Undernews: January 28, 2012

Why some people don't like Greens

We were talking to a DC journalist friend who recalled a 2005 visit to the Maine state legislature...He had mentioned to one of the members that he noticed that Maine had a Green legislator: John Eder...The disgusted reaction: "Yeah, he rents and he doesn't even drive a car." - Sam Smith

Company Obama citerd in SOTU speech just went bankrupt

Business Insider - Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That's just two days after the speech.

“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama said in his speech.

According to Phil Milford and Dawn McCarty at Businessweek, Ener1 had received a $118 million U.S. Energy Department grant to make electric-car batteries. And the grant received bi-partisan support, so it is not entirely on Obama's shoulders. ee.

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Hull House closes after 120 years

Huffington Post - Hull House, the Chicago social services organization founded more than 120 years ago by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, closed Friday after running out of money.

The agency said the poor economy resulted in more demand for its services but also made it harder to raise money to cover its costs. Hull House has been providing child care, job training, housing assistance and other services for 60,000 people a year in the Chicago area.

The agency had announced plans to close in the spring, but Friday's shutdown was unexpected, striking some 300 employees with a devastating and unexpected blow. They received layoff notices and final paychecks and then spent the day packing their belongings and saying tearful good-byes. Many said they were startled to learn their insurance ended almost two weeks ago.

Founded in 1889, Hull House was the best known of the 400 settlement houses in the United States in the early 1900s. The settlements were designed to provide services to immigrants and the poor while uplifting them through culture, education and recreation. At its peak, Hull House served more than 9,000 people a week, offering medical help, an art gallery, citizenship classes, a gardening club and a gym with sports programs.

Victoria Brown, a history professor at Grinnell College and author of "The Education of Jane Addams," said the closure was "an absolute puzzle" and wondered why officials had not publicized the financial problems earlier in an effort to save the agency.

"I wish we would have known. Why weren't they screaming this from the rooftops?" said Brown. Addams "was known as gentle, not confrontational, but one of her favorite words was `stupid.' She would say, `This is just stupid. How could this have happened?'"

Facebook tries to get reporters to sign non-disclosure agreement

Jim Romenesko - Facebook didn’t want reporters snooping and finding out about its Next Big Thing while attending yesterday’s press conference at its Seattle offices, so it ordered them to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Journalists were told the NDA “only applies to things that you might accidentally stumble upon while you are there and covers nothing discussed during our news conference.”

The NDA-is-required email went out at 8:10 a.m. Thursday, and was rescinded two hours later. KPLU public radio points out:

Somehow inviting a pack of journalists to a press conference and then telling them they have to wear blinders and not talk about anything they might see in a side office, overhear from a water-cooler conversation or perhaps a yelled statement revealing an intellectual property secret, seemed like a bad PR move.

Pre-Internet issues of the Review now online

Thanks to Ron Unz, 20 years of pre-Internet issues of the Progressive Review (1966 through January 1985 and earlier known as the DC Gazette) are on the web and searchable.

We had pretty much given up on this project, but then Jorn Barger, father of the blog, sent us a note tipping us off that it was up there.

Unz has an amazing collection of other publications and archives now available on his site

SEARCH THE REVIEW ARCHIVES

BROWSE THE REVIEW ARCHIVES

ARTICLES BY SAM SMITH

THE WHOLE UNZ ARCHIVES

Romney had atheist father-in-law converted to Mormonism after his death

Amendment of the day

Huffington Post - A Republican member of the Indiana General Assembly withdrew his bill to create a pilot program for drug testing welfare applicants Friday after one of his Democratic colleagues amended the measure to require drug testing for lawmakers.

Obama wants to control colleges through greenmail

NY Times - The president wants to create a $1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate $55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency.

The administration also wants to give families clearer information about costs and quality, by requiring colleges and universities to offer a “shopping sheet” that makes it easier to compare financial aid packages and for the first time compiling post-graduate earning and employment information to give students a better sense of what awaits them.

