Prometheus 6

The $600 million now going to the port was originally allocated for the state's housing assistance program, which provided money to families who lost property to Katrina's storm surge.

Katrina Housing Aid to Be Used for Port

JACKSON, Miss. -- The federal government has approved Mississippi's plan to divert $600 million in hurricane housing funds to a port improvement project, angering critics who say tens of thousands of people made homeless by Hurricane Katrina still need help.

In a letter to Gov. Haley Barbour (R), Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said on Friday that he is concerned about using the housing money for the port project, but that congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds "allows me little discretion."

Mississippi plans to restore public infrastructure and publicly owned facilities at the State Port at Gulfport that were destroyed by Katrina, and to improve the port's operating capacity.

Seriously.

if this pushes her over the edge, the Obama camp, and their supporters, really will feel that she stole her victory. They didn't contest those states because they weren't going to count, not because they were so committed to the DNC's procedural arguments that they were willing to sacrifice dozens of delegates to support it. It's as hard as hardball gets, and the end could be unimaginably acrimonious. Imagine if African-American voters feel the rules were changed to prevent Obama's victory, if young voters feel the delegate counts were shifted to block their candidate.

Yes. Imagine it.

Mr. Obama’s campaign was always going to be difficult, and the climb is even steeper now. There is no reason to feel sorry for him. He’s a politician out of Chicago who must have known that campaigns often degenerate into demolition derbies.

Still, it’s legitimate to ask, given the destructive developments of the last few weeks, whether the Clintons are capable of being anything but divisive. The electorate seems more polarized now than it was just a few weeks ago, and the Clintons have seemed positively gleeful in that atmosphere.

It makes one wonder whether they have any understanding or regard for the corrosive long-term effects — on their party and the nation — of pitting people bitterly and unnecessarily against one another.

What kind of people are the Clintons? What role will Bill Clinton play in a new Clinton White House? Can they look beyond winning to a wounded nation’s need for healing and unifying?

These are questions that need to be answered. Stay tuned.

...George WIll wouldn't have a job. 

He wrote that Jewish identity is "locked into the holocaust experience," which Jews "overplay . . . to the point that it begins to repulse friends." The Jewish nation -- Israel, he wrote -- is too reliant upon weapons and bombs and should instead befriend its enemies.

"Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity," he wrote.

The posting drew 438 comments -- an exceptionally high response for an On Faith essay -- and prompted such a backlash that Gandhi later posted an apology. The Web site also apologized. 

Arun Gandhi Quits Peace Institute in Flap Over Blog Posting
By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 26, 2008; C07

The grandson of Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi resigned yesterday as president of the board of a conflict resolution institute after writing an online essay on a Washington Post blog calling Jews and Israel "the biggest players" in a global culture of violence.

In his resignation letter to the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, founder Arun Gandhi wrote that his Jan. 7 essay "was couched in language that was hurtful and contrary to the principles of nonviolence. My intention was to generate a healthy discussion on the proliferation of violence. Clearly I did not achieve my goal. Instead, unintentionally, my words have resulted in pain, anger, confusion and embarrassment."

The institute is housed at the University of Rochester and has a university-paid director. Gandhi submitted his resignation to the board Thursday and it was accepted yesterday.

Need I say more?

The conventions that govern America's racial discourse derive from the odious "one drop" rule. According to it, anyone with any admixture of black ancestry -- one drop of black "blood" -- is black. So, Connerly is an African American. One of his grandparents was of African descent, one was Irish, a third was Irish and American Indian, and the fourth was French Canadian. Two of the grandchildren of Connerly and his Irish wife have a Vietnamese mother. Are these grandchildren African Americans?

Not if they don't want to be.

Will is trying to gin up support for five anti-racial justice referendums championed by Connerly. He says

On the other hand

For a while, it looked as if his strategy was to team up with Obama to knock Clinton off her stride. But during the last debate, he joined Clinton against Obama -- and then met privately with Clinton afterward.

I asked him what they had discussed. "We talked about how the media isn't giving me enough coverage," he said with a smile.

He and Billary are known to have plotted to exclude as many candidates as possible from the Presidential campaign debates.

My sympathy for him is far more limited than my sympathy for the folks for whom he really is speaking.

Billary's Adventures in Primaryland
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, January 26, 2008; A17

"Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."

