If you'd logged onto the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from "Earning Differences Between Men and Women" to "Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women" to "Women's Earnings as Percent of Men's 1979-1997."
Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women's Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like "Hot Jobs for the 21st Century" and "20 Leading Occupations for Women." It's just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women's issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to "Missing: Information About Women's Lives," a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.
You've probably heard about some of the other examples in "Missing" -- for instance, the time the Centers for Disease Control removed an online guide to condom use and changed the fact-sheet language to indicate that studies on condom use were inconclusive, focusing instead on abstinence. But the power of "Missing" comes not from its dozens of individual examples, but from the depth and breadth of its findings about the small ways in which the Bush administration is draining the well of dependable public scientific and sociological information. [...] When it comes to issues of women's health, agencies like the CDC, FDA and the Health and Human Services Administration don't fare much better than the DOL or the Census Bureau with the NCRW researchers. One of their chief battle cries -- and arguments about why a study like "Missing" can be valuable in the future -- is over the changed language on a National Cancer Institute Web site. "Missing" cites the case of the 1997 New England Journal of Medicine study that conclusively proved that there was no link between breast cancer and abortion, a favorite claim of anti-abortion advocates. The NCI had a fact sheet with reference to the study posted on its Web site until November 2002, when the Web site was changed to indicate that studies about the link had been "inconclusive," an assertion that lent implied credence to the claims of the anti-abortion advocates. According to "Missing," members of Congress forced the convention of a panel of experts who reinforced the New England Journal's findings, and the NCI again posted information that there is no link between breast cancer and abortion.
Over at the Centers for Disease Control, the NCRW researchers claim, posted fact sheets were revised to suggest studies on the effectiveness of using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and other STDs were "inconclusive." Instead, the revised fact sheet focused on abstinence -- a favorite of the family values crowd -- as the only effective path to sexual health. As was reported at the time, the CDC also removed an online guide to proper condom use (replacing it later with a revised edition) as well as a list of successful sex education programs and studies that showed no rise in sexual activity among teens taught about condoms. "These are debates that scientific research has closed," said Riche. "The people who provide the information are now reopening those debates, taking away the scientific certainty. It's more subtle than putting out wrong information or simply removing all the information -- and, frankly, more effective."
MISSING: Information About Women's Lives (National Council for Research on Women, Misinformation Clearinghouse)
The fact that the administration is doing this isn't in the least bit surprising. That it is so comprehensive, and that they actually managed to be subtle about it, is truly amazing.
Posted by iain at 05:44 PM
The more that you hear about the Area 2 police torture accusations and how the city and various officials are responding to the allegations and lawsuits, the more lunatic the whole thing seems.
Previously secret documents show how the mayor's office and his corporation counsel were trying to devise a strategy to deal with the Jon Burge problem, Unit 5's Carol Marin reported. Burge is the now-infamous commander of Area 2, where almost 100 suspects claim police tortured them.
Two years ago, while four men sat on death row, fighting for their lives, internal documents show top city officials were concerned with a looming public relations problem posed by a Chicago police commander they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, defending. [...] Now, documents have surfaced revealing that two years ago, the city actually considered suing Burge in a public relations offensive. [Flint Taylor, the lawyer for one of four former death row inmates suing the city] said he has seen the documents but declines to detail their contents: "How damaging are those documents? I think they are very damaging," he said.
Through court documents and sources, Unit 5 learned the contents of e-mails between the head of the city's law department, Mara Georges, and one of the attorneys on her staff. In an e-mail dated Jan. 10, 2002, Mara Georges wrote to her assistant, "Sheila O'Grady (Mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff) would like us to explore an action against Burge. Will you please think about it and give us your thoughts?"
Later, the assistant replied, "... it seems to me what Sheila O'Grady really wants is to distance ourselves politically/perceptionally from police Area 2 actions ... but query how we'll do in the court of public opinion after a long, public, expensive and embarrassing discovery process?"
Not half so badly as it would if they'd actually gone forward with a lawsuit to recover costs, I'd wager. For one thing, it's pretty certain that Burge would pull out all the stops -- what would he possibly have to lose? -- and detail what he thinks the people prosecuting the cases knew, and when they knew it, what he'd told them, etc. Then Hizonner Mayor Daley would have to explain why, as Cook County State's Attorney during Burge's reign of terror, he'd used evidence and prosecuted cases that he had to know were badly tainted. There are people on the bench now who have made rulings pertaining to this mess who would have to answer questions about their previous conduct. As long as the city, county and state continue to get people to settle cases, as long as this whole process drags out forever, nobody will have to be asked or have to answer these types of questions.
Once this case actually gets dragged into a courtroom somewhere, if it ever does -- once one of the people accusing Burge and his staff of torture decides that they want the truth to come out as much as they want to be done and to get on with their lives, all bets are off. (Once discovery advances far enough, it will be interesting to see how much of the city's defense of Burge really was dictated by the union contract of the time, and how much was dictated by the desire to control his lawyers and keep him quiet. After all, defending yourself against lawsuits of this type will bankrupt most people, even if you win; good legal defense costs.
Posted by iain at 12:35 AM
U.S. warplanes on Wednesday dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs and fired powerful howitzers at what military officials said were Sunni Muslim insurgents who had fired on Marines ringing this city. The airstrikes in three different sections of Fallujah were the most aggressive American response to guerrilla attacks since U.S. commanders and Iraqi officials signed a cease-fire deal earlier this month. [...] In Washington, President Bush said, "There are pockets of resistance, and our military along with Iraqis will make sure it's secure." He also said, "Most of Fallujah is returning to normal."
My, what an extraordinarily flexible definition of "normal" our Glorious Leader has.
Posted by iain at 10:59 AM
This administration really does have the most amazing chutzpah, revealed in some of the oddest actions.
The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act. This represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered. [...] Six of the world's leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports.
"The current political and legal wrangling is a sideshow to the real issues. We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," Robert Paine, one of the scientists and an ecologist at the University of Washington, said when the Science article was published in late March.
Of course, this is part and parcel of the administration's approach to science; if it doesn't support what the administration wants to do, then rewrite it until it does. That this makes hash of what is supposed to be science doesn't matter, as long as it works politically and for their backers -- er, pardon, for the constituents who have donated and lavished thousands upon thousands of dollars on their campaigns.
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new policy on hatchery salmon -- to be published in June in the Federal Register and then be opened to public comment -- was in response to a 2001 federal court ruling in Oregon. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan found that the federal government made a mistake by counting only wild fish -- and not genetically similar hatchery fish -- when it listed coastal coho salmon for protection. To the dismay of many environmental groups, the federal government chose not to appeal that ruling, though it seemed counter to the reasoning behind the spending of more than $2 billion in the past 15 years to protect stream-bred wild salmon.
Oh, now, really. What sane person would have expected this administration -- with its well documented anti-environmental, pro-logging, pro-big business policies -- to appeal a ruling that says that they can spend less money improving habitats for salmon, that they can allow logging and other actions in areas where counting hatchery fish means that the species might come off the endangered list? Honestly, nobody who has paid the least attention to this administration would have expected that.
