Undernews For November 15, 2010

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

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American indicators

Building the case for climate crime prosecution

Major deficit commission scandal: top staffers paid by Peter Peterson groups
Washington Post - The salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.

The outsourcing has come under sharp criticism from seniors' organizations and liberal activists, who say the strategy is part of a broader conservative bias favoring painful entitlement cuts over other solutions. The fears of some liberal groups appeared to come true on Wednesday, when the commission's two leaders recommended significant reductions for Social Security and other social-welfare programs.

Home value decline almost equal to depression
Prudential Northeast Properties - The housing market as measured by Zillow Real Estate Market Reports continued its decline in the third quarter, with home values falling for the 17th consecutive quarter. That puts home values an average of 25 percent below where they were at the June 2006 peak. By comparison, during the Great Depression, home values fell 25.9 percent in five years.

Some 23.2 percent of single-family home owners with mortgages were underwater in the third quarter, up from 22.5 percent in the second quarter, according to Zillow. Eleven markets tracked by Zillow had negative equity above 50 percent, led by Las Vegas at 80.2 percent.

Pentagon study finds it's safe to include gays under Constitution

Word
Jamie Galbraith - The only way to reduce a deficit caused by unemployment is to reduce unemployment. And this must be done with a substantial component of private financing, which is to say by bank credit, if the public deficit is going to be reduced. This is a fact of accounting. It is not a matter of theory or ideology; it is merely a fact. The only way to grow out of our deficit is to cure the financial crisis.

CHICAGO SELLING NAMING RIGHTS TO EVERYTHING

DADT study finds Marines most insecure about manhood

Obama plans to dump Afghanistan withdrawal promise
McClatchy - The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy. The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

Simpson-Bowles want to charge for Washington museums
DCist - Sen. Alan Simpson and Clinton Administration member Erskine Bowles, members of the the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, have suggested cutting the budget of the Smithsonian Institution by $225 million -- and recouping that loss by charging $7.50 for admission to the Institution's facilities.

Police requiring recruits to reveal social media passwords
USA Today - Law enforcement agencies are digging deep into the social media accounts of applicants, requesting that candidates sign waivers allowing investigators access to their Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other personal spaces. Some agencies are demanding that applicants provide private passwords, Internet pseudonyms, text messages and e-mail logs as part of an expanding vetting process for public safety jobs. More than a third of police agencies review applicants' social media activity during background checks, according to the first report on agencies' social media use by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Putting Bush in bookstore crime section
Guardian, UK - Inspired by a British campaign which saw Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey, appearing under crime, horror and even fantasy in UK bookshops, the protest blog Waging Nonviolence is urging its supporters to "Move Bush's Book Where It Belongs",. . .

Lyndsey German of UK anti-war group Stop the War Coalition was delighted to hear the campaign had spread to the US. . . German said that thousands of people had joined the reshelving Blair campaign earlier this autumn.

Blair was forced to cancel his only appearance in a London bookshop, after protesters in Dublin greeted the publication of his autobiography with eggs, bottles and shoes.

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Biofuels challenged by European study
Reuters - European plans to promote biofuels will drive farmers to convert 69,000 square km of wild land into fields and plantations, depriving the poor of food and accelerating climate change, a report warned. The impact equates to an area the size of the Republic of Ireland.

As a result, the extra biofuels that Europe will use over the next decade will generate between 81 and 167 percent more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels, says the report.

Nine environmental groups reached the conclusion after analyzing official data on the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of transport fuel from renewable sources by 2020.

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: ELECTION POLLS
Sam Smith

Nate Silver seems like a nice guy but, like many guiding our way, the NY Times’ election poll analyst is so absorbed in his numbers that he seems to forget that life is at best an approximation. On the other hand, when I told my urologist that I had figured out the medicine was one half science and one half gambling, he said, “I think you’re being kind to us.” Now there's a man who understands life.

Silver would have you believe that if you just work hard enough at getting the numbers right, you’ll get the right answer. Not having the time or money for that, the Progressive Review has tried a different approach over the past decade: we have simply averaged the last three polls and this year, as with most of the times we’ve tried it, the results have been surprisingly good. In the key races for both the Senate and governorship we came within three points of calling them on average – within the polls’ margin of error. You note that I didn’t say 3.1% or 3.2% because, unlike Silver, I had Alice Darnell as my high school math teacher and one of the things she taught us was that an mathematical answer can be no more accurate than the least accurate number used to create it. So if you have a polling error of 3 or 4 points, you can’t honestly end up with 3.1%. Yet pollsters, Washington analysts, and the media do this all the time.

