I just found out The Best of Soul Train comes on Saturdays.

It was inevitable, I suppose. I thik WCBS-FM or AM still does Golden Oldies in New York City...I haven't even turned on a radio in months...which is why The Best of Soul Train was inevitable.

When I was in high school (circa 1970), Golden Oldies were the records that came out in the 50s. I remember someone in a bullshit session wondering what WCBS would do when funk hit 20 years old.

Consensus was they'd be '50s station instead of an Oldies station.

Not for nothin', really. I'm just turning into the guy I used to make fun of.

U.S. Denies Liability in Torture Case
Attorney Urges Dismissal of Detainee Suit Against Officials
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 9, 2006; A07

The Bush administration asserted in federal court yesterday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S. courts.

Their political ambition is so important... 

The Department of Veterans' Affairs budget will be particularly hard hit. The House and Senate budgeted $36.5 billion for the department in fiscal 2007, but Congress' failure to act on the spending bills will leave it funded at last year's level of $34.26 billion -- even as costs and the number of people it treats continues to rise.

That means thousands of battle-wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may have to wait longer for VA medical treatment.

They gove no thought to the real-world impact of their strategies. 

Incoming Democrats face fiscal minefield
Funding gaps left in programs
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff  |  December 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The outgoing Republican Congress has placed a political time bomb for incoming Democrats: Nearly all domestic programs paid for by the federal government are level funded through mid-February with no adjustments for inflation, a situation that probably will trigger cuts or reductions in such popular areas as veterans' affairs, children's healthcare, housing vouchers, and low-income fuel assistance.

The members of the Iraq Study Group may not have come up with all the right answers; in their pursuit of unanimity, they may have settled for split-the-difference compromises where only one straight path makes sense.

...and sums up the whole problem. 

Presidential ingratitude
December 9, 2006

PRESIDENT BUSH let the ball roll under his glove Thursday when he hinted that he has little enthusiasm for the recommendations of the commission co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and the former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton. Whatever might be questioned in any particular recommendation of the report, the bipartisan spirit and consensus-building purpose of the Iraq Study Group deserve grateful praise from the president, not a defensive rejection.

Been having database connectivity problems recently. Looks a lot like DOS attacks...I'd actually have a lot better traffic figures otherwise.

Baker's attempt to offend missed its mark, according to Fotouh. Muslims do not hate pigs, he said; they just don't eat them.

just plain stupid.

Neighbors in Texas object to mosque plan
By Rasha Madkour, Associated Press  |  December 8, 2006

KATY, Texas -- A plan to build a mosque in this Houston suburb has triggered a neighborhood dispute, with community members warning that the place will become a terrorist hotbed and one man threatening to hold pig races on Fridays just to offend the Muslims.

Many neighborhood residents maintain they have nothing against Muslims and are more concerned about property values, drainage, and traffic.

Home Depot Backdated Many Options
Ex-Software Executive Sentenced in Fraud
Ex-Cendant Executive Ordered Confined at Home
Report Says Oil Royalties Go Unpaid
Fannie Mae to Restate Results by $6.3 Billion Because of Accounting

This is why the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation want to raise the standard for criminal prosecution of corporations...they want you to prove the corporation is criminal "from top to bottom."

And this is whose bidding Senator Specter is doing.

Senator Calls for an Easing of Corporate-Wrongdoing Rules
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

The departing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee proposed legislation yesterday calling for a rollback of the tactics adopted by federal prosecutors to combat corporate wrongdoing after the Enron collapse.

The bill from Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, is the latest challenge to the tactics, which have come under scrutiny from trade groups, former United States attorneys general and a prominent federal judge. Mr. Specter said he would reintroduce the bill next month when Congress convenes.

This is from this morning's Washington Journal. It's one of the things that weirded me out this morning.

The suits resulted from a two-month effort in April and May in which private investigators posed as buyers at 40 stores that had sold guns linked with more than 800 crimes in New York City between 1994 and 2001.

