Essential Reading

Short version (but whole thing should be read anyway): The right to access courts to seek redress is an essential component of a healthy democracy -- which Our Leaders, as haters of democracy, which is to say haters of America -- are long against and continuously work to weaken and destroy. Ditto a system of law generally and more ditto the issue of holding corporations accountable.

Tort reform is simply unamerican.

And in true rightwing fashion, it's a brutal solution, that benefits only the wealthiest, and the underlying problem in fact does not exist.

How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue

Thanks to constant political oratory against "frivolous lawsuits" and "jackpot justice," it is widely known that there's a legal crisis in this country. President Bush never misses an opportunity to call for laws that would bring more "common sense" to a legal system that, he claims, is out of control, wrecking the economy, driving doctors out of their practices, bankrupting small businesses, and costing American jobs. Journalists repeat the charges without examining them.

As a result, the lawsuit issue has moved to the political front burner, and in the past three years, state after state has responded by limiting citizens' rights to sue. Just this year alone, the Republicanled Congress has passed restrictions on class action lawsuits and is steps away from enacting limits on medical malpractice lawsuits.

But is there really a crisis? National data show that the number of civil suits is falling, not rising, and that the average damage award is also going down. Despite intense media hype to the contrary, the number of personal injury lawsuits filed every year has been tumbling for the past decade. Upon closer examination, the stories of ridiculous lawsuits usually turn out to be false or badly misleading. The crisis, in short, appears to be a phantom.

So how do we explain the scary headlines? Who's behind the "tort reform movement," and what are the real goals? Blocking the Courthouse Door will show that the movement against so-called greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations to get this issue on the table and thus limit their own vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "astroturf " grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to all-too-gullible journalists.

For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments in the bond market, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors in turn blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients. And for Republicans, the campaign provides an extra bonus: defunding the Democratic Party. Limits on lawsuits cut into the income of some of the Democratic Party's most generous donors, the trial lawyers, who are often the only source of campaign cash for Democrats in many states.

By exposing some of the dubious characters, corporate chicanery, skewed research, fudged numbers, and bogus journalism that have buttressed the calls for lawsuit reform,Stephanie Mencimer shows who's behind the movement to close the courthouse doors, and how they've successfully persuaded millions of Americans to give up their critical legal rights without fully understanding what they're losing -- often until it's too late.

Link.

And here's the Introduction:

The story of Frank Cornelius would be funny if it weren't so awful.

In the mid-1970s, Frank Cornelius worked as a lobbyist for the Insurance Institute of Indiana, an industry group that was trying to change the state's medical malpractice laws. Back then, doctors across the country were protesting rising medical malpractice insurance rates, which they blamed on escalating jury verdicts in lawsuits filed by patients injured by bad medical care. The doctors staged white-coat protests at state capitals and buttonholed legislators with their claims that lawsuits and rising insurance costs were forcing them to stop delivering babies and to give up their practices.

Cornelius hand carried these gripes to the back halls of the Indiana statehouse. His goal was to win legislation limiting the amount of money injured people could receive in malpractice lawsuits, awards that were generally paid not by the doctors but by the companies that employed him. As he made his rounds, Cornelius told stories about frivolous lawsuits and ambulance-chasing lawyers. He argued that a cap on lawsuit damages would help the state rein in health care costs.

Indianapolis's governing class was persuaded. In 1975 the legislature passed one of the strictest medical malpractice laws in the country. The new law capped all awards at $500,000, including actual losses like wages and bills related to botched medical care, regardless of how much those bills actually amounted to. And legislators abolished pain-and-suffering awards entirely. In the places you'd expect, the champagne flowed.

The new law made Indiana, and Cornelius, early pioneers in tort "reform," an emerging movement led by insurance companies, doctors, big corporations, and conservative ideologues who sought to restrict personal injury and other lawsuits.

Cornelius's work on the medical malpractice bill was just one item in a long and quirky professional resume. He went on to lobby for several years on behalf of a state police group to ban cop-killer bullets, then later moved into journalism and, eventually, to running a car dealership.

But in late 1988, the forty-three-year-old Cornelius fell and injured his left knee. A few months later, he went to the hospital for routine arthroscopic surgery to fix the problem. When he went home, however, he suffered a great deal of pain. He called the surgeon several times that day without reaching him. The surgeon finally called back the next day, told Cornelius's wife, Cathy, to get him a bedpan, and then left on a skiing trip, saying he'd see Cornelius when he got back.

Cornelius continued to suffer, so he consulted another surgeon, who immediately diagnosed him with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a degenerative nerve disorder brought on by an accident or medical prodecure. The condition is so painful that many sufferers desire to amputate the affected limb rather than endure the torture that comes with it, according to Stephen B. Caplin, Cornelius's lawyer.

To deal with his condition, which at that point was still treatable, Cornelius sought care from a physical therapist, who a few months later, Cornelius claimed, accidentally jolted his leg with a current of electricity from an improperly used medical device. The zap rendered his condition incurable and cost him the use of his leg. A year later, Cornelius had surgery to install a filter in his leg to catch blood clots, but the main vein from his leg to his heart was punctured. Cornelius would have quietly bled to death were it not for a visit that evening from his wife, who sounded the alarm. Another doctor intervened to save his life, although Cornelius suffered a punctured lung in the process.

The series of medical mishaps left Cornelius unemployed, a wheelchair user, and dependent on bottled oxygen and a continuous morphine drip to dampen the pain. His medical expenses and lost wages were estimated at more than $5 million should he live to retirement age.

Following the three-word American tradition known as "sue the bastards," Cornelius consulted a lawyer and filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the physical therapist, the hospital, and some of the doctors. That's when he discovered exactly what he'd accomplished back in 1975. The medical malpractice bill he'd helped pass through the Indiana legislature as a lobbyist ensured that he could recover only a fraction of the $5 million in losses the health care system's failures had cost him. In 1990 Cornelius settled his lawsuits against the hospital and physical therapist for $500,000, the most he could get. The experience transformed Cornelius into something of a consumer advocate, and he used his lobbying skills to help Ralph Nader and others across the country campaign against further restrictions on lawsuits. He went on The Phil Donahue Show.

In 1994 he wrote a mea culpa in the New York Times in which he wrote, "I have received last rites from my church. . . . At the age of 49, I am told that I have less than two years to live. . . . All of my suffering might have been worthwhile, on some cosmic scale, if the law had accomplished its stated purpose. But it hasn't." He went on to note that the argument he'd used to persuade legislators to cap malpractice awards -- that it would reduce health-care costs -- had proved to be a sham. Health care costs in Indiana had soared 139 percent between 1980 and 1990, he wrote, noting that it was just about the national average.

Cornelius's public act of contrition couldn't erase the severity of his condition. The daily dose of narcotics prevented him from driving, and the pain left him unable to work steadily, according to Cathy Cornelius, who became the breadwinner for a family of seven. Depression plagued him. His marriage fell apart, and as Cornelius wrote in the Times, "The emotional fallout on our five children has been difficult to witness, to say the least."

On March 1, 1995, Cornelius died, after intentionally overdosing on morphine. Along with his suicide note, he left behind one last piece of written testimony for the Indiana state legislature, which was considering a new bill to restrict lawsuits even further.



For years, the tort reform movement was something of a fringe element in Washington and elsewhere, a special-interest group that popped up every ten years or so when insurance premiums got out of whack. Democrats have historically opposed it, and Americans have never put lawsuits at the top of their list of national concerns. They're far more concerned about education, crime, and Social Security. Even the term itself, tort reform, is largely meaningless outside of Washington and certain legal and business circles. (Tort is the legal term for "injury.") As the famous Mississippi trial lawyer Richard "Dickie" Scruggs reportedly once said, "Most Americans don't know what tort reform is, and if they did, they'd be against it." But when President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry sparred over the issue in front of fifty million TV viewers in the second 2004 presidential debate, tort reform went mainstream, joining the Iraq war and illegal immigration as top issues facing the nation.

During that debate in St. Louis, audience member Norma-Jean Laurent posed a tough question for the Democratic challenger. Laurent noted how Kerry had bemoaned the rising cost of health care for Americans. Yet she wanted to know how the candidate could reconcile this concern with his choice of a running mate who had made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals.

