Undernews For July 20, 2010

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WORD
Republicans get elected by saying government doesn't work and then they prove it. -- hopper-i Link

TOP STORIES
INSPECTOR HITS ADMINISTRATION'S CLOSING OF AUTO DEALERSHIPS
DAVID OBEY ON ARNE DUNCAN
OBAMA PLAYS LEGAL CON GAME ON HEALTHCARE MANDATE
OBAMA SCHOOL DEFORM RULES GET TOP PRINCIPAL FIRED
OBAMA WANTED TO CUT FOOD STAMPS
FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: WHAT'S A JOURNALIST?
UPPER LAYER OF ATMOSPHERE SHRANK FOR REASONS UNKNOWN

ENTROPY UPDATE
DEFICITS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
AFGHANISTAN: LOSING THE POLLS AS WELL AS THE WAR
POLICE BLOTTER
GREAT MOMENTS IN ACADEMIA
COULD GREEN GO BLACK?
NORMALIZING TORTURE
ISN'T THIS SOMETHING YOU SHOULD DO BEFORE STARTING A WAR?
LAW ENFORCEMENT SHUTS DOWN 73,000 BLOGS
BRITISH TORTURE OF YOUTH PRISONERS REVEALED
BOOKSHELF
RACE TO THE BOTTOM: AMERICA'S GREATEST UNDERACHIEVERS
BP TRYING TO BUY OFF SOUTHERN SCIENTISTS TO HELP IN ITS DEFENSE
ENTROPY UPDATE W all Street Journal - Faced with a $118 million budget deficit, the city of San Jose, Calif., recently decided it could no longer afford its own janitors. So the city's budget called for dropping its custodial staff and hiring outside contractors to clean its city hall and airport, saving about $4 million. To keep all its swimming pools open and staffed, the city is replacing some city workers with contractors.Maywood, a tiny city southeast of Los Angeles, is taking contracting to the extreme. The city of around 40,000 is letting go of its entire staff and contracting with outsiders to perform all city services. The city is disbanding its police force and handing public safety over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff. Its neighbor, the city of Bell, will take over running Maywood's City Hall.

Wall Street Journal - Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls. In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

About a quarter of US bridges unsafe or outdated
INSPECTOR HITS ADMINISTRATION'S CLOSING OF AUTO DEALERSHIPS
CNN - Automakers GM and Chrysler were pressured to quickly close hundreds of dealerships by the Treasury department without regard for the job losses that would result, according to a government watchdog report out Sunday.

Treasury was charged with helping the car companies out of bankruptcy through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Together they've received over $80 billion in government funding.

"Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses ... potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls," said the report, released by the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky.

GM and Chrysler were both required to submit restructuring plans to the Treasury's Auto Team in February of 2009, but the plans were rejected because Treasury deemed that the car makers weren't moving to close dealerships at a rate fast enough to keep their businesses viable.

So the auto manufacturers accelerated the process, with the help of bankruptcy laws that let them cancel dealer contracts. Chrysler terminated 789 dealerships last summer and General Motors announced plans to wind down 1,454 dealerships by October of 2010. 0:00 /4:20Auto dealers forecast higher sales

According to the SIGTARP report, Treasury's Auto Team believed that with fewer dealerships, the remaining dealerships would be more profitable. But the report takes issue with this "not-universally-accepted theory," and questioned the cost in job losses for an already fragile economy.
DAVID OBEY ON ARNE DUNCAN
Rep. David Obey, Fiscal Times - The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted .… So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.

So as far as I’m concerned, the secretary of Education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He’s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, "look, you’re getting a good deal, for God's sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched."

We gave [Duncan] $4.3 billion in the stimulus package, no questions asked. He could spend it any way he wants. … I trusted the secretary, so I gave him a hell of a lot more money than I should have.

