By now several folks will have concluded I'm some Socialist that hates the free market system and wants to redistribute all the wealth evenly to all the citizens of (and illegal aliens in) the country.

BZZZT! Wrong.

Capitalism is great. Free markets are the best. Anyone who doubts that should think about how a team of people could support themselves while inventing the transistor, figuring out how to use it and manufacture it, spreading the word of the existence of the new things it made possible, selling the things and collecting the proceeds of the sales. No, I fully recognize and deeply appreciate the power of the greed it all inspires.

What I am against is the ahistorical belief that the free market is self-sustaining, and the ideal means of rationing all things. That we should monitize whatever we can, simply because we can.

We as a people have made choices. We do not want to see people starve without cause, we do not want to see people homeless without cause, we do not want to see people suffer from illness without cause. And the fact is, any time you seriously make a choice about the nature of general conditions…which requires following through, by the way…you take things out of free market conditions. And because we don't want to see these things, we will either prevent them from happening or remove those to whom it happens from our sight. The cheaper cheaper option is the market based solution.

We as a people have made choices. It seriously is well past time people stop pretending otherwise, because we can seriously damage the legal and social mechanisms that keep the free market going. I'm pretty sure we've already given it a nasty kick in the shin.

Get Your War On is brutal.

9/11 Files Show Warnings Were Urgent and Persistent
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM DWYER

ASHINGTON, April 17 — Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.

At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."

For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after two weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.

The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.

While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.

Huh? What's that got to do with The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act?

A lot. You see, while we're all gloating about the Bushistas getting caught up in lies and having their arrogance exposed for all to see, they're using the hearings to build a case for more oppressive domestic capabilities.

We know what their plans are. We know law enforcement officials have already used their new anti-terrorism powers for non-terrorism-related cases. We've seen an attempt to make the drug "war" part of the "war" on terrorism through the invention ofthe term "narco-terrorist" (hatched, btw, by Ashcroft, who it seems was disregarding terrorism and focusing on drugs all along).

We know they're saying the full powers authorized by the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act have never been used. Why, then, do they want more?

Even if you trust this crew, do you want such powers laying about for future unknowns to use as they see fit?

The P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act expires in 2005, but folks aren't waiting. Patriot II was sliced up into components in an attempt to slip it in, like passing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle under the door. Don't allow it. Even if you think we need more domestic intelligence capabilities (why? The threat was known for years! It wasn't information that was lacking, it was political will) make them prove the need for each additional capability they request. Build in safeguards to prevent their abuse (how? How hell should I know? That neither of us can think of safeguards is just more proof the powers granted by the Act should not exist).

Stay awake. This political thing is about a lot more than Munsters and monkeyboys.

From here…

UnderCurrents: Leaving the Apples at the Bottom of the Bowl
. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR (04-16-04)

Ray Bradbury once wrote a story about a man who entered a home, hung around a while, visiting, and then killed the fellow who lived there. On his way out, the man took out a rag and wiped the places where he thought his fingers might have touched. Each time he was ready to leave, he thought of a new place to wipe where he might have left traces of his identity. And then, it occurred to him that he might not have sufficiently wiped each place, and so he went back to rewipe. The police caught him there some hours later, the house spotless and sparkling, the murderer still mindlessly polishing. He had even polished the wax apples at the bottom of the bowl on the kitchen table.

The whole idea being to avoid capture, the point Mr. Bradbury makes is that in obsessing over the details of an exercise, you sometimes miss the whole reason you started the task.

Thus might my liberal and progressive friends appear to miss the mark in the present hand-rubbing and chortling over the Bush administration’s actions (or inactions) on Sept. 10, 2001, and the days and weeks immediately preceding.

…to here:

Forget the fingerprints, my friends. Stop the goddamn polishing. Remember the whole point of it. The tragedy of the American left, indeed, would be to wake up on the day after the November elections to find their own actions have left neo-conservative policies firmly in place, regardless of whose ass it actually is that sits on that chair in the Oval Office.

Just wondering.

A Different Kind of Intelligence Failure
By ADLAI E. STEVENSON III

…Foreign policy in the Bush administration reflects a lack of experience in the real world away from a Washington overrun with armchair polemicists and think-tank ideologues. Too many inhabitants of this world have no experience in the military, where one learns to expect the unexpected, or in international finance, where America's vulnerability also resides. This White House is well known for its hostility to curiosity and intellectual debate.

