Education and the Culture Wars

A Clinician’s View of the Laptop-Shooting Dad

2012-02-17T08:59:00.000-08:00

A Clinician’s View of the Laptop-Shooting Dad
Tommy Jordan shows our willingness to excoriate teens for bad behavior while absolving ourselves of parental responsibility for it
By CHRISTOPHER J. FERGUSON
February 17, 2012

By shooting his daughter’s laptop and posting the event on YouTube, Tommy Jordan has become a minor celebrity. His actions give catharsis to perennial adult frustration with teenagers. But watching the video I was struck not only by his own words but also those of his daughter (read aloud by Jordan) which, to me, reflected not moral high ground by either party but a cycle of mutual anger, frustration and failure to communicate. Given that, to my knowledge, his daughter has been given no platform to explain her grievances toward her father, it’s easy to view things through Jordan’s lenses when we hear only one side of the story. I am sure he has legitimate grievances against her (and probably she against him). However, was destroying her property and humiliating her publicly the best way to resolve this conflict?

In my own work as a clinical psychologist, I have worked with many teens and their families. Although certainly some teens are fully responsible for their problems despite having model parents, and at other times the kids would be better off being raised by a pack of raccoons, in most cases both parties fueled rather than dealt responsibly with emerging problems. Rarely did I find either parents or teens who were entirely right, although each often thought they were. Teens ranting over chores and whatnot can often reflect deeper feelings of alienation or perceived uncaring on the part of parents. In many cases the bad behavior of teens, whether disrespect, apathy or conflict, often could be traced back to failures by parents to show respect or caring toward their children in earlier years. To be clear, this is not to absolve teens of responsibility for their actions, merely to point out that family conflicts are rarely so clear as to identify one party as good, the other bad.

A study by Brian Barber in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that both negative parenting and adolescent personality problems contributed to conflicts within the family. Similar research by Bruce Simons-Morton and colleagues in the Journal of School Violence and Soh-Leong Lim and colleagues in Marriage & Family Review suggest that parental warmth and decreased overbearingness are related to less conflict and more positive teen outcomes across cultures.

This is not to say that teens should never be disciplined, but that fostering bonding and trust between the parent and teen is a crucial element that shouldn’t be but often is neglected.

To put this in perspective, let us imagine that my wife and I were having difficulties in our marriage (we are not). One day I discover she has posted ranting complaints about my boorish behavior to her friends on Facebook, believing I will not see them. Do I have a right to feel hurt? Of course. Would shooting her laptop and releasing a publicly humiliating rant of my own against her on YouTube be likely to improve our marriage? No, I don’t think so. But perhaps Hannah Jordan will have a good sense of humor and take this all in stride.

I’m less disappointed in Tommy Jordan, though, than the widespread endorsement of his actions, which probably stems from the habit of disparaging teens, a perennial sport of older adults who enjoy the sanctimonious feel of being able to say, “When we were kids we behaved much better,” even when this is patently untrue. Modern youth, by almost any behavioral measure available, are the best behaved since the 1960s, far better behaved than their parents currently complaining about them. All the Internet backslapping and support for Jordan points to our general willingness to excoriate teens for their bad behavior while absolving ourselves of parental responsibility for it.

I have little doubt Jordan cares about his daughter; that much comes through in his video despite all else. But if this video is reflective of the general way he interacts with her, I see why she might be angry with him. Was her rant on Facebook immature? Sure, but she’s 15. What’s our excuse as parents?

Ferguson is associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The views expressed are solely his own.

Eric Cantor protects political intelligence consultants from STOCK Act

2012-02-10T17:24:00.001-08:00

Eric Cantor under fire for STOCK Act tweaks
Cantor's version strips a provision requiring consultants to disclose their activities.
By SEUNG MIN KIM
2/8/12
Politico

A feel-good bill has suddenly turned nasty.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has released his version of a congressional insider-trading ban, and it strips a provision that would require so-called political intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, like lobbyists already do. It also scraps a proposal that empowers federal prosecutors going after corruption by public officials.
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That’s stoked backlash from Democrats and even some Republicans, who are furious at Cantor and are accusing the Virginia Republican of watering down the popular legislation that easily passed Senate last week.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) slammed the House for deleting his amendment targeting the political intelligence industry, which tracks action on Capitol Hill and then sells the information to investors. Instead, the House bill requires just a study of the industry’s activities within 12 months.

“It’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision,” Grassley said in a statement. “If Congress delays action, the political intelligence industry will stay in the shadows, just the way Wall Street likes it.”

Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon said the provision was deleted because it was “extremely broad” and added that the “unintended consequences on the provision could have affected the first amendment rights of everyone participating in local rotaries to national media conglomerates.”

Democrats weren’t comforted by that explanation.

“The thing we greatly feared has come upon us,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday. “It has been weakened, totally, as far as I’m concerned.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who co-authored with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) an amendment to crack down on public corruption using a number of measures, said he was “deeply disappointed” his provision had disappeared from the House bill. Leahy noted that a similar measure cleared the House Judiciary Committee in December.

“If we are serious about restoring faith in government and addressing the kinds of egregious misconduct that we have witnessed in recent years in high-profile public corruption cases, Congress must act now to enact serious anti-corruption legislation,” Leahy said in a statement. “The House Republicans’ version of the STOCK Act misses that opportunity.”

For Cantor’s part, the House’s No. 2 Republican has added provisions that he says strengthens the STOCK Act, which explicitly bars lawmakers and their aides from using nonpublic information gained through their jobs to profit themselves.

The new version of the House’s STOCK Act ensures that the bill’s insider-trading ban and its disclosure requirements apply to the executive branch, and it also bans lawmakers convicted of a crime from collecting pensions.

In a shot at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Republicans also added a so-called “Pelosi provision” that imposes stricter rules on public officials who participate in initial public offerings. The California Democrat was targeted in a “60 Minutes” probe that reported Pelosi and her husband participated in Visa’s IPO while a bill governing credit-card legislation was pending before Congress.

Pelosi has denied any conflict of interest or special access related to the Visa IPO.

Slaughter was peeved at the “Pelosi Provision” when asked about it on Wednesday.

“I think the fact that they put this in was strictly to cause grief to [Pelosi],” Slaughter said, “and I resent it.”

Cantor said in a statement late Tuesday that he consulted “dozens of members” as he reworked the bill. But neither Slaughter nor Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), the primary sponsors of the STOCK Act, worked with Cantor on the new bill, the Democrats said.

Despite the partisan bickering, the legislation is expected to pass when it comes up for a vote Thursday.

Strom Thurmond is gone but not forgotten; Juan Williams takes a step to the left

2012-01-17T10:38:00.001-08:00

Juan Williams stands in for Obama at Fox debate
The GOP celebrates MLK day by booing the black pundit as Gingrich belittles him for asking tough questions on race
BY JOAN WALSH
Salon.com
JAN 17, 2012

The Fox News debate began auspiciously, with moderator Bret Baier noting that it was our national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then his actual question had nothing to do with Dr. King. But those of us who feared the debate would duck racial issues worried for naught. The night climaxed with the South Carolina crowd giving Newt Gingrich a standing ovation for smacking down Fox’s leading black contributor, Juan Williams, for his impertinent questions about race.

Williams asked for it, of course. What was he thinking making tough racial queries at a GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.? First, he asked Romney how he squared his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with his own family’s story of moving to and then from Mexico seeking religious freedom. He asked Rick Santorum, who purports to care about poverty, what he would do about high African-American poverty rates. He asked Ron Paul whether he thought the nation’s harsh drug laws were bad for black people. Then he made the mistake of asking Newt Gingrich about his comments that poor urban children came from communities that lacked a “work ethic,” and his calling Barack Obama “the food stamp president.”

Gingrich couldn’t believe his luck. With a gleam in his eye, he thrashed Williams, and Steve Kornacki believes he may have given his candidacy one last shot with his savvy thumping of Fox’s leading black commentator. It hurt to watch. If Newt gets the nomination – he won’t, but a Democrat can dream – he’ll have to thank Williams at the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla., even before he thanks Callista.

Sure, Santorum took his chance to demagogue on race, telling Williams that it only took three things to stay out of poverty in America: “Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children.” He didn’t allow that any residue of racism or discrimination might make it harder for African-Americans to work, graduate from high school or marry. Santorum also made unfounded allegations, again, about the Obama administration forbidding certain federal programs from talking about marriage. But at least he answered Williams with some personal respect.

Gingrich looked as happy about Williams’ questions as he looked deflated at the last New Hampshire debate. The former NPR analyst referenced Gingrich’s belittling comments about poor kids lacking role models with a work ethic, and the NAACP “demanding” food stamps not jobs, and asked, “Can’t you see that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to African-Americans?”

“No,” Gingrich said petulantly, with a slight pause, “I don’t see that.” The crowd screamed with glee. Gingrich went on to bash unionized janitors in public schools, and I realized that his student-janitor comments represent a right-wing political trifecta, bashing anti-business regulations like child labor laws, public sector unions and lazy “urban” kids. Oh, and he also got to attack elites this time around, insisting his janitor plans drew liberal disapproval because “only the elites despise earning money.”

But Williams didn’t back away. “The suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic,” he told Gingrich. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.” The crowd booed Williams lustily, and Gingrich got a special twinkle in his eye. He looked at Williams like he was a soon-to-be ex-wife.

“First of all, Juan” – and there was a slight cheer when the former speaker called the Pulitzer Prize winner “Juan” – “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.

“Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point,” he continued. “The area that ought to be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No — they haven’t built the road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and someday learn how to own the job.” The crowd jumped to its feet screaming “Newt! Newt! Newt!” Fox cut to a commercial.

Where to start? Of course Obama hasn’t “put” anyone on food stamps. The Bush economy nearly doubled the poverty rate...

The Story of Juan
Juan Williams was a sometimes-controversial star at NPR until an inflammatory comment about Muslims sent him further into the arms of Fox News. A look at his career through the eyes of several old and skeptical colleagues.
By David Margolick
Vanity Fair
Jan. 18, 2012

A graduate of Haverford College, Williams launched his journalistic career at The Washington Post, which he joined as an intern in 1976. He was clearly talented and ambitious, but many thought his life there additionally charmed because of his friendship with Donald Graham, son of the publisher, who, having once been a cop in D.C., took a liking to Williams. (Asked whether he’d ever paved Williams’s way or, later, gotten him out of scrapes, Graham replied, “The answer is no—N.O.”)

Williams won praise for his willingness to cover rough parts of town and take on liberal black icons like Mayor Marion Barry long before scandals brought him down, thereby incurring charges of disloyalty from Barry and betrayal from the black mainstream. In 1980, he began writing for the Post editorial page. That December, at a convention for black conservatives in San Francisco, he met 32-year-old Clarence Thomas, then an assistant to Senator John Danforth of Missouri. An op-ed column Williams wrote praising Thomas—whose conservatism was, Williams wrote, “born of the same personal anger at racism that fired the militants of the 1960s”—called him to the attention of the Reagan administration, which led to his first presidential appointment, which effectively led to the Supreme Court. (In 1987, by which point Thomas headed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Williams profiled him in The Atlantic. The notoriously wary, reclusive Thomas opened up to him: what resulted was by far the most probing and insightful piece about him ever written. Williams and Thomas have remained friends and still lunch together occasionally; Thomas attended Williams’s 50th-birthday party.)

Continuing his expedited march up, in the early 1980s Williams became the paper’s junior reporter at the Reagan White House. Colleagues recall he was eager to get into print—sometimes too eager, jumping to conclusions, seasoning stories with his own opinions, failing to make that crucial last phone call. “Juan had talent and drive,” said Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer who was then the Post’s top man at the White House. “If he’d been more interested in journalism than in being in the limelight he could have been a great reporter. That’s more essential to understanding him than putting him on the liberal/conservative spectrum.”

Civil-rights groups often complained that their side of things went especially unrepresented or misrepresented in Williams’s stories. In September 1985, a dispute emerged when Ralph Neas, then head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, accused Williams of distorting his words in a news story. Neas was promptly summoned to the Post, where he found a tribunal—consisting of Ben Bradlee, Robert Kaiser, and Boisfeuillet Jones Jr.—then the Post’s executive editor, assistant managing editor for national news, and general counsel, respectively—convened, it appeared to Neas to, find out more about Williams’s work. What emerged, Neas recalled, was a “gentlemen’s agreement”: Williams would stop writing about civil rights. (Bradlee did not return messages; Kaiser declined to comment; Jones says he does not recall such a meeting.)

Williams disputes Neas’s story, and says that his contemporaneous notes proved Neas’s charge unfounded. Nonetheless, within a year he was moved to the Post’s less illustrious magazine.

EYES ON THE PRIZE
Williams turned out plenty of high-profile pieces at the magazine. One story, about a family devastated when one of its members was murdered, was made into a prime-time special by Oprah Winfrey. He went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he scored a rare interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall that would later grow into a biography. (Considering Williams untrustworthy, Marshall’s wife, Cecilia, urged her husband and their friends not to speak to Williams for the book. For years, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Education Fund, which Marshall long led, denied Williams access to key Marshall papers.) Williams’s editors at the magazine recall that whatever appeared under his byline usually had to be re-written from the ground up. Fame, not craft, was key.

In 1986, the producer of Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton, asked Williams to write the companion volume to what would become the legendary series of civil-rights documentaries. Some of Hampton’s co-workers, noting Williams’s lack of sympathy or any discernable ties to the movement, vehemently opposed Hampton’s choice. But Hampton was in a hurry—the films were nearly complete—and Williams was a name brand from a prestigious paper. And, unlike others who’d begged off, he was ambitious and self-confident enough to think he could do the job quickly.

Here, too, according to people who worked with him, Williams’s work was slipshod, even though he was supplied with all of the research materials. It was also slanted—skeptical or hostile to the people being portrayed sympathetically on the screen—and skewed: inordinately focused, for instance, on the sexual peccadilloes of some participants. Many felt that the project’s editorial director, Robert Lavelle, should have gotten co-writer credit for the companion book. Instead, the byline originally read “Juan Williams with the Eyes on the Prize Production Team.” But in interviews Williams always takes sole credit for the writing; indeed, in later printings, any reference at all to his co-authors has mysteriously disappeared. Some press accounts have even cited the book as the basis of the documentary, rather than the other way around—a misimpression which, his former colleagues complain, infuriated Hampton (who died in 1998), and which Williams has done little or nothing to correct.

Williams calls charges that he has taken excessive credit for the book “ridiculous.” “There are a lot of people who are jealous in the world, and crazy,” he said. Here as elsewhere, even Williams’s critics marvel at his sheer brazenness. “The one thing people could learn from him is the ‘parlay,’” said Callie Crossley, one of the producers of the original batch of Eyes documentaries, who now hosts a public radio show on WGBH in Boston. “Honestly, he was doing branding and inventing himself long before people were talking about it.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT
In 1991 Williams got attention of a different, less welcome variety, for making sexually suggestive comments to women. They were more jerky than menacing—Williams wasn’t their boss, nor did he press himself on anyone—and seemed designed to grab attention more than anything else. But they were chronic and tasteless, some extremely so. (“With your fingernails painted like that, they look like cherries, and I’d just like to eat them up,” he told one Post employee. On another occasion, he told her that he wanted to put his face where she’d just sat and inhale.)
Grumbling about Williams’s catcalls persisted for several years without ever percolating up to management. But a complaint had just reached Williams’s superiors when, during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings in October 1991, Williams wrote a column defending Thomas and calling Anita Hill a mere tool of Democratic activists. Women at the Post grew outraged, demanding that the paper disclose Williams’s own predilections. The paper resisted, but when other news outlets reported on the dispute, the Post had to, too. The charges were “absolutely false,” Williams told Howard Kurtz, who covered the story for the paper, then went on to describe it in his book, Media Circus; the women had taken “a passing word” in the wrong way.

Williams was exiled from the Post newsroom for a couple of weeks, and the matter died down. But when he returned, and told other publications the Post had effectively apologized for treating him so harshly, things reignited. Post editor Leonard Downie then had to meet with 50 women in the paper’s cafeteria; later more than a hundred employees signed a letter complaining about Williams and the paper’s handling of him.

Downie concluded that the allegations were “serious”; Williams acknowledged he’d misbehaved and promised to “change [his] ways.” But his contrition quickly faded. What he told Kurtz shortly thereafter remains his position today: the imbroglio had everything to do with the Thomas-Hill dispute, and little to do with him. In fact, he sees himself as the real victim of the fracas.

The next year Williams went on leave to work on his Marshall book. He continued to work part-time for the Post’s Outlook section, where an editor routinely checked, and corrected, his facts. Williams was more trouble than he was worth, the Post’s top editors concluded; they longed for some politically palatable way to get rid of him. “We hoped for some Act of God that would solve the problem,” one said. “God” then came in two guises. The first was Roger Ailes, head of the then-fledgling Fox News, who in 1997 signed up Williams for part-time punditry. The second was NPR.

US regrets Cuba's decision not to release Alan Gross, jailed for bringing Internet equipment to Cuba

2011-12-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

US regrets Cuba's decision not to release Alan Gross
Alan Gross's health is said to be deteriorating
BBC
Dec. 24, 2011

The US State Department has said it is disappointed that US citizen Alan Gross is not among some 2,900 prisoners to be released by Cuba.

The prisoners, some convicted of political crimes, will be released over the next few days.

President Raul Castro said the move was a goodwill gesture made after he had received numerous requests from relatives and religious institutions.

But Gross, serving 15 years for crimes against the state, will not be freed.

"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr Gross this holiday season," Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said.

He said Gross's health was deteriorating and his family had suffered for many years hoping for his release.

In his statement, Mr Toner said Gross - jailed for taking internet equipment to the Communist-run island - should be returned to his family "where he belongs".

Black Spring

President Castro said that 86 foreign prisoners from 25 countries would be freed, and that diplomats would be notified shortly.

Continue reading the main story
Cuba mass prisoner releases

1962: Release and expulsion to the US of 1,113 prisoners captured during failed Bay of Pigs invasion
1979: More than 3,000 prisoners released after negotiations with Cuban exiles
1984: Release of 26 political prisoners after a visit from US activist Jesse Jackson
1998: Release of 299 prisoners after an appeal from Pope John Paul II
July 2010: Government agrees to free 52 prisoners in deal brokered by the Catholic Church
December 2011: President Raul Castro announces 2,900 prisoners to be released
(Sources: BBC, Human Rights Watch, Organization of American States)

Havana's refusal to free him has led to frozen relations with the US, despite a brief warming under President Barack Obama.

Gross, 62, was detained in December 2009 while he was delivering computers and communications equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba. He was sentenced in March 2011.

He was working as a State Department contractor...

Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people

2011-12-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

Palestinians are descendants of the Biblical Jews. If the Palestinians are an invented people, then the invention occurred thousands of years ago when Abraham, Isaac and Jacob founded the Jewish people. Unlike many of their Jewish cousins, the Palestinians never left the land their ancestors called Judea.

Gingrich calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people
By Amy Gardner and Philip Rucker
December 9, 2011

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich said in a cable TV interview that Palestinians are an “invented” people with no apparent right to their own state, a rejection of a decade of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.

In the interview, which was taped Wednesday in Washington and will be broadcast Monday on The Jewish Channel, Gingrich spoke about his mistrust of Palestinian leaders, his admiration for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his view that the Obama administration is “favoring the terrorists” with its foreign policy.

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“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” Gingrich said. “We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”

“For a variety of political reasons,” Gingrich continued, “we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.”

Gingrich’s comments, which were first reported by Politico, were met with surprise and dismay by a range of actors on the foreign policy stage, including Democratic and Republican former diplomats and Palestinian and Israeli advocates.

Gingrich did more than fan the flames of the already fraught
Arab-Israeli conflict; he challenged long-standing U.S. policy — initiated by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and continued by President Obama — to encourage the establishment of a separate Palestinian state.

“Besides being factually and historically wrong, this statement is unwise,” said Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine and a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Rather than trying to delegitimize or undermine the narrative of either side, it would be much more productive to work towards a solution that guarantees the security and future of both the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Elliott Abrams, who was a deputy national security adviser under Bush and is now with the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood. Whatever was true then, Palestinian nationalism has grown since 1948, and whether we like it or not, it exists.”

Gingrich’s remarks also fed a long-standing narrative about the former House speaker — that he has a penchant for provocative utterances, exciting some while alienating others.

Gingrich’s chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has been highlighting that narrative this week, and Gingrich’s latest remarks gave Romney more fodder to continue doing so.

On a call with reporters late Friday, former ambassador Mary Kramer, a Romney supporter, said: “I’m not sure that kind of statement gets us any closer to accomplishing an agenda, and so that’s one of the things that I think makes me a little bit nervous about Speaker Gingrich — that he sometimes makes comments that are open to very broad interpretations.”

Republicans want to stop black women from having abortions

2011-12-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.

If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?

Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.

Republicans color the abortion debate
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
December 6, 2011

Rep. Trent Franks established his credentials as a civil rights leader last year when the Arizona Republican argued that, because of high abortion rates in black communities, African Americans were better off under slavery.

But the congressman doesn’t just talk the talk. On Tuesday, he chaired a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on legislation he is introducing that would protect African American women from themselves — by making it harder for them to have abortions.

Dana Milbank

Dana Milbank writes a regular column on politics.

“In 1847, Frederick Douglass said, ‘Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, God is the father of us all and all are brethren,’ ” Franks proclaimed as he announced what he calls the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”

Drawing a line from the Civil War to the suffragist movement to defeating Hitler to the civil rights era, Franks determined that “there is one glaring exception” in the march toward equality. “Forty to 50 percent of all African American babies, virtually one in two, are killed before they are born,” he said. “This is the greatest cause of death for the African Americans.” Franks called the anti-abortion fight “the civil rights struggle that will define our generation.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who, unlike Franks, is African American and a veteran of the civil rights movement, took a different historical view. “I’ve studied Frederick Douglass more than you,” said Conyers. “I’ve never heard or read him say anything about prenatal nondiscrimination.”

Orwellian naming aside, the House Republicans’ civil rights gambit (which follows passage of a similar bill in Franks’s Arizona and marks an attempt to get an abortion bill to the House floor before year’s end) points to an interesting tactic among conservatives: They have taken on a new, and somewhat suspect, interest in the poor and in the non-white. To justify their social policies, they have stolen the language of victimization from the left. In other words, they are practicing the same identity politics they have long decried.

Newt Gingrich, now threatening Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, tried a similar argument when he argued for the elimination of “truly stupid” child labor laws and suggested that students could replace the janitors in their schools. He further explained that he was trying to help children in poor neighborhoods who have “no habits of working.”

Developer Donald Trump, who owns a Virginia country club that counts Gingrich as a member, announced this week that he would join with Gingrich to help “kids in very, very poor schools” — by extending his “Apprentice” TV reality show concept to all of 10 lucky kids. “We’re going to be picking 10 young wonderful children, and we’re going to make them apprenti,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a little fun with it.”

This “fun” might sound less patronizing if these conservatives displayed a similar concern for the well-being of the poor and the non-white during debates over budget cuts. But, whatever the motives, lawmakers and conservative activists were not bashful when they held a pre-hearing news conference Tuesday, standing beside posters directed at Latinos and African Americans (“black children are an endangered species”).

“It is horrific that in America today, babies are being killed based on their race and based on their sex,” protested Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America. Other participants in the news conference suggested that Planned Parenthood is “excited to take money specifically earmarked to kill a black baby” and linked abortion-rights advocates to eugenics, euthanasia and the Holocaust...

“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.

If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?

Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.

Jewish Republicans say Ron Paul doesn't understand the difference between a refugee camp and a concentration camp

2011-12-05T19:02:00.000-08:00

"...Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – said they wanted to scrap existing foreign aid commitments and then have each country justify assistance, including Israel." Still, Jewish Republicans see Ron Paul as outside the fold.

Ron Paul excluded from Republican Jewish Coalition forum
Forum for Republican candidates bars Ron Paul, currently polling second in Iowa, for his 'extreme' views on Israel
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk
5 December 2011

The Republican Jewish Coalition has barred Ron Paul, one of the party's leading presidential contenders, from its forum for the candidates on Wednesday because of his "misguided and extreme views" on Israel.

