Prometheus 6

Huey converts to Catholicism. Maybe George Bush should too. That stupid Republican wolf commercial was sending a message. And reality sends a message back. You don't think George Bush will come to regret that line, do you? He is taking every step he can to make sure he doesn't…

Quote of note:

"This is not what I go to church for," said Mary Ellen Dundas, 58, a Mission San Gabriel parishioner, who along with several others has written a letter of complaint to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. "This is not a moral issue. When I go to church, I go to be uplifted, to get what I need to move on to the next week. I don't want to hear that I'm a sinner for supporting Wal-Mart."

I think I'd like to see the official List of Moral Issues. What we have here is a bunch of folks who have placed their "religion" in a little box that they venture into for a moment of refreshment before going on their amoral way. It explains a lot. A LOT. Anyway… Clerics Speak Out on Wal-Mart Some parishioners complain to Cardinal Mahony, saying that vocal opposition to discount store has no place in church. By Hector Becerra Times Staff Writer October 30, 2004 After growing up in an Ireland pockmarked with poverty, Father Mike Gleeson said he had always considered it important to speak out on social issues he believed in. So the pastor of St. Anthony Catholic Church in San Gabriel didn't hesitate when some parishioners asked him to help fight Wal-Mart's proposal to build Los Angeles County's first Supercenter store in neighboring Rosemead. In a church bulletin, he called the Rosemead City Council's approval of a Wal-Mart store disgusting and said the retailer was "the greediest corporation on Earth." He also helped Wal-Mart critics gather signatures for a referendum on the project, including allowing organizers to use the church for a petition drive. Such outspoken views have divided his parish as well as a nearby church, Mission San Gabriel, where another priest has criticized Wal-Mart. Some parishioners believe that the priests have no business encouraging opposition to the chain store.

The Washington Post has a list of who is scheduled to be on what pundit show tomorrow. There's actually no one there I'm interested in hearing from.

Quote of note:

An IRS "fact sheet" provided by the agency noted: "Even activities that encourage people to vote for or against a particular candidate on the basis of nonpartisan criteria violate the political campaign prohibition."

How many evangelical organizations are on that list, I wonder. And shouldn't the churches of those Catholic bishops or whatever that say you can't vote for a pro-choice Catholic be challenged as well? 60 Tax-Exempt Groups Under Investigation At Issue Are IRS Regulations That Bar Political Activities By Genaro C. Armas Associated Press Saturday, October 30, 2004; Page A04 About 60 charities, churches and other tax-exempt groups are being investigated for possibly breaking federal rules that bar them from participating in political activities, the Internal Revenue Service said yesterday. Such violations would threaten their tax-exempt status, the IRS said. The investigations involve guidelines for 501(c)(3) groups, which are granted tax-exempt status so long as they do not participate in political activities such as endorsing candidates or making campaign donations. Under the law, the IRS cannot reveal names from or details of its investigations. It did disclose that about 20 of the groups being investigated are churches.

Politics, Gas Fuel Battle Over New Mexico Forest Thu Oct 28, 2004 09:08 PM ET By Zelie Pollon SANTA FE, N.M. (Reuters) - A Texas energy company may get rights to drill in a pristine swathe of a New Mexico national forest after a White House task force intervened on its behalf, a move that has become a hot issue in the battleground state before next week's presidential election. Oil giant Pennzoil donated the 40,000-acre parcel in northern New Mexico known as Valle Vidal for conservation in 1982, and it has been a protected wildlife and recreation area as part of the Carson National Forest. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Houston-based oil company El Paso Corp., a large donor to Republican campaigns and candidates, asked the White House's energy task force in 2003 to intervene on its behalf with the Forest Service. The Forest Service had three times previously rejected its requests to drill in the area, saying it would threaten wildlife including roaming elk herds and 200 species of birds. After the request from El Paso, the government's energy task force last year asked Carson National Forest to reconsider the company's request and give an "expedited response" as to whether it could drill in the area, the documents show. Then in August, the Forest Service took the first step toward allowing El Paso to drill in Valle Vidal by releasing a report that said there was a high probability of recovering gas in the area and envisioned some day there could be 500 wells there. The next steps will be an environmental impact study and a period of public comment before a final decision. The move has sparked an uproar in New Mexico, a swing state in the presidential election. "The Bush administration has allowed oil and gas interests to put the Valle Vidal development request on a fast track," said Joanna Prukop, New Mexico's secretary of energy, minerals and natural resources. El Paso officials did not return calls seeking comment on the matter.

You have to admit, it has its own special flavor.

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Oklahoma Black Leaders Upset Over Candidate Remark Fri Oct 29, 2004 08:37 PM ET OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (Reuters) - A Republican Senate candidate from Oklahoma who has run into trouble over verbal gaffes was drawing fire again on Friday for saying black men have a "genetic predisposition" for a lower life expectancy than whites. Dr. Tom Coburn, a Republican physician locked in a neck-and-neck struggle for a pivotal U.S. Senate seat, made the comment in a discussion of Social Security privatization during a locally televised debate on Wednesday night. Coburn said black males were statistically more likely to die before they could benefit from Social Security. "What kind of plan is that, that we are going to take from those who have a genetic predisposition of less life expectancy, that we are going to steal from those and give it to somebody else?" Coburn asked on Wednesday. Oklahoma is solidly Republican, but Coburn's largely self-inflicted political wounds have let his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Brad Carson, gain a narrow lead in surveys of likely voters. Carson brushed aside Coburn's remark during the debate, but black politicians in Oklahoma blasted Coburn on Friday. Angela Monson, a Democratic state representative from Oklahoma City, said the suggestion that blacks are genetically inferior was "bizarre." "I think he was so bent on pushing the privatization of Social Security that he took this leap," she said. "A leap off the deep end."

Steve Gilliard hits you with…fashion tips for the election worker:

Ok, you're probably not thinking about Not What to Wear on election day, but you should. It depends on what you're doing, but overall, leave the ripped jeans at home. The more professional you look, the easier it will be to get things done. This may sound odd, but it could be crucial in preventing problems. Certain clothes will send a clear message and scare the shit out of GOP vote thieves.

He touches on working in minority neighborhoods…I've never done voter canvassing, but what he says sounds reasonable though it's rare that I'm going to eat a meatball without having seen it made. And he says one thing so clearly and nicely I may have to appropriate the phrasing:

If you're a well-meaning white liberal who finds themselves in a black community on election day, here's a hint: you know less about black people than you think.

AngryDesi at Minority Report has a good analysis of voter suppression:

These activities serve to increase the transactional costs of democracy and therefore discourage participation. I think this has a disproportionate impact on minorities and working class voters. Who has time to wait all day to vote? Who wants their legitimate right to participate questioned? That's the goal, right? Increase the transactional costs of democracy on the underclass and minorities to discourage them from voting. This is happening because the transactional costs of challenging voters are too low. In Pennsylvania, any voter can challenge any other voter. In order to respond to the challenge, the challenged voter must have another voter vouch for them. If they can't, the challenged voter must use a provisional ballot which is then cleared up later. What are the costs for Republicans to challenge voters - thus far, it appears to be minimal beyond legal, some human resource costs, and a few mailings. We should, as a society, be adding heavy penalties for interfering with a citizen's rights to vote. There should be enormous transactional costs such that individuals and organziations are discouraged from interfering.

He's right. Everyone who files a challenge that turns out to be wrong or frivolous (read the transcript of how one such challenge proceeded to see why I mention frivolous) should be fined and liable for court costs. And that should apply to corporations that generate false purging lists as well.

I just took the grand blog tour. Between this and what David is rightfully bitching about and this to make me look forward to a bi-partisan future, this lovely series of advertisements and, of course this: Among other things, I'm about politicked out.

You cannot convince me the Department of Homeland Security should be chasing down trademark infringers. Especially when they aren't infringing. No, at all. They're not supposed to do it at all. Quote of note:

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C. "One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.

Homeland Security Agents Visit Toy Store Homeland Security Agents Visit Small Toy Store in Oregon About Magic Cube The Associated Press Oct. 28, 2004 - So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act. So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland. …When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied. After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.

Writer raided for doing research Here's a deeply creepy manifestation of the Patriot Act: A writer of "mainstream women's fiction" was working on an adventure novel set in Cambodia and involving terrorists. For research, she was buying books online, checking them out from the library, and looking at Cambodia-related websites. Her home was raided and her writing material confiscated (including her computers, her files, her contracts, and even her music CDs). She still hasn't gotten most of her stuff back. I got this information from the November 2004 issue of Romance Writers Report, the monthly magazine of Romance Writers of America. I can't find the article online to link you to, but it's worth reading, so I'll put it under the cut. Edited to add: Several people have asked if they can link to this. Go ahead -- no need to ask permission. People need to know about this.

Voter Alert on Judges VOTERS IN Montgomery and Anne Arundel counties should beware of trick questions on their ballots. Thanks to a terrible system that subjects circuit judges to election challenges by "candidates" with scant qualifications, voters may be easily confused and wind up unintentionally removing a sitting judge who has undergone a thorough vetting before going on the bench. The names of the judges and any challengers appear in one alphabetical list on the ballot, with no indication of who is a judge and who is not. In Montgomery, four judges and one challenger are on the ballot; the top four vote-getters win. In Anne Arundel, three judges are listed along with three challengers; the top three vote-getters win.

A fix would address the issue that health care should be a public good. Quote of note:

What my research revealed was that the uninsured received about 80 percent of the care received by the insured and that they had a 37 percent higher mortality rate. (The mortality rate for all victims of serious car crashes was 3.8 percent, rising to 5.2 percent for the uninsured.) These outcome differences continued even after controlling for severity of injury, socioeconomic status and hospital resources that can vary between the insured and uninsured. Even insured and uninsured patients who were in the same accident and were rushed to the same hospital had these differences in treatment and mortality.

A Way to Help on Health Insurance In the continuing debate over health care, and especially the uninsured, two seemingly contradictory claims are in play. The first is that the uninsured are being denied access to care. The second is that the uninsured receive too much care, overcrowding emergency rooms and placing hospitals and businesses that cover employee health costs at financial risk. In reality, both statements contain some truth, and both can be partly addressed by one simple action: Make catastrophic care insurance more broadly accessible.

Quote of note:

"It's like the gold rush," said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. "It would be shame on them if they did not do what they did."

As oil companies reap the rewards of higher oil prices, consumers suffer. The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $2.03 yesterday, 2 cents less than a record set in May, according to a AAA auto club survey. Diesel fuel prices have reached record highs for weeks. Home heating oil prices are far higher than last year. The prices do not reach record levels when adjusted for inflation.

Big oil companies have been using hefty profits to increase dividends, buy back stock and, in some cases, repay debt. The big companies have not significantly increased their budgets for exploration and development while some smaller companies have spent more, analysts said. The larger companies say their refining operations have helped increase earnings, but the profit margins have narrowed from earlier this year. In addition, the oil companies' chemical businesses have been strong as they have passed along higher oil prices to customers, analysts said.

Oil Firms Report Big Profit Increases Demand, Prices Create Windfall By Justin Blum Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 29, 2004; Page E01 ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group yesterday reported large increases in third-quarter profits, part of an industry-wide windfall caused by high oil prices and strong demand. Irving, Texas-based Exxon said its profit was $5.68 billion, up about 56 percent from the third quarter last year. Royal Dutch/Shell, based in London and The Hague, said that its profit more than doubled, to $5.4 billion. Analysts said Exxon, Shell and several other oil companies that have reported earnings in recent days could not help but benefit from soaring oil and natural gas prices.

Quote of note:

At the heart of the problem is that all mammalian cells -- with the exception of human cells -- bear certain molecules on their surface, known as N-glycoylneuraminic acid. (Human cell surfaces bear a different but related molecule, N-acetyl neuraminic acid.) Varki had previously demonstrated that the vast majority of people have antibodies against this molecule, perhaps as a result of eating mammalian meat such as beef. The new work shows that human embryonic stem cells grown on mouse cells "consume" the mouse molecules and then display them on their own surfaces. When human blood serum was added to the mouse-cultivated human stem cells in lab dishes, antibodies attacked the stem cells and killed them. In the eyes of the immune system, "these human cells look like animal cells . . . which leads to [their] death," Gage said at a recent scientific meeting.

