Howard Dean

from A refined eye - Sex scholar Gail Wyatt clarifies perceptions about black women.

Natalie Davis at All Facts and Opinions spotted an interesting analysis of link vs. traffic ratings by Stirling Newberry at The Blogging of the President: 2004. Mr. Newberry, one of those folks whose knowledge I'd be impressed with were I less arrogant, does some analysis of the TTLB Ecosystem's numbers
This article ought to become pretty popular around the BlogNet.

Basically, Stirling correlates your traffic and link ranking and finds a deep, possibly significant divide between those whose link ranking is greater than their traffic ranking and those whose traffic ranking is greater than their link ranking. And by significant I mean that the data points, when looked at in this light, fall so cleanly on either side of the divide it's hard not to think you've hit on a key quality.

What impact that key quality has is anyone's guess at this point.

James at j-notes' first post was appropriately titled "Music to start your year"…his year started at Yoshi's, one of my favorite West Coast jazz venues (go for the music, not the Japanese food…it's not bad but you can do better).

Because I whined about the lack of east coast jazz suggestions, James pointed me to Gotham Jazz. Okay, I'm set for a while.

Meanwhile, anothe east-west battle is brewing!

I think I can scratch one show and send the money to WBGO.

City to hire 6 rejected white firefighters
Hiring follows challenge to affirmative action plan

By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff, 1/3/2004

The Boston Fire Department has agreed to hire six men who were passed over in favor of minority group members with lower test scores, marking the first time the city has voluntarily agreed to hire rejected white applicants since a federal appeals court declared its affirmative action plan unconstitutional last March.

The six white men will join four others, who challenged the department's 29-year-old affirmative action plan and won a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. All of the men had been turned down in favor of minority applicants who scored lower on a statewide civil service exam.

"This was a recognition by the city that the time has come to do away with the minority hiring preferences and judge everyone on an equal footing regardless of their race," said Mark J. Ventola, the lawyer for the six men who had filed suit in August. "It's a trend I'm hoping will continue."

City officials, though, insisted that their decision last week to hire the men is not a sign that Boston will hire dozens of other white men who also were rejected for firefighting jobs despite high test scores.

A Globe analysis conducted last spring found that some 70 white applicants were turned down, even though they scored better than minorities who were chosen.

"This settlement is merely a consequence of the original [US Appeals Court] decision," Seth Gitell, spokesman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said yesterday. "It applies only to the six plaintiffs in this particular case."

According to Ventola, the city will put on a new firefighter class in March that will be made up at least in part by white men previously rejected for the job.

Political Fundraising in Texas Is Target of Probe
Officials look at whether money linked to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay improperly financed Republican campaigns.
By Scott Gold
Times Staff Writer

January 3, 2004

AUSTIN, Texas — Authorities are conducting a criminal investigation into whether corporate money, including hundreds of thousands of dollars linked to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, improperly financed the Republican Party's takeover of the Texas Capitol.

The probe is focused on several political and fundraising organizations run by Republican activists, investigators said. One of the organizations, the political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, has direct ties to DeLay, a Texas Republican and one of the most powerful politicians in Washington.

At issue is whether the organizations improperly used corporate contributions to help finance the campaigns of more than 20 Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, according to documents and interviews with prosecutors and government investigators.

War on Fat Gets Serious
From statehouse to courtroom, the fight against obesity gains momentum. And now the feds are jumping on the bandwagon.
By Melissa Healy
Times Staff Writer

January 3, 2004

So, you're one of the 190 million Americans who are overweight.

You're trying to shed the extra pounds, but your resolve is under daily assault. The all-you-can-eat buffets. The convenience of drive-through. Supersizing. The comfort of fat and sugar. The lure of the couch.

All right, then. Meet your new weight-loss team: There's Deborah Ortiz, state senator; John D. Graham, federal regulator; Richard Banzhaf, attorney; Margo Wootan, nutritionist and government activist. There are more, too, but you probably don't know them. But they are on your case, filing briefs, drafting legislation, writing memos and holding news conferences. Determined to help you and your loved ones lose that weight and keep it off.

They are the new warriors in a national fight against fat, and they have decided that it takes a village to trim a waistline. If the increase in obesity is to be reversed, they believe, Americans must have better exercise venues, more nutritional information and improved access to healthy food that is as inexpensive and convenient as the stuff that helped to make us fat. Overweight consumers should be offered incentives to help lose the extra poundage. And government should help in the fight.

Representatives of the food and restaurant industries deride these fat fighters as scolds and food cops, bent on inviting Big Brother to America's meals and celebrations.

"The public is just not prepared to be dictated to in this regard," says Richard Berman, executive director of the Center for Consumer Freedom, an advocacy group supported by about 150 restaurant and food companies.

Americans want easy, affordable meals and tasty snacks, Berman says, dismissing claims that the food industry is tricking consumers into unhealthful eating habits. All of us know, he says, that if we eat too much and don't exercise enough, we're going to get fat. And we also know how to lose the weight.

Flight Groundings Lead Allies to Query Washington
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — British Airways canceled another flight to the United States on Friday as the Bush administration faced questions from American allies about the reliability of the intelligence information that has led to the recent rash of flight cancellations.

The British airline grounded a flight from London to Washington — the third cancellation over all in 24 hours — and canceled a flight scheduled for Saturday from London to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Seven international flights have now been canceled since last Saturday after the Bush administration began an aggressive approach to defending American airspace when the nation was put on orange or "high" alert on Dec. 21. Administration officials said no arrests had been made in connection with any of the more than a dozen international flights subjected to rigorous scrutiny. And officials have acknowledged that even now, they are uncertain whether they have succeeded in foiling a terrorist plot.

"I don't think we know yet, and we may never know," a senior administration official said.

The latest concern over the tighter security — perhaps unparalleled in commercial aviation history — was raised by Mexico on Friday. A spokesman for President Vicente Fox questioned decisions by the United States on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day to cancel Aeromexico's Flight 490 from Mexico City to Los Angeles. The spokesman, Agustin Gutiérrez Canet, said that armed Mexican agents had been scheduled to fly aboard the flights and that the authorities made special efforts to interrogate passengers closely and inspect luggage.

"Those revisions have found nothing suspicious," Mr. Gutiérrez said. "Where was the risk?"

In another indication of the turmoil resulting from the increased security measures, an American official said that the cancellation of the British Airways flights was not in response to United States safety concerns, but rather was prompted by the refusal of British pilots to fly with armed marshals on board. [P6: emphasis added] The United States put other nations on notice earlier this week that it would not allow certain suspicious flights into its airspace without armed marshals on board.

In addition to the flight cancellations, foreign airliners have been escorted into American airspace by F-16 military fighters, and a Mexican flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles was turned around in mid-air.

Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention
By SARA RIMER

TOLEDO, Ohio — The 14-year-old girl arrived at school here on Oct. 17 wearing a low-cut midriff top under an unbuttoned sweater. It was a clear violation of the dress code, and school officials gave her a bowling shirt to put on. She refused. Her mother came to the school with an oversize T-shirt. She refused to wear that, too.

"It was real ugly," said the girl, whose mother did not want her to be identified..

It was a standoff. So the city police officer assigned to the school handcuffed the girl, put her in a police car and took her to the detention center at the Lucas County juvenile courthouse. She was booked on a misdemeanor charge and placed in a holding cell for several hours, until her mother, a 34-year-old vending machine technician, got off work and picked her up.

She was one of more than two dozen students in Toledo who were arrested in school in October for offenses like being loud and disruptive, cursing at school officials, shouting at classmates and violating the dress code. They had all violated the city's safe school ordinance.

In cities and suburbs around the country, schools are increasingly sending students into the juvenile justice system for the sort of adolescent misbehavior that used to be handled by school administrators. In Toledo and many other places, the juvenile detention center has become an extension of the principal's office.

School officials say they have little choice.

"The goal is not to put kids out, but to maintain classrooms free of disruptions that make it impossible for teachers to teach and kids to learn," said Jane Bruss, the spokeswoman for the Toledo public schools. "Would we like more alternatives? Yes, but everything has a cost associated with it."

From Rogue Nuclear Programs, Web of Trails Leads to Pakistan
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

he Pakistani leaders who denied for years that scientists at the country's secret A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories were peddling advanced nuclear technology must have been averting their eyes from a most conspicuous piece of evidence: the laboratory's own sales brochure, quietly circulated to aspiring nuclear weapons states and a network of nuclear middlemen around the world.

The cover bears an official-looking seal that says "Government of Pakistan" and a photograph of the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. It promotes components that were spinoffs from Pakistan's three-decade-long project to build a nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium, set in a drawing that bears a striking resemblance to a mushroom cloud.

In other nations, such sales would be strictly controlled. But Pakistan has always played by its own rules.

As investigators unravel the mysteries of the North Korean, Iranian and now the Libyan nuclear projects, Pakistan — and those it empowered with knowledge and technology they are now selling on their own — has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators.

That network is global, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves many middlemen and suppliers. But what is striking about a string of recent disclosures, experts say, is how many roads appear ultimately to lead back to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, where Pakistan's own bomb was developed.

Bush 2005 Budget Seeks to Rein in Domestic Costs
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 — 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.

They said the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, would control the rising cost of housing vouchers for the poor, require some veterans to pay more for health care, slow the growth in spending on biomedical research and merge or eliminate some job training and employment programs. The moves are intended to trim the programs without damaging any essential services, the administration said.

Cable Joins Ranks of Oakland Shooting Victims
J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR (01-02-04)

At exactly midnight on Christmas Eve, somebody took out the main cable box on our street with small arms fire, I think, perhaps as an East Oakland-type of commentary on the continually descending quality of Comcast’s programming. We tend to be blunt and plain-spoken out this way.

Anyway, I’m sure the cable went out at exactly midnight, whatever the cause. They sent three repair trucks out 10 hours later, searching the utility poles for evidence of damage, and while two of them were up there on the booms, the third one dropped by the house and asked if we might want to upgrade our service to digital. I declined. I’ll wait 'til they include the radar attachment that detects incoming fire.