Paul, who consistently ranks among the favourites in polls of Republican primary voters despite strong libertarian views that have alienated many in his own party, has rankled Israel's supporters by advocating an end to US aid to the Jewish state. He is also strongly opposed to military action against Iran's nuclear programme and has drawn attention to Israel's own atomic weapons which it does not officially acknowledge.

The RJC director, Matt Brooks, said Paul was excluded for those and other views.

"He's just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organisation," he told CBS.

Earlier this year, Paul wrote to congressional colleagues urging them to cut billions of dollars of aid to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan. He said that the US "borrowing money from China – or printing it out of thin air – to hand out overseas in attempt to purchase friends has been a failing foreign policy".

At a Republican candidates debate last month, Paul said the US should not back Israel if it attacks Iran's nuclear sites.

"We don't even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we're going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel? So I think they're quite capable of taking care of themselves," he said.

Critics have described Paul as isolationist and compared him to appeasers of the Nazis. Donald Trump, the billionaire developer who is hosting a Republican debate later this month, took a swipe at Paul on Fox News on Monday: "He doesn't care if Iran gets a nuclear weapon that could wipe out Israel."

Paul has previously fallen afoul of the RJC for being strongly critical of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington and for comments likening conditions in Gaza to a concentration camp in saying that the US should not support the blockade of the territory.

"I think it is absolutely wrong to prevent people who are starving and having problems, almost like in concentration camps, and saying: yes, we endorse this whole concept that we can't allow ships to go in their in a humanitarian way," he said. "I think this would be a perfect opportunity to argue the case: Israel, if you want to do this, you're on your own. We're not backing you up."

Brooks previously criticised Paul when he launched his presidential campaign earlier this year saying his views are "far outside of the Republican mainstream" and that he has "espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the US and our role in the world".

"He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress. Most recently Paul gave an interview in which he voiced his objection to the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden," he said.

But Paul has also said that Israel is a "close friend" of the US, and that it should be free to decide its own position in negotiations with the Palesitnians without pressure from Washington.

Paul has also upset many in his own party by saying that the US brought the 9/11 attacks on itself through its actions in the Middle East and by maintaining military bases in countries such as Saudi Arabia. He advocates severely cutting the US military budget and bringing almost all the country's forces home.

The coalition's barring of Paul comes as the Republicans attempt to shake off the damage done by a question about foreign aid at a candidates debate last month in which three of the leading contenders – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – said they wanted to scrap existing foreign aid commitments and then have each country justify assistance, including Israel. Although the candidates swiftly said after the debate that they expected aid to Israel to continue, the damage was done among some of the Jewish state's supporters...

A Nazi Story That Still Surprises

2011-11-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

A Nazi Story That Still Surprises
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Wall Street Journal

With every passing year, every new model of portentous drivel about the Nazi era rolled out by the film industry—"The Reader," about the travails of a concentration camp guard, comes to mind—the more indispensable the facts of history become. The clearer it is, too, how flimsy these film fantasies are as vehicles for drama, compared with that history. The latest reminder of this truth comes with a PBS documentary extraordinary in its detail and revelatory power. It's title, "Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals," may be informative, but it's far from adequate for a work that yields so many surprises, the greatest of which is its freshness. Moving in unexpected directions at every turn, Jonathan Silvers's film averts the burden of predictability—no small accomplishment for work on so familiar a theme.

The Nuremberg trials and their drama are familiar enough to the world, but not the face and the work of the 27-year-old American Army lawyer and investigator Benjamin Ferencz, charged with the task of collecting evidence for the Nuremberg prosecutions. The terrors of entering the just-liberated camps with their hellish scenes—the film provides striking footage, more extensive than the usual documentary clips, of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower doing just that, with Gen. Omar Bradley just behind him—caused him, he tells the filmmakers, to create a self-defense mechanism. The whole scene wasn't real, he told himself—it was "just a case," one of many to get through, in camp after camp. He would become chief prosecutor of a special German unit, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units operating on the Eastern front. He found the report of their daily accomplishments, which Germans meticulously recorded—a typical page of which is shown on screen, detailing how many Jewish children were killed, how many men and women had been murdered on a particular date. He counted. "When I got to over a million I stopped counting."
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals

Tuesday, Nov. 15, 9-11 p.m. EST on PBS, whose dates and times vary; check local listings.

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Fridays, 8-9:30 p.m. EST on C-Span

The film offers barely a touch of atrocity footage. Its subject is justice, or as the principals in the first part of the film, the liberated survivors of the camps thought of it, revenge—this documentary's only strained, largely forgettable moments. Far more dramatic testimony—and a startling vision of justice—comes in an interview with the middle-aged son of Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, one of the Germans hanged for crimes against humanity. "My father was a murderer," Nicholas Frank declares, "one who sanctioned the acts of all the other criminals who got away." One memory from his childhood stands out—the time a drunken American soldier showed up at the Frank house and lined the family up outside, threatening to shoot them all. His younger brothers and sisters cried piteously, he recalls, "but I had the feeling the soldier was correct—I belonged to a criminal family."

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Harry Dreifuss/PBS

Nazi war criminal Kurt Lishka in Germany in 1971.

Scene after scene brings the struggle for justice to life, in obscure cases as in the ones best known to history. A middle-aged journalist in Cologne, Germany, has discovered by chance, long years after the war, the name and location of the SS officer who had beaten his grandfather to death upon his arrival in Theresienstadt, a transit camp for Czech Jews and others destined for Auschwitz. The journalist had come upon a 1988 news article about a former member of the SS deported from Italy. He recounts his stubborn effort to get a German court to take action—a story this sophisticated professional tells with ease and eloquence, none of which can conceal the rage that had driven him. His grandfather had been murdered, the killer was in Germany, a democratic state now, and the appropriate prosecutor refused to take action—this could not be the end of the story. It was not.

Candice Bergen, the documentary's excellent narrator, doesn't come to the subject of this film as a stranger. She is the widow of Louis Malle, whose haunting "Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987) was based on Malle's memory of the French Catholic boys' school he attended during the war. The school had sheltered Jewish students who were ultimately betrayed and dragged off to Auschwitz, where they were gassed upon arrival. The headmaster, Lucien Bunel—Père Jacques de Jésus—was arrested and sent to Mauthausen, one of the deadliest camps in the Nazi system. The Malle film's title quotes his last words to the assembled students as he is taken away.

The film Ms. Bergen narrates covers remarkably extensive territory—including a riveting commentary provided by Willam Gowan, a former U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent, on the so-called Rat Line through which Nazi war criminals of high and low rank escaped punishment by fleeing to Argentina, with help from sympathetic Vatican priests. Characteristically, the film enlarges on a familiar fact, taking it to a deeper level. The arrival of this considerable population of war criminals, an Argentinian journalist attests, had its poisonous effect on the nation as a whole. Most of them, he points out, were experts in exactly the kind of merciless repression and terrorization that the dictatorship in Argentina found useful.

Section after section of the narrative is made rich in the same way—by taking the familiar in this history to newer and deeper levels. This is true no less of the final part on the complicated efforts to deport war criminals living in America. Altogether a rare achievement and a spellbinding one.

Rick Perry can't remember which government agency he's decided to eliminate

2011-11-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

Nov 9, 2011
The moment Rick Perry’s candidacy collapsed
He provides what may be the most painful, cringe-inducing slip-up in debate history VIDEO
By Steve Kornacki

The good news for Rick Perry is that everyone will probably stop talking about his bizarre New Hampshire speech now. The bad news is: He created an even more cringe-inducing YouTube moment at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate — one that probably represents the most embarrassing public slip-up in what has been a campaign full of them for Perry.

Video is posted below, but we’ll stick to the transcript up here and pick things up mid-answer, a little more than an hour into the debate, when Perry — who had been mostly ignored by the moderators and his fellow candidates — tried to win some attention by talking about which Cabinet departments he’d eliminate as president:

PERRY: And I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone – Commerce, Education, and, the, uh, what’s the third one there? Let’s see…

RON PAUL (holding up five fingers): Five.

PERRY: Oh, five. OK. So, Commerce, Education, and the uh, uh, uh…

MITT ROMNEY: EPA?

PERRY: EPA. There you go.

DEBATE QUESTIONER JOHN HARWOOD: Seriously? Is EPA the one you’re talking about?

PERRY: No sir, No sir. We were talking about the agencies of government – EPA needs to be rebuilt, there’s no doubt about that…

HARWOOD: But you can’t name the third one?

PERRY: The third agency of government I would, I would do away with – Education, the uh, Commerce, and let’s see – I can’t, the third one. The third one there. Oops...

Update: The transcript has been changed to show that it was Mitt Romney — and not Ron Paul — who actually suggested the EPA to Perry. (h/t reader DR) Also, it’s probably worth noting that Perry, in an answer to a separate question more than ten minutes later, said that the Energy Department was the third “agency” he was grasping for.

Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought

2011-11-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

New evidence reinforces the suspicion that modern humans exterminated their Neanderthal cousins. The other suspect is climate change.

Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
New York Times
November 2, 2011

The fossils seemed hardly worth a second look. The one from England was only a piece of jawbone with three teeth, and the other, from southern Italy, was nothing more than two infant teeth. But scientists went ahead, re-examining them with refined techniques, and found that one specimen’s age had previously been significantly underestimated and that the other’s dating and identity had been misinterpreted.

They had in fact discovered the oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe, two international research teams reported Wednesday.

The scientists who made the discovery and others who study human origins say they expect the findings to reignite debate over the relative capabilities of the immigrant modern humans and the indigenous Neanderthals, their closest hominid relatives; the extent of their interactions; and perhaps the reasons behind the Neanderthal extinction. The findings have already prompted speculation that the Homo sapiens migrations into Europe may have come in at least two separate waves, rather than just one.

In tests conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit in England, the baby teeth from Italy were dated at 43,000 to 45,000 years old. Other analysis showed the teeth to be those of a modern human, not a Neanderthal, as previously thought when the fossil was unearthed in 1964 from the Grotta del Cavallo.

Similar tests at Oxford established that the age of the jawbone, from Kents Cavern near Torquay, Devon, had been significantly underestimated, by about 7,000 years, probably because of contamination when it was originally dated in 1989. The age is now set at 41,500 to 44,200 years old, making this the oldest known modern human fossil from northwestern Europe.

These dates are remarkable on several counts, scientists said. The earliest reliably dated European modern human specimen, up to now, came from the Pestera cu Oase site in Romania, a long way east from the English coast. The Romanian fossil’s age is estimated at 37,800 to 42,000 years old. No stone tools or other artifacts were found with it.

And in the absence of early fossils, archaeologists had not been sure who made some of the stone tools they were uncovering, the arriving humans or the Neanderthals. It had been generally assumed that modern humans probably entered Europe at least as early as 45,000 years ago, based on changing patterns of artifacts that soon followed.

The two papers describing the new research were published Wednesday by the journal Nature. The lead author of the jawbone report was Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford. The principal author of the report on the baby teeth from Cavallo was Stefano Benazzi of the University of Vienna.

Not only does the jawbone indicate “the wide and rapid dispersal of the earliest moderns across Europe” during the last ice age, more than 40,000 years ago, Dr. Higham’s team wrote, it was also found in cave layers associated with a technology that archaeologists call the Aurignacian culture. The scientists said this “fills a key gap” between the earliest human skeletal remains and the earliest dated stone and bone Aurignacian tools and weapons.

Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and an author of the Higham paper, said the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”

In a statement issued by Oxford, Dr. Higham also pointed out that the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”

The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago. Although recent genetic research shows some evidence of interbreeding between the species, there was uncertainty as to how much contact the two had in Europe, as opposed to earlier interactions in western Asia. It is still not clear how widespread was the Neanderthal population in their final millenniums; after a steady decline, the last of them seemed to disappear in their cul-de-sac of a refuge in southern Iberia.

Determining the age for any samples more than 40,000 years old was no sure thing. At that age, levels of remaining radiocarbon are low, and contamination can be a serious problem. As an alternative, Katerina Douka of Oxford, a member of the team examining the Italian specimen, focused on the dating of marine shell beads found in the same archaeological levels as the teeth, a technique that has proven successful at other sites in Europe.

When the teeth had been classified as Neanderthal, it was assumed that artifacts in the Cavallo site — bone tools and ornaments in a style known as the Uluzzian culture — were also considered Neanderthal creations. Now archaeologists suspect that they should be attributed to modern humans.

Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was not involved in the research, said, “The tendency right now is to downplay associating Neanderthals with any cultural developments after humans got to Europe.”

Chris Stringer and Tim Compton, both of the Natural History Museum, London, and members of the Higham group, obtained radiocarbon dates of animal bones found close to the jawbone in Kents Cavern and used a statistical modeling method to calculate the age of the human fossil. They further used CT scans to produce 3-D models of the worn teeth and thus confirm that the fossil was indeed from a human, not a Neanderthal.

“Everybody is going to wish some of that evidence was better,” Dr. Tattersall said. “It is pretty slender, but I have no reason to dispute it.”

Dr. Stringer elaborated in an e-mail on some possible implications of the two discoveries. Perhaps some of the “transitional cultures” that preceded the Aurignacian, he said, were introduced by “multiple early waves of modern humans coming into Europe.” For example, the Kents Cavern fossil might represent an early dispersal through Central Europe that crossed into Britain on a land bridge where the North Sea is now. The Cavallo remains might represent a possibly even earlier migration along the Soouthern European coasts.

Richard G. Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University, said he was “really impressed” by the new findings. Hearing of Dr. Stringer’s idea, Dr. Klein joined in the spirit of conjecture, noting that Homo sapiens was on the move at that time, venturing as far as Australia by about 45,000 years ago.

The Koch brothers and Herman Cain

2011-11-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Koch-backed group confirms financial ties to Cain campaign manager
By NBC's Michael Isikoff
Nov. 4, 2011

A major conservative advocacy group, funded by Koch family oil interests, says it is reviewing its "financial dealings" with a Wisconsin charity headed by Herman Cain's campaign manager, raising fresh questions about the source of tens of thousands of dollars in funds that were used to pay expenses for Cain's presidential campaign.

The Center for Public Integrity reported late Thursday that Americans for Prosperity, one of the largest and most prominent of conservative political groups, has confirmed unspecified financial transactions with two closely linked Wisconsin non-profits -- Prosperity USA and Wisconsin Prosperity Network -- that were founded by Mark Block, Cain's campaign manager.

One of those groups, Prosperity USA, paid for $37,000 in expenses, including iPads, charter flights and items, for Cain's presidential campaign, according to financial documents disclosed this week by the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

Non-profits are barred by law from paying for campaign expenses, and when the allegations first surfaced this week -- at the same time as the sexual harassment charges against the presidential candidate -- Cain said he would order an investigation of whether there were improper campaign violations.

Cain's campaign lawyer, Steve Bienek, declined to answer questions from NBC about the transactions between the Wisconsin charities headed by Block and the campaign, saying only that the campaign has retained an outside law firm to review them.

"We take these allegations very seriously," he said.

But the Center for Public Integrity report by Peter Stone raises additional questions as to whether Americans for Prosperity (AFP) funds were used by Block to pay Cain campaign expenses. AFP had "financial dealings with Prosperity USA and/or the Wisconsin Prosperity Network," Levi Russell, the spokesman for AFT is quoted as saying.

(Russell confirmed the transactions to NBC News, but declined to elaborate, and added that the group had no reason to believe there was any wrongdoing on its part.)

Some of those transactions are hinted at in the documents released by the Journal-Sentinel: They show a $5,000 expense in February 2011 for Cain to attend a meeting of a group called RightNation "at request of AFP" and that Block made a trip to Washington to meet with AFP's president Tim Phillips and David Koch."

Koch and his oil industry brother Charles Koch were the founders of Americans for Prosperity, but the group -- like most non-profits -- declines to identify its donors.

Canoodling with cavemen gave healthy boost to human genome, study finds

2011-10-31T17:22:00.000-07:00

AUG. 25, 2011
Canoodling with cavemen gave healthy boost to human genome, study finds
BY SUSAN L. YOUNG
Stanford School of Medicine

Laurent Abi-Rached, Paul Norman and Libby Guethlein are co-authors of research on how the genome of geographically-distinct human populations vary in the amount and type of immune-system genes inherited from evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. People in Papua New Guinea, for instance, have a particularly high percentage of one type of immune-system gene that is rarely found in people in Africa.

For a few years now, scientists have known that humans and their evolutionary cousins had some casual flings, but now it appears that these liaisons led to a more meaningful relationship.

Sex with Neanderthals and another close relative — the recently discovered Denisovans — has endowed some human gene pools with beneficial versions of immune system genes, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in an article published online Aug. 25 in Science Express.

Although modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans share a common ancestor in Africa, the groups split into separate, distinct populations approximately 400,000 years ago. The Neanderthal lineage migrated northwestward into West Asia and Europe, and the Denisovan lineage moved northeastward into East Asia. The ancestors of modern man stayed in Africa until 65,000 years or so ago, when they expanded into Eurasia and then encountered the other human-like groups. In some cases, the rendezvous were amorous in nature.

Last year, a partial genome sequence of Neanderthals, who died out approximately 30,000 years ago, revealed that these trysts left as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in the genetic blueprint of some present-day humans. Last December, the genome of another human cousin, the extinct Denisovans, made clear that up to 6 percent of some people's genomes are Denisovan in origin.

Now, a team of researchers led by Peter Parham, PhD, professor of structural biology and of microbiology and immunology, has found that these matings had a positive effect on modern human fitness. "The cross breeding wasn’t just a random event that happened, it gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human," said Parham, who is senior author of the study.

The useful gift was the introduction of new variants of immune system genes called the HLA class-1 genes, which are critical for our body's ability to recognize and destroy pathogens. HLA genes are some of the most variable and adaptable genes in our genome, in part because the rapid evolution of viruses demands flexibility on the part of our immune system.

"The HLA gene system, with its diversity of variants, is like a magnifying glass," said lead author Laurent Abi-Rached, PhD, explaining that it provides a lot more detail about the history of populations than typical gene families. Abi-Rached is a research associate in the Parham lab.

Prior to the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, Parham and his group had suspected that at least one HLA variant came from archaic humans. They determined that the variant known as HLA-B*73 is rare in present-day African populations but occurs with significant frequency in West Asian populations. The ethnic distribution of HLA-B*73 and its similarity across populations suggested that it came from a relatively recent co-mingling of modern human and archaic human DNA, which most likely would have happened outside of Africa. Parham's team wanted to discern which archaic humans were the source of the HLA-B*73 gene type. In the last year they have found the answer in the genome sequence of a recently discovered human relative, the Denisovans, whose existence first came to light in 2008 with the discovery of an unfamiliar finger bone and tooth in a cave in Siberia...

Genes of extinct ancestor survive in modern humans

2011-10-31T17:10:00.000-07:00

Global map of Denisovan gene frequency in modern human genomes
Genes of extinct ancestor survive in modern humans
By Brandon Keim, wired.com
Oct. 31, 2011

Genes inherited from long-extinct human ancestors may be more common than thought, suggesting a Homo sapiens origin story with more than a few evolutionary one-night stands.

The latest findings involve genes from Denisovans, a recently discovered member of the Homo genus who lived in central and eastern Asia until 40,000 years ago. Denisovans, humans and neanderthals last shared a common ancestor about 1 million years ago.

Earlier research found lingering Denisovan traces in genomes of people from Oceania. Now they’ve been found in southeast Asia, too.

“We haven’t been a very exclusive species, with a very narrow origin,” said Martin Jacobsson. Interbreeding with other members of the human family tree “is not a unique event. It’s a more complex story than we thought before.”

In a study published Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jacobsson and co-author Pontus Skoglund searched through 1,500 human genome scans from around the world for genes found in Denisovans but not chimpanzees or Neanderthals.

While the previous finding of Denisovan inheritance involved analysis of ultra-high-resolution human genome scans, of which only a few exist, Jacobsson used low-resolution scans. These are more commonly available and allowed the researchers to detect Denisovan signals in genomes from mainland southeast Asia. A signal also appeared in South America, but Jacobsson said that’s probably a false positive.
The 40,000 year-old tooth from which Denisovans were first identified in 2010
The 40,000 year-old tooth from which Denisovans were first identified in 2010
David Reich et al./Nature.

Beyond the fun of knowing that Denisovan genomes live on, the findings add to a growing sense of the richness of the human evolutionary story.

Until relatively recently, it was thought that human ancestors trekked out of Africa about 100,000 years ago in a single straight shot, descending without diversion into modernity. But what’s emerged from fossil findings in recent years is a picture of Homo sapiens and its near relatives flowing out of Africa again and again, with some populations vanishing and others surviving, often living side-by-side.

Now, thanks to well-preserved ancient genomes, it’s possible to look at mixing: Evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals in northern Europe was found, followed by the Denisovan studies. Critically, the new findings fit a genetic pattern suggesting multiple episodes of interbreeding with Denisovans.

“We were evolving for a little while, then isolated, then mixed again,” said Jacobsson. “It’s not so simple that you can say, there’s only been one admixture.”

“I find it really cool that people use the archaic genomes we produced to try to arrive at new insights,” said geneticist Svante Paabo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, who originally sequenced the Denisovan genome from 40,000 year-old fingerbones found in a Siberian cave. “Of course one will have to see which of them hold up.”

As for what Denisovan genes do for people who have them, it’s hard to say. Unlike Neanderthal genes, which seem to have given human immune systems a boost, Denisovan gene function isn’t yet understood...

The birthers eat their own

2011-10-23T17:28:00.000-07:00

The birthers eat their own
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
October 21, 2011

Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.

The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.

Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.

The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.

When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.

“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”

This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?

The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way — most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21 / 2 years before Castro came to power.

But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal...

Name changers: 285 Indian girls no longer 'unwanted'

2011-10-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

Name changers: 285 Indian girls no longer 'unwanted'
District hopes renaming ceremony will give girls new dignity, fight discrimination
By CHAYA BABU
10/22/2011

MUMBAI, India — Hundreds of Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hifndi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

The girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.

In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."

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"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi.

The plight of girls in India came to a focus as this year's census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914.

Maharashtra state's ratio is well below that, with just 883 girls for every 1,000 boys — down from 913 a decade ago. In the district of Satara, it is even lower at 881.

Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.

Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense of marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying for elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.

Fighting on behalf of girls
Over the years, and again now, there are efforts to fight the discrimination.
Advertise | AdChoices

"Nakusa is a very negative name as far as female discrimination is concerned," said Satara district health officer Dr. Bhagwan Pawar, who came up with the idea for the renaming ceremony...

In 1952, corporate taxes were 6.1% of GDP; in 2009, corporate taxes were 1% of GDP

2011-10-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

50 Amazing Numbers About the Economy
By Morgan Housel
The Motley Fool
October 21, 2011

...In 1952, corporate taxes were 6.1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 1.8% of GDP.

In 2009, corporate taxes were 1% of GDP, and employment taxes were 6.3% of GDP...

Tea Party Nation tells small Business not to Hire

2011-10-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Tea Party Nation tells small Business not to Hire
Oct 21, 2011
By Schuyler Thorpe
AllVoices.com

The political organizations wants small businesses to go on "strike"

President Obama's jobs bill has been rebuffed by Republicans and now the Tea Party Nation has sent out a statement to its members requesting that they don't hire anyone in order to further hurt the president.

On the Tea Party Nation's website, Melissa Brookstone criticizes the president's administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate as being allied in forcing the United States into socialism and away from capitalism.

Jobs bill supporters estimate that the president's bill could create nearly 2 million jobs.

On the other hand, Brookstone not only alleges the president has assumed "dictatorial powers," but that the administration, Senate Democrats, "Progressive socailsts from all around the coutnry, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning media" have colluded to create an "anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda."

Brookstone charges that Democrats "have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialst agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic's heritage of inidividual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism."

Brookstone continues to rail against President Obama, Democrats, liberals and, generally, anyone in support of their policies, but then in concluding her remarks, she adopts a stance that defies logic.

"I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped."

"I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased," she writes. "I'm on strike!"

Regardless of one's political beliefs, it seems that finding a solution to the current high unemployment would benefit everyone.

Escondido immigrant turned over to ICE; four minor childen left at home

2011-10-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

Escondido woman turned over to immigration after domestic violence incident
By EDWARD SIFUENTES
October 19, 2011

A woman who called the Escondido Police Department to report that she was beaten by her boyfriend was herself arrested and later turned over to immigration authorities after she was booked at the Vista jail, a case that critics say illustrates the problems inherent in local police getting involved in immigration enforcement.

