Border Control?

From a free-market point of view, this movement of people looks like a classic example of the law of supply and demand. Mexico is poor, overpopulated, intensely corrupt and has a nearly limitless supply of cheap, willing labor. Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, competition with inexpensive American corn has ruined tens of thousands of small Mexican farmers, while many of the light manufacturing plants just south of the border that drew so many northward a decade ago have moved operations to Asia. People are going hungry.

The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don't want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teenager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen's dreams were granted overnight -- if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported -- America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way. Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation.

Still, we maintain the pretense that we don't want a docile underclass of workers coming into the United States, and we keep trying to catch them as they cross an increasingly policed border.

Quotes of note:

Less than a month after the July 22, 2004, letter, the FDA informed the legislators in writing that their attempt to sway Crawford violated federal rules intended to shield him and other decision makers in similar quasi-judicial proceedings from outside pressure. They admonished the lawmakers that they were "not allowed" to communicate with Crawford because the lengthy public record of testimony and documentary evidence was closed.

Pickering's office said a senior House Democrat, Rep. Bobby R. Etheridge (N.C.), and members of the House Agriculture Committee were given a chance to make changes. In all, 18 Republicans and eight Democrats signed. Among them were the House's third-ranking Republican, Whip Roy D. Blunt (Mo.); John A. Boehner (Ohio), second-ranking Republican on the Agriculture Committee; and Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), who recently became chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's health panel.

Blunt's office explained his stance by saying, "The poultry industry is a $1.77 billion industry in Missouri's 7th District, creating nearly 16,000 jobs for Congressman Blunt's constituents."

Ten of the 26 signers, including Pickering, Etheridge and Blunt, received campaign contributions from Bayer's political fund in 2003 and 2004.

Lawmakers' Help for Drug Firm Tests Limits
FDA Calls Efforts For Bayer Illegal
By Dan Morgan and Marc Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 30, 2005; Page A01

Arbitrary Cuts
Saturday, April 30, 2005; Page A18

ONE OF THE STRIKING aspects of the budget deal Congress passed on Thursday night is its treatment of entitlements. Among other things, the agreement calls on Congress to partly fund $106 billion in tax cuts by finding some $35 billion in entitlement savings through 2010, most notably $10 billion in savings from Medicaid, the program that provides health care to the poor and increasing numbers of the elderly.

What is truly worrying about this gesture is not its size: Even this Medicaid "cut" is actually a reduction in rate of growth, and it's not a very big one at that. Although $10 billion sounds like a lot, in practice it would amount to some $3 billion out of a $260 billion budget in 2010, or just over 1 percent. But the underlying question remains whether the federal government intends to reduce health care for poor people and shift more costs to the states or to undertake a more serious reform of the program.

Quote of note:

The dollar fell and the euro, yen and gold rose as investors placed bets that if China let the yuan rise against the dollar, other countries would also permit their currencies to appreciate against the dollar because their exporters would no longer be so fearful of being undercut by Chinese rivals.

A Currency Afloat (for All of 20 Minutes)
By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG, April 29 - The Bush administration has been pressing the Chinese government for years to allow its currency, which is pegged to the dollar, to trade more freely. It got its wish on Friday - but only for 20 minutes.

Health Coverage Dispute Pits Older Retirees Against Younger

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

It is a health care issue that pits older retirees against younger ones, and both sides are asking Congress for help.

Some employers and unions want Congress to override a recent federal court ruling that would force employers who offer health insurance to early retirees to give comparable coverage to retirees who are 65 or older and eligible for Medicare.

Health coverage for younger retirees, as a bridge to Medicare, can be an inducement to workers to take early retirement, so that younger, lower-paid people could replace them. But groups taking the side of retirees older than 65 - notably AARP, the influential advocacy group - say that if superior benefits for early retirees is a form of age discrimination. And federal courts have agreed, citing the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Rednecks apparently do not want Black folks associated with the term. It is a wonderful example of the collective nature of mainstream Americans.

SOUTHERN CULTURE AND BLACK UNDER-ACHIEVEMENT

The person whose writings I quote most often on this blog is Thomas Sowell. I think he is spot-on most of the time. His theory of black under-achievement is however one with which I must respectfully disagree. He says that blacks do poorly because they have absorbed "cracker" culture and that holds them back. Why? Because "cracker" culture is bombastic and anti-intellectual. His thesis would seem to require that White Southerners in general do as poorly as black Southerners on IQ tests and other achievement criteria but he offers no evidence for that dubious proposition. There are certainly SOME poor whites who do as poorly as blacks on educational and other criteria but that proves nothing. It is averages across whole groups that we have to look at if we are to explain group phenomena. See also here.

