (Temple University Press, 1999) and "Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader" (NYU Press, 2002).

What did you expect? Really?

Race in America
'Cold Mountain' freezes out black history in Civil War
Erik Todd Dellums
Sunday, January 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

I am an African American, professional actor, semiotician and film lover. I am, therefore, underemployed, underappreciated and an afterthought in Hollywood. I am also a man who rarely sees an accurate depiction of black people and American history in film and on television. It's something I've grown used to, but now I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!

All people who truly care about honest representations of American history in Hollywood should boycott the heavily promoted "Cold Mountain." At a cost of $80-plus million and sporting a stellar cast and crew, this film adaptation of Charles Frazier's acclaimed best-seller opened Christmas Day and is being touted as the film to beat at the Academy Awards. It has generated glowing reviews for Disney, Miramax and all involved.

It is also a sham, a slap in the face of African Americans whose ancestors gave their lives in the Civil War, fighting for true freedom (take that, President Bush) from the most heinous form of slavery known to modern man: the American slavery system. How could a three-hour film depicting life in the heart of Virginia and North Carolina during the Civil War use only momentary shots of black people picking cotton and a few black actors portraying runaway slaves as its total picture of slavery during this period?

In an article in the Washington Post, the film-makers have said that slavery and racism were simply "too raw" an emotional issue to present in their film. In other words, who would want to see a love story with the beautiful Jude Law and Nicole Kidman set in the reality of the Southern monstrosity of slavery?

A profile in profiling

Police balk at new study of profiling
State seeks more data on traffic stops
By Brett McNeil
Tribune staff reporter

January 4, 2004

Though police departments across Illinois launched a state-mandated racial profiling study on New Year's Day, many law-enforcement officials remain unclear about its scope and their legal obligations to collect data under the new law.

Police officers performing traffic stops anywhere in Illinois now must record the name, address, sex and race of the driver--whether they issue a ticket or not.

This data and other information will be sent to the Illinois Department of Transportation for a four-year study that lawmakers believe will determine whether police engage in racial profiling--targeting people because of their perceived race or ethnicity when making traffic stops.

But even as departments geared up for the study, police criticized IDOT's handling of it as confusing and cumbersome. And rather than adopting IDOT's longer "stop sheet" questionnaire, some departments are choosing to meet only the letter of the law by gathering limited data.

"We will comply with the law, and we're trying to do it in the least bureaucratic way possible. But, quite frankly, it has been very difficult," said Naperville Police Chief David Dial.

Let's see if I do better than Tacitus' commenters

Tacitus published a post I would have responded to if

1. I had seen it earlier, or
2. The comments didn't get totally sidetracked over, of all things, grammar

That's it. The whole post.

The linked article is about Turkish resistance to the American Occupation spiking due to a newspaper report that Americans were raping Iraqi. Women. Most of the discussion in the thread was about whether or not Tacitus' headline was misleading.

I don't think the headline was misleading. I think it says what he intended it to say.

And I think it's nonsense.

Want more from the same source (The Christian Science Monitor)? Too damn bad, because you get it anyway.

Oh, yeah.

Fine, The Turks lied on the American. But wars just don't get started, nor do they seem to proceed well, without lies. And if anything, it was hard right rhetorical technique that the Turks lifted. It had nothing to do with hard left positions or actions at all…wasn't even similar.

Heresy

This is a long one.

Paul Graham has written an article titled "What You Can't Say" about how (and why) to think the unthinkable.

Laptop Blogging

Well, I'm a dozen or so yards from my wireless router watching "Cold Case." I set up 128 bit encryption AND configured the router not to accept any unrecognized WI-FI cards so as to avoid becoming a hot-spot or giving away my stuff. I've cleaned out the laptop I lent to my daughter and set up just enough development tools to work on my next few projects. Problems getting HTML-Kit to do Gecko previews, but I can live with that (btw, both Thunderbird and Firebird are pretty cool for technology previews).

Couple of Delphi libraries and I'm ready to go.

In case

George and Prince are cool so you may proceed to read either or both.

Sometimes post-traumatic stress is the best reaction you can have

Troops Return, Elated but Changed
Reservists Worry About Picking Up the Pieces of Their Old Lives

By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page A01

CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait

U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan Bennett counts them as they board the buses to the airport, tapping them on the shoulder as if to confirm their presence. The mood is giddy and raucous -- part kindergarten class, part college fraternity -- and they cheer as the buses lurch forward.

"When I get home, I'm going to sit in a bathtub with a bottle of champagne," a sergeant announces.

Bennett is in the front row -- one eye on the road ahead, one eye on his soldiers -- and he's smiling. All 116 of the men and women under his command are safe. Every day for the last 10 months, he had worried that the members of the 443rd Military Police Company would not all make it home from the war in Iraq intact.

Now the plane waits to carry them home to Maryland, a prospect that at the beginning of their deployment held nothing but unimaginable joy. But after all they have been through during their time in Baghdad -- the mortar attacks, the hostile prisoners, the roadside bombs -- there is a sense of unease beneath the palpable excitement.

Bennett cannot tell how much the experience has changed each of them. But he knows that the home they left is not the home they are returning to. What has the time away done to them, their families, their regular jobs? How hard would it be to resume their old lives and leave the war behind?

…When Bennett, 31, left for the Texas deployment, he had been selling advertisements for a local newspaper, making $75,000 a year -- enough to buy a comfortable Centreville house with a wraparound porch. His son was 6 months old, and his wife had been supportive about his leaving.

More than two years later, everything at home sounds uncertain, unsettled. Although he knew his wife has been in therapy to deal with her fears about his safety, he does not know what the time apart has done to her. Or to them. And having been around for just six months of his son's life, he knows he is something of a stranger to the boy. He has missed so much -- Chase's first words, his first steps.

Just behind him on the bus, Staff Sgt. Regina Lucas begins the trip home with a similar set of worries. When the unit shipped out for Texas, the 42-year-old single mother from Fort Meade sent her daughter, Phranci, to stay with her grandmother in Mississippi. And when the Iraq call-up came, Phranci headed south once again. Now, Lucas wonders how the 10-year-old will handle the move back to Maryland.

She also worries about how much she has changed in the desert. Who is she now: A soldier? A mother?

Orcinus added comments yesterday

Be nice, though.

What are we going to do now?

Original image stolen from Kerim at Keywords, who is looking for a better caption than I've given.