My point is that I have been working for school reform long before I ever heard of the secretary of education, and long before I ever heard of Obama. And I’m happy to welcome them on the reform road, but I’ll be damned if I think the only road to reform lies in the head of the Secretary of Education.
OBAMA PLAYS LEGAL CON GAME ON HEALTHCARE MANDATE
The growingly dishonest word play about the health mandate threatens to push similar legal skullduggery over the meaning of torture into a back corner. Bear in mind that this 'tax' is not going to the government (except the penalty); it is going to a private corporation that even gets to set the amount.

To understand what's going on here, imagine that the government decides that everyone must buy a new car every three years and if you don't do it, you have to pay a penalty. Whether you argue the case for such a law under the commerce clause or under the power to tax, any sane citizen would understand that that such a law was massively unconstitutional. Just change the word car to health insurance and the problem becomes clear.

Matt Welch, Reason - In a brief defending the [healthcare] law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is "a valid exercise" of Congress's power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power "even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions" of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

"For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase," the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program "This Week."

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, "I absolutely reject that notion."

Robert Pear, NY Times - When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.

Under the Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide for the “general welfare.” It is for Congress, not courts, to decide which taxes are “conducive to the general welfare,” the Supreme Court said 73 years ago in upholding the Social Security Act.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, described the tax power as an alternative source of authority.

“The Commerce Clause supplies sufficient authority for the shared-responsibility requirements in the new health reform law,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “To the extent that there is any question of additional authority ¬ and we don’t believe there is ¬ it would be available through the General Welfare Clause.”

The law describes the levy on the uninsured as a “penalty” rather than a tax. The Justice Department brushes aside the distinction, saying “the statutory label” does not matter. The constitutionality of a tax law depends on “its practical operation,” not the precise form of words used to describe it, the department says, citing a long line of Supreme Court cases.

Moreover, the department says the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition, the department notes, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.”

Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.

Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said, “The tax argument is the strongest argument for upholding” the individual-coverage requirement.

Mr. Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,” Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. “This bill is a tax. Because it’s a tax, it’s completely constitutional.”

“This is the first time that Congress has ever ordered Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.

In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”

In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.
OBAMA SCHOOL DEFORM RULES GET TOP PRINCIPAL FIRED
Michael Winerip, NY Times - It’s hard to find anyone here who believes that Joyce Irvine should have been removed as principal of Wheeler Elementary School.

John Mudasigana, one of many recent African refugees whose children attend the high-poverty school, says he is grateful for how Ms. Irvine and her teachers have helped his five children. “Everything is so good about the school,” he said, before taking his daughter Evangeline, 11, into the school’s dental clinic.

Ms. Irvine’s most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Jeanne Collins, Burlington’s school superintendent, calls Ms. Irvine “a leader among her colleagues” and “a very good principal.”

Beth Evans, a Wheeler teacher, said, “Joyce has done a great job,” and United States Senator Bernie Sanders noted all the enrichment programs, including summer school, that Ms. Irvine had added since becoming principal six years ago.

“She should not have been removed,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I’ve walked that school with her ¬ she seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”

Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.

Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.
OBAMA WANTED TO CUT FOOD STAMPS
Rep. David Obey, quoted in the Fiscal Times - Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration, their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. . . Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.
DEFICITS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Christopher Hayes, Nation - Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.

But right now we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.

And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day. Judging by its schedule and online video, this year's Aspen Ideas Festival was an open-air orgy of anti-deficit moaning. The festival is a good window into elite preoccupations, and that its opening forum featured ominous warnings of future bankruptcy from Niall Ferguson, Mort Zuckerman and David Gergen does not bode well. Nor does the fact that there was a panel called "America's Looming Fiscal Emergency: How to Balance the Books." This attitude isn't confined to pundits. The heads of Obama's fiscal commission have called projected deficits a "cancer."

The hysteria has reached such a pitch that Republican senators (joined by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson) have filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits because it was not offset by spending cuts. Keep in mind, the cost of the extension for people unlucky enough to be caught in the jaws of the worst recession in thirty years is $35 billion. The bill would increase the debt by less than 0.3 percent.

