You know, there's a ton of questionable patents out there and most of them are software patents. I find it interesting that the one time an industry giant is on the wrong side of things we see an invalidation. Microsoft says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has only invalidated 151 patents out of nearly 4 million patents awarded since 1988, meaning that this invalidation is a good sign for their appeal…and it is. But as a geek-influenced, technically interested, media aware person I'm one to call bullshit on the whole software patent concept. And don't get me started on the DMCA.

At any rate, in my view there are exactly two acceptable outcomes to this case. Either Microsoft pays up like one of their victims would have to, or the whole software patent concept is reviewed.

---

Feds reject Eolas browser patent
Reuters
March 5, 2004, 3:48 PM PT

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated a claim to Web browser technology central to a case against Microsoft, a move that could spare the software giant from paying more than half a billion dollars in damages, according to documents obtained on Friday.

The patent agency's preliminary decision, if upheld, also means that Microsoft will not be required to make changes to its Internet Explorer Web browser that would have crippled the program's ability to work with mini-programs that work over the Internet, such as the QuickTime and Flash media players.

Last year, an Illinois jury delivered a $521 million verdict against Microsoft for infringing on technology developed by a privately held firm, Eolas Technologies, and the University of California.

I guess it's gonna be chintz curtains in Rikers solitary.

Chameleon Card Changes Stripes

The Chameleon Card's black strip covers a programmable transducer that mimics the information on the magnetic strips of the cards it is replacing. A new handheld device from Chameleon, the Pocket Vault, programs the Chameleon Card to take the place of any credit card the consumer chooses for a transaction.

Shoppers will be able to swipe their Chameleon Cards through the same magnetic readers used in stores and banks today. And instead of reading bar codes off the back of customer-loyalty cards, retail bar-code readers will scan the bar code displayed on the Pocket Vault itself.

…First-time users of the Pocket Vault will read their old credit cards with the device, which stores their information internally and backs it up to an online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen. Each credit card stored on the Pocket Vault is then represented by an icon on the device's touch-screen display.

The Pocket Vault also prompts its owners to place their fingerprints on the device's reader pad to create a biometric profile.

To use the Chameleon Card for a credit card transaction, a shopper taps the logo on the Pocket Vault's display representing the credit card account he wants to use. Seconds later, the Pocket Vault spits out the shopper's Chameleon Card, with the selected credit card account number, expiration date and logo imprinted on its flexible display, and its transducer reconfigured to work in the store's or bank's magnetic card reader.

The Pocket Vault, which Burger expects to sell for less than $200, will also replace ExxonMobil's Speedpass and similar radio-frequency identification applications with its own, built-in RFID chips.

…The Pocket Vault will only power up when it detects its owner's fingerprint. And unlike an ordinary credit card, the information stored on a Chameleon Card becomes unreadable (and the transducer inoperable) within 10 minutes. [P6: emphasis added]

The Pocket Vault also switches off shortly after ejecting a Chameleon Card.

Last night a close friend forwarded some email about Haiti's ongoing regime change to me and asked that I post said update , which I will do. I did check out the crew the email says you can check with to stay up on the situation, the Haiti Action Committee before making that promise.

Two things made me decide to bring the Haiti action Committee to your attention instead of just posting the information from the email. First, Kiilu Nyasha is working with them. I know Kiilu and she's literally one of the original warriors. Fact is, I believe I'm a bit too much the capitalist for her taste. But I know her to be upright and her involvement is a definite good sign in my view. Second was this, which indicates they're keeping an eye on things.

Ira Kurzban, the lawyer who represents President Jean Bertrand Aristide has announced that he had just learned that the Central African Republic (CAR) has shut off President Aristide's phone service. He said that armed members of the French and CAR military are guarding President Aristide and he is not free to leave.

While there are many conflicting reports coming out of Hatai and Central Africa, the only way we will be able to determine the truth is open communications and immediate investigations.

Send an Email to your congressperson calling for the following:

* President Aristide Should be given full access to the media and telephone communications restored.
* President Aristide should be free to go where he chooses, otherwise it is clear that this was a coup orchestrated by the United States and France.
* An immediate Congressional investigation should commence to determine the role that the U.S. played, directly and/or indirectly in Aristides removal from power, and in supporting the civilian and military opposition movement.
* A multilateral force, not controlled by the U.S., should be deployed to stabilize the situation and immediately disarm the military opposition.
* The Bush administration should commit to an emergency economic development package to rebuild the Haitian infrastructure.
* Free and fair democratic elections should be permitted without the interference of the U.S. or its allies.
* One standard of treatment for all refugees should be in place. Haitian refugees should receive admission to the U.S. and be supported during this period of crisis.
* Rescind President Bush's unprecedented directive to the U.S. Marines to thwart all efforts of Haitian asylum seekers to reach our shores.

To Email your Senators and Conressional Reps with one click:
http://capwiz.com/voice4change/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=5261001

Forward this as widely as possible:
http://www.voice4change.org/stories/send2friends.asp?id=040303~v4c.asp

Ezra Klein at Pandagon has this thread nominating Democrats for a "shadow government" to keep a running commentary on/challenge to the Bushistas going. Real interesting discussion, though they insist on positions in the shadow government paralleling those we officially acknowledge in the Federal government. The Republican "shadow government" is more like HYDRA.

I like the idea, and wouldn't restrict its existence to election year. And when the Republicans lose I wouldn't object to their bringing their shadow government into the light.

THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Sharpton Talks of Conditional Exit
The New York minister may drop out if Kerry addresses an 'urban agenda' and agrees to help retire his $600,000 campaign debt.
By James Rainey
Times Staff Writer

March 5, 2004

The Rev. Al Sharpton may soon drop his longshot campaign for the presidency if presumptive Democratic nominee John F. Kerry agrees to adopt a more pronounced "urban agenda," sources in Sharpton's camp said Thursday.

Sharpton confirmed in a telephone interview that representatives of his campaign have talked to the Democratic National Committee and Kerry operatives about how he might "fold into" a campaign to defeat President Bush.

Nursing a cold at his home in Brooklyn, Sharpton said the discussions with Kerry's campaign had just begun and that he planned to continue his candidacy for the time being. A trip to Florida this weekend was likely.

"I don't know if 'discontinue' is the word I would use," said Sharpton, referring to his candidacy. "But clearly, from the beginning, our intention was to go out and affect policy. It was always a matter of how we would fold into an anti-Bush campaign. That was always part of the plan."

Although Sharpton sounded somewhat equivocal about his plans, one aide said it was clear the discussions with the Kerry camp were designed to end with Sharpton "suspending the campaign operations."

You know who you are.

I noticed a lot of strong…indeed, surprised…reactions to a post by a certain low pH Conservative. I will not link to the post because I haven't read it. Nor will I link to your reactions because I don't want to point a specific finger at you.

I will note, however, that I'm marking you down as tolerant rather than naïve because you had to have actively chosen to overlook the obvious. Reading between the lines was easy in this case, which is why I've read a total of six of his blog entries over the past year…and they were all on the same day.

And this whole thread is just full of shit.

It Had To Happen: The Disposable Computer
March 4, 2004 (11:40 a.m. EST)
By W. David Gardner, TechWeb News

A disposable paperboard computer has been developed and is already in use in Sweden. Developed by Cypak AB, the paperboard computer can collect, process, and exchange several pages of encrypted data, the company says.

“Initially, it will be used in industrial-specific applications as an enhanced and secure RFID device,” said Cypak marketing director Strina Ehrensvard in an email. “Today, in pharmaceutical and courier packaging as a data-collection device; tomorrow maybe for interactive books, lotteries, passports, and voting cards.”

With just 32 Kbytes of memory, the paperboard computer's functionality is somewhat limited at present, but the firm believes its future will be broad. Cypak has entered into an agreement in the U.S. with MeadWestvaco Healthcare Packaging, which has marketing rights to the product and technology in the Americas.

From Steal This Speech By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A23

If money didn't matter to public education, wealthy parents in suburban areas wouldn't let their school boards spend so much of it.

Quote of note:

In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.

---

What Wal-Mart Has Wrought
By Harold Meyerson
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A23

LOS ANGELES -- This city obliterates its past, so it shouldn't be surprising that few Angelenos remember the role that unions played in making Los Angeles the epicenter of America's epochal post-World War II prosperity.

But the greatest new housing boom in world history didn't descend on L.A. through some random selection in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The huge housing tracts were initially clustered around correspondingly huge aerospace factories, whose unionized workers could afford to buy new homes.

That was then. Since the Cold War's end, the aerospace industry and other unionized manufacturing here have drastically downsized. The service sector waxed as manufacturing waned, but most nonprofessional service-sector jobs are nonunion and low-wage.

The great exception was supermarket work. For decades, the industry and its union -- the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) -- signed contracts that gave supermarket workers employer-paid health insurance and decent wages. Five months ago, however, three major chains put forth a new contract that would turn supermarket employment into low-wage work with few benefits.

"Welfare state" has intentionally pejorative connotations that I don't feel are appropriate. With that in mind…

Quote of note:

After an exhaustive analysis, Lindert -- who teaches at the University of California at Davis -- is less alarmed. So far, the welfare state is a "free lunch," he concludes. That is, high taxes and benefits (for unemployment, health and retirement) haven't depressed economic growth. Countries can be caring without crippling themselves.

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The Future of the Welfare State
By Robert J. Samuelson
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A23

One great project of the late 20th century was the construction of vast welfare states in wealthy nations to protect people against the insecurities of the business cycle and the injustices of unfettered capitalism. One great question of the early 21st century is whether these welfare states, facing massive commitments to aging populations, will themselves create new insecurities and injustices. Comes now economic historian Peter Lindert, who has thoroughly probed the welfare state, with a surprising message: Relax.

Mr. Cheney's Economy
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A22

ON TUESDAY evening, Vice President Cheney offered a curious take on the economic cycle. Speaking on Fox News, he said, "What the Democrats are offering at this point are tax increases, at exactly the wrong time," and he added that the nascent recovery would be choked off by his opponents' policies.

Not only does this overlook the fact that Democratic policies would not be implemented until next year, assuming the election went their way, it misses the signs of overheating that are gathering in the economy right now. The day of Mr. Cheney's interview, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan signaled that interest rates would have to rise to forestall inflation, though he was vague about the timing.

Reining In Anti-Bush Groups
But Key FEC Member May Oppose Immediate Changes in Rules

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A06

The Federal Election Commission yesterday set in motion regulatory proceedings that could severely restrict new pro-Democratic groups seeking to defeat President Bush.

