Friday catCNNblogging

Ever the intrepid infotainers, CNN is evidently attempting to capture the catblogging audience. Check out the human-interest whoring for yourself.



To review, that's one (1) story about a cat circus, zero (0) stories about Iraq on the front of CNN. Good job, guys.

(And thanks to Mary for the tip.)

Gendered mediocrity

Interesting column over at the Post today about the growing portion of young men living with their parents - one third of men 22-34. The piece is rather short, and doesn't really get around to saying definitively what might be causing such the trend. As I myself dangle close to this precipice, I have to wonder about how to avoid slipping into complacent unremarkableness. Friends who have been successful in starting new, independent lives after college seem to have just decided to get up and do, quite incautiously. Where do they get the motivation to give up security? What separates them from those I know who seem stuck?

The gendered aspects of this are intriguing. I wonder if societal changes in gender roles have affected this - over the last 40 years or so, women have been told they can do everything, which might be read by men to say implicitly that they shouldn't be doing everything, that they no longer have some inborn responsibility to seek gainful employment, etc. While it's great to focus on correcting thousands of years of misguided gender differentiation, I think perhaps we do so at our peril if we don't recognize that everyone needs messages of empowerment if we're all to succeed in a new system.

Pull in case of market failure

This Slashdot article makes an interesting case for the need for advocacy groups, from a pro-market and libertarian perspective. It's focus is on opposing the email fees being levied by certain large service providers, but I think the logic can work elsewhere. The meat:

And this is why groups like EFF and Peacefire are rallying against pay-per-mail. We don't protest bad ideas. We protest bad ideas that could cause harm because by their nature, the marketplace will not kill them. Think about it: if AOL announced that they were going to start charging $100/month for dial-up, would we care? Would MoveOn send out e-mail warnings to its AOL subscribers? Would the EFF start a coalition against it? No, because users will abandon AOL over something like that, and the marketplace will kill it. But people don't abandon their provider over wrongly blocked e-mail if they don't even know it's happening. And thus pay-per-mail could become a de facto standard because it's invisible to customers.

If Microsoft released a new version of IE with huge ugly buttons that were hard to understand, would civic-minded groups and public advocates complain? No, because that problem will sort itself out through browser competition. It's when Microsoft releases features that have bad implications for user privacy and security, that civic groups and experts complain loudly -- because most people can't assess the privacy and security risks of using their browser, and so the marketplace alone won't solve that. (Microsoft knows this, of course, which is why they have sometimes released features that have bad implications for users' privacy and security, but they never made the buttons big and ugly.)

I think these kinds of examples are useful in showing that markets, even if they do some good, aren't a total solution to all problems. It should at least be obvious that advocacy groups serve an important purpose in providing access to otherwise hidden information. Rather than being accused of market distortion, I think such interest groups ought be given credit for this necessary augmentation.

Facebook, been good to know ya

Facebook is for sale, though evidently not at prices lower than $750 million. Not bad for a bunch of college students' part-time project. I can't help but worry about my data in the hands of the corporate world, though; those folks are definitely keen on turning hefty advertising profits on this sort of stuff. I don't think I'd use Facebook if I had to sit through ads each time I viewed my friends' profiles.

All the "religious values," none of the religion

This is an interesting thought:

Is it any wonder that public discourse about religion has become so distorted in the past few years? The news shows have stopped talking to people who do religion in favor of people who talk about "religious values," and usually from a particular perspective.

AIDS treatment prevents infection

In the long list of reasons why universal access to AIDS drugs is a critical goal, it appears that taking medications designed to fight HIV actually prevents uninfected individuals from contracting the virus, according to this AP story. The drug in the study happens to be one that SGAC is fighting to make affordable and available, Gilead's Truvada. From the article, we also find that the at-cost price for Truvada is reportedly 87 cents.

Geek break

Slashdot is discussing the recent Vista delays. Comical stuff, really.

I think that as soon as someone develops a working virtual Windows for the Intel version of OS X, Microsoft should just try to buy Apple and scrap any OS development on their own. They'd still need to figure out what to do with Office, but I don't see a suitable replacement product out there yet.

AIDS, SGAC in the news

This Post article paints a dismal picture for AIDS prevention in the district, which apparently had one of the first programs in the country to track and control the disease.

The Hatchet, meanwhile, also has coverage on the DC AIDS crisis, and includes a sizable mention of SGAC and the Road to Hope tour, scheduled for next week.

Good to see some media concern.

Lucky outlier

I don't think I was exactly a paragon of confidence growing up, so it's lucky I turned out the way I did, according to one study:

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

Of course, there's always the possibility that in Berkeley, everyone was out to get those conservative kids.

Bush can criticize himself

Just very roundaboutly, and without actually taking any responsibility. Go read this Post column for more.

Riots? Must be the brown people

So, tens of thousands of French youth are taking to the streets each day over proposed changes to labor laws, modifications which would allow employers to fire anyone under the age of 26 without cause, so long as they have worked less than 2 years. Some of the protests have turned violent, which is pretty much par for the course over there. Who are the authorities blaming? Why, those dastardly arabs, of course!

Police have speculated that the gangs may be from the poor suburban areas that erupted in riots last fall. In those disturbances, youths across France -- many of them immigrants or French-born children of immigrants -- burned thousands of cars and hundreds of public buildings and private businesses to protest government indifference to the joblessness and lack of social services in their communities. Little of that violence spilled over into Paris or other urban centers.

It could be, I suppose. But until there's any proof of this, it sounds an awful lot like racist, nationalist scape-goating to me.

Must-see TV

This link is long overdue, but if you haven't seen this already, go watch Senator Feingold explain the reasons to censure President Bush.

So, where's Blue America?

This is kind of funny - apparently the Post has hired a former Bush administration official and asshat of terrific proportion as their new rightie blogger, a man who it turns out called Coretta Scott King a Communist on the day of her funeral. Nice. Real classy.