I am also sure that the cable blackout was immediately preceded by five rounds, fired in rapid succession. 9 millimeter, maybe? I forgot to ask the neighborhood children, who are becoming expert in detecting caliber and model. Gunshots are not as common in our part of the world as they are in, say, the Sunni Triangle, but we get our share. Mostly, by way of response, we apply the footstep principle. If you hear gunshots, you must stand very still and quiet and listen for footsteps running on the pavement outside. If you hear no rapid footsteps, you can let out your breath and go about your business, and surmise that this was only someone shooting at the cable box, or Mars retreating, or one of the raccoons rummaging through a stray bin of garbage. If you hear footsteps, running, then you must quickly apply the Doppler Effect (remember when you told your high school science teacher that you’d only learn this stuff if it could someday save your life; well, wise-ass, now’s your chance). Are the footsteps coming toward your house, or retreating? If they are retreating, continue to stand still and listen for further developments. If they are coming towards your house, find cover. Chances are, more excitement will soon follow.

"Fear of a Black Hat", a documentary about the career of a rap group called NWH, or Niggaz With Hats.

For white folks around my age, think "This Is Spinal Tap"

Jan. 5: Start fooling around with WordPress and PHP-Nuke.
Jan. 7: MTClient Release Candidate 1.
Jan. 8-13: Build just one more computer to act as a server for the home network.
Jan 14: The real New Years Day. I knew what I was going to do, but now I don't. I'll likely be at some jazz performance or other.
Jan: 15 - 31: MTClient version 1.0, possibly as late as the 31st, most likely around the 21st.

Israel to add settlers in Golan
Syria protests plans for big expansion in annexed territory
Craig S. Smith, New York Times
Thursday, January 1, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Jerusalem -- Israel plans a major expansion of Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights, the government confirmed Wednesday. The announcement angered Syria, from which Israel seized the territory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The plan, approved two weeks ago and disclosed Tuesday, comes just two months after Syria's president, Bashar Assad, called for renewed peace talks between his country and Israel.

Israeli government officials said the expansion plan had been in the works for months and denied that its approval was intended as a response to Assad's vague proposal, made during an interview with the New York Times.

Assad said in the interview that he wished to resume talks, broken off nearly three years ago, on returning the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for security guarantees to Israel.

But the Israeli agriculture minister, Yisrael Katz, who heads the government's settlement committee, told Israeli radio and television Wednesday that the plan was meant to send Assad the message that "the Golan is an inseparable part of the State of Israel, and we have no intention to give up our hold."

Katz's spokesman, Benni Romm, said late Wednesday that "the message for the terrorist, Assad," is that there is a cost for "his harboring terrorists." In October Israel attacked what it described as a terrorist training camp in Syria.

The expansion plans would pour about $90 million into existing settlements in the 720-square-mile territory and bring in 900 Jewish families over the next three years. The investment would focus on developing agriculture and tourism. The new settlers would increase the number of Israelis in the thinly populated highland area by about a quarter.

The money quote:

January 2, 2004

Seven months after Congress voted to slash the tax rate on income from stock dividends, the verdict from investors and corporate managers is decidedly mixed.

The Bush administration promoted the tax cut, which lowered the top federal tax rate on dividends to 15 percent from 38.6 percent, as part of a broader economic stimulus package. But by making dividend income more attractive to investors, the effects were expected to go beyond just putting more spending money in some people's pockets.

Many economists predicted that the cut would boost the appeal of dividend-paying stocks compared with interest-paying bank accounts or bonds, giving the stock market overall a lift.

The change also was expected to force corporate managers to be better stewards of shareholders' capital in the long run. Instead of holding on to earnings for their own pet projects, managers were expected to think more about returning profit directly to investors via dividends, thereby allowing the marketplace to decide how the money should be put to work.

It's now apparent that the tax cut has had some effect, but experts differ on whether the reality has lived up to the hype:

Democracy Sags in Serbia

January 2, 2004

President Bush declared in November that the United States was leading a "global democratic revolution." But what happens when radicals hijack democracy for their own anti-democratic ends? [P6: they elect neocons] Serbia's election last Sunday, in which nationalists garnered the biggest share of the vote, offers a fresh reminder that it's easier to champion than to create viable democratic societies.

Serbia is not on the verge of a return to genocidal wars against Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. Serbia's humiliating defeat by NATO forces in 1999 during the Kosovo war punctured its pretensions to great-power status in the Balkans. But upheaval and assassinations have hampered its path toward stability and a prosperous economy. As long as ultranationalism remains a serious force, international corporations will be reluctant to invest in Serbia, and its eventual entry into the European Union will be slowed. [P6: which means the USofA can't join either]

Critics Say Education Dept. Is Favoring Political Right

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A19

When Arizona schools superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan and a group of predominantly conservative educators launched the Education Leaders Council (ELC) in 1995, their proclaimed goal was to upset an educational establishment long dominated by the Democrats and left-leaning teachers unions.

Nearly a decade later, Keegan and her allies have become the establishment -- and the left is crying foul.

People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, recently released a report depicting Keegan's group as the center of "a network of right-wing foundations" that have received more than $77 million in U.S. Department of Education funds to promote their "school privatization" agenda. The report noted that a co-founder of the council, former Pennsylvania education secretary Eugene W. Hickok, is now the second-ranking official at the federal department.

While there is a tradition of Republican and Democratic administrations rewarding allies, critics argue that the amount of money steered toward conservative educational groups by the Bush administration far exceeds the practices of the past.

"It's a farce," said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country. "On the one hand, we have the Bush administration claiming that its education reforms are all scientifically based, and on the other hand, we see the administration providing a grab bag of Santa gifts to conservative groups."

The People for the American Way report "exposes a stealth campaign by the administration to reward groups that support its private-school voucher agenda at the expense of strengthening public schools," said Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee.

"Balderdash," said Education Undersecretary Hickok. If there were any favoritism, he said, it was "favoritism in the sense that we support those organizations that support No Child Left Behind," a law President Bush signed in January 2002 that aims to raise educational standards through high-stakes testing and better-qualified teachers.

"Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy," laughed Keegan, chief executive of the ELC, who was a candidate for secretary of education after Bush was elected.

An Education 'Dynamo' Recharges Philadelphia Schools

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A03

PHILADELPHIA

Paul Vallas has been up since 3:30 a.m., when he awoke with heart palpitations. There has been a pepper spray incident at one of his schools. At another school, African American parents are demanding the dismissal of a principal for her alleged use of a racial slur.

It is a typically frazzled day in the frenetic life of the nerdish number cruncher-turned-charismatic educator, the former C-minus high school student who now specializes in fixing broken school systems.

Lanky and rumpled, the 50-year-old Vallas has a down-to-earth vision for the future of public education in America. "It's not rocket science," he insists. Balance the books. Demand high academic standards and strict accountability systems. Zero tolerance for troublemakers. Smaller class sizes. More after-school programs. Let a hundred experiments bloom. Replicate what works, and junk what doesn't.

The methods that Vallas has used to turn around schools first in Chicago and now in Philadelphia -- widely regarded as two of the most troubled districts in the nation -- have attracted nationwide attention. While critics complain that Vallas has tried to do too much too fast, he has won praise from both left and right.

Honestly, not being sure what information allies want shared, I'm inclined to give the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt on this one. It's just that other foreign policy errors have used up the reservoir of good will that would have let this pass with little public reaction.

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page D10

As Lockheed Martin Corp. begins building the first test models of the Joint Strike Fighter, some foreign partners object to security restrictions that the U.S. government has imposed on the project, initially hailed as a prototype for international cooperation.

Some foreign participants in the project who assumed they would get access to certain sensitive technology have found the Pentagon unwilling to share it. Also, some companies complain that it's more difficult than they had expected to get contracts related to the project.

Lockheed Martin and the White House are trying to placate European allies to avoid setbacks to the expected rollout of the new fighter in 2008.

"If we fail to get this right I think you can kiss goodbye to international cooperation programs," said Jeffrey P. Bialos, former defense deputy undersecretary for industrial affairs.

While the State Department isn't likely to ease its reluctance to spread sensitive U.S. technology around the world, Lockheed has begun granting no-bid contracts to companies in some partner countries. The White House also fought to force Congress to water down "Buy America" provisions that would have tightened rules on buying components from overseas.

But the foreign partners aren't entirely mollified and still could walk away from the project, taking their money with them and causing schedule delays, some industry officials fear.

When I worked on Wall Street I saw the back office operations of a couple of mutual fund custodians. I can tell you that allowing the occasional "late trade" was considered good customer service.

Appalled by Betrayal of Fund Investors
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

THE American mutual fund industry will have its 80th birthday in a few months, but no one is much inclined to celebrate. And no wonder: the $7 trillion business, born with the formation of the Massachusetts Investment Trust in Boston in March 1924, is slogging through the worst scandal in its long history.

So far, some of the biggest, oldest and proudest names in the industry - MFS, founder of that first fund; Putnam Investments; and the Janus Capital Group, among them - are facing lawsuits or investigations, and no one is sure when the last muddy shoe will drop.

The technical details may seem a bit arcane to modern investors who can conjure up stock quotes at 2 a.m. on their BlackBerries. Under laws adopted in an era of slower paperwork and more primitive technology, funds are priced once a day, typically at 4 p.m., and all orders received before the deadline are filled at that price. Now, with funds investing globally and market-moving news breaking on a 24-hour cycle, this quaint practice can leave funds with prices that are out-of-date by the legal cutoff.

Exploiting those stale prices by quickly buying shares and cashing out when prices adjust is called market timing. While not illegal, it diverts profits that fairly belong to long-term investors, and it violates the bylaws of many of the funds accused of allowing big hedge fund customers, or their own executives, to do it. Submitting orders after the deadline but getting them filled at the deadline price is called late trading, and it is illegal - although several big hedge funds have been allowed to place late trades as part of their profitable forays into public mutual funds.

To those steeped in the fund industry's traditions, saying the scandal is about late trading and market timing is like saying the scandal at Enron is about how the books were kept. In each case, they say, the larger sin was that trusted, powerful people betrayed those who trusted them in exchange for more money or more power. And it is the betrayal of the trusting middle-class American investors that seemed to weigh most heavily on the minds of the seven industry leaders and former industry regulators who were asked for advice on how regulators, the industry and fund customers should best navigate through this quagmire.

Yup. I seen him play. Boy rocks.

CLEVELAND, Dec. 31 — For a month and a half, LeBron James had the world of basketball wide-eyed and open-mouthed like no one before him. He was 18 years old, fresh out of high school and averaging 17 points, 6 rebounds and 6 assists a game in the National Basketball Association.