If you want to contact me, this is how you do it. Just know that if you submit what is, in essence, an advertisement, you'll not likely get a response.

Lester Spence:

So when Cobb asks, Who is better than Sowell? I've got two answers. On the straight academic tip--the only one that matters to me--I'd point to Glenn Loury (who is not only fiercely independent but who HAS published in top tier economic journals), Steven Levitt (who, while not black still asks novel questions about black urban life with novel data), even Roland Fryer. My real money is probably on Bomani if his ass would get his dissertation finished. But again, I'm not looking for plans from any of these joes. I'm looking for interesting questions, interesting answers, theoretical novelty, and fit (that is, the answers plausibly respond to social reality).

To that degree, Sowell doesn't pass the smell test. Period. And it doesn't matter whether anyone is better as far as "planning". Kind of like asking who was a better point guard, Mike Piazza or Tiger Woods. What the hell would we ask that question for? We've talked over and over here about how we're trying to come up with an independent mode of black leadership, a form of leadership that revolves around cell based organization.

Why would we want a two bit economist who has written the same book for the last thirty years without a journal article to his name, participate in that project?

The Dynamist:

Just slap me.

Faheem at Black Perspective and Introspection beat me to Sowell's latest.

I would like to first deal with the term  Black Redneck , in my assessment this phrase is equal to phrases like  White Nigger  and  Sand Nigger  which ascribes the behavior as described or represented by the ladder word to the group that the first word represents. Hence, a  White Nigger  would be a white person that engages in nigger behavior, but what is nigger behavior? We know the word Nigger does not have a history as being a word that describe a particular behavior; it was and still remains a disparaging word that describes Black people regardless of behavior or background. So what accounts for phrases like "Sand Nigger"? A word commonly used to describe Arabs. If we were to compare these two phrases; "Sand Nigger" and "White Nigger" what we will find is that the one thing those who are called these words have in common with those who were first referred to as plain old Niggers is that good ole white folk dislike them, thus a "Nigger" becomes a word ascribed to anything or anyone white folk find objectionable.

Such is the case with the word Redneck; Rednecks are considered to be  white trash  ignorant and backwards, in the past they were considered, lawless, lazy and sexually immoral. The most famous of all Rednecks is Jeff Foxworthy, who has made millions from describing what and who is a Redneck and if any of you have seen his show, you know most of the things he says that makes one a Redneck does not describe things that represent Black folk in thought or behavior which means the term Redneck as used in the term  Black Rednecks  is Thomas way of calling Black folk a disparaging name that will not easily offend us but ensures that white folk who love his work and find Rednecks objectionable understand that he share their resentment towards us and also think of Black folk as trash, ignorant, backwards, lazy, lawless and sexually immoral. I wonder how those white folk who are proud to be Rednecks will feel about him using a word they self identify as to describe Black people in a negative light.

It seems Thomas Sowell has a new book.

Mr. Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author, most recently, of "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," published this week by Encounter Books.

I'll not be buying it (though I would review a free copy...).

That quote came from the credits for an OpinionJournal thing he wrote that Baldilocks linked to.

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

Where Sowell says "race" you should read "genetically determined traits." I don't think that's what Sowell means...but what he writes makes sense if you make that substitution.

Okay, the email link really, really works.

I know I've been distracted but I believe I'm getting a grip again, so if anyone has seen any weird behavior by the site, please let me know.

Quote of note:

...any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads that doomed the Clinton health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way it was.

and

The main message of that report is that U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense, the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality; it's a market-based system, so it must be good.

The report even takes a Panglossian view of uninsured Americans - one that is completely at odds with the grim statistics I cited above - suggesting that "many of them may remain uninsured as a matter of choice," perhaps because "they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance."

The president's economists had only one criticism of the system: insurance is too comprehensive, which encourages people to consume too much health care. As they see it, insurance covers too large a percentage of medical costs. The answer to this problem is the creation of, you guessed it, private accounts, which have now superseded tax cuts as the answer to all problems.

A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Quote of note:

But Mr. Spitzer's inquiry may put him in competition with national regulators. Oversight of the mortgage industry has typically fallen under four separate federal agencies, which have seen their role as preventing systemic collapse rather than protecting consumers.

And in January 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department issued new regulations that effectively give only the federal government the authority to regulate national banks.

New York Begins Inquiry Into Possible Mortgage Bias
By ERIC DASH

A new preliminary inquiry by Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, is seeking credit data and other information from mortgage lenders that should offer regulators a clearer picture of whether discrimination is responsible for the higher interest rates that minority borrowers often pay.

