Quote of note:

"It's a well-established fact for the last few years that U.S. counterterrorism officials and other intelligence officials have been working through Somali partners to fight extremists," said Suliman Baldo, director for Africa policy at the International Crisis Group, a Geneva-based advocacy group that studies wars around the world.

"From the little we know, the U.S. is not supporting the warlords with arms, per se," Mr. Baldo said. Instead, he added, American operatives were paying the warlords to help track down and apprehend those in Somalia suspected of being members of Al Qaeda.

...The warlords, who say they have joined America's fight against terrorism, are calling themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism. They are led by Mohammed Deere, Mohammed Qanyare and Bahire Rageh, all powerful figures in Mogadishu.

Alliance of Somali Warlords Battles Islamists in Capital
By MARC LACEY

Jim Gilchrist, founder of The Minuteman Project was on Washington Journal. I recorded some really interesting bits.

First, his response to a man from Florida who said they were being "invaded by boat people" from Cuba and Haiti every day, who complained that because he himself is well-tanned everyone keeps trying to talk to him in Spanish and "I don't speak Spanish, I will not speak Spanish."

I don't think you'll hear this one on Crooks and Liars.

New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO, May 11 — With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.

"It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday.

Procreation Not Recreation
Thursday , May 11, 2006
By John Gibson

Make more babies. That's the lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple days.

First, a story Wednesday that half the kids under 5 years old in this country are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic.

Know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority population is Hispanic.

The Black Commentator

In the unkindest cut imaginable, more than 20 Congressional Black Caucus members last week discovered that they were to be “scrubbed” from the list of co-sponsors of the Voting Rights Act Extension bill. Bowing to pressures from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), CBC Chairman Mel Watt (D-NC) informed selected Members about the purge at a meeting on Wednesday, May 3 in which he explained the rationale for stripping down the list: it was too heavily Black.

According to a number of congressional sources, Pelosi and her Senate and GOP counterparts were concerned that Voting Rights Act Extension should not be viewed as a “racial” issue! – therefore, the excess African American co-sponsors had to go. True to past form and practice, Rep. Watt carried Pelosi’s water, while retaining a place for himself on the co-sponsor list, sources told the CBC Monitor.

Staffers for several CBC members reported that the new, “bi-partisan” co-sponsorship configuration will include Pelosi and House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr., and Senate Democratic and Republican leaders Harry Reid (NV) and Bill Frist (TN), respectively. As a token sop to Blacks, Mel Watt and Georgia Rep. John Lewis would also join the list.

Quote of note (but my reaction is below the fold):

In sharp contrast to the political reaction to that story, Jackson's tale evoked laughter from the business executives he addressed on April 28.

HUD chief: Right list leads to government cash
Dallas Business Journal - 4:48 PM CDT Thursday
by Christine Perez and Chad Eric Watt Staff Writers

"After about six months on the job, I had a person come in and say, 'I don't think you understand how government works. We don't bid out anything in government.' I said, 'What do you mean? That's illegal.' He went on about the lists people get on.

"A lot of blacks and Hispanics don't know about the lists," Jackson said. "I didn't know about this. So we started this process where every time a businessperson of color came in to see me, I'd tell them, 'Go down to the (minority small business) office and get registered -- then I can work with you.

Josh Marshall

This line, packed a decent way down into the article in the Washington Post, jumped out at me as the most significant ...

Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening.

This seems key.

This isn't yet another program with civil liberties concerns hanging around it. It's an integral part of one program. This is the initial cull, from which targets of interest -- that wouldn't be able to meet 'probable cause' standards -- are chosen for actual monitoring.

Jimi Izrael:

On April 24, I did a pretty extensive breakdown of Skrippology (and headz still want more, so stay tuned) and then, later on that same day, ABC News has a really sterilized version of the same story, kind of outlining the same facts. I also heard that some cat on MSNBC (Andy Deutch) was trying to kick science on skrippers, and that it sounded awfully familiar to some jdotscom headz. Coincidence? Caint call it. Actually, I call it the vapors... you call it what you want.

I can't complain though. You wrote a long, detailed thing...my examples tend to be too terse for mainstream media, i.e Income Averaging

One of the reasons for the disconnect between statistics and most people's quality of life is where prices rise and fall.

Most everybody these days can point to their own list of rising expenses. Electricity, air travel, medical care and even staples such as diapers cost more. Rents are jumping as the housing boom cools, just as property taxes are soaring to reflect the price appreciation of the hotter days.

Plus, interest charges are rising on credit card balances, home-equity lines of credit and adjustable-rate mortgages.

This is how it feels when the days of cheap energy and easy money give way to $70 barrels of oil and ascending interest rates. The economy may be strong, but many people are feeling pinched.

I find it interesting how the price of necessities climb while the price of crap, frills and luxuries fall.

.vs Basics, Not Luxuries, Blamed for High Debt in the Washington Post (which frankly is a better piece than mine for public comsumption).