The proposed regulations, drafted by the agency's general counsel, would severely crimp the fundraising and spending activities of "527" groups, named for the section of the tax code that governs their activities. But advocates of the tough regulations suffered a setback when a Democratic commissioner in a position to cast the key swing vote said she is likely to oppose any changes in the rules that would take effect before the November elections.

Quote of note:

Some Republicans on the committee -- and many conservative groups on the outside -- said the Senate should have probed the contents of the memos, which they contended demonstrated the collusion between Democrats and liberal advocacy groups, rather than how the memos ended up in Republican hands.

GOP Aides Implicated In Memo Downloads
Democrats' Files Accessed and Leaked In Security Breach
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A01

A three-month investigation by the Senate's top law enforcement officer found a systematic downloading of thousands of Democratic computer files by Republican staffers over the past few years as well as serious flaws in the chamber's computer security system.

The report released yesterday by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle noted that two former Senate GOP staff members -- including the Republicans' top aide on judicial nomination strategy -- were primarily responsible for accessing and leaking computer memos on Democratic plans for blocking some of President Bush's judicial nominations.

Pickle made no recommendations about whether to pursue criminal prosecutions in the case, but he cited several federal laws that might be considered, including statutes involving false statements and receipt of stolen property.

Pickle and his investigators said forensics analyses indicated that 4,670 files had been downloaded between November 2001 and spring 2003 by one of the aides -- "the majority of which appeared to be from folders belonging to Democratic staff" on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said at least 100 of his computer files were also accessed by the GOP aides.

The report identified the two former staffers as Jason Lundell, a nominations clerk who originally accessed the files, and Manuel Miranda, a more senior staff member and later the top aide to Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on judicial nominations. Miranda, the report said, advised Lundell and was said by other aides to have been implicated in leaking the documents to friendly journalists or other parties outside the Senate. Miranda had previously denied leaking the materials.

Both men left their Senate jobs during the investigation.

I got email the other day that said XP service pack 2 will be adding a firewall that is on by default. It will also close all your unused ports.

Win XP SP 2 Process and Port Hardening

The “shielded mode” security settings in the upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 will provide the best level of safety for your machine

Information security starts with knowledge of, and control over, both our software-based and human-based processes. The dangers of running unmonitored processes listening on open ports are well known. In preparing to release Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft has taken the unprecedented step of admitting it might have made a mistake in forcing Windows machines to listen to the network and accept arbitrary, anonymous and unsolicited inbound communications. Go to http://click.wd-mag.email-publisher.com/maab0hsaa4P5Pb5V78zb/ for information about the upcoming SP 2 release.

My first thought was about how many apps will be broken by this.

The Junk Science of George W. Bush
by ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

…Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process.

Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies.

The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."

…I'll actually read some spam (I don't get very much). This time it was, I guess, an invitation to join a Yahoo group of techies who are wholly annoyed about the off-shoring of their jobs. Here's one of the two photo cartoons from the invitation.

It's linked to the page of the guy what created it. Here's another one that might be useful:

Relatives of 9/11 victims call Bush ads in poor taste
LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, March 4, 2004
©2004 Associated Press

(03-04) 10:10 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

President Bush's day-old campaign commercials drew sharp criticism Thursday from relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and a firefighters union with ties to Democratic rival John Kerry demanded they be pulled from the air.

The White House defended the ads, which include images of the destroyed World Trade Center and firefighters bearing a stretcher through the rubble.

"It makes me sick," said Colleen Kelly, who lost her brother Bill Kelly Jr. in the attacks and leads a victims families group called Peaceful Tomorrows. "Would you ever go to someone's grave site and use that as an instrument of politics? That truly is what Ground Zero represents to me." [P6: emphasis added]

In Bal Harbour, Fla., the International Association of Fire Fighters Union approved a resolution asking the Bush campaign to pull the ads, spokesman Jeff Zack said. The resolution also urges Bush to "apologize to the families of firefighters killed on 9/11 for demeaning the memory of their loved ones in an attempt to curry support for his re-election." The union gave Kerry an early endorsement in the presidential race.

German Court Overturns Conviction in 9/11 Case
By DESMOND BUTLER

KARLSRUHE, Germany, March 4 — Germany's highest court today overturned the verdict against the only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, after his lawyer argued that he had not gotten a fair trial because the United States refused to allow key testimony.

The judge ordered a retrial for the man, Mounir el-Motassadeq, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in February 2003 after being found guilty of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and of playing a logistical role for the members of the Qaeda cell in Hamburg that produced three of the Sept. 11 pilots.

Mr. Motassadeq's lawyers had asked the court to overturn the verdict, arguing that he was denied a fair trial because the United States had refused to allow testimony by Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is believed to have been a member of the cell and central to the Sept. 11 plot.

Andreas Schulz, a lawyer representing the families of victims, said, "This decision will be met by my clients with incomprehension."

Presiding Judge Klaus Tolksdorf said in reading today's verdict that the case would be sent back to the Hamburg lower court for a new trial.

Mr. Motassadeq's lawyer, Josef Graessle-Muenscher, said that without the crucial witness, the rest of the evidence was not sufficient for a conviction. He called the court's decision a "life saving" one for Mr. Motassadeq, who was 28 when convicted. "Fifteen years would have been the end of normal existence," Mr. Graessle-Muenscher said.

He also said that it was not acceptable for a country, in this case the United States, to influence an important legal decision by withholding evidence. Today's decision was a "clear critique of Washington, but not clear enough," the lawyer said, adding that he wished there had been stronger condemnation of what he called American intransigence.

Last month, also citing a refusal by the United States to allow testimony from Mr. bin al-Shibh, the Hamburg court acquitted Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second suspect to be tried on charges of involvement in the attacks, of accessory to murder and membership in Al Qaeda.

The court made clear that it had acquitted Mr. Mzoudi not because it was convinced of his innocence, but because the evidence was not enough to convict him. Prosecutors attributed the acquittal to the Bush administration's reluctance to make captured terrorists available for testimony and to allow prosecutors to make use of intelligence information on the terrorist network.

Progress Report - ECONOMY

Arnold Kling at The Bottom Line. actually pointing to an article he wrote for TechCentralStation. In an article comparing economists to Galileo (I kid you not), he make the following statements:

The key point to realize about our entitlement programs is that they do not work the way that you would expect. What you expect is that when Joe pays taxes for Social Security or Medicare, then that money goes into an account until it is time for Joe to draw his benefits. Instead, Joe's taxes go to pay for current beneficiaries, and future taxpayers have to pay Joe when he starts to draw Social Security and Medicare.

It may not be working the way we would expect, but that's not our fault. We were told to expect it to work that way.

Mr. Greenspan…in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.

On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance.

As an economist I expect Mr. Klein is fully aware of this, so this statement borders on the mendacious.

And just how big a tab have we run up with Social Security and Medicare? What is the damage? Well, it turns out that the present value of the unfunded deficit in entitlements has been estimated by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters to be $45 trillion. Even if President Kerry or Edwards turned the rich people in the country upside down, emptying their pockets of all their financial assets, homes, cars, and everything else, that still could not cover the tab that Congress has run up on our behalf.

So we turn the non-rich people (who collectively own far, far less than the rich) upside down, emptying their pockets of all their financial assets, homes, cars, and everything else instead.

Pfaugh.

We don't want your assets. We want at least as much of your unearned income as you take of our earned income. That leaves your assets in your hands, still busily churning out mo' money than you are capable of spending anyway.

Economic Policy Institute is where Max Sawicki works, providing mutual credibility enhancement.

---

EMPLOYMENT – EDUCATED AND UNEMPLOYED: A new report by the Economic Policy Institute finds that long-term unemployment has skyrocketed, especially among the educated. An analysis of long-term unemployment from 2000 to 2003 shows that "the number of people without work for six months or more has risen at the extraordinarily high rate of 198.2% over this period." Especially hard hit? Job seekers with college degrees. College graduates represent 15.3% of total unemployment, but 19.1% of long-term unemployment, and long-term unemployment for this group has risen by 299.4%.

hat tip to the Center for American Progress.

First teachers are terrorists. Then Haitian are hijackers.

Now this.

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Universal care is right for Iraq, Thompson says

WASHINGTON — Fresh from a two-day weekend visit to Iraq, the Bush administration's top health-care official defended the $950 million that will be spent to help Iraq establish universal health care.

Congressional Democrats have criticized the administration for helping Iraq to establish universal health care without doing the same for U.S. citizens.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said yesterday there are major differences between the two countries that defy simple comparisons.

[P6: Here comes the stupid part]
"Even if you don't have health insurance," said Thompson, who toured medical facilities in the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Tikrit on Saturday and Sunday, "you are still taken care of in America. That certainly could be defined as universal coverage."

---

Everyone without health insurance, raise your hand if you think you're "taken care of in America."

I swear, sometimes I think the Bushistas measure carefully before speaking to insure their head is sticking just far enough out of their butts that their feet can fit neatly into their mouths.

On March 5 singer Nancy Wilson will perform at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria as part of an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign that will target the Black faith community. The benefit performance will kick off the HIV/AIDS organization The Balm In Gilead’s fifteenth annual Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS. Wilson will perform at 9 p.m., after a 6 p.m. press conference and dinner. Stage and screen actress Lynn Whitfield will host the event. Visit www.balmingilead.org to reserve tickets, or call (212) 730-7381 or (888) 225-6243. The Waldorf Astoria is located at 301 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Since its inception in 1989, The Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS has engaged black churches to become centers for education, understanding and care in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In the past, churches recognized the Black Church Week of Prayer by hosting AIDS workshops, distributing information or devoting a sermon or song to those affected and infected by the virus.

Since 1989, The Balm In Gilead has been building the capacity of faith communities to provide HIV/AIDS education and support networks for all people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS throughout the African Diaspora. The organization currently works in five African countries addressing the devastation of HIV/AIDS. The Balm In Gilead's achievements have enabled thousands of churches to become leaders in preventing HIV by providing comprehensive educational

Ga. votes on flag

In Georgia, voters chose a flag designed by Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, over one designed by his Democratic predecessor, Roy Barnes.

The flag issue has been roiling for years in Georgia, where many residents objected to their flag as a symbol of segregation. It was designed in 1956 and included prominently the Confederate battle flag.

In 2001, Barnes pushed through the Legislature a new flag that displays the state seal on a blue background with five former state flags featured along the bottom. One was the 1956 version.