Congress Passes Budget With Cuts in Medicaid and in Taxes
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: April 29, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 28 - The House and Senate broke a lengthy impasse over federal spending Thursday night, narrowly adopting a $2.56 trillion federal budget for 2006 that aims to trim the growth of Medicaid by $10 billion over five years, add $106 billion in tax cuts and clear the way for oil drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

The back-to-back votes - 214 to 211 in the House and 52 to 47 in the Senate - ran mostly along party lines. As the roll was called in the Senate, shortly before midnight, Vice President Dick Cheney sat in the chamber, ready to cast his vote to break a tie, if necessary.

Quote of note:

We're not saying that's what happened here. But when two dozen employees of an out-of-town company whose president once held a lucrative concessions contract at Los Angeles International Airport make contributions that many can't remember and few can explain, it does tend to raise a red flag.

The $31,000 Question
April 29, 2005

Imagine you're running for mayor of Los Angeles and a reporter discovers that at least 20 employees at two related Florida companies have, combined, donated about $31,000 to your campaign. The reporter telephones these contributors   whose donations, thanks to city law, are public record   and finds that some of them can't explain why they gave $1,000 to a politician running for office in a city 3,000 miles away and others can't even remember writing a check. So the reporter asks you why these folks in Florida would give you so much money.

You reply:
(a) "If there are questions about contributions, we will look into them immediately and take action."
(b) "They think it's time for a change. People are supporting me because people have seen over the last four years we have an administration that's adrift."
(c) "I don't know that anybody's shown that anybody's done anything wrong yet."

Anyone with an ounce of sense can tell you that the best response under these circumstances is "a." It was the answer delivered in writing by Ace Smith, campaign manager for City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who is running for mayor and did face that question this week.

But before Smith could get to him, Villaraigosa himself answered "b," a peculiar response that managed to be both relentlessly "on message" and completely off target. (We'll get to "c" in a bit). What kind of change, exactly, would these Florida workers want that a future mayor of Los Angeles could deliver?

That is the $31,000 question.

Quote of note:

At this point, you may be wondering whether it's really possible that professional editorial writers at a first-rate newspaper   people who, after all, are paid to think seriously about issues like this   could make such a simple statistical mistake. Are they really so dishonest or so dumb as to think that you can measure the fairness of a tax code by looking at what share of the taxes various groups pay without considering how much they earn? I can tell you, as a regular reader of that page, that the answer is: Yes, they really, really are.

A Very Special Kind of Math
Once again, the Wall Street Journal plops down numbers in arguing that the rich pay too much in taxes. Do figures lie or do liars figure?
Jonathan Chait
April 29, 2005

Maybe he has, I dunno...

Quote of note:

Just last week, Schwarzenegger and his aides sought to clarify his statement to a convention of newspaper publishers that the nation should "close the borders." Before his speech was over, an aide told reporters that Schwarzenegger had meant to say that the U.S. should secure its borders   not shut them down.

Gov. Praises 'Minuteman' Campaign
Schwarzenegger says group's patrols against illegal immigrants have been effective. One critic calls remarks 'nothing short of base racism.'
By Peter Nicholas and Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writers
April 29, 2005

SACRAMENTO   Calling the nation's borders dangerously porous, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday praised the private "Minuteman" campaign that uses armed volunteers to stop illegal immigrants from crossing into the U.S.

Why a special news conference to repeat himself?

Ah. He's been honing the language during his tour.

Problem is, he's suggesting the impossible.

Gee...

A solidarity of sorrow
Gerald Caplan
In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the  solidarity of sorrow  between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

WILLIE SEARCY: Priscilla Owen had a "reputation for slowness in handling her caseload." There were times she got so behind that court clerks tell of "other justices [ordering] opinions to be taken from her chambers." In the case of Willie Searcy, Owen stands accused of contributing to his death with her dalliance. After a defective seat belt left the teenaged Searcy paralyzed, a jury awarded his family millions of dollars in damages. Attorneys on both sides of the case asked for an expedited ruling but the family especially needed the money as they did not have the funds "to provide the medical care he needed." The case languished for years. When Owen finally got around to writing the opinion, she took issue with a question that was not even raised, "left the family with nothing and ordered a new trial."(When the court issued its ruling, it included an "odd" addendum paragraph that somewhat apologized for the delay.) Searcy died while awaiting the Owen-ordered new trial. The family attorney declared, "There's no question, absolutely no question, that the delay contributed to causing Willie's death. We could have saved his life if we'd had the funds to do it."

Leading With the Women

If war breaks out in the Senate over judicial nominations, the initial battle is likely to center on two women, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. Republicans seem to think that those nominees will come off as so likeable that Democrats will be forced to back down from their threats of a filibuster. But when the American public looks beyond the photo-op, it will be clear why these women do not belong on the federal bench. Both have records of kowtowing to big business and showing contempt for ordinary people who are the victims of injustice.

