INTERNET SIGHTINGS
Response to an online complaint about the lack of snow removal in Washington

OBAMAMETER

We are bringing up to date our Obamameter and will be listing various categries here. Positive positions are in bold. We would be glad to hear of any additional suggestions

8% Freedom & Justice

Permitting torture and renditions to continue

Continues searchs of computers at borders

Supports anti-gay marriage law

Opposes legalization of marijuana

Won't prosecute in states that allow medical marijuana

Supports unconstitutional preventive detention

Claims right to kill Americans abroad it suspects fo aiding terrorism

Refuses to prosecute CIA torture criminals

Institutues virtual strip searches of air passengers, without record to either Constitution or to proper scientific testing for dangers.

Support overturn of long-standing law that stops police from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present

Claims prisoners have no right to DNA evidence that might prove their innocence.

Eric Holder says he favors continuation of secret searches of library and bookstore data files.

Supports illegal wiretapping of citizens

BREVITAS

News, Australia - Employers are refusing to hire Generation Y workers because they lack a work ethic and spend too much time talking to friends in work hours. "Employers come to us about Gen Y, saying they're looking for a staff member but they don't want anyone in that 20s age bracket because they find they don't understand common courtesy in the workplace," Kristy-Lee Johnston, director of Footprint Recruitment told The Courier-Mail. And the complaints don't only come from managers and bosses. Social researcher Mark McCrindle said: "They also come from other people in the team who are of another generation."


It's always fun when the Washington Post tries to get down home, as with this headling: "For some folks, profusion of snow offers great sledding opportunities". . .As in, "Come on kids, let's take advantage of the sledding opportunity offered us by the profusion of snow."

Rules of Thumb: A waitress friend told me this one: If a kid asks for root beer and you don't have any, mix some Coke with some Ginger Ale. If a kid asks for Ginger Ale and you don't have any, mix some Coke with some Sprite. If a kid asks for Sprite and you don't have any, mix some sugar with some Seltzer Water. If a kid asks for Seltzer Water, he's just messin' with you. Joseph Bauer, Master Carpenter, Indian Hills, Ohio

MORE DIRT REVEALED ON GOLDMAN SACHS' ROLE IN FISCAL COLLAPSE

Put simply, for Obama to employ anyone who held a position of significance at Goldman Sachs is an impeachable offense, but since there's no one to impeach him, the sickness continues.

NY Times - Billions of dollars were at stake when 21 executives of Goldman Sachs and the American International Group convened a conference call on Jan. 28, 2008, to try to resolve a rancorous dispute that had been escalating for months.

A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world's biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.

A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman - like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment - had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.

After more than an hour of debate, the two sides on the call signed off with nothing settled, according to internal A.I.G. documents and an audio recording reviewed by The New York Times.

Behind-the-scenes disputes over huge sums are common in banking, but the standoff between A.I.G. and Goldman would become one of the most momentous in Wall Street history. Well before the federal government bailed out A.I.G. in September 2008, Goldman's demands for billions of dollars from the insurer helped put it in a precarious financial position by bleeding much-needed cash. That ultimately provoked the government to step in.

With taxpayer assistance to A.I.G. currently totaling $180 billion, regulatory and Congressional scrutiny of Goldman's role in the insurer's downfall is increasing. The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the payment demands that a number of firms - most prominently Goldman - made during 2007 and 2008 as the mortgage market imploded.

The S.E.C. wants to know whether any of the demands improperly distressed the mortgage market, according to people briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because the inquiry was intended to be confidential.

In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm. . .

Goldman stood to gain from the housing market's implosion because in late 2006, the firm had begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market soured. The further mortgage securities' prices fell, the greater were Goldman's profits.

In its dispute with A.I.G., Goldman invariably argued that the securities in dispute were worth less than A.I.G. estimated - and in many cases, less than the prices at which other dealers valued the securities.

The pricing dispute, and Goldman's bets that the housing market would decline, has left some questioning whether Goldman had other reasons for lowballing the value of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, said Bill Brown, a law professor at Duke University who is a former employee of both Goldman and A.I.G.

The dispute between the two companies, he said, "was the tip of the iceberg of this whole crisis."

"It's not just who was right and who was wrong," Mr. Brown said. "I also want to know their motivations. There could have been an incentive for Goldman to say, 'A.I.G., you owe me more money.' "

Goldman is proud of its reputation for aggressively protecting itself and its shareholders from losses as it did in the dispute with A.I.G.

WHY? . . . THE THING OUR LEADERS NEVER TELL US ABOUT TERRORISM

Bill Blum - "The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction," writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine's international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the "underwear bomber", Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. "Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well."

Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to "provoke an overreaction", or to "sow fear"? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria's article.

At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question:

Thomas: "What is really lacking always for us is you don't give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. ... What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why."

Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. ... [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death."

Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?"

Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way."

Thomas: "Why?"

Brennan: "I think ... this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland."

Thomas: "But you haven't explained why."

EVIDENCE OF CRIME STAT FRAUD

Rob Kall, Op Ed News - A new survey of over 100 retired NYPD captains and senior officers found that they believed that statistics were manipulated to portray lower crime rates for the compstat program that calculates crime rates..

The survey suggests that police have distorted crime reporting, dropping value of stolen goods so the theft is categorized as misdemeanor instead of felony. They drop categorization of crimes from felony to misdemeanor if suspects can't be found.

One element of the compsat program is the theory that aggressive arrests for the smallest crimes, with a minimum of 24 hours spent in jail, lead to discouraging of repeat offenses.

Compsat, originally adopted by Rudy Giuliani's first police chief, William J. Bratton, is now in use by hundreds of police departments all over the US and the world, including LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Houston, Baltimore and Vancouver. Many former NYPD officers now operate as consultants to those cities, helping them run the compsat program.

The survey raises the question as to whether the use of this system literally encourages police and district attorneys to manipulate crime reporting.

The NY Times, in an article title, Retired Officers Raise Questions on Crime Data, reported, "In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies -- felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat -- to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

"Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

"Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics," said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain." . . .

JUST EXERCISING A LITTLE CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

NY Times - If the Democratic Party has a stronghold on Wall Street, it is JPMorgan Chase. Its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is a friend of President Obama's from Chicago, a frequent White House guest and a big Democratic donor. Its vice chairman, William M. Daley, a former Clinton administration cabinet official and Obama transition adviser, comes from Chicago's Democratic dynasty.

But this year Chase's political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry's campaign to thwart Mr. Obama's proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions - $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics - some of his biggest supporters, like Mr. Dimon, have become the industry's chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda.

Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street's "buyer's remorse" with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street "fat cats," they may fight back by withholding their cash.

"If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose that support," said Kelly S. King, the chairman and chief executive of BB&T. Mr. King is a board member of the Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies for the biggest banks, and last month he helped represent the industry at a private dinner at the Treasury Department.

SOCIAL SECURITY SCARE SQUAD MISSTATES FUTURE

Dean Baker - Allan Sloan told listeners to Marketplace radio this morning that future retirees should be worried about their Social Security benefits because the program is now paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. In fact, the program has accumulated more than $2.5 trillion on government bonds in its trust fund. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this fund will be sufficient to pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2044.

Even after that date, if nothing is ever done to change the program, the projections still show that it will be able to pay close to 80 percent of scheduled benefits. This will still provide future retirees with a benefit that is considerably larger than what current retirees receive.

All of these benefits will be paid under current law. Congress would have to vote to overhaul the program to prevent the payment of benefits.

COMPENDIUM OF VIOLENCE IN SUPERBOWL ADS

OBAMA CANCELS NUKE PROMISE; BACKS HUGE SUBSIDIES FOR DANGEROUS ENERGY

Arjun Makhijani, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research - In his State of the Union address, President Obama formally abandoned his campaign promise on new nuclear plants. In 2008 he endorsed only continued operation of existing nuclear power plants. New ones would have to wait until safety, waste, and proliferation concerns are resolved. The latter two concerns are arguably more acute than before he took office. The Obama administration has rightly abandoned Yucca Mountain as a repository for nuclear waste . . . But his commission on nuclear waste has not even begun work; it will be 2012 by the time it issues its final report.

Further, while expressing concerns about deficits, the Obama administration is opening the spigot for more loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants because Wall Street won't finance them. They are just too risky. A single project is often more costly than the entire net worth of many electricity generating companies. They don't want to bet their companies on nuclear. But they are OK with betting taxpayer dollars. Given that the underlying relationship between energy demand and economic growth is changing (quite apart from the recession), many nuclear projects are likely to be abandoned. Some already have been. Every nuclear power plant ordered after the first energy crisis in 1973 was abandoned, leaving ratepayers and bondholders on the hook. This time it will be the taxpayers.

Worst of all, nuclear will not materially help with global warming. It takes too long and too much money to build a single plant. Pursuing nuclear takes so much money that it will sideline renewable energy and efficiency to marginal roles.

LICENSE PLATE SCANNERS: ANOTHER UNCONSITUTIONAL TOOL FOR COPS

Shenna Bellows, Maine Civil Liberties Union - Automatic license plate-readers scan and store the license plates of any car that an equipped police cruiser encounters-on the highway, in a parking lot, in a neighborhood. The scanner then checks the plate against databases, watch-lists and the identity and location of the scan is stored in a police database.

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1928, "The makers of the Constitution: conferred as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." Mainers cherish our right to be left alone by the government - to think, say, and do what we want as long as we are not hurting our neighbors or breaking the law. ALPRs, like all surveillance, threaten those fundamental privacy rights.

There are three primary civil liberties problems with this technology itself - the cameras, the hot lists, and most seriously, the database.

First, surveillance cameras, in themselves, have a chilling effect on freedom of movement. People behave differently when they believe themselves to be under surveillance. This has been a theory behind prison architecture for decades, and indeed, we have come to expect cameras in situations where heightened security is at issue - at the bank or the airport. Cameras on police cars can be very effective, and indeed, the ACLU has supported them in situations that protect both police and citizens, by videotaping arrests and questioning of suspects. But there is a difference between the camera used to monitor interactions between law enforcement and the public and surveillance cameras that monitor the ordinary activity of us, the people as we go about our daily lives. In a free society, we have an expectation that we are not being monitored by law enforcement unless we are suspected of wrongdoing or involved in a situation that requires police action. All people in America are presumed innocent and law-abiding unless the evidence indicates otherwise. The very nature of these surveillance cameras turns that presumption of innocence on its head - into a presumption that we are all guilty.

Second, the cameras rely on "hot lists," lists fed into the camera by law enforcement to generate automated matches. Even if we can't agree that surveillance cameras in themselves have a chilling effect on a free society, then perhaps we can agree on the dangers of unlimited "hot lists." The technology that many of you have seen and you will hear described in more detail functions using "hot lists" that allow law enforcement to match a photographed license plate to a license plate number on a hot list. This technology allows law enforcement to use any hot list that they like or even to construct a hot list themselves. Imagine the potential abuse of such hot lists. Law enforcement could sweep the parking lot of a No on 1 or Yes on 1 rally. . .or a synagogue. . .or a mosque. . .or a church to record the license plate numbers, which would then enable law enforcement to use that list of license plate numbers to monitor the actions of those participants.

Think that wouldn't happen in America? Ask the Eastern Maine Peace and Justice Center or Senator John Kerry or others who have been subjected to FBI surveillance because of their political activities. We have further concerns about use of some federally compiled lists, like the so-called terrorist watch list, which numbers over one million names and includes names like those of the civil rights leader and current Congressman John Lewis as well as eight-year old Mikey Hicks. Hot list technology that creates an automated match makes this surveillance camera system even more powerful and potentially threatening to civil liberties than an ordinary camera.

Third, the most dangerous aspect of this system is the database that the camera creates and feeds. I have seen this database in my visit to South Portland to meet with law enforcement. The database contains the record of every car law enforcement has encountered with a photograph, date, time and location. This database contains a virtual map of the movements of ordinary citizens about the community. Lieutenant Frank Clark has described this in the newspaper saying, "Information is gold." He is absolutely correct. Already, other jurisdictions are sharing these databases with repo companies looking to repossess vehicles whose owners are behind on payments. The commercial and political interest in these types of databases is enormous. A journalist friend of mine said when I shared with him the details of this information, "I do want to know if the mayor is at the liquor store. That's news." The newspaper. . .or one's political opponents. . .might very well be interested in who visits the liquor store or the adult video shop or a psychiatrist or a family planning center. Commercial entities have a strong interest in who shops at their stores or their competitor's stores. You will hear from supporters of this technology that their interest is very limited, but we know from experience that inevitably mission creep expands uses of these powerful technologies from law enforcement to intelligence gathering to total information awareness, all at the expense of the privacy of ordinary citizens. . .

When the government invades our privacy by collecting information about our private, personal lives, the government then has a responsibility to ensure that we are kept safe from those who would seek merely to embarrass one of us or our neighbors to those who would do us harm. We are concerned that the hasty adoption of this technology has serious and dramatic implications for both our liberty and our security. . .

The three civil liberties problems with the technology itself include the cameras, the hot lists used to create matches, and the database. Each of those technological elements creates liberty and security vulnerabilities. The urge to use the newest, fastest technology is not surprising, but ALPR's simply place too much data mining power in the hands of the police and those who breach their systems.

WHEERE THE DEFICIT COMES FROM

NEW ORLEANS CHARTER SCHOOLS: CAPITALIZING ON DISASTER

Jessica Schiller, Change - Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, including its schools. Children and their families suffered through, and are now back at school -- but they face a new school system, one dominated by the private sector. Without adequate funding from the federal and state governments, the city had little choice but to turn over its system to non-profits and for-profit companies. Now, New Orleans has the largest number of charter schools of any city in the country.

In spite of the enthusiasm for the charters, they are riddled with problems. Many exclude special education students and are physically inaccessible to the majority of students in the city, leaving them to the regular public schools or poorly-functioning charters. Moreover, low-income families spend much of their time getting their homes and neighborhoods back together, and do not have the time to navigate the school choices, leaving the school system with a few strong schools and still many poorly performing schools.

Arne Duncan wants us to see New Orleans as a model. A city largely dedicated to privately-run charter schools. Race to the Top funds require states to support charter growth, even though there is no research confirming that charter schools are better than public schools. Katrina has enabled private operators to take advantage of what Ken Saltman has called "capitalizing on disaster." Katrina wiped out the school system of New Orleans, and created an opportunity for private operators to come in and remake the schools without rebuilding or consulting the communities that the schools would serve. Indeed, these schools were remade as an essentially privately-run system. . .

Some families are benefiting from the new schools, most are not. The charter operators, on the other hand, can open up shop easily and get public funds to run their schools. This does not seem like a model of urban school systems. We need high quality schools for all children, not a bunch of private operators who create good schools for some.

SHOP TALK

Some strange things have been happening around here. Last night some of our readers trying to check in our main page, got our Down East edition, Coastal Packet, instead. The other day, they were sent to our ecology news archives. We've fixed both problems but want you not to be surprised at this sort of thing happening again over the next month and half. Just let us know when you find it.

What's happened is that Google, as part of its campaign to take over the world, has decided that it no longer likes the venerated file transfer protocol, or FTP. We don't know why it feels this way, but who are we to argue with a corporation that even scares the Chinese?

Although many readers may not know it, a few of the pages that seem to just ordinary subsidiaries of prorev.com are, in fact, produced by the Google subsidiary, Blogger.Com. By March 26, these pages must be free of FTP association or they will end up as uneditable files on our site, which has been served to the world for years by the ever-wonderful Turnpike.Net.

We have already converted two pages to the Bloggercentric paradigm. These are:

Flotsam & Jetsam is now at http://prorevflotsam.blogspot.com


Sam Smith's Essays archives is now at http://samsmithessays.blogspot.com

What is pending, however, is that our main Undernews page and our Coastal Packet page will both have to change as well. We are awaiting further instructions but, it might help if you printed this post out for future reference. Should you be unable to reach either of these sites, try the new links which will be:


http://prorevnews.com for Undernews
http://coastalpacket.com for Coastal Packet

Don't try them now; they won't work. And in the best of all worlds - remember those days? - you'll have a clear announcement that the change is occurring.