The other problem is that life is real. As such, it doesn’t move in a neat analytic sequence. For example, one place where the polls went astray was here in Maine. The polls generally had a good percentage for the winner – Paul LePage – and the Democrat, Libby Mitchell, but blew it on independent Elliot Cutler who clearly had a last minute surge among the undecideds and almost beat LePage. How does a pollster check the Portland bars the night before an election to find out how many people have finally decided how to vote after a conversation over a few beers?

So we’re going to stick with our three poll moving average which did about as well as the best of the individual results, bearing in mind that life is real and that, hell, I didn’t even make up my own mind until the last minute.

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND, GETS GREEN MAYOR
Stuff, New Zealand - Celia Wade-Brown has become New Zealand's first Green mayor – a moment being described as a "watershed" by the party leader. Green Party members flocked to congratulate Ms Wade-Brown when her narrow victory over incumbent Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast was announced yesterday. . . Although Ms Wade-Brown stood as an independent, she has been a member of the Greens for more than 15 years, and becomes the first party member elected to a mayoral office.

Dame Sukhinder "Sukhi" Turner, mayor of Dunedin from 1994 to 2005, was affiliated with the Greens, but was not a member. Getting Greens into local government was a strategy of the party, because so many important decisions were made at local and regional level, he said.

VOTERS DIDN'T LIKE DEMOCRATS BUT STILL AREN'T RIGHT WINGERS
Mike Lux, Open Left - The middle class voters most hurt by this terrible recession turned against the Democrats with a vengeance. They were looking for someone to blame for their economic woes. The good news is that their first pick was Wall Street. The bad news for Democrats is that they associated Obama with Wall Street. The two most important and dramatic statistics coming out of the exit polling were (1) the 40% of voters who felt worse off economically in the last couple of years went Republican by 29% after going for Obama in 2008 by 42%; and (2) the 35% of voters who said Wall Street was more to blame than anyone else for the bad economy broke 56-42 for the Republicans. That first number is the biggest swing by far in any demographic group I have ever seen after looking at exit poll numbers for the past 25 years. . .

So now that this election from hell is over, the question is how do Obama and the Democrats come back in 2012. There's a lot of talk about moving to the center, but what does that even mean? When Washingtonians talk about the center, they tend to mean cutting Social Security and doing trade deals, but what do the economically stressed swing voters who turned against Democrats mean by the center? Well, these voters have very strong feelings about certain issues, and they don't tend to track with what pundits in DC talk about much. Check out these numbers from a Stan Greenberg poll done for the Campaign for America's Future. Stan did a careful analysis of which voters were the key swing voters, and what he found is striking:

* Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28

* Swing voters supported a message about ending tax cuts for those making over $250,0000 a year, adding a bank tax to curb speculative trading, cutting wasteful military spending and ending subsidies to oil companies over a message about cutting 100 billion dollars from domestic programs, raising the Social Security retirement age, and turning Medicare into a voucher program by 51-37

* Swing voters supported a statement about politicians keeping their hands off Social Security and Medicare over a statement about raising the retirement age by 62-36

* 89% of swing voters supported a statement about full disclosure of campaign donations and limiting the power of lobbyists

* 90% of swing voters supported a statement about cracking down on outsourcing and creating jobs by fixing schools, sewers, and roads in disrepair

* Even when framed in direct opposition to a statement about stopping increasing government spending and tax increases, swing voters said they were more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy by 54-44

WORD
Our so-called industrial accidents should be looked upon as revenges of Nature. . . . She is plainly saying to us: "If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake." -- Wendell Berry

PASSINGS: CHARLIE McDOWELL
Sam Smith - Charlie McDowell, long time panelist on PBS' Washington Week in Review - where he described himself as the "resident provincial" - and reporter and columnist for the Richmond Times Dispatch for nearly 50 yeas has died at the age of 84.

McDowell was also an early part of the Progressive Review - back when it was called The Idler. I had run across his work while attending Coast Guard Officer Candidate School in Yorktown, Virginia, in the early sixties. There wasn't much spare time there and not much to do in it, but a small cult developed around Charlie's columns, which brought smiles to a place where they were pretty much outlawed. At lunch break we would head for a news box and see what Charlie had to say.

Charlie was first assigned to cover the capital for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1965 after publisher D. Tennant Bryan reluctantly agreed to the idea, which was being pushed by managing editor John Leard. Bryan allegedly noted that the paper had withdrawn its Washington correspondent at the time of the Civil War and that probably enough time had passed to send one back.