Of course, it will be said this represents an unacceptable litmus test of these judges' political positions.

They May Be Mundane, but Low-Tech Businesses Are Booming
By ELIZABETH OLSON

Forget Web sites and molecular imaging. The biggest fields of opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs are the same mundane ventures that have been kicking around for decades.

Think landscaping companies, child-care providers, janitorial services and nail and hair salons. In a generally buoyant market for low-technology businesses, those are four of the biggest winners by far. Altogether, sole proprietorships in the United States, a rough measure of the size of the small-business low-technology sector, grew by nearly 4 percent in 2002, the latest year with statistics available, to 17.6 million, and their combined revenue increased by 5.5 percent, to $770 billion. The figures come from the Census Bureau's Economic Census, a snapshot of the American economy that is taken every five years.

David Broder takes the Bushistas to task for overreaching in the Washington Post today.

Having armed himself with an ambitious set of goals in order to energize his government, Bush has become the victim of overreach -- the one problem he and his advisers did not anticipate.

They thought that things had gone downhill for Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton because those presidents had largely used up their "big ideas" in their first terms and were left adrift without much sense of purpose, vulnerable to their enemies, in their final four years.

So Bush set forth what any president would have to consider a breathtakingly bold agenda. As Charles O. Jones of the University of Wisconsin remarked to me in January, it was particularly striking to see "a second-term president with the smallest electoral college majority since Wilson in 1916 undertake the most ambitious agenda since Roosevelt in 1936."

We who watched the Iraq debacle rather than blindly defending one side are not surprised at all.

Of course, Sodexho admitted no wrongdoing...

Quote of note:

"As the numbers of middle-class African Americans has grown, it has created a critical mass of people who are savvy. When they see blockage of upward mobility, there is more and more of a reaction to that," said Bart Landry, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and author of "The New Black Middle Class." "It is extremely frustrating for them having done everything society says to get the credentials and education and not see the rewards."

$80 Million Settles Race-Bias Case
Black Managers Said Sodexho Wouldn't Promote Them
By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 28, 2005; A01

Wrong way to `save'
OUR OPINION: KEEP MEDICAID BENEFITS FOR 77,000 VULNERABLE FLORIDIANS

The Legislature is taking the wrong approach to cutting Medicaid costs. Consider, for example, the proposed cut in Medicaid coverage for 77,000 poor, elderly and disabled people, many of whom live in South Florida communities.

The rationale for the cuts is that these Floridians will be covered by new Medicare prescription-drug benefits beginning in 2006. Indeed, they will be. Under proposals in the state House and Senate, however, they also would lose a host of other vital health-related services that Medicare won't cover. The result, once again, will be higher costs for the local communities that ultimately pay for the needs of the frail and indigent.

That's why they tried to screw the Ethics Committee. That's why they ousted the Republicans that were honest enough to censure DeLay.

Quote of note:

These experts say the best chance for DeLay to be vindicated -- or to get little more than a slap on the wrist in an ethics inquiry -- is if he's able to convince a congressional committee that he was unaware of what the lobbyists did.

But DeLay is a hands-on kinda guy.

Anyway...

DeLay Is Likely to Be Found Culpable
Experts Weigh Potential Defense

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 28, 2005; A06

Now that it's clear that his controversial private-paid trips abroad will be put under a microscope in Congress, Tom DeLay is in serious danger of being declared in violation of House ethics rules, legal experts say.

Quote of note:

To bolster her analysis, Goodman details salary information for several women who worked at the NAACP's national headquarters in Baltimore and states that those rumored to have close relationships with Mfume, or with his son, have fared better than those who did not.

I ask women this general question:

What proportion of successful women are rumored to have fucked the boss to get their spot?

Mfume Accused of Favoritism At NAACP
Ex-President Denies Rewarding Women
By Matthew Mosk and Cheryl W. Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 28, 2005; A01

Allegations detailed in a confidential NAACP report claim that Kweisi Mfume gave raises and promotions to women with whom he had close personal relationships while he was president of the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

Debtor Nation
An angry hacker complains that debt-saddled Americans don t have identities worth stealing.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Andy Borowitz

April 26 - An identity thief who has stolen over half a million identities over the past two years returned all but four of them today, declaring the identities "totally worthless" and "an enormous waste of my time and hard work."

The computer hacker, who spoke to reporters via conference call today, said that "in all my years of stealing identities, I have never come across a bigger collection of losers."

He said that he had spent months hacking through the security firewall of one of the nation's largest financial institutions, hoping to reap billions of dollars for his efforts, but after sifting through the stolen identities he found that they were "little more than a garbage dump of unpaid college loans and overdue Blockbuster bills."