ACT UP Philadelphia Action Alert

Almost forgot:

Make one phone call and send a fax today in support of Chinese AIDS activists

Background: In the past month in China, a diverse, historic coalition of AIDS and pro-democracy activists, and the lawyers that defend them in the Chinese legal system, have been beaten, harassed, and ultimately kidnapped (or as they say in China, "detained") by the government for organizing their own symbolic hunger strikes to protest government repression of activists. At the same time, dozens of people with AIDS were held under house arrest to prevent them from reaching delegates during the just ended People's Congress.

As many as 12 prominent activists and several supporters are currently in detention, including renowned AIDS activist Hu Jia, who most recently served as director of Loving Source, a Beijing NGO that supports AIDS orphans.

Take Action: Make a phone call today to demand the unconditional release of Hu Jia and an end to the repression against people with AIDS, AIDS activists, and other groups trying to make peaceful change in China.

Contact the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.:
Tel: (202) 745-6743 or (202) 328-2520
Political Affairs Office, Minister Counselor, Cai Run
Fax: (202) 745 7473

Here are talking points: "Hello, my name is _______ and I am an AIDS activist working with _________. As a person fighting AIDS, I demand the immediate and unconditional release of the AIDS activist Hu Jia and the rest of the hunger strikers. China should stop beating and detaining activists, lawyers, and journalists. Please call me back at (your telephone number) as soon as possible regarding this urgent matter." Send a short fax, as well--it can say the same thing--with your name and address.

For more information go to www.aidspolicyproject.org

Geek break

Windows Vista will be delayed until 2007 - who saw that coming?

Insult to injury

Florida school districts will link teachers' pay to their students' standardized test scores. Sounds like a great idea, if you want the best teachers to all work in the richest districts.

Let me explain something. Standardized test scores have been shown time and again to correlate very highly with wealth and race. Unless those have become things we want to test for before we let anyone graduate, there's a problem with rewarding just test performance. What will happen with this teacher pay measure in place is that the differences already present will be exacerbated, as some teachers seek profit by going for jobs in already high-performing districts, or are economically forced out of teaching because they chose to work with struggling students.

This is just another step on a trend that misallocates funding in our schools towards having the most damaging and class-reinforcing results. Why do we spend the most money on suburban districts full of high-performers, while starving urban and rural districts of the resources they so dearly need to catch up? There can only be one expected result - that education becomes divided more sharply in quality, and that the gulf between the children of means and the children of poverty grows wider.

We should not accept such un-democratic, un-American structural flaws.

Horrendous

This is tragic, unbelievable stupidity at its finest - how the hell is the FBI operating without email addresses for all its agents?

Blast from the GW past

Man, I almost forgot about the Tradition Family Property (TFP) folks, with their red sashes of inanity. Luckily, I stumbled on this. Oh, the hilarity:

Many of the 1,500 students who received the TFP’s flyer were both surprised and pleased to see TFP Student Action on their campus located in the nation’s capital. One student said, “You guys are getting the job done.”

One professor said, “I am normally a liberal. I am in favor of socialist politics and against traditional morality. But on the issue of sodomy, I agree with you.”

Riiiiight.

Network problems

How am I supposed to blog around here if I can't get on the wireless network? Honestly.

Panda break

Went to the National Zoo again yesterday - found Butterstick in a tree:

Decision time

Lots of cool stuff coming out of SXSW, aparently. This relation of the public beating questioning of an MPAA representative is damn good, and this bit especially caught my eye:

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

I think that anyone who is inside the Music/Movie industry cabaal's clutches probably got there as an accident of history, so I don't blame them entirely. I hope they do their damnedest to get out. For the rest of us doing creative work, there is no excuse for joining this monster anymore. In the internet, we have the tools at our disposal to distribute our art ourselves, ethically (and still make money!), and we owe it to our audience to do so. The industry's self-interested obsession with rights is not compatible with the vibrant, but necessarily somewhat derivative, social process of creation, and each increase of its power represents a subsequent impediment to our art. The creative world is at stake; it's time to recognize this and act.

On napping

I do find it interesting that I can sleep through hours of my roommate playing Counter Strike, explosions and all, but my cell phone ring wakes me instantly. I bet Dave Grossman would have something to say about that.

Regulation

One commenter over at MyDD raises an interesting question about this blog regulation business - don't we want to know how our elections are being influenced, and by whom?

I think this argument will be a hurdle for the anti-regulation fight, but it isn't impossible to surmount. After all, there is a mechanism for monitoring campaign contributions, which are the principal influencers of elections, and that seems to work well enough, even if the rules regarding contributions are not perfect. The only other way that blogs influence elections is through their speech, which is pretty clearly more like a newspaper than a PAC. After all, blogs don't go around spending millions on ad buys, reaching into people's living rooms. No, they have to be navigated to, just as a newspaper has to be picked up. People make a conscious choice to consume the political speech of blogs, so it's obvious that the election-swaying effort is going on. I'm just not sure how that needs more regulation, then, than the LaRouche pamphlets I might pick up from a cultist.

Oh, those northern neighbors

So I saw an ad for Canada at Metro Center today. Not for Molson or any other Canadian product, but for Canada itself. And it wasn't a tourism ad; no, this was all "we Canasians are fighting in Afghanistan, too!" Has it really gotten to the point that Canada has to spend money to counteract all the foolish anti-Canadian hate speech? I mean, can't we all agree that we love hockey and maple syrup, and just be done with this silliness? I mean, they aren't even French (er, most of them anyway), so what's the deal?

Oh. My. God.

Trailer.