Finally, there is the unresolved problem of the RSS feeds for the above. If the current ones stop working, try loading the sites above into your reader. They should work after the change is made.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: FOOTBALL AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Sam Smith

This article appeared in the DC Gazette in the 1970s. Nothing much has changed.

It's almost over. Our autumnal orgy of orchestrated injury, our paean to triumph at any cost, the pageant of American Darwinism. Football season.

I treat football season like February. I avoid it whenever possible. But, like February, one must leave town or face it at some point. It looms nightly as a desert to cross in order to learn both the evening news and the weather. It turns up on television sets incongruously propped in strange locations so we can follow the game as well as do whatever else we had planned for that afternoon. It speaks to us with Orwellian omnipotence from screens in bars, behind store counters and perched on stools in parking lot shacks. My bank, in a singular departure from its normal practice of applying service charges to every transaction, offers me a free guide to it each year. It is the male thing of which to speak during the darkening months and if one wishes more than a cursory conversation with other males then more than a cursory glance at the sports pages is required. For while it is all right to be indifferent to baseball, soccer, or hockey - if one is discreet about it - indifference to football verges on androgyny or worse. Skip the totems if you like - the bumper stickers and the logo festooned wool cap - but avoid the issue completely? Never.

Well, the truth is that not only am I indifferent to football, I don't like it I can find only two things good about professional football. The first is that it is so popular in Washington that no otherwise pleasant friend has invited me to attend a Redskins game. The second is that it may serve the nation to some extent by sublimating violence that could be expressed in more dangerous forms. Football is part of the pornography of violence and, if we accept the liberal sociologists' view of such matters, it is perhaps wisest to let the Battle of America be won on the playing fields of RFK Stadium.

I say perhaps. The evidence is cloudy. We managed to engage in the most stupid war of our history while at the peak of arousal over professional football. And we are regressing into the state-contrived violence of capital punishment, SWAT squads, and massive subsidization of foreign and domestic police state activities apparently unappeased by the bruises of the NFL. But then, who knows what even more grizzly avocations we might find for ourselves and our nation were it not for the ritualistic release of our lust for battle on Sunday afternoons (and Monday evenings and Saturday afternoons and. . . )

Football was long kept in its place in part by the American love of baseball, that remarkably friendly game that more than any other sport seemed to reflect national political and social ideals. Slow as a bill working its way through Congress, enamored of individual eccentricity, full of conflict between citizen (ball player) and authority (umpire), organized in American technological fashion with a specialist for every position all working towards the same goal but keeping a genteel distance from each other, dependent upon skills other than physical size, and featuring the pitcher as democratic hero, recallable upon loss of a vote of confidence, baseball was closely attuned to the way we were.

But we didn't stay the way we were. As America's imperial longings became more apparent, as merchandising considerations increasingly insinuated themselves into every corner of our values, as our businesses merged and our minds conglomerated at the drop of anything bigger, more exaggerated or more "super," and as television demanded larger and larger audiences as the price of admission to its cameras, the countless, casual, dreamy and so unextraordinary afternoons of baseball no longer were what we were about. Baseball had been a way of life for America, but America's life had lost its way. As we lost confidence in the future, we needed something that would fulfill the moment - the moment that was increasingly to serve the functions of past, present and future. We no longer wished to wait a half a year to find out who had won or lost or to choose our heroes only after observing their performance in scores of games. Professional football brought us the Big Event - history in an afternoon, destiny a baker's dozen of hours on a 100-yard patch of artificial turf.

Baseball is different. As Eugene McCarthy said, theoretically, a game could go on forever. A ball hit out of the park could " travel to infinity. And baseball has a past that echoes with every crack of the bat.

I was in the cavernous-waiting room of Philadelphia's 30th Street Station recently when Mohammed Ali walked in. The entire Philadelphia patronage of Amtrak for that hour stared as much as it dared. I remembered the first time I saw him. It was 1961 or so. I was in the lobby of the Louisville Courier Journal and this black tornado roared out of the elevator bragging, yakking, dancing. Who's that, I asked. Cassius Clay. Who's Cassius Clay? Now I knew. And the reason I knew was that beyond the braggadocio, the hype that no Madison A venue copywriter would be brazen enough to emulate, was quantifiable achievement, achievement attained over enough years, with enough pain, to prove its worth. Boxing is a brutal game too, too brutal for my inclinations, but at least it knows how to find a hero.

Football has its heroes. But as in contemporary politics and contemporary music, the real ones are obscured by the institutional necessity to make every action heroic, dramatic or controversial. The truth simply does not out itself at velocity adequate to pro football's economic demands. Football has premised itself on the existence of supermen. When it can not produce them or activities worthy of them, it and the press that fawns over it simply lies to us.

Football also not only involves an unreasonable number of individual injuries but a progressive deterioration of the physical health of nearly all players. The spectator is not viewing an occasional accident, but the pandemic maiming of most of those on the field. This problem is most severe in pro ball, but is a characteristic of the game all the way down to the little leagues. Football is actually an anti-athletic endeavor since its main physiological effect is to hurt bodies rather than to make them stronger.

The sport is organized along extraordinarily authoritarian lines, with plays committed to paper in advance and individual innovation encouraged only when the play goes astray. The coach assumes an importance unparalleled in sports. The concept of a team representing a blend of individual initiative is replaced in football by, a system dependent upon each player doing precisely what he is told, providing yet another parallel to recent American political and economic history.

The watching of football and other sports has become a substitute for physical activity on the part of the spectator. I believe that part of the attraction of television sports is a subconscious belief that the karma of the athlete is transmitted to the viewer through the tube. Unfortunately, there is no metaphysical or medical evidence to support this. On the contrary, for a nation so obsessed with sports, we are remarkably unfit. When more than a thousand American males 18 to 20 were given a twelve minute running test, only six percent rated in the excellent category. A similar sample of young Austrian males found 30% rated excellent.

Simple observation suggests that this situation does not improve with age especially in that category of American males most glued to the Sunday tube. We send our top six percent to the Olympics and the stadium. A much higher percentage we send to the intensive care unit.

The obsession with football interrupts many other facets of life, not the least being sports itself. One example; A few weeks ago 1,500 persons started in the Marine Marathon here. More than a thousand finished. Based on participation it was probably the largest sporting event ever held in the area. As far as the local media was concerned, though, it was a sidelight. It rated a couple of photos and cut lines. Not stats, no detail, no real coverage. The press was following the money, not the athletes and so once again devoted its space to football.

For me, that's enough reasons to long for a new year, for a temporary end of Super Bowls, wild cards and draft choices. For me there's enough greed and brutality in the real world. A good sport takes us away from the avarices and perversions of the mind and lets us discover skill, speed, strength, grace and surprise that lie beneath the shoulders. A good sport is fun. It's play. Football is neither. It is hard, mean, power-grubbing, hurtful work because instead of releasing us from the less admirable aspects of our world, it emulates and encourages them.

BIG SNOWBALL FIGHT IN DC

(Just three blocks south of the Review's former headquarters.

Note homeless man selling newspapers helping to organize it)

CONSERVATIVE GROUP DENIES HUMAN ROLE IN TRAFFIC JAMS

Progressive Review -  Fresh from raising serious questions about the human role in climate change, a conservative group - People for Driving - has challenged the widely-held belief that people cause traffic jams. They argue that tie-ups are the result of the natural and random ebb and flow of cars.

The argument has already raised serious problems on Capitol Hill for those pushing for more mass transit or the repair of existing roads and bridges.

PFD points out that even though approximately the same number of people live in a city during a 24 hour period, traffic congestion changes considerably. Further, traffic tie-ups greatly diminish on weekends, again with no significant change in population.

"This is a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation," says Florie M. Megafone, director the group.

The group claims liberals are blaming humans for what is a natural and unpredictable event and, as a result, are damaging the economy and individual freedom.

Charles Olglebot of the American Automobile Association said that nothing in their research indicates that cars are present on the highway without their drivers wishing them to be there, but he admitted not to have done a study specifically aimed at this question.

Conservative critics point out a number of instances where local TV news programs grossly overestimated the seriousness of a traffic jam in order to build their audience. William Appledirth of Fox Channel 13, for example, has admitted using adjectives like "terrible," "tremendous" and "blocks-long" to describe traffic congestion even though Channel 13 lacked any scientific proof of these claims.

"We can't let this major traffic jam scandal continue," says Megafone.

Another conservative group is also looking into reports that sex isn't always necessary to have a baby. Said a spokesperson, "Liberals want to blame people for everything."- Josiah Swampoodle

BANK OF AMERICA CEO TRIAL COULD BRING PAULSON AND BERNANKE INTO COURT

Charlie Gasparino, Daily Beast - In defending former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis against charges that he misled investors, his lawyers will call as witnesses former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, according to people close to the matter. The defense team, led by former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, hopes to get Paulson and Bernanke to reveal that Lewis did not mislead the government about BofA's deteriorating financial condition in the aftermath of its Merrill Lynch deal. Those losses prompted a massive government bailout.

White's first order of business is to get the civil case dismissed, according to several sources. But if she's unsuccessful, she plans a vigorous defense, including calling high-level government officials to testify. "If this thing goes to trial you can expect both Paulson and Bernanke to be on the witness list," said one person close to the defense team, "and right now Lewis doesn't want to settle."

"It is unclear if either Bernanke or Paulson have already given testimony to the state attorney general in preparation for bringing today's case, which includes civil fraud charges against former Bank of America CFO Joe Price. (A spokesman for Cuomo's office did not return a call for comment; a spokesman for Bernanke had no comment and a spokeswoman for Paulson didn't return an email request for comment. And a spokesman for Lewis declined to comment on the matter.) So far, both men have given testimony before Congressional committees on the controversial merger. Paulson addresses the matter in On the Brink, his new book about his role in the financial meltdown of late 2008.

In a statement, White said that Lewis is being "publicly vilified by the political search for accountability for the financial meltdown."

SNOW DAZE: WASHINGTON AND MAINE

Sam Smith

In part because the media has misleadingly written endlessly about global warming rather than climate change, there are going to more than a few people in mid-Atlantic cities who think the recent snows prove it's all not a problem.

In fact, as a reader recently pointed out, change is just that. It is hard to predict. We know past data definitely indicates a shift but we can't define the precise nature of that shift because we haven't experienced it yet.

Just before the current blizzard, the National Wildlife Federation issued a report that suggested that we shouldn't be surprised by such things:

"Global warming is having a seemingly peculiar effect on winter weather in the northern United States. Winter is becoming milder and shorter on average; spring arrives 10 to 14 days earlier than it did just 20 years ago. But most snow belt areas are still experiencing extremely heavy snowstorms. . . Even as global warming slowly changes the character of winter, we will still experience significant year-to-year variability in snowfall and temperature because many different factors are at play."

Washington, DC, well illustrates the uncertain quality of change. The storm last weekend dropped the fourth largest amount of snow on the city in recorded history. But you need only to go back two years to February 6, 2008, and you'll find the city setting a warmth record for that date of 74 degrees. The coldest February 6 was back in 1895, when the thermometer fell to one degree.

It may help to keep in mind two principles:

- Change is change and doesn't fully define itself until it's happened.

- An average is only an average.

Having recently moved from DC to Maine, I gaze out my window at the remains of 22 inches of snow that hardly slowed things down at all in these parts and recall the number of my friends who said something like, "How are you going to survive those Maine winters?" and I think how grateful I am I wasn't back in DC this weekend.

In fact, Maine has two mre typical advantages over the capital in winter. We have a lot of sun and the cold is dry. Twenty-five degrees on a sunny Down East day is infinitely preferable to a 35 degree cloudy day in DC with the humid cold cutting through any protection you might be wearing.

Here's how I described it back the 1970s:

"The city lived for spring and fall, periods separated by muggy summer and by an unpredictable yet dull winter. In the fall, the gauze of noxious gas that stretched over DC all summer was peeled away, permitting the sun a rare chance to lounge unimpeded against the sides of buildings or ricochet off spires. The air conditioner's monotone was finally silenced and the hint of chill repulsed by a friendly jacket. But the spring was even better; you quickly forgot the snow that didn't come, or that did come but all in one blizzard, and you luxuriated in a few months of unadulterated color and life. Summer was awful and in winter it was best to heed the words of Mark Twain:

"'When you arrived it was snowing. When you reached the hotel it was sleeting. When you went to bed it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all pervading. You will like the climate-when you get used to it. . . . Take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and so forth.'"

As for Maine, I don't have to check any data to confirm that the climate has changed. All I have to do is remember the Farm Bureau supper I attended as a kid where I overheard the straw hatted Harold Mann telling a companion, "Ayah. I remembah that wintah of ought eight. We had our first snow the middle of Octobah and come May 1st we were still on runnahs."

Sam Smith, Washington Post, 1987 - Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about one percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.

Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.

How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.

To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. Since it is clear our trucks are outmoded and not properly equipped, let's look at it another way: 25 good snow plows could, using the Maine standard, run through every street in the city in nine hours. . .

Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours.

I asked if he could explain the logic of a not-uncommon Washington scene: two snow plows working directly behind each other, sometimes with a Department of Public Works pickup truck in the lead. He just laughed and said, "No." Al Thompson agrees: "Doesn't do any good to plow over ice. Got to use salt."

And you don't wait until four inches have piled up before you start plowing. You start when you've got an inch and a half, and you stay ahead of the storm. And you don't leave it to the Almighty once ice-covered streets become mushy. You run the plows through and get the stuff off. Here, even downtown, we let the streets freeze again so the morning traffic reporters will have something to talk about.

"As soon as the storm starts, we salt all our major arterials," Flaherty says. In cases of major storms, "we will salt our critical areas just before it begins to snow.". . .

It will be argued that northern cities are willing to pay a high premium for clearing their streets because they get so much snow. But this year Portland budgeted, like most cities, for the best of all possible worlds: 25 inches, a winter roughly comparable to ours so far. With one-third the street mileage of D.C., Portland still planned to spend one-third more.

Why? Maybe because they know what bringing a city to a halt really costs. Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.

9-YEAR OLD ALMOST SUSPENDED FOR BRINGING 2 INCH TOY GUN TO SCHOOL

CHENEY CENSORED CLIMATE CHANGE DATA

Although the media has gotten all excited over the manipulation of emails concerning climate change by a British research center, it largely ignored this story a year and a half ago. On the whole, censorship of important climate information by an American vice president is considerably more hazardous to your health than censorship of such data by a few British scientists.

Progress Report, 2008 Last October, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the "Human Impacts of Global Warming." Gerberding told the committee that global warming "is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans," but she gave few specifics, instead focusing on the CDC's current preparation plans. Soon after Gerberding delivered her testimony, CDC officials revealed that the White House had "eviscerated" her testimony by editing it down from 14 pages to four. The White House initially claimed that Gerberding's testimony had not been "watered down," but White House Press Secretary Dana Perino later admitted that the Office of Management and Budget had removed testimony that contained "broad characterizations about climate change science that didn't align with the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]." In a letter responding to questions by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), former EPA official Jason Burnett revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Council on Environmental Quality pushed to "remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change." During a news conference yesterday, Boxer chided Perino's previous claim that the edits were made in order to align the testimony with the IPCC. "This was a lie," said Boxer. The White House, however, refused to admit wrongdoing. "We stand 100 percent behind what Dana said," White House spokesperson Tony Fratto told reporters.

The White House's deletions, which were "overwhelmingly denounced" by scientists and environmental health experts, included "details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC's analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels." The cuts made by the White House included "the only statements casting the health risks from climate change as a problem, describing it variously as posing 'difficult challenges' and as 'a serious public health concern.'" At the time, Perino claimed that "the decision" was made "to focus that testimony on public health benefits" of climate change. "There are public health benefits to climate change," asserted Perino. But in his letter to Boxer, Burnett said that the reason for the cuts was to "keep options open" for the EPA to avoid making an endangerment finding for global warming pollution, which was required by a recent Supreme Court ruling. . .

