Quote of note:

According to a 2002 Time/CNN survey, most Americans believe the world will end not in a grinding collapse but a blinding flash of biblical light: the Rapture. Such end-times religiosity holds that environmental destruction is only a signpost on the road to salvation.

What, I asked Diamond, was the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking? "Probably that God would not let anything happen to his chosen people," he replied.

Feels Like End Times
Dan Neil

The end of the world is getting a lot of attention lately. And I don't mean Steven Spielberg's re-mounting of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds." We should be so lucky.

...If you haven't already, seek out Elizabeth Kolbert's three-part series on climate change in the New Yorker, then find a quiet place to lie down and let the dread wash over you. To briefly paraphrase Kolbert, the United States, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is essentially a carbon rogue state, contemptuous of international efforts to curb the global warming that is already bringing misery to parts of the Earth.

Quote of note:

As a visiting lecturer at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, I talked with a number of journalism students fresh from seeing the movie and fired with outrage, demanding to know why nothing had been done. Why had the world remained silent while the butchers did their work? Why hadn't there been coverage? Why hadn't it been on the news? Well, it was. I showed them the tapes of the broadcasts my "Nightline" crew did at the time. And when they were over, there was stunned silence.

There Is Evil
A TV news producer thought he'd seen humanity at its worst in Kosovo, Somalia, and other infernos, but what he saw in Rwanda was unspeakable. Until now.
By Leroy Sievers
Leroy Sievers is a former executive producer of "Nightline."
June 12, 2005

Different Speeds for Wheels of Discipline
Contrasts in how the sheriff and LAPD dealt with two high-profile cases show the difficulty of quickly resolving misconduct allegations.
By Amanda Covarrubias and Andrew Blankstein
Times Staff Writers
June 11, 2005

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca took a month to investigate and discipline the deputies who fired 120 shots into a Compton neighborhood.

But nearly a year after a Los Angeles police officer was videotaped beating a car-chase suspect with his flashlight in another part of Compton, the LAPD has yet to determine what, if any, discipline he and other officers involved should receive.

Yet.

Henry teen charged in death of sister
By KATHY JEFCOATS, ERNIE SUGGS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/10/05

Hours after his little sister was pronounced dead, 15-year-old Kevin Jones was charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with her shooting death.

A warrant was issued for the Henry County teen Thursday, and he was scheduled for a hearing in Juvenile Court at 10 a.m. today. But police said late Thursday they don't know where the teen is. Henry County police Detective Rene Swanson said she has not had contact with the Jones family since the charge was filed.

Quote of note:

"Maybe they have microphones in the lentils," deadpanned Winslow T. Wheeler, a Pentagon budget analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, who worked for 20 years on military budget matters at the U.S. Senate and General Accounting Office.

"This is absolutely typical of Department of Defense acquisition and contracting," he added. "I'm surprised it's not more. DOD doesn't build products, it builds costs."

U.S. gives glimpse of costs at prison
The Pentagon made a rare Guantánamo Bay prison disclosure: It spends $12.68 per day to feed Muslim-approved meals to each terrorism suspect.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG

An LA Times editorial reminded me of something I wrote two years ago, and so became the Quote of note:

Envy Them? No. Tax Them? Oh Yeah.
Jonathan Chait
June 10, 2005

There are certainly subjects that liberals refuse to discuss without resorting to hysteria and name-calling. (Ask Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who has spent much of the year groveling abjectly for having delicately suggested the possibility that maybe inherent differences play a role in the paucity of female scientists.) But that's nothing compared to the way conservatives react when somebody brings up the topic of economic class.

The Imaginary Candidate

The boy's a computer geek, which is prima facie evidence he shouldn't be commenting on social issues that involve women.

Inequality, by the Numbers
Don't fight bigotry with stats and ratios.
DAVID GELERNTER
June 10, 2005

Two news topics show why Democratic positions often strike Republicans as half-baked. First, the Title IX crusade to increase the number of female college athletes. (The Supreme Court turned down a Title IX challenge this week.) Second, Harvard President Lawrence Summers' revised view of women in science, and his ongoing penance for previous errors. (Harvard announced last month that it would be spending big bucks in the hopes of achieving gender equity among professors.)

