Answer:

Militias — some inside the official Iraqi security forces and some outside — have gained considerable new influence as attacks against civilians have surged, and Iraqis increasingly say that they have more faith in the militias than in the official Iraqi security forces.

100,000 Families Are Fleeing Violence, Iraq Official Says
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 29 — A new estimate by one of Iraq's vice presidents has put the number of Iraqi families fleeing sectarian violence at 100,000, far outstripping previous projections and raising the possibility that a total of a half-million people could be displaced.

Mark:

Rather than approve your comment, I'll respond to it  here.

I look at  the social networks that are the various wings of the political/editorial blogosphere and find them all to be very mainstream, and collective as hell...in fact, as a collective product of the American mind I'm like, what else could it be?

The minority voice in any community will feel this exact frustration. It's a parallel to the generally recognized problem of Black "leaders" that are strictly media phenomena...I just linked a report that only 8% of the guest appearances on Sunday morning talk shows are by Black folk, and 65% of those were by Colin Powell, Condi Rice and Juan Williams. I don't care what your politics are, you have to recognize there's no representation of the Black community's position there.

BERLIN -- The UN's World Food Program is cutting in half the emergency food rations it provides to about 3 million people in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan because of a ''severe lack of funding," especially from the wealthy nations of Europe, officials said yesterday.

Quote of note:

Among the Doncasters' holdings is a plant in Barrow's district in Georgia that is the sole supplier of turbine fan parts for the U.S. Abrams main battle tank.

Doncasters also makes engine parts for one variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. The program, co-developed by the United States and eight other countries, is building a next-generation radar-evading jet fighter.

Bush approves Dubai buying defense supplier
Fri Apr 28, 2006 06:20 PM ET
By Caren Bohan and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush approved on Friday a Dubai-owned company's $1.24 billion takeover of Doncasters, a British engineering company with U.S. plants that supply the Pentagon.

Quote of note:

As crimes against humanity continue to be perpetrated against the people of Darfur, the international community must assert its responsibility to protect these people and must deploy a U.N. peacekeeping force to the region as soon as possible, she added. "The measure of (Friday's) Security Council resolution on genocide will be the Security Council's next steps in addressing the crisis in Darfur," Colgan said.

But the Council has so far been slow to take action -- primarily because of resistance by two veto-wielding permanent members, namely Russia and China, who claim they do not want to jeopardise the current peace negotiations.

U.N. Talks But Won't Act on Genocide, Say Activists
Thalif Deen

A few questions for my fellow bloggers:

Why do you blog? For whom do you write? If you craft a particularly well-written entry and it doesn’t get any comments, does that mean it was of little value? If a blog entry is written about some frivolous topic and it gets a lot of comments, does that make it a “good” entry?

My friend John at J’s Theater wrote a piece in reaction to another blogger, Nubian. and her frustrations about the lack of responses to her more socially conscious pieces and an inability to break out and make a name for herself in the vast blogosphere.

Bernie's response is interesting, worth readng. Nubian's real concern is what I'm thinking on.

Subliminal advertising may work after all
28 April 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Alison Motluk

Johan Karremans at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and his colleagues wanted to see if they could subliminally induce volunteers to favour a particular brand of drink, Lipton Ice. For comparison, they chose a brand of mineral water called Spa Rood, as it was deemed to be as well known as Lipton Ice and equally thirst-quenching.

The researchers asked 61 volunteers to perform a nonsense task - counting how many times a string of capital Bs was infiltrated by a lower-case b as they flashed up on a screen. The B strings appeared for 300 milliseconds each, and before them, a string of Xs always appeared, flanking a 23-millisecond subliminal message. For the experimental group, the message was "Lipton Ice". Controls saw "Nipeic Tol".

When the volunteers had completed this task, they were asked to choose between Lipton Ice and Spa Rood by clicking one of two keys - though they were told this was part of a separate study. They were also asked how likely they would be to order either of these drinks if they were sitting on a terrace, and to rate how thirsty they were. Volunteers who rated themselves as thirsty were more likely to choose Lipton Ice, but only if they had received the subliminal message.