When I started the Idler after leaving the Coast Guard, I asked Charlie if I could use his columns and he not only agreed, over the years he was a repeated source of encouragement and joy.

His perspective was gentle and perceptive. For example, he liked to gaze out of his National Press Building office window, and once recalled; "I perceived John Connally of Texas, Jacob Javits of New York, Sonny Jurgenson of Washington, David Brinkley of NBC, and a red-bearded man from somewhere wearing a sandwich board that said, 'The man with the plan: Jesus in '72,' all within the space of a couple of hours, each alone, each on some mission of his own among ordinary mortals in the street."

Here's one his columns we ran forty five years ago:

Charles McDowell Jr - Washington Howard Worth Smith, who measures progress by the inch met the metric system the other day. Both were stunned by the collision. When the confusion cleared, Rep. Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, had recovered sufficiently to light a fresh cigar and smile briefly at the outcome of the encounter. The metric system had not recovered, and would be confined in a cool, dark corner of the committee room for an indefinite period.

The man who introduced the venerable Judge Smith to the metric system was Rep. Miller of California, the genial, grandfatherly chairman of the Science and Astronautics Committee. His committee had approved a bill authorizing a $2.5 million, three-year study by the Department of Commerce to determine the practicability of adopting metric weights and measures in the United States. Miller, a frank advocate of the metric way of life, wanted Judge Smith's committee to send the bill on to the House for action. As Miller talked about the grand simplicity of meters, liters and kilograms, Smith watched his old friend with affection and great skepticism.

The Judge interrupted to say: "I got my early education in a one-room red schoolhouse in the country. We took our degrees in the three R's. Just to make an honest confession, I don't know what the metric system is . . . Would we have to go back to school? Couldn't we go in a store anymore and buy 10 yards of cheesecloth?"

Miller said you could go in the store and ask for about 9.2 meters of cheesecloth. "Why, we'd have to change our education in this country!" said the Judge. Yes, said Miller, and it was about time. Eighty nations, 90 per cent of the world's population, are on the metric system, or going to it, and the United States will soon stand alone with a system that is difficult to learn and use because it has "no rhyme or reason," Miller said.

For some reason - perhaps because he saw that Smith was being foxy and having a good time - Miller invoked the measurements of Gina Lollobrigida to show that the world would still be the same under the metric system. "Her vital statistics are 36-28-34," he said, "and they would become 93-71-89, which is the same."

"You talking about her meters or her inches?" the Judge asked. "Her centimeters," Miller said. "Well, I'm still concerned about when she goes in to buy 10 yards of cheesecloth," the Judge said. The other members of the Rules Committee joined in with similar concerns - road signs in kilometers, football fields in meters, all sorts of things. Rep. Fulton of Tennessee, who had come along to support Miller, protested that nothing could be more bewildering than the present American system of weights and measures. To make his point dramatically, Fulton said, "Has anyone in this committee ever heard of a pole? Can any of you tell me how long a pole is?" "Sixteen and two-thirds feet!" the Judge replied promptly, and the committee cheered him.

"Never underestimate the Judge," said Rep. Delaney of New York. The World Almanac says it's 16 and one half feet - same as a rod or a perch - but the committee was not going to quibble. anyway. The metric system's advocates were now in some disarray, and the committee was delightedly united behind Judge Smith.

Fulton and Miller said with resignation that the country was going to come to the metric system sooner or later.

The Judge listened, leaned over toward the member seated nearest him at the long table, removed the cigar from his mouth, grinned, and said in a rumbling aside, "I ain't gonna do it."

NEARLY A THIRD OF GAYS VOTED REPUBLICAN
Yahoo News - Exit polling commissioned by the major cable news networks has found that 31 percent of people who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual voted for Republicans on Election Day. That represents a big uptick from the 24 percent of gays who voted for the GOP in 2006 and from only 19 percent who did so in 2008. The trend appears to bear out pre-Election Day predictions from gay rights organizers that gay voters were angry and disenchanted with Democrats for not delivering on promises to the community.

MEET THE FOLKS WE BAILED OUT
Eats, Shoots 'n Leaves - [Michael] Hudson is a journalist who now writes for the Center for Public Integrity, and he’s written a just-published book, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America ¬ and Spawned a Global Crisis. Writing at Huffington Post, he offers some quotes he gathered from folks in the trade, and they give a flavor of the institutionalized psychopathy now reigning at our illustrious financial houses:

* “I became a thief. And unfortunately, I found I was a very good thief.”

* “We are all here to make as much fucking money as possible. Bottom line. Nothing else matters.”

