Undernews For April 6, 2009

Undernews For April 6, 2009

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COMMODITIES WHISTLEBLOWER VICTIM OF BIZARRE HIT AND RUN

NY POST - A London-based precious-metals trader who had accused JPMorgan Chase of manipulating the gold and silver markets was involved in a bizarre weekend car accident that triggered a police chase before the suspect was nabbed.

Andrew Maguire, a metals trader at the London Bullion Market Association, and his wife were traveling in their car when a second car coming out of a side street struck their vehicle. That car then hit two more vehicles before fleeing.

London cops using helicopters and patrol cars chased the hit-and-run driver before nabbing that person, whose name has not been released by authorities.

Maguire and his wife were released from the hospital yesterday. London police would not comment on the accident investigation.

The hit and run occurred after Maguire's name came to light Thursday during a US Commodities Futures Trading Commission hearing on limiting gold and silver positions held by large market participants in order to prevent manipulation.

During the hearing, Maguire was identified as having sent e-mails to Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, and Eliud Ramirez, head of the commission's enforcement division, alleging that JPMorgan had used its massive metals positions to manipulate the commodities markets.

In one e-mail, Maguire wrote, "It is common knowledge here in London among the metals traders that it is JPM's intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits," referring to last week's CFTC hearings.

JPMorgan inherited the positions when it acquired Bear Stearns two years ago.

When the allegations first surfaced last week, JPMorgan declined to comment.

IRS THREATENS CITIZENS WITH LOSS OF TAX REFUND IF THEY DON'T PAY FOR HEALTH INSURANCE

DAILY CALLER - Individuals who don't purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency's options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don't comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don't comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

BRITISH TEACHERS MAY BOYCOTT TESTS

JESSICA SHEPHERD,GUARDIAN, UK - Government interference in education and the imposition of national tests deny children a well-rounded education

Ministers are stripping primary school children of their basic human right to a well-rounded education, a teachers' leader warned today.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said national tests for 10- and 11-year-olds, formerly known as Sats, contravene the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Under the Convention, which Britain signed in 1991, children are entitled to a broad education which develops their "personalities, talents and abilities to their fullest potential".

Blower told the NUT annual conference in Liverpool that Sats only gave children the right to pass exams, not the right "to be educated in the round". They reduced children to "little bundles of measurable outputs trained in a mechanistic model of education," she said, repeating words used last month by the children's commissioner, Maggie Atkinson.

Blower said: "The NUT says 'yes' to risk-taking and exciting approaches to learning and 'no' to children as little bundles of measurable outputs."

The NUT – the biggest classroom union in England and Wales – is balloting headteachers and their deputies over whether to "frustrate the administration" of the maths and English tests. Another union – the National Association of Head Teachers – is also conducting the ballot. The unions say they are confident that heads will vote to boycott the tests, which are sat by 600,000 children. Their boycott would take place on May 10, days after the next government came into power.

Teachers want ministers to abolish the tests because they argue they are used to compile "meaningless" school league tables. The tables unfairly stigmatize schools with the most challenging pupils, and turn children's last year of primary school into a repetitive drill for the tests, they say. They want to see Sats replaced by teacher assessment and would accept a system in which only a sample of children were tested.

Labour and the Tories have pledged to keep Sats, although Labour is considering moving to more teacher assessment and the Conservatives argue the tests should be more rigorous and could be sat by pupils in their first year of secondary school.

200,000 LOSE UNEMPLOYMENT CHECKS THANKS TO REPUBLICANS

LA TIMES - As unemployment benefits expired Monday for tens of thousands of jobless workers, Democrats and Republicans renewed their haggling over whether to vote for an extension when Congress returns from its spring break next week.

At the heart of the dispute is whether the extension should be offset by spending cuts, as Republicans are demanding, or whether it constitutes an emergency, as Democrats say.

The expiration means 212,000 unemployed people will lose benefits this week, according to figures provided by the National Employment Law Project. . .

Two weeks ago, when the Senate took up the question of a 30-day extension already approved by the House, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) objected that the $9-billion price tag would add to the federal deficit.

