Why am I not surprised this happened in good ol' Dixie?

Baldilocks' voice, D.C. Thornton's pointer to the source article:

This is one of those comments that's a post only because I want to ping someone.

In response to my somewhat uncomplimentary reaction to the idea a right-wing oriented fiction reading circle, Sharon says:

Okay, the attitude is understandable. I got no beef there. I'm just wondering who you've been talking to, and about what Sharon. The fact is capitalism and heavily limited government aren't concepts wherein the idea of race can really arise. Western principles and morals and values can bring up the issue when one wants to accuse someone of not living up to them. The principles and values themselves, though are pretty universal. I'd really like to know more about how this comes up.

That said, fiction written to make a political or philosophical point rather than simply to tell a good story tend to suck the big one. I believe the last author to succeed at commentary and art simultaneously was Plato.

You got a plot? Strong characterization, dialog that sounds like homo sapiens rather than homo fictus? You got some drama and suspense? You got my interest. A couple of explosions and naked women would be good…

But no, I wouldn't join a Conservative reading circle any more than I'd join a Mathematics reading circle. Or a Liberal one.

Between the Center for American Progress fact-checking the Republicans and these guys performance-checking the media, progressive bloggers get some serious resources.

Media for Democracy 2004

Media for Democracy 2004 is a non-partisan citizens' initiative to monitor mainstream news coverage of the 2004 elections and advocate standards of reporting that are more democratic and issues-oriented. Media for Democracy educates and activates a growing base of concerned citizens by delivering alerts -- breaking news and analysis of mainstream media election coverage. Our goal is to build a constituency of people across the political spectrum that can put news executives on notice when their reporting strays from best practices for fair media coverage of elections.

The project is run by MediaChannel.org, a media issues supersite, featuring criticism, breaking news, and investigative reporting from hundreds of organizations worldwide. Media for Democracy taps the expertise of MediaChannel's 100 U.S. affiliates and more than 125,000 users in a targeted campaign to prevent the types of media mistakes -- such as early, erroneous and politically biased projections -- that plagued the 2000 elections.

Media for Democracy 2004 is supported by the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and individual donors to MediaChannel.org. Support this ongoing initiative by following the link below.

Contact:
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MediaChannel.org
tim(at)mediachannel.org
1.212.246.0202

Join Now:
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Max at MaxSpeaks is my kinda economist, fa shizzle.

I am seriously looking forward to the coming weeks.

Having just checked the RSS feeds, I find Oliver Willis has a nice, concise summary of the evidence of the Bushista's lack of concern for American life and interests when it conflicts with their political aspirations.

Courtesy of Paul Conrad

The Problem:

Giving it due consideration:

Asking older, wiser heads:

Where's the Apology?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability.

Surely even supporters of the Iraq war must be dismayed by the administration's reaction to David Kay's recent statements. Iraq, he now admits, didn't have W.M.D., or even active programs to produce such weapons. Those much-ridiculed U.N. inspectors were right. (But Hans Blix appears to have gone down the memory hole. On Tuesday Mr. Bush declared that the war was justified — under U.N. Resolution 1441, no less — because Saddam "did not let us in.")

So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations? Where is the investigation of this intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity language from Mr. Bush — and a determined effort to prevent an independent inquiry.

True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure intelligence failure. I don't buy it: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issued a damning report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and former officials warned of politicized intelligence during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton report gave Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people — including a majority of the British public, according to polls — regard that report as a whitewash.)

In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was made, and America's credibility has been badly damaged — and nobody is being held accountable. But that's standard operating procedure. As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths. And administration officials have consistently sought to freeze out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might try to check up on their performance.

Givers and Takers
By DANIEL H. PINK

WASHINGTON

Each of the Democratic candidates vying to replace George W. Bush has a serious electability problem. The problem has nothing to do with their biographies or temperaments — and everything to do with a significant, but unnoticed, structural divide in American presidential politics.

Each year, the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group, crunches numbers from the Census Bureau to produce an intriguing figure: how much each state receives in federal spending for every dollar it pays in federal taxes.

For example, according to the most recent data, for every dollar the average North Dakotan paid in federal taxes, he received $2.07 in federal benefits. But while someone in Fargo was doubling his money, his counterpart in neighboring Minnesota was being shortchanged. For every dollar Minnesotans sent to Washington, only 77 cents in federal spending flowed back to the state.

Using the Tax Foundation's analysis, it's possible to group the 50 states into two categories: Givers and Takers. Giver states get back less than a dollar in spending for every dollar they contribute to federal coffers. Taker states pocket more than a dollar for every tax dollar they send to Washington. Thirty-three states are Takers; 16 are Givers. (One state, Indiana, has a perfect one-to-one ratio of taxes paid and spending received. As seat of the federal government, the District of Columbia has no choice but to be a Taker, and is therefore not comparable to the 50 states in this regard.)

The Democrats' electability predicament comes into focus when you compare the map of Giver and Taker states with the well-worn electoral map of red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. You might expect that in the 2000 presidential election, Republicans, the party of low taxes and limited government, would have carried the Giver states — while Democrats, the party of wild spending and wooly bureaucracy, would have appealed to the Taker states. But it was the reverse. George W. Bush was the candidate of the Taker states. Al Gore was the candidate of the Giver states.

Consider:

78 percent of Mr. Bush's electoral votes came from Taker states.

76 percent of Mr. Gore's electoral votes came from Giver states.

Of the 33 Taker states, Mr. Bush carried 25.

Of the 16 Giver states, Mr. Gore carried 12.

Juxtaposing these maps provides a new perspective on the political landscape. (Interactive moment: Color in the blue and red states — then you'll get the full picture.) Republicans seem to have become the new welfare party — their constituents live off tax dollars paid by people who vote Democratic.

As Autism Cases Rise, Parents Run Frenzied Race to Get Help
By JANE GROSS

RDSLEY, N.Y., Jan. 29 — When Phyllis Lombardi lets her 6-year-old son, Joey, play in her yard here, she cannot take her eyes off him because he is autistic, barely speaks and might bolt into traffic.

But a fence costs more than the Lombardis can afford since they moved to this Westchester County village last year. Ardsley has state-of-the-art autism programs, but also real estate prices that have forced the family into a rental just a block from the Saw Mill River Parkway.

It was desperation that brought the family here from Rockland County, when Mrs. Lombardi joined an army of parents, their frustration growing as their numbers increased, facing a crisis of supply and demand when their autistic children reach school age.

"I can't fix him, so my only peace of mind is to get him the best services I can," Mrs. Lombardi said, echoing mothers from Palo Alto, Calif., to Princeton, N.J. "That's what I have to do to sleep at night."

The mismatch between needs and services is widening, experts say, despite many start-up programs for autistic children. But new schools and additional classrooms have not kept pace with skyrocketing caseloads and growing sophistication among parents about what sort of educational techniques work.

Education — highly structured, virtually one-on-one and thus astronomically expensive — is the one proven treatment for autism, experts say. But it is no guarantee. Examples of exceptional success — and a narrow window of opportunity — have frantic parents trolling the Internet, visiting any school that sounds promising, winding up on waiting lists and often moving or suing their school district to get what they want.

Dr. Catherine Lord, primary author of a 2001 federal report on teaching techniques for autism, estimated at the time that only 10 percent of affected children had access to the proven labor-intensive pedagogy, which can cost a school district as much as $60,000 a year per child. Dr. Lord says there are many indications that the situation is worse today, when schools nationwide are dealing with 120,000 autistic students, up from 20,000 a decade ago.

Some private schools that accommodate a mere 25 children have waiting lists with hundreds of names on them. The best public school programs are besieged. There are not enough certified behavioral therapists, so promising aides are trained in the classroom and then fought over, like prized nannies, by parents seeking after-school and weekend help. Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, an autism researcher and diagnostician at Yale University who has a three-year waiting list to see new patients, said even the wealthy are not protected. "I see mega-mega millionaires and movie star folks who can't find anything to tap into," he said.

A few states — notably North Carolina and Delaware — provide coordinated, seamless services from preschool until the age of 21. But more common is an incomprehensible jumble that parents must decode amid the fog of learning their child's grim prognosis. New York State has exemplary services for preschoolers, paid for by county departments of health, and a dearth of services for students in kindergarten through age 21, whose education is paid for by local school districts. New Jersey is just the reverse. Connecticut, alone in the metropolitan region, offers no Medicaid benefits for the disability. "It's an appalling jumble," Dr. Lord said.

Somalis Reach Peace Deal After Dozen Years of Fighting
By MARC LACEY

AIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 29 — An array of Somali warlords and clan leaders struck a deal here on Thursday that could lay the groundwork for the country's first national government since 1991.

Previous peace deals — there have been more than a dozen rounds of talks since 1991 — have quickly collapsed, and Western diplomats cautioned that continued clan violence could doom this accord as well.

But the current pact, signed by leaders of all the major warring parties, is widely regarded as more credible than earlier efforts.

The agreement calls for a 275-member parliament, based in Mogadishu. That body will select an interim Somali president who, in turn, will appoint a prime minister who will put together a coalition government.

Each of Somalia's four major clans will select 61 members of the parliament, while a coalition of smaller clans will fill the other 31 slots. But the selection process is expected to be very divisive, as each of Somalia's clans is divided into subclans that are eager for their own political voice.

The negotiations that led to the new agreement have stretched on since November 2002 and have been marked by fistfights, shouting matches and, until now, few achievements. There were varying opinions on Thursday on whether the deal would hold together, ultimately uniting a country that has spent more than a decade as a collection of warring fiefs.

Panel of Experts Finds That Anti-Pollution Laws Are Outdated
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Despite three decades of progress, existing air-quality laws are inadequate to prevent pollution from threatening the environment and human health, the nation's top scientific advisory group concluded yesterday.

The panel, the National Research Council of the National Academies, said it was particularly concerned about ozone, an ingredient of smog that has proved difficult to curtail, and fine soot, which has been shown to be especially harmful.

State and local authorities in many polluted regions are increasingly finding that even if they control local emissions, they can end up violating federal standards because of additional pollution drifting from sources outside their jurisdiction.

And even though individual smokestacks and tailpipes are generally getting cleaner as a result of clean-air laws, their numbers are growing rapidly because of economic and population growth.

"Even if you say, `Let's not get any better than today,' you're still going to have to do a lot more because the economy is going to grow and we'll have more emissions," said Dr. William L. Chameides, the chairman of the 25-member panel of experts in environmental science, law, engineering and public policy.

In some cases existing rules can be improved, the report went on, but Congress will also have to pass new legislation, including revisions to the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Republican Concerns About Deficits Grow
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: January 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — A senior House Republican warned on Thursday that President Bush was on a collision course with Congress over his plans to reduce the deficit by almost freezing the growth of discretionary programs aside from military and domestic security items.

