Magpie

Saturday, May 28

No more banker's hours for suicide hotline.

Thursday, we posted on how the budget axe had hit the 24-hour suicide hotline in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. In order to save less than CAN$ 30,000 [US$ 24,000] annually, the province decided to replace the 24-hour line with a service that's only available between 9 am and 5 pm on weekdays. We suggested that this decision was going to bite PEI's Conservative government in the ass.

Well, it did. After worldwide press ridicule, including major stories on CNN and NPR, PEI's health minister announced that the province is restoring funding for the suicide hotline.

Liberal Opposition Leader and health critic Robert Ghiz commented yesterday, ?It seemed everyone except for the government knew it was a bad decision.?

As one person involved in the battle to revive the line quipped, ?You know what they say, ?When it's 10 a.m. in Toronto, it's 1952 on the Island.?

That last isn't true, by the way. Having spent time in PEI, we can say with some authority that it's at least 1965 on the Island.

Via Globe and Mail.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:55 AM | Get permalink

How not to control nuclear arms.

The current 188-nation conference to review the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty has ended in failure. While there were a number of reasons for the lack of any new efforts to control nuclear arms, US intransigence was a major factor.

The United States, for its part, objected to any reference in a final document to disarmament commitments it and other weapons states made at the 1995 and 2000 conferences.

Those commitments included, for example, activation of the nuclear test-ban treaty and negotiation of a verifiable treaty banning production of bomb material ? both steps now opposed by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Critics accused Washington of reneging on those commitments, undermining the balance of nonproliferation and disarmament obligations in the treaty, perhaps making some feel less bound by their pledge to forswear nuclear bombs.

?I wish the United States had been more flexible here, and not tried to question or downgrade the validity with respect to the 1995 and 2000 commitments,? said Thomas Graham, a former lead U.S. arms negotiator.

Critics also said Bush administration talk of developing new nuclear weapons violates at least the spirit of the nonproliferation treaty.

Via Globe and Mail.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Playin' that squeezebox.

Sex advice from accordian players.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Friday, May 27

Look out, Canada!

The Globe and Mail has a depressingly familiar-sounding article about how Christian fundamentalists are capturing Conservative party nominations for Parliament in several parts of the country.

Some Conservatives argue that the selection of a large number of candidates from the religious right is an unfortunate turn for a party that was accused in last year's election campaign of harbouring a socially conservative "hidden agenda."

"The difficulty, from a party perspective, is that it begins to hijack the other agendas that parties have," said Ross Haynes, who lost the Conservative nomination in the riding of Halifax to one of three "Christian, pro-family people" recommended by a minister at a religious rally this spring in Kentville, N.S.

Candidates who are running on single issues such as opposition to same-sex marriage "probably can't get elected because they certainly don't represent any mainstream population view," Mr. Haynes said....

But Tristan Emmanuel -- the Presbyterian minister whose endorsement at the Kentville rally aided the nominations of Andrew House in Halifax, Rakesh Khosla in Halifax West and Paul Francis in Sackville-Eastern Shore -- makes no apologies.

"It's time we stopped apologizing and started defending who we are," he said. "The evangelical community in Canada, by and large, and socially conservative Catholics, are saying we have been far too heavenly minded and thus we have been of no earthly value for far too long, on too many fronts."

Mr. Emmanuel runs the Equipping Christians for the Public Square Centre, which teaches people of his faith to become political. He is reluctant to say how many adherents have obtained Conservative nominations because he is afraid the news media will portray the campaign as the infiltration of the party by "right-wing fanatics."

All of this reminds of us of the stories we recall reading in the 1980s about right-wing Christian 'stealth candidates' running for and getting elected to state and local offices around the US, and then using those offices to springboard into Congress. Relatively little attention was paid to these early candidates (especially by the US Left), and we all know what their successes helped lead to.

We'd be interested in knowing whether these Christian fundamentalist party candidates in Canada have similarly built on their having held lower offices.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:40 PM | Get permalink

We were looking through the Washington Post ...

... when we spotted the following headline:

GOP Tilting Balance Of Power to the Right

We were ready to write a snarky post with a really sarcastic headline of our own, but we figured we should at least read the story first. And we'll be damned, this story by Post staff writer Jim VandeHei is a good short history of how Dubya and the Republicans have taken hold of power in a way not seen before in Washington. VandeHei explains how the GOP has turned both houses of Congress and the executive branch into well-oiled machinery for cranking out right-wing legislation and policies, and how the Republicans are now trying to do the same with the federal courts.

Bush created a top-down system in the White House much like the one his colleagues have in Congress. He has constructed what many scholars said amounts to a virtual oligarchy with Cheney, Karl Rove, Andrew H. Card Jr., Joshua Bolton, himself and only a few others setting policy, while he looks to Congress and the agencies mostly to promote and institute his policies.

President Bill Clinton oversaw a transition of government away from strong agencies, which historically provided a greater variety of opinions in policymaking. "On the surface it looks like Bush is doing this better than Clinton, but there is much more going on," said Paul C. Light, an expert on the executive branch.

Light said Bush has essentially turned most of the agencies into political arms of the White House. "It's not just weakening agencies but strengthening political control of the agencies," he said.

Major policies such as Social Security are produced in the White House, while Cabinet heads and their staffs are tethered. After the 2004 election, the White House began requiring Cabinet members to spend as long as four hours a week working in an office near the West Wing.

"The fact they hold close their Cabinet members is a plus -- it makes for less freelancing," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush has demanded similar loyalty from GOP lawmakers -- and received it. Republicans have voted with the president, on average, about nine out of 10 times. Critics and some scholars charge that the Congress now seldom performs its constitutional duty of providing oversight of the executive branch through tough investigations and hearings.

We just wish the Washington Post and other 'mainstream' newspapers had been publishing more stories like this in the months leading up to last year's election. Hell, we wish even one of the 'mainstream' papers had published even one story like this one.

More: If you still want a snarky post about the article, check out this one at the Left Coaster. pessimist does a great job of skewering the Post for taking so long to notice the administration's hard rightward drift.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 PM | Get permalink

We can't help it.

But what would you do if you were presented with the following headline?

Viagra may cause blindness, warns US

We're really sorry about the poor men who've been blinded, but we have no choice about saying this: What were those men doing after they took their Viagra? Maybe they should get a sex partner? And are the feds getting ready to do a study on whether men are getting hair on their palms, too?

We feel better now. Back to our normal programming.

[For the story where we got the headline, look here.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:54 AM | Get permalink

'Not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.'

We see that Harper's Magazine has finally posted Jeff Sharlet's article, Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch. That megachurch is the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado — a city that not coincidentally is also home to the US Air Force Academy.

The city's mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.

"Church" is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life's various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex,s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life's founder.

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation's most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life's "free market" approach to the divine.

This is one of the best articles on the US religious right that we've read in a long time. Do not miss it.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:05 AM | Get permalink

Not just a buried lead.

But a whole buried story.

We were reading this news story about how some Iraq veterans have been having trouble getting their old jobs back from their employers when we realized that you could make a different story out of the material the reporter presented. While the existing story focused on the various problems that National Guard members have after returning from a call-up, the new story would focus on the difficulties that the US military's heavy reliance on members of the Army Reserve and National Guard are causing for employers, especially small ones. That story would be headlined something like 'Iraq deployments hit small employers hard,' and it would read like this:

For many companies, losses begin when guard and reserve employees are called up and employers have to scramble to fill their positions with temps. Some bosses estimate they've spent up to $10,000 on fill-ins, including hiring and training costs, and time lost on the job.

"In our case, training has to be done by staff, plus schooling, so the productivity of the trainer-employee goes down. Instead of losing one employee, you lose one and a half," says Dean Hartman, owner of Capital Business Machines in Olympia....

Especially frustrating for businesses is the unpredictable timing and duration of call-ups. Employers say their reservists have been warned they could go to Iraq, six months go by, then suddenly it's: "Oh, I'm going to be gone tomorrow."

The problems have prompted business groups to push for tax relief, as well as longer notification periods, on Capitol Hill. In a national Chamber of Commerce survey at the end of last year, 76 percent of members said a 30-day notification for call-ups was a high or extremely high priority.