* “Anything that benefitted production ¬ that benefitted me and benefitted my wallet ¬ I’d do it.”

* “It’s hard to have a guilty conscience if you don’t have a conscience.”

* “Roland could be the biggest bastard in the world and the most charming guy in the world. And it could be minutes apart.”

* “He fucked me. But within reason.”

* “People don’t need access to predatory lenders. That’s like saying people need access to poison, or children need access to mumps.”

* “If you don’t find the true pain, you won’t write the loan.”

* “Tell him to do what ever it takes to close that loan or it’s his ass.”

* “Let’s compare W-2s. I made over two million dollars. What did you do?”

ITALIAN MOB BOSSES SEEK OUT PSYCHOTHERAPY

WHY TODAY'S BEST TV SHOWS ARE SUCH DOWNERS
Robert Fulford, National Post, Canada - The characters in prestige-heavy American television have in recent months revealed a persistent common theme, psychological depression. Chronic melancholia emerges as the current favourite mood, either blatant or furtive, of the people who write and produce ambitious television. It crops up often in Boardwalk Empire, the recent Mad Men season, Rubicon and Treme. And then of course there’s In Treatment, about psychotherapy, in which both the patients and their therapist are seriously despondent -- the audience too, sometimes.

The late Pauline Kael noted in the 1970s that neither Hollywood nor the TV networks could work out acceptable ways to tell stories about the failed war in Vietnam. Instead they expressed the national mood through the grim fate of film characters. She pointed out the unprecedented absence from movies and TV of happy endings. Stories of the pathologically depressed are the 21st century’s equivalent, television’s oblique way of reflecting the disappointments of the American economy and the frustrations of apparently endless warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BOOKSHELF: WHAT WENT DOWN WITH LENO, O'BRIEN, LETTERMAN

TWINKIE DIET WORKED FOR NUTRITIONIST
CNN For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too. His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food. The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months. . .

. . Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent. "That's where the head scratching comes," Haub said. "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we're missing something?"

STUPID COLORADO DISTRICT ATTORNEY TRICKS
Boing Boing - Colorado District Attorney Mark Hurlbert has dropped felony charges against Martin Joel Erzinger, a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney wealth manager who controls $1 billion in investments, because financial rules would require Erzinger to notify his clients that he was charged with a felony, and this would have "serious job implications" for the financier. Erzinger is facing charges for allegedly rear-ending cyclist Dr. Steven Milo, and then leaving the scene of the crime. Milo, a liver transplant surgeon, has spinal and brain injuries, disfiguring scars, and will likely be in pain for the rest of his life.

YOUR CREDIT CARD RECEIPT MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH
Physorg - Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a chemical found in the thermal paper widely used in receipts from cash registers and in some plastics and resins, and has now been shown to pass through human skin.

Three recent studies have shown the chemical BPA is absorbed through the skin, and that people who routinely have contact with receipts laden with BPA have higher than average levels of BPA in their bodies.

Animal studies have shown high doses of BPA are harmful, and because the chemical is known to mimic the effects of estrogen, some scientists advise that pregnant women and babies should minimize their exposure to BPA, which is commonly found in babies’ bottles.

[One researcher] said the findings suggest it “would be smart” for people, especially pregnant women, to avoid touching thermal papers used in receipts or to wash their hands after handling them.

GETTING READY FOR ASTEROIDS
BBC - Throughout geological history, our planet has been hit by a succession of major asteroids and the probabilities suggest further impacts will occur in the future. No one can say today when these might happen; we haven’t yet identified an asteroid of sufficient size and on a path that gives us immediate cause for concern.

If an object was sent to strike the asteroid, the rock's course could be subtly changed. But the evidence hints strongly that something could find us sooner or later, and we need to be ready.

On average, an object about the size of car will enter the Earth's atmosphere once a year, producing a spectacular fireball in the sky. About every 2,000 years or so, an object the size of a football field will impact the Earth, causing significant local damage. And then, every few million years, a rock turns up that has a girth measured in kilometres. An impact from one of these will produce global effects.

U.S. NOW A BANANA REPUBLIC
Nicholas Kristof, NY Times - The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. C.E.O.'s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent."

THE MAN WHO STARTED HEAD START
NY Times - Jule Sugarman, a primary architect of Head Start, the federal support program for millions of poor preschoolers, died Tuesday at his home in Seattle. He was 83.

Mr. Sugarman, who also ran the program for most of its first five years, was executive secretary of the 13-member commission that planned Head Start in 1964 after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his War on Poverty. Five-year-olds “are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” the president said in introducing Head Start.