Democracy, if we can keep it this time

Via Kos, this is excellent:

Rather than removing money from politics, the internet changes what money can buy in politics. It allows people to organize themselves, and makes it much easier to communicate compelling messages among large numbers of people without a lot of capital. Now you'd think that the people who wanted campaign finance limits (known as 'reformers') would look at the internet and say 'Awesome, this helps solve our problem!' But they didn't. Instead, they have held tight to their bias against participation. They think that restricting the ability of Americans to participate in the political system is the only way to check the power of wealthy interests. Actually, they have it backwards. Regulation not only won't help, it once again raises the barrier to participation and thus recreates the worst aspects of a mass media 'limited bandwidth politics'. In reformer-land, in order to participate in internet politics you'd need to lawyer up and do things only rich people can afford. This is precisely what they should be fighting against, not promoting.

The first point, about changing what money does in politics, is crucial. Political money is only "bad" in so far as the influence it has is "bad;" structural problems with campaign finance have hitherto created a situation in which political donating was the realm of the rich, and therefore undemocratic results were to be expected in correlation with increased funding, every dollar representing an increase in the schism between monied donors and the rest of us. In that world, the little guy gets screwed so long as anybody can give those big-dollar donations.

But we live in a land of participatory, distributed campaigning now, perhaps Politics 2.0. The old model of the elite controlling things through their exclusive lock on meaningful campaign contributions is dying, and in its place we are building a system in which real impact on political decision-making may be made by many small voices in concert. Our influence will only increase as our fundraising prowess stirs up more primaries and other highly annoying battles that once would not have been fought. We have the power to demand responsiveness of our leaders, as we have become a real threat. It is this change that the so-called reformers are reacting to, as this upset in the status quo has worried their monied masters.

I think what needs to happen for us to cease power and hold it is for us to demonstrate that we are capable of sustaining the political process ourselves, to show politicians that they can give up the old, unfair, corrupting methods of campaign finance for our people-powered version. I don't think that anybody in Washington really wants to be a corporate tool, they just have to be to survive.

Not just for command-liners any more

Looks like life is imitating art - this point-and-click hacking stuff must have been inspired by Hackers and all the other ridiculous Hollywood films in which computer cracking has been portrayed using some kind of funky CGI bullshit. I guess this means I won't be able to make fun of that ignorance anymore, since it was actually prescience.

Fiscal responsibility? Wah?

This would be hilarious if I weren't doomed to pay for it for the rest of my working years:

On vote after vote in the House and Senate, lawmakers demonstrated the growing gap between their political promises to rein in spending and their need to respond to emergencies and protect politically popular programs. The votes followed last weekend's GOP leadership meeting in Memphis, at which virtually every speaker called on the party to renew its commitment to fiscal discipline and to control federal spending and the deficit.

You know what that says when you can't conscionably cut programs but don't have money to pay for them? It means you shouldn't have cut taxes.

You know what that says when you run on promises of fiscal prudence but end up increasing the debt ceiling by $781 billion instead? It means you're a liar.

March madblogging

Colonials won our first NCAA tournament game since 1994 tonight - and in overtime, no less. What is this, Cleveland-style sports?

More AIDS money

I hear tell that the Santorum/Durbin budget amendment to give $566 million more to the Global Fund passed in the Senate, bringing the total to $866 million. That provides for the rest of this round, and another set of grants. This is a big victory for the global AIDS community, and everyone who called their Senators last week should feel proud.

Death and Taxes

Via Boing Boing, this is pretty interesting:

Preemption at what cost?

Bush is still committed to his misguided policy of preemption, according to the Post.

What I worry about sometimes, beyond the moral problems of preemption, is what the actual performance of the doctrine does for the effectiveness of our deterrence efforts. After all, who would believe right now that the US will invade and decapitate another country? We clearly don't have the military depth of force to have three occupations going at once, and we're unlikely to leave Iraq any time soon. I wonder if showing our teeth might have been more effective had we not revealed that we can't necessarily chew everything that we bite off.

The UN Human Rights Commission is dead - all hail the UN Human Rights Council

So, no idea whether this will be a significant change, but I'm fairly cynical. That same cynicism makes me glad, though, that the US did not get its way, which likely would have produced a much more occidental-centric and US-friendly body incapable of holding our government to account on its own atrocities. This is pretty telling, aftrer all:

Three nations abstained. Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau joined the US in voting against the plan.

Hmm. Two countries which were recently colonies of the US, plus Israel, which has its own incentives for resisting any change which might lead to a more effective human rights regime. We couldn't even get Poland? Sounds like we made a convincing argument.

Whine, whine

Suddenly I might actually like Jessica Simpson.

This GOP spokesman doesn't get it:

"It's never been a problem for Bono," he said, referring to the U2 rock star who has met regularly with political leaders of all stripes to promote various causes, including Third World debt relief. "I find it hard to believe she would pass up an opportunity to lobby the president on behalf of Operation Smile."

She obviously doens't want to be just your party tool. And since when was doing what Bono does not a whorish idea? Dude sold out as soon as he started accepting concessions that the rest of the global poverty advocacy community was not on board with, if not earlier.

Macs can run Windows

According to Macrumors, the contest is over - someone has earned $13,854 for their solution, which had the following requirements:

2. Windows must be able to coexist with Mac OS X and each system may not interfere with the operation of the other (basically a traditional dual boot system where one OS is running at a time)
3. Your method, upon starting the computer, must offer the user to boot either OS X or Windows XP (hint: GRUB / LILO)
7. You cannot use virtualization software such as Xen or VMWare

Screenshots of the boot selector are fairly impressive, as they look attractive enough to be usable by the unternerd.

Just squeaked under the deadline, which was next week.

More GJ folks?

United Students for Fair Trade is now sharing the Global Justice office space - yay for resident trade wonks!

Beware

I feel like eating a Caesar salad. Using only a knife.

Bullet points

This is brilliant.

Mmmm, math

Turns out lots of rich desert and 10 pm conference calls don't mix.

