Quote of note:

...what does this tax relief offer and to whom? How effective is it likely to be in easing the Gulf Coast poverty it laid bare? And how does it fit into the federal budget still being negotiated?

Unfortunately, the answer to the first question is that tax relief will probably benefit investors and businesses long before it benefits victims.

Even if enterprise zones and employer credits yield long-term benefits, the relief will flow too slowly to the displaced evacuees who most need rapid relief. The hotel chain benefits from its tax credits right away; but the homeless, out-of-work chambermaid/busboy doesn't get a new job for a year.

This Aid Will Float the Wrong Boats
By Cheryl Block
Sunday, October 2, 2005;

In broad terms the hypothesis that popular religiosity is socially beneficial holds that high rates of belief in a creator, as well as worship, prayer and other aspects of religious practice, correlate with lowering rates of lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity, and abortion, as well as improved physical health. Such faith-based, virtuous “cultures of life” are supposedly attainable if people believe that God created them for a special purpose, and follow the strict moral dictates imposed by religion.

Dale Ashberry sent me a link to this

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

I found out the requirement they are considering is, if you use code that implements a  "download source code" command, anyone who derives from that code must include a "download source code" command. I can easily live with that.

Got this via the contact form.

here's the deal for realz......I have never actually gone out and purchased any of Mr. West's music or merchandise. things change. when he came out and said what he did about our " thief in chief" bush, and then I heard that pepsi dropped their endorsement of him....I decided then and there to withhold any money I may have spent on buying pepsi products, and instead I have decided to put that money towards the purchase of any of Kanye's products. no matter what!!! he told the truth, unlike sooooo many others, and I just need for him to know that I walk the walk. I support him, not just in thought.... but in purchase power. long live Kanye. please tell him I said so. I will also spread this word to the fullest. light and blessings always...

Umm, not to nitpick but I think the civil rights movement involved more pressing issues than the loss of a celebrity sponsorship? Either way, when I looked for confirmation of the story all I found was this reply from Pepsi, claiming it's just a rumor:

Pepsi Says They Didn't Can Kanye

Nicole Bradley, Manager, Public Relations, Pepsi-Cola North America:

"Hello EUR: This note is to inform you that you've received an erroneous email regarding Kanye West and Pepsi. The letter said that Kanye has lost his endorsement deal with Pepsi, which is not true.

Our relationship with Kanye has not changed and our marketing campaign is continuing as planned. In fact, his Pepsi commercial is scheduled to air several times this week. Thanks for giving us the chance to clarify the situation and please feel free to share this note with anyone else who may have received the message."

I know y'all remember Bill O'Reilly jocking Luda. Still, trust but verify. 

Brothers and sisters...I officially request that you stop and check things out before you act on anything you get in the email from someone you don't personally know. If you choose to spread the word before you verify, let folks know you passed it on without checking on it. You do not want to disspate the impact of any legitimate actions you choose to take.

Echidne of the Snakes discusses Bennett's somewhat Freudian slip, and in the comments and adherant of Steve Sailor joins the fray.

Jimmy Ho, who is a regual reader here, links to our discussion of same, suggesting interested parties check it out.

The response was:

Jimmy Ho,

Is that some kind of slam at me? If so, be more forthright and tell me what you really think.
TangoMan | Homepage | 09.30.05 - 8:28 pm

Quote of note:

All U.S. oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, about 1.5 million barrels a day, had been offline for five days in a row since Rita made landfall last Saturday near the Texas-Louisiana border. Some output finally returned on Thursday, when about 33,000 barrels a day, or 1.4 percent of normal production, came back on online.

Katrina pipeline damage more than first thought
By Tom Doggett
Thu Sep 29, 3:16 PM ET

Hurricane Katrina did more damage to underwater oil and natural gas pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico than previously thought, according to the U.S. agency that oversees offshore energy production.

New Orleans' racial makeup up in air
Some black areas may not be rebuilt, HUD chief says
By LORI RODRIGUEZ and ZEKE MINAYA
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

It will be years before New Orleans regains the half-million population it had before Hurricane Katrina, and the population might never again be predominantly black, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said Wednesday during a visit to Houston.

"Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time," he said. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

He said he isn't sure that the Ninth Ward, a predominantly black and poor neighborhood devastated by flooding, should be rebuilt at all. If it is, the new construction should be designed to withstand disaster, he said.

Race, Class and Katrina
Thursday, September 22, 2005

What did we learn from Hurricane Katrina about race and justice in America? How can these lessons strengthen journalism about justice and injustice? What do journalists need to know to report accurately and authoritatively about race and poverty? What questions should reporters and editors be asking to help the public understand and care about the complexities and consequences of class-based racism in a new world?

Legal scholar Lani Guinier of Harvard, author and journalist Ellis Cose and other journalists will share their perspectives in live webcasts from Harvard University on Thursday, September 22.

The webcasts are part of a weeklong conference on "Covering News of Race in a New Era," co-sponsored by USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

In Even big guys deserve a fair trial, Andrés Martinez makes an absurd attempt to paint Corporate America as poor little guys struggling against the massive power of Big Government.

Roberts' impressive qualifications and moderate temperament make today's scheduled confirmation vote in the Senate a foregone conclusion, and next week the Roberts court will begin taking shape. But an important early test of its character is how it deals with some of society's most unpopular defendants facing the full force of government power — those terror detainees in Guantanamo, death row inmates in Texas seeking federal review of their shoddy state prosecutions and unpopular corporations caught up in politically expedient lynchings, such as the accounting firm Arthur Andersen several years ago and Philip Morris today.

Quote of note:

But no matter how the vote goes, several officials said in interviews, the violence in Iraq is likely to increase significantly.

Officials Fear Chaos if Iraqis Vote Down the Constitution
By JOEL BRINKLEY and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - Senior American officials say they are confident that Iraq's draft constitution will be approved in the referendum to be held Oct. 15, even though Sunni Arabs in Iraq are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat it.

Quote of note:

FEMA is leasing three ships from Carnival Cruise Lines and a fourth from Scotia Prince Lines; together, they can hold 8,116 people.

As of Wednesday, 3,726 people were on the ships when a census was taken, suggesting they may be less than half full. FEMA officials say that understates occupancy, because not all guests are on the ships at any given time....

But the ship deal has drawn rebukes from several lawmakers, some of whom are calling for an investigation into how the Carnival contract was negotiated. The three Carnival ships are costing the government $236 million, or about $1,280 per person per week, assuming full occupancy. The Scotia Prince ferry, less luxurious, is costing $13 million, or about $500 per person a week.

"Where was the judgment?" said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma.

Mr. Coburn suggested that the government could have saved money by simply sending people on a six-month cruise, as the advertised weekly rates for some Carnival cruises to the Caribbean are lower.

Housing for Storm's Evacuees Lagging Far Behind U.S. Goals
By ERIC LIPTON and LESLIE EATON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - After Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed contracts for more than $2 billion in temporary housing, including more than 120,000 trailers and mobile homes. But the agency has placed just 109 Louisiana families in those homes.

Quote of note:

At its core, the drama unfolding on Auburn Avenue is a power struggle between two intensely private people whose dispute has spilled onto a public stage. But perhaps more importantly, the outcome of their struggle could determine the direction of the King Center, one of the most visible symbols of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy.

The brothers had been fighting for two years but have not wanted their differences made public, said a person close to the family who asked not to be identified. The reasons underlying their quarrel were not apparent late Thursday.

Turmoil at King Center
Brothers feud over who is in charge
By MAE W. GENTRY, MARIA SAPORTA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/30/05

As Coretta Scott King struggles to recover from a debilitating stroke, her sons are feuding over control of the center she created to carry on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, people familiar with the strife say.

Nearly two years after Dexter Scott King announced that he would step down as head of the King Center, it has become evident in recent weeks that the move to shift authority to his older brother Martin Luther King III has unraveled.

Quote of note:

"We're looking at an approach where programs used (on a public server) will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running," Stallman said.

GPL 3 may tackle Web loophole
By Ingrid Marson, CNET News.com
September 27, 2005, 12:28 PM PT

The next version of the General Public License may tackle the issue of Web companies that use free software in commercial Web-based applications but don't distribute the source code.

At present, companies that distribute GPL-licensed software must make the source code publicly available, including any modifications they've made. Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends, it doesn't cover Web companies that use such software to offer their services through the Web, as they're not actually distributing the software.