Magic Johnson had put up similar numbers at that age, but that was at Michigan State. Michael Jordan had averaged a mere 13 points and 4 rebounds as an 18-year-old at North Carolina, and Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant were N.B.A. reserves for most of their rookie season.

Conventional wisdom said that it would not last, that there was a rookie wall in James's future that would keep him from staying at such a level.

In mid-December, James hit that wall running, scaled it with ease and used it to propel himself into another dimension.

As if it were not enough to enter the N.B.A. playing like an All-Star, James has spent the past two weeks playing like a superstar.

Over the Cleveland Cavaliers' last 10 games, James, a 6-foot-8, 240-pound guard, has averaged 27.7 points a game, scoring more than 30 points five times.

"You'd think he's 25 or 26 years old," said Rod Thorn, the president of the Nets, who will play James Friday night at Continental Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., in what will be James's first visit as a professional to the New York metropolitan area. "It's incredible. You look at Kobe and Garnett and those guys — when they were his age, they weren't as good as he is. Will he get up to their level? I'm not saying he will or won't, but there's never been an 18-year-old guy as good as he is."

NAFTA 10 YEARS LATER
After Initial Boom, Mexico's Economy Goes Bust
Supporters say the free-trade zone has been a success, but critics point to the loss of jobs, factories and investment.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer

8:20 PM PST, January 1, 2004

MEXICALI, Mexico — The heady early years of the North American Free Trade Agreement brought Oscar Garcia opportunities he had scarcely dreamed of.

An electrical engineer raised in Mexicali, he became manager of the biggest factory the city had ever seen — a Mitsubishi plant the size of three football fields where workers assembled computer monitors. Garcia bought a new sport utility vehicle. He paid cash for a new home.

Then, it all came crashing down. Unable to compete with more sophisticated flat-screen monitors made in the Far East, Mitsubishi in August shut the $250-million plant it had opened in 1998, putting Garcia and 1,200 others out of work and leaving most of its machinery to rust in a junkyard. A cluster of high-tech companies that had come up around the factory also closed.

"I thought I would retire with Mitsubishi. It was such a good place to work," Garcia, 36, said. "But I don't see much chance of a new industry coming along to replace it."

Garcia's story mirrors the course of the Mexican economy since NAFTA opened up cross-border commerce and investment 10 years ago.

Labor Dept. Plans To End Overtime Controversy in March
Changes Will Affect Who Gets Time-and-a-Half Pay

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page D01

The Labor Department plans to issue a controversial final rule changing the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime provisions by the end of March, according to a regulatory plan published by the agency last week in the Federal Register. The rule, which would redefine who must receive overtime pay, has drawn opposition in the House and Senate by many Democrats and some Republicans.

"We've said all along we hoped to have a final rule completed by the first quarter of 2003, and that's still our plan," said Victoria A. Lipnic, assistant secretary of labor for employment standards. She hinted that the rules may be modified somewhat to reflect concerns raised by critics but would not be more specific.

"We're certainly not deaf to Congress and to the debate in Congress and what members of Congress are hearing from their constituents," Lipnic said.

She said that the 1938 law needs to be revised and updated because the economy today is different from when the law was enacted and that confusion over who should qualify for overtime has led to lawsuits. Changes in the overtime rules eventually could affect millions of workers nationwide. About 11 million workers received overtime pay in 2002. The administration has proposed changes that would end mandatory overtime pay for many who now qualify but would expand overtime coverage to other workers.

A Community of Ex-Cons Shows How to Bring Prisoners Back Into Society
By ADAM COHEN

SAN FRANCISCO

Gerald Miller, a maître d'hôtel at the Delancey Street Restaurant here, could teach a tutorial on his craft. Smile at the diners no matter how annoying they are, he says. And when they have a complaint, murmur, "Sorry, sorry, sorry," while swiftly making it right. None of this is remarkable for someone trained in the restaurant trade. But until he signed on, the only jobs Mr. Miller had held were burglar, drug dealer and armed robber.

The Delancey Street Restaurant, with its staff made up entirely of ex-criminals, is a Bay Area institution, drawing enthusiastic crowds. It is also the centerpiece of the Delancey Street Foundation, where ex-convicts live together, run businesses and move to self-sufficiency. After three decades and 14,000 graduates, Delancey Street is at the intersection of two white-hot trends: the growing focus on "re-entry," the moment prisoners rejoin society, and "social entrepreneurship," using business to tackle social problems.

It is also well positioned ideologically. In a field overrun with liberal and conservative platitudes, it reflects the pragmatism of Mimi Silbert, who holds a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of California at Berkeley and who founded the group with an ex-convict in 1971. Dr. Silbert, who grew up in an immigrant family and worked on a kibbutz, drew heavily on both experiences to create an environment emphasizing hard work and mutual support.

Delancey Street's "third way" — neither harshly punitive, nor mindlessly permissive — has won backers ranging from Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, to George Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan.

Now Dr. Silbert is trying to replicate her model nationally. Working with a foundation that has a federal grant, she is helping to create programs in Virginia, South Carolina and Alaska. She may face an uphill battle in an age when the biggest idea in dealing with criminals is "three strikes and you're out" laws, which can put even small-time repeat offenders away for life. But her efforts may help bring down the nation's record prison population, saving taxpayers significant amounts of money and reclaiming some of the people lost in the system.

Some School Districts Challenge Bush's Signature Education Law
By SAM DILLON

EADING, Pa. — A small but growing number of school systems around the country are beginning to resist the demands of President Bush's signature education law, saying its efforts to raise student achievement are too costly and too cumbersome.

The school district here in Reading recently filed suit contending that Pennsylvania, in enforcing the federal law, had unfairly judged Reading's efforts to educate thousands of recent immigrants and unreasonably required the impoverished city to offer tutoring and other services for which there is no money.

"We're not trying to make a political statement, but this law can just overwhelm a school system's ability to meet its requirements, especially when a district is as financially stressed as we are," said Fred Gaige, a school board member. His school system has been struggling to comply with the law, he said, even as it flirts with bankruptcy because the local manufacturing economy is collapsing.

The law, known as No Child Left Behind and signed in January 2002, seeks to raise achievement by penalizing schools where test scores do not meet annual targets. It is the most sweeping plan to shake up public education in a generation, as well as the most intrusive federal intervention in local schools. But until recently it had provoked little more than grumbling, though polls showed that educators in most of the nation's 15,000 districts considered several of its requirements ill-conceived.

In recent weeks, however, three Connecticut school districts have rejected federal money rather than comply with the red tape that accompanies the law, and several Vermont districts have shifted federal poverty money away from schools to shield them from sanctions.

Republican lawmakers from the National Council of State Legislatures, who consider the law a violation of states' rights, took their complaints to the White House in November, where they got a chilly reception.

Now, several say they will press their case in their home states. A Republican legislator has introduced a bill that would prohibit Utah authorities from complying with the law or accepting the $100 million it would bring the state. Half a dozen other state legislatures have voted to study similar action.

Some analysts see the scattered actions as the front end of a backlash that will probably swell this year, when early penalties are likely to be imposed on thousands of schools across the nation.

Britain Says U.S. Planned to Seize Oil in '73 Crisis
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

LONDON, Jan. 1 — The United States government seriously contemplated using military force to seize oil fields in the Middle East during the Arab oil embargo 30 years ago, according to a declassified British government document made public on Thursday.

The top-secret document says that President Richard M. Nixon was prepared to act more aggressively than previously thought to secure America's oil supply if the embargo, imposed by Arab nations in retaliation for America's support for Israel in the 1973 Middle East war, did not end. In fact, the embargo was lifted in March 1974.

The declassified British memorandum said the United States considered launching airborne troops to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, but only as a "last resort."

President Nixon's defense secretary, James R. Schlesinger, delivered the warning to Lord Cromer, the British ambassador in Washington at the time. In the document, Lord Cromer was quoted as saying of Mr. Schlesinger, "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."

The seizure of the oil fields was "the possibility uppermost in American thinking when they refer to the use of force," the memorandum said.

Human Rights as Victim of Politics
By MAX BOOT

FREEDOM ON FIRE
Human Rights Wars and America's Response
By John Shattuck
390 pages. Harvard University Press. $29.95.

Most memoirs of government service are written by senior cabinet members or White House aides, and their theme, implicit or explicit, is: Look how powerful I was. The Clinton administration has produced a slew of books along those lines, by the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Sidney Blumenthal, Madeleine Albright and Robert Rubin. John Shattuck, who served from 1993 to 1998 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, has produced a different sort of memoir. Its theme is: Look how powerless I was.

Mr. Shattuck, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, vice chairman of Amnesty International and vice president of Harvard, joined the State Department determined to elevate human rights to the top of the foreign policy agenda. He had every reason to expect that he would be successful, for as a candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton criticized the first Bush administration's policies from Bosnia to China as amoral. But Mr. Shattuck was disillusioned when he realized that there was no consensus within the new administration over the priority to be given to combating repression.

Only strong direction from the top could have broken through bureaucratic logjams, but President Clinton was seldom willing to provide that push. The president was more focused on economic concerns, and after the Somalia debacle in 1993 he was leery of putting soldiers into harm's way. Mr. Shattuck traces the results of that caution in four crises he participated in — Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia and China — all of which he labels, confusingly, as "human-rights wars," a term he never defines and never distinguishes from plain old ordinary wars.

Mr. Shattuck tried to interest Washington in stopping the killing of some 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994. But he had trouble getting the administration even to admit that "genocide" was occurring. He and other human-rights activists had more luck getting the United States involved in Haiti because it was closer to home and there was a domestic political constituency (mainly the Congressional Black Caucus) for reinstating Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But although United States troops occupied Haiti in 1995, Mr. Clinton was so eager for an "exit strategy" that, in Mr. Shattuck's words, the country quickly "slid back toward its long tradition of political corruption and government repression."

Yesterday we had Bob Parks drop by to challenge my statement in the comments that it's a ballsy lie to claim liberal whites voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My response is in the comments

We also had Noah show up and toss around a few insults in the comments because I wasn't nice to White Supremacists in Arizona. I thought his comment needed no response.

I see nothing that would let me know some cosmic milestone had been passed. If it were not for the new calendar…

I may have to re-rip all my CDs. Some 1500 tracks.

I'm trying to find out when Zora Neil Hurston coined the terms "Nigerrati" and "Negrotarian."