Perdue campaigned on a promise to let voters decide on whether to bring back the 1956 version. But his version has the state seal in the corner on a blue field, and three broad stripes of red and white. It does not include the battle emblem but does closely resemble another flag from the Confederacy, the original "Stars and Bars."

Some Southern heritage groups asked their members to sit out the referendum to keep the matter on the agenda. But civil rights groups urged supporters to vote for Perdue's flag to put the issue to rest. And that is what they did, by a 3-1 ratio, state officials said.

"Let's get this thing over with, put it to bed," said Jerry Deen, a car dealership owner in Albany.

AP: Europeans Say Iraq War Raised Threat
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A majority of people living in the two countries bordering the United States and in five major European countries say they think the war in Iraq (news - web sites) increased the threat of terrorism in the world, Associated Press polls found.

In the United States, people were evenly divided on whether the war has increased or decreased the terror threat.

The AP polls were conducted by Ipsos, an international polling firm, in Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States.

If US plays global prison ratings game, it ought to play by its own rules
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON - The US State Department issued its annual review of human rights around the world last week - grading each nation on its performances in a number of categories.

Only one country escaped scrutiny: the US itself.

While monitoring human rights and holding other countries accountable is a valid and valuable exercise, there is something disquieting about the US earnestly preaching to countries like Iceland and New Zealand while completely ignoring its own practices.

One of the areas the report monitors is the functioning of prison systems. So we had the bizarre spectacle of a nation that incarcerates 2.2 million people - one-quarter of all the world's prisoners - casting a baleful eye over Iceland, which has a grand total of 110 people incarcerated. Sixteen prison cells in Iceland have no toilets, the report noted with stern disapproval.

New Zealand deserves even more criticism, according to the report, for imprisoning a disproportionate number of the indigenous Maori minority. Maori make up 15 percent of the general population, but 50 percent of the prison population. Yet the US has the same problem right here at home: Prison and jail populations are 40 percent black, while African-Americans account for just 12 percent of the total population.

Pew research recently released a report on online content creation by Internet users that CNN says proves there are very few bloggers around. This bothers some bloggers. Robert Scoble points to Marketing Wonk's take on it:

Gotta love CNN's spin: "Very few bloggers on Net." The report in question, from Pew Research, concludes that two percent of U.S. Internet users kept online journals last year, but it goes on to say that more recent research from the last couple of months suggests that figure may have risen to seven percent. Based on Pew's own estimates of how many Americans are now online (126 million adults, as of last December), that works out to 2.5 million to 8.8 million bloggers in this country.

To put that in perspective, while some 86 million U.S. homes have CNN on their cable dials, only some 3.6 million people were tuning in daily to see its live coverage of the Iraq invasion, and its top-viewed regular show, Larry King, attracts only one million viewers on average. Very few indeed.

Bad logic.

You can't compare weblogs (at best, a media category) to CNN (at best an instance of a media category). You might want to try comparing weblogs to TV.

Never mind. No contest. And frankly, I don't know why Pew's report would get under anyone's skin to begin with.

Furtive Surfers Find a Way to Keep Their Travels Secret
By HOWARD MILLMAN

A new thumb-size U.S.B. drive from a company called StealthSurfer aims to guard your privacy by keeping the records of your Web activity close to the vest. When you plug in the StealthSurfer and use its customized version of the Netscape browser, the device stores the cookies, U.R.L. history, cache files and other traces of your Web browsing that would ordinarily accumulate on your computer's hard drive. When you're done surfing, you unplug the drive and take the records of your travels with you.

StealthSurfer's name is a bit of an overstatement. It does keep your Web-hopping and file-sharing activities away from prying eyes after the fact. But since it uses your computer's Internet connection, the Web sites you visit can still track your Internet protocol address as you move around online.

The StealthSurfer comes in four capacities, ranging from 64 megabytes ($70) to 512 megabytes ($299). You may experience a slight reduction in performance when you use the device because its flash memory writes data at slower speeds than a full-size hard drive does.

On the other hand, installation is a breeze - computers running Windows Me, 2000 and XP recognize the StealthSurfer as a drive when it is plugged in. (If you're running Windows 98, you must download a driver from www.stealthsurfer .biz.) For an additional layer of privacy, Windows users can select a password to protect the drive's files.

California Approves Bond Issue, but Fiscal Problems Remain
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 3 — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won a significant political victory with the voters' approval of a $15 billion bond measure on Tuesday, but he is a long way from being free of California's dire financial problems.

The governor raised and spent $8.5 million to promote the bond issue, which will be the largest single municipal debt financing in American history. Voters approved the issue 63 percent to 37 percent. A companion measure, requiring a balanced budget and outlawing similar borrowing in the future, passed by 71 percent to 29 percent.

"We have removed the financial sword that was hanging over California's head," Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said at a rally.

Wall Street reacted favorably on Wednesday. Standard & Poor's, which had assigned California the lowest credit rating among the 50 states, said the measure's passage avoided a short-term cash crisis and said it would consider raising the rating. Moody's Investors Service raised the state's bond rating outlook to stable from negative.

But David Hitchcock, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, noted that California's debt rating would "improve to the extent the state uses the time provided by the new bond proceeds to reduce its structural deficit."

Roughly $12 billion of the new borrowing will go to retire existing debt, much of which comes due in June. What sums that remain are to be used to patch holes in the budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

After the current debt is retired, the state will still face a major gap between projected revenues and spending over the next several years. Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed cuts in programs, including state health services and higher education, to reduce the gap, or "structural deficit." But the Democratic-controlled Legislature has balked, and the budget gridlock remains

the New York Post (gag) says WLIB has signed up for the new liberal talk show network. Since Clapundit is usually reliable I'll quote him and not soil my eyes with the NY Post.

RADIO WARS....The New York Post claims to have the scoop on the long-awaited liberal talk show network. The Post says the network has signed up the aptly named WLIB in New York City, which "broadcasts a strong signal over New York City, Westchester and a nice chunk of eastern New Jersey," and could be up and running by April.

The lineup is Al Franken at noon going up against Rush Limbaugh; Randi Rhodes against Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly; and Janeane Garofalo in the 8-11 pm slot.

Sounds like fun.

It will be fun, especially if you hang around for the music.

PBS (channel 13) will have one of those "Soul OGs" shows, soul performers from the 70s this Saturday (3/6) at 8 pm.

Expect no posts on this site after that time.

A letter from CNN managing editor and news anchor Aaron Brown has given us pause. Over the past five days, Media for Democracy members have sent more than 10,000 letters to television media executives asking them to devote more airtime to the problems of electronic voting machines.

On Monday our efforts seemed to have yielded fruit. CNN ran a story on these machines. Yesterday, I wrote Brown to thank him and ask that he engage Media for Democracy members in a constructive dialogue on CNN standards for election coverage.

His reply follows:

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"No I will not. Further because this cut and paste campaign has annoyed the hell out of me for a week I won't even pay attention to what you guys want or say or think or do. There is no skill and no passion in cutting and pasting. It's just what lemmings do. I can't begin to tell you how offended I am by it all. You may feel free to pass this along to the rest of the group."

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Is his reply a legitimate complaint about our methods or is it another case of a media executive refusing to be responsive to his public? Does this executive consider "lemmings" those CNN viewers who are concerned enough about an issue to send him a letter? If his complaints are legitimate, what then should CNN's viewing public do to get the right attention of media executives?

In the past, individual letters to media executives have tended to go unanswered. Our cumulative effort (more than 10,000 letters sent thus far), did receive a reply, but this was not the constructive dialogue we had asked for.

We thought it would be best to send the issue back to you for suggestions:

What more can we do to make mainstream media responsive to our concerns about their shortcomings in election coverage? Or should Media for Democracy stay the course and continue our methods to disrupt the Big Media status quo with mass-email, fax and phone requests for more accountability?

Please respond via our citizens' forum at:

http://www.mediachannel.org/forums/mfd.html

You can also email me directly at [email protected].

Best regards and thank you for participating.

Tim Karr
Executive Director
Media for Democracy 2004

Fear of a hot gay-sex planet.

Flashback to why the fundamentalists are against gay marriage and gay sex.

Dr. Paul Cameron, founder of the Family Research Institute and ISIS, the institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality:
"Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system," says Cameron. "If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get- and that is what homosexuality seems to be-then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm." [P6: And you gathered this evidence…how?] So powerful is the allure of gays, Cameron believes, that if society approves that gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. "I'm convinced that lesbians are particularly good seducers," says Cameron. "People in homosexuality are incredibly evangelical," he adds, sounding evangelical himself. "It's pure sexuality. It's almost like pure heroin. It's such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they'll take enormous risks, do anything." [P6: Damn, Cameron, it was just a movie! And this time make sure the case isn't sticky when you return it.] He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. "Martial sex tends toward the boring end," he points out. "Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does" [P6: Sounds like a personal problem to me] So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would be come the dominant form of sexual behavior.

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Wasn't there a "joke" about the definition of a fundamentalist being a person obsessed with concern that someone, somewhere, was having fun?

hat tip to lkspence at Vision Circle

Man accused of defacing Joe Louis monument resigns township post
Tuesday, March 2, 2004
BY BEN SCHMITT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

A Superior Township parks commissioner accused of painting the Joe Louis fist monument in downtown Detroit white has resigned his post.

Brett Cashman, 45, submitted his resignation in a letter to the township over the weekend, and the board in Washtenaw County accepted his resignation at its meeting Monday, according to Cashman's attorney Marc Beginin.

The board also unanimously passed a resolution, declaring the painting of the sculpture, "reckless and wanton disregard of his oath of office,'' and "loathsome, cowardly and anti-social.''

Beginin said Tuesday that the resolution was unnecessary.

"The resolution was unnecessary because Mr. Cashman had offered his resignation if that's what the board wanted,'' he said.

Cashman and John Price, 27, both of Superior Township, have been charged with malicious destruction of property in the Feb. 23 vandalism of the 8,000-pound sculpture, a 24-foot-long arm with a fist suspended from a frame.

They allegedly used mops to paint the fist white and left photocopies of pictures of two recently slain Detroit police officers under the sculpture, police said. Written beneath the pictures was the phrase "Courtesy of Fighting Whities,'' police said.

A preliminary examination for both suspects is scheduled for March 18 in 36th District Court.

Contact BEN SCHMITT at 313-223-4296 or [email protected].

I know you don't mean it like it reads.

I hated 'Sex and the City' for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it reminded me in a rather painful way what it is like to be a black man in NYC, which is to say (in one way) rather completely outside the consciousness of the kind of skinny cute white chicks that pass for models of America's feminine consciousness.