After all, terrorism is not a phenomenon of recent origin. Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, did not expect his gunshot to bring about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He expected only a reaction — and the empire's reaction led to World War I and its own downfall. The United States government's reaction to the attacks of 9/11 could end up inflicting great damage on America.

The Bush administration demonstrates the point. One pre-emptive war against the dictator of a desert quasi-state crippled by international sanctions has stretched the American military thin. The United States is widely perceived to be waging war against Islam in the Middle East, a perception reinforced by the president's decision this week to support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and his settlement plan.

Meanwhile, the dollar — a barometer of confidence in the American economy and polity — has sunk against other currencies. In Spain, Argentina, Germany, South Korea and Pakistan, candidates win public office by denouncing or distancing themselves from the Bush administration. This record owes nothing to failures of intelligence.

Studies have recommended reforms of the intelligence community. But reform does not change the limited nature and function of intelligence. There is no substitute for the pragmatic intelligence of policy makers acquired from history and experience in the real world — and the courage to act on it.

Before 9/11, neoconservatives like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney inhabited a world of contending great powers in which force and technology were transcendent. Terrorists armed with box cutters — and now Iraqis resisting the occupation — have exploded their fantasy. The failures of the Bush administration are not those of foreign intelligence but of a cerebral sort of intelligence.

A More Humble Hawk
By DAVID BROOKS
In spite of some missteps, I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that President Bush did the right thing

Oh, it's just David Brooks in the NY Times again. Never mind. No link, you know where that crap is if you want it.

Wal-Mart, a Nation Unto Itself
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 13 — We already know that Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer. (If it were an independent nation, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) We also know that it is maniacal about low prices. (Some economists say it has single-handedly cut inflation by 1 percent in recent years, saving consumers billions of dollars annually.) We know that its labor practices have come under attack. (It charges its workers so much for health insurance that about one-third of them do not have it.)

But the more than 250 sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other scholars who gathered at the University of California here on Monday for a conference on Wal-Mart came looking for more than the company's vital statistics. Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here were examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture. As Susan Strasser, a history professor at the University of Delaware, said, "Wal-Mart has come to represent something that's even bigger than it is."

Indeed, with $256 billion in annual sales and 20 million shoppers visiting its stores each day, Wal-Mart has greater reach and influence than any retailer in history. "In each historical epoch a prototypical enterprise seems to embody a new and innovative set of economic structures and social relationships," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California here and the organizer of the conference. "These template businesses are emulated because they have put in place, indeed perfected for their era, the most efficient and profitable relationship between the technology of production, the organization of work and the new shape of the market."

Just goofing around with a "fortune cookie" generator, looking for clever phrases to stock it with, I encountered:

He who takes credit for rain will be blamed for drought.

and

Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Non-sequitur of note:

Terry Holt, Bush's campaign spokesman, said: "The biggest mistake in this election so far is that Kerry's had no serious policy for winning the war on terror. . . . The Democrats simply don't understand the threat we face."

---

DNC's Ad Mocks Bush Over News Conference
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page A05

The Democratic National Committee is trying to hang President Bush with his own words -- and pauses.

A mocking ad posted on the party's Web site yesterday uses footage of Bush struggling at Tuesday's news conference to answer a question from Time magazine's John Dickerson on what has been his biggest mistake in office.

"Hmm. I wish you had given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it," the president is shown saying, slowly. "You know I just, uh, I'm sure something will pop into my head here, in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet. . . . You just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be on coming up with one."

Some suggested mistakes fill the screen: "Mission accomplished." "We found the weapons of mass destruction." "Bring 'em on." The tag line: "Credibility is on the ballot this November."

In Afghanistan, U.S. Envoy Sits in Seat of Power
By AMY WALDMAN

Published: April 17, 2004

ABUL, Afghanistan — "So what are we doing today?" Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked the United States ambassador, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, as they sat in Mr. Karzai's office.

Mr. Khalilzad patiently explained that they would attend a ceremony to kick off the "greening" of Kabul — the planting and seeding of 850,000 trees — in honor of the Afghan New Year.

Mr. Karzai said he would speak off-the-cuff. Mr. Khalilzad, sounding more mentor than diplomat, approved: "It's good you don't have a text," he told Mr. Karzai. "You tend to do better."

The genial Mr. Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious Mr. Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive. With his command of both details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternate seat of power since his arrival on Thanksgiving.