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation-if it can be called that-about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable-Saddam Hussein-became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.

We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.
AFGHANISTAN: LOSING THE POLLS AS WELL AS THE WAR
Examiner - Many Afghans believe NATO wants to occupy or destroy Afghanistan 75% of Afghans believe foreigners disrespect their religion and 55% of Afghans believe foreign troops were in their country for their own benefit, to destroy or occupy Afghanistan or to destroy Islam.

The UK-based International Council on Security and Development report released was based on interviews last month with 552 Afghan men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan, the scene of some of the most intense fighting.

Other interesting results included:

74% believe working with foreign forces is wrong.

68% believe NATO forces do not protect them.

65% believe Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar should join the Afghan government.

70% said recent military actions in their area were bad for the Afghan people.

59% opposed a new military offensive being built up by NATO forces in Kandahar.
POLICE BLOTTER
Chicago Sun Times - A Cicero beauty salon owner who discussed her wealth in front of customers was kidnapped by a jealous client, police say.
Blanca Solis, 38, allegedly recruited her husband Marco Cadenas, 35, and three other men into the plot after overhearing Zita Paniagua, 45, describe her family holdings and assets at Salon Impresiones, 4902 West Cermak. . . The kidnappers demanded a $200,000 ransom from Paniagua’s husband, it’s alleged. But after Paniagua’s family contacted Cicero Police instead, Hanania said, the FBI provided the ransom money, then monitored Paniagua’s husband until he met up with kidnappers and recovered an unhurt Paniagua at Solis’ Schiller Park home Thursday night.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ACADEMIA
Guardian, UK - One of Britain's leading historians, Orlando Figes, is to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after a row erupted over fake reviews posted on the Amazon website.

The award-winning Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, admitted in April to posting critical reviews of books by a number of authors, including fellow historians Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals.

Initially, Figes denied the allegations, threatening legal action against colleagues, journals and newspapers that suggested he had written the reviews.

He contacted the TLS after its diary referenced comments from its website, and suggested "that Orlando Figes and orlando-birkbeck are one and the same", asking Figes to clear up the matter.

Figes's lawyer, David Price, contacted the newspaper, demanding a "corrective publication", and suggesting that his client would be entitled to damages. Hours later Price issued a new statement, which said Figes's wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer, had posted the comments, and that Figes himself had "only just found out about this, this evening".

In a statement released on 23 April Figes admitted "full responsibility" for the posts, saying he had been under "intense pressure". He said: "I have made some foolish errors and apologize wholeheartedly to all concerned."

As part of the agreed settlement Figes, who has been on sick leave since the scandal broke, has circulated an apology and retraction. Figes and his wife also agreed to pay his fellow historians damages and legal costs, and promised not to repeat the allegations or post further anonymous reviews of their works.
COULD GREEN GO BLACK?
Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report - What would a new black political strategy for the 21st century look like?

Going Republican is not an option. Today's Republican party is the party of white supremacy and empire, pure and simple. If it's time to jump the Democratic ship, this time we have to build a new one that goes where we need to go.

Democrats and Republicans don't want anybody building parties outside the two party duopoly, and have constructed a maze of discriminatory ballot access laws to prevent it. Law firms affiliated with the Democratic Party caused the 2000 and 2004 Ralph Nader campaigns to spend millions defending itself in court against spurious legal challenges. If it wasn't a weak point, an obvious point of assault, Democrats and Republicans would not make putting a new party's candidates on the ballot so difficult.

There is a network of Green parties all over the world, and while the Green party in the US has internal problems, its structure makes each individual state organization virtually independent and self sufficient. On the state level, many Green parties already have won a degree of ballot access, but are nearly empty shells, buses parked by the roadside with the keys and title in the glove compartments. It's time for black activists to walk in, put our names on those titles, take the keys, and drive these buses off.