Elena Cabrera, 36, said she came home tired from work on the morning of Aug. 20 and wanted to sleep a little. But her then live-in boyfriend, Jorge Melgar, 50, wanted her to do house chores and began beating her when she refused. When police arrived, he told the officers that she had also hit him, Cabrera said.

Cabrera said she did not hit him, but was arrested anyway. She had a bloody lip and bruises on her face, she said.

Escondido police Lt. Craig Carter said both people were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and there were injuries on both of them. Carter said the department did not turn Cabrera over to immigration authorities.

After the couple was arrested, the couple's four minor children were left home alone, Cabrera said. Police are investigating the family's complaint that the kids were left without supervision, Carter said.

Bill Flores, a retired assistant sheriff and a member of the human rights group El Grupo, said Escondido's close working relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hurts its ability to protect the community. He said police officers knew that Cabrera would be screened for immigration violations at the Vista jail and chose to take her into custody.

Incidents like Cabrera's hurt the department's relationship with the community, Flores said, making immigrants less likely to report crimes in the future.

"Everybody in that neighborhood found out what happened," Flores said. "She was a victim of domestic violence, she was taken to jail and she ended up getting turned over to ICE. All because she sought help from the Escondido Police Department."

After being arrested, Cabrera was taken to the Escondido Police Department and later to the Vista jail, where ICE placed an immigration hold on her, apparently as part of its Secure Communities program. Secure Communities links local jails to federal databases to identify illegal immigrants who are booked into the facilities.

"I never thought that this would happen to me," Cabrera said during an interview last week. "To me, it was a complete surprise."

A spokeswoman for ICE in San Diego declined to comment on the case.

Cabrera spent several days at the Vista jail before she was turned over to immigration authorities. Cabrera had an immigration petition pending as a victim of domestic violence related to a prior relationship. Under a law called the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, battered women who are married to U.S. citizens can apply for an immigrant visa.

Melgar, a legal resident, was not turned over to immigration authorities. He spent four days in jail before he was released.

Lilia Velasquez, a San Diego immigration attorney representing Cabrera, said having the visa petition does not necessarily mean that a victim is safe from deportation. However, under a new policy by the Obama administration, immigration authorities have discretion on when to pursue deportation procedures.

The Obama administration has said it wants to focus its resources on deporting violent illegal immigrant criminals, immigrants who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge and people who repeatedly have been caught in the country illegally.

"Given the new policy of prosecutorial discretion, ICE should have removed the hold (on Cabrera) once they ascertained she was a (Violence Against Women Act) beneficiary," Velasquez said.

The San Diego County District Attorney's office declined to file charges against either Cabrera or her boyfriend. She was released from immigration custody on Aug. 28 due to her Violence Against Women Act visa petition.

Critics say that the Obama administration's immigration policies, including Secure Communities, have created a dragnet that catches not only violent criminals but also people whose only violation is being in the country illegally. Those policies break families apart, tearing parents away from their U.S.-born children, critics say.

While she was detained, Cabrera's four children, ages 3 to 17 years old, were left in her Escondido home without supervision, she said. Her oldest daughter, Tayana Zarate, 17, said she had to care for her siblings while trying to figure out where her mother was being held and how to have her released.

Tayana said a neighbor helped her buy food and drove her around to find her mother.

"They never asked who I was, my name, how old I was, is there a grown-up in the house?" Tayana said last week. "They don't care."

The family filed a complaint with the police department for leaving the children without supervision. Tayana and her mother spoke with police detectives last Thursday night about the complaint.

Carter said the officers noted in their report that they left the children in the care of an "18-year-old female."

The department also came under fire last year when it announced that it had forged a new alliance with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement allowing several immigration officers to work out of its headquarters. Operation Joint Effort, as the program is called, is the only one of its kind in the county. It has been credited by the department with the arrest of over 400 criminal illegal immigrants since it started in May 2010...

The story of our holy Constitution

2011-10-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

(Credit: Ian Huebert)

Oct 7, 2011
Introducing: A Tea People’s History
Exclusive read from the history book they won't teach in schools! The story of our holy Constitution
By Alex Pareene
Salon.com

We're exceptionally proud to bring you this excerpt from Salon's new e-book, "A Tea People's History," by Alex Pareene. You can buy the full e-book for $2.99 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Continental Congress organized the new nation with a document called the American Rules of Acquisition, an early precursor to our Constitution. While the Rules — also known as the Articles of Confederation — wisely established a weak central government and powerful states’ rights, there was a certain spark missing — the spark of Natural Law, which was the Founders’ preferred phrase for the Ten Commandments.

Some argue that the Articles of Confederation created a federal government that was too small and weak, but in fact the primary problem with the Articles was that they were far too left-wing. Government bureaucracy killed nearly 2,000 soldiers at Valley Forge. It was apparent that a change was needed!

While planting some hemp one day, George Washington discovered an early draft of the Constitution, written in ancient Egyptian on a series of golden plates buried deep within the ground at Mount Vernon. James Madison translated and elaborated on the text, with the help of Thomas Jefferson and an angel. The excited Founders immediately called for a Constitutional Convention to officially ratify the document and formally make America the best country ever.

The Constitution was written with 74 essential guiding principles in mind, based on the principles of Natural Law as laid out by Polybius, Cicero, Thomas Hooker, Coke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, John Locke, Adam Smith, Moses and Jesus. Some of them include:

Principle 6: All Men are created (by God) equal (before God).
Principle 7: The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not special rights for cross-dressing Wiccans with ADHD and “the differently abled” and every other interest group under the sun.
Principle 10: Property rights are the most important inalienable right of all.
Principle 17: If anything ever goes wrong, it is not because of any flaws in the Constitution or with the Founders.
Principle 20: In fact, if something goes wrong, it is because America has strayed from the original glorious divinely inspired mission of the Founders.
Principle 21: But it’s OK, because they predicted that would happen.

In their wiseness, the Founders explicitly rejected the direct election of senators, progressive taxation, welfare and collective bargaining for public employees. In fact, Ben Franklin argued that public employees shouldn’t even be paid, at all. As he said, at the time:

“To bring the matter nearer home, have we not seen the greatest and most important of our offices, that of general of our armies, executed for eight years together, without the smallest salary, by a patriot whom I will not now offend by any other praise; and this, through fatigues and distresses, in common with the other brave men, his military friends and companions, and the constant anxieties peculiar to his station? If he can do it, should a mere instructor of youths not stop complaining about his recompense? They don’t even work all year! Can the public treasury handle giving a mere public carriage-driver half his salary upon his retirement at the age of thirty? I think not! Especially when your average carriage-hand is living to be nearly forty, these dayes.”

The Founders also explicitly designed America to be a Christian nation. After all, the Natural Laws that make every man equal are the laws of God. All of the Founders believed in God. All of them. They all believed in God and thought everyone should believe in God and worship Him. It’s just a fact. Get over it. Also Jefferson’s “wall” between church and state just meant that the federal government couldn’t interfere with churches, but in fact the Founders wanted all religions to be encouraged, because worshiping God makes us virtuous, and only a virtuous people can handle self-rule. This is why the Founders came up with the “In God We Trust” motto, which they put on all the money and in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was Ben Franklin’s idea, along with the eagle, God’s favorite bird. Madison is the one who decided everyone should be sworn in on a Bible.

After agreeing unanimously on all the Golden Plate-derived portions of the document, the Founders set about writing the BiIl of Rights. There is a friendly debate among historians about whether the First Amendment — which establishes the right of Real Americans to Speak Common Sense Truths without fear of getting attacked by America-hating trolls and the lamestream media — or the Second Amendment — which establishes the right of Corporations to bear automatic weapons — is more important, but the Founders truly believed that both were essential for Freedom.

Fun Fact: When Washington took office as our first president, not all the states had ratified the Constitution, and the Articles of Confederation said that no changes could be made without every state’s approval. This is proof that the Founders officially approved of seceding from the Union, and endorsed Rick Perry.

Buy the full “A Tea People’s History” for $2.99 on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli

2011-10-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli
An Israeli scientist whose work was once ridiculed for being out of line with received thinking won the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for discovering different ways in which atoms could be packed together in solid materials.
By Patrick Lannin and Veronica Ek
Oct 6, 2011
(Reuters) - An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

Three decades after Dan Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.

Shechtman, 70, from Israel's Technion institute in Haifa, was working in the United States in 1982 when he observed atoms in a crystal he had made form a five-sided pattern that did not repeat itself, defying received wisdom that they must create repetitious patterns, like triangles, squares or hexagons.

"People just laughed at me," Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening "crusade" against him, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for "bringing disgrace" on the team. "I felt rejected," Shechtman remembered.

"His discovery was extremely controversial," said the Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which granted him the 10-million crown ($1.5-million) award.

"Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science ... His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.

"In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves."

A PRIZE FOR THOUSANDS

On Wednesday, Shechtman said he was "excited" but at pains to praise fellow scientists, many of whom once doubted him.

Nancy Jackson, the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), called it "a great work of discovery."

Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.

Sometimes referred to as Shechtmanite in the discoverer's honor, hundreds of quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories. Two years ago, scientists reported the first naturally occurring find of quasicrystals in eastern Russia.

David Phillips, president of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, called them "quite beautiful." Interlocking arrays of stars, circles and floral shapes are typical.

"You can normally explain in simple terms where in a crystal each atom sits - they are very symmetrical," Phillips said. "With quasicrystals, that symmetry is broken: there are regular patterns in the structure, but never repeating."

An intriguing feature of such patterns, also found in Arab mosaics, is that the mathematical constant known as the Greek letter tau, or the "golden ratio," occurs over and over again. Underlying it is a sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 13th century, where each number is the sum of the preceding two.

Living things, including flowers, fruit and shellfish, also demonstrate similar arrangements, which scientists associate with the efficient packing of materials into growing organisms.

Quasicrystals are very hard and are poor conductors of heat and electricity, offering uses as thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity. They also have non-stick surfaces, handy for frying pans, and appear in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and heat insulation in engines.

Astrid Graslund, secretary for the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said: "The practical applications are as of now, not so many. But the material has unexpected properties. It is very strong, it has hardly any friction on the surface. It doesn't want to react with anything -- they cannot ... become rusty.

"But it is more a conceptual insight - that these materials exist and we need to re-write all textbooks about crystals - it's a shift of the paradigm, which I think is most important."

BATTLE OF BELIEF

Since Galileo was mocked by established scientists and persecuted by the church in the 16th century for observing that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the reverse, overturning accepted wisdom has never been easy, as several of this year's Nobel prizewinners in science have shown.

Research that was largely ignored for years secured the medicine prize for the late Ralph Steinman and the astounding finding that the universe's expansion was speeding up not slowing down meant the physics prize for its joint discoverers.

But in a year when science is in a froth over whether particles may have been fired from Geneva to Italy faster than the speed of light -- apparently defying Einstein -- few in the modern age have had to battle disbelief as hard as Shechtman.

"He dealt with the skepticism in a very scientific and gentlemanly manner and answered his critics as every scientist should -- through science," Ron Lifshitz, a physics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Reuters. "There were also personal slurs but those did not warrant a response ... He believed in his own work and carried on with determination."

Interviewed about his Nobel by television in Israel, where the award was big national news for a small country with a long roster of laureates, Shechtman spoke of a photograph in his office that showed a small cat sipping water, surrounded by angry dogs; a biblical inscription read: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil."

"That's the way I felt for many years," Shechtman chuckled. "It accurately describes the situation, during that period."

He "trusted in his science," however, and came to see the criticism by the late Pauling, which Shechtman has described as "almost theological," as a positive source of strength:

"When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling."

(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler in London, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Williams, Ori Lewis and Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)

(The Nobel Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences corrects laureate's first name to Dan from Daniel)

This American Life: A man who has searched 18 years for the right couch

2011-10-01T18:07:00.001-07:00

Cat and Mouse
This American Life
Originally aired 02.24.2006

In most games of cat and mouse, you've got the chaser and you got the chased, right? And both of them are pretty much in constant motion. But here's a story where the mouse is not moving at all. In fact, the mouse is an inanimate object. And yet, somehow it cannot be caught. David Segal reports.

David Segal

I've known Eric for just about 20 years. And for nearly the entire length of our friendship, he's been hunting quarry that everyone else cornered a long time ago, something nobody really thinks of as the sort of thing you hunt.
Eric

I've been looking for the right sofa for about 18 years.
David Segal

Yes, he said 18 years. And yes, he said sofa. All of this started after Eric left graduate school. And briefly, it looked like it would be a fairly conventional shopping experience. He spotted a sofa he liked at Pottery Barn, an off-white number with a slip cover. And he had a matching pair delivered. But once they arrived, he knew he'd made a big mistake. The lines were all wrong. The fabric wasn't right. He returned the goods within a week. And after that, the shopping experience was never conventional again. His quest moved into what I call its "Ahab/Moby Dick" phase. He began to stalk his couch.

For years he'd subscribe to these high-end furniture magazines. And slowly, he started to build a clip file of advertisements and photographs. He learned the ins and outs of couch construction, the proper materials for the frame--
Eric

What they call kiln-dried hardwood.
David Segal

Invisible stitching. Cushion filling.
Eric

There's a firmness but a softness, which is actually not all that easy to achieve.
David Segal

The fabric for the covering--
Eric

The kind of the boucle that they do, which is the fabric that I was keen on.
David Segal

And of course, all important, the springs.
Eric

What's called eight-way hand-tied, I think, which is, they do eight-way hand tying of the coils.
David Segal

I should say, Eric's not this way when he's buying clothes. He's not this way when he's ordering dinner. He's not this way with a lot of things. But when it's something he cares about, he's methodical and he's relentless. But with the sofa, he went further than he ever had before. By the time his search entered its 10th year-- that's more than twice as long as it took scientists at the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb-- Eric was honing in.

He'd started shopping in these swanky boutiques, places that don't even have storefronts, places where someone has to tell you the address and then buzz you in. He had his eyes on the work of a sofa superstar named Jean-Michel Frank. And there was one piece in particular that he decided was the couch of his dreams. It was a $12,000 three-seater of Italian nutwood in a beeswax finish. Eric found the one place in the country where it was for sale.
Eric

A place called Ralph Pucci.
David Segal

So you walked around this place, and did you fall in love with any of the sofas? Did you hear the church music you were looking for?
Eric

Yeah, well, it's interesting. The short answer is, I didn't, which was kind of dismaying. When I saw it in person, I was actually a little underwhelmed.
David Segal

So you ultimately passed on all of the sofas that you came across during your 15- to 18-year search for the perfect sofa.
Eric

Right.
David Segal

Could you describe your current sofa?
Eric

That's just plain mean.
David Segal

Where did you get your current sofa?
Eric

So I got my current sofa for free. It was a donation from a friend that I was helping move out of his apartment. The polyester fill cushions have gotten flattened to the point where if you plop down, if you just kind of collapse into my sofa, you will actually hurt yourself.
David Segal

More than a few times in these past 18 years, Eric and I have tried to figure out what this sofa thing is really about. Perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Eric is single. He's had a fair number of girlfriends. With some he's even shared the story of his never-ending couch adventure. And guess what, they don't seem very amused.
Eric

Yeah. I mean, it kind of drives them crazy.
David Segal

To review. Just after college, he found something he liked, lived with it briefly, and then decided it wasn't good enough and sent it packing. He started pursuing exotic specimens that conformed to a narrower and more unattainable ideal. He subscribed to glossy, photo-rich magazines, which only reinforced his yearning for this unattainable ideal. And then, after years of searching, he finally came face-to-face with that ideal. He found it lacking. Do you see where I'm going here? Often, when I talk to him about his quest, I want to say, wait, are we still talking about a couch?
Eric

Do I hold out for one that really knocks me out or do I just settle for something that is-- that I can live with, but really doesn't knock me out?
David Segal

But does it not worry you that you might live a sofa-less, single life?
Eric

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. This is probably the thing that causes me more concern and dismay and questions as anything in my life. I really, really like being together. And I'm not all that crazy about being alone.
David Segal

One thing that's interesting about the tale of Eric's nonstop sofa safari-- which I've heard him tell more than a few times-- is that it ticks off nearly as many people as it amuses. Some are actually angry when he's done with the story. And I think I know why. Two radically different world views are clashing here, one in which life is all about seeking perfection, and the other in which you make normal compromises and settle for good instead of great. The settlers consider the perfection people to be babies and whiners. The perfection people see the settlers as strangely hostile milquetoasts who've given up, who aren't striving for greatness, who've been cowed into lowering their standards.

Personally, I know that part of me wants to tell Eric, don't yield. Do not surrender. Hold fast. Wait for that transformative moment, even if it means you're alone and drooling on a frat house futon for the rest of your life. And another part of me wants to tell him exactly what a former girlfriend once told him, and I quote, "Just buy a [BLEEP] couch."
Ira Glass

David Segal is a reporter for the Washington Post.

Jamey Rodemeyer, 14-Year-Old Boy, Commits Suicide After Gay Bullying, Parents Carry On Message

2011-09-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

Jamey Rodemeyer, 14-Year-Old Boy, Commits Suicide After Gay Bullying, Parents Carry On Message
The Huffington Post
Dean Praetorius
9/22/11

Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old boy from Williamsville, NY, took his life Sunday after what his parents claim was years of bullying because of struggles with his sexuality.

His parents, Tracy and Tim Rodemeyer, say that Jamey faced bullies for years, though things intensified in middle school, according to NBC 2. Jamey recently became a freshman at Williamsville North High School.

In the wake of their loss, the Rodemeyers hope to carry on a message of anti-bullying and acceptance. "To the kids who are bullying they have to realize that words are very powerful and what you think is just fun and games isn't to some people, and you are destroying a lot of lives," Jamey's father told WIVB.

Tracy Rodemeyer misses her son, but hopes the loss can still be used to teach a message of tolerance. "It took him away from our family way too early and we're just convinced that he had a purpose on this planet and it was to touch as many people as he could," she told NBC 2.

According to NBC, the Rodemeyers had gone to the school about the problem in the past. Jamey even sought counseling to learn to deal with the problem, but it seems it wasn't enough.

While they say their son seemed happy in the days leading up to the tragedy, his "It Gets Better" YouTube posting from May includes details about how intense the bullying was.

Through it all, Jamey remained outwardly optimistic. “That's all you have to do. Just love yourself and you're set. And I promise you, it'll get better,” he said in the video, which you can see in full below.

Gay bullying has been gaining increasing attention in the media, as a number of tragedies has brought the issue into the spotlight. Earlier this month the California State Senate passed "Seth's Law" a measure designed to curb anti-gay bullying in schools.

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or visit stopbullying.gov.

Reporter recounts massacre as new information is revealed by WikiLeaks

2011-09-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Sep 3, 2011
Reporter recounts massacre revealed by WikiLeaks
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

This week, a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks brought renewed attention to a disputed killing of several civilians in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006.

The cable contains a copy of a letter of inquiry by a U.N. investigator outlining allegations that U.S. forces had handcuffed and then "executed" 10 people in the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee. The soldiers then called in an airstrike that destroyed the house, it alleges.

The U.S. military has maintained that nothing improper happened, but to this day has refused to comment in detail about the case.

Beyond the primary question about what happened that day and whether it was an unjustified massacre or a case of collateral damage, the incident has political ramifications. As the AP reported Friday, Iraqi politicians said this week the incident could have an impact on any agreement to allow U.S. forces to stay in the country beyond Dec. 31.

As the AP noted, "Whether U.S. forces in Iraq will continue to have legal immunity from prosecution if they stay is one of the major stumbling blocks in the ongoing negotiations, as Washington will not allow the military to remain without it."

A Pentagon spokesman said this week, "We've already investigated these allegations, and there is no new information."

To learn more, I spoke to journalist Matthew Schofield, who has been covering the incident since he first wrote about while on assignment in Iraq in 2006. He is currently an editorial writer at the Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, but he wrote a news article on the WikiLeaks cable this week.

I know there are competing accounts, so can you explain what do we know -- or think -- happened in this incident in 2006?

What we know happened -- what everyone agrees on -- is that U.S. troops went to a house in Ishaqi, Iraq, in March of 2006. In one official U.S. version, the troops were looking for an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist, or, in another official account, someone who had shot at U.S troops. When they approached the house in the early morning hours, there was a gunfight. Neighbors talked about this. In the U.S. version, in the course of the gunfight, the people in the house were killed, the house was destroyed at the same time, and they were able to detain the person they were looking for. In the account the neighbors told, as well as the report of a U.N. investigation on this, the house was standing when the soldiers went inside and was destroyed sometime later.

The bodies of the dead were found against one wall in one room, all handcuffed in white plastic handcuffs according to neighbors. The coroner we talked to after the incident said that the people who died were killed by gunshots to the upper chest and head. It didn't necessarily look execution-style -- the shots were not all to the same place in the head, or anything like that -- but it looked like they were from fairly close range. His guess was that the bullets were from an M-16. The Iraqi police investigators, who had been trained by U.S. forces, said in their report that these had been execution-style killings by American forces.

Who was killed exactly?

There were five children under the age of five, the youngest being five months old. Then there was a mother, her sister, the grandmother and a visitor -- four women in all. The father, in his 20s, was killed as well.

What about the question of an alleged airstrike on the house?

The house was certainly rubble after the raid -- that's clear. When it collapsed is the question. The neighbors said that after the U.S. troops left, an airstrike was called in. At the time, they said it was helicopters. U.S. forces maintained that it collapsed during the firefight. I couldn't get to the site when I was in Iraq because at that time we couldn't get far out of Baghdad very safely. We relied on a stringer who we had worked with quite a bit in the past. He took a satellite phone and we did phone interviews with the coroner and the police and others.

What has the military said about the incident over the years?

The initial reaction was always that "this can't be true." In June 2006, the U.S. military finally said that nothing untoward had happened in Ishaqi. But there were questions about the military investigation. They weren't on the ground for a particularly long time. Again, we were not there when the investigation took place, but neighbors told us afterwards that investigators were on the scene for a total of 30 to 45 minutes. The military maintained that it had been thorough. Some Iraqi government officials have long maintained anger over the incident.

How did you end up covering the incident?

It was an almost insanely violent period. So we were trying to do some in-depth coverage of what was going on, a sort of day-in-the-life piece, instead of just letting the violence roll. On the day we had settled on this idea, news of the Ishaqi incident was released. We got a press release from the U.S. military that talked about five people who had been killed in collateral damage. So we started looking into it. After our stringer talked to the neighbors, he told us, 'Look, the version I'm getting doesn't jibe with the version you're getting from the military.' He said it's not five people, it's at least 10. After I went to the military with this, they then came back and acknowledged the higher body count was accurate.

What did we learn from the cable just released by WikiLeaks?

One, it shows different sources of information than what I was dealing with. It shows that officialdom was concerned about this. They were not admitting they were concerned when we were on the story back then. They gave much more credence to the story than they had suggested to the press at the time. Behind the scenes, there was a great deal of concern over what exactly had happened there.

The cable outlines pretty much exactly what the worst-case scenario was when we were reporting on it. I didn't really pursue the worse-cast scenario because I didn't believe it was possible. We looked into it and we reported on the allegations at the time, but we were always looking for other explanations, for other ways this could have happened. This cable seems focused on that worst-case scenario, which I found fascinating.

So what happened with the U.N. investigation? It was essentially stymied?

Yes, it died. They sent questions out to the United States, and there was no response. They have said there was frequently no response from the United States on these matters. They sent questions to the Iraqi government, and they said these things also just tended to vanish because Iraq was a mess at the time. The investigator, Philip Alston, who is the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told us this week that they just had nowhere left to go after these nonresponses.

So this incident has really never been addressed by the U.S. military in a comprehensive way?

It has not. The military has always been dismissive of this case. It may well be that it should be dismissed. But there's enough smoke there that it deserves a very thorough investigation. These are very disturbing allegations. The Iraqi cops who investigated this had U.S. training; they were not anti-American. They had respect for the training they had gotten. There has been and continues to be a desire for concrete answers.

Ridiculed, an N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court

2011-09-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

Dan Snyder sues paper that criticized him
Citizen Media Law Project

On November 19, 2010, the Washington City Paper published "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder." The article levied a wide array of complaints about Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins NFL franchise since 1999. The complaints largely concerned his management of the team, as well as his control of several other business ventures.