Gospel Movies Reveal Myth And Society
Whereas The Fighting Temptations portrayed black religious culture as Sunday morning Dance Fever, the Coens' have consistently examined its often ignored complexities.

By Armond White

Church lady Marva Munson, played by Irma P. Hall in The Ladykillers represents an authentic social type so rarely seen in our contemporary popular culture that writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen have virtually rediscovered a lost American. She's a heavy-set widow who wears flowery-print dresses, broad-brim hats and walks in sturdy, splayed-leg steps that recall Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland's description in the film Freedom on My Mind of those Southern black women who marched during the civil rights era: "They be walkin' heavy with such pride. Look like the earth would catch they feet and hold them."

The Coens have re-rooted the proverbial black church mother — a vanished figure in the hip hop landscape - by placing Marva Munson opposite Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks), a criminal mastermind posing as a musicologist. In The Ladykillers' caper plot, Prof. Dorr rents a room in Marva's house and brings in four associates to tunnel from her cellar to a gambling casino that they intend to rob without her knowing, but that's only the movie's dramatic hook. Underneath that is a fascinating, at times powerful, film that satirizes the differences between black and white American culture.

At the moment I'm having trouble remembering what Abiola and I disagreed on.

Deregulation, that's right. That, and fact son the ground about Haiti. Obviously is wasn't anything having to do with how to treat folks.

---

Attack of the LGFers

For me, the strange thing about the sheer level of hatred and intolerance of dissenting viewpoints displayed by LGF commenters on questions relating to the Middle East and Islam is that, unlike most of these people, I've spent years living in a majority muslim environment, have seen the dark side of Islamic zealotry at first-hand, and yet, I've managed to avoid developing a generalized hatred of all things Islamic of the kind on show at LGF or "Emperor Misha." In fact, I'm willing to bet that the average Israeli, despite living daily with the threat of being killed by Islamic fanatics while going about his or her daily business, harbors less hatred for Islam than your run-of-the-mill LGFer.

…As I've said before, Islam as practiced by the majority of muslims in our day really does have serious problems, which aren't just confined to "a small minority", as the usual cant on this issue goes. Nevertheless, mindless hatred and dehumanization of all muslims will do absolutely nothing to move things forward to a state where the most we'll have to worry about from religious muslims will be phenomena like the Religious Right's never-ending attempts to get abortion outlawed and creationism into the schoolbooks; to the contrary, indiscriminate bashing of muslims as "vermin", "subhumans", "ragheads" and so forth is a surefire way to undermine any moral claims outsiders may seek to make with respect to the practice of Islam.

Trustee seeks apology for spoof photo

Parents opposing a school program used a picture from a satirical newspaper on their pamphlets.
MARISSA NELSON, Free Press Education Reporter 2004-04-08 03:15:19

A school board trustee is demanding an apology from a parents' group that used a fake photo from a satirical newspaper on its pamphlets opposing the expansion of a safe schools policy. Simply Truths Our Priority, or STOP, handed out pamphlets and computer discs with a 300-page book of Internet research outside a public meeting last week.

…The photo shows a teacher at the front of a class with explicit sexual images and terms drawn on the board and is supposed to represent one of the "countless" classrooms where homosexuality is promoted.

The picture was copied from the Onion, a satirical newspaper from the United States. The headline of the 1998 story says, " '98 homosexual drive nearing goal."

The story, written out of San Francisco, goes on to say children are being successfully recruited into homosexuality because of the "gay lobby's infiltration of America's public schools."

Are there any legitimate government functions beyond national defense and enforcement of contracts?

If so, what are they?

Are principles also to be enforced?

How would a Libertarian government pay for national defense and enforcing contracts?

I won't be challenging the answers. I may ask a followup question or two.

Voted in the first of many Rittenhouse Review weekly polls?

This week’s question, I’ll admit, is a tough one: “Who is the most dishonest member of the Bush administration?”

I provided eight choices (in alphabetical order) -- John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Elaine Chao, Dick Cheney, Scott McClellan, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld -- though the software I use allowed for as many as 10 options, but let’s not go crazy, right?

It's not a popular choice, but I'm leaning toward Colin Powell, because I get the sense the other guys believe in what they're doing but Gen. Powell doesn't.

Thanks a lot, Oliver.