Quote of note #1

First, how often people reached for the word "hero." It would be interesting to do a word count for mentions of the word "hero" in American public life, as compared with Britain, France or Germany.

Second was the way the Bush administration fell back on the military. After Katrina, members of the 82nd Airborne Division swept the streets of New Orleans, guns at the ready, as if this was Somalia, Kosovo or Iraq...

The third thing that struck me was the number of people left destitute by the damage to their homes. Why? Because they had no savings. Indeed, many of the poor evacuees from New Orleans did not even have a bank account.

Quote of note #2 

This is not just about poverty. It's also about a consumer culture, a relentless commercial pressure to spend, which has given the U.S. its lowest average personal savings rate since 1959.

In the U.S., there's very little padding to absorb another shock, such as the soaring oil prices that are America's other current obsession.

Dream on, America
By Timothy Garton Ash
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a Hoover Institution senior fellow.
September 29, 2005

Quote of note

The initiative would set up a state drug-discount program for low-income residents and give pharmaceutical companies the option to participate. A competing measure, Proposition 79, would set up a more extensive program and give the state power to punish drug makers that don't join.

The trade organization spearheading the Proposition 78 campaign — with more than $80 million in funding from Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline and other drug companies — prefers to focus on what the measure offers

I wonder why... 

...skyrocketing drug costs, and a corresponding rise in industry profits, issues at the heart of the rival ballot initiatives.

Oh! That explains it... 

Prop. 78 May Suffer From Drug Makers' Poor Image
The industry is spending millions on the discount plan but a poll shows distrust of the backers.
By Lisa Girion
Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2005

Feds Take On Outside Political Groups
The Federal Election Commission sues the Club for Growth, a conservative political group, and has launched probes into similar orgainizations
By VIVECA NOVAK

A campaign-finance loophole is suddenly getting squeezed. A year after so-called 527 political groups, like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and America Coming Together, played a piviotal role in the election and drew the ire of political figures on both sides of the aisle, the Federal Election Commission is taking closer look at their activities. The agency filed suit last week against the Club for Growth, a pro-free market, anti-tax group that raised $8.5 million last year and targeted, among others, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. The FEC's lawsuit, which accuses the conservative group of operating as a political committee which is therefore subject to caps on contributions, could be the first in a string of similar actions. America Coming Together, the mammoth pro-Democratic voter mobilization group, is also being investigated by the FEC, the group's former CEO, Steve Rosenthal, told TIME. America Coming Together and its counterpart, the Media Fund, raised nearly $200 million in the 2004 election cycle for get-out-the-vote efforts and ads in battleground states. Election lawyers in Washington say the FEC has been papering other 527s with subpoenas.

Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down"

Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies "would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do," then added again, "but the crime rate would go down."

Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument.

From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America:

All the links are below the fold, in case you really don't care.

You'll note that when everyone was talking about how wonderful it was that reporters  finally woke up and refused to spin the Katrina disaster, I was not among them. Standing in that horror would take almost any human outside the range of things they know how to respond to. It didn't surprise me that when shocked speechless yet pressed to speak, they'd find themselves unable to dissemble.

Me, I've been waiting to see if it was an actual state change or just exhaustion.

I'm still not sure. But that most of the major news sources I check are getting around to reporting how wrong the accusations of beastial behavior were is a good sign.

Now, every news anchor that repeated it on TV and radio needs to let his audience know he received bad information (even in the cases where they themselves inflated the issue, I'm willing to let them get away with it if they just clean up the mess).

Latinos don't need a made-up identity
Hispanic Heritage Month lumps together too many Latin American nationalities, ethnicities and cultures to have any real meaning.
By José Enrique Idler
José Enrique Idler, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on federal ethno-racial classification and Latino identity.
September 29, 2005

WE'RE IN THE middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 each year. Since the celebration's inception during the Lyndon Johnson administration, it has been, along with other ethnic celebrations, a staple of the cultural diversity movement. As the appreciation for diversity has become stronger, so has the length of the celebration — from a week in 1968, it was extended to a month in 1988.

