Undernews 27 September 2010

Undernews 27 September 2010

UNDERNEWS
Since 1964, the news while there's still time to do something about it

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FIFTEEN YEARS ON THE WEB
This was written five years ago, on our tenth anniversary on the web:

Sam Smith, 2005 - This fall marks the Review's tenth year on the web - and our 11th year of sending out email updates. In the last quarter of 1995 we got all of 388 page views, and in 1996, we got 27,000. This year we are approaching three million.

How early was 1995? Well, the number of Americans using the Internet was still less than the number who were watching TV in the mid 1950s. And the Washington Post hadn't yet found a way to stay on line and be happy with the results.

Some other papers, however, had gotten into the act. Fredric A. Emmert writes that, "In 1992, the Chicago Sun-Times began offering articles via modem over the America On Line computer network, and in 1993, the San Jose Mercury News began distributing most of its complete daily text, minus photos and illustrations, to subscribers of America On Line. The first multi-media news service in the U.S., News in Motion, made its debut in the summer of 1993 with a weekly edition specializing in international coverage, with color photos, graphics and sound.

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service began distributing news to its newspaper customers via computer before their morning editions arrived, and The Washington Post has created a Digital Ink subsidiary, providing an electronic newspaper research service for clients, who can buy custom-made reports on subjects of their choice." The Post dropped the fee-based Digital Ink in favor of its current site in 1996.

Your editor's interest in the internet was not all that surprising, since he had long ago discovered that keeping up with advances in technology helped compensate for his own deterioration. The Review began as a hot type magazine, The Idler, in 1964 and over the years used such novel technology as Press Type, the IBM Selectric, Radio Shack's TRS-80 (or Trash 80 as it was fondly known), the Model 100 - an amazing battery operated laptop with a six line screen, and Exxon's Qyx, among many others.

Before all that, however, were other influences, starting with Alice Darnell, my high school math teacher who went to Harvard in the summer of 1954 to learn about this new thing, the computer. She returned reporting that she had almost been locked up in a computer overnight, as it needed an entire building to do the work of a present day Mac, and she introduced us to the basics of Boolean algebra.

It would be twenty years, however, before I actually touched a computer: an 8K Atari purchased for my sons. As I fleeted up to 16 and then 32 K it occurred to me that these things might have some journalistic use. In fact, if you wasted a whole Saturday you could already program them to do little things like write messages and keep addresses.

It was a time when an earnest father such as I sent his son to computer camp where he learned to write programs that in just a year or so he could buy at the local computer store. It was a time when a computer expert came to speak at that same son's school and, at the end, the headmaster arose and said, "This is all very well and good, but I'm not running a goddamned secretarial school." Within a year he had purchased an impressive array of computers.

It was also a time short on computer expertise. The Review was blessed with two high school students who came by to empty our floor's office trash who were also seminal cyber whizzes. They shall remain nameless to preserve the security clearance of the one who now works for a major defense contractor, but he still provides occasional assistance such as suggesting that I repair a computer suffering from too much atmospheric moisture by putting it in an oven at 150 degrees for an hour. That was a year ago. It worked and the computer still helps produce the Progressive Review.

Some years back I went to a Shaker village in Maine. While on the tour of this vanishing sect I noted a TV antenna atop the dorm. I mentioned this jarring departure from my image of Shakers to our guide, who explained that the Shakers saw no conflict between technology and their faith. After all, she said, their furniture was technologically advanced for the time.

It was not unlike the Quakers who do not shun change but merely apply their faith to it. About a year and a half after launching our website I tried to give a sense of this approach in a book I was writing, The Great American Political Repair Manual:

"The first rule of media survival is use it; don't let it use you. We must ignore the role the media has prescribed for us -- audience, consumer, addict -- and treat it much as the trout treats a stream, a medium in which to swim and not to drown. The trick is to stop the media from happening to you and to treat it literally as a medium -- an environment, a carrier. Then you can cease being a consumer or a victim and become a hunter and a gatherer, foraging for signs that are good and messages that are important and data you can use. Then the zapper and the mouse become tools and weapons and not addictions. Then you turn the TV off not because it is evil but because you have gotten whatever it has to offer and now must look somewhere else."