"Everybody's running around worried about identity theft these days," he added. "All I can say is,  Don't flatter yourself by thinking you have an identity that's worth my time. "

Quote of note:

Today's religious extremists are not only trying to use the state, with all its power, as religious proselytizer. They oppose science when it happens to conflict with their version of revealed truth. They twist history to claim that the Republic's freethinking Founders, like Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, were really theocrats like themselves. They long for the predemocratic world of absolutes circa 1500.

Whose nation under God?
By Robert Kuttner  |  April 27, 2005

WHEN John Kennedy was running for president and passions were running high about whether a Catholic could serve both the American citizenry and Rome, a joke made the rounds about a priest and a minister whose friendship nearly came to blows. Finally the priest phoned his old friend. ''What a pity," he said. ''Here we are, both men of the cloth, fighting over politics." ''It's true," said the minister. ''We're both Christians. We both worship the same God -- you in your way, and I in His."

Doctors Influenced By Mention Of Drug Ads
Offbeat Study Finds Familiar Brand Name Can Evoke Diagnosis
By Shankar Vedantam and Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 27, 2005; A01

Actors pretending to be patients with symptoms of stress and fatigue were five times as likely to walk out of doctors' offices with a prescription when they mentioned seeing an ad for the heavily promoted antidepressant Paxil, according an unusual study being published today.

The study employed an elaborate ruse -- sending actors with fake symptoms into 152 doctors' offices to see whether they would get prescriptions. Most who did not report symptoms of depression were not given medications, but when they asked for Paxil, 55 percent were given prescriptions, and 50 percent received diagnoses of depression.

Florida Expands Right to Use Deadly Force in Self-Defense
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, April 26 - Gov. Jeb Bush signed a bill on Tuesday giving Florida citizens more leeway to use deadly force in their homes and in public, a move that gun-control groups and several urban police chiefs warned would give rise to needless deaths.

The measure, known as the "stand your ground" bill, lets people use guns or other deadly force to defend themselves in public places without first trying to escape.

Floridians already had the right to defend themselves against home intruders under what is known as the castle doctrine, but until now, they could not do so in public.

"Many Americans are potentially open to scams because they don't understand the purpose of the financial markets," he said yesterday.

The Republican economic plan, in a nutshell. From the very beginning of their push for private accounts it has been obvious they've been counting on the public's lack of knowledge.

This is not unusual, by the way.

A "free market" will work the way economists project if all players have perfect knowledge of the market...if you know the relative value (effectiveness and cost) of all your options. But no one has that, and frankly the continued emphasis on choice means you'll be ever less likely to have it. We manipulate the mental environment to invoke desire and manipulate the information environment to imply difference where there is none, to imply effectiveness where there is none...there's simply no intent to provide the level of information necessary for a true free market.

Quote of note:

"Many Americans are potentially open to scams because they don't understand the purpose of the financial markets," he said yesterday.

Other analysts said they thought that the findings added to a growing body of evidence that the typical American is poorly equipped to take advantage of what proponents call the ownership society: a future in which individuals are free to invest their own retirement money, rather than having to accept the returns offered by the Social Security program or a group retirement program at work, like a pension plan. Many surveys have shown the public has doubts about the Social Security program, with young people, in particular, confident that they could do better by investing on their own.

Yet even their concern is poorly informed, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, a nonpartisan research organization that is financed by companies and labor unions. The institute's own research showed that fewer than 20 percent of workers thought that Social Security would be their primary source of income in retirement, even though Social Security is currently the primary income source for more than two-thirds of retirees.

"It is abundantly clear that there are a large number of Americans who are completely unprepared to make these decisions," said Steve Blakely, the institute's editor and communications director.

Survey Finds Many Have Poor Grasp of Basic Economics
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Celera to Quit Selling Genome Information
By ANDREW POLLACK

Celera Genomics, which raced with the publicly financed Human Genome Project to decipher the human DNA sequence, has decided to abandon the business of selling genetic information. The company said yesterday that it was discontinuing its genome database subscription business and putting the information into the public domain.

Celera succeeded in signing up some subscribers to its genome database, but the company is still losing money and it never quite calmed critics who argued that fundamental information about basic human biology should be openly available to all.

Quote of note:

"We fumbled the ball badly," said one senior Republican official who spoke anonymously because he did not want to be viewed as critical of the leadership.

Do you know how sad it is that such a statement would be viewed as "critical of the leadership?" DO you know how sad it is that someone would have to consider such a thing when making a blatantly obvious statement?

House Republicans Weigh Vote on Ethics Changes
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, April 26 - House Republican leaders on Tuesday moved toward reversing rules changes that have paralyzed the ethics committee, a decision that could clear the way to an investigation of the overseas travel of Representative Tom DeLay, the majority leader, and other House members.