The GOP objection raised the specter of a filibuster; Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority.

Democrats in both the House and Senate want the extension to be classified as emergency spending, which can be added to the deficit and does not have to be paid for with specific cuts or new revenue.

WIKILEAKS VIDEO SHOWS U.S. COPTERS KILLING CIVILIANS IN IRAQ

BBC - WikiLeaks has posted a video on its website which it claims shows the killing of civilians by the US military in Baghdad in 2007.

The website's organizers say they were given the footage, which they say comes from cameras on US Apache helicopters.

They say they decrypted it, but would not reveal who gave it to them..

The video, released on Monday, is of high quality and appears to be authentic, the BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says.

It is accompanied by a recording of the pilots' radio transmissions and those of US troops on the ground.

VIDEO

ISRAEL APARTHEID LOBBY TRYING TO TAKE OVER BERKELEY STUDENT GOVERNMENT

RICHARD BRENNEMAN - The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has launched a drive to take over student government at the University of California at Berkeley, the organization’s Leadership Development Director announced at last week's annual conference in Washington.

Here's the money quote from Jonathan Kessler, made to student leaders drawn from 370 campuses, including representatives from all 50 states:

"How are we going to beat back the anti-Israel divestment resolution at Berkeley? We're going to make certain that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote. That is how AIPAC operates in our nation's capitol. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation's campuses."

JTA VIDEO

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED REVISITED

FANS OF Evelyn Waugh and his Brideshead Revisited will enjoy a wonderful piece in the current edition of Vanity Fair on the author and his work. Excerpt concerning one of the characters who inspired Waugh:

|||| Lord Beauchamp was the perfect aristocrat-tall, handsome, intelligent, cultured. He was an energetic and highly successful public servant, driven by progressive instincts and a sense of noblesse oblige. His children called him "Boom," because of his loud, booming voice, which resembled a foghorn. Lord Beauchamp was also an artist and a craftsman. He was keenly interested in embroidery. He kept a studio at Madresfield Court [model for Brideshead], devoted mainly to sculpture. It was there that he produced his finest piece, The Golfer, which was displayed in the Paris Exhibition of 1920. It depicts a naked golfer, raising his club as he concentrates on his shot.

It was not just golfers. Lord Beauchamp was said to also have "exquisite taste in footmen. " When interviewing male staff he would pass his hands over their buttocks, making a hissing noise similar to that made by stable lads when rubbing their horses down. The diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson recalled a dinner at Madresfield when he was asked by an astonished fellow guest, "Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the butler, 'Je t'adore'? " "Nonsense, " Nicolson replied. "He said 'Shut the door.' " But Nicolson knew that the other guest had indeed heard correctly. At a certain exalted level of society, Lord Beauchamp's homosexuality had been an open secret for years. Although homosexual acts were a criminal offense, it was not thought gentlemanly to make them a subject for public attack. Beauchamp felt confident that he could continue his double life without being exposed by his colleagues or the press.

And so he might have, had it not been for the jealousy and hatred of his brother-in-law Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster. The precipitating events are difficult to unravel, but in the end Westminster employed private detectives to spy on his brother-in-law. Early in 1931, when he had accrued enough incriminating evidence, he arranged a meeting with King George V. Westminster told the King that he had conferred the highest honor of Knight of the Garter on a licentious homosexual. The rumored response of King George, often repeated when the story circulated in aristocratic circles, may or may not be apocryphal: "Why, I thought people like that always shot themselves. " Another version had the King saying that he was under the impression that people only did such things abroad.

Whatever the truth, the King decided that a scandal of this nature must not taint the court, where Beauchamp had once been Lord Steward of the Household. Beauchamp was eventually given an ultimatum-either remove himself from Britain, agreeing never to return, or face trial and public scandal. Urged on by her brother, Lady Beauchamp filed for divorce and moved out of Madresfield. The children would never forgive her for what they saw as disloyalty to the father they deeply loved. In June of 1931, Beauchamp crossed the Channel. A few days later a notice appeared in The Times: "Earl Beauchamp, accompanied by his son, the Honourable Hugh Lygon, left for Nauheim yesterday to take a cure. His daughters will join him later. " ||||

THE CIA'S GUIDE TO COMMITTING WAR CRIMES

SALON - Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking - and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, 'This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.

Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency's "enhanced interrogation program" haven't been mined for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the agency's methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.

THERE, I FIXED IT

HUFFINGTON POST - Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich blasted the Obama administration's approach to financial reform. After Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, said on ABC's "This Week" that "reform is going to pass," Reich responded as part of a roundtable that Summers and his colleagues have been part of the problem.

"The fact of the matter is that Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers and Bob Rubin all -- if any trio were responsible for deregulating this financial economy, whether you're talking about getting rid of the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banking from investment banking or you're talking about saying to Brooksley Born at the Commodity Trading Commission, no, you may not regulate derivatives, it's those three," Reich said.

"Now, this is my worry. Everybody is enthusiastic -- or everybody who says that they're looking at financial reform is enthusiastic about doing something about the too-big-to-fail problem. But when it comes right down to it, if you look at the details, there is nothing in the hopper right now that is going to fundamentally change the situation so that five or 10 years from now you don't have a few big banks making wild bets with other people's money and then expecting to be bailed out by the federal government."

OBAMA'S MEDICAL RECORDS LAW A MAJOR THREAT TO PRIVACY

DEBORAH PEEL, WALL STREET JOURNAL - I learned about the lack of health privacy when I hung out my shingle as a psychiatrist. Patients asked if I could keep their records private if they paid for care themselves. They had lost jobs or reputations because what they said in the doctor's office didn't always stay in the doctor's office. That was 35 years ago, in the age of paper. In today's digital world the problem has only grown worse.

A patient's sensitive information should not be shared without his consent. But this is not the case now, as the country moves toward a system of electronic medical records.

In 2002, under President George W. Bush, the right of a patient to control his most sensitive personal data-from prescriptions to DNA-was eliminated by federal regulators implementing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Those privacy notices you sign in doctors' offices do not actually give you any control over your personal data; they merely describe how the data will be used and disclosed.

In a January 2009 speech, President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year's stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech, "will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system."

But electronic medical records won't accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing information with doctors because they know it isn't private. When patients realize they can't control who sees their electronic health records, they will be far less likely to tell their doctors about drinking problems, feelings of depression, sexual problems, or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. In 2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns.

Today our lab test results are disclosed to insurance companies before we even know the results. Prescriptions are data-mined by pharmacies, pharmaceutical technology vendors, hospitals and are sold to insurers, drug companies, employers and others willing to pay for the information to use in making decisions about you, your job or your treatments, or for research. Self-insured employers can access employees' entire health records, including medications. And in the past five years, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 45 million electronic health records were either lost, stolen by insiders (hospital or government-agency employees, health IT vendors, etc.), or hacked from outside.

Electronic record systems that don't put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health information. . .

The privacy of an electronic health record cannot be restored once the contents are sold or otherwise disclosed. Every person and family is only one expensive diagnosis, one prescription, or one lab test away from generations of discrimination.

The solution is to insist upon technologies that protect a patient's right to consent to share any personal data. A step in this direction is to demand that no federal stimulus dollars be used to develop electronic systems that do not have these technologies. . .

There is no need to choose between the benefits of technology and our rights to health privacy. Technologies already exist that enable each person to choose what information he is willing to share and what must remain private. Consent must be built into electronic systems up front so we can each choose the levels of privacy and sharing we prefer.

Dr. Peel, a psychiatrist in private practice, is the founder of Patient Privacy Rights and leads the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy.
CALVINISM IS BACK

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - Five centuries ago, John Calvin's teachings reconceived Christianity; mid-wifed Western ideas about capitalism, democracy, and religious liberty; and nursed the Puritan values that later cast the character of America.