Many guard and reserve members have had their tours in Iraq extended at least once and some have been sent to Iraq two or even three times -- prompting increasing numbers of businesses to say "enough's enough," and let their soldier-workers go. That's a flagrant violation of the re-employment law.

But as the war wears on, more employers are finding ways around the law.

"I had an employer at a small transmission company who had an employee going to Iraq ask me, 'Do I have to hire him back?' " says Burgess. "I told him 'Yes.'

"He asked me: 'What if I go out of business?' I told him 'Then you don't.' He probably closed the business, got a new license and opened up with someone else."

Bankrupt businesses don't have to hire back their soldiers sent to war. If there's no business, there's no job -- and no job protection....

But as the war grinds on -- and business costs mount -- some insiders worry support for the state's "weekend warriors" could erode.

"Most employers are within the law now, doing what they should do for the troops," says Tom Pearson, state director for the Veterans Employment and Training Service. "But if it's the second time around, and they've already gone through one bout of hiring temps and letting them go, will that change?

"What's going to happen down the road is really a puzzlement.

We're not saying that the story about the difficulties faced by returning vets is less important than the problems that military service causes to employers — that's definitely not the case. But it's interesting what turns up when you look at the same set of facts differently. And we suspect that the story about employer problems is one that will increasingly erode political support for Dubya's Iraq adventure.

Via Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:33 AM | Get permalink

Is the US economy in the midst of a housing bubble?

And is that bubble going to burst sometime soon?

Former nay-sayer Paul Krugman is starting to think that the answer to both questions is Yes.

Nobody thought the economy could rely forever on home buying and refinancing. But the hope was that by the time the housing boom petered out, it would no longer be needed.

But although the housing boom has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined, the economy would still be in big trouble if it came to an end. That is, if the hectic pace of home construction were to cool, and consumers were to stop borrowing against their houses, the economy would slow down sharply. If housing prices actually started falling, we'd be looking at a very nasty scene, in which both construction and consumer spending would plunge, pushing the economy right back into recession.

That's why it's so ominous to see signs that America's housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:21 AM | Get permalink

What a strange world.

The BBC reports that two men who may be Japanese soldiers from the Second World War have been found in a Philippine jungle.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, May 26

This may not be good news.

From New Scientist's news wire:

Chinese officials have denied media reports that H5N1 bird flu has killed more than a 100 people in the west of the country.

A web-based Chinese-language news service called Boxun (Abundant News), which allows correspondents to freely post information on its site, reported on 25 May that 121 people in 18 villages in the sparsely-settled western province of Qinghai have died of bird flu, and more are ill. Some 1300 people, have been isolated, it reports.

But on Thursday the official Xinhua news agency denied any human infections with H5N1 bird flu in the region. No unexplained pneumonia or flu among people who had contact with birds that carried H5N1 has been reported, it says. An expert team was dispatched to Qinghai soon after the strain was confirmed in wild geese at a nature reserve...

The reports say that sick people in the border region between Qinghai and the neighbouring, impoverished province of Gansu had visited the nature reserve where the birds were found. But they also report that there have been large scale outbreaks of unexplained deaths among livestock in the area.

New Scientist cautions that there's no way at this point to judge the accuracy of the Boxun report. However, the magazine also reminds readers that the Chinese government denied that there were cases of SARS in Beijing, when it was later determined that there had been.

Xinhua's denial of the Boxun report is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:32 PM | Get permalink

Not far from the truth.

Is it?

A political action group in the state of Kansas is applying pressure on the Kansas State Board of Education to ban any and all references to the twentieth century from school textbooks, a spokesman for the group confirmed today.

The move to ban the twentieth century came up in a series of contentious school board hearings this week as the group loudly complained that the state's current textbooks are rife with references to the controversial century, which they say may or may not have happened.

"These textbooks state unequivocally that the twentieth century occurred, as if that were a proven historic fact," said Gordon Lavalier, the group's leader and spokesman. "The simple truth is, the twentieth century is and has always been nothing but a theory."

Via Red State Rabble.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:31 PM | Get permalink

Thought experiment, Down-Under style.

We all know how Dubya's re-election and the increased Republican majority in the US Senate has made both him and the GOP just a bit arrogant. Okay — a whole lot arrogant.

Now here's the experiment: Imagine what things in the US would be like if Dubya had not only gotten re-elected, but the Republicans won 60 or 61 Senate seats. No filibusters. No chance to block Dubya's cabinet appointments or judicial nominees. You can probably take it from there.

Now imagine Australia. PM John Howard and his right-wing Liberal/National government have just been elected to another term. And this time, Howard's crowd finally has control of the Senate; no more having to cultivate senators from the minor parties in order to pass legislation.

As Tim Dunlop says, it's Year Zero for the Howard government. And now they're really going to show Australia what a real right-wing government is all about.

I suspect John Howard's biggest fear as PM is that he will be labelled as another Malcolm Fraser, a leader who had power he didn't use, power that he wasted because he lacked the nerve to push through unpopular changes. Howard the populist is currently confronting history and those on his own side who will be more than willing to label him as no better than Fraser.

So the shift is on. Thus we have just had a budget that favours those on higher incomes, and now we have an industrial relations bill that is aimed at benefitting employers at the expense of employees. Neither policy can be said to be anything but hostile towards "Howard's battlers". And it's not just about Howard and his legacy.

This IR bill, simply put, represents the ideological line that has always been drawn between the left and the right in Australia. It is a struggle over how we define our society and how we understand the way in which the material rewards it has to offer are generated and distributed.

Those on the left believe that employment is an aspect of citizenship, one of the ways in which individuals define their place within society and their own individuality. They believe that those who own businesses and those who employ workers are part of a joint enterprise that brings wealth to the country and security to its members. They believe that you cannot separate the successes of business and the rewards that are properly due to the investors and entrepreneurs who risk money in such enterprises and whose skills get them off the ground from the work of those they employ to help carry out their plans. Each needs the other.

The left believes that there is an inherent imbalance of power between the employed and the employer and that part of the role of government is to equalise that discrepency and to minimise the risk it poses for the average worker. It believes that those who sell their labour are entitled to certain protections against those who are in a position to excercise power over them in this fundamental respect....

The left believes that government has a role in enforcing those protections via the law of the land in exactly the same way they have a role in enforcing any other law. In fact, it is more than a mere role: democratic government is at heart charged with the job of providing the environment within which business, workers and society meld into a workable whole that creates the circumstances under which individuals can flourish. Nothing trumps the value of the individual, but that individuality is meaningless in a society that gives priority to the abstractions of "the market"....

The new workplace relation laws intend to shift that balance.

The post is a fascinating read both for how Australia's current politics both mirror and differ from those of the US. We highly recommend it.

Via Road to Surfdom.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:54 PM | Get permalink

Those riots that Newsweek supposedly caused.

The ones in Afghanistan?

Sarah Chayes suggests some more likely causes.

[For] all the artificial nature of the conflagration, fires cannot be started without tinder and fuel - in this case, popular exasperation about the unkept promises of the post-Taliban order and shock about some aspects of American conduct.

What most Afghans have complained to me most consistently about is the inexplicable staying power of predatory, corrupt and abusive officials, on both the provincial and national level. Having waited patiently through the emergency loya jirga, or national assembly, in June 2002, the approval of a new constitution at a second loya jirga in December 2003, and the presidential election last fall, Afghans are at a loss as to why the Karzai administration and its American backers repeatedly put their confidence in unqualified and often criminal officials. By blindly allying themselves with some of the most destructive elements of Afghan society (over-armed, under-disciplined thugs), American forces paint themselves in the ugly colors of their Afghan proxies. The extortions, murders, unwarranted searches and unfair monopolies on lucrative work contracts are seen as integral components of American policy.

Somehow, in the three-and-a-half years that the United States has been here, it has not figured out how to avoid this trap. This incapacity for institutional learning is perhaps the most surprising failing on the part of the Army that I have witnessed. Each new contingent starts from scratch; knowledge of local tribal dynamics, geography, customs and personalities painstakingly acquired by the previous unit is never properly transferred. And so the same mistakes are made again and again.