Really, the only way to get the species to recover would be to utterly ban fishing of any sort in the area, as well as banning all logging and development. And that would produce furious protest from the fishing and logging industries, as well as the housing industry; the latter two being ardent supporters of the administration, it would seem highly unlikely that they would choose to irritate them in this way, now doesn't it?
Posted by iain at 10:55 AM
American Civil Liberties Union attorneys lost their fight Tuesday to let a North Carolina teenager campaign for student body president with posters describing himself as the "Queer Guy for Hunt High." Seventeen-year-old Jarred Gamwell enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union in his effort to reverse a principal's decision last week that removed two gay-themed posters from the halls of Wilson's James B. Hunt Jr. High School. Judge Dwight Cranford of Wilson County Superior Court denied the ACLU's request on Tuesday without comment.
Well, I can't say that I'm even vaguely surprised that he lost. It was what I thought would happen. I'm not even surprised that the judge declined to comment; after all, that would mean defending an indefensible governmental restraint on speech, and why would any judge want to wade into that morass over a high school student election.
I don't suppose that the ACLU can or would continue with the case at this point. Since the election is over, the specific issue at hand is severely moot, and there would be no appropriate remedy.
Posted by iain at 04:59 PM
Sudan: Rebels responsible for violence (Seattle Post Intelligencer, Wednesday, April 28, 2004): Stung by charges that his government is fomenting ethnic cleansing in western Sudan, the humanitarian affairs minister came to see the evidence for himself - looted grain silos, scorched farmland, huts burned to heaps of black clay, and accounts of hundreds of thousands made homeless. But left unanswered was the question of who is to blame for the tragedy and looming famine in the Iraq-sized province of Darfur - the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, or the rebels it claims are threatening Sudan's stability with their campaign for autonomy?
The Darfur disaster has emerged as a delicate peace, brokered by Western and African diplomats, is taking root in another of Sudan's conflict zones - a 21-year civil war broadly defined as pitting the Muslim north against the Christian and animist south. In Darfur, which is almost completely Muslim, the division is between African and Arab. Human rights groups say the government is giving air support to the Arab tribal militias in Darfur. The government says the tribesmen are defending themselves against autonomy-seeking rebels, but denies aiding them....
Another Africa Calamity -- Will Media Slumber On?
The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries. We've just finished a spate of front-page stories, television docu-histories and somber panel discussions on "Why the Media Missed the Story" in Rwanda, pegged to the 10th anniversary of one of the most shocking tragedies of last century, or any century. More than 500,000 people were killed in a small African country in only 100 days, and the world turned away.
But even as the ink was drying on the latest round of mea culpas, another colossal disaster in Africa was already going uncovered. Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population. The rainy season comes to western Sudan in May. If farmers don't get back to their villages by then, the crops will not get planted this year — and that could mean mass starvation as well. But no one will go back as long as the janjaweed (literally, "armed horsemen") militias remain in the area.
So where are the journalists?
[...] But the fact is, with or without a war in Iraq, American journalists are generally slower to cover mass death if the victims are not white. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point.
Well, no ... I think you'd find that the Bosnians, Croatians and various groups in the former Yugoslavia are pretty certain that the American media tends not to cover "mass death", especially when it's on another continent, until it reaches a point where they can't avoid covering it. Relative whiteness has little to do with it. To be sure, Rwanda is a special disgrace -- although that's mostly governmental and political disgrace, rather than the press.
That said, there is truly an impressive lack of coverage of the situation in Sudan, if Google News Search is to be believed. Most of the articles seem to be coming from All-Africa.com; a few from Reuters, scattered sources here and there worldwide. It's worth noting that, according to various articles here and there, Africa seems to be having a spate of civil and other wars at the moment; figuring out which one, if any, to pay attention to is understandably difficult.
It looks like a lot of coverage above, yes, but except for the initial Seattle Post-Intelligencer link, it's almost all from African or UN sources.
Blame the US media for their particular blindness if you will. Blame the fact that with both a war in Iraq and an upcoming election, people in the US are, to put it mildly, severely distracted from anything else other than those and local affairs. However, the overwhelming evidence would be that nobody outside Africa is paying much attention to things going on there. I'm certainly not saying that should be the case; I'm merely stating that the blame should be spread around a bit more liberally.
Posted by iain at 03:29 PM
An openly gay student is fighting to campaign in his high school election with posters that read: "Gay Guys Know Everything!" and "Queer Guy for Hunt High." Seventeen-year-old Jarred Gamwell has enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to reverse a principal's decision last week that stripped the posters from the halls of James B. Hunt Jr. High School in Wilson.
"The school administration's removal of these two campaign posters is a clear violation of Jarred's constitutional right to free expression," Leslie Cooper, an ACLU attorney, wrote in a letter to the school Monday. "The Supreme Court has made it clear that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate."
School officials say they have the right to control and censor candidates for student body president, especially when their speech could interfere with learning. "The language in the two campaign posters in question was determined to be disruptive to the educational process and to have no relevance to the student's qualifications for office," said Robert E. Kendall Jr., school district spokesman in Wilson County, 40 miles east of Raleigh. In a letter to the ACLU, a lawyer for the district, David Orcutt, also said the school would also seek to prevent Gamwell from making similar statements in a campaign speech set to be broadcast Tuesday over the school intercom. Students vote Wednesday.
ACLU Sues North Carolina High School for Silencing Gay Student (aclu.org Press Release, April 27, 2004): The American Civil Liberties Union today asked a state superior court to end school officials’ attempts to censor a gay student’s campaign posters promoting his run for student body president. The posters – one with the slogan, “Queer Eye for Hunt High” and another reading, “Gay Guys Know Everything” – were removed by administrators at James Baxter Hunt Jr. High School in Wilson, North Carolina.
“At first, I just wanted to know why these two posters were taken down when dozens of others were still up in our hallways, but now I feel it’s important to stand up for my principles and my word,” said Jarred Gamwell, a 17-year-old junior who is an honor student. “I’m surprised that the school is taking this so far, but now I feel it’s important to stand up for my rights to let other students know it’s wrong for a school to stop them from being open and proud about who they are.”
The ACLU sought a temporary restraining order before the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, in Wilson, asking the court to force the school to put Gamwell’s posters back up before the student government election tomorrow. The move comes in the wake of the school’s defiant response to the ACLU’s demands yesterday afternoon. In a letter to the ACLU, the school’s attorney claimed that any speech related to student government is school-sponsored speech and therefore the school has the right to censor it. The school went on to say Gamwell’s posters were “disruptive” and had nothing to do with his qualifications to be president. This morning, in a further effort to silence Gamwell, school officials announced to students that campaign speeches planned for today have been cancelled.
Hmm.
So here's the thing: in fact, I don't think that the student's relative gaiety has anything to do with his qualifications for student government. How could it? That said ... how on earth could this possibly have been disruptive to the educational process in any way, shape or form? If the guy's running around slapping up posters, then clearly, everyone knows about him; it's not news and it's not going to create any sort of seven-days wonder.