E.J. Dionne:

Yes, there is a cultural difference between big cities and rural areas, but it's a difference in how guns are used. Rural people treasure their guns mostly for hunting and recreation, and as collectors. In inner cities, guns -- especially handguns -- are used almost entirely to threaten or kill other human beings.

"There are neighborhoods where if you say 'duck,' people get out of the way because they're worried they'll be shot," Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said in an interview. "But there are other parts of the country where if you say 'duck,' people will grab their rifles to go duck hunting."

via The American Street:

Join The 101st Fighting Keyboardists! 

Our friends on the port side of the blogosphere have had quite a time tossing around funny little nicknames for those of us who support the war on terror and use our blogs to express our convictions about it. We've seen the names here at CQ in the comments section -- the term "chickenhawk" has appeared more than once, and others in the blogosphere have assigned us to a unit called the 101st Fighting Keyboardists.

...That's why Frank J of IMAO, Derek Brigham of Freedom Dogs, and I have decided to create -- for real -- the 101st Fighting Keyboardists and adopt the chicken hawk as our mascot. First of all, the term "fighting keyboardist" describes our efforts pretty well, and we think the pseudo-military terminology is pretty danged amusing. Derek himself designed the logo.

In honor of Ronn Taylor's Poem on your Blog Weekend.

(The image is on Flikr, so I can steal it)

The Immortal
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 2002

standing before the mountain
watching wind and rain, storm and fury
grind my barriers to dust
and proceeding on my chosen path

---

Secret
Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 2003

a stone falls into a pool
and waves traverse the surface

the water level rises
the stone, in time, dissolves

and all the waves will settle
the surface becomes calm

and none will know these changes
but hand, and water and stone

---

Gap in teacher quality falls on income lines

Preliminary data released by the Department of Education show that in 39 states, the chance of finding teachers who know their subjects are better in elementary schools where parents' incomes are highest. The data show that's also the case among middle and high schools in 43 states.

"Obviously, we have a long way to go," says Rene Islas, who monitors teacher quality for the Department of Education. "Even if you have high numbers (of certified instructors) in the aggregate, there are pockets where students are being taught by teachers that are not highly qualified."

Everyone is taking it so personally...

"It would be more appropriate if they would leave us alone," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish legislator. "Let us solve our problems by ourselves."

"Enough is enough," said Sheik Mahmoud Sudani, a politician affiliated with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. "Rice's trip to Iraq at this critical time is just another desperate move by the Americans to try to impose themselves on our new government. But they have lost their influence."

Everyone has exactly the opinion of the trip you didn't want them to have

I actually think it's completely aimed at American public opinion," said Brian Katulis, Middle East analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "What's going on here is part of Bolten's plan to signal to the American public that we're not staying there forever."

Ivo H. Daalder, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the visit was "all about us."

Visit by Rumsfeld, Rice Sets Off Criticism in Iraq
Some leaders worry that the Americans' surprise trip could hurt talks on forming a government. Analysts see an effort to shore up U.S. opinion.
By Louise Roug and Paul Richter
Times Staff Writers
April 27, 2006

Open thread.

I'll not be back to approve anonymous comments today, so I don't know how exciting it will be but there you are.

Quote of note:

But when Ezzati and his colleagues looked at individual states, they found huge disparities. In Texas, for example, estimates corrected for inaccurate self-reporting suggest that 30% of men and 37% of women were obese in 2000. By comparison, self-reported figures from the BRFSS of the same year suggest that between 18% and 24 % of men and women were obese. A similar discrepancy was found in the 1990 data.

Ezzati stresses that correcting the data for self-reporting shows that the problem of obesity is in fact much worse – particularly in the southern states – than previously thought. Socioeconomic changes may have caused this region of the country to have a greater obesity problem, he speculates.

US states grossly underestimate levels of obesity
22:00 26 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

Since I'm here for a minute...

I'm still blaming Mr. Tomasky and The American Prospect.

[TS] The Death of Multiculturalism

By DAVID BROOKS

In 1994 multiculturalism was at its high-water mark, and Richard Bernstein wrote "Dictatorship of Virtue," describing its excesses: the campus speech codes, the forced sensitivity training, the purging of dead white males from curriculums, the people who had their careers ruined by dubious charges of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism.