The teams, usually a man and woman, conducted what law enforcement officials describe as a straw purchase: one customer would deal with the seller until the last moment of the sale, when the second customer would step in to pay and fill out the forms for a background check.

Federal law prohibits a seller from handing over the weapon in such cases, because it lets people obtain guns without federal scrutiny of their criminal record Mr. Bloomberg said that straw purchases were one of the most common schemes used by gun traffickers, giving the city the right — with a bold interpretation of public nuisance laws — to go after out-of-state dealers for their weapons’ deadly consequences.

You realize just printing a piece of paper doesn't add a bit of security, don't you? How would you actually do a recount?

Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election
By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.

New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

I'd name it Ouroboros.

They're going to find that "the bullet that killed him" wasn't fired by Undercover Mike. The fact that a guy emptied his clip, reloaded, and emptied it again will be deemed unimportant because he wasn't the killer. The killer responded within acceptable parameters and Undercover Mike gets diversity training. 

Ballistics Report Is Guide to Queens Police Killing
By AL BAKER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

The Police Department has delivered to prosecutors in Queens a 43-page ballistics report on the shooting of Sean Bell, a crucial piece of evidence that will act almost as an annotated guide to how the 50-shot police fusillade that claimed his life unfolded.

The Biggest Gamble of Your Life (Is College Worth it?)

In 2005, young people (ages 18-25) in the US gambled $67 billion. Not in Vegas or online poker rooms, but on a betterment program called college. Their hope is that the monies they are spending will allow them to earn more money over their lifetime. Many are paying for this wager by amassing a mountain of debt that will take years to pay off. Is it a good wager? Conventional wisdom says so, but with $67 billion on the line (and that's debt accumulated in just one year by college attendees) we should have more than conventional wisdom or parental pressures to guide the way to smart economic decisions. REEF’s economic analysis shows that college is a financial mistake for more than half of the American young people today. Shielded from scrutiny in this transaction by an assumption of 'public good' are universities and college lenders who many expect to provide guidance to these young people. While the data hints at ways for some individuals to improve the odds of a positive financial outcome, half the people attending college should hear the frank counter-intuitive advice, "Don't go to college."

There was a time when an education was a social decoration more than anything else. Where being educated meant knowing the things society had deemed sufficient to impress. Because the rate of change seems to have accelerated, training to a specific set of facts seems less important than learning how to reason.

Articles like this should be published in the Lifestyle section. It's pure noise, totally useless.

Dueling Views on Diplomacy Pit Baker Against Rice
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — Many of the blistering critiques of the Bush administration contained in the Iraq Study Group’s report boil down to this: the differing worldviews of Baker versus Rice.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III was the architect of the “new diplomatic offensive” in the Middle East that the commission recommended Wednesday as one of its main prescriptions for extracting the country from the mess in Iraq. Ever since, he has been talking on television, to Congress and to Iraqis and foreign diplomats about how he would conduct American foreign policy differently. Very differently.

I'm listening to Washington Journal this morning...the 1/3 of the country that believed Dubya is the Celestially Ordained Savor of the American People and Through Them, The World (quite coincidentally, the same position to be claimed by the Antichrist) are even more delusional.

I'm considering the Iraq Study Group's 79 suggestions and wonder why they get lauded when they've produced a grab bag much like Rumsfeld's parting shot.

I read some  responses to Heather Mac Donald's anti-Black screed over at City Journal...the National Review bragged on it AFTER linking it on its home page. Responses by police officers on NYPD Rant (a bulletin board for police supporters) were interesting too.

And the Class Wars continue. I linked that beause it's easier than typing shit out.

Cue up the GodMen house band, which opens the revival with a thrashing challenge to good boys:

*
Forget the yin and the yang
I'll take the boom and the bang….
Don't need in touch with my feminine side!
All I want is my testosterone high.
*

The 200 men in the crowd clap stiffly. Stine races through a frenetic stand-up routine, drawing laughs with his rants against liberals, atheists and the politically correct. Then Christian radio host Paul Coughlin, author of "No More Christian Nice Guy," takes the stage. His backdrop: a series of wanted posters featuring one Jesus of Nazareth.