Approved Stem Cells' Potential Questioned By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A03 All of the human embryonic stem cells available to federally funded scientists under President Bush's three-year-old research policy share a previously unrecognized trait that fosters rejection by the immune systems, diminishing their potential as medical treatments, new research indicates. A second study has concluded that at least a quarter of the Bush-approved cell colonies are so difficult to keep alive they have little potential even as research tools. The two studies -- the second still incomplete and the first one provisionally accepted for publication in a top-tier scientific journal but not yet published -- add new elements to the escalating debate over U.S. stem cell policy. Embryonic stem cell research has become an unexpected wedge issue in the neck-and-neck race for the White House, with Bush insisting that it would be immoral to expand the research to include new cell colonies and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry promising to loosen the restrictions that today limit federal funding to 22 of the more than 150 known cell colonies. The first study, led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Ajit Varki of the University of California at San Diego, focused on a peculiar aspect of the federally approved cell lines: Unlike colonies being derived using newer techniques, all the Bush-approved colonies were initially cultivated in laboratory dishes that also contained mouse cells. Scientists and the Food and Drug Administration have already expressed concern that animal viruses lurking in those mouse cells might infect the human cells and cause trouble when they are transplanted into patients, as doctors hope to do.

Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A01 The 377 tons of Iraqi explosives whose reported disappearance has dominated the past few days of presidential campaigning represent only a tiny fraction of the vast quantities of other munitions unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 18 months ago. U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown. [P6: emphasis added] Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated. "There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

It's Not Just Al Qaqaa By PAUL KRUGMAN …All of these stories would be getting more play right now if it weren't for the Al Qaqaa mess. Still, one can understand why the right is so upset. After all, Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush's national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn't have spared enough troops to guard the site, they're admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat. The story of Al Qaqaa has brought out the worst in a campaign dedicated to the proposition that the president is infallible - and that it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong. Here's what Rudy Giuliani said yesterday: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Support the troops!

Citing July Speech, I.R.S. Decides to Review N.A.A.C.P. By MICHAEL JANOFSKY WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The Internal Revenue Service has begun reviewing the tax-exempt status of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, citing concerns over a speech given by its chairman, Julian Bond, at its annual convention last July in Philadelphia. In a letter dated Oct. 8 and released Thursday, the I.R.S. told the association it had received information that Mr. Bond conveyed "statements in opposition of George W. Bush for the office of presidency" and specifically that he had "condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush in education, the economy and the war in Iraq." The letter reminded the association that tax-exempt organizations are legally barred from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office. Mr. Bond's speech on July 11 included a long section that sharply criticized the Republican Party, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their positions on an array of issues important to black Americans. In an interview Thursday, Mr. Bond defended his remarks, saying they focused on policy, not politics. "This is an attempt to silence the N.A.A.C.P. on the very eve of a presidential election," he said. "We are best known for registering and turning out large numbers of African-American voters. Clearly, someone in the I.R.S. doesn't want that to happen." He added, "It's Orwellian to believe that criticism of the president is not allowed or that the president is somehow immune from criticism."

Quote of note:

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's timing was up to him. "I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told The Associated Press. "My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. "I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives," Roberts said. "As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this."

In fact, the idea that the candidates would be "forced to pledge to protect civilian lives" simply doesn't take into account that 40-odd percent of the population believes Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. It will help folks see who is pro-life, though. It's logically impossible to be pro-life and pro-invasion at the same time. Anti-abortion and pro-invasion, sure. Anyway… Household survey sees 100,000 Iraqi deaths By Emma Ross, AP Medical Writer | October 29, 2004 LONDON --Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis -- many of them women and children -- died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war. Writing in the British-based medical journal The Lancet, the American and Iraqi researchers concluded that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths and that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were a major factor. There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Thursday, 1,106 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department. The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors. Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study was published Thursday on The Lancet's Web site. The survey attributed most of the extra deaths to violence and said airstrikes by coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths. "Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," the researchers wrote.

Bad news dogs Bush as election nears By Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press Writer | October 29, 2004 YARDLEY, Pa. -- The presidency comes with powerful tools that can help incumbents keep their jobs: a mighty public-relations machine, a bully pulpit, a famous airplane. Yet President Bush has been powerless to halt a recent tide of bad news, from surging violence and missing weapons in Iraq, to missteps by his own campaign, to a potentially damaging new probe by his own FBI.

TV video may show missing explosives October 29, 2004 WASHINGTON --Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC. "The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."

For the record, unless you're actually in favor of policies that support living well, like a medical system that works to the benefit of humans rather than corporations, you're not pro-life. You're merely anti-abortion. Anyway, this editorial does an excellent job of explaining for women how voting for George Bush supports those who would take control of their bodies from them. It's all coming back into focus because the Chief Justice is ill, but this is not a new threat. In fact, it's only an aspect of the problems an extreme right shift in the Supreme Court would bring about.

If John Kerry Wins, Abortions Could Remain Legal for 30 More Years
by Steven Ertelt
October 28, 2004 Every election year, there's always talk about the importance of the upcoming election in terms of its impact on abortion policy. There's no doubt, each election is considerably important. However, this time around, the stakes are higher than ever before. Here's why: The next president will have the power to determine whether abortion will remain legal for the next 30 years.

The next president could appoint as many as four new Supreme Court justices and elevate one of the high court's members to the Chief Justice position. This will be an exchange of power and a turnover of membership on the court like never seen before.

And that's about as starkly stated as it gets. Again, this has repercussions far beyond the issue of choice for women, but in ways the issue is rather pointed for women.

President Bush has a strong record thus far of appointing pro-life judges to key federal court positions. Should he be re-elected and replace each of those four judges with pro-life advocates in the mold of Thomas or Antonin Scalia, the current 6-3 pro-abortion margin shifts to a 6-3 position in favor of overturning Roe.

However, if John Kerry is elected president, and he replaces those four judges with abortion supporters, that will take the court back to the 7-2 position in favor of abortion that it had in 1973. In other words, the pro-life movement will be right back where it started in its effort to stop abortion. We will have made no progress in more than three decades in terms of changing the makeup of the Supreme Court, if John Kerry is elected. Notice how confident the writer is about what George Bush's intent is…overturning Roe. George Bush doesn't say it directly. He "sends the message."

If we truly want to see Roe thrown in the trash heap of history right next to the Dred Scott decision, we can't let that happen.

And the message is, he will take away your right to choose if given the opportunity. Understand, no law forces women to have abortions. And I see no spiritual benefit to anyone from banning abortion. The anti-abortionists weren't going to have an abortion anyway, and in fact suffer the black mark of denying free will.

Pro-life voters need to keep in mind this election year that if John Kerry is elected, Roe will almost assuredly be preserved and abortion will probably remain legal for decades. That means every vote for Kerry and every vote not cast for President Bush (i.e., for a third-party candidate or by citizens who abstain from voting) is a vote to keep abortion legal for as many as thirty years.

Essentially correct, though as a John Kerry supporter in this election I'd formulate it a bit differently. Everyone needs to look four years down the road in the direction we're traveling. Ask yourself if you really want to be in that neighborhood or not.

If you Google "why should you vote for george bush," the ninth item returned is this page.

Small Minority Says Draft Could Happen New Conflict Would Further Strain Troop Levels By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A03 Many military experts believe that reviving some sort of military draft is extremely unlikely, even impossible -- but not all of them. The issue has taken on urgency because of the dynamics of the presidential campaign, with Democratic operatives using the prospect of a draft to drive the youth vote, and the Democratic nominee himself raising the possibility on the campaign trail.

The military is in the high schools in New York City. I don'ty know how many folks remember a few years back when schools were ordered to turn over contact information for all their high school students to the military. Parents could opt out, but this was before people realized you actually have to pay attention to what the government does. And at the high school a few blocks from me a surprising number of students left the building in Army dress uniforms today. The Army has affiliated itself with that school; the Navy, Air Force and Marines have each affiliated with a local high school as well (something I overheard on the bus). If they keep recruiting them at an age where their heads are full of first person shooters and the natural indestructibility of youth, then (assuming we get through the next two years without a draft) the all-volunteer military may well work. Barring the drafting of specific skill sets; by the time you get a medical degree you know you're not immortal.

Quote of note:

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, said that he believed that the average level of claims over the past two weeks was consistent with job growth of around 160,000 per month. "If sustained, payroll gains of that size, which would be an improvement on recent months, would keep the unemployment rate broadly stable," he said. "There certainly seems little near-term prospects of a significant improvement in the unemployment picture and it could even deteriorate if oil slows consumption."

Weekly Unemployment Claims Jump by 20,000 By Martin Crutsinger AP Economics Writer Thursday, October 28, 2004; 3:56 AM The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week by 20,000, the largest jump in a month, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The bigger-than-expected increase pushed total new claims to 350,000 last week and provided fresh evidence that the labor market is still under pressure even though the economic recovery is about to celebrate its third anniversary. The increase of 20,000 was sharply higher than the 6,000 gain that many private economists had been expecting and was the biggest one-week rise since a jump of 21,000 claims in the week of Sept. 25.

I've noticed a few folks have had a problem logging in. The password you get when you sign up is randomly generated and CASE SENSITIVE. So where you see a capital letter in your password you must enter a capital letter. If you're still having a problem, email me and I'll give you a nice reasonable password that you can change to something you're comfortable with.

No joke. Since I'm in New York, I have a better option: The Working Families Party.This way I get to support the John Kerry ticket and a progressive party that doesn't sell out. Actually, there's a couple of brothers running for local office that's I'll be voting for though they aren't in the WFP column. But we definitely work column E for the presidential vote.

This is not from Comedy Central or Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately.

Quote of note:

But Mike Angelos, a spokesman for Harry Pappas and his media chain, Pappas Telecasting Cos., said the legality of the $325,000 in contributions was researched thoroughly.

And why would they research the legality of the donations so thoroughly? Because they know their intent is to get around the intent of the law. And it's a long term problem that bad actors like Pappas, Sinclair Fox and the like are in line to get six digital channels for each analog channel they now control. Free. Which is why you should check into Media for Democracy's campaign. Anyway… Valley media mogul donates airtime to GOP hopefuls By Jim Sanders -- Bee Capitol Bureau Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Attempting to boost Republican Party prospects, the owner of a chain of Central Valley television and radio stations has donated $325,000 in airtime for GOP candidates in many of the state's hottest legislative elections. The contribution by Harry J. Pappas comes in the final days of campaigning, and those involved in the campaigns couldn't recall another instance in which a California media mogul donated time on public airwaves for advertisements to benefit one party over another. …Rather than give away free airtime, which is illegal under federal law, Pappas Telecasting Cos. essentially is footing the bill for broadcasting minutes it is setting aside for GOP candidates, Angelos said. "We're not denying (Democrats) any opportunity," he said. "They have the opportunity to purchase an equivalent amount of airtime." The $325,000 in airtime apparently targets many of the state's most contentious races, including those of Democratic Sen. Mike Machado and Republican Stockton Mayor Gary Podesto in the 5th Senate District, and Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, against Republican Dean Gardner in the Fresno area. …California law prohibits Pappas from giving more than $3,200 in cash or nonmonetary contributions to anyone on the Nov. 2 ballot. Under Proposition 34, however, supporters can donate up to $26,600 to political party committees. Pappas gave $25,000 worth of airtime to Republican central committees in Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Kings, Madera, Merced, Tulare, Santa Clara, Fresno, San Diego, Imperial, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. State law requires that the political party committees, rather than Pappas, determine which candidates receive the airtime.

Faith, Hope and Clarity By ROBERT WRIGHT The Bush administration is suddenly taking pains to calibrate the president's devoutness: yes, Mr. Bush is very religious, but he's not too religious - not hearing-voices religious. Last week several White House aides insisted that, contrary to the witness of the televangelist Pat Robertson, the president never said God had guaranteed him a low casualty count in Iraq. And as for those reports about Mr. Bush feeling summoned to the presidency: Laura Bush denies that her husband sees himself as a divine instrument. "It's not a faith where he hears from God," she said a few days ago. It's hard to settle "he said, she-said" questions, let alone "he said, He said'' questions. But there is a way to get a clearer picture of religion's role in this White House. Every morning President Bush reads a devotional from "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of homilies by a Protestant minister named Oswald Chambers, who lived a century ago. As Mr. Bush explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday on Fox News, reading Chambers is a way for him "on a daily basis to be in the Word." Chambers's book continues to sell well, especially an updated edition with the language tweaked toward the modern. Inspecting the book - or the free online edition - may give even some devout Christians qualms about America's current guidance.

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According to the online version I linked to…there are several…:

My Utmost For His Highest, by Oswald Chambers is the most used Christian devotional reading other than the Bible itself.

which puts it in a position relative to the teaching of Jesus the Christ similar to that which the Sharia holds relative to the teachings of Mohammed.