Once again, the federal government is using greenmail to get into areas which are none of its business.

Word

[Obama] says one thing and does another. Where has he been for over three years? He's had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn't sent more than one or two to jail. - Ralph Nader

Gingrich only 25 years behind the times

Number of Americans who in 1985 held reservations with Pan Am for a trip to the moon: 90,002 - #HarpersIndex

Union membership notched up in 2011

AFL CIO - Overall union membership increased by 49,000 from 2010 to 2011, including 15,000 new 16- to 24-year-old members, according to new Bureau of Labor Statistics data. An increase of 110,000 in the private sector was partially offset by a decline of 61,000 in the public sector, making the rate of union membership essentially unchanged at 11.8 percent, with some 14.8 million U.S. workers union members.

Private-sector union membership remains at 6.9 percent. The largest increases in union membership were in construction, health care services, retail trade, primary metals and fabricated metal products, hospitals, transportation and warehousing

Obama avoids the P-word

Greg Kaufmann, Nation - Say it with me now¬“Poverty.” ...

For a record 46 million Americans, including 22 percent of all children, that’s what they are living in less than $22,300 annually for a family of four. Yet in a sixty-five-minute address describing the state of the union, President Obama decided it merited barely a mention.

Here’s what he had to say about poverty... “A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.”

Obama is hardly alone in his aversion to what Peter Edelman a Georgetown Law professor and former aide to Senator Robert Kennedy refers to as “the p-word” in his upcoming book, So Rich, So Poor. In Congress these days, most legislators will talk about the homeless if they happen to be homeless veterans, or maybe even “the most vulnerable,” but it’s ix-nay on the overty-pay.

“Economic inequality was a major theme of the president’s speech, so that’s good from an antipoverty perspective. He talked about education and job training, and that’s a plus too,” Edelman told me. “But he said nothing direct about the issues confronting the lowest-income people. If we’re going to make progress on poverty as the recovery goes on and thereafter, we need leadership from the top.”

Word: A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals

Joe Bageant, Dissident Voice, 2005 - Given that every damned utterance or word published about America these days has to have political implications ... let’s talk about the much discussed political anger and “values issues” of hitherto faceless, self-screwing working class folks. Tell ya what. I have both prayed and been shit-faced six ways to hell with these people and I am NOT seeing the much ballyhooed anger about the values most often cited, such as gun control, abortion or gay marriage. True, these are the issues of the hard-line Bible thumpers and fundamentalist leadership that has harped on them for decades. And the politicians love that crap. And apparently so do the media pundits.

But here in this particular heartland, once I step away from the fundamentalist, I am simply not seeing the homophobia so widely proclaimed by the liberal establishment. Hell, we’ve got three gay guys and at least one lesbian who hang out at my local redneck tavern and they all are right in there drinking and teasing and jiving with everyone else. As my hirsute 300-pound friend Pootie says: “Heck, I have a lot in common with lesbians!” ...

I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:

It is about the indignities suffered at the hands of managers and bosses -- being degraded to a working, faceless production unit in our glorious new global economy.

It is about being ignored by the educated classes and the other similar professional, political and business elites that America does not acknowledge as elites.

It is about one's priorities being closer to home and more ordinary than those of the powerful people who determine our lives.

It is about suffering the everyday lack of human respect from the government, and every other institutional body except the church.

It is about working at Wal-Mart or Home Depot or Arby’s wearing a nametag on which you do not even rate a last name. You are just Melanie or Bobby, there to kiss the manager’s ass or find another gig.

It is about trying to live your life the only way you know how because you were raised that way. But somehow the rules changed under you.

It is about trying to maintain some semblance of outward dignity to your neighbors, when both you and the neighbors are living payday to payday, though no one admits it.

It is about media fabled things you've never seen in your own family: college funds set aside for the kids, stock portfolios, vacation homes...

It is about the unacknowledged stress of both spouses working longer, producing more for a paycheck that has been dwindling in purchasing power since 1973.