There was yummyness:

¿Donde esta el soldado interesado?

Kinda curious at the absence.

Claude Allen details

Hard to understand how he had interest in being a small time crook when he had so much wrecking of America to do.

Teh Interwebs: rhetoric melting pot

This Boing Boing-featured description of tiny invertebrates seems almost to be channeling Real Ultimate Power:

Now here's the thing I really like about tartigrades. They are apparently the World's Toughest Animal. You can shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years and they don't care. Send them into the core of nuclear reactor. They'll be fine.

Let's remix that a bit for comparison:

Now here's the thing I really like about Ninjas. They are apparently the World's Toughest Animal. You can shoot them into space, take them to the deepest ocean depths and let them go, deprive them of air, water, and food for years and they don't care. Send them into the core of nuclear reactor. They'll be fine.

Very Hamburgerian, if you ask me.

This would be even trendier:

Now here's the thing I really like about Chuck Norris. He is apparently the World's Toughest Animal. You can shoot him into space, take him to the deepest ocean depths and let him go, deprive him of air, water, and food for years and he doesn't care. Send him into the core of nuclear reactor. He'll be fine.

More pressure on Google

So the feds keep pushing Google to release search data as evidence for a case in which Google is not a party. I wonder very much at the precedence of such an action; any constitutional scholars out there want to help me understand this?

The deeper question of implications on privacy rights remains as well:

Although the Justice Department said it doesn't want any personal information now, the victory would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.

"The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally," Berman said. "While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be."

Worst. President. Ever.

So I wasn't invited to Bush's speech here at GW yesterday, but now I wish I'd been able to go. Seems it was a classic piece of Bush administration speechwriting, that is to say, full of blatant disingenuousness and falsehood. This bit proved to be especially vile:

Earlier this year, a newspaper published details of a new anti-IED technology that was being developed. Within five days of the publication -- using details from that article -- the enemy had posted instructions for defeating this new technology on the Internet. We cannot let the enemy know how we're working to defeat him.

Greg Sargent over at TAPPED does a great job in calling the president out on that attack:

Bush didn't name the newspaper. But his aides subsequently leaked confirmation to the press that he was talking about the Los Angeles Times. And guess what: It turns out that Bush left out a small detail about the offending article in question. Turns out it was about the fact that some military officials were angry that this potentially life saving technology still hasn't been shipped to Iraq, ten months after Pentagon officials recommended investing in research and sending prototypes to Iraq for testing. Says the piece:

10 months later -- and after a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests -- not a single JIN has been shipped to Iraq.

To many in the military, the delay in deploying the vehicles, which resemble souped-up, armor-plated golf carts, is a case study in the Pentagon's inability to bypass cumbersome peacetime procedures to meet the urgent demands of troops in the field. More than half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been caused by roadside bombs, and the number of such attacks nearly doubled last year compared with 2004.

A friend once said to me that the way that Bush gets away with lying is that he does it so obviously and unapologetically. Since it's no secret, there's no fun work for the press to do uncovering his mistruths. To take a page from Kuhn, it isn't a puzzle worth solving.

For the rest of us, though, Bush's behavior should be maddening. Here we have the President of the United States, ostensible leader of the free world, blaming the press for deaths he had a hand in through negligent bureaucratic mishandling of necessary technology, all in the name of roundaboutly defending his own lawbreaking through warrantless domestic spying.

It's no wonder the man is at 34 percent; what should surprise us is that so few Senators are willing to stand behind the motion to censure him.

Fundraising reform through tech

Kos has an informative post about how early campaign dollars get transformed into sizable contributions throughout a campaign:

Nate, who now works for the Warner operation, again shocked me by saying that $65K we raised ended up being worth about $365,000 by the end of the race (about six months later). Considering he raised about $800K on the race, we accounted for nearly half his fundraising.

That list was segmented and worked. For example, they knew which donors responded to positive poll numbers and which ones responded to attacks on DeLay. And these small donors, unlike the big fish and their $2K checks, could contribute again and again.

That kind of tracking is exciting, and I think will make campaigns more responsive to small donors. I wonder if this could be one way to reduce the impact of big-money lobbyists, as it provides a mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of campaign tactics relative to small donations, which previously were probably rather mysterious. Lobbyists, in contrast, are likely rather clear in their desires and response to policy. With the little guys able to catch up in this regard, maybe we can see some reform.

Holiday madness

So this week is shaping up to be a good break, with a holiday every day. What's that, you ask, whatever holidays do I mean? Why, these, of course:

3.13: Purim started in the evening
3.14: Pi Day
3.15: The Ides of March
3.16: Bacchanalia
3.17: Saint Patrick's Day

Pi Day

I hope everyone gets a chance to celebrate the best math-based holiday of the year.

BSE, bitches!

Damn, and I liked burgers.

Question is, how many cattle are tested, and what percent of the US beef herd is represented by the three cattle that have thus far shown BSE? Because unless we do a cow census, there are definitely more out there.

The internal threat

You know, this Times article makes him sound pretty paranoid and tragically crazy, but given how big a pain the Iraqi insurgency has been to the occupying coalition forces, maybe Saddam was onto something?

Law rules after all?

So, I shouldn't have to say this, but I will just in case: I am not a fan of the September 11 attackers. There. That being said, I do think everyone deserves equal protection under the law, that this is an essential condition of a democratic state, and so I'm encouraged that the judge in the Moussaoui trial is so irate that prosecutors have flagrantly disregarded her directives regarding witness testimony. We've seen a lot of violations of legal rights of the accused over the last few years, all justified by their supposed status as terrorists. It's very good to see someone standing up against such illegal, anti-American behavior.

For anyone angered by this development, it's important that you blame the horrendously incompetent prosecutors for this incident, not the judge.