The question reflected the ongoing debate over high rates for doctors' medical malpractice insurance. Bush had turned this into a major campaign issue by blaming the problem on greedy trial lawyers and frivolous lawsuits and calling for restrictions on jury awards. It also presented Kerry with a tremendous opportunity. As a lawyer himself, Kerry had a powerful opportunity to deliver a spirited defense of the civil justice system. He could have argued for the good sense of American jurors, who know a frivolous lawsuit when they see one, without needing the heavy hand of Washington to tell them what to do. He might have suggested that people need the legal system to hold doctors accountable for the injuries they cause, which number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Most important, he might have pointed out that malpractice awards had little to do with rising health care costs.

Instead, Kerry simply said, "John Edwards and I support tort reform." Kerry then referred Laurent to his website, where he said she could find a tort reform plan outlining his proposals for limiting lawsuits.

Kerry's dodge reflected just how much success the business lobby has had in framing the nation's conversation about the civil justice system. In putting himself and trial lawyer John Edwards on record as tort reform supporters, Kerry was explicitly endorsing the conventional wisdom put forth by Bush and his business backers that Americans are too litigious, that an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits is driving doctors out of business, and that lawsuits are hindering America's economic progress.

Kerry's office never responded to several requests to interview him for this book to clarify his position, but in truth, Kerry and Edwards did not support tort reform, at least not as it's commonly articulated by its major proponents. In the Senate, neither man had ever voted for a major tort reform bill, and Kerry would go on to vote against a bill to restrict class actions in 2005. Apparently, though, not even the $33 million donated to his and Edwards's campaigns by plaintiff lawyers, whose primary issue is fighting off limits on lawsuits, or the fact that his kid brother is a trial lawyer, could persuade Kerry to rise to the defense of the beleaguered American civil justice system on prime-time TV. And why would he?

Thanks to three decades and millions of dollars' worth of careful marketing by corporations and their paid legions of lobbyists, pundits, and think-tank hacks, it's hard to find an American who hasn't heard the story of Stella Liebeck, the woman who spilled McDonald's coffee in her lap and won a $3-million jury verdict against the company. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly support limits on "lawsuit abuse" and believe that out-of-control litigation is just another symptom of the decline of personal responsibility in America.

Persuading Americans that the "litigation crisis" is a myth was a losing battle, and one that would take a lot longer than the brief time Kerry had to respond in the televised debate. Besides, as it's currently packaged, tort reform sounds so reasonable. Who could be against reform?

But the self-described "reformers" Kerry was rhetorically linking arms with are anything but. They are a retrograde alliance of insurance companies, corporate interests, and political operatives -- mostly Republican -- who seek to do away with many of the consumer, worker, and environmental protections established in the 1960s and 1970s. They have manufactured a litigation crisis that does not exist, to support their efforts to limit or even abolish average citizens' right to sue for damages when they have been wrongfully injured. And the legal rights they seek to curtail are things that most people take for granted, at least until they really need them.

It's hard to think of another public policy issue where the reality is so far removed from the myths that dominate the public discussion. Popular culture regularly leaves the impression that justice in the courtroom is alive and well. Movies like Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action suggest that David regularly bests Goliath in the courthouse and that great legal heroes are still fighting the good fight on behalf of the little guy. That impression, though, couldn't be more wrong.

New state laws pushed by anti-lawsuit crusaders and slanted media coverage are partly responsible for pushing jury trials to the verge of extinction, and the trial lawyers who lead them are an endangered species. Sober government data repeatedly show that plaintiffs' success rates at trial are at an all-time low, and they're winning ever smaller amounts of money. The right to a civil jury trial -- guaranteed by the Bill of Rights -- is in serious jeopardy. Personal injury lawsuits, the kind most despised by Bush and his business supporters, are on the decline. Punitive damages awards, which are given only in cases involving really egregious conduct, are equally rare events. The notion that Americans who take on deep-pocketed defendants or health care providers are making out like bandits is belied by numbers showing that plaintiffs in civil cases are taking it on the chin, losing far more often than they win.

Yet the perception of the legal system as out of whack has proven highly resistant to correction by the truth. This is by design. The movement against greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations (especially the tobacco and insurance industries, but many others besides), to get this issue on the table and limit their vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public-relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "Astroturf" grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to journalists. And in 2004, they succeeded in making the issue the stuff of a presidential debate, after having funneled millions of dollars into every one of Bush's political campaigns since 1994.

For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class-action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors, in turn, blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients.

In larger terms, the tort reform movement is just the logical sequel to the war against government regulation. Unable to fully dismantle popular consumer-protection and environmental laws in Congress, corporations have changed tactics and instead gone after trial lawyers and the suits that give teeth to those laws. This has proved to be an effective strategy, achieving the same results without mobilizing political resistance. After all, who can really come to the defense of lawyers?

Tort reform also draws on the ideological backlash against the 1960s-era policies that expanded civil rights and protections for various minority groups and added new legal remedies for people injured by defective products and environmental degradation. The language of antilawsuit propaganda is rich in calls for "personal responsibility." The welfare queen of the 1980s has been replaced by the fat guy suing McDonald's. The movement is populated by people who want to return to the golden years when elderly women who spilled coffee on their laps got sympathy, not punitive damages.

Even so, tort reform for many years had been a hard sell. Most of the companies looking for protection from lawsuits had such dismal safety and environmental records that they were case studies in the need for lawsuits. Tort reform might have remained on the fringes were it not for the beauty of polling data. In the early 1990s, based on polling and focus-group research largely underwritten by the tobacco industry, Republicans discovered that tort reform offered an ideal wedge issue in competitive campaigns. When framed as "lawsuit abuse" and focused on greedy trial lawyers rather than polluting and negligent corporations, it played wonderfully as a populist notion with voters.

As Bush also discovered, it made for a fabulous fund-raising vehicle as the "chronic defendants" in the business world happily anted up to support lawsuit restrictions. Even more importantly, though, GOP strategists realized that by attacking lawsuits and trial lawyers, they had a tremendous opportunity to undermine a principal source of Democratic support. Limit the earnings of plaintiffs' lawyers through caps on damages and other restrictions on lawsuits, and you limit a major source of income for the Democratic Party.

This book is in part about that marriage of corporate desire for immunity from lawsuits and the new breed of GOP politics. It's also the story of how big businesses succeeded in taking bad public-policy proposals, packaging and stage managing them, and selling them to the public through well-paid "experts," gullible journalists, and intensely misleading propaganda -- all to the detriment of the average citizen, who still thinks that if he ever needs the legal system, it will be there for him. Unfortunately, as this book will show, in many parts of the country today, that is no longer the case.

Since 1986, forty-eight states have passed some type of restriction on lawsuits, ranging from limits on lawyers' fees, to restrictions on plaintiffs' access to expert testimony, to caps on noneconomic and punitive-damage awards. Since 1995 Congress also has passed legislation to rein in shareholders' lawsuits and class actions, and it has attempted to grant legal immunity to favored industries, from defense contractors to pharmaceutical companies to gun manufacturers to fast-food chains.

None of these restrictions on civil lawsuits and the power of juries that have come over the past twenty years would have been possible without the complicity of the media. The vast majority of the reporting on the civil justice system has been lazy and gullible. Reporters have bought into the propaganda, the spoon-fed story tips and bogus research generated by the tort reform movement. Respectable outlets like 60 Minutes and U.S. News & World Report have reported outright falsehoods about lawsuits and the legal system, without apology. There are reporters who have questioned the conventional wisdom, but they are few and far between.

In one sense, it's easy to see how it happens. Few newspaper or TV reporters ever cover the civil side of the legal system as a beat, so they rarely understand its complexities. They only report the occasional big verdict, which skews the coverage by suggesting that such events are commonplace, when they aren't. Unlike most Americans, journalists are also frequently threatened with lawsuits, and occasionally sued. The same goes for their employers, which are increasingly the same types of huge corporations that have long backed the tort reform movement.

The truth is that the corporate war on the courts is also a war on journalists. It's an effort to keep the lid on potentially damaging information. Journalists are deluding themselves if they think they can produce important and groundbreaking investigative reporting without the documents and other information that is produced in discovery through private lawsuits. The Catholic Church wasn't about to turn over its files on pedophile priests just because the Boston Globe asked nicely. Most of the documentation on the scandal, including the names of the victims and the errant priests, came into the public eye because those victims sought out lawyers, who then forced the church to come clean under the threat of court sanctions.