"Jesus was a very bad Christian," Coughlin declares. After all, he says, the Son of God trashed a temple and even used profanity — or the New Testament equivalent — when he called Herod "that fox."

Manliness is next to godliness
By Jenny Jarvie and Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writers
December 7, 2006

NASHVILLE — The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct tape.

Brad Stine runs onstage in ripped blue jeans, his shirt untucked, his long hair shaggy. He's a stand-up comic by trade, but he's here today as an evangelist, on a mission to build up a new Christian man — one profanity at a time. "It's the wuss-ification of America that's getting us!" screeches Stine, 46.

A moment later he adds a fervent: "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

Patrick said that the house must be saved. "This is a gem, that it be preserved, restored, and sustained," he said.

"We have this diverse story to tell," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the museum.

"They were not just a group of black abolitionists," Morgan-Welch said. ". . . They determined they'd change the nation. These are fabulous stories."

Meeting house fetes 200 years of service to black community
By Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff  |  December 7, 2006

The words belonged to Frederick Douglass, who spoke them almost a century and a half ago as he rallied abolitionists in Boston after an antislavery meeting was broken up: "After all the arguments for liberty to which Boston has listened for more than a quarter of a century, has she yet to learn that the time to assert a right is a time when the right itself is called into question?"

Yesterday, it was the incoming governor, the first black to be elected to the office, who spoke. Reading excerpts of Douglass speeches, Deval L. Patrick helped to launch a 200th anniversary celebration of Boston's African Meeting House.

The matches were found on the seat of a woman who had attempted to conceal the odour of flatulence with the matches, Nashville airport authorities said.

All 99 passengers and five crew left the plane while it was searched.

The woman was questioned by the FBI but released without charge and allowed to board another American Airlines flight.

"It was determined that she was trying to conceal body odour," said Lynne Lowrance of the Nashville Airport Authority.

Poverty shifts to the suburbs
Suburban poor outnumber their inner-city counterparts for the first time
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:02 a.m. ET Dec 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - As Americans flee the cities for the suburbs, many are failing to leave poverty behind.

The suburban poor outnumbered their inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas released Thursday.

Okay, that looks interesting...

Berube said several factors are contributing to an increase in suburban poverty:

• Suburbs are adding people much faster than cities, making it inevitable that the number of poor people living in suburbs would eventually surpass those living in cities.
• The poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) is still higher than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent). But the overall number of people living in poverty is higher in the suburbs in part because of population growth.
• America’s suburbs are becoming more diverse, racially and economically. “There’s poverty really everywhere in metropolitan areas because there are low-wage jobs everywhere,” Berube said.
• Recent immigrants are increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to suburbs, especially in the South and West. Those immigrants, on average, have lower incomes than people born in the United States.

He said that? The first two points are the same...more people means more poor people. That 'racially' in 'more diverse, racially and economically" seems stuck in there sideways. REALLY sounds like, "All the new poor folks are un-white." And this is coming out of The Brookings Institution?

Nothing short of impeachment is going to stop these fools.

Great Britain is lucky...The Poodle's days are already numbered. This press conference may speed him out the door, which is why they are lucky. We don't get "no confidence" votes.

But Bush...

Bush keeps talking about "if we were to fail" like 'we' haven't failed already.

George W. Bush's policies have failed, and all the things he made you fear are waiting for you over the horizon because it failed.

DOV ZAKHEIM: There's one other thing, too, and that is, from the perspective of the Middle East, withdrawal is a disaster. It would follow on a series of cases that they remember -- and it's not Vietnam. We keep talking about Vietnam.

The people in the region, it's Lebanon. It's not following up in Afghanistan after the Soviets left. It's Mr. Carter saying he supported the shah, and the shah falls.

They have a series of cases -- it's not supporting the Shia when they revolted in '91 -- so that they would then interpret a withdrawal or a signal of a withdrawal in such a way that I don't think we would have influence there again

City Journal and Heather Mac Donald (latest) rant (latest because there's a lot of links with titles that threaten to piss me off on the page) has come to my attention, courtesy(?) of ptcruiser.