Since a real understanding of what actually happened is so useful in keeping Black folks sane and centered in the midst of everything from Thug Life to Black Republicans, I thought it might be interesting to apply the same technique to the most widespread delusion amongst white folks...Conservative White Americans, to be specific. That delusion is that America's Founding Fathers built some special reverence for religion into the Constitution.

Let's start with an obvious fact. The North American colonies were a military and economic venture (the two thoroughly interpenetrated each other at the time). Religious colonies were established after the economic and military base was established. Everything built on that base, including the religious colonies.

The National Humanities Center maintains a site called TeacherServe that has a section called Divining America: Religion and the National Culture. (I'm giving you all these links because they're all useful). I want to start with a brief excerpt from The Middle Colonies as the Birthplace of American Religious Pluralism by Patricia U. Bonomi, Professor Emeritus, New York University:

Texas Officials Shrug Off Fine Over Bush Law

By SAM DILLON

The authorities in Texas yesterday shrugged off a fine that the federal Department of Education has imposed on the state because it was late last year in notifying schools and districts whether they had reached student achievement benchmarks under President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.

While promising to notify schools in a timely fashion this year, the education commissioner of Texas, Shirley Neeley, said, "Classrooms and teachers will not be harmed by this fine."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the $444,282 fine on Friday. It appears to be the largest fine imposed on any state since Mr. Bush signed the federal law in 2002.

via Slashdot:

Aglassis writes

"It appears that NASA is not backing down from their nuclear space initiative. Project Prometheus has recently started a new web page (under JPL) and NASA is finishing up a period of public comment (last session today). Currently Northrop Grumman is contracted to begin preliminary design of the spacecraft until 2008 for NASA (the reactor will be built by the Department of Energy's Division of Naval Reactors--the folks who control all US submarine and aircraft carrier nuclear reactors). Early specs are that it will be 60 meters long, have a 30,000 kg mass, use a 100 KW reactor using Brayton cycle gas turbines, be powered by ion thrusters with a 7000 second specific impulse, and have a science payload of 1500 kg. Early mission plans for Prometheus 1 (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter) indicate that the spacecraft would orbit Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa individually, and perhaps have a lifespan of about 20 years."

Suppose you owned a factory. You make world-class widgets as a step in manufacturing a product for a market you've dominated years.

Suppose someone else also makes widgets for their product in a different market. Their widgets are aren't as good as yours, but they're made by a different process at significantly less cost.

Do you adapt their widget technology, maybe putting a little more expense in to bring it up to your quality standards? Do you buy widgets from them?

Suppose the widgets are people?

Robert Scheer in the LA Times

We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some perspective. The emergency funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly $80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the cost of ending healthcare for the more than 1 million Missourians enrolled in the program. That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality of life.

Similarly, with roughly 10% of what we've spent in Iraq, we could make up the $27-billion federal funding shortfall in paying for Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that they will be all but scrapped if they don't improve  — yet it doesn't provide the means to do so. This number comes from a lawsuit filed by school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont and the National Education Assn., the nation's largest teachers organization.

Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater long-term threat to our nation's security than the hyped-up claims surrounding our foreign adventures. Abroad, we must "support our troops" at all costs —  even if the cost is their lives —  while at home, the nation's leaders are all about tough love.

Faith 'War' Rages in U.S., Judge Says
A Bush nominee central to the Senate's judicial controversy criticizes secular humanists.
By Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2005

WASHINGTON   Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.

Brown's remarks come as a partisan battle over judges has evolved into a national debate over the proper mix of God and government and as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) ponders changing the chamber's rules to prevent Democrats from using procedural moves to block confirmation of conservative jurists such as Brown.

"Wait until you meet Jim."

LIP-SERVICE PUSH FOR OIL
By DEBORAH ORIN

WASHINGTON   President Bush yesterday held hands with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and took him on a stroll through a field of bluebonnet flowers at his Texas ranch in a pitch to get the Saudis to pump more oil.

They embraced and traded air kisses on both cheeks after the prince, clad in flowing robes, arrived nearly 30 minutes late for his second visit to the Bush ranch in Crawford.

The president firmly held the hand of his guest, who's in his 80s, and guided the Saudi ruler through the field of blooming bluebonnets as they headed to an office for a few hours of meetings.

Nation's Inmate Population Increased 2.3 Percent Last Year
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, April 24 (AP) - The nation's prisons and jails held 2.1 million people in mid-2004, 2.3 percent more than the year before, the government reported on Sunday.