Indeed, much of the country's greatest investigative journalism over the decades has relied heavily on information produced in the very private lawsuits that tort reform seeks to restrict. Who can forget the story of the Ford Pinto, where lawyers turned up the written cost-benefit analysis the automaker used to decide whether it was worth $5 per car to prevent passengers of the Pinto from going up in flames? The 1977 story in Mother Jones magazine that turned the Pinto into a national scandal would never have been written without the information produced in those lawsuits.

Only through private lawsuits did the public learn the extent to which asbestos companies hid the dangers of their products -- products that have caused the deaths of more than 250,000 people since the 1960s, with numbers increasing daily. Ditto for tobacco litigation, which forced the release of millions of internal documents from big tobacco companies showing just how much they were lying to the public. All of this litigation produced award-winning journalism, which in turn created the impetus for change for the public good.

The same big businesses that want to put caps on medical malpractice lawsuits also want to limit plaintiffs' ability to request documents in discovery, and they want to keep those documents that are released sealed away from the public view. While they claim to fear the financial implications of litigation, they are just as afraid of the outrage that might occur if the public really knew the truth about how they run their businesses or treat workers and consumers.

In a country with a weak regulatory system, moreover, it's rarely the Food and Drug Administration or the Department of Justice that sheds light on these critical public concerns and generates calls to withdraw dangerous drugs, ban toxic substances, or address rollover risks on SUVs. It's private citizens through lawsuits. In fact, not only do journalists rely on these lawsuits for information, so do government regulatory agencies that lack the resources or the power or the political will to investigate themselves. Oftentimes, the most important function of civil lawsuits, even beyond compensation or justice for injured victims, is their role in unearthing critical health, safety, and financial information about the workings of private institutions.

Perhaps more than anything, tort reform is a frontal assault on the civil jury. It's designed to limit the power of average citizens to set community standards, mete out justice, and to hold wrongdoers accountable in the courts. That's why tort reform, at its heart, is an elitist notion based on distrust of the intelligence and good sense of American citizens to sit in the jury box and make a decision. That same logic can be used to make a case against voting, as voters and jurors are one and the same. With its current emphasis on caps on damage awards, tort reform creates arbitrary limits on a jury's power and vests judges -- some who have lifetime political appointments -- with vastly more authority over the outcome of a trial.

No system of justice is perfect, but the American civil jury system is close to perfect democracy. As a lawyer once explained to me, jury verdicts are like having 100 percent voter participation in elections; except in the case of the jury, the "voters" are much better informed. On a jury, everyone has to listen to the evidence presented by both sides, hopefully by articulate advocates, and then they have to vote. The jury is a tremendously powerful institution, powerful enough to prompt businesses to spend millions of dollars trying to disarm it. The Founding Fathers saw the jury trial as a protection against imperial judges, and the Constitution was nearly scuttled because it didn't include a provision for civil jury trials. (One was later added in the Seventh Amendment.) The French author and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville thought the civil jury was evidence of Americans' great faith in their ability to govern themselves.

In supporting the tort reformers' agenda, Americans don't seem to realize that they are hastening their own exclusion from the democratic process and creating yet another impediment to meaningful participation in public affairs. It's not just the ability to recover financially from a wrongful injury that's disappearing as a result of restrictions on lawsuits. Fundamental constitutional rights are dying a quiet death, as the thousands of serious lawsuits that never got filed are eclipsed by one or two big ones that did. The irony of the tort reform movement is that even as it's convinced Americans that the nation is in the midst of a litigation crisis, it's reinforced their misguided belief that the system will work for them if they need it. Like Frank Cornelius, a great many people have discovered the hard way that this just isn't the case. This book, I hope, will tell some of their stories and serve as a wake-up call about what's been lost -- and what else we are about to lose -- as the nation embraces the corporate war on lawsuits.

And there's more here and here.

The author has a blog, which is to say she's staying on the story, at least to some degree.

And as is not uncommon, the book was begat (as they say) by this article.

Hav-A-Laff! Joke of the Day

I'm so scared this is true. But how can it be when we don't have that evil socialized medicine??

Two patients limp into two different medical clinics with the
same complaint. Both have trouble walking and appear to
require a hip replacement.

The first patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the
same day and has a time booked for surgery the following week.

The second sees his family doctor after waiting a week for an
appointment, then waits eight weeks to see a specialist, then
gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed for another week, and
finally has his surgery scheduled for six weeks from then.

Why the different treatment for the two patients?

The first is a Golden Retriever.

The second is a Senior Citizen.

Link.

Funny, Sort of....

Link.

If They Aren't into Reality, How About a Voice from Beyond the Veil?

David Halberstam, from Heaven, rips Our Leaders new ones.

More Genius from Our Leaders' Far Right Enablers

In early 2005, we were winning in Iraq... and then, I guess, reality intruded or something.

A wingnut hallucinates, his hallucinations being passed off as reality:

What Went Right
How the U.S. began to quell the insurgency in Iraq

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the May 9th, 2005, issue
of National Review.

"Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." — T. E. Lawrence
It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.

If current trends continue, our counter-insurgent campaign in Iraq will be fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the British victory over a Communist insurgency in Malaysia in the 1950s, a textbook example of this form of war. Our counterinsurgency has gone through the same stages as that of the Brits five decades ago: confusion in the initial reaction to the insurgency, followed by a long period of adjustment, and finally the slow but steady erosion of the insurgency's military and political base. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone's whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.

This doesn't mean the war couldn't still go wrong. "It's not over," says a top officer in Iraq. A key assassination, continued Sunni rejectionism, an inter-sectarian explosion, or something unforeseen — all could still derail us in Iraq. Nor does it mean that our effort is perfect. "I give us a B minus," says an administration official, a tough grader who is nonetheless an optimist. But it does mean that as of mid-April 2005 we are winning, just as surely as we were losing in the darkest days of the dual radical-Shia and radical-Sunni uprisings a year ago.

The basic approach of the Pentagon to the insurgency was right from the beginning. "The strategy was always political as well as military," says a Pentagon official. A counterinsurgency is never about simply killing enemy fighters the way it is — or at least seems — on a conventional battlefield. Insurgents have an endless capacity to replicate themselves, unless political conditions are created that drain them of support. If top policymakers always knew that intellectually, we have had to stumble our way to finding the correct ways to act on the insight.

Based on conversations with administration officials and key combatant commanders, this is the story of how, two years after the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has begun to win the war for Iraq . . .

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF THE DIGITAL VERSION OF NATIONAL REVIEW. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION TO NR DIGITAL OR NATIONAL REVIEW, YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR A SUBSCRIPTION TO NATIONAL REVIEW here OR NATIONAL REVIEW DIGITAL here (a subscription to NR includes Digital access).

Okay, one simple answer to a simple question: they have no shame.

The Confession of Another Scmuck who Believed Our Leader's Lies

All of these guys have proven that there too stupid to participate in anything involving the commonweal.

Bush's stand on insurance plan contradicts words of compassion

John J. DiIulio Jr.
is Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion and Civil Society, and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.

Eight years ago this week, on July 22, 1999, George W. Bush delivered his first presidential campaign speech, titled "The Duty of Hope." Speaking in Indianapolis, he rejected as "destructive" the idea that "if only government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved." Rather, "from North Central Philadelphia to South Central Los Angeles," government "must act in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need." There are "some things the government should be doing, like Medicaid for poor children."

I helped draft the speech and served in 2001 as an adviser to Bush. He has made good on some compassion pledges. For instance, he has increased funding for public schools that serve low-income children. His $150 million program for mentoring 100,000 children of prisoners has made progress. In May, he pledged an additional $30 billion in U.S. aid to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and save Africa's affected children.

On the other hand, poverty rates have risen in many cities. In 2005, Washington fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and the White House has vacillated in its support for the region's recovery and rebuilding process. Most urban religious nonprofit organizations that provide social services in low-income communities still get no public support whatsoever. Several recent administration positions on social policy contradict the compassion vision Bush articulated in 1999.

In May, Bush rejected a bipartisan House bill that increased funding for Head Start, a program that benefits millions of low-income preschoolers. His spokesmen claimed the bill was bad because it did not include a provision giving faith-based preschool programs an absolute right to discriminate on religious grounds in hiring.