“Unless we act,” he added, “these children will pass it on to the next generation like a family birthmark.”

In the planning phase, consultants suggested a demonstration project. But Sargent Shriver, the Office of Economic Opportunity director, argued for a full-scale effort. “We want to write Head Start across this land so that no Congress or president will ever destroy it,” Mr. Shriver said.

As a result, after only seven months of planning, more than half a million children were enrolled in an eight-week summer program budgeted at $96.4 million. In August 1965, Johnson announced that it would become a full-year program.

"Jule Sugarman was absolutely central in mounting the program and was an administrative genius,” said Edward Zigler, a Yale psychology professor who was on the planning committee and succeeded Mr. Sugarman as Head Start director in 1970. “The rest of us were scholars and experts on children; his bureaucratic brilliance is what the rest of us did not have.”

Under Mr. Sugarman, enrollment climbed to 733,000 in 1966 and for the next three years settled at slightly below 700,000.

WHERE IS THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT?
Justin Raimondo, Anti War - Whatever happened to the antiwar movement?

Remember all those marches, all those placards, those giant puppets and loud displays of moral outrage?

It’s vanished! Gone! Evaporated like morning mist!

At one point, millions were marching in the streets in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, people all over the world, and then – nothing! Never in the history of politics has a movement retreated faster and more completely – but in this case, it was a voluntary retreat, an act of self-abolition.

George W. Bush was the perfect hate object: obtuse, dogmatic in his ignorance, and boyishly uninformed, he had all the traits we loved to hate. It was easy to feel disdain for a President who seemed way in over his head. And his neoconservative advisers were almost caricatures of evil, such as Richard Perle, who looks and talks like a cartoon villain: or Donald Rumsfeld, whose blustering belligerence was easily parodied, not least of all by himself.

But now there’s a new warmonger in town, a new Caesar who is not quite such an easy target. As Medea Benjamin, noted peace activist and founder of “Code Pink,” put it:

“We don’t have a very vibrant anti-war movement anymore. The issues have not changed very much. … Now we have a surge [in Afghanistan] that we would have been furious about under George Bush, yet it’s hard to mobilize people under Obama. We have the same anti-war movement and not the same passion.”. . .

So why has the left been silent on the war issue? . . . A couple of reasons. One, the left has long since given up its old time populist anti-imperialism in exchange for identity politics. Obama is an African-American, and, as far as certain sections of the left are concerned, nothing more needs to be said. For them, this is enough. . .

Progressives have made a deal with the devil. And the bargain is this: they’ll shut up about murdering innocent Afghan and Pakistani civilians, about US assassination squads, and about the wholesale assault on our civil liberties, if they can get the goodies they want here at home: more government spending, more government employees, and more government period. After all, who cares if a lot of foreigners get killed? As long as they get theirs.

The transformation of the American left really is a sad and pathetic process to behold. . .

THE PBS ELITE HOUR
FAIR - A new FAIR study of the PBS News Hour finds that public television’s flagship news program continues to feature sources drawn largely from a narrow range of elite white male experts. .

As in our 2006 News Hour study, five elite occupations dominated in number of appearances. Current and former government officials, including military officials, continued to have the greatest representation, accounting for 44 percent of total sources. This was down from 50 percent in 2006.

Corporate voices, ranging from multinational CEOs to small business owners, doubled from 2006 to 10 percent; journalists and think tank experts held steady at 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively. Academic sources dropped to 7 percent from 8 percent in 2006. These five occupations totaled 742 sources, or 74 percent of the program’s 2010 total.

Public interest advocates¬sources representing civil rights, labor, consumer, environmental and other citizen-based advocacy groups¬provided just 4 percent of the NewsHour’s guests (43 appearances).

As 201 sources, or 20 percent of the total, women continue to be dramatically underrepresented on the News Hour. This number has been slowly rising, from just 13 percent in 1990 and 18 percent in 2006.

Latinos represented only 1 percent of U.S. sources, down from 2 percent in 2006, even as their percentage of the population increased from 12 to 15 percent. Asian-Americans represented 3 percent and people of Mideastern descent represented 1 percent. Eleven percent of U.S. sources were African-American, up from 9 percent in 2006 and nearly matching their proportion of the U.S. population (12 percent).

DC FAVORITE FOR GAY HOUSEHOLDS, MASSACHUSETTS FOR LESBIANS

Washington Times - The District of Columbia leads the nation in male same-sex households, while Massachusetts is tops in lesbian-led homes, a university-based research center says in a new report.