Abu Ghraib, Unresolved When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal first broke, the Bush administration struck a pose of righteous indignation. It assured the world that the problem was limited to one block of one prison, that the United States would never condone the atrocities we saw in those terrible photos, that it would punish those responsible for any abuse - regardless of their rank - and that it was committed to defending the Geneva Conventions and the rights of prisoners. None of this appears to be true. The Army has prosecuted a few low-ranking soldiers and rebuked a Reserve officer or two, but exonerated the top generals. No political leader is being held accountable for the policies set in Washington that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other prison camps operated by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoner abuse was systemic. And we've learned that the administration's respect for the Geneva Conventions, which some senior officials openly disdain as an antiquated nuisance, is highly conditional. The Times's Tim Golden documented this week the way the Bush administration secretly created a parallel - and unconstitutional - judicial universe for Gitmo. The White House was so determined to suspend the normal rights and processes for the hundreds of men captured in Afghanistan - none of them important members of Al Qaeda and most of them no threat at all - that it hid the details from Secretary of State Colin Powell and never bothered to consult Congress. The Washington Post and The Times also reported this week that over 18 months, the C.I.A., which has a record of hiding prisoners in Iraq from the Red Cross, secretly spirited a dozen non-Iraqi civilians out of prisons in Iraq to undisclosed locations - another evident violation of the Geneva Conventions. To justify that operation after the fact, the same legal offices that produced the infamous paper on how to pretend that torture is legal drew up a new opinion claiming that the president has the right to decide which prisoners are covered by the Geneva Conventions and which are not. This happened in secret, at the same time that administration officials were testifying at the Senate's Abu Ghraib hearings about the president's allegiance to the Geneva Conventions and to American constitutional values when it came to the treatment of prisoners. The gap between the administration's public statements and private actions is enormous. In May, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said civilians captured in Iraq would be treated according to the conventions. And Stephen Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld's under secretary for intelligence, gave at best a misleading answer when he testified under oath that it was his "guess" that President Bush would take the issue under advisement should it ever come up. Not only had it come up, but the decision had already been made to deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions to certain prisoners. This issue has barely been discussed by Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry, but the country needs answers and public accountability. If Senator Kerry wins next week, we hope that he will make this an early priority. If Mr. Bush wins, it will be up to Congress to meet its oversight responsibility. So far, its record is not good. The House has done nothing on Abu Ghraib and related issues. Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tried to investigate Abu Ghraib despite White House stonewalling. Mr. Warner lost his nerve as the election approached, but we hope he'll get it back next year.

Quote of notes:

In one case, the Republicans challenged the registration of the weekend anchorwoman for Columbus's NBC affiliate, Monique Ming Laven, even though Ms. Laven had voted in this year's primary and had not moved since.

and

"We wanted to have all of these questions resolved this week," said Mark R. Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party. "Now, they won't be resolved until Tuesday, when all of these people are trying to vote. It can't help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration." Democrats asserted that creating chaos and long lines has been the Republican goal all along, in the hopes of discouraging Democratic voters from casting ballots in this heavily contested swing state.

G.O.P. Bid to Contest Registrations in Ohio Is Blocked By JAMES DAO COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 27 - A federal judge on Wednesday blocked six boards of elections in Ohio from proceeding with hearings into Republican-initiated efforts to knock tens of thousands of registered voters off the voting rolls. The temporary restraining order issued by Judge Susan J. Dlott of Federal District Court in Cincinnati made it likely that few, and perhaps none, of the challenge hearings would proceed before Election Day, state officials said. "This is an important victory for all Ohio voters because it means this cynical and desperate effort by the Republican Party to prevent tens of thousands of legal registered voters from casting their votes has backfired," said David Sullivan, a lawyer for the Ohio Democratic Party. The hearings had been scheduled in 65 of Ohio's 88 counties to review challenges that Republicans brought last week against what they said were 35,000 questionable voter registrations, most of them from urban, heavily Democratic neighborhoods. The Republicans contended that the registrations were questionable because mail sent to those addresses had been returned as undeliverable - evidence, they said, of fraud. This week, about 10,000 of the challenged registrations were withdrawn or dismissed, in many cases due to filing errors. On Wednesday, Republicans said that if hearings did not go forward this week, they intended to challenge many of the 35,000 registrants in person if they showed up to vote.

4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03 By JAMES GLANZ and JIM DWYER BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 27 - Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday. The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks. Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility. The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion. But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

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Remember, the IAEA officials noted in March 2003 that all the explosives they expected to see in Al-QaQaa were all there, nice and sealed according to procedure.

Agency officials examined the explosives in January 2003 and noted in early March that their seals were still in place. On April 3, the Third Infantry Division arrived with the first American troops.

And as for the opinions of amateur sleuths

Chris Anderson, a photographer for U.S. News and World Report who was with the division's Second Brigade, recalled that the area was jammed with American armor on April 3 and 4, which he believed made the removal of the explosives unlikely. "It would be quite improbable for this amount of weapons to be looted at that time because of the traffic jam of armor," he said.

I have to say it's no less likely than that tons of heavy industrial equipment that would require expert knowledge to remove would simply vanish after the invasion. As it did.

Discrepancy Found in Explosives Amounts: ABC News Thu Oct 28, 2004 02:10 AM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The amount of conventional explosives missing from an Iraqi storage facility may be substantially less than the 377 tons reported by Iraqi officials, ABC News reported late on Wednesday, citing documents obtained by the network. The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo on the missing explosives was based on a "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time Iraqis said there were 141 tons of the explosives at the facility, ABC reported. International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors record that just over three tons of high explosives were at the Al Qaqaa storage facility, ABC reported. The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

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America's ally in the War on Terra [sic], the Bush administration's favorite and a strong leader of his people…misrepresenting the facts? Let's see…

Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9, 2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday. President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, they could have been removed before the invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.[P6: Make shit up base on the news (which only showed what the neocons wanted seen, remember] By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known. [P6: Oops! a flip-flop!] On Sunday, administration officials said that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. taskforce that hunted for unconventional weapons, had been ordered to look into the disappearance of the explosives. On Tuesday night, CBS News reported that Charles A. Duelfer, the head of the taskforce, denied receiving such an order. [P6: Making shit up again]

What else do we have?

Republican officials have sought to discredit the initial reports and seized on an NBC News account, broadcast Monday night, that said when troops from the 101st Airborne arrived at the vast site on April 10, 2003, they found conventional weapons but none of the extremely powerful high explosives, HMX and RDX, which can be used to set off a nuclear weapon. In an e-mail message sent to reporters on Monday evening, Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said, "The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry's latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false." But Tuesday evening, NBC again reported on the issue. This time it reported that it had not said that the explosives were gone before American troops arrived at Al Qaqaa. Instead, it reported that troops from the Third Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne searched bunkers at the site and had not found the powerful explosives. NBC reported that it was not clear whether American troops searched all of the bunkers. "Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives,'' Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, said. "We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them.'' "For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived,'' Mr. Brokaw added. "That is possible, but that is not what we reported.''

Gee. It looks to me like George Bush and crew don't know WHAT the fuck is going on. Which is pretty much what John Kerry is saying.

Quote of note:

Just three outs away from another crushing defeat at the hands of their bitter New York rivals, the Red Sox staged an epic rally to become the first team in Major League history to erase a 3-0 deficit and win a best-of-seven series.

Boston Fans Finally Celebrate Red October Thu Oct 28, 2004 04:25 AM ET By Steve Keating ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - The Boston Red Sox lifted a championship and buried a curse Wednesday, turning fantasy into reality with a stirring World Series victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. In a match staged under a total lunar eclipse, Johnny Damon homered and Derek Lowe pitched seven shutout innings in a 3-0 victory which completed a four-game sweep in the best-of-seven series. Since Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the hated New York Yankees in 1920, Boston has not celebrated a World Series champion team. But this October the Red Sox appeared more charmed than cursed, starting with an unprecedented comeback win over the Yankees in the American League championships series and on through a World Series in which they never once trailed.

Disaster Toll Tripled in 2003 Amid Quakes, Heatwave Wed Oct 27, 2004 08:01 PM ET By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - Natural disasters killed 76,806 people in 2003, three times the number of victims in 2002, a rise due in part to extremes in the global climate, the world's largest humanitarian body said on Thursday. An earthquake that killed 31,000 people in the Iranian city of Bam and a heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000, accounted for the higher toll, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said. In all, a quarter of a billion people were affected by drought, floods and earthquakes, which caused at least $56 billion in damage in 2003, twice the cost of the previous year, the Federation said in its annual "World Disasters Report." "Overall numbers of reported disasters are increasing, driven partly by a more variable climate. Meanwhile, a rapid increase of population in poorer parts of the world ... is putting more people at risk," the report said. In recent years more accurate satellite forecasting and early warning systems have saved lives. The report said first-aid training, emergency drills and safe building practices can help prevent human and economic losses in risk-prone communities.

Quote of note:

"It's highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared," he said. "We're looking for it, we're trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service."

Postal Experts Hunt for Missing Ballots in Florida Wed Oct 27, 2004 12:18 PM ET By Michael Christie MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying to find thousands of absentee ballots that should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous counties, officials said. The issue evoked memories of the polling problems that bedeviled the Florida election in 2000 and which the state has been trying to address before next Tuesday's presidential election, which is again expected to be a very tight race. Broward deputy supervisor of elections Gisela Salas said 60,000 absentee ballots, accounting for just over 5 percent of the electorate in the county north of Miami, were sent out between Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 to voters who would not be in town on election day. While some had begun to be delivered, her office had been inundated with calls from anxious voters who still had not received their ballots. "It's really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement," Salas told Reuters. "It was basically our first major drop of the absentee ballots," Salas said. She said postal service officials had assured Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes that the ballots had moved out of the post office to which they had been taken by the elections office. U.S. Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez, whose federal agency is independent from the U.S. Postal Service, said it had yet to be determined if the ballots reached the post office.

Remains of New Species of Hobbit-Sized Human Found Wed Oct 27, 2004 04:46 PM ET By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution. The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was 3 feet tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans. It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because of environmental conditions and coexisted with modern humans in the region for thousands of years. "It is an extraordinarily important find," Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, told a news conference on Wednesday. "It challenges the whole idea of what it is that makes us human."

DKos:

In an interview with The Citizen on Friday, DeLay called the subpoena part of the strategy by Democrats to "criminalize politics." "The Democrats are using the courts and the legal system to criminalize politics, for their political gain and character assassination," said DeLay via telephone. DeLay supporters have pointed to a calendar listing on the Morrison Web site as a smoking gun linking Morrison to the LaRouchians. "LaRouche is a con felon and all I can tell you is that Mr. Morrison has supported and campaigned with LaRouche followers and Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq," said DeLay. Morrison called DeLay out of line, accusing his connections in the capital for fighting his battles.

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But that's also the problem with his administration: his convictions are so solid that they're inflexible and utterly impervious to reality. When Mr. Bush pumped up the intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D., his exaggerations reflected the overriding truth as he saw it - that Saddam Hussein was a menace. I think Mr. Bush considered himself truthful, even when he wasn't factual. If Mr. Bush were a private citizen, I would admire his tenacity, just as I respect Barry Goldwater, Red Sox fans and Flat-Earthers. But for a president, I wish we had a clear-eyed thinker who understood the difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, or between a stuffed dog and a stuffed cat.

Pants on Fire? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Whenever I say that President Bush isn't a liar, Democrats hurl thunderbolts at me. And when I say Mr. Bush isn't truthful, Republicans erupt like Mount St. Helens. So what do I mean? Let me offer an example - not from Iraq but from Mr. Bush's autobiography. In it, he tells a charming little story involving his daughters in 1988, on the eve of the presidential debate between his father and Michael Dukakis: "One night, Laura and I were out of town campaigning, and Barbara and Jenna spent the night at the vice presidential mansion. Dad had spent the day preparing for a debate with Michael Dukakis. Unfortunately, Barbara lost her sleeping companion, Spikey, her favorite stuffed dog. She complained loudly that she could not sleep without Spikey, so 'Gampy,' better known as Vice President Bush, spent much of the night before his debate searching the house and grounds of the vice presidential residence, flashlight in hand, on a mission to find Spikey. Finally, he did, and Barbara slept soundly. I don't know if my dad ever went to sleep that night." It's a heartwarming tale of family values. And while it's not malicious enough to count as a lie, it's laced with falsehoods. We know that because Mr. Bush's mother wrote about the same incident much earlier, in 1990, in "Millie's Book," nominally written by her dog. For starters, the episode occurred when the girls were five and a half, in 1987, a year before the presidential debate. What's more, "Millie's Book" says that Spikey was a cat, not a dog. And instead of searching all night and finally finding Spikey, Vice President Bush gave up, grumbling: "I have work to do. What am I doing searching for a stuffed animal outdoors in the dark?" Anyway, little Barbara had already fallen asleep with another stuffed animal. Spikey turned up the next day behind the curtains. (I can hear some of you protesting: "You're gonna take a dog's word over our president's?" Well, frankly, no one has ever impugned Millie's word. And Millie has witnesses. The first President Bush and his wife, Barbara, later confirmed to me through a spokesman that they did not believe that Spikey had been lost on the eve of a presidential debate.) The current president's hyped version of the incident reflects his casual relationship with truth. Like President Ronald Reagan, reality to him is not about facts, but about higher meta-truths: Mom and Dad are loving grandparents, Saddam Hussein is an evil man, and so on. To clarify those overarching realities, Mr. Bush harnesses "facts," both true and false.

