The Essential Krugman: Greenspan and the Bubble

NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 29, 2005

Most of what Alan Greenspan said at last week's conference in his honor made very good sense. But his words of wisdom come too late. He's like a man who suggests leaving the barn door ajar, and then - after the horse is gone - delivers a lecture on the importance of keeping your animals properly locked up.

Regular readers know that I have never forgiven the Federal Reserve chairman for his role in creating today's budget deficit. In 2001 Mr. Greenspan, a stern fiscal taskmaster during the Clinton years, gave decisive support to the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts, urging Congress to reduce the federal government's revenue so that it wouldn't pay off its debt too quickly.

Since then, federal debt has soared. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Greenspan has never admitted that he gave Congress bad advice. He has, however, gone back to lecturing us about the evils of deficits.

Now, it seems, he's playing a similar game with regard to the housing bubble.

At the conference, Mr. Greenspan didn't say in plain English that house prices are way out of line. But he never says things in plain English.

What he did say, after emphasizing the recent economic importance of rising house prices, was that "this vast increase in the market value of asset claims is in part the indirect result of investors accepting lower compensation for risk. Such an increase in market value is too often viewed by market participants as structural and permanent." And he warned that "history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low-risk premiums." I believe that translates as "Beware the bursting bubble."

But as recently as last October Mr. Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: "While local economies may experience significant speculative price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely."

Wait, it gets worse. These days Mr. Greenspan expresses concern about the financial risks created by "the prevalence of interest-only loans and the introduction of more-exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages." But last year he encouraged families to take on those very risks, touting the advantages of adjustable-rate mortgages and declaring that "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage."

If Mr. Greenspan had said two years ago what he's saying now, people might have borrowed less and bought more wisely. But he didn't, and now it's too late. There are signs that the housing market either has peaked already or soon will. And it will be up to Mr. Greenspan's successor to manage the bubble's aftermath.

How bad will that aftermath be? The U.S. economy is currently suffering from twin imbalances. On one side, domestic spending is swollen by the housing bubble, which has led both to a huge surge in construction and to high consumer spending, as people extract equity from their homes. On the other side, we have a huge trade deficit, which we cover by selling bonds to foreigners. As I like to say, these days Americans make a living by selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from China.

One way or another, the economy will eventually eliminate both imbalances. But if the process doesn't go smoothly - if, in particular, the housing bubble bursts before the trade deficit shrinks - we're going to have an economic slowdown, and possibly a recession. In fact, a growing number of economists are using the "R" word for 2006.

And here's where Mr. Greenspan is still saying foolish things. In his closing remarks he suggested that "an end to the housing boom could induce a significant rise in the personal saving rate, a decline in imports and a corresponding improvement in the current account deficit." Translation, I think: the end of the housing bubble will automatically cure the trade deficit, too.

Sorry, but no. A housing slowdown will lead to the loss of many jobs in construction and service industries but won't have much direct effect on the trade deficit. So those jobs won't be replaced by new jobs elsewhere until and unless something else, like a plunge in the value of the dollar, makes U.S. goods more competitive on world markets, leading to higher exports and lower imports.

So there's a rough ride ahead for the U.S. economy. And it's partly Mr. Greenspan's fault.

Vocal Haliburton critic fired

Daily Times
Aug. 31, 2005

WASHINGTON: A Defence Department official, known as a vocal critic of Haliburton, the company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been sacked, a decision that has been challenged by her lawyers.

Bunnatine H Greenhouse was a top-rank civilian employee of the department. Her lawyer said that the dismissal carries the “hallmark of illegal retaliation.” She came to prominence last year when she went public with her criticism of the volume of contracts given to Haliburton in Iraq. The Houston-based oil service company was given an no-bid contract to repair Iraqi oilfields. She was highly critical of the contracts calling them “the most blatant and improper abuse” she had witnessed in 20 years of working on government contracts.

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Note: Not 'sacked'...according to reports she was demoted to a significantly lower-grade position.

Thinking about severe weather

Global Warming leads to the next ice age.

Walter Cronkite's 2004 Article: "Make Global Warming an Issue

By Walter Cronkite
The Philadelphia Enquirer
Monday 15, March 2004

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns is well known by now. While evidence of man- made environmental damage mounts, the Bush team resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats. That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all environmental issues - global warming.

First, the administration claimed that global warming was the work of liberal hysterics and had been discounted by "more sober scientists." Then, it admitted that it was happening but said there was no proof humans caused it, or could fix it.

Retreat No. 3 was the White House discovery that, yes, indeed, some of the warming was due to human activity, and we should take steps, say, to reduce emissions, but those steps should be voluntary on the part of industry.

There are two scientific theories that have been gaining credence in recent years that challenge the sanity of that kind of resistance to fact - and make no mistake about it, global warming is a fact.

Both theories begin with a phenomenon that is taking place right now. Scientists are beginning to understand climate as a complex interactive system that is affected by everything from the emission of greenhouse gases, to deforestation, to the condition of Arctic and Antarctic glaciers.

It is a system with a feedback mechanism. For example, higher temperatures lead to the melting of sea ice, which exposes more water to the sun. The water absorbs more solar energy, which accelerates global warming, and so on. Scientists fear that such feedbacks might produce a self-sustaining and accelerating warming that is beyond human control.

The second theory goes by the name of Abrupt Climate Change. It suggests that catastrophic results of global warming might not occur gradually, as most have expected, but quite suddenly - within a few years. This theory also starts with the melting of glaciers and sea ice, but involves the dilution of seawater's salinity - or salt content - that results. That salt content is a key element in an ocean current that takes heat from the tropics northward and cold water southward and in the process moderates temperatures in the Eastern United States and much of Europe.

The collapse of this so-called conveyor could, in the worst case, produce a new ice age. The best case would give us severe winters, increasingly violent storms, flooding, drought and high winds around the globe, disrupting food production and energy supplies and raising sea levels high enough to flood coastal cities and make them unlivable.

These are not predictions but real possibilities - far more possible today than scientists had previously believed. And while the politicos in the White House continue to stick their heads in the sand, some at the Pentagon have taken on the task of studying the national- security implications of Abrupt Climate Change.

What they came up with was a world whose "carrying capacity" - the number of people the globe can sustain - is being progressively lowered, a world where war becomes the rule, not the exception, and where wars are no longer fought for ideological, religious, or geopolitical reasons - but for resources and survival. This unclassified Pentagon study, completed last fall, has been released to several news organizations and was highlighted in the Feb. 9 edition of Fortune magazine.

One thing we have to keep in mind: While these might only be worst-case scenarios, many of the conditions and processes scientists think might trigger them already are present or under way. Global warming is at least as important as gay marriage or the cost of Social Security. And if it is not seriously debated in the general election, it will measure the irresponsibility of the entire political class. This is an issue that cannot, and must not, be ignored any longer.

Global Warming on PBS Circa 2001

Worst Case Scenario: "Global Warming Unstoppable for 100 Years, Study Says
Under the worst-case scenario, by 2100 average temperatures are projected to rise by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 degrees Celsius) and sea level by at least 12 inches (30 centimeters).

The World will run out of crude oil before the doomsday global warming scenario will be a major concern.

Global warming may cause the extinction of many species of plants and animals by 2050: "Global warming may drive a quarter of land animals and plants to the edge of extinction by 2050, a major international study has warned.>

Climate change in the Gulf Coast Region

Union of Concerned Scientists Warning to Humanity Statement: 1992

FEMA has maps that show the most hazardous areas of the US for a variety of actors such as floods, earthquakes, tornados, etc.

A primer on severe weather phenomenon from the Project Atmosphere Canada

US Population density map 2000

The Risk of Sea Level Rise: with Probability Distributions from twenty climate researchers under the auspices of the EPA.

Sun-Sentinel Interactive Storm Tracker: 1900 - 2005

Katrina estimated to cost insurers $15 - $20 billion, slightly less than Andrew's adjusted $25 billion

Is it Hyper-Cynical to Question Whether the Cindy Sheeham Episode is a Rovian, or DNC Creation?

An article in Al-Ahram, the Cairo based Egyptian newspaper by a self-described "Arab-American Journalist" reinforces the notion that the Sheeham episode 'feels' like propaganda.

Morning-After Pill: Politics and the F.D.A.

By GARDINER HARRIS
NY Times, August 28, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - For more than a year, federal drug officials have insisted that their repeated delays in deciding whether to approve over-the-counter sales of a morning-after contraceptive have nothing to do with abortion politics.

Among veterans of the battles over drug approvals here, it is hard to find anyone who believes them.

On Friday, the food and drug commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, announced that he would indefinitely postpone a ruling on Plan B, the morning-after pill made by Barr Laboratories. He explained that while the science supported over-the-counter access for women 17 and older, the agency had not figured out how to do that without younger teenagers getting the pills.

While the announcement prompted familiar responses on each side of the abortion debate - protest from abortion rights groups, support from abortion opponents - other veterans of the drug wars sounded more exasperated than anything else.

"At some point, the statute requires that the agency make a decision," said Dr. Eve E. Slater, an assistant secretary of health from 2001 to 2003. "You can't just delay forever."

The Plan B decision has become "overly politicized, and it shouldn't be," Dr. Slater added. Under federal regulations, the Food and Drug Administration was required to reach a decision on Plan B by January. Nothing happened. Indeed, Barr executives said they had no discussions with the agency after January. Usually when the agency is actively considering an application, there is a constant back-and-forth with the company.

As the months passed, two Democratic senators who support abortion rights, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, vowed to block any vote on President Bush's nomination of Dr. Crawford to become agency commissioner unless the F.D.A. made a decision on the pill, for or against. Mr. Bush has long been aligned with abortion opponents.

The senators relented in July after the secretary of health and human services, Michael O. Leavitt, promised that a decision would be made by Sept. 1. On Friday, both senators attributed Dr. Crawford's latest announcement to political interference.

Dr. Robert Fenichel, a former deputy division director for cardiovascular and renal drugs who left the F.D.A. in 2000, agreed, saying the agency's decisions on Plan B were being driven by abortion politics.

"I've never seen anything like this before," Dr. Fenichel said.

That the Plan B fight is politically charged is nothing new, of course. During Dr. Crawford's confirmation hearings, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a supporter of Dr. Crawford, called it not "a pharmaceutical issue as much as it's a social issue."

Nor is it new that politics would play an important role in the decisions of the F.D.A. or any other politically appointed regulatory agency. Elliott Millenson, former president and chief executive of Direct Access Diagnostics, a company that sought to sell an at-home test for H.I.V. infection in the 1980's and 90's, recalled that when gay rights groups opposed the test, the agency initially refused even to accept the company's application. "The commissioner's office explicitly told us in 1992 that if we wanted approval we would need to get political support for our product," Mr. Millenson said.

He sued the agency and won. The agency eventually approved the test, although for business reasons the company never sold any.

"On sensitive issues, politics are business as usual at the F.D.A.," Mr. Millenson said.

The agency approved Plan B as a prescription contraceptive in July 1999. The pill provides a concentrated dose of the medicines available in most daily birth control pills; it can prevent pregnancy if taken as long as 72 hours after intercourse. Many abortion opponents view it as tantamount to abortion.