Interesting stuff seen during the search:

A study question about "Dust Tracks in the Road" by Zora Neal Hurston, from the Story Circle Network Reading Circle.

U.S. to celebrate New Year's under with unprecedented security
LAURA WIDES, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Security will be extra tight at this year's New Year's celebrations around the country, with military helicopters patrolling over the Rose Parade, Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip.

"I think the level of security this time around within the United States is absolutely unprecedented," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said on CBS's "The Early Show."

As revelers prepare for New Year's Eve, the nation's terrorism alert is at its second-highest level, though officials said there were no specific threats against the holiday gatherings and urged people to go ahead with their plans.

In Las Vegas, where 300,000 revelers are expected on the Strip, officials announced that armed military helicopters will fly overhead.

Jerry Bussell, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn's adviser on homeland security, said military helicopters will also be used in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington and other cities with big outdoor gatherings.

Ye GHODS.

December 31, 2003

BERLIN — Every day there's another grisly revelation, a new stomach-turning detail about the smiling, smartly dressed computer technician known as "the cannibal."

The trial of Armin Meiwes — charged with killing and eating a willing victim he befriended in an Internet chat room — is taking the German public on a dark ride into the human psyche. It is a glimpse into a hidden world where a disturbed man's fantasies were advertised and acted upon in a macabre corner of cyberspace.

Among the most startling revelations of the trial so far has been Meiwes' testimony that more than 200 people answered his ad seeking a young man "who wanted to be eaten." This has touched off a stream of media commentary about how the Internet — a tool of wonder and modernity — has been pressed into serving base and deadly human desires.

"This trial will write judicial history, and it already now belongs to the bizarre side of progress in [electronic] communications," wrote the daily Der Tagesspiegel as the trial entered its third week. "Without the Internet it would have been unthinkable that such an offer meets such a demand. Now, it is thinkable, but it remains incomprehensible."

The case has raised concerns across this nation about the Internet's vast and virtually unregulated terrain. For many Germans, the prospect of a person clicking his or her way through Web sites to find victims has left them uneasy about the power of information technology.

"Be it sexual criminals or necrophiliacs or sadists or masochists, there are hundreds out there on the Internet," Meiwes told the court, according to the Berliner Morgenpost.

The narrative of the crime is not in dispute. In March 2001, Meiwes, a 41-year-old loner, posted his ad in an Internet chat room. The missive was answered by Bernd Brandes, a 42-year-old Berlin engineer with a history of depression. Meiwes invited Brandes to his half-timbered farmhouse in the central German city of Rotenburg, where Brandes numbed himself with sleeping pills and schnapps.

Meiwes sliced off and cooked part of Brandes' flesh and the two men ate it, according to court records. Brandes then took a bath while Meiwes read a book. Hours later, Meiwes stabbed Brandes to death, cut his body into pieces and placed them in his freezer. Meiwes told a German magazine that over the next several days he dined on Brandes, sometimes flavoring his meal with oil and garlic while drinking South African red wine.

"I had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it," Meiwes told the court recently in the city of Kassel, where the trial is expected to last until the end of January.

Searching to Bring the Lessons Home

By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 31, 2003; Page A01

It had been more than four years since she persuaded the people of Enoosaen to send her to college in the United States -- to support, for once, those grand ambitions in a girl. She had made many promises in exchange for their endorsement and had half assumed that she'd be ready to return by now to start delivering on them. That she would be trying to open a school for girls. Or a clinic. Or helping those women sitting around her mother's table start their own businesses.

But for now she was not doing any of those things. She was getting ready for her senior year at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg. Her education had made her realize just how big the world was. How vast the needs. And how much more she had to learn before she could really make a difference in a Kenyan village with no running water, with no paved roads. She would have to get a master's degree.

And then a doctorate.

Or perhaps a law degree, which would mean several more years in America before she could try to make good on her promises.

Earlier in the summer, Ntaiya had received news that fed her guilt over leaving home. Her 20-year-old sister Naserian was getting married -- throwing away the education their mother had labored to provide and rushing into the kind of careless young union that Ntaiya felt had doomed so many of their childhood friends to poverty.

"If I were there," she said bitterly, "I could stop this marriage."

But she was not there. And so there were things she simply could not do, and things she could not see. Like how a few homes now had electricity. And how the policies of Kenya's new president had filled the village school with children. And how, among even some of the people closest to her, attitudes about women and education were fast evolving.

Her home was changing, without her. Just as she was changing without her home.

These articles are based on interviews with and observations of Kakenya Ntaiya (pronounced kah-KEHN-yah n-ta-YAH) that began in spring 2001, the year after she arrived in Lynchburg, Va., to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College. In August, staff writer Amy Argetsinger and staff photographer Jahi Chikwendiu spent a week with Ntaiya's family, neighbors and teachers in Enoosaen (pronounced eh-noh-sah-YEHN), Kenya. Swahili and Maa translators assisted with some interviews there. Other sources were Ntaiya's classmates, professors and college officials in Virginia.

• In a New Country, Confusion and Doubts (The Washington Post, Dec 30, 2003)
• A Road Paved With Pledges and Pain (The Washington Post, Dec 29, 2003)
• Her Extraordinary Education (The Washington Post, Dec 28, 2003)

Disclaimer: You can have me steak when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

That disclaimed, The Washington Post, among others, tells enough about how cows become meat to make you wonder.

I would like to know who was the sicko that first said, "Hey…I can grind up that dead cow and feed it to my other cows instead of just throwing the heffa away!"

The Budget Politics of Being Poor

Quietly and painfully, most states are choosing to crimp the health-care safety net for their poorest and most politically defenseless residents. An ominous new study shows that up to 1.6 million impoverished and working-poor Americans — at least a third of them children — have been deliberately knocked from publicly financed health care programs in the last two years. Officials in 34 states are opting to slash Medicaid and poor children's health insurance coverage as a path of least resistance to the balanced budgets mandated by law.

States have raised poverty standards beyond federal requirements, increased bureaucratic delays and even shut down children's health programs entirely to keep entitled poor people off the rolls. For each dollar thereby saved in the state budget, statehouses are losing $4 to $7 in federal aid. Yet more such counterproductive "economizing" can be expected next year, according to the study, by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a government watchdog group.

During the 1990's boom, those who despaired of getting universal health insurance through federal action looked to expanding state programs as the best way to protect the working poor. But many of the same states that were increasing health coverage were also cutting taxes. Unlike the feckless tax-cutters in Congress, they cannot simply bury the resulting deficits in future debt. Something had to give, and it turns out to be programs like the hard-won gains in health insurance.

Things would be even worse except for the $20 billion in state emergency aid that the Republican-led Congress was embarrassed into approving at the height of the tax-cut frenzy this year. Since Congress is showing no signs of picking up the slack when it comes to health coverage, it should vote at least a renewal of this aid next year.

Corporate Pensions Face Pressure Despite Rally
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

This year's stock market rally has added more than $100 billion to corporate America's depleted pension funds, but even that has not been enough to offset forces that continue to weaken the funds.

If all of America's 500 largest companies had to make good on their promises to workers and retirees immediately, they would have to plug a $259 billion gap in their pension funds, according to a study by Standard & Poor's which will be published soon. A year ago, even though stock prices were lower, the same companies were considerably closer to meeting their obligations, being only $212 billion short.

That is because their obligations to their workers have spiraled up at an even faster pace than stocks have risen. One obvious reason for this is that as the baby boom generation ages, many more people are starting to claim their money. Another factor is that many pension calculations incorporate several years' worth of data, to smooth out sharp fluctuations, so the market shocks of the last three years are still working their way through the system. Finally, an otherwise positive economic development, low interest rates, is an albatross on the funds because they magnify the value of future pension obligations in today's dollars.

Whatever the reasons, for the nation's corporate pension funds to have lost ground in this year's bull market suggests that the troubles that flared up in the bear market will not be easily cured, and almost certainly not by market gains alone. But after more than a year's search for solutions, officials with responsibility for the $1.6 trillion sector remain sharply divided on what to do.

Arthur Silber writes books for blog entries. This particular one has its genesis in the hooting joy warbloggers expressed over Saddam Hussein…and make no mistake, it wasn't the capture that set Arthur off, it was the hooting. That and the level of denigration heaped on anyone who did anything less than have two small orgasms over it.

Used to be a lot of that going on in BlogNet. Steve Gilliard suggests starting it up again.

Atrios concurs:

…and throws a bone to all you link whores.

…but he's in rare form.

Then again, Star Parker can do that to you.

I suppose when these guys are done we'll have to recalculate all the productivity figures.

December 30, 2003
By Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Watch

Microsoft Corp.'s brass has committed to doubling productivity in the coming decade from the levels achieved in the 1990s. But such a promise begs the questions: How (and why) do you measure productivity? And is measuring productivity as subjective as measuring total cost of ownership?

Microsoft and other industry partners, including Cisco Systems Inc., Xerox Corp. and McKinsey & Co., are gearing up to answer these questions—at least in part.

On Feb. 2 in New York, the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) will hold an invitation-only, daylong summit on the nature of business productivity. This event will mark the first time that the IWPC showcases some of the areas on which it has been focusing.

The council is sponsoring what it is calling the "Information Work Forum," which is designed to bring together academia, government and industry to discuss maximizing business productivity, profitability and performance through information work strategies, solutions and services, according to the invitation. The IWPC was founded a little over a year ago by Microsoft, Accenture, British Telecom, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Co., SAP AG, Xerox and others. Microsoft's industry director for the IWPC, Susan Conway, described the council as "an independent group of companies and academics brought together to study the issue of information work based productivity and profitability."

I must admit I find this (by Foxman):

to be an exceedingly small nit to pick…

December 28, 2003

NEW YORK — Throughout the 1990s and even after Sept. 11, 2001, discussions about anti-Semitism often included the view that Jew hatred had diminished and was no longer a real threat. Such complacency is dangerous. Anti-Semitism is not a relic of history but a current event. Its resurgence is stronger and more widespread than even the most pessimistic among us predicted. And the threat is growing. Indeed, the contemporary rise of this oldest hatred in the world is by far the greatest since the 1930s, sharing some characteristics of that most terrible time for Jews. But it also has new forms and modes of transmission.

December 28, 2003

TORONTO — Jewish and non-Jewish commentators alike have deplored a recent upsurge in anti-Semitism. In Europe, journalist Andrew Sullivan says, "Not since the 1930s has such blithe hatred of Jews gained this much respectability in world opinion."