Does Big Government Hurt Economic Growth?
By JEFF MADRICK

IN widely reported comments before a Congressional committee in February, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, suggested that President Bush's tax cuts should not be even partly rescinded. Rather, Mr. Greenspan said, the nation should cut future domestic spending, including Social Security benefits, to balance the budget. Higher spending or higher taxes would deter economic growth, he warned.

The committee should have asked the statistically oriented chairman for the evidence. A comprehensive analysis by the economic historian Peter H. Lindert, published in a new book, "Growing Public" (Cambridge University Press), contends that there simply is none. His analysis is partly a broad extension of other studies by economists like Joel B. Slemrod of the University of Michigan, but he adds considerably to the argument.

…As Mr. Lindert points out, estimates by some economists, like Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, find that extra government spending leads to a large reduction in gross domestic product.

In fact, taken literally, these studies suggest that the gross domestic product of Sweden, to take an example of a nation with heavy social spending, should have been reduced by up to 50 percent. But nothing remotely like that has happened.

The principal problem with such studies, Mr. Lindert writes, is that they are simulations of a highly simplified world. The economists recreate an economy where almost all incentives lead to slower growth, Mr. Lindert said, but that world does not exist.

Statistics vs. quality of life, indeed.

As suggested by George

1.Grab the nearest book.
In my case, Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson…

2.Open the book to page 23.
3.Find the fifth sentence.
…ignoring the fractional sentence that starts the page…

4.Post the text of the sentence on your blog.
I come up with:

Mindreading is literally a part of our nature.

…which certainly reassures me about the outcome of a recent mailing list discussion.

Ad Let Out of the Bag
Disavowed Video Riles but Reaches Audience
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page E01

It's a scene that's hard to believe, and Ford Motor Co. says it didn't want anyone to see it in the first place:

A small black car is parked in a suburban British driveway, accompanied by the sound of birds chirping. A ginger-colored cat wanders up, and the car's sunroof suddenly slides open. The cat climbs up the hood and windshield to investigate, pokes its head into the sunroof . . . and the sunroof draws shut, slowly beheading the cat.

The tagline says, "Ford Sportka, The Ka's evil twin."

The 40-second video is an Internet-only advertisement for a small Ford hatchback sold in Britain. Except that Ford has disowned the ad, claiming that it rejected the spot as too extreme and did not approve its release.

How the video wound up e-mailed around the world over the past few days is something of a mystery. Animal rights advocates in the United Kingdom have condemned it in the British press, and Ford's ad agency -- Ogilvy & Mather -- is conducting an internal investigation to figure out what happened.

But in the world of Internet "viral" advertising, which aims to reach Web-savvy young people with offbeat messages that are so funny or shocking they'll spread through e-mail like viruses, the cat spot is already considered a big success.

A Difficult Lesson
Job Retraining, Though Touted, Often Fails the Test

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page E01

After Jerry Nowadsky lost two machinist jobs in a row, watching as his employers in Iowa moved the work to other countries, he decided to go back to school to study computers.

The coursework was hard for a middle-aged former factory worker who hadn't been in a classroom for decades, recalled Nowadsky, now 49. But he earned a certificate and set out a year ago to find work in computer systems maintenance and assistance.

Instead he found a job market awash with unemployed computer workers.

Now, Nowadsky, a married father of three living in Monticello, Iowa, is stocking shelves at a grocery store at night. He said he works 20 hours a week for $10 an hour, making less than half the pay he was pulling in at the factories, with no benefits.

"I've basically given up on computer jobs because they're all going overseas," he said in an interview, adding that he now feels the training was "a waste, because there are no jobs out there."

Policymakers have long pointed to worker retraining programs as a way to prepare the losers in the Old Economy to become winners in the new.

But decades of efforts show that retraining, while politically appealing, is no cure-all for a workforce struggling through economic transition. The success of retraining appears to depend on many factors, including the availability of jobs, the characteristics of the workers themselves and the quality of the training resources provided, according to analysts who have studied and administered such programs. And while some workers may thrive after retraining, many others do not.

Nowadsky's experience illustrates one of the reasons such efforts have often failed. The extra training doesn't help if the jobs aren't there in the new industry.

This is all rather fascinating, but totally unsurprising.

---

Bush Planned for War as Diplomacy Continued
By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; 10:45 AM

Beginning in late December, 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In three and a half hours of interviews with Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bush defended the secret planning and said war was his "absolute last option." But "Plan of Attack" describes how the growing commitments required of the military, the CIA and U.S. allies as the planning intensified would have been difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration led by Vice President Cheney, who Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force" who had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force.