A briefing paper distributed to Republican lawmakers by the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, estimated that a complete freeze on the discretionary programs — excluding military and domestic security proposals — would save only $3 billion next year.

By contrast, White House budget officials are trying to reduce a budget deficit that they say could reach $500 billion or more this year.

To cut that deficit by half in the next five years while continuing to increase military and domestic security spending, President Bush is expected to call for limiting the growth of all nonmilitary programs from housing vouchers to education to only 1 percent.

Mr. Young, in a paper prepared for Republican lawmakers attending a two-day retreat in Philadelphia, noted that the discretionary domestic programs Mr. Bush seeks to restrain account for only 17 percent of the total federal budget.

Two-thirds of the $2.3 trillion federal budget is consumed by mandatory spending — entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as interest payments on the rising federal debt. Military and domestic security budgets consume another big chunk, which Mr. Bush wants to raise by 7 percent, to $401 billion. That leaves only about $445 billion for all other domestic programs that Mr. Bush would limit to increases of 1 percent a year.

"Solely targeting nondefense discretionary spending will not have a significant impact on the deficit," according to Mr. Young's memorandum

Trying to Police Misleading Drug Ads
By NAT IVES

Published: January 30, 2004

THE Food and Drug Administration is increasingly failing to enforce its own rules on prescription drug advertising, according to a report released yesterday by the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform.

The report, issued by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, found that the drug agency was sending fewer warning letters to pharmaceutical companies and taking longer to send them than in previous years.

Weak enforcement, Mr. Waxman said in a phone interview yesterday, contributes to unneeded or risky prescriptions for consumers and higher health care costs.

"We've issued this report in order to be constructive, because we want the F.D.A. to enforce the law," he added.

But F.D.A. officials said that the report overlooked the agency's new focus on other actions it considers more constructive, like clarifying its guidelines and sponsoring educational forums for pharmaceutical companies. They said focusing on the number of enforcement letters missed the bigger picture.

"The most important thing to note is that numbers games don't advance the public health," said Peter J. Pitts, the drug agency's associate commissioner for external relations. "We don't really have the luxury to say 'gotcha.' What we can do is make sure we have clear and effective communications."

In the glare of an election year, some Democrats said the report's findings could help illustrate larger campaign themes.

David Doak, a Democratic media consultant in Washington, said, "I'm not sure that this in and of itself will be an issue, but the air of permissiveness towards big business by this administration, and the ramifications that has on the public, could well be an issue, and I would argue already is."

The report examines a vital sales tool for pharmaceutical companies. The companies spent $2.5 billion in consumer advertising last year, according to an estimate by TNS Media Intelligence/CMR, which tracks marketing spending. That is about double the amount spent in 1998.

Mr. Waxman's staff found that the number of notices of violation or warning letters to pharmaceutical companies for misleading ads fell to 24 last year from 108 in 1999.

When the agency did contact companies about ads it found misleading or incomplete, moreover, it took longer to send its complaints, the report said. For 14 of the ads that generated letters last year, the agency sent letters an average of six months after the ads first appeared. By way of comparison, the report cites a General Accounting Office study of a five-month period in 2002, when the agency took an average of 41 days to send warning letters.

Debate Over Iraqi Arms Poses Risk to President
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The intensifying debate over prewar American intelligence about Iraq presents President Bush with difficult and risky alternatives as he balances election year politics with calls to overhaul the intelligence apparatus and to restore the nation's credibility around the world.

He could order the start of an inquiry about the performance of intelligence agencies, as Democrats and the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, have insisted, but his aides fear that that could prove politically damaging and would almost certainly reopen old wounds with the C.I.A.

He could keep arguing that military action was justified no matter how immediate a threat Saddam Hussein posed, and put off an examination and possible overhaul of America's intelligence operations for another year. But his political team worries that doing so could keep the issue alive through a long campaign.

Or the president and those on his national security team who once described how Mr. Hussein could use his stockpiles of weapons to strike at any time could conclude that something went badly wrong during their long march to war.

But the White House does not make a habit of admitting error. And even if Mr. Bush vowed to fix what many say is a broken system, his national security aides note, the fix would not be easy.

"They've made a pretty huge mess of it," said one senior Republican who has been talking to Mr. Bush's top advisers about what steps to take next. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong.

"It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"

If you DON'T take it on while you're fighting terrorists, you're going to be fighting them forever.

Haiti's Neighbors Are Pressing Aristide for Reforms
By RICHARD LEZIN JONES

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan. 29 — At 24, David Jonathas is barely old enough to remember the political revolution that eventually placed a Catholic priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the presidential palace. And yet, Mr. Jonathas hopes to be part of another movement, equal in determination to that earlier campaign waged in the late 1980's but with opposite results.

"As long as Aristide is in power, there will be no democracy," said Mr. Jonathas, a student at the University of Haiti, wiping his brow moments after he and a few hundred other students finished a march through the winding, pockmarked streets of the capital here calling for Mr. Aristide's ouster. "He must go. We need a new system."

After a nearly four-year deadlock with critics and opponents, Mr. Aristide has faced increasingly frequent protests over the past few months; in the last month, opposition leaders have called for demonstrations almost daily demanding that he step down. Leaders of neighboring Caribbean nations are pressing him to defuse the situation.

Further complicating matters was the dissolution of Haiti's bicameral legislature earlier this month. Partly because of a boycott by the opposition, the government failed to hold parliamentary elections last year. As a result, the terms of all 83 members of the lower house and about two-thirds of the nation's senators expired, meaning that Mr. Aristide effectively rules by decree.

The protests have grown in size as well — on Tuesday more than 15,000 people marched on the capital — and clashes between antigovernment marchers, supporters of Mr. Aristide and the police have sometimes turned violent. About 50 people have been killed in protests during the past several months, including a university student who was shot by a tear gas canister not far from the United States consulate.

Cobb is right about most things. Just not politics.

The problem isn't Iraq. The problem is Bush and crew are not the people I want speaking for me, acting for me, planning for me.

You see, the problem with NOT parsing Bush's words is it means one isn't even interested in the truth. And the neocon plans for the world aren't as disturbing to me as their plans for the USofA--P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act crap, free speech only applying in zones instead of the whole damn country, crony capitalism, denial of scientific fact in favor of Conservative Correctness…the list goes on.

There is no issue on which the Bush administration acts for the benefit of the populace rather than corporate interests. I'm not making some simplistic judgement of the whole American political situation based on one issue. You should stop doing so.

What Tax Cut?
States are using higher taxes and fees to take back what Uncle Sam is giving away
By Leonard Wiener

You might want to relish that tax cut George Bush gave you last year--the one he argued in the State of the Union address last week should be made permanent.

That's because for all the dollars the feds are letting you keep, the states are scrambling to grab some of them right back with tax increases and a plethora of user fees and other levies designed to fill their bare coffers. States are in a fiscal bind partly because they raised their budgets in the 1990s to meet rising social needs, then saw revenue plummet. Most tie their income tax to the federal Internal Revenue Service filings. The combination of declining taxpayer income, new federal breaks, and often ill-advised state tax cuts caused a slash in revenue.

Facing yawning budget gaps--totaling about $200 billion over the past three years--state legislatures are trying to ease the revenue squeeze by disconnecting their tax rules from the federal system. That can mean denying on state individual and business returns the federal favors that Washington is bestowing on stock dividends, inherited estates, capital gains, and deductions.

Overall, 18 states imposed major tax increases last year that are expected to raise $6.2 billion for fiscal 2004, according to the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y. That's on top of boosts of nearly $6 billion that 15 states enacted in 2002. This is the heaviest round of increases since hikes during the recession of the early 1990s. In 2001, only six states hiked taxes; during the three years before that, it was mostly tax cuts.

Printing press. All states except Vermont have laws that generally call for a balanced budget, but there's another big difference between state capitals and Washington. "Unlike the federal government, the states cannot print money," says Nicholas Jenny, a senior policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute. So states have been raising taxes, limiting deductions, borrowing money, cutting spending, and engaging in tactics such as speeding up collections and tapping "rainy day" funds.

On polygamy, a crackdown and a bid for legitimacy
The practice of plural marriage comes under scrutiny as an internal struggle flares up in sect on Utah-Arizona border.
By Katharine Biele | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

SALT LAKE CITY - America's often-isolated believers in polygamy are coming into the public eye - confronted by a new crackdown even as some civil rights advocates contend that plural marriage should be legitimized.

The most sensational of the recent incidents has come in the small, tight-lipped community of Colorado City, Ariz. Recently, a power struggle has emerged within the polygamy-oriented sect that dominates the town. Some men have been excommunicated and their wives and children been "reassigned" to other men.

The turmoil there - apparently a bid by the church leader to consolidate his control of the community - comes as America's estimated 100,000 polygamists are in the spotlight on other fronts

The Tuskegee legacy
Thursday, January 29, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

THE QUIET death of Ernest Hendon earlier this month is an uncomfortable reminder of a disgraceful era of American medicine.

Hendon, 96, was the last survivor of the 623 black men who were duped by the federal government to be part of a cruel Tuskegee Syphilis Study on the effects of the disease when left untreated.

Initially designed as a 6-month study, it began in 1932 by inducing poor rural Alabama men with promises of free health care, lunches and transportation to hospitals. But the government-reviewed experiment lasted 40 years, ending in 1972 only after an Associated Press reporter exposed it.

By then, more than 100 of the men had died from untreated syphilis or related complications, scores of their wives had been infected and at least 19 of their children had contracted the disease that causes blindness, mental illness, physical deformities and more if left unchecked.

"It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy,'' said President Bill Clinton, offering a national apology to relatives of the men in 1997. Clinton noted that the study sowed "distrust of our medical institutions'' -- particularly among blacks -- and he vowed to restore that lost confidence.

But while fallout from Tuskegee has spurred federal regulations that now mandate informed patient consent and restrict the treatment of human subjects in research, suspicion lingers, especially because discernible racial disparities in health care remain. "To this day, even when blacks have the same medical insurance and symptoms, they are treated differently and more likely to die than whites,'' said Dr. Stephen Thomas, professor of community health and social justice at the University of Pittsburgh.

The legacy of Tuskegee, and the deep distrust it engendered, has not gone away.

White House to Project Deficit Exceeding $500 Billion This Year
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:18 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's new budget projects the Medicare overhaul he just signed will be one-third more costly than estimated and this year's federal deficit will surge past a half trillion dollars for the first time, administration and congressional officials said Thursday.

The White House will estimate the cost of creating prescription drug benefits and revamping the mammoth health-care program for the elderly and disabled at $534 billion for the decade that ends in 2013, the officials said. The number will be in the 2005 budget Bush proposes Monday.

