Prometheus 6

House Nixes Anti-Profiteering Penalties in Iraq Spending Bill 10/31/2003 3:44:00 PM To: National Desk Contact: David Carle of the Office of Sen. Patrick Leahy, 202-224-3693 WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The final version of the $87 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan is missing provisions the Senate had passed to penalize war profiteers who defraud American taxpayers. House negotiators on the package refused to accept the Senate provisions.

• Lodged 100 workers at a five-star hotel in Kuwait for a total of $10,000 a day while the Pentagon wanted them to stay in tents, like soldiers, at $139 a night.
• Abandoned $85,000 trucks because of flat tires and minor problems.
• Paid $100 to have a 15-pound bag of laundry cleaned as part of a million-dollar laundry contract in peaceful Kuwait. The price for cleaning the same amount of laundry in war-torn Iraq was $28.
• Spent $1.50 a can to buy 37,200 cans of soda in Kuwait, about 24 times higher than the contract price.
• Knowingly paid subcontractors twice for the same bill.

HEALTH –ADMINISTRATION CALLS FRENCH FRIES 'FRESH VEGGIES': While the White House urged Americans to eat more fresh vegetables as part of a more healthy diet, it seems his administration has a strange definition of what a healthy diet might include. According to the Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Department of Agriculture now classifies "frozen French fries as 'fresh vegetables.'" The administration "quietly changed the regulations last year at the behest of the French fry industry."

So, what's in a name? Variations such as catsup, catchup, katsup, and others abounded alongside 'ketchup'. However, when the Reagan administration briefly decided to count ketchup as a vegetable in 1981, Del Monte Catsup found itself out of the loop due to their spelling-they permanently changed to 'ketchup', but by then public outcry had forced a reversal of administration policy. Ever since, though, you'll be hard-pressed to find a bottle from any manufacturer labeled anything other than 'ketchup'. Although it frequently graces such foods as fries and greasy burgers, ketchup itself has a moderate health benefit, as it contains lycopene, an antioxidant associated with decreased cancer risk. (Unlikely that it's enough to cancel out the negative effects of the fries, though.) [P6: emphasis added.]

THE VICIOUS INSTAPUNDIT BLOGROLL CONTEST: WE HAVE A WINNER Voting for the Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest closed a week ago Sunday. …The winning entries reflect two different strains of demagogy in Blogovia (the right-hemisphere of the blogosphere). Demagogy may be giving too much credit, since in the case of [redacted], it is hard to see any persuasive power in his rants. Evidently, venting makes him and his readers feel better. Thank God for small pleasures. That aside, [redacted] is consistent with other voices that reflect a perpetual hysteria. It's not simply that the world has gone wrong for these people, since many would share that view, albeit for diverse reasons. What's different is the uncontrollable urge to demonize individuals, often in violent terms. This "literature" (sic) ought to provide case material for courses in abnormal psychology. For all of that, I can't help but doubt that the [redacted] is serious in what he writes. It's just too cartoonish. We also observe in these quarters the sophomoric desire to shock liberals. The quoted bloggers express a desire to win the vote. They think their viciousness is a badge of machismo, like suburban white boys who affect ghetto gangsta postures. We had the Beastie Boys, and now we have the beastie bloggers. They try to act dangerous, but all they really want to do is become commodities, and they don't even know it. There is no reason to fear nameless little people with keyboards. Rather, the approach is clinical, like the study of bugs. The [redacted] (2nd place) fantasy about murdering high officials of the U.S. Government is the quieter, equally demented side of this same dementia. His post seems to attain about 90 percent of the threshold for a visit from the Secret Service. [redacted] is a horse of a different color. His style is passive-aggressive, the way of the weasel. The attack is not direct and forthright, but delivered by innuendo, often through third parties. Criticism is more in sorrow than in anger. Plausible deniability shrouds his posts. If harm should befall the objects of his disapproval, it's really too bad but really their fault. They should have known better or somehow rejected bad leaders. The quote submitted in the contest typifies this logic: genocide is a misfortune, not a crime. A crime has perpetrators, but for the enemies of America to be victims of genocide, the criminals would be the West, or the U.S. But that cannot be. By definition, the U.S. is good and cannot commit crimes. All references to crimes committed by the U.S. Government bespeak hatred of America and alignment with the Enemy. This is a recipe for the production of cannon fodder. Watch the ticker.