It's apparent that the level of editing involved in Gerberding's testimony was out of the ordinary. In October, a CDC official told the press that while it was normal for testimony to be changed in a White House review, the changes made to Gerberding's testimony were particularly "heavy-handed." In an interview with CNN yesterday, Gerberding said that she "wasn't aware that there had been any edits" to her testimony until she "got to the hearing." Gerberding maintained that she did "the very best" she could to "answer the senators' questions honestly and openly." Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, refused to comment on the allegations against Cheney's office, simply saying, "We don't comment on internal deliberations."

In his letter to Boxer, Burnett revealed that Cheney's office had also objected in January to congressional testimony by EPA administrator Stephen Johnson that "greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment." According to Burnett, an official in Cheney's office "called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed." Such actions are not unusual for Cheney. Since taking office, he has taken "a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business" while undermining any real action to combat climate change. In December, after Johnson "answered the pleas of industry executives" by announcing his decision to deny California the right to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles, it was revealed that executives from the auto industry had appealed directly to Cheney. EPA staffers told the Los Angeles Times that Johnson "made his decision" only after Cheney met with the executives. Since February 2007, Cheney has quietly maneuvered to exert increased control over environmental policy by federal agencies -- particularly the regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

THE UNEXAMINED DANGERS OF TSA BODY SCANNERS

MIT Technology Review - A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done and why evidence has been so hard to gather

Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance.

The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material. And even though they don't travel far inside the body, there is great hope that the waves can be used to spot tumours near the surface of the skin.

With all that potential, it's no wonder that research on terahertz waves has exploded in the last ten years or so.

But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it's easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionize atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and Co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That's a jaw dropping conclusion.

And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.

This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.

WORD

Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money - Michael Steele, chair of the GOP National Committee

CIVIL LIBERTIES LAWYERS STRIKE BACK AT OBAMA'S CLAIMED RIGHT TO KILL AMERICANS ABROAD

Antiwar - Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back at what they describe as the "deliberate targeted killing of U.S. citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."

In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.

Attorney George Brent Mickum, who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told IPS, "I guess my sense is that it's just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don't need to offer any justification."

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS that "this extrajudicial execution of human beings" violates both international human rights law and the fifth amendment of the U.S. constitution.

"The U.S. government has now established a 'death list' for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called dirty wars," he said.

The human rights advocacy community was equally forceful in its pushback. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told IPS, "The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn't relevant. But just being a 'suspected terrorist' doesn't necessarily mean they're a combatant."

She added, "The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is 'directly participating in hostilities'. If not, and they're targeted, it's a war crime."

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told IPS, "As with its embrace of the [George W.] Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration's even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing - including of U.S. citizens - is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake."

"Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens," he said.

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, "It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'"

FIVE MYTHS ABOUT ATHEISM

THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE OF THE LEFT

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch -  In terms of organized politics the explosion of radical energy in the 1960s culminated in the peace candidacy of George McGovern, nominated by the Democrats in Miami in 1972. The response of the labor unions financing the party, and of the party bosses, was simply to abandon McGovern and ensure the victory of Nixon. Since that day the party has remained immune to radical challenge. Jimmy Carter, the southern Democrat installed in the White House in 1977, embraced neo-liberalism, and easily beat off a challenge by the left's supposed champion, the late Ted Kennedy. The antiwar movement which cheered America's defeat in Vietnam mostly sat on its hands as Carter and his National Security aide Zbigniev Brzezinski ramped up military spending and led America into "the new cold war", fought in Afghanistan and Central America.

Demure under the Democrat Carter, the left did organize substantial resistance to Reagan's wars in Central America in the 1980s. It also rallied to the radical candidacy of Jesse Jackson, the first serious challenge of a black man for the presidency. Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister and political organizer who had been in Memphis with Martin Luther King when the latter was assassinated in 1968. With his "Rainbow coalition" Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and in 1988, with a platform that represented an anthology of progressive ideas from the 1960s. He attracted a large number of supporters, many of them from the white working class. Each time the Democratic party shrugged him aside and elected feeble white liberals - Mondale and Dukakis - who plummeted to defeat by Reagan and George Bush Sr.

The left's rout was consummated in the Nineties by Bill Clinton who managed to retain fairly solid left support during his two terms, despite signing two trade treaties devastating to labor - in the form of the North America Free Trade Agreement and the WTO; despite the lethal embargo against Iraq and NATO's war on Yugoslavia; despite successful onslaughts on welfare programs for the poor and on constitutional freedoms.

Two important reminders about political phenomena peculiar to America: the first is the financial clout of the "non-profit" foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste. . . Much of the "progressive sector" in America owes its financial survival - salaries, office accommodation etc -- to the annual disbursements of these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical heterodoxy. In the other words most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of the dominant corporate world, just are the academies, similarly dependent on corporate endowments.

The big liberal foundations were perfectly happy with Clinton's brand of neo-liberalism and took swift action to tame any unwelcome radical tendencies in both the environmental and the women's movements. Clinton's drive to ratify the "free trade" treaty with Mexico and Canada provoked a potentially threatening alliance of labor unions and environmental groups. Eventually the big liberal foundations exerted some muscle, and major enviro groups came out for the treaty. It was John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council who crowed, " We broke the back of the environmental resistance to NAFTA." . . . By the end of the nineties the green movement - aside from small radical, underfunded grass roots groups - had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, hence of corporate America.

For its part, the women's movement steadily devolved into a single issue affair, focused almost entirely on defending women's right to abortions - under assault from the right. Women's groups, many of them getting big money from liberal Hollywood (which devotedly supported Clinton), swerved away from larger issues of social justice and kept silent as Clinton destroyed safety nets for poor women. The gay movement, radical in the 1970s and 1980s, steadily retreated into campaigns for gay marriage and "hate crime laws", the first being a profoundly conservative acquiescence in state-sanctioned relationships, and the second being an assault on free speech. . .

The Bush years saw near extinction of the left's capacity for realistic political analysis. Hysteria about the consummate evil of Bush and Cheney led to a vehement insistence that any Democrat would be qualitatively better, whether it be Hillary Clinton, carrying all the neo-liberal baggage of the nineties, or Barack Obama, whose prime money source was Wall Street. Of course black America - historically the most radical of all the Democratic Party's constituencies, was almost unanimously behind Obama and will remain loyal to the end. Having easily beguiled the left in the important primary campaigns of 2008, essentially by dint of skin tone and uplift, Obama stepped into the Oval Office confident that the left would present no danger as he methodically pursues roughly the same agenda as Bush, catering to the requirements of the banks, the arms companies and the national security establishment in Washington, most notably the Israel lobby.

As Obama ramps up troop presence in Afghanistan, there is still no anti war movement, such as there was in 2002-4 during Bush's attack on Iraq. The labor unions have been shrinking relentlessly in numbers and clout. Labor's last major victory was the UPS strike in 1997. Its foot soldiers and its money are still vital for Democratic candidates - but corporate America holds the decisive purse-strings, from which a U.S. Supreme Court decision on January 21 has now removed almost all restraints. . .

For the rest of his term Obama, can press forward with the neoliberal agenda that has now flourished through six presidencies. He and the Democratic Party display insouciance towards the left's anger. Rightly so. What have they to fear?

BEST BOOK TITLES OF THE YEAR

Utne Reader - From Yummy Time to Advances in Potato Chemistry and Technology, 2009 was a great year for odd book titles. The Bookseller magazine recently released its "Very Longlist" of 49 of the strangest book titles of 2009, including Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich, Is the Rectum a Grave?, Peek-a-Poo: What's in Your Diaper?, and Venus Does Adonis While Apollo Shags a Tree.

The longlist in full:

100 Girls on Cheap Paper

A Tortilla is Like Life

Advances in Potato Chemistry and Technology

Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism

Bacon: A Love Story

Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 1741-1845

Bondage for Beginners

Briefs for the Reading Room

Budgeting for Infertility

Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes

Curbside Consultation in Cornea and External Disease

Cute Yummy Time

Dental Management of Sleep Disorders

Father Christmas Needs a Wee

Fluffy Little Kitten in Fluffy's Brother

Food Digestion and Thermal Preference of Toad

Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots

How YOU Are Like Shampoo: For Job Seekers

I Stopped Sucking My Thumb…Why Can't You Stop Drinking?

I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears

Is the Rectum a Grave?

Jokes by the Not So Famous Redneck

Map-based Comparative Genomics in Legumes

Mickey Mouse, Hitler and Nazi Germany

My Hare Line Meets the Brown Rabbit

Obama Guilty of Being President While Black

Peek-a-poo: What's in Your Diaper?

Planet Asthma: Art and Activity Book

Plough Music

Plug-in Electric Vehicles: What Role for Washington?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Bean Conference

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis

Soft Drink & Fruit Juice Problems Solved

Ten Stupid Things That Keep Churches from Growing

The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

The First Home-Built Aeroplanes

The Great Dog Bottom Swap

The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin

The Origin of Faeces

The Quotable Douchebag

The True History of Tea

The Wild World of Girly Men and Masculine Women - And Why Americans Suffer from So Many Other Idiotic Syndromes!

Venus Does Adonis While Apollo Shags a Tree

What Horses Do For Us

What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahu

GREAT MOMENTS IN ILLINOIS POLITICS

Chicago Tribune - The newly minted Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor said Wednesday he doesn't think a 2005 domestic battery arrest should hurt him in the fall general election, although records in the case raise questions about his version of events.

Scott Lee Cohen, a pawnbroker who was the surprise winner in the little-publicized contest among half a dozen candidates, had previously disclosed the arrest. He described it Wednesday as an argument with his drunken girlfriend and said he didn’t lay a hand on her, though she called the police and had him taken into custody.

But the official police and court records show that the woman alleged Cohen put a knife to her throat and pushed her head against the wall.

In their October 14 arrest report detailing the complaint from the 24-year-old woman, Chicago police noted they observed "mild abrasions from knife wound" on her neck. They also noted 'minor scars on her hand from her trying to defend herself against the arrestee swinging the knife at her.' The report notes the woman was seen by ambulance personnel but not taken to a hospital.

The case was dropped a month later when the woman did not show up for a court date.

Also, public records show that the alleged victim, Scott's 24-year-old girlfriend at the time, was a prostitute. Six months before the October 2005 incident, she had been arrested after a police investigation of a Glenview massage parlor. She later pleaded guilty to a charge of prostitution.

Through a spokesman Cohen said he did not know at the time that the woman was a prostitute and that she had told him she worked as a "massage therapist."

Cohen's spokesman said the woman's accusations about the assault were false, and pointed to the fact that the case was dropped as evidence that complaint was baseless.

"These are accusations of what she says happened, but that is not what happened," said campaign spokesman Phil Molfese.

Molfese said that he doubted that the marks on the woman's neck that were noted by the arresting officers could have been made by a knife, and Cohen stands by his claim that he did not touch the woman.

"Those abrasions, we don't know where they came from," Molfese said.

STUPID SCHOOL PRINCIPAL TRICKS

Louisiana ACLU - The Principal of Maurepas High School, which had declared that students could wear jerseys in support of the New Orleans Saints, punished a student for wearing a jersey in support of the Indianapolis Colts. The student, who had lived most of his life in Indianapolis and has an outstanding academic record, was called out of class and told that he was not allowed to wear that shirt. When he refused to change his shirt, the Principal sent him home.

The ACLU of Louisiana has sent a letter to the Principal, Steven Vampran, demanding that the school restore the student's record and erase any mention of disciplinary action that may have been taken because he chose to support a team that is not the Principals' favorite. "Students do not give up their free speech rights at the schoolhouse gate," said ACLU of Louisiana Executive Director Marjorie R. Esman. "To allow students to express support of one team but not the other amounts to forcing support of the team that the Principal likes. As excited as people are about the Saints going to the Super Bowl, students like everyone else have the right to choose which team they prefer."

The student in question recently joined the National Guard, to protect this country and its founding beliefs. The right to free expression - including cheering for a football team - is one of those fundamental rights. Esman continued: "The school should be proud of this young man and his commitment to his country and the rights we enjoy. And, after all, it takes two teams to play a football game, and fans of both sides are entitled to cheer."

DEPARTMENT OF GOOD THINGS

TALKING POINTS MEMO

It should be noted that cutting job losses is a long way from creating jobs. Job loss could be reduced by doing nothing, simply because at some point the economy will have rid itself of all the jobs it can't support. What matters is job creation.  - TPR

BREVITAS

NY Post - Has the countdown begun for the end of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann?" With his ratings in free-fall, and his hateful histrionics reaching new highs, even Olbermann's former supporters on the left are tuning out. Bloggers at the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio noted the uberdork's 44 percent drop in listeners ages 25-54 from January 2009 to last month. . . . "There are creeping indications that the world may not have quite as much need of -- or patience for -- Olbermann and his shtick as it once did," Jeff Bercovici wrote on Daily Finance.

EPIC has filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the National Security Council, seeking a key document governing national cybersecurity policy. The document, National Security Presidential Directive 54 grants the NSA broad authority over the security of American computer networks. The agencies violated the Freedom of Information Act by failing to make public the directive and related records in response to EPIC's request. EPIC's suit asks a federal judge to require the release of the documents.

According to the Washington Post, "President Obama lamented the 'erosion of civility' which is nice except that he did at a prayer breakfast sponsored by the Christian extremists of the Family. As the Post adds, "The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had written a letter asking Obama to boycott the event, saying its sponsor, the Fellowship Foundation, is a "shadowy religious association" that preaches "an unconventional brand of Christianity." Also present was Hillary Clinton, whose long connection with the dysfunctional Family has been carefully not reported by much of the liberal media.

EIN - According to a study by Harvard University scientists, invasive species appear to thrive during times of climate change, meaning the species could become more prevalent and more destructive. The study suggests that the invasive species are more apt to thrive because they're better able to adjust to the changing timing of annual activities such as flowering and fruiting. "These results demonstrate for the first time that climate change likely plays a diirect role in promoting non-native species success," says study author Charles C. Davis, assistant professor in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard.

Radar - American Idol producers "will do what it takes to sign" radio legend Howard Stern as a must-have replacement for Simon Cowell when the British mogul leaves the show after this season. "Idol bosses think he'd be even nastier than Simon," a source told the NY Post

ROAD SIGNS

Gallup - More than one-third of Americans (36%) have a positive image of "socialism," while 58% have a negative image. Views differ by party and ideology, with a majority of Democrats and liberals saying they have a positive view of socialism, compared to a minority of Republicans and conservatives.
Reuters - Fewer American adults report having had the flu or a cold this January than did so in January of 2009, the third consecutive month in which self-reports of flu and cold cases have been below the prior year's levels.

GREAT MOMENTS IN WHITE HOUSE MEDIA MANIPULATION

Nashua Telegraph, NH - A story on Page 1 of Tuesday's Telegraph quoted a White House official explaining that a Q-and-A session with dozens of teenagers in Nashua High School North on Monday was "off the record." However, the explanation about the talk being "off the record" was, it turns out, also "off the record" and should not have been quoted.

THE MARCH OF THE MEDICARE - SOCIAL SECURITY WRECKERS

Robert Kuttner, Prospect - Fiscal conservatives in Congress hope to hold recovery spending hostage for long-term caps on social outlay, and they have some company in the White House. Groups like the billion-dollar Peter G. Peterson Foundation are leading the charge.

For a quarter-century, Peterson has been exaggerating long-term costs of Social Security and Medicare. In truth, Social Security is close to balance -- its 75-year projected deficit is just one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. Medicare is seriously in deficit, but reform of Medicare consistent with high-quality health care depends on tackling the deeper drivers of medical inflation.

But for those inclined to cut social insurance, the recession--driven deficit is a godsend because it lends credence both to the alarmism and to extreme remedies. Sen. Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota, and Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, are promoting a fast-track commission with extraordinary powers to cap federal spending, a long-standing Peterson project. The commission would make recommendations that Congress must vote up or down with little debate or opportunity to amend.

The flaws in this idea are both procedural and substantive. The Constitution vests the power of the purse in a democratically elected Congress, not in an elite body insulated from public deliberation and debate. Substantively, the commission's sponsors want it to recommend the sort of cuts in Social Security and Medicare that would never be approved through the normal legislative process. Some say new taxes could be on the table, but the commission's Republican backers insist tax increases would be dead on arrival. So the lowest common denominator would be deep cuts in social insurance.