Overall, there were 581,300 gay-couple-headed households in the United States in 2009, the National Center for Marriage & Family Research said in this month's Family Profiles report, citing data from the 2009 American Community Survey.

This is somewhat smaller than the 594,391 same-sex couples identified in the 2000 census, but potential misclassifications mean "these differences should be interpreted with caution," the NCMFR report said.

About 26 percent of the nation's 581,300 gay households, or 152,121, were led by married couples in 2009.

LESSONS FROM LBJ
Sam Smith

In trying to describe the difference between Obama's presidency and that of Lyndon Johnson I sometimes tell the story - recorded on tape - of LBJ lying in bed and calling a Texas county Democratic leader at 2 AM eastern time after his major 1964 win to thank him for all his great help in the campaign. LBJ, who was feeling sick at the time, then asks to speak to the Texas Democrat's wife and proceeds to tell her how wonderful her husband is and how important he was to the campaign.

I recently heard another tale of that time. Rep. Jake Pickle, a Texas Democrat, had gotten up the courage to be one of five south members of Congress to vote for the 1964 civil rights act. It was a difficult choice. After the vote he wandered around aimlessly and somewhat miserably, finally ending up in the boarding house where he lived. Earlier, Johnson had called the boarding house and asked to speak to Pickle. Pickle told the clerk who had picked up the phone to tell LBJ that he had gone to bed. Replied the clerk, "President Johnson said you would say that but tell you that he has to speak to you anyway." The purpose: just to say thanks.

LBJ was in many ways no role model. He could beat Obama for narcissism in a minute. But he had enough social intelligence to put his ego aside to help boost that of others whom he badly needed.

That skill has largely disappeared, not only from Washington, but from most places of power in the U.S. Power is no longer seen as a privilege earned from a greater community but primarily the product of individual brilliance and tactical manipulation. The Texas county Democratic leaders and Jake Pickles no longer matter.

Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama - primary examples of egos in a vacuum - seemed in the slightest in sharing their political status with others. Thus it wasn't all that surprising, for example, that the GOP gained about 1200 state legislative seats after Clinton took office.

Worse, they didn't want anyone around them reaching out, either. Dr. Aaron Schultz wrote an interesting piece in Black Agenda Report about Obama's 2008 presidential campaign:

||||||||| It is true that both community organizers and Obama's campaign volunteers learn to act, and to act strategically to achieve their goals. However, all of the campaign action is oriented around voting. There is no training about how to influence people once they are elected. Thus the campaign volunteers acquire no direct skills for actively influencing their candidate after the election except through whatever mechanisms Obama may create for them once he is president. . .

In fact, the only non-Obama activity I have heard Obama volunteers getting involved in was a service activity, not an effort to organize against power. Mike Newall, for example, reported on "a neighborhood sweep-up event organized by Obama Works, a grassroots public service organization inspired by Obama's community activism background." This service approach is actually diametrically opposed to the organizing approach, siphoning off energy that might actually generate social change. So there is an extent to which Obama (or his leaders) may, in some cases at least, be mis-educating volunteers about the nature of effective social action in America (maybe because they don't understand what organizing is). To summarize, Obama's organization is not training community organizers. It is training what seem to be quite effective campaign workers."|||||||||

GREAT THOUGHTS OF RAND PAUL
Think Progress - Kentucky elected Rand Paul (R-KY), the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), to the U.S. Senate. Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Paul announced his intention to do anything it takes to shield the privileged rich and corporate America. Asked if he would end the $830 billion, unpaid-for Bush tax cuts to the rich and return tax rates for the wealthiest bracket to Clinton-era levels, Paul snapped and said such a move would cause a “second great depression” and declared that “anybody who proposes such a policy really is, I think, unfit to be making decisions.”

Paul then clarified his delusional worldview by telling Blitzer that “there are no rich” and “there are no poor.” In Paul’s mind, even taxing yachts would somehow punish the working poor in Kentucky. “We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people,” concluded Rand:

PAUL: I would say that they must be in favor of a second American depression, because if you raise taxes to that consequence, that’s what will happen in this country. Raising taxes in the midst of a recession would be a disaster for our economy. And anybody who proposes such a policy really is, I think, unfit to be making decisions.

BLITZER: What if they just raised taxes on the richest, those making more than 250,000 dollars a year?

PAUL: Well, the thing is, we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor. We all are interconnected in the economy. You remember a few years ago, when they tried to tax the yachts, that didn’t work. You know who lost their jobs? The people making the boats, the guys making 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year lost their jobs. We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending.