Yet, Jews like myself and the Israeli journalist Ran HaCohen feel quite differently. He writes: "It is high time to say it out loud: In the entire course of Jewish history, since the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC, there has never been an era blessed with less anti-Semitism than ours. There has never been a better time for Jews to live in than our own."

Why would a Jew say such a thing? What is anti-Semitism, and how much of a danger is it in the world today?

If both sides agree on anything, it's that the definition of "anti-Semitism" has been manipulated for political ends. Leftists accuse ardent Zionists of inflating the definition to include — and discredit — critics of Israel. Zionists accuse the left of deflating the definition to apologize for covert prejudice against Jews.

It's a sterile dispute. Even in this age of intellectual property, no one owns the word. But the definitional sparring does have its missteps and dangers.

The first tells against deflationists who claim that anti-Semitism is really hatred of Semites (including Arabs), not just Jews. This confuses etymology with meaning. You might as well say that, in reality, lesbians are simply those who live on the Greek island of Lesbos.

On the other hand, to inflate the definition by including critics of Israel is, if not exactly incorrect, self-defeating and dangerous. No one can stop you from proclaiming all criticism of Israel anti-Semitic. But that makes anti-Semites out of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, not to mention tens of thousands of Jews.

What then prevents someone from concluding that anti-Semitism must be, at least in some cases, justifiable, courageous, highly moral? Is this a message any prudent Jew or anti-racist would want to encourage?

Bitter Harvest for Productive Labor Force
Output is up but workers see little increase in wages and jobs. 'White- collar assembly line' is ailing.
By Simon Head

December 28, 2003

For the last 2 1/2 years the economy's Achilles' heel has been its failure to create a strong flow of new jobs. There is, however, another negative characteristic of the labor markets that affects not just the 6% of Americans who do not have jobs but also most of the 94% who do.

During the last eight years an enormous gap has opened between the growth of employee productivity — measured by the value of employee output per hour — and the growth of employee compensation, measured by the value of hourly wages and benefits.

Economists like increases in productivity because the gains can improve the earnings and living standards of working Americans. But an economy that fails to distribute the fruits of rising productivity to those who have helped create it is as flawed as an economy that delivers little or no productivity increases at all. Yet this is exactly what has been happening in the United States.

Boston Globe:

Washington Post:

Minorities, Women Gain Professionally

By D'Vera Cohn and Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 30, 2003; Page A01

Women and minorities made significant gains in some prestigious professions during the 1990s, especially as doctors, but their progress was uneven in other occupations where white males still dominate, according to Census Bureau figures released yesterday.

Decades after civil rights campaigns opened hiring to women, the nation's police and fire departments remain overwhelmingly male, census numbers show. But minorities have made strides in both fields, helped by lawsuits and a recent push for recruitment of Spanish-speaking police officers.

Overall, women and minorities make up a growing share of all civilian workers, although the figures point to varied progress across occupations, which is reshaping the nation's labor force. Gathered during the 2000 Census, the statistics will be used by the federal government to measure progress in equal employment and will be the basis for litigation and research for the next decade.

In the high-status professions, the figures show, women now hold a substantial share of jobs.

"There's been quite a lot of diversification by gender in categories like doctors and lawyers," said Marc Bendick Jr., a Washington-based labor economist. "You'll find some progress but much slower by race and ethnicity."

That would explain both the earthquake and the new attitude…

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2003; Page A01

The United States is open to restoring a dialogue with Iran after "encouraging" moves by the Islamic republic in recent months, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday.

Iranian leaders have agreed to allow surprise inspections of the country's nuclear energy program, have made overtures to moderate Arab governments and, in the past week, have accepted direct U.S. help as the country struggles with the effects of a devastating earthquake.

"There are things happening, and therefore we should keep open the possibility of dialogue at an appropriate point in the future," Powell, who is recovering from surgery for prostate cancer, said in an interview. "All of those things taken together show, it seems to me, a new attitude in Iran in dealing with these issues -- not one of total, open generosity. But they realize that the world is watching and the world is prepared to take action."

Powell's public assessment comes as the administration is reviewing its policy on Iran for the third time since President Bush took office, other U.S. officials said.

Money quote for those who feel the market is the cheapest way to go:

DON'T BE SURPRISED if health care turns out to be the sleeper issue in the 2004 presidential campaign and if a majority of Americans eventually decide that a single-payer system is the most cost-efficient way to provide health care for everyone.

Why? Because our health system -- a fragmented hodgepodge of private and public-health plans -- is broken.

HMOs -- which pay huge amounts for administrative and bureaucratic costs, advertising and skyrocketing drug prices -- no longer can contain costs. They have also turned the health-care system into a blizzard of paperwork.

Physicians who recently resisted a single-payer system have grown increasingly resentful of HMO bureaucrats who micromanage their medical decisions. Inadequate reimbursements are driving some out of business. They also dislike having to consult dozens of drug lists or formularies before they can prescribe medicine for their patients. They'd rather spend time caring for sick people.

Businesses, which seek a level playing field, may also become supporters of a single-payer system. Consider the inequities they face. General Motors, which has a huge group of retired workers, must pay for their lifetime health costs. Newer companies, however, either don't offer health-care benefits to workers or retired workers or don't yet have any retired workers to worry about.

Labor, too, is a natural constituency for a single-payer system. The three-monthlong grocery workers' strike in Southern California against major supermarkets has highlighted the burden businesses now bear for paying for their workers' health care. How can Safeway, which has paid decent wages and benefits, compete with union-busting Wal-Mart, which pays subsistence wages and offers health-care insurance at unaffordable premiums?

It can't. To avoid a race to the bottom, each employer should not have to pay for their workers' health care. Instead, through an equitable tax, they should contribute to a single-payer health system.

Our So-Called Boom
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It was a merry Christmas for Sharper Image and Neiman Marcus, which reported big sales increases over last year's holiday season. It was considerably less cheery at Wal-Mart and other low-priced chains. We don't know the final sales figures yet, but it's clear that high-end stores did very well, while stores catering to middle- and low-income families achieved only modest gains.

Based on these reports, you may be tempted to speculate that the economic recovery is an exclusive party, and most people weren't invited. You'd be right.

Commerce Department figures reveal a startling disconnect between overall economic growth, which has been impressive since last spring, and the incomes of a great majority of Americans. In the third quarter of 2003, as everyone knows, real G.D.P. rose at an annual rate of 8.2 percent. But wage and salary income, adjusted for inflation, rose at an annual rate of only 0.8 percent. More recent data don't change the picture: in the six months that ended in November, income from wages rose only 0.65 percent after inflation.

Why aren't workers sharing in the so-called boom?

The Unkept Promise

There is a deceiving sense of timelessness to the stillness of rural life. The jungles of Mindanao offer few clues as to whether it's the early 20th century, or the early 21st. Nor do the highlands of Guatemala, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam or the cotton-rich plains of the Sahel in West Africa. But these disparate regions are very much of the present, stitched into the quilt of global commerce. World trade links us to them, as surely as it links London, Tokyo and New York.

In an effort to understand that relationship, we visited some of the poorest nations in the world in the last six months. We listened to 12-year-old Arnel Mamac's parents on Mindanao, the Philippine island besieged by an Islamist terrorist group, tearfully say they often don't let him walk to school because they fear he may not have the energy to make it on an empty stomach. In a cotton-growing village in Burkina Faso we saw a school with two rooms, but because of a lack of funds, only one classroom was finished. Most unsettling, to an American, is the realization that our nation's agricultural policies — its protectionist trade barriers and the billions in subsidies doled out to its own farmers — contribute mightily to the hardships felt by poor farmers in the developing world.

The club of rich nations that wrote the rules of global trade has been aggressive in dismantling barriers when it comes to industrial goods and services, in which they hold a comparative advantage. But they refuse to do the same when it comes to agriculture. Politically powerful farm lobbies in Japan, Europe and the United States are not willing to face global competition on fair terms. So agriculture remains the hypocritical asterisk to our fervent free-trade and free-enterprise creed.

Bring good energy.

An Alternative Theory for Perpetual Motion

We at APS News are continually entertained and enlightened by the various and sundry tidbits we find floating in the ether of the Internet, especially when we discover heretofore unsuspected scientific theories. An un-named British magazine supposedly held a competition recently, inviting its readers to submit new scientific theories on ANY subject. Below is the winner, on the subject of perpetual motion:

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. Therefore, if a slice of toast is strapped to a cat's back, buttered side up, and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground. If enough toast-laden felines were used, they could form the basis of a high-speed monorail system.

The magazine then got this letter in reply from one of the recipients:

Nation of Islam Is Said to Control Michael Jackson's Business Affairs
By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 29 - Officials from the Nation of Islam, a separatist African-American Muslim group, have moved in with Michael Jackson and are asserting control over the singer's business affairs, friends, employees and business associates of Mr. Jackson said.

Initially invited to the Neverland Ranch several weeks ago to provide security for Mr. Jackson, members of the Nation of Islam are now restricting access to him and have begun making decisions for him related to the news media, his business affairs and even his legal strategy, some of Mr. Jackson's friends and associates said. Mr. Jackson faces charges of child molesting in Santa Barbara and recently moved into a rented house in Los Angeles, where Nation of Islam officials have accompanied him.

Efforts to reach Mr. Jackson through his spokesman were not successful.

If you search on "Kobe Bryant Accuser Picture" at Popdex, you get a link to that picture of me I posted last week. Why? I haven't a clue, but it servers the seekers right.

sigh

"by and large" leaves me a out. Okay. And coupled with this, which I understand the sentiment behind, I ain't mad. I do sometimes wonder how I can have so much experience in common with someone, agree so much so often, and still run across clunkers like this. It may have something to do with (technically) not being responsible for anyone but myself anymore.

The differences aren't that much greater than those I have with a number of Black folks who wouldn't stand within five feet of a Republican, though. And though Cobb skewered Dickerson for her Kwanzaa editorial, from the description of her next book I'd bet they'd get along famously (as long as no one mentioned Kwanzaa).

And for the record, as long as Republicans send me to the trough rather than the table, I ain't feeling them.

The Black World Today was offline for hella long, and now it's back.

And no one told me.

MTClient version 0.4 is ready and very solid. It's good enough to be a release candidate...the only reason it's not is to give myself the extra two days to shake it out.