Sam Smith, 2007 - The Wall Street Journal's claim that this is the tenth anniversary of the blog - as well as some of the critical reaction to the story - led us to our archives to find what we could about our role in this tale. We've tried to avoid the word blog - preferring to call ourselves an online journal - but the phrase has a ubiquity one can't duck. The Wall Street Journal claimed, "We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary.

"On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: 'I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,' and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word 'weblog.'

"The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were "proto-blogs," embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."

While we refer to Barger as the sainted Jorn Barger - he has been repeatedly kind to this journal over the years - the WSJ has got things somewhat mixed up. It is certainly true that Barger blessed or cursed us with the word blog, but whatever you called it, something was already underway, including at the Progressive Review. As evidence, we would quote from the very issue cited by the WSJ: Barger's December 23, 1997 Robot Wisdom WebLog in which he writes: "There's a new issue of the Progressive Review, one of the few leftwing sources that's vigorously anti-Clinton. . . The lead story this week is Judge Lamberth's condemnation of White House lies about the healthcare taskforce in 1993. Its editor Sam Smith also offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow . . ."

Barger's contribution was not just one of nomenclature, but of gracing the Web with an eclectic spirit and curiosity, tapping its holistic wonders and happily mixing technology, politics, literature, philosophy and rants. In musical terms, Barger showed us how to swing.

At least as early as 1993, the Progressive Review was sending a faxed blog-like substance to our media list as a supplement to the print edition. The earliest mention of an online edition that we could find comes from the August 1994 edition: "If you have an Internet address, send it to us on a postcard or to ssmith@igc.org and we will add you to our Peacenet hotline mailing list. You can also find us at alt.activism and alt.politics.clinton. Sorry, offer not good for networks that carry e-mail charges"

There then followed a series of blog-like entries. None of that really counts, however, because it wasn't on the Worldwide Web. But by June 1995, the Progressive Review was on the web, where only about 20,000 other websites existed worldwide.

Still not bloggish, as we initially only posted longer articles. But within a few months - we were promising that "The Progressive Review On-Line Report is found on the Web" and our quasi-blogging had begun. While we weren't the earliest we were certainly in same 'hood and we may hold some sort of record for consistency. We are still brought to you by Turnpike and we are still using Adobe Page Mill to post our non-blog pages. A year or two ago we ran into an Adobe sales rep at Best Buy and mentioned our loyalty, saying that "we still love it." She looked quite annoyed and said, "That's what a lot of people say."

The Web would come to value style over substance in design and conventional loyalty over free thinking in politics. But, inspired by a few like Jorn Barger, we have tried to keep our layout simple and our thoughts complex. In the game of Internet high-low poker, we went low and it doesn't seem to have a hurt a bit. Thanks for sticking around.

EX CIA CHIEF CALLS FOR DICTATORIAL POWER OVER INTERNET

Reuters - Cyberterrorism is such a threat that the U.S. president should have the authority to shut down the Internet in the event of an attack, Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said. Hayden said the president currently does not have the authority to shut down the Internet in an emergency. "My personal view is that it is probably wise to legislate some authority to the President, to take emergency measures for limited periods of time, with clear reporting to Congress, when he feels as if he has to take these measures," he said in an interview on the weekend.

FBI NOT ONLY IGNORES CONSTITUTION, IT DISSES THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INSPECTOR GENERAL AS WELL

Huffington Post - The war on dissent, rather than terrorism, continued full steam with FBI SWAT teams breaking down doors at 7 am Friday (Sept 24) morning and raiding the homes of several anti-war leaders and activists in Minneapolis, Chicago and possibly a couple other Midwest cities. Members of the FBI's "Joint Terrorism Task Force" spent a few hours at each Minneapolis residence, seizing personal photographs and papers, computers and cell phones as well as serving Federal Grand Jury subpoenas on the various activists.