While muscling the Medicare package through Congress in November, Bush and Republican leaders won pivotal votes by reassuring conservatives that the cost over that period would track the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's estimate of $395 billion. The measure passed both chambers narrowly, giving the president one of his top legislative triumphs since taking office.

The new figures represent the first time the White House has released its projections of the bill's costs. They could deepen an election-year wedge between the White House and conservative Republicans upset over spending and budget deficits that they say have grown too high on Bush's watch.

The numbers raise questions about whether administration officials revealed everything they knew before the vote on Medicare, some conservatives complained privately. Bush signed the bill Dec. 8.

You can just jump to the extended text if you want.

Electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc. that are widely used in several states have such poor computer security and physical security that an election could be disrupted or even stolen by corrupt insiders or determined outsiders, according to a new report presented today to Maryland state legislators.

Authors of the report — the first hands-on attempt to hack Diebold voting machine systems under conditions found during an election — were careful to say that the machines, if not hacked, count votes correctly, and that issues discovered in the "red team" exercise could be addressed in a preliminary way in time for the state's primaries in March.

"I don't want to beat people up," said Michael Wertheimer, the security expert who ran the attack team for RABA Technologies, a consulting firm in Columbia, Md. "I want to get an election that people can feel good about in March."

…A representative of Diebold said the issues raised by the new report had already been addressed by the company. "There is nothing that has not been or can't be mitigated" before the election, said David Bear, a spokesman for the company.

…Maryland has bought more than $55 million worth of the machines. Georgia has chosen Diebold machines for elections statewide, and they have been chosen by populous counties in California and Ohio, among other states.

The authors of the report said that they had expected a higher degree of security in the design of the machines. "We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits" that allowed tampering, said Mr. Wertheimer, a former security expert for the National Security Agency.

William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security."

…but I think it's rude to scream on somebody on their own site.

The villain is my boy Cobb:

That's because we talked about it when it happened, dawg.

You mean the dead ones we noticed years ago or the ones we don't want to see killed in further unnecessary war?

And if you were President, we'd be talking about you high moral standards,

But this election isn't about what you said. You or any other blogger.

It's about what the Bushistas said. And did.

Best of all, though, was the excerpt you pinged me with (that's right, ladies and gentlemen, he asked for this):

WHAT A LOAD OF…

ahem

It is our humanitarian concerns that makes us break with Bush. And it's not limited to Iraq. YOUR president said Saddam could remain in power if he disarmed. That means armament was more important than human rights to him if he was telling the truth.

The most humanitarian thing we could do for Iraq at this point is get the hell out of their way. But we're set up to keep a huge occupying force there for at least three years. We've nationalized…excuse me, imperialized their economy. Humanitarians do THAT kind of shit all the time, right?

Standing by these…neocons…would be abandoning humanitarian concerns in favor of a policy of aggression designed to make the world recognize the USofA, not as its leader, but as its master.

Fuck that.

Pettus-Brown done in by savvy date, Google

By Dan Horn
The Cincinnati Enquirer

After eluding authorities from coast to coast for more than a year, Cincinnati fugitive LaShawn Pettus-Brown finally made a mistake last week in New York City:

He went on a date with an inquisitive woman.

Pettus-Brown's life as a fugitive began to unravel when the woman decided to find out more about her prospective date by running his name through the Google Internet search engine.

A few mouse clicks later, she learned that Pettus-Brown was wanted for a lot more than dinner and a movie.

The Google search turned up an FBI warrant for Pettus-Brown's arrest in connection with the failed Empire Theater project in Over-the-Rhine. The woman, who has not been identified, contacted the FBI and told agents where he would be Friday night.

Pettus-Brown was arrested a little after 10 p.m. at an Applebee's restaurant on Long Island.

While I was at the OpinionJournal this morning, I noticed an editorial which I assume is another Republican effort to convince people the REAL reason we invaded Iraq wasn't what the President said at all. The link on the headline page looks like this:

The Real World BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Weapons of mass distraction obscure the real threat: tyranny.
12:01 a.m. EST

I'm not reading it because I agree TOTALLY with the blurb, but (considering the source) I'm confident we see different entities as both the source of the distractions and as the aspiring tyrants.

This is the reason why, when pointed to editorials like this one:

I'm amazed at both the hypocrisy and the hyperbole. They compare spending increases to revenue decreases as though

1. The Democratic candidates aren't suggesting revenue enhancements that at least partially offset the increased spending
2. The Bushistas don't have increased spending that increases the damage caused by their revenue reductions.

The LA Times got its figured from a Brookings Institution report. The OpinionJournal got its figures from a National Taxpayers Union Foundation report. Examine them for yourself.

Vision Circle has picked up a new blogger, Michael Hicks.

I think Cobb is surrounded over there.

Mr. Hicks is my boy. I don't know how often he'll post but he's definitely a thinker worth reading.

And who was the idiot that decided FTP had to come in two flavors?

sigh

All my old graphics should be intact now.

Fear of Rising Interest Rates Sends Markets Into Decline
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

Published: January 29, 2004

Stocks fell yesterday after the Federal Reserve unexpectedly dropped its commitment to hold interest rates low "for a considerable period," causing concern that higher borrowing costs will slow growth in corporate profits.

Homebuilders like Centex, KB Home and Pulte Homes led the decline. Mortgage lenders, including Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual, also dropped.

"The Fed was eventually going to have to say there will be a period where we will have to raise rates," Robert W. Smith, who manages the $5.8 billion T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund, said in an interview. "The market, while it knew it was coming, didn't want to believe it was today."[P6: What? Limits? That's Communism! Americans have no limits!]

The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index lost 15.57 points, or 1.4 percent, to 1,128.48, dropping for the fourth day in five. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 141.55 points, or 1.3 percent, to 10,468.37. The Dow and S.& P. 500 had their biggest declines since Oct. 22.

The Nasdaq composite index lost 38.67 points, or 1.8 percent, to 2,077.37, its largest decline since Dec. 9.

Eleven stocks fell for every four that rose on the New York Stock Exchange. More than 1.8 billion shares changed hands on the Big Board, 34 percent above average for the last three months.

Bush Scaling Back Dollars for Third World
By ELIZABETH BECKER

Published: January 29, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — President Bush plans to scale back requests for money to fight AIDS and poverty in the third world, putting off for several years the fulfillment of his pledges to eventually spend more than $20 billion on these programs.

Hardest hit would be the United Nations-supported Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, whose contribution from the United States would drop to $200 million in fiscal year 2005 from $550 million, according to Congressional officials who have been briefed on the president's budget proposal.

Party Leaders Express Relief at the Emergence of Kerry
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: January 29, 2004

MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 28 — Democratic leaders expressed relief Wednesday at the emergence of John Kerry as the leader of the party's presidential field, after his twin victories over Howard Dean. But they voiced concern about the potential electoral liabilities of Mr. Kerry, a candidate who remains unknown in much of the country.

In the interviews, party leaders described the Democratic nomination battle as hardly decided, even after Mr. Kerry decisively defeated Dr. Dean here and in Iowa. While many said Dr. Dean's hopes had been seriously diminished by the losses, they noted Mr. Kerry's own difficulties as a candidate this year, and said Senator John Edwards of North Carolina remained in a strong position to step in should Mr. Kerry falter again, particularly as the race moves south.

Still, the evident relief among some Democratic leaders was testimony to their concern about what had once seemed the near-inevitability that Dr. Dean would be the party's standard-bearer in November. That concern had markedly grown in recent days, after his third-place finish in Iowa and the raucous concession speech he delivered that night.

"To the extent to which there is an establishment, it wants what the Democratic primary voters want: the strongest candidate in the fall," said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. "I think the consensus is that John will be a more formidable candidate than Howard."

A Southern Democratic state chairman, who would not allow his name to be used, said, "There's been a big sigh of relief," while a national Democratic strategist said: "It has been a sea change. People were worried."

Volatility in Closing Prices Worries S. & P.
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: January 29, 2004

Shares of Biogen, the biotechnology company, changed hands at an average price of $38.71 with one minute left in the trading session on the Nasdaq stock market on Nov. 12. Then, in the final five seconds, a series of small orders flooded the market, sending the stock up 1 percent.

Sharp swings like this in Nasdaq stocks at the end of the day's trading have raised concerns at the Standard & Poor's Corporation. Worried that the volatile prices are unreliable, the company is planning to announce that it will soon start using American Stock Exchange closing prices for some Nasdaq stocks when it compiles daily movements in its widely followed S.& P. 500-stock index.

"It's clear there are times when there are a lot of concerns about prices on Nasdaq," said David M. Blitzer, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's. "Our big concern is the close. I think it offers a real opportunity for mischief."

The Nasdaq stock market has scored some coups recently by luring companies like Hewlett-Packard, the Walgreen Company and the Charles Schwab Corporation to list shares for trading there as well as on the New York Stock Exchange. Still, extreme volatility at the day's end on Nasdaq poses problems for big investors.

Those people who need a firm price on big trades at the end of the day to keep their portfolios in line with the index may be unable to do so in the Nasdaq market. And investors worry that someone who wants to manipulate a stock's price higher at the close, for example, could send in a series of small buy orders that exceed the number of shares for sale, a practice called spraying the market.

Ex-Arms Monitor Urges an Inquiry on Iraqi Threat
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and THOM SHANKER

Published: January 29, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, called on Wednesday for an independent inquiry into prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, but he said he did not believe that the Bush administration had pressured intelligence analysts to exaggerate the threat.

The White House immediately turned aside the calls from Dr. Kay and many Democrats for an immediate outside investigation, seeking to head off any new wide-ranging election-year inquiry that might go beyond reports already being assembled by Congressional committees and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Trackbacks wuz busted around here. Should be working now.

Luis at ColoradoLuis gives a Latino perspective on all the "largest minority" blather that annoys me so much. But it's at The American Street.

He then went home and considered which states are seen as bellwether states for Latinos the way South Carolina is seen as a bellwether for Black folks.

Of course you have no reading. Trying to get a reading on Hispanics is like trying to understand the "nation" of Africa…you have to cram all these heterogenous folks into the same bucket and name it as though it were all one thing that actually exists exactly the way you categorized it.

The Dead Center
By ROBERT B. REICH

The dismal fifth-place showing by Senator Joseph Lieberman in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday serves as both reminder and motivator to the other Democratic presidential candidates on what it will take to win in November. For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement — one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.

Senator Lieberman's defeat on Tuesday could be a good indicator of which side is ahead. To their detriment, Mr. Lieberman and the perennially dour Democratic Leadership Council have been deeply wary of any hint of a progressive movement, preferring instead an uninspired centrist message that echoes Republican themes.