Supreme Court agrees to hear Anna Nicole Smith case

The high court agreed Tuesday to hear an appeal by television reality star Smith in her fight with the family of J. Howard Marshall, whom she married in 1994. Smith, Playboy's 1993 Playmate of the Year, was 26 at the time; Marshall was 89.

Text of DeLay press statement
Associated Press

Text of remarks by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, on Wednesday, as transcribed by DeLay's office:

__

DELAY: Good morning. Thank you for attending.

This morning, in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas named Ronnie Earle charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy, a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts.

This is one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history.

It is a sham, and Mr. Earle knows it.

It is a charge that can not hold up even under the most glancing scrutiny.

U.S. House leader DeLay resigns after indictment
Last Updated Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:24:38 EDT

U.S. House majority leader Tom DeLay resigned on Wednesday after a Texas grand jury indicted him and two associates on charges of conspiracy in fundraising. A defiant DeLay insisted on his innocence and called the prosecutor a "partisan fanatic."

DeLay is the first House leader to be indicted while in office in at least a century, according to congressional historians.

"I have done nothing wrong. ... I am innocent," DeLay said at a news conference during which he criticized the Texas prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, repeatedly, calling him an "unabashed partisan zealot." DeLay said the charges amounted to "one of the weakest and most baseless indictments in American history."

My review copy of Active Liberty : Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution by Stephen Breyer just got here, so I guess I'm not heading out to get Who Rules America? just yet.

Bush's Approval Rating Of Other Americans Also At All-Time Low
September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39

WASHINGTON, DC—Shortly after President Bush's job-approval rating dipped to 40 percent, the lowest of his presidency, a poll indicated that Bush's approval rating for American citizens is also at an all-time low. "At 30 percent, President Bush's satisfaction with 'likely voters' is the lowest it's ever been," said Rachel Markham of TNS Intersearch. While Bush finds that 40 percent of Americans are "on the right track," he said he believes only 30 percent will do a good job supporting him in the event of another disaster or terrorist attack.

I thought my next book would be Active Liberty : Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution by Stephen Breyer.

Nope. That's next-next. Next is Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social Change by G. William Domhoff. I'm going by the support website when I say this book has mad potential. In fact, I'm stealing the home page.

This Web site is an extension of the book Who Rules America? It is meant for students, researchers, and anyone else who wants to know more about what social scientists have to say about power and power structure research.

You'll find the following here: a brief overview of the American power structure at the national level and an in-depth look at power at the local level; an overview of the Four Networks theory of power, which provides the best general theory of power and social change within which to situate the class-domination theory I've developed specifically for the United States; commentaries on alternative theories of power; a special section on the Bohemian Club & Bohemian Grove, including pictures of the club in San Francisco and the encampment in the redwoods; suggestions for activists on what they can learn from social science research; links to Web sites and books about power and social change in the United States; and much more. You can use the menu on the left side of the page to navigate through the site.

Continued below the fold. 

Quote of note:

Sworn testimony as well as two newspaper accounts note that Bonsell and other board members dismissed the separation of church and state as a myth, and initially favored equally teaching creationism and evolution. Bonsell and the board members have denied making these statements or have said they were misquoted. The board meetings were taped, but the tapes apparently were destroyed.

I wonder if they'll accept support from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Intimidation Alleged On 'Intelligent Design'
Teacher Cites School Board Pressure
By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 28, 2005; Page A03

When people say, "So-and-so is a scumbag," and someone says, "I agree with So-and-so" immediately afterward, some of the scum is magically deposited on the someone.

When people say, "So-and-so is cool," and someone says, "I agree with So-and-so" immediately afterward, some of the coolness is magically deposited on the someone.

And the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

It's not something I can change. It's just the way preconscious mental processes work.

Ex-FEMA Director Says He Issued Early Warnings
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - Michael D. Brown, who stepped down as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the government's much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, told a Congressional committee on Tuesday that he had warned the White House of impending disaster several days before the storm struck.

Asked when the White House became aware that a "disaster was looming" in the Gulf Coast region, Mr. Brown said he had warned Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff, at least three days before the hurricane hit New Orleans on Aug. 28.

"They were aware of that by Thursday or Friday because Andy Card and I were communicating at that point," Mr. Brown told a special House committee investigating the government's response. "In fact, I remember saying to Andy at one point that this is going to be a bad one. They were focused about it. They knew it."