Knight Ridder no more

In some sad news, the Knight Ridder publishing chain is being consumed by smaller rival McClatchy, and 12 of its newspapers will be sold off.For those wondering at my unhappiness, its source is twofold:

(1) This is yet another sign of a disturbing trend of newspapers companies getting larger and fewer, such that editorial control is increasingly wielded by a small group of media tycoons.

(2) Knight Ridder reporters have been some of the very few mainstream sources for critical writing on the Bush administration and its war efforts, as Atrios has pointed out.

I worry that the net effect of the merger may be the loss of some measure of real journalistic integrity in our press, replace with who knows what.

OH-Gov: interweb for all

Strickland announced a plan to provide broadband goodies to Ohioans, starting with connecting up all the county seats. It sounds like a necessary initiative, and helpful to folks who currently live too far from any accessible broadband to get a connection in their homes, but I do wonder a bit about how big the demand for this is, and whether such an announcement distracts from the anti-corruption and reform messages that Democrats should focus on in the pay-to-play Republican playground that Ohio has become. I just think there might be more exciting things to talk about.

Campaign coverage

I think I'll institute a Kos-like classification system in naming my posts about the 2006 campaigns. For instance, OH-Sen will precede the title of any post regarding the Senate race between Ohioans Sherrod Brown and Mike DeWine.

Name-based disaster

So, the District and Maryland are being threatened with the withholding of federal funding if HIV programs don't record and report the names of all those testing positive for the virus. While such reporting could be beneficial in coordinating programs and assuring proper notification of sexual partners, in the end it will have disastrous results.

The first concern is the detrimental effect that such removals of privacy have on general willingness to participate in government programs. There are a lot of people who have distrust of government or healthcare, and the less anonymous testing is, the less likely these people are to undergo it. In another take on the privacy angle, DC Councilman Katania recently expressed concern that such data is not safe in the hands of a federal government which has engaged in illegal surveillance of its citizens.

Another significant problem with the proposal is that it will have even more deleterious consequences for undocumented residents, who have very real reasons to avoid government detection. Even the callously self-interested and anti-immigrant cannot see this as a positive development, as the undocumented are equally capable of contracting and spreading HIV, so anything which adversely affects their tendency to get tested will endanger the lives of everyone else.

This move should be resisted.

More violence

Not good.

Out of control

I was just forwarded this Times article about drug price increases from our favorite pharmaceutical companies. This bit should be particularly salient for anyone wondering why the SGAC treatment access campaign focuses on the targets it does:

In some drug categories, such as cholesterol-lowering treatments, many drugs compete, keeping prices relatively low. But when a medicine does not have a good substitute, its maker can charge almost any price. In 2003, Abbott Laboratories raised the price of Norvir, an AIDS drug introduced in 1996, from $54 to $265 a month. AIDS groups protested, but Abbott refused to rescind the increase.

Much of the world has no hope of paying that inflated price, which is why exclusive production rights are so dangerous when it comes to life saving drugs. It isn't just AIDS meds that worry me, though; I'd like to hear a good reason for this:

Genentech, for example, has indicated it will effectively double the price of its colon cancer drug Avastin, to about $100,000, when Avastin's use is expanded to breast and lung cancer patients. As with Avastin, nothing about nitrogen mustard is changing but the price.

That just looks bad evil. Maybe there's an explanation, but it had better be a damn good one.

OH-Sen: One more reason not to reelect DeWine

So I don't know whether this is intentional or just stupid, but Mike DeWine's appeasement bill to legalize Bush's domestic spying program would apparently also criminalize reporting about the program. Yep, DeWine's got his priorities straight there.

Censuring Bush

I wish I could be optimistic about its chances of actually doing something, but at least Senator Feingold's resolution should help show how ineffectual this Republican-controlled congress is when it comes to checking the power of the Bush administration.

Another one bites the dust

Well, Claude Allen left the administration last month, but recent news makes it pretty clear that he'll not be returning:

Allen, 45, of Gaithersburg, has been released on his own recognizance and is awaiting trial on two charges, felony theft scheme and theft over $500, said Lt. Eric Burnett, a police spokesman. Each charge is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

As some might ask, who is Claude Allen? Well, he's this Claude Allen:

Known as Rove’s enforcer, Allen wielded a heavy, censorious and punitive hand at [the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)]. In November 2001, [then Secretary of HHS Tommy] Thompson loyally toed the Rove-Bush line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS’s audit of HIV-prevention spending. Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that investigated all of the AIDS service organizations (ASOs) receiving any federal funding (like New York City’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis) whose staff members had disrupted Tommy Thompson’s speech to the 14th Annual International AIDS Conference in Barcelona; they were there to protest Bush’s lethal do-nothingism about the AIDS pandemic. These audits were designed to intimidate ASOs into abandoning AIDS advocacy. A number of ASOs, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and half a dozen other California AIDS-fighting groups, were ultimately purged from receiving U.S. funding by the Allen-led witch-hunt because Allen didn’t like their science-based sex-education programs. Allen ordered Advocates for Youth, the leading national coalition for safe-sex ed, audited half a dozen times.

Moreover, Allen was the driving force to replace science-based sex ed with the failed policy of teaching that only abstinence prevents AIDS. A black conservative and religious primitive, Allen helped bludgeon the Centers for Disease Control, which reports to HHS, into purging safe-sex materials from its Web sites and into adopting mandatory new rules requiring AIDS-fighting groups to teach that condoms don’t work in preventing the spread of AIDS

Parade politicking

Looks like my favorite Ohio slate will be marching around Cleveland soon, for any north coasters who want to join. From a press release:

Join Ted [Strickland] and Sherrod Brown in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in downtown Cleveland. Ted and Sherrod will be marching with the IBEW Local 38 contingent.

All volunteers are welcome to join them, help carry the banner and balloons. Dress warm and wear walking shoes! The IBEW contingent will line up at E. 18th and Superior Ave. at 12:30 PM sharp.