Highhanded American behavior has also contributed fuel for the fire. The 200 to 300 Afghan men who work on the American base in Kandahar, to give a mundane example, wait several hours in the sun to be admitted through increasingly stringent searches. Why not stagger the arrivals of different teams of workers, to ease their discomfort and reduce the target that such a large group of people represents? The contractor Kellogg Brown & Root initially wanted its Afghan laborers on the base to work 12-hour shifts, with a half-hour for lunch and one half-day free a week. Such sweatshop labor practices are unworthy of the values the United States claims to represent. (Afghan workers did succeed in getting the workday reduced to eight hours.)

But inconveniences are one thing, atrocities quite another. On their own, the fatal beatings of probably innocent detainees and the use of religiously based sexual humiliation at the prison on the American base in Bagram would be sufficient pretext for troublemakers to provoke a riot, never mind the Newsweek report about desecration of the Koran.

Such behavior is not only a disgrace but also a serious national security risk. Our safety and survival depend increasingly on our ability to forge profound, cooperative relationships based in mutual comprehension with Muslim peoples. But when the United States can be plausibly depicted, by Pakistani operatives or Muslim extremists, as a country with little regard for the human dignity of Muslims, such friendships founder. The kind of behavior that has been documented in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram presents a gift of inflammable tinder to the very extremists we claim to be fighting.

Chayes, incidentally, is a former reporter for NPR. She's been doing development work in Afghanistan since 2002.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:59 PM | Get permalink

We don't know how we managed to miss this story.

But finding it this week is especially appropriate, given our post yesterday on how the US government was distributing an 'amended' history of nuclar arms control measures at the conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

According to this May 15 article by military analyst William Arkin, the US military has been preparing to carry out pre-emptive attacks that may involve the use of small nuclear weapons on North Korea and (very likely) Iran. Such a 'global strike' could be carried out by forces under control of the US Army's Strategic Command (Stratcom) within a half-day of their being authorized by the president.

According to Arkin, the inclusion of nuclear weapons in the Dubya administration's global strike plans blurs the line traditionally set by US policy, which has held that the appropriate role of nuclear weapons is as a deterrent against attack from another nuclear power. But, since 9/11, the Dubya administration's concern with preventing future attacks on the US has led the administration to consider the use of nuclear weapons as part of a pre-emptive attacks.

A good example of how the nuclear/conventional line has blurred, says Arkin, is Stratcom's CONPLAN 8022-02, which deals with responding to 'imminent' threats from countries such as North Korea or Iran.

CONPLAN 8022 anticipates two different scenarios. The first is a response to a specific and imminent nuclear threat, say in North Korea. A quick-reaction, highly choreographed strike would combine pinpoint bombing with electronic warfare and cyberattacks to disable a North Korean response, with commandos operating deep in enemy territory, perhaps even to take possession of the nuclear device.

The second scenario involves a more generic attack on an adversary's WMD infrastructure. Assume, for argument's sake, that Iran announces it is mounting a crash program to build a nuclear weapon. A multidimensional bombing (kinetic) and cyberwarfare (non-kinetic) attack might seek to destroy Iran's program, and special forces would be deployed to disable or isolate underground facilities.

By employing all of the tricks in the U.S. arsenal to immobilize an enemy country -- turning off the electricity, jamming and spoofing radars and communications, penetrating computer networks and garbling electronic commands -- global strike magnifies the impact of bombing by eliminating the need to physically destroy targets that have been disabled by other means.

The inclusion, therefore, of a nuclear weapons option in CONPLAN 8022 -- a specially configured earth-penetrating bomb to destroy deeply buried facilities, if any exist -- is particularly disconcerting. The global strike plan holds the nuclear option in reserve if intelligence suggests an "imminent" launch of an enemy nuclear strike on the United States or if there is a need to destroy hard-to-reach targets [Emphasis ours]

Can you see part of the slippery slope there? Nuclear weapons can be used against hard-to-reach targets, not just in cases where an attack on the US appears to be imminent.

Arkin makes a direct connection between the US experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq and the increasing fascination with tactical nuclear weapons on the part of the Pentagon and Defense Department — especially with the fact that the heavy commitment of troops to the Iraq occupation has stretched US military resources almost to the breaking point.

As U.S. military forces have gotten bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the attractiveness of global strike planning has increased in the minds of many in the military. Stratcom planners, recognizing that U.S. ground forces are already overcommitted, say that global strike must be able to be implemented "without resort to large numbers of general purpose forces."

When one combines the doctrine of preemption with a "homeland security" aesthetic that concludes that only hyper-vigilance and readiness stand in the way of another 9/11, it is pretty clear how global strike ended up where it is. The 9/11 attacks caught the country unaware and the natural reaction of contingency planners is to try to eliminate surprise in the future. The Nuclear Posture Review and Rumsfeld's classified Defense Planning Guidance both demanded more flexible nuclear options.

Global strike thinkers may believe that they have found a way to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle; but they are also having to cater to a belief on the part of those in government's inner circle who have convinced themselves that the gravity of the threats demands that the United States not engage in any protracted debate, that it prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

There's much more of interest in Arkin's article. We suggest reading it all.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:41 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's generosity knows no end.

Just ask Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who left Washington with a 'symbolic' pledge of US$ 50 million for projects in Gaza.

Now 50 million bucks might seem a lot, especially when compared to the US$ 84 million that the Palestinian Authority received from the US in 2004. But it pales against the US$ 2.87 billion that Israel received in US military and economic aid during the same year. Not to mention the US$ 3 billion in loan guarantees.

Not like we'd suggest that there's a connection between the aid disparity and Israel's general failure to live up to its commitment to Palestinian autonomy.

More: We thought that the figures we'd found for US aid to the Palestinian Authority were aawfully low even for Dubya's administration. A little more checking found that Congress has appropriated US$ 200 million for the Palestinians during FY 2005-06. However, most of that money is being funneled thorugh US-controlled aid agencies, and not going directly to the PA. Even with this higher amount, the aid received by the Palestinian Authority is only a pittance compared to that received by Israel.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:49 PM | Get permalink

Please call back during business hours.

Faced with a CAN$22 million deficit in its 2005-2006 budget, the provincial government of Prince Edward Island (in Atlantic Canada) is mainly choosing to cut spending rather than raise taxes of other forms of revenue. One of the items on the cutting block is coming back to haunt the government, though — its decision to shut down a 24-hour suicide help line.

But lest you think that PEI's Conservative government is totally heartless, they're not cutting all services to people with mental health problems: Instead of the 24-hour line, the province is paying for a replacement service that operates between 9 am and 5 pm on weekdays. So as long as people are only suicidal during business hours, they won't even notice the change.

[The province] had been paying a New Brunswick company $30,000 [US$ 24,000] to monitor the line. The Island government says it can't afford the cost, and will end the service on June 1.

The service gets almost 1,400 calls each year. About 50 of those calls come from people considering suicide.

Joan Wright, executive director of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, said people with mental health problems need help 24 hours a day.

"After hours, in the middle of the night, those are the times when people are facing their depression and their crisis. During the day, there's lots of other supports and lots of other activity.

"The person will not get the kind of help they need. And if they don't get the kind of help they need, that's sometimes the last straw for them...."

"You know I can't say that someone who's suicidal will kill themselves because there's no crisis line, because it's a very individual act. But I can say the chances of someone completing the act are higher when they have no place to reach out to call," said Wright.

Let's assume that the changes in the hotline save the PEI government two-thirds of what it had been paying out for the 24-hour hotline (CAN$ 20,0000/US$ 16,000). Was there really nowhere else the province could have made an equal budget cut to help balance a CAN $22 million [US $33 million] budget deficit?

We guess that the Conservatives figure that potentially suicidal people won't be sticking around long enough to vote in the next election.

Via CBC PEI.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:59 AM | Get permalink

Are you worried about a 'bird flu' pandemic yet?

If you're not, we've got something that will get you thinking about whether the US government [or any other government] is doing enough to prevent the H5N1 flu strain from causing the next 1918-style flu pandemic.

No, it's not the picture below, which is scary enough.

