Prometheus 6

His apologists.

Still, even with the offensive and unreasonable remarks that appeared in print, it's hard not to feel a little bit sorry for Watson.

Not if you're Black. If you feel sorry for him, there is no anti-Black hostility you won't defend.

In some instances, the officials pointed out, progress toward healthier living and learning was notable only because so many schools had started from such low points.

Schools Found Improving on Nutrition and Fitness
By KEVIN SACK

ATLANTA, Oct. 19 — Spurred by the growing crisis in child obesity, the nation’s schools have made “considerable improvements” in nutrition, fitness and health over the last six years, according to a new government survey that found that more schools require physical education and fewer sell French fries.

The survey, which is conducted every six years, shows that more schools than six years ago offer salads and vegetables and that fewer permit bake sales. More states and school districts insist that elementary schools schedule recess and that physical education teachers have at least undergraduate training. More states have enacted policies to prohibit smoking at school and to require courses on pregnancy prevention.

Perhaps most striking, 30 percent of school districts have banned junk food from school vending machines, up from 4 percent in 2000. Schools offering fried potatoes in their cafeterias declined, to 19 percent from 40 percent.

Mr. Edwards lost the endorsement of a giant public sector union, the 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, to Mrs. Clinton this month. And the Illinois S.E.I.U. local decided to support Mr. Obama.

Largest Union in California Says It Will Work for Edwards There and Elsewhere
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 19 — The state council of the Service Employees International Union publicly threw its weight behind John Edwards’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on Friday and said it would rally its members here and in other states, including those holding early primaries, to support his campaign.

The union is the largest in California, with 656,000 members. Its backing is a significant achievement for Mr. Edwards, especially if the union is able to extend its organizational ability to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

You mean to tell me his only campaign apperance will be Tavis' Presidential Forum at Morgan?

Really?  

Evangelicals Gather at Summit
Brownback, a Top Choice of Many, Ends White House Bid
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 20, 2007; A04

Evangelical voters gathered here yesterday to weigh their political options even as one of their champions, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, officially withdrew from the 2008 presidential contest, robbing many of their first choice in the Republican nominating battle.

The 2,000 activists attending the Values Voter Summit listened to the candidates, some prayed for guidance, and many expressed deep discomfort with the Republican Party's two front-runners: former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

No matter how suggestive the economists’ data, it takes a doctor to show that some of the people most damaged by lead are out there breaking the law. Herbert Needleman, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and pediatrician whose work helped persuade the government to ban lead in the 1970s, recently studied a sample of juvenile delinquents in Pittsburgh; the group had significantly more lead in their bones than their peers. And lead may not be the only source of damage. The National Children’s Study will soon begin to track more than 100,000 children to determine the effects of exposure to common pesticides, among other chemicals...

Criminal Element
By JASCHA HOFFMAN

Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior.

In the early 1990s, a surge in the number of teenagers threatened a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. But to the surprise of some experts, crime fell steadily instead. Many explanations have been offered in hindsight, including economic growth, the expansion of police forces, the rise of prison populations and the end of the crack epidemic. But no one knows exactly why crime declined so steeply.

The answer, according to Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, lies in the cleanup of a toxic chemical that affected nearly everyone in the United States for most of the last century.

As Adam Smith first described clearly, individuals who pursue only their own narrow interests in a competitive system often inadvertently create widespread social gains. But not always. Unlike many of his modern disciples, Smith was keenly aware of the invisible hand’s limitations. Individual and social interests often diverge, he realized, and in such cases, greater competition makes matters worse. If a firm can cut costs by removing the filter from its smokestack, for example, it will feel greater pressure to do so when competition intensifies.

If our social ills are indeed rooted in increased competition, our only recourse, Reich argues, is to change the rules. Denouncing greed is simply wasted energy. If we want less inequality, we must make taxes more progressive. If we want cleaner air and water, we must adopt more stringent environmental laws.

The NY Times review makes Supercapitalism, The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life By Robert Reich right interesting.

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Borzoi Books) author: Robert B. Reich asin: 0307265617

Justin Muzinich and Eric Werker suggest what they're calling a "global tax credit" as a replacement for foreign aid.

A solution to both problems would be to give tax credits to American companies that invest in qualified developing countries....Using the domestic program as a template, Congress should provide a 39-cent tax credit for every dollar of American investment in developing countries. If Company X were to build a $100 million factory in Madagascar, its tax bill would be reduced by $39 million. The lost tax revenue would be offset by reducing direct foreign aid by the same amount.

They say this will solve two problem, but the first is actually a repercussion of the second.

To begin with, not everyone makes the $165,000 a year or so that members of Congress do. In fact, at least 100,000 federal workers — at least 5 percent of the active work force — do not have health insurance. In many cases, according to the union that represents the workers, they consider even the cheapest options within the federal plan unaffordable. The lowest-priced family coverage offered by Blue Cross, for example, costs the employee about $2,400 a year....

