Prometheus 6

McClellan's book, titled "What Happened," isn't due out until next spring. But his publisher, Public Affairs, gave us the juiciest of advance tidbits: McClellan is still angry that his bosses sent him out to swear that Rove or Libby were not involved in the Valerie Plame leak, even though they knew that was a lie. Here's the money quote: "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

Of course, many states already have laws to deal with gang activity, but it is nearing election time, and the Democrats in Congress, who were too cowardly to stop the war in Iraq, and cannot deliver health care for some children living on the edge, have to deliver something to the people. This year’s political sacrifice: thousands of African-American and Latino youth in prison if the bill passes.

For the record, it is mostly those “Blue-Dog Democrats” who want to stick it to the country’s youth under the guise of solving the country’s gang problems, but the opposition so far has been shallow from anyone up there. Everyone on Capitol Hill, as an election approaches, loves a hard nosed crime bill. Congressmen Adam Schiff, Democrat, California, pushed this one upon us.

The Gang Bill
congress has fast-tracked some tricky legislation. now comes the tough part: pegging discrimination.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
By Brian Gilmore

At a sparsely attended Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill recently, Wayne McKenzie, a former prosecutor, and now Director of the Vera Institute’s Prosecution and Racial Justice Program, spelled out an initiative that was almost unheard of just a few years ago. The Prosecution and Racial Justice Program is, for lack of a better description, a new direction at the intersection of criminal justice and race. It helps prosecutors collect data on race and crime within their own offices in the hope that it will stop the discriminatory racial patterns so pervasive these days.

The Vera Institute, a 40-year-old organization that seeks solutions to problems with the criminal justice system, says the initiative “seeks to offer…prosecutors a mechanism for being proactive by monitoring the exercise of discretion” with their offices. In addition, McKenzie’s bold effort of technical management, it is hoped, will promote “fairness” and enhance “consistency” while guarding against “biased decision making” in the criminal justice system. In other words, if there is racism in the criminal justice system, McKenzie’s program will try to help prosecutors, through technical support and information gathering, identify the problem with hard data.

15 Killed in Baghdad, Shattering Growing Calm
Blast Is Deadliest In City in Months; Nine Die in Mosul
By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 24, 2007; A08

BAGHDAD, Nov. 23 -- The man walked into the crowded al-Ghazl animal market Friday, past police checkpoints and barricades, Humvees and Iraqi soldiers. An hour or so earlier, a U.S. patrol had passed through the market. He carried a bomb, hidden in a box containing birds for sale, witnesses said.

Shortly after 9 a.m., the bomb detonated, killing 15 people and injuring 55, according to Iraqi police, although the U.S. military said the death toll was eight. Those at the market were Iraqi civilians of different sects reviving a tradition that stretched back more than 100 years, when their fathers and grandfathers might have visited al-Ghazl every Friday, often bringing their children.

Why I Don't Support Clinton - Part 3 of 3 - Two Clintons Too Many

This is the third and final installment of my series "Why I Don't Support Clinton." You can read part 1 and part 2 to witness the build-up.

There are many groups that want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee: the press, Republicans and many on the left who get all hot and bothered at the mere idea that Bill Clinton might even walk past the White House one afternoon and perhaps sign a piece of paper accidentally.

Giuliani's critics say that while he is justifiably praised for his leadership in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, his advancement of Kerik, his former chauffeur, was part of a pattern of rewarding loyalty over competence in personnel decisions.

Noooo...

As a Giuliani critic, I do NOT say he was justifiably praised for his leadership in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. I watched. What Giuliani did was go on TV daily to report on what other people did. If that is still considered leadership at the end of my personal worldline, I am prepared to make this my last incarnation on this plane. If y'all don't figure out that leadership is more than that, or introduciong a bill in the House or Senate (I swear, every time someone thanks a Representative for his or her leadership "on this matter" I will puke)...

Well, I'm just feeling bitter and...today, at least...am prepared to write off a lot of folks.

On the other hand, Giuliani IS the very definition of cronyism, so...

Giuliani's Critics Point to Cronyism
Appointments While Mayor Are Said to Tarnish His Leadership Credentials
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2007; A03

The picture that emerges from all the quintiles, correlations and percentages is of a nation in which, overall, "the current generation of adults is better off than the previous one," as one of the studies notes. The median income of the families studied was $55,600 in the late 1960s; their children's median family income was $71,900. However, this rising tide has not lifted all boats equally. The rich have seen far greater income gains than have the poor.

Did you know that if the rich get richer and no one else does, the median income goes up?

Tattered Dream
Who'll Tackle the Issue Of Upward Mobility?
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, November 23, 2007; A39

We're not who we think we are.