1918 flu news

Newspaper stories from the 1918 'Spanish Flu' pandemic

It's a blog from the future written by a journalist covering the 2006 pandemic. Here's an excerpt:

2 February 2006: The virus spreads

Today, I was at a press conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. A guy from the CDC pointed to a giant screen, a map of the world dotted with red pixels. He said that they'd reckoned the virus might hit in two or more waves up to eight months apart, as in past epidemics. They'd hoped the first pandemic strain of H5N1 might be poorly contagious, and come back again with a vengeance after it had picked up more infectivity. By that time we might have had a vaccine. That was just a hunch, though. And it was wrong.

The mild pandemic in 1968 took almost a year to cross the globe. This one probably started around October. So we're now almost four months in. Look at that map! With the huge increase in passengers travelling by air, it's already lodged in 38 cities around the globe. The outline of Asia is barely visible beneath the swarm of red pixels.

Now the virus is in coastal cities on both sides of South America. It hit Europe two weeks ago, ripping through Paris in just 11 days. In the French capital alone, there were 2.5 million cases and 50,000 dead. That's par for the course — infection rate 25% and mortality 2%, similar to the 1918 pandemic. Extrapolate these numbers, and we're going to have over 30 million dead worldwide. In poor and densely populated countries like India, it could be worse.

Where's next, I asked. Based on passenger data — which had to be prised from the airlines — one epidemiologist was willing to make a guess. "Within two weeks, there." He traced his finger from San Diego to Los Angeles, up to San Francisco. Within another three to four weeks, it'll be the turn of the conurbations along the eastern seaboard.

You can read the full blog here.

Via Nature.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, May 25

North Carolina pastor apologizes for bigoted sign.

Earlier today, we posted about an anti-Muslim sign that had been placed in front of a Baptist church in North Carolina. The sign read: The Koran needs to be flushed! In that post, we mentioned how the church's pastor, Rev. Creighton Lovelace, was thoroughly unapologetic for having put the sign out and for any possible upset it might cause people who saw it.

Today, Lovelace has reconsidered his views. We just got this message from the Council on American-Islamic Relations:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) tonight applauded the decision of a North Carolina Baptist pastor to apologize for an anti-Muslim sign displayed outside his Forest City church.

Until today, Danieltown Baptist Church Pastor Rev. Creighton Lovelace refused calls to take down the sign, reading "The Koran needs to be flushed," posted in front of his church.

CAIR reacted to the controversy yesterday by calling on mainstream religious and political leaders to repudiate the sign's bigoted message....

In today's apology, Lovelace said in part:

"When I posted the sign in front of the church, it was my intent only to affirm and exalt the Bible and its teachings. It was certainly not my intent to insult any people of faith, but instead to remind the people in this community of the preeminence of God's Word.

"When I posted the message on the sign, I did not realize how people of the Muslim faith view the Koran-that devoted Muslims view it more highly than many in the U.S. view the Bible.

"Now I realize how offensive this is to them, and after praying about it, I have chosen to remove the sign. I apologize for posting that message and deeply regret that it has offended so many in the Muslim community."

In an earlier statement sent to CAIR, Morris H. Chapman, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee, condemned the message on the sign and called for "respectful" relations with American Muslims.

"We thank Pastor Lovelace for his apology and hope this incident will serve to improve relations between Christians and Muslims in North Carolina and throughout America," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad.

Awad suggested that American churches and mosques host Muslim-Christian dialogues on Jesus, who is revered by both faiths.

More proof that evil [or ignorance] can only triumph when good people remain silent.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:45 PM | Get permalink

'The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the documents.'

Gee, we wonder why?

From a Reuters report on the release of previously classified documents to the American Civil Liberties Union:

[ACLU lawyer Jameel] Jaffer said the latest documents show the U.S. government had heard detainees complain as early as 2002 about desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one mentioning it had been placed in a toilet.

In another document, written in April 2003, an FBI agent related a detainee's account of an incident involving a female U.S. interrogator.

"While the guards held him, she removed her blouse, embraced the detainee from behind and put her hand on his genitals. The interrogator was on her menstrual period and she wiped blood from her body on his face and head," the memo stated.

A similar incident was described in a recent book written by a former Guantanamo interrogator.

But, of course, Newsweek was totally wrong about that Koran desecration that they said was going on at Guantanamo.

The ACLU's press release on the newly released documents is here.

You can read the documents here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:24 PM | Get permalink

We're sure Dubya isn't losing sleep over this.

But it sure bothers us that Amnesty International's 2005 human rights report names the US as one of the world's major human rights violators. The report also cites the selective observance of international law by Dubya's administration — particulary its attitudes toward torture and the treatment of prisoners — as an encouragement for human rights violators worldwide.

Cover of human rights report

Here's some of Amnesty secretary general Irene Khan's speech introducing the report:

[The] overriding message of our report is that: Governments betrayed their promise to fulfil human rights. They failed to show principled leadership through inaction, indifference, erosion of standards, impunity and lack of accountability.

I choose the word "betrayal" deliberately. The gap between the promise and performance of governments, between their duty to uphold human rights and their failure to do so, between their rhetoric to respect human rights and their work to disregard and distort them was so wide in 2004 that I can find no other word to describe it...

In 2004, far from any sign of principled leadership, we saw a new and dangerous agenda in the making, rewriting the rules of human rights, discrediting the institutions of international cooperation and usurping the language of justice and freedom to promote policies that create fear and insecurity.

The US is leading this agenda, with the UK, European states, Australia and other states following.

Under this agenda, accountability is being set aside in favour of impunity; a prime example being the refusal of the US Administration or US Congress to conduct a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and ill treatment by US officials, despite the public outrage over Abu Ghraib and despite the evidence, collected by AI and other, of similar practices in Bagram, Guantanamo and other detention centres under US control.

Another example was the attempt by the UK — thankfully unsuccessfully — (in the Baha Moussa case) to argue that its soldiers in Iraq are not bound by human rights law (notwithstanding Mr. Blair's claim that they are there to save the Iraqi population from Saddam's abuses - but obviously not from British ones)

The pick and choose approach to international law is being replaced by a "erode where you can, select if you must and subvert where you will" approach.

The US refuses to apply the Geneva Convention for detainees in Afghanistan. It continues to press for bilateral agreements to provide its citizens immunity from prosecution of the International Criminal Court (Congress [passed] legislation last year to penalise those who refuse).

But nothing shows the disregard of international law as clearly as the attempts by the US, UK and some European countries to set aside the absolute prohibition of torture and ill treatment by re-definition and "rendering" — or the transfer prisoners to regimes that are known to use torture. In effect sub-contracting torture, yet keeping their own hands and conscience clean.

Under this dangerous agenda, justice is not only denied, it is also distorted.... Under this agenda some people are above the law and others are clearly outside it.

Dubya's administration has responded predictably. Check out the following exchange from today's White House press briefing conducted by Scott McClellan:

Q: Scott, Amnesty International report today, saying the U.S. is a top offender of human rights. Does the White House dispute that assessment?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the allegations are ridiculous and unsupported by the facts. The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have worked to advance freedom and democracy in the world so that people are governed under a rule of law and that there are protection -- that there are protections in place for minority rights, that women's rights are advanced so that women can fully participate in societies where now they cannot.

We're also leading the way when it comes to spreading compassion. The United States leads the way when it comes to providing resources to combat the scourge of AIDS. The President put forward his emergency plan for AIDS relief to fight the scourge in Africa and high -- other highly afflicted areas of the world. So I just think it's ridiculous and not supported by the facts when you look at all that we do to promote human rights and promote human dignity in the world.

Q: On various reports of abuse, whether it's at Guantanamo Bay or Afghanistan, you've often said that those are isolated incidents. Are there any U.S. policies, though, in place currently that have lead to those isolated incidences that should be reevaluated?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are a society based on laws and values — it's not just laws, but also values that we hold dearly. And certainly, what you bring up has been a stain on the image of the United States abroad. But if you look at how we address these matters, it shows our commitment to human rights and human dignity. We hold people accountable when there is abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again, and we do so in a very public way for the world to see that we lead by example, and that we do have values that we hold very dearly and believe in.

Q: So the current policies aren't contributing to the problem?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. No.

Such bald-faced lying in the face of the facts is impressive, on a certain perverse level.

You can download the full report from Amnesty's website if you go here. You can go directly to the report's introduction by clicking here.