Given the opposition of key House and Senate leaders, Conrad-Gregg may not get through Congress. But the Obama administration, looking for "cover" to offset short-term spending increases, now supports some version of the idea. This is a huge mistake; it reinforces the misplaced obsession with deficits as well as the self--fulfilling prophesy that such a commission is both desirable and inevitable.

TIBET HAS HEAT RECORD

Guardian, UK - The roof of the world is heating up, according to a report today that said temperatures in Tibet soared last year to the highest level since records began.

Adding to the fierce international debate about the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, the state-run China Daily noted that the average temperature in Tibet in 2009 was 5.9C, 1.5 degrees higher than "normal".

It did not define "normal", but Chinese climatologists have previously drawn comparisons with an average over several decades.

"Average temperatures recorded at 29 observatories reached record highs," Zhang Hezhen, a Lhasa resident and specialist at the regional weather bureau told the newspaper. . .

A monitoring station at the foot of Mt Everest also recorded a new record high temperature of 25.8 degrees, which was 0.7C warmer than the previous peak.

Amid the worst drought in decades, Lhasa experienced its first temperature above 30C since records began in 1961, the report said. Rainfall in Tibet fell to its lowest level in 39 years, affecting nearly 30,000 hectares of cropland - an eighth of Tibet's arable land. . .

THE RESEGRGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Alternet - America's schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 1960s. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we need to radically rethink the meaning of "school choice.". . .

A professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, [Amy Stuart] Wells has spent much of her career studying the resegregation of American schools - writing the history of the steady march back to separateness that has left our educational system more racially segregated now than it was in 1968. . .

Today, one-third of black students attend school in places where the black population is more than 90 percent. A little less than half of white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white. One-third of all black and Latino students attend high-poverty schools (where more than 75 percent of students receive free or reduced lunch); only 4 percent of white children do.

Things have been better, and not so long ago. In 1990 more than 40 percent of black students in the South were attending majority-white schools. Today, fewer than 30 percent of students do - roughly the same percentage as in the late 1960s, when many districts were still refusing to implement 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. . .

SCANT ICE OVER THE ARCTIC SEA THIS WINTER

ENN - Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a "double whammy" of powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said on Thursday.

"It's not that the ice keeps melting, it's just not growing very fast," said Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.

Arctic ice cover is important to the rest of the world because the Arctic is the globe's biggest weather-maker, sometimes dubbed Earth's air-conditioner for its ability to cool down the planet.

OBAMA'S POPULISM

When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. - Barack Obama advising the average American to stop buying boats and going to Vegas

THE BUDGET CUT MYTH

GREAT CROSS-CULTURAL MOMENTS IN U.S. HISTORY

Buddy Holly appears on the Arthur Murray Dance Party in 1957.
Watch the immobile dancers in the background.

CIA AGENTS HELPED HEDGE FUNDS PLAY THE MARKET

Politico - In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side - a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation's top-level intelligence talent, Politico has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in "deception detection," the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to "connect the dots," this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details. . .

The close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of "deception detection." BIA's clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms. . .

BIA's clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.

COLLEGE-HIGH SCHOOL GRAD PAY GAP NOT AS GREAT AS CLAIMED

Wall Street Journal - The gap between pay for college graduates and high school graduates isn't as wide as has been reported.

In recent years, the nonprofit College Board touted the difference in lifetime earnings of college grads over high-school graduates at $800,000, a widely circulated figure. Other estimates topped $1 million.

But now, as tuition continues to skyrocket and many seeking to change careers are heading back to school, some researchers are questioning the methodology behind the high projections.

Most researchers agree that college graduates, even in rough economies, generally fare better than individuals with only high-school diplomas. But just how much better is where the math gets fuzzy.

The problem stems from the common source of the estimates, a 2002 Census Bureau report titled "The Big Payoff." The report said the average high-school graduate earns $25,900 a year, and the average college graduate earns $45,400, based on 1999 data. The difference between the two figures is $19,500; multiply it by 40 years, as the Census Bureau did, and the result is $780,000. . .

Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, calls it "a million-dollar misunderstanding."

One problem he sees with the estimates: They don't take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.

Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.

NOW THERE ARE 200 AMERICAN TROOPS IN PAKISTAN

Wired - The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That's about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It's a whole lot more than the "no American troops in Pakistan" promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let's not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. . . The military tells the Times that in addition to yesterday's deaths, "12 other service members had been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001."

ARE THE TELECOMS OUT TO KILL TRADITIONAL LAND LINES?

Bruce Kushnick, Neiman Watchdog - Are AT&T and Verizon trying to kill off America's traditional telephone utilities?

Are landline utilities in a 'death spiral' as AT&T claims?

If AT&T has failed on its obligation to upgrade its utilities, why should we trust it at this point?

Communications wires go to almost every home, every office, every school and library in America. They are part of individual state utilities for the most part, and are run by local telephone companies. Whether in rural areas, low income areas, or elsewhere, the wiring is part of a network that is commonly known as the Public Switched Telephone Networks. These networks have been regulated by the Federal Communications Commission on the federal level and public utility commissions on the state and local levels. . .

Now, in a recent filing at the FCC, AT&T has stated that it wants to put to an end the public switched telephone networks system, to "transition" them out of service. AT&T is asking the FCC to set a firm deadline to "sunset" the PSTN. AT&T claims the "plain old telephone service," known in the industry as "POTS," and the legacy utilities are "diverting critically needed funds that could be used for broadband deployment."

As one author writes, "Ma Bell asked the FCC to eliminate regulatory requirements that it support a landline network and to provide a deadline for phasing it out. . . The (almost) one in five Americans relying exclusively on a plain old telephone line should prepare to kiss that wall jack goodbye as the major wireline telephone providers back away from that dying (and expensive) business."

The writer adds: "However, AT&T in its filing doesn't offer a way to bridge the gap for that 20 percent of Americans relying only on landlines, nor does it address what an all-IP future means for the 33 percent of Americans who have access to broadband but do not subscribe."

AT&T writes in its filing: "Congress's goal of universal access to broadband will not be met in a timely or efficient manner if providers are forced to continue to invest in and to maintain two networks." AT&T's entire point is that the landline utilities are from a `by-gone era' that they are forced to support, as opposed to the new, bright and shiny broadband networks. . .

Starting in the 1990's, in virtually every state laws were changed to pay for upgrades of the telecommunications utilities by raising rates and through tax incentives. The plan was to replace the existing copper wiring with fiber optics, but hardly any upgrades were ever made. By 2010, we estimate the companies will have collected about $320 billion - and counting.

My group, Teletruth, recently presented a report of ours as comments to the FCC. In it we outlined how 26 states controlled by AT&T, Verizon and Qwest not only failed to deploy high-speed fiber optic based broadband to homes, businesses, libraries, schools and hospitals in both rural and urban areas, rich or poor, but that the money they collected was never intended for a so-called "second network." Each state law specified that the funding was to upgrade the first network, the PSTN. Invariably, the old copper wiring was to be replaced - and in every state we examined, that didn't happen. . .

The fact is, AT&T and Verizon did not upgrade the utilities as promised in state after state. Almost all AT&T's services still go over copper wiring. Its broadband product, U-Verse, travels over old, not upgraded, copper lines.

. . . How many people would be impacted by any new deregulation? AT&T claims that only 20 percent of customers (seems like a lot of people to me) rely on plain old telephone service. It doesn't state the number of its own customers, referring instead to basic industry statistics. The fact is, since almost all AT&T's wireline products go over copper wiring, deregulation would impact almost all current and future AT&T broadband and telephone users.

OBAMA SEEKS TO REVIVE FAILED, DIRTY NUKE INDUSTRY

Maine Public Broadcasting - President Obama is calling for $54 billion in loan guarantees for a "new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants." His administration also announced this week that it is dropping plans for underground storage of highly radioactive nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. . .

There are currently five nuclear power plants operating in New England: two in Connecticut, one in Massachusetts, one in Vermont and one in New Hampshire. Second only to natural gas, nuclear power is a major supplier of electricity to New England -- so much that a 2006 report found that nuclear plants could supply all residential households in the region excluding Massachusetts. . .

But Ed Lyman of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists says a doubling or tripling of nuclear plants would have to occur before nuclear power could significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions, and Lyman says government subsidies should not be used to get them off the ground.

"The expansion plans in the 1970s fell of their own weight because of massive cost overruns, and taxpayers and ratepayers ended up having to bail out many projects," Lyman says. "And the economics of nuclear power is no different today than it was then. The fact is that without the loan guarantees and other subsidies, there would not be a single new nuclear plant built in this country."

And then there's the thorny issue of disposing and safeguarding nuclear waste. For more than two decades the federal government has been trying to find a suitable place for a central repository for highly radioactive spent fuel that is a byproduct of nuclear power. Nevada's Yucca Mountain had been investigated and debated and rejected and finally recommended for licensing as an underground storage site.

But this week the Department of Energy moved to withdraw the application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the Obama Administration eliminated funding for the site. Anti-nuclear activists cheered the move.

Patrick Dostie takes a dimmer view. "Well, what it means is that Maine Yankee down in Wiscasset now becomes sort of a defacto storage site for high level waste."

Dostie is the state's nuclear safety inspector who has seen the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power plant through its operating, decommissioning and storage phases. Before the plant shut down in 1997 because it was no longer economically viable, it was Maine's largest source of electricity. Today, Dostie says it has 60 casks of high-level spent nuclear fuel on the site as well as several that contain the cut-up guts of the internal reactor that were too radioactive to send to a low-level waste site.

Maine had hoped to safely dispose of some of this waste at Yucca beginning in the next ten years. Dostie says the delay is a reflection of the nation's political will. "It certainly puts a wrinkle in the so-called Renaissance. Obviously, you kind of always have to ask questions: Is it appropriate to build nuclear power plants when who knows how long it's going to be before we resolve the issue?"

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SAYS IT HAS RIGHT TO KILL YOU WHEN YOU'RE OVERSEAS

Anti- War - In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told representatives that American citizens can be assassinated by the US government when they are oveseas.

Blair said the comments were intended to "reassure" Americans that there was a "set of defined policy and legal procedures" in place and that such assassinations are always carried out by the book.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R - MI) inquired about the procedures involved, asking what the legal framework was under which Americans could be killed by the intelligence community.

Blair insisted that under no circumstances would Americans be assassinated overseas for criticizing the government, adding "we don't target people for free speech." Rather they are subject to assassination when the government decides they are a threat and when they "get specific permission." Exactly who was giving that permission was unclear.

The US has killed Americans in overseas attacks before, but only as "collateral damage." It has never admitted to explicitly assassinating an American citizen before. . .

INTERNET SIGHTINGS

POLITICS EVEN DIVIDES FOOTBALL FANS

Political Wire - A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that American voters favor the New Orleans Saints over the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl by a 32% to 22% margin. Another 46% had no preference. "There's a significant partisan divide within those numbers, as Democrats prefer the Saints by a 36-21 margin while Republicans say they want the Colts to be victorious by a closer 26-25 spread. Independents lean toward the Saints as well, 33-20."

MISSOURI CHIEF JUSTICE: TOUGH ON CRIME IS NOT SMART ON CRIME

Riverfront Times, MO - The chief justice for the Missouri Supreme Court, William Ray Price Jr., delivered his "State of the Judiciary" speech to the General Assembly yesterday.

Price used the time to berate legislators over laws they've made that incarcerate non-violent offenders.

"We may have been tough on crime, but we have not been smart on crime," Price told the lawmakers.

The chief justice particularly singled out Missouri's drug and alcohol laws, such as a current bill to crack down on drunk drivers.

Jefferson City's KRCG:

"Perhaps the biggest waste of resources in all of state government is the over-incarceration of non-violent offenders," Price said.

Price said the number of non-violent offenders in Missouri prisons, most of them drug abusers, has doubled since 1994. He said the cost to taxpayers is more than $233 million a year. At the same time, the drug court approach to treatment and rehabilitation boasts high graduation rates and low recidivism. . .

TUNNEL OF TERROR

LOOKS LIKE THE ILLINOIS SENATE RACE MAY BE A LITTLE ROUGH

In other Illinois political news:

Political Wire - Scott Lee Cohen (D), "a pawnbroker who shocked state Democratic leaders Tuesday night by winning the party's nomination for lieutenant governor -- was arrested about four-and-a-half years ago and accused of holding a knife to a former live-in girlfriend's neck," the Chicago Sun Times reports. "The misdemeanor charge against Cohen was dropped weeks later when the woman -- who had just been found guilty of prostitution -- failed to show up to testify."

AIDS DEATHS AROUND THE WORLD

PAUL KEDROSKY

BREVITAS

A campaign is building to demand the impeachment of Jay Bybee, a sitting federal judge and the former head of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Council, who wrote memos to facilitate offensive war and torture. Disbar Torture Lawyers, is joining with many allied organizations at www.impeachbybee.org to lobby for immediate impeachment hearings and the introduction of a bill that would create such hearings. . .

Overheard in New York: Girl #1: My boyfriend is so romantic, he's taking me to a private wine-tasting. . . Girl #2: Doesn't that violate your probation?

Overheard in DC: Early-40's Dude #1: I'm not like that anymore. I've matured. . . Early-40's Dude #2: Really? Show me. Do something mature. . . Early-40's Dude #1: It doesn't work like that. . . Early-40's Dude #2: You know, magicians and psychics tell me the same thing.

Consumerist - Let's end mandatory binding arbitration. Companies force consumers to revoke their right to lawsuit by embedding language in terms of use contracts that say in the event of any dispute, both parties have to go to an arbitration firm, which the company pays for. . . The Christian Science Monitor found that the top 10 most used arbitration firms only found in favor of consumer 1.6% of the time. Is it any wonder they're so popular?

LIST OF LATINO BLOGS

ELITE ETHNOGRAPHY

National Enquirier - Johnny Carson was so convinced his second wife was bedding football great Frank Gifford, he mounted an undercover mission to catch her cheating. That's the shocking revelation from Johnny's former attorney and longtime confidant Henry Bushkin - who also claims the popular Tonight Show host cracked jokes about the New York Giant-turned-broadcaster to hide his grief and went on a drinking binge after finding the evidence he believed pointed to an affair. "Why Frank Gifford?" the comic asked, according to a book proposal by Bushkin. "What's that (bleep) got that I don't have? That guy plays three positions on the field. I could never get Joanne to go for more than two!" Joanne, whose nine-year marriage to Johnny ended in 1972, has dismissed the story as "a nice piece of fiction."

TMZ - Something was rotten in the state of Arizona ... and it was the carcasses of two dead giraffes previously owned by Michael Jackson. TMZ has learned the bodies of Rambo and JJ were at the center of a raging conflict in Page, Arizona because locals complained that the bodies stunk up the town. As we previously reported, the animals died last November and last month respectively and were buried on the Banjoko Wildlife Preserve where they had lived since 2006. But after several complaints were lodged with the City of Page, the preserve's founder Freddie Hancock was ordered to dig up the carcasses from their burial plots and relocate them somewhere else. In addition to moving the dead giraffes, the city also ordered Hancock to move MJ's two other live giraffes -- Princess and Annie Sue -- off the property for good.Hancock tells TMZ the dead giraffes were reburied in a private, undisclosed location outside of the preserve last Thursday. As for the two living giraffes, Hancock won't tell us where they moved them -- but she did say they're no longer in Arizona.

National Enquirer - Tiger Woods hit the roof when he found out he had to take a lie detector test during his sex addiction therapy - and spiraled into a nightmare of anxiety, sleepless nights and medication

NY Daily News - Rep. Charles Rangel's ongoing ethics probe is taking a serious toll - on his campaign war chest. In the last three months of 2009 alone, Rangel shelled out $574,348 on lawyers, according to his latest federal election filings. That's 84% of his total campaign spending during the same period. Ever since Rangel ran afoul of several ethical rules last year - from unreported income on a Dominican Republic villa to using office letterhead to raise money - his five teams of lawyers have chewed through campaign cash faster than Rangel can raise it.