It will be interesting to see if the court buys the school's argument that any speech related to student government is necessarily school-sponsored speech. For one thing, extending that argument out into any other government-related realm would be very troublesome indeed. For another, technically speaking, it can only be school-sponsored speech if the person is already a member of student government (assuming that the "school-sponsored speech" argument flies, which I kind of think it wouldn't, if we weren't talking about North Carolina and schools). Yet another problem: this is, quite clearly, state-sponsored censorship; even allowing that the school may more closely control students' speech in other forums that it provides, surely this goes well beyond the pale. If the court needed any more evidence that all the school wanted to do was to prevent Gamwell from talking about being gay, whatever relevance that might have to anything, surely the fact that they cancelled the campaign speech forum -- at which they could not reasonably have prevented him from speaking and at which they would have had precious little control over said speech -- will be enough.
That said ... this is one of the more conservative states in the country. Who knows what the court will do? Frankly, although the principal's actions are clearly based on his personal prejudices and not on any reasonable grounds, I think the court will allow it, but we'll see.
Posted by iain at 01:42 PM
I must admit, I'm somehow not surprised that the Portland, Oregon, police department settled this lawsuit out of court.
The city of Portland has agreed to pay $145,000 to an elderly blind woman after police pepper-sprayed and shocked her with a stun gun.
The altercation began as an attempt to remove shrubs and appliances from 71-year-old Eunice Crowder's yard, and ended with police citing her for harassment and disobeying an order.
This week, the city agreed to settle her excessive force lawsuit out of federal court, a month after a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge dismissed the violations against her. "This case goes to show that police misconduct and excessive force can happen to anybody outside the mainstream," said Ernest Warren Jr., Crowder's lawyer. "It does not have to be an African American; it can be someone who is elderly and white."
(Insert eyeroll, followed by, "Well, DUH," comment.)
Just imagine the picture that it would make in court: a few large and healthy (or in any event, quite a bit younger) men confessing that, for whatever reason, yes, they did in fact pepper-spray and taser a 71 year old blind woman. I'm thinking that any lawyer worth their salt said, "You know what? The merits of this case don't matter. It doesn't matter if she was calling you every foul word in the book, it doesn't matter if she was kicking you with steel-toed boots, it doesn't matter even if she bit you in the nads -- which she didn't. None of that matters in the slightest. The jury will look at you, and then they'll look at her, and then they'll look at you again, and at her again, and then they'll award her a million bucks or so, because you're strong healthy young men, and she's a 71-year-old blind woman! Whom you not only peppersprayed, but then you tasered her when she was on the freakin' ground! What the hell were you thinking?! WERE you thinking? ... Ahem. Yes. Anyway, you need to make this case go away. Settle. Now."
(Purely a side note: I just keep wondering what they were thinking when the woman's eye fell out. I mean, granted that the police do see a wide variety of incidents not normally witnessed by the general public. Still, that first moment when her eye just sails out of her head had to be rather startling, wouldn't you think?)
Posted by iain at 05:09 PM
Really, you wonder what part of "significant price increases will likely lead to signficant increases in downloading and file sharing part of the equation they're missing.
The major labels are looking at increasing the price of iTunes Music Store downloads to as much as $2.49 -- with experts predicting the move could kill the service. The US record industry believe iTunes song are too cheap, and the five top labels (Universal Music Group, EMI, BMG, Sony and Warner Music) are discussing a price hike ranging from $1.25 to $2.49 per song.
The Washington Square News notes: "At that price, downloading music will become far more expensive than buying CDs, which would practically destroy the online music market. This is counter to everything the record companies should be doing. If anything, they should be cutting prices to make it more attractive to download music legally. Instead, this move will push online music junkies back into the world of file sharing. After all, who wants to pay more for less? If the price hike happens it would be more logical to buy a CD. You might pay a couple bucks more, but that extra money buys pretty packaging, better sound quality, often some sort of video extra and, significantly, use unrestricted by Digital Rights Management. The record industry doesn't understand that the reason people flocked to free downloading services is because music simply costs too much."
Some CDs cheaper than downloads as labels put up prices (PCPro UK, Thursday 8th April 2004): Record labels in the US are already trying to cash in on the success of online music stores like iTunes and Napster by forcing up the prices for certain albums from $9.99 to $13.99. In some cases this is more expensive than the higher-quality CD version. The new album from N.E.RD. - Fly or Die - is one example, with Amazon selling it for 50˘ less than iTunes and Napster. It is by no means alone; similar price differences apply to albums from artists as diverse as Blur, Kylie Minogue and Bob Dylan.
Downloads rise as file traders seek new venues
By Dawn Kawamoto
CNET News.com
April 26, 2004, 9:09 AM PT
Music downloads among U.S. adults have risen sharply during the past several months, despite a crackdown by the music industry to curb such behavior. Between February and March, the number of people who reported they download music files increased to an estimated 23 million, compared with 18 million between November and December, according to a study released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That's an increase of 27 percent within a matter of months. [...] "Last January, we reported that after the recording industry lawsuits were launched into the public eye, there was a considerable drop in the percentage of Internet users who said they were downloading music or sharing files," Madden said. "And while its clear that the industry's legal campaign has made a lasting impression in the minds of American Internet users, we are also seeing evidence that a segment of users are simply moving away from the most popular and highly monitored file-sharing networks and are instead using alternative sources to acquire files." Kazaa, for example, lost approximately 5 million users between November and February, the report showed. But smaller file-sharing applications, such as iMesh, BitTorrent and eMule posted an increase in the number of users. And on the paid music front, more than 11 million U.S. users visited six major music download sites, according to the report.
To be sure, there are people who would use free downloading options no matter what the record labels do. But it does seem fairly clear that around $1 is about the price point where people are willing to tolerate paying for music. And who in their right mind is going to continue to use a service designed to dissuade them from downloading when it actually costs more than just buying the stuff in the first place? People certainly aren't going to pay for iTunes or Napster or Rhapsody or any of the other services is they not only have to pay more for the music, but even pay for the CD media themselves should they choose to store things that way. (Yes, they already do that, but they probably don't think of the CD costs in quite that way, because the RIAA isn't currently forcing the fact into their faces in quite the same way.) The pay services are alreadly likely somewhat skewed to an older user base -- it may just be that I'm no spring chicken myself, but most of the people I know using iTunes and Napster aren't college age or younger, and those are the people that the RIAA most needs to reach, since they do seem to have the most severe disconnect between the concept of music as a commodity that should be paid for and music as simple entertainment along the lines of radio or television, which isn't paid for directly. Making the pay services cost significantly more (and a more than 100% increase in prices is truly spectacularly brain-damaged policy) will sharply increase price resistance at those lower age levels, in part because they have less disposable income in the first place.
People will probably continue to create new filesharing methods that the RIAA hasn't detected yet (what on earth are iMesh and eMule?), continue to use anonymizing services to make it more difficult for them to track people down ... really, this is just plain stupid on their part.
Posted by iain at 12:54 PM
Well. I suppose it was necessary to think about, in any event. It's highly unlikely ever to be needed, one would hope, but given that Congress may well have been a target before, they probably should think about how it would be handled if an attack on Congress in session was successful.
Fearing that terrorists might target Congress, the House on Thursday approved a bill to set up speedy special elections if 100 or more of its members are killed. The House, in a 306-97 vote, put aside for now the larger issue of whether the Constitution should be amended to allow for temporary appointments in the event that an attack caused mass fatalities among lawmakers. The House, said Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., sponsor of the elections bill and a foe of appointments, "is rooted in democratic principles and those principles must be preserved at all costs."