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Menactra is generally expected to be the first of a series of new vaccines intended for 11-year-olds. The others include booster vaccines against tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough and vaccines against cervical cancer and herpes. Frightening parents about the consequences of failing to vaccinate their children will most likely be part of the campaign. For that task, meningococcal meningitis is ideal.

Panel Reviews New Vaccine That Could Be Controversial
By GARDINER HARRIS A committee of experts meeting in Atlanta will debate today whether the government can afford to pay for a vaccine that could save the lives of nearly 3,000 people, many of them teenagers, from deaths caused over the next decade by a virulent bacterial meningitis. The price of the new vaccine will most likely be $80 a dose. Vaccinating all 40 million people from age 11 to 20, as some experts have suggested, would cost the government $3.5 billion next year. That is more than $1 million a life spared, far more than health officials are normally willing to spend. "How much would we have been willing to spend to save the victims of the 9/11 attacks, because that's the number of people we're talking about?" asked Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who is a committee member. "I believe it's money well spent." Dr. Jon S. Abramson, chairman of the pediatrics department at Wake Forest University Medical School and another committee member, said the government could not afford such a campaign.

Signs of Voter Fraud Appear
Registrations that are faked or tossed out have emerged in key states struggling to comply with ballot reform and a flood of new signups.
By Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writers October 27, 2004 LAS VEGAS — Broke, disabled and living at the Daisy Motel in downtown Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters here. The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunks and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company's office, he recalled. "They had some shady things going on," Mrasek said.

The illusion of even-handedness would suggest I should point out Republican allegations of Democratic malfeasance. But I don't, for a number of solid reasons:

• Republicans have made such charges before, and they never find supporting evidence…except in those cases where the malfeasance turned out to be on the part of Republicans themselves
• Republicans had to settle a lawsuit brought by the NAACP over voter fraud committed in Florida during the 2000 campaign.
• As noted by People For the American Way:
  • Most recently, controversy has erupted over the use in the Orlando area of armed, plainclothes officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to question elderly black voters in their homes. The incidents were part of a state investigation of voting irregularities in the city's March 2003 mayoral election. Critics have charged that the tactics used by the FDLE have intimidated black voters, which could suppress their turnout in this year’s elections. Six members of Congress recently called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate potential civil rights violations in the matter.
  • This year in Florida, the state ordered the implementation of a “potential felon” purge list to remove voters from the rolls, in a disturbing echo of the infamous 2000 purge, which removed thousands of eligible voters, primarily African-Americans, from the rolls. The state abandoned the plan after news media investigations revealed that the 2004 list also included thousands of people who were eligible to vote, and heavily targeted African-Americans while virtually ignoring Hispanic voters.
  • This summer, Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge (R-Troy) was quoted in the Detroit Free Press as saying, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.” African Americans comprise 83% of Detroit’s population.
  • In South Dakota’s June 2004 primary, Native American voters were prevented from voting after they were challenged to provide photo IDs, which they were not required to present under state or federal law.
  • In Kentucky in July 2004, Black Republican officials joined to ask their State GOP party chairman to renounce plans to place “vote challengers” in African-American precincts during the coming elections.
  • Earlier this year in Texas, a local district attorney claimed that students at a majority black college were not eligible to vote in the county where the school is located. It happened in Waller County – the same county where 26 years earlier, a federal court order was required to prevent discrimination against the students.
  • In 2003 in Philadelphia, voters in African American areas were systematically challenged by men carrying clipboards, driving a fleet of some 300 sedans with magnetic signs designed to look like law enforcement insignia.
  • In 2002 in Louisiana, flyers were distributed in African American communities telling voters they could go to the polls on Tuesday, December 10th – three days after a Senate runoff election was actually held.
  • In 1998 in South Carolina, a state representative mailed 3,000 brochures to African American neighborhoods, claiming that law enforcement agents would be “working” the election, and warning voters that “this election is not worth going to jail.”
  and As this report details, voter intimidation and suppression is not a problem limited to the southern United States. It takes place from California to New York, Texas to Illinois. It is not the province of a single political party, although patterns of intimidation have changed as the party allegiances of minority communities have changed over the years. In recent years, many minority communities have tended to align with the Democratic Party. Over the past two decades, the Republican Party has launched a series of “ballot security” and “voter integrity” initiatives which have targeted minority communities. At least three times, these initiatives were successfully challenged in federal courts as illegal attempts to suppress voter participation based on race. The first was a 1981 case in New Jersey which protested the use of armed guards to challenge Hispanic and African-American voters, and exposed a scheme to disqualify voters using mass mailings of outdated voter lists. The case resulted in a consent decree prohibiting efforts to target voters by race. Six years later, similar “ballot security” efforts were launched against minority voters in Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. Republican National Committee documents said the Louisiana program alone would “eliminate at least 60- 80,000 folks from the rolls,” again drawing a court settlement. And just three years later in North Carolina, the state Republican Party, the Helms for Senate Committee and others sent postcards to 125,000 voters, 97 percent of whom were African American, giving them false information about voter eligibility and warning of criminal penalties for voter fraud – again resulting in a decree against the use of race to target voters.

Allegations are easy, and the Republicans have been making them for quite a while. But their accusations have never borne fruit, whereas Republicans have been proven to, well, lie when raising the issue. Republican complaints about voter fraud are very much like their complaints about playing the race card (Alan Keyes, anyone? Clarence Thomas, anyone?), their insistence than calling an out gay person by their chosen gender is unfair because it reminds the Republican base that people they are truly offended by are deep in the mix in their party.

Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3 MIAMI, FL—With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3. "Minority voters should make their unique voices heard, especially the African-American voting bloc, which is always a major factor in every election," said Florida Republican Party voter-drive organizer Mark Monreal, as he handed out flyers at a community center in the mostly black Miami neighborhood of South Farms. "That's why we put up hundreds of brightly colored banners featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and the 'Vote November 3' reminder. We needed to make sure they know when we want them at polling places." "You can't walk through a black neighborhood here in Miami without seeing our 'Don't Forget Big Wednesday!' message up on a billboard, tacked to a phone booth, or taped to a bus shelter," Monreal added. "The Republican Party has spared no expense in this endeavor." GOP committees in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Florida have spent more than $3 million on pamphlets, posters, stickers, and T-shirts bearing such slogans as "Put America First—Vote On The Third!" and "November 3rd Is Your Time To Be Heard." Monreal's group is joined by hundreds of local organizations, such as the Black Republicans For Maryland. While the Black Republicans do not actually include any black members, the group describes itself as "dedicated to communicating a strong message to members of the African-American community." "We're aiming not just to get black people to vote, but to mobilize them to come together for one specific day of minority empowerment," Baltimore County Black Republicans For Maryland president Mitchell Williams said. "As Republicans, we truly believe that, by coordinating the minority vote across the nation, we can put minorities in their proper place. We believe we know what's best for the whole country." Republicans are eager to point out the differences between their drive and those of other get-out-the-vote organizations. "Strange as it is to say it, we're non-partisan," Monreal said. "We don't care if the minority voter is part of the vast majority of non-whites that traditionally votes Democrat. What's important to us is that we get them to the polls bright and early on the third day of November, so that they feel like they've participated in this year's election." Monreal said Republican volunteers will be available to drive minorities to polling places on Nov. 3. "We'll even stay at home with them the day before, to help them prepare for the act of voting," Monreal said. "We'll engage in concentrated one-on-one tutoring the entire day, to make sure these voters focus on the important act of voting, rather than going outside, reading newspapers, or watching television." Republican Party leaders expressed pride in what they characterized as a true alternative to other programs that encourage voting, such as Rock The Vote. "Let's be honest," Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie said. "The Bush camp has been criticized for ignoring the minority vote for some time, especially during the last election. This project is our way of correcting that misperception. The Bush camp is extremely concerned about the black vote, especially in places like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. This year, on Nov. 3, we'll make a concerted effort to welcome minority voters into our own special camps with open arms."

Iraq's Prime Minister Faults U.S. Military in Massacre By EDWARD WONG BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 26 - Prime Minister Ayad Allawi blamed the American-led military forces on Tuesday for the weekend massacre of 49 freshly trained Iraqi soldiers, saying the military had shown "major negligence." In a speech before the interim National Assembly, the prime minister said a committee had begun investigating the ambush, the deadliest of the guerrilla war. The assault took place Saturday night in remote eastern Iraq, as three minibuses of unarmed Iraqi soldiers were heading south on leave. Insurgents dressed as policemen waylaid the men at a fake checkpoint, killed all 49 soldiers and their three civilian drivers, mostly with shots to their heads, and burned the vehicles. "I think there was major negligence by the multinational forces," Dr. Allawi said before the 100-member assembly. "It was a way to damage Iraq and the Iraqi people." The massacre took place in an area of the country under the command of Polish forces. Dr. Allawi did not elaborate on his statement, and his aides could not be reached by phone for further comment. The prime minister's lacerating words marked the first time he has publicly criticized the American-led forces, disclosing his profound frustration at the assault and perhaps the deteriorating security situation as well.

Company to sell genetically engineered cats - PAUL ELIAS, AP Biotechnology Writer Tuesday, October 26, 2004 (10-26) 18:03 PDT (AP) -- The biotechnology revolution is even shaking up the pet world. First came a cloned cat. Then came the fish genetically engineered to glow. Now, a Los Angeles company plans to strike it rich by exploiting the latest in biotechnology to create cats genetically engineered to be nearly free from the allergy-causing proteins that plague millions of people. Allerca Inc. president Simon Brodie said by 2007 the company will use "RNA interference" to "silence" a gene in cats that produces the irritant, which is excreted through saliva and the skin. Scientists researching everything from cancer to crops are using RNA interference to silence genes to create drugs, gene-searching tools and even a new way of decaffeinating coffee. Now Brodie hopes to bring that same promise to the cat world and eliminate the need for allergic cat lovers to receive symptom-reducing shots while encouraging others put off by the allergy to buy a pet for the first time. The company is now accepting $350 deposits for the British Short Hair breed of cats it plans to charge $3,500 a piece for in the United States and $10,000 each in Japan. Brodie said he hoped to ultimately sell about 200,000 of the genetically engineered cats a year. The four-person company has yet to engineer any cats, which will be spayed and neutered to prevent breeding with naturally born felines.

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Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to agree to the U.S. request for redeployment is a politically sensitive one for the British leader, whose popularity has plummeted because of his support for the Iraq war. Britain's 8,500 troops are based around the southern port city of Basra in a relatively peaceful area of Iraq. Sixty-eight British soldiers have been killed in Iraq, compared with more than 1,000 U.S. troops.

British Troops in Iraq Begin Deployment By RAWYA RAGEH Associated Press Writer 2:24 AM PDT, October 27, 2004 BAGHDAD, Iraq — Nearly 800 British forces left their base in southern Iraq on Wednesday, heading north toward Baghdad to replace U.S. troops who are expected to take part in an offensive against insurgent strongholds. The deployment came hours after Iraq's most feared militant group released a video threatening to behead a Japanese captive within 48 hours unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq. British Lt. Col. James Cowan said British troops, accompanied by 40 U.S. Marines, left the southern city of Basra to head for a base located north of Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. Forty U.S. Marines were with them, he said. Associated Press Television News footage showed large flatbed trucks carrying armored British vehicles up a road through Iraq's southern desert. The British soldiers' families expressed worries Wednesday that the redeployment puts the troops in greater danger. "It wasn't a cake walk in Basra but it's going to be a lot, lot more dangerous up there," said James Buchanan, 56, from Arbroath in central Scotland, who has two sons with the regiment in Iraq. "They're going to get one hell of a kicking this time," he said.