Obviously the scathing review of post 9-11 FBI "terrorism investigations" targeting various peace and social justice groups completed by the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) and just issued four days ago gave no pause to the FBI to reflect before continuing to do more of the same. Nor did accompanying media revelations about the FBI having improperly conducted surveillances of an antiwar rally in Pittsburgh; the Catholic Worker peace magazine; a Quaker activist, the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, of members of the environmental group Greenpeace and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and of a small student group of anti-war activists in Iowa City, Iowa who were targeted for 9 months in 2008.

The Justice Department's Inspector General report released this week pulled few punches in admonishing the FBI for targeting anti-war groups and advocacy organizations with no apparent justification, and for placing non-violent activists in those groups on terrorist watch lists. The report chastised the bureau for having a "weak'' rationale for some of its investigations; investigating where there was "little indication of any possible federal crimes''; and extending "the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis.'' The agency was also taken to task for improperly retaining information about the targeted groups in its files and for classifying investigations of peace groups "under its 'Acts of Terrorism' classification.''

FBI'S ANTIWAR TARGETS SAY THEY DID NOTHING WRONG

Chicago Tribune - The anti-war activists targeted by FBI agents with search warrants Friday said they did nothing wrong, voicing resolve at a West Side rally today to continue opposing U.S. policy in the Middle East and South America.

Joseph Iosbaker said he watched as FBI agents walked out of his house with his sons' artwork and poetry. He said the agents also confiscated pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Residents of Jefferson Park said they saw FBI agents carrying boxes from the home of Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network. Chicago activist Thomas Burke said he was served a grand jury subpoena that requested records of payments to Abudayyeh or his group.

No arrests were made, but agents were seeking evidence concerning the material support of terrorism, FBI representatives said Friday.

OBAMA WANTS TO REDESIGN INTERNET TO PERMIT WIRETAPPING

New York Times - Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations of the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is "going dark" as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications -- including encrypted e-mail transmitters such as BlackBerry, social networking websites such as Facebook and software that allows direct "peer-to-peer" messaging such as Skype -- to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The legislation, which the Obama administration plans to submit to Congress next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering technological innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had "huge implications" and challenged "fundamental elements of the Internet revolution" -- including its decentralized design. "They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet," he said. "They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function."

WHY THE RICHEST ARE SO ANGRY ABOUT A TAX INCREASE

Les Leopold, AlterNet -While 43.6 million Americans live in poverty, the richest men of finance sure are getting pissy. First Steve Schwartzman, head of the Blackrock private equity company, compares the Obama administration's effort to close billionaires' tax loopholes to "the Nazi invasion of Poland." Then hedge fund mogul David Loeb announces that he's abandoning the Democrats because they're violating "this country's core founding principles" -- including "non-punitive taxation, Constitutionally-guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority, and an inexorable right of self-determination." Instead of showing their outrage about the spread of poverty in the richest nation on Earth, the super-rich want us to pity them?

Why are Wall Street's billionaires so whiny? Is it really possible to make $900,000 an hour (not a typo -- that's what the top ten hedge fund managers take in), and still feel aggrieved about the way government is treating you? After you've been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $10 trillion (also not a typo) in loans, asset swaps, liquidity and other guarantees, can you really still feel like an oppressed minority?

Instead, standing before us are these troubled souls, haunted by visions of persecution. Why?

The world changed. Before the bubble burst, these people walked on water. Their billions proved that they were the best and the brightest -- not just captains of the financial universe, but global elites who had earned a place in history. They donated serious money to worthy causes -- and political campaigns. No one wanted to mess with them.

But then came the crash. And the things changed for the big guys -- not so much financially as spiritually. Plebeians, including me, are asking pointed questions and sometimes even being heard, both on the Internet and in the mainstream media. For the first time in a generation, the public wants to know more about these emperors and their new clothes.

ECONOMIST FIB OF THE DAY

Dean Baker - There is an effort by many of the economists who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy to say that there is nothing that we can do about the damage because unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This means that the problem is that workers have the wrong skills for the jobs that are available or are in the wrong location. If this is the case, then the problem is not insufficient demand, the problem is with the workers who are unemployed. . .