I suppose the difference in how replacements are currently handled must come from the differences in the length of the term. States are already allowed to appoint acting senators to serve until the next regularly scheduled election, or to call for a special election for the purpose of choosing replacements should a senator die in office.
Posted by iain at 04:47 PM
It is good to be the king, isn't it? Or at least a friend of a friend of the king.
Forbes.com: Saudis pledged oil price cut before US vote-report (Forbes/Reuters, 04.18.04, 4:33 PM ET)
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, promised President Bush the Saudis would cut oil prices before November to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day, journalist Bob Woodward said in a television interview Sunday. In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" about his new book "Plan of Attack" on the Bush administration's preparations for the Iraq war, Woodward, a senior editor at the Washington Post, said Prince Bandar pledged the Saudi's would try to fine-tune oil prices to prime the U.S. economy for the election -- a move they understood would favor Bush's re-election. [...] Earlier this month Bandar reassured Bush that the kingdom would not allow oil shortages to hurt world economic growth after Saudi Arabia led a push by OPEC to cut output by 1 million barrels a day from April. "Saudi Arabia's policy is consistent. Number one: we will not allow any shortages in the market," Bandar told reporters on April 1 after delivering his message to Bush from Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah.
Of course, this assumes a few things: (1) OPEC wants Our Glorious Leader to continue in office and will therefore follow the Saudis' lead; (2) if not, that Saudi Arabia will unilaterally increase oil production a truly impressive amount in order to drive prices down on their own; (3) that OPEC's current cut will hold together long enough that prices don't go down too far ahead of the election -- traditionally speaking, someone always decides to increase production just a touch to try to take advantage of the high prices, and then someone else notices and increases their production, and then everyone has increased production and prices drop, because OPEC is only a strong cartel ... well, it's almost never a strong cartel, in the strong-arm sense, now is it?
Posted by iain at 12:47 PM
... Salam Pax: A tip on how to make your blog popular: position yourself in a place where a bomb might fall on you. Tickles everybody and makes your hits-counter happy. Possibility of death is a downside, but hey! You get linked by A-list bloggers.
...I think I'll pass on that if possible, thanks awfully.
Posted by iain at 11:07 AM
Colin, Colin, Colin. What on earth are you thinking?
For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq. But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. Moreover, some officials said, the book has created problems for the secretary inside the administration just as the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and President Bush is plunging into his re-election drive.
Mr. Powell has not acknowledged that he cooperated with Mr. Woodward, but the book presents the secretary's reservations in such detail that it leaves little doubt. A spokesman for Mr. Powell said again Sunday that he would not comment on the book, "Plan of Attack."
I shouldn't think he would comment, no.
If it weren't for the rather stealthy way this seems to have been handled, it would almost let me respect Powell a bit more. To be fair, his criticisms do seem to have been plainly stated to (and ignored by) the president and others. Nonetheless, to cooperate with the book and then let the administration be blindsided by its release does seem a bit much in some ways. (Not the cooperation itself, you understand, but the fact that they didn't know what was coming.)
When asked on "Fox News Sunday" about Mr. Woodward's contention that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are so distant on policy matters that they do not talk, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, described the men's relationship as "friendly."
"I can tell you," she said, "I've had lunch on a number of occasions with Vice President Cheney and with Colin Powell, and they are more than on speaking terms. They're friendly."
Well, yes. Quite. And I should imagine that the less they speak, the friendlier their relations. It's entirely possible to have quite a cordial entente with someone when you make a point of not speaking to them except when forced by circumstance. It would also be entirely impolitic on both parts to have an unfriendly working relationship, since they're both senior cabinet officers.
In the last year, the Woodward book says, Mr. Powell referred privately to the civilian conservatives in the Pentagon loyal to Mr. Cheney as the Gestapo
The publication of that particular item, however, is likely to put paid to any sort of cordiality between Powell and Cheney. I should imagine that Cheney knew what Powell thought, but what you can tolerate in private and what you can tolerate being publicised are two entirely different things.
As the article notes, this almost certainly means that Powell won't be secretary of state for the next Bush administration, should such horror come to pass. That will probably be good for his sanity, if nothing else. His reputation in Europe, reportedly, has improved with the publication of this book. It's hardly likely to enhance his reputation here, regardless of which side you fall on the debate, since it does seem rather sneaky and underhanded. His honor, meanwhile, seems to have taken such blows that it will not likely recover any time soon.
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. [...] Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999
My, my. Apparently, the Log Cabin Republicans may be growing a collective brain. (No, no, not in the horror movie kind of way.) Whoda thunk? And all it took was for the administration to make official what everyone else knew all along.
We're being treated this weekend to a revealing, if slightly predictable, display of President Bush's political priorities.
Meetings of the National Rifle Association in Pittsburgh and Log Cabin Republicans in Palm Springs, California, will show where Bush is building his alliances this year. And where he is not. [...] out on the Left Coast, a different sort of Republican gathering is taking place. So which Bush administration official did the Log Cabin Republicans invite as their keynote speaker? "No one," one senior Log Cabin official told the Grind. "We didn't think that [invitation] would be a wise use of paper." (They did, however, invite Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who has agreed to do the keynote address.)
The gay GOP group has opposed Bush's support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.
Christopher Barron, the group's political director, said it's too early to say whether the Log Cabin Republicans will endorse Bush. Members won't go there until the Republican National Convention in August. They do meet Saturday afternoon to talk about endorsements, but Barron said no headline would emerge from that gathering. "Obviously there's a split. Members are in different places on this," he said. "But it's hard to say at this point what people are thinking."
Barron has to say that. He's doing his job. But I'll make a vow: If Log Cabin Republicans endorse Bush, I'll eat my shoe. (Then again, remember how that threat turned out for CNN's Tucker Carlson when he pooh-poohed sales of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir, "Living History.")
The Grind doesn't usually make predictions in politics, but when a group takes the unprecedented step of running ads against a sitting president of its own party, one has to assume there's trouble in the kitchen.
Well, one would hope that there was "trouble in the kitchen", so to speak. When one has been sacrificed on the altar of political incorrectitude, one should perhaps be a tad perturbed about the whole thing.
To be sure, even if the LCR doesn't endorse Bush, it's not likely to endorse Kerry. After all, his position differs from Bush's only to a certain extent. Besides, while they may be forgiven by the party machinery for declining to take a position in the year in which they have been offered up to the conservative gods -- it would be really unreasonable to expect them to endorse Bush right now, wouldn't it? -- they wouldn't be excused for actually supporting the enemy.
Posted by iain at 12:57 AM
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, it must be said.
A candidate who stuck to his campaign despite photos showing him wearing dresses has lost his bid for office in Texas runoff elections that also picked GOP candidates for five congressional elections. Sam Walls, 64, who sought a seat in the Texas House, had said he would not give in to "blackmail" from whomever circulated the photos, saying they tried to use "very old, personal information" to force him out of the race.
Walls, a businessman, had once seemed the favorite over real estate broker Rob Orr, but GOP leaders urged him to withdraw after the pictures surfaced, and on Tuesday Orr won with 60 percent of the vote.