On the other extreme is Howard Dean, who could be called the quintessential "movement" Democrat. His campaign is both grass-roots and reformist, and is based on the proposition that ordinary people must be empowered to "take back America." Similar threads can also be seen in the campaigns of Senators John Edwards and John Kerry. (Full disclosure: I've been helping Senator Kerry.) It was no accident after last week's caucuses in Iowa that a beaming Senator Edwards told supporters they had "started a movement to change America."

If "National Black United Fund" is too general, you can

• Get with one of the local affiliates
• Pick a particular member of the collective that focuses on an issue you find critical.

I found this thoroughly misnamed but very interesting collection of factoids at the National Black United Fund web site.

The National Black United Fund moves into the Good Causes box for Black History Month.

New PBS program spotlights black Americans
Henry Louis Gates produced 'America Beyond the Color Line'

By Lynn Elber
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:45 p.m. ET Jan. 28, 2004LOS ANGELES - Ask scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the problems facing black Americans and how to fix them and the words pour out.

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He talks about personal responsibility, government obligation and how successful blacks must reach out to “brothers and sisters left behind.”

But in “America Beyond the Color Line,” a four-part PBS documentary Gates wrote and produced, he gives others the floor.

The mighty and rich, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, are heard.

So, in equal measure, are those who often are voiceless.

Giving voice to the voiceless

Following in the footsteps of acclaimed oral historian Studs Terkel, Gates lets people living with poverty, crime and stunted dreams tell their story and offer their answers.

There’s the mother who, living with her daughter and grandchildren in a Chicago housing project, rises above its drugs and gangs. The young man who gave up crime to choose morality and minimum wage at a fast-food restaurant but sees little chance to advance.

Meet the man who’s wasted much of his life behind bars: “If I was Jesse Jackson and I was trying to keep those black men from even going to prison, or trying to get them out of prison, I would encourage everybody in the neighborhood ... to grab a person that they feel needs help.”

We also hear from those who have excelled.

Gates talks with a successful young couple who moved from Detroit to Atlanta and are content to live in an affluent black neighborhood — a new kind of segregation but one they chose, not one forced upon them — and others who are emblematic of black achievement.

It is written: It is not wrong to steal from a thief. Therefore I feel no guilt over stealing this from Guy at Rook's Rant because he stole it from Re:Zine

The biggest annoyance with not being able to import all the entries from my old server is the need to do Google searches instead of just using MT's built-in search engine. I will find out how to put a Google search on the page this week.

I mention this because in going through my logs I just noticed a couple of fairly desperate searches. About a week ago someone was trying to find the ebonics translations of a couple of White House press conference sections I did last Black English Month.

Um. Last July.

Anyway, there were three of them.

Whoever it was looking for that picture of me will just have to live with the disappointment.

Asia Times Interactive via Counterspin Central

I need a good cause for February.

I need time: I got "The End of Blackness" by Debra Dickerson, and if this book gets attention, I'll be getting the shitstorm I was hoping for. Check out the customer reviews at Amazon.com. And if you have broadband (or an inordinate amount of patience) you can check out 1/18 broadcast of KPFA's Sunday Salon, which includes a telephone interview of Ms. Dickerson and the audience reaction staring at around the 25th minute of the two hour program.

JoeF at Apathy, Inc.:

Joe is right…it's a matter of priorities.

It's a simple thing to know what the priorities are. Take a look at the things people want to let the market control…health care, education, you know the list already. This are the things that aren't important. The important stuff…rebuilding NYC and DC, pork added to spending bills, wars, tax cuts…are just done, and all the other details have to adjust around them.

Remember that. When someone says a thing should be managed by market forces, they are saying market forces are more important than the thing being managed.

Trickster at Tacitus:

Since this blogger doesn't know me from Adam, I'll be nice.

We see more a sneering and snotty denials of racism/capitalism/westernism/whathaveyou simply because the characters show the ideal conservative/libertarian value than the other way around. In fact, we see accusations of sneering snottiness whenever any mention at all of racism/capitalism/westernism/whathaveyou pops up.

It's sad that this kind of echo chamber is even desirable, but hey.

And a tip of the hat to Dean's World

Beyond the pulpit
By AMANDA RIPLEY

As the candidates eye the South Carolina primary, they are reinventing the way they court the African-American vote

The Buffalo Soldiers are invading the diners and barbershops of South Carolina. The political soldiers, named after a 19th century black Army regiment, once stormed black neighborhoods to get out the vote for Bill Clinton.

This year they are canvassing for Wesley Clark, but the battle isn't so simple this time. Last Thursday, as Buffalo Soldiers in black cavalry hats and boots gathered around Rhonda Court, 40, an apartment-complex manager eating lunch at LJ's Soul Food Cafe in Charleston, she wasn't satisfied with the cowboy pitch.

"What's Clark all about on Medicaid and getting lower-income families better access to health coverage?" she wanted to know.

Bill Clinton is gone, and so is Jesse Jackson. This time there is no easy or natural choice for black voters. Next week will be the candidates' first real test among this constituency in the "Southern gateway" primary in South Carolina, in which African Americans will probably make up as much as 50% of voting Democrats.

This year the candidates are finding they must do more if they are going to capture the imagination and the votes of the demographic that is critical not only to a victory in the primaries but also to giving a Democrat a chance against George Bush.

"Just saying the name Martin Luther King a couple of times is not enough," says Joy-Ann Lomena Reid, who writes on black issues for the Miami Herald.

I don't care, it's funny.

Chrysler execs tell of slurs
Depositions filed in auto dealer's lawsuit alleging discrimination
By Rudolph Bush
Tribune staff reporter

January 28, 2004

Top officials at DaimlerChrysler's Midwest financial arm often used slurs that maligned African-American employees and customers, according to depositions filed in a lawsuit alleging discriminatory lending practices.

The two lengthy depositions, recently unsealed in federal court in Chicago, support car dealer Gerald Gorman's claims that racist attitudes at Chrysler Financial influenced lending policies toward African-Americans as well as his ability to earn a living from dealerships in Midlothian and on Chicago's South Side, according to Gorman.

A Chrysler Financial spokesman declined to comment on the depositions Tuesday but said the company does not tolerate racial bias.

Taken last month, the depositions quote Chrysler Financial managers James Schultz and Timothy Devine as saying that their superior, the former Chicago zone manager for the company, regularly used slurs when referring to African-Americans. The manager no longer works for DaimlerChrysler.

In his testimony, Schultz recalled the manager's reaction to Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"The one that sticks out in my mind that disturbed me and probably other people in the room was, we were in collections and it was Martin Luther King Day and the delinquency was high and, you know, we were off, and he didn't like that and he just said, `Hey, let's shoot four more and give us the whole week off,' along those lines," Schultz said.

Schultz took that to mean four more African-Americans, he said.

If "in the months leading up to the strikes…the U.S. intelligence community [was] in a state of near panic that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent," exactly what was the intelligence failure?

January 28, 2004

WASHINGTON — Federal aviation authorities had considered suicide hijackings a potential threat as early as 1998, but discounted that likelihood and focused security efforts instead on detecting explosives and other concerns, according to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even in the months leading up to the strikes on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, with the U.S. intelligence community in a state of near panic that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent, aviation officials did little to step up security or tighten screening procedures, the panel said in a preliminary report Tuesday.

Report Finds No Abuse of Patriot Act

Wednesday, January 28, 2004; Page A02

The Justice Department has found no incidents in which the anti-terrorism USA Patriot Act has been invoked to abuse civil rights or civil liberties but has identified instances of mistreatment of Muslims and Arabs that did not involve the act, according to a report released yesterday by the agency's inspector general.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade Congress to renew the law, which expires in 2005 and faces a legion of critics who contend that its expansion of government surveillance powers violates constitutional free speech and privacy rights.

"It is clear that the government has been thoroughly responsible in its implementation of the act," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said. "As the president has said, it is vital that Congress reauthorize these provisions."

Shunning Stereotypes, a Reality Show Stars Blacks
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

hen the journalist Kevin Powell appeared on MTV's "Real World" during its first season in 1992, the producers turned him into a prototype for what would become a stock character on reality television: the temperamental black man.

Season after season "The Real World" has flattened the nuances of its black men, creating caricatures who seemed to be staggering under the heavy chips on their shoulders. They became the scapegoats of the house. They were paranoid, the white kids said. But maybe they had a reason to worry. People kept turning on them.

With its flagrant sidelining and stereotyping of black characters, reality television rates poorly with black viewers; even the huge hits are not among their 20 most-watched programs. But no tokenism or banishment come into play on "College Hill," BET's documentary series about students at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., which starts tonight (9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time). Marketed by this 24-year-old network as the "first black reality show," "College Hill," whose principals are all black, might be expected to provide a corrective to white TV's grating vaudeville casting. And sure enough, it doesn't harp on the subject of male outrage.

But though Stephen Hill, the show's executive producer, has said that "there is college life, and then there's black college life," the series turns out to be not at all a polemic on race or masculinity. It is an inventive, salty, high-velocity comic drama. If it's a corrective to anything, it's to the dull, badly cast reality shows in which the participants have no innate sense of tragedy or humor, and jokes must be synthesized in post-production.

Progressives take note, because a campaign contribution is either a purchase or an investment. It's never a gift.

MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 27 — Even before the results were in on Tuesday night, officials at Senator John Kerry's campaign said their candidate's financial fortunes were rapidly improving this week as they scrambled to refill depleted coffers.

Louis B. Susman, the campaign's chief fund-raiser, said in an interview that the campaign had raised more than $1.1 million in the past week over the Internet alone. Mr. Susman said the overall total "far exceeds" that but would not cite specific figures.

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Because contributions have risen markedly, campaign officials said Mr. Kerry was less likely to consider dipping into his personal money to help finance the campaign. They also said there were no plans for his multimillionaire wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, to make independent expenditures on behalf of the campaign.

"It has not even been considered," said Stephanie Cutter, a campaign spokeswoman.

Ms. Heinz Kerry, whose fortune is estimated at $500 million, said last year that she would consider such a step if she felt her husband were being attacked unfairly.

Chancellor Urges Broad Changes in Way Teachers Are Paid
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein called yesterday for sweeping changes in the way teachers are paid in New York City, advocating bonuses based on student achievement and higher salaries for teachers who agree to work in troubled schools and for those in fields where there are staff shortages, like math and science.

Mr. Klein gently praised the teachers' union for offering to try a streamlined contract, in a limited number of schools, that would do away with most work rules. He also applauded a proposal by the union president, Randi Weingarten, to speed the disciplining and dismissal of incompetent teachers.