Actually, the statistics do not show that the number of job openings is anywhere close to the number of unemployed workers. The most recent data show the number of openings at just over 3 million, a bit more than 1 opening for every 5 unemployed workers. This is still down by more than one-third from pre-recession levels.

It is also worth noting that we don't see evidence of the other factors that would be consistent with growing structural unemployment. This mismatch story would imply that there are sectors of the economy in which wages are rising rapidly and average hours per worker are increasing, as employers increase hours due to their inability to find qualified workers. There is no major sector of the economy that fits this description.

NAACP REACHES OUT TO GAYS

Washington Post Even as the NAACP engages in a tense debate over same-sex marriage, the group's leaders have begun reaching out more forcefully to gay rights groups. The outreach has been steered by former chairman Julian Bond and the group's president, Benjamin Jealous. Both men are supporters of same-sex marriage rights, though the NAACP's national board has taken no stance on the issue.

Jealous, who is helping to lead a march for jobs and justice in Washington next month, will be in New York on Wednesday night to encourage members of the city's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center to attend the rally. "The NAACP is opposed to discrimination in all its forms," Jealous said in an e-mail, adding: "We recognize that many of our members are also members of the LGBT community, and just as the LGBT community counts on us to stand with it for basic civil rights protections, so we count on the LGBT community to stand with us in our unified struggle for the broader civil rights agenda."

HEALTH INSURERS TO CUT SERVICE TO GET AROUND HEALTHCARE LAW

Raw Story - Just days away from the implementation of new rules that will prevent insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, numerous major insurers have opted to end the sale of child-only policies.

Anthem Blue Cross and associate WellPoint, Aetna Inc., Cigna Inc., CoventryOne and others have been making under-the-radar announcements about their child health offerings in recent days. . .

Insurers say the government's mandate to extend coverage to children with pre-existing conditions could endanger their obligations to other policy holders -- essentially blaming the Obama administration for their actions.

Child-only policies that have already been issued will still be honored, they claim. Citizens in states that mandate child-only policies be offered, such as Maine and New York, will retain an option to purchase the plans.

GREAT MOMENTS WITH MADONNA

NY Post - The Material Girl -- who was quoted saying, "I don't really eat food in restaurants; you can never be sure what's in it, can you?" -- dined at Hakubai, at Park and 39th, on Tuesday with her personal Japanese chef in tow. Madonna -- who follows a strict macrobiotic diet, avoiding dairy, sugar and processed foods -- noshed on soba noodles and sushi -- foods that are high in fiber and minerals and have been linked to longevity in Japanese women.

ANOTHER JUDGE RULES MILITARY ANTI-GAY BIGOTRY ILLEGAL

ABC - A federal judge in Washington state ruled Friday that the military discharge of a decorated Air Force officer because she is gay violated her constitutional rights and that she must be given her job back as soon as possible.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton is the second by a federal judge in recent weeks to cast the policy as unconstitutional and follows a failed attempt by the Senate Tuesday to overturn the controversial law.

KENT UNIVERSITY GETTING RID OF 50% OF ITS LIBRARY’S BOOKS

Kent Wired - The average book in an academic research library is only checked out once every 50 years. That is why [Kent] Library Dean James Bracken is looking to reduce the library’s in-house collection by 50 percent.

As Bracken walked the shelves of the library Tuesday afternoon, he pointed to two books, Margaret Warner Morley's "A Song of Life," printed in 1891. Both copies have never been checked out.

The university plans to reduce the 2.9 million volume collection at a rate of 5 percent per year over the next decade, which gives students more study space in the upper floors, among other places.

The books will be sent to OhioLINK, the state's book consortium that shares 48 million books with 88 university and college libraries. Students could still request all of the materials housed on site and items would be delivered within a week.

OhioLINK keeps at least two copies of every book in the state. Additional copies of the books are donated to Better World Books, which distributes them to universities in Africa, Bracken said.

A study conducted by OhioLINK found that 7 percent of an academic research library's collection accounts for 94 percent of the public’s total use.