Heather Mac Donald
No, the Cops Didn’t Murder Sean Bell
And here’s what decent black advocates would say.
4 December 2006

New York’s anti-cop forces have roared back to life, thanks to a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man a week ago. The press is once again fawning over Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Charles Barron, and sundry other hate-mongers in and out of city government as they accuse the police of widespread mistreatment of blacks and issue barely veiled threats of riots if they do not get “justice.”

The allegation that last weekend’s shooting was racially motivated is preposterous.

Of course, no one is making that allegation. The concern is over the fact that Black folks keep getting shot.

Heather knows this because after savaging the strawman with blow after matchless blow, she says

But even more preposterous than the assertion of such animus is the claim by New York’s self-appointed minority advocates that the well-being of the minority community is what motivates them.

Okay? Baby gets paid per word, looks like.

The heifer continues with the ploy that's been standard since The Bell Curve was published: throw a pile of shit at people until they can only respond with inchoate rage.

But I'll play.

The way Bob Herbert started [TS] Waiting for Answers, I thought he was going to wimp out a bit.

I don’t know whether the undercover cops who shot and killed Sean Bell and wounded his two friends should be criminally indicted. I wasn’t there and not enough information has emerged publicly to make a determination.

Because enough has come out to determine Undercover Mike has to fucking go. You don't get to reload your weapon and call it an accident.

But Mr. Herbert is talking medium, if not long, game.

The interests of the larger community can be served only when problematic police shootings are thoroughly and fairly investigated by objective, impartial and independent investigators. The police have shown over many years that they are not up to this important task, and neither are the district attorneys. This is why so few cops have been brought to justice over the years in cases of blatant police misconduct and brutality.

Many people have focused solely on the racial aspect of the Pierce case. But as I explained to the City Council, and as the city attorney is well aware, the city's liability does not hinge on whether race was a motivating factor for the dog food incident.

Pierce initially asked for three things: a permanent transfer to a new fire station; a full investigation; and fair punishment for those involved. Instead, the Fire Department tried to make Pierce return to Fire Station 5; there was no investigation; and the perpetrators received discipline that Pierce felt was a slap on the wrist. Had the department addressed Pierce's needs, there never would have been a lawsuit.

When I saw this case reported, I said NOTHING. Someone mentioned it here in the comments, I forget who...my only response was that I'm not feeling the racism part of the complaint.

This is because race obviously had nothing to do with it. And I'm glad the race noise was just editorializing in the media...while at the same time I'm totally unhappy that it was editorialized as a racial issue. We got enough legitimate ones.

Racism was only part of Pierce's case
The ex-firefighter was a victim of retaliation after he reported the dog-food incident.
By Genie Harrison

Genie Harrison is the attorney who represents Tennie Pierce in his case against the L os Angeles Fire Department.

December 7, 2006

WHAT HAPPENED to Tennie Pierce at Fire Station 5 in Westchester cannot be compared, as one angry Angeleno suggested, to an episode of "Survivor" or "Fear Factor" with a payout of $2.7 million. Pierce wasn't given a choice. Instead, he was fed dog food against his will for the purpose of "humbling" him, as the Fire Department's own inquiry found, and was forced off the job when he followed department rules and reported the incident.

But one of the most interesting things coming out of research on the economics of the media industry has been the notion that media slant may simply reflect business rather than politics.

New research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers” compiles some compelling and altogether unusual data to answer the question.

Lean Left? Lean Right? News Media May Take Their Cues From Customers
By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

When Matt Lauer declared on the “Today” show last week that NBC would start referring to the conflict in Iraq as a “civil war,” he inadvertently started his own civil war within the news media. Fox News refused to follow suit, saying that non-Iraqis were involved in the fighting, “and that makes it something different.” Accusations of partisanship arose all around. Yet newspapers around the country have been making decisions on this matter for months. The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor have somewhat officially termed the conflict a civil war; The Washington Post has not.

Any politician will tell you that sometimes what we call things is the most political decision of all.

