via Black Looks (specifically, Ms. Ekine's own entry in the collection)

African blogs celebrating African women:

Honouring African Women: Part 1
Honouring African Women: Part 2

Many Black Students Put Off Spring Break Partying to Help Rebuild Gulf
Date: Thursday, March 09, 2006
By: Monica Lewis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Each year when the calendar turns to March, it’s tradition for college students across the country to ditch the rigors of school for the rest, relaxation and often raucous rite known as Spring Break.

However, this year many students are choosing not to indulge in the week of fun and sun, but are instead looking to roll up their sleeves and work to repair the Gulf Coast region still reeling from Hurricane Katrina. It’s been over six months since the devastating storm took its toll on parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and some coeds have determined have their Spring Break could be better spent there than on a sandy beach.

Quote of note:

One of the less well-conceived actions of William H. Donaldson, Mr. Cox's predecessor, was to appoint an advisory committee on smaller public companies, stocked in significant part with people who profited from selling such shares to the public. There were investor advocates, but they were outnumbered.

The commission is seeking public comment on the advisory committee's recommendations, which are stunning. Managers of most public companies would no longer be required to assess the state of the company's internal controls, as is required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley law. For another quarter of the companies, management would have to assess the controls, but auditors would not be involved.

Why Not Let Companies Ignore a Law?
By FLOYD NORRIS

Quote of note:

The Comptroller of the Currency, another unit of the Treasury Department, has repeatedly moved at the urging of large banks to block enforcement of tougher lending laws in New York, California and elsewhere.

'Silent Tort Reform' Is Overriding States' Powers
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON

SUPPORTERS and detractors call it the "silent tort reform" movement, and it has quietly and quickly been gaining ground.

Across Washington, federal agencies that supervise everything from auto safety to medicine labeling have waged a powerful counterattack against active state prosecutors and trial lawyers. In the last three decades, the state courts and legislatures have been vital avenues for critics of Washington deregulation. Federal policy makers, having caught onto the game, are now striking back.

I need to link this book at Amazon

Gangs of America : The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Bk Currents)

...even though it's downloadable as a pdf because I may have to buy it anyway. It seems to precisely encapsulate some research I needed to do...how the anti-slavery amendments were used to give corporations greater rights than human beings.

A key revelation of the book is the wariness of the Founding Fathers toward corporations. That wariness was shaped by rampant abuses on the part of British corporations such as the Virginia Company, whose ill-treatment killed thousands of women and children on forced-labor tobacco plantations, and the East India Company, whose attempt to monopolize American commodities led to the merchant-led rebellion known as the Boston Tea Party.

Bwah-hah-ha!

Minority populations leaving large cities
Other metropolitan areas more diversified
- Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Minority populations shifted dramatically within the United States between 1990 and 2004 as Latinos and Asians moved away from large metropolitan areas and African Americans moved to the South, according to a study to be released today.

The Diversity Spreads Out report by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C., shows that although older large cities still house the majority of Latinos and nonwhites in the United States, Latinos, Asians and African Americans increasingly are moving to smaller metropolitan areas that historically have been largely white.

$25,000 to Lobby Group Is Tied to Access to Bush
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, March 9 — The chief of an Indian tribe represented by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff was admitted to a meeting with President Bush in 2001 days after the tribe paid a prominent conservative lobbying group $25,000 at Mr. Abramoff's direction, according to documents and interviews.

The payment was made to Americans for Tax Reform, a group run by Grover G. Norquist, one of the Republican Party's most influential policy strategists. Mr. Norquist was a friend and longtime associate of Mr. Abramoff.

The meeting with Mr. Bush took place on May 9, 2001, at a reception organized by Mr. Norquist to marshal support for the president's 2001 tax cuts, which were pending before Congress. About two dozen state legislators attended the session in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds. The meeting was called to thank legislators for support of the tax-cut plan, an issue on which the tribal leader had no direct involvement.

Man, the only questions I have is about battery life. {LATER: Three hours. Oh, well...]

What is the Origami Project?

Origami is the code name for Microsoft's Ultra-Mobile PC project. Partnering with hardware manufacturers, our goal is to create a small touch-screen PC that people can use in more places for more things. In our first release, we are launching with three of our OEM partners who are offering Ultra-Mobile PCs with the Microsoft Touch Pack. For the Touch Pack, we focused on making it easier to interact with a small touch-screen computer running Windows XP.

What is an Ultra-Mobile PC?

Ultra-Mobile PCs are a new class of computer that is optimized for mobility. With a screen size of 7 inches or less, Ultra-Mobile PCs can be slipped into a purse or a small bag for ultimate portability. A touch-screen, a tablet pen, and a D-pad give you a variety of input options while you are on the move. Built-in Bluetooth gives you the option of staying connected wherever you go. Running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Ultra-Mobile PCs have the full capabilities of the Windows operating system in the smallest package yet.

Nevermind that when you translate from English to American the two words mean the same thing...

How Abu Ghraib Lives On
A new human rights report says detainees in Iraq are still being abused
By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

The Pentagon says it has instituted reforms to prevent the detainee abuse that occurred in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal from ever happening again. But in a scathing 48-page report released on Monday, Amnesty International concludes that whatever reforms have been put into effect are clearly not doing the job: Mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, particularly by Iraqi security forces, is still widespread, Amnesty argues.

Need to vote they asses out.

It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control.

...The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him.

It was no surprise that Mr. Roberts led this retreat. He's been blocking an investigation into the domestic spying operation for weeks, just as he has been stonewalling a promised investigation into how the White House hyped the intelligence on Iraq.

David Brooks's entire editorial today is a dodge.