Why it's good

• Intuitive, easy–to–use interface
• Post entries to your Movable Type blog
• Edit previously–published entries
• Easy text and paragraph markup. Add bold, links, blockquotes, and paragraph alignment quickly and easily.
• Support for Movable Type all entry fields including:
  • Title
  • Body
  • Extended Entry
  • Excerpt
  • Keywords
  • Multiple categories
  • Comment Status
  • Send TrackBack pings
  • Edit entry date
• Offline operation
• Save posts as draft
• Manage multiple blogs on multiple sites
• It correctly converts between the high ASCII characters that choke most other desktop clients and HTML entities. In fact, it has a pop–up (Ctrl–Alt–E) that pastes Latin–1 entities into a message for you
• File uploads (Ctrl–Alt–U) copies the URL of the uploaded file to the clipboard

Things to note:

• First thing you have to do is run the Account Setup dialog (Ctrl–Alt–S) that gets your blog information
• There's no way of editing the configuration within the program at this point. Some things can be manually edited. However, I came up with a much easier way of handling program configuration for the next version that won't be much grief now but will be if I have to change a user interface as well as an engine.
• It's written such that multiple installations, installing new versions over old ones. This is because it doesn't touch your registry at all. There's an undelete program, but all you really need to do is delete the directory it's in.
• Spell checking works.
• Thesaurus works
• Pasting richtext (from IE or MS–Office) is done using the Edit|Paste unformatted command

Bad things:

• There's no documentation or help files yet, but I honestly don't think anyone will need them. Just mouse around the menus and toolbar.
• Configuring the spell checker requires going through the context menu or dialog box that pops up when you actually do a spell check.
• Several things that the program would profit from remembering across sessions, aren't.
• No post preview

Good things

• All the bad things will be fixed next version

A print–based fisking of Debra Dickerson's Kwanzaa editorial from the other day.

It never fails. Every single year for the past six years, at least, I have witnessed the consistent pattern. At least one or more persons from an online discussion list usually waits until December 26th, the first day of Kwanzaa, and sends an anti–Kwanzaa editorial published, you guessed it, just in time for the holiday season!

Sometimes it's written by a right–wing basher, other times it's written by a Negro working for a conservative think tank. Sometimes it's written by a supposedly hard–core, fundamentalist Black Christian insistent upon the idolatry of the holiday, always forgetting the legacy of the Crusades and the pagan origin of the generous–hearted St. Nicholas traditions. Other
times, it's written by a more balanced hand in both perspective and orientation. But at all times, the conclusion is the same—there is no real or valid reason to celebrate Kwanzaa.

This year's offering was written by Debra Dickerson, journalist, lifetime overachiever and author of "An American Story". Her article entitled, "A Case of the Kwanzaa Blues" appeared in the New York Times opinion section on December 26, 2003, to which this article is a response.

Editor's Note: Dr. Kimberly Ellis is a freelance writer as well as a Visiting Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

So, last week or so I haven't been talking about anyone else's blog. Yesterday I started dropping by some of the old haunts again and of course I find some interesting stuff here and there.

Today I decided to look at web stats and such. I visited the TTLB Ecosystem for the first time in two–three weeks. Shockingly, I'm still a large primate. Next was Technorati, where I found a number of blogs that are new to me have blogrolled P6.

American Black: Check out the blogroll. He's got a big jump on a project I had in mind. I think that's the best collection of links to Black journalists I've seen yet. Right difficult to get a grip on all the Black editorial bloggers, but Clicks has a grip on that too.

TVPoison at mind riot! dropped me some complimentary email and has me as guest blogger of the month. Month's about over, but at least I noticed in time to feel flattered for a couple of days.

Susan at laser_eraser is new enough to blogging not to be obsessed by it. Yet.

debitage makes me realize how long it had been since I checked Technorati. Stentor Danielson HAS been blogging for a while and I'm not sure how long he's had me blogrolled. Basically political but not about any fixed subject. And I wasn't going to do this, but I must: there's a reference on the site to "feminist geography," and I'd really like to know what that is.

Then there's Editor's Office. The Editrix has been blogging for what looks like two months, and I share the blogroll with Instapundit, Davids Medienkritik, Little Green Footballs, Merde in France, Anti–Idiotarian Rottweiler, Biased BBC, Cum Grano Salis, IsraPundit. Bill Spricht, HonestReportingBlog, Cox&Forkum, NRO's Blog 'The Corner,' David Yeagley, Daniel Pipes, Richard Poe, David Horowitz, angry left, Steven Plaut, Iconoclast's Daily Blog, EGO, FactsOfIsrael, USS Clueless, Judicious Asininity, Daryl Cagle's Web Log, I M A O, EYE ON THE LEFT, ALLAH IS IN THE HOUSE, EuroPundits, and Four Right Wing Wackos. I honestly don't know what to make of that.

Iraqi Council Flexes Muscles
The U.S.–appointed body is increasingly defying the coalition and pushing its own vision of a free and self–governing Iraq.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

December 29, 2003

BAGHDAD — Seen by a distrustful public as a tool of the occupying powers, Iraq's Governing Council is coming of age on the job as it tries to define a leadership to take over from the United States and its allies.

But as the 25–member body steers Iraq toward sovereignty, promised in a mere six months, it is acting like a defiant adolescent, challenging the authority and wisdom of those who gave it life. And its bargaining position has been strengthened by the Bush administration's apparent eagerness to declare its mission accomplished before the U.S. presidential election.

No longer the passive instrument that U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III used to carve the contours of a new Iraq, the council has become increasingly assertive, demanding control of the reconstruction purse strings and the authority to supplant Bremer's vision with its own.

Council members complained that fledgling Iraqi security forces were not given the financial support or authority needed to combat insurgents. They prevailed in getting U.S. assurances that war crimes suspects — jailed former leader Saddam Hussein first among them — will be handed over to Iraqis for prosecution, despite pressure from some American circles to try them in an international forum.

On Monday, the council signed three mobile telephone service licenses, ignoring a Pentagon probe into allegations of corruption made by U.S. and Turkish companies that had been unsuccessful bidders.

The council began flexing its muscles last month when it undertook a review of Bremer's gubernatorial appointments to each of Iraq's 18 provinces. It deemed four of the governors unfit for office, firing one and starting procedures to replace the others. Council members are challenging such regional appointments by Bremer, insisting they are better acquainted with the needs and values of Iraqis than an American making personnel choices under deadline pressure.

IRS Speeds Corporate Tax Audits
Fast–Track Method May Miss Fraud

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page A01

The Internal Revenue Service is fundamentally shifting its approach to auditing business tax returns, hoping to rapidly expand the number of businesses it audits by shrinking the time and scope of many of those tax examinations.

With corporate tax receipts at record lows, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson recently declared that corporate audits, which now take an average of 38 months, should be completed in less than half that time. Everson believes that by hastening the audits, the IRS will collect more taxes because more companies will fear that audits are coming. But others say faster audits will miss major tax fraud and would only embolden corporate tax cheats.

Everson said dramatic change is necessary to overcome the agency's "scandalous" complacency in a worrisome deterioration in corporate attitudes toward paying taxes. Corporate auditors are still finishing work on tax returns from 1997, or even earlier, he said. The IRS was not even a "player" in uncovering the corporate scandals that erupted in the late 1990s because "we were not even near the year these returns were filed, which is inexcusable," said Everson, who took control of the agency in May.

"What I'm trying to do is re–center the agency," said Everson, who spotlighted the corporate auditing problems during his confirmation hearing in March. "Incremental progress in this area is not success. I'm looking for a real rupture in the way we do audits."

But the architects of the new strategy say Everson has gone too far, too fast, tying the hands of the agency's best auditors and putting too much power in the hands of potential tax cheats. By declaring that audits should take 15 to 18 months, Everson is virtually guaranteeing that IRS auditors will miss tax dodges, fail to explore suspicious transactions, or even walk away from audits that are on the verge of finding wrongdoing, said B. John Williams Jr., the recently departed IRS chief counsel.

"It's a bad way to run a railroad," Williams said.

Larry R. Langdon, the former chief of the IRS's large and mid–size business division who formulated much of the new auditing approach, agreed. "At one level, I appreciate [Everson's] energy and enthusiasm," he said. "At another level, he needs to understand the complexity of the situation. He tends to see these things in black and white when in reality, they're shades of gray."

Tax Receipts Slide Lower

Tax experts agree that corporate tax avoidance has become a serious problem. Corporate tax receipts –– already in a long, steady decline –– fell to $132 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the lowest since 1993, even before adjusting for inflation. Expressed as a percentage of total tax receipts or as a share of the economy, corporate tax receipts this year will be at their second–lowest level since the Great Depression. Only 1983's receipts were lower.

In 1970, corporate tax revenue was 17 percent of the government's tax take, before it began its long slide. This year, it will be about 7 percent of the total. [P6: emphasis added]

For most businesses, the IRS is simply not a factor in deciding whether to comply with the tax code, IRS officials concede. While the nation's 1,300 largest corporations face constant IRS scrutiny, 148,000 mid–size companies face an audit rate of 4 percent, or perhaps once every 20 years.

Saddam might disagree…

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page A01

Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, an expert on enemy targeting, served 20 years in the military –– 10 years of active duty in the Air Force, another 10 in the West Virginia National Guard. Then he decided enough was enough. He owned a promising new aircraft–maintenance business, and it needed his attention. His retirement date was set for last February.

Staff Sgt. Justin Fontaine, a generator mechanic, enrolled in the Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and served nearly nine years. In preparation for his exit date last March, he turned in his field gear –– his rucksack and web belt, his uniforms and canteen.

Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, an interrogator in an intelligence unit, joined the Army Reserve in 1991, extended his enlistment in 1999 and then re–upped for three years in 2000. Costas, a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Texas, was due to retire from the reserves in last May.

According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 –– the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop–loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

To the Pentagon, stop–loss orders are a finger in the dike –– a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Through a series of stop–loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.

By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have breached the Army's manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that the number of active–duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of stop–loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of exceeding the limit by so much.

As Schenectady Rusts, Experts Fear Policy Inertia
By LYDIA POLGREEN

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — When Samuel S. Stratton became mayor of the Electric City almost 50 years ago, about 27,000 people worked at the General Electric plant at one end of Erie Boulevard and thousands more worked at the other end, at the American Locomotive Company. On Thursday nights, when the shops stayed open late, a human tide gushed onto State Street, and Mr. Stratton glad–handed voters as they thronged to the vaudeville theaters, elegant department stores and bustling restaurants that lined the city's busiest street.