Quote of note:

If we're serious about constitutional remedies for marital breakdowns, we could adopt an amendment criminalizing adultery. Zamfara, a state in northern Nigeria, has had success in reducing AIDS, prostitution and extramarital affairs by sentencing adulterers to be stoned to death.

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Marriage: Mix and Match
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Shakespeare's "Othello" used to be among the hardest plays to stage in America. Although the actors playing Othello were white, they wore dark makeup, so audiences felt "disgust and horror," as Abigail Adams said. She wrote, "My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona."

Not until 1942, when Paul Robeson took the role, did a major American performance use a black actor as Othello. Even then, Broadway theaters initially refused to accommodate such a production.

Fortunately, we did not enshrine our "disgust and horror" in the Constitution — but we could have. Long before President Bush's call for a "constitutional amendment protecting marriage," Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia proposed an amendment that he said would uphold the sanctity of marriage.

Don't Know Why Norah Jones Is Hot? Critics of Hip-Hop Do
By Jody Rosen

March 3, 2004

Norah Jones' "Feels Like Home" is at the top of Billboard's album chart, where it lodged last month after selling more than a million copies in its first week of release, one of the best one-week sales records of all time. For the last few years, the music business has been dogged by sluggish CD sales and preoccupied with the threat of Internet file-sharing. Now the industry has found an unlikely savior: a self-effacing 24-year-old piano-playing balladeer — a kind of anti-Britney Spears — who rarely raises her singing voice above a whisper, showed up to collect a bagful of Grammys in 2003 wearing a dress from Target and specializes in jazz and country-tinged songs that are decades out of date.

…But what exactly is troubling these millions of middle-aged listeners who seek solace in the music of a woman young enough to be their daughter? Is it the war in Iraq? The sputtering economy?

A better answer may be found elsewhere on the pop charts. Jones' was not the only Billboard milestone last week: For only the second time in history, all of the Top 10 singles were by African American artists. More precisely: All of the songs were by hip-hop performers. A quarter of a century after the American mainstream first encountered hip-hop's radical revision of the pop-song form — replacing sung verses and traditional instrumentation with syncopated speech and dense, machine-generated rhythms — the genre's conquest of hit radio is complete.

Technical Problems Reported in E-Voting
Tue Mar 2,11:14 AM ET
By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Electronic voting made its debut in cities and towns from Maryland to California on Tuesday as election officials beefed up security for the record number of voters expected to cast E-ballots for the first time.

… One Maryland polling place had to switch to paper ballots Tuesday because its new electronic voting machines didn't work. State elections supervisor Linda Lamone said technicians expected to have the problem fixed quickly.

Voters also had to start out using paper ballots in Georgia's Effingham County. Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Secretary of State Cathy Cox, said county officials apparently forgot to program the encoders — devices used to tell ballot access cards, which voters insert into the machines, what ballot to display.

A security issue also arose in Georgia.

Georgia Tech student Peter Sahlstrom said he found 10 Diebold terminals sitting unprotected in the lobby of the school's student center Monday. Sahlstrom, 22, photographed the machines in their unlocked cases.

"Frankly, this makes me nervous and ... it validates a lot of the concerns I already had," Sahlstrom said in a phone interview.

An economic whopper
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

IT APPEARS that some of President Bush's economic advisers have decided that the best way to put a happy face on a jobless recovery is to sprinkle old jobs with new titles. That way, a person who flips burgers can be counted as a product manufacturer, putting him or her in the same job classification as autoworkers.

Unfortunately for the administration, this concept hit a speed bump last week, when some members of Congress questioned the idea of recasting fast-food workers as assembly-line spatula operators. "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, is it providing a service or is it combining inputs to manufacture a product?'' asks the annual Economic Report of the President. Only when special sauce is counted as a durable product, suggested Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., whose state has 163,000 unemployed factory workers. He also asked whether Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, would like fries with his new manufacturing jobs.

The cheesy attempt by the administration to mask statistics on lost manufacturing jobs is hardly surprising, given that the White House recently announced it would create 2.6 million jobs this year, only to quickly disown the claim. But it is never going to satisfy a job-hungry public that doesn't yet consider napkin restocking as a high-growth career.

For the record, my position on gun control remains, "If ANYBODY has one, I want one too."

The "Politics over principle" Quote of note:

"The president is between multiple rocks and hard places if this gets to his desk,'' said veteran gun-industry representative Richard Feldman, author of the forthcoming book "Ricochet: Power Politics and the Gun Lobby.''

If the bill came to him with the amendments attached and Bush signed it, gun enthusiasts might have abandoned him in November. If he vetoed the bill, it would have fed Democratic charges that he isn't trustworthy, Feldman said.

The "Who's government is it anyway?" Quote of note:

"While we will continue to work to save the U.S. firearms industry, we have said from the start that we would not allow this bill to become a vehicle for added restrictions on the law-abiding people of America," NRA Vice President Wayne R. LaPierre Jr. said.

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Gun liability bill shot down in Senate
Defeat comes after assault-ban proposal passes
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Washington -- Senate Republicans shot down their own bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits on Tuesday, saying it had been compromised by amendments, including the slim passage of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's measure to renew the 10-year-old assault weapons ban.

The day's developments in the legislative fight over the role of guns in American society left the fate of the attached measures in doubt. That could be especially ominous for the weapons ban, which is due to expire Sept. 13, unless Congress passes a renewal and President Bush signs it.

The legislative wrangling made clear that gun control, which has hardly been mentioned in the presidential primaries, will become an issue in this year's contest. That was brought into focus Tuesday when Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards interrupted their Democratic primary campaigns to return to the Capitol and help pass the gun-control amendments.

Republicans had expected to win approval of the liability measure, which would bar lawsuits such as those San Francisco and other California cities have filed against gunmakers.

Bush had urged lawmakers to avoid amending the measure, saying he would veto the bill unless it emerged as a single-issue piece of legislation.

But Bush, as a candidate in 2000 and through a spokesman recently, had pledged to sign a renewal to the assault-weapons ban if it reached his desk. When Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., pushed their plan to attach the assault-weapons renewal as an amendment to the liability bill, it put pressure on the White House to remain true to the president's pledge.

Bet you thought I was talking about the November election,

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McDonald's decides better is not bigger
Supersize items set to disappear
By Delroy Alexander, Tribune staff reporter. Associated Press contributed to this story

March 3, 2004

Under fire for its menu amid growing concern about obesity in America, McDonald's Corp. said Tuesday that it will phase out its supersize drinks and fries in the U.S. by the end of the year.

The Oak Brook-based company was one of the primary movers in popularizing giant-size fast-food meals more than a decade ago, but McDonald's said it soon will streamline its restaurant operations and core menu.

"This has as much to do with operations as it does with emphasizing a balanced diet," said spokesman William Whitman.

However, the move comes just a couple of months before a new documentary called "Super Size Me" is scheduled to hit movie theaters. The film chronicles the rapid deterioration of health of the movie's director, Morgan Spurlock, after he spent 30 days eating nothing but McDonald's food.

"The two things are not connected," said Whitman in response to a question about the film's potential impact. "However, we recognize that consumers' tastes and preferences and choices continue to change and evolve. This seems to be a natural step when you recognize the growing trends and recognize the effect it would have on our operations."

The world's largest restaurant chain said the option to supersize drinks and fries will not be available at its 13,600 U.S outlets by 2005, except during certain promotions. It did not make mention of Mighty Meals, the bigger-portion kids meal option that is a consistent target of health practitioners and obesity campaigners.

Barbara Lee Interview on Haiti's Crisis

By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

From the March 2, 2004 issue of the Berkeley Daily Planet

The deposed President of the Caribbean island nation of Haiti has charged that he was forced out of office by a United States-orchestrated coup d'etat, and that view has been affirmed by Bay Area Congressmember Barbara Lee (D-Oakland). On Sunday of this week, under pressure from a rebel army which Lee characterized as "thugs," Jean-Bertrand Aristide left Haiti under U.S. military escort. From temporary asylum in the Central African Republic, Aristide told CNN that "I was told that to avoid bloodshed, I'd better leave." Aristide repeated that charge in telephone conversations Congressmembers Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel (both members of the Congressional Black Caucus) as well as with Randall Robinson, a respected African-American expert on African affairs.

Earlier this month, while Aristide was still in power but with rebel forces causing chaos throughout the country, Congressmember Lee wrote a scathing letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, charging that the Bush Administration was supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected government. "Our failure to support the democratic process and help restore order looks like a covert effort to overthrow a government. There is a violent coup d'etat in the making, and it appears that the United States is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide Government. With all due respect, this looks like 'regime change.' How can we call for democracy in Iraq and not say very clearly that we support democratic elections as the only option in Haiti?"

I read this and had three immediate and simultaneous reactions:

1 - Aaron could have had a franchise going
2 - I understand the motivation. Might buy one.
3 - All the above doesn't stop this:

Carter wants her shirts to be modern-day "picket signs."

She said, "The shirts are not a fashion statement. I know people of my generation will not march and carry signs like they did in the '60s, but they will wear shirts."

from being a really, really sad statement.

Two bloggers conspicuously absent:
Lynne d. Johnson, because I had no picture that was worthy (for real…I watched her reject some 10 or more digital shots)
Me, because I was taking these pictures. Rumor has it I'm in several of the other cameras.

Donald	e.j.	James
Madison	Pyoruba	Ronn	Steven

Jesus Demands Creative Control Over Next Movie

HOLLYWOOD, CA—After watching Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ Monday, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ announced that He will demand creative control over the next film based on His life.

"I never should have given Mel Gibson so much license," said Christ, the Son of God. "I don't like to criticize a member of the flock, but that close-up of the nails being pounded into My wrists—that was just bad."

Our Lord did not limit His criticisms to Gibson's Passion; He expressed frustration with historical inaccuracies in numerous film adaptations of His life.

"There have been a lot of films based on My life, and pretty much all of them have gotten it wrong," Christ said. "Just look at Godspell—what the heck was going on there? It's time I reclaim My image."

Christ said He considered returning to the physical world to make an accurate film depiction of His life for years, but seeing The Passion prompted Him to finally descend from heaven, meet with His agent Ronald Thatcher, and demand that He be attached as a producer on any future projects.

"Ron has a history of telling Me that the filmmakers 'totally understand' the Word Of God, and that the project is going to be 'fabulous,'" Christ said. "But when it comes out, it's all wrong, and Ron claims everything fell apart in post-production. At that point, there's nothing left for Me to do but say, 'Okay, fine. I forgive you all.' Well, next time, I'll be shepherding the project through from casting to final edit to marketing."