National Enquirer - Cancer-stricken Elizabeth Edwards is telling pals that John beat her during a horrific marriage-ending fight, The Enquirer has learned exclusively. "John lost his temper big-time," revealed a close friend of Elizabeth. "She has the divorce papers drawn up, but she can amend them to charge John with domestic violence. "She's holding that over his head right now - and he's scared. Elizabeth is in control."

Radar - Fox head Rupert Murdoch said there are "different opinions" circulating at the network whether to sign Conan O'Brien, but if network execs come to the conclusion he would be a ratings moneymaker, they would ink him "in a flash.". . . Fox has tried in the past to compete in the late night talk medium with little success, as programs hosted by Chevy Chase (1993) and Joan Rivers (1986-1987) were cancelled within a year of their debut.

CLASSICAL MUSIC ALBUM SALES ARE TINY

Washington Post - The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. . . .

It's not exactly news that album sales in all genres have been declining for years. Nor is it news that classical recordings are not top sellers. "The classical charts have always been looked at as in the 3-percenter club," says Alex Miller, general manager of Sony Masterworks. . . .

SoundScan, the company that provides sales data to Billboard, says it cannot officially release exact sales figures to journalists. Instead, all numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000, so sales of 501 copies are reported as 1,000, and anything less than 500 is "under 1,000." On last week's traditional classical chart, only the top two recordings managed to sell "1,000" copies. Every other recording (including, in its second week, Hahn's) sold "under 1,000." The official total sales of the top 25 titles amounted to 5,000 copies, an average of 200 units a recording (sorry, "under 1,000"). And yes, that includes downloads.

A leaked copy of the SoundScan figures for a single week from the fall tells an equally sad tale. In early October, pianist Murray Perahia's much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

AMERICANS SAY NO TO ELECTRONIC PATIENT DATABASES

Bob Barr, Atlanta Journal-Constitution - A recent survey conducted by the respected and nonpartisan Ponemon Institute questioned some 850 Americans from diverse backgrounds and views and from 45 different states. The just-released study found that a whopping 75 percent of Americans do not support a database of private health information in the hands of the federal government. The vast majority of Americans 85% according to the Ponemon survey are not even aware that such a move is in the works; that such a proposal was in fact snuck into the health care legislation passed recently by both the House and the Senate.

Were the country aware that tucked into the legislation was some $3.0 billion to be used to create an electronic health record for every American, that 75% figure might be even higher. Even in the current environment, well more than half of those surveyed - 56% - want even stricter laws to prevent government from accessing their medical records without proper consent. More than two-thirds believe correctly - that such a database will diminish their privacy rights.

For a peek at what could be expected to happen with thousands of federal bureaucrats compiling, maintaining, sharing, and otherwise manipulating health records of the most private nature imaginable on every citizen, simply consider what is occurring far too frequently even now, with the rapidly expanding number of electronic health information databases.

In November 2009, Health Net lost 1.5 million patient records but waited six months to disclose the incident. Not one patient, or a single law enforcement agency or government entity, was notified of the loss for six months. The disc that was lost not only contained personal information about nearly two million patients, but also private information on at least 5,000 physicians. . .

SURVEY: TEACHERS DON'T LIKE 'NO CHILD' LAW

Canan Tasci, Red Lands Daily Facts - Authors of a study by UC Riverside surveyed 740 board-certified teachers in California to assess the effectiveness and unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind.

The study found that 84 percent reported overall unfavorable attitudes about the act.

The bill increased federal funding for education while tying continued support to improvements in individual student scores.

"Many teachers came into the profession because they wanted to make a difference, and they believed they could make a difference if they taught to the whole child," said Rebecca Harper, president of San Bernardino Teachers Association.

"So when No Child Left Behind came in and minimized the amount of time teachers were allowed to spend on character, music and art, it soured them on the profession."

Among the findings:

- 61 percent said the act created an overly narrow conception of education.

- 46 percent felt it diminished creativity.

- 59 percent said it had unintended consequences, primarily less creativity in the classroom and increased influence of textbook companies to determine the content and pace of instruction.

One in four teachers surveyed said the act helped them improve as instructors. One in four also said the act had lowered their commitment and loyalty to the profession, and two in five said it had a negative influence on their own enthusiasm for teaching, the report reads.

TOO SMALL DEMOCRACY, NOT TOO BIG GOVERNMENT, IS THE PROBLEM

Robert Reich - I wish conservatives would stop complaining about big government and start worrying about the real problem small democracy. I wish we'd all worry more about our incredible shrinking democracy.

It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms. Which programs should be cut, which entitlements pared back, and what taxes raised in order to reduce the long-term budget deficit? Hmmm. Let's convene a commission and have them decide.

Commissions are a default mechanism when politicians want to hand off difficult issues to "experts." But reducing the long-term budget deficit has almost nothing to do with expertise. It's about our nations' values and priorities. Nothing could be more central to the democratic process. . .

The notorious Troubled Assets Relief Program began with a virtual blank check from Congress. Treasury officials then secretly decided which companies were to receive hundreds of billions of dollars. Why these particular entities were chosen and not others remains a mystery. For months, the Treasury didn't even disclose the identities of the major banks that giant insurer AIG repaid with its bailout money 100 cents on each dollar AIG owed them.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has gone far beyond its traditional role of setting short-term interest rates. It has bought up massive amounts of debt mortgage debt, Treasury bills, and debt instruments emanating several public agencies, many of them supporting a wide range of private entities. No one outside the Fed knows the ultimate beneficiaries of all this government backing, the criteria used by the Fed for making these commitments, or even how much debt the Fed is buying.. . .

The same pattern is evident on other issues. Congress can't decide whether or how to limit the pay of financial executives. So where does the issue end up? The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Fed both say they're going to look at whether pay levels are appropriate. The House and Senate can't agree on what to do about climate change. Who decides? The Environmental Protection Agency concludes it has authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.. . .

A big piece of the problem is this: Washington is now so overrun by lobbyists representing moneyed interests that it's become almost impossible to make policy in the open. If the Treasury and Fed tried to decide publicly which industries and firms should get hundreds of billions, they'd be inundated. Wall Street lobbyists are blocking real financial reform. The energy industry has filled the House's cap-and-trade bill with special subsidies and exemptions. Big Pharma and Big Insurance would have killed off the health-care reform if they hadn't been bought off. When it comes to the long-term deficit, Congress is incapable of acting because so many special interests have their hands out.

But the answer isn't to give up on democracy. Back-room policy making can succumb to private interests just as easily as lobby-infested legislatures (much of the public suspects the Treasury of being too cozy with Wall Street as it is).

HAITI: WHERE'S THE MILITARY AND THE U.N?

Dolores M. Bernal, News Junkie Post - I have been driving all week around Port-au-Prince taking photos of the destroyed homes and buildings and as I've gone from one end of this city to the other, the US is military is only found at the airport - nice and secured behind those gates.

Meanwhile, the UN and its white Jeeps are driving all around this city, but I haven't seen them stop at any particular location to give food or water. Where is all the aid going, if any?

Michel David Stephan is a 22-year-old Haitian university student who has not been able to continue his studies because the campus has been badly damaged. I asked him what he thought of the UN.

"We call them 'tourists' because they don't do nothing," Stephan told me.

I also asked Stephan what he thought of the US military.

"They are tourists too, they only come to take pictures," he said.

The only people present and actively helping on the ground are members of relief organizations, but there aren't enough of them. . .

I drove by the Presidential Palace this afternoon, the scenes were even more chaotic there. Downtown Port-au-Prince was hit stronger than other places I had been - the government buildings were flattened like pancakes, floors were stacked up on top of each other. The place smells of dead, the survivors are forced to live like rats packed up on a landfill.

I've spoken with doctors and nurses who are concerned with what will happen to the survivors once the relief organizations have to pull them out.

"Who is going to take care of the amputees?" asked Dr. Eric Salado, an Orthopedic Surgeon from Miami. "Who is going to give follow up care to the people who got stitches and will need them removed a month from now?"

WHEN DO WE ADMIT WE'RE AT WAR IN PAKISTAN?

Wired - Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America's clandestine operations there would be waged solely by remote-control - with Predator and Reaper drones. "There is a red line," said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. "And the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: No foreign troops on our soil."

Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known "as a Taliban stronghold," the New York Times notes. But the "Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants."

It's another sign that America's once-small, once-secret war in Pakistan is growing bigger, more conventional, and busting out into the open. The U.S. Air Force now conducts flights over Pakistani soil. U.S. security contractors operate in the country. U.S. strikes are growing larger, more frequent, and more deadly; the latest attack reportedly involved 17 missiles and killed as many as 29 people. Billions of dollars in U.S. aid goes to Islamabad. And now, U.S. forces are dying in Pakistan.

Which begs the question: When are we going to start treating this conflict in Pakistan as a real war - with real oversight and real disclosure about what the hell our people are really doing there? Maybe at one point, this conflict could've been swept under the rug as some classified CIA op. But that was billions of dollars and hundreds of Pakistani and American lives ago.

According to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, the American forces were there merely "to attend the inauguration ceremony of a school for girls that had recently been renovated with U.S. humanitarian assistance." These guys were merely trainers part of the small cadre - maybe a hundred or so - of U.S. special forces in Pakistan, beefing up the local Frontier Corps' counterinsurgency skills.

As the Long War Journal notes, "The soldiers are not supposed to conduct military operations alongside the Frontier Corps units."

AN INVENTOR FOR OUR TIMES

AN INVENTOR FOR OUR TIMES

We have just wasted a delightful ten minutes watching trailers of a soon-to-be-released documentary film about 2005 Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr.Yoshio Nakamats. Dr. Nakamats was awarded his Ig for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (now 39 years, and counting). That is but one of his thousands of accomplishments.


Wikipedia - Yoshiro Nakamatsu born June 26, 1928, also known as Dr. NakaMats, is a Japanese inventor claiming to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000, including "PyonPyon" spring shoes and the basic technology for the floppy disk, the CD, the DVD, the karaoke machine, the digital watch, CinemaScope, armchair "Cerebrex", sauce pump, and the taxicab meter.

Nakamatsu claims that he licensed about a dozen of his patents related to the floppy disk technology to IBM Corporation in 1979, but the details of the arrangement are confidential. A spokesman for IBM said that the company has an "ongoing relationship" with Nakamatsu, and, in another media report, said that the company owns the legal patent to the floppy disk and that it reached several nonexclusive patent agreements with Nakamatsu in the late 1970s to avoid conflicts.

In 2007, Nakamatsu became a candidate in the 2007 gubernatorial election in Tokyo, and also ran for the Upper House election, but failed to get a seat. He is known for frequently entering and losing elections in Tokyo.]

In an interview, Nakamatsu described his "creativity process", which includes listening to music and concludes with diving underwater, where he says he comes up with his best ideas and records them while underwater.

THE DARK SIDE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Suzan Mazur, Scoop, NZ - While the hacked emails episode several months ago revealing attempts by scientists to withhold information about global warming from publication has put the matter of peer review under scrutiny like never before, secrecy in peer review continues to be upheld by the science establishment as a good thing rather than seen for what it is a brake on the flow of ideas, a reminder that rogue scientists face rejection by powerful forces, ostracism and other tortures. . .

Why not just thrash these ideas out in the open as in other professional fields and properly pay scientists to write reviews instead of sending the journal money off to Wiley? Maybe then science referees (reviewers) would take time from their academic responsibilities to actually read papers submitted, particularly those from the unaffiliated. . .

I was curious how journ al reviewers are paid and so I called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesmanaging editor Daniel Salsbury the other day to ask him. Salsbury told me that neither the editorial board nor any of the anonymous reviewers of PNAS the most prestigious science journal in the world is paid. It's "all voluntary", said Salsbury.

What then is the incentive? Why do these extremely busy scientists work as slaves?

Wiley Evolution and Development journal editor Rudy Raff told me scientists see it as "traditional community service." Raff says each of his editors gets an allowance for an editorial assistant but the editor does not get paid nor do the anonymous referees. And Raff thinks the anonymity does work. "It allows reviewers to speak frankly", he said, "many scientists feel if someone is paid, there may be a question of bias."

Massimo Pigliucci, an editor of the fairly new open-access journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology . . . once termed the idea of a paid review "bribery".

But could such journal board positions simply be fast-tracks to publication of an editor’s or an editorial board member’s own work and a tool for access to grant money?

Raff indeed told me that "marks you look for in a scientist" are whether they have served on boards. But not too many, he said. As in the corporate world, that would be a negative indicator.

James MacAllister, a 61-year old graduate student in the Margulis lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, went further. MacAllister said "there's certain politics and gaming of the system that goes on at the journals".

MacAllister thinks editors and editorial reviewers are partial to publishing not only their colleagues but scientists whose papers cite familiar names -- including those of the editors and editorial reviewers. Greater visibility of a scientist's work leads to notice by potential funders.

Open-access scientific publishing, however, is proving useful to a degree in leveling the playing field so that independent scientists have a shot at being published and cited. But independent scientists still face the problem of editors not having the cross-disciplinary knowledge necessary to properly assess unique papers, i.e., the biologists may not know enough physics, for example.

Gregory O’Kelly, an independent investigator of electrochemical therapy in treating debilitation following nervous injury and reversing the degeneration of aging, submitted one of his papers titled "The terrestrial evolution of metabolism and life - by the numbers" to the open-access journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling. After facing numerous journal rejections, his paper finally drew the attention of TBioMed editor Paul Agutter and the paper was published, resulting in 1,400 viewers.

But when O’Kelly attempted to publish a second paper on the subject in TBioMed that was more cross-disciplinary involving serious math, the philosophy of science and the history of electrophysiology the journal told him it was difficult to find reviewers for the paper. So O’Kelly approached other journals. . .

Floyd Rudmin, a psychology professor at the University of Tromso in Arctic Norway and member of the US organization, Psychologists for Social Responsibility also emailed me . . . about the obstacles to publishing his paper on how minorities adjust . . . "acculturation". Rudmin says there’s been a paradigm running since the 1960s on this that "violates all of the standards of psychological research".

Rudmin says his paper addressing acculturation eventually won an American Psychological Association research prize and his department’s annual research prize, but that the paper could not pass peer review. He published it in an anthropology journal.

The paper is linked near the top on Google, he said, which pleases him. . . Wrote Rudmin:

"One journal, Applied Psychology: An International Review, took one year to get 2 reviews (not the stipulated 3 reviews in 3 months), done by the very scholars [who] I told the editor in advance will oppose because I am exposing their own errors. My complaints to Blackwell’s CEO about this instigated Blackwell to create some editorial guidelines. But Blackwell said that they cannot intervene in any way in editorial decisions about content.

"The problem is ubiquitous, and there is no avenue of appeal. Norway made a science ethics board, but they refuse to consider matters of unethical publication practices. Blackwell’s CEO told me that my only avenue of appeal is to the officers of the science associations who chose the journal editor."

Also emailing was Morad Abou-Sabe, former President & Assistant Chancellor, Misr University for Science & Technology, Cairo and Emeritus Professor, Department of Cell Biology & Neuroscience, Rutgers:

"I guess I am not surprised about the review process, it has always been a privileged club that controlled both ends of the research process, grant funding and publications. I remember that at times I had to go to my congressman for help, but it did not matter. It is the "Old Boys Network", as it is called."

Constructal Theorist Adrian Bejan of Duke University says essentially what the individual investigator is up against is the "academic mafia" and notes the following in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics:

"Loaded with bias is the review process reserved for the big projects. The review is run by the "leaders," the persons who head (or have headed) the big projects. They are the influential, the ones who are consulted during the review process and even before a new research initiative is selected for funding by the government. They are many, not one. They constitute a social stratum known colloquially as academic mafias and dark networks (in social dynamics, these terms mean "networks of persons exerting hidden influence"). Favored are the applicants who work for the mafia."

Isn’t it time to stop kissing the ring?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN TAKES ON SUPPORTERS OF ISRAELI APARTHEID

BENEATH THE SURFACE IN HAITI

F. William Engdahl, Global Research - Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world's most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another - the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth's tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth's mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12. . .

Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world's largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.

Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called - Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons. - It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons -oil and gas.

Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world s largest oil companies, including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton. Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. . .

Evidence that the US Administration may well have more in mind for Haiti than the improvement of the lot of the devastated Haitian people can be found in nearby waters off Cuba, directly across from Port-au-Prince. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain's Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world's largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a 'Super-giant' field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations. . .

A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster relief' would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing. With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world's sole superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.

DC BLACKS TURN ON MEDIA'S FAVORITE SCHOOL CHANCELLOR

DCist - D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee didn't fare very well in the latest Washington Post poll. . . Just as Mayor Adrian Fenty's approval rating has dropped way down to 42 percent (compared to 72 percent after his first year), Rhee's approval numbers have sunk to 43 percent (compared to 60 percent in 2008).

Once again, the difference between blacks and whites is striking. Among white residents, 66 percent say they approve of the job Rhee is doing, while only 28 percent of African Americans do. And parents with children in D.C. public schools have basically reversed themselves on Rhee. In 2008, 54 percent of DCPS parent approved of her, but now 54 percent disapprove.

The poll comes on the heels on Rhee's most recent public relations debacle, which found her scrambling to explain why she bragged to Fast Company magazine that some of the 266 teachers she fired in October under a RIF could possibly have been fired for cause, including at least one who had been accused of having sex with a student.

RESIDENTS OF PUERTO RICAN ISLAND SAY U.S. WEAPONS TESTING MADE THEM SICK

DURBIN, SCHUMER GET READY FOR SENATE LEADERSHIP FIGHT

The Hill - The second- and third-ranking Senate Democratic leaders are doling out huge sums of cash, laying the groundwork for a leadership race should Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lose reelection.

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the vice chairman of the Democratic Conference, has been the biggest giver to Democratic Senate candidates, contributing $210,000 to colleagues and candidates.

During the same span, Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has given $110,000 to Senate candidates.

The leaders gave money to newcomers and candidates facing tough races. But they also contributed to those whose reelection prospects seem solid, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who last won in liberal Vermont with 71 percent of the vote. While Leahy probably does not need the money for reelection, Durbin and Schumer may feel they need to contribute to his campaign to cement his loyalty.

Both lawmakers gave the money through their leadership political action committees, which allies say is a sign that they are preparing for a possible leadership battle if Reid (D-Nev.) loses reelection, a prospect that is looking more likely. . .

The situation with Schumer and Durbin is a delicate one. Both support Reid and do not want to do anything to undermine his reelection effort. But at the same time, they realize - as do many political analysts ­- that Reid faces a serious threat.

Reid's job approval rating has hovered around 40 percent in recent polls, and the national political environment is shaping up as a challenging one for Democrats.


Political Wire - A new Marist Poll in New York finds Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) "once rock solid approval rating has taken a slide. For the first time in nearly nine years, Schumer's approval rating has fallen below 50%."

Just 47% of registered voters statewide report Schumer is doing either an excellent or good job in office, while 31% rate the job he is doing as fair and 17% view him as performing poorly.

BLAIR CABINET SECRETARY SAYS HE LIED

Guardian, UK - Clare Short, the former international development secretary, today accused Tony Blair of lying to her and misleading parliament in the build-up to the Iraq invasion.

Short, giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the war, also said that the 2003 conflict had put the world in greater danger of international terrorism.

Declassified letters between Short and Blair released today show she believed that invading Iraq without a second UN resolution would be illegal and there was a significant risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.

She told the inquiry that she had a conversation with Blair in 2002. He told her that he was not planning for war against Iraq and that the evidence has since revealed that he was not telling the truth at that point, she said.

She also said she was "stunned" when she read the 337-word legal advice on the war written by the then-attorney general Lord Goldsmith during a cabinet meeting on 17 March 2003, three days before the war began. She was forbidden by Blair from discussing it during the meeting.

"I said, 'That is extraordinary.' I was jeered at to be quiet. If the prime minister says be quiet there is only so much you can do.

"I think for the attorney general to come and say there's unequivocal legal authority to go to war was misleading."

Short, who was applauded by some audience members in public seats at the end of her evidence, said the ministerial code was broken as cabinet colleagues were not aware of Goldsmith's modifications to his legal advice over the previous weeks. The inquiry has already heard how Goldsmith changed his mind over the need for a second resolution after visiting the US the month before the war.

KARZAI SAYS U.S. REPORT FINDS AFGHANISTAN SITTING ON A TRILLION DOLLARS IN OIL AND MINERAL RESERVES

Agence France Presse - Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, is sitting on mineral and petroleum reserves worth an estimated one trillion dollars, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.

"The initial figures we have obtained show that our mineral deposits are worth a thousand billion dollars -- not a thousand million dollars but a thousand billion," he said.

He based his assertion, he said, on a survey being carried out by the United States Geological Survey, due to be completed in "a couple of months".

The USGS, the US government's scientific agency, has been working on the 17-million dollar survey for a number of years, Karzai said.

While Afghanistan is not renowned as a resource-rich country, it has a wide range of deposits, including copper, iron ore, gold and chromite, as well as natural gas, oil and precious and semi-precious stones.

Little has been exploited because the country has been mired in conflict for 30 years, and is embroiled in a vicious insurgency by Islamist rebels led by the Taliban. . .

China and India have bid for contracts to develop mines, with the Chinese winning a copper contract. An iron ore contract is due to be awarded later this year.

In 2007, China's state-owned metals giant Metallurgical Group Corporation signed a three-billion-dollar contract to develop the Aynak copper mine -- one of the world's biggest -- over the next 30 years.

WHAT OBAMA, THE REPUBLICANS AND THE NY TIMES WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT THE DEFICIT

Chris Floyd, Counterpunch - The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating "news analysis" of the Administration's just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.

Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. . . . Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on "new domestic initiatives" for years to come. . .

"For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country's influence around the world eroded."

What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger's noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. . . Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries. . .

The only possible alternative he can conceive to the empire's bloody and bankrupting business as usual is some kind of divine intervention, "miraculous growth" or some "miraculous political compromise.". . .

By "compromise" Sanger means some sort of "grand bargain" between the parties to cut Social Security and Medicare, along the lines of the "blue-ribbon panel" of entitlement cutters now being pushed by the Obama Administration. The first effort to impose this elitist, unaccountable commission failed in the Senate a few weeks ago -- although the Republicans have proposed such panels before, they didn't like this one because Obama proposed it -- but the idea will keep coming back, and Sanger and the elite will doubtless get their "miracle" of slashing the remaining bits of the safety net to shreds in due time.

These are the only possibilities for deficit-cutting that Sanger can even remotely contemplate. . .

Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire -- and its global gulag -- would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants -- and inciting revenge and resistance.

This would release a flood of money for any number of "new domestic initiatives," while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.

This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society -- more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.

But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot -- or, to be more accurate, will not -- imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire -- a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.

And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.

A better world -- not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better -- is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire -- carefully, safely, with deliberation -- over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution, or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise -- and worship -- of power that empire entails. They will not accept -- or even contemplate -- any alternative to it.

AMERICA'S QUIET OCCUPATION OF COLOMBIA

The Obama administration's pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates "a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy," an article in The Nation magazine warns.

"With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region's military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems," writes historian Greg Grandin, a New York University professor.

The fountainhead of this effort is Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. aid package that over the past decade "has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States,"Grandin says, noting that more Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998. . .

"Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America," Grandin asserts. "More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since (Alvaro) Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and not one arrest has been made for the killings. And the military stands accused of murdering more than 2,000 civilians and then dressing their bodies in guerrilla uniforms in order to prove progress against the FARC."

"Unable or unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin America---normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration reform---the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture,"Grandin explains. He notes that after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Brazil, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Latin Americans to "think twice" about "the consequences" of engagement with Iran. An Argentine diplomat responded, "The Obama administration would never talk to European countries that way."

NEW VIDEO OF CHALLENGER EXPLOSION

GREAT MOMENTS IN CULTURAL TOURISM

Final Call, Los Angeles - Former gang-members have teamed up with a non-profit outreach organization to offer a look at the inner city by conducting gang tours in South Central Los Angeles.

L.A. Gang Tours are designed to raise awareness about the lifestyle of inner city gangs and address the urgent public safety issue presented by gang violence, according to creator Alfred Lomas. The tour costs $65 (down from $100) per adult to get on the bus. Creators of the tours say they want to use the money to create jobs and investment opportunities for micro-lending in some neighborhoods.

The tour has already created 10 jobs and organizers say their immediate strategy is to hire youth from four gangs participating in a cease fire that allows the tours. The groups agreed to no shootings or retaliation shootings between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. when the busses pass through, said tour organizers.

"Public safety is paramount because without freedom from violence, no other freedoms can exist. ... We've taken rival kids that would never have an opportunity to see each other outside of probably jail or a gang shooting and this is balanced out with two Hispanics, two Blacks and so on, and so forth," project coordinator Lomas told The Final Call.

Tour guides Lomas and Fred "Scorpio" Smith gave a brief history of the origination of some of L.A.'s gangs, including the Crips, Bloods and Florencia 13, during a recent tour for reporters. They also highlighted their personal experiences with gangs, and how they entered into intervention and prevention. . .

Before stops at the New Life Church of God in Christ and the Pico Union Graffiti Lab, Mr. Lomas explained the different types of graffiti tags and offered a partial viewing of the documentary "Crips and Bloods: Made in America.". . .

According to Kim McGill, an organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition, an advocacy group for incarcerated youth and their families, some youth expressed concerns that these poor communities will serve as field trips for researchers, suburbanites, and Whites. They argue the tours should provide an understanding of urban complexities and a critical analysis of racism.

"Also, it leads to a lot of exaggerations of communities so that you kind of glorify or beef up people's already preconceived notions about how violent communities are and how everyone's kind of gangster. As opposed to a situation where you're really holding wealthier communities accountable for the fact that conditions exist because wealth is not shared, because resources are not equal, because there's racism in the system, etc.," Ms. McGill told The Final Call.

EMMANUEL APOLIGIZES TO DISABLED FOR CALLING LIBERALS 'RETARDS'

Peter Suderman, Reason - When liberal Democrats threatened to run ads against moderates party members who were holding out on health care reform, nine-fingered senior Obama adviser and noted sender-of-threatening-dead-fishes, Rahm Emmanuel, reportedly responded with two words: "Fucking" and "retarded.". . .

There's a limit to what even a Hill head-knocker like Emmanuel is allowed to be quoted saying in the Wall Street Journal. So he apologized. . . just not to the Democrats; instead, he apologized to the CEO of the Special Olympics, who's running a campaign against the use of the word "retard." Message received, sir: Calling liberals "retarded" is unfair to the disabled.

NEWSPAPER CLASSIFIED DOWN 70% SINCE 2000

Poynter - It's not news that the newspaper industry's business woes have been led by a precipitous decline in print classified advertising. Toting up the figures, I found the overall decline in a decade was a stunning 70 percent -- from $19.6 billion in 2000 to roughly $6 billion in 2009. . .

Recruitment advertising in 2009 was a tenth of what it had been in the booming economy of 2000. In fact, it fell by nearly two-thirds in a single year, from 2008 to 2009. . .

The two other main categories of classified -- automotive and real estate -- show predictably high rates of decline as well, 74 percent and 56 percent respectively.

GREAT THOUGHTS OF BARACK OBAMA

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries

TREES TRYING TO HELP WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

NY Times - Forests in the eastern United States appear to be growing faster in response to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a new study has found.

The study centered on trees in mixed hardwood stands on the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland that are representative of much of the those on the Eastern Seaboard.

All are growing two to four times as fast as normal, according to a study published in Tuesday's issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After controlling for other variables, scientists concluded that the change resulted largely from the increase in carbon dioxide, a major factor in climate change.

Trees are now known to play a vital role in countering global warming because they absorb and store carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas.

Geoffrey G. Parker, a co-author of the paper and an ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., said his research indicated that the local forests were adapting to the rise in carbon dioxide by absorbing more.

"My guess is that they are already sopping up some of the extra carbon," he said.

But Dr. Parker said it was unclear whether the trend could be sustained. "We don't think this can persist for too long because other limiting factors will come into play, like water availability and soil nutrients," he said.

BUDGET BLIPS

The Department of Education gets $3 billion more, but nearly half of that will go to the test tyrants pushing the disreputable "race to the top" program.

The president is canceling "NASA's current space shuttle replacement- and lunar exploration-plan and is prepared to fight any congressional effort to save it, the nation's top budget official said Jan. 31." The program would replace the aging space shuttle fleet with new rockets and spacecraft for a return trip to the Moon. - Change

Obama and Rahm Emanual, who calls liberals "retards," are demonstrating their enthusiasm for the folks who elected them by cutting $6.2 million from the National Endowment for the Arts and the same amount from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Housing vouchers would be increased by $1.4 billion over the 2010 level, but aid to the elderly and disabled would be reduced.

"The Obama administration says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over" . . . Most of the increases are on the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010. . . The administration says 79 percent of the increases in recent years are from departments related to the war on terrorism - Washington Times.

"President Barack Obama on Monday asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2011, including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon's base budget and $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. - Common Dreams

Funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump have been eliminated. What will happen to nuclear waste is not clear

Preservation is another target including a 25% reduction in the Historic Preservation Fund,

WEDNESDAY'S MISSING WATER

Bangor Daily News, ME - The Stonington Water Co. has a mystery on its hands.
Large amounts of water have been disappearing regularly from the system since October, and officials don't know how or why. It does not appear to be a leak, according to water company Superintendent Roger Stone, and the missing water is not running into the town sewer system. There's concern that someone may be drawing water from the system either deliberately or by accident.

Either way, the problem is getting worse.

"It's bizarre," Stone said Thursday.

Since October, approximately 1.2 million gallons of water has simply disappeared from the water company tanks. It always happens on Wednesday, Stone said. Water usage almost doubles on Wednesdays, based on Stone's regular inspections of the water tanks. Usage returns to normal the next day. . .

The problem appears to be getting worse. Stone calculates that about 200,000 gallons was missing in October; it increased to about 400,000 gallons in November; and to more than 600,000 gallons in December.

Stone has discounted a leak, although he continues to check the water lines regularly. A leak doesn't start and stop once a week, he said. There's no indication that the water is flowing into the municipal sewer plant either. . .

Stone has concluded that some individual or individuals are behind the water loss.

"Somebody's doing it," Stone said. "What we don't know [is] if it's malicious or not.". . .

GOD CLEARLY LIKES THOSE WHO THINK FOR THEMSELVES

There's an interesting chart on the web that compares the religiosity of the various states - based on a Gallup poll - with other factors. Based on these stats it would seem that the five least religious states are six percent more intelligent than the five most religious states. The most religious states also have 70% more poverty, 133% more murders, 57% more thefts and 33% more divorces.

TWENTY THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN ONE MINUTE

MORNING LINE

If you were to rank the black Ivies - black pols who got ahead by passing white exams rather than crossing white police lines - Newark mayor Cory Booker would easily head the pack with an 80% approval rating in a survey last fall.

And Washington mayor Adrian Fenty would be near the bottom of the heap as the Washington Post reports:

"While Fenty (D) has lost significant support among whites, African Americans have done a complete reversal on the mayor since a Post survey two years ago. Blacks have switched from 68 percent approval after his first year in office to 65 percent disapproval in the poll conducted last week. Overall, 42 percent of residents approve of the job he is doing; 49 percent disapprove. More than four in 10 in the new poll doubt his honesty, empathy and openness. "

Barack Obama has a similar approval rating - 47% from Rasmussen - but has held on to his black support. He has, however, lost a lot of collective ground in his first year.

And Duval Patrick is in trouble as governor of Massachusetts, with only a 39% approval rating.

One of the things that comes through from these surveys is how ethnicity can shift in importance after an election. Fenty won every precinct in Washington when he ran, but now even blacks don't like him.

The exception in this tale - Booker - can probably credit his style as much as substance. While quite conservative in a number of ways, he comes across as a can-do mayor in a style and works on the ancient principle that there's no Democratic or Republican way to fix a sewer. The important thing is to get it done.