Today, his theology is making a surprising comeback, challenging the me-centered prosperity gospel of much of modern evangelicalism with a God-first immersion in Scripture. In an age of materialism and made-to-order religion, Calvinism's unmalleable doctrines and view of God as an all-powerful potentate who decides everything is winning over many Christians – especially the young.

Twenty-something followers in the Presbyterian, Anglican, and independent evangelical churches are rallying around Calvinist, or Reformed, teaching. In the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant body, at least 10 percent of its pastors identify as Calvinist, while more than one-third of recent seminary graduates do. . .

Yet the movement's biggest impact may not be in the pews. It's in publishing circles and on Christian blogs, in divinity schools and at conferences like "Together for the Gospel," where the rock stars of Reformed theology explore such topics as "The Sinner Neither Able Nor Willing: The Doctrine of Absolute Inability.". . .

Calvin's influence on America's founding is unmistakable. The nation's patriotism, work ethic, sense of equality, public morality, and even elements of democracy all sprang in part from the Calvinist taproot of Puritan New England. When Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards told worshipers in 1741 that they were loathsome spiders held over the pit of hell by the gracious hand of an offended God, he wasn't speaking a heretical creed but the basic vocabulary of American faith. It wasn't until the 19th century that Calvinist doctrines waned.

By most logic, the stern system of Calvinism shouldn't be popular today. Much of modern Christianity preaches a comforting Home Depot theology: You can do it. We can help. Epitomized by popular titles like Joel Osteen's "Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential," this message of self-fulfillment through Christian commitment attracts followers in huge numbers, turning big churches into megachurches. . .

At the same time, a strict following of the Bible, which Calvinists embrace, hardly resonates the way it once did in American society. The Barna Group, a California-based research firm, recently did a survey to find out how many US adults hold a "biblical worldview" – for instance, believe that the Bible is totally accurate, that a person cannot earn their way into heaven simply by doing good, that God is the all-powerful creator of the universe.

The result: a steeple-thin 9 percent. Among 18-to-23-year-olds, it was 0.5 percent, fewer people than might show up at a Lady Gaga concert. Even among "born again" Christians, it was only 19 percent.

In a separate report, Barna found that more than 6 in 10 born-again Christians say they are customizing their faith, not following any one church's theology. . .

The blunt implication: Scripture is no longer the sheet anchor of American spirituality.

This, of course, was the Roman Catholic warning to early reformers five centuries ago: If you break away from the church, orthodoxy will spiral into fancy. By emphasizing sound doctrine and the naked gospel, New Calvinists want to restore what they see as stability to Protestant faith. . .

THE IDEA MILL: MINDFULNESS

DRAKE BENNETT, BOSTON GLOBE - [Ellen] Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness - the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot - and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard's first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, "Mindfulness," was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York's 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins's Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer. .

Langer's reputation in the field of social psychology rests on a set of ingenious experiments that expose the strange power of the mind to fool itself and to transform the body. In one of her best-known studies, she found that giving nursing home residents more control over their lives made them live longer. In more recent work, she made hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical workout. And in the study at the center of the Aniston movie, a team led by Langer found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as if they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process. .

As Langer sees it, it's the pervasiveness of mindless behavior that makes mindfulness so powerful, and her earliest research focused on the former. Her doctoral dissertation, at Yale, grew out of a poker game with some colleagues. One round, the dealer accidentally skipped someone. "Everyone went crazy," Langer recalls. It was out of the question, she learned, to simply give the skipped person the next card and proceed with the deal. She began to wonder why people were so attached to "their" cards even when they had no idea whether they were good or bad.

At the time, the dominant view in the field of psychology assumed that human decision-making was a thoroughly logical process, driven by a constant calculation of probabilities and costs and benefits. The reaction to that botched deal made Langer suspect something very different.

To test this, she ran a study in which she set up a lottery and varied the terms by which people got their tickets. She found that subjects valued their tickets much more when they were allowed to choose them, even though that did nothing to increase their chances of winning. She called this "the illusion of control."