Bracken estimates that 25 percent of the collection has never been used, which will be the first wave to go. After that, the Faculty Senate's Library Committee will weigh in with suggestions on how to proceed.

REVIVAL OF VINYL RECORDS AS CDS DROOP

Lucas 123, Slashdot - Over the past four years, vinyl record sales have been soaring, jumping almost 300% from 858,000 in 2006 to 2.5 million in 2009, and sales this year are on track to reach new peaks, according to Nielsen Entertainment. Meanwhile, as digital music sales are also continuing a steady rise, CD sales have been on a fast downward slope over the same period of time. In the first half of this year alone, CD album sales were down about 18% over the same period last year. David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment, said it's not just audiophiles expanding their collections that is driving vinyl record sales but a whole new generation of young music aficionados who are digging the album art, liner notes and other features that records bring to the table.

TEA PARTY HAVING TROUBLE FILLING THE HALLS

Christian Science Monitor -The “National Tea Party Unity Convention” was supposed to be held next month in Las Vegas – a follow-up to last February’s convention in Nashville, where Sarah Palin wowed a crowd willing to pay $349 to hear her (or $549 for the full three-day event). But this week, supporters were told by e-mail that “the convention is just not going to happen.” Both conventions were organized by the Tea Party Nation, a social networking site for conservative political activists started in 2009 by Judson Phillips, a former assistant district attorney in Tennessee.

That first convention was controversial within the tea party movement. Several tea party-related organizations pulled out over the event’s questionable for-profit financing. At the time, Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of RedState.com and a conservative contributor to CNN, wrote that it “smells scammy.” Intramural squabbling

A few months later, the Tea Party Nation squabbled with the Tea Party Express over Nevada’s GOP primary race for the US Senate, which eventually went to Sharron Angle. Ms. Angle was supposed to be featured at the October “unity convention” along with conservative celebrities Lou Dobbs, Joseph Farah, and Andrew Breitbart.

Other recent tea-party-related events have failed to live up to expectations as well, including the “LibertyXPO” in Washington earlier this month. The second “9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington” had a smaller turnout than last year.

WAITING FOR SUPER SPIN

Rick Ayers, Huffington Post - Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven by test scores. It rejects the inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an era of privatization and market-driven school change. Its focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy, the de-militarization of our schools, and an education based on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The film is positioned to become a leading voice in framing the debate on school reform, much like Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth did for the discussion of global warming, and that's heartbreaking.

DEPARTMENT OF GOOD STUFF

Street Play - A guide to stickball, handball, spaldeens, skully, hopscotch and double dutch jump rope. Games kids played before they went online.

ENTROPY UPDATE: ALGONQUIN HOTEL TO BECOME JUST ANOTHER MARRIOTT
The Algonquin Hotel has become just another part of the Marriott hotel chain.

Alqonquin Hotel - The Algonquin Round Table – a group of 20-somethings who favored the hotel as a daily meeting spot – set the standard for literary style and wit beyond its ten-year duration.

After World War I, Vanity Fair writers and Algonquin regulars Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert E. Sherwood began lunching at The Algonquin. In 1919, they gathered in the Rose Room with some literary friends to welcome back acerbic critic Alexander Woollcott from his service as a war correspondent. It proved so enjoyable that someone suggested it become a daily event. This led to a daily exchange of ideas, opinions, and often-savage wit that has enriched the world's literary life. George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and Edna Ferber were also in this August assembly, which strongly influenced writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps their greatest contribution was the founding of The New Yorker magazine, which today is free to guests of the hotel.

Owner Frank Case treated the talented, but low paid, young writers to free celery and popovers and provided them their own table and waiter, thereby guaranteeing daily return luncheon visits. The group expanded to a core membership that included Edna Ferber, Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and Marc Connelly.

Though society columns referred to them as The Algonquin Round Table, they called themselves the Vicious Circle. "By force of character," observed drama critic Brooks Atkinson, "they changed the nature of American comedy and established the tastes of a new period in the arts and theatre."

Harold Ross, legendary editor and friend of The Round Table, created The New Yorker and secured funding for it at the hotel. The magazine made its debut February 21, 1925. Today, each Algonquin guest receives a complimentary copy of the magazine.