That reason reverses a principle Bush proclaimed in his 1999 speech: "We will keep a commitment to pluralism, not discriminating for or against Methodists or Mormons or Muslims, or good people of no faith at all." As many studies show, most urban faith-based nonprofits that serve their own needy neighbors do not discriminate against beneficiaries, volunteers or staff on religious grounds. These inner-city churches and grassroots groups would love to expand Head Start in their communities.

Last week, Bush threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate plan that would add $35 billion over five years to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The decade-old program insures children in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to afford private insurance. The extra $7 billion a year offered by the Senate would cover a few million more children. New money for the purpose would come from raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

Several former Bush advisers have urged the White House to accept some such SCHIP plan. So have many governors in both parties and Republican leaders in the Senate. In 2003, Bush supported a Medicare bill that increased government spending on prescription drugs for elderly middle-income citizens by hundreds of billions of dollars. But he has pledged only $1 billion a year more for low-income children's health insurance. His spokesmen say doing any more for the "government-subsidized program" would encourage families to drop private insurance.

But the health-insurance market has already priced out working-poor families by the millions. With a growing population of low-income children, $1 billion a year more would be insufficient even to maintain current per-capita child coverage levels. Some speculate that SCHIP is now hostage to negotiations over the president's broader plan to expand health coverage via tax cuts and credits. But his plan has no chance in this Congress; besides, treating health insurance for needy children as a political bargaining chip would be wrong.

Bush should return to Indianapolis. There, SCHIP covers children in families with incomes as high as three times the federal poverty line. The Republican governor who signed that program into law is Mitch Daniels, Bush's first budget office director. For compassion's sake, the president should compromise on SCHIP - say, $5 billion a year more - and work to leave no child uninsured.

Link.

Professor, please shut up and crawl under a rock. You've done far more harm by supporting and enabling the America-haters who rule us than you'll ever make up for.

And Professor, Bush's acts bely his lies about compassion because they're lies and because there is no compassion anywhere in his family other than for their wallets. "None are so blind...."

Read at Your Own Risk: Yet Another Post About What Absolute PAthological Liars the Wingnuts are

If interested, just go here and, if that isn't enough, here.

Simple Question, No Answer?

The legend that is Atrios has an occasional feature, simple answers to simple questions.

Well, I have the simple question but no simple answer:

Alberto Gonzalez: Is there anything more to his job as Attorney General than being a constant liar?

Rudy: The Walking House of Lies; Republicans Like Him Only Because They Don't Know the Truth

Well, as a sort of New Yorker who knows, I guess I have to help enlighten them, even if they're not reality-based....

A few weeks ago, Gallup conducted a national poll and found that three out of four Republicans (74%) believe Giuliani would make an "acceptable" GOP presidential nominee. None of the other Republican hopefuls came close.

The conventional wisdom suggested that these results, mirrored in other polls, spoke to a key development in Republican politics. Despite Giuliani's support for abortion rights and gay rights as mayor, the GOP faithful apparently no longer consider his social positions a disqualifier in a presidential race.

But the conventional wisdom didn't consider one nagging detail: most Republicans don't know Giuliani's positions on the hot-button, culture-war issues that have driven GOP politics for a generation.

As Eric Kleefeld explained, the new poll from the Pew Research Center found that when Republicans and GOP-leaners "are asked if they can name the Republican presidential candidate who is pro-choice, only 41% could correct name Rudy Giuliani. Among self-described conservatives, the answer wasn't much better at a mere 47% correct."

This is similar to results of a Pew Research poll from June, when fewer than half of Republicans realized that Giuliani has always supported abortion rights.

I haven't seen any data on the subject, but I'd guess that an even higher percentage of the GOP probably doesn’t know that Giuliani supported gay rights and has a record as a thrice-married adulterer, either.

Maybe Republican voters care about this, maybe not. But for every poll that shows the former NYC mayor as the frontrunner, the political world should pause a moment to consider just how many of his supporters appreciate these details -- and how many are likely to hear about them from Giuliani's GOP rivals before voters head to the polls next year.

[more]

How Rupert Stole the Journal

Principal, $30 millions worth to the decadent Bancroft family.

And here's more about that.

Big Journalism: Today's Example of its Wretched State

Good old Barron's goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, not necessarily in that order.

Delusional or deliberate lying:

SOME READERS HAVE ASKED WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS for Barron's now that its parent company, Dow Jones, has agreed to be bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. We are hoping that it someday could mean, among other things, a Barron's TV show on the soon-to-be-launched Fox Business Channel, perhaps more distribution of Barron's content in places like India and China, and greater investment in Barron's Online, so that, for instance, readers can more easily exchange views about their investments.

What it will not mean is any change in the standards of accuracy, fairness and authority that underpin our journalism. Readers rely on Barron's to give them a front-row seat on Wall Street, so we can let them know what the pros are thinking -- and let them know when we feel the pros have got it wrong or pushed a trend too far. The latest example: this week's cover story on overlooked opportunities in the junk-bond market.

Readers depend on our judgment to help them invest, whether for their children's education or for their own retirement. Any undue influence on these judgments would damage our relationship with readers and damage our business. Rupert Murdoch knows this.

Yes, sure. Too bad News Corp.'s track record gives the preceding absolutely not even a scintila of support. In other words, again, it's either naively wishful or a deliberate lie.

A few weeks ago, in discussing journalistic ethics with members of the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal for more than a century, Murdoch said: "Any interference -- or even hint of interference -- would break the trust that exists between the paper and its readers, something I am unwilling to countenance. Apart from breaching the public's trust, it would simply be bad business."

Toward this end, News Corp. and the Bancrofts agreed on standards that will apply to all Dow Jones publications and are modeled on the longstanding Dow Jones Code of Conduct. Among them:

• Facts are accurate and fairly presented.

• Analyses represent the publications' best independent judgments, rather than their preferences, or those of their owner, sources, advertisers or information providers.

• Opinions represent only the applicable publication's editorial philosophies, based on the core principle of "free people and free markets."

• There are no hidden agendas in any journalism undertakings.

• Accuracy and fairness extend to coverage of any real or perceived business interests of News Corp.

The above will in fact remain operative until it doesn't.

And this ceaseless dishonesty from first-class big journalism is why they're losing readers, their audience and money. First clue: the readers/audience wants information, not horseshit. If I want lies, I really don't need to buy the Journal.

The sublime: my neighbor, Alan abelson writes also in this week's Barron's:

Take, by way of example, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony before a House committee looking into what prompted the Pentagon, when Rummy was still its boss, to issue a false report on the death of Pat Tillman. Cpl. Tillman, a celebrated enlistee who had abandoned a lucrative contract in professional football to sign up, was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. The initial report was that he had died in combat and he was awarded a posthumous Silver Star. A full five weeks elapsed before the Army informed his family of the actual circumstances of his death.

Mr. Rumsfeld indignantly told the inquiring representatives that their assumptions were not only base but baseless and there was no attempt at a cover-up on his watch. After a little reflection, even the most skeptical soul would have to acknowledge the logic of his denial. "Cover-up," after all, connotes deliberate lying, as distinguished from routine lying. And in Washington, of course, lying is nothing if not routine. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Rumsfeld, an old Washington hand, properly resented the idea that he or anyone under him ever lied in any way but routinely.

We might view, in like forgiving vein, another unfortunate case of miscommunication, involving Attorney General Gonzales and his role in the dismissal of a clutch of federal prosecutors. Mr. Gonzales claimed executive privilege when questioned by a Senate committee probing the firings, but while refusing to discuss sensitive details, stoutly provided an overarching defense by insisting he doesn't know anything. Which happens to be the literal truth, so why, pray tell us, do those hideous legislators continue to badger the poor fellow?

George Bush, of course, bears the ultimate responsibility for commanding his underlings to invoke executive privilege, which boils down to not having to blab about what they may have told the president or what he may have said to them in the privacy of the Oval Office. His grounds for ordering them to remain silent is that his trusted aides might otherwise be deterred from offering him their unfettered advice. Which, alas for his argument, considering the kind of advice Mr. Bush has been getting, might be something devoutly to be wished for.