Yes, it is about values. It is about the values we have forsaken as a people -- such as dignity, education and opportunity for everyone. And it is about the misdirected anger of the working classes toward those they least understand. You. And me.

Arise oh pissy liberals!

It is one helluva comment on the American class system that I get paid to speak, write about and generally expose to liberal groups the existence of some 250 million working Americans who have been fixing America’s cars and paving its streets and waiting on its tables from day one. As a noble and decent liberal New York City book editor told me, “Seen from up here it is as if your people were some sort of exotic, as if you were from Yemen or something.” ....

However, liberals and working people do need each other to survive what is surely coming, that thing being delivered to us by the regime which promised us they would “run this country like a business.” Oh hell yes they are going to do it. So the left must genuinely connect face to face with Americans who do not necessarily share all of our priorities, if it is ever to be relevant again.

Once we begin to look at the human faces of this declining republic’s many moving parts, the inexplicable self-screwing working class voter is not so inexplicable after all. God, gays and guns alone do not explain the conservative populism .... College educated liberals and blue-collar working people need to start separating substantive policy issues from the symbolic ones. Fight on the substance, the real ground zero stuff that ordinary working people can feel and see -- make real pledges about real things. Like absolutely guaranteed health care and a decent living wage. And mean it and deliver it.

Who ho! It ain’t gonna be easy, because poor working class Americans, like the rest of us, have become fearful, numb, authority worshipping fools reluctant to give up the mindless heroin of cheap consumerism…just like you…just like me. They’ll never come to us, so we must go to them. Which means working the churches and the wards and the watering holes, the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfasts, our workplaces, and lo! Even the beeriest underbelly of America … where nice liberal middle class people do not let their kids go for fear it will damage their precious little SAT scores. Again, nobody said it would be easy.

Brotherhood. Solidarity. Compassion. Too idealistic? Futile? Maybe. But if these are not worthy goals, then nothing is.

Lots more

Another Yale cover up

Alex Klein is a Yale senior majoring in “Ethics, Politics, and Economics.” He was Opinion Editor of the Yale Daily News last year. Main media man Jim Romensko ran it on his site

Alex Klein - Late last year, national news outlets breathlessly reported that Yale’s quarterback, Patrick Witt, had chosen to skip a Rhodes Scholarship finalist interview in order to lead our team against Harvard in the annual Game. I was thrilled and proud. The decision struck me, as it did my friends in and out of the media, as smart and heroic. A few months earlier, Pat had helped move a hammock, volunteering as a stagehand in a play I directed. Remembering our connection, I fired off a paragraph-long “thank you” email. But his terse response surprised me: “Thanks for the note, I’ll see you around.”

Last night’s bombshell, broken by Times, may explain the awkward reply. At the time of my email, there was no heroic choice to be made: Pat was no longer a candidate for the Rhodes Scholarship. Days before, the Rhodes committee had suspended his candidacy after discovering that an anonymous woman had accused him of sexual assault. Yale officials knew about the complaint as early as September. It’s unclear if those directly responsible for endorsing Pat’s Rhodes application knew about the assault claim or if the Yale administration decided to re-endorse Pat after being contacted by the Rhodes committee. Regardless, Pat was no longer a candidate on November 13, when he announced he would play in the Game, earning hero-worship at Yale and in the national media.

The story is sad and still mostly untold. We know few details regarding the sexual assault claim itself. But even in the weeks before the Game, when Yale knew about the charge, the university continued to push the “heroic choice” story on the mainstream media, which gobbled it up all too eagerly. This is disappointing, but not surprising. The Yale administration has persistently stifled the reality of sexual assault on campus: a real and serious problem that prompted last year’s Title IX complaint against the university, alleging a “hostile sexual climate.” But responsibility for the culture of silence does not end at the administration’s door nor at Patrick Witt’s. I have learned in the past few hours that the editors of the Yale Daily News, the nation’s oldest college daily and a bastion of college journalism, knew about the sexual assault charge as early as November.....