TPR - One of the most famed members of the round table was Parker who once wrote:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
and drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

She died in 1967 of a heart attack at the age of 74. "Despite several suicide attempts, she outlived nearly all the original members of the Algonquin Round Table. Her small estate was left to Martin Luther King, Jr. Contrary to her wishes for rain, she died on a warm sunny day." - Mrs. Parker & The Vicious Circle

THEN AND NOW: THE TWO POPE BENEDICTS

CNN -- Pope Benedict XVI expressed his "deep sorrow" for the child sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church, the first time he has publicly addressed the issue on his four-day trip to Britain.

"I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the church and by her ministers," Benedict said during Mass at Westminster Cathedral. "Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes, along with my hope that the power of Christ's grace, his sacrifice of reconciliation, will bring deep healing and peace to their lives.

"I also acknowledge with you the shame and humiliation which all of us have suffered because of these sins; and I invite you to offer it to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of victims, the purification of the church, and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people.

Letters of Note - First ordained in 1972, six years later, in 1978, then-31-year-old priest Stephen Kiesle was first arrested after tying up and molesting two boys in a San Francisco church rectory. In 1981, at which point his probation came to an end, he, with the help of Bishop John Cummins, requested to leave the ministry as soon as possible. It was another six years - nine long years after his conviction - before Kiesle was successfully defrocked. The following letter was sent from the Vatican to Cummins in 1985, by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger; in it, the future Pope explains that Kiesle's case requires longer deliberation and that "the good of the Universal Church" must be considered when coming to such a decision.

Most Excellent Bishop,

Having received your letter of September 13 of this year, regarding the matter of the removal from all priestly burdens pertaining to Rev Stephen Miller Kiesle in your diocese, it is my duty to share with you the following.

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.

It is necessary for this Congregation to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.

In the meantime your Excellency must not fail to provide the petitioner with as much paternal care as possible and in addition to explain to same the rationale of this court, which is accustomed to proceed keeping the common good especially before its eyes.

Let me take this occasion to convey sentiments of the highest regard always to you.

Your most Reverend Excellency

O'DONNELL: PELOSI DOESN'T FOLLOW ANY CHRISTIAN MORAL PRINCIPLES

Mother Jones - On January 25, 2007, [Christine] O'Donnell, then the president of an outfit called the Faith and Flag Alliance, was a guest on the The O'Reilly Factor, according to a transcript of the show (which is not posted on the internet). The subject was supposed Christianity-bashing, and Bill O'Reilly had pegged the segment to the release of an HBO documentary on militant Christians. The film had been made by Alexandra Pelosi, a daughter of Nancy Pelosi. O'Reilly noted that he had "nothing against" Pelosi's film, but he decried what he considered to be the mainstream media's marginalization of Christians. He asked O'Donnell about the media's exploitation of the "weird behavior" of militant Christians to undermine all Christians.

O'Donnell replied by questioning Nancy Pelosi's faith: “First, let me say that Nancy Pelosi has¬can benefit from making Christians look bad because she touts her Christianity when it's politically expedient for her, yet she doesn't follow any of the Christian moral principles.”

INTERNET SIGHTINGS
Only in America do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.

Only in America do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke.

Only in America do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters..

Only in America do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.

DATA WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH
From Barking Up the Wrong Tree

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth's equator.

Source: "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents" from Journal of Happiness Studies, Volume 11, Number 4, August 2010 , pp. 441-456(16)

WORD: RICHARD HOLBROOKE
The most egotistical bastard I've ever met - Joe Biden

WORD: BILL CLINTON
Probably the best Republican president the country ever had - Rachel Maddow

BOOKSHELF: THE NEW JIM CROW

Michelle Alexander - After years of working on issues of racial profiling, police brutality, drug law enforcement in poor communities of color, and working with people released from prison struggling to “re-enter” a society that never seemed to have much use for them in the first place, I began to suspect that I was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias, but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who claimed the drug war was the New Jim Crow were not crazy; nor were the smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and earlier forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

As I explain in the introduction to my book:

|||| Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Here are some facts I uncovered in the course of my research that I cite in my book -- facts that were startling to me, even after my “awakening”:

- More African Americans are under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

- As of 2004 more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. During the Jim Crow era, African Americans were denied the right to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, felon disenfranchisement laws have accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not.