To: Southerners everywhere The League of the South is considering petitioning Congress to conduct a thorough, non-partisan study examining the long neglected injustices arising from the war crimes committed across the South from 1861-1865 in violation of the U. S. Constitution, the Law of Nations, and U. S. Executive Order Number 100, whereby the private property of non-combatants was ravaged, burned, stolen, and destroyed as a deliberate policy of an unconstitutional war of invasion, conquest, and occupation. Tens of thousands of individuals in the South are now signing petitions asking The League of the South to represent them as a class by exercising the people’s right of petition or by a suit at law for damages. We anticipate that a thorough and impartial Congressional investigation will reveal the necessity for a long overdue compensatory program of justice for people of all races in the South who were subjected to treatment during and after the War Between the States that resulted in little less than the barbaric dispossession and destruction of the Southern people and their way of life. No reparations, no indemnification, and no “Marshall Plan” has ever been conceived or enacted by the United States Government. The United States Government now claims to be the moral monitor for the entire world; however, it cannot justify this position without first cleansing its own shield of the shame of war crimes and acts of vengeance against Southern Americans in action perhaps best described by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who said: “ . . . about 20% of our effort [in Georgia and South Carolina] was against military objectives. The rest [80%] was sheer waste and destruction.” Sadly, such unconscionable depredations were all too common across the South during both the war and Reconstruction. The League of the South plans to seek reparations from the United States Government for all Southerners and their families who suffered atrocities during the war and the years of military occupation that followed. If you agree with us or would like to participate in these actions, please sign our petition. Sincerely, The Undersigned

The two narratives are also significant because, unlike many other such accounts, there is a wealth of genealogical information about the former slaves' lives that corroborates much of what they wrote.

Ralph Wiley, 1952-2004 Ralph Wiley, the ESPN sportswriter who coined the phrase "Billy Ball" is dead of a heart attack at 52. He was in the midst of covering the NBA playoffs when he died. In addition to his prominence as a sports columnist,Wiley was a respected author who dispensed racial wisdom with tough love

But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again.

Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science To Design Affirmative Action Programs CLARK D. CUNNINGHAM, GLENN C. LOURY, AND JOHN DAVID SKRENTNY

A PARABLE Imagine a mad bomber with a stockpile of biological and radiation weapons. The bomber takes a state map that indicates the boundaries of every county. He picks out a dozen counties and colors some of those counties red, some green, and the rest blue. Taking that map aloft, he drops biological weapons on the red counties, radiation weapons on the green counties, and all that he has left of both kinds on the blue counties. He then kills himself in a suicide crash. Although many residents of the targeted counties become ill almost immediately, the terrible extent of the harm he caused becomes apparent only as the years go by and public health officials begin to notice patterns of cancer and birth defects. The situation is complicated not only by the puzzling variety of problems within and among the counties, but also by the passage of time as people move out of the targeted counties, carrying illness with them, and others move into the counties where the still potent effects of the bombing linger. The government becomes increasingly frustrated by the complexity of the problem, its persistence, and the limited, and occasionally counterproductive, results of efforts to restore public health. Then the bomber's map is discovered in the rubble of his crashed plane. ... INTRODUCTION In the parable, should the government use the bomber's map in its efforts to restore public health? The answer would seem to be an obvious yes. No one would say that the government was perpetuating the bomber's vicious "discrimination" against the colored counties by using his map to guide its public health programs. Nor can one imagine that residents of un-colored counties would claim that they were being discriminated against because people with links to the colored counties were given free health care or preferential admission to cancer treatment facilities. For many social scientists, it seems equally obvious that the "map" used in the United States to categorize people into racial and ethnic categories remains a necessary tool for public policy. Because the "map" projects the complex patterns of past and continuing discrimination onto the current geography of our nation, a well-designed affirmative action plan uses that map to guide the uncertain but essential task of restoring social and economic health for the victims of discrimination. However, there are few, if any, affirmative action plans that can be described as carefully designed; in particular, relevant information and methods developed by the social sciences are not used. To return to the parable, one analogy to some affirmative action programs might be if the map users were literally color-blind, and thus, treated all targeted counties alike even though the bombing pattern varied among counties. Another analogous mistake would be if the public health officials in the parable failed to take into account population changes after the bombing event, putting all their public health efforts only into the targeted counties, providing identical health care to long-time residents and people who had moved in after the bombing, and ignoring people and their descendants who had moved out after the bombing. If there was a judicial role in the parable, it would be to make sure that government had, in fact, the right map, and was using it appropriately to remedy the harm the bomber caused.