In November, his son Brian was elected mayor. But the city the younger Mr. Stratton inherits is a shadow of the one his father, who went on to become a powerful congressman, once governed.

It has lost a third of its population. General Electric, which once defined this city, has moved tens of thousands of jobs elsewhere, and ALCO is long gone, having closed the Big Shop, as its locomotive works were known, in 1968. State Street is now a ghostly shell: empty storefronts stand between pizza parlors, a dollar store and a discount clothing shop.

In November, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the city's bond from Ba1 to Ba2, lowest in the state. Only 11 other municipalities and school districts in the country, including the town of Cicero north of Syracuse, are rated as low.

Schenectady's tale is in some ways a familiar story of Rust Belt decline. But experts on urban policy say its story also illustrates something else: how New York State, in many ways the quintessential urban state, has no real plan to save its cities. So Schenectady's long decline and uncertain future in some ways is not just its own story, but that of cities across the state.

It was not always this way. From 1886, when Thomas Alva Edison brought his manufacturing operations to this bend in the Mohawk River, the Electric City cranked out innovation, from the television to the Monitor Top refrigerator. At G.E.'s employment peak during World War II, 40,000 people worked at the factory.

Today it is a city that is too small for its britches. From its opulent marble City Hall on North Jay Street, built in 1931, to the outsize Roman Catholic Church, St. John the Evangelist, on Union Avenue — built in 1904 to accommodate thousands of Italian, Irish and Polish immigrants — to the row upon row of wood–frame houses in now–dilapidated neighborhoods, the physical dimensions of the city overwhelm its current occupants.

"We're a city built for 100,000 people that only has 60,000 people," said Marv Cermak, who writes a column about Schenectady once a week in The Times Union, an Albany newspaper.

"That's a lot of empty houses and empty streets."

Halliburton Contracts in Iraq: The Struggle to Manage Costs
By JEFF GERTH and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — The Qarmat Ali water treatment plant in southern Iraq is crucial to keeping the oil flowing from the region's petroleum–rich fields. So when American engineers found the antiquated plant barely operating earlier this year, there was no question that repairing it was important to the rebuilding of Iraq. Setting the price for the repairs was another matter.

In July, the Halliburton Company estimated that the overhaul would cost $75.7 million, according to confidential documents that the company submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers. But in early September, the Bush administration asked Congress for $125 million to do the job — a 40 percent price increase in just six weeks.

The initial price was based on "drive–by estimating," said Richard V. Dowling, a spokesman for the corps, which oversees the contract. The second was a result of a more complete assessment. "The best I can lamely fall back on is to say that estimates change," said Mr. Dowling, who is based in Baghdad. "This is not business as usual."

"The rebuilding of Iraq's oil industry has been characterized in the months since by increasing costs and scant public explanation. An examination of what has grown into a multibillion–dollar contract to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure shows no evidence of profiteering by Halliburton, the Houston–based oil services company, but it does demonstrate a struggle between price controls and the uncertainties of war, with price controls frequently losing."

I don't know that I believe there's no profiteering going on, but leaving that paragraph out entirely gives the wron idea about what the article actually says. So I do it like this, to express my opinion as well.]

The Thinning of the Army

Over a third of the Army's active–duty combat troops are now in Iraq, and by spring the Pentagon plans to let most of them come home for urgently needed rest. Many will have served longer than a normal overseas tour and under extremely harsh conditions. When the 130,000 Americans rotate out for home leave, nearly the same number will rotate in. At that point, should the country need to send additional fighters anywhere else in the world, it will have dangerously few of them to spare.

This is the clearest warning yet that the Bush administration is pushing America's peacetime armed forces toward their limits. Washington will not be able to sustain the mismatch between unrealistic White House ambitions and finite Pentagon means much longer without long–term damage to our military strength.

The NY Times has an article about the debate over the next DVD format. It's a technical debate, but will likely be decided on the basis of copy protection technology rather than digital imaging tech.

Money quotes:

Toyota used to have a "talking car" option. If you opened your car door with your headlights were still on, the car would announce (in a feminine yet mechanical "voice") "Lights are on."

In most neighborhoods.

In Black neighborhoods, the car says, "Hey man, yo' lights is on.

"I said, your lights is on, man! "

"Whut da fuk, you blind AND deaf?"

ast year, Curt Dunnam bought a Chevrolet Blazer with one of the most popular new features in high–end cars: the OnStar personal security system.

The heavily advertised communications and tracking feature is used nationwide by more than two million drivers, who simply push a button to connect, via a built–in cellphone, to a member of the OnStar staff. A Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., helps the employee give verbal directions to the driver or locate the car after an accident. The company can even send a signal to unlock car doors for locked–out owners, or blink the car's lights and honk the horn to help people find their cars in an endless plain of parking spaces.

A big selling point for the system is its use in thwarting car thieves. Once an owner reports to the police that a car has been stolen, the company, which was started by General Motors, can track it to help intercept the thieves, a service it performs about 400 times each month.

But for Mr. Dunnam, the more he learned about his car's security features, the less secure he felt. A research support specialist at Cornell University, he is concerned about privacy. He has enough technical knowledge to worry that someone else – say, law enforcement officers, or even hackers – could listen in on his phone calls, or gain control over his automotive systems without his knowledge or consent. Any gadget that can track a carjacker, he reasons, can just as readily be used to track him.

"While I don't believe G.M. intentionally designed this system to facilitate Orwellian activities, they sure have made it easy," he said.

OnStar is one of a growing number of automated eyes and ears that enhance driving safety and convenience but that also increase the potential for surveillance. Privacy advocates say that the rise of the automotive technologies, including electronic toll areas, location–tracking devices, "black box" data recorders like those found on airplanes and even tiny radio ID tags in tires, are changing the nature of Americans' relationship with their cars.

Beth Givens, founder of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said the car had long been a symbol of Kerouac–flavored freedom, and a haven. "You can talk to yourself in your car, you can scream at yourself in your car, you can go there to be alone, you can ponder the heavens, you can think deep thoughts all alone, you can sing," she said. With the growing number of monitoring systems, she said, "Now, the car is Big Brother."

So George beat me to this. I have a better title.

EACH week, Leo Jimenez, a 25–year–old New Yorker, sifts through a mound of invitations, pulling out the handful that seem most promising. On back–to–back nights earlier this month, he dropped in to Lotus on West 14th Street for the unveiling of a new fashion line, and turned up at the opening of Crobar, a dance club in Chelsea, mingling with stars like Rosie Perez, long–stemmed models and middle–aged roués trussed in dinner jackets. Wherever he goes, Mr. Jimenez himself is an object of fascination. "You get the buttonhole," he said. "You get the table, you get the attention."

Mr. Jimenez, a model, has appeared in ads for Levi's, DKNY and Aldo, but he is anything but a conventional pretty face. His steeply raked cheekbones, dreadlocks and jet–colored eyes, suggest a background that might be Mongolian, American Indian or Chinese. In fact he is Colombian by birth, a product of that country's mixed racial heritage, and he fits right in with the melting–pot aesthetic of the downtown scene. It is also a look that is reflected in the latest youth marketing trend: using faces that are ethnically ambiguous.

Ad campaigns for Louis Vuitton, YSL Beauty and H&M stores have all purposely highlighted models with racially indeterminate features. Or consider the careers of movie stars like Vin Diesel, Lisa Bonet and Jessica Alba, whose popularity with young audiences seems due in part to the tease over whether they are black, white, Hispanic, American Indian or some combination.

"Today what's ethnically neutral, diverse or ambiguous has tremendous appeal," said Ron Berger, the chief executive of Euro RSCG MVBMS Partners in New York, an advertising agency and trend research company whose clients include Polaroid and Yahoo. "Both in the mainstream and at the high end of the marketplace, what is perceived as good, desirable, successful is often a face whose heritage is hard to pin down."

WITH A WHISPER, NOT A BANG

By David Martin 12/24/2003
Bush signs parts of Patriot Act II into law — stealthily

On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing – on a Saturday – as "the President signs bills seven days a week." But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago – on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the federal government the following Monday.

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

Check out what Brad deLong read this year.

Actually, on a certain level I feel a bit of jealousy. Which just proves I'm boring.

This time it's L. K. Spence at Vision Circle. (Note: I haven't read the article Mr. Spence links to as an example, but I don't think I need to.)

I had run across the Black Cinderella blog months ago on someone's blogroll. She had just stopped blogging, if I remember correctly, until she could find twelve more hours in each day. Shame, I thought. I read about her next book, "The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to their Rightful Owners," and found much to agree with:

…though I find the "surrender" terminology less than attractive.

Well, her book ships in January. Since I already have enough books queued up to get me through the month, it will be my first Black History Month purchase.

Glenn at Hi. I'm Black! (is that Vanilla Ice? Have you no shame?) found The Gollum Rap. Who knew the river folk had rhythm?

The Department of Homeland Defense is investigating how the cow made it over the border.

December 28, 2003

WASHINGTON –– The first cow in the United States to be diagnosed with mad cow disease has been tentatively traced to a dairy herd in Alberta, Canada, U.S. agriculture officials said Saturday.

Canadian records indicated that the dairy cow in Washington state diagnosed last week with mad cow disease was in a herd of 74 animals shipped from Alberta into the U.S. at Eastport, Idaho, in August 2001, said Ron DeHaven, chief veterinary officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Despite State Promises, Reform Eludes Prisons
Court and State Senators Are Investigating Coverup Allegations
By Mark Arax and Jenifer Warren
Times Staff Writers

December 28, 2003

Five years ago, after prison scandals gripped California with tales of guards setting up inmates in human cockfights and then shooting them dead, the state Department of Corrections vowed to change its ways.

Whistle–blowers would be protected, not punished. Internal investigators would be encouraged to pursue abusive guards. And the correctional officers union no longer would have a hand in dictating policy.

That new day never came, interviews and documents show.

California guards did stop shooting at inmates engaged in fistfights, a practice that had turned Corcoran State Prison into the deadliest lock–up in America.

But the Corrections Department remains troubled by allegations that rogue guards still go unpunished, union bosses continue to exert strong influence, and top administrators still thwart whistle–blowers.