To be sure, even without the dubious excuse of executive privilege (is the nation's security really at risk if it's revealed that Karl Rove played his usual seamy role in the canning of the prosecutors?), it's traditional in Washington, no matter who happens to be running the show, to avoid an unpleasant truth. Wall Street's prime gift to this administration, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, when he can spare a few moments from busily bashing China for its strong currency, tells anyone who will listen that the subprime credit crisis is contained.

Jeez, that's awfully supportive coming from something of a conservative. A "liberal" couldn't be so critical of Our Leaders. (OTOH, I'm sure the comrade will be one of the first to go once the new regime truly takes charge....)

A Place to Surf

Warren Ellis swears by Greg Palast -- as we should too (and do).

Thank You, Diebold, For Your Continuing Efforts to Destroy Our Right to Vote

Essential reading:

Diebold continues to attempt to ensure that the nightmare of 2000 will never be repeated where a national election comes down to the votes of five partisan hacks with no respect for a system of law. Diebold plans to do this by ensuring that elections are easily rigged:

Digital Daily
AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
Published on August 3, 2007
by John Paczkowski

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine–the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus–can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet. The exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes and hotel minibars.”

–Princeton professor Ed Felten

With the presidential primary approaching, Diebold Election Systems is finally developing a voter-verified paper trail–of bad press. Earlier this week, the company made headlines when a team of investigators found fundamental security vulnerabilities in its touchscreen voting machines (as well as those of rivals Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic).

Now it’s back in the news again, thanks to another government-ordered study that found its optical-scanning machines to be flawed as well. According to a report released by Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning, Diebold’s AccuVote OS optical-scan voting devices could compromise the upcoming presidential primary elections in which they’re to be used. The machine’s “memory card can be preprogrammed to redistribute votes cast for selected candidates on that terminal, including swapping the votes for two candidates,” the report explains. “The attack can be carried out with low probability of detection, assuming that audit with paper ballots are infrequent and that programmed cards are not detected before use.”

An unsettling revelation for anyone concerned about this whole idea of “election integrity.” But never fear, Diebold has vowed to patch the vulnerabilities identified in the report by the Aug. 17 deadline given it by the state. If it doesn’t, it risks decertification, which some would argue might not be a bad idea at this point. Remember, Diebold is the company that designed its widely criticized electronic-voting systems, to be opened with a hotel minibar key and then posted a detailed photograph of that key to its online store.

It’s the company that can’t seem to safeguard its source code. It’s the company that evaded election transparency laws in North Carolina. And it’s the company that modified its machines without notifying election officials. Twice.

Link.

But there's much more (and let's remember that's it also pretty much applies to all e-voting machines):

Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election, and an attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an election using viruses, according to a review of Diebold's source code.

"The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," read the University of California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State as part of a two-month "top-to-bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for use in California.

The assessment of Diebold's source code revealed an attacker needs only limited access to compromise an election.

"An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive -- malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers," it said.

The report, titled "Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System," was apparently released Thursday, just one day before California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is to decide which machines are certified for use in California's 2008 presidential primary elections.

The source-code review identified four main weaknesses in Diebold's software, including: vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to install malware on the machines, a failure to guarantee the secrecy of ballots, a lack of controls to prevent election workers from tampering with ballots and results, and susceptibility to viruses that could allow attackers to an influence an election.

"A virus could allow an attacker who only had access to a few machines or memory cards, or possibly to only one, to spread malicious software to most, if not all, of a county's voting machines," the report said. "Thus, large-scale election fraud in the Diebold system does not necessarily require physical access to a large number of voting machines."

The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said.

The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.

In conclusion, the report said Diebold's voting machines had not been designed with security as a priority. "For this reason, the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design," it said.

[more]

Speaking of more, the report cited is here.

And as for not just Diebold, it's even worse:

This has not been a good week for e-voting companies. First came the report out of California that the security had problems on every machine tested by independent security experts, followed quickly by security experts finding problems with other machines in Florida. This should come as no surprise. Every time a security expert seems to get a chance to check out these machines, they find problems. What was odd, though, about the announcement on Monday coming out of California, was that the state had only released some of the reports. It left out the source code review. However, late Thursday, the source code reports were finally released and things don't look much better. Apparently all of the e-voting machines are vulnerable to malicious attacks that could "affect election outcomes." The report also points out: "An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive -- malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers." This, of course, is what others have been saying for years, and which Diebold always brushes off. Ed Felten has gone through the reports and is amazed to find that all of the e-voting machines seem to have very similar security problems -- and that many problems that Diebold had insisted it fixed in 2003 were still present. Remember how Diebold had used the master password "1111" in their machines? Now their machines use hard-coded passwords like "diebold" and (I kid you not) "12345678." At some point, isn't it time for Diebold (and the other e-voting machine makers) to stand up and admit that their machines aren't secure and, in fact, were never secure? At the very least, the company owes the world a huge apology -- but somehow, given its past behavior whenever its machines are shown as insecure, that seems unlikely to happen.

Link.

But having just given Diebold a partial pass, that is, showing that they're all bad, just not Diebold, let me point out that Diebold has done far more to push this vile e-voting than anyone else. So yes, Diebold is the worst among equals.

Truth in Blogging: Al Qaeda Lies like Partisan Political Hacks

Should be no real surprise but here's the story. And posting this confirms my fair + balanced creds.

What They Saw on Their Summer Vacation

So from China, some of us went home to the New York metropolitan area while the wife and child spent nearly two weeks in and on the road from San Francisco.

And up in true hippie country, this what they saw....

The Triumph of Republican Small Government

Small means ignoring matters for which not enough "campaign" contributions are not attracted. Like infrastructure maintenance, inspection, etc.

Not saying it's the case here but it too often is.

So this lack of respect, let's say for mundane things like ensuring that s bridge would actually stand longer than the short term....

Minnesota officials were warned as early as 1990 that the bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River was "structurally deficient," yet they relied on a strategy of patchwork fixes and stepped-up inspections.

"We thought we had done all we could," state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan told reporters not far from the mangled remains of the span. "Obviously something went terribly wrong."

Questions about the cause of the collapse and whether it could have been prevented arose Thursday as authorities shifted from rescue efforts to a grim recovery operation, searching for bodies that may be hidden beneath the river's swirling currents.

***

In 1990, the federal government gave the I-35W bridge a rating of "structurally deficient," citing significant corrosion in its bearings. The bridge is one of about 77,000 bridges in that category nationwide, 1,160 in Minnesota alone.

The designation means some portions of the bridge needed to be scheduled for repair or replacement, and it was on a schedule for inspection every two years.
Dorgan said the bearings could not have been repaired without jacking up the entire deck of the bridge. Because the bearings were not sliding, inspectors concluded the corrosion was not a major issue.

During the 1990s, later inspections found fatigue cracks and corrosion in the steel around the bridge's joints. Those problems were repaired. Starting in 1993, the state said, the bridge was inspected annually instead of every other year.

A 2005 federal inspection also rated the bridge structurally deficient, giving it a 50 on a scale of 100 for structural stability.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said while the inspection didn't indicate the bridge was at risk of failing, "if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions."

***

"There was a view that the bridge was ultimately and eventually going to need to be replaced," [Gov. Tim Pawlenty] said. "But it appears from the information that we have available that a timeline for that was not immediate or imminent, but more in the future."

Link.

And see this too.

It's True: Rudy is a Nightmare

Rudy: Worse Than Bush?
By Jon Wiener, TheNation.com
Posted on August 1, 2007, Printed on August 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58480/

In recent polls, Rudy Giuliani leads his rivals in the Republican primary race by about ten points. That's surprising, since he's been a supporter of gay rights, abortion rights and immigrant rights as well as gun control. It suggests that a President Giuliani would be better than Bush. I asked Kevin Baker -- he's author of the well-known City of Fire trilogy of novels about New York City -- Strivers Row, Dreamland and Paradise Alley. He also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's, where his essay, "A Fate Worse Than Bush," leads the magazine's August issue.

Giuliani's main claim to fame is his conduct immediately after 9/11. Many still remember his TV press conference the night of the attacks, when a reporter asked how many casualties there would be. Giuliani had a magnificent answer: "More than we can bear." Compared to what President Bush was saying, that was Shakespeare.

But what about the rest of his performance around 9/11?