Quote of note:

"It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said. "I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war."

Conflicted Evangelicals Could Cost Bush Votes Conservative Christians are still in his camp, but some are troubled by Iraq and other issues. By Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writer October 27, 2004 BROOKFIELD, Wis. — With their ardent, Bible-based opposition to abortion and gay marriage, evangelical Christians are a key target of the massive Republican get-out-the-vote drive heading into next week's election. Party leaders consider conservative Christians to be as near a lock for President Bush as any group can be. But GOP strategists might want to have a chat with Tim Moore, an evangelical who teaches civics at a traditional Christian school near Milwaukee. He shares Bush's religious convictions, but says the president has lost his vote because of tax cuts for the wealthy and the administration's shifting rationales for invading Iraq. "There's no way I'm going for Bush. That much I know," said Moore, 46. He remains undecided between Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and a third-party candidate. Moore reflects a potential problem for Bush in Wisconsin and other closely contested states, where the GOP and conservative groups have invested heavily in turning out a record conservative Christian vote through mailings, voter guides, targeted phone calls and announcements by prominent evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson aired on religious radio stations. Some of these targeted voters remain conflicted — torn between their religious convictions on so-called values issues, and concerns typical of suburban moms and dads, such as jobs, healthcare, the Iraq war and the environment. Some, such as Wendy Skroch, a 51-year-old mother of three who prays regularly at the evangelical Elmbrook Church in this heavily Republican Milwaukee suburb, blame Bush for failing to fix a "broken" healthcare system and for "selling off the environment to the highest bidder." Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East. "It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said. "I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war." That kind of talk, coming from a conservative Christian who might ordinarily be inclined to vote Republican, could portend trouble for Bush.

Marsh Bars Special Commissions From Insurers The broker will disclose all fees to its clients. Others in the industry may have to follow suit. By Thomas S. Mulligan Times Staff Writer October 27, 2004 NEW YORK — Beleaguered insurance broker Marsh & McLennan Cos. unveiled a reform package backed by New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer on Tuesday that could be a template for an industry under fire. Marsh said it would end questionable special fees it had been receiving from insurers, give its clients more information about all fees and commissions and create a new oversight unit to keep an eye on its insurance-brokerage operations. Michael G. Cherkasky, Marsh's new chief executive, said in a telephone interview that the changes, effective Jan. 1, were meant to satisfy not just Spitzer but other regulators around the country, "including a notable regulator in California." California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi last week proposed state regulations requiring brokers to disclose all the fees they receive from insurers and to provide customers with the "best available" coverage, under penalty of fines, loss of license or both.

(Got programming to do tonight so I'm cheating by posting one of the articles I lost when I screwed up The Niggerati Network.) Why affirmative action failed InfoPlease has a timeline and history of affirmative action that will be useful as a starting point for research (for young students) or for people who don't know the history behind the existing tug of war over it (damn near everyone else in the country). It states very simply and directly what affirmative action programs were intended to be:

IN ITS TUMULTUOUS, nearly 40-year history, affirmative action has been both praised and pilloried as an answer to racial inequality. The policy was introduced in 1965 by President Johnson as a method of redressing discrimination that had persisted in spite of civil rights laws and constitutional guarantees. "This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights," Johnson asserted. "We seek… not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result."

A Temporary Measure to Level the Playing Field

FOCUSING in particular on education and jobs, affirmative action policies required that active measures be taken to ensure that blacks and other minorities enjoyed the same opportunities for promotions, salary increases, career advancement, school admissions, scholarships, and financial aid that had been the nearly exclusive province of whites. From the outset, affirmative action was envisioned as a temporary remedy that would end once there was a "level playing field" for all Americans.

Think about this. The goal of affirmative action programs was to change the behavior of those in power. To make them stop discriminating against Black people, to force them to give Black people a chance.

I'm an O.G., I remember the reaction. "We'd be glad to hire a negro if we can find one that's qualified."

From that moment forward, the discussion stopped being about what needs be done to insure justice. Instead the debate focused on what Black folks need to do to be approved by the mainstream. This was the first class of error; pursuing the wrong goal.

The second class of error involved the techniques applied. They seemed to pick the techniques most likely to annoy. Did you REALLY expect folks to be willing to get their kids up an hour or two earlier (which means getting themselves up an hour or two earlier) so they can go to school of acknowledged lesser quality in an area they are unfamiliar with? Really? What was wrong with properly equipping and staffing ALL the schools?

The third class of error is an inappropriate expansion of reference. "Court ordered affirmative action" is a contradiction in terms. "Court ordered affirmative action" is punishment for breaking the law and should have been called "judgment due to discrimination." "Affirmative action" programs begun as part of an out-of-court settlement are unworthy of the name. But they both got lumped in with real affirmative action programs, and from this point forward the term "Affirmative Action" represented something entirely other than President Johnson intended.

The fourth class of error is an incorrect assignment of responsibility. Black people neither chose the direction of the programs nor set the standard of measurement. We couldn't…remember, at the time all this started Black folks still had a hard time exercising their right to vote without getting threatened with bodily harm. To blame Black people for the way it turned out is absurd.

And we still are on the road that began with the initial wrong turn. The majority of active efforts have been court ordered, in the military and civil service (where a simple order suffices to change behavior) or the result of an out of court settlement. Every other effort is actively opposed as making things too easy on Black folks.

It's obvious from this history that we've never actually tried affirmative action. And it doesn't look like we will in the next 25 years

Why I believe in our president by Thomas F. Schaller, Executive Editor 10.26.04 I believe in President George W. Bush. I've always believed him. I believe the president invaded Iraq to secure liberty and democracy for the Iraqi people. I believe he had compelling evidence that Iraq was a significant threat to America and the world, and presented that evidence in a complete and balanced manner. Like 42 percent of Americans – and 62 percent of Republicans – I believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. I believe we have enough troops on the ground in Iraq to ensure stability. I believe the rising American fatality rates, the rising casualty rates, and the rising American share of those coalition fatalities and casualties testify to the undeniable progress we're making there. I believe it is inappropriate and traitorous, however, for the media to broadcast pictures of American flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq. …I believe the president was right to oppose the formation of the 9/11 Commission, to change his mind but then oppose fully funding it, to change his mind but then oppose granting its request for an extension, to change his mind but refuse to testify for more than an hour, to change his mind but then testify alongside Vice President Dick Cheney so long as transcripts and note-taking were prohibited. I believe the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows it was the fault of a handful of misguided underlings who simply misunderstood a memo signed by the Secretary of Defense which authorized the use of dogs to interrogate prisoners. Domestically, I believe income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are the solution to budget surpluses or deficits, high or low inflation, stable or unstable interest rates, expanding or shrinking trade deficits, widening or narrowing wealth gaps, increasing or decreasing poverty rates, rising or falling unemployment, prosperity or recession, wartime or peace. I believe record-setting budget deficits, record-setting trade deficits, and a burgeoning national debt are examples of the president's fiscally-conservative economic leadership. I believe that a president who insists that hard-working Americans deserve tax breaks should continue to stand fast against cutting payroll taxes – the direct tax on hard work. Clearly, I do not believe that payroll taxes coupled with income taxes on work constitute "double taxation," but the dividend tax on assets does.

A series of interesting posts that began when a progressive blogger decided to tell the world I am a racist. Looking back, I rather like the way it all turned out.

U.S. Action Bars Right of Some Captured in Iraq By DOUGLAS JEHL WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday. The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said. They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply. The officials outlined the opinion on Monday in response to a report in The Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.

Quote of note:

The spending bills often earmark money for local projects and provide fodder for attack by good-government groups that object to "pork," or excessive spending on local projects in return for political support.

And Black folks don't get chitlins, much less pork. The only sign of support one can believe coming from a capitalist is money. Anyway… States See Federal Largesse as Election Nears Tue Oct 26, 2004 11:32 AM ET By Charles Abbott WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Whether as loan guarantees for a shop in Ohio or a grant for a Florida power plant, the Bush administration is showering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money on toss-up states in the presidential election. Officials insist the largesse is not tied to the campaign. But the grants are generally announced by top agency officials during local appearances, assuring attention in pivotal areas, and they have come thick and fast as Nov. 2 approaches.

The Scalia/Thomas Majority

Chief Justice William Rehnquist underwent surgery yesterday related to "a recent diagnosis of thyroid cancer." Rehnquist's serious condition – even as he is expected to return to the bench on Monday – "gave fresh prominence to the future of the Supreme Court." Bush has said publicly that the Supreme Court justices he admires are arch conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. If re-elected, it is possible Bush could get three or more appointments, "enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land." The result: "Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear."

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE: In the second presidential debate Bush was asked, given the opportunity, who he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Bush responded that he wouldn't pick a judge who supported "the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights." Why would President Bush reference Dred Scott v. Sandford, which hasn't been good law since the end of the Civil War? Because "to the Christian right, 'Dred Scott' turns out to be a code word for 'Roe v. Wade.'" Dred Scott has been compared to Roe v. Wade by prominent conservatives such as George Will, Peggy Noonan and Michael Novak. By referencing Dred Scott, Bush made it clear that "he would never, ever appoint a Supreme Court justice who condoned Roe." If Roe v. Wade is overturned, "there's a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70 million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some states may take only weeks." (For more on Bush's misuse of the Dred Scott decision read this new column from American Progress).

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD CRIMINALIZE PRIVATE SEXUAL CONDUCT: If Scalia and Thomas controlled the Court, "states could once again criminalize private, consensual conduct between adults, and could prevent local governments from enacting even the most basic anti-discrimination protections for gay men and lesbians." Last year, when the Court ruled that the police violated a gay man's right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Scalia and Thomas sided with the police.

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD END FAMILY AND MEDICAL LEAVE: The Family and Medical Leave Act "guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one." Last year, the Court upheld the law, but Scalia and Thomas voted to strike it down, arguing that Congress exceeded its power in passing the law.

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD ALLOW STATE-SPONSORED RELIGION: Justice Thomas has suggested that "despite many Supreme Court rulings to the contrary...the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a religion may not apply to the states." If that view prevailed, "states could adopt particular religions and use tax money to proselytize for them."

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD LEGALIZE SEX DISCRIMINATION: If Scalia and Thomas were in charge, "public universities, such as the Virginia Military Institute, would be able to discriminate against women in admissions." Also, federal law "could no longer be used to protect students from sexual harassment or other types of discrimination at the hands of other students."

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD LEGALIZE BRUTALITY AGAINST PRISONERS: A recent case considered a Louisiana inmate who "was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on." The beating left the inmate "with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate." The Court ruled that the inmate's treatment violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia and Thomas dissented, arguing "the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the 'insignificant' harm the inmate suffered."

A SCALIA/THOMAS MAJORITY WOULD GUT ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS: A Scalia/Thomas majority would make short work of the law that protects our air, water and land. Scalia and Thomas, for example, voted to strip the EPA "of the authority to prevent damaging air pollution by industries when state agencies improperly fail to do so." Already, federal judges appointed by Bush "were less sympathetic to environmentalists' pleadings than those appointed by previous Republican presidents... ruling in favor of environmental challenges 17 percent of the time."

Not directly, of course, but by running a story about Emmett Till on 60 Minutes. As it happens I turn up very high on a Google search using the most common misspelling of Mr. Till's first name. I've never been a big fan of putting 70+ year old folks on trial for things we KNOW they did and let them get away with for fifty or so years. But having been introduced to the idea of lynching as human sacrifice I decided to look for the value such trials have as ritual. From this perspective, the trials no longer look like clumsy attempts at racial reconciliation but seem instead to be purging rituals for Mainstream America…purging by sacrifice of a scapegoat.

Quote of note:

Pachauri urged the world to shift strategy from Kyoto's reduction targets for greenhouse gases to long-term global targets on how much of the gases the atmosphere should contain. Carbon dioxide levels have risen about 30 percent since the start of the 18th century to almost 380 parts per million. "We need a degree of agreement on where to stabilize concentrations," he said. "We have to try to come up with an understanding of where we are heading in the next 30-40 years."

I…don't have much confidence in mankind's ability to actively manage a system as chaotic as the biosphere. Anyway… Kyoto Too Little to Fix Warming - UN Climate Chief Mon Oct 25, 2004 11:16 AM ET By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Although saved last week with Russian help, the Kyoto pact on global warming offers too little to arrest climate change and governments should adopt more radical solutions, the top U.N. climate expert said. "My feeling is that we will probably need to do more than most people are talking about" to combat climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Reuters. He welcomed ratification of the Kyoto pact on Friday by Russia's lower house of parliament, paving the way for the long-delayed 1997 accord to enter into force in the 126 nations that approved it even though the world's greatest polluter, the United States, pulled out in 2001.