- Prisoners are excluded from poverty and unemployment statistics, thus masking the severity of black disadvantage. But if you take them into account, then more than half of working-age African American men in major urban areas have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In fact, in Chicago -- if you take into account prisoners -- nearly 80 percent of working age African American men have criminal records. . .

The drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, despite the fact that studies consistently indicate that people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youths, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color.

But that is not what one would guess by taking a peek inside our nation’s prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states African Americans have constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. ||||

PRO FOOTBALL ATTENDANCE DROPS FOR THIRD YEAR IN A ROW

Washington Post - As ratings continue to soar early in the new season, the NFL is facing a new business dilemma: declining attendance at the games themselves. The NFL expects attendance to drop for a third straight season and is projecting that as many as 20 percent of its regular season games will be blacked out on TV in the home team's market when stadiums fail to sell out 72 hours before kickoff.

League executives and franchise owners say they're concerned that the sport has become so good to watch on television, especially in the age of big screen, high-definition TV, that many fans are choosing in a tough economy to avoid the traffic, crowds and costs of going to stadiums in favor of watching in the comfort of their living rooms.

GREAT MOMENTS IN NEW YORK POLITICS

NY Post - Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs, who continued to handle the Cuomo campaign's dirty work, released a doctored photo showing Paladino's head on the body of a swill-slurping swine.

Paladino is "at the public trough," the flyer charges, citing the millions of dollars in tax breaks and rent that Paladino gets from the state.

A spokesman for the bomb-throwing Buffalo builder squealed that Jacobs was in fact "the pig feeding at the public trough."

Paladino had earlier in the day sent Cuomo a letter -- described alternately as insulting and condescending -- that questioned whether the attorney general had the "cojones" for a mano a mano debate.

Before that, the Tea Party-backed Republican had circulated a flyer showing Cuomo in the shower, literally washing off the filth of "special interest $$$."

COHABITATION INCREASES

USA Today - Cohabitation in the USA is at an all-time high, with the number of opposite-sex couples living together rising 13% in a year's time, from 6.7 million in 2009 to 7.5 million this year.And, it's likely because of the recession, according to a U.S. Census study out Thursday. It found a direct connection between living together and the cohabiting partners' employment status.

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE BRITISH MONARCHY

independent, UK The Queen asked ministers for a poverty handout to help heat her palaces but was rebuffed because they feared it would be a public relations disaster, documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal. . . Aides complained to ministers in 2004 that the Queen's gas and electricity bills, which had increased by 50 per cent that year, stood at more than £1m a year and had become "untenable".

BOOKSHELF: OUR ENDLESS WAR

Bangor Daily News - Hardly any American can be comfortable with the assertion of a senior Pentagon planner, Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, that “We’re in a generational war.”

He predicted in 2006 that American conflicts would last another 50 or 100 years.

Yet no one could be elected president who seriously questioned whether the United States must continue indefinitely to help police Iraq and Afghanistan, keep thousands of U.S. troops in bases strung around the world, and maintain enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major foreign city.

A provocative new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” describes an unspoken national consensus that has grown up during the past 60 years. The author, Andrew J. Bascevich, is a retired Army colonel and now a professor at Boston University. He calls it a “sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”

These Washington rules, he writes, were forged after World War II, when American power and influence were near their heights. He warns that Washington now commands less respect: “Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image.”

He blames each president from John Kennedy to Barack Obama for building and maintaining this consensus, promising American global military supremacy.

Mr. Bacevich proposes a substitute for the “sacred trinity.” In his version, the purpose of the U.S. military would be not to combat evil or remake the world but rather to defend the United States and its most vital interests. The U.S. military should not be a global police force or a global occupation force, and the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self defense.