I'm a mad scientist. A Liberal mad scientist. I don't want to rule the world, I want to save it where it wants to be saved or not.

Bwah-hah-ha!

I've come to the conclusion that race is the biggest problem facing the world, the one that most needs solving. So I've studied the nature of melanin and devised two viruses: airborne, highly contagious, affects only humans. And they have exactly two effects, no side effects: they change your hair and skin properties. One increases melanin production a random amount (you see, the presence of melanin suppresses it's action, which also means it only works on white folks) and kinkifies the hair. The other decreases melanin production a random amount (this virus is activated in the presence of a certain amount of melanin, which also means it only works on Black folks) and relaxes their hair.

Which one should I unleash on the teeming, unsuspecting masses? Why?

John Ashcroft sucks.

With that out of the way, I want to note what Dean Esmay at Dean's World got from a Gallup survey on American's attitudes about the P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act:

And the headline of the article supports such a take.

Unfortunately with all the BS headlines that have little to do with the content of an article that I've seen, I feel the need read ALL of an article before posting about it (yes, I'm a speed reader).

And to me, the quote of note is:

The survey finds that the more familiar one is with the Patriot Act, the more likely one is to believe it trespasses on civil liberties.

Education Chief Again Apologizes for 'Terrorist' Remark
By SAM DILLON

Published: March 2, 2004

…"We're not going to focus on it any more," Ms. Rogers said, "but I don't think teachers will ever forget his insulting remark."

…One who did not participate was Jeffrey R. Ryan, a high school history teacher in Massachusetts. Mr. Ryan sent an e-mail message to the Department of Education saying he considered the Bush administration to be "hostile to public education."

"Considering Secretary Paige's recent remarks about the N.E.A. and the teaching profession," he wrote, "I no longer feel that his invitation is sincere."

…Participants in the meeting said that one teacher, Elspeth Corrigan Moore, a librarian at Memorial High School in West New York, N.J., wept as she discussed Dr. Paige's comparison of the teachers union to terrorists. Ms. Moore said after the meeting that because her school had a direct line of sight to downtown Manhattan, she and many students could see the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I watched it burn, and I smelled it burn, so I take the word terrorist personally," she said.

I know what I think. I think he's right.

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Maestro of Chutzpah
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 2, 2004

…There are three lessons in this tale.

First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario — it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.

Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization — the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.

Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system — the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical — continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.

The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation.

Justices Agree to Evaluate Prison Policy Based on Race
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, March 1 — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a challenge to a California prison system policy that segregates inmates by race during their first 60 days of incarceration.

The state has defended the policy, and a federal appeals court has upheld it, as a sensible way to minimize interracial violence at the reception centers where inmates are housed while being screened for long-term placement. One purpose of the screening is to assess a new inmate's potential for violence.

During this 60-day period, inmates are assigned to two-person cells based on whether they are black, white, Asian or "other." Within those categories, the authorities also separate some by national or geographic origin. For example, Japanese and Chinese inmates are not housed together, neither are Laotians and Vietnamese, or Hispanics from Northern and Southern California.

The segregation policy is also used for the first 60 days after an inmate is transferred from one prison to another. In all instances, however, areas of the prison other than the actual cells — the yard, dining hall and work and recreation areas — are not segregated.

The policy has been in effect for more than 25 years. Garrison S. Johnson, a black inmate convicted of murder, challenged it in 1997 by filing a federal lawsuit that he drafted himself. The lower federal courts dismissed the suit while permitting him to amend it with a lawyer's help. Proskauer Rose, a New York law firm with an office in Los Angeles, has been handling the case without charge for the past three years.

Medicare and Social Security Challenge
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, March 1 - When Alan Greenspan urged Congress last week to cut future benefits in Social Security and Medicare, sending elected officials to the barricades, he was if anything understating the magnitude of the problems ahead. Today's budget deficits are measured in the hundreds of billions, but the looming shortfalls for the two retirement programs are projected to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.

The Bush administration has estimated that the gap between promises under current law and the revenues expected will total $18 trillion over the next 75 years. But an internal study in 2002 by the Treasury Department, looking much further ahead, concluded that the gap was actually $44 trillion - and would climb each year that nothing was done.

Indeed, the numbers are so big and extend so far into the future that they border on the surreal. Analysts in both Congress and the administration warn that the flood of retiring baby boomers will cause federal spending on old-age benefits to eventually consume as much of the nation's economy as the entire federal budget does now. And while the problems would be acute even if today's federal budget were balanced, the budget deficits that seem likely for the rest of the decade make matters worse. That is because the government is borrowing more than $200 billion a year from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to finance its operating deficits.

Military Still Able to Respond to New Crisis
By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: March 2, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 1 — The decision to send up to 2,000 marines to Haiti to help stabilize the country shows that the United States military can still intervene in crises large and small, even at a time when so many ground troops are already called upon for major missions.

But it also is one more unexpected military commitment that the Bush administration is not eager to embrace, especially in an election year, and underscores how far-flung the American military's missions have become.

Sending the marines to Haiti is not especially complicated. A battalion of about 1,000 marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., is always on alert to fly to an emergency. The first 200 or so marines landed in Port-au-Prince overnight Sunday, and more were expected to flow in this week with trucks and Humvees equipped with heavy machine guns.

That does not unduly tax a Marine Corps that is in the midst of sending 25,000 troops to Iraq, and preparing to move another 25,000 there later this year. "This isn't the straw that will break the camel's back," said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington group that studies the military.

But it will put more strain on a system already under stress. About 110,000 soldiers and marines are now replacing 130,000 soldiers in Iraq in the largest two-way movement of American troops since World War II. There are 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan and about 3,000 in Bosnia and Kosovo. Overall, nearly 183,000 National Guard and Reserve forces are on active duty at home and abroad.

Schools, Facing Tight Budgets, Leave Gifted Programs Behind
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

MOUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. — Before her second birthday, Audrey Walker recognized sequences of five colors. When she was 6, her father, Michael, overheard her telling a little boy: "No, no, no, Hunter, you don't understand. What you were seeing was a flashback."

At school, Audrey quickly grew bored as the teacher drilled letters and syllables until her classmates caught on. She flourished, instead, in a once-a-week class for gifted and talented children where she could learn as fast as her nimble brain could take her.

But in September, Mountain Grove, a remote rural community in the Ozarks where nearly three in four students live in poverty, eliminated all of its programs for the district's 50 or so gifted children like Audrey, who is 8 now. Struggling with shrinking revenues and new federal mandates that focus on improving the test scores of the lowest-achieving pupils, Mountain Grove and many other school districts across the country have turned to cutting programs for their most promising students.

"Rural districts like us, we've been literally bleeding to death," said Gary Tyrrell, assistant superintendent of the Mountain Grove School District, which has 1,550 students. The formula for cutting back in hard times was straightforward, if painful, Mr. Tyrrell said: Satisfy federal and state requirements first. Then, "Do as much as we can for the majority and work on down."

Under that kind of a formula, programs for gifted and talented children have become especially vulnerable.

Catholic Group Must Provide Birth Control
By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - A state Supreme Court ruling that a Roman Catholic charity must provide employees with birth-control coverage despite its opposition to contraception "shows no respect" to California's religious organizations, a spokeswoman for the church's policy arm said.

The 6-1 decision Monday, the first such ruling by a state's highest court, could open the door to mandated insurance coverage of abortion, said Carol Hogan, spokeswoman for the California Catholic Conference, which represents the church's policy position in the state.

While "religious employers" such as churches are exempt from the requirement in California, the high court said Catholic Charities is no different from other businesses.

Catholic Charities had argued that it, too, should be exempt.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the charity is not a religious employer because it offers such secular services as counseling, low-income housing and immigration services to people of all faiths, without directly preaching Catholic values.

In fact, Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote that a "significant majority" of the people served by the charity are not Catholic. The court also noted that the charity employs workers of differing religions.

The California Catholic Conference said it was disappointed with the ruling. "It shows no respect to our religious organizations," Hogan said.

Experts said the ruling could affect thousands of workers at church-backed hospitals and institutions in California and prompt other states to fashion similar laws.

The reason I need one is, I've seen news footage that lends credence to the US-supported overthrow theory. Footage that, viewed carefully, would remind you a lot of the crowds that tore down Saddam's statue.

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Crowds Greet Haiti Rebels, Aristide Slams 'Coup'
Mon Mar 1, 9:25 PM ET
By Alistair Scrutton and Jim Loney

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - Armed rebels and former militia who helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide roared into Haiti's capital on Monday as jubilant Haitians lined the streets shouting "Liberte" and "Long Live Haiti."

The rebels swooped into Port-au-Prince as a contingent of about 200 U.S. Marines secured the Caribbean country's main airport, unpacked gear and began their latest mission to restore order in the poorest nation in the Americas. Aristide charged from the Central African Republic that he had been kidnapped in an American coup d'etat, an allegation U.S. officials dismissed as baseless nonsense.

"I called this coup d'etat in a modern way, to have modern kidnapping. They were not Haitian forces. They were (unintelligible) and Americans and Haitians together, acting to surround the airport, my house, the palace," Aristide told CNN in a telephone interview, according to a transcript.

"And then, despite of diplomatic conversations we had, despite of all we did in a diplomatic way to prevent them to organize that massacre which would lead to a bloodshed, we had to leave and spent 20 hours in an American plane."

Quote of note:

A spokesman for HHS' Thompson said the federal agency cannot approve the Michigan-Vermont program in its current form. The reason: The states did not comply with federal rules on how to hire private contractors to negotiate discounts with the drug companies.

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Roadblocks frustrate state efforts to cut drug costs
Mon Mar 1, 7:53 AM ET

In Michigan, the governor is proposing a 75-cent tax increase on cigarettes to help fund the skyrocketing health care costs of the state's low-income residents. And Colorado has cut $200 million in the past two years from higher education to offset part of its escalating Medicaid bills

Tired of raiding other important programs, governors are eager to find ways to trim their Medicaid budgets, which jumped an average 9.3% last year. But when Michigan, Vermont and South Carolina tried joining forces to save millions of dollars on prescription drugs, they ran into federal foot-dragging and industry opposition.

The upshot? Michigan and Vermont, which saved $9.6 million last year when they launched the program, now find their joint venture in jeopardy. And South Carolina got so frustrated that it gave up.