-- The Duchess in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Which gets me to that superficially charming, self-absorbed couple Billary, ever so possessed with an outsize sense of entitlement. What else to call Bill and Hillary Clinton as they partner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, tag-teaming Barack Obama with alternating blows both above and below the belt? It's an act the twosome plans to take all the way to the White House.

If they make it there -- a big if -- the only unanswered question is where Bill will choose to hang his hat. Will it be in her old space in the East Wing, or will he set up shop in the West Wing?

Smart money is on Billary settling in the Oval Office with "his" and "hers" desks.

This is what the Supreme Court ordered, what Juan Williams championed . Congratulations, guys. Also

The South and West – and rural areas and small towns generally – offer minority students a bit more diversity.

I find it significant that "diversity" is now for minorities. You've got to reverse-engineer the meaning of that from the way it's used to see the conceptual problem here.

I also find it interesting that the report under discussion in the article is never identified. 

Resegregation of U.S. schools deepening
Districts in big cities of the Midwest and Northeast undergo the most change.
By Amanda Paulson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Chicago

At one time, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina was a model of court-ordered integration.

Today, nearly a decade after a court struck down its racial-balancing busing program, the school district is moving in the opposite direction. More than half of its elementary schools are either more than 90 percent black or 90 percent white.

"Charlotte is rapidly resegregating," says Carol Sawyer, a parent and member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Equity Committee.

It's a trend that is occurring around the country and is even more pronounced than expected in the wake of court cases dismantling both mandated and voluntary integration programs, a new report says. The most segregated schools, according to the report, which documents desegregation trends, are in big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The South and West – and rural areas and small towns generally – offer minority students a bit more diversity.

Smartphones Patented... Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute After Patent Issued
from the wasting-no-time dept

Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.

Tobey said Coskata's method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. 

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn
By Chuck Squatriglia
01.24.08 | 1:00 PM

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now," said Wes Bolsen, the company's vice president of business development.

My Deep Thoughts on the Dem Primary

Obama has it tough because Americans are more racist than sexist. There are just more white women than blacks. At the same time, Hillary gets a bigger benefit in the form of backlash against sexist attacks on her (like this) because sexism can be overt, while racism must be coded.

Other hand, Hillary's got it tough because any attack on Obama can be interpreted as coded racism. She's got to knock the halo off his head in order to disrupt his appeal to black Christians, but putting surrogates out to talk about his drug use blew up in her face. She's got to play to her supposed strength on experience, so Bill went out and played attack dog and quickly found out how shallow black support for him was. Who cares where you have an office? Some people who usually talk sense are already saying they'd rather see a Republican win than Hillary.

Somewhere, Karl Rove cackles.

These people who usually talk sense...have they suddenly changed somehow, become virulent? Has their reasoning changed?

MSNBC is allowing their news videos to be embedded in folks' web sites now. So of course they're issuing DMCA notices on all the NBC and MSNBC clips that have been uploaded there. In my case, it started with the Tonight Show clip where Wanda Sykes said that child molesting Republican rep from Florida was giving alcohol a bad name. It's going to catch the Cosby/Poussaint appearance on Meet The Press and the Black Women series as well.

End result: they've cancelled my account. In theory, ALL the videos I've uploaded will be purged. Queue the world's smallest violin playing the world's saddest song.

Visit the H-Afro-Am home page.

From: Abdul Alkalimat
List Editor: Abdul Alkalimat
Editor's Subject: On the 2008 presidential campaign
Author's Subject: On the 2008 presidential campaign
Date Written: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:00:03 -0500
Date Posted: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:00:03 -0500

This is to alert the list that we are having an "open mike" on the list for discussion of the Obama run for the Dem candidacy for president. This will be a somewhat polemical discussion as people will want to make arguments and present evidence for political positions. After posting what is in the cue at the moment we will be stressing research information to deepen the discussion and not just another place to vent our political and ideological views. We need to hold this list to the standards of Black Studies scholarship. With that said I hope we can shed light and not merely squabble.

I guess this is what you call "being involved with black issues."

The Clinton Fallacy
Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?
By Melissa Harris-Lacewell
Posted Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008, at 12:46 PM ET

As Clinton performed blackness, real black people got poorer. The poorest African-Americans experienced an absolute decline in income, and they also became poorer relative to the poorest whites. The richest African-Americans saw an increase in income, but even the highest-earning blacks still considerably lagged their white counterparts. Furthermore, the '90s witnessed the continued growth of the significant gap between black and white median wealth.