The F.D.A.'s announcement on Friday led to open bickering between abortion rights advocates and Barr executives. Publicly, the two sides have been supportive of each other for nearly two years, but privately, they have long disagreed on strategy.

In May 2004, the food and drug agency rejected Barr's application to sell its drug over the counter, saying the company had failed to provide enough information about how well girls younger than 16 understood the drug's label and whether they might engage in riskier sex if the drug was easily available.

At that point, Barr had two choices. It could have undertaken another "label-comprehension" study with scores of young teenagers and then resubmitted an almost identical application. Or it could have used the data that it had on hand and reapplied to sell the drug as an over-the-counter pill only to women 16 years of age and older. Younger girls would have to get a prescription. On Friday, the agency changed the age to 17.

Kirsten Moore, president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, an abortion rights advocacy group here, said she and fellow advocates suggested that Barr do another label study. Barr decided to reapply with existing data. No one knows whether the advocates' strategy would have worked, but Barr's has not, at least so far. Ms. Moore said label-comprehension studies were relatively easy, cheap and quick to perform. Most are done in malls, where researchers set up a table and ask passers-by to read a drug label and answer a few questions.

Bruce Downey, Barr's chairman and chief executive, said he did not regret the company's actions. And Dr. Carol Ben-Maimon, chief of Barr's proprietary research, said F.D.A. officials never told the company exactly what questions a new study should answer.

In addition to label comprehension, the agency voiced concerns about Plan B's effects on sexual promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Ben-Maimon said. To answer those questions, a quick study at a mall would not suffice, she said. Dr. Crawford said Friday that the F.D.A. would seek public comments over the next 60 days on whether it had the authority to approve Barr's application and whether it could enforce any regulation that would stop girls younger than 17 from buying the pill freely.

Ms. Moore said she and other abortion-rights advocates wanted Barr to withdraw its present application, perform a label-comprehension study and then apply to sell the drug over-the-counter to women of all ages. Rejecting the application again if it contained clear data showing that young teenagers understood how to use the drug would be more difficult for the agency to justify with scientific or regulatory rationales, she said.

"It's time to call F.D.A.'s bluff," Ms. Moore added.

Mr. Downey, of Barr, said the company was considering a new label-comprehension trial and added that it would provide comments to the F.D.A. during the next 60 days. Whether the agency will listen to those comments is unclear. "We volunteered repeatedly to put proposals forth to the F.D.A.," Dr. Ben-Maimon said. "They didn't really seek out our opinions or thoughts on how we could implement them."

Don't Give the Jerk Free "News" Coverage

Note: This clown has a rabid following who consider him and his "fellow travelers" in highly favorable terms. For the majority of citizens he is another in an unending stream of snake-oil salesmen whose singular goal is to sell his "medicine" to those who have convinced themselves they are in desperate need of the claims made for his product. Any patently stupid comment, or action, can be excused because he is considered to have special exemption.

BS. He should be responded to as any citizen would be. And since he has a long history of foot-in-mouth disease, refer to him in the press as: 'an anonymous person who shall remain nameless for the sake of our collective sanity', or to coin a word: an apwiaiasba, (sounds Hawaiin), and once Anglicanized to: Apises, literally means "a person who is an idiot and should be avoided".

Google Gets Better. What's Up With That?

Published: August 25, 2005
NY Times

Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it's now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today's culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it's all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

The mystery only intensified this week, as Google announced two more free software tools for Windows: a new version of Google Desktop Search and a free instant-messaging program called Google Talk.

The original version of Desktop Search, which Google unleashed last fall, brought the speed and effortlessness of Google's Internet search to your own PC. You'd type a few letters, and in a fraction of a second, you'd be looking at a complete list of files that included your search term - even if that term appeared inside the body of a document. It could even search e-mail, chat-session transcripts and the contents of Web pages you'd seen.

Google Desktop 1.0 certainly blew away Windows' own built-in search tool, which operates with all the speed of an anesthetized slug. But it was limited in three ways.

First, you had to operate it from within your Web browser, limiting its convenience. Second, because it could call up Web pages, e-mail messages and chat transcripts, Google Desktop alarmed people who, ahem, had something to hide from bosses or spouses. And finally, it could see inside only a limited number of document types. For example, it couldn't search PDF files, Web sites visited with any browser except Internet Explorer, or e-mail messages except those in Outlook or Outlook Express.

VERSION 2 , now available at google.com in what's technically in a public beta test version, attacks all of these drawbacks with a vengeance. In Version 2, you can begin a search with a keystroke or by clicking in the search box that's always on the screen. A pop-up menu of search results appears as you begin to type and narrows itself with each additional keystroke. When you see the item you want, you can open it by clicking or by walking up the list with the arrow keys and pressing Enter.

In other words, you can now find and open a certain program, document or control panel entirely from the keyboard, with blazing speed and simplicity. This is old news to Mac fans, of course; the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X 10.4 works the same way. But for Windows XP and 2000 veterans, getting such an omniscient, speedy search feature free is truly liberating. ( Microsoft plans something similar for the next version of Windows, due at the end of 2006.)

Google has also beefed up your privacy options. You can omit search categories like secure Web sites (banking sites, for example), password-protected Microsoft Office files, and so on, and you can even flag individual files so that they'll never appear in the search results again.

Finally, the program now recognizes many more document types: e-mail from Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail; chat transcripts from AOL or MSN Messenger; Web pages you've visited using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape or Mozilla; PDF files; and your Outlook calendar and address book. (And speaking of Outlook, Google Desktop now installs its own search bar right into Outlook, meaning that you can search your e-mail collection in the blink of a cursor.) The company expects to add more kinds of files to this list, thanks to a public plug-in protocol it has published online.

Yet believe it or not, the little search box is the last thing you'll notice when you install Google Desktop. The first thing you'll see is the Sidebar, a column of rectangular panels hugging the right edge of your screen. Each is a window onto a different kind of real-time information from the Internet.

Some are ho-hum, like your latest incoming Gmail and Outlook e-mail, news, stock and weather tickers. Others are refreshingly quirky: the Photos panel shows a continuous, two-inch-tall slideshow of pictures from your own collection, and the surprisingly useful Scratch Pad is a blank box where you can type casual notes throughout your workday (they're saved automatically). Each panel expands horizontally, drawer-like, to reveal more details when clicked.

The Sidebar is about as clean-looking as anyone could make it, but it's still a lot of clutter in a very small space, especially if you add new panels as they become available. On the other hand, you can tidy things up quite a bit: drag your Sidebar panels into a different order, hide the ones you don't use, or collapse them into one-line summaries.

Once again, Google isn't the first company to dream up a modular, Internet-connected suite of miniprograms; the Sidebar is a lot like Mac OS X's Dashboard or the shareware programs Desktop X and Konfabulator. But never mind that; you can't keep a good idea down, and this is a good one indeed.

Google's second revelation this week, Google Talk, lets you communicate with your buddies either by typing or, if your PC has a microphone and speaker, by speaking. As long as you and your conversation partner are at Windows computers, you can converse with spectacular sound quality.

Now, Google Talk 1.0 is probably the most stripped-down chat program on earth. No conference calling, video chats or direct person-to-person file transfers. (Features like these are common in rivals like Skype, iChat and the messenger programs from AOL, MSN and Yahoo.) So what, exactly, is Google trying to prove here?

Its mission, in fact, is far grander. Google Talk aims to end the ridiculous era of proprietary chat networks. At the moment, AOL, MSN and Yahoo each maintain separate, incompatible networks. The big boys each want to be alone in the sandbox, and the losers are their customers.

Google Talk, however, is based on an open, published standard that the company is making available to all. Already, Google Talk communicates with popular chat programs like iChat, Trillian, Adium, Psi and GAIM, but that's just the beginning. Google is making overtures to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft about making their chat programs compatible; EarthLink has already agreed to join the federation; and Google is also inviting the makers of games, collaboration tools and even cellphones to join in what it hopes will one day be a grand, unified chat network.

In the meantime, Google Talk is significant for another reason: it requires a Gmail account. (Gmail is Google's free, Web-based e-mail service, whose two most famous aspects are its vast capacity - over two gigabytes of storage for each account - and the ads that appear, in small type, off to the right side of each message you read. The ads are computer-matched to keywords in the body of the message, which disturbs some privacy advocates.)

Until now, Gmail accounts were available by invitation only. Google let the service spread gradually and virally, giving each existing member a few additional invitations to extend. At one point, people were actually selling these invitations on eBay.

As of yesterday, however, all that has changed. Now anyone can get a Gmail account - and can therefore use Google Talk. But to prevent spammers and other abusers from snapping up Gmail accounts by the thousands, Google has designed a clever safeguard: when you apply for a Gmail account, you must provide a cellphone number.

Google sends a code to your phone, which you use to complete the registration. (Actually, you don't have to own a cellphone; you just have to know somebody with a cellphone. They can get the code for you, because each cellphone number is good for a number of registrations - just not hundreds of them.)

In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use - not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons.

Wish they'd cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company's really up to is enough to drive you crazy.

California Accuses Drug Companies of Fraud

NY Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 25 - The attorney general of California sued 39 drug companies on Thursday, accusing them of bilking the state of hundreds of millions of dollars by overcharging for medicines.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer charged that the drug makers, including some of the world's leading pharmaceutical concerns, defrauded the state's Medi-Cal system for at least the past decade. Mr. Lockyer said the drug manufacturers charged Medi-Cal as much as 10 times the price for some drugs as they charged others, like private pharmacies and hospitals.

Medi-Cal is the state's version of the federal Medicaid program for the poor, which is jointly financed by the states and the federal government. Drug costs account for about $4 billion of Medi-Cal's $34 billion annual budget.

"We're dragging these drug companies into the court of law because they're gouging the public on basic life necessities," Mr. Lockyer said at a news conference here. "This scheme has cost California taxpayers potentially hundreds of millions of dollars and is jeopardizing the public health by diverting money away from patient care."

Mr. Lockyer said that each of the companies made as much as $40 million a year in illegal profits. He said he hoped to recover that amount plus the triple damages allowed under the state's false claims act.

Thursday's legal filing amends a 2003 suit against two drug companies, Abbott Laboratories and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, to add about three dozen new defendants, including Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Mylan Laboratories, Novartis and Schering-Plough. It was immediately consolidated in federal court in Boston with similar litigation filed by more than 10 other states and localities, including New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois.

Officials at several drug companies declined to comment.

Mary Anne Rhyne, a spokeswoman for the American subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline, Europe's largest pharmaceutical company, said that the prices Medi-Cal and other state Medicaid operations pay were standardized and approved by the government. Ms. Rhyne did not deny that different end-users pay widely varying prices for medicines, but said the prices were negotiated with the government and other buyers.

"We follow the law, and we follow government guidelines," she said. "They are fully aware that the government bases payment on the average wholesale price, which represents one of several starting points for negotiation of a reimbursement."