Black day for capitalists
A Delaware judge unwittingly exposes, yet again, the venal corruption at the heart of American free enterprise

Will Hutton
Sunday February 29, 2004

…Historically, culturally and economically this is only a recent doctrine. Companies were originally invented as a group of companions sharing risks in order to discharge a vital economic and social function from which they maximised profits. They would petition the crown for a licence to trade, promise that their intent and vocation was to do X and accept reciprocal obligations in return. The company thus accepted that society imposed obligations along with the right to trade and placed that above the quest for profits. For example, the East India Company in 1600 was granted a licence to trade with the proviso that it carried its cargoes in English vessels and paid duties to the crown. It then set out to maximise profits for its shareholders. It built a great business around a central vocation, accepted reciprocal obligations, and additionally made a lot of money.

This classic conception of the company, at the heart of Anglo Saxon capitalism at its best, has been wrecked by the pernicious notion, incubated by the American Right, that a company is no more than a network of contracts that maximises returns for its shareholders. The idea that it should have an organisational purpose, earn a licence to trade or accept obligations to the society of which it is part is 'socialist'. Yet a capitalism run along these allegedly purist principles soon loses its bearings and its companies degenerate. At their worst, like Black's Hollinger or Enron and WorldCom, they collapse under the weight of individual greed.

Former Ally's Shift in Stance Left Haiti Leader No Recourse
By Peter Slevin and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers

…The U.S. government returned Aristide triumphantly to power nearly 10 years ago, and did much to manufacture the final push that drove him into exile. In the end, the Bush administration's refusal to send troops to restore order may have been as important as its message to Aristide that Haiti had no future with him in power.

Aristide ended his presidency under siege, with rebel militias vowing to overthrow him and marauding gangs transforming uncertainty into anarchy in the Haitian capital. With domestic support dropping and foreign governments working ever more solidly against him, Aristide had nowhere to turn.

U.S. efforts, combined with the work of allies, winched Aristide from office, but criticism that started before Aristide's departure grew yesterday as Haiti continued its descent into chaos. A central question was whether the Bush administration should have acted sooner and more decisively.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus accused the Bush administration of sacrificing democracy by refusing to support Aristide. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said Bush should have dispatched troops earlier to stop the violence. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) described Bush as "late, as usual."

Aristide is now gone, following 1991 coup leader Raoul Cedras and dictator-for-life Jean-Claude Duvalier into the ignominy of sudden exile. Yet one week earlier, a different outcome seemed possible, to Aristide and Bush's foreign policy team.

Appeals court rules DeCSS is no longer a trade secret
Posted 02/28/2004 @ 4:24 PM, by Fred "zAmboni" Locklear

In the long...long...long running case between Andrew Bunner and the DVD Copy Control Association, Bunner has ultimately prevailed. In handing down their decision (.pdf), the court ruled that the DeCSS program had been so widely circulated on the Internet that it did not qualify as a trade secret anymore.

"The preliminary injunction...burdens more speech than necessary to protect DVD CCA's property interest and was an unlawful prior restraint upon Bunner's right to free speech," the three-judge panel wrote in its decision.

After Jon Johansen created the DVD decryption program DeCSS in 1999, the code quickly spread and was posted to websites across the globe (including Bunner's). The DVD CCA argued that posting and linking to the code violated trade secret protections and sued to get the code removed from various websites. After grinding slowly through the courts, the California Supreme Court asserted that trade secrets are afforded protection and reversed a previous appellate court's ruling. But in that ruling, it sent the ruling down to a lower court to determine if DeCSS was still a trade secret at the time Bunner posted it on his website. Fearful the lower court would find DeCSS was not a trade secret anymore, the DVD CCA dropped their case against Bunner and moved for the court to dismiss the appeal. Seeing this was an opportunity to scrape out a victory, and to help clarify issues involving trade secrets, Bunner opposed the motion for dismissal.

While this ruling is a victory for free speech rights, it still does not give California residents the right to post the DeCSS code anywhere they want. The code is no longer affords trade secret protection, but still may be protected under copyright statutes. The DVD CCA said they "are reviewing the ruling in its entirety to determine our next steps," but unless they are willing to bring a RIAA style copyright infringement case, this may be the last chapter in the Bunner saga.

if you want a cool (as opposed to unique) template for your blog, eris : design has an interesting template generator. 11 basic designs in two column (left or right) and three column modes, minimal graphics, and (if you actually site down and plan it) enough customization to satisfy most folks.

Zenpundit (yeah, it's Mark Safranski):

WHAT WE REALLY NEED

Is a constitutional amendment to defend the sanctity of the Constitution. It might actually cause the government to follow it on occasion.

David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy is not satisfied by:

A nonapology apology by Rep. Corrine Brown: Rep. Corrine Brown, who assailed United States policy toward Haiti as a "racist" policy concocted by a "bunch of white men" and later told a Mexican-American Assistant Secretary of State that "you all (non-black people) look alike to me": "I sincerely did not mean to offend Secretary Noriega or anyone in the room. Rather, my comments, as they relate to 'white men,' were aimed at the policies of the Bush administration as they pertain to Haiti, which I do consider to be racist." Rep. Henry Bonilla has accepted this "apology" and withdrawn his call for Rep. Brown to resign. But where is the apology? Brown has played the old "I apologize if I offended anyone, but I'm not backing down" trick.

Yes, Brown played the "I apologize if I offended anyone, but I'm not backing down" trick, and all I have to say about that is, turnabout is fair play. I'm actually rather amused over all the huffing and puffing when non-Black folks have to deal with the crap Black folks are supposed to just accept and then move on, rising above it all to occupy the moral high ground…and if it's not clear, I'm talking about the non-apology apology not the "all of you look alike."

Norbizness has an Unanswered Questions project that I'm not stealing because I suspect someone might actually see it…I think he's blogrolled by more of the major mainstream progressive blogs than I.

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber links to a PDF with the interesting title:

Open-Mindedness and the Duty to Gather Evidence; Or, Reflections Upon Not Reading the Volokh Conspiracy

by one Neil Levy. Brian says:

But Neil’s main point is more subtle than that. It’s that it can be a bad idea to approach a topic as an expert when in fact you’re not one.

and in the comments Sebastian Holsclaw says:

“But Neil’s main point is more subtle than that. It’s that it can be a bad idea to approach a topic as an expert when in fact you’re not one.”

I don’t think this is really his point. His point is much closer to: you should not approach a specialty topic at all unless you are an expert.

One of the major problems with his idea is the fact that you aren’t an expert in everything, you can only be a limited expert. He admits this, but fails to address the challenge this represents. His theory strongly suggests that people should avoid engaging ‘expert’ topics where they are not experts. (I note that he makes minimal effort to distinguish between expert and non-expert topics. A suspicious person would probably suggest that expert topics might be one where agrees with the expert and non-expert topics might be otherwise). What do you do with cases where the best challenge to a theory comes from someone who is expert in something else? This happens all the time in the sociology/psychology/economics spheres. It sometimes even happens in the harder sciences.

to which Neil Levy adds:

Sebastian’s right: my main point (as I just said over at TAR, Brian’s other site) is that if you’re not an expert you shouldn’t approach certain evidence at all.

…which is not surprising as I find Sebastian is generally correct when he doesn't disagree with me.

Calpundit:

I hadn't remembered that Greenspan was part of the 1983 Social Security commission that raised payroll taxes. (It's one of several Ronald Reagan tax increases that his fans conveniently forget about when they're extolling the virtues of supply side economics.) Here's the Greenspan timeline:

1983: Recommended raising payroll taxes far above the amount required to fund Social Security. Since payroll taxes are capped (at $87,000 currently), this was, by definition, an increase that primarily hit the poor and middle class.

2001: Enthusiastically endorsed a tax cut aimed primarily at people who earn over $200,000.

2003: Ditto.

2004: Told Congress that due to persistent deficits Social Security benefits need to be cut.

So: raise payroll taxes on the middle class to create a surplus, then cut taxes on the rich to wipe out the surplus and create a deficit, and then sorrowfully announce that the resulting deficits mean that the Social Security benefits already paid for by the middle class need to be cut.

Quote of note:

Del. Viola Baskerville, a sponsor of the House version of the bill, isn't buying. With enough will, she insists, the state could find a way. "We have passed budgets that contain $1 million for a horse farm. We can find the money if there is a will.

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Still Battling 'Massive Resistance'

By William Raspberry

If you want to get my juices flowing, talk to me about the claims made by victims (and their descendants) of the 1921 race riots in Tulsa. It's pretty well accepted that the city officially folded its arms while white mobs destroyed black Tulsa's thriving businesses in the Greenwood section. The obstacles I see are statutory (how do you stop the clock on the statute of limitations?), rather than moral.

And then there is Prince Edward County, Va., where what we used to call the "white power structure" shut down the public schools rather than integrate them in accordance with the 1954 school desegregation decision. The schools remained closed from 1959 until 1964, during which time there was no tax-paid education for black children. (White youngsters were sent to a newly established "private" academy.)

Victims of this last gasp of American apartheid have an obvious (to me) claim for the educations they were forced to miss.

What's more, the Virginia General Assembly agrees. Both houses of the state legislature passed bills unanimously to provide scholarships for the victims of Virginia's strategy of "massive resistance" to desegregation orders.

Yes, Virginia, there are reparations.

But backers of the legislation say it would take at least $2 million to meet the expected claims. The most generous version of the state budget provides only $100,000.

Virginia, you see, has budget problems.

Riverbend at Baghdad Burning

I get really tired of the emails deriding Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for their news coverage, telling me they're too biased towards Arabs, etc. Why is it ok for CNN to be completely biased towards Americans and BBC to be biased towards the British but Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have to objective and unprejudiced and, preferably, pander to American public opinion? They are Arab news networks- they SHOULD be biased towards Arabs. I agree that there is quite a bit of anti-America propaganda in some Arabic media, but there is an equal, if not more potent, amount of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda in American media. The annoying thing is that your average Arab knows much more about American culture and history than the average American knows about Arabs and Islam.

I wish everyone could see Al-Hurra- the new 'unbiased' news network started by the Pentagon and currently being broadcast all over the Arab world. It is the visual equivalent of Sawa- the American radio station which was previously the Voice of America. The news and reports are so completely biased, they only lack George Bush and Condi Rice as anchors. We watch the reports and news briefs and snicker… it is far from subtle. Interestingly enough, Asa'ad Abu Khalil said that Sawa and Al-Hurra are banned inside of America due to some sort of law that doesn't allow the broadcast of blatant political propaganda or something to that effect. I'd love to know more about that.