The American self-image is suffused with the golden glow of opportunity. We think of the United States as a land of unlimited possibility, not so much a classless society but as a place where class is mutable -- a place where brains, energy and ambition are what counts, not the circumstances of one's birth. But three new studies suggest that Horatio Alger doesn't live here anymore.

The Economic Mobility Project, an ambitious research initiative led by the Pew Charitable Trusts, looked at the economic fortunes of a large group of families over time, comparing the income of parents in the late 1960s with the income of their children in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here's the finding that jumps out at me:

"The 'rags to riches' story is much more common in Hollywood than on Main Street. Only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income at the very bottom move to the very top."

That wasn't his intent, though. What he's TRYING to do is establish an equivalence between religion and science.

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

That right there means intelligent design cannot be science.

Silly New Wingnut Meme: Democrats Are The "Party Of The Rich"
November 23, 2007 -- 3:31 PM EST // //

The winger bloggers and commentators are starting to push a silly new meme: That Democrats, not Republicans, are the "party of the rich."

The basis for this? A new "study" done by the Heritage Foundation that was written up in this article in The Washington Times. The study is being touted by Drudge, PowerLineBlog, Blogs For Victory, and others.

Open-Source Warfare
By Robert N. Charette
First Published November 2007

On the afternoon of Thursday, 8 April 2004, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq deployed a small remote-controlled robot to search for improvised explosive devices. The robot, a PackBot unit made by iRobot Corp., of Burlington, Mass., found an IED, but the discovery proved its undoing. The IED exploded, reducing the robot to small, twisted pieces of metal, rubber, and wire.

In this case however, it turns out that quantum mechanics implies that if an unstable system has survived for far longer than the average such system should, then the probability that it will continue to survive decreases more slowly than it otherwise would. By resetting the clock, the survival probability would now once again fall exponentially.

"The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."

Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 21/11/2007

Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too.

The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.

But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.

Taiwan is positioning itself to be one of the fastest adopters of WiMax connectivity outside of North America through its M Taiwan initiative. Officials see the technology as a good way to spread broadband Internet access throughout the island, which includes remote mountain villages and sparsely populated outlying islands.

Taiwan promotes powerful UMPC for WiMax
Taiwan has developed a powerful ultramobile PC that can fit in your hand and carries a speedy 1GHz microprocessor on board.
Dan Nystedt (IDG News Service)
24 November, 2007 11:20:19

Taiwan has developed a powerful ultramobile PC that can fit in your hand, complete with a speedy 1GHz microprocessor on board.

The aim of the device is to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer via a WiMax wireless broadband network currently in the works on the island and in several other countries around the world, including the U.S.

There's warnings about organized crime getting their hands on the tech (not like they can't jack your landlines already). To my mind, that includes the Bush administration. And there may be no legal way to stop it. This is essentially a packet sniffer, old well established tech. I don't think it's illegal to load a trojan on your own machine. 

Expert scares world with VoIP hacking proof
Ex-BorderWare guru strips IP calls naked.
John E. Dunn, Techworld
22 November 2007

An expert has released a proof-of-concept program to show how easy it would be for criminals to eavesdrop on the VoIP-based phone calls of any company using the technology.

I guess what works for medical insurance works for home insurance too.

Insurers Shift Cost Burdens to Homeowners
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

PALMETTO BAY, Fla. — Charles R. Williams stood near the glass sliding doors in his home south of Miami and pointed out parts of the ceiling and walls that had crumpled after Hurricane Andrew ripped open the roof 15 years ago.

The visible damage from that storm, one of the worst of the century, has largely disappeared. But Mr. Williams and homeowners nationwide are still feeling its effect in their pocketbooks.

The storm stunned insurance companies and, after paying out more than $22 billion in claims in inflation-adjusted dollars, they began rewriting policies to protect themselves as much as homeowners. They also developed computer programs intended to limit payouts on claims.

I never liked someone I disagreed with so strongly. He believes he is doing the best thing for his country. I watched him talk to rabid anti-immigrant groups for two days, and he never spoke with anger, just sadness that something he loves is being lost. Tancredo may be a reactionary, a xenophobe and a nationalist, but he isn't a racist.

'Xenophobe' and 'racist' are synonyms.

No wonder we still got race issues when even liberals dance around the truth.

Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request
Secret Warrants Granted Without Probable Cause

In a stinging opinion this month, a federal judge in Texas denied a request by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent for data that would identify a drug trafficker's phone location by using the carrier's E911 tracking capability. E911 tracking systems read signals sent to satellites from a phone's Global Positioning System (GPS) chip or triangulated radio signals sent from phones to cell towers. Magistrate Judge Brian L. Owsley, of the Corpus Christi division of the Southern District of Texas, said the agent's affidavit failed to focus on "specifics necessary to establish probable cause, such as relevant dates, names and places."