Everybody Into the Insurance Pool
By Jamie Court
Jamie Court, author of "Corporateering" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004), is president of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.

...The few rules of fairness in the market don't apply to individuals who buy insurance alone, only to groups of policyholders traditionally organized by employers and professional organizations.

An individual seeking insurance can be denied a policy for any medical reason. If you are overweight, or in therapy, or your kid takes Ritalin, chances are insurers won't sell you a policy. If you sign up through an employer or another professional group, however, coverage is guaranteed. So is the price of the policy.

Quote of note:

Did I mention that American scientists are tracking a mysterious spike in the U.S. of the human form of BSE, known as Creutzfeldt Jakob disease?

Brain degeneration at the Dept. of Agriculture (David Shuster)

...At the moment, there appears to be an outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan... and American researchers are incredibly nervous that we may be on the verge of a deadly mad cow outbreak here in the United States. That s what makes the U.S. Department of Agriculture s approach so troubling.

As it stands, the U.S. Department of Agriculture refuses to even consider the main recommendations put forward by the World Health Organization that have stopped mad cow disease across Europe.  What are these recommendations?  The first is testing. The other is to stop the practice of feeding cow blood, tissue, and slaughterhouse waste to other cows. 

Quote of note:

Since 2002, the Food and Drug Administration has advised hospitals to limit use of medical devices that contain phthalates. But the agency has not banned them and many neonatal units still use them despite the availability of alternatives.

Babies Show High Levels of Chemical
A study of infants in intensive care finds a substance used in medical supplies that causes testicular damage in animals.
By Marla Cone
Times Staff Writer
June 9, 2005

A Harvard study of babies in hospital intensive care units has found new evidence of high levels of a hormone-altering chemical in newborns treated with plastic medical devices.

If you can't say something nice...

Senate Approves Brown
The California justice is confirmed to the D.C. appeals court after nearly two years. Schwarzenegger will pick her replacement.
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer
June 9, 2005

WASHINGTON   The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm California jurist Janice Rogers Brown to a seat on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a position that could place her on President Bush's short list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Brown   praised by Republicans for judicial restraint and denounced by Democrats as a conservative ideologue   was confirmed by a vote of 56 to 43. One Democrat crossed party lines to support the confirmation.

Japan unveils "robot suit" that enhances human power
Tue Jun 7,10:14 AM ET

Japan has taken a step into the science-fiction world with the release of a "robot suit" that can help workers lift heavy loads or assist people with disabilities climb stairs.

"Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future," said Yoshiyuki Sankai, professor and engineer at Tsukuba University who led the project.

The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.

Brad Plumer has a grip,

A few comments. Obviously the "acting white" phenomenon only has a strong effect on achievement if the loss of friends is high enough to act as a deterrent on doing well in school. Intuitively, I'm not sure it does. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a similar white student. Friends are nice and all, but that's not a huge difference. It's also possible that the causal arrow is all wrong here. The "acting white" thesis suggests that smart black students get scorned by their peers, but it could simply be that black students who are unpopular for other reasons just end up spending more time in the library and hence, get higher grades.

but slips:

Before I say anything else: white folks, you got the whole wrong idea.Black folks upbraid one another on occasion thus:

"You think you're white!"

As People of the Word, you should recognize there's a big difference between "You're doing things white people do" and "You think you're white."

On to the topic. In February of this year Mr. Fryer published An Economic Analysis of 'Acting White' with David Austen-Smith. From the abstract:

This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer effect entitled 'acting white' 'Acting White' is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary: signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer effects, equilibria involve all ability types choosing different levels of education. 'Acting White' alters the equilibrium dramatically: the (possibly empty) set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type through investments in education; ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level. Only those in the lower intervals are accepted by the group. The model's predictions fit many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members.