A channel like Al-Hurra may be able to convince Egyptians, for example, that everything is going great inside of Iraq, but how are you supposed to convince Iraqis of that? Just because they broadcast it hourly, it doesn't make it true. I sometimes wonder how Americans would feel if the Saudi government, for example, suddenly decided to start broadcasting an English channel with Islamic propaganda to Americans.

Important note to those of you who are going to email me: The last few days, I have received at least 3 emails saying, "I read your blog and don't agree with what you say but we have a famous saying in America- I don't agree with what you say but I'll die for your right to say it." Just a note- it's not your famous American saying, it is French and it is Voltaire's famous saying:"I do not agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."

Al-Muhajabah has an editorial by Zaid Shakir, a Black leader in America's Muslim community, on Islam and Black History Month.

I think it pretty obvious that I approve of this sentiment.

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Mark A. R. Kleiman: Avodim hayyinu l'Pharoh b'Mitzrayim

I wonder whether, now that their own oxen are being gored to right-wing applause, conservative Jews and conservative gays will reflect on the extent to which "conservatism" as a political practice in American (as opposed to the conservative strand in political thought represented by Burke, Hayek, and Oakeshott) turns out to embody a willingness -- and sometimes a gloating eagerness -- to stomp on the out-groups.

[That's much less true of libertarians, with the sole -- but not unimportant -- exception that libertarians are usually willing to allow "market forces" and "free private choices" to stomp on the poor. The President's decision to make the FMA an issue in the coming election will create some agonizing choices for libertarians.]

One common, and not discreditable, reaction to being treated badly is to resist, seek revenge, and vow that no one is ever going to have the opportunity to treat you that way again. It's natural enough to generalize from oneself to a group: for a Jew, say, to resent mistreatment of Jews even if he's not personally damaged.

But the larger generalization -- from rage at being mistreated to the sense that mistreating people, and especially the vulnerable, is wrong -- seems to be less common. (Wesley Clark's claim during his campaign that concern for the unfortunate is the common core of all the great religions was edifying, but I doubt it was entirely accurate.) However, that generalization does seem to be characteristic of Jews, which is one of the things that make me proud to be Jewish.

The willingness of Jews to stand up for vulnerable non-Jews, which I had always attributed to centuries of being the out-group, turns out on closer examination to be really quite deeply rooted in the religion.

…It seems, if you think about it, a rather remarkable assertion to put at the very center of a celebratory feast. What other group, instead of boasting about being nobly born, makes a fuss about being descended from slaves, and then personalizes it so as to say that everyone present was a slave until redeemed?

But linked to the commandments in Deuteronomy, that phrase comes to mean: "We were slaves" and therefore must never, never, ever act like slaveowners. That makes sense of the empirical link between Judaism and liberalism.

No, there's no reason to think that the "liberal" viewpoint on any given policy issue is superior to the "conservative" one. With respect to crime, which is my own study, I'd have to say that the liberal tendency over the past half-century has mostly pointed toward the wrong answers, though the conservative tendency hasn't noticeably pointed to the right ones. Nor is it the case that all claims made on behalf of vulnerable groups are just claims, or even that satisfying those claims will in fact be good for the groups in question.

But I'd still rather start with a political philosophy consistent with "avodim hayyinu" than with one rooted in the impulse to defend the power and wealth of the wealthy and the powerful, and to demonstrate -- as, for example, Rush Limbaugh, Honorary Member of the House Republican Class of 1994, does so amusingly to his millions of listeners -- that despised groups are really despicable.

After all, you don't have to be Jewish to recognize the basic principle of karma: What goes around, comes around.

BloggerCon will be held April 17, 2004 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. My reflection go like this:

+ Cambridge isn't far from NYC
- Registration starts at 8 am
+ It's free
- Registration starts at 8 am
+ Could catch ideas
- Would stand out even more than at a Howard Dean meet-up
+ Party afterward
- White folks can jump. Can't dance, though…it ain't that kind of party anyway.
+ Could meet some interesting folks
- Three out of five of them will still be mad at me over the dance joke.

Collablog, the new collaborative weblog system, will be available soon.

But since it's not available now, all that's at the address is a form to sign up to be spammed notified when it is.

Just lost my rhythm for a second.

I got to practice using my digital camera today.

Donald, EJ, James, Lynne, Madison, Ron, Steven, three cool brothers whose names I can't remember because I am a bad person, and I had linner or lupper…whatever you call a meal half way between lunch and dinner. Pictures and links tomorrow.

In the course of the conversation I said something I didn't know was true until I said it: I have given myself too many projects.

My parents saw The Passion of Mad Max today. They ain't like it.

I free-associated up some random factoids about myself:

• I am no one's adversary. But if you decide to be my adversary I have no problem bitch-slapping you.
• I have exactly one shirt I am willing to give you off my back. If you don't return it you may never get so much as a used handkerchief from me ever again.
• If I don't like you, your death will not make me say, "Oh, he was an okay guy…
• From the age of five until I was 13 and a fraction years old my plan was to become a minister. Baptist. Adjusting to the events that caused me to change my mind caused me to have an interesting relationship with death.
• The book that affected my life the most was "Diary of a Witch" by Sybil Leek…and I didn't learn a single damn thing from it.
• When I was a kid I used to watch Jack La Lane and Richard Hittleman's Yoga on TV and follow as best I could. Hittleman closed his show with a meditation exercise every day. I've meditated most of my life. And I need to get that practice back.
• I'm an introvert in the Jungian sense.

via Radio Free USA, which represents a NY Times article which will undergo linkrot.

To date, the issue of the fiscal challenges posed by the Baby Boomers to the nation's entitlements system have not surfaced as a political issue in the presidential campaign.

But if a Democrat is elected and serves two terms, at some point between 2005 and 2013 the problem will need to be addressed, analysts say, because the number of Baby Boomers who will reach retirement age starts to rise exponentially in 2010.

So, if a Republican is elected the problem will take care of itself?

Harvard Says Poor Parents Won't Have to Pay
By KAREN W. ARENSON

Aiming to get more low-income students to enroll, Harvard will stop asking parents who earn less than $40,000 to make any contribution toward the cost of their children's education. Harvard will also reduce the amount it seeks from parents with incomes between $40,000 and $60,000.

"When only 10 percent of the students in elite higher education come from families in the lower half of the income distribution, we are not doing enough," said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard, who will announce the financial aid changes at a meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami Beach today.

Dr. Summers said that higher education, rather than being an engine of social mobility, may be inhibiting it because of the wide gap in college attendance for students from different income classes.

Harvard officials said they believed theirs would be the first selective college to remove the parental contribution for low-income students, though some colleges do this unofficially to attract students they want.

At Harvard, the idea of eliminating the parental contribution grew out of focus groups with lower-income students last fall. University officials found that many of the students were paying some or all of their parents' share themselves.

Peter M. Brown, a junior from Oklahoma who participated in the focus groups, said that was true for him. One of seven children whose father died in 1991 and whose mother works as a schoolteacher, he said he did not show his mother the bill for the parental contribution. Last year it was nearly $3,000.

Only 7 percent of Harvard undergraduates are from families with earnings in the lowest quarter of American household incomes, and 16 percent are from the bottom half. Nearly three-quarters are from families with earnings in the top quarter.

Dr. Summers said that the numbers at most other selective private colleges were similar.

Harvard's tuition this year is $26,066. With room, board, books and other expenses, the total can reach $44,000. Harvard provides about $80 million in scholarship aid.

Parents who earn less than $40,000 are now asked to contribute an average of $2,300. That figure will drop to zero under the new plan, which begins in the fall. Parents with incomes of $40,000 to $60,000 will have their contributions cut to an average of $2,250, from an average of $3,500.

I let my nephew use my computer the yesterday.

Today I fire up Mozilla, hit the drop-down list of recent addresses to go to a site I frequent and what three sites are at the top of the list?

ratemyboobs.com
blackplanet.com
missapplebottom.com

If I start getting spam from these places he will catch a beatdown (metaphorically, anyway).

That Was Then, This is Now
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
By Dawn Anfuso, Editor

Media Metrix celebrates its eighth anniversary with a comparison of top sites in January 1996 and January 2004. Hint: Think consolidation.

	Ranking of Top Web Sites* January 1996 U.S. Home Audience Source: Media Metrix   Ranking of Top 50 Online Properties January 2004 Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Locations Source: comScore Media Metrix Rank   Audience Reach   Rank   Home Only All Locations   Total Internet Population 115 million (100%)     Total Internet Population 100% 134,227 100% 152,443 1 Aol.com 41%   1 Yahoo! Sites 67.1% 90,129 72.7% 110,120 2 Webcrawler.com 33%   2 MSN-Microsoft Sites 66.4% 89,133 71.6% 109,059 3 Netscape.com 31%   3 Time Warner Network 64.3% 86,284 70.8% 107,081 4 Yahoo.com 29%   4 Ebay 41.6% 55,859 47.6% 58,283 5 Infoseek.com 21%   5 Google Sites 34.5% 46,275 39.7% 55,102 6 Prodigy.com 18%   6 Terra Lycos 24.5% 32,841 31.7% 52,163 7 Compuserve.com 14%   7 About/Primedia 21.5% 28,917 27.1% 52,108 8 Umich.edu 10%   8 Amazon Sites 19.6% 26,278 25.0% 40,975 9 Primenet.com 9%   9 Viacom Online 13.9% 18,619 17.4% 37,130 10 Well.com 9%   10 Weather Channel, The 13.2% 17,765 16.2% 31,501

U.S. troops to silence terrorist threats in Africa
Associated Press

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The United States is scaling up its military presence in Africa as concern mounts over terrorist threats - both immediate and future - on the continent, the deputy head of American forces in Europe said Friday.

"The threat is not weakening, it is growing," Air Force Gen. Charles Wald said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Luanda, Angola. "We can't just sit back and let it grow."

The focus on Africa is part of major restructuring as U.S. forces in Europe reposition for the war against terror.

The European Command oversees U.S. military activities in Africa excluding the Horn, site of a U.S. counterterrorism effort for northeast Africa and Yemen.

Africa is a growing strategic interest to the United States because of its terror links and its oil, which is seen as a possible alternative to Middle East fuel. [P6: emphasis added]

Quote of note:
was:

But the most formidable problem the developing world faces is one the west has little experience with. It's the market-dominant minority - ethnic minorities which - for widely varying reasons - tend under market conditions to dominate economically impoverished "indigenous" majorities.

but now is:

In the past 20 years, the US has come to be perceived as a global market-dominant minority, wielding wildly disproportionate economic power. In the eyes of many across the globe, the US is the ultimate crony capitalist, ruthlessly using its minority economic power to dominate the politics and policies of other countries.