Then two years later, the liberal writer Michael Tomasky published "Left for Dead," which argued that the progressive movement was being ruined by multicultural identity politics. Democrats have lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively, Tomasky wrote, and seem to be a collection of aggrieved out-groups: feminists, blacks, gays and so on.

Study: Sunday Political Shows Still Short on Black Guests
By Tyler Lewis
civilrights.org
April 27, 2006

Dr. Martin Luther King said in 1958 that 11am on Sunday morning is the "most segregated hour" in America.

Forty years later, he could be talking about the Sunday morning political talk shows. In the past two years, black guest appearances made up only 8 percent of total guest appearances for the period, according to a new study by the National Urban League (NUL) Policy Institute.

In addition, the study found that appearances by Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Juan Williams accounted for 65 percent of those guest appearances.

funeral

Quote of note:

This open policy stems from an incident in 1952, when rejected scientist Bayard Peakes shot and killed a secretary in the APS offices. "Since then, the APS has accepted just about any abstract that comes over the transom," says Lubell.

Study 'proves' big bang never happened
29 April 2006

THE Bible was right all along. There is now "unequivocal proof" that the big bang never happened, and that the world was created in six days. Incredibly, that claim surfaced at last week's prestigious American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Dallas, Texas.

Robert Gentry presented his "new cosmic model", which affirms the Genesis account of creation, at an APS poster session. Now a geophysicist with the Orion Foundation in Knoxville, Tennessee, he once worked for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Wanted: New Roommaid
Willing to swap free rent for chores? A new living arrangement falls back on old-school gender roles
By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN

Shorty after Stephen McCarthy moved to Las Vegas in 2004, he offered a female friend an interesting proposition: if she kept the place tidy, cleaned up after his dog Maya and brought in the paper each morning, she could live in his house rent free. It worked well until, McCarthy says, his friend began to get possessive, jealously questioning him when he went out on dates. Her argument that she had a right to ask after his whereabouts since she did "everything, just like a wife," prompted him to ask her to move out after a year. "That's the point," the divorced architect says. "I didn't want a wife."

Bush Calls Cabinet Meeting To Get Story Straight
April 26, 2006 | Issue 42•17

WASHINGTON, DC—With his administration dogged by criminal allegations, President Bush called a special Cabinet meeting Tuesday to ensure that his staff's complex web of alibis is consistent at every level, an anonymous source reported. "Okay, team, let's make sure we're all on the same completely fabricated page here," Bush reportedly said while aides distributed thick binders containing the administration's latest official side of things. "The e-mail server crashed during Katrina, the dog chewed up our files on the Plame leak, and no one ever told me that the illegal wiretapping was illegal. Right, boys?" Adde

I dragged my ass letting folks know The American Street is back. eRobin got the details, so I don't need to write it up.

I'll probably post stuff overthere now and again because they can't stop me (bwah-hah-ha!)

Bush names Fox News Radio's Snow press secretary
Wed Apr 26, 2006 09:18 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush named Fox News Radio host Tony Snow as the new White House press secretary on Wednesday.

"I'm here in the briefing room to break some news, I've asked Tony Snow to serve as my new press secretary," Bush said.

Snow will replace Scott McClellan, who announced his resignation last week as part of a staff shake-up engineered by new White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten aimed at reviving Bush's presidency.

The conservative commentator had worked as a speech writer for Bush's father when he was president.

Of course, the Democratic Party isn't the only collective where folks take issue with Black folks' issues.

Blac(k)ademic:

i am guest blogging over at alas, a blog, which is a VERY different space than my own blog. i have encountered a few white feminists who disagree with my postings and who view patriarchy as the root of all oppression, which shows in my "this is not tawana brawley" posting with the comment by a reader who claimed that "gender trumps race."

hmm...now, why does this statement bother me so?

because it is ridiculous to lay claim to the idea that all women are oppressed on equal terms, simply because they are women. obviously, oppression is more complicated than that and i personally think that gender does not trump anything. instead, there are interlocking systems of oppression that women face based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religious background, nationality, citizenship status and so forth. it is very naive and very, very 2nd wave-ish to say, "well, gender trumps race." i can't even understand how one can come to such a conclusion.

I need a tag...this might become a series.

When I wrote up an actual consideration of Party in Search of a Notion last night, I was "inspired" by E.J. Dionne's editorial, The Left's Big Ideas.