Wtf is a "stylized" fact? And that "equilibria" of "all ability types choosing different levels of education" is an unsupported assumption.

Our foreign and economic policies are one and the same.

Is this something that a black partisan can get with, or, is it a moral and cultural abomination that we should oppose?

I think it's something a Black partisan takes into account.

Quote of note:

They took his bloody chainsaw, and sent him on his way
Man on run from law, spattered with blood, allowed to enter U.S.
Gary Dimmock and Chuck Brown
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The Quote of note comes from TrueMajority:

The principles for TrueMajority are revenue neutral. If Washington enacted all of these changes it wouldn't cost us an extra cent.

By ending programs that are detrimental to America s security and harm our nation s role in the world, these changes would provide $40 billion in savings. We can then invest that sum in programs that enhance security by attacking poverty at home and abroad, restore the environment and celebrate the dignity of all the people of the world.

Here is where we would invest the money

Double K-12 education funding.
Renovate public schools over 10 years:	$12 billion
Reduce class size in grades 1-3 to 15 students per class:	$11 billion
Modernize computer technology over 5 years:	$11 billion
Double humanitarian aid to poor countries:	$10 billion
Offer health insurance to all uninsured American kids:	$ 6 billion
Increase federal funding for clean energy and energy efficiency:	$ 5 billion
Reduce debts of impoverished nations:	$ 2 billion
Fully fund Head Start:	$ 2 billion
Provide Public financing of federal elections:	$ 1 billion
TOTAL	$ 60 billion

Here are the savings from Cutting Outmoded Programs

Bring home 100,000 troops and modernize Cold War strategies:	$20 billion
Reduce nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads:	$15 billion
Cut Cold War weapons:	$12 billion
Eliminate Star Wars:	$ 8 billion
Curb international weapons sales:	$ 4 billion
Eliminate offshore corporate tax loophole:	$ 1 billion
TOTAL	$60 billion

Arms Fiascoes Lead to Alarm Inside Pentagon
By TIM WEINER

Quote of note:

"He does still work at Pfizer," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "We continue to employ him." By yesterday afternoon, after a reporter's inquiries with the company, Dr. Rost reported that his e-mail account was working again.

At Pfizer, the Isolation Increases for a Whistle-Blower
By ALEX BERENSON

No man is an island. But Peter Rost is getting close.

Dr. Rost, a vice president for marketing at Pfizer with a history of corporate whistle-blowing, has for the last year publicly criticized the pharmaceutical industry over the price of drugs. Along the way, Dr. Rost has become increasingly isolated at Pfizer, the world's largest drug company.

Consumer Debt Rises, but Less Than Expected
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, June 7 (AP) - Americans increased their borrowing for auto loans and other types of consumer debt at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in April, the slowest increase in five months, the Federal Reserve said Tuesday.

The Fed reported that consumer credit rose $1.26 billion in April, significantly below the $7.5 billion increase that many analysts had been expecting.

The 0.7 percent April rate of increase came after a revised 3.9 percent gain in March and was the smallest gain since a 0.2 percent increase last November.

The consumer has been the star of the economic recovery from the 2001 recession, increasing personal borrowing to record levels to support continued strong gains in spending.

After Lowering Goal, Army Falls Short on May Recruits
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, June 7 - Even after reducing its recruiting target for May, the Army missed it by about 25 percent, Army officials said on Tuesday. The shortfall would have been even bigger had the Army stuck to its original goal for the month.

On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that it met only 75 percent of its recruiting goal for May, the fourth consecutive monthly shortfall in the number of new recruits sent to basic training. Just over 5,000 new recruits entered boot camp in May.

But the news could have appeared worse. Early last month, the Army, with no public notice, lowered its long-stated May goal to 6,700 recruits from 8,050. Compared with the original target, the Army achieved only 62.6 percent of its goal for the month.