If you don't want to read the whole report, the BBC has prepared a PDF file containing an A–Z summary for key countries. It's available here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:11 PM | Get permalink

The Ministry of Truth strikes again.

This time, the ministry's target was a brochure on disarmament distributed by the US at the conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. That brochure lists milestones in arms reductions since the 1980s, while (not incidentally) highlighting the supposedly great job that the US is doing in reducing its own nuclear arms.

What's interesting about the brochure is that two important arms reduction milestones have 'mysteriously' been dropped out of the chronology:

[The] timeline omits a pivotal agreement, the 1996 treaty to ban nuclear tests, a pact negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 countries but now rejected by President George W. Bush.

Further along, the brochure skips over the year 2000 entirely, a snub of the treaty review conference that year, when the United States and other nuclear-weapons states committed to "13 practical steps" to achieve nuclear disarmament - including activating the test-ban treaty, negotiating a pact to ban production of bomb material and "unequivocally undertaking" to totally eliminate their arsenals....

Bush administration officials now suggest the 2000 commitments are outdated...

"Official disdain for these agreements seems to have turned into denial that they existed," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms-control specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who accused the State Department of rewriting history.

"Does this mean that, because we have a change of administration, we are not accountable to other countries?" asked another disarmament advocate, Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute.

Asked why the 1996 treaty and the 2000 U.S. commitments - along with similar commitments in 1995 - didn't make the 40-entry list of "progress in arms control," U.S. delegation spokesman Richard Grenell said simply: "We highlighted certain items, and it wasn't an exhaustive list."

By contrast, an official UN chronology has several entries on the test ban, and prominently notes the 1995 and 2000 agreements.

Via The Gadflyer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:08 PM | Get permalink

Wow.

Amazing photos of lenticular mammatus clouds over Joplin, Missouri.

While we've seen plenty of lenticular clouds and mammatus clouds, we'd never seen even a photograph of the hybrid before now. Apparently they are very uncommon; the KSN TV meteorologist said on air that the last report of lenticular mammatus clouds in the Joplin area was over 30 years ago.

[Photo: KSN TV]
You can see a much larger version of the photo here.

For the time being, at least, there are about a dozen photos of the storm that generated the odd mammatus clouds here. We particularly liked this one.

Via Boing Boing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:21 AM | Get permalink

A Latin-American Aljazeera?

A new Latin-American television network had its first test transmissions on Tuesday.

Telesur logo

Telesur — a joint venture bankrolled by the governments of Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, and Cuba — plans to broadcast news, documentaries, and other programming produced in Latin America. The hopes that some Latin Americans have placed on the network has already led it to be nicknamed El Jazeera and Al Bolívar. Detractors, however, are calling it Telechávez because of the network's funding from the leftist government of Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez

Telesur's website describes its programming this way:

24 horas diarias de programación hecha en Latinoamérica, por latinoamericanos. Pluralidad de voces, variedad de enfoques. [24 hours daily of programming done in Latin America, by Latin American. A plurality of voices, a variety of approaches.]

Telesur has has already obtained satellite time, and its programming will be available to viewers in North and South America, as well as in western Europe and Africa. Current plans call for news and current affairs to take up 40 percent of the network's airtime. To support this goal, Telesur has already opened bureaus Brasilia, Bogota, Caracas, and La Paz. Additional bureaus are planned for Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo, and Washington, D.C.

Although Telesur has barely gone on the air, the network already has its critics, who say it will be a propaganda mouthpiece for the governments that are funding it, especially that of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

But Telesur's president Andres Izarra, who is also Venezuela's information minister, denied any ideological agenda.

"This will be a window through which we will be able to know and view ourselves... but it's not a weapon to promote political models and views," he said.

Marcelo Ballvé of Pacific News Service says that Telesur will have a tough row to hoe if it wants to attain the stature of an Aljazeera:

It's true: Latin American audiences need a broadcaster with a Latin American lens, open to documentaries and capable of reporting on Latin America with empathy, sophistication and depth. Even on local 24-hour news channels and CNN Español there is often better coverage of European and U.S. news than of coups in the Andes.

But can Telesur become more than a niche player? In the Middle East, Al Jazeera's success was due to its ability to project a relatively independent voice in a landscape dominated by censored media. In Latin America, media began slipping out of state control in the 1980s. In that sense, Telesur is the reverse of Al Jazeera: a statist reply to a mostly privatized landscape.

Venezuelan officials say Telesur content may be incorporated into the broadcasts of state-owned channels like Venezuela's state TV; the municipal TV station in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay; and Argentina's Canal 7 network. These media, in turn, would create programming for Telesur.

What are these TV stations like? Argentina's "long-suffering" and "poorly programmed" Canal 7 (according to local media historian Pablo Servín) has the worst ratings of Argentina's five free networks. State media here also are tainted by a history of serving as mouthpieces for governments, including the junta that disappeared and tortured tens of thousands of people in the 1970s.

That is another question for Telesur: the far from exemplary history of state-influenced media in the region, baggage that Latin Americans are familiar with, since they unwillingly viewed the boring or propagandistic programming for decades. Telesur will interact, on a day-to-day basis, with broadcasting partners that still respond to state media bureaucracies. Telesur's board includes at least two veterans of state media: a Cuban media worker and the chief of Argentina's Canal 7.

Telesur expects to be broadcasting a limited schedule of news and documentaries beginning in late July. A shift to a full 24-hour schedule is planned for September.

Telesur's website [in Spanish] is here.

Via BBC and Pacific News Service.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Another shining example of tolerance and respect for differences.

A Baptist church in Rutherford County, North Carolina is bringing the state more unwanted publicity. Last weekend, the pastor of the Danieltown Baptist Church put out in front of the church the message shown below.

Anti-Muslim sign

[Photo: Josh Humphries/Daily Courier]
According to this article in the online version of the Rutherford County Daily Courier, Rev. Creighton Lovelace is making no apology for putting out the sign.

"I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong," said Lovelace. "I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn't agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what's right...."

"Our creed as a Christian, or a Protestant, or a Baptist church — of course we don't have a creed but the bible — but we do have the Baptist faith and message that says that we should cling to the 66 books of the Holy Bible and any other book outside of that claiming to know the way of God or claiming to be God's word is automatically written off and is trying to defeat people from the way of true righteousness inside of our viewpoint in how we view the word of God," Lovelace said....

When Lovelace was asked whether he considered before he put the sign up that there may be some consequences or that some people may be angered, he said he was aware of the likelihood of angering some people.

"Well, I thought about it and I said there may be people who are offended by it but the way I look at it, Jesus told his followers that if the world hates you, don't feel bad because they hated me first," said Lovelace. "If we stand for what is right and for God's word and for Christianity then the world is going to condemn us and so right away when I got a complaint I said 'well somebody's mad, somebody's offended, so we must be doing something right.'"

The only good thing about the sign is that it will be gone this weekend — the church's sign is changed every seven days.

We might have titled this post 'What is it with North Carolina, anyway?" but this magpie has spent too much time in that state to jump to the unwarranted conclusion that that sign is somehow representative of the people of the state. Trust us, it isn't.

More: Over at The Light of Reason, Arthur Silber picked up on an aspect of the Courier story that we're embarassed to say that we missed. You really should go read his post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Spreading freedom around.

Oh, does Dubya's administration ever like to spread freedom.

According to a report from Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute, the majority of US arms sales and materiel transfers since 9/11 have gone to countries that the State Department rates as 'undemocratic' and/or as having poor human rights records. As if that isn't enough, the study also says that US-made arms are being used in every major military conflict on the planet.

According to report co-author Frida Berrigan, arming undemocratic governments often helps to enhance their power, and exacerbates conflict or enables human rights abuses. In addition, it undermines efforts to cut off financial and political support for terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Says Berrigan: 'Arming repressive regimes while simultaneously proclaiming a campaign against tyranny undermines the credibility of the United States and makes it harder to hold other nations to high standards of conduct on human rights and other key issues.'

The report's other co-author, William Hartung, points out that US arms sales could have unintended consequences: 'Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe. Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.'

In 2003, the last year for which full information is available, the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts. From Angola, Chad and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan, Israel and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest U.S. arms sales programs (Foreign Military Sales and Commercial Sales) to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003.