"Some people have said they feel sorry for me, but let me tell you how wonderful it has been for me," Walls said after his loss. "If you have not had the opportunity to find out that all your friends are true friends, then I feel sorry for you." He has said his family had "dealt with" the dress issue, and he apologized to supporters for any embarrassment caused by "a small part of my personal past."
Yes, well ... you'd kind of rather find that out without that sort of accompanying public embarrassment, most times.
It is oddly encouraging -- well, as encouraging as it can be when you're talking a conservative Republican being defeated by an archconservative Republican -- that Walls managed to still pull 40% of the primary vote. Allowing that it wasn't a massive number of votes overall -- Walls lost by just over 1,000 voves, according to other accounts -- it still indicates that a fair number of people may be starting to see beyond things that may be irrelevant to actual job performance; that is, whether or not the person stands a chance on delivering for things that are important to you.
Posted by iain at 01:13 PM
...but apparently twelve of them is another issue altogether.
A woman who keeps 12 capuchin monkeys as pets lost her bid today for permission to continue to keep the animals in her Dunlap home. The Elkhart County Board of Zoning Appeals denied the request by Darlene Rucker, but gave her a one-year exception allowing her time to move from her home in a subdivision about 20 miles east of South Bend to a more rural setting.
Rucker has owned monkeys for nine years, but until recently she had encountered few complaints. A complaint to zoning officials, though, forced her to apply for the variance. Zoning administrator Larry Harrell said the fact Rucker kept monkeys as pets was not the issue. He said neighbors were concerned about the number of animals.
I can't say as I terribly blame them, overall. Twelve of any sort of domestic animal that roams around the house or lands is perhaps pushing it just a bit much.
Posted by iain at 06:37 PM
Transgender teenager Gwen Araujo was executed in cold blood by a group of men bent on revenge for being deceived by a flirty girl who turned out to be biologically male, a prosecutor told a Hayward jury Wednesday. In an opening statement that lasted nearly three hours, prosecutor Chris Lamiero outlined his case against three men charged with the 2002 murder of the Newark 17-year-old, who was born Edward Araujo but lived and identified as a young woman. "Make no mistake, Eddie's death was an execution, because in their minds, he committed a capital offense," Lamiero said.
They're only just getting started on this. Good grief. Jury selection alone on this trial took three weeks; I wonder if that means that the trial itself is going to be a long one.
Attorneys for Merel and Magidson have suggested that their clients did not plan the crime in advance, but instead were acting in the heat of passion. That would support a manslaughter charge instead of murder.
I still can't believe that they're going to run with this defense. If the facts are remotely as they've been reported in coverage thus far, they don't really support this. It's essentially a cynical ploy on the part of the defense to play on the jury prejudices against homosexuals and the transgendered.
Results from an arguably much more conservative part of the country indicate that this defense may not work terribly well.
Every jury is different, to be sure. Nonetheless, if you can't get a manslaughter conviction out of an Indiana jury on that particular charge, it may be considerably more difficult to get one out of a northern California jury.
Posted by iain at 05:09 PM
Two senators on Wednesday asked the Transportation Security Administration whether the agency violated federal rules by helping its contractors acquire passenger data, and why the agency told government investigators it didn't have such data. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and ranking member Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) asked the questions in a letter sent to Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson. The senators also pressed the TSA for an explanation of why it hadn't revealed the transfer of millions of passenger records to government contractors. Senate members had asked TSA officials directly whether they had done so, but the answer was no. Two TSA agency spokesmen also denied to Wired News that any data transfer had taken place, saying that the project did not need data at the time.
But this week, American Airlines became the third airline to reveal that it turned over millions of passenger records to the government without informing the passengers. JetBlue and Northwest Airlines had earlier revealed that they too had transferred passenger records to government contractors. For the past eight months, TSA officials and spokesmen have repeatedly denied that any data transfer occurred. "We are concerned by potential Privacy Act and other implications of this reported incident," the senators wrote. "Moreover, TSA told the press, the General Accounting Office and Congress that it had not used any real-world data to test CAPPS II. American Airlines has now indicated that it provided over 1 million passenger itineraries at TSA's request, which raises the question of why agency officials told GAO that it did not have access to such data."
TSA officials were unavailable for comment on the letter.
I should think they would be unavailable to comment to the press, yes. Having directly lied to the press on more than one occasion about this information, the questioning would be decidedly unpleasant. Although probably not as unpleasant as what the senators may have in mind.
Frantz added that the transfer didn't violate American's privacy policy in 2002, but that its current policy says the company "won't share data with the government unless explicitly ordered to do so." American said the contractors destroyed the data, but that could not be confirmed. A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security's chief privacy officer, Nuala O'Connor Kelly, is looking into whether TSA officials violated federal privacy laws or internal regulations in asking for the data. Two months ago, O'Connor Kelly issued a report about JetBlue's data transfer. At the time she was writing the report, she was not told about the American Airlines transfer, which happened at the same time, she said. Barry Steinhardt, who heads the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, said he suspects more airlines will reveal that they, too, shared data. "We are on the verge of seeing a clean sweep of all the major airlines," he said on Tuesday.
You just wonder why TSA has decided that "deny, deny, deny" is their watchword on this issue. It's especially puzzling because there are so many out there who can say, "Yo! Over here! We gave our data to you just a few months ago! We got receipts and everything!" Seeing that they're not taking a business hit on this, the airlines have nothing to lose by coming clean; the TSA has decided to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate, and in so doing, is hanging itself out there in the wind, twisting gently in the breeze caused by the press' importunate questioning.
It's just terribly impressive to watch this agency hamstring itself. Whether or not people believe that TSA needs stricter oversight, it's certainly going to get it, and it will be all their own fault.
Posted by iain at 04:47 PM
Media Relations: we are here, we are here, we are here!tv./ April 14, 2004
The Big Gay Channel seems to be coming. The question is, is that a good thing?
Posted by iain at 02:06 PM
UPDATE, 4/13/2003: The management of this weblog (that is, me) apologizes to the management of SFGate.com for the piece which formerly occupied this space.
A reader pointed out something very important. It turns out I completely misread the Poynter article linked below; Morford actually used the word "fucking" itself in his piece. Additionally, after I'd posted this, the people at Poynter posted the full text of the article footer itself in their own article feedback section -- about six hours after this piece went up -- so that we could see exactly what he said. Morford waxes wroth, to put it mildly.
This weblog management deeply regrets the error.
Controversial SFGate.com columnist Mark Morford was suspended by his bosses at the San Francisco Chronicle following his use of the word "f***ing" in an e-mail newsletter. As I reported here last week, his humorous column was put on hiatus for more than a month. The profanity was a serious-enough transgression that the company put him on paid leave while it negotiated with the Northern California Media Workers Guild, which represents SFGate.com workers. According to Guild executive officer Doug Cuthbertson, the result of the negotiations was that Morford was put back to work (starting today) and given a four-day unpaid suspension. The profanity appeared in a subscription footer at the end of his thrice-weekly newsletter, The Morning Fix, for some time. It did not appear on the website or in Morford's column.
UPDATE, 4/13/2003: Again, I apologize for the error, and the commentary previously existing in this space has been withdrawn.