It really isn't representative of my reading. For instance, there's no sign of Alterdestiny, which I read every day since finding it.

Forgotten American Blogging: Ella Baker

Kevin Levin, the writer of the excellent blog Civil War Memory, wrote this on Martin Luther King Day:

Martin Luther King Day has become too fashionable. At its worst it reinforces a skewed memory of the Civil Rights Movement as beginning with his organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and ending with his assassination in 1968. It also obscures the complexity of organization on the grassroots level and the fissures that existed within the movement that followed generational, geographic, and gender lines. King's words are no doubt stirring and his actions are a model of civic dissent, but we run the risk of reducing the struggle for civil rights and its importance to the broader narrative of freedom down to a few choice lines and poor generalizations.

I could not agree more. I have complained about this myself. Levin chose to remember Vernon Johns on that day, a man certainly worth a Forgotten American post. Check it out.

I am going to take this opportunity to discuss another forgotten member of the civil rights movement, Ella Baker.

Once again, Majority Leader Harry Reid demonstrates why he deserved to be the first recipient of the prestigious Hero of the Bush Revolution medal.

He proves his worthiness today when the FISA bill comes up for a vote in the Senate. Our Leader and Deputy Leader really like the bill that came out of the Intelligence Committee, because it gives them the ability to spy on people who might be disloyal to the party without any oversight.They don't like the Judiciary Committee bill, because it requires a justification to spy.

Hero Reid said he will allow votes on both bills, and offered helpful advice to the Republicans, telling them they should consider tabling the Judiciary Committee Bill in order to kill it.

Here go an excerpt...you'll want to see the rest of it as much as I do.

DX Exclusive: Boondocks Vs BET!
January 23rd, 2008 | Author: Andreas Hale

Over the past couple of weeks there has been rumors hovering about a certain Boondocks episode waiting to be aired. A clip leaked to youtube that previewed the episode which takes a critical and humorous look at BET and its programming. The snippet heightened curiosity of when the episode would eventually air. After the rumored original air date (January 7th) had passed, there would be even more speculation as to what happened to the episode. The clips on youtube were also taken down with no explanation.

It has been suggested that the Bush Administration actually has three primary items on its agenda:
1) making Africa another front in the Administration’s war on “terrorism”;
2) protecting U.S. access to African oil, mineral wealth and other raw materials; and
3) putting the U.S. in a better position to compete with China for domination of Africa’s resources.

Africom threatens the sovereignty, independence and stability of the African continent
A position paper of the National Conference of Black Lawyers
Mark P Fancher, Jeffrey L Edison & Ajamu Sankofa (2008-01-24)

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) concludes that the mission of Africa Command (Africom) infringes on the sovereignty of African states due to the particularity of Africa’s history and Africa’s current economic and political relationship to the United States.

Further, Africom is designed to violate international law standards that protect rights to selfdetermination and that prohibit unprovoked military aggression.

Africom is also likely to become a device for the foreign domination and exploitation of Africa’s natural resources to the detriment of people who are indigenous to the African continent.

NCBL opposes Africom in the strongest terms and calls upon people of African descent in the U.S. to avoid military service to ensure that they will not be ordered to carry out missions on behalf of Africom, or any military unit or program engaged in violating international law, committing crimes against humanity, or committing crimes of any kind that threaten the peace of any continent.

Yesterday I linked U.S. to Insist Iraq Grant It Wide Mandate in Operations. Today that story makes more sense. Or less sense.

U.S. Cannot Manage Contractors In Wars, Officials Testify on Hill
Problem Is Linked to Lack of Trained Service Personnel
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008; A05

With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.

At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

"Karibu's demise is a result of the ownership, including myself, failure to resolve conflict in a peaceful way and also a failure to end relationships amicably," he said....

"Simba wanted the company to go national," said Jonathan Robinson, who has managed the Bowie store, one of six in the chain, for two years. Co-owner Hoke "Brother Yao" Glover "felt it wasn't ready for that yet," Robinson said. He added that last fall, Sana's wife, Sunny, who bought books for the stores, abruptly left -- the two are divorcing -- and that customers began to notice that titles weren't coming in.