THE HYPOCRACY OF THE OLBERMANN SUSPENSION
FAIR - MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been placed on indefinite suspension without pay in the wake of a Politico report that revealed Olbermann had donated $7,200 to three Democratic candidates, in violation of NBC's standards barring employees from making political contributions.

A journalist donating money to a political candidate raises obvious conflict of interest questions; at a minimum, such contributions should be disclosed on air. But if supporting politicians with money is a threat to journalistic independence, what are the standards for Olbermann's bosses at NBC, and at NBC's parent company General Electric?

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, GE made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle (most coming from the company's political action committee). The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio. The company has also spent $32 million on lobbying this year, and contributed over $1 million to the successful "No on 24" campaign against a California ballot initiative aimed at eliminating tax loopholes for major corporations.

Comcast, the cable company currently looking to buy NBC, has dramatically increased its political giving, much of it to lawmakers who support the proposed merger. And while Fox News parent News Corp's $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association caused a stir, GE had "given $245,000 to the Democratic governors and $205,000 to the Republican governors since last year," reported the Washington Post.

Olbermann's donations are in some ways comparable to fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough's $4,200 contribution to Republican candidate Derrick Kitts in 2006. When that was uncovered, though, NBC dismissed this as a problem, since Scarborough "hosts an opinion program and is not a news reporter." Olbermann, of course, is also an opinion journalist--but MSNBC seems to hold him to a different standard.

Two years earlier, the Washington Post reported (1/18/04):

NBC chief executive Robert Wright has contributed $8,000 since 1999, including $3,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $1,000 to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Andrew Lack, a former NBC News chief, gave $1,000 to Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) while NBC president, and Wright contributed $1,500--after the House committee Tauzin chairs held hearings on the networks' election night failures. NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust said the network allows its executives to make contributions and that Wright "does not make any decisions specific to news coverage."

Wright, however, was reported in a recent New York magazine piece to have told then-NBC News chief Neal Shapiro to move to the right of Fox News in response to the September 11 attacks: "We have to be more conservative then they are," the magazine quoted Wright.

MSNBC's treatment of Olbermann is also in sharp contrast to Fox News' handling of Sean Hannity, who was revealed by Salon to have given $5,000 to the campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.-Minn.), a Tea Party favorite--without Fox expressing any public disapproval. Hannity has allowed Republican candidates to use his Fox program for fundraising; as Salon noted, Hannity was this year's keynote speaker at the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual fundraising dinner.

If the concern is about how giving money to politicians threatens journalistic independence, then companies like NBC should explain why their parent companies can lavish so much money on political candidates or causes with no concern about conflicts of interest or the need to disclose these donations to viewers. The lesson here would seem to be that some of the workers shouldn't make political donations, but the bosses are free to give as much as they'd like. Anyone who watches Olbermann's show knows what his political views are. So what do the far larger contributions from GE tell us?

ATT CASE BEFORE SUPREME COURT THREATENS CITIZENS’ LEGAL RIGHTS
LA Times - It hasn't gotten a lot of press, but a case involving AT&T that goes before the U.S. Supreme Court next week has sweeping ramifications for potentially millions of consumers. If a majority of the nine justices vote the telecom giant's way, any business that issues a contract to customers ¬ such as for credit cards, cellphones or cable TV ¬ would be able to prevent them from joining class-action lawsuits.

This would take away in such cases arguably the most powerful legal tool available to the little guy, particularly in cases involving relatively small amounts of money. Class-action suits allow plaintiffs to band together in seeking compensation or redress, thus giving substantially more heft to their claims. The ability to ban class actions would potentially also apply to employment agreements such as union contracts.

83 PAGE ARTICLE ON THE MIDDLE FINGER AND THE LAW
This Article argues that, although most convictions are ultimately overturned on appeal, the pursuit of criminal sanctions for use of the middle finger infringes on First Amendment rights, violates fundamental principles of criminal justice, wastes valuable judicial resources, and defies good sense. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that speech may not be prohibited simply because some may find it offensive.. . . .

ACLU FILES SUIT AGAINST PHILLY MASS STOP AND FRISKS
Washington Post- A civil liberties group filed a federal lawsuit challenging the use of "stop and frisk" searches by Philadelphia police, alleging that the policy is violating the rights of blacks and Latinos who have done nothing wrong. In the lawsuit, the ACLU cites city data showing that 253,333 pedestrians were stopped last year, compared with 102,319 in 2005. More than 70 percent of the people stopped last year were black and only 8.4 percent of all stops led to an arrest, the ACLU said.