By early January, 2003, Bush had made up his mind to take military action against Iraq, according to the book. But Bush was so concerned that the government of his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, might fall because of his support for Bush that he delayed the war's start until March 20 because Blair asked him to seek a second resolution from the United Nations. Bush later gave Blair the option of withholding British troops from combat, which Blair rejected.

Quotes of note:
On the one hand-

Though their style is sometimes comically imitative of American artists, Colombia's rappers take special pride in the authenticity of their adopted art, to the point of professing disdain for their more famous counterparts to the north, who they say have sold out to get big record deals.

"This is real rap, not fake," said Juan Emilio Rodríguez, Cescru Enlace's 30-something leader, who goes by the name 3X. "It is contrarian. It is political. It is not about cars and women. They do not do this in the U.S. anymore. We are doing it."

But on the other hand-

The biggest sellers remain Americans, artists like 50 Cent and the group NWA. Some American rappers, like Eminem, have had phenomenal success here, selling even more albums than better-known stars of more traditional popular music, like cumbia.

---

For Colombia's Angry Youth, Hip-Hop Helps Keep It Real
By JUAN FORERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, April 7 - In the living room of their mother's modest cinderblock home, beneath the glare of two bare light bulbs, the Rodríguez brothers, Juan Emilio and Andrey, whirled into action, arms swinging, as they burst into a rap about Colombia's drug-fueled guerrilla war.

"Blood in the fields, colonized lands, invisible bonds of slavery, in the Amazon," they sang in rhyming Spanish in "Criminal Hands," a song about Washington's war on drugs.

In another, "Exodus," about the refugees who have fled Colombia's civil conflict, they say, "as the war advances, there's only a ticket out."

"The exodus continues, burden of the violence," they chant, "The war is uncertain, incomprehensible, absurd science."

Juan Emilio and Andrey, rappers in a threesome called Cescru Enlace, are hardly household names. But they have released two CD's, their first in 1999, and their politically charged songs are catching on among young Colombians.

Today rap is produced and heard virtually the world over, as young people nearly everywhere mimic the lyrical styles and fashion of America's hottest selling music. Rap has spread across the Spanish-speaking world, too, but in few other countries are rappers as political in their lyrics as they are in Colombia.

"They've become like poet reporters for their neighborhoods," said Ruth Kathryn Henry, who studied Colombian hip-hop as a Fulbright scholar. "They're speaking for the people around them who don't necessarily have a voice."

Educations falls into the "public goods" category, and as we all know public goods are not adequately allocated by the free market. The term for it is "market failure." So what do the idiots do?

Quote of note:

But focusing on the rocky start misses the big picture, said Jeffrey Cohen, president of Sylvan Education Solutions, one of the largest tutoring companies. "This is the establishment of a whole new marketplace," he said. "It's like when Medicaid started, the creation of a new right for low-income parents. It will breed investment and innovation."

So what happens when education becomes as "affordable" as health care? How much will education insurance cost? Can incompetent practitioners be sued for malpractice?

---

For Children Being Left Behind, Private Tutors Face Rocky Start
By SAM DILLON

CHICAGO, April 13 — The competition between public schools and private enterprise that the Bush administration is encouraging heated up the other day, just outside Classroom 207 at Wentworth Elementary School here.

Over several months, a string of novice tutors from a private company offering federally financed after-school classes had tried and failed to control Room 207's dozen rambunctious students. A supervisor from the company was dispatched to troubleshoot. Effie McHenry, Wentworth's principal, was clucking her tongue in disapproval.

"I just don't think they're prepared to deal with challenging inner city children," Mrs. McHenry said of the company, talking past the supervisor to a visitor. "I think they expected to find children who'd just sit down and wait for them to expound. These kids aren't like that. They need challenging instruction."

The No Child Left Behind law has kicked off one of the nation's largest experiments in educational capitalism by inviting private companies and other groups to offer tutoring in failing public schools and financing the effort with federal money previously spent on the schools themselves. The aim is to help struggling children perform in their regular classrooms, while invigorating public education with private competition. The initiative has set off a stampede, with 1,000 companies rushing to recruit armies of tutors and grab chunks of what experts say could be a $2 billion-plus tutoring market.

New Yorkers want other, `richer' schools to fix poor schools
By Michael Gormley, Associated Press Writer | April 15, 2004

ALBANY, N.Y. --Most New Yorkers want to take state aid from rich school districts to help poorer, struggling schools, according to a poll released Thursday.