The suit originally arose from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed in 1998 by a Florida pharmacist, who noticed wide discrepancies in prices charged by drug manufacturers. California joined that suit in 2003 and expanded it on Thursday after more investigation. The pharmacist, John Lockwood of Ven-A-Care, a home health care company in Key West, Fla., appeared at the news conference with Mr. Lockyer. "These drugs are far too important to everyone in this country to allow this kind of fraud scheme to continue," Mr. Lockwood said.

California officials cited as an example a pint bag of saline solution used as an intravenous drip manufactured by Abbott Laboratories. The lowest price available to health care providers was 95 cents, the officials said. Medi-Cal was charged $9.78 for the same item.

"We have an ocean of it," Mr. Lockyer said. "It's called saltwater."

Mr. Lockyer held up a bottle of 50-milligram tablets of Atenolol, a generic high blood pressure treatment manufactured by Mylan Laboratories, for which the state paid $804.70. A pharmacy chain pays $33.85 for the same bottle, he said.

Mr. Lockyer acknowledged that the Medi-Cal system might not always be the most prudent buyer of pharmaceuticals and other medical services. But he said that did not let the drug companies off the hook for what he called an elaborate scheme of fixing prices.

"I wish there had been more aggressive negotiations along the way," Mr. Lockyer said. "Now we have to clean up after the elephant."

After 140 years, the 1860's era Confederate States of America have the
distinction of:

Having the highest rates of infant mortality in the US

Having the greatest concentration of obese individuals in the US.

Having the lowest educational attainment for its citizens in the US.

Having the greatest concentration of fundamentalist religious institutions in the US.

Having the highest divorce rates per capita in the US.

Having the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the US.

Having the highest murder rates per capita in the US on a statewide basis.

Having the highest concentration of military bases in the US.

Having some of the highest rates for illegitimate children.

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The most populous segments of America are the Northeast, the South, the West and Central, in that order, and the South has the some of the nations highest concentrations of African Americans, and Latinos. However, even limiting the statistics to whites only, the above rates still hold true!

The worst rates of the above criteria in the US can easily be assigned to one city: Washington, DC, with Los Angeles and Chicago not far behind. Still, the South has a long way to go to become an equal of the Northeast, or West in certain elements of social functioning. Incidentally the two highest rated states with positives are: Virginia then Georgia. The two lowest are: West Virginia, and then Mississippi. 

Frank Rich has an article about the attempted sliming of Cindy Sheehan

Note: A devasting critique of the Administration's smear tactics. For example:

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"Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle Scout: a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve his country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was almost a year after the president had declared the end of "major combat operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The Times, the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort were militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric. The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns reported, members of "the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force" abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations "almost as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the militiamen in unchallenged control."

Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld typically went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these Iraqi security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there were "over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped" and that they were "out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence." We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination thereof.

As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, a declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops and police officers at 171,500, with only "a small number" able to fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr, he remains as much a player as ever in the new "democratic" Iraq. He controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated Basra's politics and police force.

Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't exist."

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the Union speech.)

Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans' sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral services for the military dead. It's why January's presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the Inaugural Address.

THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.

Other Voices Concerning the Israeli Exodus from Gaza

...from Al-Ahram, the Weekly Newspaper in Cairo

The Essential Krugman: Don't Prettify Our History

NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 22, 2005

The 2000 election is still an open sore on the body politic. That was clear from the outraged reaction to my mention last week of what would have happened with a full statewide manual recount of Florida.

This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner.

The second is what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual recount - as there should have been. The probable answer is that Al Gore would have won, by a tiny margin.

The third is what would have happened if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by butterfly ballots, felon purges and more; the answer is that Mr. Gore would have won by a much larger margin.

About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.

The Herald group later did an analysis of "overvotes," in which more than one choice was recorded, but this wasn't a true recount, because some of it was based on computer records rather than the ballots themselves.

In November 2001 a larger consortium, which included The New York Times, produced more definitive results that allowed assessment of nine hypothetical recounts. (You can see the results at www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl - under articles.) The three recounts that had been most widely discussed during the battle of Florida, including the partial recount requested by the Gore campaign and two interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court order, would have given the vote to Mr. Bush.

But the six hypothetical manual recounts that would have covered the whole state - including both loose and strict standards - would have given the election to Mr. Gore. And other evidence makes it clear that many intended votes for Mr. Gore were frustrated.

So why do so many people believe the Bush win was rock solid?

One answer is that many editorials and op-ed articles have claimed that no possible recount would have changed the outcome. Let's be charitable and assume that those who write such things are victims of the echo chamber, and believe that what everyone they talk to says must be true.

The other answer is that many though not all reports of the results of the ballot reviews conveyed a false impression about what those reviews said. A few reports got the facts wrong, but for the most part they simply stressed the likelihood - in some cases presented as a certainty - that Mr. Bush would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened. But even if a proper recount wasn't in the cards given the political realities, that says nothing about what such a recount would have found.

The tone of these reports may have been influenced by the timing: the second consortium's report came out just two months after 9/11. The country wanted very badly to believe in its leadership. Nobody wanted to write stories suggesting that the wrong man was sitting in the White House.

More broadly, the story of the 2000 election remains deeply disturbing - not just the fact that a man the voters tried to reject ended up as president, but the ugliness of the fight itself. There was an understandable urge to put the story behind us.

But we aren't doing the country a favor when we present recent history in a way that makes our system look better than it is. Sometimes the public needs to hear unpleasant truths, even if those truths make them feel worse about their country.

Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.

Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks

NY Times
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement on Monday that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."

His comments came on the same day that the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Department had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence veteran, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Captain Phillpott, about the early identification of Mr. Atta.

Colonel Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying that analysts in the intelligence project were overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the F.B.I. in 2000 in hopes of tracking down terrorist suspects tied to Al Qaeda.

The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Asked if the Defense Department had questioned Captain Phillpott in its two-week-old investigation of Able Danger, another Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, said he did not know.

Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.

The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.

In its final report last year, the Sept. 11 commission said that American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission acknowledged on Aug. 12 that their staff had met with a Navy officer last July, 10 days before releasing the panel's final report, who asserted that a highly classified intelligence operation, Able Danger, had identified "Mohamed Atta to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."

But the statement, which did not identify the officer, said the staff determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation" and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant."

With his comments on Monday, Captain Phillpott acknowledged that he was the officer who had briefed the commission last year. "I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he said. "But my story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000. I have nothing else to say."

They are not the only ones

Note: You probably know about the two biggies in online auctions and the P2P payment systems; but there are others that deserve your attention:

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Online Auctions:

eBay: The 800 pound gorilla

Yahoo:

Overstock:

Dovebid:

Ubid:

Onlineauctions:

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Online P2P Payment Systems:

PayPal:

Western Union BidPay

Neteller:

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It's Past Time for the Big Boy Banks & Credit Cards to Get Into The Game !!!

Let Us Know About Any Worthwhile Additions to This List in COMMENTS

EBay, PayPal and the Fufu’s furniture fiasco

Antique collectors’ ordeal highlights the risks of global e-commerce
By Mike Brunker
MSNBC
Updated: 5:13 p.m. ET Jan. 29, 2004

The locked shipping container sitting in a police storage yard in Long Beach, Calif., isn’t an obvious icon for the risks of the global Internet economy, but it succinctly symbolizes the predicament that dozens of American antique collectors have been trapped in since their online purchases of Chinese furniture ran into heavy seas nearly 2½ months ago.

The 40-by-8-by-8-foot container, filled with a precious cargo of ornate Ch’ing Dynasty beds, tables, chairs and other items dating back to the mid-1800s, is the focus of a legal free-for-all involving a Chinese shipping company, several U.S. cargo handling firms and the collectors, most of whom purchased their goods on eBay and paid via the Internet auction site’s PayPal electronic payment system.

The dispute has its roots in the failure of Fufu’s Chinese Antiques to pay for shipping and warehousing the container, which has been gathering dust since its arrival in the States on Nov. 16. The reasons the company based in the town of Sanxiangin in China’s Guangdong province suddenly fell from grace after several years as a successful eBay seller aren’t clear, but fractured accounts assembled by a group of thwarted buyers indicate that the meltdown was precipitated when Rodney Fee, a Canadian citizen and partner in Fufu’s, vanished with a large chunk of the company’s cash.

‘(He) thieved our company money ... and run away’ Attempts to contact the company by e-mail were unsuccessful, but “Gary,” who says he is an employee of Fufu’s and who provided a partial list of antique buyers reviewed by MSNBC.com, stated in an e-mail that Fee “thieved our company money and lot(s) of very nice and old furniture (and) run away.” Included in the vanished proceeds, according to Gary, was $60,000 intended to pay the shipping bill for the furniture sent to the American buyers.

Sources familiar with the case say that Fee, a former amateur motorcycle racer (click link and scroll down to see photo), is being sought by authorities in China and the United States. A spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to say whether an arrest warrant had been issued for Fee there.

The number of people with paid-for goods in the crate — and a second container reportedly in the hands of a U.S. cargo-handling firm — is not known. But the group of purchasers, which has coalesced over the Internet over the past several months, now numbers 64. Together, they say they have paid well in excess of $250,000 for the works of art they unabashedly covet.

“We just have a passion for this strange, eclectic furniture,” said Kellie Ann Moore, a Los Angeles attorney who has taken a leading role in the group’s effort to interest authorities in the case.

That has proven to be an uphill battle, even though the pricey nature of the hostage antiques has made for a high-profile victim class that includes a judge, at least a half-dozen lawyers, a university professor, an art historian, a journalist, several dentists and a stockbroker.

“Everyone has been very disappointed with the authorities,” said Moore. “They’re looking at this as Internet-related, and it’s sticky and they don’t want to get involved with the Chinese government.”

Thomas Vartanian, a Washington, D.C., attorney and former chair of the American Bar Association's Cyber Law Section, said such reluctance is understandable given that many legal and jurisdictional issues surrounding e-commerce remain undefined.

“When you buy online, you don’t normally execute a sales contract to buy the goods that ... might determine some of the issues,” he said. “And in terms of Internet jurisdiction, there is still an enormous lack of clarity in terms of whose laws apply.”

In the Fufu's case, the lone exception to the indifference of authorities has been the Oak Lawn, Ill., Police Department, which after examining the evidence assembled by one of the purchasers, Jennifer Epich, found “probable cause” that a crime had been committed. It then requested that police in Long Beach seize the container to prevent the goods from being sold to cover the shipping and warehousing bills.

Members of the group have harsher words for eBay and PayPal, charging that the companies ignored complaints for months alleging that Fufu’s was failing to fulfill orders as new victims lined up to be fleeced.

Representatives of eBay and PayPal denied that they allowed complaints about Fufu’s to pile up.

“As far as we can tell, none of this alleged fraud actually took place on the eBay platform,” said Hani Durzy, a spokesman for eBay. “There is a grand total of one complaint against this seller. That’s why the account is suspended.”

But the purchasers group said Fufu’s clean record prior to November merely reflects policies at eBay and PayPal that make it impossible to lodge complaints more than 30 days after an auction closes or post negative feedback about a seller after more than 90 days. Those limits are unrealistic when sellers are overseas and often can’t deliver goods within that time frame, they say.