The inmate population increased by slightly more than 48,000 from mid-2003 to mid-2004, a growth of about 900 inmates each week, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The total inmate population has hovered around two million for the last few years: It was 2.1 million on June 30, 2002, and just below that mark a year later.

Improved Scanning Technique Uses Brain as Portal to Thought

By NICHOLAS WADE

By peering not into the eyes but into the brain, an improved scanning technique has enabled scientists to figure out what people are looking at - even, in some cases, when they are not aware of what they have seen.

The advance, reported today, shows that the scanners may be better able than previously supposed to probe the border between conscious and unconscious thought and even, in certain circumstances, to read people's state of mind.

The scanning technique, known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, is a more powerful version of a technique widely used in hospitals. It can show which regions of the brain are actively performing some task, but until now has lacked the resolution to track specific groups of neurons, as the functional units of the brain are called.

In the Today's News section of their web site, which is only accessible to subscribers, is this:

In response to hate mail, college temporarily moves minority students off campus

That's some shit I want to read.

LATER: Details here, courtesy of EG in the comments.

Quote of note:

The point is that people sense, correctly, that Mr. Bush doesn't understand their concerns. He was sold on privatization by people who have made their careers in the self-referential, corporate-sponsored world of conservative think tanks. And he himself has no personal experience with the risks that working families face. He's probably never imagined what it would be like to be destitute in his old age, with no guaranteed income.

Oh, hell, here's another. I feel generous...

Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't part of the base.

The Oblivious Right
By PAUL KRUGMAN

As Saudi Visits, Bush Seeks Help on Lowering Oil Prices
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and JEFF GERTH

CRAWFORD, Texas, April 24 - When he meets at his ranch here on Monday with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Bush will confront one of his trickiest diplomatic relationships. He will look for help on oil prices, try to find common ground on the Arab-Israeli conflict and prod the crown prince to allow more democracy at home , even as both sides struggle with deep strains set off by the involvement of Saudis in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, American officials and analysts said.

Not the kind of charity that gets you into hebbin, anyway...

Quote of note:

"I'm deeply disturbed that with a good number of supporting organizations, people are taking multimillion-dollar tax deductions for what they claim are contributions to charity, yet too often the result is a thimbleful of benefit to charity," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

A Tax Benefit for Big Donors Often Bypasses Idea of Charity
By STEPHANIE STROM

George B. Kaiser, a publicity-shy oilman who built a fortune estimated at $4 billion by snapping up busted petroleum businesses in Oklahoma, set aside roughly $1 billion for charitable endeavors from 2000 to the end of last year.

Quote of note:

"This gives me a chance to sound off with a few words or a long editorial," said Mr. Cronkite, 88, the longtime "CBS Evening News" anchorman. "It's a medium that is new and interesting, and I thought I'd have some fun."

A Boldface Name Invites Others to Blog With Her
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

LOS ANGELES, April 23 - Get ready for the next level in the blogosphere.

Arianna Huffington, the columnist and onetime candidate for governor of California, is about to move blogging from the realm of the anonymous individual to the realm of the celebrity collective.

Dreams, Hunches and 600-to-1 Keep the Numbers Game Going
By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: April 25, 2005

New York City, so famous for tearing down and plastering over, has made a pastime of lamenting lost folkways. But where the Automat, trolleys and Ebbets Field disappeared, the numbers games remain.

Twenty-five years after New York State started a legal version of these small-time tests of chance, the underground games survive, a pounding ventricle of New York neighborhood life run on a heady concoction of numerology and poverty, superstition and fate.

Unemployment will hit historic new lows.

All beneficiaries are 65 or older or disabled. About 5 million of the 41 million beneficiaries are 85 or older, and some are so sick they die while pursuing appeals.

The projected debt of the Social Security fund will be markedly reduced.

In a summary of its plans, the department said it was "not economically or administratively feasible" to station judges around the country.

...though we've been doing it all this time.

Anyway...

Medicare Change Will Limit Access to Claim Hearing
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, April 23 - A new federal policy will make it significantly more difficult for Medicare beneficiaries to obtain hearings in person before a judge when the government denies their claims for home care, nursing home services, prescription drugs and other treatments.

I've done a lot here at at The Niggerati Network recently.

The change in styling here coincides with the update of the site to Drupal 4.6. Now both sites are running under the same codebase. There have been a lot of changes under the hood as well. Here, the big change is the WYSIWYG editing, and the privatemsg function has been replaced by a contact page that emails your message.

The editor uses the TinyMCE editor widget. It uses hot  keys, by the way...control-i toggles italic, control-b toggles bold. You got the indent button for your block quotes, the anchor and image dialogs work, and the button with the little broom cleans up stupid HTML. Lovely. I have no idea how to customize it yet...when I figure it out, you'll have smileyfaces.