A 21st century political strategy for black America could turn these state level Green parties into red, black and green parties by doing what the Democratic Party would do if it were a peoples party, but cannot and will not. It would entail running candidates for state legislator, for sheriff and prosecutor who pledge to find ways to roll back the tide of black mass incarceration, to oppose privatization of public resources on every level, to uphold the rights of humans over the rights of corporations.

A new black political strategy would have to look beyond the next election cycle or two, and advocate policy positions, like the restoration of human rights over corporate ones, an end to privatization of schools and prisons, that cannot be accomplished in the next elections. It's not that hard. People all over the world form political parties to struggle for what they believe they need even when elections are illegal. Only in the US do supposed political activists limit the dimensions of their struggle to what might be pushed through the legislature this year or next. What they have in those other places is something we lost with the slow death of the movement in the sixties and seventies, a culture of struggle for its own sake, whether the goals are achievable this year or next, this decade or the next. With such a spirit, anything is possible, even the politically impossible.
NORMALIZING TORTURE
Zach Heiden, Maine Civil Liberties Union - The Washington Post reported on the release of a transcript of a House Judiciary Committee deposition of Judge Jay Bybee, concerning torture of detainees by the C.I.A. The transcript included this revelation by Judge Bybee: "many brutal techniques reportedly used in CIA interrogations were not authorized". This is startling for at least three reasons.

First, the idea that torture could be authorized or not authorized still, apparently, has not been so discredited as to be an embarrassment. Torture is illegal under U.S. law and (binding) International law, yet a Federal Appeals Court judge still feels comfortable distinguishing between authorized and unauthorized torture.

Second, it has been over eight years since Bush administration officials first took intelligence gathering to the dark side, and yet not one high government official has ever been held accountable for the torture and mistreatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Every effort by victims of torture to have their day in court has been dismissed before the government even had to file an answer to the charges. And yet, Judge Bybee, who has been serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 2003, was still aware that CIA interrogators were acting outside of the law.

And third, the authorization that Judge Bybee refers to--the Bybee Memo and others--are notoriously broad and poorly reasoned. Judge Bybee has practically acknowledged as much in public (and there is some disagreement as to whether he has been even more candid in private). Yet, even with the legal bar set so low, the culture of hostility to human rights, which was created by the Bush administration, overwhelmed any reasonable human restraint.

Newspapers have stopped calling waterboarding torture
FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: WHAT'S A JOURNALIST?
The growth of citizen journalism, thanks to the web, has repeatedly raised the question of what constitutes a journalist. The media corporados would like to control the definition, claiming that journalism is a profession. But this is bad history and bad facts as these two stories from our files point out.

WHY JOURNALISM ISN'T A PROFESSION

Sam Smith, October 1970 - It was nice to learn the other day that the National Labor Relations Board agrees with me that journalists are not "professionals." The ruling came in a labor dispute over which union reporters and other newspaper workers should join. The NLRB probably didn't mean to, but it nonetheless struck a small blow for freedom of the press -- and the rest of the country as well. One of the most serious of the infinite misapprehensions suffered by reporters is that they are somehow akin to lawyers, doctors and engineers. They long for initial letters after their name.

As late as the 1950s more than half of all reporters lacked a college degree. Since that time there has been increasing emphasis on professionalism in journalism; witness the growth of journalism schools, the proliferation of turgid articles on the subject, and the preoccupation with "objectivity" and other "ethical issues." There has also been an interesting parallel growth in monopolization of the press.

Among the common characteristics of professions is that they are closed shops and have strong monopolistic tendencies. The more training required to enter a field, the more you can weed out socially, politically, and philosophically unsuitable candidates; and, armed with a set of rules politely known as canons or codes of ethics but also operating as an agreement for the restraint of trade, one can eliminate much of the competition.