Langer followed this up by looking at the often meaningless factors that determine how people evaluate information. In one study, conducted with Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank, she had experimenters approach people who were using a Xerox machine and ask to cut in to make copies. They found that people were more likely to let someone cut if offered a reason - but, intriguingly, it did not matter if the reason made sense. People were as receptive to a meaningless reason ("to make copies") as a valid one ("I'm in a rush").

"It is not that people don't hear the request," Langer wrote in "Mindfulness," "they simply don't think about it actively.". . .

Langer. . . thought mindlessness was harmful. Not paying attention to their lives, as she saw it, made people bored and careless, prejudiced and complacent; it stunted innovation and led to catastrophic errors among pilots and soldiers and surgeons. She didn't see mindlessness as a window into the brain. She saw it as a condition to be cured.

So Langer began to study its opposite. She called it "mindfulness," a term that was being independently adopted around the same time by doctors and therapists embracing the Buddhist practice of mindful meditation. Langer's definition was something more everyday - that we simply need to go through life paying better attention to it. She began to focus her work on the question of what difference that might make.

Among other things, she argued, it could make us live longer. In 1976, working with Judith Rodin at Yale - a psychologist who would later become president of the University of Pennsylvania - she published a landmark field study that looked at what happened when nursing home residents were given more control over their lives. Langer and Rodin set up their experiment so that one group of residents was asked to make a few small decisions about their lives - where to receive visitors, what entertainment options they preferred, and how to care for houseplants placed in their rooms - and another group was not given these choices. A year and a half later, Langer and Rodin found that not only were the residents who had been given more choices happier, more social, and more alert than the other group, many more of them were still alive. . .

GEORGE KENNEY has an interesting podcast interview with Langer. Unfortunately, Langer avoids Kenney's clear interest in applying her thoughts to politics, but the listener may gain a few ideas about it.

PETREUS, OTHERS PLANNNG FOR UNDECLARED 80 YEAR WAR

TOM HAYDEN, LA TIMES - Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger generation of resources for their future.

The term "Long War" was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.

According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy."

The concept has quietly gained credence. Washington Post reporter-turned-author Thomas E. Ricks used "The Long War" as the title for the epilogue of his 2009 book on Iraq, in which he predicted that the U.S. was only halfway through the combat phase there.

It has crept into legal language. Federal Appeals Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a darling of the American right, recently ruled in favor of holding detainees permanently because otherwise, "each successful campaign of a long war would trigger an obligation to release Taliban fighters captured in earlier clashes."

Among defense analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at Boston University, is the leading critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins among a "small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists" who view public opinion "as something to manipulate" if they take it into consideration at all.

MORNING LINE

SAM SMITH - As one of the founders of the DC statehood movement and a four decade long advocate of urban statehood, I was pleased to see that Vanity Fair at least thought the issue was worth taking a poll about. Support isn't strong, but neither is it insignificant.

For example, 24% of respondents support dividing California into a northern and southern half and 20% support giving DC statehood. What is sad, given a Democratic president and Congress, is that only 25% of Democrats support the idea, even though it would give the party two more seats in the Senate.

Making NYC a state - the great brief cause of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin - got only 9% support.

THE CASE FOR URBAN STATEHOOD

VATICAN TRIES ABE FOXMAN COVER BUT IS A LITTLE PITCHY

REUTERS - The sermon by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, a Franciscan whose title is "Preacher of the Pontifical Household", drew sharp criticism from both Jews and victims of sexual abuse by priests.

It further racheted up tensions over the abuse scandal, forcing even the Vatican spokesman to distance himself from Cantalamessa, the only person authorized to preach to the pope.

Cantalamessa, speaking with the pope sitting nearby, drew the parallel at an afternoon Good Friday service in St Peter's Basilica on the day Christians commemorate Jesus' crucifixion.

Noting that this year the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter fell during the same week, he said Jews throughout history had been the victims of "collective violence" and drew comparisons between Jewish suffering and attacks on the Church.

As the pope listened, Cantalamessa read the congregation a part of a letter he received from a Jewish friend, who said he was "following with disgust the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the pope..."