These folks were concerned, and NBT of Columbia worked with them...New York City should have been as reasonable when they found the slave burial ground in downtown Manhattan.

But on the real, I don't care about dead bodies. That's me...your mileage may (and probably does) vary. 

This dispute dates to a 1927 land sale. That deed gave the family access to the cemetery, limited to a quarter-acre of the roughly nine acres sold. But the access clause disappeared when the land was sold again a decade later.

The Rev. Freda Bonner of Lexington said she remembers when, in 1949, one family's house was burned, and a burning cross was put in another's yard for daring to ask to visit the cemetery. She said her mother's dying request was that she "see about the cemetery."

Amaker said her father was told in 1986 to never set foot on the property again.

Developer Gives Tract to Slave Descendants
Family to Get Four Lots for Cemetery on Piece of Land Bought by Ancestor in 1789
By Seanna Adcox
Associated Press
Friday, November 23, 2007; A10

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- After decades of being barred from the land where their ancestors were laid to rest, the descendants of a slave in Lexington will get a piece of the land he once owned for a family cemetery.

"Now I know my ancestors will rest in peace," said Revious Amaker, who lives next to the land her ancestor, Dave Draft, bought from his slave master in 1789.

Someday Rudy Giuliani will look back on this moment and wonder why he didn’t run as himself.

He IS running as himself...a guy who will say anything to win.

Brooks is going back ten years to find Giuliani saying something constructive about immigration. Newsbusters went back ten years to find "strong conservative woman" (yes I am ignoring Malkin). Mr. Brooks plagiarized an effort to clean up Reagan's quarter-century old appeal to naked racism that the Republican Party is STILL riding into the sunset.

I'll tell you what. Find me something the Republican Party has done in the last...five years that didn't rape and pillage the wallets of anyone less than a millionaire and I'll listen. 

Kinda-sorta via Oliver, because he linked a different picture in the photostream, without which I wouldn't have found this one.

It was a small ceremony. Just George, Dick, Condi, Karl, and a few others. They gathered around the document, and each said a few words. Then they let George bring out his condiment; a favorite bbq sauce from a ranch near his in Texas. He'd been putting that sauce on everything. He joked it was a shame they couldn't use this as an endorsement. Those gathered laughed, without hint of nervousness or doubt. This was a liberating evening for all.

After a toast, the President began. At first he tried silverware, but the parchment crumbled too much under the knife. After some trial and error, the method settled upon was to tear off long strips, and roll them up with bbq sauce like enchiladas. For the remainder of the document, he ate in this way. Once there was nothing left save for a paste of dust and sauce, they toasted again, clapped, and called it a night.

Next week was Dick's turn, with the other document. He was leaning towards bringing a simple vinaigrette. But that bbq sauce was growing on him.

“The United States has consistently stated that the E.U. continues to lack a predictable, workable process for approving these products in a way that reflects scientific rather than political factors,” Mr. Gianfranceschi said.

The only science the USofA applies in making such decisions is economics. NO ONE in the Bush administration has any grounds at all for complaining about using political factors when science is called for. 

Proposed Ban on Genetically Modified Corn in Europe
By JAMES KANTER

PARIS, Nov. 22 — European Union environmental officials have determined that two kinds of genetically modified corn could harm butterflies, affect food chains and disturb life in rivers and streams, and they have proposed a ban on the sale of the seeds, which are made by DuPontSyngenta. Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences and

The preliminary decisions are circulating within the European Commission, which has the final say. Some officials there are skeptical of a ban that would upset the powerful biotechnology industry and could exacerbate tensions with important trading partners like the United States. The seeds are not available on the European market for cultivation.

In the decisions, the environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, contends that the genetically modified corn, or maize could affect certain butterfly species, specifically the monarch, and other beneficial insects. For instance, research this year indicates that larvae of the monarch butterfly exposed to the genetically modified corn “behave differently than other larvae.”

The sudden growth of the drug in the United States and its expansion from a regional issue to a national one serves as a warning, said an expert at the United Nations drug office. “It must be feared that something similar could happen in Europe,” said the expert, Thomas Pietschmann, a main author of the annual United Nations World Drug Report.

Europe Fears That Meth Foothold Is Expanding
By NICHOLAS KULISH

JESENIK, Czech Republic — The methamphetamine epidemic is not just a scourge of the American heartland. It has a powerful foothold here in the heart of Central Europe. Home meth labs are sprouting up all over the country to produce this cheap, potent drug using the pseudoephedrine found in common cold medications.