The professional aspirations of such formerly unpretentious occupations as journalism, teaching and politics is one of the most dangerous of the numerous anti-democratic currents of the day. Professionals hoard knowledge and use it as a form of monopolistic capital. For example, one of the most constructive ways to improve health in the country is through preventive action and personal habits, which depend upon widespread information and education. Yet it has been largely through governmental intervention (the FDA, EPA, etc.), renegade doctors so few they are household words, investigating legislators, health nuts and consumer groups that the country began to understand that health is not something that you buy from a doctor. The medical profession regarded this as a trade secret.

Lawyers have been more successful in withstanding the democratic spirit. The fact that there are ways of dealing with civil disputes and community justice other than in the traditional legal adversary system is still not widely known. Through semantic obfuscation, a stranglehold over our courts and legislatures, and an arcane collection of self-serving contradictions known as law, attorneys have managed to turn human disputation from a mere cottage industry into a significant factor in the gross national product.

The First Amendment says nothing about objectivity, professional standards, national news councils, blind quotes, deep backgrounders or how much publicity to give a trial. Its authors understood far better than many contemporary editors and journalistic commentators that the pursuit of truth can not be codified and that circumscribing the nature of the search will limit the potential of its success. Nor can there be an institutionalization of the search for the truth; it always comes back to the will and ability of individuals.

Check a reporter's bookshelf and you'll find a dictionary, Bartlett's, a thesaurus and, perhaps, Strunk & White and lots of junk reading. No stacks of maroon or blue texts with thin gold titles like "Compton on Trial Coverage." Doctors need such tomes and lawyers have made it necessary to themselves to have them. But journalism does not depend upon the retrieval of institutionalized stores of knowledge, and won't -- until we presume to know as much, as definitively, about the working of human society as a doctor must know about the workings of the stomach.

Journalism has always been a craft - in rare moments, an art - but never a profession. It depends too much on the perception, skill, empathy and honesty of the practitioner rather than on the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills.

The techniques of reporting can be much more easily taught than these human qualities and they can be best learned in an apprentice-like situation rather than in a classroom. Too many reporters have nothing but technique. Trained not to take sides, to be "balanced," they lose the human passion that makes up the better part of the world about which they write. They are taught to surrender values such as commitment, anger and delight that make the world go round and thus become peculiarly unqualified to describe the rotation. Disengaged, their writing is not fair but just vacuously neutral on the surface while culturally biased underneath.

All memory of the newspaper trade short of printing could be wiped out and in a matter of days someone would start publishing a newspaper again, and probably a good one. Someone would want to tell a story.

The institution of journalism functions like all large institutions; it is greedy, self-promoting, and driven towards the acquisition of power. The thing that has saved it has been the integrity and craft of individual journalists. Preserving that integrity and that craft is not only important to reporters but to everyone, for when reporters become merely agents of an overly powerful profession, democracy loses one of its most important allies, free journalists practicing their craft.

JOURNALISM: WHAT GOOD OLD DAYS?

Sam Smith, 1998 - Some journalists would have us believe that there was a time -- before Drudge and the Internet -- when journalism was a honorable activity in which no one went looking for a restroom without first asking directions from at least two sources (unless, of course, one of the sources was a government official), in which every word was checked for fairness, and in which nothing made the prints without being thoroughly verified. There may have been such a time but it wasn't, for example, on January 20, 1925, when the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial declaring that:

"A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk."

Nor was it a decade or so later when a Washington correspondent admitted:

"Policy orders? I never get them; but I don't need them. The make-up of the paper is a policy order. . . I can tell what they want by watching the play they give to my stories."

Nor when George Seldes testified before the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the Newspaper Guild which was then trying to organize the New York Times. The managing editor of the Times came up to Seldes afterwards and said, "Well, George, I guess your name will never again be mentioned in the Times."

Nor when William Randolph Hearst, according to his biographer David Nasaw, "sent undercover reporters onto the nation's campuses to identify the 'pinko academics' who were aiding and abetting the 'communistic' New Deal. During the election campaign of 1936, he accused Roosevelt of being Stalin's chosen candidate."