Senate Leaders Break a Stalemate Over an Immigration Bill
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, May 11 — Senate leaders said Thursday that they had broken a political stalemate and would bring to the floor next week an immigration bill that could put millions of illegal immigrants on the road to eventual American citizenship.

An agreement reached Thursday by Senators Bill Frist of Tennessee and Harry Reid of Nevada, the Republican majority and Democratic minority leaders, ends an impasse that has stalled action in the Senate for weeks while immigrants and their advocates have held huge demonstrations across the country.

I'm not. In fact, I warned you all.

President Bush has insisted in the past that the government is monitoring only calls that begin or end overseas. But according to USA Today, it has actually been collecting information on purely domestic calls. One source told the paper that the program had produced "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

The government has stressed that it is not listening in on phone calls, only analyzing the data to look for calling patterns. But if all the details of the program are confirmed, the invasion of privacy is substantial. By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with.

Evolution's Bottom Line
By HOLDEN THORP

Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does.

...[E]volution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?

One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than 600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts. Kansas has 11.

Slashdot finds some weird shit... 

Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it Goes ... Backwards?

In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they've gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light.

Confused? You're not alone.

"I've had some of the world's experts scratching their heads over this one," says Robert Boyd, the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics at the University of Rochester. "Theory predicted that we could send light backwards, but nobody knew if the theory would hold up or even if it could be observed in laboratory conditions."

I thought you'd like to know how the Bush regime can keep talking about the progress in Iraq with a straight face.

Have you ever run a mid-sized to major corporate project, or participated in scheduling one? You'll have these gantt charts running your damn life for a while.

You'll have these progress meetings where you talk about which tasks are on schedule, which are falling behind, which are on hold untill two parallel tasks are completed. And every bullet point you hit is progress.

And when you have to revert a step because some other process won't be ready, bringing that reverted step back to its earlier condition is also progress.

It's not progress when the copying machines you need to distribute the plans break down (yes, success depends on copying machines too). That's not a problem with the plan, though.

I've already said I want the bastard impeached and the regime dismantled. And I can't add anything that's not already somewhere in the massive response already working going on.

This is as close as it gets. 

PA Gov's race in spotlight
By Peter Durantine, Special to Stateline.org

With neither candidate facing an opponent in Tuesday’s primary election, the race for Pennsylvania governor has already started with the incumbent, Democrat Ed Rendell, ahead in the polls and secure in his Philadelphia-area base – the five-county electorate fortress that won him the office in 2002.

Historically, incumbent governors have won second terms in this two-term limit state, and though most political observers believe tradition will carry on this year, Rendell nonetheless faces a strong challenge from Republican pro football Hall of Famer Lynn Swann.

Not really a toy, but a collection of really interesting short videos at Neural Surfer.

Also I have finally taken possession of

Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior
by Ralph H. Abraham and Christopher D. Shaw
4th edition of 2005, an eBook

Dynamics is a field emerging somewhere between mathematics and the sciences. In our view, it is the most exciting event on the concept horizon for many years. The new concepts appearing in dynamics extend the conceptual power of our civilization and provide new understanding in many fields.

We discovered, while working together on the illustrations for a book in 1978 that we could explain mathematical ideas visually, within an easy and pleasant working partnership. In 1980, we wrote an expository article on dynamics and bifurcations, using hand-animation to emulate the dynamic picture technique universally used by mathematicians in talking among themselves: a picture is drawn slowly, line by line, along with a spoken narrative - the dynamic picture and the narrative tightly coordinated. [P6: emphasis added]

Quote of note:

"The biggest difference between California and New York and the rest of the United States is a high cost of living," said Ms. Reed, an economist with the policy institute. "If you live in Mississippi and pay $6,000 for rent and you're at the poverty threshold, you have $13,000 left for everything else. But if you're in San Francisco and pay $21,000, you have nothing to pay for child care, preschool, books, etc."

The study also suggests that differences between federal poverty rates and adjusted rates could hurt large states like New York and California, which depend on such estimates to determine federal aid for programs like Head Start and food stamps.

Housing Costs Change List of Top Areas for Poverty
By JESSE McKINLEY

F.B.I.'s Focus on Public Corruption Includes 2,000 Investigations
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, May 10 — A post-9/11 effort by the F.B.I. to concentrate on public corruption now includes more than 2,000 investigations under way, highlighted by the Jack Abramoff lobbying inquiry, the racketeering and fraud conviction of former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, and the multipronged corruption probes after the guilty plea by Randy Cunningham, a former Republican House member from San Diego, bureau officials said.

As one of the Bush administration's least known anticrime efforts, the F.B.I. initiative has yielded an unexpectedly rich array of cases. The results suggest that wrongdoing by public officials at all levels of government is deeply rooted and widespread. Several of the highest profile cases in which the F.B.I. played an active role involve Republicans.

...and all I got was a Distinguished Service Award.

Another preemptive pardon.