NASA Spacecraft to Pass Close to Saturn's Moon Mon Oct 25, 2004 04:58 PM ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The NASA spacecraft Cassini, which is carrying a European Space Agency probe, cut off communications with controllers on Monday as it prepared to peer beneath a veil of smog shrouding Saturn's moon, Titan. Cassini is set to pass within 745 miles of Titan's surface at about 12:45 p.m. (2:45 p.m. EDT) Tuesday, in the closest pass ever to the mysterious icy moon, whose atmosphere scientists have likened to a primordial Earth. Cassini will snap infrared and radar images 100 times sharper than any taken so far of Titan, said scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Carrying the European Space Agency probe called Huygens, Cassini is supposed to resume contact with NASA controllers on Tuesday evening. It will download data and images collected during its pass near Titan -- one of 45 planned for the spacecraft's four-year tour of Saturn and its moons. Titan is the only known moon with an atmosphere. It is believed to have oceans of liquid methane and ethane on its frozen surface and a nitrogen-rich atmosphere that may hold clues to how Earth's atmosphere evolved. "What we've got is a very primitive atmosphere that has been preserved for 4.6 billion years. Titan gives us the chance for cosmic time travel ... going back to the very earliest days of Earth when it had a similar atmosphere," said Toby Owens, principal scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In Africa, Hoping for Kerry Because He's Not Bush Tue Oct 26, 2004 07:16 AM ET By C. Bryson Hull NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) - President Bush's administration boasts no other American presidency has done more for Africa than his, and many on the world's poorest continent agree. But despite Bush's championing of a $15 billion anti-AIDS program and efforts to drop trade barriers, sub-Saharan Africa appears to want to see his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, in the White House for the next four years. Though many Africans are preoccupied with crushing poverty, disease or conflict, the continent -- like the world -- is keenly interested in the outcome of the Nov. 2 contest. "If Africa was to vote, Kerry would get a landslide," said Robert Kabushenga, a political analyst and journalist in Uganda. But it is not so much of because who Kerry is, but who he is not: George W. Bush. "All public opinion surveys show the publics of the world don't know Kerry but they don't like Bush. Someone sitting in Chad doesn't know who Kerry is, but he sure knows who Bush is," said John Stremlau, a professor of international relations at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University.

Bush, Kerry Both Seen Pressed to Curb Drug Prices Tue Oct 26, 2004 10:27 AM ET By Lisa Richwine WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The pharmaceutical industry is expected to face pressure to curb rising prescription-drug costs no matter which candidate wins next week's U.S. presidential election. Drug makers prefer Republican President Bush's plan to contain costs, which relies on the private marketplace and competition to drive prices down, over Democratic Sen. John Kerry's more aggressive approach, several analysts said. "It would be hard to imagine any president being more pharma-friendly" than Bush, said Diane Duston, a Washington-based analyst for Prudential Equity Group. Bush signed a Medicare law that commits the government to paying for prescription drugs for seniors starting in 2006 and was crafted largely to the industry's liking. Kerry and other Democrats back two things drug makers do not want: importation of cheaper medicines from Canada and government authority to negotiate prices with manufacturers for Medicare patients.

Bush Jobs Gain Claim Rests on Jobs Not Yet Counted Tue Oct 26, 2004 10:56 AM ET By Jonathan Nicholson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With days to go before the presidential election, the Bush administration is trumpeting the creation of nearly 2 million jobs in the past 13 months -- a claim critics say rests on payrolls not yet officially logged by the Labor Department. The expected-but-not-yet-counted jobs underpin a figure President Bush and his team are using to rebut a charge by Democrats that Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to see a net job loss during his tenure. Lee Price, research director with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Commerce Department, said Treasury chief John Snow -- one of the first to tout 1.9 million jobs created since August 2003 -- is indulging in data inflation. "He's reaching to lift that number close to 2 million," said Price. The Treasury has said the 1.9 million figure -- also used by Bush in his weekly radio address on Oct. 9 -- includes not only monthly job gains from the Labor Department's survey of company payrolls but also some of the jobs Labor expects to add in February 2005, when it will revise data for the past year, factoring in new information and seasonal factors. Earlier this month, the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said that at the February benchmarking, it expects to add about 236,000 jobs going back to March 2004. By claiming some of that gain that will be reflected in the seven months leading up to new March 2004 figure, Treasury adds 138,000 to the 1.778 million gain seen since August 2003, bringing the total to 1.916 million.

Man arrested on chemical weapons charges October 26, 2004 JACKSON, Tenn. --A man who authorities say hated the federal government was charged with attempting to acquire chemical weapons, explosives and weapons of mass destruction with the intent to attack official buildings. Demetrius "Van" Crocker, 39, was characterized by U.S. Attorney Terrell Harris as having "hatred for the government, and anti-Semitic and racist views." Crocker is accused of attempting to obtain sarin nerve gas and C-4 explosives, according to a federal complaint filed Monday. Crocker was arrested Monday after an undercover federal agent met him to deliver fake explosives and what Crocker believed were ingredients for sarin, considered one of the world's deadliest chemical agents. His arrest ended a seven-month investigation.

Mosh is a nice piece of work. Even if somewhat derivative.

The Man Behind the Oval Office Curtain It's Cheney's administration, and it's a shame. Robert Scheer October 26, 2004 Can this nation survive four more years of Dick Cheney running the show? Probably, but it is a risk that few thoughtful Americans, conservatives included, should want to take. Whatever one thinks of George W. Bush — do you see a smile or a smirk? — it is now patently obvious that the most powerful vice president in U.S. history is in charge of the White House. Cheney's ultra-secretive, anti-democratic and crony-capitalist instincts have defined this administration. Perhaps we should have expected all this from a man who, as head of the Bush vice presidential search team, selected himself. It was a forewarning of the Machiavellian arrogance that has made him the leading individual in an administration that has consistently believed that self-serving ends — such as helping Enron at the expense of California's energy needs or boosting Halliburton's profits at the expense of American troops — justify lying, secrecy and preemptive war.

Americans Are Electing a Supreme Court Too By John C. Yoo John C. Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Bush administration Justice Department official. …Even one new justice could profoundly affect a court that is closely divided on important social issues. And two new justices could shift national policy dramatically. Slim 5-4 majorities stand behind the decisions that have struck down prohibitions on partial-birth abortion, approved affirmative action programs in colleges and universities, allowed the use of vouchers at private religious schools and restricted use of the death penalty. Only a one-vote margin has supported restricting Congress' regulatory power in favor of the states, which affects anti-discrimination, criminal and environmental laws. A 5-4 majority last term agreed that the nation was at war after the Sept. 11 attacks and that the president and Congress could authorize the detention of "enemy combatants" in the war on terror. A 6-3 margin defends the basic right to abortion first recognized in Roe vs. Wade and the expansion of gay rights in Lawrence vs. Texas that has spurred efforts for a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Quote of note:

The U.S. failure to guard hundreds of ammunition depots after the invasion has been well documented. Top military officials in Iraq believe that weapons taken from these sites have armed an insurgency that is taking American lives almost daily. More than 1,100 U.S. troops have been killed since the invasion began. The explosive power of the stolen material — just half a pound of HMX brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 — has officials particularly worried. "That's half a pound; 380 tons are missing — that's almost 40 truckloads," an IAEA official said on condition of anonymity. "Imagine what it could do in the hands of insurgents there. It's a huge concern that it is missing, whatever it may be used for."

A little more perspective: 380 tons = 760,000 pounds = 1,520,000 bombs like that which brought down Pan Am 103. White House Downplays Missing Iraq Explosives By Mark Mazzetti and Maggie Farley Times Staff Writers October 26, 2004 WASHINGTON — The White House acknowledged Monday that nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives were missing from a weapons facility that American forces failed to guard after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, raising fears that the munitions could be given to militants or used for attacks against troops in Iraq. U.S. officials say the explosives — which are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear bomb — may have been looted from one of Saddam Hussein's bomb-making plants when U.S. forces worked to pacify Baghdad and other restive cities. White House officials downplayed the significance of the missing explosives.

Government withdraws 45-minute claim By Times Online and agencies The Government today formally withdrew its controversial claim that Iraq had had chemical and biological capable of being deployed within 45 minutes. In a Commons statement, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, disclosed that a further line of intelligence reporting on Iraqi production of biological weapons agents before the war had also now been withdrawn by John Scarlett, the head of MI6. Mr Straw’s statement means that the Secret Intelligence Service has now had to withdraw three of its main lines of intelligence reporting on Iraq’s weapons prior to the war.

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By the way, has George Bush withdrawn his support for these claims? How about Dick Cheney? Have they repudiated the claims or simply stopped repeating them?

War and 'Competence'
What Abraham Lincoln could teach John Kerry about Iraq. Tuesday, October 26, 2004 12:01 a.m. A week before Election Day, John Kerry and his allies have once again changed their line of attack on Iraq. The issue isn't any longer whether we should have fought the war at all ("wrong war, wrong place, wrong time"), it is that the Senator would fight it with more "competence."

Sorry, we haven't decided the Iraq Invasion was the right war at the right place at the right time. We're just noting more proof that even were it justified it was mishandled. Badly.

The peg for this line is yesterday's story that a stockpile of explosives was stolen from under the Coalition's nose in Iraq. This is certainly bad news and looks like a blunder.

Looks like? It IS a blunder. You know where this stockpile is, you lock it down. Period. It IS a blunder. Especially when you keep in mind all the equipment that simply vanished since the Invasion

BAGHDAD – Concerns are growing that high-precision equipment in Iraq that could be used to make nuclear weapons has been "systematically" disappearing, and may present a new proliferation risk. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has told the UN Security Council of the "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement" of buildings in Iraq that once housed key dual-use items. Because UN inspectors have been all but barred from Iraq since March 2003, they must rely primarily on satellite imagery to track the missing equipment. Among them are precision milling and turning machines and electron-beam welders that before the war were tagged with IAEA seals and monitored to ensure that they were not used for an illicit weapons program. Analysts say the missing equipment could be useful to a nation or terrorist group bent on building a nuclear bomb. The fact that it's now unaccounted for also raises questions about the quality of protection of such sensitive sites by US-led forces in Iraq. The Bush Administration declared that preventing the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction know-how and material was an aim of the US-led war. "It's equipment that is very specialized, very hard to come by, that's tightly controlled, so it could be very helpful for [those] seeking to build weapons," says Jon Wolfsthal, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, contacted in Paris.

This wasn't stuff you could throw into a backpack and carry through the mountain passes. This required heavy equipment and specialized knowledge to move. And it all disappeared on George Bush's watch.

But what is it precisely that the Kerry campaign is asserting? That if it were running the war, mistakes would never be made? That amid the fog of war, and facing a determined enemy, nothing bad ever happens?

The Kerry campaign is asserting they would likely have found war unnecessary to proactively contain any imperial ambitions Iraq might have had. That necessary war would be less foggy, that in fact the fog of war was generated by the actions of the George Bush administration. Since the rest of the editorial is a dismemberment of the above straw man it deserves no further consideration.

The Kitchen bills itself as A Community-based Online Book about Weblogging. And there's an interesting article

After the ‘haters’ community on diaryland (which I thought might be a little bit too ‘OMGtHeDrAmA’ to discuss here1), the Wordpress community is the finest example I’ve seen of the mob mentality amongst webloggers. I’d like to select two examples, more or less at random, of how having a ‘strong community’ fighting your corner isn’t always the asset it might at first appear.

…that provides illustrations of the force being mistaken for power.

People want to believe changing one thing can change everything; they think changing one thing is easy. But nothing is caused by only one thing; and nothing causes only one thing. That you can abstract something in your mind is no guarantee it exists independently of you…this is especially true of those things that are abstracted for you and handed to you. I am therefore asking for something unprecedented in American racial discourse. Thought. All other things being equal, knowledge and perseverance determine the outcome of a contest. But all other things aren't equal. All other things being equal, the place you begin determines the order in which you finish. But all other things aren't equal. It is illegal to shoot someone, but police can shoot someone to enforce the law. Remove that authority and government agents will be unable to act as they need to when they need to. It is illegal to exceed the posted speed limit but police can exceed the local speed limit to catch a speeder. Remove that authority and government agents will be unable to act as they need to when they need to. It is not unusual to find applying the letter of the law to government agents would prevent those agents from enforcing the law. So how do you undo the damage cause by irrational exclusion based specifically on race? Think.