Ian Ayres, who is both an economist and a legal scholar, has reported the results of empirical research on retail car negotiations showing that black male testers received final offer mark-ups that were much higher than those given white male testers. Although the behavior of the car retailers may indeed have been caused by present practices of deliberate discrimination, consider the following model that could also explain these results:

Suppose automobile dealers think black buyers have higher reservation prices than whites - prices above which they will simply walk away rather than haggle further. On this belief, dealers will be tougher when bargaining with blacks, more reluctant to offer low prices, more eager to foist on them expensive accessories, etc. Now, given that such race-based dealer behavior is common, blacks would come to expect tough dealer bargaining as the norm when one shops for cars. As such, a black buyer who contemplates walking away would have to anticipate less favorable alternative opportunities and higher search costs than would a white buyer who entertains that option. And so, the typical black buyer might find it rational to accept a price rather than continue searching elsewhere, even though the typical white might reject that same price. Yet, this racial difference in typical buyer behavior is precisely what justified the view among dealers that a customer's race would predict bargaining behavior. Thus, even if there are no intrinsic differences in bargaining ability between the two populations, an equilibrium can emerge where the dealers' rule of thumb, "be tougher with blacks," is all too clearly justified by the facts.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted to strike down the statutory ban on flag burning some years ago, has described in speeches how doing so irritated him. He would have loved to put the defendant -- a "bearded, scruffy, sandal-wearing guy burning the American flag" -- in jail, he said. It made him "furious" not to be able to. But "I was handcuffed -- I couldn't help it, that's my understanding of the First Amendment. I can't do the nasty things I'd like to do."

The initiative, which does not yet have a ballot number, would immediately require DNA samples from everyone convicted of any felony, as well as those arrested for murder or rape. The ballot measure requires that beginning in 2009, DNA samples would be collected from anyone arrested for a felony. "Today, with a state DNA database of more than 220,000 samples, we have increased the number of 'hits' from one a year to an average of more than one a day,'' said state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a co-chair of the initiative campaign. "By including DNA samples from all felons, we should have a database of more than 1 million DNA profiles that will help California law enforcement use this proven, high-tech tool to quickly solve even more criminal cases and prevent more crimes from being committed.''

The Post deleted several lines from the memo that are not germane to the legal arguments being made in it and that are the subject of further reporting by The Post.

None of that has been lost on the Kerry campaign. "It's one thing for a bishop to tell Catholic politicians to refrain from taking Communion but quite a different thing when the church hierarchy begins to bring that pressure to all Catholics," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. President Bush's campaign also sees the issue as producing a potential upside for Kerry. A top Bush strategist is concerned that it unsettles the moderate slice of the Catholic electorate that both parties are courting, puts Kerry in the sympathetic position of being a victim and—worst of all, as far as the Bush campaign is concerned—makes people aware that he is a Catholic. Indeed, one of the more striking findings of the TIME poll is that fully a third of Americans know Kerry's religion, which is slightly higher than the percentage who named some version of Protestantism when asked the religion of Bush.

Meet Joe Blog Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased

Gipperporn: Four Days In, Reagan Still Deceased So glad that the nets are going wall-to-wall with the Reagan stuff for the fourth consecutive day. Otherwise we might forget that he's dead. At this point, however, the strain of keeping the story alive is starting to show. Fox, for instance, has run out of famous Reagan fanatics; this morning they interviewed one of the soldiers guarding the president's casket.

Fox: Did you ever meet Reagan? Marine (who appears to be approximately 18 years old): Uh, no, sir. Fox: How much of an honor is it to be doing this duty? Marine: It's a great honor.

Clearly, things are getting desperate; at some point, they may have to interview someone who didn't like the guy. And in case you were wondering: Still dead.

Jonathan Chait writes:

Last night I happened to be reading an old Michael Kinsley TRB column from 1985. (I tend to do that when I need inspiration to write.) The column deals with book by Peter Ueberroth and Lee Iacocca. He writes, “Both books are examples of a genre best described as autohagiography.”

I, myself, too, tend often to just happen to be reading old newsmagazine columns from decades ago...