---

Our most dangerous export
Imposing free-market democracy on Iraq has unleashed ethnic hatred
Amy Chua
Saturday February 28, 2004
The Guardian

In May 1998, Indonesian mobs swarmed through the streets of Jakarta, looting and torching more than 5,000 ethnic Chinese shops and homes. A hundred and fifty Chinese women were gang-raped and more than 2,000 people died. In the months that followed, anti-Chinese hate-mongering and violence spread throughout Indonesia's cities. The explosion of rage can be traced to an unlikely source: the unrestrained combination of democracy and free markets - the very prescription wealthy democracies have promoted for healing the ills of underdevelopment. How did things go so wrong?

H.I.V. Risk Greater for Young African Brides
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

ATLANTA, Feb. 28 — Teenage brides in some African countries are becoming infected with the AIDS virus at higher rates than sexually active unmarried girls of similar ages in the same areas, the director of Unicef and other United Nations officials said here on Saturday.

The studies are the first to show such differences among married and unmarried young women, the officials said at the closing of a two-day international meeting on women and infectious diseases. The officials said the findings pointed to an inadequacy in programs that focus on abstinence among teenagers as a main means of preventing H.I.V. infection because they failed to take into account fully the risk of transmission in marriage.

The young brides are apparently acquiring H.I.V., the AIDS virus, from their husbands, who tend to be many years older and were infected before marriage, the officials said.

While many people around the world may conclude that being married and faithful protects them from exposure to AIDS, that is not necessarily true, said Dr. Paul DeLay, an official of the United Nations AIDS program. In many parts of the world, a married woman who is faithful runs the highest risk of exposure to the AIDS virus, he said, if she has "a philandering husband."

In Zimbabwe, Even the Farmers Are Going Hungry
By MICHAEL WINES

MARONDERA, Zimbabwe — The grasslands surrounding Harare, the capital, are blessed with rich soil, good drainage and a temperate climate that comes from sitting a half mile above sea level. Amon Zimbudzana raises corn on four acres of it.

Yet on a recent morning, he walked the mile from his thatched hut to a clearing in the bush here to collect sacks of free corn for his family from international relief workers. Mr. Zimbudzana is destitute — so destitute that the family celebrated the New Year with a 20-cent pack of Zimbabwean Kool Aid; so destitute that two children are unable to attend school for lack of the $6 tuition; so destitute that he cannot buy food to tide his family over until his own harvest, in April.

Soon after the harvest, he will be destitute again. He expects to harvest about 100 pounds of corn, enough to last about two weeks.

"This is prime farmland," one relief worker said as Mr. Zimbudzana and 900 others waited to collect their sacks. "If people are suffering here, imagine what it must be like in other parts of the country."

One need not imagine. As January ended, the United Nations and other relief agencies here quietly raised their estimate of Zimbabwe's "food insecure" population — essentially, those who have no ready access to a bare-bones daily diet — from nearly half its 11.6 million citizens to two-thirds.

No other nation in Africa has such a high proportion of hungry citizens, the officials say. It is one more testament to the three years of economic and social disintegration here.

If you do, all our activity, both that of Progressives and Conservatives, could wind up useless.

---

The Results Are in and the Winner Is . . . or Maybe Not
By ADAM COHEN

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga.

Rob Behler isn't saying Max Cleland's Senate seat was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, but he insists it could have been. Mr. Behler, who helped prepare Georgia's machines for the 2002 election, says secret computer codes were installed late in the process. Votes "could have been manipulated," he says, and the election thrown to the Republican, Saxby Chambliss.

Charlie Matulka, who lost to Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska the same year, does not trust the results in his election. Most of the votes were cast on paper ballots that were scanned into computerized vote-counting machines, which happen to have been manufactured by a company Mr. Hagel used to run. Mr. Matulka, suspicious of Senator Hagel's ties to the voting machine company, demanded a hand recount of the paper ballots. Nebraska law did not allow it, he was informed. "This is the stealing of our democracy," he says.

Defeated candidates who think they were robbed are nothing new in American politics. But modern technology is creating a whole new generation of conspiracy theories — easy to imagine and, unless we're careful, impossible to disprove. The nation is rushing to adopt electronic voting, but there is a disturbing amount of evidence that, at least in its current form, it is overly vulnerable to electoral mischief.

sniff
That was a good one. Heh.

---

Quote of note:

In June 2001, Paul H. O'Neill, President Bush's first Treasury secretary, said all that Americans expecting benefits have is "someone else's promise'' that the paper held by the Social Security Trust Fund will be redeemed with taxes paid later by others.

---

The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

…Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.

Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan, who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.

On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance. After Congress adopted the plan, Mr. Greenspan rose to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.

This year someone making $50,000 will pay $6,200 in Social Security taxes, half deducted from their paycheck and half paid by their employer. That total is about $2,000 more than the government needs in order to pay benefits to retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled, government budget documents show.

So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?

The advance payments have all been spent.

New U.S. Effort Steps Up Hunt for bin Laden
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — President Bush has approved a plan to intensify the effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, senior administration and military officials say, as a combination of better intelligence, improving weather and a refocusing of resources away from Iraq has reinvigorated the hunt along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The plan will apply both new forces and new tactics to the task, said senior officials in Washington and Afghanistan who were interviewed in recent days. The group at the center of the effort is Task Force 121, the covert commando team of Special Operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency officers. The team was involved in Saddam Hussein's capture and is gradually shifting its forces to Afghanistan to step up the search for Mr. bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader.

Iranian Radio Reports Bin Laden Captured
Iranian State Radio Reports Bin Laden Captured; U.S. and Pakistani Officials Deny It
The Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran Feb. 28 — Iran's state radio, quoting an unnamed source, said Saturday that Osama bin Laden was captured in Pakistan "a long time ago." U.S. and Pakistani officials denied the report.

The report said that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's visit to the region this week was in connection with the arrest. In Washington, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied early Saturday that bin Laden was captured.

The report was carried by Iran radio's external Pushtun service. The director of Iran radio's Pushtun service, Asheq Hossein, said he had two sources for the report that bin Laden had been captured.

A Pakistani military operation has been under way in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a Pakistani official said previously that members of al-Qaida are being sought there, although bin laden was not a specific target.

Pakistani Army spokesman Gen. Shaukat Sultan also told The Associated Press that the report was not true. "That information is wrong," he said.

Quote of note:

But the most difficult training exercise for most new executives, he said, was to dress up as Mickey Mouse or another character and walk around a theme park for a few hours. "One cannot don 40 pounds of heavy, stinky fir, and trip all over your feet, and not be somewhat changed after the experience," he said.

Mr. Lipp said many of the company's top executives recommended the purchase of new suits, made of more breathable fabrics, after participating in that exercise.

Indeed, several subjects of "Now Who's Boss?'' say they have already made changes in their companies as a result of their experiences. The day after Mr. Flax and Mr. Rosenfield resumed their executive duties at California Pizza Kitchen, they instituted a new procedure in their restaurants to separate knives, forks and spoons before they hit the dishwasher, Mr. Rosenfield said.

"Washing dishes was a hot, hard, never-ending job," Mr. Rosenfield said, and it was made more difficult when servers tossed all utensils together in one bin, leaving him with the task of sorting them out.

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For the Boss, Days of Sweat and Fumbles
By MELINDA LIGOS

LARRY FLAX and Rick Rosenfield have made millions of dollars with their 19-year-old chain of upscale pizza restaurants, California Pizza Kitchen, which they started from scratch. But ask them to handle some of the most rudimentary tasks required of their front-line employees, and they are clueless.

That became clear during the filming of an episode of a new reality series, "Now Who's Boss?," which is scheduled to start on March 8 on TLC, the cable network. On the show, corporate leaders work for five days in rank-and-file jobs in their companies. In the California Pizza Kitchen episode, to be shown on March 29, Mr. Flax and Mr. Rosenfield, the company's co-chief executives, blunder their way through a number of tasks at two of its restaurants in Southern California.

During a stint as a waiter, Mr. Flax fails to ask for proof of age when a young Japanese tourist orders a beer, forgets whether the restaurant serves Pepsi or Coke and is flummoxed when he has to take care of four tables at the same time.

Mr. Rosenfield also has problems. His tie becomes caught under several drinks on a tray while he is waiting tables. Working as a pizza maker, he struggles to shift the pies in a wood-fired oven, receiving a stern talking-to from a kitchen manager who insists that he remake several of his creations.

"The truth is, we would have been fired from every job we undertook," Mr. Flax said. "We were completely incompetent." In other episodes, Jonathan M. Tisch, the chief executive of Loews Hotels, plays bellhop at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel and does not get a tip after lugging 15 bags for a family of 10; Dan Brestle, group president of the Estée Lauder Companies, works as a makeup artist at a cosmetics counter and balks when a young woman tells him she wants to look like "J. Lo"; and John D. Selvaggio, president of Song, the low-fare service of Delta Air Lines, wrestles with the hoses connecting a plane to a sewage truck.

Abuse Scandal Is Now 'History,' Top Bishop Says
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

ASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — Just after the release on Friday of two long-awaited studies on the sexual abuse of children by more than 4,000 priests, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared with emphatic finality in a news conference that the bishops had faced the problem, come clean and swept the church of abusers.

"I assure you that known offenders are not in ministry," the leader, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Ill., said as he punched out his words. "The terrible history recorded here today is history."

One report said that "there must be consequences" for the leaders who failed to stop the abuses and that the bishops should hold one another accountable in the future. That did not satisfy critics, who said the church was continuing to sidestep the most sensitive and intractable issues that the scandal had raised.

In reacting to the reports, advocacy groups and reporters peppered the bishops with a host of questions like, Should not bad bishops be removed? Should the celibacy requirement for priests be abandoned? Should seminaries bar gay men?

And why have most bishops not released the names of offending priests, many of whom are living unsupervised and anonymously in the civilian world as a result of the church's new "zero tolerance" policy?

"What Catholics want to know is has there been a pedophile priest in my parish or in my school?" said Peter Isely, a psychotherapist in Milwaukee who is a board member of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "The most useful information the bishops have they're not giving us.

I just heard on WABC News that President Aristede of Haiti has left the country. He's in the Dominican Republic right now and seeking asylum in one of three countries whose names slip my mind at the moment.