The reasons for the decline all grow out of forces building for decades. The federal government has been losing fewer cases in the lower courts and so has less reason to appeal. As Congress enacts fewer laws, the justices have fewer statutes to interpret. And justices who think they might end up on the losing side of an important case might vote not to take it.

But there are still plenty of lower-court conflicts that go unresolved, said Thomas C. Goldstein, a Supreme Court practitioner and close student of court statistics who wrote last week on the popular Scotusblog that the justices were “on the cusp of the greatest shortfall in filling the court’s docket in recent memory, and likely in its modern history.”

“I don’t think we’re at the end of history and have fixed all the problems,” Mr. Goldstein said in an interview.

Case of the Dwindling Docket Mystifies the Supreme Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — On the Supreme Court’s color-coded master calendar, which was distributed months before the term began on the first Monday in October, Dec. 6 is marked in red to signify a day when the justices are scheduled to be on the bench, hearing arguments.

The courtroom, however, was empty on Wednesday, and for a simple reason: The court was out of cases. The question is, where have all the cases gone?

Hm.  

Make no mistake, the report is a stunning indictment of Mr. Bush’s failure — in Iraq and no less in Washington. But its recommendations are still couched in language vague enough to allow the president to pretend it is the “new way forward” his aides are now talking up, rather than a timetable for withdrawal, which is on Mr. Bush’s no-go list. Predictably, the first reaction of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, was to insist that “there is nothing in here about pulling back militarily.”

Where have I seen this problem before? Ah, I remember...UNMOVIC. More specifically, every WMD inspection report produced by Hans Blix.

The Sept. 11 commission report was not sacred writ. And Democrats still vow to enact major commission recommendations to bolster port security and screen airport cargo. But the lawmakers cannot ignore the fact that they were found to be an organic part of the problem.

But not if they want their job...and that's not that dumb "vote Republican to send a message" line. You can punish folks with the primaries.

Cherry-Picking Campaign Promises

Weeks before they take majority control of the Capitol, the Democrats are reported to be wriggling out of one of their most important campaign vows: to repair Congressional oversight of the nation’s intelligence agencies. Congress was found to be nothing less than “dysfunctional” on this duty by the Sept. 11 commission, which wisely recommended a full-scale revamping of the committee structure.

The University of Texas-Austin is Exhibit A for those seeking changes. In 1998, 37 percent of all University of Texas freshmen were admitted under the law. This year, it's 66 percent. Count only in-state students, and the number edges up to 71 percent....

The law has overwhelmed a few University of Texas programs, like the College of Business. The program is so popular that it can't admit every top 10 percent student who applies. And to leave room for others, there's a 75 percent cap on the number of business spaces for top 10 percent rule students.

Texas' `top 10 percent law' under fire
By Holly K. Hacker
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - It's been praised for keeping public universities in Texas racially diverse. It's been criticized for hurting talented students with less-than-stellar grades.

The suit was brought by a student identified as John Doe. The schools conceded that the student probably would have been admitted had he possessed Hawaiian ancestry. The suit argued that the admission policy ran afoul of a Reconstruction-era law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The court, splitting almost entirely along partisan lines, ruled that the prohibition did not apply to the schools’ admissions program. (The eight judges in the majority were appointed by Democratic presidents. All but one of the dissenters were appointed by Republicans.)

“The schools are a wholly private K-12 educational establishment, whose preferential admissions policy is meant to counteract the significant, current educational deficits of Native Hawaiian children in Hawaii,” Judge Susan P. Graber wrote for the majority. That fact, coupled with Congressional praise for the schools’ mission, she wrote, meant that the admission program did not violate the civil rights law.

Hawaii Schools’ Racial Enrollment Upheld
By ADAM LIPTAK

The Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii, private schools with an endowment of more than $6 billion, are entitled to limit their enrollment to Native Hawaiian children, a federal appeals court panel in San Francisco ruled yesterday by a vote of 8 to 7.

I once heard "negotiation" defined as "discussing an issue until it is sufficiently ambiguous to let everyone claim victory.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Iraq Study Group report.