What has become clear in recent months is that the impatience on the center-left with the hopeless endeavor of waiting for workaday politicians to come up with ideas -- Godot would deliver faster -- has spilled over the barriers of conventional politics. The brooding, musing and, yes, thinking since President Bush's victory in 2004 is starting to show results.

The biggest change is that moderates and liberals have begun to accept the fact that they cannot simply adjust to conservative dominance of the political debate and alter their ideas to fit the current consensus.

Quote of note:

Just as disparities between rich and poor were exposed in the days after Hurricane Katrina, class and wealth seem to be playing a significant role as elected officials struggle to determine which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which should revert to swampland, if not bulldozed and sold en masse to a developer. While Eastover is full of the sound of saws ripping wood and the pneumatic punch of nail guns, the sound of the Lower Ninth Ward is mainly silence.

On one level, the rebuilding plan approved in March by Mayor C. Ray Nagin appears to put every neighborhood on the same footing. That plan places responsibility on residents to determine who is moving back to their communities and to decide collectively on a vision for their neighborhood.

But not every community has the same resources to track down former neighbors and draft a plan that can provide for things as diverse as a local elementary school and a grocery store.

In Rebuilding as in the Disaster, Wealth and Class Help Define New Orleans
By GARY RIVLIN

NEW ORLEANS — Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September.

The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back.

Quote of note:

Although it was mostly in the slave economies of the South that whites objected to black soldiers fighting on their side, Northerners were not much better. New Hampshire excluded ''lunatics, idiots, and Negroes," from their militias. In contrast, the British offered unambiguous freedom. As a result, hundreds of American blacks fought to keep America British.

...The Founding Fathers of the United States knew well the double standard embedded in the liberty they preached. Patrick ''give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death" Henry admitted that he might be against holding slaves in principle, but ''I'm drawn along by the general inconveniency of living without them."

Questions of note:

Schama wondered aloud how his book would be received in America. For although there are plenty of books critical about this or that aspect of American history, by in large the Founding Fathers have been deified in this country. Schama joked that he would not look good in an orange Guantanamo jumpsuit.

Do we Americans glorify our Founding Fathers too uncritically? Certainly, a great many biographies have been worshipful. Thucydides and Herodotus, the fathers of history, did not ''whitewash the past," Schama said. The story of the Peloponnesian wars ''is the story of a cock-up," he said.

Do we, as a nation of immigrants, need whitewashed founding legends to unite us?

Whitewashing the Founding Fathers
By H.D.S. Greenway  |  April 25, 2006

I finally got around to reading Party in Search of a Notion...that article in The American Prospect that I got a bad taste in my mouth over based on a extract.

Michael Tomasky reminds me too much of Joe Taylor...Open Source Politics is void now or I'd link you directly to his ignorance...the text of the OSP post is also here; I think I saved the original OSP post with comments.  I suspect Joe was a college freshman at the time...I suspect (assuming he's still politically active and actually trying to learn something) he would reach the point where he was capable of writing something like Party in Search of a Notion.

Quote of note:

Dr. Rose, the energy consultant, sees what may be subtle attempts to influence prices through strategic bidding that, when graphed, resembles a hockey stick. He points to July 27, 2005 - one of the hottest days in PJM last summer - as a case in point.

A big power company started the bidding with a very low offer: 4,300 megawatts for zero dollars or other nominal amounts, Rose says. It offered the next 2,700 megawatts at gradually higher prices until it reached $100 per megawatt hour. But the last 1,000 megawatts were offered at $200 to $1,000, and it's those last high-cost blocks of power that often set the rate overall.

That, he says, could be evidence of market power.

In deregulation of electric markets, a consumer pinch
Competition was supposed to lower prices in deregulated states. But faster-rising rates there are spurring a backlash.
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

I have still not forgiven him for this:

Then a black female student who moonlighted as a part-time stripper screamed that she was sexually mauled by a pack of white Duke University lacrosse players. DNA tests on the players proved that a sexual attack likely didn't happen.

He's gotten around to covering Devah Pager's research though.

Discrimination: The Root of the Black Job Crisis
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Pacific News Service
Posted on April 24, 2006, Printed on April 25, 2006