Incredible. On the one hand, air and light being the best antiseptics, this may herald the blog's end. On the other hand, I might as well burn my passport because if I go overseas I'll probably get stoned to death (you decide if I'm talking about rocks or 21 year old scotch).

I suggest you check out Booker Rising for the results of some polling done by The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Interesting stuff. And as you read, keep in mind they included 109 Black folks in the poll. And ask yourself if that's a large enough sample to say anything significant…much less accurate…about Black folks.

…who also needed to live in the world a while before realizing just how protected she was from all this.

Requisite Monthly Rant: The Point at Which I Pull that "Race" Mumbo Jumbo I respect authority in many forms: God-given, parental, spiritual, governmental, you name it. I was raised to respect those with authority over me and I truly appreciate those who serve to ensure my safety on a consistent basis. That said, despite a number of circumstances that should determine I do the opposite, I even respect police officers. However, I must say, my patience is wearing thin

Though to be honest she (my daughter) still gets jarred by the occasional reminder.

Dollar Falls, Gloom Over Economy Persists By Andrea Ricci | October 25, 2004 NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar fell sharply on Monday, dropping to within one cent of record lows against the euro as worries over the state of the U.S. economy persisted. Record high oil prices, mixed U.S. economic data, low interest rates and a large and growing current account deficit have weighed on the dollar, pushing it down through several key technical levels, which in turn has sparked more selling. "The risk of being long dollars is not one that the market is willing to bear," said Bob Lynch, senior currency strategist at BNP Paribas in New York. [P6: You, of course, have little option about which currency to hold and have probably been short dollars for some time now…] Lynch said the dollar's close below key technical levels against the euro and other currencies last Friday set the stage for Monday's big losses, as overall weakness in the U.S. currency, not just against the euro, became more apparent.

Grab a copy of the magazine. It will take time to read the whole endorsement, which includes a recounting of the Bush administration's record that it so scathing only because it is so accurate and clearly stated. I've added the merest whisper of emphasis to the quote here and there.

THE CHOICE
by The Editors
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.” …Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

Opponents accuse Blair of lying to help Bush By Associated Press | October 25, 2004 LONDON -- Political opponents of Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a renewed attack on his handling of the Iraq conflict yesterday, as British soldiers prepared to move deeper into the country to support US troops. Four senior members of previous Conservative Party governments, including former Prime Minister John Major, leveled a series of allegations against Blair ranging from accusations of outright lying to moving British troops deeper into Iraq and into much more dangerous territory to help President Bush in the approaching US election. Major's former deputy, Lord Heseltine, was the most outspoken critic. "I think he has lied about the situation in the Middle East," he told ITV1's "Jonathan Dimbleby" program. "We were told that there was a threat. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no threat." Blair has repeatedly rejected allegations that he misled the country over the reasons for going to war, but many political watchers believe the issue could lose him votes at next year's general election, expected in May or June.

Hat tip to David Sirota for the reminder. Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq By Jim Miklaszewski Correspondent NBC News Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 2, 2004 With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger. In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council. “Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution. Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq. “People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey. In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq. The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it. Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam. The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added. And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today. © 2004 MSNBC Interactive

Ivan's pounding bares gap between rich and poor BY CARA BUCKLEY [email protected] GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands - The sun was scorching and heat waves blurred the horizon as Taekia Christian scanned the sea for her boyfriend, out spearfishing for something to eat. Her three children sprawled beneath a green canvas tent amid a bright mess of plastic toys. Behind it, Christian's uninsured old house sat in ruins, destroyed like many of her neighbors' homes by Hurricane Ivan. A mangled stack of cars, one of them hers, towered nearby. But a few miles west, in the financial center of the Cayman Islands capital of George Town, tall mirrored buildings stood virtually untouched. Homes to banks in this British-controlled tax haven, they were built to withstand ferocious storms like Ivan, which ravaged the island of Grand Cayman six weeks ago. Offshore banking made this three-island British territory the world's fifth-largest financial center with a gross domestic product of $36,000 per capita -- the fifth-highest in the world. But the wealth isn't evenly spread, and locals say the country's high per capita income is skewed by the very wealthy. And when Ivan tore through most of Grand Cayman, it underscored the division. After the storm, most owners of gutted mansions left for homes abroad or off-island hotels. But many like Christian, a bank teller, had nowhere else to go.

(Originally posted at Open Source Politics a year ago, I thought I'd repost it as a lantern of sorts…a reminder that the nation has been tempted down the road George Bush, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia and John Ashcroft are so comfortable on; that though fear send us in a bad directions we always turn away when things become clearer. And to introduce the idea that maaaaaybe we should take steps to remain clear.)

We like to think all citizens of the United States of America are guaranteed certain civil and human rights. Unfortunately, that guarantee is subject to the vagaries of human judgment. At times of national crisis this nation has always reduced the protections we are "guaranteed" by law. In fact Justice Scalia has said in wartime, "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

It is expected. There is historical precedent for it. Unfortunately, in every case the historic precedent has been that the impositions were deemed unnecessary and, in most cases, unconstitutional after the fact. The first such case was the Alien and Sedition Acts which passed in 1798. The threat was a French-backed navy of privateers operating in the area around the West Indies which was threatening the expanding U.S. merchant shipping force. The Act allowed the President to order



One month later an addendum was added to the law. Section two is worth quoting in its entirety:



Under the Act the reigning Federalists party arranged for at least 25 arrests, 15 indictments, and 10 convictions—all against the minority Republicans. Among the defendants were the four leading Republican newspapers and three Republican officeholders. And when the Republicans took power in the 1800 elections, Jefferson pardoned most of them and Congress paid their fines.

It is fortunate the Act had a sunset provision, specifically expiring March 3, 1801 or there would be no need for the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act…and before you dismiss that remark as partisan hyperbole, remember that John Ashcroft's Justice Department charged Greenpeace a full fifteen months after one of their standard protest under an 1872 law:



The next such instance was President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War…an event I've seen Conservative commentators use to support the idea of a Presidential perogative to cut into civil rights at times of war. Unfortunately, this one actually made it to the Supreme Court…also unfortunately, after the Civil War ended. And Mr. Ashcroft should heed the last paragraph of the decision:



The next major breech of civil rights took place during World War I. According to a speech given by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.[pdf],



And of course there was the infamous interning of Japanese Americans during World War II, a case so egregious that reparations, symbolic though they may have been, were paid to survivors.

Now we find ourselves "at war" with a concept. Once again we're told we're in a situation where the "suspension" of our rights is "necessary" for national security, for the duration…of a "war" with an undefined and undefinable end. Will we as a nation allow our rights to be suspended when the odds of being struck by lightning are greater than that of being involved in a terrorist attack?

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International law experts contacted for this article described the legal reasoning contained in the Justice Department memo as unconventional and disturbing. "The overall thrust of the Convention is to keep from moving people out of the country and out of the protection of the Convention," said former senior military attorney Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. "The memorandum seeks to create a legal regime justifying conduct that the international community clearly considers in violation of international law and the Convention." Silliman reviewed the document at The Post's request.

This is an American tradition: to craft reports and laws to legalize the inhuman (see the next post). Anyway… Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq Practice Is Called Serious Breach of Geneva Conventions By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A01 At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions. One intelligence official familiar with the operation said the CIA has used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months. The agency has concealed the detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities, the official said. The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the treaty. It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period." It also says the CIA can permanently remove persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law." Some specialists in international law say the opinion amounts to a reinterpretation of one of the most basic rights of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians during wartime and occupation, including insurgents who were not part of Iraq's military. The treaty prohibits the "[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory . . . regardless of their motive." The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft. "For these reasons," the footnote reads, "we recommend that any contemplated relocations of 'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis." It says that even persons removed from Iraq retain the treaty's protections, which would include humane treatment and access to international monitors.

In N.M., Spotlight Is on Voting Rights Charges Fly as Parties Dispute Registration of Hispanics in State's Arid South By T. R. Reid Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A06 ROSWELL, N.M. -- On the north end of town, where the Anglos live, people lined up in large numbers Saturday at the Roswell Mall to take advantage of the early voting site there. But down on the south side, in the Hispanic neighborhood, the designated early voting venue was locked up tight -- closed for the weekend. For community activist Bonnie Aria, that distinction says all you need to know about voting rights here in southern New Mexico, a rugged expanse of arid desert country that could play a key role in the 2004 election. "Of course it's deliberate," Aria said. "Up where the Republicans live, they make it as easy as possible for anybody to vote. But in our part of town, the polling place is closed on the one day when working people could go vote. They're sending us a clear message: We're locked out."

I've said The only bad thing about Eliot Spitzer as AG would be New York losing him. I've decided the benefits of having Mr. Spitzer doing what he does on a national level outweighs any loss New York would take by his appointment. Eliot Spitzer is blatantly pro-human and committed to holding corporations…which legally are humans…as accountable to the law as actual flesh and blood humans are. Isn't that refreshing? In fact, given that corporations attained their current level of invulnerability by manipulation of the 14th Amendment…which was written to protect the rights of freed slaves…I would like to see them subject to the same scrutiny Black people receive. They wouldn't get away with a damn thing. But I digress. Consider the change in the Justice Department brought on by Ashcroft. And consider the similar scale change Spitzer would initiate. Who knows? We may even be allowed to see Justice's titty again. Which would set precedent for the rehabilitation of Janet Jackson. Anyway… Busting the Insurers Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A18 IN THE 1990s, states such as Wisconsin experimented with welfare reform, driving a national change in policy. In the current decade something similar is happening with financial regulation. Although Enron Corp.'s collapse and succeeding scandals drove Congress to pass significant legislation, the performance of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has been at least as remarkable. Lawsuits brought by Mr. Spitzer have revealed conflicts of interest at the investment banks that sell equities as well as massive cheating by mutual fund companies. Now Mr. Spitzer is going after conflicts of interest in the insurance industry. The attorney general's latest target is Marsh & McLennan Cos., the leading broker of insurance. Marsh's role is ostensibly to serve businesses by soliciting bids for their insurance needs from rival insurers. The businesses pay Marsh for this service, figuring that the fee will be more than justified by the lower insurance premiums that result from competitive bidding. However, there's a catch. Marsh accepts fees not only from insurance buyers, it accepts them from insurance sellers. As a result, the buyers are sometimes getting nothing for their fees, because Marsh is putting their interests behind those of insurers.

Question of note:

Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, lays out the major difficulty in the current issue of AJR: "How do you handle controversial, explosive charges made in the heat of a political campaign by people with painfully obvious axes to grind?"

With integrity. Point out the obvious axe and the nature of the accusation without going into detail…because the story is NOT the bullshit line being pushed but the fact that partisans are pushing a bullshit line. And if you MUST report the details, take the line used in criminal proceedings: say this group of partisans who have this ax to grind are claiming this, with no support beyond partisan hopes, spin, etc. Best of all would be to hold to high journalistic standards and when asked "Why isn't the MSM reporting this," tell the truth—because it's bullshit. See, if you don't handle it with integrity, you cannot be surprised when you get lumped in with the Drudges and WorldNetDailys of the world. And regardless of what those guys think, that's not raising them to the level of a Boston Globe or New York Times. It's dropping a New York Times or Boston Globe to the level of a WorldNetDaily or Drudge. Anyway… A Web of Bunk How the Press Gets Pushed Into Phony Stories By William Raspberry Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A19 The information explosion occasioned by the World Wide Web -- putting at the fingertips of schoolchildren information that would have been inaccessible to PhD researchers a generation ago -- has the potential to make us all smarter, to free us from the tyranny of those who would limit our access to truth, to empower us. But it has made serious journalism -- political journalism in particular -- a hundred times more difficult. Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, lays out the major difficulty in the current issue of AJR: "How do you handle controversial, explosive charges made in the heat of a political campaign by people with painfully obvious axes to grind?" It was the charges made in an ad by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that prompted Rieder's examination, but it could have been -- and assuredly will be -- any number of spurious, or at any rate unproven, allegations.