Posted by iain at 05:32 PM
Media Relations: radical alienation/ April 12, 2004
Posted by iain at 01:55 PM
Media Relations: fine, just fine (April 8, 2004)
Posted by iain at 03:36 PM
And so all of the Academy's censored roast chickens have come home to roost. And the Academy continues to be an ass.
Black-clad art students smoking black cigarettes massed on the sidewalk when a "pop culture'' class erupted into a full-blown demonstration at the in San Francisco on Wednesday. Just under 100 students were joined on the downtown sidewalk by a group of nationally known authors who gathered to support freedom of expression and to protest the recent expulsion of a student and dismissal of a teacher. [...] brief speeches were given by Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers, San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez and David Green of the First Amendment Project. Author Herb Gold and Zoetrope magazine editor Tamara Straus were also on hand. [...] The incident soon took on a life of its own, particularly after a story ran in The Chronicle in late March. That was when Handler became concerned and helped organize a "forum on free expression" to be held in Kaufman's class last week. But when he arrived at the school, security guards blocked him from entry. On Wednesday, he was again denied access to the building at 180 New Montgomery St., which led Kaufman to bring his class to the street. The administration explained that in both cases, Kaufman had not submitted Handler's name on a list of guests that instructors are required to file in advance.
I can't imagine that the Academy's administration is the least concerned about all this, except that the continuing publicity, low level though it may be, is giving them a black eye in the public. But they can weather this easily enough. After all, their target audience will, for the most part, be next year's 18-year-olds, most of whom won't be paying the slightest attention to this controversy right now. Unless you're actually in San Francisco, it's likely not on your local news radar, so why would you ever hear of this? So the Academy will likely get through all this just fine.
Pity, really.
(Previously: The Academy of Art University is an ass.)
Posted by iain at 11:46 AM
Clearly, this administration never learns nothin' about nothin'.
9/11 Panel: Bush White House Withheld Papers (Washington Post, registration required)
By Dan Eggen
Thursday, April 8, 2004; Page A04
The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks announced yesterday that it has identified 69 documents from the Clinton era that the Bush White House withheld from investigators and which include references to al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and other issues relevant to the panel's work. The White House turned over 12 of the documents to the commission yesterday, officials said. But 57 others, which were not specifically requested but "nonetheless are relevant to our work," remain in dispute, according to a commission statement. The panel has demanded the documents and any similar ones from the Bush administration. [...] The discovery of the documents came as a result of a staff review this week of about 10,800 pages of material from the Clinton archives, including about 9,000 pages that the White House had not given to the commission despite the conclusion of federal archivists that they may be relevant. The administration had not notified the panel about the records, which Clinton attorney Bruce R. Lindsey discovered in February. [...] Kerrey said the panel was provided yesterday with a copy of a draft speech that Rice was scheduled to give on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks. It focused on missile defense and made little mention of terrorism. Some commissioners had complained that the document had not been turned over to the panel, and the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) accused the White House yesterday of trying to "stonewall" the commission.
White House Refuses Panel Request for Rice Speech (NY Times, registration required, April 7, 2004)
The White House has refused to provide the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks with a speech national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was to deliver on that day touting missile defense as a priority rather than al Qaeda, sources said on Tuesday. With Rice slated to testify publicly before the commission on Thursday, the commission submitted a last-minute request for access to Rice's aborted Sept. 11, 2001 address, sources close to the panel said. But the White House has so far refused on the grounds that draft documents are confidential, the sources said. A spokesman for the commission would neither confirm nor deny the request, or the administration's response.
The White House said it was cooperating with the investigation. "The White House is working with the commission to ensure that it has access to what it needs to do its job,'' White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.
Yeah. Sure it is. I'm sure we all believe that, now don't we?
Leaving that peculiar assertion aside, you have to wonder what it takes to get it through the White House's head that at this stage, any refusal will pretty much automatically become a bigger story than the information could possibly be worth. Let's be realistic, shall we? Nobody could reasonably expect that a speech on missile defense would have word one about terrorism or any other particular issue. At best, it will indicate that the administration had other defense priorities besides terrorism -- and, if you think about it, it should. Mind, in this day and age, missile defense is a spectacularly foolhardy priority. But nonetheless, the simple fact that the administration was looking at other defense issues is, in and of itself, meaningless.
This refusal is especially problematic because the grounds on which it is based -- that background documents and ungiven speeches are classified and confidential materials -- are not only invalid pretty much on their face, but the administration itself has freely violated that principle with wilful abandon whenever it so chooses. For example, in their ongoing attempts to smear Richard Clarke, the administration gave Fox permission to use his name and broadcast information from a background briefing that had been given on the explicit grounds that it was off the record or confidential.
Fox News Channel created a stir yesterday by broadcasting past remarks by a leading critic of the Bush administration that seemed to support the president's anti-terror efforts - although the comments were originally made on condition that their speaker not be identified.
In August 2002, the critic - former chief counter-terrorist official Richard A. Clarke - defended the White House's record on fighting terrorism in a "background" telephone conversation with a small group of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle, who taped the exchange. But the comments were considered "on background," an arrangement frequently used by the press. In "background" conversations, a source provides information to reporters on the condition that it not be directly attributed to him. At the time, Clarke's bosses at the National Security Council insisted that his quotes be attributed only to an unnamed counter-terrorism official, Angle said yesterday.
Clarke's remarks and identity were released yesterday, the same day he testified before a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Clarke also this week published a book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in which he argues that in the months preceding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the president and his aides didn't take warnings about the threat posed by al-Qaida seriously enough. Yesterday, Angle got permission from the Bush administration to broadcast the remarks and to use Clarke's name. "We asked them to lift the rules, and for obvious reasons, they did," Angle said.
"For obvious reasons." Well. Yes. Quite.
In any event, if it's fair game to release attributable background materials when you want to try to discredit someone (although it didn't work at all the way they planned -- the only ones being discredited are Fox News itself and, as it turns out, the administration for allowing the revelation), then it should be fair game for attributable background materials to be released when requested for an investigation. Especially when it consists of a speech that was going to be given in public in the first place, for heavens sake. Had the attacks happened a few hours later, there wouldn't be any refusing, because the speech itself would be in the public domain.
When it comes to public relations, this administration seems suddenly to be quite ham handed and stupid.
In the meanwhile, now that we're all focused on 9/11 investigations and the ongoing rebellion in Iraq, it seems that we're missing one or two things elsewhere. For example, remember Afghanistan? The country where all this grand strategy theoretically started?
Afghan Warlord's Troops Storm Province, Governor Flees (Washington Post, registration required)
Thursday, April 8, 2004; 8:59 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Forces of a northern strongman overran the capital of a remote Afghan province Thursday, the interior minister said, in a burst of factional violence undermining the authority of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai. Troops loyal to ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum swept into Maymana, the center of Faryab province, some 260 miles northwest of Kabul, on Thursday morning, Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said. "Today, at 10 o'clock, militia troops loyal to General Dostum entered Maymana city," Jalali said. "They have control of the city." [...] The fighting was bad news for Karzai, and sure to lead to deep concern in Washington over the future stability of Afghanistan, just as American forces are facing a surge of violence in Iraq.