On November 24, 2010, Washington Redskins General Counsel David Donovan wrote a letter on behalf of Dan Snyder to Atalaya Capital Management, an investment company that, according to the letter, purchased the City Paper out of bankruptcy in 2009. The letter alleges that the City Paper article, and its inclusion of a photograph of Snyder with drawn-in devil horns, goatee, and uni-brow, were anti-Semitic and that the allegations made regarding Snyder and his wife in the article were false and defamatory. The letter also suggests that the statements regarding Snyder may have been published at the direction of Atalaya Capital, which competes with RedZone Capital (an entity which Snyder co-founded).

On December 7, 2010, attorneys for Atalaya Capital responded to Snyder's letter, rejecting the assertion that Atalaya had control over the content of Washington City Paper, disputing the factual allegations made in the letter, and asserting City Paper's First Amendment right to criticize Snyder under Hustler Magazine v. Falwell.

On February 2, 2011, Snyder filed suit in the New York Supreme Court for New York County against Atalaya Capital, its portfolio company Creative Loafing, Inc., and 10 "John Doe" defendants. Snyder alleged that four statements made in the article were defamatory, and sought relief in excess of $2 million

On April 26, 2011, Snyder discontinued his action in New York and filed a second the complaint in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, this time against Creative Loafing, Inc., Washington City Paper, and Dave McKenna, the author of the article.

Using DC's recently enacted anti-SLAPP law, the defendants brought a special motion to dismiss on June 17, 2011. The defendants argue that D.C. Code § 16-5502 protects the statements as they are "an act in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest" and that Snyder will not be "likely to succeed on the merits" of his claims.

According to the Blog of LegalTimes, Snyder filed a memorandum in opposition to the motion to dismiss on August 1, 2011, in which he argues that the anti-SLAPP law in question is in violation of the Home Rule Act, the federal law which delegates some congressional control of the District of Columbia to the DC local government. On August 30, 2011, the District of Columbia intervened in the case for the limited purpose of defending the validity of the anti-SLAPP law.

Oral argument for the motion to dismiss is currently scheduled for October 14, 2011.

Related Links:

John Sharkey, Dan Snyder Gets a Taste of D.C.'s New Anti-SLAPP Law, CMLP Blog, June 17, 2011.

Dan Snyder, Why I am suing Washington City Paper, Washington Post, April 25, 2011.

Michael Schaffer, Bully Pulpit: Why Dan Snyder's Lawsuit Matters, Washington City Paper, Feb. 11, 2011.

Rep. Steve Cohen, Protect Free Speech by Combating SLAPPs, Roll Call, May 23, 2011.

Erik Wemple, Daniel Snyder lawsuit: No settlement in sight, TBD, April 26, 2011.

David Carr, Ridiculed, an N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court, New York Times, Feb. 6, 2011.

Stetson Kennedy, Exposer Of Ku Klux Klan Secrets, Dies At 94

2011-08-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

Stetson Kennedy, Exposer Of Ku Klux Klan Secrets, Dies At 94
By TERRY SPENCER
08/27/11

MIAMI -- Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan six decades ago and exposed its secrets to authorities and the public but was also criticized for possibly exaggerating his exploits, died Saturday. He was 94.

Kennedy died at Baptist Medical Center South near St. Augustine, where he had been receiving hospice care.

In the 1940s, Kennedy used the "Superman" radio show to expose and ridicule the Klan's rituals. In the 1950s he wrote "I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan," which was later renamed "The Klan Unmasked," and "The Jim Crow Guide."

"Exposing their folklore – all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets" was one of the strongest blows delivered to the Klan, said Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press. She was a friend of Kennedy for about 30 years and did her doctoral thesis on his work as a folklorist.

"If they weren't so violent, they would be silly."

Kennedy began his crusades against what he called "homegrown racial terrorists" during World War II after he was deemed unworthy for military service because of a back injury. He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and served as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.

"All my friends were in service and they were being shot at in a big way. They were fighting racism whether they knew it or not," Kennedy said. "At least I could see if I could do something about the racist terrorists in our backyard."

Using evidence salvaged from the Grand Dragon's waste basket, he enabled the Internal Revenue Service to press for collection of an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944 and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan's national corporate charter in 1947.

Kennedy infiltrated the Klan by using the name of a deceased uncle who had been a member as a way to gain trust and membership.

But the Klan did not know that Kennedy was giving its secrets to the outside world, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League and Drew Pearson, a columnist for The Washington Post.

When he learned of plans for the Klan to take action, he would make sure it was broadcast, thwarting them.

"They were afraid to do anything. They knew that somebody was on the inside. They had first-class detectives looking, and I was trying hard not to be caught," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said he always feared exposure and remained scared throughout his life. "Nonstop, to date," mentioning threats, the shooting of his dog and frequent attempts to burn his home...

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

2011-08-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
By WARREN E. BUFFETT
New York Times
August 14, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

Rick Perry under fire over veiled Bernanke threat

2011-08-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

"'To accuse Bernanke of being a traitor to his country -- treason is a crime punishable by death -- to say you are going to treat him pretty ugly if he was down in Texas, this was unpresidential and unnecessary,' said Rove."

When Karl Rove says a fellow Republican has gone too far, it's time to worry. But here's my question. How does someone like Rick Perry, who talks about having Texas secede from the US, manage to also claim to be a patriotic American?

Perry under fire over veiled Bernanke threat
(AFP)
August 16, 2011

WASHINGTON — Republican White House hopeful and Texas Governor Rick Perry faced disbelieving and angry reactions Tuesday to remarks seen as threats of implied violence against Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke.

At a campaign stop in the heartland state of Iowa on Monday, Perry said he would consider any attempt to boost the US economy before the November 2012 elections as "almost treasonous" and invoked the specter of mob justice.

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa -- but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas," Perry told supporters.

"I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous -- or treasonous, in my opinion," Perry told supporters at a backyard get-together, with US President Barack Obama not far away on a campaign-style swing through Iowa.

The eyebrow-raising comments, visible in a video that was widely available on the Internet Tuesday, drew fire even from Republicans, though most of his rivals for the party's presidential nomination initially kept quiet.

Tony Fratto -- a former spokesman for Republican President George W. Bush, who named Bernanke to the Fed chief post -- took to Twitter to call them "inappropriate and unpresidential."

Bush political guru Karl Rove warned on Fox News Business television that Perry's Bernanke comments sounded like he was going to "take him out behind the barn and whup him" and warned the candidate "did not help his cause."

"To accuse Bernanke of being a traitor to his country -- treason is a crime punishable by death -- to say you are going to treat him pretty ugly if he was down in Texas, this was unpresidential and unnecessary," said Rove.

Perry may have stoked worries among some voters who could be wondering "is he going to be too much of a cowboy?"

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Melanie Rousell dismissed Perry's unusual broadside at Bernanke as "inflammatory schoolboy taunts" that left other Republican candidates "looking positively thoughtful."

She also invoked Perry's past controversial remarks suggesting Texas might secede, saying he "would have needed a passport to visit Iowa if he had his way."...

Maddow discusses Rick Perry's connections with a Christian conspiracy group

2011-08-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Aug 11, 2011 07:12 ET
Maddow discusses Rick Perry's connections with a Christian conspiracy group
A number of the Texas governor's prayer rally pastors are plotting world domination

On Wednesday night Rachel Maddow discussed Texas Gov. Rick Perry's prayer event, The Response, which took place last weekend. The event "raised eyebrows," she noted, for involving pastors known for their extreme conservative views. A number of the pastors have something more in common explained Maddow:

"Many of them are part of a little-known, very specific religious and political movement... The New Apostolic Reformation."

According to a cover story in the Texas Observer this month, pastors in the movement believe themselves to be modern day prophets or apostles, directly linked to God. Their aim, explained the article author Forrest Wilder, is "to infiltrate government, and Rick Perry might be their man."

The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they're intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an 'army of God' to commandeer civilian government.

Just days before Perry is expected to announce his presidential run, Maddow expressed concern that the Texas governor was able to hold a very public prayer event, largely organized by members of this group, without the Beltway media exposing who they really are...

Why Mitt Romney believed it was wrong to force anti-abortion beliefs on others

2011-08-10T09:50:00.001-07:00

Mitt Romney and his young relative Ann Keenan in her high school yearbook picture.

Aug 8, 2011
The abortion that Mitt doesn't talk about anymore
His young relative died tragically in an illegal abortion in 1963: Her untold story -- and what it means for Romney
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

In a 1994 Senate debate with Ted Kennedy, Mitt Romney revealed a startling chapter from his past: A close relative had died many years earlier in a botched illegal abortion, shaping Romney's stance in favor of safe and legal access to abortion for all women. But in the many years since that revelation, even as Romney flipped his position and became an ardent opponent of legal abortion, the details of his young relative's story, including even her name, have never been reported.

The relative he was referring to back in '94, Salon has learned, was a Detroit woman named Ann Keenan. She was the sister of Romney's brother-in-law and died at the age of 21 in 1963, a full decade before Roe v. Wade. While much of what happened remains murky, an investigation by Salon has uncovered never-reported details about her life and death, including: how she died (an infection); that her grief-stricken parents asked for memorial donations to be made to Planned Parenthood; and that the family apparently wanted to keep the death quiet because Romney's politically ambitious father, George, was then governor of Michigan.

With access to abortion increasingly restricted in many states and the possibility that a Republican victory in 2012 -- potentially by Romney -- will tilt the balance of the Supreme Court against Roe v. Wade, Romney's account of how a back-alley abortion touched his own family is more relevant than ever. The episode is a window into an era when obtaining an abortion meant the real risk of serious injury or death. It also represents a key part of Romney's political journey on the issue of abortion, which has more than any other tarred him as a flip-flopper.

The outlines of the story first became public when Romney -- unprompted -- brought it up in that 1994 debate with Kennedy, whom he was trying to unseat. At the time, Romney, who was making his first bid for office, was struggling to prove his pro-choice bona fides to liberal Massachusetts voters. In the debate, he insisted that he separated his personal beliefs -- opposition to abortion -- from his policy position that abortion "should be safe and legal in this country." Accused by Kennedy of being "multiple-choice," Romney angrily fired back:

"On the idea of 'multiple-choice,' I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter...

This is new: tundra fires in the Arctic

2011-07-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

28 July 2011
Huge Arctic fire hints at new climate cue
By Richard Black
BBC News

An exceptional wildfire in northern Alaska in 2007 put as much carbon into the air as the entire Arctic tundra absorbs in a year, scientists say.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned across more than 1,000 sq km (400 sq miles), doubling the extent of Alaskan tundra visited by fire since 1950.

With the Arctic warming fast, the team suggests in the journal Nature that fires could become more common.

If that happens, it could create a new climate feedback, they say.

Fires in the tundra are uncommon because the ground is covered in snow and ice for large periods of the year.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Melting can lead to other huge changes... releasing carbon that's been frozen since the Pleistocene”

Michelle Mack University of Florida

Temperatures are low even in summer, and the ground can also remain wet after the ice has melted.

But 2007 saw unusually warm and dry conditions across much of the Arctic - resulting, among other things, in spectacularly fast melting of Arctic sea ice.

This created conditions more conducive to fire, and when lightning struck the tundra in July, the Anaktuvuk River fire ignited.

"Most tundra fires have been very small - this was an order of magnitude larger than the historical size," said Michelle Mack from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led the research team on the Nature paper and is currently conducting further field studies in Alaska.

"In 2007, we had a hot, dry summer, there was no rain for a long period of time.

"So the tundra must have been highly flammable, with just the right conditions for fire to spread until the snow in October finally stopped it."...

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again

2011-07-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again
By Barry Malone
EL ADOW, Kenya
Jul 26, 2011

(Reuters) - A besuited U.N. official wearing well-buffed shoes crouches in the orange dust near a cluster of huts in northern Kenyan, and, as his tie wafts in the breeze, raises an iPad and carefully films the rotting carcass of a cow.

Since drought gripped the Horn of Africa, and especially since famine was declared in parts of Somalia, the international aid industry has swept in and out of refugee camps and remote hamlets in branded planes and snaking lines of white 4X4s.

This humanitarian, diplomatic and media circus is necessary every time people go hungry in Africa, analysts say, because governments -- both African and foreign -- rarely respond early enough to looming catastrophes.

Combine that with an often simplistic explanation of the causes of famine, and a growing band of aid critics say parts of Africa are doomed to a never-ending cycle of ignored early warnings, media appeals and emergency U.N. feeding -- rather than a transition to lasting self-sufficiency.

"Although humanitarian agencies are gearing themselves up to mount a response, it is far too late to address anything but the worst symptoms," Simon Levine, an analyst at the Overseas Development Institute think-tank, wrote on its website.

"Measures that could have kept animals alive -- and providing milk, and income to buy food -- would have been much cheaper than feeding malnourished children, but the time for those passed with very little investment," Levine said.

The drought gripping the region straddling Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is the worst for 60 years, some aid groups say, and is affecting more than 12 million people. In the worst-hit area in Somalia, 3.7 million people are at risk of starvation.

"It seems once again that slow onset disasters don't get attention until they become critical," said a senior humanitarian adviser at a U.N agency in the region

"One can understand this with rapid onset disasters as they come out of the blue, but drought ... we've seen it before and we will again," said the official, who declined to be named.

The man filming the dead cow with an iPad was just one in a series of incongruous episodes when the director of the U.N. food agency, Josette Sheeran, flew for a day-trip to a small village and the world's biggest refugee camp in Dadaab to see how her organization is delivering emergency food.

Sheeran posed awkwardly next to the dead carcasses, an uneasy almost-smile on her lips as her staff snapped away with cameras and phones, watched by bemused locals.

Officials then had stilted conversations with refugees used to answering questions from Western aid workers who come with sometimes sympathetic nods, always promising that they can make things better.

"While international NGOs can be very active around humanitarian response many of them don't have a long-term development strategy for these areas," Andrew Catley, an expert on the Horn of Africa at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, told Reuters.

THORNY POLITICS

Reporters accompanied Sheeran, knowing they might need the iconic, loathed-by-Africans footage of the most emaciated babies they could find to get air time, or chance upon the "haunted" mother with the most dead children.

For many analysts, however, the story being told in the Horn of Africa by the humanitarian and media caravan is simplistic and misleading.

There is clearly a drought, they say, but the reason tens of thousands of people are leaving their homes in search of food is also because a festering insurgency in Somalia -- along with the forced recruitment of youths -- is making things worse.

Much of southern and central Somalia is controlled by al Shabaab Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda who imposed a ban on food aid in 2010. They have since lifted the ban but maintained the embargo on the WFP, calling it a "spy agency."

"This is not political," Sheeran briefed frontline aid workers in northern Kenya, saying that responding to the crisis was all that mattered now. "It's about saving lives."

Al Shabaab accused the United Nations last week of exaggerating the severity of the drought and said it would not allow agencies with "hidden agendas" to return.

Part of the problem, analysts say, is that much of the funding for WFP, and some other aid agencies, comes from the United States, opening them to charges of skewed objectives.

"What they are really interested in is security in Somalia. Since 9/11 a development for security agenda has come in with big donors like USAID and (Britain's) DFID," said a former senior aid worker in the Horn of Africa.

"Humanitarian issues and real development have basically played second fiddle to their security agendas," he said.

The State Department website says that although USAID is independent, it "receives general direction and overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary."

According to WFP's website, the United States has contributed 45 percent of its government funding since the start of 2007 -- or $7.3 billion out of $16.3 billion.

Analysts say that, without tackling the political complications that influence the distribution of food aid, and even the use of the word "famine," droughts will remain difficult both to prevent and to manage.

"Whilst it is tempting to say that the causes of the crisis are natural causes, it's much more difficult to look at the man-made causes of the crisis such as governance, conflict and economic trends," Catley said.

Several senior aid officials spoken to by Reuters did not want to be named when criticizing the aid system for fear of losing their jobs or being banned entry by African governments, but said the industry desperately needed an overhaul.

"Some of these organizations have been in these regions for 20/25 years and they're doing the same things today that they were doing 25 years ago," one said.

"If you were in any other sector -- and you had such a terrible impact -- you'd be out of business."

(Editing by David Clarke)

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda

2011-07-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

Michael Takiff says threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral
Jul 22, 2011
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff
Salon.com

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Jul 22, 2011 07:45 ET
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
AP
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, center, flanked by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, left, and House Speaker John Boehner, right

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?

Shonda what?

* * *

My father used to tell us a morality tale. Not long after the events of November 22 and 24, 1963, our rabbi attended an interfaith meeting of clergymen from our midsize New Jersey town. He later reported to his congregation a conversation he’d had at the gathering. “The Protestant minister,” Dad would say, “said to the rabbi, ‘I see one of your people got Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Jack Ruby was Jewish, you know. [Right, Dad, I know from the other 18 times you’ve told me the story.] And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, and I see one of yours got the president.’”

It was an article of faith among American Jews of my parents’ generation -- people who came of age in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, when the best country clubs and colleges and suburbs and law firms still remained unpolluted by the Hebrew menace -- that the bad example of any Jew (e.g., Jack Ruby, né Rubenstein) casts disgrace on every Jew, even though no one generalizes about Christians on the basis of a single bad apple (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald). (Or even a string of bad apples: “Man, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson ... all the way to Clinton and Bush and Obama. Those dirty Christian bastards control the government!”) Our shtetl-minded insecurity survives today -- if not among all of us, if not as centrally in our lives -- when anti-Semitism, in the West, anyway, is but a bad memory. (Right, Mel Gibson, Oliver Stone, Julian Assange, Helen Thomas, John Galliano, and Charlie Sheen?)

When a Jew is publicly bad -- especially publicly really bad -- large numbers of the rest of us Jews cringe. That Jew becomes a shonda fur die goyim -- a disgrace for the non-Jews, an example for the gentiles to latch onto as evidence that every one of us is out to control their banks, run their newspapers, and make matzoh from the blood of their children. Think of the long list of Jewish financial miscreants of the past 25 years -- Ivan Boesky, Mike Milken, Bernie Madoff, the gonifs at Goldman Sachs. Let’s see, rich Jewish financiers screwing millions of ordinary people -- gee, that doesn’t play into any pernicious stereotypes about Jews, does it?

It’s gotten to the point that when I read about a swindler who is not one of us I’m ecstatic. A while ago the New York Times reported on the trial of an allegedly crooked defense contractor named Brooks: “A goy!” I said after reading the first paragraph. “Thank goodness. Keep reading.” I did, drooling with schadenfreude. Oh, this was a juicy one: According to the charges, he and another employee pulled down $190 million via stock fraud. To top it off, his company, which makes body armor for our troops in Afghanistan, allegedly paid out more than $6 million to cover his personal expenses, including plastic surgery for his wife and pornographic videos for his son.

But then came one last example of his obscene conspicuous consumption. The guy spent millions -- hiring 50 Cent and Aerosmith as entertainment -- on his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Bat mitzvah? So Brooks isn’t Brooks at all -- he’s Brodsky or Bernstein or Bergman or Buxbaum, whose grandfather changed his name years ago so he could be one of the goys. Such a shonda!

And the neocons. Oy, the neocons. Do so many of these momzers, so keen on sending other parents’ children off to war, have to be tribe members? Ken Adelman, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Elliot Abrams, Scooter Libby, and the Podhoretzes...

In other words, Ivan Boesky, you should know better. In other words, William Kristol, reread the list of sins -- the al chaits -- we reel off on Yom Kippur. In other words, Eric Cantor, didn’t you learn anything from your upbringing? Were you out on your shul’s front steps enjoying a smoke when your rabbi sermonized about the Jewish obligation to lead an honorable life?

Evidently you didn’t learn, because if you had, you’d share my belief that just as Jews should not stage multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, so they should not threaten to bring about world economic calamity for no better reason than to curry favor among a bunch of mouth-breathing fanatics who don’t know a principle of economics from a pulled-pork sandwich. You’d understand that a man who counts himself among the People of the Book, a people that has won Nobel Prizes in a ratio as much as a hundred times its share of the world’s population, should not dismiss the learned opinions of credentialed economists who warn of dire consequences should Congress not do its duty and protect the full faith and credit of the American dollar. You’d know, without being told, that pointing a gun at working people everywhere and threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral...

Fox News Bias Exposed By Leaked Memos

2011-07-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

Fox News Bias Exposed By Leaked Memos
TheYoungTurks
Uploaded Dec 10, 2010

Cenk Uygur (host of The Young Turks) discusses leaked memos from Fox News that expose a clear right wing conservative agenda.

You and I know that Fox News is not fair and balanced, they do conservative programming.

Propaganda. That's exactly what Fox News Channel does. And this is yet another case of overwhelming evidence of that.

The Perils of Polar Bears’ Longer Swims

2011-07-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

July 20, 2011
The Perils of Polar Bears’ Longer Swims
By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times

In arguments over the impact of climate change, some of the images commonly associated with those clashes have attracted skeptical critiques, perhaps none more so than those of polar bears forced to swim longer distances because their sea ice habitat is melting. Some skeptics point out that polar bears are born swimmers and that the worries of environmentalists are therefore overdone.

Now comes a new study from researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the World Wildlife Fund indicating, after tracking a small sample of bears wearing radio collars, that the swims have indeed grown longer over the last six years. Five of the 11 mothers swimming with cubs lost the cubs along the way, and one bear even swam 427 miles to reach sea ice...

Bonuses for Billionaires

2011-07-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

Bonuses for Billionaires
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
July 20, 2011

The first few times I heard House Republicans talk about our budget mehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifss, I worried that they had plunged off the deep end. But as I kept on listening, a buzzer went off in my mind, and I came to understand how much sense the Tea Party caucus makes.
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Why would we impose “job-crushing taxes” on wealthy Americans just to pay for luxuries like federal prisons? Why end the “carried interest” tax loophole for financiers, just to pay for unemployment benefits — especially when those same selfless tycoons are buying yachts and thus creating jobs for all the rest of us?

Hmmm. The truth is that House Republicans don’t actually go far enough. They should follow the logic of their more visionary members with steps like these:

BONUSES FOR BILLIONAIRES Republicans won’t extend unemployment benefits, even in the worst downturn in 70 years, because that makes people lazy about finding jobs. They’re right: We should be creating incentives for Americans to rise up the food chain by sending hefty checks to every new billionaire. This could be paid for with a tax surcharge on regular working folks. It’s the least we can do.

Likewise, the government should take sterner measures against the persistent jobless. Don’t just let their unemployment benefits expire. Take their homes!

Oh, never mind! Silly me! The banks are already doing that.

LET JOBS TRICKLE DOWN Leftist pundits say that House Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. That’s unfair! Granted, the Republican-sponsored Cut, Cap and Balance Act would eliminate 700,000 jobs in just its first year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, but those analysts are no doubt liberals. America’s richest 400 people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans, and the affluent would feel renewed confidence if the Republican plan passed. We’d see a hiring bonanza. Each of those wealthy people might hire an extra pool attendant. That’s 400 jobs right there!

Cut, Cap and Balance would go even further than the Ryan budget plan in starving the beast of government. Sure, that’ll mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, but so what? Who needs food safety? How do we know we really need air traffic control unless we try a day without it?

ROOT OUT SOCIALISM Republicans have been working to end Medicare as we know it but need to examine other reckless entitlements, such as our socialized education system, in which public schools fritter resources on classes like economics and foreign languages. As a former Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, is said to have declared when she opposed the teaching of foreign languages: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

For that matter, who needs socialized police and fire services? We could slash job-crushing taxes at the local level and simply let the free market take over:

“9-1-1, may I help you?” “Yes, help! My house is burning down!” “Very good, sir. I can offer you one fire engine for $5,995, or two for just $10,000.” “Help! My family’s inside. Send three fire engines! Just hurry!” “Yes, sir. Let me just run your credit card first. And if you require the fire trucks immediately, there’s a 50 percent ‘rush’ surcharge.”

CHILL OUT ABOUT THE DEBT CEILING House Republicans like Michele Bachmann are right: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, some solution will turn up. As Representative Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia, observes: “In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow.”

We got through the Great Depression, didn’t we? It looked pretty hopeless in 1929, but in just a dozen years World War II bailed us out with an economic stimulus. Something like that’ll come along for us, too. Ya gotta have faith.