Policies not geared toward overseas sellers
“You cannot get someone (at eBay or PayPal) to talk to you or listen to you (after those dates) because the complaint is not in their system and it gets dismissed outright,” said Moore. “They don’t even want to hear about it. They just let the seller continue to sell and collect their fees.”

Durzy responded that it is the responsibility of buyers and sellers to familiarize themselves with eBay’s policies.

“We offer tools to pay safely, the ability to communicate with the seller, we encourage the use of an escrow service and have an escrow service we recommend, but we hope people don’t check their common sense at the door when logging onto eBay,” he said.

Members of the purchasers group also charge that PayPal continued to accept funds for purchases from Fufu’s even after it had frozen the company’s account while investigating complaints of possible fraud.

To substantiate the charge, members of the group produced an e-mail from “info@fufuschineseantiques” dated Nov. 26, which stated that the company’s PayPal account had been frozen for “over two months.”

They also note that Fufu’s was allowed to routinely violate the PayPal user agreement, which states that sellers should not use the service to “sell goods with delivery dates delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment.”

Were complaints ignored?
“If PayPal was aware of this whole mess, then by taking my money aren’t they aiding in some sort of fraudulent activity?” asked Larry Mullin, a Massachusetts man who spent $1,875 for a Chinese marriage bed he has yet to see.

PayPal, already the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging illegal seizure of customer funds, denies the charge.

Spokeswoman Amanda Pires said Fufu’s account was frozen in early November, “as soon as we received the first complaint.”

She also said that the company “regrets very much that this has happened with this seller,” and stated that PayPal is working with authorities investigating the case.

In the meantime, frustrated purchasers are asking a Long Beach court to order the goods released to them under a state penal code that requires stolen property to be returned expeditiously to the victims. If successful, those who live outside Southern California will have to pay shipping costs for a second time to get their goods, while the shipper and cargo handlers will be left to pursue their own legal remedies.

But after waiting for months to receive their goods, many victims say that will be a small price to pay to put the frustrating affair behind them.

“It’s a bizarre situation that points out a lot of loopholes about the Internet and law enforcement and regulating it,” said Bona Flecchia, an Italian journalist living in New York City who has been waiting since June 2003 for an ornate Chinese marriage bed that she bought for her rapidly approaching September wedding.

“We are still hoping to be getting the bed by September,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll be sleeping in Japanese style on the floor.”

eBay's Gotten Too Big for It's Britches

So Let's Welcome Some Competition

Social Security Lessons

NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 15, 2005

Social Security turned 70 yesterday. And to almost everyone's surprise, the nation's most successful government program is still intact.

Just a few months ago the conventional wisdom was that President Bush would get his way on Social Security. Instead, Mr. Bush's privatization drive flopped so badly that the topic has almost disappeared from national discussion.

But I'd like to revisit Social Security for a moment, because it's important to remember what Mr. Bush tried to get away with.

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system F.D.R. created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

Meanwhile, the administration politicized the Social Security Administration and used taxpayer money to promote a partisan agenda. Social Security officials participated in what were in effect taxpayer- financed political rallies, from which skeptical members of the public were excluded.

I'm writing about this in the past tense, but some of it is still going on. Last week Jo Anne Barnhart, the commissioner of Social Security, published an op-ed article claiming that Social Security as we know it was designed for a society in which people didn't live long enough to collect a lot of benefits. "The number of older Americans living now," wrote Ms. Barnhart, "is greater than anyone could have imagined in 1935."

Now, it turns out that an article on the Social Security Administration's Web site, "Life Expectancy for Social Security," specifically rejects the idea the Social Security was originally "designed in such a way that few people would collect the benefits," and the related idea that the system faces problems from "a supposed dramatic increase in life expectancy in recent years."

And the current number of older Americans as a share of the population is just about what the founders of Social Security expected. The 1934 report of F.D.R.'s Commission on Economic Security, which laid the groundwork for the Social Security Act, projected that 12.7 percent of Americans would be 65 or older by the year 2000. The actual number was 12.4 percent.

Despite Ms. Barnhart's efforts, however, privatization seems to be dead for the time being. The Democratic leadership in Congress defied the punditocracy - which was very much in favor of privatization - by refusing to cave in, and the American people made it clear that they like Social Security the way it is.

But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war.

And there are two reasons to study that lesson. One is to be prepared for whatever comes next on Mr. Bush's agenda. Despite the tough talk about Iran, I don't think he can propose another war - there aren't enough troops to fight the wars we already have. But there's still room for another big domestic initiative, probably tax reform.

Forewarned is forearmed: the real goals of reform won't be as advertised, the administration will say things about the current system that aren't true, and the Treasury Department will function in a purely partisan capacity.

The other is that the public's visceral rejection of privatization, together with growing dismay over the debacle in Iraq, offers Democrats an opportunity to make an issue of the administration's pattern of deception. The question is whether they will dare to seize that opportunity, when for some of them it means admitting that they, too, were fooled.

Kan. Teen Dies Playing 'Passing Out Game'

The Guardian
Wednesday August 17, 2005 4:01 AM

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) - A teenager found hanging from a dresser drawer with a coated bicycle chain lock around her neck apparently died while playing the ``pass-out game,'' the girl's parents said. Kimberly Wilson, a 15-year-old student at Veritas Christian School in Lawrence, died last week.

Her parents, Tim and Carol Wilson, began discussing the details of her death Monday because they wanted other parents to be aware of the dangers of playing the choking game, which cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain. Those who play achieve a type of ``high,'' they said.

``We are very close to our children, and we did not know this was going on,'' Tim Wilson said Monday. ``There were no outward signs. This isn't like drugs or alcohol use, which a parent should be able to detect.

``We want parents to know this is out there.''

The game has been in the news in recent weeks. Just last month, a 10-year-old Idaho boy was found dead, hanging from a tree. Authorities said he apparently died while trying to get high by playing the choking game. The case was similar to that three months ago in the Idaho town of Nampa, where 13-year-old Chelsea Dunn was found dead after apparently hanging herself in her closet.

Tami Radohl, a Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center counselor at Southwest Junior High School in Lawrence, said the behavior is not uncommon.

``This is going on in every junior high in Lawrence,'' Radohl said.

Usually, the game involves one person causing another to pass out and, seconds later, reviving the unconscious peer.

``It's like anything else that creates a high or a buzz; it can lead to addictive behavior,'' said Dr. Paul Loney, an emergency room physician at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. When addiction reaches the point of passing out alone, Loney said, ``they're in deep trouble.''

What the New Congressional Budget Office's Report Shows

Budget and Economic Outlook Has Not Improved
by James R. Horney and Richard Kogan
August 16th, 2005

Over the last few months it has become clear that federal revenues collected in the fiscal year that ends this September 30 will be higher, and the deficit will be lower, than either the Administration or the Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year. The Administration and conservative pundits have claimed that the unanticipated increase in revenues this year is proof that the President’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts “are working” — boosting the economy and increasing revenues not only for this year, but for future years as well — and that deficits will be brought under control if only the Congress continues to support the President’s policies.

In contrast to the Administration’s optimistic spin on the good news for this year, the Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update released on August 15 by CBO indicates that there has been no general improvement in the outlook for the economy, and little change in the outlook for the budget in coming years. Instead, the new CBO report indicates that:

The unanticipated increase in revenues this year is largely the result of temporary factors, such as an increase in corporate book profits relative to the size of the economy, and revenues over the next 10 years are not expected to be significantly higher than CBO estimated last March;

The economy has grown slightly more slowly this year than CBO forecast last January (after adjusting for inflation), and CBO’s outlook for the economy over the next 10 years now seems slightly worse than CBO had earlier expected; and,

There has been no significant improvement in the bleak deficit outlook for the next 10 years. When you take into account the President’s proposed extension of expiring tax cuts, continuation of current Alternative Minimum Tax relief, and a conservative estimate of future funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, projected deficits never dip below $330 billion over the next 10 years and total $4.0 trillion over the 2006-2015 period. The resulting growth in the debt is not sustainable.

The CBO report reinforces a report recently issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, showing that the recent recovery has been less robust than the average post-war recovery.[1] (GDP, employment, investment, and other measures of the economy have grown more slowly than average — only corporate profits have grown at a faster-than-average rate.) The information in the CBO report and the CBPP report refute claims that the President’s tax cuts have led to exceptional economic growth that will bring deficits under control if only Congress continues to support the President’s policies. They show instead that returning the nation to a sustainable fiscal path will require changes in the policies that have been adopted in recent years.

This is what the Intelligence Identities Protection Act says:

"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the US is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the US shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."

Many Going to College Aren't Ready, Report Finds - New York Times

NY Times
By TAMAR LEWIN
August 16th, 2005

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

'It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college,' Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.

ACT sets its college-readiness benchmarks - including the reading comprehension benchmark, which is new this year - by correlating earlier students' ACT scores with grades they actually received as college freshmen. Based on that data, the benchmarks indicate the skill level at which a student has a 70 percent likelihood of earning a C or better, and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better.

Among those who took the 2005 test, only 51 percent achieved the benchmark in reading, 26 percent in science, and 41 percent in math; the figure for English was 68 percent. Results from the new optional ACT writing test, which was not widely taken this year, were not included in the report."

Government to decide morning after pill's fate by month's end

August 13, 2005
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
Associated Press Medical Writer

WASHINGTON - By month's end, federal health officials will decide whether to let women buy emergency contraception without a prescription - and if so, if the morning-after pill will be treated more like aspirin off the shelf or like cigarettes.

Regardless of how the Food and Drug Administration ends the two-year saga, it isn't likely to settle the issue. States already are moving to expand access to Plan B, the pill that can prevent pregnancy if taken soon after unprotected sex, amid some competing efforts to restrict it.

And if the FDA does allow easier access, the pills probably would come with an age limit - anyone younger than 16 would still need a prescription. So drugstores would have to "card" young customers seeking to prevent pregnancy much as they now check cigarette buyers' ages.

How is unclear. Would morning-after pills sit next to other over-the-counter drugs or condoms? Cash registers could be programmed to block purchase pending an age check. That's doable: Walgreen's, the nation's largest drugstore chain, just last month took that step to prohibit sales to minors of cold medicines containing a sometimes-abused ingredient.

Or would the contraceptive be treated like cigarettes, put behind cash registers as a reminder against teenage sales?

Or would morning-after pills be sold only "behind the counter," meaning the pharmacist still must hand them over even though no doctor's prescription is required?

Laws in seven states - Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Washington - already allow women to buy Plan B that way, with no age restrictions. Massachusetts is set to become the eighth this fall, as lawmakers are expected to override their governor's veto of nonprescription sales.

Whether drugstores even agree to carry nonprescription Plan B will depend largely on whether such steps are required.

"A lot of it is going to be the ease with which it can be handled in the retail store," says Mary Ann Wagner of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.