"Most of 9-11 was actually a debacle for the city government," Baker told me in an interview, and "Giuliani bears a great deal of the responsibility." The World Trade Center had been attacked in 1993, but Giuliani had "learned none of the lessons that could have been learned. There was no serious attempt to coordinate the radios between the police and fire departments, or even to insure that the fire department had its own communications that would work inside buildings." The consequences? "Probably hundreds of unnecessary deaths that day."

The second failure: Giuliani insisted on locating his emergency control center in the World Trade Center complex, even though that had been the target of the 1993 attack. "He did that against the advice of virtually all the security experts he consulted," Baker explained. "He put it on the twenty-third floor of a forty-seven-story building, World Trade Center Tower 7. It included an unprotected, 7,000 gallon fuel source on the seventh floor, a sort of a fuse to set the building off. When the building was hit by debris on 9/11, that did indeed bring the whole building down."

What if Giuliani he had been in his new command center on 9/11?

"He was within a few minutes of dying right there that day," Baker said. "Instead he ended up having to spend most of the 102 minutes between when the first plane hit and when the second tower came down simply walking around the area with staff members, looking for someplace to set up a new command center."

What should he have been doing?

"Other things badly needed to be done," Baker said. "Realizing there was no communicating with the firemen who were in these towers, maybe they could have set up a trail of runners or something to tell them they should get out of there, the towers are coming down. Nothing like that was done."

Giuliani told the 9/11 Commission that the firemen in the towers died because they refused orders to come out. He said they wanted to save lives of people trapped inside.

"That's a demonstrable lie," Baker told me. "The firemen in the buildings were simply waiting for orders. They never got the word. It's easy to second-guess people in such a traumatic event, and anybody could be forgiven for not making the right decisions in the middle of everything. But to go to Congress months later and lie about this -- I find that despicable."

The workers at Ground Zero in the following months, we now know, were exposed to significant health hazards. How much of that is Giuliani's responsibility? "He made no real attempt to determine the safety of working there," Baker said. "That was also the responsibility of Christie Todd Whitman, was the EPA Administrator at the time."

So what did Giuliani do after 9/11?

"He very quickly took the disaster of 9/11 as a great opportunity," Baker told me. "He proposed that his term in office be extended to give him more time to deal with things, and he tried to put his mistress of the time, who later became his third wife, Judith Nathan, in charge of a fund set up to give money to survivors and victims' families. Right from the beginning he was trying to exploit this. The words he said on TV were wonderful, but they weren't backed up by any actions at all."

Before 9/11, one of the things that made Giuliani famous, in New York at least, was his success at getting the "squeegee-men" off the streets. Baker explained that "The scourge of the squeegee-men involved a couple of dozen homeless black guys with buckets and squeegees who would come up to cars at red lights near the tunnels and bridges and offer to clean your windshield, expecting some kind of tip in return. They were not terribly threatening people. Usually you could deflect them by tapping on the window and shaking your head. End of story.

"But these guys were seen as another sign that the social order had broken down in New York. Right-wing institutions like the Manhattan Institute said they were a 'symbol of disorder' that encouraged crime, along with graffiti and turnstile-jumping and broken windows. So Giuliani made a big part of his 1993 campaign a promise to clear the squeegee-men off the streets. In fact by the time he took office in 1994, almost all of them had been cleared off the streets, by the police department. But nonetheless he got credit for this."

Giuliani as mayor said he would reduce crime -- and the crime rate did go down while he was mayor. But, Baker argued, "It had already dropped dramatically before Giuliani took office, under Mayor David Dinkins. Under Dinkins the murder rate dropped 14 per cent, robbery 15 percent, burglary 17 per cent -- the first time major crime dropped in New York City in all seven major felony categories in nearly four decades. This was before Giuliani ever came to power. It did continue to drop once he was in City Hall, but of course it also dropped dramatically throughout the country."

New York had real problems when Giuliani ran for mayor: deindustrialization, the disappearance of blue collar jobs, white flight, and then the plagues of heroin, guns and AIDS. But it was Giuliani's "insidious political genius," Baker said, to take these real problems and turn them into an argument that "the city was out of control because a black mayor was letting blacks in this town get out of control." That argument, Baker said, got him elected.

A lot of us would be delighted to see the Christian right lose in the Republican primaries. Baker agreed that Giuliani is indeed a real threat to the Christian right. But, he argued, "the problem with Bush is not so much his religious ideology, crazy as that can be. It's the arrogance emanating from this man. It's the cronyism, the incompetence, and the frightening authoritarian impulses. Giuliani embodies all the worst of that, and maybe more."

Link.

How Rudy Uses 9/11: By Exploiting it and its Victims

Here's an alternative; maybe he can do something for the victims instead of, you know, for himself.

Activity for the Day: Rupert-Bashing

Go here and here to vent.

Of course the best revenge is to just not give Rupert any money; stop buying the Journal.

MY FIRST DIRTY POST!!!!

Smarter kids (or kids more involved in schoolwork, I suppose) have less sex than the others.

See this and this.

On the other hand, boredom and free time often results in, um, some sort of sexual activity. So obviously hard working kids have less available time. That is, if I recollect correctly.

And, aw nuts, this is a post about sex, so here's a little iCandy....

A Little M$ Bashing

So there's two kinds of companies. One just markets the hell out of crap. And then there's the mutant version of that, Microsoft which, without it's monopoly would be nothing and it's God-awful OS forced on us all. I mean who by choice would really want to deal with the high maintenance mediocrity of the Win OS?

Ugh.

Anyway:

According to International Data Corporation’s 2006 white paper, “The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista in the United States,” Windows Vista was supposed to generate 100,000 new jobs and $70 billion in revenue for U.S. companies in 2007, revitalizing and advancing the long mutualism between the tech industry and Microsoft’s near-monopoly on desktop operating systems. For every dollar of Vista-related revenue pocketed by Microsoft, $18 was to be generated for the technology industry as a whole. “If you add up all of the spending on hardware and software that run on Microsoft operating systems as well as all of the services around installing and maintaining Microsoft applications and solutions, you quickly come up with a number much bigger than Microsoft’s revenues,” the report claimed. “It grows even larger and more significant when compared to the subset of Microsoft revenues for operating systems.”

Quite a claim and one that should, perhaps, be revisited in light of news that fewer businesses plan to adopt Windows Vista than did seven months ago. According to a client survey by patch-management outfit PatchLink, only 2% using Windows have upgraded to Vista. Nine percent plan to roll it out in the next few months. And 87% have no plans to roll it out at all–at least not yet. Windows XP pretty much works and, unlike Vista, it plays well with the hardware and peripherals you already have.

Link. And the report is here.

And the people speak on the subject. (Consensus seems to be reaching a point that without a monopoly and being entrenched, M$ is on track for a little heartbreak.) Myself, if I was starting a small business wouldn't even think of a Win system but would go straight to Mac and avoid all the IT crap on top of all the necessary business activities. Why waste time maintaining a high maintenance system when I can have a low maintenance one? and FYI: yours truly spends more time working in Windows than Mac so my dislike of Windows is very well-earned....

A Black Day for the Wall Street Journal, a Great Opportunity for the Times

Well, great if Pinch and family have the brains and the balls, and history doesn't give one hope.

The Times and the Journal were the two pre-eminent newspapers in the US, notwithstanding the Times' frequent water carrying for the wingnuts (paper still has a major hard-on for the Iraq fandango) and a few other idiosyncrasies.

But with Rupert's great victory, that number just got cut in half.

Now if the Times can just expand the business section to something on a par with the main news section and focus on Journal-quality journalism in the latter... people will snap it up. Hello, there are a lot of disaffected WSJ readers ready to switch to the Times.

Something New to Worry About

This is really scary when you think about it....

Every child left behind?

By Rick Perlstein on July 29, 2007 - 1:55pm.

The part that worries me most about the Foreclosing of America's new home abandonment phenomenon is the effect on our schools. American public schools are largely financed by local property taxes. That's bad enough on its own—one of the most savage inequalities in the entire system: it means that if you can't afford to buy into a nice neighborhood, your child's "equality of opportunity" gets strafed. Now, a spiral unto apocalypse: what happens to the school systems in communities where the net assessed values of the homes has tanked?

Is anyone in Washington prepared to do something about this? Anyone?

Link.