"The tough question is going to come when people are told: `Your district is rich,'" said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University poll.

To underscore his point, just 2 percent of those polled felt their school district's aid should be cut. Fifty-eight percent said their state aid should increase and 35 percent said it should remain the same.

Muslim Army chaplain cleared of convictions
By Jane Sutton, Reuters, 4/15/2004

MIAMI -- The US military yesterday dismissed the convictions against a Muslim Army chaplain who was initially suspected of espionage at the Guantanamo prison camp but was found guilty only on lesser charges.

The appellate decision by Army General James Hill, the Southern Command chief who oversees US military operations at Guantanamo, wipes the slate clean for Captain James Yee, who had been assigned to minister to prisoners at the base in Cuba.

"This means there will be no official mention of it in his military record," Hill said.

His decision put an end to what one of Yee's lawyers called a "hoax" case against the chaplain.

Yee, 36, was found guilty in March of noncriminal charges of committing adultery and storing pornography on a government computer. He ministered for 10 months to foreign terrorism suspects held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yee was arrested on suspicion of espionage in September and faced six criminal charges that included mishandling classified information at Guantanamo. Court documents accused him of spying, mutiny, sedition and aiding the enemy, and he was held in solitary confinement in a military brig for 76 days.

The military dropped all the criminal charges in March, citing national security concerns that would arise from the release of evidence against him.

Army Major General Geoffrey Miller, who at the time commanded the task force running the Guantanamo prison, then found Yee guilty of the noncriminal charges and issued a written reprimand.

Yee appealed the decision. His civilian lawyer, Eugene Fidell, said the proceedings were biased and "a hoax by any standard." Fidell said he had not had time to prepare a defense because the Army did not give him the evidence in the case until 11 minutes before Yee's hearing began.

Plea Bargain Frees Man from 1969 Race Riot
Date: Friday, April 16, 2004
By: Associated Press

YORK, Pennsylvania -- A black man who implicated himself on the witness stand in the fatal shooting of a white police officer during a 1969 race riot was released from jail Wednesday after reaching a plea deal.

Michael E. Wright had been charged with homicide in the slaying of Henry Schaad but pleaded guilty instead to conspiracy to commit an unlawful act.

He was sentenced to time already served after apologizing to the rookie officer's family and released from jail, where he had been since January 20.

Schaad's death came during days of fighting between blacks and whites, and sparked revenge attacks that included the fatal shooting of Lillie Belle Allen, a 27-year-old black woman.

The 10 days of rioting left dozens injured and entire blocks burned before 400 state police and National Guardsmen armed with rifles and tanks quelled the violence.

Two black men were convicted of killing Schaad.

Ten white men were charged in Allen's case; two were convicted of second-degree murder, and seven others pleaded guilty or no contest to lesser charges. Former York Mayor Charlie Robertson, a police officer at the time, was acquitted of inciting violence against blacks.

EarthLink finds rampant spyware, trojans
Paper identifies 300,000 programs capable of stealing personal information
By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service April 15, 2004

Internet service provider EarthLink and Webroot Software released a report on Thursday that said an average of almost 28 spyware programs are running on each computer. More serious, Trojan horse or system monitoring programs were found on more than 30 percent of all systems scanned, raising fears of identity theft.

The report presents the results of scans of over one million Internet-connected computers. Many of the 29 million spyware programs that were found were harmless "adware" programs that display advertising banners or track Web surfing behaviors. However, the companies also found more than 300,000 instances of programs that are capable of stealing personal information or providing unauthorized access to computers, the companies said.

Spyware is a generic term that describes a wide range of programs that track user behavior on a computer, often for marketing purposes. The programs are sometimes bundled with other software, such as peer to peer (P-to-P) file sharing programs, and installed legally on users' systems. However, once installed, they run surreptitiously in the background and can be difficult to detect and remove.

The report covers the first three months of 2004 and compiles information from scans conducted by both EarthLink and Webroot. It is the first of what will be regular updates that track the prevalence of spyware, the companies said.

Can you guess what it might be?

---

Survey: Small business health care costs rose 13 percent in 2003
By LINDA A. JOHNSON
AP Business Writer

April 15, 2004, 3:13 PM EDT

TRENTON, N.J. -- Companies in New Jersey saw the cost of providing health insurance to their employees jump 13 percent last year and expect this year to be the third straight with double-digit cost increases, a survey found.