Each morning, Yale’s dining halls fill with students leafing through their daily copy of the News. I believe they have come to trust it more than your average college paper as a source unafraid of angering friends, professors, or Presidents when telling unsavory truths. We have all been let down. In choosing to ignore this story, the News not only perpetuated the deceptive, now-shredded narrative of Pat’s “heroic choice.” The paper and its editor are also complicit in Yale’s culture of secrecy surrounding sexual assault: the very object of the Title IX complaint.

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16 year old gets prayer removed from school wall

MSNBC, Cranston RI She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion.

In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

Mitch Daniels

Isn’t he the former Bush budget director who said the Iraq War would cost $50 billion when it ended up costing $3 trillion? The bureaucrat who promoted the Bush tax cuts when we were fighting two wars? The one whose budget projections were so fraudulent that he predicted federal surpluses in 2004 and 2005?- Joe Conason

Man awarded $22 million due to inhumane jail treatment and being held without trial for two years

MSNBC - A New Mexico man who said he was forced to pull his own tooth while in solitary confinement because he was denied access to a dentist has been awarded $22 million due to inhumane treatment by New Mexico's Dona Ana County Jail.

Stephen Slevin was arrested in August of 2005 for driving while intoxicated, then thrown in jail for two years. He was in solitary at Dona Ana County Jail for his entire sentence and basically forgotten about and never given a trial, he told NBC station KOB.com

Deconstructing Gingrich's demagoguery

Chief European ACTA bureaucrat quits in disgust

Boinb Boing - Kader Arif, the EU "rapporteur" for ACTA (a copyright treaty negotiated in secret, which contains all the worst elements of SOPA, and which is coming to a vote in the EU) has turned in his report and resigned from his job, delivering a scathing rebuke to the EU negotiators and parliamentarians, and the global corporations who are pushing this through:

I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands.”

Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.

This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.

Tacovism

When asked what he was going to do about the fact that there were no latinos on the East Haven police force, the town's mayor, Joseph Maturo Jr., replied, ""I might have tacos when I go home, I'm not quite sure yet." The latino community responded by delivering 500 tacos to his door.

85 year old woman used shovel to get rid of moose attacking her husband

Overheard at Broadway & Houston

Guy on cell : And this guy wasn't saying anything, I mean he had nothing to say, nothing... He didn't say anything, he just kept talking, but he wasn't saying anything... It was all just, talk-talk-talk but nothing, I couldn't take it, talking and talking and talking and talking and nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say about anything, endless mindless talking and not saying a word. I mean, how could anyone do just talk about nothing..

UN expert says solitary confinement is a form of torture

Huffington Post - Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of being the Wikileaks source, was kept in solitary confinement for eight months in a Marine brig at Quantico, Virginia. He was subjected to 24-hour surveillance and was forced to relinquish his clothing before bedding down for the night, then made to stand naked at roll call, his lawyers said.

And in Atlanta, Ga., Judge Amanda F. Williams resigned on January 2 after being accused of acts of misconduct, among them jailing offenders in solitary confinement without access to lawyers.

A lengthy solitary confinement can cause serious mental and physical damage and be considered torture, according to Juan Mendez, the United Nations rapporteur (investigator) into torture. And most countries in the world practice it.

While Mendez did not concentrate on the United States (although he was denied a private interview with Manning), he knows something about the human cost of persecution. An Argentine lawyer, he was jailed for 18 months during the "Dirty War" in 1976, tortured with an electric prod and watched friends pulled from their cells and executed. He is now a visiting law professor at American University's Washington College of Law in D.C.

Compared to the United States where public protests are possible, there are many countries where prisoners are lost, Mendez said. But he noted that few in the United States investigate what happens to locked-up foreigners in the name of ferreting out terrorism.

More states pushing climate change denial

LA Times - Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.

In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.

"Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they're running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands," said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. "We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family."

Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.

In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.

"Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they're running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands," said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. "We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family."