In 2000, the Czech police raided 19 cooking facilities. By last year that number had grown to 416 — in a country of just 10.2 million people.

The appetite for methamphetamine in the Czech drug scene grew out of the strange ingenuity fostered among users once cut off by the Iron Curtain from imported highs. Now the consumption of this strongly addictive, often injected stimulant appears to be spreading from the Czech Republic to the rest of Europe.

“The festival has been our kid,” added Ms. N’Daw-Spech, whose day job is as a financial director at a Teachers College center. “The kid is an adolescent now. When we started out, we had no experience, no connections. We knew nobody. We got some film festival catalogs and started calling people.”

A Universe of Black Film
By FELICIA R. LEE

The African Diaspora Film Festival has grown each year since its genesis in a kitchen-table conversation between a couple of film fanatics frustrated by the shallow pool of black films in New York. Starting today the 15th edition of the festival will offer something for just about anyone interested in the global black experience: 102 films from 43 countries in a 17-day feast of documentaries, comedies, musicals, dramas and romances.

He really does, you know...said so himself. 

Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.

But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. The huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back. There’s no indication that any laws were broken this time — but the public’s trust was nonetheless betrayed, once again.

The point is that the subprime crisis and the credit crunch are, in an important sense, the result of our failure to effectively reform corporate governance after the last set of scandals.

Banks Gone Wild
By PAUL KRUGMAN

“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.

The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.

Newsbusters is funny!

As useless as the annual "X best/worst Y person/place/pet" parade is, Newsbusters got their panties in a bunch because Glamour chose "not one strong conservative woman" for their Women of the Year list.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, is lauded as “The Role Model” for her boldness in continuing to live her life in the face of cancer and for her devotion to her family.

But Edwards is not the only wife of a presidential candidate who is facing health issues. Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998 and is also extremely devoted to her family in addition to helping better the lives of at-risk youth. Yet Romney wasn’t chosen as a “Role Model.” Is it because her husband is a Republican candidate?

No, it's because Mrs. Edwards's case is new. Mrs. Romney's case is almost ten years old. Is it not telling they had to go back a decade to find something to complain about here?

They also complained about the winner of the "truth teller" title.

These enterprises, whose sponsoring churches benefit from a host of tax breaks and regulatory exemptions afforded to religious organizations in this country, sometimes provoke complaints from the for-profit businesses with which they compete — as ChangePoint’s new sports center has in Anchorage.

Mixed-use projects, like shopping centers that also include church buildings, can make it difficult to determine what constitutes tax-exempt ministry work and what is taxable commerce.

And when these ventures succeed — when local amenities like shops, sports centers, theaters and clinics are all provided in church-run settings and employ mostly church members — people of other faiths may feel shut out of a significant part of the community’s life, some religion scholars said.

Megachurches Add Local Economy to Their Mission
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW W. LEHREN

In Anchorage in early October, the doors opened on a soaring white canvas dome with room for a soccer field and a 400-meter track. Its prime-time hours are already rented well into 2011.

Nearby is a cold-storage facility leased to Sysco, the giant food distribution corporation, and beside it is a warehouse serving a local contractor and another food-service company.

The entrepreneur behind these businesses is the ChangePoint ministry, a 4,000-member Christian congregation that helped develop and finance the sports dome. It has a partnership with Sysco’s landlord and owns the warehouse.

Mr. Singer, 63, who was surprised to be photographed for this article on a Manhattan street, said in an e-mail interview that he had contributed to the California initiative on his own, and that he was not acting on behalf of the Giuliani campaign. He noted that buying what he called “sovereign distressed debt” represented only a tiny fraction of the $9 billion that is under management by his funds, but defended his decision to press for repayment, saying that countries must meet their obligations.

And he lamented what he called “the name-calling against investors who do not just ‘go along’ with cents-on-the-dollar offers for valid sovereign debt,” saying it was primarily generated by ideological groups and debtors who do not want to pay.

Publicity-Shy Giuliani Backer Is Thrust Into Spotlight
By MICHAEL COOPER and LESLIE WAYNE

Paul E. Singer is the founding partner of one of the oldest hedge funds around. And while he has become a major donor to Republican and conservative causes in recent years, he has largely managed to stay out of the limelight, even avoiding having his picture appear in newspapers.

But this year Mr. Singer became one of the biggest supporters of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, making his jet available to Mr. Giuliani, while Mr. Singer and workers at his companies have donated $200,000 to the campaign. And he became the largest individual backer of a California ballot initiative that many Democrats believe could sink their chances of winning the presidency.

Suddenly, the normally low-profile Mr. Singer, a New Yorker, found himself singled out by Democrats intent on beating back the California effort before it gained any steam.