Email Susan Hagan at hagan@tedstrickland.com or call her at 216-696-2006 if you plan to attend.

You can always help grease the political machine in others ways, too.

Clever man

President Bush is coming to GW, but he'll shrewdly avoid a protest by visiting during spring break.

Good riddance

Another member of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, has resigned, likely due in part to the continuing Abramoff scandal:

The leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee have said that e-mails uncovered by the committee show that Steven Griles, Norton's former deputy, had a close relationship with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an investigation of his ties to Congress and the administration.

Another one-time Norton associate, Italia Federici, helped Abramoff gain access to Griles in exchange for contributions from Abramoff's Indian tribe clients, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee chairman, and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., have said.

Of course, she'll be replaced by someone just as bad, just as dedicated to opening up federal lands to destructive resource extraction. For now, though, we should celebrate.

GW shame, aired more publicly

The Post has picked up the story of Jordan Nott, the GW student threatened with expulsion for seeking help dealing with suicidal thoughts. It will be interesting to see if coverage in a national newspaper is enough to dissuade Trachtenberg from bad behavior, or if he'll stand up to such pressure.

More action details

Just a reminder, SGAC is having a national call-in day to get Abbott Laboratories to provide affordable AIDS drugs around the world.

In case you haven't called yet, please follow these instructions:

1) Call the office of Miles White: 847-937-3417
2) Ask to speak to Mr. Miles White… if you don’t get him (likely) then just use this phone script to talk to his receptionist!
3) Send an email to sara [at] fightglobalaids [dot] org and/or the SGAC chapters list telling us how it went!

Phone Script
"Hello, Mr. White. My name is _______ from the ________ chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign. It greatly concerns me that your company, Abbott Laboratories, is denying access to life-saving AIDS drugs to people in the Global South. I'm calling to demand that you take responsibility and...


• Register new Kaletra in Africa and the global South immediately

• Expand the number of countries in Abbott's ACCESS program to 117 like WHO/UNAIDS has suggested

• Offer an open, voluntary license for your drugs to assist in the production of generic, cheaper versions

• Publish affordable prices for Kaletra in middle-income countries

• Publicize a timeline for a pediatric formulation of the new Kaletra


“Finally, Mr. White, I'm asking that you convene a meeting with leaders and members of our campaign to discuss these demands further. You can contact Grant Gordon from our University of Chicago chapter to set up the details at 949.689.9999. We look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you."

Peak bloom prediction

Park Service says March 27th-April 1st. I can't wait!

SGAC Action Alert

Meant to blog this already - give Abbott a call today. Five minutes of your day could mean a lot to people with AIDS around the world.

Why did we get involved with this again?

So, apparently certain groups within the Iraqi government may be suppressing the official tally of execution-style murders in Iraq, so that their buddies can kill people in retaliation for the destruction of the Askariya mosque. Yep, sounds like freedom is on the march!

The good thing about South Dakota

If Meteor Blades over at Kos is any indication, the atrocious, women-hating anti-abortion law passed in South Dakota may radicalize a new bunch of pro-choice activists. A law of lesser evil might not have so incensed and mobilized people, so perhaps this cloud has some silver lining.

Thoughts on conflict

I've been studying for an exam in my insurgency, terrorism and guerrilla warfare class, and what has struck me in our group get-togethers is how in discussions of the Vietnam war, my fellow students always talk about what "we" did, referring to the US side. This gives me some pause in two ways: first, it doesn't seem like the best thing in academically dissecting a conflict to identify with one of the parties involved; and second, how much can college students in 2006 make claim to be part of a US war effort in the 1960s and '70s? None of the people in my small study group were even alive during the Tet offensive, yet we talk about it in terms of "when they attacked us." What is it about our conflict discourse that makes a bunch of early-20-somethings identify so strongly with something that happened almost 40 years ago? I wonder what effect this nationalist sense of self and history has on the capacity of the united states to start and continue wars. Much has been said, after all, of the theory that the defense department neocons are in a way trying in Iraq to do Vietnam right, that they are perhaps through this current conflict trying to make up for failures in the other. If young people not directly associated with the old war feel so strongly about it as to feel attacked in Tet, though, perhaps we ought to consider that it is more broadly the national psyche as a whole that is trying to get revenge in Iraq. That kind of determination may be harder to break than the few misguided old codgers in the Pentagon.

Accountability

The Post is doing its job:

After saying in January that he would end his regular meetings with lobbyists, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), the third-ranking GOP leader in the Senate, has continued to meet with many of the same lobbyists at the same time and on the same day of the week.

The onus is now on the voters - in Pennsylvania and everywhere else politicians are behaving so shamefully. At some point we need to realize that the Electorate bears as much responsibility for these atrocious leaders as does sometimes-poor media coverage. Anyone who votes for this liar is endorsing the system of corruption in which he flagrantly participates.

Building the party

Kos has an interesting postmortem of the TX-28 primary battle which was made a national issue by blogger money. What I find most noteworthy about Kos's posts recently is the focus on the party machine, and taking control of it, rather than any particular idealism about individual candidates. I think he and other such folks will be changing the way Democrats operate in the coming years, and probably represent the best way for the party to compete on even footing with the GOP.

My fear, though, lies in that one of the biggest problems with the Conservative movement is that their party is now so corrupt and incapable of actually achieving what its leaders set out to do 30 years ago; rather than a government-shrinking laser, it is instead a schizophrenic hydra vaguely directed by various parties of extremists on the right., randomly destroying the institutions and freedoms of the republic. It got that way because it looked to mercenaries like Karl Rove to build its power, idiots savant who knew how to construct a ruthless party machine but had no real understanding of the necessity of guaranteeing the realization of the ideals which originally begat that search for power.