Quote of note:

When loser chic works, as in "The Comeback" and the original "Office," the characters are not pathetic but poignant and likable, endless strivers who earn our respect and even affection. Viewers embrace them for reasons that go beyond Schadenfreude. These heroes offer relief from the oppressive image of perfection that can seem like a media assault on ordinary people.

New On-Screen Losers Are Winning a Following
By CARYN JAMES

Is America finally ready to embrace its inner loser? From Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger through "American Idol" and "The Apprentice," the rags-to-riches success story has been a central cultural myth. But now the most daring television heroine is Lisa Kudrow as an actress on a hopeless quest to regain her former stardom, in the new HBO series "The Comeback." That show echoes, without quite matching, the tragicomedy of the British series "The Office," about an obnoxious middle manager with no place to go but down.

Until I read this.

It was against this backdrop that The Source, another urban magazine, implausibly likened Ms. Jones's prosecution to the dirty tricks that were launched against law-abiding civil rights groups by the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960's.

I don't read this genre of magazine...did that really happen? Because if it did, niggas need to raise up off that chronic before writing...

The Hip-Hop Media - a World Where Crime Really Pays
By BRENT STAPLES

...The July issue of the magazine XXL - "The Jail Issue" - trumpets "exclusive interviews" with "hip-hop's incarcerated soldiers."

Quote of note:

Mr. Cooney's alterations can cause clear shifts in meaning. For example, a sentence in the October 2002 draft of "Our Changing Planet" originally read, "Many scientific observations indicate that the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change." In a neat, compact hand, Mr. Cooney modified the sentence to read, "Many scientific observations point to the conclusion that the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change."

...even though

A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, said yesterday that Mr. Cooney would not be available to comment. "We don't put Phil Cooney on the record," Ms. St. Martin said. "He's not a cleared spokesman."

He's cleared to spin data he's not qualified to generate.

The Bush Economy

...President Bush did not create the income gap. But the unheralded effect of his tax policy is its unequal impact on the modestly well to do. By 2015, those making between $80,000 and $400,000 will pay as much as 13.9 percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $400,000, assuming the tax cuts are made permanent. Below $80,000, most taxpayers will see their share of taxes rise slightly or stay the same.

Quote of note:

Excluding heavily minority areas from town boundaries is a common but little examined practice, particularly in small towns in the South, civil rights advocates and geographers say.

In County Made Rich by Golf, Some Enclaves Are Left Behind
By SHAILA DEWAN

PINEHURST, N.C., June 2- Golf has made Moore County rich. There are spas, country clubs and new $2 million homes. The United States Open, to be held later this month on the most famous of the county's 43 golf courses, is expected to bring $124 million to the state.

But as developers rush to provide "resort quality" amenities in the newest subdivisions, some neighborhoods have been left behind - without sewers, police service, garbage pickup or even, in some cases, piped water.

Quote of note:

"We didn't need those aircraft either, but we didn't screw the taxpayer in the process," Garant added

E-Mails Detail Air Force Push for Boeing Deal
Pentagon Official Called Proposed Lease of Tankers a 'Bailout,' Report Finds
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; A01

For the past three years, the Air Force has described its $30 billion proposal to convert passenger planes into military refueling tankers and lease them from Boeing Co. as an efficient way to obtain aircraft the military urgently needs.

But a very different account of the deal is shown in an August 2002 internal e-mail exchange among four senior Pentagon officials.

Quote of note:

The National Dairy Council has spent $200 million since 2003 to promote the idea that milk can help people lose weight. Some research has suggested that calcium or other elements in milk may cause the body to make less fat and speed its elimination, but the studies produced mixed results.

Study: More Milk Means More Weight Gain
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; A03

Children who drink more than three servings of milk each day are prone to becoming overweight, according to a large new study that undermines a heavily advertised dairy industry claim that milk helps people lose weight.

Customer Data Lost, Citigroup Unit Says
3.9 Million Affected As Firms' Security Lapses Add Up
By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; A01

A unit of financial services giant Citigroup Inc. said yesterday that a box of computer tapes with account information for 3.9 million customers had been lost in shipment, exposing a vast new swath of Americans to the increased possibility of identity theft.