[TS] Op-Ed Columnist: Both Sides of Inequality

It's wrong to say good parents raise successful kids and bad parents raise unsuccessful ones. The story is more complicated than that.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? But parenting is not the point of his editorial. He doesn't get to the point until the very last sentence. He even says it's the core issue.

But the core issue is that today's rich don't exploit the poor; they just outcompete them.

Given that all they guys passing laws (such as free dividends, privileging unearned income in the tax code, tax cuts that go almost exclusively to the wealthy ) shifting the tax burden off the wealthy are, themselves, wealthy, that is easily debatable.

Quote of note:

it is partly a byproduct of a closed political system that ensures Communist Party rule but is without any national elections to force the party to whip itself into shape.

China Attacks Its Woes With an Old Party Ritual
By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING, March 8 — Like a giant company concerned with organizational disarray and a sinking public image, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to remake itself into an efficient, modern machine. But to do so, it has chosen one of its oldest political tools — a Maoist-style ideological campaign, complete with required study groups.

Quote of no note at all:

"People who make far less than we do. People who can't afford their medical bills or their mortgages or their kids' tuition. You ask them if they think that the people they send to Congress should be able to rack up a $50 meal on a lobbyist's dime."

Spare me. And the worst thing is, this may be the most substantive change made.

Senators Vote to Prohibit Dining on Lobbyists' Dime
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2006

WASHINGTON — Senators would have to go Dutch when wining and dining with lobbyists under a provision approved Wednesday as part of a pending ethics reform bill.

It was a pain in the ass but I got a copy that clip of Bush discussing preparations for Hurricane Katrina I could edit. I needed to isolate a bit that explains one whole hell of a lot.

Notice: we will move in assets to deal with loss of property. Humans just get prayers.

Seems a little ass-backward to me...but I'm not a Republican.

Filmmaker Gordon Parks dies
Tue Mar 7, 2006 09:35 PM ET
By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Gordon Parks, the pioneering black photographer and filmmaker who explored the African-American experience in his work, including landmark movies "The Learning Tree" and "Shaft," died on Tuesday in New York, a relative said.

Parks, 93, had been in failing health, said the nephew, Charles Parks, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was orphaned by age 15 and grew up homeless. He worked a variety of menial jobs before taking up photography in the late 1930s. He joined "Life" magazine in the late 1940s and became its first black staff photographer, remaining with the publication until 1968.

He worked at several government jobs as a photographer and was a correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information during World War Two. After the war, he served for a stint as a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine.

But it was at "Life" where he made his mark documenting the human consequences of intolerance and crime. He was equally at ease with gangsters as with cops, and he won the trust of the fiery Malcolm X, the militant Black Panthers and ordinary black Americans who lived in big cities and small, rural towns.

His photo of a black cleaning lady, standing in front of a huge American flag, mop in one hand, broom in the other and a resigned look on her face, became one of his best known shots.

"I suffered first as a child from discrimination, and poverty to a certain extent, bigotry in my hometown in Kansas," Parks told Reuters in a 2000 interview. "So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves."

DeLay Beats 3 Rivals in Texas G.O.P. Primary
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, March 7 — Representative Tom DeLay survived a challenge to his renomination for Congress Tuesday night, outpacing three Republican primary rivals seeking to capitalize on the criminal charges and ethics citations against him.

Mr. DeLay, 58, an 11-term incumbent, turned out a disciplined army of poll workers and pledged his Washington influence on behalf of NASA's Johnson Space Center and other big constituencies.

With nearly 88 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Delay had 19,684, or 61 percent of the vote, far ahead of his closest opponent, Tom Campbell, at 9,595, or 30 percent.

Ex post facto blowjob of note:

The agreement would reinforce the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1978 to issue special warrants for spying but was sidestepped by the administration. The measure would require the administration to seek a warrant from the court with all deliberate speed whenever possible.

If the administration elects not to do so after 45 days, the attorney general must certify that the surveillance is necessary to protect the country and explain to the subcommittee why the administration has not sought a warrant. The attorney general would be required to give an update to the subcommittee every 45 days.

Democrats called the deal an abdication of the special bipartisan committee's role as a watchdog, saying the Republicans had in effect blessed the program before learning how it worked or what it entailed.

G.O.P. Senators Say Accord Is Set on Wiretapping
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, March 7 — Moving to tamp down Democratic calls for an investigation of the administration's domestic eavesdropping program, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that they had reached agreement with the White House on proposed bills to impose new oversight but allow wiretapping without warrants for up to 45 days.

You know, if it's really about the morality they profess, some half-steps are offensive.

In a country where two thirds of the public does not want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, but nearly as many favor stricter limits on abortion, pragmatic abortion opponents have pushed for parental notification laws, waiting periods, restrictions on late-term abortions: The strategy was to chip away at Roe to try to shrink it, change its shape, and over time promote a “culture of life” that would view abortion less as a right than a tragedy, perhaps eventually a crime. That gradual approach requires a certain level of hypocrisy—or at least a willing suspension of moral belief—because if you truly equate abortion with murder, it’s hard to settle for slowing it down rather than stopping it altogether, right away: the Purist approach.

Beauty and the Geek was interesting enough when I stumbled onto it that I watched the all-day recap of the first series.

Black. White. I'll be watching as it develops.

TV's Crash Course in Race
In a provocative new reality show, two families change their skin color to see how the other half lives
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

From The Jazz Singer to White Chicks, the history of black- and whiteface in entertainment has generally not been one of high social purpose. But starting March 8, an FX reality show is betting that the same magic that made Marlon Wayans look like Paris Hilton can be used to start a dialogue about what race means. In Black. White. (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), a provocative and valuable reality-TV experiment, two families of different races live life in each other's skin.