There was, too be sure, a better side, including those who hewed to the standard described recently by William Safire in a talk at Harvard:

"I hold that what used to be the crime of sedition -- the deliberate bringing of the government into disrepute, the divisive undermining of public confidence in our leaders, the outrageous assaulting of our most revered institutions -- is a glorious part of the American democratic heritage."

In the late 1930s a survey asked Washington journalists for their reaction to the following statement:

"It is almost impossible to be objective. You read your paper, notice its editorials, get praised for some stories and criticized for others. You 'sense policy' and are psychologically driven to slant the stories accordingly."

Sixty percent of the respondents agreed. Today's journalists are taught instead to perpetuate a lie: that through alleged professional mysteries you can achieve an objectivity that not even a Graham, Murdoch, or Turner can sway. Well, most of the time it doesn't work, if for no other reason than in the end someone else picks what gets covered and how the paper is laid out.

There were other differences 60 years ago. Nearly 40% of the Washington correspondents surveyed were born in towns of less than 2500 population, and only 16% came from towns of 100,000 or more. In 1936, the Socialist candidate for president was supported by 5% of the Washington journalists polled and one even cast a ballot for the Communists. One third of Washington correspondents, the cream of the trade, lacked a college degree in 1937. Even when I entered journalism in the 1950s, over half of all reporters in the country still had less than a college degree.

In truth the days for which some yearn never existed. What did exist was much more competition in the news industry. If you didn't like the Washington Post, for example, you could read the Times Herald, the Daily News or the Star. While the number of radio stations in my town has remained fairly steady, it has been only recently that 21 local outlets have been owned by just five corporations.

By the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all or part of 26 cable channels. Some 75% of all dailies are now in the hands of chains and just four of these chains own 21% of all the country's daily papers.

Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of ideas." In the end, the hated Internet is a far better heir of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain than is the typical American daily or TV channel; and H.L. Mencken would infinitely prefer a drink with Matt Drudge than with Ted Koppel.

The basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting."

Far better to risk imperfection than to have quality so carefully controlled that only banality and official truths are permitted.

In the end journalism tends to be either an art or just one more technocratic mechanism for restraining, ritualizing, and ultimately destroying thought and reality.

If it is the latter, the media will take its polls and all it will hear is its own echo. If it is the former, the journalist listens for truth rather than to rules -- and reality, democracy, and decency are all the better for it.
HEALTH SYSTEM CONTINUES TO FRAY
LA Times - Despite passage of the landmark healthcare overhaul this spring, the nation's existing health system is continuing to fray, raising the prospect that the country could experience a crisis before the law establishes a new safety net in 2014.

Three months after President Obama signed the law, state governments struggling with budgets savaged by the recession are contemplating further cuts in healthcare aid for the poor, despite the promise of more federal dollars.

At the same time, several million laid-off Americans and their families who have used federal assistance to hold on to health insurance will lose coverage in coming months as the special assistance program expires. Those with jobs face their own challenges as employers continue to look for ways to pare health benefits and shift more costs to employees, if not drop health coverage altogether.

And people in all walks of life face rising healthcare prices and skyrocketing insurance premiums, which in many parts of the country are rising at double-digit rates this year.

In a March survey, a sampling of 507 large employers reported that their healthcare costs would jump an average of 6.5% this year, slightly less than last year, but still more than three times as fast as prices are rising in the overall economy.

Many large employers are shifting more of those costs onto employees. Small businesses, which are already less likely to offer their employees health benefits, are under even more pressure as they wrestle with insurance premiums that are shooting up by more than 20% in some parts of the country.

So far, federal and state officials have managed to hold together a healthcare safety net with the help of billions of dollars of stimulus spending authorized by Congress last year. Washington provided an estimated $2 billion in 2009 to help more than 2 million people and their dependents hold onto their health benefits after being laid off.