I have no doubt that Democrats like Kos could build a party that could beat Republicans. I have fear, though, that focusing too much on this party may leave us in the same sorry state as the GOP, worthless to anyone and dangerous to everyone.

Questionable strategy

So, ordinarily I'd think Iran was insane to threaten the US over possible sanctions, as this kind of rhetoric backs up the US position that Iran is dangerous and shouldn't have nuclear arms capabilities. But you know what? Iraq tried to be compliant, and we invaded them anyways. US foreign policy has left rational axis of evil rulers with no clear motive to do what we'd wish them to, so we may be left with this crazy stuff for the foreseeable future.

Google Earth surprise

I was just toying around with Google Earth when I turned on the community layer, and all these names started popping up everywhere. Thinking that vanity had run completely amuck, I clicked on one to see what sort of narcissist would pollute my map like that.

Well, turns out that it wasn't narcissists at all, but dead soldiers. Someone has taken the time to geocode every coalition war death in Afghanistan and Iraq by their hometowns, and made this available as a GE Placemark file. What's more is that this information is also viewable by turning on the military layer inside GE community, thus attaching these names and locations to any viewing of US military base locations.

It is horrifying.

Google, please improve

Anybody else notice that the adwords on this site suck? So, I mention Cingular a couple times, and suddenly all the ads are for phones and ring-tones. How many people have visited this site because of phone-related searches? About three. Political issues outweigh phone deals vastly in both the number of hits generated and the percentage of content of this site. Yet I get phone ads that no one clicks on. Google is hurt a lot more by this than I am (I'm not trying to make a living at this, they are), so what gives?

Again? We're doing this again?!

One of the most frustrating things about the last presidential election cycle, and this is coming from a volunteer's standpoint, was that the left couldn't get its act together to cooperate, so everyone just duplicated everybody else's efforts. I thought that we all sat down after that and decided that yes, that was a bad idea, not to be repeated. Guess we forgot about that. Olde-time Clinton aide Harold Ickes has a bunch of Soros money to start a info-gathering operation, with the intent to compete technologically with the right wing. What does the party do? Why, it whines about its turf being encroached upon, of course!

"From an institutional standpoint, this is one of the most important things the DNC can and should do. Building this voter file is part of our job," Communications Director Karen Finney said. "We believe this is something we have to do at the DNC. Our job is to build the infrastructure of the party."

Yes, and you've failed miserably to do so. I was using Democratic party info when I went door to door for the get out the vote effort, and I can tell you that what we had sucked. Sure, we had names that were largely accurate, but the party identification prediction was pretty scattershot. I'm sure I talked to a lot of Bush voters in 2004, and that couldn't have helped us.

I'm not one of the Dean haters that I fear Ickes might be, and I do believe that the party has a good chance to change the way it's been doing things and make real strides in catching up with Republicans at the grassroots level. But good god, what morons they must be to fight about this! Let me spell it out:

Money is tight, and soft money that might pay for revitalizing Democratic database infrastructure even more so.

The Ickes venture provides a way the party can get better info cheaper - by allowing its allies like labor unions to foot some of the bill for the overall system.

Democrats lose when we do our now-standard piss-poor job integrating with our allies; we'll continue to lose if the party gets caught up in these useless turf battles.

Ports nonsense

Folks, can we please spend some time actually trying to secure our ports, instead of just playing incredibly stupid politics? C'mon, just this once?

And Senator Reid, please, just let the Republicans eat themselves alive on this - I'd love to see Bush have to use his first veto ever on his own party. That'd be awesome.

Minutemen in Maryland, none too tolerant

The Post has a good video report up about the political fight around day laborers; the minutemen's tactics of photographing workers in the morning, coupled with their anti-latino (or is it just anti-mexican?) rhetoric, makes for a pretty creepy group.

South Dakota shows its colors

I predict a bright future for the women of South Dakota, for whom abortion will no longer be a legal option after July 1st.

YouTube test

So, I just signed up for a YouTube account, and it turns out to be pretty easy. Now let's see it work:

Geek break

So, looks like Apple's conversion to Intel might be having some positive effect on market share, at least among the web elite. Three recent switchers include Penny Arcade's Tycho and Gabe, and Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall.

Princeton SGACer makes a small error

So, turns out that when you ask companies for small donations of condoms, you should specify that you don't want an 800-pound pallet of condoms:

She said she expected to receive about 500 condoms but estimates she now has hundreds of thousands.

At the time, the company told Blake the shipment's size exceeded that of a P.O. box, so she arranged to pick it up at the building in Princeton where she works. When Blake went to sign for the shipment this past week, however, she learned it could no longer be sent back to the pharmaceutical company once it had left the warehouse and would require heavy lifting equipment to transfer into her car.

Go read the rest for more hilarity.

Also, since when are we known as "The SGAC?"

Natalie Portman SNL rap

The Lonely Island Boys strike again, with hilarity of so great a magnitude that I can't watch straight through while still at work, for fear of cracking up. Seriously, Natalie Portman telling a little kid to suck her dick? Genius.

Phone conglomeration fun

With AT&T's reported acquisition of Bell South, things are looking more incestuous than ever in the telecommunications market. A brief history:

AT&T gets really freaking big
AT&T splits divisions off into the Baby Bells
Cell phone companies start popping up all over, including at the Bells and AT&T
SBC starts buying up other Bells like mad
SBC and Bell South start joint venture Cingular Wireless
AT&T spins off its cell phone division
Cingular Wireless buys AT&T Wireless, is largest wireless carrier
SBC buys AT&T, changes its name to AT&T, is largest wired carrier
New AT&T buys Bell South, bringing Cingular under its total control

Hmm. That antitrust thing worked really well.

SGAC action coming up

Keep March 9th free, so you can call Abbott Laboratories' CEO and demand lower prices for Kaletra, its second-line AIDS Drug. Follow the link for more details.

It's. Just. A. Movie.