If FDA rejects nonprescription sales nationally, the small but growing Plan B state rebellion is sure to continue. It's legal for states to allow behind-the-counter sales because states, not the federal government, regulate how pharmacists practice, explains Dr. Alastair Wood of Vanderbilt University, a well-known pharmacologist who advises the FDA.

Still, Wood says conflicting state policy over a drug long considered safe makes little sense.

Plan B contains a higher dose of the hormones in regular birth control pills. It cuts the chances of pregnancy by up to 89 percent if used within 72 hours of rape, condom failure or just forgetting routine contraception. The earlier it's taken, the more effective it is. But it can be hard to find a doctor to write a prescription in time, especially on weekends and holidays. Hence the push to allow nonprescription sales here, just as in Britain and Canada.

If a woman already is pregnant, the pills have no effect. They prevent ovulation or fertilization of an egg; they also may prevent the egg from implanting into the uterus, the medical definition of pregnancy, although recent research suggests that's not likely.

Contraceptive advocates and doctors' groups say easier access could halve the nation's 3 million annual unintended pregnancies. FDA's own scientists call the pills extremely safe, used by more than 2.4 million Americans and millions more women abroad with few side effects. FDA's independent scientific advisers overwhelmingly backed over-the-counter sales in December 2003.

But FDA rejected that move, citing concern about young teens' use of the pills without a doctor's guidance.

Maker Barr Laboratories reapplied, asking that women 16 and older be allowed to buy Plan B without a prescription while younger teens continue to get a doctor's note. When FDA missed a January deadline to decide, members of Congress refused to seat the agency's new commissioner until he pledged a new deadline - Sept. 1.

Opponents argue that unfettered access to Plan B could increase teen sex and are pushing states to restrict prescription access, too, such as by blocking requirements that emergency rooms or pharmacies sell it.

If the drug is sold without a prescription, FDA has no way to enforce an age restriction, says Wendy Wright of the conservative Concerned Women for America. "The person who buys the drug is not necessarily the person who takes the drug," she says. "It's a ludicrous proposal."

Plan B's proponents don't like the age restriction, either, saying teens are most in need of a second chance at avoiding pregnancy - and that there's no evidence easier access increases teen sex or makes women of any age more careless about regular contraception.

If FDA rejects even age-staggered nonprescription sales, Planned Parenthood may sue, says president Karen Pearl.

"The FDA really ignored the scientific evidence," Pearl says. "This is absolutely the best way of assuring that when something does go wrong, that people have that second opportunity to prevent the unintended pregnancy."

The President As Role Model

Note: G.W.Bush said on several occasions in the run-up to the 2000 election that the Clinton/Gore administration had emphasized political positions he felt were wrong for America. He said that as President, Mr.Clinton set the ethical tone for his administration, and that he, George W. Bush would lead the country with private virtue, and public morality of a higher caliber. At the convention he said: "So when I put my hand on the bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God."

Thus Mr. Bush acknowledged that the President has a powerful ability to affect the course of public morality of Americans. He asserted Mr. Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had cheapened the Presidency, and by championing relativistic morality, Clinton had adversely affected public responsibility, honesty, and integrity.

But what of the various proclamations, processes, and principles Mr. Bush has supported as President? Are they compatible with the best tendencies in America?

For example:

Zenophobic reactions to member states in the European Union; including the infamous 'flaming' of the French

Initiating and supporting disregard of the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of enemy combattants in Afganistan, and Iraq

Active resistence to the findings of international courts related to prisoner of war treatment

Active support for the teaching of creationism in public school science classes

Active support for abstinence only programs, combined with active resistance to planned parenthood, condom use, and Plan B drug availability

Active support for the incursion of Christian only doctrine, icons, and practices in governmental activities

Active support for the political division of the American electorate into competing camps

Strong opposition to internationally agreed treaties, rules of engagement, and limits on the occupation of foreign countries

Strong opposition to peer-reviewed scientific information, especially when the data does not support his ideas or positions

A complete lack of willingness to admit mistakes

And most detrimentally: a willingness to support dirty-tricks political manoeuvers by his staff

It should come as no surprise that a significant majority of the world's population consider Mr. Bush one of America's worst Presidents, not one of their best.

...but then again, maybe Mr. Bush has some public virtues that transcend his negatives. I for one, would like to know what they are. Or perhaps a retrospective look at Al Gore circa 2000 would be instructive.

Info Update: Waste Management & Trash

Note: In 2004 the average US family of four generated slightly over four tons of trash during the year, or about 5.5 pounds per person per day. Yet as a recent article reports, management of the three major trash haulers, who process roughly half of the nations trash, estimates their remaining permitted capacity will be sufficient for another twenty six years.

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A Report on New Trash Compacting Methods for Major Haulers is here.

Errors Cited in Assessing Climate Data

NY Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: August 12, 2005

Some scientists who question whether human-caused global warming poses a threat have long pointed to records that showed the atmosphere's lowest layer, the troposphere, had not warmed over the last two decades and had cooled in the tropics.

Now two independent studies have found errors in the complicated calculations used to generate the old temperature records, which involved stitching together data from thousands of weather balloons lofted around the world and a series of short-lived weather satellites.

A third study shows that when the errors are taken into account, the troposphere actually got warmer. Moreover, that warming trend largely agrees with the warmer surface temperatures that have been recorded and conforms to predictions in recent computer models.

“These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models,” said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University.

But the new paper, by Dr. Mears and Dr. Wentz, identifies a fresh error in the original calculations that, more firmly than ever, showed warming in the troposphere, particularly in the tropics.

The error, in a calculation used to adjust for the drift of the satellites, was disclosed to the University of Alabama scientists at one of the government-run meetings this year, Dr. Christy said.

"Things being debated now are details about the models," said Steven Sherwood, the lead author of the paper on the balloon data and an atmospheric physicist at Yale. "Nobody is debating any more that significant climate changes are coming."

The Wal-Mart Thought Police

Sometimes “family values” just means censorship.

By Amy Schiller, Brandeis University

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer, prides itself on being a “family-friendly” store, with smiley faces guiding stressed-out breadwinners to a land of low-cost, guilt-free consumption. Indeed, there are mega
Wal-Marts that inhabit a space the size of five football fields. The total square footage of all of the Wal-Mart stores nationwide tops 25 million square feet, probably enough to make up an actual country to rival Luxembourg in size.

As you have probably heard before, the “everyday low prices” at these concrete boxes of utopian consumption have tremendous costs for our environment, our workers, our wages, our communities, and the public coffers. But they also come at the expense of free speech and artistic expression, as the corporation targets items that often include edgy, progressive criticism of conservative values.

Based in Bentonville, AR, the brand behemoth has become the self-appointed culture police by effectively screening the music, books and magazines that many Americans will be able to access – since in a number of communities, a Wal-Mart is the only convenient store in the area that stocks culture products.

Take, for example, Wal-Mart’s refusal to sell Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album in 1996, citing objections to a lyric that criticized Wal-Mart for selling handguns (a practice that the chain has since discontinued), which they felt was “unfair and irresponsible.” Much as Crow probably appreciated the paternalistic advice, as the No. 1 CD retailer in the world (yes, the world) with sales accounting for 10% of total domestic CD sales, a Wal-Mart boycott can result in hundreds of thousands in lost album sales.

The record industry, never too proud to bend over for sales, has started issuing two versions of the same album, one “sanitized.” Sometimes this entails altering the cover art, as John Mellencamp was asked to do for his album Mr. Happy Go Lucky, whose cover featured an angel and devil in the background. Nirvana actually changed its song title from "Rape Me" to "Waif Me" for the Wal-Mart version. Both they and the Goo Goo Dolls came under fire for portraying babies in their cover art as well. The cover of the Goo Goo Dolls album titled “A Boy Named Goo” featured a baby covered in blackberry juice; Wal-Mart banned it and only reversed its decision under pressure from the media.

Wal-Mart’s official statement on music is as follows: “Wal-Mart will not stock music with parental guidance stickers. While Wal-Mart sets high standards, it would not be possible to eliminate every image, word or topic that an individual might find objectionable. And the goal is not to eliminate the need for parents to review the merchandise their children buy. The policy simply helps eliminate the most objectionable material from Wal-Mart’s shelves.”

Objectionable material like a book cover with a comedian posing with an American flag and a bald eagle? Actually, yes. The huge bestseller, America: the Book, featuring Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the rest of the Daily Show crew, was banned from Wal-Mart in 2004. Granted, the company objected to the infamous page 99 featuring obviously photoshopped naked pictures of Supreme Court justices (just think, now we can all look at Justice O’Connor’s wrinkled, saggy flesh with great nostalgia.)

Stewart is not the only comedian with a book banned by Wal-Mart, though; a shipment of George Carlin’s When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops was returned, citing a mistake in ordering the book in the first place. A mistake which probably had nothing to do with Carlin’s cover of himself inserted into the Last Supper. Perhaps there is some legitimacy (however hysterical) to their objections to irreverent images. Yet the political bias inherent in Wal-Mart’s criteria became clearer when Wal-Mart’s merchandiser for films found Robert Greenwald’s acclaimed documentary, "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War," (produced with the support of the Center for American Progress) “inappropriate for Wal-Mart.” For no conceivable reason could a documentary involving no gratuitous violence, expletives, or sex be inappropriate, other than its criticism of a conservative political administration.

Pathetically, the rationale for these items is that they “would not appeal to the majority of our customers” or would offend those proverbial family values. Fine, if they know their designated market and have complaints pouring in from their consumers. Except that those two books were both fixtures on the bestseller list for months and Sheryl Crow, Nirvana and the Goo Goo Dolls are top selling entertainers. And those items that are not religiously objectionable demonstrate the degree of hypocrisy within the “family values” standards.

Even something as potentially broadly appealing, positive, and utterly non-offensive as a T-shirt reading “Someday a woman will be president” was pulled from the sales floor because “the message goes against Wal-Mart family values.” So old school patriarchy and sexism are Wal-Mart values? Seems a little retrograde and moot in the age of “take your daughter to work day.”

Frighteningly and hypocritically, the family values red flag was absent for the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion , which describes a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. Booksellers like Amazon that do offer it at least include a disclaimer that describes it as a "pernicious fraud," and "one of the most infamous, and tragically influential, examples of racist propaganda ever written." Wal-Mart’s site, in contrast, says "If … The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs." Yet another example of the cloak of “family values” serving as a euphemism for a more sinister ideology. (If the book actually featured a cover image of Jews milking children for blood, then would Wal-Mart ban it?)

Furthermore, ever wonder who is buying those oversize drink coasters also known as Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly’s perniciously partisan publications? Their publishers readily admit that Wal-Mart’s merchandising and promotion basically fueled their bestselling runs.