This month, the department's beleaguered director, Edward Alameida, abruptly resigned, citing personal reasons. Alameida was known among some employees as "Easy Ed" because of his reputation for acceding to the wishes of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. — a union that gave millions to the campaigns of former Govs. Gray Davis and Pete Wilson.

For 2004, Bush Has Strength in the White Male Numbers
His wide advantage in that right–leaning group may trump Democrats' edge elsewhere.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

December 28, 2003

WASHINGTON — President Bush's overwhelming strength among white men looms as a central obstacle between Democrats and the White House as 2004 approaches.

In an election season heavily shaped by terrorism and national security, several recent polls suggest Bush could dominate white male voters as thoroughly as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did during their three successive presidential victories in the 1980s.

"Clearly, it is where the Democrats are going to have their biggest difficulty," said Ruy Teixeira, a public opinion analyst at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank.

In the modern political era, Democrats never expect to carry white men, who reliably tilt Republican. But the emerging threat to Democrats in 2004 is that Bush will win white men so decisively that the party can't overcome his advantage with other voter groups that lean in their direction, such as minorities and college–educated white women.

Analysts in both parties agree that Bush is benefiting among white men from his aggressive use of force against terrorism and his alternately folksy and blunt "bring 'em on" personal style[P6: Why does this appeal to white males?]. Some senior strategists on both sides believe the risk to Democrats with white men could increase if the party nominates Howard Dean, whose opposition to the war, liberal positions on social issues and buttoned–down persona create clear contrasts for Bush.

"That's the best situation for us, and the worst situation for them, with this group," said David Winston, a Republican pollster.

White men compose just under 40% of the electorate, with white women just over 40%, and minorities composing the rest.

White men have given Democrats problems in presidential elections for decades. Since the 1970s, Democrats have won when they kept the Republican advantage within sight and lost when they didn't.

"It's a damage minimization strategy," Teixeira said. "If it's too much of a landslide with white men, it just creates a hole you have to dig out of."

Attacks Force Retreat From Wide–Ranging Plans for Iraq

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 27 –– The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq's economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated.

Plans to privatize state–owned businesses –– a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free–market system –– have been dropped over the past few months. So too has a demand that Iraqis write a constitution before a transfer of sovereignty.

With the administration's plans tempered by time and threat, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government.

"There's no question that many of the big–picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Right now, everyone's attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer."

The new approach, U.S. diplomats said, calls into question the prospects for initiatives touted by conservative strategists to fashion Iraq into a secular, pluralistic, market–driven nation. While the diplomats maintain those goals are still attainable, the senior official said, "ideology has become subordinate to the schedule."

Haaretz (Tel Aviv)

Draw your own conclusions, before or after reading the entire editorial.

Haaretz (Tel Aviv)

Time is on Israel's side
By Ephraim Inbar

Many Israelis believe time is not on their side and are therefore looking to change the status quo, even unilaterally. And yet, an analysis of Zionist action rather than Zionist rhetoric reveals that playing for time was one of the mainstays of Israel's national strategy. David Ben–Gurion understood that Israel was too weak to impose a peace settlement on the Arabs and that it would simply have to wait until the other side would recognize perforce the reality of a Jewish state.

Unfortunately, Palestinians still have their pipe dreams of inundating Israel with refugees or winning sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Despite the festive declarations from the Israeli peace camp that we have a partner, it is obvious that peace cannot be achieved today. This is mainly because of the Palestinians' inability to establish a stable political entity that would be willing to suppress those who oppose Israel's existence.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has also concluded that before 2020 there is no chance of seeing a Palestinian leadership ready to make the concessions that are necessary for a comprehensive agreement. What this means is that Israel has to go on playing for time until the Palestinians are ripe for the kind of peace that will be acceptable to Israel.

Haaretz (Tel Aviv)

The price of ignorance
By Gideon Levy

The suicide bomber at the Geha Junction, Shehad Hanani, was from Beit Furik, one of the most imprisoned villages in the territories that is surrounded by earth roadblocks on all sides. It's a place where women in labor and the sick have to risk walking through fields to get to the hospital in adjacent Nablus. At least one woman in labor, Rula Ashatiya, gave birth at the Beit Furik checkpoint and lost her infant. Few Israelis are capable of imagining what life is like in Beit Furik: the almost universal unemployment, poverty, endless siege and humiliations of life inside a prison. A young man like Hanani, who was 21, had no reason to get up in the morning other than to face another day of joblessness and humiliation.

However, Israelis have little interest in knowing the lay of the land from which terror springs. The Israeli media have next to nothing to say about life in Beit Furik. By the same token, few Israelis heard about the killing of the suicide bomber's relative, Fadi Hanani, 10 days ago in Nablus, just as they hadn't heard about all the killings of Palestinians in the past few months. Life in Beit Furik and the killing in Nablus do not justify a suicide bombing at a bus station, but whoever wants to fight terror must first and foremost improve life in Beit Furik.

Israel counted "81 days of quiet" without terrorist attacks. But there is no greater lie than this. The quiet was only here. During this "quiet," dozens of Palestinians were killed, and almost no one bothered to report it. That is how it becomes possible to speak of quiet and then claim that the Palestinians disturbed it. The fact that the media does not speak of Palestinian deaths does not mean that they did not happen. The eight Palestinians who were killed last week in one day at Rafah, for example, killing along the lines of a medium–sized terror attack, together with destruction that is to an extent unknown in Israel, weren't enough to generate any interest here last week. They barely got a mention. The international community dealt prominently with this frightening killing, and the United Nations secretary–general issued a special statement condemning them. There was only one place where the entire event was ignored – the country whose soldiers perpetrated the killing. The images of giant bulldozers and tanks demolishing more and more houses, and the scenes of the dead and 42 wounded, among them women and children, being taken to hospitals in Rafah were hardly shown in Israel.

Haaretz (Tel Aviv)

Democracy on the retreat

Preliminary results from the "Democracy Index – 2003 Report" published in yesterday's Haaretz, reflect troubling erosion in the public's perception of democracy and of the necessity for it to exist.
The study, sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute and the Guttman Center, is based on surveys carried out during the past year, and on comparisons between these findings and ones compiled in previous years in Israel and in other countries. Its authors conclude that while a clear majority of Israelis favor democracy, the support for the democratic system in 2003 has plunged to the lowest level recorded during the past 20 years.

Currently, just 77 percent of Jews in the country agree that democracy is the best system, as compared to a figure of some 90 percent that remained constant up to five years ago. The comparison to figures from around the world is still more worrisome. In public opinion surveys relating to support for democracy that were conducted in 32 countries between 1999 and 2001, Israel ranks in the lowest tier – with Poland, Chile, South Korea, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Taiwan, Argentina and South Africa.

The finding that a majority of Israelis support "strong leaders" – 56 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that "strong leaders can do more for the state than debates and laws" – and also that fact that 50 percent of respondents concur that if there is a conflict between security interests and the preservation of the rule of law, the former should take precedence, are similarly worrisome. No less troubling are the findings that 23 percent of the Jewish public believes that a soldier can refuse orders, and just 57 percent of respondents definitely agree with the statement that violence should never be used to attain political objectives.

Answers to questions about checks and balances between Israel's three branches of government reflect gaps between Israel's religious and secular populations. Whereas 17 percent of secular respondents oppose processes of judicial review, the figure for the religious is 37 percent; whereas 51 percent of religious respondents said that the High Court's intervention in government decisions is excessive, just 23 percent of secular respondents criticized the court in this respect.

Israel is a young democracy. The national movement that established the state created a revolution among the Jewish people, and brought a variety of Jewish communities and cultures to the Middle East, to an arena of continuing, violent dispute. This dispute, which (among other things) produced the occupation, casts a long shadow over the state and society in Israel, and hedges against the orderly development of democratic government, and acceptance of the democratic system among various groups. Religious pressures – which draw on messianic, nationalistic and other impulses – and other factors threaten to undermine the society's emerging rules and consensus.

In recent years, Israel's society has become divided up into sectors, each of which understands its own values and needs as having precedence over the wider national consensus. Some sectors are preoccupied with their own separate issues; others seek to impose their agenda on the public as a whole. In contrast, Israel's pluralistic, tolerant center is shrinking. The cult of zealous, purist agendas can be seen in the increasing legitimacy accorded to refusal to do military service.

The NY Times spells out what the Republican Party has become under the Bushistas.

It ain't pretty. The money quote:

Is this really how you want your country run? Is this what you want to affirm with your vote?

Islamic Relief is taking donations to help deal with this disaster. See the column on the right.

Not to downplay the earthquake at all, but I noticed they have a fund to help out with famine in Africa, so I had to add a link to that as well. The African famine link may well become a permanent fixture.

Published: December 28, 2003

KERMAN, Iran, Dec. 27 — As rescue workers raced to the ancient city of Bam, officials there raised the death toll from its 12–second earthquake on Friday to 25,000, and worried that it could go much higher.

The interior minister, Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari, said on state television from Bam: "The city is ruined. More than 70 percent of it is destroyed."

Tens of thousands of the injured crowded field hospitals or lay helplessly in the streets. Survivors and rescuers dug frantically to uncover those still trapped.

In Bam, Reuters reported, one man, Taher, cried over the body of his teenage son, calling out, "Wake up, wake up!" Another parent, Fatemeh, 35, mourned her two children, saying, "I am burying myself in this grave."

Aftershocks jolted the area, shaking down the already crumbled low–rise dwellings of clay tile, brick and concrete block.

Dozens of international relief flights and supply shipments sped on their way, transporting everything from skilled rescue workers to water purification tablets. The United States said it was sending tons of medical supplies in a military airlift, as well as rescue squads and medical teams.

Most rescue workers were flying here to Kerman, to make their way by land to Bam, 120 miles to the southeast.

Iradj Sharifi, rector of the faculty of medicine in Kerman, said that in the pre–dawn earthquake, "Five thousand people were killed on the spot and there are 20,000 people under the rubble."

Brigadier Mohammadi, commander of the army in southeastern Iran, told state television, "We need help — otherwise we will be pulling corpses, not the injured, out of the rubble."

There were grim but uncertain predictions that the death toll — in a 2,000–year–old city of 80,000 people — might keep growing.

"As more bodies are pulled out, we fear that the death toll may reach as high as 40,000," said Akbar Alavi, the governor of Kerman, the provincial capital, according to The Associated Press. "An unbelievable human disaster has occurred."