But now, under pressure to control spending, Congress appears certain to end the COBRA assistance, which provided unemployed workers with a 65% subsidy to help them pay their premiums. Normally, people who lose their jobs but want to keep their insurance through COBRA must pay the full cost of the premiums, making it unaffordable for most.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are moving to provide states with extra money to prop up their Medicaid programs for the poor, which have seen a huge surge in enrollment since the recession began. But for many states, even the extra aid is not expected to be enough.

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UPPER LAYER OF ATMOSPHERE SHRANK FOR REASONS UNKNOWN
CNN - An upper layer of Earth's atmosphere recently shrank so much that researchers are at a loss to adequately explain it, NASA said.

The thermosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, expands and contracts regularly due to the sun's activities. As carbon dioxide increases, it has a cooling effect at such high altitudes, which also contributes to the contraction.

But even these two factors aren't fully explaining the extraordinary contraction which, though unlikely to affect the weather, can affect the movement of satellites, researchers said.

"This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years," John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab was quoted as saying in NASA news report.

The thermosphere interacts strongly with the sun and hence is greatly influenced by the sun's solar activity, which occurs in cycles.

When solar activity is high, solar extreme ultraviolet rays warm and expand the thermosphere. When it's low, the opposite occurs.

The collapse occurred during what's known as a "solar minimum" from 2007 to 2009, during which the sun plunged into an unprecedented low of inactivity. Sun spots were scarce and solar flares were nonexistent, NASA reported.

Still, the collapse of the thermosphere was bigger than the sun's activity alone can explain.

Emmert suggests that the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide making its way into the upper atmosphere might have played a role in the anomaly.

Carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in the upper atmosphere, unlike in the lower atmosphere, shedding heat via infrared radiation. As carbon dioxide levels build up on Earth, it makes its way into the upper levels and magnifies the cooling action of the solar minimum, Emmert said.
ISN'T THIS SOMETHING YOU SHOULD DO BEFORE STARTING A WAR?
Boston Globe - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton started a South Asia tour on Sunday aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old war in Afghanistan. . . .
WHY CLOSING PARKS TO SAVE MONEY IS DUMB
Darell Hammond, Huffingoton Post - As cities and states across the country face record-breaking budget deficits, Parks and Recreation Departments are being forced to reduce hours, lay off staff, trim back maintenance efforts, and close some parks altogether.

The situation is so severe that "America's State Parks" are number one on The National Trust for Historic Preservation's "11 Most Endangered Historic Places" list. According to a recent survey, as many as 400 state parks are in danger of closure. Here are some other depressing numbers:

* 150 parks in California have seen reduced services and part-time closures.
* New Jersey's state park budget has been slashed from11.6 million to3.4 million.
* Over 120 state park jobs have been eliminated in Missouri and the state's backlog of deferred maintenance totals200 million.
* New York plans to close 41 state parks and 14 historic sites.

On the city level, the outlook is equally grim:

* Sacramento, Calif. is proposing to slash about8.3 million and 145 positions from its Department of Parks and Recreation.
* Further south, Los Angeles recently eliminated 125 jobs in its Department of Recreation and Parks.
* Dallas, Texas is looking at a budget reduction from75 million to45 million between this year and next.

It may even be worse for smaller towns, many of which have frozen their capital budgets. Montvale, N.J., which has a population of about 7,500, is cutting its Parks and Recreation budget by 53 percent, the largest of all its budget cuts.

Like any living thing, parks need care and attention to thrive. Back in January, The Denver Post outlined the heartbreaking situation in Colorado Springs:

"The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter. . .Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that. . . Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July...

2A closed or ill-maintained park becomes vulnerable to vandalism and crime. A playground covered in graffiti invites more graffiti; a field scattered with trash invites more trash. A single park closure can launch a vicious cycle that changes the entire character of a neighborhood. It can also lower property values and deter tourists.

In fact, as parks writer Anne Schwartz points out in Gotham Gazette, "when parks are well-maintained, attractive and accessible, the economic boost they provide - in increased real estate values, tourism dollars, jobs and tax revenues -- far outweighs the cost of upkeep."