“This is a private-based solution, with all of its foibles,” said Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is advising various Democrats about the federal program as a possible model. It would probably have higher administrative costs and pose more of a risk of private insurers trying to enroll only the healthiest people, Mr. Gruber said, than if the government were to provide the insurance directly.

What will happen is, insurance companies will calculate the amount of coverage they are willing to provide for the amount of money the government is willing to spend and that will be called insurance. 

Health Plan Used by U.S. Is Debated as a Model
By REED ABELSON

It makes for a compelling stump speech. And the leading Democratic candidates for president are all saying pretty much the same thing: adapt the health care program that covers Congress and offer it to the 47 million Americans currently without insurance.

“The American people should have access to the same array of health care choices and benefits as the senators and representatives they elect,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said as she introduced her health care plan last month.

Mrs. Clinton’s main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, have made similar proposals to expand the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

The program gives members of Congress, along with about four million other active and retired government workers, a wide array of private insurance offerings with fairly generous benefits. But if this would be health care reform, it is reform with a small “r,” according to many nonpartisan experts.

In Montebello, a tough section of northeast Baltimore, Newports are shared, sometimes for cash by people trying to recoup the cost of a pack.

“Everybody here smokes who can afford it,” said Eddie Johnson, 54, who broke a heroin addiction during a recent jail stay and is now training to be a drug counselor. Mr. Johnson said he smoked 10 to 20 cigarettes a day.

The Smoking Scourge Among Urban Blacks
By ERIK ECKHOLM

BALTIMORE, Oct. 15 — Outside subway stops and bars in parts of this blighted city, slouching hustlers mutter “loosies, loosies” to passers-by, offering quick transactions, 50 cents a stick or three for a dollar.

Their illegal, if rarely prosecuted vocation: selling loose Newport cigarettes to those who do not have $4.50 to buy a pack.

In small corner markets, customers sometimes use code words like “bubble gum” or “napkins” to receive individual cigarettes wrapped in a napkin. Or they buy a flavored Black and Mild, the latest smoking craze here, from an opened five-pack.

The Suggestion of Law

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on October 20, 2007 - 8:32am.

You must read American Lawbreaking at Slate.

This series explores the black spots in American law: areas in which our laws are routinely and regularly broken and where the law enforcement response is … nothing. These are the areas where, for one reason or another, we've decided to tolerate lawbreaking and let a law—duly enacted and still on the books—lay fallow or near dead....

1. You really aren't making too much sense; sadly I overestimated your ability to reason at my level (3rd year law student)
2. You can't find facts as it relates to culural problems without discourse, and you definitely cannot solve them without discourse.
3. Good luck with your myopic perception of facts and broken arguments. My time is better spent making a legal, societal, and cultural difference. Take care.

OH! but he's not done!

"I'm bringing documented statistics compiled by the Justice Department that PROVE the problem is restricted to 19-24 year olds. As I said, if you need them all to be equal problems you are spreading falsehoods and damaging your own cause."

It's not restricted to just one of the three groups as you falsely state. You twist your own facts. Anyway, goodbye.

But one good bye is NEVER enough.

You know what they say...if you got nothing to hide, you got nothing to fear. 

Manhattan: Union Challenges Sobriety Tests
By AL BAKER

The union representing 24,000 New York City police officers is challenging a new departmental policy requiring mandatory sobriety tests of any police officer who shoots someone, wounding or killing him. The union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, filed papers in federal court yesterday challenging the sobriety tests on constitutional grounds. The union argued that the tests violate an officer’s protection against unreasonable searches, according to a statement from the union president, Patrick J. Lynch. Earlier this week, unions representing detectives, sergeants and lieutenants filed papers in federal court against the sobriety tests. “We believe the sobriety test is a reasonable requirement and anticipate the courts will find it so,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced the new policy in June when he accepted the recommendations of a panel created after a Queens man, Sean Bell, was fatally shot in November in a volley of 50 bullets fired by officers.

This is that guy on
target="_blank">the YouTube Cosby/Poussaint conversation who says The Culture is the problem.

"Must yield to fact." How about you yield to the fact that their are problems in all of those groups so that you can move beyond rhetoric and make so me changes? Fact-yielding and fact-finding is done through rhetoric. Moving beyond rhetoric means to eliminate discourse. What are you taking about? Bill and the professor says there are problems in all groups and there are. I suggest you try some of that fact-yielding that you vaguely promote.

"fact-finding is done through rhetoric"

Good Lord. Anyone who believes that is lost beyond all redemption. 

Quaker in the Basement sent me a link to this guy

Which set me looking for other stuff.

This was Ruffins final performance a few days before his death. You will have to turn up the volume, and you should.

Morris Day's role models

I was looking for something with The Spinners and wasn't happy with what I found. Wound up rambling through my music, tossing whatever caught my eye into the current play list. God only knows why I do that...something painful always winds up playing.