Addressing a breakfast forum sponsored by Crain's New York Business, Mr. Klein was unrelenting in his demands for a complete overhaul of the way teachers are compensated. "We have to change the culture of our schools," Mr. Klein said. "We don't have a culture of excellence."

Contract talks with the union, the United Federation of Teachers, are to resume next week.

In his speech, Mr. Klein endorsed a recent report by the Teaching Commission, a group led by Louis V. Gerstner, the former chairman of I.B.M., that urged incentive pay and other bonuses for public school teachers, as well as greater authority for principals in personnel decisions, including hiring and dismissing teachers.

"I think this is a seminal document," Mr. Klein said, adding that he had arranged for copies of the report to be distributed to the audience of 350 business leaders. Even though he praised the report, Mr. Klein declined to embrace one of its major recommendations: that base pay for teachers be increased across the board.

The report's No. 1 recommendation says: "We call on school districts and unions to address the critical problem of low base compensation while also ensuring that a significant portion of future increases in teachers' total compensation is tied to improvements in student performance."

I understand what Mr. Kearney is saying here, and it would probably be helpful to follow his suggestion.

I have a hard time believing an Identity Christian, a Presbyterian and Ariel Sharon are all worshipping the same diety.

Sunday is one of the most important holidays in Islam: Id al-Adha, the feast celebrating Abraham's faith and willingness to sacrifice his son to God. It would also be a good occasion for the American news media to dispense with Allah and commit themselves to God.

Here's what I mean: Abraham, the ur-monotheist, represents the shared history, and shared God, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many Christians and Jews are aware of this common past, but seem to have a tough time internalizing it. Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a deputy under secretary of defense, made headlines last year suggesting that Allah is not "a real God" and that Muslims worship an idol. Last month in Israel, Pat Robertson said that today's world conflicts concern "whether Hubal, the moon god of Mecca known as Allah, is supreme, or whether the Judeo-Christian Jehovah, God of the Bible, is supreme."

Never mind that Hubal was actually a pre-Islamic pagan god that Muhammad rejected. Mr. Robertson's comments, like those of General Boykin, illuminate a widespread misconception — one that the news media has inadvertently helped to promote. So here's a suggestion: when journalists write about Muslims, or translate from Arabic, Urdu, Farsi or other languages, they should translate "Allah" as "God," too. A minor point? Perhaps not.

Last August the Washington Post Web site posed this question to readers: "Do you think that Muslims, Christians and Jews all pray to the same God?" One Muslim respondent wrote yes, each of the three major monotheistic faiths "pray to the God of Abraham."

Christian respondents, however, were equivocal or hostile to the notion. "Jews pray to Yahweh," one Virginia woman wrote. "As a Christian, I pray to the same God." But she insisted that "Muslims pray to Allah. Allah is not the God of Abraham." This woman might be surprised that Christian Arabs use "Allah" for God, as do Arabic-speaking Jews. In Aramaic, the language of Jesus, God is "Allaha," just a syllable away from Allah.

Still, who can blame her? Earlier that month, NPR reported Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza City intoning, "there is no God but Allah." Last week, The Los Angeles Times mentioned mourners for a slain Baghdad professor reciting, "there is no God but Allah" at the university campus. In September, The New York Times reported an assassinated Palestinian uttering, "there is no God but Allah" before he died.

"There is no god but God" is the first of Islam's five pillars. It is Muhammad's refutation of polytheism. Yet to today's non-Muslims, the locution "there is no God but Allah" reads as an affront, a declaration that inflammatory Allah trumps the Biblical God. This journalistic rendition distorts the meaning of the Muslim confession of faith.

Of course, there are distinctions to be made between religions, which the press shouldn't shy away from. But there is no need to augment these differences artificially, especially at the cost of an accurate understanding of the origins of the Abrahamic faiths.

John Kearney is a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

9/11 Commission Says It Needs More Time to Complete Inquiry
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks announced on Tuesday that it was seeking an extension of its deadline to complete the investigation until at least July, raising the prospect of a public fight with the White House and a final report delivered in the heat of the presidential campaign.

The White House and Republican Congressional leaders have said they see no need to extend the congressionally mandated deadline, now set for May 27, and a spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said Tuesday that Mr. Hastert would oppose any legislation to grant the extension.

But commission officials said there was no way to finish their work on time, a situation they attribute in part to delays by the Bush administration in turning over documents and other evidence.

The commission said Tuesday that it had not yet received a commitment from the administration for public testimony from prominent White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser. The panel said it was still in negotiations over the possibility of testimony from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

NY Times (all the way at the end of the article:

I'm watching "Head of State" with my parents.

Chris Rock just gave his "That Ain't Right" speech. My mom actually got comfortable listening. I said, "Ain't that the kind of speech you want to hear a politician make?" She said, "Dean came pretty close the other day."

A nice way to understand how the federal budget breaks out.

Chasing a Ghost

What are we to make of the news about David Kay, the chief WMD hunter in Iraq? He has resigned his position. In an interview, Kay expressed the view that no substantial stockpiles of WMD are in Iraq. Mr. Kay has also noted that:

the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991.and that there has been no substantial production of WMD since the first Gulf war in 1991.

Others justify the war as a means of showing that we are serious about terrorism and that by striking in the heart of the Arab world we provide a powerful symbol of American strength. Still others hope that Iraq emerges as a democratic nation, marking a different path for the Arab world. Finally, some see the war in Iraq as a first step in a series of confrontations between Islam and the West.

For one person, however, the war was about the WMD. For that person, had it been known that Saddam had no WMD, the war would not have been necessary. That person is George W. Bush.

President Bush made clear in the run up to the invasion that war could be avoided if Saddam disposed of his WMD. George W. Bush would have permitted Saddam to remain in power free to oppress the Iraqi people, sending them in countless numbers to rape rooms and mass graves if it had been known that Saddam possessed no WMD. In the absence of WMD, George Bush did not feel that the establishment of a free and democratic Iraq was worth the price in blood and treasure. It now appears that George W, Bush went to war chasing a ghost.

Those are strong words. The evidence to back up those assertions is contained in the words of George W. Bush and administration officials in the run up to the war.

Untenable Positions To Take With Me:
"Well, everyone thought he had WMD. "
That's because everyone relies on U.S. intelligence.

"Why didn't he just let inspectors in?"
He did. He'd been complaining for years about the inspectors being a political tool because he'd already proven to them he had no forbidden weapons.

"Why are you on Saddam's side?"
I'm not. I'm just not on the side of liars either. For some reason people keep acting as though one side or the other must be right. Are you REALLY that stupid?

Because the real swing voters in 2000 didn't shift because of policy. We've known at least since Reagan that presidential politics is about picking a guy that projects the image you want projected…who "sends the message" you want sent.

The real swing voters went for Bush because he promised to end the rancor in DC. To be a uniter rather than a divider.

Although I guess silencing different viewpoints could be considered a way of ending the ceaseless arguments.

Police Officer in Shooting Straddles Two Worlds
By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: January 26, 2004

In the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn, where a police officer shot and killed a teenager early Saturday morning, lives are jumbled together. Extended families share apartments, nicknames are familiar and people traverse smoothly from one building to the next and back again by way of the rooftop.

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That is not how life is where the officer who fired the fatal shot, Richard S. Neri Jr., calls home.

Officer Neri, who was placed on modified duty and forced to turn in his gun and badge, lives in Wantagh, on the South Shore of Long Island, about 27 miles from the housing project he patrolled in Brooklyn.

With his wife, Felicia, Officer Neri owns a 43-year-old ranch house with cream-colored aluminum siding, a few shrubs and a white plastic fence. That part of Wantagh, where the median household income is about $72,000, is built around keeping people separated. Obstacles to an easy flow of neighborly life are evident: few of the sidewalks are shoveled.

The house is on a four-lane thoroughfare, where the patches of homes seem to divide strip malls rather than the other way around. The stamp of the suburbs is evident in a jogging path that gives runners a view of little more than roadway for miles.

It always takes me a day or two to pull together my reaction to a police shooting of innocents in NYC. There's always been a significant chunk of anger in the mix.

I did, however, notice the Bloomberg administration is MUCH better about dealing with the issue than Giuliani ever was or could be.

Less than 12 hours after Timothy Stansbury Jr., an unarmed 19-year-old, was fatally shot by a police officer early Saturday morning on a Brooklyn rooftop, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced that there appeared to be no justification for the shooting and pledged to review Police Department tactics and training.

Even as the commissioner was accepting responsibility at Police Headquarters for the shooting, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was in Bedford-Stuyvesant, going past an angry crowd to offer his condolences to the slain youth's mother, father and grandmother.

In a city where deadly encounters between police officers and minority residents like Mr. Stansbury, who was black, have often become flashpoints, administration officials said yesterday that they hoped to keep the trust of residents by leveling with them quickly.

"The public deserves to know what happened, how it happened, and what steps the administration will take to do everything in its power to prevent another tragedy from occurring,'' said Edward Skyler, the mayor's press secretary.

The Bloomberg administration's response to the shooting was a departure from the way other mayors have reacted to past police shootings in two significant respects: the administration was swift to take responsibility for it, and Mr. Bloomberg himself chose not to address the public about it at all, leaving that task to his police commissioner.

Mugabe Is Said to Be Ill
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 25 — The president of Zimbabwe, Robert G. Mugabe, suddenly flew to South Africa on Saturday, according to news reports on Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph of London reported that the 79-year-old authoritarian leader was flown by military aircraft for medical treatment after he collapsed early on Saturday at his state residence in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare.

The newspaper said Mr. Mugabe had apparently suffered a violent fit of vomiting on Friday night, then collapsed trying to get out of bed on Saturday morning.

Reached by telephone on Sunday, Zimbabwean officials insisted that they had heard nothing to indicate either that Mr. Mugabe was ill or that he had left the country.

Mr. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe for more than two decades.

1. There's a upswing in the number of cases should be looked into. There is cause for concern
2. There's a upswing in the number of cases. Prove there is cause for concern and we may looked into it.

To one disputes it. Cases of autism, the baffling and often devastating neurological disorder that strikes in early childhood, are rising sharply.

In California alone, the number of children receiving special services for autism tripled from 1987 to 1998 and doubled in the four years after that. National figures tell a similar story.

The upsurge has lent urgency to calls for more research on autism and more government spending to educate autistic children and has inspired federal officials, who late last year held an "autism summit" meeting in Washington, where they presented a 10-year plan of action.

But what lies behind the increase in cases is sharply debated. To some, the upswing has all the hallmarks of an epidemic and indicates that autism itself is increasing rapidly.

To others, the rise can in large part be explained by increased public awareness of autism in recent years, changes in the way the disorder is diagnosed and the incentive of tapping into federally mandated services for autistic children.

Neither side can prove its argument, because the types of studies that could tease out a true increase have not been done.