Black Readers Are Jolted by a Chain's Demise
Loss of Karibu, a Result Of Owners' Rift, Leaves A Hole in a Community
By Lonnae O'Neal Parker and Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 24, 2008; A01

By early afternoon, word had spread and dozens of customers crowded the bookstore's aisles. One of the nation's largest black-owned bookstore chains, Karibu, will be closed by mid-February, and people brought their shock and sadness to Bowie Town Center, along with their checkbooks.

They pulled titles from the shelves: civil rights biographies, Harlem Renaissance classics. And they lamented.

Freddie Mills, a security officer who was scanning the aisles as his 2-year-old daughter played nearby, said he was "angry, angry, angry."

"Where are we going to get books for our kids?" he said.

Even with the criticism of Clinton, however, some in the black community believe that it will make little difference. Black voters will overwhelming support the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is, they say.

"I don't think the Clintons are the enemy to most black people," said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University. "If Hillary succeeds, black people are going to vote for her. They might not be excited." 

Black America Feels the Sting of Ex-President's Comments
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008; A08

For nearly two decades, Yvette Wider, an African American, adored Bill Clinton, once described by a famous black novelist as the nation's first black president.

But now, after Clinton's "fairy tale" remark about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in New Hampshire and a statement in South Carolina that Obama had put a political "hit job" on him, Wider said she feels she hardly knows the former president. "I was surprised to hear him make a comment like that, because I thought he understood our people better," said Wider, who said she will vote for Obama in Saturday's South Carolina primary. "It made me think he's been playing us all this time."

Wider's sentiments are echoing across black America -- on blogs, Web chats and talk radio, where Clinton is being attacked as never before.

Some People Never Learn
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - Einat Rotman

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors. The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation, which reduces the amount of dopamine D2 receptors in the brain, are less successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry this genetic mutation. This finding has the potential to improve our understanding of the causes of addictive and compulsive behaviors.

Some people do not give up even when they do not succeed.Theyrefuse to accept defeat and continue to try even when common sense tells others there's no use in trying.

Tilmann Klein and Dr. Markus Ullsperger at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, believe they have found the genetic cause for this "stubbornness". They discovered that a single genetic mutation can determine whether people repeat their mistakes. This mutation, named the A1 mutation, is found in about one-third of the population and causes a reduction in the amount of D2 receptors in the brain, which are the docking sites for dopamine.

The iPhone Meets the Fourth Amendment
ADAM M. GERSHOWITZ
South Texas College of Law January 15, 2008

Abstract:    

Imagine that police arrest an individual for a simple traffic infraction, such as running a stop sign. Under the search incident to arrest doctrine, officers are entitled to search the body of the person they are arresting to ensure that he does not have any weapons or will not destroy any evidence. The search incident to an arrest is automatic and allows officers to open containers on the person, even if there is no probable cause to believe there is anything illegal inside of those containers. What happens, however, when the arrestee is carrying an iPhone in his pocket? May the police search the iPhone's call history, cell phone contacts, emails, pictures, movies, calendar entries and, perhaps most significantly, the browsing history from recent internet use? Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent decided well before handheld technology was even contemplated, the answer appears to be yes. This article demonstrates how the full contents and multiple applications of iPhones can be searched without a warrant or probable cause under existing Supreme Court precedent. The article also offers approaches courts and legislatures might adopt to ensure greater protection for the soon-to-be pervasive iPhone devices.

The sealed-in battery means you can't carry a spare in case you run out of juice, and you have to bring it to a dealer when you need a new one. There's no built-in DVD drive. The thin case can't accommodate a larger internal hard disk. And the machine omits many common ports and connectors.

There's no Ethernet jack for wired broadband Internet connections and no dedicated slot for the most common types of external cellphone modems. That means that out of the box, the MacBook Air has only one way to get on the Internet -- through its fast, built-in Wi-Fi connection. If you're out of Wi-Fi range, you're out of luck, unless you buy an optional, $30 add-on Ethernet connector or a cellphone modem that connects via USB.

In fact, the MacBook Air has only three connectors: a headphone jack, a single USB port and a port for connecting an external monitor.

Apple's MacBook Air Is Beautiful and Thin, But Omits Features
January 24, 2008; Page B1

Apple finally has entered the subnotebook market, introducing a lightweight laptop meant to please road warriors. But, typical of Apple, the company took a different approach from its competitors. The result is a beautiful, amazingly thin computer, but one whose unusual trade-offs may turn off some frequent travelers.

Bill Clinton's Old Politics
Robert Reich

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992 campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s – was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.