Doctors Are Warned on Fetus Care
Guidelines Are Issued on Born-Alive Infants Protection Act
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 23, 2005; Page A07

The Bush administration issued guidelines yesterday advising physicians and hospitals that under a 2002 law they are obligated to care for fetuses "born alive" naturally or in the process of an abortion, and medical providers could face penalties for withholding treatment.

The law, signed by President Bush nearly three years ago, conferred legal rights on fetuses "at any stage of development." It specifies that a fetus that is breathing, has a beating heart, a pulsating umbilical cord or muscle movement should be considered alive and entitled to protection under federal emergency medical laws and child abuse statutes.

Solvency. Then make them justify the additional expense of any privatization scheme.

Just throwing it out there, but I suspect part of the reason folks want to throw the Social Security fund into the equities markets is so they can get capital as cheaply as they get labor.

Anyway...

Panel to Start Writing Social Security Bill
Both Sides of Personal Account Debate Gird for Battle at Finance Committee
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page A04

Five months after President Bush launched his drive to overhaul Social Security, the difficult, if not impossible, task of drafting legislation begins Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee holds the first hearing on options to secure Social Security's future.

DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page A01

The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.

DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.

Quote of note:

While it is unclear precisely why enrollments have dropped, Army officials and defense experts say the decline probably mirrors the problems the Army has had recruiting generally, as some potential recruits fear they will be sent into a war zone after earning their second-lieutenant bar at graduation. Some ROTC programs, such as the one at the University of New Hampshire, have seen more than 80 percent of their graduates fight in Afghanistan or Iraq over the past few years, and the Army's increasing need for young, capable officers has been drawing more ROTC graduates into the fighting ranks.

Enrollment in Army ROTC Down in Past 2 School Years
More Officers Now Being Commissioned From Earlier Pool, But Problem Looms

Comb the newspapers for every example of Conservatives talking about how the Democratic Party is dependant on the Black vote.

Exchange every instance of "Democratic" and "Republican," and replace "Black" with "radical Christian."

Economic Jitters Hit Community Not Used to Lean Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

MARIETTA, Ga., April 22 - Inflation is tamer here than in the rest of the country, and gas is somewhat cheaper. The number of new people asking for unemployment is falling. Even so, for this affluent community just north of Atlanta, economic anxiety is creeping in.

The shopping district around the town square, usually prime real estate, is dotted with rental signs. Paul Lubertazzi, the owner of Traveling Fare Catering, plans to redo his menu this weekend, raising prices to cover increased food and delivery costs. Hakan Senkal and his wife, Semra, have moved into the apartment above their restaurant and laid off the cook. Their weekday business has dwindled to just a few diners.

A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
By FRANK RICH
Published: April 24, 2005

...The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.

Stephanopolis is still too damn nice, but I get to run the PVR to show Sen. Jon Kyl's avoiding a simple question: if the allegations against Bolton are true, isn't that cause to reject his nomination?

And the argument there has never been a judicial filibuster is, I think, nicely countered by the Justice Fortis filibuster...whenever that was. I never heard of it before...

Evidence in Vioxx Suits Shows Intervention by Merck Officials
By ALEX BERENSON

In 2000, amid rising concerns that its painkiller Vioxx posed heart risks, Merck overruled one of its own scientists after he suggested that a patient in a clinical trial had probably died of a heart attack.

In an e-mail exchange about Vioxx, the company's most important new drug at the time, a senior Merck scientist repeatedly urged the researcher to change his views about the death "so that we don't raise concerns." In later reports to the Food and Drug Administration and in a paper published in 2003, Merck listed the cause of death as "unknown" for the patient, a 73-year-old woman.

Quote of note:

...it's hard not to scratch your head when conservative Republican senators like Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa talk about finding new revenue for Social Security so we don't borrow fresh trillions, while the policy professionals trumpet the miracle of the free lunch. They don't call it "political economy" for nothing.

Private Accounts, and Priorities
By MATT MILLER

WHATEVER you think of President Bush's proposal to let people divert a third of their Social Security payroll taxes into new private accounts, one thing seems a mystery.

Many Say End of Firearm Ban Changed Little
By DEBORAH SONTAG

Despite dire predictions that the streets would be awash in military-style guns, the expiration of the decade-long assault weapons ban last September has not set off a sustained surge in the weapons' sales, gun makers and sellers say. It also has not caused any noticeable increase in gun crime in the past seven months, according to several metropolitan police departments.

The uneventful expiration of the assault weapons ban did not surprise gun owners, nor did it surprise some advocates of gun control. Rather, it underscored what many of them had said all along: that the ban was porous - so porous that assault weapons remained widely available throughout their prohibition.