CONSIDER ASSET SALES While Democrats are harrumphing about “default,” Republicans have sagely noted that there are alternatives in front of our noses. For example, why raise taxes on hard-pressed managers of hedge funds when the government can sell assets?

Fort Knox alone has 4,600 tons of gold, which I figure is worth around $235 billion. That’s enough to pay our military budget for four months! And selling Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon would buy us time as well.

RENT OUT CONGRESS If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we could also auction members of Congress for day jobs: Are you a financier who wants someone to flip burgers (steaks?) at your child’s birthday party? Why, here’s Eric Cantor! Many members of Congress already work on behalf of tycoons, and this way the revenue would flow to the Treasury.

Finally, if we risk default, let’s rent out the Capitol for weddings to raise money for the public good. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something positive emerge from the House?

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench:The Supreme Court justice broke the law by not disclosing his wife's $700K

2011-06-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench
The Supreme Court justice broke the law by not disclosing his wife's $700K think-tank payday. Paul Campos on Clarence Thomas' "preposterous" defense and why he likely won't be punished.
March 3, 2011

The criminal-law scholar George Fletcher once quipped that the maxim "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is one of the few fundamental principles of law that most people actually know. As harsh as this principle may sometimes be when applied to ordinary citizens, applying it to justices of the Supreme Court seems only reasonable.

Thus it's difficult to feel sympathy for Clarence Thomas, as he finds himself embroiled in a controversy over his failure to reveal the sources of his wife's non-investment income (or indeed that she even had any such income). The 1978 Ethics in Government Act requires all federal judges to fill out annual financial-disclosure forms. The relevant question on the disclosure form isn't complicated: Even if Justice Thomas wasn't a lawyer, he shouldn't have needed to hire one to explain to him that the box marked NONE next to the phrase "Spouse's Non-Investment Income" should only be checked if his spouse had no non-investment income.

In fact Ginni Thomas was paid nearly $700,000 by the Heritage Foundation, a "conservative think tank," between 2003 and 2007, as well as an undisclosed amount by another lobbying group in 2009. Justice Thomas' false statements regarding his wife's income certainly constitute a misdemeanor, and quite probably a felony, under federal law. (They would be felonies if he were prosecuted under 18. U.S.C. 1001, which criminalizes knowingly making false statements of material fact to a federal agency. This is the law Martha Stewart was convicted of breaking by lying to investigators.)

Thomas' defense is that he didn't knowingly violate the law, because he " misunderstood" the filing requirements. This is preposterous on its face. Bill Clinton was impeached—and subsequently disbarred—for defending his false statements about his affair with Monica Lewinsky with an excuse that wasn't as incredible as the one Thomas is now employing...

Michele Bachmann: counseling clinic received nearly $30,000, family farm received some $260,000 in subsidies.

2011-06-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

Michele Bachmann denies benefiting from government aid
By Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times
June 26, 2011

With a new Iowa poll putting her in a dead heat with the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rep. Michele Bachmann deflected allegations that she and her family had benefited from government assistance programs and said that hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family farm and a counseling clinic went instead to her employees and her in-laws.

"My husband and I did not get the money," she said, appearing on Sunday news talk shows as she prepared to officially open her campaign in her original hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.

The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and "tea party" favorite, portrayed herself as a fiscal conservative while also benefiting from government funds and federal farm subsidies. An examination of her record and finances showed that a counseling clinic run by her husband received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, with part of the money coming from the federal government. And a family farm in Wisconsin, where she is listed as a partner, received some $260,000 in federal subsidies.

Bachmann and her staff declined to talk to about the government assistance for the L.A. Times article. But asked about the issue on "Fox News Sunday," she insisted that she and her husband had not benefited at the expense of federal and state taxpayers.

"First of all," she said, "the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees. The clinic did not get the money. And my husband and I did not get the money either. That's mental health training money that went to employees."

As for the farm, she said it belonged to her father-in-law. "It's not my husband and my farm," Bachmann said. "And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm."

As the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, however, in financial disclosure forms, Bachmann reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum, between 2006 and 2009.

Bachmann also repeated her stance that she was opposed to federal earmarks that sponsored pet projects for politicians back home and said she believed "the states have to build roads and bridges," not the federal government. But asked whether that was an inconsistency given that her family appeared to be benefiting from government aid, she said the clinic money was spent to train employees when they otherwise would have been there working...

Corporations line up to block rules that would force companies to disclose comparison data.

2011-06-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Business group: Public companies shouldn’t have to compare CEO and worker pay
By Peter Whoriskey
June 24, 2011

Here’s one financial figure some big U.S. companies would rather keep secret: how much more their chief executive makes than the typical worker.

Now a group backed by 81 major companies — including McDonald’s, Lowe’s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills — is lobbying against new rules that would force disclosure of that comparison.

The lobbying effort began more than a year ago. It involved some of the biggest names in corporate America and meetings with members of both parties on the House Financial Services Committee and Senate banking committee.

The companies and their Republican allies in Congress call comparisons between the chief and everyone else in the company “useless.”

But some Democrats and investors say the information should be issued to highlight the growing income disparity in the United States. They add that opponents of disclosure merely want to hide the outrageous scale of executive pay packages.

On Wednesday, a House committee approved a bill that would repeal the disclosure requirement.

Disclosing such comparisons “can mislead or confuse investors,” said Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (R-N.Y.), who filed the bill to repeal the disclosure. “It creates heat but sheds no light.”

She also said the calculation of the ratio would be a burden for companies, especially those with global operations.

The committee vote was largely along partisan lines: Twenty-nine Republicans and four Democrats supported repeal; 21 Democrats opposed it.

“The real reason House Republicans want to keep the typical worker’s pay secret is that it may embarrass some companies to reveal that they pay their CEO in the range of 400 times what they pay their typical worker,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)...

Republicans roll eyes at Obama's (accurate) assertion that taxes were higher under Reagan

2011-06-16T12:16:00.000-07:00

Republicans roll eyes at Obama's (accurate) assertion that taxes were higher under Reagan
by Jed Lewison
Daily Kos
Jun 02, 2011

First, the facts (.xls):

During Ronald Reagan's presidency, total federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP averaged 18.2%, reaching a low point of 17.3% in 1984.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

During Barack Obama's presidency, total federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has averaged 14.9% and is projected to drop to 14.4% in 2011.

Second, the punchline:

GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. The White House and Republicans are trying to reach a deal on spending cuts that could allow the $14.3 debt ceiling to be raised.

“(The President) made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (former President Ronald) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”

The fact is, one of our biggest fiscal challenges is that taxes are too low, yet not only do these guys refuse to even consider raising them, they never get tired of denying the plain reality that we have historically low taxes. Perhaps if they acknowledged that simple fact, then they'd have to admit that taxes aren't the problem: underinvestment is.

Activists cry foul over FBI probe

2011-06-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

Activists cry foul over FBI probe
By Peter Wallsten
Washington Post
June 13, 2011
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
CHICAGO — FBI agents took box after box of address books, family calendars, artwork and personal letters in their 10-hour raid in September of the century-old house shared by Stephanie Weiner and her husband.

The agents seemed keenly interested in Weiner’s home-based business, the Revolutionary Lemonade Stand, which sells silkscreened infant bodysuits and other clothes with socialist slogans, phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries.”

Anti-war activist Tom Burke meets Barack Obama in 2004 at Burke's Chicago-area union hall as Obama was running for U.S. Senate. Burke is one of 23 prominent anti-war activists to be subpoenaed as part of an ongoing FBI terrorism probe.

The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.

The probe — involving subpoenas to 23 people and raids of seven homes last fall — has triggered a high-powered protest against the Department of Justice and, in the process, could create some political discomfort for President Obama with his union supporters as he gears up for his reelection campaign.

The apparent targets are concentrated in the Midwest, including Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise...

1% of your neighbors are psychopaths; so are 4% of business leaders

2011-05-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

The Psychopath Test
This American Life
05.27.2011

Recently we heard about this test that could determine if someone was a psychopath. So, naturally, our staff decided to take it. This week we hear the results. Plus Jon Ronson asks the question: is this man a psychopath?

Facebook hires 2 former Bush aides as lobbyists, stepping up efforts to friend Washington

2011-05-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

Facebook hires 2 former Bush aides as lobbyists, stepping up efforts to friend Washington
By Associated Press
May 26, 2011

NEW YORK — Facebook said Thursday that it hired two aides of former President George W. Bush as lobbyists. The world’s largest online social network is stepping up efforts to friend Washington as it grows.

Facebook hired Joel Kaplan as vice president of U.S. public policy in a newly created position. Kaplan will oversee the company’s public policy strategy and interactions with federal and state policymakers. He was previously deputy chief of staff in the Bush White House.

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The other hire, Myriah Jordan, will be Facebook’s policy manager, focusing on congressional relations. Jordan most recently served as general counsel to Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. She also worked in the Bush White House in the office of the Chief of Staff.

Facebook now has four registered lobbyists. The new Republican hires join Democrats Tim Sparapani and Adam Conner. Facebook has 12 staffers in its Washington office, including administrative support.

“At Facebook, we’re committed to explaining how our service works; the important actions we take to protect the more than 500 million people who use our service; and the value of innovation to our economy,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. “This work occurs daily in Washington, at the state level, and with policymakers around the world.”

The company spent $230,000 lobbying in the first quarter, according to a recent filing with the House clerk’s office...

O'bama visits Irish village of his ancestor

2011-05-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Obama in Europe: tending to old friends, new global problems and ancestral roots in Ireland
By Associated Press
May 21, 2011

...A highlight of Obama’s opening stop in Ireland will be a feel-good pilgrimage to the hamlet of Moneygall, where America’s first black president will explore his Irish — yes, Irish — roots, and most likely raise a pint.

It turns out that Falmouth Kearney, who immigrated to the United States in 1850 at the age of 19, is the great great great grandfather of Obama on his white, Kansas-born mother’s side. Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, will connect in Moneygall with distant relatives from the Irish branch of his family tree.

Michael Collins, the Irish ambassador to the United States, says the president’s visit will be “a golden moment” for a country that’s been on the economic ropes after its boom time. The visit is sure to play well at home for Obama — make that O’bama — as he heads into re-election season after being pushed to great lengths simply to prove he was born on U.S. soil...

England and Ireland are friends; are Israelis and Palestinians next?

2011-05-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Queen leaves on high as Irish crowds finally appear
By Conor Humphries
May 20, 2011

CORK, Ireland (Reuters) - Large crowds cheered Queen Elizabeth for the first time on her historic visit to Ireland on Friday, as police relaxed security for the final day of a bridge-building mission widely seen as a success.

After an arrival marred by bomb scares and a riot by people opposed to Britain's continuing control of Northern Ireland, police appeared to ease security to allow thousands of people within yards of the monarch for the first time.

She responded with an unscheduled walkabout to shake hands with her well-wishers in the center of Cork, Ireland's second city. She later boarded the royal plane past an honor guard.

"This will show the world that the past is the past," said Pamela Hyland, 41, who brought her 9-year-old child to see the queen. "It has taken us decades to achieve peace and this is the icing on the cake."

Organizers slowly breathed a sigh of relief that the four-day trip, the first by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland since independence from London in 1921 and a diplomatic high-wire act, had gone off without a hitch.

Daring gestures included the queen laying a wreath to those who died fighting the British crown and visiting the scene of a massacre of 14 people by British forces. In a speech to the nation, she expressed sympathy to those who suffered during hundreds of years of conflict between the two neighbors.

"It has been a stunning success," said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. "We knew what was going to happen in advance, but it's not until you see it that you realize the power of the symbolism."

"It got to people in a way that probably surprised them."

Several dozen nationalists protested a few hundred yards from the queen, but there was no disorder in Cork, known as the rebel county for its resistance to the partition of Ireland during a civil war that followed independence from Britain...

Iowa conservative group hosting potential GOP candidates accepted $3 million in federal grants

2011-05-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Iowa conservative group hosting potential GOP candidates accepted $3 million in federal grants
By Associated Press
May 13, 2011

IOWA CITY, Iowa — A conservative group that has brought a string of potential presidential candidates to Iowa to lecture about the need to reduce government spending owes some of its past success to generous federal grants, which it has since rejected amid charges of hypocrisy.

The Family Leader has organized multicity forums for Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Sen. Rick Santorum. Each has called for reining in federal spending and talked about family values.

The same group received more than half of its funding from federal grants over a five-year period when it operated under a different structure as The Iowa Family Policy Center. The group was among those that benefited from former President George Bush’s faith-based initiative, which made it easier for social and religious organizations involved in community work to win federal funding.

The organization defends taking the grants, the bulk of which helped provide marriage mentoring for couples, but decided last year to turn down the final $550,000 in grant money and operate free of government involvement. In all, the group had accepted more than $3 million in federal grants since 2004...

Hypocrisy among religious conservatives doesn't happen only in America--Osama Bin Laden's compound reveals stash of porn

2011-05-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

May 13, 2011
Porn found in Bin Laden compound
By Tracy Clark-Flory
AP

...A porn stash was found in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, according to unnamed U.S. officials. Reuters reports that the smutty library "consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive."

Now, we don't know who was watching the porn. We don't know what particular genres or titles were favored...All we know is that someone in Bin Laden's compound was indulging in X-rated entertainment of some sort. A religious extremist turning out to be a total hypocrite -- particularly when it comes to sex? Why I never!...

Donald Trump says everyone is as much of a racist as he is

2011-05-04T09:42:00.000-07:00

Donald Trump Cancels on Letterman Over Racism Allegation
5/2/2011
by THR staff

...Trump wrote Letterman a personal note, stating he was "disappointed to hear the statements you made about me last night on your show that I was a 'racist,’" according to the New York Post. "In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth and there is nobody who is less of a racist than Donald Trump," Trump went on.

Donald Trump's racial discrimination problem

2011-04-30T16:21:00.001-07:00

Apr 28, 2011
Donald Trump's racial discrimination problem
In the 1970s, he was sued by the feds for not renting to African-Americans
By Justin Elliott

In an episode early in Donald Trump's career, his New York real estate company was sued by the federal government for discriminating against potential black renters. After a lengthy legal battle, it ultimately agreed to wide-ranging steps to offer rentals to nonwhites.

The little-remembered case provides crucial context for the current discussion centering on Trump and race. The celebrity businessman made news last month when he declared, "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

He has recently come under fire for attacks on President Obama that critics have described as racially tinged. CBS anchor Bob Schieffer, for example, said Wednesday there is "an ugly strain of racism" in Trump's recent (baseless) accusations that President Obama should not have been admitted to Columbia. Also yesterday, Trump told a black reporter, unprompted, "Look I know you are a big Obama fan."

The discrimination case began in the earliest days of Trump's career, when he was still in his 20s.

Fred Trump, Donald's father, was, unlike his son, a self-made man. He made his fortune by building thousands of units of middle-class housing in Brooklyn and Queens. But in the early 1970s, Donald was made president of the family company.

One of Donald's first challenges came in October 1973, when the Justice Department hit the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act. The Times reported:

... the Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals "because of race and color." It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.

The journalist Gwenda Blair reported in her 2005 Trump biography that while Fred Trump had sought to combat previous discrimination allegations through "quiet diplomacy," Donald decided to go on the offensive. He hired his friend Roy Cohn, the celebrity lawyer and former Joseph McCarthy aide, to countersue the government for making baseless charges against the company. They sought a staggering $100 million in damages.

A few months after the government filed the suit, Trump gave a combative press conference at the New York Hilton in which he went after the Justice Department for being too friendly to welfare recipients. He "accused the Justice Department of singling out his corporation because it was a large one and because the Government was trying to force it to rent to welfare recipients," the Times reported. Trump added that if welfare recipients were allowed into his apartments in certain middle-class outer-borough neighborhoods, there would be a "massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants, but communities as a whole."

A federal judge threw out Trump's countersuit a month later, calling it a waste of "time and paper."

Writes Blair in her book:

Donald testified repeatedly that he had nothing to do with renting apartments, although in an application for a broker's license filed at the same time he said that he was in charge of all rentals...

McCain's Birth Abroad Stirs Legal Debate

2011-04-28T14:00:00.001-07:00

McCain's Birth Abroad Stirs Legal Debate
His Eligibility for Presidency Is Questioned
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post
May 2, 2008

The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.

That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.

Article II of the Constitution states that "no person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of president." The problem is that the Founding Fathers never defined exactly what they meant by "natural born citizen," and the matter has never been fully tested in court. At least three pending cases are challenging McCain's right to be sworn in as president.

Jurists on both sides of the political divide, consulted by the McCain campaign, insist that the issue is clear-cut. They argue that McCain is a natural-born citizen because the United States held sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone at the time of his birth, on Aug. 29, 1936; because he was born on a U.S. military base; and because his parents were U.S. citizens.

But Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the "natural born" issue in detail, said the question is "not so simple." While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.
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"The Constitution is ambiguous," Duggin said. "The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution."

Senators sympathetic to McCain's position, including Democrats Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), dropped an earlier attempt to quell the eligibility controversy with legislation. McCaskill acknowledged in an interview that there is "no way" to completely resolve the question short of a constitutional amendment, a cumbersome process which could not be concluded before November.

She described the nonbinding resolution, which she sponsored, as "the quickest, clearest and most efficient" way for the Senate to send a message to the courts that McCain has the right to be president.

One person who disagrees with that premise is New Hampshire resident Fred Hollander, who has filed a suit in U.S. District Court claiming that the Republican candidate is "not a natural born citizen." In an attempt to prove his argument, the 49-year-old computer programmer filed a subpoena last month seeking McCain's birth certificate.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees citizenship services, declined to hand over copies of the document, saying the subpoena was improperly served.

In his autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain writes that he was born "in the Canal Zone" at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Coco Solo, which was under the command of his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr....

Priorities in the Land of the Free

2011-04-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

Apr 19, 2011
Priorities in the Land of the Free
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

Millions of Americans are without jobs and are having their homes foreclosed. The U.S. is currently fighting three out-in-the-open wars (or, if you prefer, one war, one occupation, and one kinetic humanitarian intervention) and several other covert ones. Financial and political elites are preparing to tell Americans (quite unpersuasively) that they have to sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements because the U.S. debt is so large and unmanageable that it threatens to subvert America's superior creditworthiness. And we're constantly told that civil liberties erosions are necessary to combat the Great Menace of Domestic Terrorism. So what is our political class focused on, and to what are law enforcement resources being devoted? First, there's this, from a couple weeks ago:

Nearly half of the members of the U.S. Senate are urging Attorney General Eric Holder to step up federal prosecutions of adult pornography...

Penny wise and pound foolish? The cost of not helping the homeless

2011-04-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

Click on the following link to see the original story, which is full of terrific links:

Morning Report: The Half-Million-Dollar Transients
April 21, 2011
by Randy Dotinga

Seven homeless people in the county annually cost taxpayers more than half a million dollars each. Another 16 transients cost $250,000 to $500,000 every year. Now, advocates are launching a program to help people like them find a place to live and stop requiring so much care.

"It's more expensive to ignore the problem than confront the problem," said the commissioner of the United Way's Plan to End Chronic Homelessness yesterday. The numbers are pretty amazing: Just seventeen of the transients "had an average of 16 ambulance rides, 17 emergency room visits and five inpatient medical stays a year," the NCT reports."The cost is estimated at $218,552."

So far, though, only a few homeless people have been helped. In part, that's because the transients in need aren't easy to find.

A 2006 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell tells a similar story of a homeless man who cost Nevada more than a million dollars. He spoke to NPR about it, too.

Let’s Not Be Civil

2011-04-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

Let’s Not Be Civil
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
April 17, 2011

Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

That’s a bad idea. Equally important, it’s an undemocratic idea.

Let’s review the story so far.

Two weeks ago, House Republicans released their big budget proposal, selling it to credulous pundits as a statement of necessity, not ideology — a document telling America What Must Be Done.

But it was, in fact, a deeply partisan document, which you might have guessed from the opening sentence: “Where the president has failed, House Republicans will lead.” It hyped the danger of deficits, yet even on its own (not at all credible) accounting, spending cuts were used mainly to pay for tax cuts rather than deficit reduction. The transparent and obvious goal was to use deficit fears to impose a vision of small government and low taxes, especially on the wealthy.

So the House budget proposal revealed a yawning gap between the two parties’ priorities. And it revealed a deep difference in views about how the world works.

When the proposal was released, it was praised as a “wonk-approved” plan that had been run by the experts. But the “experts” in question, it turned out, were at the Heritage Foundation, and few people outside the hard right found their conclusions credible. In the words of the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers — which makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear — the Heritage analysis was “both flawed and contrived.” Basically, Heritage went all in on the much-refuted claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy produces miraculous economic results, including a surge in revenue that actually reduces the deficit.

By the way, Heritage is always like this. Whenever there’s something the G.O.P. doesn’t like — say, environmental protection — Heritage can be counted on to produce a report, based on no economic model anyone else recognizes, claiming that this policy would cause huge job losses. Correspondingly, whenever there’s something Republicans want, like tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations, Heritage can be counted on to claim that this policy would yield immense economic benefits.

The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose.

So when pundits call on the parties to sit down together and talk, the obvious question is, what are they supposed to talk about? Where’s the common ground?

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.

Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day.

The Ox-Files: 'Mass cow sacrifices by aliens' sent White House into panic, FBI records reveal

2011-04-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Ox-Files: 'Mass cow sacrifices by aliens' sent White House into panic, FBI records reveal
By Richard Hartley-parkinson
Daily Mail
13th April 2011

Cows were sacrificed by aliens sending the White House into a panic declassified FBI files have revealed.

It is claimed that more than 8,000 cows were abducted by UFOs before they were mutilated and thrown back down to earth over the southern United States during the 1970s.

The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in a new online resource called The Vault.
Close encounters of a herd kind: Farmers continue to believe their cattle are being targeted by extraterrestrial beings

Close encounters of a herd kind: Farmers continue to believe their cattle are being targeted by extraterrestrials

The files detail how the aliens took trophies from their victims in the form of body parts and in some cases they drained the animals entirely of their blood.
Cattle Star Galactica: Some of the cows were mutilated by aliens

Cattle Star Galactica: Some of the cows were mutilated by aliens

One investigator's theory was that 'these animals are picked up by aircraft, mutilated elsewhere and returned and dropped from aircraft.

'Identical mutilations have been taking place all over the south west. whoever is responsible is well organised with boundless technology, financing and secrecy.'

When news of the cow abductions reached the White House in 1979, there was fear.

'The materials sent to me indicate one of the strangest phenomenon in my memory,' said the then US Attorney General Griffin Bell in a letter to senator Harrison Schmitt, according to The Sun newspaper.

Mr Schmitt represented New Mexico, where countless incidents were reported at a ranch in Dulce, a small town in the north of the State.

In one case an 11-month old bull was dropped close to someone's house from an aircraft and its sex organs had been removed.

The police report about the incident said: 'The bull sustained visible bruises around the brisket seeming to indicate that a strap was used to life and lower the animal from the aircraft... flesh underneath the hide was pinkish in colour.

'A probably explanation for the pinkish blood is a control type of radiation used to kill the animal... both the liver and the heart were mushy. Both organs had the texture and consistency of peanut butter.'
ROSWELL MEMO
ROSWELL MEMO

Un-bull-eivable: The FBI has put hundreds of files online so that people can access them more easily

FBI agents were dispatched to farms across the country upon reports to probe the abductions.

A report from the farm in Dulce during 1976 said that a suspect aircraft had landed and left three pod marks in a triangular shape.

More...

* Could aliens be living on planets deep within black holes?
* Trial of suspected Nazi mass murderer John Demjanjuk could be based on fabricated evidence, FBI claims

A further report commissioned in 1979 added: 'The Department of Justice advised that their criminal division has been aware of the phenomenon of animals being mutilated in a manner that would indicate such acts were performed by persons as part of a ritual or ceremony.'

The FBI added that other possible theories for the mutilation of the animals was as a result of biological warfare or 'unidentified objects' were to blame.
Fact or fiction: A memo sent regarding the Roswell incident in 1947 said that three 'flying saucers' were found that contained the bodies of alien pilots

Fact or fiction: A memo sent regarding the Roswell incident in 1947 said that three 'flying saucers' were found that contained the bodies of alien pilots

The documents about the cows is just one among thousands of files released by the FBI.