The general problem is the inability of the for-profit model to deliver top of the line health care to the entire population. Go ahead and say the whole population doesn't need top of the line health care. Or say they need it but it's okay that they don't have it because they can't afford it. Anyway… Canada's Vaccine Plan May Be Model for U.S. Program Supports Market for Producers By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A03 When it comes to getting flu shots for its citizens, the United States may someday soon look like a giant version of Canada, its national-health-plan neighbor to the north. Like the United States, Canada has only two suppliers of influenza vaccine, fluctuating public enthusiasm for flu shots and a lot of wasted doses at the end of winter. What it doesn't have is any question about who pays for uncertainty or miscalculation. It is the government. Canada's public works ministry orders about 90 percent of the influenza vaccine the country uses each year. The Ottawa office tells vaccine manufacturers how much to make, based on the share of the national total the firms have won by bidding on long-term contracts. The companies make extra doses. This "on-spec" production is sold in the small, private market operating outside Canada's national health system, or overseas on the world market. But the vast bulk of vaccine is made without financial risk. The United States appears headed toward such an arrangement.

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But Lamy has stated that the bill may not go far enough toward meeting the requirements set by the WTO's ruling because it phases out the export subsidies rather than eliminating them and contains "grandfather" clauses effectively allowing certain businesses to continue enjoying the illegal subsidies if their contracts were signed early enough. Lamy's stance has left unclear whether the E.U. will terminate the sanctions. "We will be asking the WTO to look into the [new law's] compliance with its original findings," the E.U. official said, adding that Brussels hopes to get a ruling on this matter within three months or so. Asked whether another ruling by the WTO against Washington would mean that the existing sanctions would go back into effect, or whether similar tariffs would be applied on a different list of goods, the official declined comment.

E.U. Set To Lift Sanctions For Now U.S. Tax Plan Prompts Move By Paul Blustein Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A11 The European Union has decided that it will lift, at least temporarily, the sanctions it has imposed on U.S. goods, now that Congress enacted sweeping changes in corporate tax law earlier this month, an E.U. official said yesterday. But the E.U., which doubts that the new law fully complies with a 2001 ruling by the World Trade Organization, intends to file a new complaint with the WTO, the official said. If the Geneva-based trade body finds that the new law still violates global trade rules, Brussels may reimpose the sanctions, which involve stiff duties on a targeted list of U.S. goods shipped to the European market.

Senators Offer Intelligence Plan By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 25, 2004; Page A03 The chairman and the ranking Democratic member of the Senate conferees on the bill to restructure intelligence gathering said yesterday that a House Republican compromise proposal fails to provide the needed authority to a new national intelligence director and called for acceptance of their bipartisan counteroffer. "The bipartisan counterproposal the Senate conferees unanimously offer the House answers the most critical question raised by the 9/11 commission: Who is in charge of the intelligence community?" Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) said yesterday in a statement.

In This Climate, Victory's No Picnic, Either By ROBIN TONER THE long and bitter presidential campaign will (it is widely and devoutly hoped) be over in nine days. One man will win, and the voters will be rewarded with either George W. Bush's "ownership society," with sweeping change in Social Security and an overhaul of the tax system, or John Kerry's "stronger America," with a huge new health program and other assistance for the strained middle class. Right? Actually, probably not. Theoretically, it could work that way, with a bitter campaign producing a robust mandate, functional control of the government for one party and a season of legislative accomplishment. But not many in Washington expect it to happen this time. To begin with, whoever wins on Nov. 2 will face determined resistance on Capitol Hill. As Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, put it, "Neither side is going to get a 1964-style landslide." A President Kerry would probably face, at the very least, a Republican House. A second-term President Bush could face a Democratic Senate, but even if the Republicans retain control, their majority is expected to fall well short of the 60 votes needed to break Democratic filibusters. The winner will also be left with a budgetary legacy - the proverbial deficits as far as the eye can see - that will make the grand goals of the campaign trail very hard to achieve. And the situation in Iraq will be a steady drain on resources, political capital and presidential energy. Moreover, either a President Kerry or a re-elected President Bush would have to cope with a poisonous political climate that is unlikely to suddenly improve when the election is over, and in fact, has steadily worsened over the past decade. There is a long and happy tradition of divided government in the United States - the framers, after all, built the system with checks and balances to make it hard to do anything too big, too fast - but this is something different. "There's more bitterness now, more hatred," said former Senator Warren Rudman, the New Hampshire Republican. "If Kerry wins this election, you'll have a huge number of Republicans who are absolutely boiling about it, and will be as tough on him as the Democrats were on Bush." In short, if the campaigning was hard, the governing could be brutal. And the intensely partisan struggle over each man's domestic agenda will not end, but simply move to another arena.

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The latest hip convergence is in the here and now, a time when hip's ideology, Leland notes, ''has become the mainstream's.'' Rather than taking the predictable stance that hip is played out, and nothing and no one will ever be truly cool again, Leland argues that hip is simply moving on as it always has, sloughing off the old polarities that defined it in the past -- black versus white, straight versus gay, Iron Curtain versus NATO -- and redefining itself in a new world where whiteness is as much an adopted pose as blackness. Whereas Elvis was a white Negro, the doofus Ashton Kutcher wannabe, in his ironically worn sideways Von Dutch white-trash trucker hat, is, Leland says, a ''White White Boy . . . a whiteface minstrel.''

'Hip': The White Negro Problem By DAVID KAMP DON'T be misled by the glib title; ''Hip: The History'' is not a decade-late cash-in book on martini revivalism and what made Frank and Dino swing. Rather, it's a thoroughgoing, research-intensive analysis of that uniquely American anti-establishmentarian posture known as hip, undertaken by a fellow who's spent much of his career ruminating on the subject, John Leland, a reporter for The New York Times and a former editor in chief of Details. Leland has assigned himself a mighty task: to explain the history of hip from its 18th-century origins in America's West African-born slave population, where hip evolved as a sort of whitey-confounding slanguage (evidently, the word ''hip'' derives from the Wolof term ''hepi'' or ''hipi,'' meaning ''to see'' or ''to open one's eyes''), to today's epidemic of ubiqui-hip, of corporate-sponsored grooviness (iPods, Gap ads) and pan-cultural dreadlocks. Hip, in Leland's view, is an outgrowth of the process whereby Europeans and Africans built a new country side by side, inventing identities as Americans ''in each other's orbit.'' That they did so as social unequals is what made things interesting -- blacks developed their own insular customs and code-speak, which were appropriated, if not totally understood, by curious whites, whose own customs were copied by aspirational blacks, whose artistic flowering during the Harlem Renaissance enthralled white bohemians, and so on and so forth, creating a ''feedback loop of hip'' (Leland's words) that has engendered all manner of mutant hipster poses, from Dizzy Gillespie's French-existentialist specs-and-beret get-up to Lou Reed's quasi-ironic proclamation ''I wanna be black.'' The organizing principle of ''Hip: The History'' is that America has experienced a series of what Leland calls ''hip convergences,'' periods in which current events and societal circumstances have conspired to spark a cultural paradigm shift, an explosion of new art forms and new criteria for what's cool and what ain't. The first convergence was the development in the 19th century of America's first homegrown cultural idioms, the blackface minstrel show and the blues -- the former, a bizarre kind of stage entertainment (the century's most popular) in which white performers enacted their fascination with blacks by imitating them in crude stereotype; the latter, the first music created by blacks as Americans, reflecting on their experience as an oppressed people. Later periods of hip convergence include the 1910's and 20's, when the radical bohemians of Greenwich Village and the renaissancers of Harlem fed off each other's energy, and the midcentury heyday of Beat and bebop, two outsider movements that set the stage for the huge (albeit unhip) counterculture juggernaut of the 1960's. (Norman Mailer's famous essay from the height of Beat-bebop convergence, ''The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,'' was essentially a sketch for ''Hip: The History,'' and is duly mentioned in the introduction.)

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To understand what has gone wrong in health care, one need only look at the booming market for prescription drugs. Once upon a time, drugs were a needs-based product. You received a prescription when you were truly ill. Now many drugs are demand-driven, just like Froot Loops and Lucky Charms.

The Health of Nations By DONALD L. BARLETT and JAMES B. STEELE For years the people in Washington have offered one plan after another that they said would provide health care for all Americans and rein in costs. Each plan has failed. Today more people than ever have inadequate coverage or no insurance at all. And still costs continue to spin out of control. Notably absent from the rhetoric has been any mention of the existing system's inherent flaw - the inability of market-based, for-profit medicine to deliver on the political promises. Two decades ago, when Washington embraced the for-profit model to curb escalating charges, health care spending represented 10.5 percent of gross domestic product. Now it is approaching 16 percent. We spend more per capita on health care than any other developed country. Yet on the important yardsticks, like life expectancy measured in healthy years, we don't even rank among the top 20 nations. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, we come in an embarrassing 29th, sandwiched between Slovenia and Portugal. The explanation for this abysmal record is one that politicians decline to discuss. The market functions wonderfully when we want to sell more cereals, cosmetics, cars, computers or any other consumer product. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in health care, where the goal should hardly be selling more heart bypass operations. Instead, the goal should be to prevent disease and illness. But the money is in the treatment - not prevention - so the market and good health care are at odds. Just how much at odds is seen in the current shortage of flu vaccine, as men and women in their 80's and 90's line up for hours at a time, hoping to get the shot they have been told they need, but may not receive because not nearly enough has been manufactured.

I'm not, not really. In this case the "what" is enough for me. Anyway… After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law By TIM GOLDEN Published: October 24, 2004 WASHINGTON - In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism. Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II. The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress. White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy. But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists. "We've cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."

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Two economists, Warwick J. McKibbin of the Brookings Institution and Andrew Stoeckel of the Center for International Economics in Australia, have calculated that the war may have already cost the United States $150 billion in lost gross domestic product since fighting began in March 2003. That is close to one percentage point of growth lost over the past year and a half. If that figure is correct, the nation's annual economic growth rate, which has been 3.7 percent during this period, could have been nearly 4.7 percent without the war.

and

What really worries economists, though, is the future economic impact. "The longer this war runs, the weaker our long-run growth will be," Mr. Zandi said. That is because spending on things like the occupation and peacekeeping in Iraq does not do anything to bolster the American economy's productive capacity. And it adds to the growing budget shortfall. "With a budget deficit already at 3.5 percent of G.D.P.," Mr. Roach said, "that's a really big deal."

Counting the Hidden Costs of War By ANNA BERNASEK IT'S often said that truth is the first casualty of war. During a presidential campaign, that may be more apt than ever. Consider a seemingly simple question: What is the cost of the Iraq war to the United States? President Bush and Senator John Kerry have given different answers, but both candidates have ignored what may be the biggest cost item: the war's impact on the overall economy. After all, the real cost of war is not only the money spent but also the economic effects, good or bad. For example, World War II led to huge levels of production and employment in the United States, while the Vietnam War dragged down economic growth as it wore on. So, after 19 months of conflict in Iraq, how has the war affected America's economy, and what about the future? Of course, calculating the net effect of a continuing war is neither easy nor exact. That's why many analysts are reluctant to try. But a few knowledgeable economists have made reasoned estimates, and the results are surprising. The economic cost incurred so far may be as large as - or larger than - what has actually been spent directly on the war. (While estimates vary, the official figure for spending stands at around $120 billion since the conflict began.) And there are likely to be major economic costs as long as the war continues.

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A spokeswoman for the Iraqi government, Maha Malik, had a somewhat different account of the attack. She said insurgents had fired rocket-propelled grenades at two minibuses carrying the soldiers, The Associated Press reported. An A.P. reporter at the scene said the charred hulks of the buses were still in the area, as were human remains and pools of blood. It was unclear whether the soldiers were part of the Iraqi National Guard, a domestic militia, or the new Iraqi Army. Kirkush is the largest training camp run by the Americans, and is located in a dry swath of desert near the mountainous Iranian border. The murders of the roughly 50 soldiers raises questions of why the soldiers were unable to defend themselves, especially given the fact they were undergoing training by Americans, and whether they had sufficient protection as they were traveling back and forth from leave.

50 Iraqi Soldiers Are Found Shot to Death After Rebel Ambush By EDWARD WONG Police officers discovered this morning the bodies of about 50 Iraqi soldiers who were killed in an ambush by insurgents the previous night in a remote part of eastern Iraq, Iraqi officials said. The bodies were found near the Iranian border, about 30 miles east of the restive city of Baquba, which has been wracked by guerrilla warfare since the American invasion. The soldiers were going home on leave. It is unclear who killed them, or how such a brazen and deadly ambush could have been mounted by guerrillas on American-trained Iraqis. In violence in the capital, a State Department security officer, Ed Seitz, was killed in a mortar or rocket attack at Camp Victory, an American military base near Baghdad International Airport, said Bob Callahan, an embassy spokesman. Mr. Seitz was posted at the base. His death is the first known one of a State Department official in Iraq. "I mourn the loss of one of our own today in Baghdad," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in the statement issued while he was flying to China from Japan. "Ed was a brave American, dedicated to his country."