The announcement from CitiFinancial, a subsidiary that provides personal and home equity loans, pushes to more than 6 million the number of U.S. consumers whose personal data have been lost or stolen in just the past six months. The spate of breaches has included federal agencies, universities, banks and other financial institutions, data brokers and data-storage companies.

His ultimate goal is, I think, beyond his capabilities.

Quote of note:

For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002, Mr. Johnston wrote, each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000.

The Mobility Myth
By BOB HERBERT

The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who's winning.

A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they're getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions.

Quote of note:

Dr. Fred Valentine, director of the AIDS research center at New York University, who is also pushing the city to switch, said, "In the best of all worlds, you'd test everybody both ways," but that would require pouring much more money into testing.

H.I.V. Tests Pose Choice of Breakthroughs
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

For almost two decades, H.I.V. tests had two glaring flaws. They did not detect the earliest stage of infection, when people are more likely to spread the virus. And they took days to produce results, and many people never returned to learn whether they were infected.

Stem Cell Advances May Make Moral Issue Moot
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 6, 2005; Page A07

...In recent months, a number of researchers have begun to assemble intriguing evidence that it is possible to generate embryonic stem cells without having to create or destroy new human embryos.

The research is still young and largely unpublished, and in some cases it is limited to animal cells. Scientists doing the work also emphasize their desire to have continued access to human embryos for now. It is largely by analyzing how nature makes stem cells, deep inside days-old embryos, that these researchers are learning how to make the cells themselves.

This should be filed under "People of the Word" because if they pull it off it will be final proof that reality can't withstand a dedicated verbal assault.

"Obviates the need for the entire article" of note:

Digging deeper, they found that their overall results did not change significantly when they examined all of a student's friends, regardless of race.

This is the sort of crap that gives economics a bad name and justifies the derision with which the "physics envy" pejorative is delivered.

The Price of Acting White
By Richard Morin
Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B05

" Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
-- Barack Obama, keynote speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention

It may be even worse than Obama imagined: It's not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of "acting white" appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades.

At least that's the claim of Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, who have mined an unusually detailed data set on teenage students to study the relationship between performance and popularity in public and private schools.

Can someone make this mutha fukka shut up? Check how they calculate popularity:

Old heads will remember when Bugs Bunny cartoons got funnier as you got older. There was an incredible amount of subtext and current events punnery going on in there..which, since they started life as adjuncts to adult movies, makes sense.

There's an article in the SF Chronicle discussing War of the Worlds in advance of the movie release. Here go the credits:

William S. Kowinski is a writer in Arcata. His sci-fi blog is soulofstartrek.blogspot.com.

I went to the blog and got treated to a longer version of the article.

William brings out a lot of context that I was simply unaware of as a child...context it never occurred to me to look for.

Most of them don't have a clue in life of what the KJB actually says. Way too many of them are participating in prayer handkerchief chain letters. WAY, WAY, WAY TOO MANY are devoted to electromagnetic snake oil salesmen and performance artists.

"Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps," said David Black, a retiree from Osborne, Pa., who agreed to be interviewed after he was polled.

And they can't tell the difference between mythology and history.

Anyway...

Poll: Religious Devotion High in U.S.
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer

 from Body and Soul:

Good morning,

  In reaction to one of your many posts regarding the torture of  prisoners at the hands of Americans, I sent an email to both of my senators.  Looking back at my email, I am embarrassed by my quotation  which I erroneously ascribed to you. I apologize for that.  Nevertheless, the response I received from Senator Obama was quite disappointing. Here is the exchange:

My email to Senator Obama:

   I read a blog called "Body and Soul." Today, the author writes about an issue that she has written of several times recently: CIA abductions of people around the world. These people are then transported by private planes to places like Afganistan where they are subjected to torture for extended times only to be released without charges. According to the article, the "White House, Justice Department and CIA officials have long argued that U.S. laws authorize such covert operations," If this is the case, I believe it is imperative that congress issue legislation to stop this morally despicable practice.