"The use of stereotypes, the shifting of personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," he quoted from the letter.

"Shame on Father Cantalamessa," said Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

"The Vatican is entitled to defend itself but the comparison with anti-Semitic persecution is offensive and unsustainable. We are sorely disappointed," he told Reuters.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said: "This should not be interpreted as an official position of the Vatican." But some Jewish groups demanded a personal apology from the pope for the words read by his preacher.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

FROM A READER - If the Vatican's declaration that the Pope is a sovereign head of state protected by diplomatic immunity is true, why don't Catholic clergy have to register as foreign agents?

ROAD SIGNS

Vi Ransel, Market Oracle, UK

- According to the United Nations Gini Coefficient, which measures the national distribution of family income, the US had the highest level of inequality of the highly industrialized countries, based on the data available in 2008. It was ranked slightly more unequal than Sri Lanka, and on a par with Ghana and Turkmenistan.

- Since 1980, the richest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple, while for the "lowest" 90% of us, incomes fell. The average wage is lower today than it was in the 1970s, while productivity has risen almost 50%.

- In 1983 middle class debt held at 67% of income. In 2007, middle class debt had gone over the falls to 157% of income.

- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.

- Between 1978 and 2008, almost 35% of America's total income growth went to the top one-tenth of one percent of "us." And according to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of society, a higher share of income than at any time since 1928.

THE ROLE OF PAPER CLIPS IN DENTAL PROBLEMS

THANKS to Improbable Research, we have just learned that a Fall River, MA, dentist is accused of using paper clips instead of steel posts during root canal operations and then charging Medicaid for the more expensive devices.

This is not the first time that paper clips have played a role in dental problems, witness this report from an Indian hospital earlier this year:

J Indian Soc Pedod Prev Dent. 2010 Jan-Mar;28(1):45-6.
Foreign body in a deciduous incisor: A radiological revelation.
Lehl G.
Department of Dentistry, Government Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, India.

A 6-year-old boy was brought to the dental department with a history of toothache in the anterior maxillary region. Intraoral examination revealed caries in the deciduous upper central and lateral incisor teeth. Radiological evaluation revealed the silhouette of a metallic paper clip in the pulp chamber of the deciduous right maxillary central incisor. The tooth was extracted as the permanent incisor was erupting below. Children often avoid informing their parents regarding such incidents due to fear of punishment.

PLACES YOU MAY NOT HAVE VISITED YET

UMBRELLA COVER MUSEUM - The World's First and Only Umbrella Cover Museum opened with firecrackers and cupcakes on Peaks Island off the coast of Maine during the summer of 1996. The brainchild of U.C.M. Director and Curator, Nancy 3. Hoffman, the Museum exhibited close to eighty umbrella covers (also known as "sheaths" or "pockets"). Each cover has its provenance and story posted along with the actual cover. When asked what inspired her to open such an unusual museum, Nancy replied, "I was cleaning out my house one day, and discovered that I still had all of the covers from all of the umbrellas I'd ever bought (seven or so). That got me thinking. Then one day, around 1992, I was in a dime store and I stole a cover off of an umbrella . . . just the cover. Then I knew I was hooked. After that I started planning the Museum and soliciting donations for the exhibits."

After 6 years, the Umbrella Cover Museum outgrew its place in Nancy 3's kitchen and is now housed at 62-B Island Avenue, Peaks Island, Maine. It is open during the summer, call or e-mail for hours and directions to the museum from Portland, Maine. It's a lovely 20 minute ferry ride from Portland and a five minute walk from the landing on Peaks.

Umbrella covers currently on display at the Umbrella Cover Museum hail from thirty countries. Regular Museum events include guided tours and the singing of "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella," with accordion accompaniment. A $2-$5 donation is requested. For more information contact Director, Nancy 3. Hoffman or phone 207-766-4496.

As of June, 2009, there are over 600 covers in the collection from 37 countries. The museum has been featured on National Public Radio, BBC Radio London, as well as in numerous published articles.

BOOKSHELF

• THE FLAT WORLD AND EDUCATION

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