Using "stop and frisk" to reduce crime can be legal, but officers must have a reason for suspicion, said Mary Catherine Roper, an attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. In New York, civil rights advocates have also challenged the use of stop and frisk; a lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department by the Center for Constitutional Rights is pending.

RECOVERED HISTORY: WINSTON CHURCHILL'S DARKEST HOURS
Johann Hari, Independent, UK - Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering". The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men". Later, he boasted of his experiences there: "That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about."

Then as an MP he demanded a rolling program of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph". There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the "natives". In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will "willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown".

But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."

HOW THE INTERNET AFFECTS OUR MINDS
Discovery - In 2008, tech scholar Nicholas Carr sparked an earnest debate when he proclaimed in The Atlantic magazine that Google is making us stupider. Habitually link-hopping down the rabbit hole of online information, Carr argued, has degraded our collective attention span and threatens to permanently downgrade our intelligence. Rather than reading for context and nuance, the Internet encourages us to skim for fast facts that lack substance. . .

Not only did his Google thesis quickly attract rebuttals extolling the potential intellectual virtues of Internet use, but the Pew Internet Project, in conjunction with Elon University, also surveyed 371 telecommunications experts to help settle the score. Responding to the question of "whether Google is making people stupid," a majority of respondents - 81 percent - countered that the search engine and the Internet is doing just the opposite.

A recent study comparing students' academic performances from classroom versus online instruction in the same microeconomics course highlighted potential pitfalls of the Web as a learning tool. Female students appeared to learn just as well in front of a teacher as they did in front of a screen, while males, Hispanics and academically struggling students' grades suffered from online instruction. "We certainly find that Internet-based delivery of traditional classes has different effects on different types of students," said lead study author and Northwestern University economist, David Figlio. At the same time, Figlio didn't interpret his study results as an argument against online learning. Rather, the results should serve as a warning that online courses might not be a one-size-fits-all resource.

Brevitas
Bush
• Putting Bush in bookstore crime section
• Ex German chancellor says Bush not telling the truth
Ecology
• Building the case for climate crime prosecution
• Biofuels challenged by European study
• World Bank helping corporations seize public water
• What's the best way to spend a million bucks reducing climate change?
Media & writing
• Number of books checked out of public libraries declines
• Maddow and Stewart's 50 minute post-modern examination of themselves; further evidence that post-modernism is a total bore
College
• Are universities corporate sellouts?
• British students plan big day of protest
Politics
• Peas in a pod: Clinton praises Bush's bopk
• How money will buy the 2012 election
• Supreme Court ruling created costliest and most secretly funded mid term election ever
• San Francisco has approved a repulsive anti-homeless referendum that bans sitting or lying on sidewalks. No additional funds for the care of those forced to lie or sit on sidewalks was voted.

• Ballot Access - An 83-year-old Pennsylvania voter, on the way home from the hospital in an ambulance, persuaded the ambulance driver to stop first and let him vote. He voted while lying on a stretcher.

• Fair Vote - This fall North Carolina held the first statewide general election with instant runoff voting in the nation’s history to fill federal judge Jim Wynn’s vacancy in on the Court of Appeals. Three Superior Court vacancies were also filled with instant runoff voting. Initial results suggest that voters in the state handled IRV well.

• Green Results - Gayle McLaughlin was re-elected as mayor of Richmond, CA. Several candidates for state legislature had good showings: Mark Miller (MA) 45%, Fred Horch (ME) 34% - losing by just 4%, Jeremy Karpen (IL) 35% , Ben Manski (WI) 31% of the vote.

American notes
• Police requiring recruits to reveal social media passwords
• Seven of ten richest counties in DC area
• 50 things restaurant servers don't like
Foreclosure scandal
• Obamites have spent only 12% of housing loan modification funds
• More state judges getting tough with banks
• But not in Florida where high speed rubber stamping of foreclosure is underway.
Homeland insecurities
• Reuters notes resistance
• GAO says TSA program to catch terrorists has failed
• Update on TSA's film or fondle policy
• Flight attendants join protest against TSA fondling
• More
Fiscal fiasco
• The Bowles-Simpson lie on Social Security
• OBAMA'S AMERICAN DEATH PANEL CHAIRS OFFER PLAN FOR A DEPRESSION
• Center for Budget & Policy Priorities - At least 46 states plus the District of Columbia have cut major areas of state services since the start of the recession, including health care (31 states), services to the elderly and disabled (29 states and DC), K-12 education (34 states and DC), and higher education (43 states)
Young
• Malls banning unescorted young
Health
• Dark chocolate reduces blood pressure

ENDS

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