The city of Maymana fell before the arrival of hundreds of U.S.-trained Afghan soldiers, who left Kabul for Faryab on Thursday afternoon. It was the second major burst of militia violence to rock Afghanistan in less than a month, and threw into further doubt this country's readiness for national elections scheduled for September.
So, let's see: we've got a nicely overextended military, comprehensive rebellion from both Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, Iraqi rebels kidnapping foreign nationals to force their country's withdrawal, loss of control of a city in Afghanistan, and the administration trying -- again -- to stonewall an investigation at home.
My, things are going well, aren't they?
Posted by iain at 11:27 AM
Houston Chronicle article reproduced in its entirety due to brevity, and because for the moment, I'm just about speechless.
DALLAS - What started as a dull runoff race to field a Republican candidate for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives has heated up due to a controversy over cross-dressing. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Tuesday photographs of candidate Sam Walls dressed in women's clothes have circulated among political leaders in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth. Local Republican leaders confirmed separately that they had seen the photographs of Walls in a wig, dress and high heels.
Walls, who has the endorsement of several leading Republicans in the state and was expected to win the run-off, was not available for comment. He said in comments printed in the Star-Telegram that he will not drop out of the race due to a campaign of blackmail. "Through intermediaries, my opponent told me to drop out of the campaign or the private information would be released," Walls told the paper. "Now my opponent is using the information in an attempt to intimate that I am a homosexual, which I am not." Walls, 64, who describes himself as a fervent Baptist, told the paper his family had "dealt with" the issue of his cross-dressing and that he asked for forgiveness.
The opponent in question is Rob Orr and his campaign officials said they have not distributed the photos. Jeff Judd, the county chairman of the Republican party, said it was too late for Walls to drop out of the April 13 runoff. "It would have been much better judgment for him not to have run," he said.
County GOP takes cautious stance (By Martha Deller, [Fort Worth] Star-Telegram Staff Writer, Wed, Apr. 07, 2004)
CLEBURNE - More than 100 people showed up at Johnson County Republican Party headquarters Tuesday night hoping to hear more about photos of state House candidate Sam Walls in women's attire that began circulating last week and have divided the county GOP. Walls, 64, is in the April 13 GOP primary runoff against Burleson real estate broker Rob Orr for the House District 58 seat. [...] Two and a half hours later, party chairman Jeff Judd read a statement that left Walls' backers and his District 58 opponent Rob Orr each claiming victory in the dispute about the photos and how they were made public. The statement called on all Republican party candidates to "keep the peoples' trust by living their lives and conducting their activities in a manner that is above reproach."
"Above reproach." Yes. Well. Quite. Just a bit late for that particular admonition, one might think.
I will admit that I am (somewhat) impressed at how the Johnson County Republican Party managed to cobble together a desperately neutral and mostly non condemnatory statement. Although one suspects that it's mostly because the deadline had passed, and there was no way to get Walls off the ballot, so they had to figure out a way to be unsupportingly supportive, so to speak.
It's nasty but masterful political dirty tricks. It has the advantage of apparently being true and documented (and one wonders first why Walls had pictures taken, if he did, or who took them and how if he did not, and second, how whoever did this managed to get the damn things). It will also be interesting to see if Texas Republicans can separate what's relevant from what isn't. After all, one would assume that Mr Walls' political values are the same, regardless of the clothing he's wearing at the time. (Mind, one suspects that they may also be more than a little hypocritical, but that's somewhat beside the point.) And, for what it's worth, now that this has been revealed, should they elect him, he'll probably be more effective, because now he doesn't have to worry about the information leaking out in a more damaging way. (Although how it could be more damaging, one can't and doesn't want to imagine, thanks.)
Posted by iain at 01:16 PM
Percentage of African American population 1990 (GIF Image, 572x413 pixels)
Found at the GIS Data Bank via caught In between. I was wondering what more recent data might look like, so I went searching.
African Americans make up the largest racial minority group in the United States, numbering 34.7 million individuals, or 12.3 percent of the U.S. population in 2000. The 2000 Census was the first census to give respondents the option of reporting more than one race. An additional 1.8 million people (0.6% of the population) reported black in combination with at least one other race.
...Geographic Perspectives:
Over half (53.6 percent) of black Americans live in the South; 18.8 percent live in the Midwest, 17.6 percent live in the Northeast, and 8.9 percent live in the West. The largest black populations are in New York (3.2 million) and California, Texas and Florida (2.5 million each)...
The PRC map and data offer a somewhat more nuanced picture, if not directly comparable. The 1990 map looked only at people identifying as African-American; because the racial categories changed, the PRC summary looked at "people indicating one or more races including Black or African American as a percent of total population by state"; the breakdown of percentages is also finer (and frankly, makes somewhat more sense). Additionally, the PRC map contains only a statewide picture, rather than using county by county data. Nonetheless, you can put together an interesting overview of the whole, assuming that residence patterns didn't change too drastically from 1990-2000.
There are some interesting and peculiar variations -- for example, it seems that New York City and a couple of the larger cities within New York state apparently have so many blacks that they deform the results for that state. It also seems to be true of Detroit and a few other areas in Michigan, California with San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Chicago and a few cities in Illinois (Peoria, Rockford, and East St Louis, at a guess). Other than that, the two maps are more or less consonant. We're apparently a very localized bunch of people, not terribly surprisingly given history.
(You do wonder what the heck is going on with West Virginia, though.)
The PRC paints an unexpectedly cheery picture for education and other demographics, based on 2000 data. I wonder if 2010 data will show the same unexpectedly cheery trend. It's likely that both education and poverty will be affected by the recent recession, for example.
Posted by iain at 12:41 PM
Media Relations: he's victoria's secret?/ April 6, 2004
Posted by iain at 12:32 PM
Jan Richman had seen the work of some hyperactive imaginations in her time as an art-school writing instructor. This was something else entirely. The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the teacher panicked, wondering what to do now that she had already handed out copies to her class to take home and read. [...] Before the week was out, the student was expelled and sent home, the instructor was fighting for her job, and many students and faculty were left wondering about issues of artistic and academic freedom in the post-Columbine era of heightened fear over student safety. [...] By the time Richman's weekly class was set to reconvene, the university's director of security had called in the San Francisco Police Department's homicide division. [...] Kaufman said one of his students had recently been asked to leave the school when she submitted a paper alluding to suicide threats. Like Richman, the instructor approached his superiors for advice on possible counseling services, only to see the student swiftly expelled.
"They asked me if I plan to use my book 'Outlaw Bible' in class, because there are dirty poems in the book," he said. "The move is toward repression."
Reportedly, the university has also responded to this "crisis" -- entirely of the university administration's making -- by announcing stringent content guidelines for student work in all media. Author Daniel Handler was forcibly prevented from entering the university's buildings to present at a forum regarding the professor's dismissal. (I should think the university would have actively been doing all it could to prevent anyone from presenting or attending at that forum, indeed, considering as it could not have hoped to fare well.)
It will be fascinating to watch the Academy try to fit their new censorship -- of people who are not only paying for the privilege, but almost all of whom are legal adults -- into what they will be pleased to call their principles of artistic expression document. This is also the sort of thing that's likely to affect both faculty and student recruitment, at least in the near term. After all, it's likely that the ability to create freely will be one of the things that attracts both students and faculty to a university, and the fact that the university is now on record with behavior that says, in essence, "Well, no, you can't create freely; you can only do what we approve," will perhaps create some problems in the future.