Another secret document released as part of the projects detailed how police and army officers witnessed a UFO exploding over Utah in April 1949.

The top secret document reveals how an army guard, a policeman and a highway patrol, who were all miles apart, each saw a UFO, which they said exploded over mountains near Logan, north of Salt Lake City.
X-RAY SPECS FOR FBI AGENTS

The FBI investigated whether it could teach its agents to see through walls, one memo details.

In the document, written by agent WA Branigan in July 1957, it says that if extrasensory perception could be mastered then the 'possibilities are endless.'

It continues that the Bureau cannot afford to not investigate further, so later that month they held a secret meeting with William Foos.

Foos claimed he could make the blind see and did a stage show where his blindfolded daughter would read a book.

However an investigation revealed the blindfold contained tiny holes and the demonstrations were concluded as 'merely tricks.'

Another file released involves FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and details of the infamous Roswell incident in 1947.

The memo claims that the air force recovered three 'flying saucers' which contained the bodies of alien pilots.

The aliens were described as being 3ft tall with human like bodies, which were dressed in a fine metallic cloth.

The memos from Hoover are the only evidence that the Roswell incident did in fact take place - and the names of the FBI staff involved have been withheld...

For Super Rich, Taxes Keep Falling

2011-04-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

For Super Rich, Taxes Keep Falling
April 17, 2011
ABC News' Kevin Dolak reports:

With just one day left for Americans to file their tax returns, the super wealthy can look forward to paying significantly less than they would have two decades ago: Since 1992, the average federal income tax actually paid by the wealthiest 400 households in the country has fallen from 26 percent to 17 percent.

But why, if the top income tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent, are the very, very wealthy paying such a small percent of their income into taxes? Short answer: tax breaks. There are built-in tax breaks in every bracket that everyone can take advantage of, including breaks for having children, paying a mortgage and furthering education.

According to Washington, D.C.-based think tank Tax Policy Center, the number of tax breaks is so high that this year it is estimated that 45 percent of households will not pay any taxes whatsoever.

Roberton Williams explained to The Associated Press the conundrum that leads to these tax-free households.

"It's the fact that we are using the tax code both to collect revenue, which is its primary purpose, and to deliver these spending benefits that we run into the situation where so many people are paying no taxes," Williams said.

This has led to efforts to overhaul the tax laws on both sides of the political aisle, and today on “This Week with Christiane Amanpour,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner accepted that disagreements remain with Republicans on the scope of how to reform the tax.

"We have very big disagreements on what the right balance is," Geithner said. "The things we're going to disagree on for some time, we can take more time to resolve."

However, he said he does not believe fundamental deficit reduction can happen without ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which were extended in a temporary agreement last December, and remain in place in House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan passed Friday by the House.

Geithner said he thinks the deficit can be reduced without raising taxes on the middle class, by ending tax loopholes and deductions that primarily go to wealthier Americans who itemize their tax returns.

"Those benefits, even like the mortgage interest deduction that lets people have two homes, pretty expensive homes … if you target them on the most fortunate Americans, they can afford to take a little bit larger share of the burden," Geithner said. “They can afford to do that, and it's the responsible thing to do for the economy."

"Patriotic Millionaires": Raise our taxes, please!

2011-04-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

Apr 13, 201
"Patriotic Millionaires": Raise our taxes, please!
Republicans insist that raising taxes on anyone would be catastrophic. But some of the most affluent disagree
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group of dozens of the wealthiest Americans that formed last year during the fight over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, is now jumping into the budget battle just as President Obama is expected to call for an end to the Bush cuts on the rich.

"For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000," the group writes in a new letter to Obama, Harry Reid, and John Boehner. "We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned incomes of $1,000,000 per year or more."

Last year, Obama signed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts after originally proposing that the two highest tax rates return to 36% and 39.6%, up from the Bush tax cut levels of 33% and 35%.

One of the signatories of the new letter, film and television producer Linda Gottlieb, explained her participation to me this morning: "For me to be sitting and hoarding my money is insane," said Gottlieb, whose producer credits include Dirty Dancing and who now teaches at NYU's Tisch school. "We all give to charity, but that's not the same as creating a more equitable society."

Gottlieb said she has been upset by the experience of her grandchildren, who attend a New York City public school where arts education has been cut and parents have had to organize an auction to try to fill the gaps. She added that raising taxes on the wealthiest people would be an important way of reducing the deficit.

"For rich people to moan and groan -- nobody likes to pay increased taxes -- but it's not going to change your life in any important way," she said. "What it can do is help your country."

The millionaires who comprise the group are in the process of reaching out to more of their wealthy peers and may take a trip to Washington at some point down the road, according to Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, the New York-based progressive group that is behind Patriotic Millionaires.

Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that any tax increases are a "nonstarter." So expect a big fight on this ahead.

Becoming human: watch the NOVA series from PBS

2011-04-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Man Convicted in Racially Motivated Church Burning After Election

2011-04-14T15:26:00.001-07:00

Man Convicted in Racially Motivated Church Burning After Election
April 14, 2011
Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- A 26-year-old white man was convicted Thursday in what prosecutors said was the racially motived burning of a predominantly black church in the hours after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

An all-white, 12-member jury found Michael Jacques guilty of all the charges he faced in the burning of Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield.

Prosecutors portrayed Jacques and two friends who pleaded guilty as racists who were upset at the election of the nation's first African-American president.

Jacques, his lawyer and family said he is not racist and only confessed during a police interrogation because he suffered withdrawal from painkillers.

Prosecutors had said during closing arguments that Jacques' racism reached the "boiling point" when Obama was elected. They said he often used racial epithets, expressed anger that minorities were "taking over" the country and once set a dog on a black person.

Jacques was convicted of conspiracy against civil rights, damage to religious property and use of fire to commit a felony.

"They got it all wrong," Jacques said outside court after the verdict was returned.

His attorney, Lori Levinson, said, "We are very disappointed. We will be appealing."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Smyth said he was pleased with the jury's verdict. Smyth said when the church was burning on Nov. 5, 2008, law enforcement officials hoped it was not arson. "In the few days that followed, our worst fears were confirmed," he said.

Smyth said the government was pleased that all three men had been convicted, two by pleading guilty. Benjamin Haskell was sentenced to nine years in prison in November. Thomas Gleason pleaded guilty last year and awaits sentencing after testifying in Jacques' trial for the prosecution. Both implicated Jacques in the arson.

Jacques could face 10 to 60 years in prison. Smyth said federal sentencing guidelines call for a prison term closer to 15 years, but he said it is too early to say what prosecutors will recommend.

Judge Michael Ponsor revoked Jacques' bail and ordered him to report Friday for detention until sentencing Sept. 15.

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

2011-04-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Series: But nobody pays that
New York Times
March 24, 2011

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

In a regulatory filing just a week before the Japanese disaster put a spotlight on the company’s nuclear reactor business, G.E. reported that its tax burden was 7.4 percent of its American profits, about a third of the average reported by other American multinationals. Even those figures are overstated, because they include taxes that will be paid only if the company brings its overseas profits back to the United States. With those profits still offshore, G.E. is effectively getting money back.

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Yet many companies say the current level is so high it hobbles them in competing with foreign rivals. Even as the government faces a mounting budget deficit, the talk in Washington is about lower rates. President Obama has said he is considering an overhaul of the corporate tax system, with an eye to lowering the top rate, ending some tax subsidies and loopholes and generating the same amount of revenue. He has designated G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, as his liaison to the business community and as the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and it is expected to discuss corporate taxes.

“He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Immelt, on his appointment in January, after touring a G.E. factory in upstate New York that makes turbines and generators for sale around the world.

A review of company filings and Congressional records shows that one of the most striking advantages of General Electric is its ability to lobby for, win and take advantage of tax breaks.

Over the last decade, G.E. has spent tens of millions of dollars to push for changes in tax law, from more generous depreciation schedules on jet engines to “green energy” credits for its wind turbines. But the most lucrative of these measures allows G.E. to operate a vast leasing and lending business abroad with profits that face little foreign taxes and no American taxes as long as the money remains overseas.

Company officials say that these measures are necessary for G.E. to compete against global rivals and that they are acting as responsible citizens. “G.E. is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations,” said Anne Eisele, a spokeswoman. “We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our shareholders to legally minimize our costs.”

The assortment of tax breaks G.E. has won in Washington has provided a significant short-term gain for the company’s executives and shareholders. While the financial crisis led G.E. to post a loss in the United States in 2009, regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion.

But critics say the use of so many shelters amounts to corporate welfare, allowing G.E. not just to avoid taxes on profitable overseas lending but also to amass tax credits and write-offs that can be used to reduce taxes on billions of dollars of profit from domestic manufacturing. They say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like G.E. not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States...

House Votes Against ‘Net Neutrality’

2011-04-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

House Votes Against ‘Net Neutrality’
By EDWARD WYATT
New York Times
April 8, 2011

The House of Representatives approved a measure on Friday that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from regulating how Internet service providers manage their broadband networks, potentially overturning a central initiative of the F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski.

The action, which is less likely to pass the Senate and which President Obama has threatened to veto, is nevertheless significant because it puts half of the legislative branch on the same side of the debate as the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in restricting the F.C.C.’s authority over Internet service.

House Joint Resolution 37, which was approved by a vote of 240 to 179, was spurred by the F.C.C.’s approval in December of an order titled “Preserving the Open Internet.” The order forbids the companies that provide the pipeline through which consumers gain access to the Internet from blocking a user’s ability to reach legal Internet sites or to use legal applications.

But Republicans in the House maintained that the order exceeded the F.C.C.’s authority and put the government in the position of overseeing what content a consumer could see and which companies would benefit from Internet access.

“Congress has not authorized the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the Internet,” said Representative Greg P. Walden, an Oregon Republican who sponsored the resolution.

The F.C.C. order “could open the Internet to regulation from all 50 states,” Mr. Walden said, and was little more than the Obama administration’s attempt to use the regulatory process “to make an end run around” the Court of Appeals ruling.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, warned of dire consequences should the resolution be approved. “This is a bill that will end the Internet as we know it and threaten the jobs, investment and prosperity that the Internet has brought to America,” Mr. Waxman said.

It is likely that Democrats in the Senate can defeat the measure, but by no means is that certain. The joint resolution was initiated under the Congressional Review Act, meaning that it cannot be filibustered and requires the support of only 30 senators to bring it to the floor.

President Obama courted Silicon Valley supporters during his campaign by promising to enact a “net neutrality” provision, as the F.C.C.’s Open Internet order is known. Advisers to the president have said that he will veto the resolution; it would then take a vote by two-thirds of each house of Congress to override the veto.

Is Barack Obama actually not in this photo of Barack Obama?

2011-04-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

The president's grandparents,
and his knee

Apr 7, 2011
Is Barack Obama actually not in this photo of Barack Obama?
Conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill and the mystery of the president's knee Video
By Alex Pareene

Jack Cashill, the right-wing journalist currently winning the national game of "'prove' the most outlandish thing you possibly can about Barack Obama" with both his theory that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote "Dreams From My Father" and his claim that the president's father was actually Jimi Hendrix, dropped a bombshell today: Barack Obama is not actually in a photo of Barack Obama and his grandparents.

As Cashill explains:

In his definitive 2010 biography of Barack Obama, "The Bridge," New Yorker editor David Remnick features a photograph of a dapper young Barack Obama sitting between his grandparents on a Central Park bench.

The bench is real. The grandparents are real. The wall behind them is real. Barack Obama is not. He has been conspicuously photoshopped in. Who did this and why remains as much a mystery as Obama's extended stay in New York.

The video evidence:

So, yes, this is actually just a picture of Barack Obama's grandparents hanging out in New York, where they did not live and where Obama was attending college, without their grandson, who was I guess secretly in Pakistan, at the time. I think that's what has been definitively proven here. Obama was being a Marxist Muslim in Pakistan.

But unmentioned by Cashill is the single most insidious part of this deception: While Barack Obama is nowhere to be found in the unretouched version of this photo, his knee is still in between his grandparents.

What was Barack Obama's knee doing in New York, while the rest of him was in Pakistan, and Indonesia? Dealing drugs? Why are mainstream journalists afraid to ask tough questions about the president's detachable knee? The people have a right to know!

(An alternate theory: Is Barack Obama actually fading from this photo because he accidentally prevented his parents from falling in love while traveling through time? And if so, doesn't Obama teaching his father Jimi Hendrix how to play guitar based on listening to Jimi Hendrix records present a paradox?)

Cashill was just recently on "Fox & Friends" in order to promote his reporting on the president's mysterious background. His work has also been endorsed by Andrew Breitbart and the National Review's Andrew McCarthy.

Muslims' unique love of violence?

2011-04-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

Apr 4, 2011 19:05 ET
Primitive Muslims' unique love of violence
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, today, echoing so many by lamenting the compulsive violence of Muslims:

It’s hard to keep track of all the barbaric behavior emanating from that part of the world.

Glenn Reynolds, November 23, 2010, on his prescription for dealing with North Korea:

If they start anything, I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs. They’ve caused enough trouble -- and it would be a useful lesson for Iran, too.

Glenn Reynolds, November 4, 2006, on how to deal with the Muslim world:

It's also true that if democracy can't work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a "more rubble, less trouble" approach to other countries in the region that threaten us.

Glenn Reynolds, February 13, 2007, on how to deal with Iran:

We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists . . .

Glenn Reynolds, September 11, 2001, on responding to the 9/11 attacks:

GEORGE BUSH IS NOW THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD:. . . Now, if he wants to nuke Baghdad, there is nobody to say him nay -- and damned few who would want to...

Was the Civil War Necessary?

2011-03-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Was the Civil War Necessary?
By ANDREW DELBANCO
New York Times
March 25, 2011

Writing about what might have been is something historians tend to avoid. You may find the occasional counterfactual sentence in a serious history book — What if Lee had accepted command of the Union army? What if Lincoln had lived? — but that sort of speculation is usually left to novelists, as when Philip Roth, in “The Plot Against America,” imagines a United States gone fascist under President Charles Lindbergh.

AMERICA AFLAME
How the Civil War Created a Nation
By David Goldfield
Illustrated. 632 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $35.

“America Aflame,” David Goldfield’s account of the coming, conduct and consequences of the Civil War, is not a book about things that never happened. It is a riveting, often heartbreaking, narrative of things that did. Yet it also compels us to ponder choices not made, roads not taken — always with the implicit question in mind of whether the nation might somehow have spared itself the carnage of the war and, if so, what kind of nation it would have become.

At the outset of his masterly synthesis of political, social, economic and religious history, Goldfield tells us that he “is antiwar, particularly the Civil War.” Then he shows, in painfully vivid prose, young men marching into fields “fat with corn and deep green clover” only to be burned alive or torn by shrapnel, survivors left to breathe “in spurts, a frothy saliva dripping creamily from their mouths down to their ears, strings of matter from their brains swaying in the breeze,” or to die in their own blood and excrement or, if sufficiently alive to be carried off the field, to be treated by surgeons who, without knowledge of anesthesia or antisepsis, slice off mangled limbs with knives sharpened on “the soles of their boots.”

Many other books (one thinks of Charles Royster’s “Destructive War” and, more recently, of Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering”) have sought to convey, without glorifying or glossing it over, the battlefield truth of America’s four-year descent into organized savagery. What is distinctive about Goldfield’s book is that he believes the 600,000 deaths and countless mutilations could have been avoided. A war fought over the future of slavery did not have to happen because “the political system established by the founders would have been resilient and resourceful enough to accommodate our great diversity sooner without the tragedy of a civil war.” In advancing this thesis, Goldfield is returning to a view once held by eminent historians, including his teacher Avery Craven, that the war was an avertable catastrophe rather than, as Senator William Henry Seward of New York called it in advance, an “irrepressible conflict.”

In Goldfield’s telling, the force that drove the nation toward apocalypse was evangelical fervor of one form or another — in the North, faith in the righteousness of the abolitionist cause, in the South, faith in slavery as a guarantor of a threatened way of life. “Faith reinforced the romance of war” until “war had become a magic elixir to speed America’s millennial march” toward Armageddon.

But Goldfield’s belief that the “political system” could have solved the problem of slavery is a leap of faith of his own. Secessionists, after all, left the Union precisely because they rejected a constitutionally valid election that placed slavery, as Lincoln put it, “in the path of ultimate extinction.” In his first Inaugural Address, which Goldfield aptly calls “a walking-on-eggshells speech,” Lincoln tried to reassure slaveowners that he would not interfere with their peculiar institution where it already existed, but would only limit its expansion into territories over which the federal government held authority. But slaveowners did not concede the constitutional legitimacy of that authority — and the United States Supreme Court, in its notorious Dred Scott decision, had agreed with them.

Goldfield’s heroes are those who, in the face of this impasse, sought a solution short of secession — men like Alexander Stephens, a congressman from Georgia, later a reluctant vice president of the Confederacy, who was, in his words, “utterly opposed to mingling religion with politics,” and Stephen Douglas, a figure “of selfless patriotism and personal courage” who, recognizing his impending defeat in the election of 1860, campaigned through the South in an effort to save the Union and, after the attack on Fort Sumter, threw his support to Lincoln.

In the end, the war did put an end to legal human bondage in America. But emancipation came slowly — first as a military measure to deny the Confederacy the coerced manpower of its slaves, only later as a war against the institution itself once the valiant service of black soldiers had made the thought of restoring slavery after the fighting was over unthinkable.

AMERICA AFLAME
How the Civil War Created a Nation
By David Goldfield
Illustrated. 632 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $35.

According to Goldfield, the war reduced the North to a sort of postorgiastic exhaustion, leaving former slaves at the mercy of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan in a South determined to return them to subjugation. After a failed experiment in reconstruction on the basis of racial equality, some of the hottest antebellum abolitionists became apostates to their once-professed faith. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “passion for the plight of the slave” gave way to a preoccupation with decorating houses. Horace Greeley, who had once goaded Lincoln to act more decisively against slavery, wondered if his own enmity to slavery “might have been a mistake.”

Lamenting the horrors of the war, Goldfield computes its total monetary cost at around $6.7 billion in 1860s currency, and asserts that if “the government had purchased the freedom of four million slaves and granted a 40-acre farm to each slave family, the total cost would have been $3.1 billion, leaving $3.6 billion for reparations to make up for a century of lost wages. And not a single life would have been lost.” But this computation proceeds from some dubious assumptions. Such a transaction can be made only if there is a willing seller as well as a willing buyer — and, as Goldfield himself notes, all attempts at compensated emancipation, even in the small border state of Delaware, where slaves were a minor part of the local economy, failed because slaveowners had no interest in such a deal. And even if they had, just where would the 40-acre farms be located? In the South? Or in the western territories, where abolitionist sentiment was often mixed with racist animus — a sentiment, that is, in favor of excluding black people, whether slave or free?

Throughout Goldfield’s book, one sees the present peeping through the past. In his allergy to the infusion of religion into politics, and his regret over the failure of government to achieve compromise, he sometimes seems to be writing as much about our own time as about time past. Yet even looking through his eyes, one finds it hard to imagine that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments by which black citizenship rights were advanced could ever have been ratified if the slave states had remained in the Union. The “secession war,” as Walt Whitman called it, would seem to have been a necessary prelude to the process of securing black equality — a process still unfinished today.

Despite its implausibilities, Goldfield’s thought experiment in alternative history is provocative in the best sense. Most history books try to explain the past. The exceptional ones, of which “America Aflame” is a distinguished example, remind us that the past is ultimately as inscrutable as the future...

Andrew Delbanco, the editor of “The Portable Abraham Lincoln,” is the Levi professor in the humanities and the director of American studies at Columbia.
A version of this review appeared in print on March 27, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review.

Who cares what scientists believe? The House GOP is on the record: The earth isn't warming

2011-03-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Mar 16, 2011
Triumph of the flat-earth Republicans
Who cares what scientists believe? The House GOP is on the record, now and for all time: The earth isn't warming
By Andrew Leonard
Salon.com

In this week's most obvious serving of dog-bites-man news, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted on Tuesday to approve a measure designed to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. This was not unexpected: House Republicans declared their crusade against the EPA on Day One of the new Congress.

But along the way, three Democrats on the committee put Republicans neatly on record by proposing three short amendments to the "Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011."

Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked Congress to concede that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level."

Diana DeGette, D-Colo.'s, amendment asked Congress to accept "the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that the 'scientific evidence is compelling' that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions 'are the root cause of recently observed climate change.'"

Jay Inslee, D-Wash., asked Congress to accept that "the public health of current generations is endangered and that the threat to public health for both current and future generations will likely mount over time as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and result in ever greater rates of climate change."

Every single Republican on the committee voted against all three amendments, with the sole exception of Tennessee's Martha Blackburn, who declined to vote on DeGette's amendment.

It is possible to understand how people might disagree that climate change is a threat to public health (we'll all just start farming wheat in Siberia or northern Canada) or that humans are the main cause of rising temperatures (sunspots! natural variation!). But I still find it confounding that 31 Republicans are willing to deny, flat-out, that temperatures are rising, period. But let's outsource this argument:

Last spring, the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences reviewed the available facts and declared that "A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems."

The NAS position makes things nice and tidy. The House Republicans in charge of energy policy are unanimous in their contradiction of the findings of the United States' most august body of scientists...

What, greed in the nuclear industry? Has it compromised safety in Japan, the US and everywhere else?

2011-03-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who as director of the Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency helped in the efforts 25 years ago to clean up Chernobyl, has lashed out against the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and private corporations for failing to heed lessons from that 1986 nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine...

Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis

Reports suggest that greed within the worldwide nuclear industry, combined with an insufficient UN watchdog and lax oversight of Japan's nuclear plants, contributed to the Japan nuclear crisis.
By Stephen Kurczy
Christian Science Monitor
March 16, 2011

As Japan races to control a nuclear crisis in the wake of Friday's devastating earthquake and tsunami, the country's sterling image as one of the nations most prepared to prevent and manage a disaster of this magnitude is being tarnished.

Reports are emerging that both the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency and the Japanese government failed to properly ensure the safety of country's nuclear power industry.

The reports are challenging the recent refrain that the world's No. 3 economy couldn't have done better and once again highlighting how poor government oversight of an industry that allegedly cut corners to turn higher profits can spawn an environmental disaster.

IN PICTURES: Japan survivors

Just as the BP oil spill one year ago heaped scrutiny on the United State's Minerals Management Service, harshly criticized for lax drilling oversight and cozy ties with the oil industry, the nuclear crisis in Japan is shining a light on that nation's safety practices.
Design flaws in nuclear reactor containment vessels?

Four out of six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (also known as Fukushima I) have now suffered explosions or fires since a March 11 earthquake and tsunami devastated the region and knocked out electricity at the plant, which caused cooling systems to fail and reactors to suffer at least partial meltdowns.

Two of those reactor containment vessels may now have cracked and appear to be releasing radioactive steam. Their designer, General Electric, is now feeling heat for marketing the reactor despite safety concerns dating back three decades. Indeed, just as the BP oil spill drew scrutiny on several multinational companies, the crisis in Japan is underscoring a "flat world" where responsibility – along with environmental and economic fallout – spreads across oceans.

Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who as director of the Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency helped in the efforts 25 years ago to clean up Chernobyl, has lashed out against the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and private corporations for failing to heed lessons from that 1986 nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine...

Huckabee: No 'attack' on Natalie Portman

2011-03-06T19:38:00.000-08:00

Conveniently left out of this discussion, so far: The GOP push to slash many the programs that could ensure these babies a better life.

Huckabee: No 'attack' on Natalie Portman
March 6, 2011
By Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA TODAY

Mike Huckabee, the ex-preacher, ex-governor and GOP front-runner for the 2012 presidential race, has plenty to say about Natalie Portman, unwed motherhood and poverty but not much about the GOP-led budget cuts to programs that help young families avoid the poverty trap.

In the Murphy Brown move of 2011, Huckabee condemns successful women, real as Portman or fictional as Brown's 1992 TV character (blasted by then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle as a bad "lifestyle choice") for glamorizing the single mom experience when, in reality most will be raising their babies in poverty, he says.

What he told Michael Medved on air:

One of the things that is troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, 'Hey look, we're having children, we're not married, but we're having these children, and they're doing just fine. But there aren't really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie.