Obama trashes Constitution over trade agreement

Belatedly, here and elsewhere, Obama's stunning indifference to the law in the case of the ACTA trade agreement was well described last October by Senator Ron Wyden:

As the U.S. Trade Representative prepares to ratify an international agreement related to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) – chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Trade – sent a letter to President Obama asking why the administration believes the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement does not require Congress’s formal approval. According to legal experts, cited by Wyden, if the USTR ratifies ACTA without Congress’ consent it may be circumventing Congress’s Constitutional authority to regulate international commerce and protect intellectual property and would therefore represent a significant expansion of the executive branch’s authority over international agreements.

“It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law,” Wyden writes. “But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law…the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress’ authority, absent congressional approval.”

Wyden goes on to indicate that while the USTR has long asserted its authority to enter ACTA as a “sole executive agreement,” with no congressional authorization or approval needed, it has yet to publicly explain its legal justification for that assertion.

ACTA is a plurilateral agreement currently negotiated by the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, establishing basic minimum standards on a broad range of intellectual property enforcement issues. In addition to covering issues ranging from counterfeit goods to generic medications to online copyright infringement, ACTA creates a governing body that would operate outside of current international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

The imprisonment of America

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker - The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men¬a full house at Yankee Stadium¬wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic¬more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year¬that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape¬like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows¬will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

FULL ESSAY

San Francisco suspends medial marijuana licensing

Survey finds incoming college students more liberal

First-year college students' political and social views shifted in a more liberal direction in 2011, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey, UCLA's annual survey of the nation's entering students at four-year colleges and universities. Notable changes were seen in student views on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and access to higher education for undocumented students.

An unprecedented 71 percent of incoming college students indicated that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status, compared with 65 percent in 2009, a remarkable 6.4 percentage-point increase over a two-year period. While support for same-sex marriage is highest among female students and those who identify as liberal, a significant amount of conservative students (42.8 percent) and an increasing number of male students (64.1 percent in 2011 vs. 56.7 percent in 2009) expressed support for this issue.

In another finding with important implications in the current political climate, fewer students said they believe that undocumented students should be denied access to public education.

Since the question was last asked in 2009, opposition to educational access for these students dropped by 4.2 percentage points, from 47.2 percent to 43.0 percent in 2011. While liberal students are much more likely to support undocumented students' access to education, 39.0 percent of conservative students also indicated their support.

Alcohol consumption at all-time low The proportion of students who said they drank beer as high school seniors dropped from 38.4 percent in 2010 to 35.4 percent in 2011, while those who said they drank wine and/or liquor dropped from 43.3 percent in 2010 to 41.1 percent in 2011.

Emendation: CEO vs. worker wages

Steve Fowle, editor of the New Hampshire Gazette, sent us a link to Politifact that challenges a chart that a number of publications, including us, have posted that claimed the disparity in CEO to average worker wages is 475:1. While Politifact is a bit precious and inconclusive backing up its claim that the statistic is false, we have removed the chart from our site.

At best, the 475:1 figure seems to date from the middle of the past decade. The Financial Times offered 2010 data that would suggest 187:1 would be more accurate - almost the same as an Economic Policy Institute read of 185:1 for 2009

On the other hand, the Institute for Policy Studies says its was 320:1 in 2010. And Business Insider reported in 2010: “In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.”

Multiple your salary by any of these figures: from 187 to 500, however, and you come up each time with a number that fits an eminently fair and precise term that most can agree on: “huge.” It seems a little shoddy of an outfit that puts so much emphasis on the facts to ignore the fact that numbers aren’t the only things that matter in life, After all, a two, three or four alarm fire can ruin your whole day.

But, according to Politfact, “This is a textbook example of how claims can spiral out of control on the Internet. Just as conservatives have circulated unfounded claims about President Barack Obama's birth certificate, liberals are spreading this questionable chart.” Which is what your editor’s math teacher, Miss Darnell, would have called, “adding apples and pianos.”