But the question is crucial, experts say, because its answer has significant implications for how federal money is spent, how afraid parents should be and how much effort scientists should devote to tracking down environmental factors in addition to genetic influences.

Advocacy groups, many of them founded by parents of autistic children, have tended to line up on the side of an epidemic. And some autism experts also believe the illness is increasing.

"To me, it's a huge public health emergency, a crisis," said Portia Iversen, a founder of Cure Autism Now, an organization based in Los Angeles that finances research. Ms. Iversen said she was certain that the number of children with autism was rising sharply.

But epidemiologists cluster on the other side of the debate.

They do not rule out the possibility of a true increase in autism. But they point to flaws in the way that the rising numbers — especially those in California — have been presented to the public. And they say the small size and widely varying findings of epidemiological studies of autism make it impossible to say what is going on.

For example, Dr. Eric Fombonne, an epidemiologist and a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at McGill University, said most of the increase was probably a result of diagnostic changes and statistical anomalies.

What everyone agrees on is that autism is being diagnosed more frequently than in the past. The disorder, which is believed to be strongly influenced by genes, is marked by a profound impairment in the ability to relate to other people, a delay in language development, or repetitive behaviors.

Before the mid-1980's, most studies estimated the prevalence of autism at fewer than 5 cases for every 10,000 children. Over the last decade, epidemiological studies have come up with wildly disparate estimates, from 5.2 cases per 10,000 (in a large Norwegian study) to 72.6 per 10,000 (in a small Swedish study). But the trend has been upward, with most experts agreeing that at least 10 children out of every 10,000 are autistic.

Last year, in a review of all available studies of autism rates, Dr. Fombonne concluded that the findings "point toward an increase in prevalence over the last 15 years."

Bush's Call for Job Training: Cruel Joke on Unemployed
By Gordon Lafer
Gordon Lafer is an associate professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and author of "The Job Training Charade" (Cornell University Press, 2002).

January 25, 2004

For those who follow employment policy, it was no surprise that President Bush's State of the Union address called for more job training as the solution to unemployment. For 20 years, every jobs crisis — whether inner-city poverty, jobs lost due to the North American Free Trade Agreement or loggers put out of work by the spotted owl — has been met with calls for retraining.

Whatever the problem, it seems, job training is the answer.

The only trouble is, it doesn't work, and the government knows it. The most comprehensive evaluation of training programs, conducted by the Department of Labor, followed 20,000 people over four years. For the vast majority, the government concluded that training made no difference whatsoever.

People got the same kind of jobs whether or not they'd been through the program. The single most successful group was adult women. But here's what it means to be the single most successful group: Those who did not go through training ended up making 47% of the poverty line, and those who did made 54% of the poverty line.

It's tempting to think that these meager results are due to mismanagement in one program. However, every training program reports similar anemic outcomes, whether publicly or privately run, for welfare recipients, high school dropouts or laid-off union workers. Indeed, in studying more than 40 years of job training policy, I have not seen one program that, on average, enabled its participants to earn their way out of poverty.

Why doesn't training work? First, there simply are not enough decent-paying jobs. Any individual may benefit from education, but training by itself does not create more jobs.

Second, outside of the professional job market, most jobs just do not require much in the way of sophisticated training. Fully two-thirds of American jobs are in occupations that do not require a college degree.

This leads to the obvious question: training for what? The president insists that "much of our job growth will be found in high-skilled fields…. " But the biggest-growing occupations are jobs in fast-food preparation, customer service, retail and security. Of the 25 occupations projected to add the most positions between 2000 and 2010, more than two-thirds can be learned in a few days of on-the-job training. And almost half pay wages near the poverty line.

The truth is that more technology jobs are being sent out of the country than are being created for Americans, with the industry estimating that one-tenth of all high-tech jobs will be exported to places like India by the end of 2004.

These facts aren't secret; most of them come from the government. So if the president knows there are not enough jobs, why is he trumpeting training as the answer to unemployment?

Simple. It's a way of shifting responsibility away from the administration — and its corporate donors — and suggesting instead that workers have themselves to blame for their misfortune. If only they had the right skills, Bush implies, they wouldn't be facing the crushing reality of joblessness.

Democrats have accused Bush of hypocrisy for promoting training after cutting the training budget for three years. And indeed, the president's new $250-million initiative would serve less than one-tenth of 1% of the 8.5 million Americans currently unemployed. But the hypocrisy is not that Bush is spending too little. It's that he's promoting training at all when he knows that it can't solve the problem.

There are any number of things the president could do that would help workers more. He could demand a raise in the minimum wage, helping millions escape poverty. He could make it easier for workers to unionize; union workers make roughly 25% more than nonunion workers in the same occupations and industries. Or he could discourage American companies from laying off American workers and moving jobs overseas.

The president is doing none of these.

In this context, to promote training in order to make workers think that unemployment is their own fault is a cruel joke on the millions of American families struggling to make it through hard times. They deserve better.

This excerpt doesn't quite put across the idea the editorial intends to express.

Just thought I'd let you know.

By Cathy Young, 1/26/2004

YOU KNOW HOW sometimes when you listen to two opponents in a debate or two warring soon-to-be-ex-spouses, each side does such an awful job of self-presentation that the more you listen to one party, the more you sympathize with the other? That seems to be happening right now in the war over religion in public life. Last week, I expressed my dismay over the notion that insufficient religiosity is, in 21st century America, a disqualification from high political office (we're voting for president, not pontiff).

Now, here comes Salon.com, one of the finest magazines on the Web, with an article titled "How Satan Is Propping Up Bush's War on Terror." The piece, by Salon editor Andrew O'Hehir, is based on an interview with Penn State University professor Bill Ellis, author of a new book on Satanism in popular culture. Ellis, writes O'Hehir, "says he understands exactly why so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together, despite the lack of any factual evidence." The key, he claims, lies in the popularity of evangelical Christianity, which sees the devil as a real, ever-present and ever-scheming entity.

In O'Hehir's (and Ellis's) view, the same fundamentalists who can fall for a satirical story claiming that the evil influence of the Harry Potter books is driving millions of schoolchildren into Satanic covens can also easily believe in an "axis of evil." For a "born-again believer," Ellis is quoted as saying, there is no doubt that "the person who is giving the orders to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the leader of Iran and the leader of North Korea is, of course, Satan."

Never mind that the phrase "axis of evil" was coined not by "our born-again president" (as O'Hehir refers to President Bush), but by a speechwriter, David Frum, who happens to be Jewish. Never mind that plenty of Americans who are not evangelical Christians supported the war in Iraq or that the war's most ardent champions in the media included Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic critical of religious fundamentalism, and Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist.

Clyburn plays S.C. kingmaker in quest for black vote

By Rick Klein, Globe Staff, 1/26/2004

SANTEE, S.C. -- If there was any doubt as to the importance of black voters in South Carolina's Feb. 3 Democratic presidential primary, witness the courtship of Representative James E. Clyburn.

Clyburn's first choice, House colleague Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, came in a disappointing fourth place in last Monday's Iowa caucuses. Gephardt had not even made his withdrawal official before Clyburn's cellphone started buzzing that night.

Before he went to bed, Clyburn had heard from Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, and retired Army General Wesley K. Clark of Arkansas. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean had a college roommate whom Clyburn had taught in high school call on his behalf, and Dean himself followed up two days later.

All the major Democratic presidential contenders have checked in several times since, with Edwards ringing just about daily. They have been calling for the same reason, even if they do not say it every time: They want Clyburn's endorsement.

"At least this time, we're getting some attention," Clyburn said with a laugh. "We never had a presidential primary before that really matters."

Those records should be destroyed right away…in fact, they shouldn't even be created…because the The GOVERNMENT can use them to track down and disarm gun owners when they try to force us all into Socialism."

feh

THE U.S. Congress has done a grave disservice to the average American and severely hindered law enforcement by sneakingly passing an amendment that requires the destruction of background records on gun sales within 24 hours.

In a belated Christmas gift to the National Rifle Association, the measure was approved as part of a catch-all appropriations bill that was originally designed as a supplemental spending plan to keep government running. The Republican-controlled Congress tucked the measure deep inside the overbloated bill.

Until now, the Department of Justice required a 90-day hold on firearm sales records to ensure the kind of background checks that have so far stymied more than a million illegal buyers.

"Congress . . . has made it easier for spousal abusers, stalkers, the mentally ill and even terrorists to get guns and keep them,'' said Sarah Brady, wife of President Reagan's former press secretary, who was wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt. She chairs the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The new policy makes it nearly impossible to track and retrieve illegal weapons. It eschews public safety in favor of reckless gun dealers and street hoodlums.

For the sake of national security, it is hoped Bush will muster the courage and leadership to quickly veto this measure.

Annan Warns of Narrow Focus on Terrorism
Annan Warns of Too-Narrow Focus on Fighting Terrorism; Ashcroft Appeals for Help in Iraq

DAVOS, Switzerland Jan. 23 — U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned the United States and other rich countries Friday that a too-narrow focus on fighting terrorism could worsen global tensions and threaten human rights.

Addressing the World Economic Forum, the U.N. chief said international terrorism threatens peace and stability and "has the potential to exacerbate cultural, religious and ethnic dividing lines."

Yet in unusually blunt criticism apparently aimed at the Bush administration, he said that the war against terror also carried the risk of aggravating such tensions, "as well as raising concerns about protection of human rights and civil liberties."

The war on terror also has redirected world attention "dangerously away" from other pressing concerns such as poverty, hunger and disease, Annan said, adding that it was "time to rebalance the international agenda."

"The most privileged members" of the United Nations, he said, were "currently and understandably preoccupied with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. (But) the U.N. must also protect millions of our fellow men and women from the more familiar threats of poverty, hunger and deadly diseases."

The aftermath of the war and dealing with the threat of terrorism has been a running theme this year at the annual gathering of global business and political leaders in this Alpine resort.

Hours after Annan's speech, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the "entirety of the world community" was needed to eliminate terrorism and establish freedom in Iraq.

Get Your War On explains.

Sharpton's Bid Aided by an Unlikely Source
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

The Rev. Al Sharpton has demonstrated his quick wit and deft use of one-liners in his campaign for president. But while the delivery has been all his own, he had help shaping his message from an unlikely source: Roger Stone, a political consultant who worked for Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Mr. Stone, who describes himself as a Republican-libertarian, has had a hand in some of Mr. Sharpton's most effective attacks on Howard Dean, aides to Mr. Sharpton said. By extension, he has played a role in shaping the dynamic of the Democratic primary, political strategists and observers said.