The crown jewel of Wal-Mart’s commercial triumph is the dystopic end of days series Left Behind. As reported in the New York Times, Tyndale House, publisher of the Left Behind series, credits Wal-Mart with a pivotal role in turning the evangelical thriller "Armageddon" (No. 11 in the Left Behind series) into the best-selling novel in the country. As Melani McAllister wrote in The Nation, “these novels work [because] they seamlessly integrate an apocalyptic religious view with a strongly conservative political vision, and locate both in a universe of supernatural action adventure in which good and evil are fully and finally revealed.” Left Behind books do not include any actual sex, except for when the faithful rail against abortion and immorality, though they include plenty of violence between good (evangelical warriors complete with fighter planes) and evil (the Antichrist fronting as a smooth-talking UN ambassador.) Granted, the Left Behind series is hardly comparable to Maxim, but really, though, it could be considered the equivalent of evangelical porn. Not to beat a dead metaphor, but they’re all about self-gratification and ultimate rapture. As many have noted, a lot of purchasers for right-wing screeds probably buy them for the element of fantasy and self-affirmation, particularly those who believe that the war in Iraq and conflict in Israel herald the impending end times.

In all seriousness, the most self-defeating attitude for progressives would be to give an elitist sneer to those who shop at Wal-Mart, shrugging our shoulders not only at Wal-Mart’s censorship but at its union busting, sex discrimination, and reprehensibly stingy health plans for already underpaid workers. To Wal-Mart shoppers: There’s nothing wrong with wanting religious or G-rated entertainment material in your own home and wanting to shield children from materials that you might find offensive. But, it is a problem when the biggest retailer in the country, which is a staple for millions of people, only offers up a sanitized world of culture that is comprised primarily of Veggie Tales videos and Toby Keith albums (wonder if they include the “gonna put a boot in your ass” lyric).

Still, this bleak picture seems to be changing as anti-Wal-Mart groups begin to gain strength and actually win some victories. In early August, Salon.com reported on the increasingly successful anti-Wal-Mart publicity efforts from organizations like Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart. These organizations have been particularly successful in mobilizing union members while making the public aware of the costs of sustaining
Wal-Marts, including the millions and millions spent providing public health care assistance to the thousands of Wal-Mart employees who do not receive company health care.

Political change is happening too on the state and local level. Legislative efforts are underway to prevent more
Wal-Marts from moving into communities like Inglewood, CA, and to enforce stricter labor laws for those that already do exist. And far from being restricted to perceived "liberal, anti-corporate" enclaves, even conservatives such as the Republican speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives have started to address the financial burden Wal-Mart’s health care negligence places on states.

Crucial, and hopefully successful, as these campaigns are, another lesson to take from Wal-Mart’s censorship policy is the danger of corporate conglomizoration that stifles free media under the misleading name of radically conservative “family values.”

'Architect' of WorldCom collapse is jailed

David Teather in New York
Friday August 12, 2005
The Guardian

Scott Sullivan, the WorldCom finance chief who turned prosecution star witness, was sentenced to five years in prison yesterday for his role in the $11bn fraud that bankrupted the company.

Sullivan, 43, said he was "ashamed and embarrassed" by his actions at the company. "I made horrible decisions," he said. "It was a misguided effort to save the company. Every day I regret what happened at WorldCom and I accept responsibility. I am sorry for the hurt that has been caused by my cowardly decisions. I truly am."

In a sign of his changed fortunes, Sullivan headed not for a waiting limousine but for the New York City subway. He has already agreed to sell an $11m mansion in Florida to settle a lawsuit brought by former WorldCom shareholders.

The sentencing draws the government's pursuit of WorldCom to a close. Former chief executive Bernard Ebbers was sentenced last month to 25 years in prison.

Four other former executives who also cooperated with investigators have been sentenced in the past week. Controller David Myers was sentenced to one year and one day, as was the director of accounting Buford Yates; Betty Vinson, an accounting department manager was sentenced to five months; Troy Normand, in the same department, was given three years' probation.

Ebbers built WorldCom into one of the largest telecommunications firms in the world through a series of acquisitions. But as the market crumbled in 2000, the company began to massage accounts to hide costs and boost revenues to meet Wall Street expectations.

Sullivan faced a maximum sentence of 165 years before agreeing last year to plead guilty to three counts of securities fraud and help prosecutors in their pursuit of Ebbers. Prosecutors said his testimony had been crucial in securing the conviction of his former boss on charges of fraud, conspiracy and false filings.

At the sentencing, Judge Barbara Jones described Sullivan as the "architect" of the scheme to defraud investors. "Mr Sullivan's offences were of the highest magnitude," she said.

She said he was granted leniency because of his cooperation and because of his family situation; his wife is diabetic and Sullivan said she had been hospitalised nine times this year alone. The couple have a four-year-old daughter.

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Federal judge denies new trial for Ebbers
Tom Henry at 2:13 PM ET

[JURIST] Judge Barbara Jones in a ruling made public Tuesday, has denied a petition by former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers for a new trial, opening the way for him to be sentenced as scheduled on Wednesday for the huge WorldCom business fraud. Ebbers had made various arguments claiming that the judge or prosecutors should have granted immunity to certain witnesses that he believes could have aided him in combatting some of the fraud-related charges. He was convicted in March 2005 of orchestrating the $11 billion accounting scam that led to the telecommunications giant's downfall.

Note: The trials were conducted by the US District Court of the Southern District of...New York; not the District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. Sullivan and Ebbers apparently weren't able to follow Scrushy's lead.

Kool-Aid Economics

American Progress Action Fund

August 11th, 2005

Although "the nation's faith in him is clearly tailing off, [President] Bush still seems pretty pleased with himself." The President and other administration officials have launched a public relations blitz in order "to win credit for the rash of positive economic news." If President Bush thinks the recent economic growth should be heralded as a victory for his fiscal policies, then he is suffering from "the soft bigotry of low expectations." "[Relative] to comparable past periods, the current economic recovery has, on balance, been worse than average." Not only is the most recent economic recovery inferior to previous ones in history but also it is leaving out a notable section of the citizenry. Treasury Secretary John Snow recently acknowledged, "the fruits of strong economic growth are not spreading equally to less educated Americans." Taken together, "the economy’s overall performance does not make up for the adverse fiscal effects of the recent tax cuts or the unusually uneven distribution of the economic gains from this recovery."



THE REALITY BEHIND THE "RECOVERY": While administration officials are busy slapping themselves on the back for the recent positive signs of economic growth, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has presented a more sobering picture. Looking at seven economic indicators -- including gross domestic product, income from wages and salaries, and employment -- experts ranked this economic recovery against previous ones. "For six of the seven indicators, growth rates over the current period are below the average of the growth rates for the comparable post-war periods." What was the one indicator not growing below average? Corporate profits. In short, "relative to comparable past periods, the current economic recovery has, on balance, been worse than average."



TAX CUTS FROM MAGIC LAND: Wherever he goes and whatever happens, President Bush can’t seem to stop praising his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He certainly hasn't missed the opportunity to do so when talking about the most recent economic numbers. But as Center for American Progress fellow Gene Sperling notes, President Bush embraces the idea “that any bad economic news has nothing to do with Bush fiscal policies, but that any good news is due solely to the magic of tax cuts.” However, a study conducted by "the independent economic research firm Economy.com finds the tax cuts were poorly designed for [the] purposes of stimulating the economy." Furthermore, the tax cuts disproportionately benefit high-income Americans, "exacerbate income inequality," and lead to higher taxes at the state level." And although President Bush claims to be "[working] with Congress to reduce our deficit," "the tax cuts have played a larger role than all other legislation enacted since the start of 2001 in the emergence of the current sizable budget deficit [and] account for the majority of the current deficit." Despite all this, the President is continuing in his push to make the tax cuts permanent. Such a move will directly cost nearly two trillion dollars over the next ten years and increase the deficit by trillions, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

TRYING TO KILL THE ESTATE TAX: While President Bush fights to make his own tax cuts permanent, he is working just as hard to get rid of the estate tax. In the face of an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots, the estate tax stands as a powerful check against the growth of an American aristocracy and getting rid of it would constitute the most regressive tax cut ever. It would violate core American values including fairness and a belief in a meritocracy while simultaneously denying core American priorities, such as the Social Security solvency gap. Additionally, a repeal of the estate tax weakens our nation’s fiscal health -- adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt -- at a time when Congress has already started cutting Medicaid and other programs for those most in need. But, instead of the facts, President Bush is trying to appeal to the sympathy of small businesses and farmers, claiming that Congress needs to repeal the tax "for the sake of family farmers." In actuality, the estate tax affects a miniscule number of farmers. Its repeal would not benefit farmers but rather place an even heavier tax burden on the backs of the middle class, all for the benefit of the heirs of a handful of multi-millionaires.

JONESING FOR A JOB: Trying to repeal the estate tax is not the only way the administration demonstrates a callous attitude towards the economic reality of millions of struggling Americans. At yesterday's "Ask the White House," Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Al Hubbard showed his "compassionate conservative" side. A reader from Texas wrote in, " Everybody keeps talking about how the economy is growing and so good yet I have been out of work for 6, 12 months now. I am a legal assistant with 15 years of experience...I need a job now, what help is there for me?" To that question, Hubbard railed off some statistics before responding, "My suggestion to you is to remain persistent in your job hunt and I am sure you will find the right job for you." The fact is "employment and wage and salary growth are especially slow in the current period, underperforming not only the historical average but, in the case of employment growth, every comparable period since the end of World War II.” A study by American Progress shows minority youth and other vulnerable groups have been hit hardest by the weak labor market. 



D'OH FOR JOHN DOE: President Bush doesn't just appeal to family farmers in his stump speeches; he also likes to invoke the "average American" when discussing who is feeling the effects of recent economic growth. This political maneuver -- playing to the interests of John Doe -- belies a reality that Treasury Secretary John Snow recently acknowledged, "the fruits of strong economic growth are not spreading equally to less educated Americans." A notable characteristic of  the recent economic growth is the "unusually uneven" economic gains distribution: "exceptionally fast growth in corporate profits [has been] coupled with exceptionally slow growth in wages and salaries." In what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan referred to as "a very disturbing trend," the income gap has widened to a chasm that "by some measures is the biggest in the United States since the Roaring '20s." Though infamous for his belief in the free-market, Greenspan testified to Congress that "a free market, democratic society is ill-served by an economy in which the rewards are distributed in a way" that excludes the majority. How much of the majority? According to the Labor Department, "the nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages [have] barely maintained their purchasing power." Unfortunately, President Bush continues to champion his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, despite the fact that they "were too slanted toward upper earners to be particularly effective economic medicine."



DROWNING IN DEBT: Although the administration itself has admitted the recovery isn't being enjoyed by all Americans, officials still have gone on the offensive, attacking those who do not share their "rosy" outlook on the economy. "Snow and other administration officials say strong consumer demand for housing, cars and other big-ticket items indicates that the negative message voters are giving pollsters on the economy is belied by their open wallets." Actually, an increasing number of Americans are taking a page out of President Bush's playbook on how to "afford" their spending: excessive borrowing. "More and more Americans are turning to debt to pay for lifestyles their current incomes can't support...Since 1990, income for the median American household has risen only 11 percent after adjusting for inflation, while median household spending has jumped at 30 percent, according to an analysis by
Economy.com. How could the typical family afford to spend so much? Median household debt outstanding leaped by 80 percent."

Biblical Inerrancy and Infallibility

Description of biblical inerrancy?