1. The elements of Negro culture that enabled creativity and survival during Jim Crow days were valuable elements
2. Many of those elements were voluntarily released in the name of integration (an entirely different issue than social equality or equality before the law).
3. Many of those elements would be useful to us now.
4. We cannot go back in time
5. We do not want to go back in time
6. Any changes we'd like to see must start with us as we are now, not as we were then.

Remember when I said I wanted to get creative?

The Niggerati Network is, technically, almost where I want it. I got rid of the navigation box and replaced it with drop-down menus. If you want to see what members can do, you can log in with your Prometheus 6 user name, like this:

[email protected]

...and your password. You'll see Account and Post options appear in the menu. Look around, I'd like opinions.

And I made another site where I'll put all the techie conversation.

...though the Quote of note:

As we learn more about the human mind, even qualities such as self-discipline seem to be a matter of luck, not grit. The problem, in short, may not be that reality is receding from the national myth. The problem may be the myth.

really does gas it up just a bit...

Mobility Vs. Nobility
By Michael Kinsley
Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B07

According to our founding document and our national myth, we are all created equal, and then it's up to us. Inequality in material things is mitigated in two ways: first, by equal opportunity at the start and, second, by full civil equality despite material differences. We don't claim to have achieved all this, but these are our national goals and we are always moving toward them.

Quote of note:

On Dec. 6, the fires destroyed 12 largely unoccupied Colonial-style houses in the Hunters Brooke development and damaged 15 others. One man, Jeremy D. Parady, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit arson; four others face trial. Parady has said he targeted the houses because many were bought by African Americans. But prosecutors say there could have been more than one motive, including a desire to draw attention to a car club. The men, all white and in their early twenties, have not been charged with hate crimes.

Md. Community Rises, Arson Seared Into Its Consciousness
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 5, 2005; A01

A Battalion for Haiti
Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page B06

THE NEW secretary general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, has pledged to bring up the subject of Haiti at the OAS general assembly beginning tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. If so, it won't be a moment too soon. Fifteen months after U.S. forces escorted a besieged President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile, Haiti once again is on the brink of chaos. An international peacekeeping mission mandated by the United Nations has been a failure; the interim government has not managed to create the conditions that would allow for promised elections in October. Another rescue is needed, one that would benefit from OAS diplomacy but must be founded on the restoration of order. That probably can't happen without American troops.

Bush's Optimism On Iraq Debated
Rosy View in Time Of Rising Violence Revives Criticism
By Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 5, 2005; A01

...While Bush and Vice President Cheney offer optimistic assessments of the situation, a fresh wave of car bombings and other attacks killed 80 U.S. soldiers and more than 700 Iraqis last month alone and prompted Iraqi leaders to appeal to the administration for greater help. Privately, some administration officials have concluded the violence will not subside through this year.

The disconnect between Rose Garden optimism and Baghdad pessimism, according to government officials and independent analysts, stems not only from Bush's focus on tentative signs of long-term progress but also from the shrinking range of policy options available to him if he is wrong. Having set out on a course of trying to stand up a new constitutional, elected government with the security firepower to defend itself, Bush finds himself locked into a strategy that, even if it proves successful, foreshadows many more deadly months to come first, analysts said.

Quote of note:

John Joyner, a 58-year-old businessman from Charlotte, began slipping in references to octoroon concubines in New Orleans and "breeding farms" where enslaved men were forced to impregnate women. He began to improvise in the role of Watt, hoping to provoke strong reactions.

"When people leave these events, they leave applauding, laughing, and saying, 'Thank you for the show,' " said Tiffani Sanders, 32, a freelance graphic designer who volunteered with her husband, Charles. "We should see tears come out of their eyes."

A Hard Truth to Portray
At one of the few museums to stage America's shameful past, slavery reenactors want to reflect more of the brutality.
By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2005