Mr. Stone, like Mr. Sharpton, is a larger-than-life character with a flamboyant personal style who is both revered and reviled for his work. A 1985 cover story in The New Republic magazine described Mr. Stone as "the State-of-the-Art Washington Sleazeball." Mr. Stone called the article a "political hit job."

Today Mr. Stone says he loves helping Mr. Sharpton.

"Frankly," Mr. Stone said in a recent telephone interview, "there has not been a candidate with this much charisma since Ronald Reagan. He is a natural talent. Who else could do the funky chicken on television and get away with it? I don't share his politics. Let's be very clear, if you check the F.E.C. records you will see I am supporting George W. Bush. I am a Reagan Republican."

But the men have found a common agenda in the Democratic primary. They have delighted in skewering Dr. Dean, with Mr. Sharpton generating one of Dr. Dean's lowest moments in a debate when he forced him to admit he had no blacks or Hispanics in his cabinet when he was governor of Vermont.

"I saw Roger's fingerprints all over that," said the developer Donald Trump, who has worked with Mr. Stone over the past two decades.

Mr. Stone did not want to discuss the specifics of his relationship with Mr. Sharpton, but aides Mr. Sharpton confirmed his involvement in that and other aspects of the campaign.

The Girls Next Door
By PETER LANDESMAN

The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.

On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''

The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.

It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.

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Ex-cons can't vote but they can run for office?

Mississippi seems like a good state for him to run in. I'm sure the governor of that state will endorse him.

Hat tip to All Facts and Opinions

Economic Policy Institute
1660 L STREET, NW | SUITE 1200 | WASHINGTON, DC 20036 | 202/775-8810 | FAX 202/775-0819

Correcting the Record on the Economy

Recent speeches and statements by key administration officials contain assertions about the economy that
are either inaccurate or incomplete. The failure of the economy to generate enough jobs to lift the labor
market out of the doldrums is likely to be a major part of the president’s State of the Union Address on
January 21. The table below lists and corrects some of the most egregious of these errors.

Money quote: For every dollar of white per-capita income, African Americans had 55 cents in 1968 - and only 57 cents in 2001. At this pace, it would take Blacks 581 years to get the remaining 43 cents.

New Report: The State of the Dream
Black-White Gaps Still Wide — Some Even Widening — Since Dr. King's Death
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE: State of the Dream 2004 (PDF, 112 KB).
Or, email us to receive a copy by return e-mail.

"There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Racial inequities in unemployment, family income, imprisonment, average wealth and infant mortality are actually worse than when Dr. King was killed, according to United for a Fair Economy's new report, "The State of the Dream: Enduring Disparities in Black and White," by Dedrick Muhammad, Attieno Davis, Meizhu Lui and Betsy Leondar-Wright. The report contrasts the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the reality of the continued racial divide.

Progress has been made in narrowing the divide in per capita income, poverty, homeownership, education, life expectancy and median wealth, but so slowly that the gaps would take decades or even centuries to close at the current rate.

"As Americans celebrate the King Holiday and listen to President Bush's State of the Union address, we must hold in mind the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to create opportunity for all its people," said Dedrick Muhammad. "No longer do we hear about a War on Poverty or a Great Society. It has been replaced by compassionate conservatism, which has been very conservative in its compassion."

• The typical Black family had 60% as much income as a white family in 1968, but only 58% as much in 2002.
• One in nine African Americans cannot find a job. Black unemployment is more than twice the white rate – a wider gap than in 1972.
• Black infants are almost two-and-a-half-times as likely as white infants to die before age one – a greater gap than in 1970.
• White households had an average net worth of $468,200 in 2001, more than six times the $75,700 of Black households. In 1989 (the oldest comparable data available), average white wealth was five-and-a-half times Black wealth.

"The phrase 'snail's pace' doesn't describe the slow progress in some black-white gaps, because snails travel faster than that," said Meizhu Lui.

• At the slow rate that the Black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it would take 150 years, until 2152, to close.
• For every dollar of white per-capita income, African Americans had 55 cents in 1968 – and only 57 cents in 2001. At this pace, it would take Blacks 581 years to get the remaining 43 cents.

"African Americans have endured unbearable disparities for too long," said Attieno Davis. "581 years is too long to wait for our missing 43 cents on the dollar."

• While white homeownership has jumped from 65% to 75% since 1970, Black homeownership has only risen from 42% to 48%. At this rate, it would take 1,664 years to close the homeownership gap – about 55 generations.
• If current rates of incarceration continue, one out of three African American males born today will be imprisoned at some point during their lifetimes.
• At the current pace, Blacks and whites will reach high school graduation parity in 2013, six decades after the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. And college graduation parity wouldn't be reached until 2075, more than 200 years after the end of slavery.

"Dr. King worked to instill in us all a sense of moral urgency about the racial disparities in the United States," said Betsy Leondar-Wright. "We can honor his memory by shaking off our complacency and committing ourselves to racial justice."

Dedrick Muhammad is the Racial Wealth Divide Coordinator at United for a Fair Economy. Attieno Davis coordinates UFE's Racial Wealth Divide education work. Meizhu Lui is UFE's Executive Director, and Betsy Leondar-Wright is UFE's Communications Director.

United for a Fair Economy is an independent national non-profit that raises awareness that concentrated wealth and power undermine the economy, corrupt democracy, deepen the racial divide, and tear communities apart.

The brother is in ICU. Bad heart valve.

Of course, you can follow the link to find out.

Published: January 25, 2004

IF there is one thing that most people think they know about incomes in the United States over the last few decades, it is probably that salaries have grown more unequal. The rich have gotten richer faster than everyone else has.

In recent weeks, a new book has challenged this conventional wisdom, calling it a statistical mirage, and its striking claim has begun to receive national attention. Among native-born Americans, lower- and middle-income families have actually received proportionately bigger raises than the wealthy, according to "The Progress Paradox" (Random House), written by Gregg Easterbrook, a Washington journalist. Only a great influx of immigrants - many of them poor, but richer than they were in their home countries - has made inequality appear to widen in the statistics, Mr. Easterbrook says.

"Factor out immigration," he writes, "and the rise in American inequality disappears."

The idea has echoed from the book into the pages of The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Times of London and BusinessWeek magazine, among other publications. It seems like one of those facts that could rewrite conventional wisdom about the American economy.

It happens, however, not to be true.

The millions of immigrants who have entered the country in recent decades have indeed made inequality look larger than it otherwise would. But even among households headed by native-born Americans, the rich have done far better than others over the past 20 years - as well as over the past 30, 40 or 50 years, according to government statistics and the economists who study them.

E-mail scam taps antiterrorist push, says FDIC
Last modified: January 23, 2004, 3:29 PM PST
By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the national insurer of U.S. bank accounts, warned Americans on Friday that a convincing e-mail scam is making the rounds.

The fraudulent e-mail claims to be from the FDIC and informs recipients that their bank account has been denied insurance as a result of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into "suspected violations of the Patriot Act." The USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, gives broad powers to law enforcement to combat terrorism.

"Someone really did their homework," said David Barr, a spokesman for the FDIC, adding that the letter is mostly free of the grammatical and spelling mistakes that usually act as a sign that the message is not genuine. Moreover, citations of the little-understood antiterrorism law, whose acronym stands for "Uniting and Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," lend the message a dire tone.

"The Patriot Act is an actual act out there. It's done through Homeland Security, and it's used to block the flow of money," making the fraudulent e-mail seem at least plausible, Barr said.

The FDIC sent out the advisory after being inundated with complaints from consumers, who were worried that their bank accounts wouldn't have the $100,000 protection historically guaranteed by the FDIC.

The scheme is only the latest attempt to get personal and financial information through fraud, a criminal activity known as "phishing." Similar messages have targeted customers of Citibank, Wells Fargo, PayPal and other financial companies, but haven't cited the USA PATRIOT Act.

The latest letter states that unless recipients confirm their personal information by going to what looks like an FDIC Web site, then their account will lose its protection. The link to the Web site provided in the e-mail message leads to a server in Karachi, Pakistan, CNET News.com has discovered. Moreover, the link is formatted to take advantage of an Internet Explorer flaw that allows an attacker to hide the true destination of the link; in this case, the address bar in Internet Explorer displays "www.fdic.gov," while the actual Web site is at a different address in Pakistan.

Guantanamo spy cases falter
Doubts are cast on US theory of espionage ring

By John Mintz, Washington Post, 1/25/2004

Last September, top officials of the US Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told a military judge in Florida that the prison's Muslim chaplain, Army Captain James Yee, would soon be charged with mutiny, sedition, espionage, and aiding the enemy -- crimes that could lead to his execution.

Based on those allegations, Yee was held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina for 76 days. But authorities never charged him with any of those offenses. Instead, Yee will face much less serious charges, such as adultery and mishandling classified materials, at a hearing at Fort Benning, Ga., scheduled for Feb. 4.

While Yee was being detained, Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad I. Halabi, who worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay, was in solitary confinement 3,000 miles away, held in California on charges of espionage and aiding the enemy. The most serious of those allegations have been withdrawn as well.

The men's lawyers and some specialists on military law say the prosecutions of Yee and Halabi have been riddled with inconsistencies and oddities that cast doubt on the government's original fears that a spy ring was operating in the high-security prison for those captured in the global war on terrorism.

"I find it difficult to believe professional prosecutors are proceeding with these two cases in this manner," said Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University. "The ineptitude at each step of the proceeding is amazing." Even now, prosecutors have not made final determinations that some of the documents Halabi was charged with possessing were classified -- and, if they were, what level of security applied to them. So his lead civilian attorney, Donald G. Rehkopf Jr., said he has only a hazy picture of why his client was arrested last July.

A similar review of documents in the Yee case was finished only in recent days.

In an unusual episode last month, military investigators raided offices used by Halabi's military lawyers at an Air Force base in California, temporarily seizing a computer and copying its hard drive in a search for evidence against the airman.

Rehkopf protested against the search in a letter to Air Force officials, calling it "bizarre" and "a conscious disregard of the attorney-client relationship."

As Fed Holds Rates Down, Investors Face Tough Choice
Markets are likely to react badly when credit tightens, but bulls say that's not today's worry.
Tom Petruno

January 25, 2004

Imagine you're on a train that's taking you toward somewhere you really want to be. Imagine also that you're clairvoyant, and you know the train will wreck at some point — you just don't know exactly when.

Do you stay on the train for as long as you can, hoping to jump off just before the wreck?

That, in essence, is the question that faces big and small investors alike this year as they debate what the Federal Reserve may do with interest rate policy, when it will do it and how a Fed shift could affect financial markets.

Central bank policymakers will meet Tuesday and Wednesday, their first gathering in the new year. It's virtually certain they will hold the target level for their key short-term interest rate at a generational low of 1%, which is where it has been since June.