Followers of many religions believe that their own sacred texts are inerrant. This is particularly true within the conservative wings of the world's major religions. For example:

Fundamentalist and other Evangelical Christians generally believe the entire Bible to be inerrant. Their belief in inerrancy is based, in part, on 2 Timothy 3:16 which states that the Scriptures are "God-breathed."

Muslims generally believe the Qur'an to be dictated to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel, and is thus inerrant.

Members of the Baha'i world Faith believe that the writings of their founder, Baha'u'llah, are inerrant.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognize four canonized scriptures. Most Mormons consider three to be inerrant in their original form: the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.

Since the religious texts of various religions and denominations differ greatly from one another, only one of them (at most) can be truly inerrant. The rest must be in error - at least to some degree.

United Church of Christ Homeland Ministries Article on Creationism

UNITED CHURCH BOARD FOR HOMELAND MINISTRIES:
Creationism, the Church, and the Public School

I. Background On The Creationism Issue

Creationism is a relatively recent development in an older and on-going controversy concerning the relationship between science and religion. In the 1920's the teaching about evolution in public schools (specifically the work of Charles Darwin) was challenged on the basis of perceived conflict with biblical teaching. In Tennessee John Scopes was convicted of violating a law which made it "illegal ... to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Although the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law which was not repealed until 1967.

The central issue in challenges such as this is the apparent conflict between scientific explanations about the origins of life, even the cosmos itself, and biblical accounts of creation. Science and religion often are perceived as being in basic conflict concerning creation.

In more recent decades, the debate has taken a new twist. While still opposing the scientific theories of evolution concerning the origins of life, a number of persons began to suggest that certain scientific data and/or approaches could 'prove' the validity of biblical accounts concerning creation. In the 1960's and early 1970's, several organizations were formed to promote the idea that the creation accounts recorded in the book of Genesis were supported by scientific data. The terms "creation-science," "scientific creationism," and "creationism" are used to describe this interpretation of scripture.

This movement took on more focused activity in 1977 when over twenty state legislatures recorded bills requiring teaching of "creation-science" when evolution was taught. This "balanced treatment" proposition was passed as model legislation by the Arkansas Legislature in 1981.

Opponents of the Act, including religious leaders, educators, and scientists, challenged the constitutionality of the Act in the federal courts (McLean v Arkansas Board of Education) and in 1982 the law was declared unconstitutional. A similar law was passed in Louisiana and litigation went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court in Edwards v Aguillard declared the law unconstitutional in 1987. the Supreme Court decision has been applied in subsequent cases involving individual teachers who chose to teach "creation-science" outside the curriculum. Federal courts declared that teaching "creation-science" was a religious advocacy and, therefore, unconstitutional. Courts have taken special care to protect the religious independence of students in the public schools.

Since the Supreme Court decision in Edwards, creationists have concentrated their efforts at the level of the local school board, where they pressure educators to teach "creation-science," omit or qualify the teaching of evolution, and/or adopt textbooks that exclude evolution. Additional terms for "creation-science," such as "abrupt appearance theory" or "intelligent design theory" are attempts to avoid the constitutional issue of religious advocacy. However, beyond the notion of "equal time" other issues are emerging. The attempts to use scientific data and methods to prove certain biblical claims are raising concerns among many educators and scientists about the integrity of scientific inquiry itself and what students may be learning about the nature and role of science. Science and scientific methods can be abused by setting out to prove certain assumptions rather than allowing even those assumptions to be open to inquiry and discussion.

The concerns over current activities by creationists touch basic affirmations about the public school made by the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries. The effort to make creationism part of the science curriculum in the public schools tests our commitments to the public school, excellence in education, the integrity of science, and academic freedom. It also tests our interpretation of the Bible and our belief in God's unlimited creative powers.

It is therefore appropriate amidst this controversy for the United Church Board to work with members of the United Church of Christ and others to understand this issue from the perspective of our religious and educational traditions. We mean to assist persons to participate fearlessly in open inquiry, debate, and action concerning the goals of education; to understand the role of science, including an appropriate relationship between science and faith; to help develop consensus in public policy issues affecting the public school; and to support academic freedom at all levels of the educational experience.

II. Affirmations

1) We testify to our belief that the historic Christian doctrine of the Creator God does not depend upon any particular account of the origins of life for its truth and validity. The effort of the creationists to change the book of Genesis into a scientific treatise dangerously obscures what we believe to be the theological purpose of Genesis, viz., to witness to the creation, meaning, and significance of the universe and of human existence under the governance of God. The assumption that the Bible contains scientific data about origins misreads a literature which emerged in a pre-scientific age.

2) We acknowledge modern evolutionary theory as the best present-day scientific explanation of the existence of life on earth; such a conviction is in no way at odds with our belief in a Creator God, or in the revelation and presence of that God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

3) We affirm the freedom of conscience and freedom of religion set forth and protected in the U.S. Constitution, including the right of the creationists to their religious beliefs.

4) We believe that the nurturing of faith and religious commitment is the responsibility of the church and home, not of the public school. No person or group should use the school to compel the teaching or acceptance of any creed or to impose conformity to any specific religious belief or practice. Requiring the teaching of the religious beliefs of creationists in the public school violates this basic principle of American democracy. We concur with judicial rulings that the teaching of the religious beliefs of the creationists in the public school science curriculum is unconstitutional.

5) We assert that the public school science curriculum is not the proper arena for the expression of religious doctrine. However, we believe that the public school does have the responsibility to teach about religion, in order to help individuals formulate an intelligent understanding and appreciation of the role of religion in the life and culture of all people and nations. In this context, it is fully appropriate for the public school to include in its non-science curriculum consideration of the variety of religious literature about the creation and origins of human life.

6) We reaffirm our historic commitment to the public school, and declare that each student has the right to an education which rests firmly on the best understandings of the academic community.

7) We affirm our historic commitment to academic freedom in the public school; in that context, the open and full search for truth about all issues in science including creation must proceed in the light of responsible scholarship and research, subject always to the process of peer review, and of factual and logical verification, and of scientific replication.

8) We reject any modification of science textbooks to include the point of view of the creationists or that weakens scientific teachings, and we support publishers who resist this effort. To do otherwise would abridge both academic freedom and the customary practices of careful scholarship.

9) We affirm the responsibility of professional educators to make final decisions about the public school curriculum. These decisions should be based on sound scholarship, competent teaching practices, and policies of local and state school boards which are accountable to the public and in keeping with judicial decisions upholding Constitutional values.

III. Recommendations

1) That through study and discussion we, as church people, become informed about issues of creation raised by both science and religion, including the "creation-science" controversy.

2) That we urge pastors and teachers to preach and teach about issues of creation, particularly the ways of understanding the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and other relevant Scripture passages. We further urge pastors and teachers to teach about the problems of biblical literalism in blocking creative dialogue between the faith community and contemporary educational, scientific, and political communities.

3) That we support the determination of schools, school boards, and textbook publishers to retain their professional integrity in treating the creationism issue, carefully recognizing the distinction between promoting religion and teaching about religion.

4) That we make all efforts to resist any viewpoint which would maintain that belief in both a Creator God and in evolutionary theory are in any way incompatible. Confident in our conviction that God is the ultimate source of all wisdom and truth, we encourage the free development of science and all other forms of intellectual inquiry.

5) That clergy and laity exercise their civic responsibility to monitor the work of state legislatures, taking care that any discussion of proposed "creation-science" legislation include educational and constitutional questions, and affirming that such legislation is a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

6) That informed persons, including clergy and laity, in each community monitor the work of local school boards and state departments of education, so that issues of 'creation-science" may be discussed fully and openly if and when they come to their agendas. In communities being divided by the creationism controversy, we ask our people to be both a source of reconciliation and a community of support for those who oppose efforts to present creationism as a science.

7) That concerned educators and citizens work with teachers to support their efforts to teach their disciplines with integrity, rather than omit subjects such as evolution as a way of avoiding controversy.

9) That the church renew efforts to understand and relate to science and technology, not only to comprehend and respond to issues of controversy, but also to discover new ways of appreciating and expressing God's creative and redeeming activity.

Are You Curious?
What Other Churches Have to Say About the Teaching of Evolution?

Visit this website to read what dozens of Christian denominations have to say about this principle.

A World Worth Living In

From: "Diseasing of America" by Stanton Peele; pg 287

"In all of this, we need to face up to the fact that our current efforts to respond to people in humane ways - however well meaning - have not brought the benefits we have hoped for. There is still tremendous room for helping people by offering them access to accomplishment and real skills with which to pursue it.

But even such help will fail if it does not entail creating genuine communities. Then all our addictions will increase, along with other social problems, while our responses as a society will themselves become more pathological.

Science fiction that depicts cities of the future whose denizens live in towers totally sealed off from the street and rabble below, while interacting only with machines and using advanced neurochemistry to induce feeling like love and fun, is the logical extension of the idea that medicine has a cure when a society ails. As we proceed down this road, we must ask at every step along the way whether we are creating a world worth living in."

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From: "The Myth of the Halloween Sadist" by Joel Best

"In addition, the urban legends foster fear and mistrust, jeopardizing our sense of community. Once people believe that their world contains dangerous maniacs, they are likely to withdraw into the safety of privacy and anonymity."

The Essential Krugman: That Hissing Sound

NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 8, 2005

This is the way the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with a hiss.

Housing prices move much more slowly than stock prices. There are no Black Mondays, when prices fall 23 percent in a day. In fact, prices often keep rising for a while even after a housing boom goes bust.

So the news that the U.S. housing bubble is over won't come in the form of plunging prices; it will come in the form of falling sales and rising inventory, as sellers try to get prices that buyers are no longer willing to pay. And the process may already have started.

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble.

In the nation as a whole, housing prices rose about 50 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2005. But that average blends results from Flatland metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta, where prices rose 26 and 29 percent respectively, with results from Zoned Zone areas like New York, Miami and San Diego, where prices rose 77, 96 and 118 percent.

Nobody would pay San Diego prices without believing that prices will continue to rise. Rents rose much more slowly than prices: the Bureau of Labor Statistics index of "owners' equivalent rent" rose only 27 percent from late 1999 to late 2004. Business Week reports that by 2004 the cost of renting a house in San Diego was only 40 percent of the cost of owning a similar house - even taking into account low interest rates on mortgages. So it makes sense to buy in San Diego only if you believe that prices will keep rising rapidly, generating big capital gains. That's pretty much the definition of a bubble.

Bubbles end when people stop believing that big capital gains are a sure thing. That's what happened in San Diego at the end of its last housing bubble: after a rapid rise, house prices peaked in 1990. Soon there was a glut of houses on the market, and prices began falling. By 1996, they had declined about 25 percent after adjusting for inflation.

And that's what's happening in San Diego right now, after a rise in house prices that dwarfs the boom of the 1980's. The number of single-family houses and condos on the market has doubled over the past year. "Homes that a year or two ago sold virtually overnight - in many cases triggering bidding wars - are on the market for weeks," reports The Los Angeles Times. The same thing is happening in other formerly hot markets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent on the housing bubble. The economic recovery since 2001 has been disappointing in many ways, but it wouldn't have happened at all without soaring spending on residential construction, plus a surge in consumer spending largely based on mortgage refinancing. Did I mention that the personal savings rate has fallen to zero?