(And I'm sure that's a rhetorical question....)

Freedom on the March; Bloomberg to the World: "Drop Dead!"

Coming to New York? Leave the camera and camcorder at home:

Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks.

New rules being considered by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting would require any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour to get a city permit and insurance.

The same requirements would apply to any group of five or more people who plan to use a tripod in a public location for more than 10 minutes, including the time it takes to set up the equipment.

Julianne Cho, assistant commissioner of the film office, said the rules were not intended to apply to families on vacation or amateur filmmakers or photographers.

Nevertheless, the New York Civil Liberties Union says the proposed rules, as strictly interpreted, could have that effect. The group also warns that the rules set the stage for selective and perhaps discriminatory enforcement by police.

“These rules will apply to a huge range of casual photography and filming, including tourists taking snapshots and people making short videos for YouTube,” said Christopher Dunn, the group’s associate legal director.

Mr. Dunn suggested that the city deliberately kept the language vague, and that as a result police would have broad discretion in enforcing the rules. In a letter sent to the film office this week, Mr. Dunn said the proposed rules would potentially apply to tourists in places like Times Square, Rockefeller Center or ground zero, “where people routinely congregate for more than half an hour and photograph or film.”

The rule could also apply to people waiting in line to enter the Empire State Building or other tourist attractions.

The rules define a “single site” as any area within 100 feet of where filming begins. Under the rules, the two or more people would not actually have to be filming, but could simply be holding an ordinary camera and talking to each other.

The rules are intended to set standards for professional filmmakers and photographers, said Ms. Cho, assistant commissioner of the film office, but the language of the draft makes no such distinction.

“While the permitting scheme does not distinguish between commercial and other types of filming, we anticipate that these rules will have minimal, if any, impact on tourists and recreational photographers, including those that use tripods,” Ms. Cho said in an e-mail response to questions.

Mr. Dunn said that the civil liberties union asked repeatedly for such a distinction in negotiations on the rules but that city officials refused, ostensibly to avoid creating loopholes that could be exploited by professional filmmakers and photographers.

City officials would not confirm that yesterday. But Mark W. Muschenheim, a lawyer with the city’s law department, which helped draft the rules, said, “There are few instances, if any, where the casual tourist would be affected.”

The film office held a public hearing on the proposed rules yesterday, but no one attended. The only written comments the department received were from the civil liberties group, Ms. Cho said.

Ms. Cho said the office expected to publish a final version of the rules at the end of July. They would go into effect a month later.

The permits would be free and applications could be obtained online, Ms. Cho said. The draft rules say the office could take up to 30 days to issue a permit, but Ms. Cho said she expected that most would be issued within 24 hours.

Mr. Dunn says that in addition to the rules being overreaching, they would also create enforcement problems.

“Your everyday person out there with a camcorder is never going to know about the rules,” Mr. Dunn said. “It completely opens the door to discriminatory enforcement of the permit requirements, and that is of enormous concern to us because the people who are going to get pointed out are the people who have dark skin or who are shooting in certain locations.”

The rules were promulgated as a result of just such a case, Mr. Dunn said.

In May 2005, Rakesh Sharma, an Indian documentary filmmaker, was using a hand-held video camera in Midtown Manhattan when he was detained for several hours and questioned by police.

During his detention, Mr. Sharma was told he was required to have a permit to film on city property. According to a lawsuit, Mr. Sharma sought information about how permits were granted and who was required to have one but found there were no written guidelines. Nonetheless, the film office told him he was required to have a permit, but when he applied, the office refused to grant him one and would not give him a written explanation of its refusal.

As part of a settlement reached in April, the film office agreed to establish written rules for issuing permits. Mr. Sharma could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Mr. Dunn said most of the new rules were reasonable. Notably, someone using a hand-held video camera, as Mr. Sharma was doing, would no longer have to get a permit.

Link.

Okay, Have a Cheap Laugh....

The laffs are here.

So Much for the Liberal Judiciary in Liberal New York

These guys are, at least in this case, whacko enough to be Supreme Court justices. First the choice bits, then the explanation.

After two separate Bronx juries awarded a man more than $50 million for the confrontation with an off-duty police officer that left the man paralyzed from the waist down, an appellate panel has thrown out the plaintiff's complaint in its entirety.

The underlying incident took place in August 1988, when off-duty policeman Franz Jerome shot plaintiff Darryl Barnes, piercing his spine.

Ten years later, a Bronx panel awarded Mr. Barnes $76 million. A judge later reduced that award to $9 million, before the Appellate Division, First Department, vacated the verdict and ordered a new trial.

In 2003, a second jury awarded Mr. Barnes $51 million, which was again reduced by the trial court, this time to just under $10 million.

Yesterday, the First Department again vacated the award. This time, however, instead of remanding the case for another trial, the appellate court dismissed the complaint.

The controlling issue was Mr. Barnes' attorney's decision to read his client's testimony from a prior hearing rather than producing his client to testify at the second trial.

"By avoiding his obligation to testify at a trial in which he was seeking millions of dollars, plaintiff was able to frustrate the City's fundamental common-law right to cross-examine a witness," Justice Joseph P. Sullivan (See Profile) wrote for the unanimous panel in Barnes v. City of New York, 9969.

"That the trial court contributed to plaintiff's shortfall in proof by erroneously allowing his counsel to read his 50-h hearing testimony does not justify a remand for a new trial. It was counsel's choice, deliberate and calculated, to withhold his client from the rigors of cross-examination - an understandable strategy, given plaintiff's unsavory background and conviction of attempted assault in the first degree for his actions in the very incident in question."

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This 50-h hearing where the City is deprived of the opportunity to cross-examine the claimant... is conducted by a City-retained attorney. So the responsibility for failing to question properly is... the City's, not the claimnt.

But reflecting our times, these guys needed to rationalize making the decision they wanted to make -- no reward for a scumbag -- like the admittedly illegal decision in 2000 appointing Our Beloved Leader POTUS because five Supremes wanted him appointed, not the guy who was elected.

Scary! Our Leaders Really Seem to Know Less than Us!

Yeah, yeah, we knew that....

In reviewing Ian Shapiro's new book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror, Samantha Powers emphasizes a point that has been completely lost on Republican presidential candidates (and the man they hope to replace):

Shapiro is at his most persuasive when he argues against lumping Islamic radical threats together. He points out that at the time of the cold war, George Kennan, the formulator of the containment policy, warned against treating Communism as a monolith. Policy makers, Kennan said, ought to emphasize the differences among and within Communist groups and "contribute to the widening of these rifts without assuming responsibility." The Bush administration, by contrast, has grouped together a hugely diverse band of violent actors as terrorists, failing to employ divide-and-conquer tactics.

Although it is tempting to feel overwhelmed by the diversity of the threats aligned against the United States, Shapiro says that very diversity presents us with opportunities, since it "creates tensions among our adversaries’ agendas, as well as openings for competition among them." To pry apart violent Islamic radicals, the United States has to become knowledgeable about internal cleavages and be patient in exploiting them. Arguably, this is what American forces in Iraq are doing belatedly -- and perilously -- as they undertake the high-risk approach of turning Sunni ex-Baathists against Qaeda forces.

Kevin Drum notes that this is "the serious side of dumb gaffes from people like Rudy Giuliani, who seem unable to distinguish between even simple divisions like Sunni and Shia." That's absolutely true, but it's not just Giuliani who's confused about the basics.

For example, in the first Republican presidential candidates' debate in May, Mitt Romney tried to explain how he perceives threats to the U.S. from the Middle East: "This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. They also probably want to bring down the United States of America."

It seemed to impress the Republican faithful, but it didn't make a lot of sense. Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda, for example, have nothing to do with one another. The latter is a terrorist organization; the prior has renounced violent jihad and, in some countries, participated in elections.

At a subsequent debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Mike Huckabee whether he has confidence in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Huckabee responded with a semi-coherent argument about the Taliban in Afghanistan. The connection to Maliki was unclear.

Giuliani, running on a foreign-policy platform, has been more confused than anyone, conflating every possible rival in the Middle East as one dangerous entity. At a recent debate, he connected Iran to the Fort Dix plot for no apparent reason. Around the same time, he gave up appreciating the nuances of Middle East politics altogether, concluding that the region is filled with those who "have a similar objective, in their anger at the modern world." In other words, Giuliani said, they all hate America.

