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Friday, July 11, 2003 Senate repeals "global gag rule" In a major blow to President George W. Bush's foreign aid policy, the US Senate voted to repeal his ban on assistance to international family planning groups that fight for the availability of abortion. By a vote of 53-43, senators rejected a motion to kill an amendment by Democrat Barbara Boxer of California that strikes down the so-called Mexico City Policy, an anti-abortion measure reaffirmed by Bush on his second day in office. The Boxer amendment, which has thus been allowed to stand, is attached to a 27-billion-dollar State Department foreign aid bill being debated by the chamber. The Mexico City Policy, often referred to as "the global gag rule," bars the US government from providing assistance to organizations that advocate abortion as one of family planning tools and openly counsel women about abortion services. It ain't over yet, but it's a start. posted by chris at 1:42 PM   Dropping a bomb A long-awaited final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be released in the next two weeks, containing new information about U.S. government mistakes and Saudi financing of terrorists. Former Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and who has read the report, said it will be ''highly explosive'' when it becomes public. The staff director for the congressional investigation that produced the 800-page report, Eleanor Hill, said Wednesday that several lengthy battles with the Bush administration over how much secret data to declassify have been resolved. She expects the document to go to the Government Printing Office late this week and then be made public about a week later. A source familiar with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, cited two ''sensitive areas'' of the report that will command public attention: • More information on ties between the Saudi royal family, government officials and terrorists. The FBI may have mishandled an investigation into how two of the Sept. 11 hijackers received aid from Saudi groups and individuals. • A coherent narrative of intelligence warnings, some of them ignored or not shared with other agencies, before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The report will show that top Bush administration officials were warned in the summer of 2001 that the al Qaeda terrorist network had plans to hijack aircraft and launch a ``spectacular attack.'' More here. posted by chris at 1:08 PM   Who represents you? A site called SelectSmart.com has set up a quiz to help you determine which presidential candidate most closely resembles your political views. The information is based on the candidate's actions, voting records and public statements. The results can be rather surprising. Take the quiz here. Via Ruminate This. posted by chris at 12:09 PM   ------------------ Thursday, July 10, 2003 Instant live! This year, the music industry has taken the next logical step [after live albums]: they've created the souvenir concert album. Simultaneously a bold new step for bootlegs and the audio equivalent of the snapshots they sell you when you get off a rollercoaster, a venue can now sell you a CD of the concert you just saw as you're walking out the door. A team of engineers record the show from start to finish, with no edits, and the second it ends they burn the recording through a tower of CD-R drives. Ten minutes later it's packaged and ready to sell at the merch table-- a perfect, complete record of the gig you just watched, just the way you remember it. But there's a catch: Instant Live, which launched in May, is owned by Clear Channel Entertainment, one of the largest and most aggressive media companies in America. The owner of six times as many radio stations as its nearest competitor and the owner and/or booker of over 130 venues, Clear Channel has been criticized for anti-competitive and anti-artist practices by the press-- Salon's extensive coverage has set the bar-- and politicans including Senator John McCain. Even the deregulation-happy FCC has scrutinized their business. Story via Pitchfork. I just saw this almost happen at a Samples show in DC. The Samples' propaganda slideshow before the show was advertising it, but it turns out they weren't recording that night. It's an interesting idea - I've got tons of bootleg tapes that I've traded with people over the years. And while currently, the artist is actually making money on this deal, I worry about Clear Channel's involvement. They seem to not be so "artist-friendly" when money's at stake. And there's another issue for live music fans: And for all the great records that could come from these programs, we risk downgrading the live album from an event of its own to just another snapshot. I'm worried that someday I'll walk out of the best show I've ever seen, drop ten dollars on a souvenir album because it's there, and a month later play it for my friends-- and suddenly the whole show will be lost; we'll just sort of look at each other and say, "What was the big deal?" posted by chris at 4:28 PM   Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, Tomorrow . . . Tom Tomorrow, the cartoonist of This Modern World and gracious host of www.thismodernworld.com, has just released a collection of his cartoons called The Great Big Book of Tomorrow. It's sort of a "greatest hits" package, as it collects cartoons from previous books and throws in some "unreleased" stuff as well. Should be in bookstores soon, so check it out. You can also hear all about it from the man himself. posted by chris at 3:46 PM   Supporting the troops, part 5 Its formal title is The Retired Pay Restoration Act of 2003. . . What the bill would do is redress a century-old injustice - a law that says anyone who retires after a full career of military service and draws retirement pay