A NEW DIRECTION FOR HISTORICAL MARKERS

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: THE BIG DISASTER THAT BEGAN WITH A LITTLE DISSIN'

Sam Smith

Fifty years ago this month, Fidel Castro spoke at the UN. But the hotels of New York refused him space. The result: Malcolm X found him a hotel in Harlem and a key early step was taken in the alienation of a man who, with just a little respect and effort, might not have tormented every American president since by refusing to die or fade away.

A year earlier, Castro appeared at Harvard, where I had been news director of the college radio station. Later I wrote about it:

||| The most noteworthy figure to appear at Harvard during my tenure was the newly victorious Fidel Castro, who spoke to 8,000 enthusiastic faculty and students (including one from Brandeis named Abbie Hoffman) at Dillon Field House. Castro was still considered a hero by many Americans for having overthrown the egregious Batista. While those of us who had taken Soc Sci 2 knew that not all revolutions were for the better, there was about this one a romance that took my thoughts far from Harvard Square as a top Castro lieutenant, sitting in front of my little recorder in the Bick, told me of his days with Fidel in the mountains. Castro was booed only once according to my broadcast report later that evening, when he "attempted to defend the execution of Cuban war criminals after the revolution. Castro asked his listeners, 'you want something else?' and proceed to give them a fifteen minute further explanation." My story continued:

"Some of Castro's aides expressed a feeling of relaxation during the Harvard tour in comparison with the formal diplomatic visit to Washington. Leaving the faculty club, Castro's air attaché was cheered for his snappy uniform by the students who surrounded the area." ||||

A SCHOOL WITH LOW TEST SCORES & HIGH ACHIEVEMENT

New America Media - Last week, California’s Department of Education released the annual Academic Performance Index), and MetWest High School in Oakland scored low at 570. Further, a majority of students scored either “below basic" or "far below basic” in math on the California State Exam. MetWest students and educators argue that the school’s high rates of graduation and college attendance show it is doing something right, despite the test scores. Oscar Servellon, a recent MetWest graduate, will start at the University of California at Davis next year. He writes about how the small school’s innovative teaching model guided him towards academic success and a stronger sense of self.

Oscar Servellon - MetWest students may not test well on standardized tests, but we aren’t a bunch of low achievers. Our graduation rate is much higher than other schools in Oakland. Of this year’s senior class, 32 of 33 students graduated with me in June, and 28 students were accepted to four-year colleges. The remaining four will attend community college this fall because college is an integral component of the MetWest curriculum.

MetWest is one of 40 public high schools around the country pioneering a model of internship-based education for students in grades 9-12. Students attend school for three days a week and an work at an internship for two days a week. . .

On the first Tuesday of freshman year, students are asked to think about their interests and begin searching for an internship that will give them experience in the working world. . .

When it was time to work on my senior thesis project, I expanded upon what I had learned from doing an internship in youth and ethnic media to create a project that identified the negative portrayals of Latinos in the media. . .

At MetWest, teachers measure our progress by grading us on effort and skills. We have exhibitions every quarter, instead of tests. At exhibitions, students proved their understanding of the material they studies by presenting in front of peers and being evaluated by them.

For required evaluation tests, such as the CAHSEE and SAT, we took prep classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays before our scheduled internships. College counselors taught us about the standardized tests, examples of the type of questions we’d be asked, and test-taking skills.

BUSH ADVISOR TO THE LEFT OF OBAMA ON HOUSING RESCUE

Business Insider - A new federal program that would be tasked with a massive refinancing of mortgages for strapped Americans has been chattered about for awhile, though The White House has never indicated that the idea is on the table.

But the calls are growing louder. This time it's from the NYT op-ed page, where former Bush advisor (and now Columbia business prof) Glenn Hubbard along with Columbia's Chris Mayer are calling for exactly that -- a massive new agency to bail out underwater homeowners via refinancing.

Hubbard and Mayer anticipate $50 billion in annual savings for homeowners -- though the one thing that's not there is principal reduction. So underwater homeowners under their plan -- though receiving lower interest rates -- would still be underwater. That being said, at least they'd be able to refinance, which they can't easily do right now, so that would help.

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