Now we're starting to hear a hissing sound, as the air begins to leak out of the bubble. And everyone - not just those who own Zoned Zone real estate - should be worried.

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Note: And in communities such as Canton, Georgia the bubble will have serious effects since a large percentage of the local population depends on construction, and lawn care. To forsee the problem one only has to park near the interstate on-ramps between 6am - 9am to see all the pickup trucks with garden implement trailers in tow heading south toward Atlanta. Or one could visit Home Depot or Loews and count the number of construction oriented trucks driven by customers loading up on supplies. Or check with your local Real Estate salesperson to see how receptive they are to anything resembling a potential sale of one of their properties. It is going to happen, and it's not going to be pretty, mild, or short lived.

Viruses, Hoaxes, Bogus Data & Urban Legends

Note: While some computer users can readily discern hoaxes/bogus information and fake offers from incoming email messages and online articles, a majority cannot do so unaided. Here are a few sites that can help you deal with questionable information:

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Snopes Website for 'Urban Legends'

Christian Urban Legends

About's Website for Urban Legends

Annenberg Political Fact Check

Wikipedia's Encyclopedia

Logical Thought Processes to Detect Erroneous Information

Legal Issues on the Electronic Frontier

Quackery, Health Fraud & Intellgent Decisions

Debunking False Scientific Claims

This is only a test

A test of the Blogger tag BloggerPreviousItems. If it works as expected, the sidebar should only show: "A test of the Blogger tag". Anything else, and putting the tag in a post for use with Previous Item Titles by itself doesn't work.

The Essential Krugman: Design for Confusion

NY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 5, 2005

I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that non-scientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

Bail, bail...we're sinking

Approval of Bush's Handling of Iraq Drops
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
Fri Aug 5, 6:05 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq is at its lowest level yet, according to an AP-Ipsos poll that also found fewer than half now think he's honest.

A solid majority still see Bush as a strong and likable leader, though the president's confidence is seen as arrogance by a growing number. Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq, which had been hovering in the low- to mid-40s most of the year, dipped to 38 percent.

Six in 10 said they think the country is headed down the wrong track, despite some encouraging economic news in recent weeks.

Seven Marines killed in Iraq, toll passes 1,800
Tue Aug 2, 2005 2:39 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Seven American Marines have been killed in fighting in Iraq's western Anbar province, (which makes up a quarter of the land mass of Iraq), the guerrilla heartland which keeps challenging U.S. and Iraqi troops despite repeated security crackdowns.

The attacks push the number of U.S. troops to have died since the start of the war in March 2003 to above 1,800, according to a Reuters count based on information provided by the Pentagon.

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Note: During the period March 2003 - July 2005, the DoD lists 13,189 as being wounded in action in Iraq, with approximately half not returning to active duty within 72 hours. Anbar province, near the Syrian border, has been the site generating over one third of the US combat fatalities.

Bolton Installed

John Bolton, opposed by Democratic senators for five months, was installed by President Bush in a so-called recess appointment that allows him to make such appointments when Congress is not in session. Bolton can serve until January 2007, when a new Congress is sworn in.

Who's Paying for Our Patriotism?

Washington Post
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Monday, August 1, 2005; A17

President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail. Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.

Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort -- neither blood nor angst nor taxes -- on well over 95 percent of the American people?

At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.

The administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate voters from the money cost of the wars -- to the point even of excluding outlays for them from the regular budget process. Furthermore, they have financed the wars not with taxes but by borrowing abroad.

The strategic shielding of most voters from any emotional or financial sacrifice for these wars cannot but trigger the analogue of what is called "moral hazard" in the context of health insurance, a field in which I've done a lot of scholarly work. There, moral hazard refers to the tendency of well-insured patients to use health care with complete indifference to the cost they visit on others. It has prompted President Bush to advocate health insurance with very high deductibles. But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional -- and financial -- cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?

A policymaking elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war. Moral hazard in this context can explain why a nation that once built a Liberty Ship every two weeks and thousands of newly designed airplanes in the span of a few years now takes years merely to properly arm and armor its troops with conventional equipment. Moral hazard can explain why, in wartime, the TV anchors on the morning and evening shows barely make time to report on the wars, lest the reports displace the silly banter with which they seek to humor their viewers. Do they ever wonder how military families with loved ones in the fray might feel after hearing ever so briefly of mayhem in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Moral hazard also can explain why the general public is so noticeably indifferent to the plight of our troops and their families. To be sure, we paste cheap magnetic ribbons on our cars to proclaim our support for the troops. But at the same time, we allow families of reservists and National Guard members to slide into deep financial distress as their loved ones stand tall for us on lethal battlefields and the family is deprived of these troops' typically higher civilian salaries. We offer a pittance in disability pay to seriously wounded soldiers who have not served the full 20 years that entitles them to a regular pension. And our legislative representatives make a disgraceful spectacle of themselves bickering over a mere $1 billion or so in added health care spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs -- in a nation with a $13 trillion economy!

Last year kind-hearted folks in New Jersey collected $12,000 at a pancake feed to help stock pantries for financially hard-pressed families of the National Guard. Food pantries for American military families? The state of Illinois now allows taxpayers to donate their tax refunds to such families. For the entire year 2004, slightly more than $400,000 was collected in this way, or 3 cents per capita. It is the equivalent of about 100,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. With a similar program Rhode Island collected about 1 cent per capita. Is this what we mean by "supporting our troops"?

When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: "Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service, and it will condemn you to the bottom of the economic scrap heap should you ever get seriously wounded." The intervening years have not changed my views; they have reaffirmed them.

Unlike the editors of the nation's newspapers, I am not at all impressed by people who resolve to have others stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At zero sacrifice, who would not have that resolve?

The writer is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University.

Any similarities between Lord of the Ring and Harry Potter?

Check it out here.

Cobb County iBook program halted

MacWorld
By Peter Cohen pcohen@maccentral.com
July 29th, 2005

A deal between Apple and Georgia’s Cobb County School District that could ultimately result in 63,000 iBooks has been stopped cold because of a lawsuit filed by a former county commissioner. Superior Court Judge S. Lark Ingram ordered the iBook deployment to stop on Friday.

Heralded as the largest ever “one-to-one” computing initiative, Cobb County’s “Power to Learn” program used money earmarked from a special tax fund Georgia taxpayers in individual counties can request called Special Purpose Location Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST. How this tax override was represented to voters is central to the judge’s decision, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Cobb County School District PR director Jay Dillon told MacCentral in May that the deal with Apple funding the first phase of the “Power to Learn” program cost the school district about $23.5 million — less than one quarter the amount some local news agencies had reported, and about four percent of the overall SPLOST program. That phase of the plan, which began in May, was supposed to put 17,000 iBooks into the hands of teachers across the district, as well as high school students at four “demonstration” sites.

Apple had hoped that, if the first phase was successful, it would ultimately lead to a total of 63,000 iBooks installed in the Cobb County school program. Experts from the University of Georgia’s Learning & Performance Support Laboratory were to measure the program’s effectiveness before Cobb County school officials would have voted on whether to continue the program.

That wasn’t good enough for former Cobb County commissioner Butch Thompson, however. Thompson filed suit against Cobb County to stop the program earlier this year. Represented by former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, Thompson argued that taxpayers were misled about how the SPLOST money would be spent.

The language of the tax override passed by Cobb County voters in 2003 wasn’t specific enough to inform voters that the money might be used to fund the lease of laptop computers, according to Thompson. “I didn’t vote for laptops for every student in the county, and I don’t think anyone else did,” Thompson told the Associated Press in June.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that judge Ingram agreed, and put the brakes on the program. “As a result of the ruling, the only way school officials could pay for the program would be to use their general fund,” said the newspaper.

The school board will meet on Monday evening, August 1, 2005 to discuss the decision and determine whether they’ll appeal the ruling.

Representatives from Cobb County and Apple were not available for comment on the ruling as MacCentral posted this article.

A Respect Policy for School and the Workplace

In the early 1990s, associate principal Paula Martin and others spent months developing the following Respect Policy to help students in their increasingly diverse school get along better. The policy was later adopted by the entire Mukilteo, Wash., School District.

"At the beginning of every school year," says Martin, "we go from class to class in teams that include students, counselors, administrators and often parents, and we talk about the rules of the school, the culture of the school and the Respect Policy. We do small presentations because a large assembly with lots of content is hard to pull off in September.

"Also, we can talk about sexual harassment and sexual orientation, which immature students might hoot about at a large assembly but won't in a class of 30," she observes. "We have a high annual turnover rate, so we have to teach and reteach all the time, to students, parents, staff, bus drivers, cafeteria workers - everyone." (see also Establish School Policies that Promote Equity and Respect.)

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RESPECT IS THE CORNERSTONE OF ALL OUR INTERACTIONS AND BEHAVIORS. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE DIGNITY AND WORTH OF ONE ANOTHER, AND STRIVE NEVER TO DIMINISH ANOTHER BY OUR CONDUCT OR OUR ATTITUDES.

OUR MISSION: To prepare students to live and work in a complex
and interdependent society. To acknowledge diversity and build
community by practicing hospitality, civility and respect.

WHY WE NEED A POLICY: Mariner is a community which dedicates
itself to the safety and well-being of its citizens and which
recognizes that human dignity is the basis for all our
relationships and growth.

DEFINITION OF MISCONDUCT: Any physical, spoken or written
act of abuse, violence, harassment, intimidation, extortion,
the use of vulgarity, cursing, making remarks of a personally
destructive nature toward any other person, and any restriction
or prevention of free movement of an individual. This
prohibition applies whether the act is deliberate, intentional
or unintentional or is directed toward an individual or group
regarding race, color, creed, national origin, sex, sexual
orientation, physical or mental disability, political or
religious ideology. Federal law and Washington State rules
and regulations will apply.

CORRECTIVE ACTION:
• Discipline file entry, parent notification and counseling; detention;
• In-school suspension, short or long-term suspension;
• Emergency expulsion (may or may not be final, depending on
investigation of incident)/final expulsion;
• Police may be contacted; charges may be filed.
Note: The severity of the offense dictates the consequence.
These expectations apply to all facets of school life - at
school, school activities, on transportation, at bus stops,
on field trips, and so on.

HOW TO FILE A GRIEVANCE
1. Consult the Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook issued
by the Mukilteo School District to file a formal, written report.
2. District policy and all applicable laws will be followed regarding all
grievances.

PUTTING A STOP TO DISRESPECT
STEP ONE: When you witness behavior that is in violation of the
Respect Policy, tell the person to stop. Apathy, silence or laughter
encourages the abuse and further disrespects the victims. Inform
an adult in school and your parents.

STEP TWO: If the behavior doesn't stop, contact an administrator
as soon as possible to initiate a complaint. See "How to File a
Grievance" in this brochure. Again, report to the adult in charge
of the area.

STEP THREE: If the behavior continues, keep a journal of further
incidents, including description, time, date, place and witnesses.
Keep your parents and administrators informed.