In 2003, more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department?s Human Rights Report: in the sense that "citizens do not have the right to change their own government." These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers in 2003, with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).

When countries designated by the State Department?s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80% -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

The press release for the Arms Trade Resource Center's report is here.

You can read the full report if you go here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, May 24

Reneging on the 'nuclear option' deal.

One part of the agreement was that two of Dubya's judicial nominees — William G. Myers and Henry Saad — would either be withdrawn or filibustered. Well, Senate majority leader Bill Frist has apparently already gone back on the deal, according to Congress Daily PM (as quoted by Think Progress).

Senate Majority Leader Frist will file for cloture on President Bush's nomination of William Myers to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later this week, according to sources on and off Capitol Hill, wasting no time in testing the resolve of 14 Republican and Democratic senators who forced at least a temporary halt to the battle over Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial picks.

We bet the rest of the agreement — especially the part about Dubya consulting with the Senate before he makes judicial nominations — is just as durable.

Via The Sideshow.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:06 PM | Get permalink

New news or old news?

We've noticed today a spate of blogs linking to a BBC story about the US military's plans for a court and death chamber at Guantanamo. [See here, for example.]

What none of the various posts we've read contains is the fact that this isn't a new story. In fact, a look to the top of the BBC story shows that it was reported on 10 June 2003, almost two years ago. To give some credit to the bloggers who missed this, so did we. The only reason we caught the date is because we thought we'd posted on something similar before — and a search of the Magpie archives came up with this post from 25 May 2003:

Several other weblogs have been linking to this story from the Courier-Mail newspaper in Brisbane, Australia. The story claims that the US is planning to set up a 'death camp' at its Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, with its own death row and execution chamber.

While Magpie is second to none in believing the worst about the current government in Washington, she hasn't posted a link to the death camp story until now, more than 24 hours after she first saw it. Magpie has been unable to track down the original story in the UK Mail on Sunday newspaper (cited in the Courier-Mail story), and the version of the story carried yesterday on news.com.au has disappeared. In addition, there's nothing on the camp story on the website for Fair Trials Abroad — which is suspicious, given that the story quotes their director, Steven Jakobi.

While it's not impossible that the death camp story is true, Magpie finds the lack of independent corroboration (outside the Courier-Mail story) and coverage in other media outlets is more typical of a rumor...

It turned out that there was more to the story, as we acknowledged in this 10 June post, after we'd seen the BBC story being cited so often today. While that report gave more credence to the execution chamber story than we'd initially believed to be warranted, even the general spoken to by the AP [which was the source of the BBC story] said that the construction of an execution chamber was only one of a number of possibilities then under discussion. So while the story had moved out of rumor status, it hadn't (at least in our opinion now) done so by all that much.

But knowing the history of the story still leaves us with some questions:

Why is the story about the possible Guantanamo execution chamber showing up again now?
Has that chamber moved from the planning stages to being a brick-and-mortar chamber that's just waiting to claim its first victim?

Inquiring magpies want to know.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:13 PM | Get permalink

We wouldn't normally grab a whole column to re-post here.

But today we're going to make an exception.

Rather than containing her own words, the bulk of Molly Ivins' latest column consists of a speech by Texas state representative Senfronia Thompson, a black legislator from Houston. Thompson rose during debate on the night of 25 April to oppose the insertion of an anti-gay marriage clause into the state constitution by the Texas House of Representatives.

Her words bear repetition here.

Texas legislator Senfronia Thompson

Senfronia Thompson on the floor of the Texas legislature, 2001
[Photo: AP]

"I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at it's worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

"Members, this is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.

"Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP [Children's Health Insurance Program] who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.

"Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination... When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about 'protecting the institution of marriage' as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree... Fifty years ago, white folks thought interracial marriages were 'a threat to the institution of marriage.'

"Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, 'Gay people can't marry.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Thou shalt discriminate against those not like me.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination.' Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness -- not hate and discrimination.

"I have served in this body a lot of years, and I have seen a lot of promises broken... So... now that blacks and women have equal rights, you turn your hatred to homosexuals, and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag -- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?

"Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this state now. Texas law does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this state -- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.

"If you want to make your hateful political statements then that is one thing -- but the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way. This is obscene...

"I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors' pensions and stem cell research to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.

"Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids -- sweet little vulnerable kids -- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting.

"I have listened to the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap... I want you to know that this amendment [is] blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry."

We don't have to tell you how the legislature voted. [Sigh.]

Via Common Dreams.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:22 PM | Get permalink

We weren't the only one unhappy with the 'nuclear option' compromise.

US senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin wasn't very pleased, either.

This is not a good deal for the U.S. Senate or for the American people. Democrats should have stood together firmly against the bullying tactics of the Republican leadership abusing their power as they control both houses of Congress and the White House. Confirming unacceptable judicial nominations is simply a green light for the Bush administration to send more nominees who lack the judicial temperament or record to serve in these lifetime positions. I value the many traditions of the Senate, including the tradition of bipartisanship to forge consensus. I do not, however, value threatening to disregard an important Senate tradition, like occasional unlimited debate, when necessary. I respect all my colleagues very much who thought to end this playground squabble over judges, but I am disappointed in this deal.

The emphasis is ours, not Feingold's.

And, at The Gadflyer, Jonathan Weiler has a round-up of response to the compromise:

In fact, what the Democrats really did was to save Bill Frist and the rabid right from their own bad judgment in this whole process. As {Salon's Tim] Grieve writes, "Susan Collins and other senators involved in the deal suggested Monday night that it was never really in doubt -- that too many senators were too afraid of what the nuclear option would bring. Democrats were afraid it would destroy the Senate's tradition as a "cooling saucer," the place where debate outruns passions and minority views can moderate majority desires. Republicans feared that they might someday live to reap what they sowed, and that in the meantime Democrats could make their lives difficult by using Senate rules to slow legislation in the Senate to an agonizingly difficult pace."

In other words, prior to the compromise, the Republicans had boxed themselves into a corner. The Democrats bailed them out.

Again, our emphasis, not theirs.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:21 AM | Get permalink

A socialist in the US Senate?

At this point, that's the likely result of the 2006 elections in the US state of Vermont. The likely winner of the state's Senate seat is Bernie Sanders, the long-time 'independent' member of Congress from Vermont. ('Independent,' in Sanders' case, is the euphemism that the media arrived at to avoid the inconvenience of having to explain that Vermont has repeatedly sent a socialist to Washington.) Sanders will be running for the seat being vacated by Jim Jeffords, a former Republican who bolted his party after Dubya's first election to the White House.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Sanders has has consistently been on the left wing of that body, steadfastly working on issues affecting poor and working class people, and pressing for stronger civil liberties and environmental legislation. In These Times has an excellent article on Sanders, containing both excerpts of ITT's coverage of Sanders since he was first elected as mayor of Burlington (VT) in 1981, and a recent interview with Sanders on a range of topics.

Bernie Sanders

US Rep. Bernie Sanders

ITT: Over the years you've developed a strong base among working people in Vermont, a base that has ensured your re-election. How can other progressives running for public office do the same?

Sanders: When I was mayor of Burlington, low-income and working people supported me because they knew that I was fighting for their interests and succeeding. We significantly transformed working-class neighborhoods, provided programs for the kids and the elderly, and built affordable housing. As a congressman, I've worked hard to protect some of the most vulnerable people in our state, the people who don't make large contributions to the Republican Party. I've helped lead the effort against our disastrous trade policies and have protected the pensions of thousands of Vermont workers. My office has brought a federal program into the state which provides good nutrition for over 5,000 lower-income seniors, we've helped develop federally qualified community health centers and dental clinics that provide medical and dental care for people all over the state. I've held dozens of meetings for Vermont veterans, helping many of them get the benefits to which they're entitled. People in Vermont recognize that while they may disagree with me on this or that issue, I spend the bulk of my time fighting for their rights and that we have had some very significant accomplishments.