But everyone knows that, barring unforeseen calamity, the Fed can't keep rates at this level forever. If the economy continues to improve, Chairman Alan Greenspan and his cohorts eventually will have to tighten credit.

And when they do, that's when the train wreck occurs, many investors fear. Though it's true that the Fed has tweaked interest rates countless times over the last century without causing catastrophe, the concern this time is that the economy, and financial markets, may be so addicted to rock-bottom rates that any upturn would trigger panic selling on Wall Street, slam the housing market and cause many other unpleasant side effects.

Truth: a Bitter Pill for Drug Makers
By Greg Critser
Greg Critser is the author of the forthcoming "One Nation Under Pills" and "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World," recently out in paperback.

January 25, 2004

Next month, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration will meet to discuss what might arguably be the most tendentious issue in modern psycho-pharmacology: the use of antidepressants to treat childhood and teen depression and the drugs' possible role in teen suicide. This comes on the heels of Britain having banned the prescribing of Paxil for children under 18 and advising against most other commonly prescribed antidepressants for that age group.

But the FDA should really be debating bigger issues, including the role these drugs have come to play in society, and the ways the drug companies have distorted the truth about their products.

The current crop of antidepressants, mostly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, have become, in a sense, cultural products as well as medical products. We have embraced them as a society, yet we are intensely conflicted about them. They are not just pills but stories we tell ourselves about how we should feel and how life should be lived — pills as movies if you will. This may well be the reason we have such mixed feelings about antidepressants: We simply don't know how to assess them objectively, independent from the tales we have told ourselves.

One reason for that is the speed with which these drugs were launched out of the corporate womb and into the patient population. In the old days, before medicines were marketed directly to consumers, prescription drugs took years to gain a foothold and hence become profitable. Doctors stuck to the tried and true and were slow to embrace new drugs. But after Congress passed a law in the 1980s making generic drugs easier to get, brand-name companies had to become entrepreneurial; they realized they could no longer afford long waits for profitability.

This change led directly to a whole new marketing strategy at the big pharmaceutical companies: Rather than marketing to the relatively small pool of potential prescribers with psychiatric training, they cast a wider net: focusing on building demand among general practitioners — and later, more directly, among patients themselves. To help general practitioners unfamiliar with antidepressants explain the drugs to their patients, the manufacturers created easily understood stories, maintaining that SSRIs, such as Prozac (made by Lilly), Paxil (GlaxoSmithKline) and Zoloft (Pfizer), were not like the previous generations of psych meds. They were not uppers or downers or tranquilizers that turned patients into zombies but more sophisticated compounds that simply reestablished our "natural" neurotransmitter balance. It was a powerful message to a generation of patients inclined toward the natural.

Should This Marriage Be Saved?
By LAURA KIPNIS

CHICAGO

Marriage: it's the new disease of the week. Everyone is terribly worried about its condition, though no one can say what's really ailing the patient. Others are simply in denial, like President Bush, who insisted that heterosexual marriage was "one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization" in his State of the Union address last week. Yet this statement came shortly after his own administration floated a proposal for a $1.5 billion miracle cure: an initiative to promote "healthy" marriage, particularly among low-income couples. And what of all the millionaires in failing marriages or fleeing commitment? Where are the initiatives devoted to rehabilitating this afflicted group? Sorry, they're on their own in the romance department. In this administration, the economic benefits filter upward, the marital meddling filters down.

The administration may think that low-income Americans need to be taught better communication and listening skills, but actually they're communicating just fine. Conservatives just don't like the message being communicated, which is this: We don't want to get married.

More and more people — heterosexuals, that is — don't want to get or stay married these days, no matter their income level. Yes, cohabitation is particularly prevalent in less economically stable groups, including the women counted as unmarried mothers. But only 56 percent of all adults are married, compared with 75 percent 30 years ago. The proportion of traditional married-couple-with-children American households has dropped to 26 percent of all households, from 45 percent in the early 1970's. The demographics say Americans are voting no on marriage.

The fact is that marriage is a social institution in transition, whether conservatives like it or not. This is not simply a matter of individual malfeasance; in fact, it may not be individual at all. The rise of the new economy has gutted all sorts of traditional values and ties, including traditions like the family wage, job security and economic safety nets. Women have been propelled into the work force in huge numbers, and not necessarily for personal fulfillment: with middle-class wages stagnant from the early 70's to the mid-90's, it now takes (at least) two incomes to support the traditional household.

But as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama has pointed out, the changing nature of capitalism since the 1960's also required a different kind of work force; it was postindustrialism, perhaps even more than feminism, that transformed gender roles, contributing to what he calls the "great disruption" of the present. The increasing economic self-sufficiency of women has certainly been a factor in declining marriage rates: there's nothing like a checking account to decrease someone's willingness to be pushed into marriage or stay in a bad one. And interestingly, welfare reform has played the same role for lower-income groups: studies have shown a steep decline in marriages among women in welfare-to-work programs, for many of the same reasons.

Questions weren't raised. Doubts were verified.

Justice Scalia's Misjudgment

This month may have been duck hunting season in Louisiana, but it was still a bad time for Justice Antonin Scalia to hunt ducks with Vice President Dick Cheney. Their trip came shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Mr. Cheney's appeal of an order requiring him to disclose members of his secret energy task force. By going, Justice Scalia raised serious questions about his ability to judge the case impartially, and needlessly sullied his court's reputation.

Environmental groups and others have long suspected that the Cheney task force, which met to devise a national energy strategy in 2001, gave representatives for the oil, electricity and nuclear industries — many of them large Republican donors — undue influence. A federal appeals court ruled in a case brought by two public-interest groups that at least some of the names should be made public.

Justice Scalia told The Los Angeles Times that social contacts between judges and officials with cases pending are permissible when officials are sued in the course of their public duties. He compared his situation to justices' dining at the White House when a suit involving a president is pending. But vacationing with a litigant in a small group, outside the public eye, raises a far greater appearance of impropriety than attending a White House dinner. And Mr. Cheney's case involves not just any action, but one calling his integrity into question.

This is the second time in recent months Justice Scalia has cast doubt on his impartiality. Last year, he told a civic gathering that the decision about whether the Pledge of Allegiance should contain the words "under God" should be left to legislators, not courts, when that issue was headed to the court. After a litigant protested, Justice Scalia recused himself.

To avoid the appearance of partiality, and to protect the reputation of the court, he should do the same in Mr. Cheney's case. And in the future, he should choose his shooting companions from the legions of hunters with no cases pending before him.

Programs Try Down-to-Earth Aid for Marriages
By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: January 25, 2004

PHOENIX, Jan. 22 — There is a lot of earnest nodding as Leo Godzich tells the seven couples in his premarital education class how important it is to enter into marriage knowing each other's finances, sharing assets, and agreeing on their budget priorities. He tells of a time early in his marriage when he and his wife went without utilities — dinner by candelight, every night — to save money, and how, because they chose their sacrifice together, it became a fond memory.

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He asks his students what they will budget for, and they call out the basics: Shelter. Food. Car payments. Utilities. Clothing. Entertainment. Debt. Pets. There is a pause, then one young man asks, uncertainly, "Golf?" Yes, if that's a priority, Dr. Godzich says.

It is a mixed group, this premarital class at the Phoenix First Assembly of God. Some are members of the church, but most are not. Some have their weddings planned, while others are just beginning to explore the idea of marriage. Most are middle class, but some are eligible for a subsidy through the state welfare program, which has budgeted $1 million for initiatives to promote marriage — much as President Bush proposes to do, to the tune of $1.5 billion, in the welfare re-authorization bill.

Many such programs already exist, without government backing. Over the last decade, marriage education has mushroomed, in churches, community centers, colleges and even high schools.

There are dozens — perhaps hundreds — of curricula, written by therapists, lawyers, psychologists and pastors, covering everything from communications skills and finances to sexuality and divorce law.

What there is not is solid evidence that such efforts can bring down the nation's divorce rate, which has plateaued at about 4 divorces per 1,000 people — down from the high of 5.3 in 1979 and 1981, but still higher than the 2 per 1,000 of the 1940's and 1950's.

The Only Superbad Power
By SERGE SCHMEMANN

It is difficult to believe that George W. Bush has been in the White House for only three years. It seems ages now that we have been living in a new world, in which his administration is closely identified with new passions, new fears, new enemies. Sept. 11, of course, is the dominant reason; it has effectively divided our life into a ''before'' and an ''after,'' pushing the 20th century with its hot and cold wars, its thickets of nuclear missiles and its arguments into a foggy past. George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton managed the immediate consequences of the collapse of Communism, but they did so when the presumption was still that the main threat to the world had been lifted, when there seemed no pressing need to define a new, post-Communist order.

For better or for worse, it was left to George W. Bush to propose that new order, and it hasn't worked out the way many had expected -- a world in which arsenals would be sharply reduced and democracies would cooperate in resolving conflicts, ensuring human rights and protecting the environment. Instead, Bush and his team disdainfully chucked out containment and deterrence and declared that America had the right to ensure its security any way it deemed proper, including pre-emptive war. The triumphant America of the 21st century would use multilateral institutions only when it suited American aims. Not only that; guaranteeing its safety required that America impose its democratic values, starting in the Middle East.

Someday Bush may be proven right, and a harmonious chain of friendly democracies may stretch from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. For the time being, the new American order has generated a tsunami of anti-Americanism, with the United States perceived in some quarters as a greater threat to world peace than Al Qaeda. Deep fissures have developed between the United States and its allies; American policies have threatened to undermine Europe's drive toward unity; Muslims around the globe have turned against the United States; many leaders in Asia now look to China for their economic and political security; and Americans themselves have become polarized in their attitude toward the rest of the world. The ''war on terrorism'' has gotten mired in an anarchic Iraq; Guantanamo has come to represent a willful violation of civil rights; and tyrants have seized on the concept of pre-emptive war to justify their own suppression of opponents, now labeled terrorists.

Not unexpectedly, the rise of so contentious a new order, and the man who so unexpectedly launched it, have hatched a considerable library of condemnation, all the more as his re-election campaign gets under way. Of the books reviewed here, two -- "America Unbound'' and ''Crisis on the Korean Peninsula'' -- can be classified as reasonably evenhanded, though the first is broadly critical of the Bush approach and the second implicitly so. The others leave no doubt of what they think, ranging from George Soros's declared hope that his book will contribute to sweeping Bush out of office to Robert Jay Lifton's image of a ''malignant synergy'' between the United States and Al Qaeda ''when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American leaders seem to act in concert.'' From across the Atlantic, Emmanuel Todd contributes the wistful notion that the United States, the true empire and axis of evil in his view, is already near collapse. These are only a portion of a swelling anti-Bush literature, for now only partly offset by equally ardent pro-Bush books.