What he now says at his political action website Huck PAC:

However, contrary to what the Hollywood media reported, I did not "slam" or "attack" Natalie Portman, nor did I criticize the hard-working single mothers in our country. My comments were about the statistical reality that most single moms are very poor, under-educated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death. That's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that society often glorifies and glamorizes the idea of having children out of wedlock.

Conveniently left out of this discussion, so far: The GOP push to slash many the programs that could ensure these babies a better life...

Bay Area Rep. Jackie Speier stuns House colleagues with story of her abortion

2011-03-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

Bay Area Rep. Jackie Speier stuns House colleagues with story of her abortion
By Bruce Newman
mercurynews.com
02/18/2011

It happened nearly two decades ago, in the most personal and painful of moments. Jackie Speier, 17 weeks pregnant, was losing a baby she desperately wanted. She miscarried, with the fetus slipping from her uterus, and doctors told her the baby wouldn't survive.

Agonizingly, Speier and her physician husband terminated the pregnancy.

Minutes before midnight Thursday, that unbearably emotional experience came pouring out in the most public way when the 60-year-old Democratic congresswoman from San Mateo spoke about her abortion to stunned colleagues on the floor of the House.

"I lost a baby," Speier began softly, admonishing Republicans for graphically describing the procedure she had endured. "But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."

By Friday, her three-minute speech had gone viral on the Internet, with many Americans lauding her courage.

Speier had just listened to Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., assail Planned Parenthood as a place where babies are "exterminated." He described a procedure known as "dilation and evacuation" as fetal murder.

She had been standing at the alternate podium in the well of the House -- where members await their turn to address the chamber -- when suddenly she forgot what she had planned to say.

"I was thinking to myself, 'Not one of you has endured this
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procedure,' " she told the Mercury News in an interview Friday. She said she thought, —‰'How dare you? How dare you talk about it in those terms?' That's why I changed what I was going to say."

Speier on Thursday joined other House Democrats from California to voice concern about Republicans' efforts to block federal aid to Planned Parenthood. The House on Friday voted 240-185 to cut off funding.

"It was pretty tense in the chamber anyway," Speier recalled. "The language being used, the nature of the comments, it got so incendiary."

She said she felt "a sense of disbelief at the level of vitriol and animus coming from my colleagues, who don't have a clue what they're talking about."

Speier turned right and glared at Smith, who "just put my stomach in knots," and continued to look directly at him as she froze the hushed chamber. "Because I'm one of those women he spoke about just now."

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, was standing in the aisle as Speier began to speak. Pelosi quickly took a seat and didn't move until Speier had finished.

As a member of the California Legislature, Speier was the first lawmaker to have a baby while in office, giving birth to her second child when she was 44. The "spontaneous abortion" she described -- a miscarriage, in common terms -- occurred before that birth.

The 20-minute procedure she received, known as either "dilation and evacuation" or "dilation and extraction,'' involves the use of medical instruments and suction to remove a fetus from the uterus after it has died. The cervix must be dilated before the fetus can be extracted, and the procedure, under some circumstances, has been labeled "partial-birth abortion'' by political opponents.

"This was not an elective procedure, but it really emphasizes how important it is that doctors be trained in the technique, because it is the same, whether elective or management of a miscarriage," said Dr. Amy Jean Voedisch, a Stanford University OB-GYN...

The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies

2011-02-27T12:51:00.000-08:00

The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies
By CHARLES M. BLOW
February 25, 2011

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.

Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.

Part of the reason for our poor ranking is that declines in our rates stalled after premature births — a leading cause of infant mortality as well as long-term developmental disabilities — began to rise in the 1990s.

The good news is that last year the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the rate of premature births fell in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years.

Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, the president of the March of Dimes, which in 2003 started a multimillion-dollar premature birth campaign focusing on awareness and education, has said of the decline: “The policy changes and programs to prevent preterm birth that our volunteers and staff have worked so hard to bring about are starting to pay off.”

The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:

• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”

• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”

• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.

This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood...

Insects are nutritious and easy to raise without harming the environment

2011-02-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 19, 2011
The Six-Legged Meat of the Future
Insects are nutritious and easy to raise without harming the environment. They also have a nice nutty taste
By MARCEL DICKE and ARNOLD VAN HUIS
[BIUGS] John S. Dykes

At the London restaurant Archipelago, diners can order the $11 Baby Bee Brulee: a creamy custard topped with a crunchy little bee. In New York, the Mexican restaurant Toloache offers $11 chapulines tacos: two tacos stuffed with Oaxacan-style dried grasshoppers.

Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat of the future? As the global population booms and demand strains the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate animal proteins. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, and they're low in fat. Insects are easier to raise than livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six legs; over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It's often described as "nutty."

The vast majority of the developing world already eats insects. In Laos and Thailand, weaver-ant pupae are a highly prized and nutritious delicacy. They are prepared with shallots, lettuce, chilies, lime and spices and served with sticky rice. Further back in history, the ancient Romans considered beetle larvae to be gourmet fare, and the Old Testament mentions eating crickets and grasshoppers. In the 20th century, the Japanese emperor Hirohito's favorite meal was a mixture of cooked rice, canned wasps (including larvae, pupae and adults), soy sauce and sugar.

Will Westerners ever take to insects as food? It's possible. We are entomologists at Wageningen University, and we started promoting insects as food in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Many people laughed—and cringed—at first, but interest gradually became more serious...

Though it is true that intentionally eating insects is common only in developing countries, everyone already eats some amount of insects.

The average person consumes about a pound of insects per year, mostly mixed into other foods.

In the U.S., most processed foods contain small amounts of insects, within limits set by the Food and Drug Administration. For chocolate, the FDA limit is 60 insect fragments per 100 grams. Peanut butter can have up to 30 insect parts per 100 grams, and fruit juice can have five fruit-fly eggs and one or two larvae per 250 milliliters (just over a cup). We also use many insect products to dye our foods, such as the red dye cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari and candies. So we're already some of the way there in making six-legged creatures a regular part of our diet.

Recipe: Crispy Crickets

Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Strip the antennae, limbs and wings (if any) from 20 to 30 clean, frozen adult crickets, or 40 to 60 cricket nymphs. Spread the stripped crickets on a lightly oiled baking sheet and place in oven. Bake until crickets are crisp, around 20 minutes. Yield: one cup.

Sprinkle these on salads or put them through a coffee grinder to turn them into bug "flour." You could even combine the crickets with Chex Mix for a protein-rich snack.

From "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook" by David George Gordon (Ten Speed Press)

Right-wingers run out of sympathy for reporters attacked in Egypt

2011-02-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

Feb 4, 2011 13:05 ET
Right-wingers run out of sympathy for reporters attacked in Egypt
By Alex Pareene
Salon.com

...Rush Limbaugh said this, about New York Times reporters who've been detained by the Mubarak government:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is being breathlessly reported that the Egyptian army -- Snerdley, have you heard this? The Egyptian army is rounding up foreign journalists. I mean, even two New York Times reporters were detained. Now, this is supposed to make us feel what, exactly? How we supposed to feel? Are we supposed to feel outrage over it? I don't feel any outrage over it. Are we supposed to feel anger? I don't feel any anger over this. Do we feel happy? Well -- uh -- do we feel kind of going like, "neh-neh-neh-neh"? I'm sure that your emotions are running the gamut when you hear that two New York Times reporters have been detained along with other journalists in Egypt. Remember now, we're supporting the people who are doing this.

And that is why Andrew Breitbart's "BIG PEACE" features a post by Hoover Institution research fellow Peter Schweizer headlined "I Don’t Have a Lot of Sympathy for Those Journalists Attacked in Egypt."...

Time is now for humane immigration reform

2011-01-30T11:21:00.000-08:00

Employers both large and small like the low cost of immigrant workers. That's why the rules are being enforced only in a haphazard manner. But although the people in power want to keep immigrant labor, many of them do not want immigrants to stay and become part of American society. That's why we don't give documents to all the workers we want and need. We keep them in the shadows. Obviously, we should give documents to the workers we want and need. The other part of the equation is the government of Mexico, which operates for the benefit of the Mexican elite. It's no accident that the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, is a Mexican. Mexico is using immigration to the US to relieve the political pressure that would normally build up in a brutally unequal society. I believe that both the US and Mexico need reform, and I would like to see activists addressing both problems. We should care about all our Mexican brothers and sisters, not just the ones who come to this country.

Time is now for humane immigration reform
By Enrique Morones
SDUT
January 30, 2011

The country is once again united, at least momentarily, as we mourn the recent violence in Arizona. It was so sad to see the rise in rhetoric that leads to a rise in violence. Racial profiling kills, as in the case of the 9-year-old girl killed in Arizona. The death of

Christina Taylor Green was tragic, but I am referring to Brisenia Flores. Never heard of her? Murdered in 2009 in Arizona, allegedly by Shawna Forde, an anti-immigration activist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform and a Minutemen member. Forde’s trial is currently under way in Tucson. Brisenia was murdered along with her father, Raul, because they were brown.

It was so sad to see the vile comments online in connection with this “Living in the shadows” project by some that oppose immigration reform, and the ignorance of their own family history as well as the history of this great country. Those in favor of humane immigration reform, 67 percent of the population according to a national Gallup poll, presented positions based on documented facts and sources.

We all agree that the immigration system in this country is broken. Let’s fix it. We all want secure borders. Let’s secure them. What this country needs is humane immigration reform. We want a pathway to legalization and civil discourse. To learn more about sources of information and/or myths versus realities on immigration, check our website: www.borderangels.org.

Societies are judged on how we treat our children. Christina Green and Brisenia Flores PRESENTE!

Humane immigration reform. Si se puede!

Morones is the founder and president of Border Angels, a nonprofit group that seeks to prevent the deaths of migrants crossing the Southwest border.

Partisanship Is the New Racism

2011-01-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

Partisanship Is the New Racism
Democrats and Republicans may sit together for Obama's speech, but partisanship won't budge.
By Shankar Vedantam
Slate
Jan. 24, 2011

Partisanship is the new racism. We love to criticize it, and we love to claim we've transcended it. We recognize it in our enemies but not in ourselves. We use it to discriminate against others. And increasingly, we find sophisticated ways to mask it in a veneer of open-mindedness.

New psychological research and insights from political science suggest parallels between partisanship and racism. Both seem to arise from aspects of social identity that are immutable or slow to change. Both are publicly decried and privately practiced. Both are increasingly employed in ways that allow practitioners to deny that they are doing what they are doing.

Let's take these assertions one by one. Most of us don't think of partisanship as a matter of social identity. We think that party loyalties stem from our views about government, abortion, guns, and foreign policy. But if you look at those issues, there is no logical reason why people who are against abortion rights should also support gun rights, as many conservatives do. There is no logical reason why those who support unions shouldn't also support a militaristic foreign policy—yet liberals tend to do one but not the other. The issues that bind liberals together and the ones that tie conservatives together are all over the place. Most people see the incoherence in their opponents' views: Liberals, for example, mock conservatives for opposing abortion on the grounds that it takes human life while simultaneously supporting the death penalty. Conservatives shake their heads at liberals who pour onto the streets for antiwar protests, but only when the commander in chief is a Republican.
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In recent years, a number of political scientists have argued that our party loyalties drive our views about issues, not the other way around. But if our views don't make us Democrats or Republicans, what does? Consider this thought experiment: I have two neighbors, Jack and Jill. Jill is an African-American woman and a yoga instructor. Jack is a white man and an evangelical Christian. I've told you nothing about Jack and Jill's views about abortion, government, guns, taxes, or foreign policy. Yet most of us would have no trouble guessing that Jill is a Democrat and Jack is a Republican. How do we know this? Because social identity—race, gender, religious affiliation, geographical location—play an outsize (and largely hidden) role in determining our partisan affiliations.

When partisanship is seen as a form of social identity—I'm a Democrat because people like me are Democrats, or I'm a Republican because people like me are Republicans—we can understand why so many blue-collar Kansans are Republicans and why so many Silicon Valley billionaires are Democrats, even though each group's rational interests might be better served by the other party...

Five myths about why the South seceded

2011-01-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

Five myths about why the South seceded
By James W. Loewen
Washington Post
January 9, 2011

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it -- or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even on why the South seceded.

...Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians." Given this belief, most white Southerners -- and many Northerners, too -- could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. "The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy." Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well...

White Northerners' fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.

Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers -- and those they wrote home to -- became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers' and sailors' votes made the difference.
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5. The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.

Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them - or forced them to abandon slavery?

To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it...

Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother

2011-01-19T17:07:00.000-08:00

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley Apologizes for Christian-Only Comments
Following Backlash, Robert Bentley Says He Didn't Mean to Offend Anyone
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN
World News
Jan. 19, 2011

Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama met with religious leaders and issued an apology today...

Addressing a crowd Monday at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church in Montgomery, the new governor said, " Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

"If the Holy Spirit lives in you that makes you my brothers and sisters. Anyone who has not accepted Jesus, I want to be your brothers and sisters, too," he said.

Following the initial comments many civil right groups objected to the comments and called on the governor to apologize.

"It is stunning to me that he'd make those remarks. It's distressing because of the suggestion that he feels that people who aren't Christian are not entitled to love and respect," said Bill Nigut, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League...

Gov. to NAACP: 'Kiss My Butt'

2011-01-17T16:44:00.000-08:00

Gov. to NAACP: 'Kiss My Butt'
Maine's Republican Governor, Paul LePage, Triggered Controversy but Has -- Somewhat -- Backpedaled From Friday's Remarks

Here's a little tip for newly elected, first-time governors: You might want to hold off on telling the NAACP to kiss your butt on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

But Gov. Paul LePage, Maine's Republican chief executive, did just that Friday when pressed on why he would forgo attending events to commemorate the holiday. He later made room in his schedule, after the predictable fallout.

The remark came as a throwaway line after a longer, somewhat more thoughtful explanation as to why he declined the organization's event.

"They are a special interest," he told Portland's WCSH-TV. "End of story. And I'm not going to he held hostage by any special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black. So they can do whatever they'd like about it."

LePage's son, Devon Raymond, was adopted from Jamaica.

The governor, who is white, went on to explain his stance and stress that he also had a scheduling conflict.

But when pressed by the reporter for a response to claims by the NAACP that he has a history of being racially insensitive, the governor shrugged and answered, "Tell 'em to kiss my butt. If they want to play the race card, come to dinner and my son will talk to them."

The NAACP swiftly denounced the ill-considered quip. Headline writers were quick to pounce.

"I don't care who he's got in his family," Rachel Talbot Ross, the state director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the Waterville Morning Sentinel.

"The makeup of his family isn't the issue and it never was the issue. For him to say we're playing the race card shows a real lack of awareness of the very important issues we're working to address. Our kids deserve better. Maine deserves better. His son deserves better."

In a statement following the governor's initial comments, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous called LePage "out of touch with our nation's deep yearning for increased civility and racial healing." ...

Jewish Group Wants Glenn Beck Dropped From Fox News

2011-01-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

Jewish Group Wants Glenn Beck Dropped From Fox News
AOL News
Suzi Parker
July 14, 2011

Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), a charity that campaigns for social change, delivered a petition with 10,000 signatures to Fox News Thursday demanding that talk show host Glenn Beck get the pink slip.

The petition drive began in November after Fox News aired a three-part Beck special on businessman and philanthropist George Soros called "Puppet Master." The television show was deemed anti-Semitic by many in the media and Jewish groups.
Beck once said that his election coverage goal was to "make George Soros cry," which is "hard to do," as Soros "saw people into gas chambers."

Beck's Thursday night show highlighted nine people of the 20th century who contributed to "the era of the big lie." All nine of these "shadowy figures," as Beck called them, were Jewish, including psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and columnist Walter Lippman. Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania also was cited.

Mik Moore, chief strategy officer for JFSJ, told Politics Daily that the group met with Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes last summer to raise concerns about Beck's use of Holocaust references. Moore said the group received some commitments from the network that it would watch for anti-Semitic language. But that didn't happen, according to Moore.
On Thursday, the group unveiled Beck's 10 worst quotes of 2010, which included "Women are psychos" and "Charles Darwin is the father of the Holocaust."

The group says it has other plans regarding Beck. On Jan. 17, WOR in New York, citing Beck's low ratings, and WPHT in Philadelphia are dropping Beck's radio show. JFSJ has sent letters to six radio stations in New York City that seem like a match for Beck's talk show, asking them not to pick it up. If that happens, Beck will not have a radio outlet in the city.

"We are just beginning to enter into a conversation with those stations," Moore said.
In light of Sarah Palin's blood libel comment this week, the group said that Palin and Beck "have abused two of the most tragic episodes in the history of the Jewish people: the Holocaust and the blood libel."

The group's president Simon Greer said, "The Jewish community does not appreciate their identification, which only serves to denigrate the very real pain so many Jews have suffered because of anti-Semitic violence. It is clear that Fox News has a Jewish problem."...

Rabbi: By 'blood libel' claim Palin admits 'words can be deadly'

2011-01-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Rabbi: By 'blood libel' claim Palin admits 'words can be deadly'
by Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA Today
January 12, 2011

You might think a rabbi would see Sarah Palin's video claim she's a victim of "blood libel" as monumental chutzpah (nerve), as if she, too, were an Arizona shooting victim like gravely injured U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords or Gifford's murdered aide Gabe Zimmerman.

After all, "blood libel" points to a often distorted and lethally misused passage about Jews and the crucifixion of Christ in Matthew 27:25:

All the people answered, "His blood is on us and on our children!"

It was the pretext of anti-Semitism for 2,000 years and the motive behind centuries of mass killings, pogroms, in Eastern Europe when Jews were falsely accused of using Christian children's blood in religious ceremonies.

The Guardian notes:

That it should be used by an avowedly Christian politician about a Jewish one just takes crassness and insensitivity to a new level.

Maybe it's now a perverse form of 'victim chic' to try to corner your own teardrop of sympathy in every moment of headliner public mourning, I wonder.

But Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, has a surprising (well it was to me) spin on Palin's comment. If she thinks she's turning the guns, so to speak, back on her critics for attempting to endanger her (her what? her political future?) by claiming she contributed to a climate of violence, she's gone about it totally backwards. He told me today:

It's not just inappropriate, it's profoundly ironic. By making this comparison and playing Jew in the picture, the person endangered by a blood libel, she admits that the words people use can have deadly impact.

By claiming that others' words are a blood libel that endangers her, she's at least admitting the prospect that claims her words endangered others could be true.

I'm not giving her a free pass. It was a poor and hurtful analogy. But clearly, she's affirming exactly what her critics charge...

[Rabbi Irwin] Kula even wonders whether the phrase came to her because,

... at some level, unconsciously, she feels guilty in some way for what has happened. But this is so painful at an unconscious level that she has disassociated and lashed out accusing others of what is a deep self-judgment. This is sad, as she is not responsible at all for the shootings in Arizona. She is simply, along with all of us who have created her, responsible for the coarsening of our public culture at a time when we are facing historic challenges that cut to the very core of what America will be in the next period of history.

Rabbi David Sapperstein, executive director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, just back to his office after joining in the House of Representatives' prayer service this morning, says,

To compare (historic blood libel accusations) and their outcomes to what she is facing really distorts and diminishes the meaning of this accusation. In fairness, she's not the first to water it down, as if it means just being falsely accused of something terrible. But it concerns us. It escalates the intensity of the rhetoric, rather than calming it down.

By waving this red flag, it seems to me she's missed an opportunity at real leadership. We call on her to retract the statement and to find a way to help calm things down...

Carbon dioxide could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution

2010-12-23T14:03:00.000-08:00

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
By JUSTIN GILLIS
December 21, 2010

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.

They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.

The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.

Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.

When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.

By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?...

Some Southerners believe the Old South was "a society far and above anything else on Earth."

2010-12-22T19:30:00.000-08:00

Let's say you start a war that costs more American lives than either WW I or WW II. What do you get? Apparently, the undying admiration of your descendants. What exactly was great about Southern society? The fancy balls, obviously: the height of human achievement.

At Charleston's Secession Ball, divided opinions on the spirit of S.C.
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post
December 22, 2010

...John B. Hines, a wealthy Texas oilman and cattle rancher, helped, too. He sent a $5,000 sponsorship for the affair because he loves the Old South: "They created a society far and above anything else on Earth."...

Gary Chapman, Internet Ethicist, Dies at 58

2010-12-18T12:23:00.000-08:00

Gary Chapman, Internet Ethicist, Dies at 58
By KATIE HAFNER
December 17, 2010

Gary Chapman, an educator, writer and widely recognized expert on the impact of high technology on society and public policy, died Tuesday while on a kayaking trip in Guatemala. He was 58.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said...

For seven years Mr. Chapman was the executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit group concerned with the impact of technology on society. Under his guidance, it grew into an influential organization with international reach.

In the 1980s, the group cast a particularly skeptical eye on the application of computers to decision-making in military systems and took a public stand against the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

Mr. Chapman was on the faculty of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He also founded and directed the school’s 21st Century Project, which studies the social implications of information technology and telecommunications.

Although not a computer scientist himself, and neither a champion nor a foe of technology per se, Mr. Chapman gave voice to many leaders in the field who struggled with the ethical implications of new technology.

“He helped many distinguished computer scientists articulate their concerns,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington and a longtime colleague of Mr. Chapman’s. “He promoted an important dialogue between leaders in computer science and the broader public. It’s part of a very important tradition, and he played a key role.”

Closer to home, Mr. Chapman also worked to bridge the so-called digital divide, the gulf between those with access to technology and those without. In 1995, his 21st Century Project helped bring computers and the Internet to low-income areas of Austin.

“He made many people stop and ask hard questions about technology,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “Not just ‘Is it cool?’ but ‘Does it make our lives better, or more just? And does it make our world more secure?’ ”

Gary Brent Chapman was born on Aug. 8, 1952, in Los Angeles. In the mid-1970s he was a medic with the Army Special Forces.

After his military service Mr. Chapman attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, graduating in 1979 with a degree in political science. He was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University’s political science program in 1984, when he left to take the job at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

“When word went around in the community of peace activists that we had hired a former Green Beret, eyebrows were raised everywhere,” said Severo Ornstein, a computer scientist and a founder of the organization. But through Mr. Chapman’s careful and original thinking on a variety of issues, Mr. Ornstein said, “the raised eyebrows were quickly defused.”

With David Bellin, Mr. Chapman edited “Computers in Battle: Will They Work?” (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

As a senior lecturer at the University of Texas, Mr. Chapman taught graduate courses in technology policy. “Over the years, Gary mentored dozens of students, who went on to work in key policy areas,” said Sherri Greenberg, a fellow faculty member.

Mr. Chapman’s survivors include his wife, Carol Flake Chapman; his father, Arthur S. Chapman, and stepmother, Pierrette Chapman, of Solvang, Calif.; and a half-brother, Duane Chapman, of Bakersfield, Calif.

Although Mr. Chapman was known to colleagues as soft-spoken, he could be passionate when arguing a point. Eric Roberts, a computer science professor at Stanford, recalled that at a C.P.S.R. board meeting on the Stanford campus in 1988, Mr. Chapman banged his fist on the table to make his case. “Just at that moment we had an earthquake...”

Abortion Common Ground: A Pro-Life Agenda

2010-12-08T11:54:00.000-08:00

Abortion Common Ground: A Pro-Life Agenda
What pro-lifers can learn from the Princeton abortion conference.
By William Saletan
Nov. 16, 2010
Slate.com

1. Reduce the abortion rate through voluntary means. In the conference's opening session (videos of all but one session are available here), David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, warned fellow pro-lifers that overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn't address the underlying cultural dynamics that cause abortions. The next day, Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Notre Dame, voiced a similar concern: "... I'm very concerned with the study in 2007 that indicated that societies which criminalized abortion did not succeed in reducing the rate of abortion."

Rather than focus on passing laws, Gushee conveyed an alternative approach:...Help women avoid pregnancies they don't want, and you'll wipe out the vast majority of abortions without having to enact a single restriction.

I don't expect pro-lifers to stop fighting for restrictions. But I did notice some of them—notably, Helen Alvare, the former spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—using the term "pro-life" to describe the broad spectrum of Americans who are morally but often not legally opposed to abortion...

2. Subsidize maternity. Money can't buy everything. But it can make it easier to carry a pregnancy to term and raise the child...