will have that pay reduced, dollar for dollar, for any payment received from the Veterans Administration for permanent service-connected disability. In other words, if a military retiree is judged 100 percent disabled as a consequence of old war wounds or Agent Orange or bone damage from jumping out of airplanes, he would draw a maximum disability payment of $2,300 per month. His retired pay would disappear entirely, under the law. Curiously, if a former soldier served only a two or four-year tour and was later judged disabled he would draw full disability payments with no reduction for any other payments he might receive from Social Security or a government or private retirement plan. It is those who served honorably for at least 20 years and sometimes more than 30 years who are subject to the Disabled Veterans Tax. The long-promised relief is hung up in Congress this summer and looks like it may well die in committee. It is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office that redressing the retirees' grievance would cost the Treasury between $3 billion and $5 billion a year - and the Bush administration has turned thumbs down because they see it as a budget-buster. -clip- "Republican representatives are being forced to represent the White House," complains retired Air Force Lt. Col. B.E. Cushing, a Florida resident. He adds that the word is that the Republican leadership is "urging and even threatening" members to keep them from signing the Discharge Petition. Story here. posted by chris at 3:18 PM   And the walls come tumbling down . . . A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The claims came as the Bush administration was fighting to shore up its credibility among a series of anonymous government leaks over its distortion of US intelligence to manufacture a case against Saddam. This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September, and had access to the classified reports which formed the basis for the US case against Saddam, spelled out by President Bush and his aides. Mr Thielmannn said yesterday: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq." There's been a lot of these kind of reports going around. Some turned out not to be true, but they all seem to make a certain amount of sense - that the information the American public received about Iraq was not terribly accurate. And that inaccuracy may not be a result of poor intelligence, but rather selective use of that intelligence in the White House. posted by chris at 3:12 PM   ------------------ Wednesday, July 09, 2003 Spin of the day "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." - Ari Fleischer Courtesy of Atrios. posted by chris at 8:56 PM   New trans fat labeling Trans fat hasn't gotten the attention its infamous cousin, saturated fat, earned through warnings and labels. That's about to change: After 10 years of debate, the government is requiring food labels to reveal exact levels of the artery clogger. Trans fat is the stuff that helps make such foods as doughnuts, french fries, crackers and fried chicken taste so good. But it's at least as dangerous to the heart as saturated fat -- and many doctors consider it worse. And until now, consumers have had no way of knowing how much trans fat they eat. Food and Drug Administration regulations unveiled Wednesday will require nutrition labels to include a new line listing the amount of trans fat in each food right under the amount of saturated fat. Add the two lines together to learn the total of heart-risky fats in every serving. -clip- Saturated fat is found primarily in meat and other products containing animal fat. People are advised to eat no more than 20 grams a day, about 10 percent of calories. Some surveys suggest trans fat comprises up to another 10 percent. Both types can increase the risk of heart disease, although some research suggests trans fat may be the worst culprit. Trans fat is in numerous products, from meats and dairy products to pastries. The most common source is partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, where liquid oil is turned into a solid to protect against spoiling and maintain long-term flavor. The whole story here. Thanks Lindsey. posted by chris at 3:06 PM   We're number one! The United States has by far the largest number of publicly owned firearms in the world and is approaching the point where there is one gun for every American, according to the Small Arms Survey 2003 released Tuesday. America is now estimated to have between 238 million and 276 million firearms, compared with some 250 million legally owned guns, or 84 for every 100 people, recorded in a July 2001 survey. More here. Now, go see Bowling for Columbine. Again. posted by chris at 2:41 PM   You want Total Information Awareness? I got Total Information Awareness. Two researches from MIT have created a response to the government's Total Information Awareness program, By which the gov't harvests vast amounts of data about its citizens (all for purely benign purposes, of course). This new program is called the Government Awareness Program (GIA) and it collects vast amounts of data on gov't officials and displays it as public information. McKinley worked with Csikszentmihalyi to design the GIA system. It's partly based on technology used to create Internet indexes such as Google. Software crawls around Internet sites that store large amounts of information about politicians. These include independent political sites like opensecrets.org, as well as sites run by government agencies. McKinley created software that ferrets out the useful data from these sites, and loads it into the GIA database. The result is a one-stop research site for basic information on key officials. The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided by cable TV's C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program "reads" each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete rundown on all available data about that person. The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span at that moment. If there's a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress's reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking. All of the information currently on the site is available from public sources. But GIA will go one step further. Starting today, the site will allow the public to submit information about government officials, and this information will be made available to anyone visiting the site. No effort will be made to verify the accuracy of the data. Here's the story about it. And here's the actual site. Happy searching! Via Cursor. posted by chris at 1:24 PM   Safe sex vs. abstinence Here's a really interesting article in the Washington Post about the success Uganda has had in combatting AIDS. Bush will be traveling to Uganda and there's some tension between the abstinence only type of education versus education about safe sex and the proper use of condoms. In Uganda, where nearly 1 million people have died as a result of AIDS since the deadly disease was first identified in the East African nation in 1983, it's almost never too early to start talking about AIDS or sex education. The entire nation, from the president to grandmothers and first-graders, has mobilized over the last 11 years in Africa's most successful fight against the epidemic. While Africa is home to 70 percent of the world's HIV patients, and in some countries at least one in three adults are HIV-positive, Uganda's AIDS and HIV infection rates have plummeted from 30 percent to 5 percent in slightly more than a decade. Uganda's HIV-fighting mantra is referred to as ABC: Abstain, be faithful or use a condom. The government launched a massive campaign on radio, television and in newspapers to encourage people to get tested and to follow the ABC's. It was the first African country to even talk about AIDS, which had been considered a taboo topic. In Kenya, leaders denied AIDS existed and called it "a mysterious disease." Still, the rates of infection in Uganda are uneven, with higher numbers in rural areas, health workers say. Free testing has been slow finding its way to rural areas, and people there cannot afford the $4 to $7 fee. They also don't have as much access to condoms and health care. Women living in poverty suffer the most because they perform sex for money. But in the cities, people of all ages are frank and focused about wearing condoms and getting tested frequently. posted by chris at 1:08 PM   ------------------ Tuesday, July 08, 2003 Crying wolf The New Republic has an excellent account of the run-up to the attack on Iraq. They go thru it point by point and lay out the details of each lie or mis-direction that the administration presented to the public. It's a long read, but it's definately worthwhile. Might be good to print out and pass around to your less cynical friends. posted by chris at 12:28 PM   A new (British) voice in America The Guardian, one of Britian's leading liberal newspapers, (and a personal favourite of mine) is coming to America. In magazine form. Its tentative form is as a weekly magazine, quite unlike any other weekly magazine that has been started in the U.S. in the past generation. Not only is it about politics (Rusbridger is looking to launch in the winter to cover the presidential-primary season), but the magazine—meant to be 60 percent derived from the Guardian itself, with the rest to come from American contributors—has a great deal of text unbroken by design elements. This is almost an extreme notion. Quite the antithesis of what virtually every publishing professional would tell you is the key to popular and profitable publishing—having less to read, not more. Even with the Guardian’s signature sans-serif face, it looks like an old-fashioned magazine. Polemical. Written. Excessive. Contentious. Even long-winded. And here's the interesing part: The Guardian is the fruit of a legal trust whose sole purpose is the perpetuation of the Guardian. In other words, the trust—the Scott Trust, created in 1936 by the Manchester family that controlled the paper—eliminates the exact thing that has most bedeviled media companies: the demands of impatient shareholders and the ambitions of would-be mogul CEOs. An intelligent, well-written liberal publication that's not beholden to advertisers or share-holders? Incredible. Via the daily Kos. posted by chris at 11:39 AM   Bush Lied! That should have been the headline in today's Washington Post as the administration finally admitted that Bush lied, excuse me, "misled the people" in his State of the Union address when he said that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country to reconstitute its nuclear program. Turns out the information was simply dead wrong. Joseph Wilson, who actually went to Niger on behalf of the US to verify the intelligence findings, said that his report on the issue was buried. But instead of a damning headline and story about this great deception, we get this: The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. Asked about the British report, the administration released a statement that, after weeks of questions about the president's uranium-purchase assertion, effectively conceded that intelligence underlying the president's statement was wrong. "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech," a senior Bush administration official said last night in a statement authorized by the White House. All carefully worded to avoid placing blame on the President. Just a simple, "whoops!" But it's something we need to remember when the election rolls around. It's all a simple misunderstanding. posted by chris at 10:38 AM   ------------------

    

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