As a case in point, Arizona's state park system costs $32-34 million to properly operate. When open, the parks attract 2.3 million visitors a year, directly and indirectly generating about $266 million. New York City's Central Park--which has been dubbed the "world's greatest real estate engine"-- sees over 35 million visitors a year, more than Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks combined.
BRITISH TORTURE OF YOUTH PRISONERS REVEALED
Guardian, UK - Shocking details of techniques used to inflict pain deliberately on children in privately run jails have been revealed for the first time in a government document obtained by the Observer.

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

'Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee's sternum and drive inward and upward.'

'Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person's ribs until a release is achieved.'

'Drive straight fingers into the young person's face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person's groin area.'

The disclosure of the prison service manual follows a five-year freedom of information battle. The manual was condemned last night by campaigners as 'state authorisation of institutionalised child abuse'.

Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.

Instructions to staff warn that the techniques risk giving children a 'fracture to the skull' and 'temporary or permanent blindness caused by rupture to eyeball or detached retina'.

The guidance, designed to cope with unruly children, also acknowledges that the measures could cause asphyxia. One passage, explaining how to administer a head-hold on children, adds that 'if breathing is compromised the situation ceases to be a restraint and becomes a medical emergency'.

Carolyne Willow, national co-ordinator of the Children's Rights Alliance for England, which led the campaign for disclosure following the deaths of two teenage boys in secure training centres, said: 'The manual is deeply disturbing and stands as state authorisation of institutionalised child abuse. What made former ministers believe that children as young as 12 could get so out of control so often that staff should be taught how to ram their knuckles into their rib cages? Would we allow pediatricians, teachers or children's home staff to be trained in how to deliberately hurt and humiliate children?'
BOOKSHELF
Where Did the Party Go?

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure

False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble by Dean Baker

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer Cheley Wright describes her trip out of the country closet

Wrong by David H. Freedoman. How experts are so often wrong

Education and the Crisis of Public Values

RACE TO THE BOTTOM: AMERICA'S GREATEST UNDERACHIEVERS
The anonymous Palin aide who told Politico: "“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature."

Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer claimed that waiters are overpaid. Reports TPM: He ended a town hall meeting early last night (at a restaurant) after an attendee "tipped" Emmer by pouring a bag of 2,000 pennies in front of him.

Barry Wong who is running for Arizona Corporation Commission wants to cut electricity, water, natural gas, and even telephone lines at the homes of illegal immigrants. He says this will lower costs for the rest of the state's customers.

Chicago Sun Times columnist berates kids for giving away lemonade in violation of the capitalist ethic.
BP TRYING TO BUY OFF SOUTHERN SCIENTISTS TO HELP IN ITS DEFENSE
Press Register, AL - For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation.

BP attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company's lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.

The Press-Register obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.

"We told them there was no way we would agree to any kind of restrictions on the data we collect. It was pretty clear we wouldn't be hearing from them again after that," said Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama. "We didn't like the perception of the university representing BP in any fashion."

More than one scientist interviewed by the Press-Register described being offered $250 an hour through BP lawyers. At eight hours a week, that amounts to $104,000 a year.

Scientists from Louisiana State University, University of Southern Mississippi and Texas A&M have reportedly accepted, according to academic officials. Scientists who study marine invertebrates, plankton, marsh environments, oceanography, sharks and other topics have been solicited.

The contract makes it clear that BP is seeking to add scientists to the legal team that will fight the Natural Resources Damage Assessment lawsuit that the federal government will bring as a result of the Gulf oil spill.
FURTHERMORE. . .
Michael Wolf, Newser - My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the [London Times paywall] website, but subscribers to the paper itself¬who have free access to the site¬are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I’ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: “What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. ‘Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It’s as though their writers don't exist anymore.’”
THE DARK SIDE OF DARWIN

IS THE AMERICAN NOVEL DEAD?

THE EFFECT OF DECRIMINALIZING DRUGS IN PORTGUAL: DRUG USE & CRIME DOWN

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