Obama: Justice Department Must Fire Voting Rights Official
Friday, October 19, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Amy Brundage, 202 228 5511

Comments about minority voters offensive, dangerous

WASHINGTON , D.C. – U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today sent the following letter to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler calling on him to immediately replace John Tanner, the chief of the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, for offensive and erroneous comments he made about minorities.

On October 5, 2007, Tanner argued that photo identification requirements for voting cause problems for the elderly. However, he argued that such requirements do not disenfranchise minority voters because "Our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do; they die first." Video of Tanner's comments are
.

Earlier this week, Obama called on Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey to address how he would reverse the Bush Administration's failure to enforce civil rights, for example, in the cases of the Jena 6 and the Georgia voter photo identification requirement. A copy of that letter is here. Senator Obama has been working in the Senate to pass legislation he authored to protect voting rights and prevent deceptive and intimidating practices, and has been an outspoken critic of onerous photo identification requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise poor, minority, and disabled voters.
The text of Obama's letter is below:

I missed Sen. Obama's letter to Mukasey because this far from the election I only pay attention to the campaign press releases that hit the right inbox. I would like to hear Mukasey's response, especially to question four. The quality of the evasions used to answer question four, as well as the audience for whom it is composed, will say a lot.

Obama Calls on Mukasey to Address Racial Discrimination, Protecting Civil Rights
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Amy Brundage, 202 228 5511

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today sent the following letter to Attorney General-Designate, Judge Michael Mukasey, asking him how he intends to protect the civil rights of all Americans if he is confirmed Attorney General. In recent years, there has been a systematic failure by the Department of Justice to exhibit any significant commitment to upholding civil rights – particularly in the cases of the photo identification requirement for voting in Georgia, the Jena 6 in Louisiana, the death of a young man at a boot camp in Florida, and concerns that minorities have been steered into high-cost subprime loans.

In the letter, Obama requests Mukasey’s commitment to enhancing voting rights, enforcing the Voting Rights Act, ending racial profiling, and reversing the politicization of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The text of the letter is below:

I have to admit that's an original thought to me, that phrasing. 

If we’ve learned nothing from the historic Million Man March –where African American men became the first group of people to launch a protest march against themselves– we found out that the government and mainstream Americans will never stop large numbers of Negroes from confessing their collective sins in full public view. The problem is that, instead of inspiring policymakers to support our efforts, such actions reinforce the absurd notion that violence and poverty can be eliminated by embracing a gospel of individual responsibility. In this case, by agreeing to “take back our neighborhoods” we concede the point that we lost them solely due to our own personal failings.

The last time I checked, joblessness and crack had something to do with it too.

Chris Clarke of Creek Running North rocks, and Mandolin rocks for directing me to Chris.

Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says

Special to Creek Running North: Biologists have long assumed that evolutionary psychology, a controversial branch of psychology that ascribes many common social behaviors to genetics, is a muddled blend of half-understood evolutionary biology, selective data mining and resentment of women’s changing roles in society.

It means you're being pushed out...you're no longer important...that the Boss doesn't even want to see you anymore. 

Getting to Know the New Neighborhood (Watch Your Briefcase)
By Al Kamen
Friday, October 19, 2007; A19

Folks at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just can't stop fussing about their eviction next summer from the posh headquarters at 18th and L streets NW to the wasteland -- or "developing" neighborhood -- known as NoMA.

So various police officials attended a headquarters staff meeting last week to calm employees who are worried about moving to the area between Union Station and New York Avenue NW.

In the past 30 days, D.C. police Lt. Robert Fulton reported, there had been only one homicide, a measly five robberies, four assaults with weapons -- and those were really closer to Union Station -- and various break-ins to cars in lots and on the streets.

Democratic Lawmaker Pushing Immunity Is Newly Flush With Telco Cash
By Ryan Singel

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.

He has also recently benefited from some interesting political contributions.

Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.

Obey views the $22 billion in extra domestic spending Democrats want as a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of the war, and a gesture toward the nation's have-nots. He calls Bush's philosophy "an obscenity."

"He is trying to distract attention from Iraq by having other fights," Obey said over hamburgers at the Democratic Club, whose faux-leather grandeur recalls the supper clubs of his home.

"We're going to have . . . tax cuts for people making a million bucks a year while we supposedly can't afford to improve education or improve veterans' health care or do some real science on climate change. It's all a political charade." 

Obey Raises the Specter of War Tax
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007; A19

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) hates this "misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised" Iraq war. He won't even consider President Bush's latest war funding request until next year. And he wants to tax Americans to pay for it.

The positions surprised many of his colleagues. But not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Obey's friend for decades.

"I went to Nancy a week before we did it, and I told her: 'Nancy, I'm gonna do two things. One of them you're gonna like, and one of them you're not," Obey said. He told her he wouldn't take up Bush's funding request for Iraq until next year. "And she said: 'I like that. What won't I like?' "

She doesn't like that war tax. "We don't go forward lightly when we're talking about a tax on all the American people," Pelosi said. No problem -- Obey will introduce the tax proposal anyway on Tuesday.

...they're not really interested in your answer.

Just sayin', is all.