Too often, people on the left look at cultural issues as the most important issues. They are important, but we have to appreciate the reality that tens of millions of people are struggling hard just to keep their heads above water economically. They either have no health insurance or they are paying much more than they can afford for health insurance. They're desperately trying to get a decent education for their kids. They're scared to death about whether their pension is going to be there when they retire. To a large degree we've ignored those people. It's important that we reach out to them and let them know that we know what they're going through and that we're going to change the system. It is not acceptable that America is the only country in the industrialized world without national health care. It is not acceptable that we haven't raised the minimum wage in 10 years to a living wage, that we haven't addressed the major crisis in affordable housing. Homelessness is a problem, sure, but a bigger problem is that millions of people are spending 50 percent of their limited incomes on housing. When you are forced to do that, how do you have money to provide the basics for your family? The middle class in America is collapsing. And it's about time we started addressing that reality....

ITT: You've been examining issues and setting an agenda at town meetings across Vermont. What role does the media play in exploring issues and setting the national agenda?

Sanders: Corporate control of the media, media consolidation and growing censorship threats are enormous issues that we have been actively involved with. The central issue is not just the right-wing slant of the corporate media. That's obvious. All you have to do is look at how they covered the war in Iraq and how millions of Americans had to go to the BBC or the CBC to get an objective view. It's not just the difference of how they covered Bill Clinton who was under attack before he took office and under attack when he left office. This was Clinton, a moderate democrat, as opposed to Bush, a right-wing Republican, who gets very little scrutiny compared to Clinton.

The far more important issue is what they don't cover. To the average American today, the most important issue is why that person is working longer hours for lower wages and why his or her standard of living has declined over the past 30 years. But for much of the corporate media it's a non-issue. The growing gap between the rich and the poor, the fact that we have the most unequal distribution of wealth of any major country on Earth, the fact that we are the only industrialized country in the world without a national health care system--those are also non-issues. Will the media talk about our health care problem? Sure they will. Will they talk about how other countries are doing better for less? No they won't.

The reality of people's lives is not reflected in the media, and therefore people begin to question their very existence, as if they were the only ones struggling hard. And as a result they think their problems are unique to them, and are not social or political problems that we as a nation can solve by working together. The result of that is that people lose interest in the political process, don't vote or simply pay attention to the cultural issues that the right-wing propagates.

In my view, the corporate media is certainly one of the main factors in the depoliticalization of our country and the low level of political consciousness.

This magpie is definitely looking forward to seeing Sanders in the Senate.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:20 AM | Get permalink

If things in the world weren't already grim enough.

The Spice Girls are about to go on the comeback trail.

Via Sky News.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:31 AM | Get permalink

The 'nuclear option' deal.

When we heard that 'Senate moderates' had come up with a deal to avoid a vote on eliminating the right to filibuster judicial appointments in the US Senate, we got a bad feeling that the Democrats had given up too much.

According to Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED, we were right to be nervous: Get ready to say hello to federal judges Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen, and Bill Pryor.

Read all of the depressing details here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:12 AM | Get permalink

Can someone please tell us ....

How anyone can possibly look at the US-Afghanistan relationship described in this news report and then say that Afghanistan is anything other than a US protectorate?

President Bush rebuffed Afghan President Hamid Karzai's effort to gain greater control over U.S. military operations in his country yesterday, as the two leaders endorsed an agreement allowing the United States to continue its policy of simply informing Afghan officials before launching raids in Afghanistan....

Bush also turned down Karzai's request for Afghanistan to take custody of its citizens being detained by the United States as suspected terrorists, saying that Afghanistan lacks facilities where the suspects "can be housed and fed and guarded." The United States is detaining hundreds of former Taliban fighters, many of whom were captured in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion more than three years ago.

Basically, the leader of the client state was told who was in charge. This is not the way a nation treats an ally.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:54 AM | Get permalink

'A kind of inherited meritocracy.'

The latest article in the NY Times' series on class in the US deals with one of the effects of class on higher education. Specifically, it talks about one of the fastest-growing groups of young adults in the country: college dropouts. According to the Bureau of the Census, one in three people in their mid-20s have dropped out of college; this compares to a one in five figure during the late 1960s when these figures began being kept. Most of the dropouts come from poor and working class families.

Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20's now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960's, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.

Going to college has become the norm throughout most of the United States, even in many places where college was once considered an exotic destination... At elite universities, classrooms are filled with women, blacks, Jews and Latinos, groups largely excluded two generations ago. The American system of higher learning seems to have become a great equalizer.

In fact, though, colleges have come to reinforce many of the advantages of birth. On campuses that enroll poorer students, graduation rates are often low. And at institutions where nearly everyone graduates - small colleges like Colgate, major state institutions like the University of Colorado and elite private universities like Stanford - more students today come from the top of the nation's income ladder than they did two decades ago.

Only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college managed to graduate within five years, the Department of Education found in a study last year, but 66 percent of high-income students did. That gap had grown over recent years....

There is certainly much to celebrate about higher education today. Many more students from all classes are getting four-year degrees and reaping their benefits. But those broad gains mask the fact that poor and working-class students have nevertheless been falling behind; for them, not having a degree remains the norm.

That loss of ground is all the more significant because a college education matters much more now than it once did. A bachelor's degree, not a year or two of courses, tends to determine a person's place in today's globalized, computerized economy. College graduates have received steady pay increases over the past two decades, while the pay of everyone else has risen little more than the rate of inflation.

As a result, despite one of the great education explosions in modern history, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over the course of a lifetime - has stopped rising, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest that it has declined over the last generation.

The main thing that we noticed about this article is that, while it did mention the financial difficulties that low-income students face when attending colleges and universities, it didn't mention two of the most important reasons why those difficulties exist:

The continuing cuts in federal financial aid programs for students, largely as a result of decisions made during Republican administrations.
Cuts in state-funded financial aid programs as a result of Republican-backed tax cuts and tax-rollback initiatives — cuts which mainly benefited corporations and those with high incomes.

Rather than being a problem of colleges not doing enough to help poor and working class students stay in school, the problem of the increasing dropout rate among these students is more accurately attributed to deliberate political decisions made at the federal and state levels. And while one can argue over whether those decisions were intended to make higher education increasingly available only to the well-off, there's little question that this is what those decisions did.

Funny how an article about class could be so class-biased as to miss that angle, isn't it?

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:20 AM | Get permalink

One of those 'pot, kettle' quotes.

"We are very concerned about a democratically elected leader who governs in an illiberal way, and some of the steps that have been taken against the media, against [political] opposition, I think are really very deeply troubling."

It's from Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearing before the US Senate back in January. She was talking about the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela.

But we bet you noticed how well Rice's words describe another country in the hemisphere besides Venezuela — although we're certain that Madame Secretary wouldn't agree with that comparison.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 AM | Get permalink

Monday, May 23

Pop quiz!

Quick! What's that in the image below?

Mystery spot

Is it the surface of one of Saturn's moon? Virus colonies under a scanning electron microsope?

Nope. It's a satellite image of a famous US national park:

This image of the mountainous Shenandoah National Park was acquired by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, launched on February 11, 2000. Two visualization methods were combined to produce this image: shading and color coding of topographic height.

Via NASA Image of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:41 PM | Get permalink

What are the terrorists thinking of doing next?

Cockeyed asked readers to read terrorists' minds. The list is both scary and hysterically funny.

You can guess which ones this magpie liked:

Terrorists might dump a bag of broken light bulbs over Times Square on New Years
Terrorists might kidnap Alan Greenspan
Terrorists might cut off the coffee supply
Terrorists might equip rabbits with explosive-laden backpacks, with detonators attached to their heart-rate monitors
Terrorists might unleash a cotillion of angry Walmart greeters
Terrorists might break Florida off of the United States. That little state looks so brittle.
Terrorists might throw the nation's largest pancake breakfast
Terrorists might take over the emergency broadcasting system and replace our television programming with a large, hypnotizing wheel.

Actually, we believe that last one has already been done.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:25 PM | Get permalink

You don't want to read a Murdoch paper to get the news.

But The Sun, at least, is good for stuff like this:
Dubya gets to the bottom of it

In case you're wondering, it's for a story on how Dubya wants to know who was responsible for giving The Sun those pictures of Saddam in his underwear.

Via Crooks and Liars.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:07 AM | Get permalink

Securing the US borders. Not.

It looks like the US $10 billion that the feds are planning to spend on a system to screen foreign travelers electronically is paying for a new system that uses untried technology that may not work. And, even worse, it's paying for building the new system on top of an antiquated system that often doesn't work.