It looks like the other three expected far more of a free ride than they got.

coLeges fnd studnts DK gramA NEmor lk u knw?

Cnews, Canada - Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly.

For years there's been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.

Now there seems to be some solid evidence.

Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.

Almost a third of those students are failing. . .

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years. . .

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, "still can't pass our simple test," she says.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett. . .

At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.

That 10 per cent must take so-called "foundational" writing courses first. . .

Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.

"Little happy faces . . . or a sad face . . . little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.

"Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.

Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

. . . Says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser, "Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra. . .

He says this has been going on now for the 20 years he's taught college and university in B.C. and Ontario-only the mistakes have changed. . .

WHAT POPULISM IS REALLY ABOUT

No word is being more badly abused in the corporate media these days that populist. The idea that the views of either Obama or the carefully contributed Tea Parties have anything to do with the concept is absurd. During the last presidential campaign I tried to explain what populism was really about. - Sam


Sam Smith, 2008 - There have only been two Democratic presidents over the past three-quarters of a century who have gotten significantly more than 50% of the vote: Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom received 61% in one election. While neither fit the definition of a populist, many of their programs - from FDR's minimum wage and social security to LBJ's war on poverty and education legislation - were part of a populist agenda.

Since LBJ, the party has increasingly deserted its populist causes and been trapped between defeat and a tantalizing break-even division with the GOP.

Although current party and media mythology treats Bill Clinton and other Vichy Democrats as symbols of Democratic triumph this is far from the case:

- Clinton did no better than Kerry, Gore, Carter, JFK, and Harry Truman. All of them came within two percent of the midpoint despite markedly different styles and programs. It is fair to say that in each case, party loyalty proved more important than the candidate.

- Michael Dukakis, the unfairly assigned butt of party jokes, did three points better than Clinton in the latter's first election and only three points worse in the second. Even more striking, Dukakis beat or equaled Clinton's best percentage in 12 states including Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Oklahoma, a record dramatically at odds with the spin of the Clintonistas and the Democratic Leadership Council.

- Democratic losses at the state and national level under Clinton were worse than any seen by a party incumbent since Grover Cleveland. Clinton proved a disaster for the Democrats. What happened in Congress this year was a partial recovery from this disaster.

In short, the only thing that has really worked for the Democrats have been campaigns heavily populist in nature.

American populism has a long past. It began when the first Indian shot the first arrow at a colonist attempting to foreclose on his hunting grounds. As early as 1676, the farmers in Virginia were upset enough about high taxes, low prices and the payola given to those close to the governor that they followed Nathaniel Bacon into rebellion.

One hundred and ten years later found farmers of Massachusetts complaining that however men might have been created, they were not staying equal. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays they took on the new establishment in open rebellion to free themselves high taxes and legal costs, rampant foreclosures, exorbitant salaries for public officials and other abuses. The rebels were routed and fled.

The populist thread weaves through the administration of Andrew Jackson, an early American populist who recognized the importance of challenging the style as well as the substance of the establishment value system. It was a time when it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a banker to get into the White House, a problem bankers have seldom had since.

It was the end of the nineteenth century, though, that institutionalized populism, and gave it a name. The issues are familiar: economic concentration, unfair taxation, welfare and democracy. Critics are quick to point out that they also included racism and nativism, which was true in some cases, but it has been traditional for liberal historians to emphasize these aspects while overlooking the rampant class and ethnic prejudices of the more elite politicians they favored.

In the end, the most debilitating, discriminatory and dangerous form of extremism in this country is found in the middle -- with its cell meetings held in the committee rooms of the US Congress, its slogan "Not Now" and its goal of maintaining the timorousness of the people towards their leaders. A true populist revival could change this but the merchants of moderation will do what they can to control and blunt it.

As a party, the populists were not particularly successful, but it wasn't long before the Democrats bought many of their proposals including the graduated income tax, election of the Senate by direct vote, civil service reform, pensions, and the eight hour workday. It's not a bad list of accomplishments for a party that got just 8.5% of the popular vote in the only presidential election in which it ran a candidate on its own.

The growth of an urban left and the influence of transatlantic Marxism overwhelmed rural-oriented populism, which also suffered due to racism and regionalism. European socialism got a much better break under Roosevelt than did the native populist tradition although there were notable exceptions such as the rural electrification program. In the end, however, neither ideological socialism nor pragmatic populism could hold their own against the emerging dominant style of contemporary liberalism, which espoused human rights and civil liberties even as economic welfare was carefully constrained by a prohibition against the redistribution of wealth or power.

The Democrats came to emphasize the worst aspect of socialism, concentration of power in the state, while failing to expend a proportionate amount of energy providing the supposed benefit of the shift: economic and political justice. The growth of the economy, aided by a couple of wars, obscured this development until the sixties, when the forgotten precincts began to be heard from: first blacks, then one mistreated group after another - including young non-college educated whites - until today we find ourselves a country of angry, alienated minorities, bumblinq around in the dark looking for a coalition to wield against those in power.

Here lies the great hope in the rediscovery of populism. More than any other political philosophy it offers potential for those who serve this country to seize a bit of it back from those who control it. It emphasizes the issues that should be emphasized: economic justice, decentralized democracy and an end to the concentration of power.

Populism's hidden army is the non-voter. A study by Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer, associate professors at Northwestern University's School of Journalism, found that "Nonvoters as well as now-and-then voters see politicians as almost a separate class, who say what they think voters want to hear in language that's not straightforward and whose sole mission is winning. . .

A review of Doppelt and Shearer's work notes that "In the 1996 elections, 73% of nonvoters were 18 to 44 years old. 39% were under age 30. 48% make less than $30,000 per year. 30% identified themselves as minorities."

And the study also found that 52% agreed with the statement: "The federal government often does a better job than people give it credit for." 83% of nonvoters thought the government should have a major policy role in the realms of healthcare, housing, and education.

While a follow-up study found that nonvoters divided pretty much the same way as voters on the presidency, the fact that they didn't do anything about it was more telling. Besides, we're talking about a huge number of people. If those of voting age simply turned out in the same proportion as they had in 1960, there would be about 24 million more voters, nearly 25% more cast ballots. That's a lot of people looking for some difference between the candidates and some new directions.

But there are also big problems. We have, for example, reached a stage where many minorities have produced enough winners that the greater number of losers not only have to battle their oppressors but the indifference of, and misleading impressions caused by, their own role models. All pressure groups - farmers, labor unions, women, ethnic groups - have grabbed a piece of the cake. But the citizens at the bottom of each of these causes - the poor farmer, the unemployed laborer, the tip-dependent waitress, the slum dweller - has hardly been allowed a bite. We have created the superstructure of a welfare state without providing its supposed benefits to the people who need it most.

Not even the organizations supposedly dedicated to correcting this imbalance have been up to the task. The Black Congressional Caucus remains silent as the toll mounts of black young men sent to prison or to their death thanks a war far more deadly to them than Iraq, namely the war on drugs. The major women's groups are far more interested in Nancy Pelosi than in women working at Wal-Mart. In fact, the most effective women's and minority groups in the country are unions like SEIU and Unite Here, which actually help some of those most in need.

Unlike New Deal and Great Society liberals, contemporary liberalism has cut its close ties to populism and instead is content to drive its SUV to the church of Our Mother of Perpetual Good Intentions. The goal is to believe the right thing, unlike populism, whose goal is to do the right thing. Faith vs. works.

Interestingly, populism - despite its bad rap - has far more potential for creating the diverse, happy society of which the liberals dream. The reason for this is that hate and tension are directly related to people's personal social and economic status. Both the old Democratic segregationist and the new GOP fundamentalist understood and exploited this. They made the weak angry at each other, they taught the poor of one ethnicity and class to blame those of another for their troubles. Karl Rove is just the George Wallace of another time.

But you won't break this cycle with feel-good rhetoric and rules. You break it by creating a fairer and more decent society for everyone. You don't do it with political correctness; you do it with economic and social equity.

Yet when Howard Dean made his comment about wanting to get the votes of people who drove pickups with confederate flag stickers, he was immediately excoriated by Kerry and Gephardt. By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have been left behind? Yet because some of them still cling to the myths the southern white establishment taught their daddies and their granddaddies, Gephardt and Kerry didn't think they qualified as Democratic voters.

The decline of liberalism has been accelerated by a growing number of American subcultures deemed unworthy by its advocates: gun owners, church goers, pickup drivers with confederate flag stickers. Yet the gun owner could be an important ally for civil liberties, the churchgoer a voice for political integrity, the pickup driver a supporter of national healthcare. Further, while liberals are happy to stigmatize certain stereotypes, they are enthralled with others, such as the self-serving suggestion that they represent a new class of "cultural creatives" saving the American city. And from whom, implicitly, are they saving the American city? From the blacks, latinos and poor forced out to make way for their creativity.

The black writer, Jean Toomer once described America as "so voluble in acclamation of the democratic ideal, so reticent in applying what it professes." Writing in 1919, Toomer said, "It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition."

So what might a populist agenda look like? Let's look at two examples - neither a paragon of virtue - yet far better, and stunningly so, than any of today's politicians in starting programs that helped large numbers of people. Their legacy was not to be found in their own amply noted inadequacies but in the adequacies they made possible for others. In a time of shallow political celebrities incapable of even modest achievement, these men remind us what democracy was meant to be about.

The first was Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. Here's how Wikipedia describes him:

|||| In his four-year term as governor, Long increased the mileage of paved highways in Louisiana from 331 to 2,301, plus an additional 4,508 2,816 miles of gravel roads. By 1936, the infrastructure program begun by Long had [doubled] the state's road system. He built 111 bridges, and started construction on the first bridge over the lower Mississippi. He built the new Louisiana State Capitol, at the time the tallest building in the South. All of these construction projects provided thousands of much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. . .

Long's free textbooks, school-building program, and free busing improved and expanded the public education system, and his night schools taught 100,000 adults to read. He greatly expanded funding for LSU, lowered tuition, established scholarships for poor students, and founded the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. He also doubled funding for the public Charity Hospital System, built a new Charity Hospital building for New Orleans, and reformed and increased funding for the state's mental institutions. His administration funded the piping of natural gas to New Orleans and other cities and built the seven-mile Lake Pontchartrain seawall and New Orleans airport. Long slashed personal property taxes and reduced utility rates. His repeal of the poll tax in 1935 increased voter registration by 76 percent in one year. . .

As an alternative to what he called the conservatism of the New Deal, Long proposed legislation capping personal fortunes, income and inheritances. . . In 1934, he unveiled an economic plan he called Share Our Wealth. Long argued there was enough wealth in the country for every individual to enjoy a comfortable standard of living, but that it was unfairly concentrated in the hands of a few millionaire bankers, businessmen and industrialists.

Long proposed a new tax code which would limit personal fortunes to $50 million, annual income to $1 million (or 300 times the income of the average family), and inheritances to $5 million. The resulting funds would be used to guarantee every family a basic household grant of $5,000 and a minimum annual income of $2,000-3,000 (or one-third the average family income). Long supplemented his plan with proposals for free primary and college education, old-age pensions, veterans' benefits, federal assistance to farmers, public works projects, and limiting the work week to thirty hours. . .

Long, in February 1934, formed a national political organization, the Share Our Wealth Society. A network of local clubs led by national organizer Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, the Share Our Wealth Society was intended to operate outside of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt administration. By 1935, the society had over 7.5 million members in 27,000 clubs across the country, and Long's Senate office was receiving an average of 60,000 letters a week. Pressure from Long and his organization is considered by some historians as responsible for Roosevelt's "turn to the left" in 1935, when he enacted the Second New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration and Social Security; in private, Roosevelt candidly admitted to trying to "steal Long's thunder." |||

The other example is Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's gross mishandling of Vietnam has obscured memory of the fact that he fermented the greatest number of good domestic bills in the least time of any president in our history. Again, some examples from Wikipedia:

|||| Four civil rights acts were passed, including three laws in the first two years of Johnson's presidency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations. . .

The War on Poverty . . . spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youths develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the first summer jobs established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children.

The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. . . initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a National Teachers Corps to provide teachers to poverty stricken areas of the United States. It began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.

The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002

The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare and provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans. . . In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. . .

In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies. . .

The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states . . . The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the Highway Safety Act of 1966 were enacted, largely as a result of Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed.

Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. . . Child Safety Act of 1966 prohibited any chemical so dangerous that no warning can make its safe. Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967 set standards for children's sleepwear, but not baby blankets. Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales. Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 required inspection of poultry which must meet federal standards. Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968 provided safeguards against fraudulent practices in the sale of land. Radiation Safety Act of 1968 provided standards and recalls for defective electronic products. |||||

It is virtually impossible to conceive of any elected official today being as productive as Johnson and Long. Yet Johnson never went to business school; he was just a teacher. And Long took the bar exam after one year at Tulane Law school and then went out and sued Standard Oil. These were not people who are meant to succeed by today's distorted and ineffectual standards, yet they did. In fact, if you want to find anything comparable one of the few names that springs to mind is Harry Hopkins who put millions to work within months for FDR. Hopkins was a social worker by trade. With such leaders, hearts and smarts were the credentials they really needed.

What would a new populist program look like? It might include things like this:

- Universal healthcare with no trough-slopping by insurance companies

- A housing program in which the federal government would be an equity partner with lower income house purchasers. It would be a self-sustaining program as each partner would get their equity back when the house was sold.

- An end to usury in credit card lending.

- Pension protection

- A revival of high quality vocational training

- Election reform including instant runoff voting and public campaign financing

- Expansion of cooperatives and credit unions

OBAMA PLANS RECORD POST-WWII MILITARY BUDGET. . .GATES PROMISES CONTRACTORS IT WILL KEEP GROWING

Gov Exec - The Obama administration's request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that's not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years

Politico - Defense Secretary Robert Gates hosted a meeting with the nation's top defense company executives, stressing the need for a closer partnership with them and pledging to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon's budgets over time, according to his spokesman.

David Sirota, Salon - The 2010 Pentagon budget means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year," reports the Cato Institute. "By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China's per capita spending is less than $100."

"(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike," reports Hearst Newspapers. * "President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II," reports National Journal's Government Executive magazine.

In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

And who pushes this madness? Among others, the thoughtless tank, Brookings Institute, where O';Hannon is a senior Pentagon pimp.

Michael O'Hanlon, Washington Post - After three months of very impressive decisions regarding national security, President Obama made perhaps his first significant mistake. It concerns the defense budget, where his plans are insufficient to support the national security establishment over the next five years. . .

The administration is hardly slashing funds for defense; it is simply adopting a policy of zero real growth in the "base budget" (the part that does not include war costs, which are too unpredictable to include in this analysis). Specifically, the base budget is to grow 2 percent a year over the next five years. But with the inflation rate expected to average over 1.5 percent, the net effect is essentially no real growth. Cumulatively, that would leave us about $150 billion short of actual funding requirements through 2014.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE

Sacramento Bee - Finally, in this month's Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, a University of Rochester study revealed that . . . people are happier on weekends. Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. . . explained in a news release, "Our findings highlight just how important free time is to an individual's well-being."

GROUP URGES PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS NOT TO ATTEND PHONY NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has urged President Obama and all members of Congress not to attend this year's National Prayer Breakfast, scheduled for February 4. The breakfast, designed to appear as if government-sanctioned, actually serves as a meeting and recruiting event for the shadowy Fellowship Foundation.

The Fellowship, also known as "The Foundation" and "The Family," is run by Doug Coe, a spiritual advisor to past government officials who uses the organization to push his unorthodox brand of Christianity within government circles. The Fellowship operates the infamous C Street House, a congressional residence and meeting place on Capitol Hill that has been a frequent haunt of some ethically challenged elected officials, including Sens. John Ensign (R-NV) and Tom Coburn (R-OK), Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) and former-Rep. and now-Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC).