One can but hope, in any event.
Posted by iain at 03:36 PM
Once a week, the five friends, all members of the Abundant Life Cathedral here, get together to eat sushi, sip wine and talk. But one recent afternoon, the women chose a different activity: They went to see "Not a Day Goes By," a musical about black men on the "down low" who, while not calling themselves gay or bisexual, have sex with other men, often behind the backs of their wives and girlfriends.
To these women, it was a subject of increasing urgency.
"Once I found out how prevalent the down low was in our community, I was very afraid," said one of the women, Tracy Scott, a 37-year-old government relations consultant.
Her friend Misha King, 35, said she needed to get as much information as she could, as quickly as she could.
"I've been on field trips to the gay bars and have seen guys that look like men you would date," Ms. King said. "I treat every man as a bisexual because I don't want to end up as the sister with H.I.V."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that should pretty much have been her standard operating procedure for the past 20 years. People lie about their sex lives; trusting them before you know them well is foolish. Mind, at some point, you do have to decide to let down your guard, but still, why would you do that early in a relationship?
(Purely a side note: I do love how Miss King talks about "field trips to the gay bars". Makes one feel like a zoo exhibit, or something that the Crocodile Hunter would be declaiming about.)
In government studies of 29 states, a black woman was 23 times more likely to be infected with AIDS than was a white woman, and black women accounted for 71.8 percent of new H.I.V. cases in women from 1999 to 2002. Though new cases of H.I.V. among black women have been stable in the past few years, the number of those who have been infected through heterosexual sex has risen. [...] In February, health officials identified a fast-spreading outbreak of infections among 84 men, primarily black students at 37 colleges in North Carolina. The majority were infected through sex with other men, but a third reported that they had had sex with men and women.
"What we learned from the research we did with college men here is the potential for H.I.V. to enter the mainstream population of the black community," said Dr. Peter Leone, medical director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services H.I.V. prevention unit and a co-author of a study of the 84 men.
"This is a big change and may be a defining moment," Dr. Leone added. "I don't mean to sound like Chicken Little, but if we don't react to this very quickly and aggressively, it'll be like the 80's all over again. Instead of gay white men, though, we'll be dealing with large numbers of young black men and their female partners." [...] the North Carolina findings made it clear that H.I.V. had the potential to spread to a wider circle of blacks. In particular, the new research has alarmed black women. Now in online chat rooms, at book clubs, on radio call-in shows and in whispered conversations with friends, many are trying to piece together information to figure out if men, whether one-night stands or their husbands, may have secret lives putting them at risk.
"H.I.V./AIDS is a disease of opportunity, not socioeconomics," said Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. "The research out of North Carolina reveals that among black folks, no matter who you are or who you think you are, you are not safe from H.I.V."
And once again, once the initial flurry dies down, the greater society at large will likely just shrug and say, "Oh, well. Just don't have sex with black people." That was the general reaction regarding gay men once more information was available about AIDS, so there's no reason it won't be the reaction when this new outbreak occurs. And because people are who and what they are, it probably will occur. Unfortunately, it's very hard to make people prevent a problem; for some reason, we seem to prefer to react to crises instead.
Posted by iain at 01:14 AM
Media Relations: straight gaydar/ April 2, 2004
Posted by iain at 12:16 PM
Former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and a former homicide detective bragged about beating and other forms of torture they allegedly used against murder suspects at a South Side police station, the detective's sister has told lawyers for a former Death Row inmate.
"They began to boast about power and what really happens in a police station," Ellen Pryweller, sister of former Detective Robert Dwyer, said in a sworn videotaped statement given to attorneys representing Madison Hobley. "When they get them in a police station, they give them hell," she added. "...They beat the [expletive] out of them. They throw them against walls. They burn them against radiators. They smother them. They poke them with objects. They did something to one guy's testicles."
Accused Cop's Sister Testifies About Alleged Torture (NBC 5 Chicago, transcript of original report and video footage.)
It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Pryweller's statement was sworn for another case, but has been denied by her brother already. They're already dragging her reputation through the mud, talking about her divorce, contested child custody, having seen a counselor to get through such a rough time.
Technically speaking, it's essentially hearsay; the policeman's sister wasn't present for the torture, so there's a limit as to how useful this will be. Burge is off in Florida, the lawyers for the other policemen are saying, "This never happened" ... You just wonder what, if anything, can come of this. Still, for all that it's worth very little, it's the first independent corroboration of any sort -- coming from someone who wasn't one of the victims -- that torture seems to have happened. She's recounted some details that may wind up matching up to details of injuries suffered by others, although since nobody admitted the torture at the time, the people weren't treated for the injuries and they wouldn't have been cataloged.
In one of the cosmic ironies of this mess, the city as a codefendant with the officers, and as a condition of the police union contracts, is required to defend the officers that they fired as a result of the various allegations of torture. Additionally, according to Carol Marin's televised report of April 1, all of the former police officers are stating that they will assert their Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination, rather than testify in any case. (I thought the Fifth Amendment didn't apply in civil cases; however, since it is a state civil case, they may not be able to be subpoenaed to bring them back in any event.)
Posted by iain at 12:05 AM
The International Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered American courts to review death sentences imposed on 51 Mexicans in the United States, saying their rights under international law had been violated. The decision, by the United Nations' highest court, was seen as a moral victory in Mexico and as a stinging rebuke to the United States.
In a firm ruling read out before the judges in the stately hall of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the court said the prisoners' rights to speak with Mexican consular officials after their arrests had been repeatedly violated. It ordered the United States to undertake "an effective review" of the convictions and the sentences. The next Mexican to be executed in the United States is scheduled to die May 18 in Oklahoma. President Vicente Fox of Mexico called the decision "a victory for international rights, for human rights." Arturo Dager, a senior legal adviser to the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said Mexico "totally trusts that the United States will do the right thing and the necessary thing to fulfill this decision."
It is unclear whether American courts will heed the ruling, and federal officials reacted cautiously, saying they needed time to study the list of decisions. "It's a very complex ruling," said Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman. "We'll decide, based on studying it, how we can go about implementing it."
Frankly, I should think that it was crystal clear that American courts will not heed the ruling, and that the US government has no intention of trying to implement it. The reaction of Governor Goodhair (as Molly Ivins calls Texas governor Perry), below, is likely to be fairly typical.
[...] Gov. Rick Perry, who succeeded President Bush in Texas, has said that "the International Court of Justice does not have jurisdiction in Texas."
[...] "This is great news; it means my client's case will now be looked at again," said David Sergi, a lawyer from San Marcos, Tex., who was present in The Hague and represents Roberto Moreno Ramos, a Mexican awaiting execution in Texas.
Um ... no. Sorry. Your client is a dead man. Texas in particular is unlikely to pay the slightest attention to an international court decision. (See Gov. Goodhair's comment, above.) California ... might. New York ... might. It's a virtual certainty that nobody else will.
Posted by iain at 03:06 PM
Media Relations: the horrors of nudity!/ April 1, 2004
Posted by iain at 11:25 AM