Maybe we should chip in and buy a copy of Shapiro's book for the GOP candidates. It sounds like they could use a refresher.

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Yet Another Truth Our Leaders Feel Necessary to Ignore in Order to Promote their Programs

Lies, lies, lies; an endless river with nary a single island of truth....

Was Pat Tillman murdered?

Stunning as it is to contemplate, the Associated Press obtained Pentagon documents through the Freedom of Information Act showing that investigators looked into whether the athlete-turned-soldier might have been deliberately killed in 2004 by members of his Special Forces unit in Afghanistan. Nothing the AP obtained is definitive, and ultimately the friendly-fire ruling withstood a criminal investigation.

But, according to the AP, medical examiners questioned the close proximity of three bullet holes in Tillman's forehead, fired from ten yards away. There are questions -- which will be difficult to hear, considering Tillman's heroism -- that Tillman was not well-liked within his unit. Other elements of the circumstances surrounding Tillman's death appear difficult to reconcile with the friendly-fire ruling -- which came after the Army announced that Tillman died in combat:

In his last words moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop "sniveling."

_ Army attorneys sent each other congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or non-criminal, punishments.

_ The three-star general who kept the truth about Tillman's death from his family and the public told investigators some 70 times that he had a bad memory and couldn't recall details of his actions.

_ No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene _ no one was hit by enemy fire, nor was any government equipment struck.

Almost every aspect of Tillman's death has been surrounded by official obfuscation. The head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, General William Wallace, is in charge of issuing reprisals to Tillman's commanders. His recommendations, according to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, are for administrative punishments and not criminal ones. The general who told investigators 70 times of his faulty memory, now-retired Lieutenant General Philip R. Kensinger Jr., will be stripped of one of his stars and lose approximately $900 a month from his retirement package.

On Wednesday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) will hold a hearing about what and when the Pentagon leadership knew about Tillman's death. Kensinger has been invited to testify, as has former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Central Command chief General John Abizaid, and former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers. They're not likely to appear, but the AP's revelations will surely figure prominently in the committee's exploration of what exactly happened to a national hero.

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And there's more here.

And the dead has the last word, I suppose:

Pat Tillman famously said, “You know, this war is so fucking illegal.” Kevin Tillman’s piece might be cast as I have frequently paraphrased Pat’s quote: “You know, this administration is so fucking illegal.”

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Ah, So We're Arming the Sunnis in Iraq with our Best Friends, the Saudis, Covering for Us

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration sold fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, sparking a considerable controversy about Israel and a regional arms build-up.

In 2007, just as we're learning about the aid Saudi Arabia is giving to Sunni militias in Iraq, the Bush administration is planning a large arms deal with the president's long-time allies.

The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.

The proposed deal, which includes advanced weaponry for Saudi Arabia, has raised eyebrows, but administration officials hope to resolve concerns by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, which would represent a significant increase over the assistance Israel received over the last 10 years.

But the amusing part of the news is this: "The Saudis had requested that Congress be told about the planned sale, the officials said, in an effort to avoid the kind of bruising fight on Capitol Hill that occurred in the 1980s over proposed arms sales to the kingdom."

In other words, what does it take to get the Bush administration to communicate with a Democratic Congress about matters of foreign policy? Directives from the Saudis.

Good to know.

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Today's Awareness Message

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Apparently There Maybe is a Zionist Conspiracy and if so, Maybe this is it

(Jivester News, Lmtd.) In a breathtaking announcement today, Rabbi Soyvitch Goldberginsky told a slightly confused gathering of End Timers at a How to Dress for the Rapture: Boxers, Briefs or Dangler’s Puffery seminar in Las Vegas, Nevada that the basis for their religion, the founding gospels of the New Testament were in fact part of an elaborate gag perpetrated by “…a few wisenheimers back in the day. The guys were sitting around, tossing shrimp at pigs for who-knows-why, when one of them says “Hey, what if we say that God shtupped a zaftig and Jr. will give everyone a Get Out of Hell card? And they will have to sing ass-kissing songs and feel bad a lot of the time, just like us.”

The audience, who stopped breathing as they scratched their heads, were a bit confused by the announcement. Added Goldberginsky, “What, you didn’t know that? You didn’t maybe suspect a little something was up with all the David Blaine stuff? Millions of people in the “I’m With Stupid” line and still you don’t know? It was a giggle. A zoo. We made it up. What, you thought Yawheh was real too? If I slap your face does wind come out?”

Ed Handlebarb of Grunting, West Virginia, who was attending the conference as part of God’s Plan to place him “…near tall, naked white women” did not understand what Goldberginsky was saying. “Did he say Jesus was a Jew? Everybody knows he was a Christian—I mean, yeah, He was a Jew, but His dad was a Christian. Well, His dad was a Jew—no, He did business with the Jews and made a baby with a Jew, but then he became a Christian. He was baptized and everything…they made that shit up? Holy mother of daddy, what the hell am I supposed to pray to now?”

A slight digression vis a vis the Punking of the Gentiles Story: after his stunning public admission to Jewish complicity in the World’s Longest Running Gag, a crowd of angry men in long coats and hats began to taunt Soyvitch upon his arrival back in Los Angeles—the Orthodox men wore hats that had been blocked with an attention to detail that should shame anyone who ever tried to block a hat and then charged someone else—i.e. the paying customer for what was obviously substandard work…I mean, so many so-called haberdashers charge for work that is garbage—their so-called craft should stumble and die and rot in a dump. Lousy work that should be loudly condemned and people should dance and laugh at how dumped it all is. But I digress. You would too, if you paid for a hat to be blocked and then it came back like a rhombus. A rhombus. I kid you not. Anyway…

Well, I’ve had my say. The crowd of Orthodox Jews gathered around and started yelling and making those loud grunting sounds they are famous for. One man with a beard like a wolverine with a mouthful of bear fur who just ate a hair pie during a full moon in a barbershop called out, “Shut your trap, Soyvitch. What, you want the gentiles to get wise? Are you a crazy person? Everything was fine. They were sending cash to the Likkud with great regularity, and now you want they should feel stupid? We should stone you where you stand. Wait, move a little to the left…not my left, your left. Good: that is where we should stone you.”

Spokesmen for various Christian groups responded to this story, each adding a unique perspective. Pope German Guy With a Weird Rat Like Face seemed resigned to the whole brouhaha. Pausing while loading gold bars into his VW van, the Pope told this interviewer, “I knew this day would come. I had it in the pool. Das tut mir leid.” After loading the van up the Pope jumped in the back as his driver started the engine. It lunged a little, made a grinding sound, stopped short, and then was blown apart by normally cautious bazooka-wielding Bishops who were concerned that the gold bars might not be used for God’s Greater Glory or whatever.

“We felt the Holy Spirit,” said one Bishop who asked that we don’t ask any questions about the Holy Spirit’s age. I’d say the lad was eight or nine, ten tops. And I’m sorry, but those were tears in that little boy’s eyes. Big Catholic tears.

American Christian Fundamentalists remained non-plussed by the announcement. “Look-the Jews control Hollywood, know what I mean?” said Reverend G. Happy “Doc” Doolittle of the Very First Baptist Church in Little Vapors, Mississippi. “Hollywood is Entertainment, you understand? Show folks a good time, maybe make them think a little—maybe not. And if they invented Christianity the way Soyvitch contendeth, they must have had a good reason for what they have done. Surely, they will die and reside in everlasting fire, but where will that fire come from? I ain’t gonna pay for it. You gonna pay for it? They made up Satan, too—think he’s gonna pay for it? I don’t think he’s gonna pay for it. Hallelujah. Lost at last, lost at last, thank them Jew Boys, we are lost at last!”

CNN, unsure of just about everything except how many pharmaceutical companies are coming to their summer picnic, has decided to not cover this story. Wolf Blitzer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said (anonymously, of course), “Dick Cheney doesn’t give a shit about God. Why should I? Dick? Anyone? I got a situation here. Which is good, because I’m in the Situation Room. I’m dying.”

Deepak Chopra has been giggling incoherently for about a week and could not be channeled for comment.

Well, that does it for tonight. Tune in later this week when Jivester News goes undercover to reveal the truth about some other once sacred, now discarded, pile of utter nonsense.

Go with God.

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