Documents and interviews with people familiar with the program, called US-VISIT, show that government officials are betting on speculative technology while neglecting basic procedures to ensure that taxpayers get full value from government contractors.

"There's no question we could end up spending billions of dollars and end up with nothing," said Steven A. Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that has been monitoring efforts to improve border controls. "It creates an illusion of security that doesn't exist."

Although the government has already spent or budgeted about $1 billion for the US-VISIT program, the new system is being built on top of aging computer databases and software that government scientists concluded two years ago are out of date, poorly coordinated and ineffective. Among them is a fingerprint system that does not use the government's state-of-the-art biometric standard. As a consequence, millions of dollars are budgeted this year for upgrades, according to budget documents.

The Post article tells a story of cost overruns, companies whose contracts continue despite their inability to deliver workable technology, and revolving doors between contractors and the government agencies for whom work is being done. In other words, it shows Dubya's administration conducting business as usual on the taxpayers' dime.

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:08 AM | Get permalink

Boys' club.

This one is in the US news media, in terms of whose voice is heard when sourcing a news story. A study released today by the Center for Excellence in Journalism shows that most news still comes from a male perspective.

The nine-month study looked at 16,800 stories that appeared in 45 different news outlets, including print, online, and television sources. The study found that men are used as sources more than twice as often as women. While more than three-quarters of all stories used male sources, only one-third of those stories had even a single female source. This disparity was even more pronounced in stories that used more than one source.

Here are some of the report's main findings:

In every topic category, the majority of stories cited at least one male source.
In contrast, the only topic category where women crossed the 50% threshold was lifestyle stories.
The subject women were least likely to be cited on was foreign affairs.
Newspapers were the most likely of the media studied to cite at least one female source in a story (41% of stories). Cable news, despite all the time it has to fill, was the least likely medium to cite a female source (19% of stories), and this held true across all three major cable channels.
On network TV, the morning news programs, which often cover lighter fare, relied more on female sources. The evening newscasts were somewhat less likely, but still did so more than cable.

The stories included in the study showed that the preferential use of male sources exists across the board, although some media use male sources more heavily than others.

Gender of sources used in US media

Source: Center for Excellence in Journalism

While we're really glad to see this study, we've seen ones like it before over the past couple of decades. We have to wonder how many more studies it's going to take before things change.

The full report can be read in HTML here. You can download a PDF file containing the report here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:53 AM | Get permalink

Bad news for time travelers.

Two new studies say that wormholes are useless for time travel.

Via BBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:11 AM | Get permalink

Paul Krugman makes a prediction.

Well, sort of.

Here's the end of his current column in the NY Times:

Everyone loves historical analogies. Here's my thought: maybe 2004 was 1928. During the 1920's, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies, but reformist policies that presaged the New Deal were already bubbling up in the states, especially in New York.

In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil. But four years later F.D.R. took office, and the New Deal began.

Of course, the coming of the New Deal was hastened by a severe national depression. Strange to say, we may be working on that, too.

Now go read the rest of the column to see how Krugman got there.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:20 AM | Get permalink

Today's gem from the world of spam.

Sometimes the semi-coherent text put into a spam message to help sneak it past mail filters have an interesting ring to them. Like this one that just arrived in our mailbox:

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

Almost poetic, isn't it?

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, May 22

Stopping the 'nuclear option.'

The US Senate will be voting on whether to bar filibusters on judicial nominees in two days — the GOP's so-called nuclear option. MoveOn PAC is collecting signatures on a petition opposing the nuclear option that will be going to Senators.

This Tuesday, the Senate will vote on Republican Leader Bill Frist's "nuclear option" to break the rules of the Senate and give the Republican Party absolute control over appointing federal judges.

For 200 years the minority's right to filibuster has kept our courts fair, by making sure that federal judges needed to get at least some support from both sides of the aisle before they were given life time appointments.

If Frist eliminates the filibuster, his next step would be to force far right partisan judges onto the powerful U.S. Courts of Appeals. The real targets, however, are the four seats on the Supreme Court likely to become vacant in the next four years.

With that much power on the Supreme Court, the far right could strike down decades of progress on labor rights, environmental protections, reproductive rights, and privacy.

The "nuclear option" will live or die by a final vote, probably on Tuesday, and the vote is still way too close to call. There are at least 6 moderate Republicans still on the fence and only 3 more votes needed to win. If we can get enough of our voices into congress and into the streets in the next 72 hours, we can still save our courts.

Go here to add your name to the MoveOn PAC petitiion.

We just sent signed the petition, and we plan to call our Republican senator (Gordon Smith) tomorrow and ask that he vote against the 'nuclear option.' If you're in the US, we suggest that you call your senators too.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:10 PM | Get permalink

'We're putting the evolutionists and secular humanists on notice.'

A Christian evangelist is spending US $25 million to build a museum of 'creation science.' The 50,000 square foot Creation Museum is slated to open in two years in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

Soon, visitors to [founder Ken] Ham's still-unfinished Creation Museum will experience his view: that God created the world in six, 24-hour days on a planet just 6,000 years old. This literal interpretation of the Bible runs counter to accepted scientific theory, which says Earth and its life forms evolved over billions of years...

Ham's views of history and science are based on a literal reading of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. Among other things, he believes that:

Earth is about 6,000 years old, a figure arrived at by tracing the biblical genealogies, and not 4.5 billion years, as mainstream scientists say.

The Grand Canyon was formed not by erosion over millions of years, but by floodwaters in a matter of days or weeks.

Dinosaurs and man once co-existed, and dozens of the creatures - including T-rex - were passengers on the ark built by Noah, who was a real man, not a myth....

"We're putting the evolutionists and secular humanists on notice," says Ham, who has lived in America for 18 years. "We're coming to take back what rightfully belongs to God's word - what rightfully belongs to the Christian faith..."

Ham argues that evolution - the scientific theory that says life on the planet evolved from a common ancestor over millions of years - conflicts with the biblical version of a six-day creation. That, he says, has undermined the Bible's authority, leading to a "relative morality" based on man, not God, and resulting in moral decay that ranges from racism and pornography to school violence and gay marriage.

It's important to understand that this museum isn't just some rinky-dink roadside operation that will have no impact on the public. The museum is under the umbrella of Ham's 'Answers in Genesis' ministry, which spends US $14 million annually to take his 'creation science' message to the US and the world. Just one part of that ministry, Ham's radio program, is carried by 725 stations. He's an invited speaker at the 2005 Creation Mega Conference organized by Jerry Falwell. Ham and his museum are an important part of the effort by the fundamentalist Christian right in the US to supplant science with theology .

We on the left laugh at or ignore the work of people like Ham at our own peril.

Via Cincinnati Enquirer.

More: 'Creation science' museums are popping up all over the place. Today's issue of the UK Observer has a story on the Museum of Earth History in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

No expense was spared. The fossil casts, which range from a Triceratops skull to an 18ft-long Albertosaurus (a relative to T. rex), could easily grace London's Natural History Museum. Plans for a much bigger museum in Dallas are advanced. 'We would love to open in the United Kingdom if the right partner showed up,' Sharp said.

The museum forms part of a Bible-based theme park in Eureka Springs; the car park is full of cars and coaches from all over the country. To enter the museum is to explore a surrealistic parallel world. Biblical quotes appear on displays. The first has dinosaurs, alongside Adam and Eve, living in harmony. The ferociously fanged T. rex is likely to be a vegetarian. Then comes the Fall of Man and an ugly world where dinosaurs prey on each other and the first extinctions occur. The destruction of the dinosaurs is explained, not by a comet striking the Earth 65 million years ago, but by the Flood. This, the museum says, wiped out most of the dinosaurs still alive and created the Grand Canyon and huge layers of sedimentary rock seen around the world.

Some dinosaurs survived on Noah's ark. One poster explains that Noah would have chosen juvenile dinosaurs to save space. An illustration shows two green sauropods in the ark alongside more conventional elephants and lions. The final exhibit depicts the Ice Age, where the last dinosaurs existed with woolly mammoths until the cold and hunting by cavemen caused them to die out.

Scary stuff.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:32 PM | Get permalink