What the hell is wrong with Krauthammer?

Back to reality

I meant to blog this yesterday. The Bush administration has claimed that its domestic spying program is necessitated by an increased risk of terrorism. What hasn't been adequately addressed by the media is whether the program is actually effective in preventing attacks. Robert Byrd says it isn't:

What most Americans don't know is that FBI agents complained about the utility of the wiretapping program. Voluminous amounts of information and records that were gleaned from this secret eavesdropping program were sent from the National Security Agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI officials repeatedly complained that they were being drowned by a river of useless information that diverted their resources from pursuing important counterterrorism work. Such complaints raise the question of whether the domestic wiretapping program may have backfired by sending our top counterterrorism agencies on wild goose chases, thus making our country less secure, instead of more secure.

Byrd goes on in his surprising eloquence, his capability for which I all too often forget, to remind us of what the consequences of this poorly conceived and illegal program may be:

The efficacy of our laws and our Constitution is at stake...

There is no doubt that Constitutional freedoms will never be abolished in one fell swoop, for the American people cherish their freedoms, and would not tolerate such a loss if they could perceive it. But the erosion of freedom rarely comes as an all-out frontal assault, but rather as a gradual, noxious creeping, cloaked in secrecy, and glossed over by reassurances of greater security.

The missing governorship

One thing that struck me the other day as I was watching Channel 13 (our District government equivalent of C-SPAN) is that our city council has to be a lot more than the average body by that name. It has to simultaneously deal with all the ordinary problems of a major American city (and one of the poorer ones at that), and coordinate what would normally be state-level programs (this was especially clear during a discussion of medicaid). This is a huge task.

With that in mind, Mayor Williams recent call to have his position's title be changed to "governor" makes a lot of sense - it would be a good step towards gaining acknowledgment of the difficulty of administrating the District. But even if DC can't get anyone else to recognize it as a state, it still needs to act like one.

Reaching way back into the dustbin

For all you Hilary fans out there, this is pretty funny:

Republican critics are now coalescing around a late entry: Kathleen Troia McFarland, 54, a protégée of Henry A. Kissinger who has not been in public service since working as a Pentagon spokeswoman under President Ronald Reagan. Yet Ms. McFarland, known as K. T., is pretty green: She has been a stay-at-home mother since 1985, and was drawn to the Senate race only because she already believed she was going to lose her bid for a Congressional seat on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

It's amusing that a party so obsessed with the Clintons can't find a more worthy challenger; I guess it will work in Hilary's favor that qualified candidates are apparently terrified of her already.

Buying morality

I heard about Ave Maria, the Florida town that former Dominos Pizza owner Thomas S. Monaghan is financing, some time ago, but haven't seen much about it since. CNN now has a story which reveals more details about the plan, which always worried me somewhat:

During a speech last year at a Catholic men's gathering in Boston, Monaghan said that in his community, stores will not sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies will not carry condoms or birth control pills, and cable television will have no X-rated channels.

Homebuyers in Ave Maria will own their property outright. But Monaghan and Barron Collier will control all commercial real estate in the town, meaning they could insert provisions in leases to restrict the sale of certain items.

The next stage of the encroaching theocracy is apparently corporate ownership. Why spend money fighting abortion in the courts when you can just buy whole towns and ban it?

The covert Whig conspiracy

The Editors have prepared another masterful work for your enjoyment. Highlight:

When it comes to vetoes, Bush isn’t in the same league with other presidents. No president since Warren Harding has finished with fewer than 21 vetoes. The last president with no vetoes was James Garfield, who was shot in his first year. In fact, three of the last four presidents who never vetoed a bill had a good excuse: Like Harding, they died in office: Garfield, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison. (The fourth was Taylor’s successor Millard Fillmore.)

So, is the Congress WPE’s bitch, or the other way ’round, or what? Reed doesn’t seriously try for an answer, preferring poli-sci nerd riffs such as “maybe WPE is secretly a Whig!”

Go read the rest.

Bush knew

The Post has the video to prove it.

More unintended pregnancy

This op-ed in the Post has it right:

...We are talking only about adult access to safe and effective contraception. Over 98 percent of adult women have used some form of contraception. So what is the objection?

Perhaps it is that posed by a small but vocal political minority that insists on labeling emergency contraception as abortion, or at least confusing the two. One of the main questions I hear is, "Does this pill cause an abortion?" In fact, the only connection this pill has with abortion is that it has the potential to prevent the need for one.

If you want less abortions, support good contraception. It's that simple.

Patriot Act coming up soon

The Senate has approved, by a wide 95-5 margin, changes to the Patriot Act which will likely make possible its reauthorization. Anything to be done must be done now.

The Patiot Act itself may not be a constitutional crisis, but it is indicative of the sort of scared, feeble thinking that will lead to one. Lets run a comparison:

Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky:

"Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead."

Ben Franklin, founding father:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Well, there you have it. Jim Bunning hates America.

Unsurprising

Cutting access to contraceptives and good sex education leads to more unintended pregnancies - wow, what a shocker! I guess it takes a scientific study for the media to be able to report that fact, but really, who's surprised? The news here should be that conservatives are being disingenuous in their cries for reduced teen pregnancy so long as they propose solutions that have the opposite effect.

Here's some sanity:

"The most powerful and least divisive way to decrease abortion is to reduce unintended pregnancy," said Sarah Brown, director of the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "If we can make progress reducing unintended pregnancy, we can make enormous progress reducing abortion."

This is where I differ with those who say that the Catholic Church's pro-life stance is enviably consistent. Empirically speaking, it just doesn't make sense to be anti-abortion, anti-condom and anti teen motherhood. The combination of moral standings leads to some pretty tricky situations, especially when the culture you promote is not known for its focus on female empowerment. Inevitably, the ideological stew that is conservatism's approach to sex results in more abortions than we'd have without it.