Romney invested in fund that held Florida mortgages later foreclosed

Josh Israel, Think Progress - A ThinkProgress examination of Mitt Romney’s presidential personal financial disclosures from May 2011 reveal that the former Massachusetts governor and his wife own or owned millions of dollars worth of a Goldman Sachs investment fund invested heavily in mortgage-backed obligations. And the current owners of those mortgage debts began foreclosure proceedings against thousands of Floridians.

Along with his investments in Bain Capital funds linked to offshore tax havens, the Romneys have large investments in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). The firm’s March 2011 annual report for the fund notes that about 8 percent of the fund is invested in banks and 24.5 percent is invested in mortgage-backed obligations. Romney’s form says he has invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the fund and his wife Ann has invested an additional $1 million-plus. Since the 2008 economic meltdown and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, this fund has done quite well, growing 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

The mortgage-backed securities in the fund include adjustable rate mortgages from Bear Stearns, Countrywide, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual. A 2009 Center for Public Integrity report identified all four of those companies as among the top-25 subprime lenders in the lead-up to the market’s collapse. Countrywide ranked first in that report and Washington Mutual ranked second. While the remnants of those companies have been purchased by major financial institutions, an array of mortgage loan service companies bought up the individual mortgages.

85 year old woman used shovel to get rid of moose attacking her husband

News Miner, Alaska - An agitated moose ran down and stomped a well-known bush pilot from Willow, but he was saved when his wife grabbed a shovel from their pickup truck and whacked the big animal until it backed off.

George Murphy, 82, and his wife, Dorothea Taylor, 85, told the story of their recent moose encounter Sunday afternoon from Murphy's hospital room in Anchorage, where he is recovering from gashes to his head and left leg as well as seven broken ribs. He was in good condition Monday, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The couple was at the Willow Airport around 10:30 a.m. Friday running their golden retrievers as they do almost every day. They drive along the access road in their truck and let the dogs, Fellar and King Tut, run on ahead.

When it came time to round up the dogs, Murphy told Taylor she could wait in the truck.

Murphy was hiking back to the truck with Fellar when he saw the moose up the road.

"He was way off. Jeez, he spotted me and he started to come right after me. So I was trying to get to the truck. But I didn't make it," Murphy told the Anchorage Daily News.

At the airport, there were no trees to duck behind. Murphy dove into the deep snow for protection. And the moose came at him.

"He started to stomp. Then he turned around and stomped again. And there was nothing I could do. I was afraid he was going to kill me."

From inside the truck, Taylor heard the dogs barking in alarm and jumped out to investigate. At 5 feet tall and 97 pounds, she is tiny but tough. Years ago, she shot and killed a trophy size brown bear on Kodiak Island. The mount is on the wall of the home they built on eight acres in Willow.

She saw the moose rear up and strike at something on the ground with its front hooves. She didn't know that her husband was down or that the moose was stomping him. She couldn't see him in the snow…

FBI plans to spy on Facebook, Twitter

Obama pushing secret copyright treaty that would do the work of SOPA

Boing Boing - ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, the press, public interest groups, legal scholars, independent economists and so on. Time and again, the world's richest governmental administrations (only rich countries were in the negotiation) told their own parliaments and congresses that they could not see what was in the treaty, nor know the details of the discussion.

The European Parliament was one of the bodies that asked its administration to share the treaty discussions with the elected members, only to be turned down. Cables in the Wikileaks dumps showed US officials orchestrating this secrecy because they knew how unpopular this one-sided, heavy-handed copyright treaty would be. Freedom of Information requests to the Obama administration confirmed that the reason for the secrecy was the experience in transparent negotiation at the UN, which resulted in an uprising by developing nations, who saw stricter, more expansive copyrights as a means of extracting rents from the world's poorest people.

Now the European Parliament is being arm-twisted into ratifying ACTA, which contains many of the worst provisions that Americans rejected in SOPA and PIPA.

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