The New Jersey Business & Industry Association's annual employer benefits survey, released Thursday, indicates the average cost for a year's health insurance for one employee could soon hit $7,000. Already, the average is $6,692, up $781 from 2002. That amount is a whopping 15 percent of the average wage of the companies' workers, now $43,940 per year.

"We are in a very dangerous period of hyperinflation in the cost of health insurance that is putting a tremendous, tremendous financial burden on both employers and employees alike," said Philip Kirschner, the association's president. Job creation has been stifled as well, he said.

The findings are based on responses to a January survey from 1,468 association members, 85 percent of whom have just 2 to 50 employees.

The survey found that altogether, health insurance costs for the participants rose 53 percent over the last four years. The average increase was 15 percent in 2002 and is projected to be 11 percent this year _ compared with increases of about 8 percent each year from 1999 through 2001 and only 3 percent in 1997 and 1998.

Matt Stoller at The Blogging of the President places me in the third of four anti-Bush categories:

Three, there are people who care less about policies than progressive politics, believing that the system is too ossified to serve its purpose without substantial political reform. Joe Trippi and Jon Stewart falls into this camp; they dislike the Democratic party machinery (such as it is) because it continually undercuts the ability for progressive ideas to emerge. More than that, these people think that the media is as much a part of the insider machinery as any political organization, and seek to break down the broadcast culture of politics. They respect Ralph Nader's underlying critique, but see him as stubborn and counterproductive. Far leftists like Green Party candidate for mayor of SF Matt Gonzalez fit in this mold, as do right-wingers like Ross Perot and John McCain. While not in agreement about solutions, this group is distinguished by its disgust with the methods of discourse and the lack of pragmatic principle in the current American political system. This group is generally disgusted with party politics, and wants to go around the party system; it therefore shows up strongly on the web.

And Digby at Hullabaloo says to all four segments:

However, I will be my usual dark Cassandra in this argument and issue my standard warning. There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy's Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We'd best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain't gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC'rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don't have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have.

If the Democrats take back the White House the Republicans are going to lose their minds, not because our party is faulty because theirs is. We need to remember that. We may be imperfect, but they are nuts.

The rise of the baby al-Qaidas
Bush's failed strategy in the war on terrorism has spawned more al-Qaidas -- and they're funded by the booming heroin traffic in Afghanistan.
By Husain Haqqani

April 7, 2004 | In the 30 months since President Bush's declaration of war against global terrorism, the U.S. and its allies have ostensibly detained or killed 70 percent of al-Qaida's senior leaders. But the frequency of terrorist acts worldwide attributed to al-Qaida has increased, compared to the pre-9/11 period. Baby al-Qaidas are being spawned in new regions of the world -- striking from Turkey to Spain, from Uzbekistan to Tunisia -- and a new generation of terrorists is stepping up to take the place of those killed in Afghanistan or detained in Guantanamo. Is the U.S. underestimating the enemy and not paying sufficient attention to al-Qaida again? Or are the war in Iraq and the grandiose scheme to democratize and reshape the Middle East it represents distracting the administration from the pursuit of the perpetrators of 9/11?

The State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, testified last week before the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights. In his testimony, the 28-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations listed "some important successes against the al-Qaida organization" resulting from the coordination of U.S. efforts with those of its allies. Al-Qaida had been deprived of "a vital safe haven" in Afghanistan, most of its known leadership had been decapitated, and it had been "separated from facilities central to its chem-bio and poisons development programs."

But, according to Black, "a new cadre of leaders" and "relatively untested terrorists" has started to emerge. "Al-Qaida's ideology is spreading well beyond the Middle East" and "has been picked up by a number of Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe." Black also said that "Some groups have gravitated to al-Qaida in recent years, where before such linkages did not exist" -- something that "greatly complicates our task in stamping out al-Qaida".

Iraq was described by the State Department's senior counterterrorism official as the emerging "focal point for the foreign jihadist fighters." According to Black's testimony, "Jihadists view Iraq as a new training ground to build their extremist credentials and hone the skills of the terrorist." In short, the war in Afghanistan struck a severe blow to terrorism, but the war in Iraq may have resuscitated it. The U.S. will prevail against terrorism eventually, but the problem is with us for the foreseeable future. The administration's desire to proclaim "mission accomplished" too quickly might actually have prolonged the war against terrorism.