The organization operates under an intense veil of secrecy, staying largely out of the public eye and hiding its donors' identities. The Fellowship has used its government clout to facilitate backdoor meetings between U.S. and foreign officials, improperly claimed tax exempt status for the C Street House, and has persuaded members of Congress, including Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) to conduct Fellowship-sanctioned evangelizing while traveling at taxpayer expense. Members of the Fellowship also have been involved with legislation in Uganda calling for the death penalty for gays.

Kathryn Joyce And Jeff Sharlet, Mother Jones - Through all of her years in Washington, [Hillary] Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. . .

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" . . . Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. . . The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan. . .

The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voter - God . . .

The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to [the group's] Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. . .

CORPORATION ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY FOR CONGRESS

Murray Hill Incorporated today announced it was filing to run for U.S. Congress "Until now," Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, "corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves."

Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first "corporate person" to exercise its constitutional right to run for office.. "The strength of America," Murray Hill Inc. says, "is in the boardrooms, country clubs and Lear jets of America's great corporations. We're saying to Wal-Mart, AIG and Pfizer, if not you, who? If not now, when?"

The campaign's designated human, Eric Hensal, will help the corporation conform to antiquated "human only" procedures and sign the necessary voter registration and candidacy paperwork. Hensal is excited by this new opportunity. "We want to get in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store is bought by China."

First campaign video ad

HARPER'S IN TROUBLE

NY Times - Just before noon last Wednesday, John R. MacArthur, the president, publisher and chief benefactor of Harper's Magazine, joined his editorial staff after its monthly meeting. . .

John R. MacArthur has appointed Ellen Rosenbush the acting editor of Harper's, whose top editor left last week.

"We are going through a crisis," Mr. MacArthur, who goes by Rick, told them in a crowded conference room, where the business employees had joined them. Bound volumes dating from 1850 reminded everyone of Harper's pedigree and prominence.

In a rambling 40-minute monologue that left many attendees perplexed, Mr. MacArthur, 53, talked about the problems facing Harper's: readership was down 35,000, newsstand sales were plummeting, the only direct-mail piece that seemed to work was 20 years old. Worse, Harper's seemed irrelevant - "the mainstream media is ignoring it to death," he said - according to people who were at the meeting.

What he did not address was the chief concern on everyone's mind: two days earlier, without warning, he had fired the magazine's well-liked editor, Roger D. Hodge, in a five-minute conversation as Mr. Hodge was finishing his breakfast croissant.

The episode has sent ripples through the placid magazine, which has long been an outlier in the fast-paced New York publishing world.

Harper's is a nonprofit that relies on the support of Mr. MacArthur's foundation. As advertising revenue in publishing has declined, many organizations have considered that foundation model - combining traditional revenue with donations - to finance quality journalism. But as the Harper's situation shows, no publishing model is immune to change - especially when one influential person runs the place.

With Mr. Hodge's dismissal, "there is a sense that there is only one authority to appeal to," said an editor who, like almost everyone inside the magazine who was interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of being fired.

"We all on the editorial side were surprised," Donovan Hohn, a senior editor, said. "He is the best editor I've worked with." At least one contributing editor, John Berger, asked to be removed from the masthead in protest. . .

VERMONT SECESSIONISTS PULL 13% IN POLL

Christopher Ketcham, Time - On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. "For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign," said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.

A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as "left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy." The group not only advocates the peaceful secession of Vermont but has minted its own silver "token" - valued at $25 - and, as part of a publishing venture with another secessionist group, runs a monthly newspaper called Vermont Commons, with a circulation of 10,000. According to a 2007 poll, they have support from at least 13% of state voters. . .

FLOATING THROUGH THE BIG APPLE

Tree Hugger - Created by a team of New York-based artists, designers, builders, civic activists, scientists, environmentalists, and marine engineers, the Waterpod was conceived as a way to experiment with more sustainable living systems that might be suitable for a future world of "widespread climate change, desertification, overpopulation, and rising sea levels."

Built of repurposed wood, metal, plastic, fabric, and other materials on top of an industrial barge, the Waterpod included space for both hydroponic and soil-based gardens -- growing such goodies as bok choy, strawberries, and squash -- a composting toilet, greywater recycling, and 12 solar PV panels, among other green features. The voyagers were also equipped with a shower, art and yoga spaces, a fuel-efficient stove. . .

The pod has been designed to run on solar, wind and human power; visitors will be invited to pedal one of four onboard bicycles, which recharge the pod's three batteries. . .

One thing the Waterpod is not, however, is an exercise in survivor-style schadenfreude. "It will be quite civilized," promises Ward, a sculptor who fronts the psychedelic rock band the Ruffian Arms. "We'll eat with utensils."

CHICAGO TRANSIT TO HAVE MOBILE GARDEN

Tree Hugger - The Mobile Garden concept dreamed up by artist Joe Baldwin just got the thumbs up from the Chicago Transit Authority. The plan is to add some green space to the transit system by transforming a rail car into a mobile garden boasting greenery and native species. The car will help commuters "visualize the possibilities for enhancing green space in the city," as Hugh Bartling puts it.

According to Mobile Garden, "The basic concept that artist Joe Baldwin came up with is to build a garden on a flatcar train and to let it travel with the Chicago Transit Authority as part of their regular transit service. Because of the conditions that would subject plants to the ideal plants for the mobile garden are native plants that require low water and low maintenance. This also allows the opportunity to highlight the importance of native plants in the community."

HARKIN TO INTRODUCE ANTI-FILIBUSTER BILL

The Hlll - Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) intends to introduce legislation that would take away the minority's power to filibuster legislation. . . Under Harkin's bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), 60 votes would still be necessary to cut off debate on an initial procedural motion. If senators failed to reach 60 votes, a second vote would be possible two days later that would require only 57 votes to cut off debate. If that also failed, a third vote two days after that would require 54 votes to end debate. A fourth vote after two more days would require just 51 votes.

Reid shot down the option in his 2008 book The Good Fight. Recalling the "nuclear option" debate in 2005, Reid compared lowering the filibuster threshold to "opening Pandora's Box."

"It was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular business," Reid wrote. "And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States Senate . A filibuster is the minority's way of not allowing the majority to shut off debate, and without robust debate, the Senate is crippled."

Even Obama, referencing the 2005 debate, is on record opposing the idea during a speech he gave as a senator that year.

"The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this chamber knows that if the majority chooses to end the filibuster - if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate - then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse," Obama said in the April 2005 speech in Washington.

HOW TO USE A SEXTANT

WORD

Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. - Philip K. Dick

ROAD SIGNS

BBC, UK - Almost three-quarters of people support assisted suicide for someone who is terminally ill, a BBC poll suggests. However if the illness is painful and incurable, but not fatal, then backing falls to slightly under half.. . .


Guardian, UK- People in their 70s who are classed as overweight live longer than those thought to be a healthy weight, researchers say. While people who are moderately overweight seem to live the longest, being very overweight or being underweight is linked to the worst impact on people's lifespan. . . Researchers have looked at nearly 10,000 Australians aged between 70 and 75. Over 10 years, the people least likely to die were those classed as overweight, based on their BMI. People with a supposedly healthy BMI were slightly more at risk of dying during the study, with the most at risk being the underweight and the obese. . .

EXCERPTS FROM READER COMMENTS

THE PASSIVHAUS VS. THE SOLAR HOME

-- Super-insulated houses were in vogue for a while in the seventies and eighties in the US. But there were problems with indoor air quality, condensation, etc. (And the cost savings did not materialize.) A lot of these houses were retrofitted with expensive air exchangers. Having slightly leakier windows and doors would have been a cheaper, more elegant, solution.

BILL AIMS TO CUT TECH FIRMS' BIAS AGAINST AMERICAN WORKERS

-- If Congress had done this five years ago, I might still have my old job today.

If you were to go stand by my old Dilbert cube today, you'd hear a lot of New Zealand accented speech, but precious few American accents below the top executive ranks.

On the books it looks like an American high tech firm. Under the surface, more and more of the American employees are being kicked out the door.

And certainly in a country where unemployment keeps rising, it makes no sense at all to be bringing in foreign workers to take American jobs.

OIL'S HIDDEN ROLE IN LATIN AMERICA

--The US uses about 20 million barrels per day, every day. 142 million is not very much. The claim that Haiti has more oil than Venezuela is a claim that is remarkably free of facts. If you look closer, you will find that there have been a couple test wells drilled, but no where near enough to establish how much, if any, oil is actually in Haiti. - Mark Robinowitz

DEMOCRATS IN BIG TROUBLE

-- I'm not disappointed by Obama and Biden.

Obama promised to escalate the wars on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama promised to promote health insurance companies instead of single payer.

Obama promised us clean coal and safe nuclear power. George Orwell wrote about that sort of language.

I am disappointed in the Obama fan club, but it's nice to see some of them getting buyer's remorse.

OBAMA, BIG BUSINESS WANTS TO NUKE US

-- Most of the byproducts of nuclear reactors are extremely toxic to life and cannot be used in any type of reactor, whether fueled with thorium or uranium.

Integral Fast Reactors are a nice marketing campaign, but they're not something tested with experience.

Even a thorium reactor creates hundreds of new radioactive isotopes that are dangerous for long periods of time, some of them years, decades, centuries and millennia.

The only safe nuclear reactor has a 93 million mile evacuation zone -- the sun. It rises every morning and sets every evening. It cannot be used to make nuclear weapons ingredients, doesn't require a police state or a centralized corporate structure. . .

We are no closer to detoxifying nuclear wastes today than we were in 1945. Only time can make radioactive wastes non-radioactive.

AMERICA'S CANNED BEER FETISH

-- Beer in bottles, absolutely. Only thing I like in a can is a soft drink since the cans are relatively small you can finish it before it gets warm.

-- The craft beer market has exploded since the 1980s. At least in Masachusetts, the number of types of beer sold in bottles far supersedes that sold in cans.

Can beer does not have to taste worse than glass. And some craft brewers are finding it more eco friendly to ship their brews in cans rather than glass due to reduced shipping weight. Oskar Blues and 21st Amendment are two brewers selling lots of great beer in cans:

-- In many states, bottle collection seems to be no longer happening. Most machines for redemption are automated bar code readers that crush the redeemables for recycling. The exception are breweries or small brewers that charge a large deposit for growlers to ensure return.

-- Keg beer is aluminum too, and highly reusable. I don't think anybody argues that flash-pasteurized, glass-bottled beer is better than unpasteurized keg draft beer. Most local brewers supply in this too.

I'm not opposed to beer in glass mind you; that's how I consume most of my beer at home. It's just fiction that the benefits of glass bottled beer are that much more superior to canned beer these days.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT PREDICTABLE

Reader Samson - Chaos theory comes from studying the weather. And fractals. Both started with a weather researcher named Mandlebrot and his discovery of how the beat of a butterfly in one place can create a hurricane in another.

The systems are far too complicated to be understood by bumper sticker politics. Run a globe view or a sat view for awhile and watch all the swirling circles of storms and systems and the rotation patterns that emerge. . .

Warmer might mean more evaporation in one place. Which can mean more snowfall or growing glaciers in a place downwind despite a generally warmer world. Changes in temperature patterns can move those big swirls one way or another, or move the jet stream up down or sideways. Some of what we've learned about El Nino and Nina point to weather patterns that span multiple years, all of which can change subtly or drastically with changes in temperatures.

We are not in a steady state time right now. Instead, we are in a time of change. That's what global warming means. Change. It's not the same as it was. And next year won't be the same as this year was. It's getting warmer. It's changing.

That means if you studied the weather by memorizing the patterns of the past, then forget about them.

But it also means, don't necessary look for new patterns. We are in a time of flux. Almost certainly until human society either crashes and burns or somehow achieves some stable, sustainable equilibrium. The very fact that humans have disturbed the natural weather patterns by our gas emissions means that we are a time of change. Don't expect stability any time soon.

Your typical government bureaucrat is going to have trouble dealing with this. The people who like their weather 'predictable' are not going to like this era much.

RWANDA FAMILIES LEARN ABOUT POPULATION GROWTH

All Africa, Rwanda - Local leaders at grass-roots level are championing the family planning drive given the threats posed by the country's fast growing population. . .

The gathering of over 70 residents, young and old, male and female, then keenly listened as Dr. Ezechias Rwabuhihi, an area resident, who is also a former Health Minister and legislator expounded on the threats posed by a large family and, consequently a large population to a small comparatively poor economy.

"A family should, surely, have children it is able to properly look after - feed, educate, cloth, and provide many others basics for," Rwabuhihi told the attentive audience.

"Unlike our forefathers, it is time we bring to an end the misguided conceptions that we can only give birth to children and then leave them to God's care.". . .

Describing an alarming population state of affairs in the most unambiguous terms, Rwabuhihi told Intwari residents how the country's population has exploded from one million to, currently, averagely over 10 million in just a few decades.

He noted, Rwanda's wealth moves up unproportionally slowly and the land size too, does not increase at all.

The residents seemed to take all this in and agreed that the village's women, including girls above 18 years should participate in a related but special female only session . . .

The average fertility rate drop of 5.5 children per woman from 6.1 in 2005, however encouraging, analysts state, still remains a massive burden to the economy and if it continues unchecked, could be ruinous.

Instead of forcibly limiting couples to no more than three children, Government has opted to sensitize Rwandans to control the size of their families.

Two children per family are considered as ideal.

HAS AMERICA BECOME A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY?

Washington's Blog - Fiscal liberals say [Obama] cuts spending at the exact time that we most need to increase it. See this and this.

Fiscal conservatives say this doesn't go nearly far enough. See this, this and this.

But I think there's a bigger issue that deserves some inquiry: is America being turned into a third world country?

As I wrote last June: "When the International Monetary Fund or World Bank offer to lend money to a struggling third-world country (or 'emerging market'), they demand 'austerity measures'". . .

Private banks, or institutions like the International Monetary Fund, may require that a country pursues an 'austerity policy' if it wants to re-finance loans that are about to come due. The government may be asked to stop issuing subsidies or to otherwise reduce public spending. When the IMF requires such a policy, the terms are known as 'IMF conditionalities'.

Since the IMF and World Bank lend to third world countries, you may reasonably assume that this has nothing to do with "first world" countries like the US and UK.

But England's economy is in dire straits, and rumors have abounded that the UK might have to rely on a loan from the IMF.

And as former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker said :

"People seem to think the [American] government has money. The government doesn't have any money."

Indeed, the IMF has already performed a complete audit of the whole US financial system, something which they have only previously done to broke third world nations.

Al Martin - former contributor to the Presidential Council of Economic Advisors and retired naval intelligence officer - observed in an April 2005 newsletter that the ratio of total U.S. debt to gross domestic product rose from 78 percent in 2000 to 308 percent in April 2005. The International Monetary Fund considers a nation-state with a total debt-to-GDP ratio of 200 percent or more to be a "de-constructed Third World nation-state."

Martin explained:
'de-constructed' actually means is that a political regime in that country, or series of political regimes, have, through a long period of fraud, abuse, graft, corruption and mismanagement, effectively collapsed the economy of that country."

Some have asked questions like, "Is the goal to force the US into the same kinds of IMF austerity programs that have caused riots in so many other nations?" Some predicted years ago that the "international bankers" would bring down the American economy.

I used to think, frankly, that such kinds of talk were crazy-talk. I'm not so sure anymore.

Catherine Austin Fitts - former managing director of a Wall Street investment bank and Assistant Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President George Bush Sr. - calls what is happening to the economy "a criminal leveraged buyout of America," something she defines as "buying a country for cheap with its own money and then jacking up the rents and fees to steal the rest.". . .

Writer Mike Whitney wrote in CounterPunch in April 2005:

The towering [U.S.] national debt coupled with the staggering trade deficits have put the nation on a precipice and a seismic shift in the fortunes of middle-class Americans is looking more likely all the time. . . The country has been intentionally plundered and will eventually wind up in the hands of its creditors This same Ponzi scheme has been carried out repeatedly by the IMF and World Bank throughout the world. Bankruptcy is a fairly straightforward way of delivering valuable public assets and resources to collaborative industries, and of annihilating national sovereignty. After a nation is successfully driven to destitution, public policy decisions are made by creditors and not by representatives of the people . . . "

And given that experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic, maybe the process of turning first world into the third world is already complete.