3. Embrace contraception... Speaking of the evangelical Protestants to whom he ministers and belongs, Gushee said:

...I think it's fair to say that conservative religion is one contributing factor to the remarkably high rate of unintended pregnancies in our culture. … In my world, I sense currently a weakening of opposition to the provision of birth control and birth control information, including in the South... you could win the argument that even if one would wish that our young people were not having sex, we should tell them about birth control anyhow...

The morality of contraception is not the intrinsic problem in Protestant thought that it is in traditional Catholic moral thought...Even Christopher Kaczor, a Catholic philosopher at Loyola Marymount University, noted the vast moral difference between abortion, which in his view kills an innocent human being, and contraception, which doesn't. Honor that difference. Trade abortion for contraception.

4. Early abortions are better than late ones... From a pro-life standpoint, trading late abortions for early ones is hardly ideal. But it's better than nothing, and if you pursue it, nobody will stand in your way.

5. Choose your friends by your mission, not your mission by your friends. Camosy and Jennifer Miller, the pro-lifers who co-organized the conference, have been derided and accused of treachery by colleagues who regard any cooperation with pro-choicers as stupid or evil. Gushee has endured similar treatment. After the conference, Austin Ruse, the President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which opposes contraception as well as abortion, mocked Camosy and Miller for being young and poorly funded and for "validating" their pro-choice collaborators...

Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized

2010-11-22T09:59:00.001-08:00

Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized
By Dan Vergano
USA TODAY
Nov. 22, 2010

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.

..."It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

U.N. CONFERENCE:Negotiators give talks another try

Led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, the 2006 report criticized the statistics and scholarship of scientists who found the last century the warmest in 1,000 years.

"The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists," says Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists."

But in March, climate scientist Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts asked GMU, based in Fairfax, Va., to investigate "clear plagiarism" of one of his textbooks.

Bradley says he learned of the copying on the Deep Climate website and through a now year-long analysis of the Wegman report made by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif. Mashey's analysis concludes that 35 of the report's 91 pages "are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning." Copying others' text or ideas without crediting them violates universities' standards, according to Liz Wager of the London-based Committee on Publication Ethics.

Allegations under review

"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality."

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

• "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "

•"If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them," says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. "There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate."

•"The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side," says Ohio State's Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU's misconduct committee.

The report was requested in 2005 by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, then the head of the House energy committee. Barton cited the report in an October letter to The Washington Post when he wrote that Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann's work was "rooted in fundamental errors of methodology that had been cemented in place as 'consensus' by a closed network of friends." ...

Pastor who said Facebook was 'portal to infidelity' had four-way relationship

2010-11-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

Pastor who said Facebook was 'portal to infidelity' had four-way relationship

By Jon Swaine, New York 5:28PM GMT 21 Nov 2010

Rev Cedric Miller, of Neptune, New Jersey, last week told 50 married church officials to delete their accounts with the social networking site or resign.

Rev Miller, 48, claimed that 20 couples from his 1,100-member church had experienced marital problems in recent months after contacting ex-partners through the site.

But over the weekend Rev Miller's local newspaper disclosed that he "didn't need Facebook to be part of an extramarital affair".

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It found transcripts from a criminal trial against the church assistant in 2003, in which details emerged of what Rev Miller has since called "a very painful part of my past".

In the case, which was eventually dismissed, he testified that his wife, Kim, had an affair with the assistant, and that he and the man's wife were often present at their meetings.

"I mean between the four of us," Rev Miller said. "It was just, I mean there was touching ... it was crazy, it was as wrong as wrong could get."

Asked by a lawyer whether he was talking about "sex", Rev Miller replied: "Yes". He described their behaviour as "beyond what was appropriate".

Rev Miller told the court that the meetings between the couples often took place after Thursday Bible study sessions and after church services on Sundays.

Pope approves use of condoms in fight against Aids

2010-11-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

Pope Benedict XVI was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on 16 April 1927.

Pope approves use of condoms in fight against Aids
After decades of fierce opposition to the use of all contraception, the pontiff will end the Catholic Church's absolute ban on the use of condoms.
Pope Benedict XV will accept that in some circumstances it is better for a condom to be used if it protects human life
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones
The Telegraph
20 Nov 2010

He will say that it is acceptable to use a prophylactic when the sole intention is to "reduce the risk of infection" from Aids.

While he will restate the Catholic Church's staunch objections to contraception because it believes it interferes with the creation of life, he will argue that using a condom to preserve life and avoid death can be a responsible act – even outside marriage.

Asked whether "the Catholic Church is not fundamentally against the use of condoms," he replies: "It of course does not see it as a real and moral solution.

"In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality."

He will stress that abstinence is the best policy in fighting the disease, but accept that in some circumstances it is better for a condom to be used if it protects human life.

"There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be ... a first bit of responsibility, to redevelop the understanding that not everything is permitted and that one may not do everything one wishes...

Fox News' Roger Ailes Calls Obama Socialist, Jon Stewart 'Crazy' and NPR 'Nazis'

2010-11-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

Lee Atwater (see bottom of this post) apologized for political dirty tricks he pulled with Roger Ailes, but it looks like Ailes isn't about to apologize.

Fox News' Roger Ailes Calls Obama Socialist, Jon Stewart 'Crazy' and NPR 'Nazis'
David Knowles Writer
AOL News Surge Desk
Nov. 18, 2010

How does one define "fair and balanced"?

In a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes was not shy about voicing his opinions on a variety of subjects, including President Barack Obama, Jon Stewart and NPR. The interview, which ran in two parts at Tina Brown's site, offered insights into how the man charged with running Fox News views some of the topics most discussed on his network.

On President Obama:

"The president has not been very successful. He just got kicked from Mumbai to South Korea, and he came home and attacked Republicans for it. He had to be told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with."

On Jon Stewart:

"He loves polarization. He depends on it. If liberals and conservatives are all getting along, how good would that show be? It'd be a bomb. He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives."

On NPR:

"They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive."

What's striking about Ailes' commentary is not that it mirrors the perspective that often seems to be offered by the hosts and anchors at Fox News, but that it is being offered so freely by the head of a news organization whose motto would seem to dictate withholding it.

"If you watch most of the programming on the channel, I don't think you would find many of those comments surprising," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in response to the interview.

For his part, Ailes contends that his network, which donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association in the 2010 elections, is still focused on maintaining objectivity. "We're interested in two points of view; most networks aren't," Ailes told Kurtz while drinking from a mug adorned with the network's famous logo, "Fair & Balanced."

Ailes and Atwater (from Wikipedia)

Ailes served as a political consultant for many Republican candidates during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. His first such job was as media advisor for the Nixon campaign in 1968. He returned to presidential campaigning as a consultant to Ronald Reagan in the latter stages of the 1984 campaign. He is widely credited with having helped coach Reagan to victory in the second presidential debate with Walter Mondale, after aides Richard Darman and David Stockman bungled preparations for the disastrous first debate.

In 1987 and 1988, Ailes was credited (along with Lee Atwater) with guiding George H. W. Bush to victory in the Republican primaries, and the later come-from-behind[8] victory over Michael Dukakis. Ailes scripted and (with Sig Rogich) produced the "Revolving Door" ad, as well as all of Bush's broadcast spots in the primary and general-election campaigns.

Ailes denies producing the so-called Willie Horton ad, which showed the face of the convicted rapist furloughed by Michael Dukakis. The ad was sponsored and funded by the independent-expenditure group National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), but the Democrats later charged the Bush campaign with illegally coordinating the ad with the NSPAC. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated the charge, but deadlocked on a 3-3 vote, essentially clearing Ailes and the campaign of any legal wrong-doing.

Efforts to Improve Evolution Teaching Bearing Fruit

2010-11-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2010
Efforts to Improve Evolution Teaching Bearing Fruit
Education Week
By Sarah D. Sparks

When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pa., school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction.

Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit.

The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the Evolution Education Research Centre, a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, Journal of Evolution: Education and Outreach.

Though only one of a long series of skirmishes in a conflict that goes back almost as far as public education in America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which took place five years ago this month, engaged the professional science community because it put on trial for the first time the scientific validity of intelligent design. The concept posits that the development of humans and other living things was designed by an unnamed guiding force, rather than being the result of natural selection based on random variations.

The school board in Dover argued that there were weaknesses in the theory of evolution, and that students should be exposed to the idea of intelligent design. Judge John E. Jones III of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania flatly rejected that argument, noting that evolution is one of the most strongly supported theories in all of science, backed by broad evidence from across the field. By contrast, he concluded that “the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID [intelligent design] is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” in his 139-page findingRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader of fact.
See Also
From the Archives: View an interactive timeline of historical highlights in the debate over teaching evolution.

The district chose not to appeal the ruling, limiting its legal jurisdiction. But, along with the rejection of efforts in Arkansas and Georgia to undermine evolution’s validity through disclaimer labels on textbooks and fights over state science standards in Kansas around the same time, the ruling ignited an unprecedented push by scientists and education researchers to become more directly involved in integrating evolution concepts in science classes.

“What it has done is made it clearer to the scientific community that they have to come out and make a stand; they can’t wait in the wings and hope it all blows over,” said E. Margaret Evans, an assistant research scientist in education at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Classroom Model

One of the instructional-improvement projects is Evolution Readiness, a program devised by a team of researchers from the Concord, Mass.-based Concord Consortium and Boston College. It pairs computer modeling of natural selection with classroom activities and readings on evolution concepts. In the process of developing the program, the researchers have crafted the first evolution-content assessment for elementary students, based on 11 standards-based learning goals for Massachusetts, according to Camelia Rosca, a senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Testing Evaluation and Education Policy at Boston College.

At Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary School in Randolph, Mass., one of a handful of states where the program is being tested, 4th graders have finished a unit on plant adaptation, in which they watched the changes to a water-sensitive-plant population as the amount of water available was altered. The class is now extending the computer model to include rabbits and will soon add hawks to illustrate a basic food chain, said lead researcher Paul Horwitz, a senior scientist at Concord.

“We thought deeply about how to teach concepts to kids this young,” Mr. Horwitz said. “I didn’t want children to ‘believe’ in science; I wanted them to understand it as an explanation for the natural world.”
Brandon Ho, a 4th grader at Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary School in Randolph, Mass., responds to a computer-based teaching program on evolution that was created by the Concord Consortium. The program is among several projects scientists have launched in recent years that are aimed at improving students' understanding of that topic.

In addition to using the computer program, the children study a 25-foot-long timeline of species development, play games about food webs, and experiment with Fast Plants®, which germinate and flower within a month.

Now in the last year of a three-year study sponsored by the NSF, the project’s initial results with 200 students and 10 teachers in Massachusetts; San Juan, Texas; and North Kansas City, Mo., suggest that students who participate in the program show significantly better understanding than those in a control group of evolution concepts, such as the idea that changes in the environment will prompt changes in a population over time...

As Glaciers Melt, Science Seeks Data on Rising Seas

2010-11-15T18:18:00.000-08:00

As Glaciers Melt, Science Seeks Data on Rising Seas
By JUSTIN GILLIS
New York Times
November 13, 2010

TASIILAQ, Greenland — With a tense pilot gripping the stick, the helicopter hovered above the water, a red speck of machinery lost in a wilderness of rock and ice.

To the right, a great fjord stretched toward the sea, choked with icebergs. To the left loomed one of the immense glaciers that bring ice from the top of the Greenland ice sheet and dump it into the ocean.

Hanging out the sides of the craft, two scientists sent a measuring device plunging into the water, between ice floes. Near the bottom, it reported a temperature of 40 degrees. It was the latest in a string of troubling measurements showing that the water was warm enough to melt glaciers rapidly from below.

“That’s the highest we’ve seen this far up the fjord,” said one of the scientists, Fiammetta Straneo.

The temperature reading was a new scrap of information in the effort to answer one of the most urgent — and most widely debated — questions facing humanity: How fast is the world’s ice going to melt?

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.

But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia...

Oklahoma Surprise: Islam as an Election Issue

2010-11-15T09:51:00.001-08:00

Oklahoma Surprise: Islam as an Election Issue
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
New York Times
November 14, 2010

OKLAHOMA CITY — Cory Williams, a Democratic state representative from Stillwater, expected his opponent in the recent election to label him a free-spending liberal allied with President Obama.

Residents at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City last week. A lawsuit has stalled the ballot initiative.

He did not foresee that he would be accused of trying to subject Oklahomans to Islamic law.

Mr. Williams was one of 10 Democrats who voted against putting a state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would forbid state judges from considering international or Islamic law in deciding cases. He considered the idea unnecessary, since the First Amendment already bans state-imposed religion.

His Republican challenger sent out mailers showing him next to a shadowy figure in an Arab headdress. On the other side, the flier said Mr. Williams wanted to allow “Islamic ‘Shariah’ law to be used by Oklahoma courts” and suggested that he was part of “an international movement, supported by militant Muslims and liberals,” to establish Islamic law throughout the world.

“At the end of the day, it was just fearmongering,” Mr. Williams said.

He won by 280 votes, but many of his fellow Democrats failed to hold their seats...

“It was inflammatory, and it got people to turn out,” said State Representative Wallace Collins, a Democrat from Norman who lost a close race. “It worked for them.”

The day after the election, Muneer Awad, executive director of the local Council on American-Islamic Relations, filed a lawsuit. Mr. Awad argued that the amendment violated the freedom of religion clause of the United States Constitution, because it singled out Shariah law and Islam for special treatment rather than banning consideration of all religious codes. That amounts to state disapproval of Islam, he argued.

Last Monday, Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange of Federal District Court agreed that Mr. Awad’s complaint had merit, finding that the amendment’s “primary purpose inhibits religion.” She temporarily halted the certification of the election results and scheduled a hearing for next week.

Outside the courthouse, Mr. Duncan said the restraining order “thwarts the will of the people.” He said the amendment was never intended as an attack on Muslims, but as an effort to prevent what he called “activist judges” from using Islamic law in deciding cases.

Law professors have begun to raise questions about the unintended consequences of the amendment. Because it also “forbids courts from using or considering international law,” it could complicate contractual arrangements between Oklahoma companies and those with headquarters abroad. The amendment might also prevent judges from referring to the Ten Commandments or exploring English common law in their decisions.

“You throw a series of ambiguous ill-conceived words into the State Constitution and you don’t know what will happen,” said Harry F. Tepker Jr., a law professor at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s a mess.”

Ms. Fallin, who has strong support from business, has begun to back away from the amendment, even though she supported it. “It’s something that she will have to meet with the attorney general on and look at the legal specifics,” said Alex Weintz, a spokesman.

Muslim leaders in Oklahoma said the amendment felt like a slap in the face. They worry that marriages, wills, divorces and contracts — often drawn up between parties under Islamic principles then submitted to a court for approval — will no longer be valid. Jews and Roman Catholics often follow the same procedure in civil matters.

But many Muslims said they were more worried about the anti-Muslim mood that fueled the amendment’s passage. The vote here follows the controversy over a Christian pastor’s aborted plan to burn Korans in Florida and the opposition to an Islamic community center near ground zero in Manhattan...

Why is Glenn Beck attacking a man who dedicated his life to promoting democracy in Communist nations?

2010-11-14T18:47:00.000-08:00

Glenn Beck apparently approves of anti-Semitism as long as the target is a progressive.

Nov 13, 2010
This week in crazy: Glenn Beck
The king of conspiracy shamelessly attacks George Soros -- and finally nabs the award he was born to win
By Alex Pareene

Shocking but true: Glenn Beck has not yet been the subject of "This Week in Crazy," the feature that was essentially created to honor 2009's Craziest Man. This week, though, as if he knew that his usual conspiracy-mongering, fake tears and suffocating paranoia just weren't cutting it anymore, Beck aired a series of shameless attacks on George Soros that seemed ripped from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The message? Financier and philanthropist George Soros is a "puppet master" secretly at the center of a vast conspiracy that aims to destroy our economy and take over the nation through deceit. The proof? A lot of selectively edited quotes, wild innuendo and the fact that Soros "collapsed regimes" in "four other countries."

Beck knows full well that Soros dedicated his life to promoting democracy in Communist nations, which an avowed anti-socialist like Beck should theoretically be championing him for. But Soros is a progressive, and in the Beck world, progressives are socialists are Maoists are Communists are totalitarians, so any enemy of Soros is a friend of Glenn Beck's. Insanity makes strange bedfellows. Look who Beck quotes to support his argument that Soros is one of the secret rulers of the world:

He's known as the man who broke the bank of England. The Prime Minister of Malaysia called Soros an unscrupulous profiteer. In Thailand, he was branded the "economic war criminal." They also said that he "sucks the blood from people."

The prime minister of Malaysia went on to say: "We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew." (The other quote, about how Soros is a bloodsucking something-or-other, speaks for itself.)

I don't think people who read secondhand accounts of the specials -- or even those who read the transcripts -- can grasp how weird and shameless the entire spectacle was. There were puppets strewn about the set. The camera always watches Beck watching whatever we're supposed to be watching. Beck blatantly flirted with classic anti-Semitic tropes, knowing he'd be called on it but confident his friends would have his back. His taunting response to criticism: If he's a lying anti-Semite, why would Rupert Murdoch allow him on the air?

But the craziest bit of the entire thing came when Glenn Beck accused Soros -- a 14-year-old Jew in Budapest attempting, during the war, to survive the Holocaust -- of collaborating with the Nazis and "helping send the Jews to the death camps." Yes, that happened. Repeatedly.

Even Beck's allies in the Anti-Defamation League seemed taken aback by this -- though they affirmed that they still supported Beck the following day.

The fact that, for reasons of partisan convenience, half the media and the Anti-Defamation League ignore or pretend to not see fairly blatant repurposing of ancient anti-Semitic propaganda on a major cable news network by a prominent pundit? That makes me feel like this week's craziest person.

Eric Cantor's Pledge of Allegiance

2010-11-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

Nov 13, 2010
Eric Cantor's Pledge of Allegiance
Salon.com
By Glenn Greenwald

Soon-to-be GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- the same day when the actual U.S. Secretary of State met with Netanyahu -- and vowed that he and his GOP colleagues would protect and defend Israeli interests against his own Government. According to a statement proudly issued by Cantor's own office:

Regarding the midterms, Cantor may have given Netanyahu some reason to stand firm against the American administration.

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

Leave aside the absurdity of believing that Israel needs to be protected from the extremely deferential and devoted Obama administration. So extraordinary is Cantor's pledge that even the Jewish Telegraph Agency's Ron Kampeas -- himself a reflexive American defender of most things Israel -- was astonished, and wrote:

I can't remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president. Certainly, in statements on one specific issue or another -- building in Jerusalem, or somesuch -- lawmakers have taken the sides of other nations. But to have-a-face to face and say, in general, we will take your side against the White House -- that sounds to me extraordinary.

As Kampeas notes, Cantor's office quickly disputed his understanding, but this is hardly the first time Cantor has violated supposedly sacred political conventions in order to side with Israel over his own country. Last August, Cantor led a GOP delegation to Israel and while in Jerusalem -- which happens to be "foreign soil" -- he condemned his own President and American policy for opposing the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Criticizing America while on Dreaded Foreign Soil is supposed to be one of the most extreme taboos in American politics: Al Gore was bitterly denounced as a borderline-traitor for a 2006 speech in Saudi Arabia criticizing American foreign policy, and Gore at the time was merely a private citizen, not a leading political official. But American political figures like Cantor feel free to do exactly that -- criticize America on foreign soil -- when it comes to Israel; recall the same thing being done by by Mike Huckabee.

That's because, in general, all the rules change -- are completely reversed -- when it comes to Israel. As Cantor's behavior demonstrates, the rules that apply to "foreign countries" are inapplicable to Israel because in mainstream American politics, Israel is not considered and therefore is not treated as a "foreign country" at all. Many Israel devotees actually tried to expand the "no-criticizing-the U.S.-on-foreign-soil" rule by suggesting there was something wrong with Obama's criticism of Israel while in Indonesia; apparently, it's fine for American officials to criticize the U.S. while in Israel, but not for the U.S. President to criticize Israel while on foreign soil...

Joel Burns tells gay teens "it gets better"

2010-11-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

Watch video: a message to teens who are being bullied.

Outspoken Chinese Risk Confinement in Mental Wards

2010-11-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

Outspoken Chinese Risk Confinement in Mental Wards
Du Bin for The New York Times
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and DAN LEVIN
November 11, 2010

LOUHE, China — Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.

But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.

“I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.”

Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government’s response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital — and then to forge his brother’s name on the signature line.

He was finally released in April, after six and a half years in Zhumadian and a second mental institution. In an interview, he said he had endured 54 electric-shock treatments, was repeatedly roped to his bed and was routinely injected with drugs powerful enough to make him swoon...

Hometown paper blasts McConnell over Iraq revelation

2010-11-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

Nov 11, 2010
Hometown paper blasts McConnell over Iraq revelation
By Justin Elliott

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is taking some serious heat from his hometown newspaper for the revelation in George W. Bush's memoir that McConnell asked the president to pull some troops out of Iraq to boost the GOP's chances in the 2006 election. As we reported yesterday, McConnell at the exact same time was publicly accusing Democrats of endangering America because of their calls to withdraw troops from Iraq...

Spacing Out Half the Day Makes People Unhappy in Harvard Study

2010-11-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

Spacing Out Half the Day Makes People Unhappy in Harvard Study
November 11, 2010
Bloomberg Business Week
By Elizabeth Lopatto

People spend almost half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and their daydreaming usually doesn’t take them to a happy place, a study reports.

People’s minds wandered about 46.9 percent of the time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except sex, according to a study in the journal Science. Straying attention occurred most often at work.

Some religions suggest happiness is to be found by focusing on what’s happening at the moment, or “be here now,” the authors wrote, using a title of a 1971 book by spirituality and meditation guru Ram Dass. By analyzing the data over time, the researchers discovered that people didn’t merely fantasize when they were unhappy; instead, wandering minds led to unhappiness, said study author Matthew Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“People spend a lot of time with their minds wandering and that seems to be damaging for their happiness,” Killingsworth said in a telephone interview. The ability to think about things other than the present is a uniquely human trait, and seems to come with an emotional trade-off, he said...

Atheists, Jews, Mormons top U.S. religious knowledge poll, Christians trail

2010-09-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Atheists, Jews top religious knowledge survey
Atheists, Jews, Mormons top U.S. religious knowledge poll, Christians trail
By Ed Stoddard
Sep 28, 2010

DALLAS (Reuters) - They may not believe in God or gods but they know a thing or two about them.

Atheists and agnostics topped a survey of religious knowledge among Americans released on Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

"On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 ... Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers," Pew said.

It found Protestants answered 16 correctly and Catholics on average 14.7.

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, Mormons and white evangelical Protestants scored the highest, while Jews, atheists and agnostics trumped the other faiths on their knowledge of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism.

"While previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world's developed nations, this survey shows that large numbers of Americans are not well informed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions -- including their own," said Pew, which is based in Washington.

To see the "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" go to: here

Highlights of the survey include:

_ More than four-in-10 Catholics do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the body and blood of Christ.

- About half of Protestants cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person who sparked the Protestant Reformation.

- Less than half identified Buddhism as the Dalai Lama's religion, 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon and 54 percent correctly said the Koran is the Islamic holy book. More than 80 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic.

- Nine-in-10 Americans know U.S. Supreme Court rulings do not allow teachers to lead public school classes in prayer. But two-thirds incorrectly said Supreme Court rulings prevent them from using the Bible as an example of literature.

Glenn Beck cranks up the culture wars

2010-09-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck cranks up the culture wars
By Rich Benjamin
CNN
August 31, 2010

Editor's note: Rich Benjamin wrote the book "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America," winner of a 2009 Editor's Choice award from Booklist and the American Library Association. He is also senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan think tank.

Glenn Beck, consummate showman and talk hound, would have been more honest calling his rally to "Restore Honor" a rally to restore the culture wars.

Despite his splashy show to celebrate the troops, Beck's rally was not about "honor" any more than the controversy over the Islamic center near ground zero is about a building -- or the immigration debate is about fixing the system. Instead, Beck's rally upped the ante on America's social divides, all the while appearing to champion unity. It was a clever head-fake disguising backward conservative zealotry as feel-good inclusion.